Patrick Bade
New York: The Impact of Refugees

• Hi, Patrick.

• [Patrick] Hi, Wendy.

• Hi. Great to have you back with a new internet, having gotten rid of the old one. What a relief for you. I’m sorry that it created so much stress. So, I’m going to say welcome back to everybody. And Patrick, we’re looking forward to this lecture and I’m handing over to you, thanks.

Visual slides are displayed and audio clips are played throughout this presentation.

• Thank you, Wendy, and thank you everybody for being patient, with having patience with my terrible internet problems. But anyway, I’m newly liberated as from this afternoon, from BT. So I hope everything is going to work smoothly from now on. Just to follow up from last night, one of the listeners emailed me to point out that, of course, the subject of circumcision is actually a popular one. There are numerous Renaissance depictions of the circumcision, which makes it even kind of more mysterious, that the Christ child would be represented uncircumcised. But anyway, if you want to follow up on all of that, I would recommend to you a book called “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art” by Leo Steinberg. Brilliant, amazing, revelatory book. You will look at Renaissance art with different eyes, if you read that book. So here we are in Paris. So tonight I’m going to reprise the lecture that got rudely interrupted by internet problems. So what I decided to do tonight, I’m going to go fairly briskly through the early part of this lecture, which I was able to do to some extent last time because I want the luxury of spending a bit more time on the later part of the lecture. So here we’ve got an image of the German army arriving in Paris in June, 1940.

This triggered an extraordinary exodus, the city completely emptied and people who felt threatened, in particular, obviously Jews, communists, left-wingers, or people who were, you know, culturally the Nazis would’ve regarded them as subversive, they tended to go down to the south of France, which was not occupied by the Germans. And if possible, they managed to emigrate to America. They were helped by Varian Fry. There will be a talk on this absolutely amazing endeavor of Varian Fry to rescue the intelligentsia of Europe and get them across the Atlantic. Here you see people queuing outside his office and people being interviewed in his office. And then I wanted to, I showed you these images of people arriving in America. You can see a very emotional woman on the left-hand side. So many descriptions in memoirs of the period of this incredible moment of arriving off New York and seeing this absolutely heart-stopping skyline of New York. It’s still heart-stopping. It’s still absolutely amazing. And the tallest new building in New York, there’d been a pause of tall buildings. You know, between 1890 and 1931, when the Empire State Building was completed, every year or other year, there was a new world record for height in buildings. And this was due to steel frame construction and to lifts. So the buildings went up and up and up. In 1931, it all stopped. There were economic reasons for this, the Great Depression, but also I think the technology had reached its limit. And then there are several years where there are no very tall buildings built.

And then you get the Rockefeller Center completed, 1939. So this was the new architecture in New York, but two immigrant architects who fled from Nazi Germany, would introduce a new type of architecture, modernist architecture. Both had been the head of the Bauhaus in succession, first of all, Walter Gropius on the left hand side, and then Mies van der Rohe. Interestingly, neither of these were of Jewish background and both might have stayed, actually. They both entered for a Nazi sponsored architectural competitions. But Hitler hated this kind of architecture. He rejected it and they found themselves out of work. And Gropius left early 1934. Mies actually stayed until 1937 before crossing the Atlantic. Intellectuals, there are so many of them I could have chosen from, but there’s Erwin Panofsky, very great art historian. Because art history as a discipline was very much a middle European or German Austrian Jewish thing. In Britain and America, it was pretty amateur up to this point in both countries. It was made in something far more professional by the arrival of these European refugees. And on the right hand side, you have Hannah Arendt, and I believe you’re going to have a whole session on her, intellectual philosopher. Very, very controversial journalist of course, because of her take on the Eichmann trial. So the war in Europe must have seemed very distant to most New Yorkers, even after America entered the war.

