We wind the clock back to 1929, Berlin, right before the Nazis would fully control the Weimar Republic. At the turn of the century and after the end of the first World War, the city of Berlin established itself as one of the cultural epicenters of Europe during a golden age that brought together writers, architects, painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, playwrights, thinkers, and of course, composers and musicians. By this juncture, the young and charismatic Wilhelm Furtwangler was leading the Berlin Philharmonic, Erich Kleiber was conducting at the Opera House, and bright minds such as Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, and Alexander Zemlinsky arrived to a city already brimming with great composers such as Ferruccio Busoni, Paul Juon and Paul Hindemith. Anyone who wanted a career in music would spend time in Berlin during those years, as Carl Flesch was teaching violin and Artur Schnabel was the piano professor at the Berlin Academy Music, which housed every young virtuoso from Bronislaw Huberman, Igor Stravinsky, and Vladimir Horowitz to Fritz Kreisler, Claudio Arrau and Nathan Milstein.
The energy was bustling, and ideas abounded. A young composer named Kurt Weill and his librettist, Bertold Brecht, would write a piece called the Three Penny Opera that would take Berlin by storm. In the early part of the 1920's, Weill's Quartet No. 1, Op. 8 would get its premiere by the Amar Quartet, of which Paul Hindemith was the violist. In between composing, Kurt Weill would privately tutor composition students both at the Academy and the University, who were often disciples of his friend, Paul Juon. We say that the music world is small now, but the musical community in Berlin then was even more tight knit. Everyone who was someone knew one another.
I imagined this program as a house concert that the Amar quartet would have put together during Hindemith's last season as its violist. They would play Hindemith’s own works as well as Weill's, and give homage to Paul Juon, who came before them and was the composition professor at the Academy of Music for over 20 years in Berlin.
When the Nazis finally made their imprint on Berlin in the 1930's, Hindemith and Weill fled to the US, and Juon eventually retired to Switzerland. Kurt Weill's heritage was Jewish, and Hindemith's wife was Jewish. Although Paul Juon was a Russian born of Swiss heritage and his music was not labeled as degenerate by the Nazis, he left Germany after witnessing the demise and death of his friend and colleague, the composer Franz Schreker.
During the first two installments of A Far Cry’s “Entartete Musik” chamber series, we honored composers who perished in Terezin and Auschwitz for being Jewish, along with others whose music was considered “degenerate” by the Nazis. During this third and final installment, we examine German composers whose works were labeled “degenerate” (Hindemith and Weill), and a Swiss-Russian (Juon) who defended his Jewish friend, as well as the ways in which all of their works helped cement Berlin as a musical capital during the 1920s.
-Jae Cosmos Lee, AFC Violinist and program curator of Berlin
