Patrick Bade
Wir von der Opera: Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Wir von der Opera: Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed, Part 1

- This is the title page of a book that I came across, oh maybe 30 years ago or more. And it’s a collection of biographies of 35 people who were amongst the good and the greater the art world in Germany immediately before the Nazi takeover. What struck me was that of the 35 people listed here, within six years, 20 had left Germany and gone into exile. Now there have been other great cultural intellectual exoduses over the years. Of course the Huguenots who left France in the 17th century, there was a great cultural exodus from Russia after the Revolution. We, in Britain at the moment, we’re having a minor cultural, intellectual brain drain as a result of Brexit. Many people are up sticks and moving from the country and going to Europe instead. But it’s never been anything quite on this scale. 20 out of 35, that’s huge, it’s well over half. And I showed this book to a great friend, Trude Levi. People who are listening from London and used to go to the London Jewish Cultural Centre will remember her. She was a real fixture there. A really amazing woman, Hungarian woman who was a survivor of Auschwitz. And she used to go out into schools to talk to children. And she said to me, she asked me if I would give her a copy of this title page that you can see. And she wanted to make the point of that Jews in Germany had made a contribution, an enormous contribution. They really punched beyond their weight. I think it’s something like one, between 1 and 2% of the population was Jewish in Germany.

But we’ll see. There’s well over a quarter of these names who are people, shall I put it, of Jewish origin. I don’t want to say they were Jews because they didn’t necessarily always define themselves that way. It was the Nazis with somebody for instance, like Alicia Talva, who was a Catholic. It was the Nazis who told him he was a Jew. But I want to make another point about this list. Imagine that many of you have already seen or will be seeing the documentary, “The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz,” which was made recently. Of course, the cellist of Auschwitz is Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. And she is the best part of this documentary. She is, of course, always worth listening to, and she’s as cogent and powerful in this as she always is. But I’d sort of recommend, you may wish to fast forward through a lot of the rest of it. I mean, she herself is not really very happy with some of it. It’s full of inaccurate statements. And the one thing that both Trude and Anita are always very insistent on is that if you’re dealing with this subject matter, you must be accurate. You must not allow the slightest possibility of doubt of the truth of what you’re saying. And so there are many things actually in this documentary that I would question, particularly the discussion, much of the discussion of Furtwangler. But it opens with the statement that when the Nazis took power in 1933, the entire musical establishment without exception, cooperated and collaborated with the Nazi regime, without a glimmer of protest. This is simply not true.

And so of the 20 people who left Germany because of the Nazi regime out of the 35, 10 were in inverted commas, “Arians”. Fritz Busch, Carl Ebert, who else? Hebert Janssen, Maria Jeritza, Erich Kleiber, Lotte Lehmann, Frida Leider, and so on and so on, they left because they could not stomach the regime. So, what I’m going to do today and on Sunday, I want to talk you through this list and tell you the stories of all these people, both the ones that left and the ones that stayed. And I’m starting with the delightful Hungarian, coloratura soprano, Gitta Alpar. She was Jewish. She was the daughter of a cantor in Budapest. She was very precocious. She made her debut at the Budapest Opera in 1923 when she was just 20 years old and quickly established herself as one of the leading coloraturas in Europe. And she was invited to sing in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, with great success. And just to show you how good she was in these roles, here is a taste of her “Queen of the Night.” Now her timing, you could say, was on one hand brilliant and on the other hand, disastrous. And the timing was brilliant because she was a charming, photogenic. She was much more. She was a very clever, very funny actress, a real gift for comedy. So she was perfect for the new medium of sound movies. They were around about 1930. They were looking for people who were photogenic for the movies. And she made her first movie in 1932. And it was an absolutely huge, huge success. So from that point of view, as I said, her timing was brilliant. And from 1932 to the beginning of 1933, she was absolutely the toast of Berlin. She was immensely, immensely popular. She was really a superstar very briefly. You can see her singing to a crowd in the street in Berlin in this picture.