Of course, New York was never touched. It was never bombed. And so it was really a question of news reels, newspaper headlines and so on. And last time I did play you an announcement over the radio. I won’t repeat it this time. It was an interruption to, appropriately enough, to a concert conducted by Toscanini, who you see here, in 1943 to announce that Mussolini had resigned and effectively Italy had been knocked out of the war. So I’m going to skip that. And also, this is Lot of Lehmann, wonderful, wonderful singer. I can’t recommend her enough. For me she’s the greatest German soprano of all. She found herself in America as a refugee because she was not Jewish, but her husband was. But in 1941, November, December, 1941, she was giving a series of radio programs in which she introduced the art of the German lied to American audiences. And her introduction is really quite funny ‘cause it’s partly a sort of hard sell for her records. And it’s so wonderfully condescending, introducing these poor barbarous ignorant Americans to the joys of the German art song. This is Max Ernst who was, of course he was German. So he was initially arrested as an alien in France after the declaration of war. But thanks to Varian Fry, he escaped to America and was arrested once again.

This is the moment of his arrest when he arrives in America, but then spent the war years in America. And this is, wow, what a group photograph we have here. Just look at this lineup. Matta, Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger, Andre Breton, Pete Mondrian, Andre Massan, Annedee Ozenfant. So you’ve got the cream of Parisian avant garde art. I say Parisian, not French, because several of these artists are not French, obviously Marc Chagall, Ozenfant, Zadkine. Many of the leading figures of the Ecole de Paris, were of course Jewish artists from different countries. Another incredible lineup with some of the same artists. So this was Paris’s loss, it was New York’s gain. And the arrival of these artists really triggered the New York School, which would be at its height in the late 1940s and the 1950s. This is an exhibition put on in New York during the war of surrealist art. You can recognize the Max Ernst on the left hand side. Surrealism is really particularly important for the birth of abstract expressionism, the leading, the dominant style in New York in the 1940s. Surrealism, which has this big emphasis on the expression of the unconscious. And here are the young artists who form this New York school Willem de Kooning, Gottlieb, Pollock, so on and so on and so on. So in fact, artists had been arriving in New York in the interwar period, probably the first major artist to come as a refugee from Nazi Germany was George Gross. He read the writing on the wall and he left Berlin before the end of 1932. He could see what was coming with Hitler. And he eventually took American citizenship. But he’s a case, you see him sitting in the street in New York. But he’s one of many artists who in a way was lost in America.

His great work was all behind him. He never again, once in America, managed to produce work as powerful as he had in Weimar, Germany. This is a picture he painted during the war showing the defeat of Hitler. But it’s a pretty banal image compared to the stuff he’d done during the First World War and shortly afterwards. Here are two composers whose sad, tragic fate, I think explains why people so often say, you know, couldn’t the Jews of Germany see what was coming? Why did so many people stay? Why did they not go to America? And I think what happened to these two explains why I think people were reluctant to go. I think they understood that they were going to, you know, they had roots, they had deep, deep cultural emotional roots in Germany. And to be uprooted and find yourself in America, for many of them, was really being a fish out of water. On the left is Zemlinsky, a composer who thankfully has, you know, really come back into his own. I would say in the last 20 years, I’ve just been very kindly given, I’ll do a little plug for Anita’s son, Raphael Wallfisch, of course, who’s one of the top cellists in the world. And he’s just done a wonderful CD of recently discovered cello sonata of Zemlinsky.

So I recommend that to you very, very strongly. Zemlinsky arrived in New York. I mean he, of course, he had quite a reputation in Vienna, but nobody knew him in New York. And there is a very sad story of him in the last months of his life, walking down Broadway, looking around him and saying to his wife, “Do you know what? I wouldn’t want to even be buried in this country.” And Jaromir Weinberger, who had a tremendous success in the 1920s with his opera, “Schwanda the Bagpiper” which had even had a big success in New York at the Metropolitan. But he arrived in New York, he was forgotten. Nobody was interested. And eventually he committed suicide. This is Emmerich Kalman, who is Hungarian. And after Franz Lehar, I suppose he was the most successful composer of operetta in the period that’s often referred to as the Silver Age of Viennese operetta. Wonderful tunes. He was very highly regarded. I mentioned last time that even the Nazis wanted to hang onto him. And when he was in Paris, before he got to America, they sent a delegation to him to say that if he wanted it, he could have honorary Aryan status. He was smart enough to realize that that would be a poison chalice and a very dangerous thing.

