Erwin Schulhoff’s jazz oratorio “HMS Royal Oak” in Theresienstadt – culture

The room where the public dress rehearsal takes place is odd enough. A hall, neoclassical, extensively renovated. gorgeous. A hall like one might find in many manorial palaces, but this is not a palace here. It is the palace that was built around 230 years ago by the master builder who had the Habsburg fortress Theresienstadt built. The man, Wieser’s name, apparently had a good sense of his own importance and that of the huge fortress building, which was considered perfect at the time. From 1941 to 1945 the hall was the casino of the SS, after the war until 1990 it was the officers’ casino of the Czech army. Now students from the Cologne University of Music are playing Erwin Schulhoff’s jazz oratorio “HMS Royal Oak”. In the middle of the former concentration camp.

The performance is the result of the “Terezín Music Academy”, a summer school for students, which brings together many people, most of whom are in concert: the German ambassador Andreas Künne; Per Boye Hansen, intendant of the Prague National Opera, at whose house the project “Musica non grata” is located, more about that in a moment; Markus Klimmer, who knows Frank-Walter Steinmeier and knows how to bring people together; Tomáš Kraus, whose father was part of the construction crew of the concentration camp and survived the Nazis, who himself managed the business of the Jewish community in the Czech Republic for many years and can now answer any question about Theresienstadt in retirement. There are also students of musicology from Brno, who gave lectures here the days before, and people from the surrounding area.

They are all listening to music by a composer who was born in Prague in 1894, studied in Cologne, became a communist, received Soviet citizenship, was arrested in Prague shortly before leaving the country and died of tuberculosis in the Wülzburg internment camp in 1942. Although Schulhoff himself was not in the Theresienstadt camp, he belongs to the generation of those German-Czech-Jewish composers who were imprisoned here by the Nazis and lived under terrible living conditions – the fortress was once built for 7,000 people, the Nazis crammed here up to up to 58000 together at the same time (there were 150000 in total) – and still continued to make their music. First in secret, then requested by the Nazis because they wanted to make a model camp out of Theresienstadt. That worked, in the summer of 1944 a Red Cross commission let itself be fooled. As soon as this was gone, the performers of the perfidious staging of a city where Jews could live were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. Just like those who had to take part in the propaganda film that became horribly famous under the (rumored) title “The Führer gives the Jews a city”.

The past is always there, you live in the former concentration camp

Viktor Ullmann and Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása composed in Theresienstadt – in the attic, where his children’s opera “Brundibár” was performed, the symposium of students from Brno takes place. The past is always there, you live in the former concentration camp. In the house where the hotel is now, there were SS greats. The daughter of Tomáš Kraus, who is significantly involved in the organization of the academy and also lives in this hotel, says that she cannot sleep here, she always hears the ghosts of the past. For those who live here – around 600 people – the five years of Nazi terror (in 1940 a horrible Gestapo prison was installed in the Small Fortress) are only one of many historical layers. The hotel landlady uses her translation app to talk about Maria Theresa (to whom the fortress was once dedicated), about socialism and that Terezín has been a normal town since 1992. A very bizarre, almost dead, oppressive city.

Schulhoff and the composers mentioned above want to bring the “Musica non grata” project back into consciousness. Some things have already happened in this respect. Prominent representatives of the composition between the world wars, which blazed its own trail out of late romanticism and was not oriented towards Schönberg and his students, have already experienced at least a partial renaissance, such as Alexander Zemlinsky and the one in Hollywood so successful Erich Wolfgang Korngold. But much remains to be discovered. Those composers, one hears here these days, died several times: first they were killed by the Nazis, then their works were not played in post-war Germany because they did not suit the dictates of the avant-garde in Donaueschingen or Darmstadt, in the Czech Republic they were considered dead German composers , you didn’t want to hear that. Now the celebratory closing concert of the summer academy, which takes place in the Jerusalem Synagogue in Prague, is being broadcast on Czech television in prime time.

Schulhoff was the craziest of those now forgotten

“Musica non grata” is a four-year project, with the German Foreign Office donating one million euros each year. This finances the summer academy, but also excavations that the National Theater in Prague is realizing, for example in June of this year Schulhoff’s opera “Flames”. The aim is to snatch the composers and their works from oblivion. And Schulhoff was the craziest of them all.

He composed a piece only from breaks, anticipating John Cage by decades. In a cantata he set a female orgasm or the Communist Manifesto to music. And he wrote the “Royal Oak”. Their story is historical. The British battleship was commissioned in 1916, and on a voyage in 1928 a wondrous thing happened: the officers had a dispute about what music should be played on board. Some wanted to hear jazz, but the admiral hated it, the argument escalated and ended in British courts, where the officers were reprimanded. In 1939 the German submarine U 47 sank the Royal Oak.

Erwin Schulhoff and his librettist Otto Rombach exaggerated the story according to their façon, caused the crew to revolt, highlighted the admiral’s condemnation and ultimately created a sounding argument for the new that the people wanted. In 1931, the play, which lasted about 40 minutes, had its radio premiere in Frankfurt, and a year later it was staged in Breslau. In 2009 the Ebony Band recorded “Royal Oak” in the original version for large jazz orchestra. Otherwise hardly any performances are known. Maybe also because it’s so difficult to play. For the Terezín Academy, Frank Engel created a chamber arrangement for six musicians, one singing voice, one speaking voice and a small sailor choir, which is contributed by the Prague National Opera.

All the others are students from Cologne, and apart from Fabio Cimpeanu, who is studying jazz drums, they have probably never played anything like it. Because Schulhoff writes real jazz. Not the wonderful as-if-jazz in the style of Weill, which one only feels reminded of here in the declamatory passages. Schulhoff swings casually through, and the students learn this under the direction of Werner Dickel. It’s intricate, almost polyrhythmic at times, there’s tango and waltz, but what a waltz. One perhaps in the spirit of Duke Ellington. In addition, there is a permanent change in the structure; Schulhoff can write songs, even chorales (that’s why it’s perhaps an “oratorio”, but it’s more of a cantata), but above all he thinks in larger sections, builds larger blocks, sometimes purely instrumental.

In any case, it’s music you’ve never heard before. The whole undertaking is an enormous exclamation mark and yet only a beginning. Beginning of a perhaps institutionalized, permanent academy, as a Czech-German collaboration. This year the Terezín Composers’ Institute was also involved, in addition to the “Royal Oak” works by composers who had to live in Theresienstadt were also played. And then were murdered. But their music is alive.