And it all seemed perfect. She married her handsome co-star in the film Gustav Frohlich but of course the Nazis arrived and everything went pear-shaped very quickly. And he dumped her for a beautiful Czech film star called Lida Baarova. And she in turn dumped him for Goebbels. Well, there’s a turnaround for you. So she divorced Gustav Frohlich, or he divorced her, I don’t know which round it was. And she came to England and she continued her… She didn’t sing at Covent Garden. So she didn’t sing an opera, but she continued her career in movies. And she had a very big success with a movie called “I Give My Heart,” which is a very fictional account of the life of Madam Dubarron. And you can see this, I recommend it, on YouTube. She’s absolutely delightful. I mean, she has a kind of earthy warmth liveliness, which seems to me to be, it’s a very Jewish kind of charm that she has. I see a bit of Bette Midler, a bit of Fanny Brice in her character. So she was in Britain throughout the 30s. And then of course, as the situation darkens and the war is brewing, she crosses the Atlantic and goes to Hollywood, but doesn’t really pick up much, hardly any work in Hollywood. And she gives up her career in 1940, only 37. A terrible waste, actually, of a brilliant talent. But I’m going to play another little excerpt of probably the last recording ever made of her. This is a radio broadcast from New York, conducted by the great Hungarian operetta composer, Emmerich Kalman. As you can hear, the voice is still very much intact. But she gave up her, her career on stage, became a singing teacher, and she moved over to the West Coast and ended her days in California.

And here you see her in her old age. Now my, my the next person alphabetically is Fritz Bush. Very, one of the great conductors of the first half of the 20th century. He was not Jewish. He was born into a working class family, very remarkable family. I don’t know how many siblings there were altogether. But three of them became internationally famous as musicians. Who was his brother Adolf, who was a great violinist. And his brother Herman, who’s a cellist, and one of the founding members of the famous Bush Quartet. Now Fritz Bush in the thirties was the director of the Dresden Opera. It was one of the great opera houses of the world, but both he and his brothers were outspokenly anti-Nazi. And Saxony was very, very heavily Nazi. And so he found himself the victim of protests and his performances at the Dresden Opera were interrupted by protests because of his anti-Nazi views. And a petition was circulated amongst all the staff, of Dresden Opera. And they were heavily pressurised into signing the position the petition to have him leave. And he was pushed out very early in 1933. Now, felt that this was a loss to such a great conductor. He was actually quite keen to keep him in the fold, so to speak. And various offers were made to him, including later in 1933 when Toscanini pulled out of by Roy. He was offered the job of Chief Conductor by Roy. Of course that would’ve been a great honour and it must have been very tempting, but he would have absolutely nothing to do with it and nothing to do with Germany while the Nazis were in par.

So he came, he left and between 33 and the end of the war, because he was working at Glyndebourne, he’s the first chief conductor of the Glyndebourne Festival in 1934. But he was also conducting at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. And during the war conducting at the Met in New York. And he did not go back to, he was in exile altogether for 16 years before he went back to Germany. There is a really excruciating radio interview in German. I did play it to you once before when he went back to Germany. He went back to Cologne where he came from. And you can see how tough, how difficult it was for him to even talk about it. The pain of leaving his country or being driven out and coming back and finding it in ruins. But I want to play you a bit from a live performance that he conducted in Buenos Aires was a little, a golden age of German opera in Buenos Aires, in the second half of the 1930s, because you had both Busch and Kleiber we’re going to be talking about later. Great conductors and many singers and many refugees went to Buenos Aires. This excerpt also gives me a chance to let you hear the wonderful voice of Alexander Kipnis, who is actually not on the list of the 35 people, but of course he was another very great singer who was driven into exile. Here you’ll hear him in a minute as Baron Ochs in the end of act two of Der Rosenkavalier. Now my next singer is the handsome debonair baritone Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender. And he was the figure in the very first, the opening performance of the Glyndebourne Festival in 1934. I’ve often said of course Glyndebourne was Hitler’s gift to England. Glyndebourne would never have happened if it were not for suddenly all these very wonderfully gifted people being at a loose end.