So he rejected it and he went to America. In fact, his very popular operator, “Grafin Mariza” was one of the last things that many German Jews would’ve been able to hear in theater. It was many multiple performances were given in Germany, right up till even after the outbreak of war, till 1941, of “Countess Maritza” by the so-called Judischer Kulturbund, which was the only way that Jews could actually hear live music or go to theater. Luckily he had friends in high places. So he was helped in his passage from Europe to America by Admiral Horthy, the fascist dictator of Hungary, after the fall of France, by Marshal Petain, who got him across the border into Spain and Franco got him to America and he arrives in America on a luxury liner, The Count of Savoy, which you see here, with 60 pieces of baggage. One suitcase stuffed with $100,000 which had been given to him by MGM for the rights to film “Countess Maritza”. Which in fact, they never did. This is Ralph Benatzky. And when I was researching my book, I found his diaries. They were published, oh, a long time after he died, his New York Diaries. I found them very fascinating, very depressing, though. He had had a huge international success with the musical “White Horse Inn”. It had been a, you know, an absolute top success in London, Paris, and New York in the 1930s.

So he must have had high hopes when he got to America. But he, once again, he found nobody was interested. And that’s one of the things about America, I suppose, is that you have your moment and then you can be very quickly forgotten. And he became incredibly embittered. I must say he didn’t seem to make very much effort. He only mixed with other refugees, Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, all people that he’d known in Berlin and Vienna. And he found them again in New York. And of course, they only spoke German with one another. And his diary, of course, is in German with just the odd English word in it. And he talks in the diary about how he becomes very angry, very, very bitter and completely denounces the cultural world of New York. At one point, even denouncing it as it’s completely 100% Jewized, you know, a very nasty thing to say and rather an extraordinary thing to say from somebody who’s come as a refugee from Nazi Germany. At one point in the diary again, he says, “I’m afraid that sooner or later I’m going to throw myself out of a window 'cause I’m in such despair.” This man did commit suicide. This is Jean-Michel Frank. I mean, there are so many aspects, of course, to the Nazi story and the show, which are so tragic and so terrible, and loss of millions of human beings.

But, you know, loss of talent, the waste of talent. Trudy likes to quote that the Nazis may have killed the cure for cancer, because the talented amazing people that were slaughtered by the Nazis. But the waste of talent in other ways as well. So this Jean-Michel Frank was a furniture designer-decorator. He was the interior decorator of choice for the wealthiest people in the world in the 1930s. And you see an interior that he designed for the Rockefellers at the end of the 1930s. But he found himself in New York again, suddenly, well, of course nobody’s very interested during the war in such a lavish interior design. And he found himself again, a fish out of water. And he committed suicide in 1941. Now it wasn’t so terrible for everybody. There were people who got to America and loved it. And one of them was the Dutch abstract artist, Pete Mondrian, who’d been in Paris in the inter war period. He adored New York and it stimulated him and it excited him. And it actually inspired a very brilliant late phase in his work. This is his most famous late masterpiece. It’s called “Broadway Boogie Woogie”. He loved jazz. He loved the fact that the city was on a grid system, and he loved New York’s yellow taxis.

And I think you can see all of that in “Broadway Boogie Woogie” on the left hand side here. This is Bela Bartok, who is Hungarian. And he didn’t need to leave for racial reasons. He was not Jewish, but he was warned that he’d better get out because he had left-wing sympathies and he had made his total disgust for fascism. He refused to allow his music to be published or performed in Germany or Italy. And when it became clear that Hungary was going to be aligned with Nazi Germany, he realized that he had to get out. He arrived in America, he had a big international reputation, but even he found it really hard going in America. He struggled financially. And various musicians came to his rescue. Koussevitzky, who commissioned his final masterpiece, the concerto for orchestra. And Benny Goodman, who commissioned a trio for clarinet, violin and piano. And you see that being performed here with Bartok at the piano. And Stravinsky. Now, Stravinsky was of course a double refugee, as was Rachmaninoff.

They were initially refugees from Soviet Russia. And Stravinsky in the inter war period was Paris based. And he took French nationality at the end of the 1930s. He was not Jewish. And in fact, he wrote to his German publishers late in the 1930s saying, “Why do the Nazis not love my music? "Don’t they know that I hate Jews and Bolsheviks as much, if not more than they do?” That letter still exists. It always amazes me that it’s never held against him. Some people carry on about Strauss, who would never have said something like that. But somehow Stravinsky got away with it. He arrived in America. He swallowed his dislike of Jews to collaborate with various Jewish musicians, including Woody Herman, who you see on the right hand side. And he also had to do some fairly humble tasks to earn some money. Ringling Circus commissioned him to write a ballet piece for a company of dancing elephants. You can actually see them performing this Stravinsky ballet here. And the elephants apparently really disliked the music. And one critic remarked that the elephants turned up their trunks at Stravinsky’s piece.

