Summary: We mark the birth – on July 16, 1901, 117 years ago today – of the Austrian composer and conductor Fritz Mahler. While we might not recognize his first name, we surely recognize his surname, and Fritz’ father was indeed a cousin of the great composer and conductor Gustav Mahler.<br> His present obscurity aside, Fritz Mahler was a well-known musician in his time. He studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. He emigrated to America in 1936, where he taught at Juilliard and conducted the Erie Philharmonic and the Hartford Symphony.<br> For us, for now, the key phrase is “he emigrated to America in 1936”: Fritz Mahler was one of the hundreds – the thousands – of artists, scientists, writers, and intellectuals who managed to escape Europe in the 1930s. And thereby hangs our tale.<br> Catastrophe<br> On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was appointed Chancellor of Germany: head of the German government. Until April 30, 1945, when a palsied and defeated Hitler put his 7.656 mm Walther pistol against his right temple and scrambled his diseased brain, he presided over as malignant and criminal a regime as modern Europe has ever seen.<br> Once in power, Hitler and the Nazi party quickly destroyed the democratic process that had brought them to power. At the same time, the racial and ethnic hatred that lay at the heart of Nazi doctrine became law, and the persecution of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally ill began. With the annexation (the Anschluss) of Austria into the German Reich in March of 1938, German racial laws were applied to Austria as well.<br> The brain drain began immediately upon the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and continued for the remainder of the 1930s. Across the continent writers, intellectuals, scientists, philosophers, physicians, Jews and non-Jews alike took to their heels. It was an exodus of talent unlike any other in history.<br> The short list of composers who fled Europe is itself extraordinary.<br> <a href="https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/course/great-music-20th-century/"></a>The Vienna-born Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) resigned his professorship at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin on March 1, 1933, just before he was to be fired. He eventually became a U.S. citizen and lived out the remainder of his life in southern California. The French-born Jewish composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) almost waited too long to get out of Europe; the Germans had already occupied Paris when he and his family managed to escape through Portugal to the United States. The German-born Jewish composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) – whose Threepenny Opera contains one of the most famous songs in the theatrical repertoire, Mack the Knife – left Germany in March 1933. He became a U.S. citizen along with his Viennese-born wife, the Tony Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated singer and actress Lotte Lenya (1898-1981). (Because we need to know: Lenya is best known to American movie audiences as the Russian counter-intelligence SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Russia With Love. Klebb killed her victims with a poisoned knife blade hidden in the tip of her right shoe. Following the appearance of the movie, Lenya recalled that whenever she met someone new, the first thing they’d look at were her shoes.)<br> Not everyone who skedaddled Europe did so because he or she was Jewish. Some left out of pure moral outrage, like Béla Bartók. Others, like the Austrian-born Ernst Krenek (1900-1991), fled because their music was declared as being “degenerate” and was banned. For Igor Stravinsky, serendipity played a role: a French citizen since 1934, he was in residence at Harvard when Germany invaded France in May of 1940. By necessity rather than by design, Stravinsky ended up staying in the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 1945. The German-born Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) had a controversial relationship with the Nazis.