And the Christie, the owner of Glyndebourne happened to be attending a concert in Eastbourne given by Adolph Busch, the violinist brother of Fritz Busch. And Adolph said, well, if you need a conductor, why don’t you ask my brother? He’s free. And that’s how it happened. And so I often wonder though, what people talked about, about Glydebourne in 1930s. Cause you had very strange mixture of people. You had Jewish refugees, you had people who were there just because they were very anti Hitler like Carl Ebert and Fritz Busch. And you had card carrying Nazi party members like Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender. 1934, the year he appeared as di Figaro, he joined the Nazi party. Whether he did it, I mean, the fact that it’s 1934 or not earlier suggests to me that he probably did it for career reasons rather than as a true believing Nazi. And you can decide for yourselves whether you think that’s better or worse to join the Nazi party for purely opportunistic reasons. But he’s of course the first ever complete recording of The Marriage of Figaro was with that cast in 1934. And he’s very good in that recording, although his Italian is really atrocious. It’s very heavily German accented in the last act aria for Figaro he sings, . So I’m going to play you that aria, but actually I’m going to play it in, in a version where he sings in German. He’s obviously rather more comfortable singing in German than he is- oh this is what it looked like in 1934 with Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender standing there in the middle. And here he is back in Germany with Erna Berger. And here he is singing Figaro’s last act aria in German rather than in Italian. So he went back to Germany.

He continued his career very successfully all through the Nazi years. There are two mentions of him in The Goebbels diaries of being invited to sing privately at Goebbels house. But as I said, I don’t really know what his actual political beliefs were. This is Glyndebourne in the 1930s. And this is the triumvirate who made Glyndebourne into such a great festival. Three refugees from Nazi Germany, Rudolf Bing, who was a Vietnamese Jew in the Middle East, Fritz Busch, I’ve talked about him already. And on the right is Carl Ebert. Carl Ebert, who was outstanding, outspoken critic of the Nazis. So he was really forced to leave, otherwise he would’ve been put into prison or a concentration camp. And he came to England and he was the director, the theatrical director of Glyndebourne from the 1934 from the first festival right up until his retirement in 1959. Another person who landed up at Glyndebourne was the delicious soubrette soprano Irene Eisinger. She was a very, very popular singer in Berlin. You can see she was an extremely pretty woman. And I played you recently an excerpt from a live performance of Spoliansky’s “Rufen Sie Herrn Plim”. She’s in that performance and you have a sense of how the audience loved her. I mean, the moment she walks onto the stage, the audience spontaneously bursts into applause. They clearly absolutely loved her. And that was the end of 1932. But Lotte Schuner another very popular singer in Berlin who I’m going to be talking about on Sunday, she said, well, it’s all very well to be loved on stage, but those people who applaud you in the theatre might well be the same kind of people who would throw a brick through a shop window of a business owned by a Jewish enterprise.

But so Irene Eisinger I mean, she should have had a much greater career. I mean she continued. She of course she survived. She came to England, she survived and she occasionally sang at Covent Garden. But probably her best roles were at Glyndebourne and in the mid to late 30s. And here she is singing Despina Aria from Cosi fan tutte which she took part in the complete Glyndebourne recording, which again was the very first recording of that opera. Hans Fidesser I don’t have a record of him to play to you, but you can find him on YouTube. He was quite a decent tenor of the 1930s, very popular. He was- you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the rather awful picture of him as on the right hand side, but he was a handsome man. And so he was rather like Gitta Alpar, he was popular in movies as well as on the opera stage. , of course, I’m not going to say much about today because I’m going to do a whole session on him later in the series. Such a complicated story. This one, one thing you can say about him was he was never in sympathy with Nazi ideas and he was adamantly against the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis. For a couple of years, he was very much keen to leave as well. There’s was a discussion of him going to New York to take over the New York, the Harmonic, but I think Toscanini was the one who really put paid to that. The Nazis didn’t want to lose him. They at one point they confiscated his passport cause they were very afraid that he was going to leave the country. So there was quite a big standoff between and the Nazis in the mid 1930s.

