The Justice

Media Credit: Rachel Corke As part of his Recovered Voices project, the conductor has investigated artists who were displaced or murdered by the Nazi regime.

"This gentleman, this artist personifies the words of the poet William Morris, who wrote, 'History remembers the kings and the warriors because they destroyed. Art remembers the people because they created.'"

With these words, Office of the Arts Director Scott Edmiston welcomed Director of the Los Angeles Opera James Conlon, who declared the introduction "glorious" (if possibly exaggerated) to Brandeis University's Faculty Center Monday night.

Conlon spearheaded the Recovered Voices program as, in his words, "an attempt to revive the works of those composers whose music has dropped out of the repertory where it really belongs and to whom the loss of their position in the great line of classical music tradition is due exclusively or directly to the crimes of the Third Reich." The conductor, an unprepossessing and direct speaker, emphasized that while some of the work of these Nazi-labeled "degenerate" composers had been destroyed in every sense of the word, most of it was lost to us due to the reluctance of musical organizations to program it for Bach- and Beethoven-happy audiences. "What cannot be found sufficiently are those artists who are willing to go out on a limb and perform [this music], and I mean to perform it with committed performances that come out of the heart and the brain and the passion of the music-maker," said Conlon, who recounted that displaced German and Austrian conductors were identified in post-World War II America almost solely with the traditional luminaries Mozart and Beethoven.

In both his lecture and an interview with the Justice, Conlon also stressed that he never set out to create Recovered Voices as a gimmick or form of musical tokenism, but through a desire to correct the "enormous omission" in the repertory of 20th century music. His particular affinity for Alexander Zemlinsky, the first of the eventual Recovered Voices composers whose music Conlon encountered, led him "in a completely natural and organic manner" to investigate the artists who were displaced or murdered over the course of the Nazi regime. Through one chance encounter on the radio with work by Zemlinsky, who twice fled the Nazis only to land alone and unrecognized in the United States, Conlon was "astonished to find great music that was being ignored," and so set off on a mission to restore these composers to their rightful place in history.

Continued...

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