Anti-Semitism comes full circle

On the morning of the presentation day, Solti was telephoned in his room at the Imperial Hotel and a woman’s voice said, ‘They are not coming because you are a dirty, Hungarian Jew.’ After receiving the award, as Solti walked along the corridor, the door of the office of Ernst Vobisch, the orchestra’s Chairman, was open, and all the missing committee members were sitting there having coffee. Vienna doesn’t change.
The much-missed John Drummond recalls Georg Solti and 1960s Vienna in his autobiography Tainted by Experience (Faber, ISBN 0571200540). For more on this terrible subject read about a rare performance of a holocaust opera.
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Comments
LAO is doing a double bill of Zemlinsky's fantastic Der Zwerg and Ullmann's Der Zerbrochene Krug in February, 2008. Nice, but I'm *really* looking forward to the fully staged Schreker opera, which will probably be Die Gezeichneten.
I found this while Googling "Schreker students" (it's from a profile of Jascha Horenstein):
In 1920 Franz Schreker was appointed director of Berlin's Hochschule fur Musik, which virtually overnight was transformed from a tradition-bound institution into a lively creative workshop fully responsive to Germany's contemporary culture. When he came to Berlin, Schreker was accompanied by most of his Viennese students, including Horenstein, Julius Burger, Alfred Freudenheim, Alois Haba, Ernst Krenek, Alois Melichar, Karol Rathaus, and Isaak Thaler. The class distinguished itself from the outset. Georg Schunemann, vice-director of the school, writing in the 1928 Schreker issue of UE's "Anbruch", recalled the impression that first group of Schreker students made upon the Musikhochschule examination committee:
"It was amazing what these young Schreker students could do. We gave them contrapuntal problems to solve, examined their strict and free styles, heard one fugue after another (both vocal and instrumental), gave them themes for modulation and improvisation, examined their musicality and ear training - these students were skilled in everything. As many exams as I have witnessed since, I have never again encountered such an artistic level."