Mozart. Zemlinsky

PERFORMERS:
Soloist: Lise de la Salle (piano)
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: James Conlon

PROGRAMME:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466

Alexander Zemlinsky
Die Seejungfrau, fantasy for orchestra

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate… Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Siegfried Sassoon

After 1945, those who performed, wrote or taught classical music worked in a culture scarred by omissions. These were not of their making, but were part of the legacy of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.
With its racist ideology and systematic suppression particularly, although not exclusively, of Jewish musicians, artists and writers, the Third Reich silenced two generations of composers and, with them, an entire musical heritage. Many who perished in concentration camps, and others whose freedom and productivity were curtailed, were fated to be forgotten after the war. Their music seemed to have passed with them, lost in endless silence.
However, more lost music has survived than was at first thought. It has taken decades of dedicated work to recover and publish it. We must now mitigate a great injustice by working to revive the music of those whose only “fault” was that they were Jewish, or that they were opposed to, or deemed offensive by, an authoritarian regime.
But that is not the only reason to restore these works. I believe that the spirit of this “lost generation” now needs to be heard. The creativity of the first half of the 20^th century is far richer than we may have thought. Alongside Stravinsky, Strauss and other major and more fortunate figures, the varied voices of composers from Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Budapest, whether Jewish, dissident or immigrant, reveal much about the musical ferment of their time.
I now perform this music regularly, in the hope that it will find its place in the standard repertoire. I devote myself to programming works by this group of composers wherever possible.
The list of names is long: Alexander von Zemlinksy, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Bohuslav Martinů, Wolfgang Erich Korngold, Karl-Amadeus Hartmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Franz Schreker, Walter Braunfels, Ernst Krenek, Hanns Eisler, Eric Zeisl and Kurt Weill, to name just a few. The answer to Sassoon’s question is: it is we, now, who can begin to “absolve the foulness of their fate.”
James Conlon