Evidence from a fragmented musical history: Notes on Berthold Goldschmidt's Chamber Music

Extract

In Germany during the last few years interest has at last been growing in composers who were forced to go into exile (and were still able to do so) in the age of National Socialism. Thus attention has been focussed again in the land of his origin – though pretty belatedly – on the composer and conductor Berthold Goldschmidt, born in Hamburg in 1903. Goldschmidt had to reach a positively biblical age before he received serious consideration: in 1987, on the occasion of the Berlin Festival ‘Music in Exile’; in Duisburg, Hamburg, Essen, and – with heightened intensity – in the most northerly region of the Federal Republic, Schleswig-Holstein. Some of his works were performed on these occasions, and received with amazement and perplexity. But above all Goldschmidt was constantly questioned in interviews and panel discussions, as a ‘witness of his time’. Of course he is, beyond doubt, the ideal conversational partner: he can describe and comment on German musical life in the 1920's and early 1930's most vividly and with a touch of irony; he can report movingly, yet apparently without any trace of bitterness, on the abrupt breaks in his life and his musical career – emigration to England, the struggle to make a fresh start in that country (of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1947), the attempt to establish himself as a creative artist. One learns a great deal about the numerous disappointments on the way to a viable and satisfying existence as an artist, and about his virtual silence as a composer for almost 25 years, from 1958 to 1982.