Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers who Fled Hitler
Michael Haas
Aug 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by James Cameron Stewart
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14 hr 28 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
What happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience? In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler's Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile-composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos. Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today's repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape-and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture.
About the author
Michael Haas is senior researcher, cofounder, and chair of the Exilarte Centre in Vienna, where he studies and archives music suppressed by National Socialism. He is the author of Forbidden Music and was formerly music curator at Vienna's Jewish Museum.
Trained at Hull University and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, James Cameron Stewart is a veteran actor whose performances include roles in theater, film, and television. His credits include Outlander, Jericho, Flying Blind, Golden Years, Emmerdale, London's Burning, Eastenders, Coronation Street, and Holby City.
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