Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism: Let Our Music Be Played (Italian and Italian American Studies) 3030529304, 9783030529307

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ITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism Let Our Music Be Played Edited by Alessandro Carrieri · Annalisa Capristo

Italian and Italian American Studies Series Editor Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA

This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. Editorial Board Rebecca West, University of Chicago, USA Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University, USA Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY, USA Phillip V. Cannistraro†, Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY, USA Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy William J. Connell, Seton Hall University, USA More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14835

Alessandro Carrieri  •  Annalisa Capristo Editors

Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism Let Our Music Be Played

Editors Alessandro Carrieri Independent Researcher Trieste, Italy

Annalisa Capristo Center for American Studies Rome, Italy

ISSN 2635-2931     ISSN 2635-294X (electronic) Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-030-52930-7    ISBN 978-3-030-52931-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Arturo Nathan, Il passaggio del veliero, courtesy of the Civico Museo Revoltella - Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Trieste, Italy This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Alessandro Carrieri and Annalisa Capristo 2 Forms and Methods of Anti-Jewish Persecution in Fascist Italy from 1938 to 1943  9 Michele Sarfatti 3 Cultural Cleansing in Italian Music Criticism in the Early 1930s: Autarchy, Eugenics and Anti-Semitism 21 Luca Lévi Sala 4 Jazz in Fascist Italy: Social Impact, Politics, and Racism 55 Camilla Poesio 5 La Scala, the Jews and Erich Kleiber: An Anti-Semitic Episode of December 1938 83 Annalisa Capristo 6 Music in Transit: The Exile of Italian Jewish Musicians from Fascist Italy111 Alessandro Carrieri

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7 “Wir treffen uns am Schluss” (We Shall Meet at the End)— Kurt Sonnenfeld (1921–1997) at Ferramonti: The Persecution, the Exile, the Internment, the Music151 Raffaele Deluca 8 An Expedient Alliance? Musical Relationships between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the period between 1933 and 1945169 Erik Levi Index

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Notes on Contributors

Annalisa Capristo  holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and a postgraduate degree in Library and Information Science from the Vatican School of Library Sciences. She was awarded fellowships from the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples, the Vatican Library and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. She is a librarian at the Centro Studi Americani in Rome, Italy. Her research focuses on the effects of the anti-Semitic Fascist laws on Italian culture, the reactions of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals (Italian and foreign) to the persecution, as well as on the flight of Jewish scholars from Italy. Her publications include the books L’espulsione degli ebrei dalle accademie italiane (2002) and (coauthored with Giorgio Fabre) Il registro: La cacciata degli ebrei dallo Stato italiano nei protocolli della Corte dei Conti, 1938–1943 (2018), as well as several essays in academic journals and conference proceedings. In 2019 she coedited (with Ernest Ialongo) the special issue of The Journal of Modern Italian Studies on the 80th anniversary of the Racial Laws (JMIS vol. 24, no. 1). Alessandro  Carrieri  PhD was Visiting Research Fellow in Holocaust Studies at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University in Melbourne and Honorary Research Associate at the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies. During his Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Trieste, he completed his book Lagermusik e resistenza: Viktor Ullmann e Gideon Klein a Theresienstadt (2013), about

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music and resistance in the ghetto-lager of Theresienstadt. His current research focuses on the persecution and exile of Italian Jewish musicians under Fascism. Raffaele Deluca  is a musicologist and choir director, and a professor at Music Conservatory in Rovigo. He began to study the connection between internment camps and music in Fascist Italy in 2011 as a scientific collaborator at the Library of the Milan Conservatory, where he later organized a symposium (2016). He has participated in many concerts, seminars, and symposia throughout Italy and Austria. In 2017 he ideated a concert in Ferramonti entitled “Serata Colorata” at Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, broadcast live on RAI, and then performed again (2018) at LAC Theatre in Lugano (CH). Erik Levi  is Visiting Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, having formerly been Professor of Music and Director of Performance there up to 2015. He studied in the Universities of Cambridge and York and at Berlin Staatliche Hochschule für Musik. An extremely versatile musician, he has interests in both the academic and practical aspects of music, having become a worldwide authority on German music of the twentieth century, especially during the Nazi era with the pioneering books Music in the Third Reich (1994) and Mozart and the Nazis (2010). Levi is also Academic Director of the International Centre for Suppressed Music at Royal Holloway and has organised a number of conferences on topics that include music and national identity in the 1930s, the composition class of Franz Schreker, Music and Displacement, the impact of Nazism on twentieth-century music, Hanns Eisler and England, and most recently Music under German Occupation during the Second World War. Camilla Poesio  holds her PhD in European Contemporary History from the University of Venice and the Freie Universität Berlin. She was a research fellow in many universities (Florence, Venice, Freie Universität Berlin, Detmold/Paderborn, Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom, Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig, European University Institute) and collaborated with the Italian Encyclopaedia Treccani. Her research interests are Italian Fascism and Nazism; political violence; public and private memory, jazz and politics. Her last book is Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing. Il jazz, il fascismo e la società italiana (FirenzeMilano Le Monnier-Mondadori, 2018).

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Luca Lévi Sala PhD  is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Manhattan College (NYC). He was Visiting Teaching Professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków (2021) and at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2020–2021), former Professeur associé at Université de Montréal (2017–2020), Visiting Researcher at New York University (2017) and Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University (2015–2016). He has published a range of articles and chapters, reviews and reports (serving as peerreviewer as well) in various international books and refereed journals, including Early Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, Revue de musicologie, Studi musicali, Journal of Jewish Identities, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Ad Parnassum Journal, Studia Chopinowskie, Musica Jagellonica, Eighteenth-Century Music, Analecta Musicologica, Oxford Bibliographies Online, MGG, Grove Music Online. His book Music and Politics in the Italian Fascist State in the 1930s: The View from the Press is committed to be published with Boydell & Brewer (Suffolk, UK). Michele  Sarfatti  is a scholar and author of several works on Jews and anti-Semitic persecution in modern Italy. His most celebrated book is Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzione (English translation The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution; German translation Die Juden im faschistischen Italien. Geschichte, Identität, Verfolgung). He is the former director of Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea CDEC and is one of the founding editors of the e-journal Quest Issues in Contemporary Jewish History.

Abbreviations

ABC ABM ACR CDEC EIAR ISCM MPI NSW R.d. R.d.l. SBN SIAE USHMM

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Acadêmia Brasileira de Música (Brazilian Academy of Music) National Security Aliens Control Regulation (Australia) Fondazione Centro di documentazione ebraica contemporanea (Foundation Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center, Milan, Italy) Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche (Italian Radio Program Company) International Society for Contemporary Music Military Police Intelligence (Australia) New South Wales Regio decreto (Royal Decree) Regio decreto legge (Royal Law Decree) Servizio bibliotecario nazionale (National Library Service, Italy) Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Archival Sources AAV ACS

Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (Vatican Apostolic Archive, Vatican City) Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Central State Archive, Rome, Italy) xi

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Abbreviations

ADN

Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (Diary Foundation Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano, Arezzo, Italy) AES Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari (Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs) AROLSEN Arolsen Archives, International Center on Nazi Persecution ASAC Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee (Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts, Venice, Italy) ASCDEC Archivio Storico CDEC (CDEC Historical Archive, Milan, Italy) ASCM Archivio Storico Biblioteca Conservatorio di Musica Giuseppe Verdi, Milano (Historical Archive, Milan Conservatory, Italy) ASL Archivio di Stato di Livorno (State Archive of Leghorn, Italy) ASS Archivio della Segreteria di Stato, Città del Vaticano (Archives of the Secretariat of State, Vatican City) DGPS Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza (Italian General Police Administration) DGTM Direzione Generale Teatro e Musica (Italian General Directorate for Theater and Music) MI Ministero dell’Interno (Italian Ministry of the Interior) MinCulPop Ministero Cultura Popolare (Italian Ministry of Popular Culture) NAA National Archives of Australia PCM Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers)

List of Images

Image 6.1

Image 6.2

Image 6.3

Image 6.4 Image 7.1 Image 7.2

Gualtiero Volterra-pianist and his wife Patricia Kelly-taken in the garden at the home of her parents-Mr and Mrs T. H. [Thomas Herbert and Ethel Knight] Kelly-at Darling Point-Sydney, 1946, Sydney, box 136, SP1011/1, item 4546, ABC, NAA, NSW Gualtiero Volterra-pianist-and Mrs Volterra at their beautiful home at Darling Point Sydney-Mrs Volterra listens while her husband plays music that listeners will hear when he begins his tour for the ABC in early April [1946], box 136, SP1011/1, item 4546/5, ABC, NAA, NSW Renzo Massarani with Elda Constantini (Massarani) and their children Laura, Andrea and Giulio-taken at Leme beach (Rio de Janeiro-Brazil), June 30, 1943, Private collection, Massarani Family Archive, Milan Renzo Massarani at Malpensa Airport (Italy) before returning to Brazil after a holiday in Italy, ca. 1970, Private collection, Massarani Family Archive, Milan Sonnenfeld family in a picture taken a few days before his exile in Italy, July 7, 1939, Private collection, Locatelli, Milan A drawing by Kurt Sonnenfeld depicting one of the barracks in Ferramonti where he was interned from February 1941 to September 1945, June 19, 1943, LET.XII.42, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, ASCM

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138 145 153

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List of Images

Image 7.3 Image 7.4

Opening page of Kurt Sonnenfeld’s Ferramonti-Walzer autograph score, February–March 1941, LET.XII.41, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, Music ASCM Leopold Sonnenfeld to Kurt Sonnenfeld, Vienna, April 5, 1941, LET.XII.2, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, ASCM

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Alessandro Carrieri and Annalisa Capristo

“Music is made for everyone, like the sun and air. When this fountain of consolation, so necessary in these hard times, is denied to any human being– and merely because he belongs to a different religion and race–I cannot collaborate either as a Christian or as an artist” Erich Kleiber1

There are voices of musicians that still remain unheard but will live forever. This is the case of both Italian Jewish and foreign Jewish musicians and composers in Fascist Italy. At that time, their specific situation gradually All translations in the following chapters from Italian into English, unless otherwise noted, are the author’s own. 1

 The Washington Post, December 30, 1938, 1, 4.

A. Carrieri (*) Independent Researcher, Trieste, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Capristo Center for American Studies, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_1

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worsened: they were excluded by theatres, orchestras and music conservatories, from musical high schools, universities and the academies, and from record companies, publishers and the radio.2 The musical compositions of Jewish composers were banned and branded as degenerate music. This book is the first collection of multidisciplinary research on the marginalization and expulsion of Jewish musicians and composers from the aforementioned institutions after the 1938–9 Racial Laws, and their subsequent persecution and exile. While recent decades have seen a number of works analyzing the expulsion and persecution of Italian Jews from cultural, professional and political spheres, such as the expulsion of Jews from Italian academies and Jewish professors and students from universities and schools,3 there has been little attention paid to the role of Jewish musicians during Italian Fascism. While monographs have been published on individual Italian Jewish composers, such as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco4 and Vittorio Rieti,5 this book marks the first broad study of Jewish musicians during Italian Fascism. In this collection, established and emerging scholars from different fields are brought together to reconstruct the impact of both the Racial Laws and the musical relations between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy on the lives and works of Italian Jewish composers from 1933 to 1945. Most of these chapters, which demonstrate a variety of critical perspectives and innovative methodological approaches, are expanded versions of papers presented at the international conference,  Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism (Trieste, Italy, October 26, 2015). In addition, we have included two new papers. One is by Luca Lévi Sala, who at the conference presented findings from his research on antisemitism at the Teatro La Fenice. Due to this research already being 2  Annalisa Capristo, “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale,” in Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, eds. Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva (Milan: IAML Italia, 2018), 365–381. 3  See for example: Annalisa Capristo, “The Exclusion of Jews from Italian Academies,” in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 81–95; Roberto Finzi, “The Damage to Italian Culture: The Fate of Jewish University Professors in Fascist Italy and After, 1938–1946,” in Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman, 96–113. 4  Mario Castelnuovo–Tedesco, Una vita di musica: Un libro di ricordi, ed. James Westby, intr. Mila De Santis, editing Ulla Casalini (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005); Angelo Gilardino, Mario Castelnuovo–Tedesco: Un fiorentino a Beverly Hills (Milan: Edizioni Curci-CIDIM, 2018). 5  Franco Carlo Ricci, Vittorio Rieti (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987).

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published elsewhere,6 he has contributed a chapter containing new research for this book. The other is by Camilla Poesio, who was not present at the conference, but whose chapter on jazz in Fascist Italy enriches this collection by expanding its focus to not only include antisemitism but also anti-black racism within Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Recently Poesio published an Italian-language book on this topic,7 and her original chapter in this collection will provide English-language readers an opportunity to engage with her research in this area. The conference was organized by the Festival Viktor Ullman and the University of Trieste Department of Humanities in conjunction with the Fondazione Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi of Trieste. Founded and based in the Italian city of Trieste, the Festival Viktor Ullman is the first music festival in the world dedicated to degenerate music, concentrationary music and exile music. The conference was made possible thanks to funding from the Autonomous Region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. In addition to featuring research papers, talks and a piano concert by Pierpaolo Levi, the conference also hosted a roundtable with descendants of the persecuted musicians and composers, who offered their direct testimonies and personal memories. During this roundtable, it was revealed that some of the descendants had primary materials belonging to their ancestors in their private possession, such as music, letters and various documents. The problem emerged, from the point of view of the researcher reconstructing not only the various phases of persecution but also the individual biographies of Italian-­ Jewish musicians and composers, of the dispersal of primary sources. To collate the various primary sources which are disseminated throughout archives, museums, institutes and the homes of the descendants, is an issue common to researchers in this field of the persecution of Italian-Jewish musicians and composers. We mention this because we hope that this collection will encourage musical institutions to acquire, organize and valorize the precious sources in the possession of the descendants. The project from which this collection emerged was innovative and original in many ways. First, the topic of Italian Jewish musicians has so far received scant attention both inside and outside Italy. In fact, the literature 6  Luca Lévi Sala, “Propaganda, Negotiations, and Antisemitism at the Teatro La Fenice, 1937–43: Proscription Lists and Other Unpublished Documents,” Journal of Musicological Research 33, no. 4 (2014): 271–314. 7  Camilla Poesio, Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing: Il Jazz, il fascismo e la società italiana (Florence: Le Monnier-Mondadori, 2018).

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on the topic includes only a few books, none recently published, dealing mainly with music and musicians under Fascism in general.8 This book is the first to develop a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach on the specific topic of the lives and works of Italian Jewish musicians and composers under Fascism. Secondly, the multidisciplinary approach used by different authors makes the collection appealing to the wider public as well. The original contributions on relatively unresearched aspects of historiography and musicology offer new perspectives on the relationship between the Fascist regime, music and anti-Jewish persecution. In particular, anti-Semitism in opera houses and Jewish musicians’ exile from Italy have never been analyzed before in-depth. This book aims to make the stories and events of the exclusion, the persecution, and the exile of Italian Jewish musicians and composers known to a wide readership, by retrieving information about some important musicians who—having been eliminated from the history of music in Italy as well as from every music event within Italy—were almost entirely forgotten after 1945. We have decided to bookend this collection with two general overviews of different aspects of Fascist Italy, with the remaining chapters in between presented in chronological order. The chapters number among them both case studies and broader overviews that stretch from the early 1930s up until 1997. We begin this collection with internationally renowned scholar Michele Sarfatti’s overview of the situation of Italian Jews at the time of the introduction of the 1938 Racial Laws and the historical developments that affected their lives until 1943. As first proposed and defined by Sarfatti in his seminal works on this period,9 the Fascist persecution of Italian Jews is categorized into three definable periods: the attack on Jewish equality, the attack on Jewish rights, and the assault on Jewish lives. Prior to the Racial 8  Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984); Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); Stefano Biguzzi, L’orchestra del duce. Mussolini, la musica e il mito del capo (Turin: UTET, 2003); Italian Music during the Fascist Period, ed. Roberto Illiano (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America, eds. Roberto Illiano, and Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Charlotte Ginot-Slacik, Michela Niccolai, Musique dans l’Italie fasciste. (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2019). 9  See Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). The rev. and enl. Italian edition of this book has been published in 2018.

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Laws, the Jews in Italy had obtained full equality of political rights during the Risorgimento. In his chapter presented here, Sarfatti details how these laws excluded Jews from state schools, cultural life, the army and public employment, as well as further limiting access to private employment. New “racially mixed” marriages were also outlawed. Significantly, this chapter points out that the policy of separating Jews from mainstream society resulted in the confinement of Jews into non-physical ghettos. This continued until 1943 when arrests and deportations, in collaboration with the German authorities, began. We then move to Luca Lévi Sala’s detailed outline of attitudes towards Italian Jewish musicians in music criticism of the 1930s. While the Fascist regime imposed strict control on the Italian press, there was little interference within printed musical polemics and debates in specialized music journals. Using archival newspaper sources, Levi Sala demonstrates how despite this lack of imposition, music criticism in Fascist Italy was not only characterized by cultural violence but also that it significantly contributed to the dissemination of Fascism and racism within Italian culture. Drawing focus onto the way in which music was received by the general Italian population, Camilla Poesio presents an overview of the place of jazz in Fascist Italy. In this captivating chapter, Poesio explores the significant impact that jazz had upon popular Italian music culture and society. Despite the Fascist State’s efforts to prevent the dissemination of music from abroad and its definition of jazz as degenerate music, Poesio details the diffusion of jazz within Italian society. The case studies in this volume highlight different aspects of the Jewish persecution within the field of music. Annalisa Capristo’s chapter reconstructs the events that led to the expulsion of Jewish musicians and even audiences from Italian theatres using both documentary and media sources. Capristo’s contribution focuses on the situation at Milan’s Teatro La Scala and offers important original insight on Erich Kleiber’s refusal to conduct Beethoven’s Fidelio in December 1938. It also investigates the reactions of some other prominent figures on the international music scene who protested (as Jews) against the onset of the racist campaign at the hands of the Fascist government. Another case study turns its focus on the exiles of select Italian Jewish musicians. The topic of exile from Fascist Italy has been dealt with only recently by some scholars who mainly focus on the exile of Jewish and

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anti-Fascist intellectuals.10 The exile of musicians has not yet been comprehensively analyzed. Alessandro Carrieri’s contribution is a comparative analysis of the exile experiences of two significant Italian Jewish musicians: the composer Renzo Massarani and the pianist Gualtiero Volterra. Importantly, this chapter features the first study on the life and exile of Volterra in Australia. The last case study included in this collection sheds light on a rather unknown case of musical activity which took place in the internment camp of Ferramonti di Tarsia, Calabria. In this chapter, Raffaele Deluca, who has written an Italian-language monograph on this area of research,11 offers expert insight on the musical activities inside the Ferramonti concentration camp. Deluca turns a specific focus on the composer Kurt Sonnenfeld (1921–1997), born in Austria, who arrived in Italy as a young refugee during World War II. By focusing on the experience of Sonnenfeld, this chapter elucidates on the experiences of interned foreign Jews in Italy after the declaration of war in June 1940. We conclude this collection with a chapter by the internationally distinguished music scholar Erik Levi.12 Based on original documentary sources and reports, this chapter provides an innovative comparative analysis and in-depth discussion of the musical relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Levi demonstrates how this relationship was uneasy from the beginning, as the Italian regime was seen to be more culturally lax than its zealous German counterpart. This situation changed following the signing of a cultural agreement between the two countries in 1938. Nevertheless, the cultural alliance between the two regimes was still flimsy enough for the Italians to defy Nazi cultural propaganda and continued to hold performances and promote music that had been banned by the Germans, up until 1943. In this chapter, Levi shows how music and cooperation regarding its control was a fundamental component of both regimes. Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism–Let Our Music Be Played makes a new and substantial contribution to the history of persecution of Jews under Fascism. All but one of the contributors are Italian, 10  See Renato Camurri, ed. “Mussolini’s Gifts. Exiles from Fascist Italy,” special issue, The Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15, no. 5 (2010). 11  See Raffaele Deluca, Tradotti agli estremi confini: Musicisti ebrei internati nell’Italia fascista, intro. Carlo Spartaco Capogreco (Milan: Mimesis, 2019). 12  See Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994) and Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon, (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010).

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and we are particularly proud to be making dynamic Italian scholarship available to English-language readers. It is our hope that it will stimulate scholarly discussion and further study on the relationship between Fascism and the Italian musical milieu. In beginning this project, our aim was to rediscover and promote Jewish musicians persecuted by the Fascist Regime, which considered their music to be “degenerate music.” In closing this project, we see how the chapters collected in this volume not only provide a varied and insightful analysis of the role and impact of music within Fascist Italy, but also offer a broader examination of the important relationship between music and totalitarian regimes. The cover of this book features a painting by the artist Arturo Nathan (1891–1944).13 Titled Nostalgia: Passaggio del veliero, it was painted in 1930. Nathan was born in a cosmopolitan Jewish family in Trieste. During World War II, he was deported first to Bergen-Belsen then to Biberach an der Riss, where he died. We chose to feature this work on our cover, both because of its profound beauty and as an homage to this little-known and wildly talented artist, who faced many of the discriminations and persecutions that have been detailed in the pages of this book. We believe that the painting evokes the sadness and alienation that many artists and musicians of the time would undergo. Acknowledgments  We would like to thank the Museo Revoltella Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Trieste for giving us permission to reproduce Nathan’s painting and the Festival Viktor Ullmann for their invaluable support during the process of this project. We would also like to express our gratitude to the following people: Amaryllis Gacioppo, Davide Casali, Mirna Cicioni, Stanislao G.  Pugliese, Tullia Catalan, Luisa Franco, Daniela Massarani, Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi, Vitale Fano and the staff at Palgrave Macmillan and Springer.

Bibliography Biguzzi, Stefano. L’orchestra del duce: Mussolini, la musica e il mito del capo. Turin: UTET, 2003. Camurri, Renato, ed. “Mussolini’s Gifts. Exiles from Fascist Italy,” special issue of The Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15, no. 5 (2010). Capristo, Annalisa. “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale.” In Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, 13  See Mann, Vivian B., ed., Ghetto and Garden: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 337.

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edited by Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva, 365-381. Milan: IAML Italia, 2018. ———. “The Exclusion of Jews from Italian Academies.” In Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, edited by Joshua D.  Zimmerman, 81-95. New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Deluca, Raffaele. Tradotti agli estremi confini: Musicisti ebrei internati nell’Italia fascista. Introduction by Carlo Spartaco Capogreco. Milan: Mimesis, 2019. Finzi, Roberto. “The Damage to Italian Culture: The Fate of Jewish University Professors In Fascist Italy and After, 1938-1946.” In Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, edited by Joshua D.  Zimmerman, 96-113. New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ginot-Slacik. Charlotte, and Michela Niccolai. Musique dans l’Italie fasciste. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2019. Illiano, Roberto, ed. Italian Music during the Fascist Period. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Illiano, Roberto, and Massimiliano Sala, eds. Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Levi, Erik. Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010. ———. Music in the Third Reich. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994. Mann, Vivian B., ed. Ghetto and Garden: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Nicolodi, Fiamma. Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Fiesole: Discanto, 1984; reissued with a new preface Padova: Libreriauniversitaria.it, 2018. Poesio, Camilla. Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing: Il Jazz, il fascismo e la società italiana. Florence: Le Monnier-Mondadori, 2018. Sachs, Harvey. Music in Fascist Italy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Sala, Luca Lévi. “Propaganda, Negotiations, and Antisemitism at the Teatro La Fenice, 1937-43: Proscription Lists and Other Unpublished Documents.” Journal of Musicological Research 33, 4 (2014): 271-314. Sarfatti, Michele. The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution. Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 2

Forms and Methods of Anti-Jewish Persecution in Fascist Italy from 1938 to 1943 Michele Sarfatti

By 1938, when the anti-Jewish laws were introduced, the Kingdom of Italy could boast over 2000 years of uninterrupted Jewish presence, which was very unusual in Europe. Indeed, the process of independence and national unity in the nineteenth century was inextricably linked with the definitive legal emancipation of the Jews (and not the development of new discriminations). The reactionary-dictatorial party that had ascended to the government in the 1920s was not (yet) officially anti-Semitic, and it counted both Jews and anti-Semites among its members. The Jews possessed a profound Italian identity and—as a result—held a wide range of political affiliations: some supported the fascists, others the antifascists, while some remained neutral.

All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own. M. Sarfatti (*) Foundation Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center (CDEC), Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_2

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In the decade leading up to 1938, the condition of the Jews in Benito Mussolini’s Italy underwent a slow, complex, contradictory and often subtle deterioration, marked by their gradual removal from roles and positions of national importance.1 The dictator repeatedly stated that he hoped “antiSemitism in Italy would not be provoked … by the Jews,” suggesting that they themselves would be responsible for any deterioration in their situation.2 Between the end of 1935 and the first half of 1936, Mussolini decided to introduce a universal and public anti-Jewish policy in Italy. During those months the government was engaged in the bloody military campaign to conquer Ethiopia, in which regard it is vital to note that, following the conquest of Addis Ababa in May 1936, the Italian propaganda and legislation concerning Ethiopian women and the Ethiopian population in general moved from being racist in a colonial sense, to pure racism. In that same period, Nazi Germany was in the process of becoming an ally of Italy. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the Italian dictatorship’s shift towards anti-Semitism must be attributed to domestic policies, and not to those connected—whether directly or indirectly—with foreign politics. The fact was that, in the eyes of the regime, Italian Jews—be they fascists, anti-­ fascists or apolitical—had shown themselves to be incapable of achieving a complete “fascistisation” of the Jewish Communities (which had been reformed by the State in 1930–1931). Furthermore, they had demonstrated that they were not useful to national interests abroad: the initiatives that the leadership of Italian Jewry had undertaken in Europe against the sanctions decreed by the League of Nations following the invasion of Ethiopia had been unsuccessful, while Italian Jews’ solidarity with their persecuted brethren under the Nazi government was by this point incompatible with the new orientation of the Fascist Party’s foreign policy. In essence, we can say that the fascist regime moved from what had previously been a persecution of Jewish equality and autonomy to a new policy of persecuting the rights of individual Jews because they, regardless of their 1  On the history of Jews in Italy during fascism, see Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2006). On the politics of exclusion prior to 1938, see Annalisa Capristo, “L’esclusione degli ebrei dall’Accademia d’Italia,” La rassegna mensile di Israel LXVII, no. 3 (September–December 2001): 1–36; Giorgio Fabre, Hitler’s Contract. The Secret History of the Italian Translation of Mein Kampf, trans. Robert Miller, intro. Susan Zuccotti (New York: Enigma Books, 2006); Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di un antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005). 2  On Mussolini’s statements, see Sarfatti, The Jews, 59–60.

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personal political convictions, behaved in a way that the regime considered dangerous, antagonistic, alternative, inconsistent, even useless in relation to its own aims. Once the decision had been made to persecute all Jews (though how remained to be decided), it was necessary to communicate this to the entire population, as well as garner support and gain commitment from the upper echelons of the regime and the propaganda machine. This was necessary because at that time in Italy, unlike in other European countries, anti-Jewish sentiment was present in a greater degree in the government’s program than it was in the thought and behavior of the general population. For this reason, the enactment of the anti-Jewish legislation did not take place until sometime after the decision had been made in 1935–1936. However, the latter date marks the start of the period of the persecution of Jewish rights. On December 31, 1936, Mussolini anonymously published his own article in his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, defining anti-Semitism as an “inevitable” consequence of the “troppo ebreo” (literally translating to “too-much Jew”).3 He had made similar statements in previous years, but this time his words had a definitive tone. A similar concept, namely the incompatibility between fascist Italy and ebrei “ebraizzanti” (literally translating to “Judaizing” Jew) [sic!], also permeated Paolo Orano’s widespread pamphlet, entitled The Jews in Italy, published in the spring of 1937, in which “Judaizing” Jews were essentially those who retained any kind of Jewish identity, regardless of whether they were Zionists or anti-fascists.4 Towards the end of 1937, while the propaganda was amplifying and intensifying (with, amongst other things, a new edition of the anti-Semitic book, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion),5 the second phase of the persecution period of Jewish rights began, which included the census of Jews (progressing from the initial sectoral surveys, to a formal and detailed national census based on race, carried out on August 22, 1938) and the adoption of persecutory measures (from the first isolated sectoral measures, to the decrees of early September and early November 1938).

 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia (Florence: La Fenice, 1959), v. XXVII, 98.  Paolo Orano, Gli ebrei in Italia (Rome: Poinciana, 1937). 5  L’internazionale ebraica. I “Protocolli” dei “Savi Anziani” di Sion (Rome: La Vita Italiana, 1937). 3 4

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It is important to remember that 1938, especially the first three months, was characterized by the sudden, rapid spread of anti-Jewish legislation in Europe: persecutory measures were announced in Romania on December 30, 1937, and formally adopted on January 21, 1938. On February 16 the Italian measures were announced; Hungarian measures followed on March 5; the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich on March 12 led to the automatic extension of the Nazi anti-Semitic legislation, while on March 31 Poland began to legislate against Polish Jews who had emigrated. Thus, what had—until 1937—been characteristic of a single State (Germany), became one of the characteristics of the continent during 1938. It is essential to bear in mind that, except for Austria of course, to date no traces of German imposition or autonomous coordination between the other countries have been found: each national anti-Jewish legislation had its own specific origins and its own individual characteristics, the rapid developments therefore demonstrate that the “anti-Jewish question” had by that time reached maturity in many areas of the continent. In this context, the anti-Jewish legislation adopted in Italy was—after Germany—the most complex and articulated in Europe. Furthermore, it included some features which, when they were adopted and for several weeks afterwards, were more severely persecutory than those in force in Germany. For example, the universal expulsion of Jewish students from public schools in Italy was decided on September 2, 1938, whereas in Germany, where a complex system of numerus clausus had been in force since 1933, it was decided over two and a half months later. From what we know today, the first national survey of the Jewish presence in a specific section of Italian society was conducted in mid-January 1938 by the Minister for National Education, Giuseppe Bottai, and focused on foreign Jewish university students. The following month, while Bottai extended the survey to include students and professors of all nationalities, Mussolini looked into the Jews who held senior positions in the armed forces and surveyed the religious affiliations of the employees of his Ministry of the Interior, paying particular attention to those employed in the police force. On August 22, 1938, the newly created Ministry of the Interior’s General Administration for Demography and Race carried out a national census, which was racist in structure, of all Italian and foreign Jews. It had been technically prepared by the Kingdom of Italy’s Central Institute of Statistics and was carried out by the local authorities, under the surveillance and coordination of the Prefectures. Individuals with two

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non-­Jewish parents, who had converted to Judaism as adults, were not included in the survey. In total, 58,412 people were recorded with at least one Jewish or ex-Jewish [sic!] parent: of these, 46,656 declared that they professed the Jewish faith, or at least identified as Jewish. This figure amounts to 80% of those surveyed, and approximately 1 per 1000 of the total population of the peninsula. The group was subdivided into 37,241 Italians and 9415 foreigners.6 The largest Jewish communities were in Rome (almost a quarter of the national total), Milan, Trieste and Turin; elsewhere the urban communities did not exceed 3000 people. Of all the working Italian Jewish citizens included in the census, 20–25% worked in some capacity in the production and trade of textile products and clothing; a further 9–10% either taught in schools or universities, or worked in publishing houses, or printing presses. It could be said that fabric and books were the defining elements of the Italian Jewish community in the early twentieth century. The persecution did not affect all of the 58,412 people surveyed. The laws enacted in September–November 1938 established a classification system based on a biological racist principle. Those whose ancestors were all “of the Jewish race” were classified as belonging to that “race,” regardless of the religion they professed. The same criterion applied to those whose ancestors were all “of the Aryan race.” Those who were of “mixed” ancestry were assigned to one or the other “race.” For example, the son of a “Jew” and an “Aryan,” baptized before October 1938, was in principle classified as “Aryan,” due to the “criterion of the racial superiority of Italian blood.” If, however, the person had demonstrated “displays of Judaism” (such as marrying a Jew) they were classified as belonging to the “Jewish race.” All those of “mixed” ancestry who were not baptized were classified as being “of the Jewish race.”7 Based on all of the above, the number of people subjected to persecution was between the aforementioned values of 46,656 and 58,412. After a series of complex calculations, I believe that approximately 51,100 people suffered from persecution, of which perhaps 41,300 were Italian and 9800 were foreigners. Of these 51,100 people, almost 10% were either Catholic or neither-Jewish-nor-Catholic;8 as such, the “anti-Jewish” 6  Michele Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei. Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, 2nd ed. (Turin: Zamorani, 2017), 175–179. 7  Sarfatti, Mussolini, 126. 8  Sarfatti, Mussolini, 128–129.

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persecution carried out by Italian fascism did not solely affect people of Jewish faith or identity. Over the course of 1938, Mussolini publicly changed his mind several times on how to implement the persecution. At first (in Diplomatic Information No. 14, February 16, 1938 and Diplomatic Information No. 18, August 5, 1938) he announced that it would be partial, i.e., enforced according to quantitative and qualitative criteria, applying on the one hand the criterion of numerus clausus (based on the national figure of “1  in 1000”), and on the other hand, distinguishing between those in possession of military, national or political “merits”; other Italians; foreigners. Subsequently (with the Grand Council of Fascism’s Declaration on the race, dated October 6, 1938), Mussolini confirmed that it would be a partial persecution, taking into account only the three qualitative levels, thus excluding the numerus clausus. Finally (with the legislative proceedings of November), he almost completely stopped differentiating between Italian Jews, such that their persecution became largely uniform, though foreign Jews continued to be treated more harshly. Mussolini vehemently wished to avoid Italy being subjected to international boycotting actions in a show of solidarity with the Jews of the peninsula. For this reason, the Grand Council of Fascism’s Declaration on the race of October 6, 1938, specified that the various persecutory regulations “could be annulled or intensified according to the behavior adopted by the Jewry towards Fascist Italy.”9 Despite the fact that public statements, law titles and the press campaign clearly differentiated between the “Italian” or “Aryan” race and all other races, the laws enacted in 1938 only concerned the persecution of the Jews, with the exception of a single article which prohibited marriage between an “Aryan” Italian and a “Hamite” or “Semite.” In the periods leading up to and following 1938, measures were put in place which were specifically aimed at Africans and “half-castes”; however, this kind of racist law primarily originated from the governors of the Italian colonies in Africa, rather than the national government. It must, however, be acknowledged that fascist Italy devastated those populations, not only with institutional racism, but also with physical racism in the form of massacres. The political declarations and laws of July–November 1938 categorized members of the “Jewish race” as a separate group, both distinct from and 9  Grand Council of Fascism, Dichiarazione sulla razza, October 6, 1938, quoted in Sarfatti, Mussolini, 199–201.

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hostile to the Fascist-Catholic nation-state-populace entity. This represented a profound, irrevocable and definitive change for the fascist regime. Jews were entirely dismissed from all roles, with the sole exception of senators, who were royally appointed, and whose position was granted for life (although they were prevented from entering the Senate building). In September 1938, the government revoked residency permits from the majority of foreign Jews. By the time Italy entered the Second World War, about half of the foreign Jews had left the peninsula; this must be considered a fascist success, given the grave difficulties imposed by almost all states on foreign Jewish immigrants. The majority of those who remained, and later also the foreign Jews who were moved to the peninsula from other Mediterranean territories under Italian control (Libya, Yugoslavia, Rhodes), were held in internment camps, awaiting expulsion from Italy at the end of the war. This internment was an anti-Semitic measure: treatment in the camps was similar to that of a minimum-security prison, although prisoners were not subjected to violence. Fascism also proposed the solution of emigration and expulsion for Italian Jews. This could not be enforced in a totalitarian way until the widespread integration between Jews and non-Jews could be dismantled. For this reason, the 1938 legislation aimed on the one hand at a policy of separation and on the other, to revoke the right to education and—increasingly—the right to work, which in fact encouraged the Jews to emigrate. Furthermore, it is worth highlighting that the vast majority of Italian Jews could not bring themselves to accept that the Italian government, whatever its ideology, wanted to expel them from Italy. Indeed, from 1938 to late 1940, only 8% of Italian Jews emigrated. In February 1940 Mussolini formally announced to the Union of Italian Jewish Communities that the vast majority of Jews with Italian citizenship would need to permanently leave the peninsula. The government was preparing a complex expulsion bill, which it intended to gradually implement over the following decade. However, Italy’s entry into the war (June 1940), and particularly the extension of the conflict to the seas, prevented Mussolini’s order from being carried out, and even the legislative proposal was postponed to the post-war period. The approved legislation was particularly severe and totalitarian in both the educational and cultural sectors. The Minister for National Education, Giuseppe Bottai, expelled all traces of Judaism he could find from state schools: teachers, students, clerks, textbooks written by Jewish authors, wall maps created by Jewish cartographers, textbooks that referred to Jews

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who had died after 1850, and so on. The only exception was the authorization in a select few cities, to form classes for Jewish students between the age of 6–10 and 11–13. The Minister for Popular Culture, Dino Alfieri, expelled prose and music writers, directors, choir conductors, performers, singers, actors, from the radio, theatres and opera houses, record catalogues, cinemas, and so on. Painters and sculptors could no longer exhibit their artwork. Publishers almost completely stopped publishing new books written by Jewish authors, while those already published were seized or gradually removed from sale (including academic essays on calculus or legal matters), and excluded from library catalogues. In addition, 96 university full professors were expelled from universities, equivalent to about 7% of the entire profession. In all probability, university teaching was the career in which Italian Jews—who represented less than 1  in 1000 of the general population—were most engaged, in proportional terms. In November 1938, it was decreed that Jews were to be expelled from the army and all public roles; as such, they lost their jobs as ministerial employees, army generals, tram drivers, magistrates, librarians, and so on. In 1942, the decision was made to dismiss Jews from private companies deemed “auxiliary” to the defense of the nation (Fiat, shipyards, electricity companies, etc.). Between 1939 and 1942, Jews were forbidden to work as itinerant traders (a common activity in the poor and populous Jewish community in Rome), hoteliers, private teachers, pigeon breeders, street performers, photographers, stationers, sellers of sacred (Catholic) objects, and so on. Furthermore, in 1942 employment agencies and companies were officially encouraged to favor the employment of “Aryan” workers, not only when making redundancies, but also when hiring new staff. A complex decree in 1939 expelled or marginalized, either legally or de facto, freelance professionals such as lawyers, doctors, engineers, midwives, accountants, agronomists, and so on. Essentially, by 1943 the only options open to Jews were employment in small- and medium-sized private companies, or small-scale work in the traditional food or clothing sectors. The small number of Italian Jews choosing to emigrate, combined with the growing tensions across the country and within the Fascist Party following the Italian military defeats, led to a serious deterioration in the conditions of those persecuted. In May 1942, the government ordered that all Jewish adults with Italian citizenship be made to undertake forced

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labor in their local province, an order enforced to varying extents by the different prefects. In June 1943, the government decided to gather adult Jews into four internment and forced labor camps. On July 15, 1943, the decision was made to hand over any German Jews present in the Italianoccupied territories in Southern France to German police. On July 25 it was decided that the inmates (most of whom were foreign Jews) of the Ferramonti di Tarsia camp would be moved to the province of Bolzano: Ferramonti was located in the very south of the peninsula; Bolzano in the far north. These last three decisions were never actually implemented, since the military gains of the Allies (who had landed in Sicily on July 10) caused the political crisis of the fascist regime on July 25, 1943, and the first dismissal of Mussolini. With regard to the order for the German Jews in France to be consigned to the German police, it is vital to remember that Adolf Hitler had decided to proceed with a systematic genocide at the end of summer 1941. It is not known to what extent he informed Mussolini of his actions and intentions; however, it is certain that from the summer of 1942 Mussolini received several partial reports, and that, together, they painted a sufficiently clear picture of the extermination in progress. Until July 1943, there had been only one real wave of serious physical racial violence in the Italian peninsula: in September–October 1941 the synagogues of Ferrara, Turin, Casale Monferrato and Trieste were attacked or devastated. Most likely, these attacks had been organized by a radical offshoot of the Fascist Party, and it was Mussolini himself who brought a stop to this movement, since in Fascist Italy it fell to the state alone to authorize acts of violence. There were relatively few other, isolated, incidents of direct anti-Semitic violence; one notable event was the vicious attack aimed at the synagogue and Jews of Spalato (Split) in June 1942, which was, at that time, ruled by Italy. During those years, no Jew from the peninsula was killed, but the persecution pushed between 0.5 and 1 per 1000 of the victims to commit suicide. As far as Jewish social life is concerned, the politics of separation developed into a metaphysical confinement of the Jews into invisible ghettos. Marriages between Jews fell drastically from about 200 per year in 1935–1937 to 156 in 1939 and 116 in 1940; “racially mixed” marriages obviously ceased completely (there had also been around 200 “religiously

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mixed” marriages per year between 1935 and 1937).10 The birth rate declined even more drastically, starting of course, from the spring of 1939. Most non-Jewish Italians approved, accepted, adapted or were apathetic to the State’s anti-Semitism. Public protests were extremely rare (Italy was under a dictatorship and at a time when support for the regime was at its highest); some expressed solidarity through private writings and actions. King Victor Emmanuel III of Savoy promulgated the laws. “Aryan” Deputies approved them unanimously, “Aryan” Senators approved them with 154  in favor and 10 against. Few in the Catholic world spoke up against the racism; “L’Osservatore Romano” published only a single critical article, which protested the ban on “racially mixed” marriages. In summary, from the summer of 1938 to the summer of 1943 the Jews of Italy were subjected to an extensive and increasingly severe persecution of their rights. The decisions taken by Mussolini in the weeks immediately preceding July 25, 1943, indicate that the dictator was treading the narrow path between the persecution of the rights of the Jews and the persecution of their lives. This began in the central and northern regions of Italy after September 8, 1943, with the German occupation and the establishment of the Italian Social Republic.

Bibliography Capristo, Annalisa. “L’esclusione degli ebrei dall’Accademia d’Italia,” La rassegna mensile di Israel LXVII, no. 3 (September–December 2001): 1–36. Fabre, Giorgio. Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di un antisemita. Milan: Garzanti, 2005. Fabre, Giorgio. Hitler’s Contract. The Secret History of the Italian translation of Mein Kampf. Translated by Robert Miller, introduction by Susan Zuccotti. New York: Enigma Books, 2006. L’internazionale ebraica. I “Protocolli” dei “Savi Anziani” di Sion. Rome: La Vita Italiana, 1937.

10  Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1937 (Rome: 1937), 20; Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1938 (Rome: 1938), 30; Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1939 (Rome: 1939), 33; Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1941 (Rome: 1941), 33; Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1942 (Rome: 1942), 33 (analysis mine).

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Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1937. Rome: 1937. Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1938. Rome: 1938. Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1939. Rome: 1939. Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1941. Rome: 1941. Istituto centrale di statistica del regno d’Italia, Annuario statistico italiano 1942. Rome: 1942. Mussolini, Benito. Opera Omnia. Florence: La Fenice, 1959, v. XXVIII. Orano, Paolo. Gli ebrei in Italia. Rome: Pinciana, 1937. Sarfatti, Michele. Mussolini contro gli ebrei. Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938. 2nd ed. Turin: Zamorani, 2017. Sarfatti, Michele. The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution. Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 3

Cultural Cleansing in Italian Music Criticism in the Early 1930s: Autarchy, Eugenics and Anti-Semitism Luca Lévi Sala

Primary findings of this chapter were presented at the local chapter AMS-GNY of the American Musicological Society, New York University, September 23, 2017, as part of the research project Composers as Officials within the Fascist State (1937–1943). Minculpop and the Role of the Musical Institutions, hosted by New York University (2017). An extended paper “«Nazism in Germany was a metastasis of a tumor originating from Italy.» (Primo Levi) Italian Music Criticism and Fascist Eugenics in the early 1930s,” will be presented at the Forty-Fifth Annual Conference organized by the German Studies Association (Indianapolis, IN, September 30-October 3, 2021). In order not to overwhelm the flow of the text, the original Italian quotations provided in the footnotes are limited only to the longer extracts included in the chapter. All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own. L. L. Sala (*) Manhattan College, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_3

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Debates and polemics published between around 1926 and 1927  in Critica fascista (1923–1943), the fortnightly journal founded and directed by Giuseppe Bottai,1 were crucial in helping define the way in which Fascist intelligentsia established new aesthetic standards for both Fascist art and culture.2 Such polemics proved at least useful in providing a clear indication of the needs that the new leading class required in order to control the entire cultural system. Among the laws enacted after the installment of the so-called Leggi fascistissime (1925–1926)—which aimed to turn the Italian government into an authoritarian regime—the ‘Law related to the periodical press’ on 31 December 1925,3 which entered into law a month later, on 20 January 1926, played a crucial role. As Albertina Vittoria highlighted, Critica fascista was the most important publication of its  kind, capable of turning such polemics into a proper educational vision, whose merit was to understand that such an aim would be achieved only through a long and slow process of the fascistization of the elite.4 In a mishmash of self-referential elucubrations, Critica fascista contributed to the discussion on the political aspect of art and culture, mainly by drawing on the cult for Mussolini and by using strikingly chauvinistic, eugenic and slick rhetoric. Alessandro Pavolini, who would become the leader of the Ministry of Popular Culture (from 1939 to 1943) and a central figure in the National Fascist Party, said it was to Fascism’s merit that it “let Italian artists return back to the most spiritual condition which is more fitting, according with the Italian tradition, to their work.”5 In the issue of December 15, 1926, Umberto Fracchia said new art had to be 1  Fascist politician and journalist, Giuseppe Bottai (1895–1959) was a leading figure of the Fascist cultural apparatus. Founded in 1929 of Critica fascista and in 1940 of the racist and anti-Semitic journal Primato, Il (journal), Bottai was Minister of Corporations (1929–1932) and Minister of National Education (1936–1943). 2  Literature on the topic is extensive; see for instance Carlo Bordoni, Cultura e propaganda nell’Italia fascista (Messina-Florence: Casa editrice G.  D’Anna, 1974), Luisa Mangoni, L’interventismo della cultura: Intellettuali e riviste del fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1974), Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State. Culture & Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 3  “Disposizioni sulla stampa periodica,” (no. 2307), Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia no. 3 (5 January 1926), 22–24. 4  Albertina Vittoria, Le riviste del duce. Politica e cultura del regime (Milan: Guanda, 1983) 97–99. 5  Alessandro Pavolini, “Dell’arte fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (November 1, 1926): 395.

