Concerts of English and Hungarian music in Wiesbaden, 1936

One common fiction is that in Nazi Germany, there were practically no performances either of modern or international music; indeed this fiction was propagated by many after 1945 in order to secure funding to present concerts of precisely that thing. But this is not really accurate; while there is no doubt that concert programming in Germany after 1933 was intensely nationalistic (certainly in comparison to the 1920s), there were still many performances of international works, though the representation of composers of particular countries often depended upon the state of political relations between those countries and Germany at the time.

One organisation dedicated to the promotion of international musical exchange was the Ständiger Rat für internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten, founded in 1934 at the behest of Richard Strauss, which ran until 1939. They organised exchange concerts, often with German musicians playing in other countries and vice versa. In 1936 this included exchanges between the cities of Berlin, Wiesbaden and Karlsbad, and Vichy and Zürich. The organisation was responsible for an Internationales Musikfest which took place in September in Wiesbaden, and featured a concert of Hungarian music (conducted by Hans Swarorsky) and one of English music (conducted by Carl Schuricht).

The Hungarian programme was as follows:

Franz Erkel, Overture to opera Hunyadi Laszlo (1845)
Béla Bartók, Magyar parasztdalok (Hungarian Peasant Songs) (1933)
Zoltán Kodály, Háry János Suite (1926)
Miklós Rósza, Theme, Variations and Finale (1933)
Ernst von Dohnányi, Ruralia Hungarica, op. 32b (1924)

That for the English concert (conducted by Carl Schuricht) was:

Edward Elgar, Overture, Froissart (1890, rev. 1901)
Herbert Bedford, Ad Alta, symphonic poem
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Overture to The Wasps, Aristophanic suite (1909)
Eugene Goossens, Four Humoresques (1907)
Arnold Bax, Symphony No. 3 (1929)

It may seem strange to imagine such an event at this time, but it was not wholly unusual in the second half of the 1930s; in Frankfurt there was also a relatively international range of programming at the behest of Generalmusikdirektor Hans Rosbaud, whilst in Baden-Baden earlier that year, the GMD Herbert Albert had founded an Internationale Zeitgenössisches Musikfest  in the city, which ran until 1939. The Wiesbaden event was generally positively reviewed in the Zeitschrift für Musik, by the critic Grete Altstadt-Schütze, recognising the grotesque elements in some of the Hungarian music, a bit more tepid in her response to the English works (though her comment that the Goossens was ‘a music of the heart, not the intellect’ appears to be a compliment), though comparing the second movement of the Bax to the work of Hans Pfitzner. Both concerts were enthusiastically received, including by Richard Strauss, who was present.

 

 

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