A Musical Life in Two Worlds: The Autobiography of Hugo Leichtentritt ed. by Mark DeVoto

In 1940, a committee of Harvard professors invited fugitives of Nazi Germany to describe their experiences under Adolf Hitler’s regime. Hugo Leichtentritt (1874– 1951), an exact contemporary of Arnold Schoenberg and an eminent German musicologist who had been working as a lecturer at Harvard since 1933, set to the task with German thoroughness. The result, however, was not a description of Nazi terror (Leichtentritt was lucky to leave Germany before all hell broke loose, taking with him more than twenty chests of books and a fine Steinway grand piano), but a 516-page autobiography, dedicated to the rich culture of Europe that Leichtentritt rightly feared would never be the same after the war. An avid diarist, Leichtentritt documented life around him (Mark DeVoto appends a sample of Leichtentritt’s diary from 1893 to the autobiography). The reader finds fascinating descriptions of Leichtentritt’s hometown, Pleschen, and its inhabitants on the Polish-Russian frontier; the educational system of the old world; Harvard at the end of the nineteenth century, where Leichtentritt spent three years after his family emigrated to the United States; Boston and its musical life, including detailed accounts of concerts by such celebrities as Arthur Nikisch, Ferruccio Busoni, Ignace Jan Paderewski, and Eugen d’Albert, a concert life that the reader can compare to that of the Boston to which Leichtentritt returned in 1933, and to the European capitals Leichtentritt visited when his family moved back to Europe in 1894.

The central location in the autobiography is Berlin, with which, as Leichtentritt writes in the preface, his entire career had been identified during the thirty-eight years he spent there. Many pages of the memoir are taken up with what Leichtentritt describes as a “sort of requiem on that now dead city” (p. 2). Berlin’s importance in Leichtentritt’s autobiography inspired Nicolas Slonimsky, who edited and published Leichtentritt’s Music of the Western Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), to call it “The Life of a City.” Leichtentritt spent three years at the Hochschule in Berlin, directed by Joseph Joachim, and three years at the University of Berlin, where he earned a Ph.D. with music as a special field of concentration. After receiving his degree, Leichtentritt taught music history and theory at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Con servatory, gave private lessons in composition, wrote reviews in Die Vossische Zeitung and other prestigious newspapers, and tried his hand in composition, mainly after 1924. His main interest, however, remained musicology, which he pursued with passion and discipline, producing comprehensive volumes on topics such as Italian motets and the history of form. Berlin at the time, especially before the financial aftershocks of World War I, was being transformed into a leading cultural center that provided the young musician ample opportunities to develop his taste for high culture. Leichtentritt records in his diary that in 1897 he “heard seventy-five concerts, given mostly by world-famous artists and organizations, and twenty-four operas, some of them given two or three times,” to which “half a dozen ballets must be added” (p. 121).

It was hard not to get swept up by the euphoria that overtook Germany after it emerged from the Franco-Prussian War victorious and united. Leichtentritt describes the “gigantic mood of celebration” in Berlin as Germany was commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sedan victory in 1895. “Berlin was intoxicated with enthusiasm, and all over the huge city one could hardly see a house without more or less display of illumination” (p. 127). The euphoria remained until the beginning of World War I. Leichtentritt, himself Jewish but no less a loyal German patriot, greeted the war with a Quintet for Piano and Strings, the Finale of which was “full of the enthusiasm that filled almost everybody in Germany during the first months of the war. We all had a fervent love for Germany and were...