Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe by Joy H. Calico (review)

The cantata A Survivor from Warsaw, Arnold Schoenberg’s emblematic work commemorating the Holocaust, offers up innumerable challenges to performers and historians, not to mention audiences. Only seven minutes in duration, it poses programming problems for being too short to stand on its own either before or after an intermission, but its somber subject and dramatic effects make it difficult to pair with suitable works. Praised by some critics for its powerful message and derided by others for kitschy devices, it can have the effect of confusing audiences with its academic compositional conception (Schoenberg’s renowned “twelve-tone” method), its jarring sonorities, and the eerie vocal delivery employing Schoenberg’s signature “speech-song” (Sprechstimme) style. Adding to its musical complexities are the oddly juxtaposed narrated texts, which mingle the English-language Jewish testimony, the Berlin-accented German orders barked at inmates, and the concluding Hebrew prayers. Music historians have long struggled to situate the work within Schoenberg’s self-imagination as a Jew, an American, a Zionist, and an heir to the imposing legacy of German music.

Joy Calico’s confrontation with this perplexing work takes a completely new approach, using its postwar performance history in Europe as a cultural barometer of the Cold War. Calico situates her study within the subarea of Exilforschung that concerns itself with remigrants, but she treats the work, rather than the composer, as the object experiencing remigration (Schoenberg lived out his days in the United States). She positions the work as sharing features with the millions who migrated across Europe in the years following World War II, proposing that through its many performances across the continent it accumulated its own experiences and “baggage,” such that its successive stagings had to reckon with its previous incarnations. Moving chronologically through its performance history, this analysis of A Survivor’s “cultural mobility” further highlights the importance of artistic exchanges during the Cold War, showing how cultural artifacts managed to penetrate what has been described as the “Nylon Curtain.”

Chapter by chapter, we are taken to six different European performance sites between 1950 and 1968: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Calico structures each chapter by presenting a thorough and incisive overview of the cultural-political environment in each of the locations and periods, tracking the genesis of the performance by scrutinizing the archival and oral history of the preconcert arrangements, and documenting the fate of the work in the critical responses found in newspapers and journals. In West Germany, the site of the work’s European premiere in August 1950, the reactions escalated into a cause célèbre when Hans Schnoor, a music critic with a Nazi past, castigated the work as hate mongering and offensive to the German people, couching his attack within his longstanding record of opposing modern music broadcasts on West German radio. His tactless vilification erupted into a public scandal but also revealed the seething resentments among West Germans toward the Allied occupation and the small number of remigrants. Calico casts the subsequent performance in Vienna (in April 1951) as a more direct “remigration,” since this was where the Viennese native Schoenberg had endured systemic antisemitism through the 1920s and, after the war, tried to block any performances of his works in this city where he had suffered so much discrimination and personal attack. The Vienna performance was also the only one for which, much to Schoenberg’s dismay, the English text was translated into German, and the term “gas chamber” was conspicuously excised. Yet unlike in West Germany, the critical response was surprisingly tame. Because of Austria’s official status as a victim of National Socialism, A Survivor did not ignite the feelings of collective guilt that were so volatile in West Germany.

Thereafter any European performances of A Survivor fell short of inciting the types of heated debates surrounding its West German premiere, understandable...