Mapping Canada's Music: Selected Writings of Helmut Kallmann

15. Mapping Canada’s Music: A Life’s Task (1997)

15 Mapping Canada’s Music: A Life’s Task Guido Bimberg (full name Sir Graf Guido von Bimberg zu Lenninghausen) is a German music scholar who has taught around the world and has edited books on Russian and German music. After visits to several branches of the Canadian Music Centre and guest appearances at various Canadian universities between 1992 and 1994, Bimberg decided to edit a collection of essays on Canadian music, the first such book to be produced in Germany, or indeed in Europe. The project was of much interest to HK, whom Bimberg in his introduction [p. 5] calls “Nestor der kanadischen Musikwissenschaft” (“Nestor of Canadian musicology,” referring to the ancient Greek king who was famous for his wisdom and eloquence). In this, the first essay in Bimberg’s volume, HK reflects on his nearly fifty-year involvement in Canadian music studies. The book appeared as volume 25 of a Canadian Studies series produced under the aegis of the University of Augsburg’s Institute for Canadian Studies. A projected second volume on Canadian music never materialized before the series ended in 2001.  The Impetus All I wanted was to gain more insight into Beethoven’s personality. I had plowed my way through three volumes of his letters in Prelinger’s edition1 and was now, in the summer of 1948, reading through the second Guido Bimberg, ed. Music in Canada / La Musique au Canada: A Collection of Essays, vol. 1 (Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1997), 11–34 Mapping Canada’s Music 190 appendix. There, underneath a letter to the composer from a visitor to Vienna, it stared at me in clear print, “Theodor Molt, music teacher in Quebec, North America” [“Musiklehrer in Quebec in Nord Amerika”], December 1825. “A music teacher in Quebec in 1825, but that’s impossible!” was my immediate reaction. I thought the eldest of the teachers I saw around the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto, men born in the 1870s, surely belonged to the first or, at most, second generation of music teachers in this new country.2 Yet here was someone by the name of Molt who taught in Quebec City a century earlier! What was the story behind this man? Other Beethoven literature provided details about Molt’s visit to the composer, and of these I will mention only that Molt, who had first settled in Quebec in 1822, returned there in 1826 with a Beethoven manuscript in his hands, the canon “Freu’ Dich des Lebens,” WoO 195. Rather, what piqued my curiosity was the Canadian aspect of the episode. Although I had arrived in Canada in 1940 as one of some 2,000 interned refugees from Germany and Austria, our camps were enclaves of European culture, for three years linked to Canadian musical life only by radio broadcasts of the Montreal and Toronto orchestras and recorded music programs. We knew little about Canada’s history. By the time I entered the University of Toronto in 1946 I had gathered my first impressions about current musical life. Although a strong wartime morale booster, music making had been downsized, but now that the nation had returned to civilian life it was raring to emerge stronger than ever. I heard a lot about music’s future. Thus, in Quebec a series of state conservatories expanded or opened, in Toronto plans matured for a senior school with master teachers, a professional opera school, and a new course for future school music teachers. Composition teachers versed in contemporary idioms at last assumed university positions. Professionalism seemed just to arrive. Indeed there was a flurry, if not an explosion, of talent and activity. And what about the past? One didn’t talk about that. In my three years of music history classes under three different professors , Canadian musicians, past or present, were never subjects of discussion or even mention. Anything of importance, as though by definition, had to take place in Europe or the United States. Music in Canada “had no past” apart from folksong, and in any case one was too busy to celebrate old heroes. True, the Hart House String Quartet of Toronto, and the Montreal Opera Company were memories of older music lovers; true, Mapping Canada’s Music: A Life’s Task 191 a Kathleen Parlow or a Rodolphe Plamondon had won acclaim abroad, but there had been a long succession of shipwrecked orchestral and operatic enterprises—backwoods enterprises typically...