This is a very famous photograph taken in Berlin in 1931 when Toscanini, the world’s most famous conductor, went to Berlin. So he’s second from the left, and he’s surrounded by leading Berlin conductors, Bruno Walter, left, Erich Kleiber in the middle, Otto Klemperer, the tall one, Furtwangler on the right hand side. So if you were in Berlin in the Weimar period and you loved music, my goodness, you could have a feast any night of the week. You could choose, imagine, you know, looking in what’s on and saying, “Well am I going to listen to Bruno Walter with the Berlin Philharmonic? Am I going to listen to Erich Kleiber at the Staatz Opera? Am I going to listen to Klemperer at the Kroll opera. Furtwangler? Incredible, incredible, incredible. Well, four years later, only Furtwangler was left. Well, Furtwangler’s pretty good too, but the others had all gone to, were based in New York by 1940. So you had a glut of the world’s great conductors.

Pierre Monteux actually was, on the left, he was the conductor of the Boston Orchestra. He was French Jewish. He had actually gone to America before the war, but of course stayed there after the collapse of France. Fritz Reiner, Hungarian, he was there as a refugee. Fritz Busch, who was German, you see in the middle top there. He was the director of the Dresden Opera, who was not Jewish, but was very anti-Nazi and was forced out. So that was Germany’s loss. He helped to found Glyndebourne. But during the war, he was conducting at the Met. William Steinberg, on the right hand side, had various positions in Europe. And he conducted with the Judischer Kulturbund then arrived in America. And he became director of the Buffalo Philharmonic before going on to Pittsburgh. So you have all these orchestras all over America, you wouldn’t have, you know, Buffalo Philharmonic. It doesn’t sort of immediately come to mind as one of the world’s great orchestras. But you’ve got this tremendous pool of European talent. And so American orchestral standards were raised incredibly during this period. We’ve got Maurice Abravanel on the bottom who became the director of the Utah Symphony Orchestra. Two other immigrant conductors, although they’d been there already for some time. Koussevitzky on the left. And our own beloved Leopold Stokowski, a genius, but a kind of a charlatan really.

I dunno if you’ve ever heard, if you’ve seen "A hundred men and a girl”, or if you’ve seen “Fantasia”, 'cause he did a lot in Hollywood and you’ve heard him speak. You’ve heard him speak with his completely fake middle European accent. He was actually born and brought up in St. John’s Wood in London. Some people have said his real name was not Stokowski, it was Stokes. But actually he did have a Polish grandfather called Stokowski. This is a conductor who went in the other way, the other direction. This is Sir John Barbirolli, who was chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic, 1943, you know, a very very hard time in the war with the Battle of the Atlantic, he decided that he had to come back to England. So he risked his life coming across the Atlantic at the most dangerous time, got as far as Lisbon, and had a ticket for a plane journey on an airplane from Lisbon to London. At the last minute, he agreed to swap his ticket with the actor Leslie Howard, which of course saved his life because Leslie Howard was in a plane that was shot down by the Nazis. So the world’s greatest conductor is based in New York, this is Toscanini. I think Dennis is going to do a whole talk around Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. It’s an incredible story, how it was written in the besieged city, how the score was microfilmed and smuggled out and got to America.

And then a kind of war broke out between all these star conductors who was going to get the honor to do the premiere in July, 1942. And I suppose it was a kind of given in the end that it had to be Toscanini. Now this is the Metropolitan Opera House, I suppose, the world’s greatest opera house in the 20th century. This is the old Met. The outbreak of the war, of course caused a lot of problems for the Met because the Met imported most of its singers from Europe. And even just before the war, Mussolini had declared certain leading Italian singers like Beniamino Gigli. He declared them as living national treasures. And they were forbidden to go back to America for the 1939 and the 1940 seasons. Other singers, other great singers who were supposed to arrive German just couldn’t get there because of the war. So, in fact, in some ways, it turned out to be good, turned out to be good for American singers, gave them opportunities. And again, the wonderful conductors, Our brilliant but shameless Sir Thomas Beacham was in charge of the French repertoire at the Met during Second World War. And the German repertoire was taken over by George Schell, you see in the middle, and Erich Leinsdorf. In fact, it was the German repertoire that was the glory of the Met. It’s kind of ironic that if you wanted to hear great Wagner, great German opera during the Second World War, Berlin was not the place to hear it. New York was.

