Composers in Exile: Those Who Fled the Nazis
(THIS COURSE IS IN PERSON, AT THE COMMUNITY CENTER AND NOT ON ZOOM.)
Instructor: Dotty Burstein
May 5, 12, 19, 26, June 2
5 Thursdays, from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
For Jewish composers living in Germany and Austria in the early 1930s, the rise of Nazism brought with it a stark choice: face an unknown but increasingly hostile future, or abandon their cultural heritage for the relative safety of the U. S. We shall explore the lives of those composers and the works they produced. Enrollment limited.
One We will begin our study of this dark but ultimately fruitful period by examining the effect of antisemitic tropes and attitudes on the legacies of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn and on the lives of composers who followed at the end of the century: Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. We will explore the social and artistic climate of the Weimar Republic, whose spirit of the Enlightenment as well as political confusion and violent uprisings between 1919 and 1933 inspired the creation of works like Erich Korngold’s opera Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) and Kurt Weill’s theater production The Threepenny Opera. Then we will discuss the lives and music of composers who fled Nazi Germany in 1933: Schoenberg, Weill, and Korngold. We also will consider the effect of “Entartete (degenerate) Musik” on composers whose music was featured in the 1938 Dusseldorf exhibition. Next, we will review the lives and works of composers like Mario Tedesco, Paul Hindemith, Bela Bartok, and Ernst Krenek, who left Europe after 1933 and produced some of their greatest music while in exile. Finally, we will look at the legacy of all those composers who fled Europe between the wars because of racial, religious, or political persecution and the opportunities they brought about for their students, many of whose names are familiar to us today: John Cage, Leon Kirchner, Dave Brubeck, and Steve Reich.
Dotty Burstein Dotty Burstein, a former science textbook editor and chemistry teacher, has had a lifelong interest in the intersection of composers’ lives and their music. Her extensive studies have led her to develop a series of courses exploring the music of composers from the Classical and Romantic eras as well as twentieth-century Russian composers and emerging American composers. Dotty has offered classes at the Tufts Lifelong Learning Institute, Winchester’s Jenks Center, the OWLL program at the Lexington Community Center, and the Arlington Center for the Arts. Several times a year, Dotty speaks to groups such as the Harvard University Retirees Association. She is a member of the honorary music fraternity Sigma Alpha Iota.