Music by Jewish Composers Lost in the Holocaust Revived by Exilarte Center: NPR

There is something elvish and even a little mischievous about the 102-year-old man named Walter Arlen. The composer lives in a house by the ocean in Santa Monica, Calif., with her husband of 65 years. But he was born in Austria in 1920 as Walter Aptowitzer. He grew up in a cosmopolitan cradle of music and high culture: pre-war Vienna.

“I grew up in an atmosphere of great joy, as far as I was concerned,” says Arlen, whose grandfather founded a department store – the Warenhaus Dicther – in 1890. “And it grew and grew, because he was a very good businessman. And there was always music, because my grandfather believed in having music in the store. And he was the first in Vienna to install loudspeakers throughout the store.

Her grandfather paid a young woman to sit by a phonograph all day and change records. The same music would be heard on all floors. The Aptowitzers lived in an apartment above the store, and by the age of five young Walter had learned the words to all the songs. His aunts placed the child on the counter of the store and asked him to sing.

His mother played the piano, his uncle played the violin and he was eight years old when his parents took him to his first opera: Toscaby Puccini.

“It knocked me over,” he says. “It was the beginning of my desire to be a composer.”

The budding musician took piano lessons and sang in school. One day, his teacher had him dress up as Franz Schubert for a class celebration of the composer. He was praised for his talent and encouraged to write music. It was a happy childhood – “until Hitler came along, and that’s when it changed overnight,” he says. “It was 1938. Up in the air, the sky was full of planes. It was the occupation of Austria.”

Aptowitzer was 17 years old. Her father was imprisoned by the Nazis and her mother was placed in a psychiatric hospital. The boy responded by writing a melancholic song based on a poem, titled “Es geht wohl anders”. The title, in English, translates to Things are going differently.

Aptowitzer fled Austria and moved in with relatives in Chicago. Many other members of his family were not so lucky: his grandmother died in the Treblinka extermination camp and his father was taken to Dachau. His mother later died by suicide. In Chicago, Aptowitzer changed his name to Walter Arlen. (He is not related to “Over the Rainbow” composer Harold Arlen.) Arlen staved off depression by writing music. He won a prize in a song cycle competition and became the assistant of American composer Roy Harris.

Arlen went on to study music at UCLA, worked as a driver for Igor Stravinsky, and before long was hired as a classical critic for the Los Angeles Times. I also write for the Los Angeles Times, but I had never heard of Arlen until Michael Haas introduced him to me – a music historian who arranged for Arlen’s work to be recorded with many other Jewish composers. For decades, Arlen’s music sat in his desk drawer.

Among the recently recorded works is an oratorio, “The Song of Songs”, based on the ancient Jewish love poem and composed by Arlen in the early 1950s.

“It’s music that could only have been composed by a Viennese composer uprooted and transplanted to America, trying to solve all his problems,” says Haas, author of the book. Prohibited music about the Jewish composers banned by Hitler.

Although most of Arlen’s music was written after the Holocaust, Haas says it belongs to this unique and particularly traumatic time and place. “You know those horrible things he had to witness and go through and just the stories he has to tell about just trying to get out of Austria, and the things that happened to him, to him and his family. The only way he could cope with that was to write music…and then put it away in the desk drawer,” Haas says.

In 2006, Haas co-founded the Exilarte Center for Banned Music in Vienna, which locates, preserves and presents music lost during the Holocaust. The impetus began when Haas, a Grammy-winning classical producer for Decca Records, recorded the music of Kurt Weill – the German-Jewish émigré who wrote “The Threepenny Opera”.

“I kept coming across names of other composers who were just as famous as Kurt Weill,” says Haas. He evokes the Jewish composers who fled Hitler’s Europe and found success in Hollywood.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, for example, was a classic prodigy who escaped Austria in the 1930s and rose to fame scoring Errol Flynn swordsmen such as The sea falcon. But Haas began to uncover a whole hidden world of composers who either died in the Holocaust or went into exile. Either they gave up music or, like Walter Arlen, they wrote music no one has ever heard.

“The more we recorded,” says Haas, “the more suddenly we discovered that the music had been, to some extent, also deliberately suppressed after the war – not because the composers were Jewish, but because the music did not represent the kind of post-war anti-fascist statement that society saw as crucial to re-educating, you know, post-war publics.”

It evokes the music of the late Robert Fürstenthal – who also left Vienna at the age of 17 and whose desk-of-drawer compositions have always sounded like the glory days of his Austrian childhood.

“He was the US Navy’s auditor, for heaven’s sake, in San Diego,” Haas says. “You can only imagine a more different place than Vienna. I said, ‘Robert, why did you write in the style of Hugo Wolf in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s?’ And he said, “When I’m composing, I go back to Vienna.”

Forensic musicologists from the Exilarte Center have saved hundreds of works by these composers. They also traced their heirs and estates – over 30 estates worldwide.

Robert Thompson, president of Wise Music Group, calls the Exilarte team “monument men” of composers and manuscripts. “But I realized the missing part was getting that music out into the world, so it could be performed,” Thompson said. “We spent several months talking to them about how this could work, how we could be helpful as a publisher to get all this music out there.”

Wise Music Group, owner of historic publishing house G. Schirmer, partnered with Exilarte last year to help resurrect this forgotten and exiled music in public concerts. Publishing royalties go to the Exilarte project, and composer royalties to families and estates. Or, in the case of Walter Arlen – who expects to turn 103 in July – the composer himself.

“I think he’s our newest and oldest living composer,” says Thompson.

Over the decades, Arlen composed some 65 works, many of them vocal. It is music imprisoned in the amber of his memory, music from a Vienna he loved so much and was forced to leave. Professionally, Arlen has distinguished himself as a critic. So how would he rate his work?

“If I hadn’t liked it, I wouldn’t have written it,” he says.

And if he hadn’t survived, we would never have heard from him.