The greatest Wagnerians were all in New York. And the big, big star at the Met, the great draw was the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstat, who you see here on the cover of Time Magazine, a phenomenal voice, the greatest Wagnerian voice ever, probably. But she made the decision to go back to occupied Norway to be with her husband in 1941. So I want to play you an excerpt from a performance of the “Fidelio”. It’s an opera that took on a tremendous resonance during the Second World War and after. Cause it’s an opera about tyranny, the struggle against tyranny. And so I’m going to play you a bit of a live performance, which I find very moving and very exciting. And it dates from the 22nd of February, 1941. Everybody involved in this performance must have been aware of the political resonance of the opera, it’s conducted by Bruno Walter, who was a Jewish refugee from Berlin and Vienna. The tenor Rene Maison was a refugee from Belgium. Flagstad herself was the dilemma of Leonora in the opera, you know, who sacrifices, who offers to sacrifice herself to save her husband. Her decision to give up her career and go back to be with her husband in occupied Norway was a very Leonora-like thing to do. And on the right hand side, we have the greatest Wagnerian bass ever, in my opinion.

This is the Ukrainian Jewish Alexander Kipnis. So I’m going to play you a little bit. This is a radio broadcast of the dungeon scene. And we are going to hear Kipnis and Flagstad. First of all, we hear them talking in the melodrama with the orchestral accompaniment then we hear them singing. These two stupendous, incredible voices. And there’s a sense of engagement, a sense of emotion, which is really palpable in this very extraordinary performance. Incidentally, if you’re interested in historic recordings and these Met broadcasts, they are available. I recommend a firm to you called Immortal Performances. It’s a Canadian firm. And I think I did give the details to you on one of the lists that Judy sent out to you. Now on the 6th of December, 1941, a performance of Wagner’s “Die Walkure” was scheduled with what should have been one of the all-time great casts. You have the greatest heldentenor ever, Lauritz Melchior as Sigmund, the greatest Siglinda, Lot of Lehmann. You had the fabulous Kipnis again as Hunding and Friedrich Shaw, a wonderful Wotan.

The day of the performance Lot of Lehmann fell ill. And because, you know, in New York in the second World War there were no other singers available. So they turned to a 22 year old girl called Astrid Varna who’d never appeared on stage before. Without rehearsal, she was just pushed out onto the stage to sing with these very great Wagnerians. And she had a triumph. She’s pretty amazing, really. In fact, they’re all amazing and it’s in very good sound this performance. Of course she should have been front page news, but just as they were singing act one of “De Walkure” the Japanese bombers were taking off and heading for Hawaii and Pearl Harbor. So I’m afraid she was a bit upstaged the next morning by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But I’m going to play you a fragment of this performance, which is available in very good sound. You’re just going to hear a tiny bit of her voice. And then you’re going to hear the great Lauritz Melchior as Siegmund. Now I’m going to finish off by talking about the golden age of the Broadway musical. It really comes into its own during the Second World War.

The first great New York musical is always said to be “Showboat”, which dates back to 1927. It’s the first time you have a Broadway musical that has a really coherent plot and character development and deals with serious issues like racism and alcoholism and so on. But there was no initial follow up, I think mainly because of the Wall Street crash and the depression. People wanted something lighter and more entertaining. So the popular musicals of the 1930s, the Gershwin, Cole Porter musicals are, you know, very delightful but they’re pretty frothy and unserious. The next New York musical that really tries to be a more hard hitting is “Pal Joey” of Rodgers and Hart. And that was first performed at the end of 1940 and actually was not initially a huge success. I think maybe New York audiences weren’t quite ready for it. So in fact, the first great fully integrated New York musical where choreography, dance, songs, it’s a musical, to use of Wagnerian term as music drama, is “Oklahoma”. And that was launched in 1943. Tremendous, tremendous success. And it went on to have a continuing success around the world after the war. This is the original cast. I’m going to play you the greatest Broadway male musical star. That’s Alfred Drake singing one of his hit songs from “Oklahoma”.