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nurtured by a “universal spirit” whose “viewpoint has to be religious,”6 eventually. Such a concept, echoed by Alberto Jacopini on the same issue,7 was reframed a few months later, by the painter and politician Cipriano Efisio Oppo who observed that “Italian art is above all order, hard discipline, good faith and awareness […] which are not the result of thrills or intellectualistic and artistic torments.”8 For Ardengo Soffici, Fascist art had to be about the “restoration of the lost values of [the] race,”9 a concept also expressed by Mario Puccini in the issue of December 1.10 Mino Maccari: “if we have to accept a new modernity, it shall be a modernity of our own, born from our spirit, nourished by our humanity, carved by the eternal headlines of our race.”11 Warning against the “unnatural couplings between painting, music and poetry”, Oppo said Fascist art was necessary in order “to be popular and universal, against every snobbish and academic approach. In order for Fascist art to be truly Italian, it is essential that Fascism become above all a lifestyle.”12 A similar concept was put forward by Enrico Rocca in the issue of November 1, 1926,13 and underlined by Massimo Bontempelli, who said Fascist art should be born from a Fascist approach to organizing “public and individual life: an accomplished and total, practical and theoretical, moral and intellectual order, action and spirit.”14 While Rocca was likewise to express that the “great art must obey, in its creation the same laws that govern great politics,”15 for Curzio Malaparte “the only original and powerful artistic expression of Fascism is Mussolini himself.”16 Not surprisingly, there were also calls to  Umberto Fracchia, “Arte fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 24 (December 15, 1926): 453.  Alberto Jacopini, “A proposito di arte fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 24 (December 15, 1926): 455. 8  Cipriano Efisio Oppo, “Arte fascista e arte di Stato,” Critica fascista 5, no. 3 (February 1, 1927): 44. 9  Ardengo Soffici, “Arte fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 20 (October 15, 1926): 385. 10  Mario Puccini, “Un’arte fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 23 (December 1, 1926): 436. 11  Mino Maccari, “Arte fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (November 1, 1926): 397. 12  Oppo, “Arte fascista e arte di Stato,” 44. 13  Enrico Rocca, “L’arte fascista è la grande arte,” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (November 1, 1926): 396. 14  Massimo Bontempelli, “Arte fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 22 (November 15, 1926): 416. 15  Rocca, “L’arte fascista è la grande arte,” 396. 16  Curzio Malaparte, “Botta e risposta,” Critica fascista 4, no. 22 (November 15, 1926): 420; see also Lorenzo Giusso, “Letteratura fascista,” Critica fascista 4, no. 13 (July 1, 1926): 247–248. 6 7

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militarize a new generation of artists and suggestions that the baton should be used to restrain criticism,17 and to moralize and silence the public life of the social collective, with “nooses around the neck […] muzzles, vices, handcuffs and punches.”18 Whether they were inherited from the most violent fringes of those intellectuals with links to the militaristic culture close to Maccari and Malaparte’s monthly journal Il Selvaggio (1924) or the more moderate standpoint of Bontempelli’s journal 900 (1926),19 such a concern with nationalistic cultural identity at a time that the Fascist political structure was evolving fast might have created the conditions for the fascistization to come in the 1930s. As Pietro Solari stated in 1934: “Only now, in the twelfth year of the Fascist era, the Weltanschauung of the March on Rome begins to become incarnate in the Italian people. And for how long have the real Fascist forces of our art been on the front line?”20 In the end, though, criticisms of the ‘professoroni’ and the “plutocratic and internationalist snobbish bourgeoisie”21—ready to challenge the rhetorical rationale of the former ‘old’ cultural institutions and the “kingdom of the old ideas and the system of old wigs”22—that were published in Critica fascista proved to be nothing more than pompous autarchic slogans and nationalistic cultural innuendos. These increased markedly from 1932, the year Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism was published,23 also affecting the musical arena with the drafting of the reactionary Manifesto of Italian Musicians for the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century Romantic Art (1932);24 the latter clearly intended to  Maccari, “Arte fascista,” 397.  “Il pornografo, ovvero i rimedi contro la rettorica,” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (November 1, 1926): 399. 19  A broader investigation about these journals is proposed in Mangoni, L’interventismo della cultura, 93–195. 20  “Solo oggi, anno dodicesimo dell’èra fascista, la Weltanschauung della Marcia su Roma comincia a incarnarsi nel popolo italiano. E da quanti anni sono in prima linea le leve veramente fasciste dell’arte nostra?” Pietro Solari, “Estetica razzista,” Pan 1, no. 2 (January 1934): 267 21  Pavolini, “Dell’arte fascista,” 393. 22  Anton Giulio Bragaglia, “Lo stile è l’epoca,” Critica fascista 4, no. 22 (November 15, 1926): 417. 23  Benito Mussolini, “La dottrina del fascismo,” Enciclopedia Italiana, 14 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1933), 847–84. See also Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo. Con una storia del movimento fascista di Gioacchino Volpe (Rome: Treves-TreccaniTumminelli, 1932). 24  “Manifesto musicale,” Corriere della sera (Milan) 57, December 17, 1932, 5. The topic has been largely discussed, see for instance Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio 17 18

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create a safe political territory for the patronage of the entire musical world. Feeling pressured by the politically orientated criticism, the whole network of the press was affected. As Augusto Turati was to recall in 1926, the power of such a pressing process of solidification of the Fascist thought through intellectual media was yet to be achieved and it would have taken time to properly assess the militaristic meaning of Fascist cultural coercion: The critics, at whatever cost, have at times stated that, once the great plan of the Leggi fascistissime were achieved, the Party would lose its great task. I personally disagree with such critics, and I don’t believe I’m exaggerating when I say that Fascism’s greatest challenge starts perhaps from today. […] We feel that our squadrista spirit is more alive than ever, with its vision of new power and ideological violence.25

During the early 1930s, the Fascist regime released further rules and laws in order to take full control of the press, enforcing restrictions and censorship to silence any dissent from journals and newspapers.26 After the application of the legal restraints toward the regulation of the press, introduced by the Rocco code on October 19, 1930,27 it was time to develop a deeper concept of the militarization of journals and newspapers. This was accurately pursued by Gaetano Polverelli28 in 1931, with the issuing of a number of Direttive per la Stampa, the first of which was to state that the journals shall be nothing but “an organ for the propaganda of the Italian spirit and the Regime.”29 Issuing service notes (veline) for the press increased and helped overcome the “very obedient discretion of the press fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984) and Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (New YorkLondon: Norton, 1987). 25  “I critici a qualunque costo hanno talora affermato che, realizzato il grande piano delle riforme fascistissime, il Partito resta svuotato del suo grande compito. Io mi permetto di dissentire da tali critici e credo di non esagerare affermando che il compito più difficile del Fascismo incomincia forse da oggi. […] Noi sentiamo che lo spirito squadrista è piu vivo che mai con la sua visione di freschissima potenza e di violenza ideale.” Augusto Turati, Ragioni ideali di vita fascista (Rome: Berlutti, 1926), 20, 138. 26  See Paolo Murialdi, “La stampa quotidiana del Regime fascista,” in La stampa italiana nell’età fascista, eds. Valerio Castronovo, and Nicola Tranfaglia (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 31–257. 27  “Regio Decreto no. 1398,” Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 251, libro i, titolo iii (art. 57 and 58). 28  Gaetano Polverelli (1886–1960) was a Fascist journalist and politician. He was Under Secretary-General of the Minister of Popular Culture from 1941 to 1943 and he succeeded Alessandro Pavolini as Minister of Popular Culture from 1943 to 1945. 29  ACS, MinCulPop, folder 155, file 10.

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overall”30 until the outbreak of the war, in June 1940. Such an approach to journalism as a moralizing legion was reinforced by Mussolini himself in Il Popolo d’Italia on November 2, 1933: Fascism wanted and now requires a journalism of its own: thus, a different kind of journalism. It requires an armed journalism: therefore, it needs a journalist not to serve himself, but the Idea. All the newspapers must form a homogenous bloc. Therefore, it is necessary for each newspaper to begin by coming together to form a whole. From the first to the last page […] such a newspaper must concern itself with finding an imperative uniformity. That is: to serve.31

Clearly in disagreement with one of the first formulations of Giovanni Gentile,32 for whom a diversification between Fascist and non-Fascist press was necessary, for the latter to be “exempt from the obligation of being fascistized,”33 Fracchia urged the creation of an accurately structured legion of “renovated criticism,” whose purpose must be to “review the values of the artistic heritage”34 as a whole, for it to become “necessarily all-inclusive.”35 As reported in Annuario della Stampa Italiana of the years 1931 and 1932, according to Pier Maria Bardi, the aim of the newly organized press was to represent “a path for the novel journalism of the

30  See Francesco Flora, Stampa dell’era fascista. Le note di servizio (Rome: Mondadori, 1945), 4, and more generally Nicola Tranfaglia. La stampa del regime, 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005). 31  “Il Fascismo ha voluto e vuole intanto un giornalismo suo: perciò un giornalismo diverso. Vuole il giornalismo milite: perciò un giornalista al servizio non di se [sic] stesso, ma dell’Idea. Tutti i giornali devono formare un blocco omogeneo. Bisogna perciò che ogni giornale cominci col formarsi come un blocco solo. Dalla prima all’ultima pagina […] il giornale deve preoccuparsi di trovare un’omogeneità essenziale. Cioè: servire.” Benito Mussolini, “Il Duce ai giornalisti,” Il Popolo d’Italia 20, no. 260 (November 2, 1933): 1. 32  Philosopher, pedagogue and Fascist politician, Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) was Minister of Public Education from 1922 to 1924, during which he accomplished the reformation of the secondary school system in 1923. In 1925 he drafted the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals and the core of the Mussolinian Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana (Milan, Treccani). 33  Giovanni Gentile, “Stampa fascista e responsabilità di partito,” in Fascismo e cultura (Milan: Treves, 1928), 119. 34  Fracchia, “Arte fascista,” 453. 35  Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val Cismon, “Anticipazioni,” in Bonifica fascista della cultura (Verona: Mondadori, 1937), 34–35.

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post-war to come, still in the process of being revised”36 and its style must be nothing but “the same of the first squads […]. Fascist journalism means anti-journalism.”37 According to him “a well-driven criticism became mandatory in configuring the development of the Regime.”38 As registered by Ermanno Amicucci, critic, politician, and among others General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists,39 the nomination of Galeazzo Ciano as a Director of the Press Office of the Head of Government on August 1, 1933, was the perfect choice aimed at coordinating all the forces of information into a real offensive weapon just “ready to fight.”40 His pamphlet, published on May 1938 just before the promulgation of the Racial Manifesto on July 15,41 shows the accuracy that such a political and legal enforcement had finally reached, between 1931 and 1935, on the whole system of the press: It was necessary to create a new organism, truly political, swift and ready to go; a weapon at the service of the Revolution and the Nation, in such sensitive fields as the leading and striking sectors of the press and the propaganda. […] In less than two years, the structure was complete and was perfectly able to influence all the creative and spiritual activities of journals, books, cinema, theatre and radio from the inside.42

The transformation of the Press Office into the Secretariat for Press and Propaganda on July 14, 1934 (R.d. no. 1434),43 and the institution of the Ministry for the Press and Propaganda, on June 24 of the following year (R.d. no. 1009),44 under the almost absolute control of Ciano, would 36  Pier Maria Bardi, Annuario della Stampa Italiana. A cura del sindacato nazionale fascista dei giornalisti 1931–1932 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1932), 28. 37  Pier Maria Bardi, Annuario, 45. 38  Pier Maria Bardi, 47. 39  Ermanno Amicucci, La stampa della rivoluzione e del regime (Milan: Mondadori, 1938), 65. 40  Amicucci, La stampa della rivoluzione, 98–99. 41  “Il Fascismo e i problemi della razza,” Il Giornale d’Italia 38, no. 167 (July 15, 1938): 1. 42  “Bisognava creare un organismo originale, squisitamente politico, agile e pronto; un’arma al servizio della Rivoluzione e della Nazione, nel sensibilissimo settore della stampa e della propaganda, settore di punta e d’assalto. […] In meno di due anni l’organizzazione era stata compiuta ed era perfettamente in grado di dare all’interno sempre più vivo impulso alle attività creatrici e spirituali del giornale, del libro, del cinema, del teatro, della radio.” Amicucci, La stampa della rivoluzione e del regime, 99–100. 43  Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 213 (September 11, 1934): 4100–4101. 44  Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 148 (June 26, 1935): 3174.

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have eventually defined the new decisive rules marking duties and responsibilities to supervise the press. During the early 1930s the regime did not explicitly address and ratify formal directives regarding musical aesthetics45—as it was especially envisioned for visual arts, literature, and both cinema and the radio46—and barely intervened in repressing musical polemics and debates hosted in specialized journals and magazines. This left the door open for various elements of music criticism to forge their own open interdisciplinary interpretations and debates and to endorse political narratives. Many non-­ musical journals and politically orientated newspapers came into being or were developed, closely following debates regarding nationalism and internationalism in music according to the paradigms and the needs of the increasingly autarchic strategies of Fascist culture, whose aesthetic politics were unremittingly controversial and ambiguous.47 Despite the lack of explicit pressure, the writings and polemics of various critics would often go above and beyond what was required in order to conform with the rigid rules of state politics, sometimes providing an ideological or aesthetic basis for even more violent and well-organized cultural cleansing. We have in mind here such publications fascistissime as the daily newspapers Il Tevere—as it was defined to be Mussolini’s “personal, unofficial organ”48 or his “unofficial mouthpiece”49—or Il Regime fascista, La Tribuna and many others as the so-called normal dailies as Il Corriere, La Stampa50 and the like. We can count also, the monthly Perseo or La Vita italiana—fortnightly supplement to Il Regime fascista, and edited by Giovanni Preziosi, one of the most influential theorists of Italian anti-Semitism.51 Nonetheless, a clearer picture of such a cultural framework may be best represented by those specialized musical journals whose investigation was hitherto yet to be accomplished. Journals such as Rassegna Musicale (1928–1959), 45  For a larger discussion on the topic, see Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista and Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy. 46  See for instance Stone, The Patron State. Culture & Politics in Fascist Italy, and BenGhiat, Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1933–1945. 47  Stone, The Patron State. Culture & Politics in Fascist Italy, 3–22. 48  Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (New York: Scribner, 1973), 400. 49  Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 79. 50  See Alfredo Signoretti, La Stampa in camicia nera: 1932–1943 (Rome: Volpe editore, 1968). 51   See Giovanni Preziosi, Giudaismo, bolscevismo, plutocrazia, massoneria (Milan: Mondadori, 1941).

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Rassegna Dorica (1929–1942), Musica d’oggi (1919–1942) or Il Pianoforte (1920–1927) have been briefly touched on in previous studies.52 It would be useful to study further journals such as Rivista musicale italiana (1894–1955), Pegaso (1929–1933), Pan (1933–1935), the weekly L’Italia letteraria (1929–1936), in order to extend such an inquiry into the early 1930s. Their editorial boards were mostly composed of low-­ level figures who represented the grey zone intertwining the role of the official with that of the aligned intellectual. Nonetheless, the involvement of a large number of the most influential figures of the period, including composers, musicians, music, literary and art critics, renders the plethora of specialized music journals and magazines a unique cross-section of the musical-political debates hosted in such specialized periodicals. We are speaking here of such figures as Bruno Barilli, Fedele D’Amico, Ugo Ojetti, Mario Labroca, Massimo Mila, Guido M. Gatti, Guido Pannain, Massimo Bontempelli, Renzo Massarani, Francesco Balilla Pratella, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Luigi Dallapiccola, Franco Alfano, Alfredo Casella, Goffredo Petrassi and many others. This would prove useful in clarifying to what extent new ideological tendencies were specifically pursued in music criticism, and if it is possible to trace the expression of a real Fascist narrative and political language adopted by musical critics early in the 1930s as a contribution to the fascistization of the cultural elites.

Music in the Context: Exploring the Semantic Axes of the Racist Criticism Rhetoric Rationale The Regi Decreti emanated between 1931 and 193453 imposing the oath of loyalty, beyond the king and the state, also to the Fascist regime for those who wanted to work at universities, academies and any other

52  See Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy; Roberta Costa, “Una rivista musicale degli anni Trenta: Rassegna Dorica,” in La critica musicale in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, eds. Marco Capra, and Fiamma Nicolodi (Milan: Marsiglio, 2011), 69–114; Nicoletta Betta, “Il Pianoforte (Turin, 1920–1927): A Window on Modern Music during the Fascist Regime: Searching RIPM to Identify an International Network of Collaborating Music Critics,” Fontes Artis Musicae 64, no. 3 (2017): 227–43. See also Davide Ceriani, “Mussolini, la critica musicale italiana e i festival della Società Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea in Italia negli anni Venti,” Journal of Music Criticism 1, no. 1 (2017): 17–71. 53  See Jürgen Charnitzky, Die Schulpolitik des faschistischen Regimes in Italien (1922–1943) (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994).

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cultural institutions,54 were clearly meant to make the intelligentsia appeal to a proper arrangement within the process of regimentation of the Italian old cultural asset. As one can read again in Bardi, “adapting the press to the Revolution, making the press perfectly consistent with Mussolini’s guidelines seems to be one of the most delicate tasks for the journalistic generation of today and for those to come. The extraordinary step hitherto undertaken by means of the law, the vigilant control and advice of the Duce, by grafting old tree trunks with new sap, is a good sign for tomorrow’s success, beneficial to a kind of press which has to be in service of the extraordinary ventures that await the Country.”55 Whether we are considering moderate or more violent political positions, music criticism of these early years of the 1930s seems to have been strongly engaged with such a task. In nearly all cases, the determination to take part in the rising nationalistic cleansing promoted by the Fascist cultural autarchy happens to have been the result of a personal choice and the political semantics or the language pursued, from journal to journal, if they fluctuate in the form, little differs in their contents. Deeply coordinated as early as the first years of the 1930s, such specialized music criticism seems to have eventually become the environment in which commentators could contribute and ensure a national unification under the control of a racist state, just at the dawn of the passing of the Racial Laws in 1938. In January 1935, the musical journal Rassegna Dorica promoted a referendum whose topic was about the future prospects of contemporary music criticism, about its “independence, influence, function, path, organization”56 and the debate happened to be concluded on the issue of December of the same year. On January 25 Guido Margottini recalls that “criticism, because of its healing function of art, should be free,” without any subjective interposition of the ego, stating that the “ideal critic” is  Gabriele Turi, “Le accademie nell’Italia fascista,” Belfagor 54, no. 4 (July 1999): 403–424. 55  “Adeguare la stampa alla Rivoluzione, rendere la stampa perfettamente coerente con gli enunciati di Mussolini appare uno dei compiti più delicati della odierna generazione giornalistica e di quelle a venire. Il formidabile passo fin qui compiuto per mezzo delle leggi, del vigile controllo e consiglio del Duce, e dell’innesto nei vecchi tronchi di nuove linfe, è buon segno per il successo di domani, favorevole ad una stampa al servizio delle formidabili imprese che attende il Paese.” Bardi, Annuario della Stampa Italiana, 24. 56  Vincenzo di Donato, “Referendum,” Rassegna Dorica 6, no. 3 (January 20, 1935): 41. For a broader discussion about the journal see Costa, “Una rivista musicale degli anni Trenta: Rassegna Dorica,” 69–114. 54

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actually “yet to be born.”57 Adelmo Damerini focused his argument on the ethical aspect of such a task, according to which the critic must be loyal to “the value of the spirit as well in the original force of his race.”58 These and other contributions of the kind were also to be dealt with and strengthened in Il Musicista (Journal of the National Fascist Union of Musicians, 1934–1943)59 which two years later, on 1937, devoted a whole year to such polemics, through the column “Appello ai camerati della critica,”60 clearly showing that the ‘problem’ of music criticism—alongside that one concerning singers, music for the movies and the theatre—was still far from being ‘resolved.’ Two indications were proposed, to never be xenophile and defeatist61 about the new Italian music, clearly forcing the Italian musical intelligentsia to fulfil the path of the National autarchy. Mainly twisted around the central topic as it was suggested by Mussolini earlier in 1931 with the famous epithet “Andare decisamente verso il popolo” (literally translating to Go Decisively to the People),62 the prospect of a musical autarchy pushed the intelligentsia to conform ruthlessly to an increasing attention of the regime to the concepts of mass and race, so as to get personal programmatic intents ready to be forged. Vito Raeli, among the first respondents to underline his journal (Rivista Nazionale di Musica), was born with a “very pure Fascist program intended to value the national art and his artists.”63 Later, the composer Alfredo Casella was to affirm pompously: “[The  Italian] social world is going  through a very hard period, from which a new human order is coming into being, which is Mussolini’s creation and of which we as Italians have full vision.”64 Proceeding toward an emphatic crescendo, he closed his intervention eulogizing the Regime for its strenuous support to the “Italian 57  Guido Margottini, “Referendum sulla critica musicale,” Rassegna Dorica 6, no. 4 (February 25, 1935): 86. 58  Adelmo Damerini, “L’aspetto etico della critica musicale,” Rassegna Dorica 6, no. 6 (April 20, 1935): 134–136. 59  Former Bollettino dei musicisti, starting from 1937 it was directed by Giuseppe Mulé (1885–1951), composer and secretary of the National Fascist Union of Musicians. 60  “Appello ai camerati della critica,” Il Musicista 4, no. 1 (January 1937): 1–2; see also Il Musicista 4, no. 3 (March 1937): 45. 61  “Appello ai camerati della critica,” Il Musicista 4, 1–2. 62  Benito Mussolini, “Al popolo napoletano,” (October 25, 1931), Scritti e discorsi 7 (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), 317–318. 63  Il Musicista 4, no. 4 (April 1937): 62–63. 64  Alfredo Casella, “I più urgenti problemi concertistici,” Il Musicista 5, nos. 1–3 (October– December 1937): 24.

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contemporary music, which never ceases to be present and vigilant, should the musical future of the race be at risk.”65 At this time, the Ministry for the Press and Propaganda was transformed into the Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop, R.d. no. 752, May 24, 1937)66—under the leadership of Dino Alfieri, former deputy secretary of the Minister for the Press and Propaganda—which enforced the power to supervise and centralize almost all the activities related to monitoring the entirety of Italian culture, including the major musical institutions and festivals.67 On March 1937, Fascist Institutes of Culture were converted into National Institutes of Fascist Culture, directly in the employment of the National Fascist Party, and on October 1937 the direction of Il Musicista, as well as all the journals belonging to Fascist Unions, would pass under the control of the “National secretary of each respective category,”68 unequivocally declaring their unconditional adhesion to governmental guidelines. Pavolini was to highlight in the opening article of the issue of October, that Il Musicista had to become the “faithful mirror” of the National Fascist Union of Musicians and “collaborate in every further activity organized by any other institution of the Regime.”69 With two articles published in the issue of September 1937, “Premessa all’autarchia musicale” and “Musica e popolo,” the latter signed by the editor-in-chief Alberto Ghislanzoni, the journal entered the intellectual climate of eugenics. Whereas Ghislanzoni was to write “music is in the soul of our people […], the sensibility for music has always been one of the features typical of any privileged person or race,”70 Gaspare Scuderi highlighted “that [it] will allow Italy to regain its imperial supremacy in the world.”71 Such vigorous governmental coercion of Italian society, encompassing both high and low-brow musical spheres, thus guaranteed the standardization of Fascist rhetorical techniques and styles. The motto Andare verso il popolo, to be found printed in  Casella, “I più urgenti problemi concertistici”.  Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 125 (June 1, 1937): 1993. 67  Luca Lévi Sala, “Propaganda, Negotiations, and Antisemitism at the Teatro La Fenice, 1937–43: Proscription Lists and Other Unpublished Documents,” Journal of Musicological Research 33, no. 4 (2014): 271–314. 68  Il Musicista 5, nos. 1–3 (October–December 1937): 1. 69   Alessandro Pavolini, “Consegna,” Il Musicista 5, nos. 1–3 (October–December 1937): 1. 70  Alberto Ghislanzoni, “Musica e popolo,” Il Musicista 4, no. 9 (September 1937): 141. 71  Gaspare Scuderi, “Premessa all’autarchia musicale,” Il Musicista 4, no. 9 (September 1937): 145. 65 66

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a Manifesto on the occasion of the institution of the local office of the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro in Rovereto in 1937, explicitly referred, among other things, to some ‘suggested’ “tasks for the musicians: compose and direct choirs and music, songs as well as simple, elementary, colorful and encouraging hymns. Freshen through a stylistic modernity and impress the taste of the new popular, of the new and living Italian austerity.”72 Such was stated no less forcefully in an article by Alberto Ghislanzoni, in Il Musicista on May 1937 where he suggested the “ethical function of music is, step by step, that of purifying, sweetening, or enflaming noble and sacred works. It has to […] find its place in those organisms whose mission is to make more ‘ours’, more Fascist, the culture and the sensibility of those who are artists and sons of the Italian Empire”73— clearly justifying any means undertaken by his leadership as editor-in-chief of the journal. These calls for the music critics to strictly accord with the “highest echelons,”74 of the Regime, encompassed almost all the major and minor protagonists of the musical environment since the early 1930s, clearly implying a conscious remodeling of their textual language. The representation of Fascist rhetorical narrative quickly became, as stressed by Andrew Hewitt, a “mimetological model of truth, […] central to political discourse”75 and ready for the aesthetization of the new musical lexicography. As registered by Costa, the referendum pursued on Rassegna Dorica amounted to a “tedious banality.”76 However, such a linguistic dullness was nothing, but an echo of a broader linguistic structure fulfilled by almost the entirety of specialized music criticism, meant to accord to a well-defined and systematic political textual approach which defined the Italian experimentation for the creation of a linguistic autarchy.77 In the 72  “Andare verso il popolo: Manifesto-Programma del Dopolavoro Artisti,” (Rovereto: 1937): 2. 73  “La funzione etica della musica è volta a volta quella di purificare, addolcire, serenare, o infiammare a nobili e sante opere. Essa deve […] trovare il suo posto in seno a quegli organismi che hanno la missione di rendere più ‘nostra’, più fascista la cultura e la sensibilità degli artefici e dei figli dell’Impero d’Italia.” Alberto Ghislanzoni, “Cultura fascista e musica,” Il Musicista 4, no. 5 (May 1937): 80. 74  “Appello ai camerati della critica,” Il Musicista 4, no. 1 (January 1937): 2. 75  Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 168. 76  Costa, “Una rivista musicale degli anni Trenta,” 80. 77  See Tommaso Tittoni, “La difesa della lingua italiana,” Nuova antologia, 61 (August 1926): 377–87; see also Paolo Monelli, Barbaro dominio (Milan: Hoepli, 1933).

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opening speech of a keynote presented on December 16, 1933, for the inauguration of the series “Classes of Fascist Culture,” later included in the book Bonifica fascista della cultura, Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val Cismon—future Minister of the National Education between 1935 and 1936—insisted on the revolutionary character of the Fascist ‘new’ as a spiritual idea to reach the reorganization of the national institutes of culture according to such a novel “universal,” prophetical and leading design, which are Mussolinian “Idea” and his “Word.”78 In a pastiche of pompous formulations, he highlights the need to channel every cultural effort “towards the unity of an action which must be aimed at the same goal, and always directed by only one inspiration,” so as to “act with faith in the hearth and with well-designed purposes: that are imperial ones.”79 The educational ambition of the National autarchy was meant to intertwine critical prose with the political semantics—tradition, nation, Italianness, rediscovery, collective, romanità, which was still somehow in essence in pre-fascist culture,80 and race—but with the aim of levelling the text into a kind of etymological and linguistic annihilation within the context of the broader concept of the Fascist mystic: “Nothing can exist in opposition to the State and nothing can exist outside it” so that “no national activity” can be opposed to or outside of the “Regime, which […] coincides constitutionally with the life itself of Italian people.”81 In an article published in the monthly journal Pan, directed by Ugo Ojetti, Ildebrando Pizzetti, in defending his adhesion to the antimodernist Manifesto, traces a profuse oratorical argumentation of these concepts, with the pretext of recalling a mediocre Mussolinian slogan: “As a means of expression, music is international, but in its intimate essence it is absolutely national.”82 Reducing the textual context into a semantic reformulation of the political apologia, Pizzetti’s text merely degenerates into an ideological report:

 De Vecchi di Val Cismon, “Anticipazioni,” 26–27.  De Vecchi di Val Cismon, 34. 80  Guido Bas, “L’essenza della musicalità italiana,” Il Primato artistico italiano 4, no. 1 (January 1922): 1–6. 81  De Vecchi di Val Cismon, “Anticipazioni,” 25. 82  Ildebrando Pizzetti, “Questa nostra musica,” Pan 1, no. 3 (April 1934): 336. For a broader discussion about Pizzetti, see Lara Sonja Uras, Nazionalismo in musica. Il caso Pizzetti dagli esordi al 1945 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2003). 78 79

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Fascism renovated Italy and Italian life, firstly wiping away cowardice and spiritual miseries, then imposing on Italians, with the example of the Chief above all, imperative of human, civil and national dignity, of religious and moral meaning, of will and action […].83

Pizzetti seems to have echoed Ojetti’s preface to the very first volume of the journal launched on December 1933: The post-war years, introducing an unprecedented world to the gaze of man, gave many people the illusion of restarting from scratch. Hence the search for the new and the refusal of the past […]. Before anyone else, Italy emerged from this situation thanks to Fascism, which is by now recognized everywhere as an exemplar regime of human order and creative intelligence. In fact, there is no catastrophe able to erase the history of Roman and Italian civilization.84

Although more sober, the interventions of Guido Maggiorino Gatti, also fall often into an emphatic and stereotyped rhetorical progression, fluctuating between pure musical analysis and the inclusion of political elements.85 Gatti’s reflection stalls so as to allow him to achieve a degree of neutrality, a typical predicament: […] one feels that the art work that makes history, as the Germans say, will certainly come from that way. Romanticism, Classicism, or ‘Romanticism of Steel,’ as Goebbels said? […] Historians will have thought of other more fitting designations in a hundred years’ time, for the art of our time. But I feel it is not inappropriate to briefly mention the importance of the moral and religious element in its development, about the ethos in its broader meaning […].86  Ildebrando Pizzetti, “Questa nostra musica,” Pan 1, 339.  “Gli anni subito dopo la guerra, aprendo allo sguardo degli uomini un mondo senza precedenti, dettero ai più l’illusione di ricominciare dal niente. Donde, la ricerca del nuovo, l’aborrimento del passato […]. Prima di tutti ne è uscita l’Italia per merito del Fascismo, ormai riconosciuto dovunque come regime esemplare d’ordine umano e d’intelligenza creativa. Non v’è infatti cataclisma che riesca ad abolire la storia e la civiltà romana e italiana.” Ugo Ojetti, “Al lettore,” Pan 1, no. 1 (December 1933): 3; see also Ugo Ojetti, “A sua eccellenza Benito Mussolini,” Pegaso 1, no. 1 (January 1929): 89–92. 85  Guido M. Gatti, “Nazione e tradizione nella musica tedesca,” Pan 1, no. 1 (December 1933): 98. 86  “[…] si sente che l’opera d’arte da far epoca, come dicono i tedeschi, verrà da quella strada. Romanticismo, classicismo, o ‘romanticismo d’acciaio,’ come ha detto Goebbels? 83 84

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As Amicucci stated in 1938: Once solved the issues of responsibility and guarantee, the Fascist law has also dealt with and resolved the problem of the independence of the press.87 […] Thus, it is now time to finally complete the fascistization of the press and give to Fascist journalism a proper style.88

A gradual but solid transformation of the tools of the language became mandatory, so as to push elitist semantic formulations into line with official propaganda. Mottos and watchwords were supposed to transform the narrative of specialized articles, whose writing rather conformed to the doctrinal emphasis of the militaristic and the epic reasoning. That is, as Mario Isnenghi stressed, the typical “mythopoetic machine” of the regime which aimed at manipulating the language toward a “reformulation of the basic political language”89 into the Fascist ideology. The “wordiness prolixity”90 seems to stand as a daily duty of the musical press toward a newly reformed political rhetoric, to keep the pace with the latest “militaristic-­hierarchical reorganization”91 pursued since the school reform in 1923. The role of the press, as highlighted by Bardi on the Annuario della stampa, in 1931, became crucial in “recording” and spreading the rhetoric of the nationalistic lexicography, with the aim of better driving “vigilant polemics […] in structuring the Mussolinian thought.” Bardi saw in the development of a balance between formation and in-formation, “a factual style, to which press must aspire,”92 particularly for those “newspapers which advocate policies and ideas and fight literary and artistic clashes, not failing  to imply a political and moral attitude which to some degree […] Penseranno gli storici fra cent’anni a trovarne altri [appellativi], più calzanti per l’arte del nostro tempo. Ma non ci pare fuori luogo accennare di sfuggita alla importanza del fattore morale e religioso nello sviluppo di essa, dell’ethos nel suo significato più esteso […].” Guido M. Gatti, “Nazione e tradizione nella musica tedesca,” Pan 1, 102. 87  Amicucci, La stampa della rivoluzione e del regime, 59. 88  Amicucci, 66. 89  Mario Isnenghi, Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari. Appunti sulla cultura fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 39. 90  Giuseppe Carlo Marino, L’autarchia della cultura. Intellettuali e fascismo negli anni Trenta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983), 162. 91  Gabriele Turi, Lo stato educatore. Politica e intellettuali nell’Italia fascista (Bari: Laterza, 2002), 67. 92  Bardi, Annuario della Stampa Italiana, 26.

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­ articipates in the Fascist contemporary life.”93 Such categorical and celep bratory representation of political language found its way into the education systems populated by the middle-class intelligentsia. This provided another impetus which would deeply permeate the language of critics and editors of specialized journals, providing them with a quilting point in structuring a novel doctrinal lexicography for the new academic language to come. According to Giovanni Gentile, “Fascist philosophy is a philosophy of praxis […]. From this fundamental aspect of Fascist philosophy derive the qualities of the so-called Fascist style; style of both literary expression and practical behavior.”94 The process of self-fascistization had only to pass through the “most absolute, transformative pragmatism in using and manipulating concepts and words coming from a very diversified origin.”95 Literature on the topic concerning the Fascist use of language is quite extensive96 but still, deeper research on music criticism, and whether and how such an all-inclusive linguistic manipulation might have affected it, is yet to come. In a foggy defense of Italian popular music, hidden under an escalating climax of a pretentious construction of the syntax, Francesco Balilla Pratella shows a vivid example of such typical semantic redundancy. Published in Musica d’oggi, a specialized musical monthly known for its quite non-radical political positions, on December 1931, the article elucidates the composer’s purposes in sterilizing any valid argument on the topic, somehow anticipating the dialectical chaos that would have characterized the musical arena after the editing of the antimodernist Manifesto, the year after. The rhetorical process takes advantage of the antithesis in a mixture of topical key points of Fascist semantics, where the justification for the recovery of the value of the traditional folk music, typical of the first production of Pratella, is here mixed and dismissed in a distinctive nationalistic terminology. The overwhelming presence of substantivized  Bardi, 88.  Giovanni Gentile, Origini e dottrina del Fascismo (Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1929), 58. 95  Isnenghi, Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari, 39. 96  See, for instance, Giovanni Lazzari, Le parole del fascismo (Rome: Argileto, 1975); Augusto Simonini, Il linguaggio del Fascismo (Milan: Bompiani, 1978); Sergio Raffaelli, Le parole proibite. Purismo di stato e regolamentazione  della  pubblicità in Italia (1812–1945) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983); Gabriella Klein, La politica linguistica del fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986); Enzo Golino, Parola di Duce: Il linguaggio totalitario del fascismo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994) and Fabio Foresti, ed., Credere, obbedire  combattere. Il regime linguistico nel Ventennio (Bologna: Pendragon, 2013). 93 94

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adjectives and the disproportionate use of a sequence of figures of speech, take on the form of apologia: […] whilst the popular is static, simple and faithful to the collective  and straightforward expression of a people and of a race, the artistic, conversely, evolves and refines itself according to the parable of the culture of its era, through the work of  individual cultured  artists and, once reached the unavoidable and inevitable phase of decadence, this latter becomes individualistic and almost imcomprehensible to most. Once this phase is over, the artistic races to drink from the unexhaustible essence of the popular, in order to rediscover  its lost collective and authentic expression  of the race and regenerate itself, to then restart a new evolutionary parable.97

The evocative use of the prosopopoeia closes with a magical allegorical enunciation, as if it was nothing but a tale. Pratella reprises this symbolic style from his early artistic phase as a futurist, where the action transforms itself into a never-ending process of regeneration. Nonetheless, such an overlaying impetus is here covered by a rhetorical coating of Fascist mythology, in which the individuality of the artistic process seems to flow necessarily into the construction of the social collective as a source of power and life, that is the mass and its quality as a race. This seems to be in line with some of the formulations of De Vecchi di Val Cismon, for whom “The spirit that contradicts […] the Faith, that does not build, that is sterile, that is outside of Fascism and therefore against Fascism […]. Italianness […] therefore means drawing directly from the wellsprings of life with all the civil and political wisdom of Rome, through the essence of the universal, it means being absorbed, revived, exalted, purified by that Christianity for which Christ became Roman.”98 The hyperbolic 97  “[…] mentre il popolare si mantiene statico, semplice e fedele all’espressione collettiva e schietta di una gente e di una razza, l’artistico, in cambio, si evolve e raffina seguendo la parabola della cultura del suo tempo attraverso gl’individui artisti colti e, giunta la fase immancabile ed inevitabile della decadenza, si fa individualistico e quasi incomprensibile ai più. Al termine di questa fase, l’artistico corre ad abbeverarsi alla essenza inesausta del popolare, a fine di ritrovare la smarrita espressione collettiva ed autentica della razza e rigenerarsi, per poi ricominciare una nuova parabola evolutiva.” Francesco Balilla Pratella, “Variazioni ed evoluzioni della poesia e della musica popolare,” Musica d’oggi 13, no. 12 (December 1931): 500. 98  “Lo spirito che contrasta […] con la Fede, che non costruisce, che è sterile, è fuori dal Fascismo e quindi è contro il Fascismo […]. Italianità […] significa cioè l’attingere direttamente alle fonti della vita con tutta la sapienza civile e politica di Roma, con lo spirito

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parallelism between Christ and the new Christ ‘reincarnated’, rises to a climax and closes the sentence. As the “artistic” in Pratella’s writing is deeply rooted in the need of the “popular,” Italianness is identified as a race through a process of regeneration, which shall not be only a religious experience but must be necessarily political and civil: that is, collective. Although the concept of race is by Pratella proposed in a kind of ambiguous formulation between spiritual heritage and nationalistic xenophobia, this is not in contradiction from what he stated in 1935, railing against the modernism as “international infection,”99 anticipating what it would become a couple of years later, namely an anti-Semitic slogan, the “international disintegrating theory” spread by “an antisocial and anti-human Judaism.”100 In a long opening article published in Rassegna Dorica on January 20, 1933, “Musica e Sport,” Mario Saint-Cyr articulates in fifteen points the “direct and indirect educational role”101 of music and sport, passing from apologetic refrains to pompous statements. Saint-Cyr’s attempt to a kind of sociological reasoning moves into an anti-scholarly celebration of the language, which actually regresses into a theatrical over stimulation of different semantic fields: That’s why music and sport […] are extremes of the same truth—they meet around a common interest and share a common aim. That’s why music and sport have always somehow instinctively and ingeniously appealed to the masses: the first for being unreal, the latter for being real, providing a rhythm for the eternal walk of life.102 […] Beyond the exaggerations, the ­exasperations, the degenerations, as jazz and boxing represent—nothing is

dell’universale, assorbiti, vivificati, esaltati, purificati dalla Cristianità onde Cristo è fatto Romano.” De Vecchi di Val Cismon, “Anticipazioni,” 34–35. 99  Francesco Balilla Pratella, “Repertorio per masse corali,” Santa milizia, 1935, quoted in Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista, 118. 100  Ennio Porrino, “La musica nella tradizione della nostra razza,” La difesa della razza 3, no. 3 (December 5, 1940): 8. 101  Saint-Cyr, “Musica e sport,” Rassegna Dorica 4, no. 3 (January 20, 1933): 56. 102  “Per questo la musica e lo sport […] sono infatti gli estremi d’una medesima verità— finiscono per incontrarsi in un interesse comune e avere una comune identica mèta. Per questo la musica e lo sport in ispecial modo ànno [sic] sempre attratto istintivamente e ingenuamente le masse: l’una per la sua irrealtà, l’altro per la sua realtà e perché ambedue ritmano alterni il cammino eterno della vita.” Saint-Cyr, “Musica e sport,” Rassegna Dorica 4, 57.

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more educational than music and sport; since both […] aim at the same goal which is spiritual and physical health.103

Still, Saint-Cyr’s rhetoric does not differ too much from Pratella’s reasoning. Against the process of decadent involution into individuality, there is nothing that might save more than the ‘real’ truth and the “instinctively” popular and ordered “walk of life,” seen as a process of recreation of “spiritual and physical health.” The attempt to forge an aesthetical formulation of the role of music falls into a mystical catechesis of Fascist eugenics: “Some music and some sports come from countries where there is scarce, or recent or no civilization at all […] they triumph in periods of decadence or moral relaxation.”104 Saint-Cyr does not renounce rhetorically to strike a blow in accordance with the antimodernist manifesto—not differently to what is to be found on the more violent pages of Il Tevere or Perseo—and denounces the “drained and impoverished Romanticism” which expresses itself in the forms of the “pyrotechnical internationalisms of jazz on one side and the simplicity of the folk music and the ethnophony on the other”105 Saint-Cyr’s argumentation shows the boundaries of a confused aggregation of the most powerful topics of Fascist modernistic rationale and its mythology into a sequence of syntactical levels of crescendos and diminuendos, whose emphatic or negative tones as opponents are carefully chosen: spirituality and religion, physicality and health, morality and ethics, regionality and centralization, folklore and nation, strapaese and stracittà, idealism and materialism and the like. Such clear pastiche is crucial in proving the binding link between the slogan aimed at the mass culture and the conformation of a new intellectual and leading class—as Mario Isnenghi defined as the “militant science at service of the national community and the Fascist state on the way.”106 […] one can find the excessive rhythmical variety, the cold rhythmical delirium which smells like cerebralism a mile away, […] not only in the superficiality—even if witty—of jazz; but usually in every primitive  music, poor 103  “[…] nonostante le esagerazioni, le esasperazioni e le degenerazioni, quali il jazz e la boxe—non c’è nulla ch’abbia più valore educativo diretto e indiretto della musica e dello sport; perché l’una e l’altro […] tendono a una mèta comune ed essenziale che è di sanità fisica e spirituale.” Saint-Cyr, “Musica e sport”, 56. 104  Saint-Cyr, “Musica e sport”. 105  Saint-Cyr, “Musica e sport”, 54. 106  Mario Isnenghi, L’educazione dell’italiano. Il fascismo e l’organizzazione della cultura (Bologna: Cappelli, 1979), 83.

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in ideas and substance as well as in the works of those composers who are scarcely endowed with ideal capacity who, for this very reason need exterior masks. Moreover, the calculated and cerebral rhythmic exasperation, by the very fact of living and playing outside every  natural law, in the end produces—even in the best disposed audience—a sense of tiredness, annoyance, monotony and aridity which nothing can overcome, not even  the most imaginative and colorful pyrotechnics.107

The hyper-adjectivation and the overwhelming presence of a systematic medical lexicography aims to show an argumentation always directed to the opposition of what is good and what is not, in and out, Fascist or not—and “out of Fascism” means “against Fascism.”108 The use of a polymorphic and multi-sensorial terminology ends up deviating the reader’s attention towards the perception of semantic chaos. Such language somehow becomes and merges with the political semantic implied within a superficial evaluation of the musical topic, toward the distortion of the liturgical language, passing through a process of pivotal lessening of the meaning. The path toward the “totalitarian regeneration”109 of Italianness in the language, which recalls the catholic doctrinal motto extra ecclesiam nulla salus, is aimed at misusing the function of language in an “anthropological way, as a set of languages, habits, mentalities,” as stressed by Gabriele Turi.110 Accordingly, one can find several reformulations of semantic extrapolations of meaning of that kind throughout the entirety of the music critical production. Such a textual consistency proves also firmly rooted in the audience’s attention, as we read from a reader’s intervention in Il Musicista on September 1937 who rails against jazz and tango. They would serve at nothing but at “producing a feeling of hypochondria, discomfort and pain […] caused by a lack of virility which appalls 107  “[…] l’eccessiva varietà ritmica—il delirio ritmico quasi sempre a freddo che sa lontano un miglio di cerebralismo e di tavolino—non solo lo si trova […] nella superficialità—sia pure spiritosa—del jazz; ma in genere in ogni musica primitiva povera d’idee e di contenuto e nelle opere di quei compositori, scarsamente dotati di capacità ideale, i quali per questo appunto ànno bisogno di maschere esteriori. Eppoi l’esasperazione ritmica, calcolata, cerebrale, per il fatto stesso di giuocare e di vivere fuori da ogni legge naturale, produce alla fine—anche nell’auditore meglio disposto—un senso di stanchezza, di fastidio, di monotonia, di aridità, che nulla vale a vincere, neppure la più immaginosa e colorata pirotecnica.” Saint-Cyr, “Musica e sport,” 52. 108  De Vecchi di Val Cismon, “Anticipazioni,” 34. 109  De Vecchi di Val Cismon, 34. 110  Turi, Lo stato educatore, 73.

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and produces a sense of disgust in he who is really a man.” The comment includes a clear racist epithet: “You want to reproduce the pronunciation of the American diction, the English one, or worst, that of the Negros.”111 The note of the journal’s editors is resolutely evocative: We pass this right criticism to the artistic directors of EIAR, record companies, our Comrades Orchestra conductors who perform in those places where such inexplicable and unacceptable distortions for the Fascist regime are to be produced daily.112

This concept of autarchic ‘sanitization’ is part of a broader cultural framework of cultural cleansing, directly mirroring governmental guidelines, as those which are the basis of the project of restoration of the Ministry of the National Education, as anticipated in 1933 by De Vecchi di Val Cismon. He stated that the Ministry would revise “all legal statuses and guidelines of Academies, Institutes and scientific, literary and artistic Associations,” in order to “eventually build a new order within those cultural activities. Healthy organisms will come out on the inside, and the activities of one institute will be coordinated by those of another one.”113 In 1928, likewise Saint-Cyr’s argumentation, Alfredo Casella—who did so much for introducing the ‘internationalist’ music of Schönberg, Stravinsky, Weill, Milhaud, Honegger, Bartók to Italian nationalism during the 1920s through the institution, together with Gian Francesco Malipiero, of the Corporazione delle nuove musiche (1923–1928)114—in a letter to Pierre Schaeffner, was to state: […] In Italy today we make good and authentic national music, we owe it to our past and not to foreign contaminations which are by now incompatible with our spirit. […] While I never ceased to hold admiration for the author of Petrouchka, it would be impossible for me to take a work such as Pulcinella as a ‘standard’, as it is made—at least for us Italians—of rough111  “[…] produrre un senso di ipocondria, di fastidio e di pena […] da una mancanza di virilità che sgomenta e produce, in chi eè veramente uomo, un senso di schifo […],”  “Si vuole imitare la pronuncia, la dizione americana, quella inglese o, peggio, quella dei negri.” Alberto de Feo, “La canzone jazzistica in Italia e la sua esecuzione,” Il Musicista 4, no. 9 (September 1937): 148. 112  Alberto de Feo, “La canzone jazzistica in Italia e la sua esecuzione.” 113  De Vecchi di Val Cismon, “Anticipazioni,” 45. 114  Founded in 1923, the Corporazione delle nuove musiche became on 1928 the Italian section of the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), see Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista, 243–244.

