As part of #FakeImages, Cultuurcentrum Mechelen together with Kazerne Dossin organised the concert series ‘Entartete Musik’ . This series of concerts, curated by Piet Van Bockstal, focused on music that was considered degenerate and pernicious by the Nazi regime. Many composers and musicians were deported, died or fled their homeland because of this music. The six concerts ran from 18 June to 19 December 2021 at various locations in the city centre of Mechelen.
Who could ever have imagined the dramatic developments that were to stem from the Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition when it opened at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 1938 (under de auspices of the Minister for Propaganda Goebbels)? In the wake of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich the previous year, Nazi ideologists meticulously defined the parameters for ‘contemporary’ music. The Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) culture that typified National Socialism tolerated no ‘excesses’ such as jazz and swing, but equally musical innovators like Schönberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith were also gagged. Moreover, the majority of ‘banned’ composers and performers were of Jewish origin and this of course reflected the Nazis’ brazen racial policy.
Most people are familiar with the next chapter of this sinister story: numerous artists of diverse artistic plumage decided to call it a day in old Europe and emigrate to safer climes. Many others, mostly Jews but also Roma and Sinti, were rounded up and dispatched to concentration camps and extermination centres.
It is still of fundamental concern to us today that people were written out of society on racial grounds and made victims of a genocide and that art and culture were curtailed or banned for ideological reasons. Support for this ideology by an unseen propaganda machine serves as a bridge to the Fake Images exhibition, which runs parallel with this series of concerts and explores the theme of public deception.
During the war years, many artists spent a brief period of time at the Dossin barracks transit camp. The intrinsic artisticity of the work these artists were still able to create despite their plight, has largely been overlooked. This new series of concerts aims to address that oversight.
Piet Van Bockstal
Completeness is certainly not our ultimate objective here and, in any case, that would be well-nigh impossible. Neither is this series of concerts restricted to works composed in wartime conditions (such as the tragic pieces written in the “model” Theresienstadt – Terezin concentration camp -, which was the Nazis’ artistic and human poster child between 1941 and 1945).
Thankfully, many composers branded as ‘degenerate’ lived on long after the holocaust but the influence of the psychological terror inflicted by National Socialism is apparent in much of their output.
We set out to bring all this together in an eclectic and even vulgarized programme. As the curator of this series of concerts, particularly in these polarizing times when the political climate is all too quick to label religious, social and artistic beliefs as non-conformist, this initiative seemed to me to be a solicitous way of paying tribute to the “degenerate composers” who simply wanted to connect with their music. So it is to them that I would like to dedicate this festival.
Piet Van Bockstal, curator
Oxalys, the country’s premier chamber music ensemble, opens the debates in this new and prestigious series of concerts. Flanked by world mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn, the ensemble peruses tranquil lieder and melancholy pages on which the horrors of the Second World War have left their mark.
Introduction by Kurt Van Eeghem
During the Second World War, the Nazis used the Czech fortress Theresienstadt – Terezin – as a concentration camp. National Socialism made it the symbolic cultural ‘model town’ solely for propaganda purposes. This concert is devoted largely to several of the best known composers from Theresienstadt. Striking pieces for wind instruments by Gideon Klein and Pavel Haas form the leitmotif.
Ensemble STYX
Mechels Kamerorkest
Tom Van den Eynde: conductor
Piet Van Bockstal: conductor
Guido Deneve: violin
The four cellists who make up the Tetracelli quartet perform a serenade to the destruction of the Occident. In a mock military fashion in Hindemith’s Minimax Repertorium but also with a jazzy undertone in Kurt Weill’s famous Threepenny music. They also ‘rediscover’ the suite for four cellos by the ‘lost composer’ James Simon, who spent the last few months of his foreshortened life in Theresienstadt.
Numerous entartete composers excelled in vocal music. This evening Flanders’ foremost choir, the Vlaams Radio Koor (VRK), performs a whole gamut of vocal elegies in a quiet and reflective manner: from laments from Theresienstadt through passionate arrangements from some of Mahler’s most beautiful symphonic pages.
The Polish-born, Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg was a brilliant musician. However, his work topped the list of degenerate music and he was largely silenced by the fascist reign of terror. His renaissance is very recent. As he himself said, you only needed a handful of good string players to express his feelings in music. Oxalys takes up that challenge and juxtaposes Weinberg’s piano quintet with highlights from chamber music for strings and piano composed during the first half of the twentieth century.
Oxalys
Victor Chestopal: piano
Embittered by the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, in 1937 the world-famous Spanish cellist Pablo Casals went into artistic exile in the idyllic Prades in the south of France, where he set up a network to support exiled and incarcerated compatriots both morally and financially. In 1942 German troops occupied Prades. That was Casals’ signal to write an oratorio entitled ‘The Crib’ on the theme of hope for peace and happiness.
Mechels Kamerorkest led by Tom Van den Eynde
Various choirs and soloists