Audio clip plays.

♪ There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow ♪ ♪ There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow ♪ ♪ The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye ♪ ♪ And it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky ♪ ♪ Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ ♪ ♪ Oh, what a beautiful day ♪ ♪ I’ve got a beautiful feelin’ ♪ ♪ Everything’s goin’ my way ♪

• But the European immigrants also made very important contributions to the Broadway musical. Kurt Weill in particular. And in 19, what year is it? 1941, as early as 1941, Kurt Weill while working with Ira Gershwin created “Lady in the Dark”, which starred Gertrude Lawrence. And again, this is, you know, a very adult subject. It’s about psychoanalysis, a musical about psychoanalysis. Because that’s another way in which the immigrants, the European immigrants, made a tremendous contribution to American culture. The large number of psychoanalysts who arrived from Vienna and Berlin in New York. But I want to play you a bit from another Kurt Weill musical, which is a street scene, which, has really quite a hard hitting and even a tragic subject that involves a crime of passion. And this is a song from “Street Scene”, which I think is wonderful. The way that it expresses urban alienation, that sense of being in a city surrounded by millions of people. But being very alone.

Audio clip plays.

♪ At night when everything is quiet ♪ ♪ This old house seems to breathe a sigh ♪ ♪ Sometimes I hear a neighbor snoring ♪ ♪ Sometimes I hear a baby cry ♪ ♪ Sometimes I hear a staircase creaking ♪ ♪ Sometimes a distant telephone ♪ ♪ Then the quiet settles down again ♪ ♪ The house and I are all alone ♪ ♪ Lonely house ♪ ♪ Lonely me ♪ ♪ Funny with so many neighbors ♪ ♪ How lonely it can be ♪ ♪ Oh lonely street ♪

• So there’s a real sense that new musical has grown up. It’s become a much more adult entertainment. And that New Yorker audiences had become much more sophisticated in their appreciation of these musicals. Not only the actual content of the musical subject matter of musicals, but also musically. So Leonard Bernstein, you can tell that he’s been listening to Stravinsky, he’s been listening to Schonberg, he’s been listening to all this new European music and incorporating elements of it into his idiom for his first great musical success, which was “On the Town” in 1944.

Audio clip plays.

♪ I feel like I’m not out of bed yet. ♪ ♪ A-a-a-a-a-a-h ♪ ♪ Oh, the sun is warm ♪ ♪ But my blanket’s warmer ♪ ♪ Sleep, sleep, in your lady’s arms ♪ ♪ Sleep in your lady’s arms ♪

• Ya got the time, bud?

• Two minutes to six. ♪ All night I’ve been walking the baby ♪ ♪ Oh-Oh-Oh-O ♪ ♪ Oh his eyes are blue ♪ ♪ But her eyes are bluer ♪ ♪ Sleep, sleep in your ladies arms ♪ ♪ Sleep in your ladies arms ♪

• What time’s it now, bud?

• Oh, six o'clock. Will ya? ♪ New York, New York ♪ ♪ It’s a helluva town ♪ ♪ We’ve got one day here and not another minute ♪ ♪ To see the- ♪

• So all these refugees from Europe, escaping tyranny, escaping racism, it was wonderful to be in New York, wonderful to feel safe, but many of them were also very disillusioned. That having escaped the racism of the Nazis, they encountered another form of racism in America. Racism against the blacks in particular. You know, segregation, even with the most successful black performers who were not allowed to perform or record with orchestras that included strings, all sorts of petty regulations. So my next excerpt is actually, this is again a live broadcast of a concert given by the great Ella Fitzgerald from the Roseland Ballroom in the middle of the second World War.

Audio clip plays.

♪ Love here in The starlit hour ♪ ♪ Oh, heaven is in your eyes ♪ ♪ While the wind is sobbing ♪ ♪ Underneath the stars ♪ ♪ Both our hearts are throbbing ♪ ♪ Like two guitars ♪ ♪ Love here in The starlit hour ♪ ♪ Night whispering lullabies ♪ ♪ Let me dream forever ♪ ♪ Underneath the silvery skies ♪ ♪ Will it be- ♪

• But I’m going to finish with one of the most notorious concerts that took place in New York during the Second World War on the 5th of October, 1944. And this is when Florence Foster Jenkins, I’m sure you all know about her, she was a New York socialite who’d been giving private concerts for years that had become a kind of cult events on the New York social scene. But this time she took the huge Carnegie Hall and it sold out and she had a roaring success singing this. The next day she rang the recording studio and she said she thought she might have sung a wrong note and she wanted to come and redo it. And they said, “No madam, There is nothing you could do to improve it. It is perfect in its way.”