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ness and above all irreverence towards one of the most gorgeously pure authors who counts amongst the finest in our musical history.115

During the first half of 1929, Casella, Mario Labroca and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco had an open debate in the journal Pegaso, about Stravinsky and Italian Neoclassicism. Defending his music, Casella traced an outline of the latest European musical developments, warning against the “menacing possibility of the destruction of the old tonal system, made by the atonal theory” clearly identified by “the decadent and atonal Schönberg;”116 it was necessary for Italian music to go against any residual Romantic inspirations, so as to comply with a purpose “strictly appropriate to the historical spirit of our race, which was always bearer of balance and civilization.”117 The following year—in the first chapter (written in 1930) of the book 21+26, pretentiously entitled “About our actual musical ‘place’ and the crucial role of Italian spirit in the next future of European music”—Casella went further to reiterate and strengthen such a concept, stating rabidly that the position of Italian contemporary music had to be against the “very serious menace which today threatens all the musical arena in general. This danger is the ghost of an ‘internationalist’ musical art. […] To this absurd claim of Germanic-Jewish flavor, we undoubtedly oppose our most vigorous veto. […] And we declare a ruthless war to such a disgraceful and stupid intellectual demand.”118 In a pathetic methodical listing of negative nouns and adjectives, Casella’s reasoning reverses any sense of rational neutrality. The nationalistic clash is clearly implied by

115  “[…] aujourd’hui en Italie l’on fait de bonne et authentique musique nationale, nous le devons à notre passé et non point à des influences étrangères désormais incompatibles avec notre esprit. […] Quelle que soit l’admiration que je n’ai jamais cessé d’avoir pour l’auteur de Petrouchka, il m’aurait été impossible de prendre pour ‘modèle’ une œuvre telle que Pulcinella, faite—pour nous autres italiens du moins—de grossièreté et surtout d’irrévérence envers un des musiciens le plus merveilleusement purs que compte notre histoire musicale.” Letter to Pierre Schaeffner, February 6, 1928, Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris. 116  Alfredo Casella, “Il Neoclassicismo mio e altrui,” Pegaso 1, no. 5 (May 1929): 578. 117  Alfredo Casella, “Il Neoclassicismo mio e altrui,” 583. 118  “[…] gravissimo pericolo che minaccia oggi tutta la musica in generale. Questo pericolo è lo spettro di un’arte musicale «internazionale». […] A questa assurda pretesa di sapore germanico-giudaico, opponiamo senz’altro il nostro più vigoroso veto. […] E dichiariamo guerra spietata a quella disgraziata e scema pretesa intellettuale.” Alfredo Casella, “Della nostra attuale ‘posizione’ musicale e della funzione essenziale dello spirito italiano nel prossimo avvenire della musica europea,” in 21+26 (Rome-Milan: Augustea, 1931), 44.

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subtraction and by the dismissal of every non-Italian ‘entity’—and through the calculated use of the contrast. The easy attack on Schönberg and the presumed internationalist Jewish cerebralism mirrored the views of almost all critics. Guido Pannain described him rabidly as an “aberrant violent, a braggart, a romantic offshoot. He would be a hero, if not a comic, if his style did not reveal the putrefaction of the romantic decomposition.”119 Pannain’s writing exceeds all limits of stylistic pomposity and decency with an excessive use of metaphors and hyperbolic periphrases. Different semantic fields cross each other ending up into a pleonastic redundancy, typical of the mythical terminology. Whether the Gurrelieder and the Pelleas und Mélisande are to be a “cloak shrouding his aesthetic hypocrisy,” the Quartet Op. 10 is the result of the “obscurity of a tumultuous and deformed conscience, imperfection of the spirit […] a monstrous and convulsive aesthetic,”120 still “his work is a superb monument built by an abstract intellectualism and an artistic impotence.”121 In Pannain, the use of the psychological terminology ends up becoming a pseudo poetical construction through the adoption of continuous appalling quotations from the medical vocabulary, unceasingly reminding one of the Fascist call to moral force, a healthy spirit and intellectual fortitude against any obscurity, monstrosity, malformation or impotence. This kind of language is easily mixed up with anti-­ Semitic formulations as to be found in a review by Guido Piovene, always in Pan: “It seems that Segre, in his Abram, wanted to picture a typical Jew: without any moral nor his own identity, inconsistent to himself, alive only to his capacity of adapting and taking advantage.”122 Recent studies have proved that Fascist anti-Semitism was not something ultimately detected in the German directives nor directly influenced by German racist propaganda.123 In the chapter “Mussolini nel 1919” Roberto Farinacci stressed how long the Fascists had fought against the “Jewish danger” denouncing the “need to free the delicate ganglia of our country from the Jews, which have been able, with an evil manoeuvre, to  Guido Pannain, Musicisti dei tempi nuovi (Turin: Paravia, 1932), 55.  Guido Pannain, Musicisti dei tempi nuovi, 58–59. 121  Guido Pannain, 68. 122  See for instance Erik Levi. “An Expedient Alliance? Musical Relationships between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Period between 1933 and 1945,” in Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, eds. Alessandro Carrieri, and Annalisa Capristo (Cham: Springer International Publisher: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 169–199. 123  Guido Piovene, “Alfredo Segre: Agenzia Abram Lewis,” Pan 1, no. 5 (April 1934): 765. 119 120

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spread their tentacles everywhere.”124 As Mussolini himself stated, the intensification of the fight against Jews coincided with the development of the Fascist identity: The racial problem did not break out suddenly […]. It is related to the conquest of the Empire; for  history teaches that empires are to be conquered  with weapons, but they  are maintained by prestige. And prestige requires a clear, severe racial consciousness that establishes not only differences, but clear superiorities. The Jewish problem is but one  aspect of this phenomenon. […] World Judaism has been, for sixteen years, despite our policies, an irreconcilable enemy of Fascism.125

In 1939, another more acrid article126 updated Casella’s political vision, strengthening his nationalistic approach in defining Italian musical nationalism. Between the end of 1937 and early 1938, Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero were the object of a series of violent attacks from the more radical and anti-Semitic fringes of Italian music criticism. A ferocious press campaign was undertaken in August 1938  in the journal Perseo by its editor-­ in-chief Arturo Francesco della Porta, and  the composer Ennio Porrino, among others,127 in Il Musicista and in other newspapers such as Il Tevere—directed by Telesio Interlandi, founder of the fortnightly La difesa della razza—by the composer and critic Francesco Santoliquido. 124  Roberto Farinacci, La chiesa e gli ebrei (Cremona: Stabilimento tipografico società editoriale, 1938), 5–6. 125  “Il problema razziale non è scoppiato all’improvviso […]. È in relazione con la conquista dell’Impero; poiché la storia ci insegna che gli imperi si conquistano con le armi, ma si tengono col prestigio. E per il prestigio occorre una chiara severa coscienza razziale che stabilisca non soltanto delle differenze ma delle superiorità nettissime. Il problema ebraico non è che un aspetto di questo fenomeno. […] L’ebraismo mondiale è stato, durante sedici anni, malgrado la nostra politica, un nemico irreconciliabile del Fascismo.” Benito Mussolini, “Lo storico discorso di Trieste,” Il Popolo d’Italia 25, no. 261 (September 19, 1938): 1–2. For a broader discussion see Paul Baxa, “Il nostro Duce: Mussolini’s visit to Trieste in 1938 and the workings of the cult of the Duce,” Modern Italy 18, no. 2 (June 2013): 117–128. See also Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista (Milan: Garzanti, 2005), Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy. From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) and Luca Michelini, Alle origini dell’antisemitismo nazional-fascista (Venice: Marsilio, 2011). 126  Alfredo Casella, “Problemi e posizione attuale della musica italiana,” Le Arti 1, no. 3 (February 1939): 256–262. 127  See Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista, 262–264.

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Accused of being “representative of the infiltration of Italy by Europeanist and Jewish music”128 or “being the Italian cell of the spiritual, divisive and destroyer of the Italian national musical world,”129 Francesco Santoliquido closes his text with violent and vulgar epithets: “We don’t want the Jewish intellectual seed to be inoculated in us and we refuse to become, albeit only in a spiritual way, bastards”130 or “now Alfredo Casella’s Jewish propaganda is an integral part of the crazy hegemonic dream of the Jewish race.”131 Ennio Porrino railed against the two composers in Il Musicista, reaffirming the need to go “toward the People” so as to stop the formation of “certain aristocracy, which is nothing but a ‘league made to protect bad music.’”132 While Malipiero reacted softly with a controversial article published in a very minor local journal133 hiding his identity with the use of a pseudonym, Casella’s reaction was mild, veiled and ‘official’, curiously according with some of Porrino’s strikes launched toward him. Stressing his defense of the modern theatrical production, Casella seemed to feel the need to justify his Fascist approach re-presenting some of the worst slogans of the nationalistic rhetoric. Whereas the composer was ready to affirm that new contemporary Italian music is “[…] adherent not only to the Littorio style […]. It is so in its melody, which has remained untainted by  Middle European deformations and at the same time freed from the decadent vocal style typical of the late nineteenth century. […] enemy of the dazzling and virtuosic French-Russian sonorities. [It is pure] because of its profoundly religious character, which […] links with the ancient Roman and Catholic world.”134 Casella’s deplorable apologia about a “revolutionary and popular Regime,” 128  Francesco Santoliquido, “La musica verso il popolo,” Il Tevere 15, no. 88 (February 10, 1938): 3. 129  Francesco Santoliquido, “La piovra musicale ebraica. Ebraismo e sovversivismo,” Il Tevere 15, no. 75 (January 26, 1938): 3. 130  Francesco Santoliquido, “La piovra musicale ebraica,” Il Tevere 15, no. 40 (December 14–15, 1937): 3. 131  Santoliquido, “La piovra musicale ebraica. Ebraismo e sovversivismo,” 3. 132  Ennio Porrino, “Il problema della musica dotta e della musica popolare,” Il Musicista 5, nos. 4–5 (January–February 1938): 66. 133  “«Andare verso il popolo»?: In margine a un articolo di Gian Francesco Malipiero dell’ «Anno XVI dell’Era Fascista»,” in Musik und Musikwissenschaft im Umfeld des Faschismus, ed. Stephanie Klauk, Luca Aversano and Rainer Kleinertz (Sinzig: Studio Verlag, 2015), 121–133. 134  “[…] aderente non soltanto al clima littorio […]. Lo è nella sua melodia, rimasta pura dalle deformazioni medieuropee ed in pari tempo liberata dalla decadenza vocalistica del tardo Ottocento. […] nemico delle smaglianti e virtuosistiche sonorità russo-francesi. Lo è infine per il suo carattere profondamente religioso, che […] si riconnette coll’antico mondo romano e cattolico.” Casella, “Problemi e posizione attuale della musica italiana,” 256, 259.

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and incoherent use of old backward-looking anti-bourgeois mottos, become the usual refrain andare verso il popolo to be followed as if it was the “more eloquent synthesis” of the Regime “towards the Arts” and as a “watchword”135 to follow. Highlighting firmly the Italian choice in repelling either the “Menshevik” as the “Bolshevik” style in music, he stressed that the Italian musical “position is clear and unequivocal; strictly consistent with the political effort of the Fascist Regime, which is at the same time tradition and revolution.”136 With masked anti-Semitism, he stated that “our contemporary music is now defined ‘antimodern’ in certain foreign places, mainly Jewish and snobbish […]. Nonetheless, our position belongs to the history and the tradition of our homeland and race, perfectly agreeing with the political climate of the Regime.”137 Pompously he closed the article affirming that it was necessary to “reach the final aim of the universality, through our Italianness,” as a “higher purpose which shall drive our action as Mussolinian artists […].”138 Clearly not meant to be an anti-Semitic motto (Casella’s second wife, Yvonne Muller, was Jewish),139 the composer’s ambiguous and opportunistic political positions did not go unnoticed, as registered by the younger composer Luigi Dallapiccola on February 1938 who, in a letter to the critic and journalist Alberto Mantelli, railed ironically: Tomorrow morning Casella passes through Florence on his way to Munich. I am busy, but I plan to send Laura [Laura Coen Luzzatto, Dallapiccola’s wife] to the rail station, since C. brings me ‘good news’. I suppose it is about some detail concerning that indecent press campaign, which will remain a memorable document of certain dishonesty of purely national stamp. […] I would, if I could, mercilessly fuck all those who were guilty of dishonesty in the recent campaign. Instead, we will see Casella again, being kind to everybody, smiling at everybody, and being ‘sovereignly oblivious’.140  Casella, “Problemi e posizione attuale della musica italiana”, 260.  Casella, 261. 137  “[…] è oggi similmente definita «antimoderna» la musica contemporanea nostra in certi ambienti stranieri, prevalentemente ebraici e snobistici […]. La nostra posizione però corrisponde alla storia e alla tradizione della nostra patria e della nostra razza, e concorda perfettamente col clima politico del Regime.” Casella, 259. 138  Casella, 262. 139  Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista, 242. 140  “Domattina Casella passa da Firenze, diretto a Monaco di Baviera. Io sono occupato, ma conto di mandare Laura alla stazione, perché C. mi annuncia ‘buone notizie’. Suppongo 135 136

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Conclusions As shown above, the political essence of specialized music criticism was deeply rooted in a linguistic transformation in a way that was strongly aligned with the rhetorical techniques and styles of Fascism. Its narrative seems to coherently  follow the political regimentation dictated by the Fascist ideological framework, and whether or not such an aligned political consistency was due to personal opportunistic reasons, a large part of critics did not avoid wearing a Fascist mask. As Paolo Orano, one of the most violent representatives of the Italian Fascist anti-Semitism, stated in 1931: The journalist who wants to “make history” […] inaugurates the battle in the columns of the newspaper, […] prepares those that will march to the attack in the piazza, makes its readers and subscribers part of such an enterprise that will no longer be on paper. […] The newspaper, which has a plan, which is precisely that of winning, is transformed more and more clearly into a command bulletin, into an order sheet.141

If music criticism of the late 1930s is characterized by a more evident expression of such a cultural violence, it seems clear that specialized music criticism, like the majority of the Italian press of the early 1930s, contributed strongly to creating the conditions for a conscious political self-fascistization.

si tratti di qualche particolare riguardante quella indecente campagna di stampa, che resterà memorabile documento di certa disonestà di pura marca nazionale. […] Io, se potessi, fotterei senza alcuna pietà, tutti coloro che si sono macchiati di disonestà nella recente campagna. Invece vedremo ancora Casella gentile con tutti, sorridente con tutti e ‘sovranamente dimenticante’.” Letter of Luigi Dallapiccola to Alberto Mantelli, February 18, 1938, “Fondo Dallapiccola,” Archivio ‘A.  Bonsanti’, Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G.  P. Vieusseux, Florence. 141  “Il giornalista che vuol «fare la storia» […] inaugura la battaglia sulle colonne del giornale, […] prepara quelle che marceranno all’attacco in piazza e dei propri lettori ed abbonati fa gli iscritti all’impresa che non sarà più di carta. […] Il giornale che ha un programma e precisamente quello di vincere, lo trasforma sempre più chiaramente in un bollettino del comando, in un foglio d’ordini.” Paolo Orano, “Giornale foglio d’ordini,” Canaglie, venturieri, apostoli del giornalismo (Milan: Corbaccio, 1931), 23, 24; see also Paolo Orano, Gli ebrei in Italia (Rome: Casa Editrice Pinciana, 1937).

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Bibliography Primary Sources Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), MinCulPop, folder 155, file 10, Rome. “Andare verso il popolo: Manifesto-Programma del Dopolavoro Artisti” (Rovereto: 1937). “Appello ai camerati della critica.” Il Musicista 4, no. 1 (January 1937): 1–2. “Disposizioni sulla stampa periodica,” (no. 2307), Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 3 (5 January 1926), 22–24. Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 213 (11 September 1934): 4100–4101. Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 148 (26 June 1935): 3174. Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 125 (1 June 1937): 1993. “Il Fascismo e i problemi della razza.” Il Giornale d’Italia 38, no. 167 (15 July 1938): 1. “Il pornografo, ovvero i rimedi contro la rettorica.” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (1 November 1926): 399. “Manifesto musicale.” Corriere della Sera 57, no. 300 (17 December 1932): 5. Amicucci, Ermanno. La stampa della rivoluzione e del regime. Milan: Mondadori, 1938. Bas, Guido. “L’essenza della musicalità italiana.” Il Primato artistico italiano 4, no. 1 (January 1922): 1–6. Bardi, Pier Maria. Annuario della Stampa Italiana. A cura del sindacato nazionale fascista dei giornalisti 1931–1932. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1932. Bontempelli, Massimo. “Arte fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 22 (15 November 1926): 416–417. Bragaglia, Anton Giulio. “Lo stile è l’epoca.” Critica fascista 4, no. 22 (15 November 1926): 417–418. Casella, Alfredo. “I più urgenti problemi concertistici.” Il Musicista 5, nos. 1–3 (October–December 1937): 21–24. ———. “Il Neoclassicismo mio e altrui.” Pegaso 1, no. 5 (May 1929): 576–583. ———. “Della nostra attuale posizione musicale e della funzione essenziale dello spirito italiano nel prossimo avvenire della musica europea.” (Rome, 1930). In 21+26, 46. Florence: Olschki, 2001. ———. “Problemi e posizione attuale della musica italiana.” Le Arti 1, no. 3 (February 1939): 256–262. Damerini, Adelmo. “L’aspetto etico della critica musicale.” Rassegna dorica 6, no. 6 (20 April 1935): 134–136. De Feo, Alberto. “La canzone jazzistica in Italia e la sua esecuzione.” Il Musicista 4, no. 9 (September 1937): 148. De Vecchi di Val Cismon. Cesare Maria, Bonifica fascista della cultura. Verona: Mondadori, 1937.

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Di Donato, Vincenzo. “Referendum.” Rassegna dorica 6, no. 3 (20 January 1935): 41. Farinacci, Roberto. La chiesa e gli ebrei. Cremona: Stabilimento tipografico società editoriale, 1938. Flora, Francesco. Stampa dell’era fascista. Le note di servizio. Rome: Mondadori, 1945. Fracchia, Umberto. “Arte fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 24 (15 December 1926): 453. Gatti, Guido M. “Nazione e tradizione nella musica tedesca.” Pan 1, no. 1 (December 1933): 91–102. Gentile, Giovanni. Fascismo e cultura. Milan: Treves, 1928. ———. Origini e dottrina del Fascismo. Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1929. Ghislanzoni, Alberto. “Musica e popolo.” Il Musicista 4, no. 9 (September 1937): 141–143. ———. “Cultura fascista e musica.” Il Musicista 4, no. 5 (May 1937): 80. Giusso, Lorenzo. “Letteratura fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 13 (1 July 1926): 247–248. Jacopini, Alberto. “A proposito di arte fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 24 (15 December 1926): 454–456. Maccari, Mino. “Arte fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (1 November 1926): 396–398. Malaparte, Curzio. “Botta e risposta.” Critica fascista 4, no. 22 (15 November 1926): 419–420. Margottini, Guido. “Referendum sulla critica musicale.” Rassegna dorica 6, no. 4 (25 February 1935): 86. Monelli, Paolo. Barbaro dominio. Milan: Hoepli, 1933. Mussolini, Benito. “La dottrina del fascismo.” In Enciclopedia Italiana 14, 847–84. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1933. ———. La dottrina del fascismo. Con una storia del movimento fascista di Gioacchino Volpe. Rome: Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, 1932. ———. “Il Duce ai giornalisti.” Il Popolo d’Italia 20, no. 260 (2 November 1933): 1. ———. “Al popolo napoletano” (25 October 1931). In Scritti e discorsi 7, 317–318. Milan: Hoepli, 1934. ———. “Lo storico discorso di Trieste.” Il Popolo d’Italia 25, no. 261 (19 September 1938): 1–2. Ojetti, Ugo. “Al lettore.” Pan 1, no. 1 (December 1933): 3–4. Ojetti, Ugo. “A sua eccellenza Benito Mussolini.” Pegaso 1, no. 1 (January 1929): 89–92. Oppo, Cipriano Efisio. “Arte fascista e arte di Stato.” Critica fascista 5, no. 3 (1 February 1927): 44.

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Orano, Paolo. Canaglie, venturieri, apostoli del giornalismo. Milan: Corbaccio, 1931. ———. Gli ebrei in Italia. Rome: Casa Editrice Pinciana, 1937. Pannain, Guido. Musicisti dei tempi nuovi. Turin: Paravia, 1932. Pavolini, Alessandro. “Dell’arte fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (1 November 1926): 393–395. ———. “Consegna.” Il Musicista 5, nos. 1–3 (October–December 1937): 1–2. Piovene, Guido. “Alfredo Segre: Agenzia Abram Lewis.” Pan 1, no. 5 (April 1934): 765–767. Pizzetti, Ildebrando. “Questa nostra musica.” Pan 1, no. 3 (April 1934): 321–342. Porrino, Ennio. “La musica nella tradizione della nostra razza.” La difesa della razza 3, no. 3 (5 December 1940): 6–14. ———. “Il problema della musica dotta e della musica popolare.” Il Musicista 5, nos. 4–5 (January–February 1938): 61–66. Puccini, Mario. “Un’arte fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 23 (1 December 1926): 435–436. Pratella, Francesco Balilla. “Variazioni ed evoluzioni della poesia e della musica popolare.” Musica d’oggi 13, no. 12 (December 1931): 498–500. ———. “Repertorio per masse corali.” Santa milizia, 1935. Preziosi, Giovanni. Giudaismo, bolscevismo, plutocrazia, massoneria. Milan: Mondadori, 1941. Rocca, Enrico. “L’arte fascista è la grande arte.” Critica fascista 4, no. 21 (1 November 1926): 395–396. Saint-Cyr. “Musica e sport.” Rassegna dorica 4, no. 3 (20 January 1933): 49–57. Santoliquido, Francesco. “La musica verso il popolo.” Il Tevere 15, no. 88 (10 February 1938): 3. ———. “La piovra musicale ebraica. Ebraismo e sovversivismo.” Il Tevere 15, no. 75 (26 January 1938): 3. ———. “La piovra musicale ebraica.” Il Tevere 15, no. 40 (14–15 December 1937): 3. Scuderi, Gaspare. “Premessa all’autarchia musicale.” Il Musicista 4, no. 9 (September 1937): 144–145. Soffici, Ardengo. “Arte fascista.” Critica fascista 4, no. 20 (15 October 1926): 383–385. Solari, Pietro. “Estetica razzista.” Pan 1, no. 2 (January 1934): 263–269. Tittoni, Tommaso. “La difesa della lingua italiana.” Nuova antologia 61 (August 1926): 377–387. Turati, Augusto. Ragioni ideali di vita fascista. Rome: Berlutti, 1926.

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Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Betta, Nicoletta. “Il Pianoforte (Torino, 1920–1927): A Window on Modern Music during the Fascist Regime: Searching RIPM to Identify an International Network of Collaborating Music Critics.” Fontes Artis Musicae 64, no. 3 (2017): 227–243. Bordoni, Carlo. Cultura e propaganda nell’Italia fascista. Messina-Florence: Casa editrice G. D’Anna, 1974. Ceriani, Davide. “Mussolini, la critica musicale italiana e i festival della Società Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea in Italia negli anni Venti.” Journal of Music Criticism 1, no. 1 (2017): 17–71. Charnitzky, Jürgen. Die Schulpolitik des faschistischen Regimes in Italien (1922–1943). Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994. Costa, Roberta. “Una rivista musicale degli anni Trenta: Rassegna dorica.” In La critica musicale in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, edited by Marco Capra and Fiamma Nicolodi, 69–114. Milan: Marsiglio, 2011. Fabre, Giorgio. Mussolini razzista. Milan: Garzanti, 2005. Foresti, Fabio, ed.  Credere, obbedire combattere. Il regime linguistico nel Ventennio. Bologna: Pendragon, 2013. Golino, Enzo. Parola di Duce: Il linguaggio totalitario del fascismo. Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Hewitt, Andrew. Fascist Modernism, Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Isnenghi, Mario. Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari. Appunti sulla cultura fascista. Turin: Einaudi, 1979. ———. L’educazione dell’italiano. Il fascismo e l’organizzazione della cultura. Bologna: Cappelli, 1979. Klein, Gabriella. La politica linguistica del fascismo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986. Lazzari, Giovanni. Le parole del fascismo. Rome: Argileto, 1975. Levi, Erik. “An Expedient Alliance? Musical Relationships between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Period between 1933 and 1945.” In Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, edited by Alessandro Carrieri, and Annalisa Capristo, 169–199. Cham: Springer International Publisher: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Lyttelton, Adrian. The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929. New York: Scribner, 1973. Mangoni, Luisa. L’interventismo della cultura: Intellettuali e riviste del fascismo. Bari: Laterza, 1974. Marino, Giuseppe Carlo. L’autarchia della cultura. Intellettuali e fascismo negli anni Trenta. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983. Michaelis, Meir. Mussolini and the Jews. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

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CHAPTER 4

Jazz in Fascist Italy: Social Impact, Politics, and Racism Camilla Poesio

Jazz in the Land of ’O Sole Mio Born in humble quarters, jazz popped out from the cheery music played on the piano known as ragtime and danced to with the cake walk, which had burned up America in the years of the Reconstruction at the end of the nineteenth century. It entered the New York scene with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and had been attracting young men like Duke Ellington since the 1920s. During the years of the Charleston and garçonne haircuts, flappers, and cabarets in the black neighborhood of Harlem, jazz could be heard at the Cotton Club or in rent-parties—private parties organized by the black community to collect money in order to pay the rent of the apartment in which the parties took place. Here I expose the outcomes of my last book, Camilla Poesio, Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing. Il jazz, il fascismo e la società italiana (Florence: Le Monnier-­ Mondadori, 2018). All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own. C. Poesio (*) Independent Researcher, Erfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_4

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In Europe, jazz arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century. It circulated especially in ballrooms and started becoming popular first in England, France, and Holland, where the first clubs were opened between the end of the First World War and the immediate post-war years. Among the profound changes brought by the First World War in many fields, particularly deep were those in mind-sets and ways of communication. Jazz was an expression of this change. In Italy, jazz appeared later, at the beginning of the 1920s, that is, upon the establishment of the Fascist regime. Therefore, studying jazz in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s meant studying jazz during the fascist era. If jazz in Berlin was “roaring” during the Weimar Republic,1 the situation in Italy could not have been more different, and for this reason, if no other, the themes addressed here can be considered original and particular when compared to other European and non-European cases. Compared to other countries, the spread of jazz in Italy was slower and considered negatively from the beginning, as it didn’t align with  the traditional musicality of the nation. Until 1926, the Italian press developed an ambiguous approach toward jazz, but from 1928 on critics became even harsher, relating it to sexual perversion, savagery, and degeneration of manners and morals. Jazz was considered an American music par excellence. Italian Fascism regarded America with mixed feelings of love and hate. This relationship was marked by mutual interest that was more than a little influenced by cinema, and that lasted until the war with Ethiopia in 1935–1936 and fascist participation in the Spanish Civil War in 1936–1939. After this point and especially when the United States entered the war in 1941, relations began to crumble. Slowly, the idea of America as the country of rampant, limitless capitalism, where everything revolved around money and where the emancipation of women symbolized the end of any kind of traditional order, began to emerge. In the theater revues, where jazz was present as a background soundtrack or as part of the history of the scenic representation, it was associated, as an American element, with the vulgar and the grotesque: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor were frequently targeted. In general, the American man became a symbol of capitalism and unscrupulous money squandering, while the American woman represented much-abhorred female emancipation. Some saw in it a corrupting factor for young men; other 1  Jonathan O.  Wipplinger, The Jazz Republic. Music, Race and American Culture in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).

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people related it to women with a dubious reputation different than the model of the fascist woman. Dances on jazz rhythms were labeled by the futurist composer Luigi Russolo in 1932 as “epileptic dances”2 that could be performed only by barbaric races not comparable to the “higher” ones like the Latins; according to Russolo, they were the symbol of a “ludicrous modern civilization made up mostly by American rubbish.”3 For other people, jazz music was deeply anti-formative or associated with hard drugs like opium and cocaine (so was convinced the composer Pietro Mascagni) or anti-­ Catholic. In other words, it was a genre that weakened the spirit. Despite these attempts to discredit jazz, it became popular in Italy through many means, channels, and transnational agents. The liners that traveled between Genoa and New York were one of the most important channels of diffusion: the musicians that played on those huge boats had come across, in Harlem, music that they had never heard before. Some bought jazz records, others tried to emulate and adapt this new way of playing, bringing it to Italy. But jazz wasn’t just brought from across the sea: other important channels included Italian emigrants, some of whom sent jazz records and every kind of unobtainable news to Italian jazz lovers. This was the case of the Italian writer Cesare Pavese, who regularly had new information about jazz and the newest records thanks to the Italian emigrant Antonio Chiuminotto, a former professor of music who had emigrated to United States. He sent many articles to Pavese about Duke Ellington and other jazz musicians to keep him updated.4 The grand 2  “Questa razza [latina] che si ritrova in se [sic] stessa tanta bella serenità di gioia tanta giovanile fresca maniera di espanderla si è lasciata invadere tuttavia dalle danze epilettiche regalo epilettico d’America—Fox-Trot Charleston Black-Bottom” (This [Latin] race that finds in itself such beautiful serenity of joy, such a fresh youthful manner of expansion, it has allowed itself to be invaded by the epileptic dances, gifts of epileptic America—Fox-Trot Charleston Black-Bottom). Luigi Russolo, “La Sardana Catalana,” in Gian Franco Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’Arte dei rumori. Con tutti gli scritti musicali (Turin: Martano, 1978), 296. 3  “[…] voglio essere lontano da quella cosiddetta detestabile civiltà moderna fatta per la massima parte di cretine americanate dei cui risultati così evidenti nella crisi attuale soffre tutto il mondo!,” ([…] I want to be far from that detestable so-called modern civilization made for the large part by stupid Americanisms of which the results are so clear in the current crisis that the whole world suffers!). Luigi Russolo, “Lettera da Terragona, 24 febbraio 1933,” in Maffina, Luigi Russolo e l’Arte dei rumori, 291. 4  ACS, MI, DGPS, Divisione Polizia Politica, Fascicoli Personali 1927–1944, fasc. Mila Massimo.

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American Orchestras, like the one of Sam Wooding, or English orchestras, like the one of Jack Hylton, as well as traveling shows, put on some jazz and dances: for example, the tap dance, the Charleston, Lindy Hop and so on. Jazz spread out also into the world of classical music. Some classical composers recognized the importance of jazz, for example Brahms, Dvorák, Casella, Ansermet, Ravel, Satie, Bartók, Milhaud, Honegger, Hindemith, Debussy, and Stravinsky. But the primary way in which jazz was circulated in Italy was without a doubt through radio and cinema. The radio waves spread jazz across some parts of Italy, but not all, due to the sparse coverage which did not reach the whole Italian peninsula, and the high prices of appliances and subscription which had ensured radio remained a luxury good. Suffice it to say that in 1938 the price of a good radio was between 1200 and 1300 lire and that a good annual salary was between 1300 and 1500 lire. In Germany, for example, in 1934 the price of a radio was only 76 marks, that is, 350 lire. Therefore, radio was a consumer product only for a part of the Italian population, which means that only a minority could hear jazz on the radio. The cinema and American films were even more fundamental to the spread of jazz. Italians, for the cost of a cinema ticket, attainable for most people, were captivated not just by American film stars but also by that new, and to their ears, strange music. In addition to the images of Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and so on, people heard jazz for the first time. Being rooted in Italy as a primarily urban phenomenon, the diffusion of jazz, from the 1920s, was closely linked to tourism and to some holiday destinations. Therefore, it is possible to find a link between tourism (especially luxury tourism, largely American), jazz, and opulent hotels. A significant case study is Venice. Many American tourists lived for some weeks in the smartest-set hotel in Europe—the Excelsior Palace Hotel. They brought in their suitcases not only fancy dresses and eccentric hats but also many jazz discs. The hotel offered every comfort and every kind of entertainment: a huge terrace where the guests skated, four tennis courts, one beach resort, horse races, and the largest and most popular Kursaal in Italy, where the tourists danced jazz all through the night. Back in the United States, the American financier and banker John Pierpont Morgan observed of the Excelsior Palace Hotel: “In America, those who have visited Europe talk more of your Excelsior Palace than they do of the Doge’s Palace.”5 Among those rich American tourists, there was a special 5  Richard James Bosworth, Italian Venice: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 61.

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one: the musician and composer Cole Porter. From 1923 to 1927, Cole Porter and his wife, Linda, rented a beautiful palace on the Grand Canal and organized memorable parties where the main element was jazz music. Along with their friends, most of them musicians and artists, Porter was a channel and a transnational agent that contributed to the diffusion of jazz culture in the city. The high point of the presence of Cole Porter in Venice was the opening of a dance boat: on August 12, 1926, Venetians saw for the first time an Afro-American jazz band—the Leslie Hutchinson Band— playing on a boat on a dock on the Grand Canal. Many journalists reported this entertainment event. One of them wrote: “A large barge, which, has been specially constructed, containing facilities for serving supper, will float out into the lagoon and, on still nights, even into the open sea. A negro jazz orchestra is being brought from Paris to play and there will be dancing.”6 In Italy, like in the rest of Europe, jazz had a close relationship with youth, given that those who listened to this music tended to be of the younger generation. They tried to imitate the British Bright Young People7 wearing long and checked coats, wide pants, bright socks, short plissé skirts, turtleneck sweaters, bracelets, rings, sunglasses, umbrellas, red nails, and red lipsticks. Jazz, which was connected to the “American way of life,” meant a new way of behaving and was closely linked to the relationship between modernity and society, primarily among young people and among women. Therefore, jazz was not just a new musical genre; it brought with it new, typically American ways of behavior. For these reasons, young men who listened to jazz were given the derogatory nickname of gagà or zazou, and young women were considered ‘loose’ by conservative circles. Actually, exploring the idea of jazz and young people, it is essential to consider their habits, fashion, and choice of consumer products. It’s no coincidence that in the United States a lot of jazz programs were sponsored by consumer products typically for young people, like cigarettes, makeup products, fancy dresses, and fragrances. In the 1930s, some of these consumer 6  Venice innovation. From our own correspondent, 1926 Photo Album, Cole Porter Papers, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University. 7  The idea of Bright Young People described young people belonging to the aristocracy and to the high English bourgeoisie who had not participated in the First World War because of their age. Eventually, because of the suffering and destruction endured, these young people began in the 1920s to adopt a lifestyle aimed primarily at the pursuit of fun and pleasure, assuming a rebellious attitude toward some traditional values; see Jon Savage, The Creation of Youth Culture (London: Penguin, 2007).

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products, such as the illustrated weeklies, sound films, radio, and gramophones, produced profound changes in cultural models and responded to the needs, worries, and expectations of the public. Mediums such as radio, records, and cinema had an enormous influence on Italian customs, and they became, for example in the case of songs, a method of mass communication. Through some Italian songs associated with jazz, we can understand the spirit of the time. These songs can be considered key points in time. They helped circulate new social customs and gender relations. Consequently, through songs, dance, and fashion, we can try to imagine, as if we were using a time machine, both how the modern society of the day was seen by the people living it and how they wanted it to be.

Jazz, Politics, and Racism As well as examining society’s reaction, it must be remembered that Italians were under a dictatorship when jazz arrived. It’s important to bring to light the politics of the Mussolini regime with regards to jazz and to consider what steps the regime took, faced with this American music/ culture, from the 1920s to wartime. The regime used bans, prohibitions, and censorship on one side, and showed tolerance and acceptance on the other. Being a musical genre from America, jazz was not considered part of Italian artistic patrimony. From the mid-1920s, jazz was often defined with racist connotations. The racist attitude toward jazz was not only Italian: since its birth, the genre had to face these attacks in the United States as well; white people who attended jazz gigs/shows/concerts in Harlem did so with contempt toward the black musicians. Since its origins, jazz had been associated with situations of social and moral degradation, to ghettos and brothels and, later on, to the Italian American mafia, as it was played in speakeasies, hangouts where alcohol was consumed against the rules established by Prohibition. Moreover, it was often performed by black, Italian, or Jewish musicians belonging to the Eastern Europe area accustomed to klezmer music: none of these were particularly beloved subjects in America at the time. No wonder that in 1928 an East Coast musician of clear Italian

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descent, Edgar Varèse, declared that “Jazz is not America,” “It’s a negro product, exploited by the Jews.”8 The racist undertone in the discourse around jazz was evident also in Italy. Even in novels, jazz made its appearance according to the stereotypes of the era: primitive and thunderous noise, typical of licentious and decadent places like hotels and casinos.9 Music and dances “imported in Europe by Negros”10 were seen as a menace for young people, including by the founder of the Italian Communist party, Antonio Gramsci. While he was in prison for his ideas against the Fascist regime, in a letter to his sister-in-law he confessed to be worried about the diffusion of those syncopated rhythms, considering them violent, expressions of a “foreign”11 society—a “primitive and basic”12 manifestation that was slowly rooting and creating a “terribly […] advanced, at least until the half-breed phase” process.13 For most intellectuals, to speak about the existence of an African genius in art was inconceivable, like Anton Giulio Bragaglia affirmed resolutely in a book that was a manifesto against jazz, where the genre was described in a loathsome way.14 Composer Adriano Lualdi—who had prominent public roles, thanks to which he held strong authority over the Italian music environment by establishing and organizing festivals and participating in state manifestations—considered jazz to be a snobbish Western misrepresentation of Negro musical primitivism. In 1927, he associated the “half-blooded and crooked Negro and barbaric music”15 to the loud noises of bustling and chaotic cities like Milan and New York. The Fascist State tried to prevent the population from listening to rhythms and songs that came from abroad, especially the United States, through the press and specific directives. The order of March 29, 1927, of the Ministry of Internal Affairs—on behalf of Mussolini—banned the 8  Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise. Listening of the Twentieth Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 153. 9  Lucio D’Ambra, La repubblica del “Jazz-Band”. Memorie di corte del marchese Armando d’Apre (Milan: Edizioni Corbaccio, 1929). 10  Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, ed. Paolo Spriano (Turin: Einaudi, 1971 [1947]), 79. 11  “…estranea.” Gramsci, Lettere, 80. 12  “…primitiva e elementare.” Gramsci, 80. 13   “…tale processo era terribilmente avanzato, almeno fino alla fase di meticcio.” Gramsci, 80. 14  Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Jazz Band (Milan: Corbaccio, 1929). 15  “barbare musiche negre imbastardite e incanagliate.” Antonio Lualdi, “Jazz,” in Lualdi Adriano, Viaggio musicale in Italia (Milan: Alpes, 1927), 244.

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employment of “Negro small orchestras” in dancing clubs and in hotels, in order to preserve “dignity and decorum in the arts” and to defend Italian musicians from international rivals.16 A month before, in February 1927, the “latest dances of foreign import”17 were banned, and jazz bands were excluded from some reform provisions involving small orchestras. In sum, nationalism was pushed to its extreme consequences and bordered on racism, defending with vehemence Italian and white music from foreign contributions. Some hoped for the intervention of the Church, of the press, even of the government itself. Jazz continued to have great popularity in Italy even if a rooted hostile attitude refused to appreciate the artistic side of it. Those who opposed jazz in the music scene brought it back to barbaric and primitive societies without morals and decency and considered it dangerous for young people. The political problem was not the “barbarization” of manners, but the inability to hold control over a new phenomenon, which, aside from musical innovation, carried within itself novelties in terms of lifestyle and social order. A phenomenon that, moreover, came from the capitalist country by definition—the United States—but couldn’t be completely banished for at least two fundamental reasons. First, jazz favored mass entertainment necessary to maintain the consensus; second, mild tolerance avoided the circumstance of people trying to catch foreign radio stations to listen to jazz, where they could also hear news not filtered by the regime. A similar discourse developed in Germany where jazz was tolerated, though with more restrictions, played at nighttime, and watered down.18 In those years, few defended jazz without employing racial connotations. Not surprisingly, one of them was a musician who had lived many years in France and traveled around Europe and the States: Alfredo Casella. The maestro recognized a dignity in jazz, even if only for the success it had. 16  “orchestrine negre,” “dignità e il decoro dell’arte.” ASL, f. Questura, b. 1358, fasc. 47, quoted in Gianluca Gabrielli, “Africani in Italia negli anni del razzismo di Stato,” in Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870–1945, ed. Alberto Burgio (Bologna: il Mulino, 2000) 202, also quoted in Michele Sarfatti, “Quando in Italia il Jazz faceva paura,” L’Unità, October 22, 1997, 1–2. See also Anna Tonelli, E ballando ballando. La storia d’Italia a passi di danza (1815–1996) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998), 210 et seq. 17  “ultime danze di importazione straniera.” Riccardo Schwamenthal, “Postfazione,” in Zwerin Mike, Musica degenerata. Il jazz sotto il nazismo (Turin: EDT, 1993), 186. 18  See Richard J.  Evans, Il Terzo reich al potere 1933–1939 (Milan: Mondadori, 2010); Martin Lücke, “Jazz in Germany during World War II,” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May– August 2018): 225–240.

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He also understood its being a product of the era that met the desire of the masses to escape and have fun after the struggling war years. Eventually he saw in jazz (the American and not the diluted European one) a real and veritable work of art. But in 1929 Casella’s compliments were isolated episodes.19 Racism also existed when jazz was apparently appreciated. Josephine Baker’s case is a clear example. She had been having a lot of success, especially in France and Germany, for putting on stage what white Europeans wanted to see from people of African descent. The quick and muscled Afro-American dancer was an erotic symbol that reinforced the stereotype of the primitive woman, morally unbound to the point of defying decency. Some dedicated erotic poems to her, while others used her figure in the advertisement industry: in sum, for her nudity on stage, Josephine Baker was the icon of Eros and immorality, but in the end the dancer was rejected as a “racial alien.” According to the historian Kater: The German star cult around black personalities such as Josephine Baker really was an inverted form of racial prejudice: it was considered safe by good German burghers to flirt with this symbol of Eros as a manifestation of potential immorality, but the mere taste of temptation was satisfying enough. […] For her, behind the facade of popularity, lurked the grim reality of rejection as a racial alien.20

Even if Baker was a popular European star, her tour in Italy in March 1929 was cancelled by official orders: a black woman was not permitted to show herself.21 Fascist authorities were affected not only by obvious racism, but also by commercial blindness since Josephine Baker was a theater filler at the time. After much pressure, the authorities permitted the artist to perform only once in 1932, during a small tour in Italy. How much of the racism against jazz was really shared and felt by the population and how much was, instead, the result of fascist propaganda? Did people really believe that listening to jazz would imply the barbarization of the 19  See Alfredo Casella, “Mascagni and Jazz,” The Christian Science Monitor (September 1923): 8. 20  Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 18. 21  Emanuela Scarpellini, Organizzazione teatrale e politica del teatro nell’Italia fascista (Milan: LED, 2004), 89; Giulia Norbedo, Pirandello, C’est ainsi. Un musical per fuggire (Rome: UniversItalia, 2015).

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lifestyle and social habits and could cause serious damage within the population? We can’t give a complete answer, but we believe that a big part of this racism was an effect of the fascist propaganda. The success and the warm welcome that Josephine Baker (and Louis Armstrong in Turin 1935)22 received, and the consequent order to not repeat another tour prove this conviction. In 1935, Massimo Mila, a music critic not beloved by the regime—he had been arrested for joining an anti-fascist organization—published an article widely appreciating jazz, stressing the fact that Afro-American jazz and not the symphonic one was real—the latter being called jazz straight and made popular by Paul Whiteman’s orchestras. Even if Whiteman deserved the credit of helping the word “jazz” to become accepted by making it more listenable, he tricked Europe into thinking that the genre was danceable.23 Mila’s considerations were right: often what was called jazz had little to do with the real genre: the theatrical show Jazz Scandale, for example, current in Venice in 1935, was a vaudeville show in which jazz was nothing if not the danceable musicality performed by the orchestra Grégor et ses Grégoriens, and a little sketch with a “false negro” interpreted by a white actor whose face had been blackened with burned cork and whose lips were painted white like those known as blackface (this had been typical in American Minstrel Shows).24 In 1935, Mila applauded instead the piano talent of Duke Ellington and the inimitable singing of Louis Armstrong, recognizing in Afro-Americans the real fathers of jazz. Anyway, the records that Mila appreciated were not retrievable in Italy, like the magazine Pan boldly remarked. The taste for the exotic was mixed up with an inverted form of racism: often there were shows in which African performers were presented as savages performing wild dances to which the public reacted with enthusiasm, as had happened in one of the many nights of the already-­ mentioned Excelsior Palace Hotel in Venice Lido. On a warm August night in 1936, the beach in front of the hotel had been invaded by 1500

22  Massimo Soria, “Big sulla formula del ‘Jazz hot’,” Radiocorriere, January 27–February 2, 1935, 18; Soria, “Louis Armstrong,” Radiocorriere, January 20–26, 1935, 22; Adriano Mazzoletti, Il jazz in Italia: Dalle origini alle grandi orchestre (Turin: Edt, 2004), 273–276. 23  Massimo Mila, “Jazz hot,” Pan, January–April, 1935, fasc. I, 84–96. 24  “Jazz Scandal Revue al Goldoni,” Il Gazzettino, May 14, 1935; “La rivista Jazz Scandals,” Il Gazzettino, May 16, 1935; “La prima del Jazz Scandals,” Il Gazzettino, May 17, 1935; “Goldoni, La rivista Jazz Scandals,” Il Gazzettino, May 18, 1935.

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“savages,” as wrote the local newspaper, while the Mirador orchestra played and let “possessed showgirls” dance to jazz rhythms.25 The war in Ethiopia led to a radicalization of racism in Italy. In October 1935, the country had invaded Ethiopia using an incident at the border as a pretext. The League of Nations punished Italy with a ban from adhering countries—especially France and Great Britain—to import and export some products (but not steel, oil, and coal). The Italo-Ethiopian war had immediate consequences on the Italian musical and cultural scene: many theaters and musical shows started to display a patriotic touch and the plays in which the “Negro race” made its appearance were subject to tighter censorship. Between 1935 and 1936, jazz became definitively defined as the music of the “black savages.” In a certain sense, this racism expressed toward jazz served to help the racist Italian regime. The private and public attitude toward blacks and the years of the Italo-Ethiopian War, along with the racism embedded in Italian Fascism, infected and infiltrated the cultural and musical scene. Moreover, to balance the bans of the League of Nations—which the fascist government considered to be unfair—on May 23, 1936, in the midst of the Ethiopian War, Italy reacted with the implementation of autarchy, a series of policies meant to make the country the most auto-­ sufficient possible in terms of production. In the music field, this autarchic policy meant an incentive for Italian song and a ban against music belonging to countries in the League: any music genre from abroad, jazz included, was to be banned. The directives on music from the general director of the Italian public broadcaster EIAR Raoul Chiodelli established the following: In the compilation of radio programs and in radio broadcasts, even if carried out by external venues (either orchestra or soloists, or records) the following must be abolished in the most absolute way: 1) music of negro character (negro folk songs or imitations of such, choral or solo songs, typical orchestras, etc.) 2) dance music with choruses sung in English.26  “La vita al Lido,” Il Gazzettino, August 2, 1936, 3.  “Nella compilazione dei programmi e nelle trasmissioni radiofoniche, anche se effettuate eventualmente da locali esterni (sia di orchestra o solisti, sia di dischi) dovrà essere nel modo più assoluto abolita: (1) la musica di carattere negro (canti popolari negri o imitazione, canzoni corali o a solo, orchestre tipiche, ecc.), (2) la musica da ballo con ritornelli cantata in inglese.” Note from EIAR broadcast station in Turin, August 8, 1935, addressed to Mr. 25 26

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With the beginning of musical autarchy as a consequence of the economic sanctions, this extreme form of nationalism came back with vehemence. Some of this was felt right away, for example, the English bandleader Claude Bampton. He was a pianist, arranger, and bandleader who became famous in April 1935 when he won many Melody Maker dance band contests with a successful gig band called The Bandits. This brought him to the attention of the Italian government, which signed him in June 1935 as musical director, coach, and arranger of the Italian public broadcaster (EIAR), in Turin, intending to make him the Henry Hall of Italy. Despite language difficulties, Bampton did a splendid job, but overnight he was dismissed and sent home, after being considered an undesired citizen. The reason was not related to his job as written to him by the Administration of Cetra [the recording house which produced easy listening and jazz records] and EIAR—“We are very glad to express to you our complete satisfaction for your work in our Broadcasting Station of Turin as jazz piano solist [sic] and conductor of our jazz orchester [sic]”27—but for political reasons. His Italian contract was interrupted due to hostilities with Abyssinia. He wrote in his unfinished autobiography: On August 8, 1935, a messenger came to the flat and asked if I would return to the Administrative Offices with him, or attend early the next morning. I elected to get dressed, and went off to see what was up. What was up was that Italy had invaded Abyssinia, and as a result the Orchestra C.E.T.R.A. was forbidden to play any music of the character of, or compositions by, the Negro, i.e. mutes included, and no vocals in English. And this midnight session of the Administration made it quite clear that there was to be no missing. When I say “No mutes” I mean mutes, or bowler hats, hand-over-bell etc., or anything savoring of the Negro. And it knocked about 80% of our new program material for six over the Pavilion, and we had to fall back on a greater proportion of Italian material. But we made out, and bit by bit it became clear that Italy was not very pleased with England on matters of economic embargo, sanctions and things, and my father’s passport (He come out for a holiday) shows that we passed through Paris on 9th Sept.: 1935, en route for London, and home.

