Classical music This article is more than 8 years oldErnst Toch - my grandfather the forgotten composer who fled the Nazis
This article is more than 8 years oldErnst Toch was one of Weimar Germany’s most celebrated composers. Fleeing the Nazis for California, he continued to write, but found his work overlooked. Today, his grandson writes, his compositions are finally being reassessed and getting long overdue recognition
Back in the late 30s and early 40s when scores of Europe’s leading cultural figures escaped Hitler’s depredations and settled along the Pacific shores of Los Angeles, exiles as it were in Paradise, the Germans among them used to regale themselves with the tale of two dachshunds meeting beneath the breeze-wafted palms on the Santa Monica palisade, and how one confided to the other that “Here it’s true, I’m merely a dachshund, but back in the old country, I was a St Bernard.”
One such schnauzer, the writer Bruno Frank, used to make regular evening pilgrimages to that very palm colonnade, where he’d occasionally startle strolling passers-by. “There,” he would announce plaintively, pointing out over the glistening water toward the setting sun, “there lies Germany!” No one had the heart to tell him that, well, no, actually there lay… Japan.
Oh the other hand, Thomas Mann, that undimmed greyhound, betrayed no such wistfulness. “Wherever I am,” he’d frequently proclaim from the gardens of his elegant Pacific Palisades fastness, “there is Germany!” to the hearty (if dubious) concurrence of his fellow emigres. If only it were so. For Los Angeles was very pointedly not Berlin. The rich tradition of popular immersion in high (and in particular avant garde) culture that had grounded creative life over there (four orchestras and three operas in fertile competition almost every night of the year!) was replaced in LA by what the composer Ernst Krenek once characterised as “the echolessness of the vast American expanses” or what conductor Henri Temianka often described as Southern California’s overriding characteristic: “an unlimited indifference and passive benevolence toward everything and everybody.”
Such at any rate was the melancholy experience of my own grandfather, the composer Ernst Toch, a dachshund who really had been a St Bernard back in the old country. Vienna-born (1887), largely self-taught, Toch had grown into one of the stand-out fixtures on Weimar Germany’s modernist Neue Musik scene during the decade and a half after the first world war. A fervent experimentalist (though one firmly planted as well in the Great German tradition of his heroes Mozart and latterly Brahms), he was regularly featured in all the avant garde festivals, where among other things he virtually invented rap music by way of his hugely popular 1930 composition “Geographical Fugue” for the new medium of spoken chorus (“Trinidad, and the big Mississippi and the town Honolulu and the lake Titicaca…”), a piece subsequently championed by no less a figure than LA High School’s own John Cage.
He virtually invented rap music by way of his hugely popular Geographical Fugue for the new medium of spoken chorusHis chamber operas and string quartets were in regular rotation (as were his pieces for mechanical piano), his cello concerto had been premiered and then regularly performed by Feuermann, and his piano concerto was performed over 50 times by Walter Gieseking (and indeed slated to have been thus performed in London late in the spring of 1933, that is until Hitler ascended to power, at which point the dutiful Gieseking dropped the piece from his repertory and never performed it again).
Toch seemed to realise instantaneously upon Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 that it was time to leave, and taking advantage of the fact that he’d been selected to represent Germany at an international musicological conference in Florence that spring (one of two such envoys, the other being Richard Strauss), he simply never returned, travelling instead to Paris, from where he sent his wife Lilly a pre-agreed all-clear cable signalling that she should join him with their young daughter, a cable which read in its entirety, “I have my pencil.” As if that was going to be all he was going to need.
Alas things would not prove so simple. From Paris the family made its way to London (where Toch got some work scoring films, notably including the Bertold Viertel-Christopher Isherwood Little Friend, the collaboration that would later prove the basis for the latter’s slim novel, Prater Violet). But there wasn’t enough work to live on, so by the autumn of 1934 the family was on the move again, first to New York and then to LA where he threw himself into teaching (Andre Previn, among others) and film-scoring (the studio heads quickly pegged his modernist idiom as perfect for chase scenes, such as the sleigh chase at the end of Shirley Temple’s Heidi, and horror effects as in the Hallelujah chorus in Charles Laughton’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, with its screenplay by the aforementioned Bruno Frank). Toch’s efforts in this regard were all the more frantic in that – back home his large family (he had over 60 cousins) were now clamouring for help in escaping, and every single such affidavit had to be secured by a separate surety bond (in the end, fully half of the cousins would nonetheless perish).
He'd sometimes refer to himself as 'the world’s most forgotten composer,' a wistful joke with a certain painful validityMeanwhile, pencil or no, Toch’s personal creative wellspring began to run dry, and by the war years he was producing hardly any work of his own. On the far side of the war, however, his inspiration began to resurge, specifically around a series of works that summoned the image of the rainbow on the far side of the flood. He affixed lines from Eduard Moerike, a beloved German romantic poet – “Only through my tears can I see the beloved light of the sun” – as motto to a fresh string quartet opus 70 in 1946 (and you can almost hear the dapple).
And then, following his survival of a shattering heart attack in 1948, which he took as a sign, he gave up all his extraneous pursuits and poured himself back into his own work, in a veritable 15-year frenzy, as if making up for lost time, generating seven symphonies, a final opera, and countless chamber pieces. To his highly autobiographical Third Symphony, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he appended a motto from Goethe’s Young Werther, “Of course I am a wanderer, a pilgrim on this earth, but can you say that you are anything more?” (thereby seeming to meld both his Wandering Jewish and Classical German origins).
Notwithstanding Toch’s late life surge in productivity, which lasted through to his death in LA in 1964, he would sometimes refer to himself as “the world’s most forgotten composer,” a wistful joke that betrayed a certain painful validity. Perhaps owing to the fierce independence of his creative path (he was a follower of no school), his work got dismissed as too traditional by avant-gardists and too avant-garde by traditionalists. But with the passage of time, those artificial distinctions are beginning to fade, and Toch’s oeuvre is being reassessed, as it will be this coming weekend, 19-21 June when it will form a featured part of the Continuum Ensemble’s “Swept Away” Festival at London’s Kings Palace, which will feature no less than nine British premieres of Toch works from his Weimar prime.
Not included in the festival, though certainly also worth a fresh listen, will be a piece Toch conceived in London, his last night before boarding the ship to America, when walking the fogbound streets, he meticulously recorded the exact sequence of the Big Ben chimes, which he then used as the basis for an extraordinarily evocative set of orchestral variations, op. 64, which he composed on the journey out – by turns evincing melancholy, hope, anguish, despair and a guttering affirmation. Like almost all of Toch’s orchestral and chamber music, it has been freshly recorded over the past several years, and it can be heard here.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKWlqLake5FpaG5nmqq7cH2XaJyrpqOperW7wqFkZq%2BVnrqivoygnKulkaPGbrLOq56orKSau26vzqanqKuVp3qtrdarnKeblWLEpr%2FCoaOeqg%3D%3D