The Entartete Musik, literally "degenerate music", is the name Decca has given to a series of CD recordings highlighting a range of music, much of which has lain in neglect for a half century or more. The series's executive producer, Michael Haas, outlines three strands in the thinking behind the project:
Firstly, to restore "important works lost, destroyed or banned by the political disruptions of the 20th century, most conspicuously the music suppressed by the Third Reich". Secondly, to offer "a representation of musical evolution, trends and ideas destroyed before reaching maturity yet nevertheless contributing a valuable and almost unrecognised addition to 20th-century music". And lastly, to explore "the music of exile: the composers' outer response to new stimuli and challenges - the inward response to a different world unable or unwilling to acknowledge their native musical language".
The Nazis organised an exhibition of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Munich and, in 1938, in Dusseldorf, presented a show of Entartete Musik. Fifty years later, the music exhibition was reconstructed in the city of its origin, and was to prove the starting point for a burgeoning interest in exploring the full range of what had been suppressed.
It's heartening to note that the fearless Bartok, whose own challenging music was predictably classed as "degenerate", took the description as being an honour, and wrote to the German government to protest at his work having been left out of the Dusseldorf show.
Israel Yinon is emphatic about the music he conducts. He's not doing it, he says, because it was designated entartete, but because of its quality and the interest it holds for him. As a student, he says, when he followed the development of music in the 20th century, he found a break in continuity. Things were just so different after the second World War. For him, then, the discovery is of a lost generation of composers, many of them cut off in their prime, who form an essential link in the understanding of how music has developed during the last 100 years.
The names are becoming more familiar: Ervin Schulhoff, Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, Gideon Klein. The Nazis had a concentration camp especially for people with artistic gifts, Theresienstadt or Terezin, where many composers ended up. Yinon explains one of the factors that makes their music so unusual to us today: "They didn't have an influence. They don't have successors. They were spreading around in many musical directions. But everything was artificially cut off."
Perhaps now, more than half a century later, their work is at last being freed up to feed back into, and influence, a whole new generation.