Bampton. MS 1025, f. 230, MS Mus. 1025–1029: Claude Bampton Papers, The British Library; see also Mazzoletti, Il jazz in Italia, 415. 27  Letter from Administration of CETRA and EIAR on conclusion of Italian contract due to hostilities with Abyssinia, Turin, August 31, 1935, MS 1025, f. 186, MS Mus. 1025–1029: Claude Bampton Papers, The British Library.

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And the rather quaint and quite paradoxical fact remains that my last week’s work with Orchestra C.E.T.R.A. was to record 27 American Titles for Italian Parlaphon. Composers like Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and things from the big films of the period. And thus, being American, and therefore, not English, we could do the “English” vocals, which I still think was quaint, but the trip was all a great experience, and very memorable.28

The war in Ethiopia ended in May 1936. Some months after, on December 26, 1936, the director of the police, by order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, dispatched to the prefects the order to ban shows in theaters or in cinemas with “vaudeville acts staged by Negros.”29 On November 29, therefore, the director of the Office for the Theatre Censorship, Leopoldo Zurlo wrote to the director of the music publishing house Ricordi that the show La saetta negra couldn’t be staged because “a choreography with Negros is not appropriate for the current state of events.”30 Next to low-profile racist comments, there were also those of intellectuals like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1937 signed with Bruno Corra the manifesto Contro il teatro morto. Contro il romanzone [sic] analitico. Contro il negrismo musicale (Against dead theatre. Against the big analytical novel. Against musical negroism), in which he vehemently attacked syncopated music. It should be stressed that the dispositions that pushed for listening and producing only Italian music were not only a consequence of the developments in foreign politics—the economic sanctions imposed for attacking Ethiopia—but also a clear attempt to shape what had to be the “Italian music” free from foreign influences and truly Italic in “race.” Like historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has successfully emphasized, “The campaign of cultural reclamation (bonifica della cultura) that began in 1938 aimed not only to ban Jewish influences from Italy but American and French ones as well. With its arts and letters purged of all elements ‘that do not fit the 28  An unfinished autobiography by Claude Bampton 1908–1969, MS 1026, 216–217, MS Mus. 1025–1029: Claude Bampton Papers, The British Library. 29  “numeri di varietà costituiti da negri,” Sarfatti, “Quando in Italia il Jazz faceva paura,” 1. 30  “Non [era] opportuno nel momento attuale un’azione coreografica di soggetto negro,” ACS, MinCulPop, DGTM, Ufficio Censura Teatrale, b. 332, fasc. 6139 “La saetta negra”, Message of Zurlo to Ricordi, November 29, 1936; see also Leopoldo Zurlo, Memorie inutili. La censura teatrale nel ventennio (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1952), 254–255.

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particular characteristics of our race,’ Italy would at last bring a distinctive product to the international cultural marketplace.”31

Racism Turned into Anti-Semitism Since its origins, Italian Fascism, both in its ideology and in its political action, showed a clear racist nature. Particularly cruel was the violence of the Squadristi against the Slavic minorities in Istria and in Venezia Giulia, considered as belonging to the “inferior Slavic race.” They were physically persecuted and forced to replace the Slovenian and Croatian languages with Italian, by the forced translation of names, place names, and the destruction monuments.32 During the years of the regime, racist violence was also expressed in the Italian colonies33 as well as against Italian and foreign Jews,34 homosexuals,35 and the faithful of minority religions.36 A further regression took place in 1938, when racism in relation to jazz assumed anti-Semitic tones after the passing of the race laws. The music business was affected in this case as well. The anti-Semite twist in 1938 grew even more so as the regime moved closer to Nazi Germany. The 31  Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities Italy, 1922–1945 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 124. 32  Stefano Bartolini, Fascismo antislavo. Il tentativo di “bonifica etnica” al confine nord orientale (Pistoia: I.S.R.P.T.), 2008; Enzo Collotti, “Sul razzismo antislavo,” in Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia. 1870–1945, ed. Alberto Burgio (Bologna: il Mulino, 1999), 33–61. 33  Angelo Del Boca, I gas di Mussolini. Il fascismo e la guerra di Etiopia (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1996); Nicola Labanca, “L’internamento coloniale italiano,” in I campi di concentramento in Italia. Dall’internamento alla deportazione (1940–1945), ed. Costantino Di Sante (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), 40–67. 34  Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1961); Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei: le leggi razziali in Italia (Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2003); Michele Sarfatti, La Shoah in Italia. La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin, Einaudi, 2005); Storia della Shoah in Italia, eds. Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam, and  Marie-Anne Matard Bonucci, (Turin: Utet, 2010); Giorgio Israel, Il fascismo e la razza. La scienza italiana e le politiche razziali del regime (Bologna: il Mulino, 2010); Giuseppe Speciale, Giudici e razza nell’Italia fascista (Turin: Giappichelli, 2007). 35  Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo: l’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005); Circolo Pink, ed., Le ragioni di un silenzio. La persecuzione degli omosessuali durante il fascismo (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002). 36  Giorgio Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche: direttive e articolazioni del controllo e della repressione (Turin: Claudiana, 1990).

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tightening of the relationship with Germany had certainly speeded up the affirmation of anti-Semitic racism in Italy, even though comments soaked in violent racism toward jazz and those who performed it had been proliferating for years. This had another effect on jazz; from that point on, it was considered the music of the Jews. In Germany, jazz was considered “American-­ Negro-­Jewish music straight out of the jungle” and was related not only to an Afro-American element, but also to a Jewish one. Jazz was music to be banned, and its managers needed to be excluded from the industry. This genre was considered to be Entartete Musik, a form that didn’t correspond to Nazi models and therefore was “degenerate.” According to the Nazi perspective, this definition encompassed “Bolshevik music,” “Jewish music,” and “Negro music.”37 In 1938, Alceo Toni, music composer and critic affiliated to the printed issue of the regime Il Popolo d’Italia, wrote an article that left no doubts in terms of racism. Attacking any expression of internationalism—like the Contemporary Music Festival in Venice—he proudly affirmed the existence of “artistic racism, in general, and of musical racism, in particular, which must be defended just as much as the ethnic one.”38 Stronger and stronger were the mutual influences of the Fascist and Nazi regimes: the relationships between the minister of popular culture Dino Alfieri and his peer Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in the Third Reich, were meaningful when it came to “degenerate music.” In a letter dated April 8, 1938, Goebbels invited Italians to “keep their musical life pure and free from malevolent influences.”39 Equally important was the impact of “Chancellor Hitler’s speech on modern art” on July 18, 1937. 37  In May 1938, following the example of the “Degenerate Art Exhibition” in Munich, Hans Severus Ziegler, director of the Weimar National Theatre, organized an exhibition of “degenerate music” in Düsseldorf. The event poster reproduced a caricature of an African or Afro-American saxophone player with a star of David on his jacket lapel. About the exhibition, see Albrecht Dümling and Peter Girth, eds., Entartete Musik. Dokumentation und Kommentar zür Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938 (Düsseldorf: Dkw, 1993); Albrecht Dümling, Das verdächtige Saxophon. “Entartete Musik” im NS-Staat—Dokumentation und Kommentar (Regensburg: Con Brio, 2007). 38  “C’è un razzismo artistico, in generale, e uno musicale, in ispecie, che va difeso come quello propriamente etnico.” Alceo Toni, “Parliamo di razzismo,” Il Popolo d’Italia, September 4, 1938, 4, in ASAC, Raccolta documentaria—Musica, 1936–1940, b.1, f. VI Festival di Musica 1938-XVI, sf. 6. Festival internazionale di musica 1938. 39  “mantenere pura la loro vita musicale da influenze perniciose.” Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto edizioni, 1984), 27.

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On November 1938, the dismissal of every Jewish employee in theaters, music, cinema, and radio was established (R.d.l., November 17 no. 1728); works of Jewish authors disappeared from theaters, as well as in radio music shows. In June 1940, “any entertainment activity in the show business” was banned to people of “Jewish race.” It is said: Italian music. Now Italian music cannot and must not be understood  as anything other than  the music of an Italian composer, or of an Italian author of lyrics […], or of an Italian publisher. The 80% of genre music [easy listening music] is made by Jewish composers and edited by Jewish publishers who, through the profits in broadcasting rights and worse—through tortuous copyright and uncontrollable ownership contracts—manage to obtain the export of Italian currency.40

Among the convinced supporters of the regime, some wondered about the effective ties in being a good fascist and listening to jazz music and dancing to it, but these were exceptions. Most wished for the “defence” of Italian music against syncopated rhythms, also in dance and cinema. In the history of the anti-Semitic persecution in Italy, there were also the Lescano Sisters, a famous musical jazz trio. The three young women, who came from Holland, became extremely popular in a short time. But when they arrived at the top of their career, they were accused of being Jewish. Their mother was Jewish, and they saved themselves only thanks to the interference of the EIAR, which couldn’t allow the loss of the most beloved stars of radio entertainment.41 For the Fascist regime, addressing jazz was a matter of not only cultural politics, but also an internal political affair, functional to maintaining the consensus: jazz could be listened to, but the worst had to be said about it. 40  “[…] Si dice: musica italiana. Ora per musica italiana non si può e non si deve intendere che la musica di compositore italiano, di autore delle parole italiano […], di editore italiano. L’80% della musica straniera del genere [musica leggera] è di compositori ebrei, ed è edita da editori ebrei, che attraverso gli incassi dei diritti di esecuzione, e peggio, attraverso tortuosi contratti di esclusività incontrollabili, riescono ad ottenere l’esportazione di valuta italiana […] Bisogna riconoscere alla Cetra il merito di aver italianamente ostacolato e impedito l’affermarsi del monopolio giudaico.” Santi Savarino, “Cronache del teatro e della radio. Altoparlante,” La Stampa, January 7, 1939, quoted in Giovanni Isola, Abbassa la tua radio per favore…Storia dell’ascolto radiofonico nell’Italia fascista (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1990), 210. 41  ACS, MI, DGPS, Divisione Polizia Politica, Fascicoli Personali 1927–1944, b. 715, fasc. Lescano sorelle.

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Therefore, a lesser evil was to transform jazz to giazzo, that is, Italian jazz, a meaningless expression, but enough that Italian musicians such as Gorni Kramer, Natalino Otto, Alberto Semprini, and Pippo Barzizza, to name but a few, could continue playing jazz.42 Little by little, these Italian jazz musicians found more space in the scene: they played jazz, but in the end, they were Italians. In other words, the lesser evil was chosen. In the face of the true impossibility to avoid jazz, at least the “Italian” one could be tolerated. We find evidence of this thesis in the anti-Semitic declarations of journalist Santi Savarino, who said bluntly that “Cetra deserves the credit of having fought and countered the Jewish monopoly of music in a true Italian way.”43 In January 1939, the Commission promoted by the Minister of Popular Culture Dino Alfieri, and designated to address the problems of producing, marketing, exporting, and importing easy listening music and dances, decided to ban Jewish music from the repertoire.44 In November 1941, a bill was approved for the regulation of pop music, and on the same subject a meeting was also held at the Ministry of Popular Culture. It was concluded that jazz should not be banned, but only that the lyrics of the “rhythmic songs” should be revised, eliminating “any distinctly exotic tendency” in the way artists sing. It has been admitted by all that syncopated music, which gives the rhythm of today’s songs, has undergone such an evolution in our country to acquire the right of citizenship, so alive and abundant has been the grafting of our melodic vein. And it has also been recognized that although it is necessary to proceed to a disciplining and improvement of production, one cannot think of suppressing it at least until other forms of modern compositions that do not exist today have come out, because it is a type of music that has entered fully

42  The attempt to nationalize jazz did not take place only in Italy. Similar efforts were undertaken in Spain and in Japan, accounts of which can be found in the works of Iván Iglesias, “Forgotten Sounds of the Spanish Civil War: Jazz in the Urban Rearguard (1936–1939),” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018): 209–224; and of E. Taylor Atkins, “Frenemy Music? Jazz and the Aural Imaginary in Wartime Japan,” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018): 241–260. 43  “Bisogna riconoscere alla Cetra il merito di aver italianamente ostacolato e impedito l’affermarsi del monopolio giudaico.” Savarino, “Cronache del teatro e della radio,” quoted in Isola, Abbassa la tua radio, 210. 44  “Ancora della musica leggera,” Radiocorriere, March 15–11, 1939, 5.

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into the taste of the public and towards which all our production is oriented, including the very traditional regional one.45

In 1942, the music “purge” was desired in music festivals in Siena and Venice to avoid the presence of Jewish composers and authors. Finalized for this purpose, in 1942 an “International Federation of composers” (in actuality only Italian-German) was established by the initiative of Italy and Germany. Richard Strauss chaired the Federation along with a Presidency Committee directed by Ildebrando Pizzetti, in which Gian Francesco Malipiero and Goffredo Petrassi—the latter under the function of secretary of the Presidency Council—were also present. The regime was not unique in seeing jazz as dangerous. The Church thundered against jazz and its dances, which it considered to be amoral, wild, and unfit for good Christians to partake in. The Catholic hierarchy saw in those syncopated rhythms the devil’s music, or, less dramatically, a music that had the potential to destroy the traditional role of women, and even the very institution of marriage. In some ways, therefore, the Catholic Church was even more rigidly against jazz than the Fascist regime was.46 The so-called syncopated couldn’t disappear though. Despite the closure of clubs, the censorship imposed on lyrics, the ban in 1942 against broadcasting music of Anglo-Saxon provenance on the radio as it was music from the enemy, and the prohibition in 1942 against selling American records, not only did jazz not disappear, but it resurfaced with

45  “È stato da tutti ammesso che la musica sincopata, che dà il ritmo delle canzoni di oggi, ha subito nel nostro Paese tale evoluzione da acquistare il diritto di cittadinanza, così vivo e abbondante è stato l’innesto della nostra vena melodica. Ed è stato pure riconosciuto che pur essendo necessario procedere ad un disciplinamento e ad un miglioramento della produzione, non si può pensare a sopprimerla almeno sino a quando non siano venute fuori altre forme di composizioni moderne oggi inesistenti, perché si tratta di un tipo di musica che è entrato pienamente nel gusto del pubblico e verso il quale è orientata tutta la nostra produzione, quella regionale tradizionalissima compresa.” “La musica leggera e il suo miglioramento,” Radiocorriere, November 16–22, 1941, 5, italics mine. 46  Here are just a few of the many articles of a local Catholic newspaper against jazz and dancing: Brontolon Sior Todaro, “La lotta contro il ballo. Motivo per ballerina,” La settimana religiosa, February 19, 1928, 1; “Perché tante donne muoiono tisiche?,” La settimana religiosa, August 12, 1928, 2; “Ballo e villeggiatura,” La settimana religiosa, July 24, 1932, 2; “Prescrizioni relative al ballo. Seguono alla Lettera le seguenti prescrizioni,” La settimana religiosa, January 6, 1935, 2.

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more strength through the so-called Victory Discs (V-Discs), special records produced only for American troops on the front line.47 With the arrival of the Allied troops and the circulation of V-Discs, the nationalist resurgence emerged even stronger, but jazz resurfaced with more strength. While the Allies advanced on Italian soil, jazz—especially the most danceable and easy to sing to in swing style—penetrated Italian life more and more. After the fall of the regime in 1943, the Allies took control over the information and entertainment system in Italy. Along with chocolate, chewing gum, and nylon stockings, V-discs became the symbol of a new way of life, affecting and leading to numerous changes in Italian cities. The nationalism, the racism, the aversion of the Catholic Church, and the censorship imposed on lyrics, the closure of bars and clubs, legislative actions against “exotic” dancing, with the aim of protecting public morals and the youth, and the prohibition of foreign music during the war couldn’t stop jazz.

Entertainment and War Jazz found its place in Europe in part because there was such a need for escapism and for entertainment, to “have fun” after the dark years of the First World War: this happened in many countries, among them Italy. And that is how Augusto Caraceni, writing one of the first monographs in Italian that spoke of the jazz phenomenon from an artistically critical point of view, explained the success of the musical genre. To this Caraceni added that there was also the need to find something new.48 The need to “forget” the hardships of reality through syncopated rhythms—at least for a couple of hours—resurfaced under the bombings during the Second World War. The more cannonballs fired, the stronger became the need for evasion, a need that has been confirmed by private diaries and statistics. During the Second World War the demand for entertainment products, such as cinema, records, and concerts did not decrease but rather expanded. This happened in different countries with

47  About V-Discs, see Richard S. Sears, V-Discs. A History and Discography (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1980); Lawrence McCleallan, The Later Swing Era. 1942–1955, (Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 2004). 48  Augusto Caraceni, Il Jazz dalle origini ad oggi, (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1937).

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different political realities, different regimes, democratic (like Great Britain) or not (like Germany, Japan, and Spain).49 The fascist authorities recognized the need to give people the possibility to enjoy themselves, but in a regime where the distinction between the public and private sphere was blurred, even entertainment and escapism had to undergo state rules, that is, control. It was the regime that decided what to listen to, where to listen to it, under what restrictions, and with what permission. There were kept spaces in which Italians could stop thinking about the conflict, for example during football matches, comedy films, magazines, and, indeed songs, although everything remained under strict control.50 In some sectors such as the theater, an initial drop in ticket sales was followed by an increase, due to the need to have fun and forget the war.51 In 1939, 87% of subscribers to the radio had responded to a referendum of EIAR to prefer songs, 64% dance music, and 51% pop music,52 and, in 1941, in the middle of the conflict, the EIAR had organized a show for the wounded soldiers in which the music played was jazz by the dance band Cetra of Pippo Barzizza.53 This situation was similar to what happened in other countries at war: a heartfelt need for light music, danceable, and allegra that could move one away for a moment from the soreness of war. In 1942, a ministerial provision invited some comedy newspapers— such as Marc’Aurelio, Bertoldo, and Guerin Meschino—to write amusing scripts so that radio could be used as a tool to lift spirits.54 As Giuliano Ugolini, a young worker from Pisa confirmed, the only type of fun to be had during wartime was “andare a fare quattro salti” (‘to have a boogie’),55 that is, to go out and dance. The need to enjoy oneself continued even in the face of danger: “One evening as I was playing the sound of an airplane 49  On the huge demand for entertainment products, such as records, concerts, and cinema during wartime, see “Musical Notes and Weapons: Jazz and War (1936–45),” ed. Camilla Poesio, special issue, Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018). 50  Pasquale Iaccio, La scena negata: Il teatro vietato durante la guerra fascista (1940–1943) (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), 43–44. 51  Scarpellini, Organizzazione, 318. 52  “I risultati del referendum,” Radiocorriere, October 13–19, 1940, 16–17. 53  “Le cronache,” Radiocorriere, May 18–24, 1941, 11. 54  Franco Monteleone, Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia: Società, politica, strategie, programmi 1922–1992 (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 134. 55  Giuliano Ugolini, “Durante la settimana fra amici” [1943–1945], MP/T2, 1, ADN, Pieve Santo Stefano.

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[…] dropped a bomb right next to the castle the windows were shattered to smithereens, we were scared but then the need to dance took over.”56 Experiences like this were common for many people who lived through the tragedy, both within and outside of Italy.57

Conclusion Jazz, fascism, and society implicates, in the first instance, a political question: that is, the question of the relationship between politics and music. As jazz arrived in Italy at such a crucial point in the country’s history, during the years of liberticidal dictatorship, the question of how far the Fascist regime interfered with art for its own political gain is fundamental, as is the idea of the relationship between the totalitarian state and the use of free time in the Italian population. Jazz, fascism, and society are a triad that bring to the foreground other social questions, such as the changing of habits and traditions, the relationship between men and women, and interaction between young people and adults. It also throws up economic issues, such as the establishment of the Italian discography industry, which tried to pitch itself against the American one, the birth of radio stations, and the relationship with the tourism and fashion industries. The use of new consumer products, such as radio, discs, gramophones, and films, provokes the question of how and to what extent the arrival of jazz, having been adapted to Italian musical tradition and above all for an Italian audience, influenced people’s behavior, and if, vice versa, these consumer products brought the Italian people closer to jazz. During the war, the demand for jazz was increasing. It is exactly these dramatic events that render interesting an analysis of entertainment, free time, escapism, and the numerous ways to distract oneself from worries and daily routine. It was in those moments of enormous crisis that the public sphere began to meld with the private, through state regulations such as the closing of ballrooms. The theme of entertainment can be used as a magnifying glass to understand the relationship between the private, 56  “[…] una sera mentre suonavo arrivò il rumore di un aeroplano […] buttò una bomba molto vicina al castello i vetri delle finestre andarono tutti in frantumi solo un pò [sic] di spavento, poi la voglia di ballare prese il sopravvento  […].” Giornando Barbari, “Miriam l’ebrea” [1940–1952], MP/02, 289, ADN, Pieve Santo Stefano. 57  “Bombed, they danced on,” Melody Maker and Rhythm, October 19, 1940, 11; see also Camilla Poesio, “‘Swing is definitely the stuff to give the RAF’: Jazz in Wartime Britain,” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018): 191–208.

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intimate sphere of those enjoying themselves and the public sphere where entertainment happens, that is, in places such as the theaters, the cinemas, the circus, and the ballrooms. Also, the American Secret Service—The Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—understood the link between entertainment and politics and used jazz music to create a consensus between the Italian people in the liberated cities.58 Italian Fascism had been grounded in violence, both as an idea and a political practice, since its birth in 1919. Having proved itself to be highly intolerant and oppressive in many fields, I assumed that the regime had perpetuated a harsh repression against jazz as the symbol of Negro and American music. I also supposed that in Italy jazz was repressed in a similar way as it had been in Germany. This hypothesis, as I have explained, has not been disproved: the regime was very restrictive and used censorship and control. However, Italian fascism also revealed an oscillatory attitude, as it did in other fields, due to its political opportunism. The regime alternated bans, prohibitions, and censorship with exhibitions of tolerance and acceptance. The regime was forced to balance nationalistic and conservative strivings, supporters of a national music, and more modern and cosmopolitan intellectual milieus. It surfed the nationalist wave, and at the same time it had to bend according to the needs of modernity— especially those inspired by the United States—to avoid losing consensus. This attitude shifted during the 20 years of the Fascist regime, and we may identify different phases, which don’t follow the history of jazz— whether world jazz or Italian jazz—per se but are related to the history of the regime. There are some chronological turning points. The first was the interval between 1921 and 1929 when, at least until 1926, Fascism showed its most violent face in order to establish itself. In this phase, jazz was fundamentally deprecated and considered to be a music genre for the few. A second phase was determined by the international economic crash in 1929, which led to some sort of chauvinism in the music industry. Only Italian music must be listened to, which implied also a contraction of paid gigs for foreign musicians. The third phase was related to the Italo-­ Ethiopian war (1935–1936), along which the racism embedded in Italian 58  Music has always been used during wartime to help to deal with the challenging environment. I reflect on the close, historic relationship between music—in general—and war, which brings together different time periods and countries. See Camilla Poesio, “Introduction,” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018): 179–190.

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Fascism poured into the cultural and musical scene. Year 1938 was decidedly a turning point because the Fascist regime promulgated the Racial Laws, which had further repercussions on jazz music. The fifth phase began with the entrance of the United States into the Second World War in 1941, which meant an upsurge of hostility toward everything that was American, especially jazz music. Finally, the last phase was the years 1943–1944 when with the arrival of the Allies, the so-called Victory discs—special records produced only for American troops—made their appearance. Compared to cinema, theater, painting, and literature, music was one of the arts the Fascist regime focused on and engaged with less. Nevertheless, the issue of the relationship between art and Fascism’s needs—in other words the interference of politics in the arts to exploit them for its own purposes—is true also for music. The interferences of political power in musical activities were many and determined by precise political decisions, not differently from what happened in Nazi Germany, though with dissimilar results. Like in Germany, in Italy the intervention of the state in musical activities was a new circumstance: in both cases, this was driven by the resolve to become a totalitarian regime,59 which meant to control, manage, and decide over every aspect of the private life of individuals, and included the ones pertaining to music. The research has brought to light a picture that is much more wide-­ ranging and varied than originally expected: it has shown that the regime, as in other areas, assumed an erratic approach, due to political opportunism. It fluctuated between extremely invasive bans, prohibitions, and censorship on one side, and to tolerance and acceptance on the other, in order to make use of an internal consensus: jazz was adored by Italians and could not be taken away from them. In the wake of Eric Hobsbawn’s pioneering work—The Jazz Scene—I tried to recreate not a history of jazz in Italy during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, but a history of listening to jazz during those years. The arrival of jazz in Italy meant not only a new musical genre, but also new habits, new dances, new trends, new tastes, new manners, and new words. So wrote the renowned English historian: It is not merely about a certain type of music […] The world of jazz consists not only of the noises which emerge from particular combinations of instruments played in a characteristic way. It consists also of the musicians  Bruce Johnson, ed., Jazz and Totalitarianism (New York: Routledge, 2017).

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who play them, black and white, American and non-American. […] It consists of the places in which they play, the business and technical structure which is built round the sounds, the associations they call up. It consists of the people who listen to it, write about it, and read about it.60

The question shifted from whether jazz was repressed or tolerated in Italy to exploring the impact that jazz (and everything that revolved around it) had on Italian society in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Studying the people’s reaction to regime propaganda, and, in this specific case, for example, radio subscribers’ reaction to jazz music, helps us to understand the difference between state propaganda—which saw jazz as worthless from a musical perspective and dangerous when it came to the morals of the youth, and above all, women—and what people really thought. As the scholars Goffredo Fofi and Pietro Cavallo argued, the ways of enjoying oneself and escaping reality explain, at times, more “than history books and political testimony.”61

Bibliography Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), MI, DGPS, Divisione Polizia Politica, Fascicoli Personali 1927–1944, fasc. Mila Massimo, Rome. ———. b. 715, fasc. Lescano sorelle, Rome. Atkins, E.  Taylor. “Frenemy Music? Jazz and the Aural Imaginary in Wartime Japan.” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018): 241–260. Barbari, Giornando, “Miriam l’ebrea” [1940–1952], MP/02, 289, Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (ADN), Pieve Santo Stefano. Bartolini, Stefano. Fascismo antislavo. Il tentativo di “bonifica etnica” al confine nord orientale. Pistoia: I.S.R.P.T., 2008. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities Italy, 1922–1945. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Benadusi, Lorenzo. Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo: l’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005.

60  Francis Newton (Eric Hobsbawm), The Jazz Scene (London: Mac Gibbon & Kee, 1959), 11. 61  “[…] dei libri di storia e delle testimonianze dei politici.” Goffredo Fofi, “Prefazione,” in Follie del varietà. Vicende, memorie, personaggi 1890–1970, eds. Stefano De Matteis, Martina Lombardi, and Marilea Somarè (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), quoted in Pietro Cavallo, La storia attraverso i media: Immagini, propaganda e cultura in Italia dal fascismo alla Repubblica (Naples: Liguori, 2002), 69.

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Bosworth, Richard James. Italian Venice: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Bragaglia, Anton Giulio. Jazz Band. Milan: Corbaccio, 1929. Casella, Alfredo. “Mascagni and Jazz.” The Christian Science Monitor (September 1926): 8. Caraceni, Augusto. Il Jazz dalle origini ad oggi. Milan: Suvini Zerboni 1937. Cavallo, Pietro. La storia attraverso i media: Immagini, propaganda e cultura in Italia dal fascismo alla Repubblica. Naples: Liguori, 2002. Centro Furio Jesi, ed. La menzogna della razza: documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista. Bologna: Grafis, 1994. Circolo Pink, ed. Le ragioni di un silenzio. La persecuzione degli omosessuali durante il fascismo. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2002. Collotti, Enzo. “Sul razzismo antislavo.” In Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia. 1870–1945, edited by Alberto Burgio, 33–61. Bologna: il Mulino, 1999. ———. Il fascismo e gli ebrei: le leggi razziali in Italia. Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2003. D’Ambra, Lucio. La repubblica del “Jazz-Band”. Memorie di corte del marchese Armando d’Apre. Milan: Edizioni Corbaccio, 1929. De Felice, Renzo. Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo. Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Del Boca, Angelo. I gas di Mussolini. Il fascismo e la guerra di Etiopia. Rome: Editori riuniti, 1996. Dümling Albrecht. Das verdächtige Saxophon. «Entartete Musik» im NS-Staat— Dokumentation und Kommentar. Regensburg: Con Brio, 2007. Dümling, Albrecht, and Girth, Peter, eds. Entartete Musik. Dokumentation und Kommentar zür Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938. Düsseldorf: Dkw, 1993. Evans, Richard J. Il Terzo reich al potere 1933–1939. Milan: Mondadori, 2010. Flores, Marcello, Levis Sullam Simon, and Matard Bonucci, eds. Storia della Shoah in Italia. Turin: Utet, 2010. Gabrielli, Gianluca. “Africani in Italia negli anni del razzismo di Stato.” In Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870–1945, edited by Alberto Burgio, 201–212. Bologna: il Mulino, 2000. Gramsci, Antonio. Lettere dal carcere, edited by Paolo Spriano. Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Storia sociale del jazz. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982 [alias Newton Francis, The Jazz Scene. London: Mac Gibbon & Kee, 1959]. Iaccio, Pasquale. La scena negata: Il teatro vietato durante la guerra fascista (1940–1943). Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. Iglesias, Iván. “Forgotten Sounds of the Spanish Civil War: Jazz in the Urban Rearguard (1936–1939).” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018): 209–224. Isola, Gianni. Abbassa la tua radio per favore…Storia dell’ascolto radiofonico nell’Italia fascista. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1990.

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Israel, Giorgio. Il fascismo e la razza. La scienza italiana e le politiche razziali del regime. Bologna: il Mulino, 2010. Johnson, Bruce, ed. Jazz and Totalitarianism. New York: Routledge, 2017. Kater, Michael H. Different Drummers. Jazz in the culture of Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Labanca, Nicola. “L’internamento coloniale italiano.” In I campi di concentramento in Italia. Dall’internamento alla deportazione (1940–1945), edited by Costantino Di Sante, 40–67. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001. Letter from Administration of C.E.T.R.A. and E.I.A.R. on conclusion Italian contract due to hostilities with Abyssinia, Torino, 31 agosto 1935, Claude Bampton Papers, MS 1025, f. 186, MS Mus. 1025–1029: The British Library, London. Lualdi, Adriano. Jazz. In Lualdi Adriano, Viaggio musicale in Italia. Milan: Alpes, 1927. Lücke, Martin. “Jazz in Germany during World War II.” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018): 225–240. Maffina, Gian Franco. Luigi Russolo e l’Arte dei rumori. Con tutti gli scritti musicali. Turin: Martano, 1978. Mazzoletti, Adriano. Il jazz in Italia: Dalle origini al dopoguerra. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1983. McCleallan, Lawrence. The Later Swing Era. 1942–1955. Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 2004. Monteleone, Franco. Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia: Società, politica, strategie, programmi 1922–1992. Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Nicolodi, Fiamma. Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Fiesole: Discanto edizioni, 1984. Norbedo, Giulia. Pirandello, C’est ainsi. Un musical per fuggire. Rome: UniversItalia, 2015. Note from EIAR broadcast station in Turin, 8 August 1935, addressed to Mr. Bampton Claude Bampton Papers, MS 1025, f. 230, MS Mus. 1025–1029, The British Library, London. Poesio, Camilla. “‘Swing is definitely the stuff to give the RAF’: Jazz in Wartime Britain.” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018a): 191–208. ———. “Introduction.” Memoria e Ricerca 58, no. 2 (May–August 2018b): 179–190. ———. Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing. Il jazz, il fascismo e la società italiana. Florence: Le Monnier-Mondadori, 2018c. Rochat, Giorgio. Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche: direttive e articolazioni del controllo e della repressione. Turin: Claudiana, 1990. Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise. Listening of the Twentieth Century. London: Fourth Estate, 2012.

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Sarfatti, Michele. The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution. Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. ———. La Shoah in Italia. La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo. Turin: Einaudi, 2005. ———. “Quando in Italia il Jazz faceva paura.” L’Unità, October 22, 1997, 1–2. Savage, Jon. The Creation of Youth Culture. London: Penguin, 2007. Scarpellini, Emanuela. Organizzazione teatrale e politica del teatro nell’Italia fascista. Milan: LED, 2004. Schwamenthal, Riccardo. Postfazione. In Musica degenerata. Il jazz sotto il nazismo, Mike Zwerin, 185–195. Turin: EDT, 1993. Sears, Richard S. V-Discs. A History and Discography. Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1980. Soria, Massimo. “Big sulla formula del ‘Jazz hot’.” Radiocorriere, January 27– February 2, 1935a, 18. ———. “Louis Armstrong.” Radiocorriere, January 20–26, 1935b, 22. Speciale, Giuseppe. Giudici e razza nell’Italia fascista. Turin: Giappichelli, 2007. Tonelli, Anna. E ballando ballando. La storia d’Italia a passi di danza (1815–1996). Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998. Ugolini, Giuliano. “Durante la settimana fra amici” [1943–1945], MP/T2, 1, Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (AND), Pieve Santo Stefano. Wipplinger, Jonathan O. The Jazz Republic. Music, Race and American Culture in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Zurlo, Leopoldo. Memorie inutili. La censura teatrale nel ventennio. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1952.

CHAPTER 5

La Scala, the Jews and Erich Kleiber: An Anti-Semitic Episode of December 1938 Annalisa Capristo

Introduction In analyzing the events involving Jewish-Italian musicians and composers persecuted by Fascism, attention is primarily concentrated on the “victims”—a category that directly calls into question the “perpetrators” (equally those who conceived and those who executed anti-Semitic provisions). But, as we all know, there is also a third category implied in the process of persecution, whose role was relevant and should be taken into

This essay is a revised and expanded version, with new documents and additional bibliographical references, from my article “La Scala, gli ebrei ed Erich Kleiber: Una vicenda antisemita del dicembre 1938,” originally published in Italian within the journal Quaderni di storia, no. 67 (January–June 2008), 205–220. All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own.

A. Capristo (*) Center for American Studies, Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_5

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account during the historical reconstruction: namely the category of “onlookers” or “bystanders,” to use the term coined by Shoah historian Raul Hilberg.1 In this specific case, the definition may refer to those who in 1938 were forced to take a stand on the issue of the exclusion of Jews from the Italian musical scene (including colleagues, masters and pupils). Even in this sector, as in the rest of Italian society and culture, the prevailing reaction was compliance with the directives of the Fascist government—with many instances of explicit and fervent adhesion. While considering the political context (a totalitarian regime that harshly repressed all demonstrations of dissent), historians are still baffled by the almost total acquiescence towards the eradication of the Jewish presence in a setting where it was particularly lively and meaningful. All the more worthy of attention are the few demonstrations of protest, like the one voiced by orchestra conductor Erich Kleiber that is narrated herein. Even for the resonance that his position had in the international press, this event demonstrates the value—not only symbolic—of his refusal to remain silent and conform to silent complicity.

Kleiber and La Scala Theatre in December 1938 At the end of December 1938, the international press gave a certain prominence to their report regarding famous Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber’s2 refusal to conduct the Teatro alla Scala orchestra; the reason 1  Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher Books/ Harper Collins, 1992). See also “Bystanders, people who witness but are not directly affected by the actions of perpetrators, help shape society by their reactions. [...] Bystanders can exert powerful influences. They can define the meaning of events and move others toward empathy or indifference. They can promote values and norms of caring, or by their passivity of participation in the system, they can affirm the perpetrators.” Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 87. An interesting reexamination of the category of the bystander has been recently provided by the volume edited by Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs, Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). See also Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019). 2  Erich Kleiber (Vienna 1890–Zürich 1956) was an Austrian-born conductor of international renown. In 1923 he was appointed Generalmusikdirektor of Berlin’s Staatsoper. “Unwilling to compromise with the Nazi regime’s cultural policy, however, he resigned from Berlin in 1934 (4 December) after the political embargo placed on such operas as Berg’s Lulu, but he conducted the première of Berg’s Lulu suite at his last concert before his resignation.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd. ed., ed. Stanley Sadie,

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behind his decision was the exclusion of Jewish spectators by the prestigious Milan Opera House. Kleiber had been invited by La Scala to direct Beethoven’s Fidelio,3 scheduled for March 1939.4 But the orchestra conductor discovered that season tickets already purchased by Jewish audiences for the forthcoming opera season had been revoked after the enactment of anti-Semitic provisions by the Fascist regime.5 Namely, the Theatre had not  only limited itself to enforcing provisions by firing its staff “of Jewish race” (including the choral director Vittore Veneziani),6 but had proceeded to the point of banishing Jews even from audiences. executive ed. John Tyrrell (New York: Macmillan, 2001), v. 13, 669–670). He fled Nazi Germany in January 1935. In 1938 Kleiber became an Argentine citizen. He returned to Berlin in 1951. “His reappointment was announced to the Berlin’s Staatsoper, now in the eastern zone of the city, but before taking up the post in 1955 he resigned (16 March) in protest against political intrusion.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd., v. 13, 669–670. On Kleiber, see John Russell, Erich Kleiber: A Memoir (London: Andre Deutsch for Seven Art Books Club, 1957). 3  In addition to its symbolic value from the musical standpoint, Fidelio was of particular significance for Kleiber since it was the opera that had consecrated him General Music Director of the Staatsoper in Berlin. On the “three big ‘F’s in his life–the operas ‘Fidelio’, ‘Figaro’, and ‘Freischutz,’” see The New Yorker, October 4, 1930, 21. 4  The opera was actually staged in March 1939 and conducted by Wilhelm Sieben. See Duecento anni di Teatro alla Scala, v. 2: Giampiero Tintori, Cronologia: Opere, balletti, concerti 1778–1977 (Gorle: Grafica Gutenberg Editrice, 1979), 88. 5  The first anti-Semitic provisions were issued between September and November 1938. Additional persecutory laws and circulars were issued over the following years. See Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C.  Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 125–174. On the consequences of Fascist persecution against Jewish musicians, composers, singers, and music critics see: Annalisa Capristo, “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale,” in Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, eds. Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva (Milan: IAML Italia, 2018), 365–381. 6  Carlo Gatti, Il Teatro alla Scala nella storia e nell’arte, 1778–1963 (Milan: Ricordi, 1964), 385 and Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (New York: Norton, 1988), 186. Costantino Costantini was nominated new choral director; Corriere della Sera reported the actual substitution on December 8, 1938 (Radius, “Vigilia alla Scala”, 6); see article commenting on the La Scala premiere that took place on December 26: “La stagione lirica alla Scala,” Corriere della Sera December 27, 1938, 2. Vittore Veneziani (1878–1958), in addition to being choral director, was also a composer. Following his estrangement from La Scala, he conducted his activities within the Jewish community in Milan; to escape deportation, in February 1944 he took refuge in Switzerland. He resumed his activities in La Scala in the year 1946, see Guido Lopez, “Ricordo di Vittore Veneziani,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 24, no. 4 (April 1958): 156–165.

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And Kleiber reacted by deserting rehearsals and annulling his contract with the theatre. The news of his refusal spread and reached the most important foreign newspapers, forcing La Scala to issue a press release. On December 30, The Washington Post, whose source was the United Press news agency, reported the incident in an article entitled “Kleiber Quits La Scala Over Aryan Issue: Noted Opera Leader Objects to Milan’s ‘Anti-Semitism.’” The newspaper reported that Kleiber had written a harsh letter to the Milanese theatre explaining his withdrawal. “I have just learned that the doors of La Scala Theatre will be closed to your Jewish fellow citizens”—the conductor explained to La Scala management, immediately adding that: Music is made for everyone, like the sun and air. When this fountain of consolation, so necessary in these hard times, is denied to any human being— and merely because he belongs to a different religion and race—I cannot collaborate either as a Christian or as an artist.7

But La Scala management quickly reacted, and with equal harshness, a press release was issued, defining Kleiber’s withdrawal as an unjustified breach of contract and the reasons he stated as “absurd racial reasons,” as The Washington Post reported in the same article. The Milanese theatre simultaneously announced Kleiber’s substitution with the German orchestra conductor (and “Aryan”, as the newspaper accurately observed) Wilhelm Sieben.8 Ultimately theatre management denied that Jews were forbidden to attend performances: “Jews can no longer purchase season tickets, but they are allowed to buy seats for single performances,” they explained. 7  The Washington Post, December 30, 1938, 1, 4. Apparently, no documentation about Kleiber’s refusal is preserved in the historical archives of Teatro alla Scala. Afterall, La Scala theatre was heavily damaged during the Allied bombing of Milan in World War II. I wish to thank Luciana Ruggeri, responsible for the historical archive, for the information. It is worth mentioning that in June 2018 the Fidelio’s Premiere at La Scala was dedicated to Vittore Veneziani and Erich Kleiber on the 80th anniversary of the Italian Racial Laws. “Per gli 80 anni delle Leggi Razziali, la Scala dedica la prima del Fidelio a Vittore Veneziani ed Erich Kleiber,” Bet Magazine Mosaico 2018, accessed May 18, 2019, http://www.mosaico-cem. it/attualita-e-news/eventi-attualita-e-news/la-scala-dedica-la-prima-del-fidelio-a-vittoreveneziani-ed-erich-kleiber. 8  On Wilhelm Sieben (1881–1971), see the Deutsche Biographische Enziklopädie, ed. Walther Killy and Rudolf Vierhaus (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1998), v. 9, 304–305.

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Whether this was true, or whether on the contrary it was a justification devised to dampen the uproar aroused by the spreading of the news, the fact remained that the annulment of purchased season tickets was a serious and unprecedented action—in addition to being a particularly loathsome one. That same day, even The New York Times dedicated some space to the story, with a short article that, however, added a few interesting details. The title of the article was: “Won’t Direct at La Scala: Kleiber Refuses Because of Milan Ban on Jews,” the source this time being the Associated Press news agency.9 All the attention was concentrated on what La Scala management had dismissed as “absurd racial motives,” to undermine Kleiber’s protest. The opera house recently barred Jews from its audiences and asked those who already had subscribed for the current season to turn in their tickets. This action was criticized both in the Vatican City newspaper Osservatore Romano and in a speech by one Italian senator.

To fully grasp what the American newspaper was referring to, we have to take a few steps backwards. A notice appeared on the Corriere della Sera (the Italian daily newspaper published in Milan) on December 9, 1938, regarding the annulment of La Scala season tickets purchased by Jews: As previously announced, the normal sales of season tickets for the forthcoming opera season will be closed at 6:30 p.m. this Saturday, December 10, 1938. Season tickets must be collected within the said deadline, which will be delivered along with related schedules. Notwithstanding what has been previously announced within the subscription regulations regarding no reimbursements for any whatsoever reason, on Sunday 11 from 10:00 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. payments made by subscribers belonging to the Jewish race will be reimbursed by the ticket office. [emphasis added]10  The New York Times, December 30, 1938, 10.  “Come a suo tempo annunciato, sabato 10 corrente, alle ore 18.30, si chiuderanno gli abbonamenti normali per la prossima stagione lirica. Entro tale termine dovranno essere ritirate le tessere, che saranno consegnate insieme coi calendari dei turni. A deroga di quanto annunciato nelle norme di abbonamento circa la non rimborsabilità, per qualsiasi motivo, dei versamenti eseguiti, nella giornata di domenica 11, dalle ore 10 alle ore 12.30, la biglietteria rimborserà i versamenti effettuati dai prenotatori appartenenti alla razza ebraica.” [emphasis added] Corriere della Sera, December 9, 1938, 2 (“Corriere dei teatri: Alla Scala”). 9

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With hardly any notice, the Theatre made a public address to “subscribers belonging to the Jewish race” (whose identities they were not aware of)11 communicating a provision that breached the norms of its own regulations. Jewish spectators were to show up at La Scala box office the following Sunday and be subjected to the humiliating procedure of returning their season tickets, obtaining reimbursement of the tickets that had been purchased at a previous date. This measure (and this is the second report given by The New  York Times) was criticized a few days later by L’Osservatore Romano—the official newspaper of the Holy See. In fact, the edition dated December 12–13 carried an anonymous commentary “Ostracismi” (Ostracisms): Newspapers announced that certain theatres invited Jews to collect reimbursement for their subscriptions for the forthcoming season, which had already been regularly paid, and return the season tickets that had already been regularly delivered. As if to say that it was forbidden or that the participation of all Israelites in the performances was not welcome; a notice, moreover, that had already appeared in public places; a provision implemented in other private ones.12

One month from approval of Provisions for the Defense of the Italian Race, which had dealt a serious blow to the Concordat with the prohibition of mixed marriages and for this reason aroused protests by the Holy See (protests voiced by L’Osservatore Romano itself with a front-page editorial published in mid-November),13 once again the Vatican newspaper intervened critically and with a certain degree of relevance on the subject of anti-Semitic persecution in Italy. 11  According to the antifascist exile Guido Lodovico Luzzatto, there were Jews who “at their own risk” did not return their season tickets, see Guido Lodovico Luzzatto, “Sei mesi di antisemitismo in Italia,” Il nuovo Avanti, June 17, 1939, reprinted in Scritti politici: Ebraismo e antisemitismo, eds. Alberto Cavaglion, and Elisa Tedeschi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996), 98–99). 12  “I giornali annunciano che alcuni teatri hanno invitato gli ebrei a ritirare le loro quote d’abbonamento per la prossima stagione, già regolarmente incassate e a ritornare le tessere altrettanto regolarmente consegnate. È come dire che è interdetta o non si desidera la partecipazione di tutti gli israeliti agli spettacoli; avviso del resto che è comparso in pubblici ritrovi; disposizione che si attua in altri privati.” “In margine: Ostracismi,” L’Osservatore Romano, December 12–13, 1938, 6. 13  “A proposito di un nuovo Decreto Legge,” L’Osservatore Romano, November 14–15, 1938, 1. See Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, 334.

