Music is a thing apart politics, Otto Klemperer, noted conductor who was forced to leave Germany when the Nazis assumed control, declared Friday when he arrived on the liner Aquitania to conduct the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra during the first four weeks of its ninety-third season, which begins next Thursday evening.
The remark was made in explanation of Klemperer’s plan to introduce the “Mathis der Maler” symphony written by Paul Hindemith, Reich composer, to an American audience at the inaugural program. The opus had its world premiere last March when the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwaengler played it.
HINDEMITH NOT NAZI
Klemperer, a tall, dark, broad-shouldered man who wears spectacles and carries a cane, pointed out that Hindemith, although indubitably German, is definitely not a Nazi and is married to a Jewess.
“I consider him one of the best of the modern composers.” the conductor aserted, “and, as his works have not been played here to any great extent, I believe the ‘Mathis der Maler’ will prove interesting.”
When the Hitler regime forced Klemperer to give up his position as conductor of the State Opera in Berlin for no other reason than that he is of Jewish blood, it peremptorily broke a contract which would not have expired until 1937 and, also, confiscated his property and warned anyone having financial obligations to him not to make payment.
The conductor now makes his home in Vienna with his wife and two children, Werner, 14, and Lotte, 10. Frau Klemperer accompanied her husband here.
FRIENDLY TO AUSTRIA
His feelings toward Austria are of the friendliest sort, Klemperer said, asserting that he owes that country a debt of gratitude for providing him and his family a “refugium”—a sanctuary. He declined to comment on the recent display of anti-Semitism by the government of Chancellor Schuschnigg. His position as a refugee made it impossible for him to save anything along these lines, he said.
As for Germany, Herr Klemperer asserted “there is no hope.”
“It is too terrible,” he said, his face clouding. “They have taken away our positions, our property, our money, our lives.
“What is left? What is there to say?
Contrariwise, he reported that he and other Jews expelled from Germany by the Brown Shirts have “great hope” that in Austria they will find opportunity to rebuild their lives.
A reporter suggested that it was a gracious gesture on his part to present Hindemith’s symphony after the treatment the rulers of Hindemith’s country gave Klemperer.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” the conductor agreed. “But that is not the reason why I am bringing it to America. It is perhaps the best new work of the season—that is why.”
Hindemith is a professor at the Hochschule of Music in Berlin.
During the summer Klemperer conducted at various European music centers, including Milan. He has engagements to conduct at Vienna and Prague during November and December, after he is through in New York, he said, but there is a possibility that he will not return to Europe for those two months if negotiations with the Los Angeles Symphony work out satisfactorily.
He and his wife, an attractive little woman who appeared dwarfed as she stood beside her tall husband during the interview, are fairly reconciled to living outside the boundaries of Germany, he stated.
His father was born in Prague when that city was part of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire and they moved to the Reich when Klemperer was a boy. The children, too, do not miss Germany excessively.
Every now and then Frau Klemperer, who is unfamiliar with English, made her husband pause to translate for her benefit a question addressed to him by the press.
Senator Carter Glass, Democrat of Virginia, and Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State under President Hoover, were among other notables arriving on the Aquitania. Neither would enter into a discussion of foreign affairs.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
