Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe

Introduction

1 Introduction Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis’ prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music. Said composer was both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony and had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. Clocking in at approximately seven minutes, A Survivor is too short to occupy either half of a concert yet too fraught with meaning to easily share the bill with anything else. For all of these reasons, the decision to program, perform, review, or otherwise write about A Survivor in postwar Europe was not taken casually. Its presence was always by design, and it was always understood to mean something important. That meaning proved remarkably multivalent, and A Survivor was susceptible to appropriation for a surprising range of designs. Like all meanings and uses, these were determined by time (the early Cold War, between 1948 and 1968) and place (six different countries in postwar Europe). A Survivor might signal acknowledgment or commemoration of the Holocaust, as in Norway or, obliquely, Czechoslovakia; it could represent an endorsement of Schoenberg specifically, of dodecaphony, or of modernist music generally, as in West Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Resistance to A Survivor is also telling, as it was frequently met by recourse to easy anti-Semitic or anti-American tropes and sometimes both, as in West Germany and Austria. In the Eastern Bloc, A Survivor acted as a canary in the cultural-political coal mines. In the early years of the Cold War, Schoenberg’s music was officially endorsed there only during occasional moments of relative relaxation, such as the Thaw. Otherwise, 2 / Introduction ad hominem attacks on the composer and rejection of his music typified the early status quo as well as noxious episodes of retrenchment. Thus A Survivor’s appearance behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1950s was an indicator of just how warm the Thaw had gotten in each satellite, although even then its presence required de-Semitization in the name of antifascism, most obviously in East Germany. A Survivor could also be a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, as when East Germans gave the Polish premiere in Warsaw. For all of these reasons and many others, the performance and reception history of A Survivor as it circulated through postwar Europe is uniquely suited to serve as the basis for a cultural history of that time and place. It is also a piece that continues to provoke discussion, although the critique is more often framed in terms of taste and artistic quality than symbolic content; such questions, in fact, have been part of its reception from the beginning. Plenty of erudite people take issue with A Survivor: some find it campy and melodramatic, arguing that the extreme expressionist musical gestures reduce the Holocaust to the clichés of a B-grade Hollywood film soundtrack; others find the choral finale distasteful because it panders to an audience’s preference for the heroic redemptive narrative arc and lets the listener off the hook; there are also those offended by what they perceive to be its exploitation of the suffering of others for entertainment. Nonetheless I pursue the project of reading the cultural history of the early Cold War in Europe through its performance and reception history for several reasons. First, A Survivor occupies a unique position in the oeuvre of a major composer. It may not have been the first piece of art music to treat the subject of the Holocaust, but it has been surprisingly popular.1 The prestige of its composer’s name, its status as a late work, and its subject matter have all drawn keen critical interest, and it has had a significant, even disproportionate, influence on the composer’s overall reception as well as on perceptions of his Jewishness.2 For these reasons, reconstructing its reception history as it circulated through postwar Europe fills in gaps in our knowledge about a well-known work by a historically significant figure. Second, there is no minimum aesthetic standard a piece of music must meet to be historically, culturally, or personally significant. Because of the unique combination of attributes and conditions outlined above, the performance and reception history of A Survivor is ideally positioned to teach us about the postwar period in Europe. Furthermore, it is...