And he agonised over it. And in the end, I think he didn’t want to leave his country. He didn’t want to leave his family, he didn’t want to leave his mother. And he decided to stay. And he came to an agreement, a private agreement with Goebbels, which he thought would allow him to keep his nose clean, to keep his integrity. But of course it was a pact with the devil. And there was no way you could keep your nose clean if you were working with the Nazis. So inevitably he became very compromised. And, but that’s a long, complicated story and I’ll tell it on another occasion. This is a man who also sold his soul to the devil, ironically, because his greatest role was the Devil, Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. This is the actor Gustaf Grundgens regarded as Germany’s greatest classical actor in the early to mid 20th century. This is a notorious photograph of him. He’s the figure on the right. And he’s here with Klaus Mann. He’s Klaus Mann with his arm around Erika Wedekind, who’s the daughter of Frank Wedekind, who I talked about in an earlier lecture. Famous playwright, cabaret artist, very left wing. And the other woman entwined with Grundgens. No, let me, have I got this the right way? No, it’s Pamela Wedekind, who’s next to Grundgens and it’s Erica Mann who’s next to, or no, I’ve got it the other way, I’ve got it the wrong way around actually. I’m not sure which is which, to tell you the truth. But anyway, they were in a very interesting . Grundgens was engaged and briefly married to Pamela Wedekind and Klaus Mann was engaged to, you know, sorry, I’m getting totally confused here. Klaus Mann is engaged to Pamela Wedekind and Grundgens is, ugh, I don’t know where I am. I’m getting totally confused.

But I think everybody was confused actually. And the four of them appeared in a play that really exploited the sexual ambiguities of the relationships. In reality, it was the two men were in a sexual relationship and the two women were in a sexual relationship despite the fact that they were normally heterosexually engaged So Grundgens, Gustaf Grundgens was so openly gay, really, everybody knew that he was gay and he was also very, very left wing. So when the Nazis came to power, the three of the three, apart from Grundgens all left, they all went into exile. But Grundgens decided to stay and he decide again rather like, but I think rather more cynically than , he decided to compromise. So he really did do a deal with the devil. And as early as 1936 Klaus Mann was extremely disillusioned by this, what he saw as betrayal by his former lover. And he wrote a roman a clef called Mephisto, which everybody knew was really about Gustaf Grundgens. So I hope I haven’t- I feel confused. I hope I haven’t totally confused you there. This is Ludwig Hofmann, very fine baritone. I played him last time in an excerpt from Jonny . And you can see him in the role of, in the Blackface the role of Jonny on the left-hand side. He was a very distinguished Wagnerian baritone and I’m slightly mystified by his career because he continued to, he was a big star in New York at the Met and he sang at the Met right up until 1938. So if he’d really wanted to, it would’ve been relatively easy for him to leave Nazi Germany, because he was already established in America. But eventually he chose to go back, who knows why really. Family reasons, career reasons.

This is the delicious soprano, Maria Ivogun. She was Hungarian, she was the chief soprano star of the Munich Opera from all the way through the great Bruno Walter period during the First World War and after. And she, I’m not quite sure why she’s in the book actually, because she was really at the end of her career, although she wasn’t actually that old. She was born in 1890, but she divorced her first husband, the tenor Karl Erb in 1932 and 1933, she married Michael Raucheisen and she retired. So you might think, oh, that’s a bit significant. Why did she retire in 1933? I don’t think it was for political reasons. Michael Raucheisen was certainly somebody who was very well in with the Nazi regime. So anyway, let’s hear a little bit of her delightful voice in an aria from the This is Herbert Janssen. He was one of the finest baritones in the German repertoire in the interwar period. Very fine singer both in the Opera House and a wonderful interpreter of German leader, beautiful voice, the lovely velvety quality to it. And have had a very successful career, particularly at Bayreuth. He’s in the first complete recording of Tannhauser made in Bayreuth in 1930. And again, he was not Jewish, but he was openly contemptuous of Hitler. And in 1937, he sang in a concert that was attended by Hitler and he was invited to have dinner with the at the end of the concert. And he refused. And he was heard to say, I may have to sing for that man, but I’m not going to eat with him. And this was a very rash thing for him to say. It was picked up by the Nazi top brass Goebbels mentions in his diary that they need to get rid of Janssen. And they were planning to find an excuse to arrest him and sent him to a concentration camp. He was warned by somebody very high up. And it’s believed that the person who warned him, interestingly was Winifred Wagner, you know, who was very, very close with Hitler. So whoever it was, as soon as he got the warning, he went straight to the railway station and left the country.

