Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe

Joy H. Calico

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780520957701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw —a short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. Schoenberg, a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been one of the Nazis' prime exemplars of entartete (degenerate) music, immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, he wrote this twelve-tone piece about the Holocaust in three languages for an American audience.This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe during the early Cold War in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Each case is unique, informed by individual geopolitical concerns, but this analysis also reveals common themes in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces on both sides of the Cold War divide.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• West Germany: Retrenchment versus A Survivor from Warsaw
• Austria: Homecoming via A Survivor from Warsaw
• Norway: Performing Remembrance with A Survivor from Warsaw
• East Germany: Antifascism and A Survivor from Warsaw
• Poland: Cultural Diplomacy through A Survivor from Warsaw
• Czechoslovakia: A Survivor as A Survivor from Warsaw
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index