So I’m going to see if we have any questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Which books could you recommend on Jewish refugees going to New York?

A: Oh, there are so many of them. I’d have to really think about them. I mean, often the best books I think are people’s memoirs.

Q: Statue of Liberty in New York City looks like the Liberty Woman of Eugene Delacroix.

A: Yes, yes, Eugene Delacroix. It’s of course it’s by a French sculptor. I’m sure you know that it was a gift of France to America. I’m quite sure that Bartoldi was thinking of the painting “Liberty leading the people” of Delacroix. That connection is quite right.

Courtauld Institute founded in the early 1930s. That’s true. But you know, it was such an amateur thing. You know, they used to actually close it down on ladies day at Ascot ‘cause they knew that, that none of the students were going to turn up. They’d all be at Ascot. And the Courtauld didn’t really become, you know, fully professional I would say, until after the Second World War.

Q: What happened to the musician who said he didn’t even want to be buried in America?

A: He died there. He was buried there. Unfortunately.

That’s Zemlinsky. Somebody’s mentioned. Yes, thank you.

Dorothea Burston. She says “The Viennese opera, the Vienna State Opera was opened with wonderful cast Marta Modal and Anton Demwater with Fidelio after the war.” Practically all the great German opera houses that had been bombed in the war, in almost every case they were reopened with Fidelio. Thomas Mann famously said he didn’t understand how anybody in Nazi Germany could possibly sit through a performance of Fidelio because of its poignancy.

Pretty sure I heard, somebody says, I’m pretty sure I heard Stokowski conduct Carmina Burana in the Albert Hall. That’s possible. I heard him once conduct Poem of Ecstasy at the festival. I think he’s a wonderful conductor. I’m a big fan of Stokowski.

Somebody’s mentioning Wagner on record in 1926 to 42, EMI International archives. Yes, but I’m very happy to, you know, people have asked me where I get all my recordings from. I’m very happy to give you any tips about this.

Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. Yes. Although of course it exists in two versions, as I’m sure you know. I think “Street Scene” is just after the war. It’s 1946.

Somebody said, you are so right. People could really sing in those days. My God, there’s certainly those big Wagnerian invoices. They don’t exist anymore in respect of is that racism encountered in the US just after, just found that vile and Anderson did a musical. You know, I think it’s very, very interesting that maybe there’s a talk here, probably not from me 'cause I don’t know enough about it, about the contribution of Jewish refugees to America, to the Civil rights movement. 'Cause I think, you know, those refugees were acutely aware of the injustice of racism towards the black in America.

What was she singing? Unfortunately I couldn’t make it out. I’m not sure which one you are asking about. But I played Fidelio, Valkyrie and then those American musicals. Yes, Florence Foster Jenkins. Oh, what was she singing? What was Florence Foster Jenkins singing? She was singing the Queen of the Night’s Aria from the Magic Flute. Yes, I know. Apparently the audience was not very seemly. They were all falling about with laughter. Somebody knows somebody who sings like her. Well, I’m sorry for you.

Was it an April Fools joke? Yes, 'cause is it? Oh it is April Fools Day. You are quite right. No, it wasn’t consciously.

Mondrian was not Jewish. He was not. And I think that’s it for the questions.

Thank you all very much and thank you. Thank you for sticking with me.

• Thanks Patrick. That was great.

• Thank you.

• Really, really, really brilliant. Thanks everybody for joining us. Thank you Judi. And we will see you all again on Sunday.

• [Judi] Monday. No, we are back on Monday, Wendy. We have a Monday.

• Sorry.

• [Judi] Yeah, so our new schedule will be sent out on Sunday afternoon everybody. Wends, I’ll send the new schedule out on Sunday.

• Perfect. Alright Judes, thank you so much. Thanks everyone.

• Thanks. Bye-Bye.