He arrived in London with nothing but the clothes that he was wearing. He’d lost absolutely everything. I mean, this gives you a sense of, how difficult it was for these, whether you were a Jew or a non-Jew to leave Nazi Germany just like that. He went straight to the house of Berta Geissmar. She lived in Red Line Square in Central London. Berta Geissmar had been the much trusted and loved secretary of Furtwangler. He helped her escape and he arranged for her to become the assistant and secretary of Sir Thomas Beecham, which she was right up until the second World War. So Berta Geissmar took in Herbert Janssen and she got hold of Beecham, Beecham got him work at Covent Garden, and he was also helped by Toscanini who helped to establish him in New York. So he went across the Atlantic and he had actually a very fine end of his career for about a decade singing at the Metropolitan in New York. But here he is we’ll hear this lovely malevolence, velvety voice in Schubert’s Serenade. Next we come to the glamorous Czech Moravian diva Maria Jeritza. As you can see, she was a fabulously beautiful woman, extremely glamorous. And if you read the correspondence of Strauss and Hofmannsthal, you can see how much they both admired her. They were desperate to have her for the premiere of their opera, “The Egyptian Helen”, “Die agyptische Helena” in 1928. They felt that she was the only opera star in the world who was beautiful enough and glamorous enough to play Helen of Troy. And she was equally loved by Puccini, you see him here. Well here on the right, you see her as Helen. She did eventually sing it, but not in the premier. She sang the role of Helen. Here she is with Strauss. And on the right hand side, here she is with Puccini, who also absolutely adored her. He was completely swept away by her and even prepared to accept her blonde hair and blue eyes as Tosca.

Puccini was normally a stickler for everything being correct. I’m sure you know in Tosca, the heroin, it’s mentioned in the text of the opera that she has black eyes, not blue eyes. And she’s certainly not blonde. So Maria Jeritza superstar in Vienna and in New York. Her contract with the Met ended somewhat acrimoniously at the beginning of the 30s, mainly because her fees were so high. And after the Wall Street crash, the Met simply couldn’t afford her fees anymore. So she went back to Vienna. But after the Angelus, she returns to America. In fact, she’d married an American and she spent the rest of her life in America. So I’m going to play you, I think, a very poignant live recording. This is a radio broadcast of a live concert in New York. Where she shares the platform with the great Romanian tenor Joseph Schmidt, I’ll be talking about him on Sunday. And I say it’s poignant. Well, it’s poignant for a lot of reasons, poignant because you see that he was obviously very popular in America. He could have stayed there and that would’ve saved his life if he had. But he was tiny, he was under five foot tall and she was tall and statuesque. So I’m going to play you this. You’ll hear them being introduced. They’re singing the love duet from “Faust”. They walk onto the stage and of course the sight of the two of them together reduces the audience to absolutely helpless laughter.

• [Host] Maria Jeritza returns to join Joseph Schmidt in the love duet from Act three of the Opera “Faust”.

• [Host] Maria Jeritza.

• Now we move on to Erich Kleiber another one of the real conducting giants of the 20th century. Now, if you follow Dennis’s lectures, you’ll know that Dennis is a huge fan of Carlos Kleiber, who is Erich Kleiber’s son. But Erich was also an absolute giant of the podium, not Jewish, but very outspoken in his criticism of the Nazis and absolutely disgusted by the policies of the new regime. And he resigned from his post as head of the Berlin Opera, the most prestigious post, I suppose at the time in the opera world. So he gave all of that up and in fact never again had a comparable post. But he goes to South America and spends the Nazi years in South America conducting opera at the Colon. But I’m going to play you an excerpt from a broadcast of a live concert of the . Very monumental, very powerful, rather different interpretation from anything you might hear today. This is Otto Klemperer, another giant in the realm of conducting very, very important figure in the history of 20th century music, particularly loathed by the Nazis. Not just because he was Jewish, but because of his left-wing policies, and also his sympathy for the cultural avant garde. So he was accused of called . So he was sacked immediately and he was one of the first to go in 1933 and cross the Atlantic and managed to get a position as a conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Not at that point, a particularly well known or distinguished orchestra, but he completely transformed it and he turned it into a major orchestra of world standard. But I’m going to play you a rather bizarre thing. It’s a bit unfair really. It’s from a concert given with the Los Angeles Orchestra in the Hollywood Bowl in 1938. And it was just after the tragic death of George Gershwin from a brain tumour.

