Vocal Resistance at the New York Festival of Song
When is it time to flee an incipient police state and go into exile? If you are lucky, you will receive an unmistakable sign. In the spring of 1933, not long after Hitler assumed power in Germany, the brilliant cabaret songwriter Friedrich Hollaender and his wife, the artist Hedi Schoop, were returning to Berlin after a trip to London when, arriving at their residence, they saw Schoop’s mother at a window signalling that they should not enter. Soon afterward, at a bar around the corner, she told them that the Gestapo was searching their apartment. The couple drove off, with Hollaender hiding under a coat, and boarded a train to Paris. A few weeks later, the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had lost his professorship at the Prussian Academy of Arts after antisemitic measures went into effect, got a telegram from his brother-in-law, Rudolf Kolisch, that read “Change of air on account of asthma urgently recommended.” Schoenberg, too, hurriedly left for Paris.
Hollaender and Schoenberg were among the German, Austrian, and Czech composers featured on a program titled “Fugitives,” which the New York Festival of Song, or NYFOS, recently presented at Merkin Hall. All were Jewish, and their fates were as disparate as their styles. Hollaender, who had found fame writing songs for Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” thrived in Hollywood. Schoenberg became a vastly influential teacher at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. Kurt Weill had hits on Broadway. But the magisterial opera composer Franz Schreker was shattered by the events of 1933 and died of a stroke the following year. Alexander Zemlinsky, another significant force in German-language opera, arrived in New York in 1938, hoped in vain for a production at the Met of his work, and died in 1942. Bleaker still are the stories of those who waited too long to leave or lacked the resources to do so. Viktor Ullmann and Hans Krása were murdered in Auschwitz. Many others perished before they had a chance to make their names.
I was especially haunted by the case of Georg Jokl, one of two musical brothers—the other was Otto—who were born in Vienna in the eighteen-nineties. Otto studied with Alban Berg and won notice as a composer, conductor, and music publisher; he later found steady employment in New York. Georg worked mainly as a pianist, often accompanying singers in recital. He arrived in New York in 1938 and largely vanished; one of his few publications was “4 Progressing Pieces for Piano.” His death, in 1954, at the age of fifty-seven, went unnoticed. NYFOS featured one of the few surviving traces of Jokl’s existence—a meltingly lovely, lullaby-like song titled “Abendlied” (“Evening Song”), which resembles a message in a bottle from a decimated world.
The pianist Steven Blier, who co-founded NYFOS in 1988 and remains its artistic director, is one of the most imaginative programmers in classical music, his myriad interests bursting the courtly confines of the vocal recital. He has placed Schubert alongside the Beatles, Poulenc alongside Sondheim; he has dabbled in ragtime, blues, tango, and samba. In a recently published memoir, “From Ear to Ear,” he explains that when he is planning an event he spends countless hours pondering and rearranging potential items until they form a “lyric architecture”—an underlying narrative that emerges with each successive song. “Fugitives” is exceptionally strong in this regard: it documents a fundamental transformation in the nature of songwriting while demonstrating continuities in the personalities of the composers under consideration.
We began in the world that was—in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In a program note, Blier wrote that the “Fugitives” concept was inspired by Zemlinsky’s “Meeraugen,” or “Sea Eyes,” which tells of a “person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean.” You had the feeling, as the evening went on, that the crushing realities of twentieth-century history—war, revolution, inflation, the Depression, Fascism—made such refined aestheticism untenable and forced composers onto other paths. But NYFOS imposes no stylistic ideologies, and if, in 1939, Ullmann felt compelled to dive back into Straussian late Romanticism, Blier sees nothing contradictory in the gesture.
When a recital ranges from “Meeraugen” to Kurt Weill’s “Buddy on the Nightshift,” by way of Krása’s atonal Five Lieder and Hanns Eisler’s Brecht setting “The Landscape of Exile,” singers of extreme versatility are required. The duo on hand for “Fugitives”—the mezzo Kate Lindsey, a veteran of the series, and the baritone Gregory Feldmann, a new addition—met the challenge. The pianist and vocal coach Bénédicte Jourdois, NYFOS’s associate artistic director, assisted with the accompaniments and with the stage patter, of which there is always a fair amount. Blier is a strong personality, as his entertainingly candid book reveals, but he is a genial host, and also a knowledgeable one. If he dominates the party, you don’t want to leave.
Feldmann, a relatively recent Juilliard graduate, showed his Lieder-singing chops in the Viennese fare, his tone robust, his diction crisp. He could have brought a sharper edge to political songs by Eisler and Weill—the latter’s “Caesar’s Death” needs more of a snarl to make its anti-Fascist allegory clear—but he shifted effortlessly into Broadway belting in “Love Song,” from Weill’s “Love Life.” Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” a radiant song by a composer who did so well in Hollywood that classical snobs wrote him off, benefitted from a plush timbre. Feldmann learned all this esoteric repertory in just a week (after Justin Austin dropped out on account of illness), making his achievement somewhat heroic.
Lindsey came on the musical scene as a sweet-voiced Mozart mezzo and has grown into a fearless singing actor. Although her German diction lacked bite, especially in the cabaret-style material, she has an inherent ability to inhabit and project a song. Daringly, she took on Hollaender’s “Black Market,” which was written for the mighty Dietrich: it comes from Billy Wilder’s 1948 film “A Foreign Affair,” an acidulous political comedy set in occupied Germany. Lindsey didn’t impersonate the original—as Blier pointed out, she actually sang the notes, rather than a Dietrich-like approximation of them—but she did throw in a few smokily accented phrasings. More important, she and Blier together caught the unscrupulous sophistication of the scenario, for which Hollaender supplied both words and music:
Powdered milk for bikes.
Souls for Lucky Strikes.
Got some broken-down ideals? Like wedding rings?
Sh-h-h! Tiptoe. Trade your things.
During his American period, Hollaender worked with such lyricists as Leo Robin and Frank Loesser, but as a wordsmith he equalled any of them, and over time he mastered English well enough that he could replicate the mordant virtuosity of his German numbers. (“Get the Men out of the Reichstag” and “The Jews Are to Blame for Everything” are two classics.) NYFOS did a service by celebrating this often overlooked songwriting genius, whose wit was as lethal as his melodies were lithe.
Fiercest of all was Lindsey’s rendition of Weill’s “Wie lange noch?” (“How much longer?”), which was written in 1944 and broadcast into Germany for psychological-warfare purposes. The tune comes from Weill’s French-language torch song “Je ne t’aime pas.” The émigré satirist Walter Mehring inserted a new text that retains a torchy vibe—this is ostensibly a complaint against a lying lover—but implicitly urges resistance against Hitler: “I believed you, I had gone mad / From all your talk, your vows.” The title phrase alludes to Cicero’s denunciation of a would-be dictator: “How much longer, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?” The airing of the song had no apparent effect: the madness went on until Hitler was dead. ♦