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The article was subtle and keen. In fact, it noticed that the measure against Jewish theatre-goers was not only harsh in and of itself, but ended up having a wider effect as it discouraged all Jews from participating in performances, attending public places and even visiting shops. The Holy See newspaper then continued with other critical observations, not only defining this measure as illegitimate (as it was both the “violation of an actual contract” and “limitation to the nature and function of a public place”), but even as contradictory compared to the campaign “in defense of the race”: which, on the basis of the Manifesto dated July 14, excludes the existence of inferior and superior races; excludes every and any absurd imitation; is inspired, for that which particularly regards the Jews, by a principle that the Italian Ministry of National Education (certainly the most credible institute for expressing the guiding thoughts of the said reforms) has nobly declared in its speech of October 28; it deals with a distinction, with a separation, as it were; but not persecution.14

Even in this instance, L’Osservatore Romano touched upon a delicate issue. The Vatican newspaper made reference to declarations following those of L”Informazione diplomatica n. 18 on August 5, 1938: “discriminating does not mean persecuting.”15 Even Minister Bottai publicly expressed himself using these terms. On October 16, on an occasion marking the beginning of the school year, he declared: At the beginning of the new school year, it (the school) has already prepared its staff, excluding and separating elements that are racially extraneous. 14  “La quale [l’attuale questione razzistica], in base al manifesto del 14 luglio, esclude l’esistenza di razze inferiori e superiori; esclude ogni e qualsiasi assurda imitazione; si ispira, per quel che riguarda particolarmente gli ebrei, ad un principio che il Ministro dell’Educazione Nazionale – certo il più accreditato all’uopo nell’esprimere il pensiero informatore di siffatte riforme – ha nobilmente dichiarato in un suo discorso del 28 ottobre: si tratta di distinzione, di separazione, se volete; non di persecuzione.” “In margine: Ostracismi,” L’Osservatore Romano, December 12–13, 1938, 6. 15  Michele Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei: Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, new and enl. ed. (Turin: S. Zamorani, 2017), 41–42. For the elaboration of this document, see Giorgio Fabre, “Uno sconosciuto articolo razzista di Mussolini (con una nota sui suoi autografi),” Quaderni di storia, no. 65 (January-June 2007): 129–177.

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Without controversial debates that would be, within its sphere, inappropriate […]. Its separation from the Jews is literally and substantially a separation. It does not intend to be either a persecution or a mortification.16

It is likely that Bottai uttered similar words during his speech of October 28, mentioned by L’Osservatore Romano (the text of which has not been found). Hence, the newspaper referred to what the Minister had affirmed in hoping that the Jews would not be deprived of the opportunity to attend theatre performances and concerts. The newspaper of the Holy See apparently did not take into account the very harsh provisions that even Bottai had adopted against the Jews as part of his ministry.17 In any case, according to L’Osservatore Romano, banishing the presence of an Israelite or a “non Aryan” from a public place represented a violation on the “basis of principle, intention, method of Italian ‘racism’”: We find ourselves confronted not with authoritative and authorized actions, but arbitrary extensions of interpretation: which, being contradictory to current provisions, are mostly illicit; which being practically inapplicable […], these racist exasperations actually turn out to be useless.18

Described as an “excessive and humiliating ostracism,” a “deformation” of the law, these provisions were not only useless but unfair, contrary to civil solidarity and Christian charity. While that of the Vatican newspaper was not an unconditional refusal of anti-Semitic legislation, but only of its “racist exasperations,” it was nonetheless a quite clear pronouncement against the spreading of racist fanaticism in Italian society.

16  “All’inizio del suo nuovo anno, essa [la Scuola] ha già predisposti i suoi quadri, sceverandone e separandone gli elementi razzialmente estranei. Senza furori polemici, che sarebbero, nella sua sfera, inopportuni […] La sua separazione dagli ebrei è, letteralmente e sostanzialmente, una separazione. Non vuol essere né una persecuzione, né una mortificazione. “Si riaprono le scuole,” in Giuseppe Bottai, La carta della scuola (Milan: Mondadori, 1939), 208–209 (radio conversation dated October 16, 1938, IX). 17  Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, 151–157; Giorgio Fabre, L’elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei (Turin: S. Zamorani, 1998), 126–128. 18  “Ci troviamo di fronte non già ad atti autorevoli ed autorizzati, ma ad arbitrarie estensioni interpretative: le quali per esser contraddittorie con le norme vigenti, sono per di più illecite; che per essere praticamente inapplicabili […], queste esasperazioni razzistiche, tornano, in realtà, inutili.” L’Osservatore Romano, December 12–13, 1938, 6.

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Regarding the “speech by one Italian senator” that The New York Times mentioned in the article of December 30, the reference was to the declarations offered by Marquis Filippo Crispolti during the course of a Senate session dedicated to the approval of anti-Semitic provisions on December 20, 1938.19 This is confirmed by another article published by the American newspaper on December 26.20 During his speech, according to official minutes of the session, Crispolti specified that he would have voted in favor of the decrees: “I am about to calmly cast my ballots into the urn,” he said in fact, in closing his speech; but in the meanwhile he also expressed a few “practical recommendations” to avoid government provisions assuming “the aspect of some kind of persecution.” However, his position did not imply any criticism of anti-­ Jewish decrees, but only proposed some “adjustments”. As Vittorio Foa (an anti-fascist born to a Jewish family) wrote in one of his letters from prison on December 18, 1938, on the subject of one of Crispolti’s previous interventions, “the more than octogenarian racist Senator Filippo Crispolti tries to reconcile his conscience (let’s call it as such) as an orthodox Catholic with his Italian sentiments (let’s call them as such).”21 Crispolti touched upon three issues: he advocated a benevolent attitude towards “deserving” Jews from the regime’s point of view, on the basis of a loathsome consideration: “sometimes it is only fair to separate a few individuals who perhaps do not resemble the others from an affected mass of people”; he sided with the Concordat on the subject of mixed marriages: “we should seek and find a way to practically avoid any nick to the 19  Filippo Crispolti (1857–1942) was a Catholic journalist and politician, a former deputy of the Partito Popolare party and subsequently prominent figure of “Clerico-Fascism”. See Matteo Baragli, Filippo Crispolti: Un profilo politico fra cattolicesimo e nazione (1857–1942) (Milan: Morcelliana, 2018). The declaration of votes towards laws “for the defence of the race” was Crispolti’s final speech at the Senate. On Crispolti’s speech, see Bruno Di Porto, “La temuta protesta dei senatori ebrei per le leggi antiebraiche,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 64, no. 2 (May–August 1998): 75–76 and 79–80; Baragli, Filippo Crispolti, 401–407. The substantially verbatim account of the remarks made by senators has been published in La persecuzione degli ebrei durante il fascismo: Le leggi del 1938 (Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1998), 164–170; Crispolti’s speech is on p. 167. 20  “‘No Jews Wanted’ Sign Appears in Trieste Café,” New York Times, December 26, 1938, 24. 21  “Il razzista più che ottuagenario senatore Filippo Crispolti cerca di conciliare la sua coscienza (chiamiamola così) di cattolico ortodosso coi suoi sentimenti italiani (chiamiamoli così).” Vittorio Foa, Lettere della giovinezza: Dal carcere 1935–1943, ed. Federica Montevecchi (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), 531–532.

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monumental Lateran Pact”; he requested curbing persecutory excesses, in full accordance with what had been sustained the previous week by the newspaper of the Holy See: the Government should seek to discourage those who, using private or press initiatives or free associations, with the aim of implementing measures not provided for by law, attempt to exacerbate the struggle by turning some Jews into the subject of bitterness and humiliations, albeit by way of pinpricks; so, while the collection of decrees is a framework of precautions, the arbitrary frame (of which, at times, here and there, such a context is involved), threatens to make it seem a sort of persecution. I would say that this is generally the work of the zealous, for whom I cannot disguise my abhorrence in every field, since the zealous are the plague of every cause, for their pure yet unbridled enthusiasm, for their secret speculation of hence improving their own fortune, and ultimately for an intrinsic vanity that makes them use all means to thrust forward and impress.22

That reference to the “measures not covered by law that attempt to exacerbate the struggle by turning some Jews into the subject of bitterness and humiliations” fit in exactly with the provisions La Scala had adopted against Jewish subscribers, and which the Vatican newspaper had criticized a few days earlier. On December 30, the news regarding Kleiber’s sensational resignation was also reported by the Italian press. Corriere della Sera, in its theatre column (“Corriere dei teatri”) published La Scala’s news release, but without offering further explanations or comments: The Superintendence moreover communicates: […] Orchestra conductor Erik Kleiber, regularly employed by the theatre for staging and conducting Beethoven’s Fidelio, has not shown up for the scheduled orchestra rehearsals, claiming absurd racial motivations to justify non-adherence to his 22  “Il Governo cerchi di scoraggiare coloro che con iniziative private o di stampa o di associazioni libere, per attuar misure non contemplate dalla legge, cercano d’inacerbire la lotta col fare oggetto alcuni ebrei di certe asprezze e umiliazioni, sia pure a colpi di spillo; cosicché, mentre il complesso dei decreti è un quadro di precauzioni, la cornice arbitraria, di cui talvolta e qua e là un tal quadro viene involto, minaccia di dargli l’aspetto di una qualche persecuzione. Dirò che questa in genere è l’opera degli zelanti, dei quali non posso tacere il mio profondo aborrimento in ogni campo, perché gli zelanti sono la peste di ogni causa, sia per entusiasmo puro ma sfrenato, sia per calcolo segreto di migliorare così la propria fortuna, sia finalmente per una vanità congenita che li butta a tutti i modi per farsi belli cacciandosi avanti.” La persecuzione degli ebrei durante il fascismo: Le leggi del 1938, 167.

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commitments. The Superintendence has summoned German orchestra conductor Wilhelm Sieben for staging and conducting Fidelio.23

In the meanwhile, Kleiber (according to what was later recalled by his biographer John Russell) closely followed the progression of the situation and the reactions aroused by his gesture: in December 1938 he withdrew from an agreement to conduct Fidelio at the Scala having heard that no Jews would be admitted to the performance. It was in the little Villa Les Anémones in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin that he sat out the storms [emphasis added] this provoked—and watched, too, the evolution of events in Austria.24

Behind the Scenes and Development of a Protest Erich Kleiber’s refusal to conduct Fidelio at La Scala in December 1938 because Jews were forbidden to attend performances at the Milanese theatre was a circumscribed example of dissent expressed by figures in the world of culture (in this case, in the field of music) against fascist anti-­ Jewish persecution. But it is also a very relevant case study. In the analysis of this event, one must bear in mind two fundamental circumstances that fostered Kleiber’s position (I shall be making reference to a third and crucial circumstance at the end): the fame he enjoyed at the international level and the fact that he lived outside Italy (but he was hired to conduct in Italian theatres). But this does not diminish the remarkable nature of his public gesture. All the more, when considering that the great orchestra director was not Jewish,25 but a practicing Catholic. It was a fact 23  “La Sovrintendenza inoltre comunica: […] Il maestro Erik Kleiber, regolarmente scritturato dal teatro per la concertazione e la direzione del Fidelio di Beethoven, non si è presentato per le prove d’orchestra prestabilite adducendo assurde motivazioni razziali a giustificazione del non adempiuto suo impegno. La Sovrintendenza ha chiamato il maestro tedesco Wilhelm Sieben per la concertazione e direzione del Fidelio.” Corriere della Sera, December 30, 1938, 6. See also “Alla Scala,” Il Popolo d’Italia, December 30, 1938, 4. 24  Russell, Erich Kleiber, 167. 25  In his biography of Carlos Kleiber, journalist and author Alexander Werner wrote that Ruth Goodrich, Erich Kleiber’s American wife and mother of Carlos, was Jewish. Alexander Werner, Carlos Kleiber: Eine Biografie (Mainz: Schott, 2008), 19, 24. In an exchange of emails with the undersigned (September 4–11, 2015), Werner confirmed this assumption, declaring he got the information from a “church document” (marriage certificate?) and other sources, but that he cannot send me a copy or provide me with information that could

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that was underlined by the Jewish press of the time, which tied Kleiber’s name to that of another star in the international music universe, namely Italian orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini who was famous for his anti-­ Nazi, anti-fascist and pro-Jewish positions.26 I wish to open a brief parenthesis and recall two cases of prominent figures on the international music scene who voiced their protests (as Jews) against the onset of the racist campaign by hand of the Fascist government. The first one is well-known27 and regards the famous Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982): in September 1938 Rubinstein cancelled his Italian tour and returned the decoration of Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy that had been bestowed upon him. He also dispatched a telegram to Mussolini in which he explained his gesture: “in view of your injustice towards my race” (“en vue Votre injustice envers ma race”), signing himself as “Arthur Rubinstein, Jewish pianist” (“Arthur Rubinstein, pianiste juif”).28 The musician was subjected to violent attacks

help me in retrieving them. Ruth Goodrich’s presumed Jewish origins have been resolutely denied to the undersigned by her daughter, the late Veronica Kleiber, during the course of a telephone conversation (October 16, 2015) and later during a meeting that took place in Milan on October 31, 2015. In the absence of documentary evidence, it is impossible to pronounce a definitive statement on this issue. 26  On Toscanini, see Harvey Sachs, Toscanini, Musician of Conscience (New York: Liveright, 2017); Arturo Toscanini dal 1915 al 1946: L’arte all’ombra della politica, mostra documentaria curata da Harvey Sachs (Arturo Toscanini, 1915–1946: Art in the Shadow of Politics, documentary exhibition organized by Harvey Sachs) (Turin: EDT/Musica, 1987). In September 1938, Toscanini expressed his disgust at the anti-Jewish laws in a wiretapped conversation with a woman friend: “[Jewish] children can’t go to school … This is Medieval stuff!” Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 232; ACS, MI, Divisione Polizia Politica, Fascicoli Personali, 26 B. Mussolini ordered his passport to be withdrawn, and it was returned to him one month later. Once Toscanini retrieved his documents, he set sail for the United States along with some of his family members. His daughter Wanda, who was married to the Russian-Jewish pianist Vladimir Horowitz, was already living abroad. 27  Renzo De Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, trans. Robert L. Miller (New York: Enigma Books, 2001), 329; Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 301–302; Harvey Sachs, Rubinstein: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 262. 28   ACS, PCM, Gabinetto (1937–1939), folder 2296, file 3.2.2.5441.7, Rome. “Restituzione di onorificenze, decorazioni, ecc. da parte di ebrei stranieri.” The autograph telegram is owned by Fundación Albéniz, Madrid, Fondo Rubinstein Papers and is available online at: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/11001/79A6B12912690C47C4A71 DD90C9236CABF1C60F9.html, accessed July 13, 2016. See also Arthur Rubinstein, My Many Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 443.

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by the anti-Semitic Fascist newspaper Il Tevere;29 even in his case, just like for Kleiber, his protest was reported by the foreign press.30 The reaction of the New  York-born soprano Natalie Bodanya (1908–2007)31 is less well known, although at the time it was reported by the American press (both Jewish and non-Jewish).  In September 1938, the star of the Metropolitan Opera (according to the definition of the The Jewish Exponent) cancelled her participation in the Venice Music Festival and provided the following reasons in doing so: “It is difficult for a young singer to refuse to sing for a people she loves and in a country so rich in vocal traditions, but being a Jew I feel I must, after news of measures the Italian Government recently has taken.”32 For the same reason, according to what The New York Times recalled in her obituary, Bodanya refused to perform in Milan as well.33 But, meanwhile, we shall discuss the aspects that make the Kleiber case such a particularly relevant one. First aspect. This is an incident that, in a certain sense, has been “forgotten” for seventy years. Or rather it has been recalled in the obituaries and biographies of the great orchestra conductor and his son Carlos, in turn a very important orchestra conductor. But, for decades, it was never mentioned in reports on anti-Jewish persecution in Italy and especially not in reports regarding the field of music: until the incident was

29  In the issue dated 9–10 September 9–10, 1938, Il Tevere published a photograph of Rubinstein on the first page, with the caption: “The Jew Arturo Rubinstein has returned the title of Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy granted to him a few years ago to our government. We can apply to him what was previously said about Enrico Bernstein.” Regarding the French playwright Henri Bernstein, who had also voiced his protests against anti-Semitic persecution and had (in turn) given back the title of Knight of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus, a few days earlier Il Tevere reprimanded him for not having surrendered the copyright royalties accrued in Italy. 30  “Rubinstein Cancels His Concerts in Italy: Polish Pianist Refuses to Play Because of Anti-Jewish Laws,” The New York Times, September 17, 1938, 20; Sachs, Rubinstein, 262. 31  On Natalie Bodanya (born Bodanskaya), see the obituaries published in The New York Times (March 10, 2007) and The Los Angeles Times (March 15, 2007). 32  “Refuses to Sing in Italy: Natalie Bodanya Acts Because of Anti-Jewish Measures,” The New York Times, September 15, 1938, 28. The news also appeared in the Philadelphia weekly Jewish Exponent: “Metropolitan Opera Star Cancels Italian Performance,” The Jewish Exponent, September 30, 1938, 11. 33  “In 1938 she canceled engagements in Venice and Milan to protest the Italian government’s anti-Semitic measures.” Anne Midgette, “Natalie Bodanya, 98, Soprano at Metropolitan, Dies,” The New York Times, March 10, 2007, C10.

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mentioned by Sandro Gerbi in 200434 and then by myself in my essay published in 2008. The oblivion that befell the episode is peculiar, considering that manifestations of dissent towards Fascist anti-Semitic persecution expressed in public by non-Jewish intellectuals (both Italian and foreign) were very few. Moreover, Kleiber’s reaction aroused quite a stir on a vast scale, thanks to the news being spread by important news agencies and international newspapers. In addition to the aforementioned Washington Post and New York Times, the incident was also reported by The Manchester Guardian,35 The Telegraph,36 The Times,37 Le Temps38 and the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.39 The news soon bounced back onto local American newspapers such as The Milwaukee Journal40 and in the Australian press.41 Of course, it was highlighted in the Jewish press: The Jewish Telegraphic Agency,42 Palestine Post,43 Jewish Chronicle44 and The Jewish Advocate45— the Jewish weekly magazine published in Boston. Reports were also made in April 1939 by the classical music journal called The Musical Times, within the “Musical Notes from Abroad” column.46 Even Giuseppe Gaddi (1909-1982), an antifascist exile in Paris, mentioned Kleiber’s protest in his pro-Jewish pamphlet entitled Racism in Italy, which appeared in 1939 both in Italian (Il razzismo in Italia) and in French (Le racisme en Italie),

 Sandro Gerbi, “I volenterosi cronisti di Mussolini,” Il Sole 24ore, January 25, 2004, 37.  “Italy’s Boycott of the Jews: A Conductor’s Protest,” The Manchester Guardian, January 11, 1939, 18. 36  “A Conductor’s Protest: Italian Contract Cancelled, Treatment of Jews Resented,” The Daily Telegraph, December 29, 1938, 8. 37  “Conductor’s Boycott of Anti-Jewish Italy,” The Times, December 31, 1938, 11. 38  “Échos et informations: A la Scala de Milan,” Le Temps, February 20, 1939, 5. 39  Quoted in Gerbi, “I volenterosi cronisti di Mussolini.” 40  “Kleiber Rebukes La Scala for Its Ban Upon Jews,” The Milwaukee Journal, December 29, 1938, 18. 41   Amongst the various newspapers reporting the news of Kleiber’s protest: Age (Melbourne), January 21, 1939, 10; West Australian (Perth), February 4, 1939, 8. 42  “Kleiber Quits La Scala, Protesting Anti-Jewish Bias,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency News, January 1, 1939, 6. 43  “Conductor Refuses Milan Honour Because Opera House Boycotts Jews,” The Palestine Post, January 24, 1939, 3. 44  “Herr Kleiber’s Protest,” The Jewish Chronicle, January 13, 1939, 18. 45  Jules Wolffers, “Music in Review: Kleiber Breaks Italian Contract,” Jewish Advocate, January 6, 1939, 12. 46  The Musical Times 80, no. 1154 (April 1939): 306. 34 35

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with a preface by Bernard Lecache, president of the International league against racism and anti-Semitism.47 As for The Jewish Chronicle, the prestigious British newspaper gave news of Kleiber’s protest on January 13, 1939, in a short article titled “Threat to Anti-Racialists.” The article, in one paragraph, also made mention of the protests voiced by another non-Jewish intellectual, in this case an Italian one, namely the philosopher Benedetto Croce.48 During the summer of 1938, he addressed a letter to one of his Swedish correspondents, which was published at the beginning of October in The Palestine Post. In December, when the news was spreading extensively, the Fascist press railed against the philosopher, accusing him of “pietismo”49 and of having taken sides with Italy’s enemies; the incident received wide coverage in foreign newspapers.50 Whereas on January 6 The Jewish Advocate commented that Kleiber’s stand had placed him alongside Christian musicians such as Toscanini, who demonstrated that they were not only great musicians, but also great men: All this needs very little editorial comment―the facts speak for themselves. It is natural for a Jew to show his hatred of intolerance, but for a Christian to give up wealth and honors in order to protest against injustice which may not concern him directly, shows great courage and principle. Kleiber has

47  Giuseppe Gaddi, Il razzismo in Italia, pref. Bernard Lecache (Paris: Edizioni della Lega italiana contro il razzismo e l’antisemitismo, 1939), 26: “La direzione della Scala di Milano ha ritirato agli ebrei le tessere di abbonamento che essi avevano acquistato per la stagione lirica.” On Gaddi, see Michele Sarfatti, “Il razzismo in Italia: Prime reazioni del fuoriuscitismo italiano in Francia,” Qualestoria 16, no. 2 (1988), 5–38; Alessandro Casellato, Giuseppe Gaddi: Storia di un rivoluzionario disciplinato (Sommacampagna, Verona: Cierre Edizioni, 2004). 48  “Benedetto Croce as ‘Jew Slave.’” The Jewish Chronicle, January 13, 1939, 18. 49  The Italian word “pietismo” may be translated as “compassion for the oppressed,” see Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922–1945 (Oxford: Published for the Institute of Jewish Affairs, London by the Clarendon Press: 1978), 294; as well as “pity as a contemptible connivance with the defeated,” according to Fascist propaganda, see Hector J. Ritey, The Human Kingdom: A Study of the Nature and Destiny of Man in the Light of Today’s Knowledge (New York and London: Jason Aronson, 1984), 403. 50  Annalisa Capristo, “ ‘Oltre i limiti’: Benedetto Croce e un appello svedese in favore degli ebrei perseguitati,” Quaderni di storia, no. 70 (July–December 2009): 145–179.

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now aligned himself with Toscanini and those other Christian musicians who have shown themselves to be not only great musicians but great men.51

Second aspect that makes the Kleiber event so important. The protest voiced by the great conductor sheds some light on a mechanism that was characteristic of persecution: the exacerbation of ongoing legislation, as the result of extensive interpretation on the part of single individuals and institutions. In fact, the R.d.l. decree dated November 17, 1938, n. 1728, subsequently converted into a law without modifications to the same (Law January 5, 1939, n. 274), prescribed the exclusion of Jews from all public administration staff and from institutions under the control of state funding, from provincial and municipal offices; these also included musical and theatre institutions, which received precise instructions also entailing Jewish musicians and singers.52 One of the foreign singers who could no longer perform in Italian theatres was a young and promising American soprano named Sylvia Brema (1917-1986).53 She arrived in Florence in March 1938 after having been invited by maestro Mario Labroca to attend courses in the Centro di Avviamento al Teatro Lirico established on the premises of the municipal theatre in the Tuscan capital; she was supposed to complete her training period by participating in some performances staged during the Florentine opera season. But the enactment of anti-Semitic provisions harshly interrupted her artistic projects: the young singer, who found it impossible 51  Jules Wolffers, “Music in Review. Kleiber Breaks Italian Contract: Famed Christian Conductor Assails Discrimination,” The Jewish Advocate, January 6, 1939, 12. 52  On La Fenice Opera House in Venice, see Gli ebrei a Venezia 1938–1945: Una comunità tra persecuzione e rinascita, ed. Renata Segre (Venice: Il Cardo, 1995), 70–72; Luca Lévi Sala, “Propaganda, Negotiations, and Antisemitism at the Teatro La Fenice, 1937–43: Proscription Lists and Other Unpublished Documents,” Journal of Musicological Research, 33, no. 4 (October 2014): 297–301. In 1942 all the legislative and administrative measures regarding the entertainment sector (the theater, music, cinema and radio) were collected in a specific law (L. 517/1942). See Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, 156. 53  Documents regarding Sylvia Brema are kept in the Teatro Comunale di Firenze and Maggio musicale fiorentino Archives, series no. 143 (papers 23–32) and no. 174 (papers 14–17). I wish to thank the curator of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Historical Archives, Moreno Bucci, for his assistance during my research. A note present in these documents states Sylvia Brema’s date of birth (New York, August 14, 1917) and the names of her parents “Carph Berman and Esther Glauberman”; her date of death was obtained from the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), consulted on http://www.genealogybank.com/.

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to work and continue her studies in Italy and (being a foreign Jew) was exposed to the threat of expulsion, decided to immediately return to the United States. Labroca wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for her on October 18. It was addressed to the director of the Metropolitan Opera, Mr. Johnson, clearly explaining the reasons for Brema’s missed debut in Italy because of the enactment of “current provisions on the subject of race.” Upon her return to New York on November 2, Sylvia Brema found a swarm of reporters awaiting her, but in her interviews (which were published in various newspapers)54 she simply expressed her displeasure for not having made her debut, without voicing any critical judgement on Italian fascism. Whereas in Italy, on December 31, 1938, reporting on the news about the imminent inauguration of the concert season, the Il Telegrafo newspaper in Leghorn (belonging to the Ciano family) applauded the liberation of the Florentine music environment from “Judaic stardom,” specifically referring to the exclusion of “soloists, conductors, performers, composers and directors of the Jewish race.”55 As we have seen, however, in December 1938 the Milan theatre went well beyond what was required by law. In fact, it announced the withdrawal of season tickets to the public (namely to Jewish subscribers), who had to show up at the ticket office and return their tickets, for which they would have been reimbursed for the fees that had already been paid. The announcement of this humiliating rigmarole (which, among other things, constituted a double exception to the rule as it did not provide for 54  Sylvia Brema wrote to Labroca on November 25, 1938, telling him about the reporters who were awaiting her when she landed in New York. She confirmed that she had kept with instructions to avoid emphasizing the reasons for her return, but the press had already been informed. She enclosed two newspaper clippings published on November 3 by The New York Times (“Soprano, 19, Barred by Italians, Is Back: Says Her Contract Was Voided Because She Is a Jew,”) and by The New York Herald (“Jewess, Barred From Opera in Italy, Returns,”). On November 11 the news of her dismissal was also reported by The Jewish Exponent (“American Jewess’ Scholarship Cancelled by Italy”). Mario Labroca made no reference to this in his memoir, L’usignolo di Boboli: Cinquant’anni di vita musicale italiana (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1959). 55  “La stagione sinfonica al Teatro Comunale Vitt. Em. II,” Il Telegrafo, December 31, 1938, quoted in Leonardo Pinzauti, Il Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (Florence: Vallecchi, 1967), 64 and Id., Storia del Maggio: Dalla nascita della “Stabile” Orchestrale Fiorentina (1928) al festival del 1993 (Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana, 1994), 49. In 2007 the late Professor Pinzauti was kind enough to send me a copy of the clipping. The article was also mentioned by Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, 186.

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reimbursement of season tickets) was given on the sly, in a short article published in the theatre column of the Corriere della Sera newspaper. But it aroused international reactions, certainly beyond the intentions of La Scala management. It was the ostracism decreed against Jewish people even in the audience, and not only amongst the staff, that aroused Kleiber’s outraged reaction in a message that was read around the world. So, over the next few days, La Scala was forced to respond. It did so through a misleading press release, which accused the great orchestra conductor of unjustified breach of contract. And that’s not all: according to a report by The Washington Post and evidently in an attempt at limiting the damage and avoiding international discredit, management of the Milan theatre resorted to a ploy that confirmed (instead of denied) the arbitrary discriminatory measure. In fact, as we have already seen, La Scala claimed that season subscriptions were precluded to Jews, but that they could purchase tickets for single performances. In other words: they were allowed to attend performances, but only anonymously. At the current state of knowledge, we do not know whether the initiative of La Scala had been conceived independently or whether it was the result of a directive imparted by higher echelons; whether it was simply an isolated case, or whether other theatres were behaving in the same manner—namely revoking season tickets from their subscribers. To this extent, the British newspaper The Observer (which immediately reported the news on December 11) predicted that La Scala’s example would soon be followed by other Italian theatres.56 But we do know that the inauguration of the opera season in at least one of the other Italian theatres during that same period was characterized by the “absolute absence of Jewish audiences.” Evidence in this sense is offered by an entry written in the register of the Trieste Opera House (Teatro Verdi), which is preserved in the theatre’s historical archives, at the Civico Museo Teatrale “Carlo Schmidl”. Under the date January 8, 1939, with reference to the premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s Trovatore, it states: “Despite an absolute absence of Jewish audiences, the theatre had a shiny appearance, with all of its seats occupied from top to bottom.”57 56  “The example of the Scala is likely to be followed elsewhere in Italy.” “Ban on Jews at Italian Opera,” The Observer, December 11, 1938, 16. 57  “Malgrado l’assoluta assenza del pubblico ebraico, il teatro presentava un aspetto brillante, occupato da cima a fondo in tutti gli ordini dei posti.” Libro cronaca giornaliero del

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The only concern that can be sensed between the lines is that the theatre preserve its “shiny appearance,” despite its then being Judenfrei. We do not know whether there was a ban (either official or unofficial) even in Trieste for Jewish subscribers (nothing to this effect was mentioned in the local Il Piccolo newspaper), but the effect must have been the same as Milan: namely the disappearance of “Jewish audiences.” In any case, other theatres might have followed La Scala’s lead without issuing an official announcement in the press: access to Jewish audiences might have been forbidden simply by putting up signs—as occurred in stores, coffee shops and movie theatres in many Italian cities.58 The third aspect that should be underlined regarding La Scala events is the complicated Catholic intervention that followed publication of the announcement in Corriere della Sera. Based on some new documentary research, as well as on already known documents and the newspapers of the day, I propose herein a new reconstruction of the whole affair: Catholic intervention was a determining factor in Kleiber’s decision. We have already seen that restitution of theatre season tickets by the Jews and even their exclusion from “public meeting-places” and performances seemed to be a measure so unnecessarily vexatious as to urge the newspaper of the Holy See to a reaction (albeit a cautious one). There is the possibility that the commentary entitled “Ostracismi” had been directly inspired by Pope Pius XI. While commenting on this article, American historian Susan Zuccotti expressed a substantially negative opinion, as she believed that it involved a protest that “allowed the Church to plea for moderation and take a Teatro Verdi. Vol. 1928–1941, Archivio Teatro Verdi-Civico Museo Teatrale “Carlo Schmidl,” Trieste). Silva Bon made reference to the document in her book Gli ebrei a Trieste 1930–1945: Identità, persecuzione, risposte (Trieste: Istituto regionale per la storia del movimento di liberazione nel Friuli-Venezia Giulia; Gorizia, Libreria Editrice Goriziana, 2000), 132, 144n. I wish to thank the Archive for sending me a copy of it. 58  “The placards announcing ‘This is an Aryan shop’ and ‘Jews are not welcome in this locale,’ placed on stores and café windows and reproduced in newspapers everywhere in the country in December 1938, struck painfully at those targeted as ‘unwelcome.’” Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, 158, 356. The news regarding Trieste was reported also by The New York Times “‘No Jews Wanted’ Sign Appears in Trieste Café,” December 26, 1938, 24. In Ancona, a notice “Jews not wanted” was even affixed at the entrance of a movie theatre, according to the newspaper Corriere Adriatico “Giudei alla porta,” January 6, 1939, quoted in Luca Garbini, “Ancona 1938–1940: Note e percorsi di ricerca sull’antisemitismo nelle istituzioni,” Storia e problemi contemporanei 7, no. 14 (October 1994): 54. See also Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, 356.

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moral and humanitarian stand with little risk to its primary objectives,” that is “a modification of the marriage law and enlarged rights for converts,” as well as the existence of the Catholic Action.59 But in light of the new documents that have emerged from recent studies and the reactions that the article had in the Fascist and American press, I believe that some interesting considerations may be made. First and foremost, we learn from some handwritten notes in the files of the Secretariat of State regarding this article,60 that it was not inspired by the agency of Vatican diplomacy. On the contrary, the Secretariat of State advanced serious reservations about the subject. This comment, which was written alongside the article published on December 12 on the pages of L’Osservatore Romano, stated: “Does that seem appropriate? … for performances? … It seems too strong.” (“Sembra proprio opportuno? … per spettacoli? … Sembra troppo forte”). Underneath this comment there is another one written by a different hand, dated December 13: “Quite right” (“Giustissimo”). It can be assumed, but there is no certainty about it, that the first handwriting belonged to Domenico Tardini (then Secretary of the Secretariat of State for Extraordinary Affairs), while the second comment was written by the Secretary of State and future Pope Pacelli, who we assume was directly responding to his subordinate Tardini. In any case, the article published by L’Osservatore Romano aroused some uncertainties in the Secretariat of State. The reason was obviously that, in that specific moment 59  “Italian Jews at the time may have been grateful for this small expression of support. However, when Jews throughout the country were losing jobs, property, and the right to attend public schools, it seems strange that the Vatican newspaper chose theater subscriptions as the sole target of its criticism on humanitarian ground […]. There is, of course, a better explanation of the article. Even as late as December 1938, Vatican officials were reluctant to oppose the government’s anti-Jewish policies because they still hoped to obtain a modification of the marriage law and enlarged rights for converts. A real confrontation with Mussolini would not only prevent future concessions on those special issues but might endanger other privileges obtained by the Lateran Accords, especially the existence of the Catholic Action. Cancellation of Jewish theater subscriptions, however, was a private initiative rather than a government policy, and it could be criticized with relative impunity. Opposition to it allowed the Church to plea for moderation and take a moral and humanitarian stand with little risk to its primary objectives and responsibilities.” Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 53. 60  ASS, AES, Italia, Pos. 1054, fasc. 728, foglio 44. These notes have already been reported (with some inaccuracies) by Elena Mazzini, Ostilità convergenti: Stampa diocesana, razzismo e antisemitismo nell‘Italia fascista (1937–1939) (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2013), 120–121.

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in time, the Vatican authority believed more important issues were being aroused by the racist campaign—and audiences being allowed to view theatre performances was not one of them. In particular, they were then more concerned about the question of mixed marriages. But, on the other hand, there weren’t many in the Vatican who could inspire an article of such a scale on L’Osservatore Romano, and on such a delicate subject. Excluding the Secretariat of State and, except for an improbable decision by the newspaper itself, it seems possible that the one who inspired the article was Pope Pius XI himself. Hence a coincidence is reported, which is perhaps nothing but casual: on December 11, 1938, at noon,61 the Pope received the podestà (Fascist unelected mayor) of Milan, the Catholic aristocrat Gian Giacomo Gallarati Scotti.62 He might have been the one who reported the measure adopted by La Scala. The next day the Vatican newspaper, which came out in the afternoon, published the commentary entitled “Ostracismi.” So there was all the time needed between the 11th and the morning of the 12th to write the article. Furthermore, comparing the article with documents regarding the agreement between the Holy See (namely the Pope) and Mussolini in August 1938 on the subject of the Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action) association, racism and Jews (reviewed and enriched with new documents by Giorgio Fabre)63 leads to the conclusion that the article written on December 12–13 was a clear shattering of the silence imposed by that agreement. To the point that it actually might have been the Pontiff’s

 AAV, Palazzo Apostolico, Prefettura, ottobre-dicembre 1938.  Compared to his brother Tommaso, who was an anti-fascist Catholic liberal (see Fulvio De Giorgi, “Tommaso Gallarati Scotti e l’opposizione liberaldemocratica al fascismo, 1922–1925,” Contemporanea 17 no. 2 (April 2014): 181–218), Gian Giacomo Gallarati Scotti (1886–1983) was a convinced fascist. Member of the National Fascist Party since 1922, Senator since 1934, Gian Giacomo Gallarati Scotti was nominated podestà of Milan in June 1938. On him, see Repertorio biografico dei Senatori dell’Italia fascista: E-L, eds. Emilio Gentile and Emilia Campochiaro (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2003), 1163–1164. Achille Ratti, then Pope Pius XI, was a friend of the Gallarati Scotti family; just one week before his death, the Pontiff met with Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, as the latter recalled in 1957. See Emma Fattorini, Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech That Was Never Made, trans. Carl Ipsen (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2011), 193–194. 63  Giorgio Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’,” Quaderni di storia, no. 76 (July– December 2012): 83–153. See also David I.  Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014), 305–312. 61 62

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reply to the failure of negotiations on the subject of mixed marriages. Hence discontent on the part of the Secretariat of State. The uproar that followed on the international press (both Jewish and non-Jewish) demonstrated the weight that a stand of the kind (albeit a measured one) by the Holy See on the subject of racism and anti-Semitism could have assumed. In Italy, in turn, the fascist newspaper Il Tevere responded to the article in L’Osservatore Romano in a short matter of time (December 14–15) with a mocking commentary titled “Pàlpito e pùlpito” (“Palpitation and pulpit”).64 Telesio Interlandi’s newspaper adopted a controversial ploy that was well tested by the Fascist press to defuse criticism of the Church towards anti-Jewish policies of the regime: it recalled centuries-old humiliations inflicted upon the Jews by popes, including forced sermons and the obligation of wearing a distinguishing mark (the yellow cap), to demonstrate how practices inspired by Catholic anti-Judaism were actually harsher that those “today causing so much heart palpitation”—namely the exclusion of Jews from theatres. It was the same argument (somewhere between mocking and intimidating) used by Mussolini during his meeting on August 16, 1938, with Father Tacchi Venturi that aroused the irritation of Pius XI when told of the events: as is well known, the terms of the agreement that had been reached involved Fascism respecting the Azione Cattolica association and in exchange the Church would remain silent on the subject of racism and Jews.65 When the press agency of the Holy See shattered its silence and criticized “racist exaggerations” of the new political course, symbolized by the banishment of Jews from theatres, Interlandi’s newspaper promptly  “Pàlpito e pùlpito,” Il Tevere December 14–15, 1938, 1.  Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, 85. The minutes of the meeting state that: “Regarding the Jews, the distinguishing caps of whatever colour will not be reinstated, nor will the ghettos, and far less there will not be any confiscation of properties. In summary, the Jews may be certain that they will not be subjected to treatment worse than that employed in their regards for centuries by the Popes who hosted them in the Eternal City and in the lands of their temporal domain” (“Quanto agli ebrei, non saranno ripristinati i berretti distintivi di qualsiasi colore, né i ghetti, e molto meno non vi saranno confische di beni. Gli ebrei, in una parola, possono essere sicuri che non saranno sottoposti a trattamento peggiore di quello usato loro per secoli e secoli dai Papi che li ospitarono nella Città eterna e nelle terre del loro temporale dominio”). Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, 87. 64 65

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proceeded in refuting criticism with very similar words to those used by the Head of government in the month of August. In this case, obviously the issue of theatres and music was slightly more than a pretext. But even that pretext could act as a detonator sparking an explosion and a conflict. The end of the article was particularly caustic, insinuating (moreover expressed using a quote from a book written by a Jewish author named Attilio Milano)66 that “so much heart palpitation” must have been caused by “financial constraints” between the Holy See and “Jewish Rothschild bankers.”67 Most probably Interlandi’s newspaper was hinting in a convoluted way to some news reported in foreign newspapers a few days earlier: in fact, on December 10 the international press (but not L’Osservatore Romano)68 gave the news of a telegram sent by Cardinal Pacelli in the name of Pope Pius XI to an important public event supporting the victims of racial and religious persecutions, which was staged in London on December 9.69 66  Attilio Milano, Ricerche sulle condizioni economiche degli ebrei a Roma durante la clausura del ghetto: 1555–1848 (Città di Castello: Tip. dell’Unione arti grafiche, 1931), originally published in La Rassegna mensile di Israel 5, nos. 9, 10/11, 12 (January–April 1931). Interlandi’s newspaper also cited an article written by Paul Gentizon, “Le drame d’Israël en Italie,” published in Revue universelle in Paris; the first part came out on December 1st (and it was the one mentioned by Il Tevere); while the second one was published on 15 December 1938. 67  “Therefore, what has caused such heart palpitations? A Jew, Attilio Milano, in his research on the Condizioni economiche degli ebrei a Roma says, speaking about the policies of the Popes: ‘In such a way, with assiduous sequence of events, the harshest oppressions were alleviated by the most unexpected facilitations, mostly agreed upon consequently to the inspiration of Jewish Rothschild bankers, closely bound to the Holy See by financial constraints’ (pg. 36).” (“Che è successo, dunque, che provoca oggi tanta palpitazione cardiaca? Un ebreo, Attilio Milano, nel suo studio sulle Condizioni economiche degli ebrei a Roma dice, parlando della politica dei Papi: ‘In tal modo, con assidua vicenda, le più dure oppressioni furono alleviate dalle più insperate facilitazioni, in gran parte accordate dietro ispirazione dei banchieri ebrei Rothschild, strettamente uniti alla Santa Sede da vincoli finanziari’ (pag. 36).” “Pàlpito e pùlpito,” Il Tevere, December 14–15, 1938, 1. 68  Valerio De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 2010), 236–237; Giovanni Coco, Il labirinto romano: il filo delle relazioni Chiesa-Stato tra Pio XI, Pacelli e Mussolini (1929–1939), pref. Emilio Gentile, vol. 2, (Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2019), 1054. 69  Regarding the episode, see Coco, Il labirinto romano, 1053–1054 and Suzanne Brown-­ Fleming, “November 1938: Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, and the Kristallnacht pogrom,” Jewish Historical Studies 46 (2014): 160–164. The Pope’s message transmitted by Pacelli’s telegram was very cautious and did not contain explicit reference to

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Papal intervention was requested by the Cardinal of Westminster, Arthur Hinsley, on November 26; he also attached a letter written by Lord Rothschild. And it was Lord Rothschild himself who read the Pope’s message on the premises of Mansion House.70 The article published in Il Tevere was resumed and relaunched on the 14 itself by the evening edition of the La Stampa newspaper in Turin (called Stampa Sera), in the latest news column, with the title “Jews at the Theatre: The Action Taken by La Scala Management and Newspaper Controversy” (“Gli Ebrei a teatro: Un gesto della Direzione della ‘Scala’ e una polemica di giornali”).71 And this is how other newspapers came to learn about La Scala events. Actually, it is most probable that Kleiber read the news in the Turin newspaper itself, since those days he was in the Piedmont capital conducting the EIAR orchestra.72 But at the margins of this story there’s another aspect that should be delved into. It regards the channels through which news of the famous conductor’s protest was spread. The hypothesis that I advanced in 2008 was that Kleiber himself had delivered the letter of protest he had sent to the Milanese theatre to press agencies.73 But it has presently been clarified that the background to the event was much more complicated. This can be derived from a letter anti-Jewish persecution, to Nazi Germany or to Italian fascism: “The Roman Pontiff casts a humane and Christian gaze upon every work of charity and assistance to the benefit of those who suffer and are afflicted undeservingly” (“Romano Pontefice mira con occhio umano e cristiano ogni opera di carità e di assistenza a vantaggio di quanti sono immeritatamente sofferenti ed afflitti”). Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, eds. Pierre Blet, Angelo Martini, and Burkhart Schneider, vol. 6: Le Sainte Siège et les victimes de la guerre, mars 1939-décembre 1940 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1972), 539. Translating the text into English, on December 10 The New York Times on page 6 published the title: “Pope Backs Britons on Aid to Refugees.” Whereas the Vienna edition of the Nazi Party newspaper called Völkischer Beobachter, published on December 11, recited: “Rothschild commands, Pius XI acts,” (“Rothschild befielht―Pius XI. handelt”: 1), also quoted in De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 237. 70  De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 276. 71  Stampa Sera December 14, 1938, 5. 72  “Teatro di Torino. Venerdì: Il quarto concerto sinfonico diretto da Kleiber,” Stampa Sera, December 14, 1938, 4. In his book on Carlos Kleiber, Alexander Werner mentions a letter that Erich Kleiber addressed to his wife Ruth, which was mailed from Turin on December 15, 1938, in which Kleiber senior spoke about the letter he had sent to La Scala in communicating his decision to refrain from conducting the orchestra of the Milanese theatre. Werner, Carlos Kleiber, 23. 73  Capristo, “La Scala, gli ebrei ed Erich Kleiber,” 179.

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addressed to the Editor of The Manchester Guardian, which the British newspaper published on January 11, 1939,74 and The Palestine Post resumed on January 24.75 The letter, sent from Milan and dated “January 8, 1939,” was signed with the pseudonym “Italiano” (“Italian”). The informer, who yet has to be identified, stated that Kleiber’s letter of protest was distributed thanks to what we would now call a “whistle blowing” operation: namely, it seems that the text of the telegram was made known to the outside by some anti-fascist La Scala employees and distributed through clandestine leaflets (at the cost of high risks). The anonymous informer connected this action to the political demonstrations that took place at La Scala during the Risorgimento, when the slogan “Viva Verdi” was chanted during anti-Austrian rallies. The letter to the British newspaper seems the result of a rather sophisticated operation: in fact, the author validated the existence of a protest against Fascism’s anti-Jewish policies where international élite intellectuals (in this case Kleiber, a famous foreign orchestra conductor with deep roots in Italian musical traditions) were welded to portions of Italian society that criticized the regime, in the name of the most authentic Italian political tradition (the Risorgimento). Finally, we should mention what the American Jewish Year Book reported on the subject, in the paragraph dedicated to Italy in the section called Review of the Year: Foreign Countries (1939-1940): “Pressure by patrons also caused the La Scala Opera House to rescind its order cancelling subscriptions to Jews.”76 We are not aware which source gave the American Jewish Committee magazine this information, or whether this was how they interpreted the 74  “Italy’s Boycott of the Jews: A Conductor’s Protest,” The Manchester Guardian, January 11, 1939, 18. The article reported an extract of Kleiber’s letter to La Scala that had not been mentioned by other newspapers, namely the one in which the orchestra conductor annulled his contract: “Therefore I beg you to consider my contract as void, although I would have the privilege and pleasure to conduct in the famous Scala theatre so rich with the noblest Italian traditions.” 75  “Conductor Refuses Milan Honor Because Opera House Boycott Jews,” The Palestine Post, January 24, 1939, 3. 76  American Jewish Year Book 41 (1939–1940), 291. The periodical reported the cancellation of season tickets on page 289: “This thoroughgoing legislation was supplemented by a great many rules and edicts, private and official, too numerous for description here. On December 14, for example, the La Scala Opera House decided to cancel subscriptions to all Jews.” See also The Jewish Advocate, August 4, 1939, 4, “The world-famed La Scala Opera was compelled by public opinion to rescind the order barring Jews.”

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news published by The Washington Post regarding the denial provided by La Scala or those of The Manchester Guardian and The Palestine Post. But one cannot rule out that the uproar aroused by the ultra-racist withdrawal of season tickets had actually led La Scala into a partial turnabout.