And so the concert was dedicated to him. So rather bizarrely, you have this great master of the German classics trying to tackle Gershwin with very bizarre results. I don’t think you will have ever heard Gershwin sounding quite as lugubrious as it does in this performance. I’m going to finish with two of my favourite sopranos Lotte Lehmann, Frida Leider Lotte Lehmann, ugh, for me, she’s the greatest of all really. Everything she sings she’s living it. She’s just such and it’s a gorgeous voice of course, but it’s technique not the most perfect. And she would often be inaccurate. Somebody once said to Strauss, don’t you mind Lehmann making all those mistakes? And he said, well, I prefer what she sings to what I wrote. She was of course the most famous Marzelline ever. Here you see her in two images as the Marzelline. As you can see on the right hand- I never met her, actually, sadly I’d love to have met her. But we did have a correspondence in the 1970s. Well, I’m sure if you’ve listened to my lectures before- I never miss an opportunity to play Lehmann because I just adore her so much. So today I thought I’d not going to play you Lehmann singing. You can find that for yourself. You can go on YouTube and get lots and lots. She made an enormous number of recordings and they’re mostly absolutely marvellous. But I thought I’d play you Lehmann speaking. She had a very beautiful speaking voice actually. So there’s a famous story about the Nazis courting her. They wanted her to make her the great national- she was regarded as a sort of national treasure really. And Gering had her flown to Berlin early in the Nazi regime and said, you know, what do you want? We’ll give you anything you want. And made her all sorts of offers. And they were so over the top that she, and he said, is there anything else you want?

And she said, oh yes, what about a castle on the Rhine? And they really thought she meant it, that she wanted a castle on the Rhine. But she herself said, of course, at the beginning, at this time, the beginning of the Nazi regime, she was totally apolitical. She didn’t really understand what it was all about. But she soon did and she turned her back on her native country. And she, first of all, she of course moved to Vienna where she was very adored. And then after the Angelus, she moved to America and she spent the rest of her life in America. Now, all these exiles, all these people who went into exile from Germany, they, many of them regarded it really as their mission to bring German to us poor, ignorant Anglo-Saxons in Britain and America. And that was an attitude that was sometimes resented. You can still really pick it up, I would say in the North London Jewish community that amongst elderly people who remember it, that the Jews who’d been in England for some time, particularly the ones who’d come from Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, resented these upper Germans, Austrian and Czechs, who thought that they were so superior and they felt that they were being talked down to. And so I play- this is Lehmann introducing a concert on the radio in America. And I must say I do find it quite funny because it does- apart from the fact that she’s shamelessly trying to sell her records over the radio, there is an element of her, I think talking down to her audience.

• [Lehmann] Good evening, I’m so glad to be with you all. There’s always something particularly heartwarming for me in singing over the radio. I think then of all those people who cannot go to concerts, the sick and the old, and those who live in lonely places, I think of all those people into whose lives the radio and the phonograph have brought music. And it makes me happy to know that you may repeat for yourselves on records, whatever gives you pleasure in this broadcast. Now, please think of yourselves as guests in my home, in my own music room. You can hear my accompanist Paul Ulanowsky playing now. He plays well, doesn’t he? Now tonight we are going to begin our series with the music of-