Bibliography Blet, Pierre, Angelo Martini, and Burkhart Schneider, eds. Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Vol. 6: Le Sainte Siège et les victimes de la guerre, mars 1939-décembre 1940. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1972. Baragli, Matteo. Filippo Crispolti: Un profilo politico fra cattolicesimo e nazione (1857-1942). Milan: Morcelliana, 2018. Bon, Silva. Gli ebrei a Trieste 1930-1945: Identità, persecuzione, risposte. Trieste: Istituto regionale per la storia del movimento di liberazione nel Friuli-Venezia Giulia; Gorizia: Libreria Editrice Goriziana, 2000. Bottai, Giuseppe. La carta della scuola. Milan: Mondadori, 1939. Brown-Fleming, Suzanne. “November 1938: Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, and the Kristallnacht pogrom.” Jewish Historical Studies 46 (2014): 155–166. Capristo, Annalisa. “La Scala, gli ebrei ed Erich Kleiber: Una vicenda antisemita del dicembre 1938.” Quaderni di Storia, no. 67 (January–June 2008): 205–220. ———. “‘Oltre i limiti’: Benedetto Croce e un appello svedese in favore degli ebrei perseguitati.” Quaderni di Storia, no. 70 (July–December 2009): 145–179. ———. “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale.” In Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, edited by Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva, 365–381. Milan: IAML Italia, 2018. Casellato, Alessandro. Giuseppe Gaddi: Storia di un rivoluzionario disciplinato. Sommacampagna, Verona: Cierre Edizioni, 2004. Coco, Giovanni. Il labirinto romano: il filo delle relazioni Chiesa-Stato tra Pio XI, Pacelli e Mussolini (1929–1939). Preface by Emilio Gentile, vol. 2. Vatican City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2019. De Cesaris, Valerio. Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale. Milan: Guerini e Associati, 2010. De Felice, Renzo. The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History. Translated by Robert L. Miller. New York: Enigma Books, 2001. De Giorgi, Fulvio. “Tommaso Gallarati Scotti e l’opposizione liberaldemocratica al fascismo, 1922–1925.” Contemporanea 17, no. 2 (2014): 181–218. Di Porto, Bruno. “La temuta protesta dei senatori ebrei per le leggi antiebraiche.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 64, no. 2 (May–August 1998): 69–80.

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Fabre, Giorgio. L’elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei. Turin: S. Zamorani, 1998. ———. “Uno sconosciuto articolo razzista di Mussolini (con una nota sui suoi autografi).” Quaderni di storia, no. 65 (January–June 2007): 129–177. ———. “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’.” Quaderni di Storia, no. 76 (July–­ December 2012): 83–153. Fattorini, Emma. Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech That Was Never Made. Translated by Carl Ipsen. Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2011. Foa, Vittorio. Lettere della giovinezza: Dal carcere 1935–1943, edited by Federica Montevecchi. Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Gaddi, Giuseppe. Il razzismo in Italia. Preface by Bernard Lecache. Paris: Edizioni della Lega italiana contro il razzismo e l’antisemitismo, 1939. Garbini, Luca. “Ancona 1938–1940: Note e percorsi di ricerca sull’antisemitismo nelle istituzioni.” Storia e problemi contemporanei  7, no. 14 (October 1994): 37–57. Gentile, Emilio, and Emilia Campochiaro, eds. Repertorio biografico dei Senatori dell’Italia fascista: E-L. Naples: Bibliopolis, 2003. Kertzer, David I. The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. New York: Random House, 2014. Killy, Walther, and Rudolf Vierhaus, eds. Deutsche Biographische Enziklopädie. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1995–2003. Gatti, Carlo. Il Teatro alla Scala nella storia e nell’arte, 1778–1963. Milan: Ricordi, 1964. Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945. New York: Aaron Asher Books/ Harper Collins, 1992. Labroca, Mario. L’usignolo di Boboli: Cinquant’anni di vita musicale italiana. Venice: Neri Pozza, 1959. La persecuzione degli ebrei durante il fascismo: Le leggi del 1938. Rome: Camera dei Deputati, 1998. Lopez, Guido. “Ricordo di Vittore Veneziani.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 24, no. 4 (April 1958): 156–165. Luzzatto, Guido Lodovico. Scritti politici: Ebraismo e antisemitismo, edited by Alberto Cavaglion, and Elisa Tedeschi. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996. Mazzini, Elena. Ostilità convergenti: Stampa diocesana, razzismo e antisemitismo nell‘Italia fascista (1937–1939). Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2013. Michaelis, Meir. Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922–1945. Oxford: Published for the Institute of Jewish Affairs, London by the Clarendon Press, 1978. Milano, Attilio. Ricerche sulle condizioni economiche degli ebrei a Roma durante la clausura del ghetto: 1555–1848. Città di Castello: Tip. dell’Unione arti grafiche, 1931.

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Morina, Christina, and Krijn Thijs, eds. Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Nicolodi, Fiamma. Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Fiesole: Discanto, 1984. Reprinted, with a new afterword: Padua: Libreriauniversitaria.it, 2018. Pinzauti, Leonardo. Il Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Florence: Vallecchi, 1967. ———. Storia del Maggio: Dalla nascita della “Stabile” Orchestrale Fiorentina (1928) al festival del 1993. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1994. Ritey, Hector J. The Human Kingdom: A Study of the Nature and Destiny of Man in the Light of Today’s Knowledge. New York and London: Jason Aronson, 1984. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019. Rubinstein, Arthur. My Many Years. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. Russell, John. Erich Kleiber: A Memoir. London: Andre Deutsch for Seven Art Books Club, 1957. Sachs, Harvey. Music in Fascist Italy. New York: Norton, 1988. ———. Rubinstein: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1995. ———. Toscanini, Musician of Conscience. New York: Liveright, 2017. ———, ed. Arturo Toscanini dal 1915 al 1946: L’arte all’ombra della politica: mostra documentaria (Arturo Toscanini, 1915–1946: Art in the Shadow of Politics: Documentary Exhibition). Turin: EDT/Musica, 1987. Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2. ed., executive ed. John Tyrrell. New York: Macmillan, 2001. Sala, Luca Lévi. “Propaganda, Negotiations, and Antisemitism at the Teatro La Fenice, 1937–43: Proscription Lists and Other Unpublished Documents.” Journal of Musicological Research 33, no. 4 (October 2014): 297–301. Sarfatti, Michele. “Il razzismo in Italia: Prime reazioni del fuoriuscitismo italiano in Francia.” Qualestoria 16, no. 2 (October 1988): 5–9. ———. The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution. Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. ———. Mussolini contro gli ebrei: Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, new and enl. ed. Turin: S. Zamorani, 2017. Segre, Renata, ed. Gli ebrei a Venezia 1938–1945: Una comunità tra persecuzione e rinascita. Venice: Il Cardo, 1995. Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Tintori, Giampiero. “Cronologia: Opere, balletti, concerti 1778–1977.” In Duecento anni di Teatro alla Scala, vol. 2. Gorle: Grafica Gutenberg Editrice, 1979. Werner, Alexander. Carlos Kleiber: Eine Biografie. Mainz: Schott, 2008. Zuccotti, Susan. Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

CHAPTER 6

Music in Transit: The Exile of Italian Jewish Musicians from Fascist Italy Alessandro Carrieri

Introduction For Italian Jewish musicians and composers after 1938, and more generally for all Italian Jews that chose to emigrate, exile1 was a necessity of escape from Fascist Italy’s Racial Laws. The defining factor of this “involuntary exile” is that it “was a flight determined by racist discrimination.”2 This is one of the specific elements of the phenomenon of twentieth-century exile, the peculiarity of which is found in “a series of political, religious,

All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own.  For an overview of the term exile, see Bruno Groppo, “Exilés, réfugies, émigrés, immigrés: Problèmes de définition,” in Exilés et rifugiés politiques aux Etat-Unis 1789-2000, ed. C.  Collomp and M.  Menéndez (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2003), 19-30; Maurizio Bettini, “Exilum,” in Parolechiave, no. 41 (2009): 1–14. 2  Annalisa Capristo, Gather What You Can and Flee: Jewish Intellectual Emigration from Fascist Italy, trans. Peter Rothstein (New York: CPL Editions, 2014), 13 pdf version. 1

A. Carrieri (*) Independent Researcher, Trieste, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_6

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racial and moral elements.”3 As has already been observed, the twentiethcentury exile is not comparable to any other experience that precedes it in modern history.4 Since this is not the place for a discussion on the phenomenon of exile, I shall confine myself to examining it within the category of musicians and composers, and therefore in its manifestation within the facet of intellectual exile.5 Within this facet, the choice of exile by musicians and composers was one of survival and, excluding some rare cases,6 was not dictated by a direct political opposition to the Fascist regime. The general attitude of Italian musicians and composers in the face of the Fascist regime consisted of, as shown by Harvey Sachs, “workaday infighting and intrigue in abundance, much grotesque opportunism, occasional examples of naïve good faith in the government, and very little real political opposition.”7 Due to both the extent and complexity of this subject, in this chapter I will limit myself to analyzing two Italian Jewish musicians: the pianist Gualtiero Volterra, exiled in Australia, and the composer Renzo Massarani, exiled in Brazil. Here I will reconstruct their experiences during their respective exiles with the aim of answering the following underlying question: How did the conditions of their exile influence their creativity?  See Renato Camurri, “Introduzione,” Memoria e Ricerca, no. 31 (May/August 2009): 6.  See Franz Neumann, “The Social Sciences,” in The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America, ed. W.R.  Crawford (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 16–17. 5  Regarding the twentieth-century European intellectual migration, see Donald Fleming and Bernard. Bailyn eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1969); H.  Stuart. Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Dante Della Terza, Da Vienna a Baltimora: La diaspora degli intellettuali europei negli Stati Uniti d’America (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001); Edward Timms and Jon Hughes, Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation: Refugees from National Socialism in the English-Speaking World (New York: Springer, 2003); Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso Books, 2017). 6  See for example the well-studied case of the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini; see Harvey Sachs, Toscanini, Musician of Conscience (New York: Liveright, 2017) 7  Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), 10. 3 4

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I have chosen these two musicians as case studies for two reasons: both are curiously under-researched, and each had vastly divergent experiences of exile, with Volterra eventually returning to Italy and Massarani remaining in Brazil. The life and music of Volterra has almost entirely been ignored by academia, while Massarani has been the subject of a few scholarly articles.8 However, these articles focus in large part on Massarani’s life prior to his departure for Brazil, rather than his exile. I will also be briefly mentioning two other Italian Jewish composers throughout this chapter, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Vittorio Rieti,9 both exiled in the United States. The decision to compare the two figures of Massarani and Volterra arises from the desire to identify the differences in their artistic activity and in their lives as exiles. A commonality they share is their Jewish origin and the consequences of the Racial Laws that affected both in different ways. Considering the Racial Laws, it is clear how the decision to “pack your bags”10 and leave Italy represented, for the two musicians, the answer to the discrimination actioned by the Fascist anti-Semitic legislation.

 See Enrico Girardi, “Su Renzo Massarani,” in La musica a Milano in Lombardia e oltre. Volume secondo, ed. Sergio Martinotti (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2000), 399–411; Carlo Piccardi, “Renzo Massarani, popolare e moderno,” in Affetti musicali, Studi in onore di S. Martinotti, ed. Maurizio Padoan (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2005), 361–379; Piccardi, “La parabola di Renzo Massarani, compositore ebreo all’ombra del fascismo,” in Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America, eds. Roberto Illiano, and Massimiliano Sala, (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2010), 171–331; Grove Music Online, s.v. “Renzo Massarani,” by John C.G. Waterhouse, accessed October 10, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo9781561592630-e-0000018007; Dizionario Bibliografico degli Italiani Online, s.v. “Renzo Massarani,” by Roberto Balzani, accessed September 21, 2019, http://www.treccani.it/ enciclopedia/renzo-massarani_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. 9  See Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Una vita di musica: Un libro di ricordi, ed. James Westby, intr. by Mila De Santis, editing Ulla Casalini (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005); Angelo Gilardino, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Un fiorentino a Beverly Hills (Milan: Edizioni Curci-­ CIDIM, 2018); Franco Carlo Ricci, Vittorio Rieti (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987); Edda Fogarollo, Note Scordate: Tre musicisti ebrei nella tempesta delle leggi razziali (Leghorn: Sillabe, 2018), 109–151. 10  On September 5, 1938, Vittorio Foa wrote a letter from prison to his family suggesting that they should be prepared to pack their bags (fare fagotto); see Vittorio Foa, Lettere dalla giovinezza. Dal carcere 1935-1943, ed. Federica Montevecchi (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), 477. 8

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Massarani and Volterra Before the Exile Prior to diving into a detailed account of Renzo Massarani and Gualtiero Volterra’s11 experiences of exile, it is first necessary to consider their respective biographies leading up to their departures from Italy, to better illuminate the two musicians’ personal and professional paths. Massarani’s life in Italy has already been covered extensively. I will therefore focus my attention more on Volterra, who is yet to be the primary subject in any published work. Massarani’s life narrative in Italy can by divided into two periods: from the end of the First World War until 1928, and from 1928 until 1939. The first thing to note is the versatility of the Mantuan musician. He would oscillate, during these periods, between two identities: that of composer and orchestra director and that of music critic. The first period can be defined by his professional and artistic development, and is characterized by his work as musical director of the marionette Teatro dei Piccoli of Podrecca and his work as a music critic. After graduating from the S.  Cecilia Music High School in 1921 under the tutelage of Ottorino Respighi, Massarani first spent a period of time in Germany and then in Vienna studying with F. Schalk. In the Austrian capital he met Vittorio Rieti, with whom he became fast friends.12 In 1923, he became musical director of Vittorio Podrecca’s Teatro dei Piccoli.13 It proved to be a very important moment in Massarani’s career. At this point, Podrecca’s marionette theater had gained worldwide fame, which allowed Massarani to travel abroad extensively and come into contact with different national musical scenes. As a conductor, he directed several marionette shows, and was highly praised for his interpretative qualities and for some of his  musical compositions that

11  Renzo Massarani was born in Mantua in 1898 to Giulio Massarani and Gina Colorni, and Gualtiero Volterra was born in Florence in 1901 to Gustavo Volterra and Adele Melli. 12  Under the aegis of Alfredo Casella, the collaboration between Massarani, Vittorio Rieti and Mario Labroca was born. They called themselves “i Tre” (The Three), inspired by the French group known as “Six.” Piccardi, “La parabola di Renzo Massarani, compositore ebreo all’ombra del fascismo,” 174. 13  Piccardi,  “La parabola di Renzo Massarani,” 190–191. For an overview on Vittorio Podrecca’s Teatro dei Piccoli, see Vanni Zuliani, Vittorio Podrecca ed il “Teatro dei Piccoli” (Udine: 1980); Guido, Leonardo Vergani and Maria Signorelli, Podrecca e il teatro dei Piccoli (Udine: Casamassima, 1979); La fabbrica dei sogni, eds. Paola Veroli, and Giuseppina Volpicelli (Bologna: Edizioni Bora, 2005).

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these shows introduced to the public.14 It should be noted that Massarani’s artistic production of this period features a strong undercurrent of folk music.15 He worked as a music critic for the Fascist newspapers L’Impero, Il Tevere and the journal Musica d’oggi. This allowed Massarani to participate, thanks to Alfredo Casella, in the various international festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Thus, he had the opportunity to attend performances of avant-garde European music, one such being the first performance of Erwartung by Arnold Schönberg and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments by Igor Stravinsky, both in Prague in 1924. The second period of his life prior to exile can be defined by maturation. The beginning of this period coincides with his marriage to Elda Costantini in 1928, and the choice to cease his work with the Podrecca theater.16 Settling in Rome, he began to work for the SIAE at the Plagiarism department, as chief secretary, a work which allowed him to continue composing. Massarani’s Roman period was to be the most prolific of his career as a composer and marks the highest point of his artistic success and production. He is mentioned by Casella along with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco17 and

 For example, the opera Guerino detto il Meschino of 1928.  This folk influence can be seen, for example, in piano pieces Dal Lago di Mantova (From Mantua Lake) of 1922, Due canzoni corali (Two choral songs) of 1923 and Sinfonietta (Little Symphony) of 1924. 16  Renzo Massarani had three children: Laura born in 1929, Andrea in 1930 and Giulio in 1937. 17  Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born in Florence in 1895. He studied first at the Istituto Musicale Cherubini in Florence and then composition at the Liceo Musicale of Bologna. He became one of the most important composers of the new Italian generation. In 1939, he left Italy with his family for New York, and then he moved to California. From 1940, he started to work with several Hollywood studios. He died in Beverly Hills in 1968. Grove Music Online, s.v. “Castelnuovo-Tedesco,” by James Westby, accessed October 15, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/ 9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000005128. 14 15

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Vittorio Rieti,18 as “among the most interesting of the young people who today make up our nation.”19 His compositions were performed at major music festivals and theaters. For example, in 1930, his Chad Gadyà poem for voice and piano, inspired by a Passover song, was performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice. In 1937, his ballet Boè, inspired by the short story The Pale Mountains by Carlo Felice Wolff, was performed at the inaugural Festival delle Novità in Bergamo. This final performance would also be his last success before his exile in Brazil. As for Gualtiero Volterra, born on October 22, 1901, in Florence, an accurate reconstruction of the period prior to his Australian exile is unfortunately rendered arduous by the scarcity of information and availability of documentation.20 We find one of the first pieces of information about the young Volterra in an article titled Promettenti (Up-and-comers), published in the national children’s paper  Corriere dei Piccoli on April 5, 1914. The article opens with an introduction about the “host of children who rise up to embrace life with their arms full of beautiful promises.” In the article’s second column, there is a paragraph accompanied by a picture of Volterra that presents him in the following terms: “Gualtiero Volterra is an eleven-year-old pianist, a young artist who already knows how to brave even difficult classical music. He has already participated in more than one public competition, earning the applause of the spectators and the praise of the

18  Vittorio Rieti was born in Alexandria (Egypt) in 1898. He first studied music with Giuseppe Frugatta in Milan and then composition with Alfredo Casella and Ottorino Respighi. From 1925 to 1940, Rieti divided his time between Rome and Paris, and he became close to Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Hindemith. In 1940, he moved to the United States where he became a citizen in 1944. In the United States, he continued to compose, especially music for ballet, and he taught at several musical colleges. Grove Music Online, s.v. “Vittorio Rieti,” by Harry Haskell, accessed October 20, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/gr ovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/ omo-9781561592630-e-5000007336. 19  Alfredo Casella, 21+26, ed. Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini (Florence: Olschki, 2001), 126, quoted in Piccardi, “La parabola di Renzo Massarani,” 277. 20  In the online photographic archive of the CDEC, there is a photo of the Volterra family dated 1907 ca. “La famiglia Volterra tra cui Beppino, Amedeo, Gastone e Gualtiero,” Digital Library, CDEC, accessed November 28, 2019, http://digital-library.cdec.it/cdec-web/ fotografico/detail/IT-CDEC-FT0001-0000030770/la-famiglia-volterra-cui-beppino-­­ amedeo-gastone-e-gualtiero.html.

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judges.”21 This enthusiastic account gives us an idea of the precocious talent of Volterra. In fact, already at the age of thirteen he graduated with a diploma in piano from the Cherubini Music Conservatory in Florence in 1914, under the guidance of Maestro Felice Boghen. He would subsequently continue his studies with Maestro Ernesto Consolo. From the musical and theatrical reports of the Corriere della Sera, and from the space dedicated to Volterra in the two biographical reference books on the musicians of the time, the Schmidl and the De Angelis, we see him performing in the most important Italian and foreign theaters. Both dictionaries speak of him as an enfant prodige who already at the age of eleven gave his first concert at the Florence Philharmonic.22 In 1916, at the age of fifteen, he gave a concert at the Royal Philharmonic of Rome, and in 1917 at the Royal Conservatory of Milan23 and for the Society for Concerts in Parma at a charity concert for the Red Cross, achieving great public success.24 The “Concert pianist of rare talent”25 performed at the following places: Singakadem Philarmonie in Berlin; in Rome’s Royal Academy of Santa Cecilia in 1920 and again in 1929; in Milan at the Royal Conservatory in 192126; again in Rome at the Augusteo, both in 1923 with the singer Doris Dettelbach and the conductor Bernardino Molinari, and again in 1931 with the conductor Mario Rossi27; in 1929 at the Aeolian Hall in London28; in 1930, both at the Scala di Milano with the conductor Vittorio Gui, and with the Florence Philharmonic in Florence29; in London at Albert Hall with the famous singer Amelia Galli Curci under

21  “Promettenti,” Corriere dei Piccoli (Milan), no. 14, April 5, 1914, 10. The Corriere dei Piccoli (Courier of the Little Ones) was a weekly magazine for children, as a supplement of Corriere della Sera, published in Italy from 1908 to 1995. 22  Carlo Schmidl, Dizionario universale dei musicisti. Appendice–aggiunte e retifiche al primo e secondo volume (Milan: Sonzogno, 1938) 764; Alberto De Angelis, Dizionario dei musicisti. Appendice alla seconda edizione, (Rome: Ausonia, 1929), 182. 23  “Il Concerto Volterra,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), May 23, 1917, 2. 24  Lucia Brighenti, La società dei concerti di Parma (Parma: Silva Editore, 2013), 122. 25  Carlo Schmidl, Dizionario universale dei musicisti, 764. 26  “Notizie Musicali. Al Conservatorio,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), March 15, 1921, 2. 27  Alberto De Angelis, Dizionario dei musicisti, 182. 28  “Un concerto italiano a Londra,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), October 18, 1929, 3. 29  “I concerti dell’ Orchestra Fiorentina,” Corriere della Sera, January 13, 1930, 3; “Il secondo concerto Gui alla Scala,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), June 28, 1930, 4.

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the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham30; and finally, at the Queen’s Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1931.31 In Florence, he met the Australian Patricia Kelly, a piano student attending an English finishing school in Florence. They married on October 15, 1928, at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.32 From this union, one child was born in London, a girl named Sara (known as Tatia). In 1932, during a moment of great success for his promising career as a pianist,33 Volterra was left with no choice but to abandon his career and dedicate himself to his family’s antiquarian business. In a press release written by the Australian Federal Publicity Section about Volterra archived in the ABC folder,34 titled “Concert Virtuoso is also an expert Picture-­ Buyer,” Volterra’s life as a pianist and art merchant is detailed. The document opens by describing Volterra as “The continental celebrity (…) also an expert collector of Renaissance paintings,” and that due to his elder brother’s illness he “was recalled from London, where he had just been acclaimed at the Albert Hall.” The document goes on to explain how the resultant death of his brother (who was the head of the family) “revealed a chaotic state of affairs in the antiques shop on the Ponte Vecchio.” Volterra had never been involved in the family business and “had never actually been trained in it.” Seeing as the financial situation in which the family had found itself was dire, Volterra decided to temporarily abandon his career as a concert pianist, and dedicate himself to his family’s affairs “to pledge his name and time as security for the creditors.” Volterra began to travel throughout Europe as an advisor to the family firm, buying Renaissance paintings, “many of which have since found their way into the great galleries of the world.” In the press release, a particularly important detail is noted, which reveals Volterra’s expert abilities as an art dealer. The document states, “In 30  “Un concerto Galli Curci-Volterra a Londra,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), November 17, 1930, 2. 31  “Notiziario,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), November 22, 1931, 5. 32  For a brief account of the wedding ceremony, see “Nozze Volterra-Kelly,” Italo-­ Australian (Sydney), November 24, 1928, 5, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ article/259234026. 33  Gualtiero Volterra became friends with the pianists Alfred Cortot and Ferruccio Busoni. See Publicity Section, Press Release, “Pianist Travels with His Own Music Chair. Volterra’s Early Career,” Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138, Volterra Gualtiero, ABC, NAA, NSW. 34  Publicity Section, Press Release, “Concert Virtuoso is also an Expert Picture-Buyer,” Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138, Gualtiero Volterra, ABC, NAA, NSW.

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1934 Volterra discovered in a country home in England three famous ceilings by Tiepolo,” which he later succeeded in selling to Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, enriching the Count’s already-important art collection. Due to this success, Volterra would devote himself to the family business for several years and not for just a few months, as he had originally planned.35 The press release ends with Volterra’s departure for Australia, relaying that before he left Italy, he “locked the gates of his villa.” Inside, Volterra had left “a library of 3000 books, including first editions of Petrarca, Dante and Boccaccio” and “a number of compositions of Brahms, personally marked with his own fingerings.”36 All of Volterra’s belongings were looted by the Nazis except a grand piano that was hidden in a shipping company in Florence.

Jewish Musicians Facing the Racial Laws With the forceful entrance of the R.d.l. 1728/1938 on November 17, 1938, entitled Provvedimenti per la difesa della razza italiana (Provisions for the Defense of the Race), the order was issued for the dismissal of all Jews from public and related employment and their expulsion from all private businesses and operations.37 This also included all Jewish permanent employees of institutions operating in the culture and entertainment industries.38 At the end of November, Renzo Massarani was fired from his job at the SIAE.39 At this point, Massarani found his music censured from broadcast radio; he was fired from his job and was forbidden from publishing his music criticism in newspapers.40 In order to reconstruct the 35  Newspaper clippings, West Australian (Perth), April 12, 1946, Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138, Volterra Gualtiero, ABC, NAA, NSW. 36  Publicity Section, Press Release, “Concert Virtuoso is also an Expert Picture-Buyer,” ABC, NAA, NSW. 37  Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 151. 38  Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, 156. 39  Massarani was employed by SIAE from 1929 to November 1938. See Carlo Piccardi “La parabola di Renzo Massarani,” 310. 40  For an overview of the broadcasting interdiction, see Giorgio Fabre, L’elenco. Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei, (Turin: Silvio Zamorani Editore, 1998), 50–51; Annalisa Capristo, “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale,” in Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, eds. Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva (Milan: IAML, 2018), 366–367.

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phases that preceded Massarani and his family’s exile, it is worthwhile to quote the precious testimony of his son Andrea: “In 1939, after having said farewell to friends and relatives with immense sadness and having given away all the contents of our beautiful home in Rome on Viale Carso 77, we set sail from Naples on the ship that delivered us to salvation in Brazil.”41 Why did Massarani pick Brazil? Here too the testimony of a descendant is fundamental to better understanding his choice. As his granddaughter Daniela (Andrea’s daughter) recalls, Renzo Massarani “first thought about going to the United States, but his application wasn’t accepted, seemingly because he didn’t speak English well enough.”42 How did he manage to procure an entry visa for Brazil? In Mario Tagliacozzo’s diaries, there is a reference to Massarani’s social network. Many years before, he had undertaken a tour of Latin America, as director of the Teatro dei Piccoli orchestra, “where he could count a number of friendships and acquaintances. These connections facilitated his securement of Brazilian visas.” We find confirmation of this in the words of his son Andrea, who remembers that their departure from Italy was made possible “thanks to the visas obtained through Mario da Silva, a Brazilian critic friend of my father who was always very dear to us.”43 Massarani therefore turned to Brazilian critic Mario da Silva (who was married to a German Jewish woman), who he had first met in Germany and then probably met again on the Teatro dei Piccoli Latin American tour, and who succeeded in demonstrating to the Brazilian authorities that there was a job for Massarani in Rio de Janeiro. This was an invaluable requirement for emigration, and thus in May 1939 Massarani obtained permission to move with his family to Brazil. As for Gualtiero Volterra, the scarcity of available information makes it difficult to reconstruct and evaluate the pianist’s attitude towards the Italian anti-Semitic legislation and its consequences on his personal and professional life. The main source is found in a report by the Military Police Intelligence (MPI) of the Police Head Quarters in Sydney dated July 10, 1940, following an interrogation of Volterra carried out by the Australian authorities.44 41  Andrea Massarani, “Esilio in Brasile M° Renzo Massarani,” in Incontro commemorative del centenario della nascita di Renzo Massarani (Milan, 1998). 42  Daniela Massarani, email correspondence with author, October 30, 2018. 43  Andrea Massarani, “Esilio in Brasile M° Renzo Massarani.” 44  See report to Inspector 1/C Keefe, M.P.I. Section, July 10, 1940, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. In the ACS, Demorazza, there are no documents regarding Volterra’s discrimination request.

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In Volterra’s statement, the pianist declares that due to his Jewish origin he was subject to many degradations on the part of the Italian Fascists, and being unable to accept these conditions, he moved with his wife and child to Paris in 1938. With the progressively dire situation in Europe, continued Volterra, he then decided to move with his family to Switzerland in August 1939. During this period, Gualtiero Volterra’s wife, Patricia, got in contact with her father Thomas Herbert Kelly in Sydney who, through a series of grievances addressed to Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, managed to secure Australian entry visas for the Volterra family.45 After leaving Switzerland on October 20, 1939, the Volterra family returned to Florence for a very brief period, and on October 31, 1939, they embarked on the Conte Rosso ship in Venice bound for Singapore. There, the Volterra family boarded the Marella ship and arrived in Sydney on December 22, 1939.46

Experiences of Exile in the Host Country: A Comparison between Volterra and Massarani Gualtiero Volterra Volterra’s arrival in Sydney was announced by two articles in major newspapers: one in English in The Sydney Morning Herald (henceforth referred to as The Herald) and one in Italian in Il Giornale Italiano,47 a primary newspaper for Italian speakers in Australia.48 The Herald article, 45  Despite the fact that Patricia Kelly was born in Australia, having married a citizen from an enemy country she was considered an enemy alien. This resulted in the Australian authorities denying to renew her driver’s license after she arrived in Australia in 1939. See letter from Secretary E.J. Baldwin to Patricia Kelly, December 24, 1941, Box 202, C123/1, Item 6839, Volterra [nee Kelly], Patricia (Italian by marriage—born in Australia), NAA, NSW. 46  The Volterra family was staying at the Kelly family home at 39 Sutherland Crescent, Darling Point, Sydney, NSW. 47  For an overview of Italian-language newspapers in Australia, see Amedeo Tosco, “Origini e primi sviluppi della stampa italiana in Australia: il caso dell’Italo-Australiano (1885),” in Altreitalie no. 34 (2007), 39–68. This article was previously published in English as Amedeo Tosco, “Features of early ethnic Italo-Australian newspapers: a case study of L’Italo-­ Australiano (1885),” Australian Journalism Monographs 7 (2005): 1–34. The Italian version has been used here because it has been updated. 48  This is not the first time that the Volterra family was mentioned in Australian newspapers. Prior to their arrival in Australia, their October 15 marriage was announced six weeks later by the Queensland Figaro’s society pages “Sydney Letter,” on December 1, 1928,

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with the headline “Arrived From Italy Yesterday,” featured a family photograph of the newly arrived family, Volterra with his wife Patricia and their five-year-old daughter Tatia. It was published on Saturday, December 23, 1939, the day after their arrival, while Il Giornale Italiano’s article, titled “Chi Va e Chi Viene?: La Famiglia Volterra a Sydney,” was not published until two weeks later, on Wednesday, January 10, 1940. We can explain this lag in publication by assuming that Il Giornale Italiano sourced its article from The Herald. The Herald article is brief, with its focus primarily on “Signora Volterra,” noting that she once translated the book The Story of San Michele into Italian and that she was known prior to her marriage as “Miss Patricia Kelly,” the daughter of a prominent Australian couple, Mr. and Mrs. T.H. Kelly49 of Darling Point in Sydney.50 Il Giornale Italiano’s article echoed the former; however, it took care to mention that Volterra was not only an eminent Italian musician, but also the son of one of the most noted antiquarian art dealers in Italy. Interestingly, both articles stress that the family is passing time in Sydney, staying at the Kelly home, rather than migrating to Australia, with Il Giornale Italiano’s article welcoming these “illustrious guests” to Australia. The publication of these articles is notable for two reasons. First, not every Italian migrant’s arrival was announced by newspaper articles. Second, neither article mentioned the Volterra family’s reason for coming to Australia: that Volterra was an Italian Jew escaping from persecution by which took care to mention that Volterra had performed concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall the previous year, that he spoke English fluently, and that he was “young and goodlooking.” See “Sydney Letter,” Queensland Figaro (Brisbane), December 1, 1928, 12, accessed May 5, 2019, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article84904431. 49  Thomas Herbert Kelly had been a lieutenant colonel heading the Intelligence Branch during the First World War. He then became a well-known businessman in Sydney, in addition to being cultured: he was a member of the Dante Alighieri Art and Literary Society. Ethel Knight Kelly (nee Mollison) had been a theater actress in the United States before migrating to Australia to continue performing there. The couple were well known as prominent members of Sydney’s high society. See Australian Dictionary of Biography, s.v. “Kelly, Thomas Herbert (1875-1948),” by Martha Rutledge, accessed September 7, 2019, http:// adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kelly-thomas-herbert-6924. 50  The Volterra family received a third mention on January, 11, 1940, in the Catholic Freeman’s Journal society pages, “The Social Round,” which reported that Mr. and Mrs. Kelly had held a “late afternoon party at their home” with their daughter Signora Volterra and son-in-law Signor Volterra. See “The Social Round,” Catholic Freeman’s Journal (Sydney), January 11, 1940, 11, accessed May 5, 2019, http://nla.gov/nla. news-article146100746.

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the Fascist regime.51 Why did neither newspaper mention the Volterra family’s reason for exile to Australia? While we cannot presume to know the exact reasoning behind either newspaper’s omission, we do know that Il Giornale Italiano was aligned with the Italian Fascist Party’s ideals.52 In addition to these welcoming articles and the mentions in the society pages that continued after their arrival in Australia, the Volterras were being watched by another Australian institution: the MPI (Military Police Intelligence). As stated in the MPI report addressed to Inspector Keefe made on July 10, mentioned above, Volterra was considered an “Alien” of the state, which made him subject to constant investigation and surveillance. He and his family were under the Aliens Control Regulations.53 With the outbreak of the Second World War, the Commonwealth Government of Australia introduced the Aliens Control Regulations (Registration Act 1939) that was formed under the National Security Act. The center of this investigative operation was situated in the police headquarters and called MPI Section, wherein a group of police officers and army officers worked together to carry out intelligence work. This new National Security Aliens Control Regulation defined non-­ British migrants living in Australia—who were an ethnic and cultural minority—as either aliens or enemy aliens. According to the historian Kay Saunders, once the war began, “Australian society became obsessively intent upon identifying and punishing those perceived to be potentially undermining national security, the war effort or morale.”54 Saunders goes  We don’t know if Volterra was in contact with the small Italian Jewish antifascist group that was exiled in Australia. Marcello Montagnana writes about this group in the essay, “I rifugiati ebrei italiani in Australia e il movimento antifascista ‘Italia Libera’ (1942–1946),” in Notiziario dell’Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Cuneo e Provincia 31 (June 1987), 5–114. 52  The newspaper was edited in Sydney from 1932 until the beginning of the Second World War, by Cesare Bianchi and Franco Battistessa, who was a convinced fascist, former squadrista and came from the nationalist ranks. Tosco, “Origini e primi sviluppi della stampa italiana in Australia,” 49. 53  See report to Inspector 1/C Keefe, M.P.I. Section, July 10, 1940. 54  K.  Saunders, War on the Homefront: State intervention in Queensland 1938-1948 (Queensland, St. Lucia: University Queensland Press, 1993), 33, quoted in Maria Glaros, “ ‘Sometimes a little injustice must be suffered for the public good’. How the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations 1939 (Cth) affected the lives of German, Italian, Japanese and Australian born women living in Australia during the Second World War” (PhD thesis, University of  Western Australia, 2012), 48, https://researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/ islandora/object/uws%3A14497. 51

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on to observe that the ACR’s primary objective was “to ensure that aliens, resident in Australia, enemy and otherwise, could in no way become a danger to the country nor impede the progress of the war either individually or in association with others.”55 All aliens and non-British people residing in Australia were consequently put under control and surveillance. Residents of German nationality were immediately classified as enemy aliens. After Italy entered the war in 1940 and Japan in 1941, Italians and Japanese were also classified as enemy aliens and placed under investigation.56 In addition, restrictions were placed upon their daily lives (for example, when it came to obtaining drivers’ licenses). In the July 10 MPI report of a police interview with Volterra, the extent of the surveillance placed on Italians in Australia is made evident. Volterra states that he is married to an Australian, has studied the piano, and is a pianist. Interestingly, he had to prove this fact to the Australian police, as the report mentions that he provided newspaper cuttings that proved his work as a pianist. The report relays Volterra’s reason for leaving Italy was that, due to his Jewish origin “he was subject to many indignities by the Fascists in Italy. Finding the position intolerable in Italy he went to Paris.” The report stresses that “Volterra states that neither he nor his wife have any correspondence with anyone in either Germany or Italy. He is not a member of the Fascist Party.” The report also notes the important standing of Patricia Volterra’s parents in Australian society, and confirms that the Volterras were “registered as Aliens at the Rose Bay Police Station.” In a postscript added to the report, it is confirmed that both “Gualtiero Volterra’s parents were born in Italy, they were of Jewish origin.”57 Unfortunately, Volterra continued to suffer “indignities” in Australia, though now due to his Italianness rather than Jewishness. Because the Kelly  K. Saunders, War on the Homefront, 33.  For an overview of Italian migrants in Australia during the Second World War, see Richard Bosworth, and Romano Ugolini, War, Internment and Mass Migration. The Italo-­ Australian Experience 1940-1990 (Rome: Gruppo Editoriale Internazionale, 1992); Cate Elkner, Enemy-aliens: the internment of Italian migrants in Australia during the Second World War, foreword by James Franklin (Bacchus Marsh, Vic: Connor Court Publishing, 2005); Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien, and Mathew Trinca eds., Under suspicion: citizenship and internment in Australia during the Second World War (Canberra, A.C.T., National Museum of Australian Press, 2008); Gerardo Papalia, “The Italian “Fifth Column” in Australia: Fascist Propaganda, Italian-Australians and Internment,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 66, no. 2 (June 2020), 214–231. 57  Report to Inspector 1/C Keefe, M.P.I. Section, July 10, 1940. 55 56

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family was very active in Sydney’s social scene attending many gatherings, the Volterras accompanied them to many events, which attracted media attention—to the apparent chagrin of many Australians. In another MPI report made on September 21, 1940, in which the subject is “Volterra, Gualtiero–Italian Alien,” it is reported that police Constable Taylor received a phone message from Mrs. D.V.  Russell of Elizabeth Bay, stating that Volterra was still audaciously “mixing in society.” She added that if the police called her she may be able to give them some information on Volterra, but that she did not want them visiting her home. The report ends: “Perhaps some further inquiries might be made from Mrs. Russell, she may have something helpful to impart,”58 proving that the investigation on Volterra was still active. Another report made on November 19, 1940, summarizes the phone interview the police conducted with Mrs. Russell, following her initial phone message. It reads that Mrs. Russell stated that she had never met the man Volterra but had seen him walking about the streets, and knowing that he was an Italian and that he has only been in Australia for a short time she was of the opinion that he should be interned as well as all the other Italians. She further stated that she had never heard him say anything which was subversive and does not know whether he is a member of the Fascist Party or like organizations.59

The report concludes that Mrs. Russell had no more information to add. On the same day, a second report was made on Volterra, summarizing an interview he had given to the police. The report notes that he came to Australia because he was Jewish and that he had not worked since his arrival, being supported by his father-in-law Mr. Kelly. Volterra stated to the police that he had often walked to Kings Cross from his in-laws’ home in Darling Point to do the shopping and see his dentist; however, he had stopped, due to the numerous letters and one phone call that his mother-­ in-­law Mrs. Kelly received from people who had seem him out. The letters and phone call, all of which were anonymous, all expressed the opinion that Volterra “should be interned with the rest of the Italians.” Letters and phone calls made to the police were not anonymous however. In a letter written by Mr. Noel Linton, and submitted by his brother Sir Richard 58  Report to Inspector 1/C Keefe, M.P.I. Section, September 21, 1940, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 59  Report to Inspector 1/C Keefe, M.P.I.  Section, subject Mrs. Russell, November 19, 1940, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW.

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Linton to the Army Headquarters in Melbourne, Volterra is described as being a member of the supposed “Fascist aristocracy” who has been a “big shot at many elegant social soirees in Darling Point centres [Kelly’s house].” Linton goes on to warn that Volterra is attractive to women, which renders him “most dangerous.” He accuses Volterra of professing “Italian and Fascist ideas and ideals,” and closes the letter by requesting that “something be done about this fellow being put where he belongs.”60 Finally, we have another notable report from January 13, 1941, which included a newspaper clipping from the previous day. Presumably from the opinion section of the Sydney Truth, the report informs us that the column was written by Jim Donald, who expresses his anger that while “eleven hundred enemy aliens” had been admitted to Australia, most Italians and many Germans had not been interned in Australia’s camps. He went on: “Every man Adolf and Antonio on that refugee roll call should be under lock and key. Aye, even unto the Dago husband of the daughter of one of our leading socialites.” While he is not named, the report notes that the column is undoubtedly referring to Volterra, adding that “This is not the first occasion the undersigned has noted adverse criticism regarding the same person.”61 On February 6 of the same year, another report was made by the MPI, this time addressed to Inspector Wilson, with the same subject line of the previous report: “Gualtiero Volterra–Italian alien.” This particular report is notable however, for its specific request to authenticate Volterra’s Jewish origins.62 This request can be explained by the fact that on August 2, 1940, an interrogation of Volterra was filed in dossier No. 6606 of the MPI section and which was used as reference for all successive reports. What piques interest here is question number four in the dossier that asks: “If he claims to be a Jewish refugee, is his passport stamped with the letter ‘J’? The response follows: ‘No, but the alien claims Jewish nationality’.”63 60  Letter by Mr. Noel Linton, January 9, 1941, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 61  Memorandum containing a newspaper clipping by Jim Donald, Truth (Sydney), January 12, 1941, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 62  See report to Inspector 2/C Wilson, M.P.I.  Section, February 6, 1941, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 63  Dossier 6606, M.P.I. Section, August 2, 1940, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW.  See also report to Inspector 1/C Keefe, M.P.I.  Section, subject Volterra, Gualtiero-an Italian alien, November 19, 1940, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW.

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The February 6 report contains an explanation for the absence of the letter “J” brought up in the dossier from the August 2 report, where it is stated that “if Volterra is of Jewish origin his Passport would be stamped with the letter ‘J,’ it might be pointed out that there is no letter ‘J’ in the Italian alphabet.” In this regard, it should also be noted that, to facilitate the emigration of Italian Jews from the peninsula, the Ministry of the Interior of the Fascist regime considered it more prudent to avoid stamping any distinctive sign on Jewish passports.64 In 1941, this practice changed in part, and in fact the report goes on to explain that “although Jewish Italians have their Passport marked ‘Of Jewish Race’ this came into being after Volterra had left Italy and gone to Switzerland.” From the February 6 report, another interesting detail emerges, confirming that Volterra, due to the various letters addressed to the police accusing him of being a Fascist, was being spied on by the MPI. In fact, it is declared in the report that in order to uncover his true feelings, Volterra’s mail “is still under scrutiny and information.”65 The attention paid to Volterra by the MPI in that he is “unfavorably reported” and suspected to be a member of the Fascist party and therefore under surveillance,66 is in spite of Volterra’s numerous assertions that he is not a member of the Fascist Party, and from the many references submitted in his favor by distinguished persons, along with the Kelly family’s social relations. Despite this, the suspicion directed toward him continued to influence his experience of exile in Australia.67  See Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy, 144.  In this report it is also mentioned of Volterra: “towards the present war, it is difficult to find out just what his views are, but he appears to be Pro-British.” See report to Inspector 2/C Wilson, M.P.I. Section, February 6, 1941, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 66  In this regard, we may refer to two successive reports from March 3, 7, and 10, 1941, respectively, with the subject “Gualtiero Volterra question of issue of motor driver’s license.” These reports state that Volterra is an enemy alien, and that “he has been unfavorably reported on [with suggestions] that he is a member of the Fascist party.” It is suggested that “the use of a motor driver’s license is not essential to this man.” See report to Inspector Wilson, Police Headquarters, March 7, 1941, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. Following the three reports, on March 13, 1941, Secretary E.J. Baldwin of the Sydney Police Department addressed a letter directly to Volterra, communicating the decision of the Military Authorities that “it will be necessary to return your driver’s license to the Department of Road Transport for cancellation.” See letter from Secretary E.J. Baldwin, Sydney Police Department to Gualtiero Volterra, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 67  Confirming this continued discontent, another document from the previously mentioned Sir Richard Linton is included in the Volterra folder. Linton delivered a newspaper 64 65

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According to Maria Glaros, “War hysteria, discrimination, isolation, racism, and victimization,” was present in the Australian public and was part “of the wartime experience for German, Italian and Japanese women [and men] caught up in the net of the Aliens Control Regulations.” This evidently had an effect on the lives of the Italian, German, and Japanese migrants that lived in Australia during the Second World War.68 Seven months after the last MPI report, another insinuation of suspicious activity carried out by Volterra is documented in two reports, one on October 2 and the other on November 6, both addressed to Inspector Wilson with the subject “Anonymous complaint re Italians meeting at 41 Eltham Avenue, Darling Point.” In the first report, we read that for a period of five months Volterra has rented a room at 41 Eltham Avenue, close to his residence at the Kelly home, to undertake his almost-­daily piano practice. In the second report, we discover why Volterra has decided to rent a room close to his family residence: due to his being “a musician of high repute,” he needs to practice the piano daily. His wife, however, “entertains on a large scale at their home” and so it is “desirable to secure a room where he could carry on his studies without interruption.” The complaint received by the MPI alleges that the room rented by Volterra was used on Friday evenings “as a meeting place for Italians.” The report continues by specifying that on the “26th ultimo,” six Italians were seen entering Volterra’s room, and that for the entire time they were there, the piano was not heard being played.69 In the second report of the same day, there is the transcript of an interview with Mrs. McGree, a tenant in the apartment adjacent to the room rented by Volterra. Mrs. McGree states that “the studio was used only for the purpose of musical studies, as far as she was aware” and that Volterra “was not visited by people very often.” Regarding the alleged presence of Italians on the “26th ultimo,” Mrs. McGree “could not say that there was a greater number of people visiting clipping from the Sydney Morning Herald dated February 28, 1941, to the police station. Titled “Social and Personal–Dinner Party,” the clipping describes a party at the Kelly home that had been held in honour of a distinguished guest. Linton had underlined the name of Gualtiero Volterra, who was reported in the clipping as having been in attendance, to prove that Volterra was still attending high society events. See newspaper clipping Sydney Morning Herland, February 28, 1941, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 68  Glaros, “‘Sometimes a little injustice must be suffered for the public good’,” ix. 69  See report to Inspector 2/C Wilson, M.P.I.  Section, October 2, 1941, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW.

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Volterra on Friday evening.” On this occasion, the MPI concludes that it is not necessary to question Volterra, concluding the second report by stating that “nothing extraordinary has taken place at Mr. Volterra’s room.”70 From this last report, an interesting detail emerges. Volterra had returned to the full-time piano study that he had abandoned ten years earlier to devote himself to the family business. The recollection of the famous Polish Jewish pianist and composer Ignaz Friedman confirms this.71 Friedman, also exiled in Australia, recalls that (presumably in 1943) Volterra had rented a room in which to practice piano.72 Meeting Friedman would completely change Volterra’s life in Australia, giving a definitive twist to his career as a pianist. Friedman, recognizing the extraordinary talent of the Italian pianist, “took the second floor to coach Volterra in concert repertoire” and “urged him to perform again.”73 After convincing Volterra to resume his work as a concert pianist, Friedman contacted Billy James, the ABC concert director, advising that he not “let [Volterra] out of Australia without playing!”74 and to have Volterra sign a contract right away. Volterra, who, as some Australian newspapers later wrote, “was destined for music,” was as a result engaged by James for a twenty-six-­concert tour in 1946, which was broadcast around Australia. As Allan  Evans wrote  in his biography of Ignaz Friedman, Volterra, observing that anti-Italian sentiment in Australian was very strong, was persuaded to perform his first concert for a Red Cross benefit as a way of demonstrating to the Australian public that he was not “one of those bloody Eye-ties.”75 During the war, prior to his engagement with the ABC, Volterra volunteered as a wharf-laborer in the Foreign (Aliens) Labor Corps attached to the Australian Military Force. Presumably in an effort to ingratiate himself with Australian public opinion, he “spent the next few years unloading ammunition on the southern wharves.”76 In his spare time he also performed in a series of “Twilight Hour Chamber  Report to Inspector 2/C Wilson, M.P.I. Section, November 6, 1941, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 71  Ignaz Friedman was born in 1882 in Podgórze (Galicia) and died in Sydney in 1948. 72  Allan Evans, Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 205. 73  Evans, Ignaz Friedman, 205. 74  Evans, Ignaz Friedman. 75  Evans, Ignaz Friedman, 206–207. 76  Publicity Section, Press Release, “Volterra to Tour for the A.B.C. Italian Pianist with a Background of Triumphs,” February 27, 1946, Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138, Gualtiero Volterra, ABC, NAA, NSW. 70

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Music” piano recitals in the Kellys’ family home at Darling Point in Sydney for the Air Force Comforts Fund. In addition, through an article which appeared in the March 8, 1943, issue of the Sydney Morning Herald, we know that Volterra performed music by Franz Schubert the following day in a music club event at the Collegium Musicum to raise patriotic funds.77 Despite the efforts made by Volterra and his family to demonstrate pro-­ British sentiments, the Australian authorities continued to discriminate against him. In a letter of October 5, 1944, written by B.W. Kirke, ABC manager for New South Wales (NSW), to the deputy security of NSW, Kirke asks the deputy to advise on whether Volterra should be “consider[ed] [a] suitable person to have access to a microphone” since “He is an Italian.”78 Volterra was engaged to perform in a solo piano recital at the Orchestral Concert on November 10 at Sydney’s Town Hall. The deputy replied on October 17, informing the ABC Manager, that “it is not considered advisable, from a Security aspect, that Mr. Volterra should be allowed to have access to a microphone.”79 We don’t know if Volterra finally performed in this concert, as evidence for it is absent from the archival documents. As numerous articles appearing in Australian newspapers show, Volterra gave his first concert for the Australian Red Cross on March 19, 1946, in support of the Food Aid for Britain Fund, at Sydney Town Hall. The program included Chopin’s Piano Concert in E Minor op. 11 with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Percy Code. It was broadcast by the ABC. Every newspaper article announcing the Red Cross concert emphasizes that Volterra was “a famous continental pianist,” “a refugee from Italian Fascism” who “served for several years in the Foreign Labor Corps.” The first ABC press releases make sure to depict Volterra as a foreigner who actively participated in supporting Australian and British causes during the war (Image 6.1). It is important to note that the articles do not mention Volterra’s Jewishness, while what is noted is that he left Europe before the outbreak of the war. This can be easily explained by the rooted anti-­ Semitism and hostility toward Jewish immigration present in Australia at 77  See “Music and Drama,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 8, 1943, 6, accessed May 5, 2019, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17847577. 78  See letter by B.W. Kirke, ABC manager for NSW to deputy director of security, October 5, 1944, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW. 79  See letter by deputy security for NSW to the manager for the NSW ABC, October 17, 1944, Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606, Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian), NAA, NSW.

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Image 6.1  Gualtiero Volterra-pianist and his wife Patricia Kelly-taken in the garden at the home of her parents-Mr and Mrs T. H. [Thomas Herbert and Ethel Knight] Kelly-at Darling Point-Sydney, 1946, Sydney, box 136, SP1011/1, item 4546, ABC, NAA, NSW

the time. According to Suzanne D.  Rutland, “Anti-refugee hysteria” in Australia was directed against Jewish refugees “in the late 1930s and continued after 1945 in general newspapers, in statements by some members of parliament and in resolutions passed by pressure groups.”80 From the archival documents in the ABC box, there are many promotional photographs and newspapers clippings about Volterra’s very 80  Suzanne D.  Rutland, The Jews in Australia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 51.

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Image 6.2  Gualtiero Volterra-pianist-and Mrs Volterra at their beautiful home at Darling Point Sydney-Mrs Volterra listens while her husband plays music that listeners will hear when he begins his tour for the ABC in early April [1946], box 136, SP1011/1, item 4546/5, ABC, NAA, NSW

successful ABC concerts across Australia during 1946 (Image 6.2). The critics were enthusiastic about his exceptional performances, which report that he was always enthusiastically received by the public.81 He performed

81   See newspaper clippings, Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138, Volterra Gualtiero, ABC, NAA, NSW.

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for nine months, from March 19 to December 16, 1946, twenty-one concerts (recitals and orchestral) across every Australian state.82 During his last concert at Sydney Town Hall, Volterra performed a program of J.S. Bach, L. van Beethoven, R. Schumann and F. Chopin works, and received a very positive reception from the audience. At this concert, Ignaz Friedman bade farewell to Volterra before his departure for the United States. In fact, in a short newspaper clipping dated February 1, 1947, titled “Volterra Leaves Sydney,” we discover that Volterra had “plans to go to the United States” and then to embark for Europe for a series of concerts in Norway, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and England.83 Volterra left Australia in January 1947 for the United States.84 We cannot determine whether he performed in the United States, but we do know, as has been reported by Evans, that Volterra, accompanied by the ABC’s Billy James, met with Mr. Mertens, manager at the Judson Agency in New York.85 We have an amusing account of this meeting from Patricia Volterra. After he had finished “yelling like a madman” on the phone, Mr. Mertens asked Volterra if he wanted to do “a coast-to-coast tour.” Volterra responded that after seeing him tinkering with all those phones, he was certain that next year he didn’t want to become like him “because you are really a wreck.” Mr. Mertens, on the other hand, replied that Volterra was right and that “If I had a son who wanted to be a concert pianist in this country, I’d cut his throat.” Thanking him for the advice, Volterra went 82  As it was reported in a few newspapers, one concert in Adelaide, scheduled for ANZAC Day on April 25, 1946, was cancelled following protests from ex-servicemen. The reason for this, as is explained by the articles, was due to Volterra’s Italianness, as many Australian soldiers had died in combat against the Italian and German troops in Africa. Hence the inappropriateness, according to the protest, of allowing an Italian artist to perform on the first ANZAC Day after the Second World War. See newspaper clipping “Anzac Night Concert by EX-Alien Pianist Resented By Soldiers,” The Truth (Sydney), May 5, 1946, Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138, Volterra Gualtiero, ABC, NAA, NSW. 83  See newspaper clippings “Volterra Leaves Sydney,” The Sydney Morning Herald, February 1, 1947, Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138, Volterra Gualtiero, ABC, NAA, NSW. 84  From the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for The United,” we know that Volterra embarked on the ship SS Defender in Sydney on January 21, 1947, and arrived in Boston on February 24, 1947. See “Massachusetts, Elenchi dei passeggeri e degli equipaggi, 1820-1963,” Ancestry, accessed November 28, 2019, https://www.ancestry.it/search/ categories/40/?name=Gualtiero_Volterra 85  The memoir by Carla Pekelis confirms the presence of the Volterra family in New York. See Carla Pekelis, My Version of the Facts (St. Evanston: Marlboro Press, 2005) 260.

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on to say “because of the persecution I’ve gone through [two of Volterra’s brothers died in a concentration camp]86 and my success in Australia, I’ll keep my music for myself.”87 In the following years, Volterra dedicated himself to the art market and for almost ten years would remain in the United States, traveling extensively in Europe (especially in London) to acquire many paintings. He became Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi’s agent, with whom he had worked prior to leaving Italy in 1939. Information on Volterra post-exile is dispersed throughout various published works and academic research on Contini-Bonacossi and the  American Kress Foundation.88 Through the information gathered from these sources, it appears that Volterra was very active in the art market and played a central role in the business of Contini-Bonacossi, as is shown by Fulvia Zaninelli and Sandro Pazzi.89 After the disruption induced by his period in Australia, Volterra, back in Italy temporarily,90 commenced “re-engaging with Contini-Bonacossi,” helping him to recover from a difficult financial situation and on his behalf “perused auctions, monitored 86  Umberto Angelo Volterra was arrested in Florence and deported, first to Fossoli Internment camp in Italy and then to Auschwitz on April 5, 1944. He was killed on arrival in Auschwitz on April 10, 1944. Gastone Volterra was arrested in Florence and deported, first to Fossoli’s camp in Italy and then to Auschwitz on April 5, 1944. He was killed on arrival in Auschwitz on April 10, 1944. See Liliana Picciotto, Il libro della memoria. Gli ebrei deportati dall’Italia (1943-1945) (Milan: Mursia, 2002) 652. For an overview of the Jewish deportation from Tuscany, see: Enzo Collotti ed., Ebrei in Toscana tra occupazione tedesca e RSI: persecuzione, depredazione, deportazione (1943-1945) (Rome: Carocci, 2007). 87  Evans, Ignaz Friedman, 207-208. 88  See Eugenia S. Robbins ed., “Art News–from Colleges and Elsewhere,” Art Journal 32, no. 1 (Autumn, 1972); Dianne Dwyer Modestini, Masterpieces, based on a manuscript by Mario Modestini (Florence: Cadmo, 2018); Eva Toffali, “Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi tra le due guerre: Kress e gli altri. Novità dagli archivi fiorentini e romani (1929-1939),” Gazzetta antiquaria, Associazione antiquari d’Italia, 2016, accessed October 18, 2019, https://www.antiquariditalia.it/it/gazzetta/articolo/2/138/alessandro-contini-bonacossitra-le-due-guerre-kress-e-gli-altri. 89  Fulvia Zaninelli, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Antiquario (1878-1955) The Art Market and Cultural Philanthropy in the formation of American Museums, (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018), 105–110, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/31510; Sandro Pazzi, La donazione dimenticata. L’incredibile vicenda della Collezione Contini Bonacossi, (Milan: Electra, 2016). 90  We know from an article about the tax contribution from Florentine families to the Florence Municipality of the Corriere della Sera newspaper on December 30, 1960, that Volterra was resident in Florence. See “L’imposta di famiglia a Firenze e i ruoli suppletivi per Bologna,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), December 30, 1960, 10.

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the art market in London, and helped with deals with overseas clients.”91 During this time, Volterra found a successful second life as an art dealer. Contini-Bonacossi, thanks to Volterra’s work, became one of the Kress Foundation’s most important clients, as documented by the inventory of the works featured in the Foundation.92 Volterra was subsequently involved directly with the Kress family, buying “European paintings and objects,” and he “continued to expand his holdings.”93 From 1950, Volterra was helping Vittorio Cini to collect “cose ferraresi” (literally “things from Ferrara”) for his art collection in Venice. Volterra acquired two exceptional paintings for Cini: the San Giorgio by Cosmé Tura and the San Giorgio by Ercole de’ Roberti.94 Among the various mediations, acquisitions and sales made by Volterra on behalf of Contini-Bonacossi are the Cook collection, the Kress collection and the Contini Bonacossi photographic collection. After Contini-Bonacossi’s death in 1955, Volterra acquired all of Contini-­ Bonacossi’s photographic collections, to which he continued to add photographs. Until Volterra’s death in 1967  in Florence, the entire collection remained “on the estate of his villa, La Limonaia” in Florence.95 In 1969, Vanderbilt University (Nashville, USA) purchased the collection from the Volterra estate, which consisted of 50,000 photographs of art objects created in Europe from the thirteenth through to the twentieth century, today known as the Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive.96 Renzo Massarani The primary sources that allow us to reconstruct Massarani’s arrival in Brazil97 are found in a few newspaper clippings conserved in the Massarani  Zaninelli, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, 108.  See “The Kress Collection Catalogue,” Samuel H. Kress Foundation, accessed October 15, 2019, http://www.kressfoundation.org/collection/catalogue. Contini Bonacossi was unable to go to the United States because he wasn’t granted a visa. For this reason, he sent, among other collaborators, Gualtiero Volterra. See Sandro Pazzi, La donazione dimenticata, 109. 93  Eugenia S. Robbins ed., “Art News–from Colleges and Elsewhere,” 80. 94  See Andrea Bacchi ed., Dipinti ferraresi della collezione Vittorio Cini, (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1990), xi, 6, 26. 95  Robbins ed., “Art News–from Colleges and Elsewhere,” 80. 96  See “Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive,” Digital Collections of the Vanderbilt University Library, accessed October 15, 2019, http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/cv.pl. 97  We know, from the immigration schedule, that Massarani received a visa from the Brazilian Consulate in Livorno on April 5, 1939 (he had previously received the pass91

92

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family archive in Milan.98 Just as in Gualtiero Volterra’s case in Australia, two articles, one in Italian and one in Portuguese, herald Massarani’s arrival in Brazil. The article in Italian was published in the São Paolo newspaper Fanfulla: o jornal dos italianos (newspaper of the Italians), and is dated June 13, 1939. The article is entitled “Maestro Renzo Massarani.” The article reports that Massarani, who has recently arrived in Brazil, has decided to settle temporarily in Rio de Janeiro.99 Describing him as a “remarkable composer that belongs to the new generation of Italian musicians,” the article goes on to list some of his most important compositions and the highlights of his career as a musician and music critic. The article, like in Volterra’s case, bears no trace of Massarani’s reason for migrating to Brazil or of his Jewish origin. This absence must not be attributed to an oversight on the part of the newspaper, but can be explained by the fact that the editorial staff of Fanfulla had gradually begun to align itself with the ideology of Italian Fascism.100 The article in Portuguese reads differently from the one in Italian. It appeared in the newspaper Diario da Noite on August 10, 1939, with the title Por Motivos Raciaes foi forçado a deixar a Italia un grande maestro italiano (It was on the Grounds of Race that a great Italian maestro was forced to leave Italy).101 The article includes a photo of Massarani, and port on December 26, 1938), and he embarked on the ship Neptunia in Naples on May 11, 1939. See “Rio de Janeiro, Brasile, Schede di immigrazione, 1900-1965,” Ancestry, accessed on November 28, 2019, https://www.ancestry.it/search/ categories/40/?name=Renzo_Massarani. 98  I express my gratitude to Daniela Massarani for having given me the possibility to see the family’s archive and for the extremely helpful information she gave me during my time in Milan. I would like to note that in 2015 Daniela Massarani’s son, Luca Buratto, won the prestigious Honens Prize Laureate of the Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, Canada, and that he is one of Italy’s most promising young Italian pianists, continuing his family legacy. For an overview of the Italian and Jewish immigration in Brazil, see Anna Rosa Campagnano, In difesa della razza: os judeus italianos refugiados do fascismo e o antissemitismo do governo Vargas, 1938-1945, (São Paulo: EDUSP- FAPESP, 2011); Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, Citoyens du monde: Le Brésil face à l’Holocauste et aux réfugiés juifs (1933-1948), trans. from Portuguese by Marie Jo Ferreira, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017). 99  See Fanfulla–Cronaca (São Paolo), June 13, 1939, 8, Massarani Family Archive, Milan. 100  See Angelo Trento, “Il Fanfulla di San Paolo e la stampa italiana in Brasile dal nazionalismo al fascismo,” Anais do V Seminário da Imigração Italiana em Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, 4-5 nov. 2009, accessed October 21, 2019, https://www.ponteentreculturas.com. br/revista/fanfulla.pdf. 101  See “Por Motivos Raciaes foi forçado a deixar a Italia un grande maestro italiano,” Diario da Noite (Rio de Janeiro), August 10, 1939, 3, Massarani Family Archive, Milan.

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opens by stating that “Renzo Massarani acha-se entre nós e vae fixar residencia no Brasil” (Renzo Massarani is with us and will settle in Brazil). It gives the reason for his arrival in Brazil, (the Fascist Racial Laws), and welcomes him to the country. The article subsequently summarizes the Mantuan composer’s career by listing some of his most significant compositions. It is curious to note that on the same page we find an article on the Italian opera singer Gabrielle Bezanzoni Lage, married to Henrique Lage, a rich Brazilian businessman, entitled Gabriella Bezanzoni Lage applaudida por Mussolini (Gabriella Bezanzoni Lage applauded by Mussolini).102 The two articles are at odds with one another: that on Massarani which reports the cause of his exile—the Fascist anti-Semitic persecution—and the other, which announces Mussolini’s praise—the man responsible for the persecution experienced by Massarani—for the singer. On August 14, 1939, an article appeared in A Gazeta–S. Paulo, accompanied by a photograph of Massarani, entitled Algunos minutos com o maestro Renzo Massarani que èle nos disse sobre or movement musical na Italia de hoje (A few minutes with the maestro Renzo Massarani who told us about the musical movement in Italy today).103 In this case, there is no trace of the reason that prompted him to escape from Italy and move to Brazil—all that is said about the matter is that Massarani is passing through São Paolo. The first part of the article gives a short biography of the composer, while the second provides commentary on some of the new Italian music trends and on the attention given to the various contemporary music festivals in Italy. Toward the end Massarani lists the most important Italian composers of the moment, including Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Vittorio Rieti.104 Massarani’s son, Andrea, remembers that this initial period in Brazil proved very difficult and painful, and that the family of five’s first home had been “in a room in a very modest pension” in Rio de Janeiro.105 To 102  The article recounts Bezanzoni’s last Italian performance in Rome, in the principal role of Carmen, in the presence of Mussolini. See “Por Motivos Raciaes foi forçado a deixar a Italia un grande maestro italiano,” Diario da Noite (Rio de Janeiro). 103  See “Algunos minutos com o maestro Renzo Massarani que èle nos disse sobre or movement musical na Italia de hoje,” A Gazeta–S. Paulo–Segunda Feira (San Paulo), August 14, 1939, Massarani Family Archive, Milan. 104  The article also relays Massarani’s hope of having his ballet “Guerin detto il Meschino” performed in São Paulo. 105  Andrea Massarani, “Esilio in Brasile del M° Renzo Massarani.”

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Image 6.3  Renzo Massarani with Elda Constantini (Massarani) and their children Laura, Andrea and Giulio-taken at Leme beach (Rio de Janeiro-Brazil), June 30, 1943, Private collection, Massarani Family Archive, Milan

earn a living in this first period in Rio de Janeiro (Image 6.3), Renzo Massarani took on work as a ballet class accompanist, and would tutor privately in music composition, voice, and even Italian language.106 His real entrance into the Brazilian music scene was established when he was given the role of orchestrator at Radio National and then as music critic, first for the newspaper A Manhã and then for Jornal do Brasil (a role  Andrea Massarani, “Esilio in Brasile del M° Renzo Massarani.”

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which lasted for twenty-two years).107 This resulted in him becoming a member of Associação Brasileira de Críticos Teatrais (Brazilian Association of Theater Critics).108 The online portal of Acadêmia Brasileira de Música, which boasts among its founders the famous composer Heitor Villa-­ Lobos, offers a profile on Renzo Massarani.109 In fact, in 1945 thanks to the interest of Villa-Lobos, Massarani obtained naturalized Brazilian citizenship for artistic merits, and in 1950 the ABM elected him “cadeira n. 15.” On September 27, 1946, driven by nostalgia for Italy and his friends who had remained on the peninsula, Massarani wrote a touching letter to Alfredo Casella and his wife Yvonne.110 The letter opens by recalling that “The moment Rome was liberated one of the first names that came to mind was yours.”111 Massarani then apologises for not having written before, confirming that he had heard about Alfredo Casella’s illness from Italy, but thanks to information later communicated by Renzo Valcarenghi, director of the musical publishing house Ricordi in Missione in Brazil, he was aware that Alfredo’s health was improving. In the remainder of the letter, Massarani conveys, with emotional intensity, his life in Brazil:

107  Conserved in the Massarani Family Archive are a few articles written by Renzo Massarani for these two newspapers. Massarani became one of the most important music critics for the Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro). 108  Massarani’s articles for the two newspapers are difficult to access today in the music section of the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. A partial collection of Massarani’s Brazilian articles is conserved in Venice at Fondazione Giorgio Cini. See Recensioni e Scritti Critici su Alfredo Casella, Fondo Alfredo Casella, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; Ritagli stampa, Ritagli stampa raccolti in album, vol. 16, 1946–1951, Fondo Gian Francesco Malipiero, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; Scritti, Articoli a stampa raccolti in album, Scritti su G.F.  Malipiero, Articoli su G.F.M. vol. II, Fondo Gian Francesco Malipiero, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. 109  The Acadêmia was founded on June 28, 1945, by Villa-Lobos, Lorenzo Fernandez, João Baptista Julião, Florêncio de Almeida Lima and Arthur Iberê de Lemos. See “Renzo Massarani,” Acadêmia Brasileira de Música, accessed September 4, 2019, http://www. abmusica.org.br/_old/academico.php?n=rrenzo-massarani&id=107 110  See “Lettera di Renzo Massarani a Alfredo Casella,” September 27, 1946, Rio de Janeiro, Carteggi, Corrispondenze di Renzo Massarani a Alfredo Casella, busta XVIII, fasc. 4, n. L.3767, Fondo Alfredo Casella, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, quoted in part by Carlo Piccardi, “La parabola di Renzo Massarani, compositore ebreo all’ombra del fascismo,” 171. 111  “Appena liberata Roma, uno dei primi nomi a cui ho pensato è stato il vostro.” “Lettera di Renzo Massarani a Alfredo Casella,” September 27, 1946, Rio de Janeiro.

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About us there is little to report: even during the war we continued a dull, mediocre life, one of drifters full of regrets and saudades. Little by little I overcame my illness, I worked for months and months for 20 hours a day, giving lessons of all kinds, writing music...for local composers, doing colorful orchestrations, I glumly earned my daily bread, without the slightest fulfilment. Elda has cheerfully held down the fort and now battles against the increasingly severe crisis that is making the very rich Brazil worse off than our Italy.112

Here, what is significant to note is the element of nostalgia, which is universal in those who have experienced the emotional burden of the exilic experience which, in the words of Renato Camurri, bears “the weight of absence from one’s motherland and of nostalgia that her memory generates in the mind.”113 At the letter’s conclusion, another typical element of exile emerges, the “dimension of distance,” which can simultaneously be “the torment and privilege enjoyed by the exile.”114 As you can see, nothing cheerful: but we cannot complain, if only to think that we have saved the children while 32 of our relatives who remained in Italy were, instead, murdered. We thank God, therefore, and we carry on. Now we have a tremendous desire to return to Italy for a bit (be it only to visit relatives and friends) but the expense is too great for our means, and we’ll still have to wait for who knows how long.115  “Di noi poco da raccontarvi: abbiamo continuato anche durante la guerra una vita scialba, mediocre, da spostati pieni di rimpianti e di “saudades.” Io ho superato poco a poco la mia malattia, ho lavorato per mesi e mesi per 20 ore al giorno, dando lezioni di tutti i generi, scrivendo musica…per compositori locali, facendo orchestrazioni variopinte, mi sono malinconicamente guadagnato il pane, senza la minima soddisfazione. Elda ha tenuto in piedi allegramente la baracca e adesso lotta contro la crisi sempre più dura che sta riducendo il ricchissimo Brasile peggio della nostra Italia. (…).” “Lettera di Renzo Massarani a Alfredo Casella,” September 27, 1946, Rio de Janeiro. 113  “il peso del distacco dalla propria terra madre e della nostalgia che il suo ricordo genera nella mente,” in Renato Camurri, “Introduzione,” in Gaetano Salvemini Lettere Americane 1927–1949, ed. Renato Camurri, pref. Paolo Marzotto (Rome: Donzelli editore, 2015), XXII. 114  Camurri, “Introduzione,” in Gaetano Salvemini. 115  “Come vedete, niente di allegro: ma non possiamo lamentarci, se non altro pensando che abbiamo salvato i figli e che 32 dei nostri parenti rimasi in Italia sono stati, invece, ammazzati. Ringraziamo Iddio, perciò, e tiriamo avanti. Adesso avremmo un enorme desiderio di tornare un poco in Italia (sia pure soltanto per far visita a parenti ed agli amici) ma la spesa è troppo grande per le nostre possibilità, e bisognerà aspettare 112

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Massarani was not the only exiled Italian Jewish composer to write a letter to Alfredo Casella after the war. Both Castelnuovo-Tedesco, exiled in Los Angeles (Beverly Hills), and Vittorio Rieti exiled in New York, each sent a letter to Casella, who had remained in Italy.116 The tone of the two letters, compared to that of Massarani, is very different, although it is possible to find some commonalities in the three letters, such as the desire to return to Italy for a while. It is worthwhile here to briefly consider the three composers and their experiences of exile in relation with one another. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s letter, dated August 26, 1945, begins with some resentment for the behavior exhibited by Casella preceding Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s departure from Italy for the United States, which was the reason why he had not written him earlier: I was under the impression that you did not want (at least, during that particular period) to remain in touch with me… this impression (born from the fact that, the last time you came to Florence before my departure, you did not come to my home like you usually did, but preferred to say goodbye on “neutral territory”!) this was later confirmed to me by the fact that you yourself, during the first year of my stay in America, never wrote to me (…) not even when my Mamma passed away! (…) I noticed it because, on that occasion, even the purest Aryans and the most zealous fascist hierarchs did not hesitate to send me an expression of sympathy.117

ancora chissà per quanto tempo.” “Lettera di Renzo Massarani a Alfredo Casella,” September 27, 1946, Rio de Janeiro. 116  To these, another from Vittorio Rieti to Casella on December 27, 1945, must be added. See “Lettera di Vittorio Rieti a Alfredo Casella,” December 27, 1945, New York, Carteggi, Rieti, Vittorio, busta XXI, fasc. 5, n. L.4388, Fondo Alfredo Casella, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. 117  “Ero rimasto con l’impressione che non desideravate, (almeno in quel particolare periodo) restare in corrispondenza con me .. quest’impressione (nata dal fatto che, l’ultima volta che venivate a Firenze prima della mia partenza, non venite a casa nostra, com’eravate soliti, ma preferite prender commiato in “luogo neutro”!) mi fu poi confermata dal fatto che voi stessi, durante il primo anno del mio soggiorno in America, non mi avete mai scritto (…) neanche quando mancò la mia Mamma! (…) lo notai poiché, in quell’occasione, anche i più puri ariani e i più zelanti gerarchi non esitarono ad inviarmi una parola di simpatia.” “Lettera di Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco a Alfredo Casella e Yvonne Muller Casella,” August 26, 1945, Beverly Hills, Carteggi, Corrispondenza di Mario Catelnuovo-Tedesco a Alfredo Casella, busta X, fasc. 3, n. L.2302, Fondo Alfredo Casella, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice.

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Castelnuovo-Tedesco continues, writing that by now what happened “belongs to the past,” and goes on to tell of his professional and personal life in the United States and the difficulties he has undergone. It is important to highlight the element that ties Massarani and Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s letters, namely the paradoxical aspect of both burden and fortune brought by their departures from Italy. As Castelnuovo-­ Tedesco writes: It certainly turned out to be greatly fortunate that we left Italy that July long ago, even if the blow was very painful, it is certain that decision spared me and my family from infinite dangers and much physical suffering. Moral sufferings have not been lacking and you can imagine in what state of unspeakable anxiety we have lived in for the fate of our loved ones who remained in the homeland and for the events of the world and of our poor Italy in particular.118

As for Rieti’s letter, dated August 17, 1945, the tone is unquestionably more positive, due not only to the fact that he quickly succeeded  in integrating himself into New  York’s music scene, garnering a degree of success: New York is celebrating the end of the war in the Pacific and I am beginning to open my heart to the hope of making a trip back to Europe in a not too distant future (…) I, too, worked on all manner of things: symphonic music and chamber music and three ballets, two already on the stage and one for next season. In this last field, one fares better than in the field of concerts, where a strong reactionary wind of nationalism blows. Personally however, I feel strong (…) despite the thorn in my heart that with time has lodged itself deeper with the harrowing news received from Italy.119 118  “Fu certo una grande fortuna per noi di lasciare l’Italia in tempo in quel lontano luglio, anche se il colpo fu quanto mai doloroso e certo quella decisione ha risparmiato a me e ai miei infiniti pericoli e molte sofferenze fisiche. Sofferenze morali non sono mancate e potete immaginare in quale stato di ansia indicibile abbiamo vissuto per la sorte dei nostri rimasti in patria come per le vicende del mondo e della nostra povera Italia in particolare.” “Lettera di Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco a Alfredo Casella e Yvonne Muller Casella,” August 26, 1945, Beverly Hills. 119  “New York è in festa per la fine della guerra nel Pacifico e comincio ad aprire il cuore nella speranza di poter fare un viaggio in Europa in un avvenire non troppo lontano (…) Anch’io ho lavorato ad ogni sorta di sacco di cose: musica sinfonica e da camera e tre balletti, due già arrivati in scena e uno per la stagione prossima. In quest’ultimo campo, si sta meglio che nel campo dei concerti, dove spira un gran vento di reazione e di nazionalismo.

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Rieti too, in his letter, gives thought to Italy and the suffering that the country has had to endure in the years since the war. This encapsulates within itself the entirety of the exilic experience, shared by all three composers—and all exiles—in which the element of distance materializes as passage from one place to another. During the entirety of his Brazilian period, Massarani remained in epistolary contact with both Rieti and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.120 Turning our attention back to Massarani in Brazil, deeply disillusioned by his Italian homeland, Massarani decided to prohibit the performance, re-release, and access to the manuscripts of his compositions. Massarani came to this drastic decision after the Italian state had reinstated him in his post at the SIAE after the war. Massarani politely refused the offer, as if to reassert somehow that Italy, after having condemned and banished him, did not appreciate his music and his work.121 During the Brazilian years, Massarani considerably reduced his composing work, dedicating himself intermittently to composing stage music and harmonizing some Brazilian folk songs for Ricordi Brasiliana and for other record producers of São Paolo.122 A singular episode during the war, recalled by his son Andrea and also reported by Vittorio Rieti,123 concerns the Louis Jouvet’s theatre company’s production of Paul Claudel’s Announce faite à Marie, with music by Darius Milhaud, at the Teatro Municipal in Rio.124 Since the scores did not arrive in time for the performance, Massarani wrote, in a very short amount of time, a new musical score which proved to be a great success.125 Personalmente però mi sento in forza (…) malgrado la spina nel cuore che mi si è conficcata dal tempo delle angosciose notizie ricevute dall’Italia.” “Lettera di Vittorio Rieti a Alfredo Casella,” August 17, 1945, New  York, Carteggi, Rieti, Vittorio, busta XXI, fasc. 5, n. L.4387, Fondo Alfredo Casella, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. 120  Andrea Massarani mentions Castelnuovo-Tedesco in his memoirs, see Andrea Massarani, “Esilio in Brasile M° Renzo Massarani.” Some information on Rieti is available in Ricci, Vittorio Rieti, 356–357. 121  Girardi, “Su Renzo Massarani,” 399. 122  In the catalog of Massarani’s works, put together by Enrico Girardi, these were the compositions made in Brazil: eight Brazilian folk songs and a composition for solo piano. Girardi, “Su Renzo Massarani,” 405–411. 123  Ricci, Vittorio Rieti, 476. 124  Episode also reported by Girardi, “Su Renzo Massarani,” 401. 125  Andrea Massarani remembers another episode in which his father had to write some of the missing parts in the symphony of the composer Giovanni Battista Lulli for the Teatro Musical di Rio de Janeiro, which had not arrived in time due to the war. See Andrea

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After the war, Massarani re-established contact with his Italian musician friends, managing to arrange on two occasions, for his friend the orchestra conductor Nino Sonzogno to come to Brazil from Italy to conduct at the Orchestra Sinfônica Brasileira.126 An important event took place in April 1950. Nicola Pende,127 one of the Italian scientists who had signed the 1938 Manifesto of Race, traveled to Brazil to give a series of lectures. The Jewish families of São Paolo protested, preventing Pende from speaking.128 In Rio de Janeiro, a group of students from the Faculty of Medicine lay on the stairs, impeding the conference in that city as well. Andrea Massarani recalled that his father took an active part in the student protest.129 Massarani never returned to live in Italy, but he did spend numerous holidays there (two of his children, Andrea and Laura, eventually moved to Italy), and participated as a judge in various composition competitions. He was also invited to several European countries as a music critic for many events (Image 6.4). He died in Rio de Janeiro on March 28, 1975, and was buried in Caju Jewish cemetery. Prior to his death, Renzo Massarani forbade his children from performing and publishing his music. His children had a tree garden planted in his memory near Jodfat in Israel.

Some Final Considerations First of all, one of the questions addressed at the beginning should be recalled: How did the conditions of exile influence their creativity? In Gualtiero Volterra’s case, the experience of exile was marked by a return to music. He had ceased his work as a pianist in the 1930s, resuming Massarani, “Renzo Massarani, l’uomo,” in Incontro commemorative del centenario della nascita di Renzo Massarani (Milan, 1998). 126  Nino Sonzogno was the director of the first performance of Massarani’s ballet Boè in 1937. 127   See Francesco Cassata, Molti sani e forti. L’eugenetica in Italia (Turin: Bollati Boringheri, 2006), 188-211; Maria Sophia Quine, “Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy. The Biological Politics of Sex and Reproduction,” in Fascism: Journal of comparative fascist studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 92–144; Pasquale Martino ed., Razza Fascista. Nicola Pende fra scienza e ideologia eugenetica (Bari: Radici Furture, 2017). 128  See Elena Mazzini, “Come ricordare il 1938. La stampa ebraica italiana e la memoria delle leggi razziali (1948-1968),” in Ventunesimo Secolo 7, no. 17, A settant’anni dalle leggi razziali (Ottobre 2008): 24. On participation in the protest see Andrea Massarani, “Renzo Massarani, l’uomo.” 129  Andrea Massarani, “Renzo Massarani, l’uomo.”

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Image 6.4  Renzo Massarani at Malpensa Airport (Italy) before returning to Brazil after a holiday in Italy, ca. 1970, Private collection, Massarani Family Archive, Milan

it successfully during his exile in Australia. For Massarani, exile signified a near-total abandonment of his work as a composer, and the refusal to have the music written before he left Italy performed. For him, exile represented a critical moment that ruptured his past in Italy from his future in Brazil. Massarani and Volterra’s experiences of exile were different in both circumstance and vantage point. Massarani had to adapt to his new country, Brazil, in which he hardly knew anyone, and rebuild his professional life from scratch. For Volterra, Australia was his wife’s country of origin, and therefore he did not have to work too hard to enter the Australian cultural establishment. Both actively contributed to artistic and cultural progress by lending their musical skills to their respective host countries. Italianlanguage newspapers both in Australia and Brazil never mentioned neither Volterra’s nor Massarani’s Jewishness. This may be explained by both newspapers’ strong Fascist sympathies and alignment with party ideology. While this is a particularly under-researched topic, there is nevertheless great potential in analyzing how these newspapers dealt with the two conflicting values of promoting Italian migrants within their communities and the Fascist denigration of Jews.

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For Massarani, the disappointment and pain inflicted by his exclusion from the Italian musical establishment was so profound that he decided to remain in Brazil. There was nothing left binding him to Italy, since he had sold everything prior to his departure. Instead, for Volterra, who still had his villa in Florence, Italy, always represented, even in Australia, the country to which he would one day return.

Archival Sources Massarani Family Archive, Milan. Recensioni e Scritti Critici su Alfedo Casella. Fondo Alfredo Casella. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. Ritagli stampa, Ritagli stampa raccolti in album. Vol. 16, 1946-1951. Fondo Gian Francesco Malipiero. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. Scritti, Articoli a stampa raccolti in album. Scritti su G.F.  Malipiero, Articoli su G.F.M. vol. II. Fondo Gian Francesco Malipiero. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. Volterra Gualtiero. Box 6, SP767/1, Item 138. ABC, NAA, NSW. Volterra, Gualtiero (Italian). Box 194, C123/1, Item 6606. NAA, NSW. Volterra [nee Kelly], Patricia (Italian by marriage—born in Australia). Box 202, C123/1, Item 6839. NAA, NSW.

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Capristo, Annalisa. Gather What You Can and Flee: Jewish Intellectual Emigration from Fascist Italy. Translated by Peter Rothstein. New York: CPL Editions, 2014. ———. “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale.” In Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, edited by Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva, 365–381. Milan: IAML Italia, 2018. Casella, Alfredo. 21+26. Edited by Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini. Florence: Olschki, 2001. Cassata, Francesco. Molti sani e forti. L’eugenetica in Italia. Turin: Bollati Boringheri, 2006. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario. Una vita di musica: Un libro di ricordi, edited by James Westby, introduction by Mila De Santis, editing by Ulla Casalini. Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005. Collotti, Enzo, ed. Ebrei in Toscana tra occupazione tedesca e RSI: persecuzione, depredazione, deportazione (1943-1945). Rome: Carocci, 2007. Coser, Lewis. Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. De Angelis, Alberto. Dizionario dei musicisti. Appendice alla seconda edizione. Rome: Ausonia, 1929. Della Terza, Dante. Da Vienna a Baltimora: La diaspora degli intellettuali europei negli Stati Uniti d’America. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Elkner, Cate. Enemy-aliens: the internment of Italian migrants in Australia during the Second World War, foreword by James Franklin. Bacchus Marsh, Vic: Connor Court Publishing, 2005. Evans, Allan.  Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Fabre, Giorgio.  L’elenco. Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei. Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998. Fleming, Donald, and Bernard Bailyn, eds. The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Foa, Vittorio. Lettere dalla giovinezza. Dal carcere 1935–1943, edited by Federica Montevecchi. Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Fogarollo Edda. Note Scordate: Tre musicisti ebrei nella tempesta delle leggi razziali. Leghorn: Sillabe, 2018. Gilardino, Angelo. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Un fiorentino a Beverly Hills. Milan: Edizioni Curci-CIDIM, 2018. Girardi, Enrico. “Su Renzo Massarani.” In La musica a Milano in Lombardia e oltre. Volume secondo, edited by Sergio Martinotti, 399–411. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2000. Glaros, Maria. “‘Sometimes a little injustice must be suffered for the public good’. How the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations 1939 (Cth) affected the lives of German, Italian, Japanese and Australian born women living in Australia during the Second World War.” PhD Thesis, University Western

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CHAPTER 7

“Wir treffen uns am Schluss” (We Shall Meet at the End)—Kurt Sonnenfeld (1921–1997) at Ferramonti: The Persecution, the Exile, the Internment, the Music Raffaele Deluca

Introduction Scholars have debated the question of Fascist internment camps for the past forty years. Historians are still working hard to remove all the prejudices and misunderstandings which, since the end of the Second World War, have covered up Italy’s responsibilities and disguised the framework of foreign Jews’ persecution in Italy from 1945 until today. Researchers’ persistent efforts have produced important results through academic I want to thank for this chapter my friend Professor Paul Crabb, Director of Choral Activities, University of Missouri. All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own. R. Deluca (*) Music Conservatory, Rovigo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_7

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studies on civilian internment camps during Fascist Italy, from which general inquiries have been made about their stories.1 Due to the subject’s complexity, many aspects related to music and internment camps have remained totally unknown among musicologists and scholars until recently. First evidence of a musical heritage in that context came to me with the music of a Jewish composer interned in Fascist Italy, through his former musical assistant and heir, Armida Locatelli. Locatelli possessed the entire oeuvre of Austrian composer Kurt Sonnenfeld (Vienna, February 24, 1921; Milan, March 22, 1997) which I was able to study from 2011, as a scientific collaborator at the Library of the Music Conservatory in Milan (Image 7.1). The complete collection includes at least 300 music manuscripts, mostly autographs and many archival documents. It took me more than a year to study and to catalogue all these scores on the Italian Opac (SBN)2 where they are now all displayed. The result led to more than 200 original works, within a fifty-year period from 1930 to his death, in very different genres (songs, concertos, Kabarett, sonatas, sacred music etc.) and performance media (chamber music, symphonic music, solo instruments, choir, voices etc.). This opportunity gave me, for the first time, the possibility to define the historical and artistic context of his life, and allowed me to investigate in many Italian archives3 and private collections over the years, enabling me to discover what happened to the music in one of the largest internment camps in monarchic-Fascist Italy: Ferramonti.4 1  Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, Ferramonti: la vita e gli uomini del più grande campo d’internamento fascista 1940-1945 (Florence, Giuntina, 1987). See also Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, Mussolini’s camps: civilian internment in fascist Italy (1940-1943), trans. Norma Bouchard, and Valerio Ferme (London, New York: Routledge & Kegan, 2019), originally in Italian as Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, I campi del duce: l’internamento civile nell’Italia fascista (1940-1943) (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). For a general history of Ferramonti, see Geoffrey P. Megargee, Joseph R. White, and Mel Hecker eds., The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopaedia of Camps and Ghettos, vol. III: Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), ad vocem. 2  SBN, https://opac.sbn.it. 3  Among others, the ACS in Rome and the historical archive of CDEC in Milan that holds the Israel Kalk papers, perhaps the most extensive archive on Ferramonti. 4  These four years of research appeared (December 2019) in a book on Jewish musicians interned in Fascist Italy. See Raffaele Deluca, Tradotti agli estremi confini: Musicisti ebrei internati nell’Italia fascista, intro. Carlo Spartaco Capogreco (Milan: Mimesis, 2019). The book takes into account and discusses all the documents and events mentioned in the present chapter.

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Image 7.1  Sonnenfeld family in a picture taken a few days before his exile in Italy, July 7, 1939, Private collection, Locatelli, Milan

The Ferramonti Camp It has been historically proven that Italy established at least forty-eight camps, mostly located in little towns and villages in southern Italy, far away from war centers and large cities. Their activity began soon after the declaration of war on June 10, 1940. This forced relocation added further persecution and new torments for the Jews already afflicted by the 1938 Italian Racial Laws. Jews were since considered enemies to be arrested and isolated.5 Among them I tried to take into account lives and musical 5  The Jewish population in Italy was evidently much more limited than elsewhere in Europe. Their presence in Italy has been estimated as being between 45,000 and 47,000 people just before the Second World War. See Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy:

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activities of professional musicians interned; many of them chose to live in Italy not only for transit, but for their professional career as singers and postgraduate music students or for their general artistic sake, as well. Certainly, for the sixty professional musicians whose biographies I have now studied, it became evident that the Belpaese was soon to be revealed as an uncertain refuge or at least the wrong path.6 The Ferramonti camp, with Kurt Sonnenfeld living there for almost the entire duration of its operation, seemed the most interesting case study to develop the traces of a paradoxical music scenario. It was located in a remote land near the city of Cosenza, belonging to the riverside village of Tarsia, already considered at the beginning of the twentieth century as one of the most miserable and pitiable places of the Calabria region.7 Ferramonti was built ex novo in a 160,000 square meter state-owned area infected by malaria. More than ninety barracks built by the fascist construction firm belonging to Eugenio Parrini (1889–1978) should have provided accommodations until the end of the war years for all the Jews interned in Italy before they were to be sent to other countries willing to receive them (Image 7.2). The majority of the people interned in Ferramonti during 1940–1943 were foreign Jews from all over Europe. The camp reached its peak in 1942 with more than 2000 people. The unofficial language of the camp was German. Kurt Sonnenfeld spent four years and eight months of his life there, first as an internee, and then as a displaced person after the Allied Liberation in 1943. The collected musical material led me to a starting point, allowing me to present my findings in Trieste and later at congresses in Milan and Vienna.8 After this, I tried to collect all the available documents on Kurt From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C.  Tedeschi, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 20–26. 6  Klaus Voigt, Zuflucht auf Widerruf: Exil in Italien 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989–1993). 7  “The same fate – the same relapse from prosperity to decay – and for the same reasons, has overtaken many other riverside villages, among them that of Tarsia […]. It was described to us as the most miserable and dirty village in Calabria: but we found it worse.” Norman Douglas, Old Calabria (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 299. 8  Raffaele Deluca, “Musik und Musiker in italienischen Lager Ferramonti,” Musica Reanimata-Mitteilungen 91 (December 2016): 7–17. On June 1, 2016, I organized a symposium at the Music Conservatory in Milan with the title “Wir treffen uns am Schluss. Music from internment camp Ferramonti, a first recognition.” On that occasion, I discussed some major topics with Gerold Gruber, founder of Exil Arte Zentrum and professor of Musicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and we later visited the historical site of Ferramonti, in Calabria, together.