• I going to play one very beautiful record for you before I finish tonight. And this is Frida Leider in my opinion, the greatest Brunnhilde and Isolde on record. And this is a complicated, strange story. She did stay, and I really wonder why? Many people assumed in Germany that she was Jewish, and certainly Winifred Wagner did and made rather petty comments about Frida Leider Jewishness. She was in fact married to a Jewish musician, this man Rudolf Deman, who was the leader of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. And she could have, they could have both gone to America because in 1933 and 34, she was singing at the Met. And she was much appreciated by the American public and by the American critics. But you think what there is complicated. Why? Why did she not go when she could have done? Well, you know, she was in the latter part of her career. She had a magnificent villa outside of Berlin. She had her roots in Germany. She didn’t want to give all of that up. Rudolf Deman remained because he actually had Austrian an Austrian passport, which was some kind of protection. So he remained with her in Berlin as well until 1938. And then after the Angelus the Austrian passport was of no help to him. So he fled into exile in Switzerland. She supported him financially from a distance still giving concerts in Germany, although she found herself somewhat disapproved of, was the word unwanted in Germany. And under great pressure, she agreed to divorce him in 1943. But immediately at the end of the war, they got back together and they spent the rest of their lives together. So I want to play you a record, not “Brunnhilde”, not ‘Isolde". I’m going to play you a song from the which to me displays the incandescent beauty of her voice. Guys I’ve run out of time. So I’m going to see what you have to say.

Q&A and Comments:

The name of the documentary I think you might be able to find it on YouTube. It’s called “The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz”. It’s spelt differently. So I wouldn’t think that Herb Albert is relative. Gitta Alpar.

Q: Was he of Hungarian origin as well?

A: Yes, she was Gitta Alpar. She was Jewish. She was the daughter of a cantor in a synagogue.

“The maestro and the cellist of Auschwitz”. Yes thank you.

Yes Brigitte Fassbaender is related. She is the daughter of Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender. Wonderful singer as well. I took the title of this actually- Oh, well no, I didn’t actually- I don’t know the Ferranti novel.

Q: Did the Nazis have a problem with the marriage of Figaro?

A: No, they had a problem with it. They had a real problem with it, partly because who was Jewish. Then of course the Nazis insisted that all operas should be performed in German under the right. And the standard German translation was also by a Jewish translator. So they went to the trouble of having it re translated. I don’t think that- I don’t think they thought it through the whole political side of the opera. The history of artists, opera singers actually, who like Alexander Granach spent at least part of his time hiding in Germany. I don’t know about Granach.

Yes, Grundgens he married Marianne Hoppe. I believe that she was also lesbian. So I mean, at the time it was generally thought that, that marriage was, a coverup for his, because he had to put behind him not only his political views, but his sexuality.

Yes, Klaus Mann was the son of Thomas Mann.

Thank you, Rita. I mean, the thing is, anybody who lived through that time, their stories are going to be moving because it’s just- it was- they were such extraordinary times.

Did any of the Arian, sorry, that’s jumped, I’m going to go back again. Where is it that looked like an interesting question?

Who stayed or went back or- their families have to fight for- Yes, some did, although the composer, Hugo Distler is a very fine composer, actually committed suicide when he was forced to go and fight on the Eastern front, he actually killed himself rather than go to the Eastern front, though were certainly people and Elizabeth Schumann, who am I going to talk about next time. Her son was forced to join the Air Force. And yeah, there were many stories like that actually.

Thank you Martin. And thank you Shelly. Yes. Well I think some of those recordings probably capture very well, maybe even more truthfully than modern recordings, which of course can be manipulated.

Q: What was the name for conductor shown before Lotte Lehmann?

A: That was Erich Kleiber father of Carlos Kleiber.

Oh, Joan. So you knew the wonderful Trudy. Well, Trudy, It was Trude Levi. She and I were kind of, for about 10 years, we were really joined at the hip. I never gave a dinner party to which she was not invited. Almost never went anywhere without her.

Mara, thank you very much. Oh, Katrine, I would so love to talk to you about Frida Leider who as you could see, I passionately admire. Thank you, Vivian. Thank you.

Q: How did the Nazis courting a brunette dark?

A: No, not Lotte Lenya. No, it’s Lotte Lehmann that they were courting. Not Lotte Lenya was of course an absolute anathema to the Nazis for not for racial reasons, but for political reasons.

That’s interesting. Cause there’s an auto, I’ve got the autobiography of Frida Leider, but I must look out this biography of her. This is Sandra who says she hoped that every opera lover lover got to see “Rosenkavalier” live at the movies last Saturday. Great production.

And Margaret, thank you so much for your nice comment and I’ll continue with more of the same, some wonderful people coming up on Sunday. Elizabeth Schumann, another adorable singer, and sort of Bruno Walter. I’ll be talking about them on Sunday.

Thank you everybody.