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Image 7.2  A drawing by Kurt Sonnenfeld depicting one of the barracks in Ferramonti where he was interned from February 1941 to September 1945, June 19, 1943, LET.XII.42, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, ASCM

Sonnenfeld in Milan (where he lived his whole life after internment). Sonnenfeld’s last romantic partner, Angela Boselli, gave me the most significant materials about his life, most importantly twenty-six original letters written to him by his parents in Vienna from March 11, 1941, to April 16, 1942. Additional correspondence contained in Boselli’s possession includes thirteen letters by his Ferramontian friend, the Romanian clinician and amateur violinist Joseph Lax (1905–1990). The letters, dated from October 4, 1944, to August 10, 1945, were written from Salerno, Rome, and Milan while following the territories gradually freed by the Allied troops heading toward Northern Italy. Both correspondences show two major historical periods of the camp, the first during monarchic Fascist Italy (1940–1943) and the second after the liberation of Ferramonti on September 14, 1943 (1943–1945). The letters are full of musical evidence, because music was generally a topic not to be censored, and are thus a treasure for a better comprehension of such a complex era. His parents’ letters were sent from Vienna to Ferramonti under the severe

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control of two censorships, both Nazi in the Ostmark and Fascist in Italy. Soon after the last letter, in April 1942, his parents were arrested and transferred from Vienna to the Maly Trostenets extermination camp in Belarus, near Minsk, where they were murdered in June 1942. Kurt Sonnenfeld was born in Vienna at the very crowning point of its cultural development, allowing him to benefit during his childhood from varied cultural influences of the cosmopolitan capital. His father Leopold (1885–1942) was a Hungarian Schlagerkomponist performing Kabarett in Vienna; with his wife Therese Schwarz (1886–1942), they led commercial activities in textiles soon after their marriage in Vienna’s Synagogue on December 18, 1918. The family environment was linked to music: an uncle also performed in cabarets while another relative taught piano and violin. Surely his family environment contributed to creating his musical style, from operetta to Kabarett, from Gebrauchsmusik to classical works, from Tonfilm-Operette to Hungarian folk music. During his early years, he studied at the Neues Konservatorium in Vienna where he attended piano lessons until the Anschluss, the Austrian annexation to the Third Reich in 1938. The Nazi shutdown of the Conservatory forced him to interrupt his musical studies, but after having tried to visit Franz Lehár to present one of his works to him, he continued studying with Edmund Eysler (1874–1949), remaining his pupil for five years (1934–1939). In consideration of what was happening in Vienna, Sonnenfeld’s parents decided to let him depart for Milan, Italy, hoping he could eventually leave from there to the US through Affidavit, one of the few legal possibilities for foreign Jews to leave Europe. Lithuanian-born engineer Israel Kalk (1904–1980), who lived in Milan and helped many Jews with his committee Mensa dei Bambini throughout the war years, pointed out that many thousands of refugees came to Italy between June and August 1939 and among them 2000 decided to stop in Milan.9 According to statistics of the 15,783 children and young people between the age of ten to eighteen living in Vienna before the Anschluss, about 13,600 emigrated with or without their families.10

 ASCDEC, Fondo Israel Kalk, b. 1, fasc. 2.  Dieter J. Hecht, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel and Michaela Raggam-Blesch, Topographie der Shoah. Gedächtnisorte des zerstörten jüdischen Wien (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2015): 214; Christina Köstner and Klaus Voigt eds., Österreichisches Exil in Italien 1938-1945 (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2009). 9

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After ending his private lessons in music, with a statement written specifically for him by Edmund Eysler, some of his music books and his Juvenilia (minuets, fox-trots, polkas, Walzer), Kurt Sonnenfeld left for Italy on July 7, 1939: Vienna July 1, 1939 Mr. Kurt Sonnenfeld has studied with me Harmony, Counterpoint and Piano with constant application; he is very diligent and he has always striven to maintain a good musical taste. I highly recommend him (as a good piano player too). Devoutly, Edmund Eysler, composer.11

The situation in Milan was still somehow bearable at that time. He was provided with accommodation and meals through a committee called the COMASEBIT (which later became DELASEM, Italian acronym for Aid Committee for Emigrants) and worked as a delivery boy in a toyshop and was then helped by a local family. A year and a half later, just after his passport renewal, he was arrested, on February 1, 1941, sent to local prison S.  Vittore for a few weeks; and then taken to Ferramonti in Calabria, approximately 640 miles far from Milan, where he stayed from February 19, 1941, until September 1945. Sonnenfeld, in the “cursed place,” as it was defined by ex-interned Joseph Lax in a letter written to Sonnenfeld in March 1945,12 had the totally unexpected opportunity to meet professional musicians and to continue to study music. Very close to him were the Croatian cellist and orchestral conductor Lav Mirski (1893–1968),13 former cellist in the Wiener Concertverein and then director of the National Theatre in Osijek; the Polish pianist Bogdan Daniel Zins (1905–1994), who studied with Richard Robert (1861–1924) and Franz Schmidt (1874–1939) in Vienna and who Leonard Bernstein later (1953) defined as “a rabid music lover”14;  ASCM, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, LET.XII.40.  ASCM, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, LET.XII.32. 13  S.  Marijanović, “Maestro Lav Mirski: Nacrt za istraživački rad,” in Krležini dani u Osijeku. 100. godina Hrvatskoga narodnog kazališta u Osijeku: Povijest, teorija i praksa-­ hrvatska dramska književnost i kazalište, ed. B.  Hećimović (Zagreb, Osijek: Hrvatsko narodno kazalište, Filozofski fakultet, 2008), 159–164. 14  Bogdan Daniel  Zins was interned in Campagna, near Salerno (September 16, 1940), and from April 1941, in Ferramonti. For Zins’ correspondence with Leonard Bernstein, see Leonard Bernstein Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, ML31. B49, box 60, folder 38. After the war, Zins lived in Rio de Janeiro, and in the late 1970s went 11 12

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the Ukrainian composer Isak Thaler (b. 1902), a former pupil of Franz Schreker (1878–1934)15; the Bosnian pianist Ladislav Sternberg (1914–1984), who studied piano with Antonija Geiger-Eichhorn (1893–1971); German baritones Sigbert Steinfeld (b. 1909)16 and Paul Gorin (1916–1992). Also interned in the camp were some younger musicians similar in age, for example the Serbian composer Leon Levitch (1927–2014), who later settled in Los Angeles and went on studying composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Darius Milhaud.17 Lav Mirski in particular was soon considered as a sort of spiritual leader in the camp. He was to be the Kapellmeister, able to reconstruct a new cultural identity even in those conditions. After the liberation, on November 9, 1943, he did not hesitate to perform a concert with ex-inmates in a cinema at Cosenza, dedicated to the victims of an air raid in the city that caused seventy deaths among civilians a few months before, on April 12. In Bari, while attending the ship for Mandatory Palestine, he formed an orchestra and gave concerts: back to Europe and lived in Munich, Germany, until his death on 29 August 1994. His enthusiastic admiration for Leonard Bernstein appears in every letter. On August 25, 1979, from Munich he wrote to Bernstein: “Happy birthday to you, dear Lenny! No present for you! The most beautiful present you gave to me: the opportunity to enjoy Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Prokofiev directed by the world’s greatest genius. There is no other conductor or interpreter who is able to transmit to the orchestra and to the public the most brilliant and exciting sound, to open heaven and hell. In 1953 you called me in your letter “a rabid music lover”; you are the most rabid music genius, the only one whom I can call so. […] I thank you for all the happy hours you gave to me. God bless you, Lenny.” Some traces of his early musical activities (1928-1929) in Vienna both as a concert pianist and a composer can be found in the newspapers of the time. See ANNO Austrian Newspapers online, https:// anno.onb.ac.at/anno-suche#searchMode=simple&query=%22Daniel+Zins%22&from=1&s electedFilters=date%3A%5B1917+TO+1929%5D. 15  See Joachim Stutschewsky, Der Lebenspfad eines jüdischen Musikers. Ein Leben ohne Kompromisse (1944-76) (Tel Aviv, 1977). In 1924 Thaler took part in the “Donaueschinger Musiktage,” a festival for contemporary music with his Gesänge for Alto and piano. For Thaler’s life after internment in Bari and Rome, see also AROLSEN, 3. Registrations and Files of Displaced Persons, Children and Missing Persons, 3.2 Relief Programs of Various Organisations, 3.2.1 IRO “Care and Maintenance” Program, 3.2.1.2-CM/1 Files originating in Italy, CM/1 files from Italy A-Z, ref. cod. 03020102 oS, no. 215395, https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/search/people/80523535/?p=1&s=Thaler,%20Isaac&s_ lastName=asc. 16  Maria Corelli, In love and war: A letter to my parents (Croydon: Short Books, 2001). 17  Leon Levitch, A Twentieth Century Romantic Temperament: Oral History Transcript: L’artist doit aimer, interview by Thomas Bertonneau (Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984). A complete survey of the musicians will appear in my scheduled book.

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Last Sunday afternoon [July 23, 1944] I went to the Bari Opera House, where Conductor Mirsky [sic] directed a fifth-rate Italian orchestra of ninety musicians, and lifted them to heights of which they had never dreamed, in a program of Mozart, Chopin and Rimsky-Korsakov. Since Mirsky had no clothes fit to appear in public, we had outfitted him in a discarded British officer’s uniform, and we paid him ten dollars for the performance.18

The Greek archimandrite Damaskinos Hatzopoulos (1913–1977) wrote in French a postcard to thank Lav Mirski for the music, and he defined the concerts in Ferramonti as “bright spots of a very dark age.”19 The scarce possibilities for making music were increased by collecting printed music or writing it down, eventually resulting in the accumulation of hundreds of scores in the Ferramonti musical library.20 After the internment, Sonnenfeld himself held in his personal library in Milan a great amount of the music performed in the camp, which included operatic repertoire (G. Verdi, R. Wagner, G. Puccini, G. Rossini, R. Leoncavallo, U. Giordano, F. Halévy, J. Massenet), classical tradition (G. Frescobaldi, J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, L. van Beethoven, F. Mendelssohn, F. Schubert, F. Chopin, R. Schumann, M. Ravel, J. Brahms, F. Liszt), Serbo-Croatian popular tradition (Zlatko Grgošević, Vinko Žganec, Stanislav Binički), Italian popular tradition (Vittorio Monti, Carlo Chiappani, Vincenzo Billi, Geni Sadero (pseud. Eugenia Scarpa), Pier Adolfo Tirindelli, Carlo Buti, Francesco Paolo Tosti), contemporary music (M.  Kowalski, Edvard Moritz), and music written or harmonized for the occasion (B. Zins, I. Thaler, L. Mirski, K. Sonnenfeld). Playing music in such conditions naturally meant that internees had to search for musical instruments. Only some accordions were present, already possessed by some inmates in the camp. During August 1942, the internees managed to take a grand piano from Cosenza, perhaps a mid-nineteenth-century Pleyel, played daily by all the pianists. In a later interview (1984) with Thomas Bertonneau, Leon 18  Allen Raymond, “Ghetto survivors discuss their future,” Canadian Jewish Chronicle, (July 1944): 13. 19  ASCDEC, Fondo Israel Kalk, Album 5. 20  On November 12, 1940, a library was established in Ferramonti and the shelving built specifically for the books was placed in a barrack. Over time the number of volumes possessed was over 2000 books, the origins of which were varied: personal possession of the internees, gifts of the Jewish communities and of the DELASEM, Kalk’s committee Mensa dei Bambini, some specific purchase requests. The musical materials were cataloged and placed inside the library or in a special musical archive. Kurt Sonnenfeld preserved both manuscripts and printed music (scores, parts, piano reductions) once performed in the camp.

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Levitch remembered that the Ferramonti piano “was the light that drew us and that helped” and that making music “helped us to keep up some kind of morale”: One or two thousand people were housed in that house–I mean, in that concentration camp–and they all had one piano. There was literally warfare to get the piano; there were only so many hours available that we could play, that we could be out of the barracks, and every hour was taken, always. The only hours that I could possibly get would be very early in the morning when it was very cold and people were freezing, there was no heat. My mother would take a little brazier. […]. I was still a beginner; I was not considered as a member of the “professional” musical community. […] The rest of the time I sat and eavesdropped on everybody who practiced, and this is how I learned some Bach.21

A harmonium was transported from Northern Italy and brought in the camp as military equipment with the intervention of father Caliste Lopinot (1876–1966),22 an Alsatian Catholic monastic assistant sent there by the Vatican. In addition, the inmates succeeded in obtaining guitars and violins mostly provided by Nicola De Bonis (1918–1978), a local guitar-­ maker who belonged to a long-lasting Calabrese guitar-making family, still active today in Bisignano, a little village located six miles away from Ferramonti. All these instruments formed the Barackenorchester, as described by architect Arthur Lehmann (1877–1948) in his diary on Ferramonti.23 Furthermore, there was a choir formed by forty choristers that sang in many exciting concerts and for the different liturgies (Jewish, Roman-catholic, and Greek-orthodox). Concerts and services were allowed as a bureaucratic nuisance by military authorities. The “barracks orchestra” within the Ferramonti camp was not allowed due to any ­particular exception in the regulations in force, in the monarchical-Fascist camps the artistic-cultural activities were in fact tolerated, if they did not affect the prohibitions and the regulations imposed on internees. The choir rehearsed daily, even when temperature reached –7°C in winter.  Levitch, A twentieth century romantic temperament, 37–38.  Caliste Lopinot, “ Fr. Callistus a Geispolsheim, De Apostolatu inter Hebraeos in publicae custodiae loco cui nomen v. “Campo di Concentramento Ferramonti-Tarsia (Cosenza)”,” in Analecta Ordinis Fratrum minorum Capuccinorum. In lucem edita iussu r.mi P. Donati a Welle, no. LX (1944): 72. 23  The diary has been digitized by the USHMM in Washington. See Arthur Lehmann, “Bilderbogen aus Ferramonti,” 1941–1942, 137, Lehmann Family Papers, USHMM. 21 22

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Lehmann described a concert held in Ferramonti on March 10, 1942, where all the musicians took part (Sonnenfeld as a choir member). The concert was directed by Lav Mirski: Those who didn’t take part in this event could not imagine what happened before and after the concert. Obviously, the Lager’s kitchens prepared the meal in advance, and 7pm curfew was postponed after the concert. Women tried to seek their best dress for the occasion, perhaps hidden in the very depths of a suitcase, fur shawl, coats, even a necklace. Men too held their hair net until an hour before the concert and changed their every-day britches for wearing the best cloth they could find, after having stretched it under the bed […] It was not only for artistic excitement, it was longing for some culture, we still wanted to feel part of the society. […] More than 300 people crowded the barrack n. 16 […] At the end the director looked up at the choir, and then the public for silence, then he began with a little gesture. Immediately it resounded with tremendous security the notes of “The Glory of the Lord” (Die Himmel rühmen des ewigen Ehre) by Beethoven, on all the listeners. Like something we were not used to anymore, a shiver ran through us and because of the tense nerves, tears fell from everyone’s eyes.24

Kurt Sonnenfeld tried to live in Ferramonti in this very particular context; his name appears several times within the concert programs, as an accompanist, as a singer of Wienerlieder, and as a member of the choir. The first of more than twenty official concerts25 performed in Ferramonti took place on March 23, 1941, in a courtyard in front of a barrack. Sonnenfeld went on studying harmony and music theory among the barracks with Isak Thaler and choir direction with Lav Mirski. He worked as archivist of the many musical scores collected in the camp library. He taught history of music to the many children, and he played the harmonium for the services and wrote music. Among the pieces remembered in his parents’ letters (two Schlager, an oratory, a military march, and piano music), I mention here only the Lagerlied called Ferramonti-Walzer (Image 7.3), which was written just after his arrival in Ferramonti (February–March 1941) and that summarize with its naïveté the main characteristics of the life in camp at that time. Leopold Sonnenfeld wrote to Kurt on April 5, 1941 (Image 7.4):  Lehmann, “Bilderbogen aus Ferramonti,” 137.  In a sort of diary written after the end of the Second World War, Sonnennfeld preserved a large number of typescript playbills of the concerts performed in Ferramonti. The document is actually held in Milan, ASCDEC, Fondo Israel Kalk, b. 2, fasc. 25. 24 25

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Image 7.3  Opening page of Kurt Sonnenfeld’s Ferramonti-Walzer autograph score, February–March 1941, LET.XII.41, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, Music ASCM

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Image 7.4  Leopold Sonnenfeld to Kurt Sonnenfeld, Vienna, April 5, 1941, LET. XII.2, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, ASCM

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My beloved Kurt! Your dear letter of March 17 we received on April 4 with great joy. You have no idea of our happiness to know that you are well. We are fine my dear Kurt and we always talk about you because you are everything for us. […] Above all we are happy to know that you are writing a Ferramonti-Walzer and that you have become a good lyricist too. What is the meaning of Ferramonti in German? And the phrase scritto in tedesco [written in German]? Be careful not to become too famous there.26

It can be said, paradoxically, that the two most important places of Kurt Sonnenfeld’s formative years shaping his destiny were Vienna and Ferramonti. A new chapter of his life began after 1945 in Milan but persecution did not end there, with the end of war. He didn’t want to live in Vienna anymore. His parents in Austria were murdered, as were most of his relatives. He was alone. In 1979, at the age of eighty-nine, Heinrich Schwarz, his only surviving maternal uncle, wrote to Kurt for the last time: “I know, all my four sisters met the most dreadful end.”27 Trying to reconstruct his own life in the Italian city where he was to live for more than fifty years, Kurt Sonnenfeld immediately decided to attend (1947) the local Conservatory, still partially destroyed by air raids. He was rejected by commission members Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli (1882–1949), Ettore Desderi (1892–1974), Renzo Bossi (1883–1965), and Giulio Cesare Paribeni (1881–1964). They didn’t let him continue with academic studies in composition, “for his age,” as they wrote.28 In front of their eyes he presented a written memory about the preceding eight years of his life.29 The return to normality after the war was far from being a reality for all the Jews living in Italy at that time. In considering such a major topic of purging fascism from a twenty-year radical influence in Italian society and institutions,30 the question about music schools after the Fascist era has yet to be investigated in academic studies, though musical education and 26  Letter from Leopold Sonnenfeld to Kurt Sonnenfeld, Vienna, April 5, 1941, LET.XII.2, Fondo Sonnenfeld-Schwarz, Music Conservatory, Milan. 27  Letter from Heinrich Schwarz to Kurt Sonnenfeld, on the envelope, the address: 20 Wallingford Road, Brighton, Mass., June 11, 1979, Private Collection Boselli, Milan. 28  ASCM, Carteggi e documenti. Esami di ammissione. Composizione, anno scolastico 1947-1948, file Sonnenfeld. 29  ASCM, Domande ammissione, 1947-1948, file Sonnenfeld. 30  Liliana Picciotto, Salvarsi. Gli ebrei d’Italia sfuggiti alla Shoah 1943-1945 (Turin: Einaudi, 2017).

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Racial Laws have recently begun to be studied.31 On July 16, 1945, US Army Colonel Charles Poletti (1903–2002) compiled an order (Ordine amministrativo) for the Military Allied Government-Lombardy, containing the names of some music professors of the Conservatory in Milan to be immediately suspended from the service for their Fascist involvement.32 Among those names is that of Ettore Desderi.33 Despite this, he was still in his seat on October 13, 1947, in Sonnenfeld’s commission; a date long before the De Gasperi government determined the end of anti-Fascist purges (February 7, 1948). Another two cases are worth mentioning. Leon Levitch, while he was transferred in Bari before his parents decided to go from there to Fort Oswego, New York, attended the Conservatory of Music in Lecce, continuing to study piano with Làszlò Spezzaferri (1912–1989) and harmony with Gerardo Sannino. Referring to Bertonneau, Levitch interpreted the proliferation of music schools and academies during Fascism very positively34: “You know, every two-bit town has a conservatory in Italy. Isn’t that beautiful? I don’t know where it was, Lecce, but it wasn’t very far, and I went there, and I wanted to register, to enter the conservatory, which I did, and I was absolutely ecstatic.”35 Michael Seidmann was born in Vienna (1905). He was interned in Campagna (April 16, 1940) and Ferramonti (November 7, 1940) and later taken to Camisano Vicentino, in Northern Italy (September 17, 1941). From there, he asked to enter the Music Conservatory of Padua with a letter to the Prefect in Vicenza (July 17, 1943), but his request was rejected.36 Such lasting abuse against Kurt Sonnenfeld did not destroy his will to make and to write music, but it definitively signaled his “unfortunate” 31  Annalisa Capristo, “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale,” in Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, eds. Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva (Milan: IAML, 2018), 365–381. 32  The registered letter reached the Milan Conservatory, July 23, 1945. See ASCM, Personale (1904–1958), prot. 1395. 33  Ettore Desderi joined the National Fascist Party (PNF) on March 1, 1925, becoming professor of Composition on February 1, 1941. 34  For a survey on the history of the Conservatories in Italy during Fascism, see Orazio Maione, Conservatori di musica durante il fascismo: La riforma del 1930: Storia e documenti, (Turin: EDT, 2005). 35  Levitch, A twentieth century romantic temperament, 41. 36  ACS, MI, DGPS, Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati. Ufficio internati., A4bis., Internati stranieri e spionaggio, b. 326.

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artistic career. However, he never gave up. As a singer told him during a concert in Ferramonti while he was accompanying him on the piano, “even if my singing does not coincide with your playing, go on, we shall meet at the end.”37

Bibliography Capogreco, Carlo Spartaco. Ferramonti: la vita e gli uomini del più grande campo d’internamento fascista 1940-1945. Florence: Giuntina, 1987. ———. I campi del duce: l’internamento civile nell’Italia fascista (1940-1943). Turin: Einaudi, 2006. ———. Mussolini’s camps: civilian internment in fascist Italy (1940-1943). Translated by Norma Bouchard, and Valerio Ferme. London, New  York: Routledge & Kegan, 2019. Capristo, Annalisa. “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale.” In Scripta sonant: Contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, edited by Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva, 365–381. Milan: IAML, 2018. Corelli, Maria. In love and war: A letter to my parents. Croydon: Short Books, 2001. Deluca, Raffaele. “Musik und Musiker im italienischen Lager Ferramonti,” in Musica Reanimata-Mitteilungen 91 (December 2016): 7–17. ———. Tradotti agli estremi confini: Musicisti ebrei internati nell’Italia fascista. Introduction by Carlo Spartaco Capogreco. Milan: Mimesis, 2019. Hecht, Dieter J., Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, and Michaela Raggam-Blesch. Topographie der Shoah: Gedächtnisorte des zerstörten jüdischen Wien. Wien: Mandelbaum, 2015. Köstner, Christina, and Klaus Voigt, eds. Österreichisches Exil in Italien 1938-1945. Wien: Mandelbaum, 2009. Levitch, Leon, and Thomas Bertonneau, eds. A twentieth century romantic temperament: L’artist doit aimer. Los Angeles: University of California, 1984 (Typescript). Lopinot, Caliste. “Fr. Callistus a Geispolsheim, De Apostolatu inter Hebraeos in publicae custodiae loco cui nomen v. “Campo di Concentramento ­Ferramonti-­Tarsia (Cosenza)”.” In  Analecta Ordinis Fratrum minorum Capuccinorum. In lucem edita iussu r.mi P. Donati a Welle, n. LX (1944). Maione, Orazio. Conservatori di musica durante il fascismo: La riforma del 1930: Storia e documenti. Turin: EDT, 2005. Marijanović, Stanislav. “Maestro Lav Mirski. Nacrt za istraživački rad”. In Krležini dani u Osijeku: 100. godina Hrvatskoga narodnog kazališta u Osijeku: Povijest,  ASCDEC, Fondo Israel Kalk, b. 2, fasc. 25, Tagebuch, p. 8.

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teorija i praksa-hrvatska dramska književnost i kazalište, edited by B. Hećimović, 159–164. Zagreb, Osijek: Hrvatsko narodno kazalište, Filozofski fakultet, 2008. Megargee, Geoffrey P., Joseph R. White, and Mel Hecker, eds. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos: Vol. III: Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Nicolodi, Fiamma. Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Fiesole: Discanto, 1984; reissued with a new preface Padova: Libreriauniversitaria.it, 2018. Picciotto, Liliana. Salvarsi. Gli ebrei d’Italia sfuggiti alla Shoah 1943-1945. Turin: Einaudi, 2017. Sarfatti, Michele. Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista: Vicende, identità, persecuzione. New ed. Turin: Einaudi, 2018. ———. The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution. Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Stutschewsky, Joachim. Der Lebenspfad eines jüdischen Musikers: Ein Leben ohne Kompromisse (1944–76). Tel Aviv, 1977. (Typescript) Voigt, Klaus. Zuflucht auf Widerruf: Exil in Italien 1933-1945, 2 Vol. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989-1993. Woller, Hans. Die Abrechnung mit dem Faschismus in Italien: 1943 bis 1948. München: Oldenbourg, 1996.

CHAPTER 8

An Expedient Alliance? Musical Relationships between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the period between 1933 and 1945 Erik Levi

Rome, December 3, 1941: a huge choir of 300, an all-star cast of soloists, including Beniamino Gigli, Maria Caniglia, Ebe Stignani, Tancredi Pasero and an enlarged EIAR orchestra, drawing musicians from Rome and Turin, assemble in the august surroundings of the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli to perform Mozart’s Requiem under the baton of Victor de Sabata.1 This broadcast performance, relayed throughout the whole of Italy, formed the climax to a series of musical events in the country honoring the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death. Yet, the performance of the

All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own. 1  See, for example, “La Messa da Requiem in Santa Maria degli Angeli,” La Stampa (Turin), December 4, 1941, 3.

E. Levi (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4_8

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Requiem, an excerpt of which was also captured on film in the newsreel Giornale Luce, turned out to be far more than a purely musical event. The newsreel provides a tantalizing excerpt from the closing fugal passage of the work. As the camera hones in on the large audience, it soon becomes evident that a high proportion of wounded soldiers are listening to the music, thereby reminding us that this homage to Mozart took place in the middle of the war.2 No less significant is the spoken commentary which mentions that a substantial German delegation, which included German ambassador to Italy Hans-Georg von Mackensen and members of the Wehrmacht, was in attendance. Their presence signified a clear indication to the outside world of the continuing strengths of the much-trumpeted cultural agreement that had been signed between the Axis powers in 1938. Whether musical relationships between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were as vibrant as this demonstration of cultural solidarity might suggest is however a moot point. Predictably, reviews in the Nazi press were orientated entirely toward bolstering what were perceived to be the quintessentially Germanic features in Mozart’s music. Several papers even referred to the performance as a “hymn to the German genius.”3 According to their view, the dramatic rise in Mozart’s reputation in Italy, in contrast to the early 1930s when he remained surprisingly neglected, offered conclusive proof of the positive impact on Italian musical life resulting from the political alliance between Mussolini and Hitler. In this respect, it is also significant therefore that music journals in the German Reich carried the information about an order drafted by the Italian minister of cultural propaganda which suggested not only that would Italian musicians devote far more time than ever to performing Mozart in 1941 but also that Fernando Previtali would conduct no less than 14-hour-long programs devoted to the composer on Italian radio.4 In the context of the Mozart anniversary celebrations in Italy, the Rome performance of the Requiem was obviously designed to match the extravagance and grandeur of the Mozartwoche des deutschen Reiches that was concurrently taking place in Vienna. However, there were significant differences of emphasis between the way the Italians and the Germans presented Mozart. Whereas to all intents and purposes the Requiem was regarded by the Nazis as a secular work, the Rome performance fully 2  Newsreel Giornale Luce, no. 204, December 11, “Commemorazione di Mozart. Roma L’esecuzione nella Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli della Messa del Requiem di Mozart” 1941, accessed June 13, 2019, https://www.net-film.eu/film-64323/. 3  See “Mozarts Requiem in Rom,” Völkischer Beobachter, December 5, 1941, 3. 4  “Kleine Mitteilungen: Musikfeste und Festspiel,” Zeitschrift für Musik 108 (1941): 803.

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respected its religious context. Indeed, despite the promulgation of antiSemitic Racial Laws in Italy, it would have been unthinkable for the Italians to have followed in Nazi footsteps and tamper with a text that was regarded as a sacrosanct part of the Catholic liturgy. Yet, this is exactly what happened in Berlin during the same year when a performance of the Requiem was given by soloists, the Bruno Kittel Choir and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in an Aryanized version divested of all Hebraic-­sounding words, such as Zion, Jerusalem and Sabbath.5 Perhaps more important than these internal details regarding the presentation of the Requiem was the broader aim of the Italians to place Mozart firmly within their own national context. This emphasis was already explicit in the lavish program book that was published in conjunction with the concert which included an article by Giovanni Tebaldini entitled “Ispirazioni italiane nella musica sacra di Mozart” that placed the Requiem firmly in the tradition of Italian sacred music of the late eighteenth century, thereby providing an alternative interpretation to that postulated by the Nazis which invariably focused on the composer’s profoundly Germanic outlook.6 Tebaldini’s approach was mirrored in a related event that took place a day before the performance of the Requiem in which Italy’s intellectual elite gathered alongside the cultural minister Giuseppe Bottai and German ambassador von Mackensen to pay formal homage to Mozart at the Accademia d’Italia. On this occasion, they were treated to a celebratory address by literary scholar Arturo Farinelli which went to even greater lengths to emphasize the essential Italianness of Mozart’s art.7 Farinelli’s lecture, which was published in the following year, contains a number of salient remarks supporting an Italian nationalist appropriation of the composer. Italian art left powerful roots on Mozart’s soul....Italian art was the one that harmonized better with his sprit than that of any other nation and gave his 5  See Hermann Stephani, “Mozarts Requiem. Vorschlag zur Text Retusche,” Zeitschrift für Musik 107 (1940): 628. Bruno Kittel’s recording of Mozart’s Requiem was reissued on CD in 1998 on Deutsche Grammophon, 459 004-2. 6  Giovanni Tebaldini, “Ispirazioni Italiane nella musica sacra di Mozart,” in Basilica di Santa Maria deglie Angeli alle Terme. Roma 3–4 Dicembre 1941 Requiem per quattro parti principali. Musica di Wolfgango Amadeo Mozart (Turin: EIAR, 1941), 20–24. 7  For further details of Farinelli’s contribution to the Mozart celebrations at the Accademia d’Italia, see the online inventory Farinelli Arturo, “Mozart: corrispondenza, bozze di stampa e 1 fotografia,” busta 36, fasc. 150, 1942, Collana “Celebrazioni e commemorazioni,” https://www.lincei.it/sites/default/files/documenti/Archivio/Inventario_Reale_ Accademia_d_Italia.pdf.

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marvelous personality sparks of inspiration and moral support as well as an Italianate physiognomy. Even in the artistic farewell of a dying man—in the panting sorrowful pages of the Requiem–a tender recalling of Italy is evident….8

Farinelli’s rhetoric illustrates the extent to which it was deemed politically expedient at that particular juncture in the war to bolster Italy’s sense of pride in having molded the musical idiom of the great Austrian composer. It also illustrates the essentially fragile nature of the relationship between the Axis powers, in particular that beneath the smooth exterior of cultural accord, there were growing tensions between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as to which nation ultimately had the right to assert its musical hegemony over the “New Order for European Culture.” Although this Nazi-Fascist concept of the “New Order” became far more explicit as a result of German successes during the early part of the Second World War, the forging of a cultural and political alliance between the two most powerful right-wing nations in Europe dates back to 1933 and to Hitler’s seizure of power in Nazi Germany. As Benjamin G. Martin has shown, the most significant driving force to pull the two countries ever closer together was a shared desire to usurp the liberal internationalism that had prevailed in other Western European countries since the end of the First World War. Even before the signing of the cultural agreement between the Axis powers, Martin argues that “German and Italian cultural officials had begun to see each other as partners in a common project of cultural revisionism, forging a revolutionary alliance against the hegemony of the liberal-democratic vision of European civilization.”9 Prior to 1936, Mussolini may have believed that Italy was the dominant partner in this relationship, simply because the regime and its cultural organizations had been firmly entrenched for a longer period of time than the Nazi equivalents. Thereafter, he stuck to the line that the Axis reinforced a partnership between nations of equal status and power. But in reality, it was Nazi Germany that increasingly called the shots by trying to impose an ultra-­ conservative nationalist outlook on all of its European neighbors—a

8  Arturo Farinelli, Mozart: Celebrazione tenuta alla Reale Accademia d’Italia il 2 Dicembre 1941 (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1942), 15–16. 9  Benjamin G.  Martin, The Nazi–Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4.

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process that was intensified following the outbreak of war.10 In essence, therefore, statements such as those by Farinelli regarding Mozart were emblematic of growing Italian anxiety that they were being marginalized by their Axis partners. In 1933, however, the situation was rather different. The first turbulent months of Nazi rule were characterized by a vicious purge of the German music profession. The Nazi objective was to remove all vestiges of modernism and Jewish influences from German musical life. However, the ruthlessness with which the Nazis carried out this program was received with outright hostility by most of Germany’s European neighbors. In particular, the much-publicized removal of several high-profile musicians from prestigious conducting and teaching posts and performing engagements provoked widespread condemnation in the international press.11 An inevitable consequence was that Germany became increasingly isolated from international cultural exchange. For some Nazis, this isolationism was a welcome development since it enabled Germany to look inward and reassert its own national strengths after a period of crisis and political humiliation. Not surprisingly, therefore, the decision by the regime late in 1933 to close down the German section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and withdraw from any further participation in its annual festivals generated much support. The argument for taking such a drastic step rested on the Nazi contention that the ISCM’s membership was dominated by Bolsheviks and Jews, and that its outlook was pacifist, cosmopolitan and staunchly modernist.12 Yet at the same time as proclaiming that a national revival in German music could only be accomplished through the suppression of unwanted international influence, the Nazi regime also craved acceptance abroad and worked assiduously to influence other countries to follow its example. 10  For a general overview of the relationship between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy with specific reference to cultural matters, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 257–286. 11  See, for example, Olin Downes, “Racial Spirit vs. Chauvinism in Art: Hitlerism and Politics in Music,” New York Times, March 19, 1933, X5; “Toscanini heads protest to Hitler: He and ten other musicians of world fame ask end of persecution of colleagues,” New York Times, April 2, 1933, 1. 12   Anton Haefeli, “Politische Implikationen einer ‘unpolitischen’ Organisation: Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik zwischen 1933 und 1939,” in Musik im Exil. Die Schweiz und das Ausland 1918–1945, eds. Chris Walton, and Antonio Baldasarre (Berne: Peter Lang, 2005), 108–110.

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For obvious reasons of compatibility, Fascist Italy appeared to be Nazi Germany’s most natural ally in this process, not least because both countries appeared to share similar political objectives. Yet at this stage, Fascist Italy seemed to be far more accommodating to musical modernism than its German counterpart. Furthermore, there was no obvious evidence of cultural anti-Semitism within the Italian music profession, or, at least if there was, it was not officially sanctioned by the regime until the increasingly intensified press campaign in Italy against Jewish music and musicians began to take root in 1937.13 Therefore, at the same time as purging their home-grown musicians on either political, aesthetic, or racial grounds, the Nazis took cautious steps to forge closer musical links between the two countries. Martin suggests that the first tentative steps toward realizing this goal came with a series of meetings held between Richard Strauss, Italian composers and fascist music officials in May 1933 at the first International Music Congress which was held in conjunction with the Maggio Musicale in Florence. Apart from pursuing an overwhelming desire to create a powerful enough international forum for protecting copyright issues for composers, Strauss mooted the idea of setting up a rival international organization to the ISCM—one that eschewed modernism and promoted contemporary repertoire of a more conservative stylistic orientation, which he believed would have a broader public appeal.14 Strauss’s ambition became much more of a reality in November 1933 after Propaganda Minister Goebbels appointed him to the post of president of the Reich Music Chamber (Reichsmusikkammer), an organization analogous to Italy’s National Union of Musicians (Sindacato nazionale fascista dei musicisti). At the grandiose opening ceremony of the Reich Music Chamber, which took place in Berlin in January 1934, leading members of the German music profession were on hand to deliver speeches expressing loyalty and gratitude to the Nazi regime for its support of the arts. Since the occasion was primarily directed toward a home audience, relatively few non-German musicians were in attendance, one notable exception being the prominent Italian fascist composer and conductor, Adriano Lualdi. Strauss had specially invited Lualdi to be present since he also arranged a separate meeting to carry forward the discussions that had 13  See Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987), 175–183. 14  Martin, The Nazi–Fascist New Order for European Culture, 18.

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begun in Florence about forming an alternative to the ISCM.15 According to the eye-witness account of Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg, who was another of the select number of non-German invitees to the ceremony, there was a sufficient degree of agreement between the Germans and their foreign guests for this proposal to take further shape. So Lualdi returned to Germany and to the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein Festival in Wiesbaden in the summer of 1934 to draw up more definitive plans for an organization that would be known as the Permanent Council for Cooperation among Composers.16 Although, for the time being many of Italy’s most prominent composers remained loyal supporters of the ISCM, it became increasingly evident that Germany and Italy would be the two countries with the greatest vested interest in charting the future course of the Permanent Council, particularly so after it was agreed in Wiesbaden that the Venice Contemporary Music Festival in September 1934 would be the chosen venue for its formal inauguration. No less significant was the unanimous decision taken in Venice for Strauss to be appointed president of the Permanent Council, with Lualdi taking on the role of vice-­ president, a position he shared with his more illustrious colleagues, Sibelius and Roussel.17 Apart from the decision of trying to influence musical developments through the establishment of a grandiose international organization steered jointly by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, there were also some other notable attempts to promote German-Italian musical exchange in 1933. A good example took place at Berlin’s second opera house known as the Städtische Oper. Shortly before his death in July 1933, Max von Schillings, who was the opera house’s intendant, had followed official Nazi policy by removing most non-German and Jewish singers from the company. Yet, at the same time, Schillings issued a formal invitation to 15  For further details of the opening ceremony of the Reich Music Chamber as witnessed by the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg, see Petra Garberding, “‘We take care of the Artist’: The German Composers’ Meeting in Berlin, 1934,” Music & Politics 3 (2009), accessed March 14, 2019, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0003.204?view=text;rgn= main. Lualdi’s speech to the German composers in Berlin, where he claimed that Italy had become the “first nation to set a stop to certain artistic forms of extremism from which now the world is moving away,” is summarized in “Notiziario,” Bollettino dei musicisti I, no. 1–2 (April–May 1934–XII): 24. 16  “Gesellschaften und Vereine,” Zeitschrift für Musik 101(1934): 793–794. 17  Raymond Hall, “International Congress: New Organization Presided Over by Richard Strauss Meets in Venice,” New York Times, October 28, 1934, X7.

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singers and conductors who were active in Milan, Rome and Naples to appear in Berlin at the beginning of the 1933–1934 season as part of a special program exclusively devoted to Italian repertory.18 A few months later, a further signal of increased German-Italian cooperation in the musical arena was reflected in a special concert given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the sponsorship of the Italian ambassador in which Ottorino Respighi conducted a program entirely devoted to his own compositions. It marked the first time that Germany’s principal orchestra had mounted a concert exclusively focusing on this composer’s work.19 At the same time as two of Berlin’s most prestigious performing organizations were honoring Italian music, intensive discussions were taking place between German and Italian officials regarding the ways in which culture could be disseminated to the wider population. The Germans were keen to emulate the already-established Italian program of Dopolavoro with their own similarly constituted organization entitled Kraft durch Freude. A number of German music periodicals referred to the positive benefits of Dopolavoro for German musical education,20 and some leading musicians, including composer Paul Hindemith, were invited to submit their own ideas on how such a system might work in practice in the new Germany.21 Perhaps the most tangible demonstration of increased cooperation between German and Italian musicians was the three-week tour of Italy in November 1933 undertaken by the NS Reichs-Symphonie Orchester. Thanks to financial support from Hitler, the orchestra was originally formed in Munich in 1932 from unemployed musicians that had lost their jobs as a result of the economic depression following the Wall Street Crash and the demise of the silent film industry. It had already traveled the length and breadth of Germany, performing concerts which juxtaposed classic and conservative contemporary German repertoire, with political speeches 18  “Bühne,” Zeitschrift für Musik 100 (1933): 870; Fritz Stege, “Berliner Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musik 100 (1933): 1126–27; Fritz Ohrmann, “Italienische Stagione in Berlin,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 91 (1933): 702–703. 19  “Aus Berlin- Ottorino Respighi,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 91, no. 45 (1933): 752–753. 20   See, for example, Friedrich Herzfeld, “Kraft durch Freude,” Die Musik 26/1 (1933–1934): 334–335; Hanns Rohr “Der Konzertsaal des deutschen Volkes,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 91, no. 33–34 (1933): 562. 21  “Letter to Willy Strecker, February 5, 1934,” in Selected Letters of Paul Hindemith, trans. and ed. Geoffrey Skelton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 75–76.

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given by local party dignitaries. In its first visit abroad, the orchestra presented concerts in nineteen cities, including one in Rome given in the presence of the prominent Italian fascist leader, Achille Starace. Performing a judicious mixture of German and Italian music in front of apparently rapturous crowds, the main emphasis of the tour was to demonstrate that a strong brotherhood already existed between supporters of Hitler and Mussolini.22 Whether this brotherhood extended to commonly shared attitudes toward contemporary musical styles during the same period remained more of an open question. The more reactionary forces in German music could certainly point to the Manifesto di musicisti Italiani per le tradizione dell’arte romantica dell ‘800 (Manifesto of Italian Musicians in favor of the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century), signed by Respighi, Zandonai and Pizzetti among others, and published in various Italian newspapers on the December 17, 1932, as evidence that the tide in Italy was turning against musical experimentation. This was certainly the position adopted by the zealously nationalist journal Zeitschrift für Musik. It published a German translation of the Manifesto noting that the document attacked every vestige of musical modernism, from atonality and expressionism to the “new objectivity,” and argued for the return to a more lyrical style of composition, a sentiment that the journal argued would surely be echoed in the new Germany.23 22  Erwin Bauer, “Italienfahrt des N-S Reichs-Symphonie-Orchesters,” Zeitschrift für Musik 101 (1934): 37–41; “Tageschronik,” Die Musik 26/1 (1933–1934): 239. For Italian reviews of this concert tour, see “Il primo concerto a Bologna dell’orchestra del Reich,” La Stampa (Turin), November 17, 1933, 8; “Posta di Milano,” La Stampa (Turin), November 19, 1933, 3; “L’orchestra del Reich a Genova,” La Stampa (Turin), December 6, 1933, 4. See also Rainer Sieb, Der Zugriff der NSDAP auf die Musik. Zum Aufbau von Organisationsstrukturen für die Musikarbeit in den Gliederungen der Partei (Dissertation, University of Osnabrück 2007), https://repositorium.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/bitstream/ urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-2007091013/2/E-Diss699_Thesis.pdf, 33–35. 23  Fritz Rose, “Das italienische Musikmanifest und wir!,” Zeitschrift für Musik 100 (1933): 6. For a comprehensive discussion of the Manifesto, see Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 140–149. The original article can be read at the historical archive website of La Stampa newspaper, accessed March 31, 2019, http:// www.archiviolastampa.it/component/option,com_lastampa/task,search/mod,libera/ action,viewer/Itemid,3/page,3/articleid,1147_01_1932_0300_0003_24895687/l. The political and cultural ramifications of the Manifesto are examined in Ben Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67.

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The problem with subscribing to this position was that Mussolini refused to support the Manifesto. At this juncture, he sided with the enlightened positions adopted by Alfredo Casella and Gian-Francesco Malipiero, the two unnamed composers targeted by the signatories of the Manifesto for their apparently tolerant attitudes toward avant-garde music. Mussolini’s backing for both musicians may well have had less to do with any intrinsic sympathy for their artistic open-mindedness than with recognizing their international standing as the two of the major composers of their generation to have put contemporary Italian music on the map. Whatever motive prompted Mussolini to reject the Manifesto, it is little wonder that in 1933 the journal Melos, which had been one of the most enthusiastic and enlightened advocates of new music during the Weimar Republic, adopted a rather different position to that of the Zeitschrift für Musik. Instead of supporting the prevailing reactionary cultural climate, it looked to Italy in the hope of salvation from the more virulent and proscriptive elements of Nazi music policy. Through promoting such composers as Casella and Malipiero, and featuring headlines that commended “Mussolini’s far-sighted cultural policy,” Melos hoped to demonstrate that fascist musicians could be open-minded and cosmopolitan, as well as appear much more accommodating to modernism.24 To further emphasize this stance, Melos devoted most of its October 1933 issue to exploring the current musical scene in Italy, with a series of articles by Italian writers extolling the achievements of musical life under Fascism. Underpinning the survey was a brief editorial expressing a wish for the closest possible cultural bond between National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy.25 The increased amount of attention devoted to contemporary Italian music and musical life in the pages of Melos was also connected to a concern that new operas by Malipiero and Casella, which were to be premiered in German theaters during the 1933–1934 season, might be 24  See, for example, the German translation of a speech given by Alfredo Casella to the 1933 Maggio Musicale Congress in Florence, in “Alfredo Casella spricht,” Melos 12 (1933): 189–192, and the subsequent headline praising Mussolini’s far-sighted cultural politics, Melos 12 (1933): 207. 25  The brief editorial is entitled “Italien,” Melos 12 (1933): 323. It precedes the following articles: Massimo Bontempelli, “Kunst und Faschismus,” 323–327; Nicola de Pirro, “Sindacato dei Musicisti,” 327–332; Aristide Rotunno, “Musikerziehung durch den Dopolavoro,” 332–335; Alfredo Casella, “Moderne und traditionelle Faktoren in der faschistischen Musik,” 336–339 and Mario Labroca, “Neue italienische Musik im faschistischen Staat,” 339–342.

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received warmly. In particular, Malipiero’s La favola del figlio cambiato, which was given its world premiere in Braunschweig in January 1934, was viewed by Melos as a welcome barometer for testing the Nazi regime’s degree of tolerance toward an ostensibly modernist composer. One advantage of highlighting Malipiero seemed to be that he was very much a known quantity in Germany, several of his earlier operas having enjoyed world premiere performances on the German stage.26 More controversial, however, was the librettist with whom Malipiero collaborated on this latest opera, for despite being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934, as well as earning a reputation for exploiting grotesque subject matters, playwright Luigi Pirandello remained a relatively unknown figure in Germany. Initial fears regarding the German reception of La favola proved to be unwarranted. By all accounts, the opening night, attended by Nazi officials, as well as by a delegation from Italy that included Ambassador Vittorio Cerruti, appears to have been a success.27 Critical response was also positive. Writing in Melos, Hans-Heinz Stuckenschmidt commended Malipiero’s range of expressive means. The critic was particularly impressed by the composer’s skill at juxtaposing high art and popular art traditions in which “jazz and Gregorian chant, atonality and fauxbourdon, folk song and street dance combine to form a magical unity.”28 Another review, published in the Berliner Zeitung and subsequently reprinted in the newspaper 26  The following operas by Malipiero were premiered in German theaters prior to 1933: L’Orfeide (Düsseldorf, November 5, 1925); Tre commedie goldoniane [La bottega del caffè, Sior Todaro Brontolon, Le baruffe chiozzotte] (Darmstadt, March 24, 1926); Il finto Arlecchino (Mainz, March 8, 1928); Torneo notturno (Munich, May 15, 1931); Le aquile di Aquileia (Coburg, December 15, 1932) and I corvi di San Marco (Coburg, December 15, 1932). For reviews of these operas, see A. Spies, “Malipiero L’Orpheide,” Rheinische Musik-­ und Theater-Zeitung 26 (1925): 552–553; K.H. Ruppel, “Casella–Malipiero: Landestheater Darmstadt. Uraufführungen. Die Oper,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 8 (1926): 232; Dr P. N., “Malipiero-Premiere in Mainz,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 10 (1928): 131–132; Hans F.  Redlich “G.F Malipiero und die neue Oper,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 11 (1929): 325–330; Wilhelm Zentner, “Festwoche Neuer Musik in München 13–21 Mai 1931,” Zeitschrift für Musik 98 (1931): 611; Anon, “ Konzert und Oper: Coburg,” Zeitschrift für Musik 100 (1933): 70–71. 27  See Ernst Stier, “Konzert und Oper: Braunschweig (Uraufführung der ‘Legende vom getauschten Sohn’ von Malipiero),” Zeitschrift für Musik 101 (1934): 215. The review focuses initially on the opera itself, but then emphasizes the fact that it was also a highly political occasion with the Italian ambassador, members of the SA (Sturmabteilung or Brownshirts), and the local minister of the region in attendance. 28  H.H. Stuckenschmidt, “Zu Malipieros Bühnenwerke,” Melos 13 (1934): 51.

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Il giornale d’Italia, claimed that the opera demonstrated “how the Italy of Mussolini is today a free forum for cultural progress.”29 Such a seemingly positive endorsement accorded to La favola in Braunschweig was sufficiently enticing that the opera house in Darmstadt was persuaded to take up the work in March 1934. This time, however, official reaction was far less accommodating, the Hessian minister of the interior objecting to the opera on the grounds of its “atonal and culture-­ subverting tendencies,” which were deemed to be contrary to the directives of national German state.30 As a result of this hostile remark, the work was temporarily removed from the stage at Darmstadt. But Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels decided to revoke this decision, partly in a bid to curb the power of local officials from pursuing their own cultural agendas, and the opera survived a few more performances, both in Braunschweig and in Darmstadt. Nevertheless, this disagreement between Goebbels and a local politician served to shine a greater spotlight on the opera itself. One issue that may well have embarrassed the Ministry of Propaganda was the realization that the German translation of Pirandello’s libretto had been made by Hans Ferdinand Redlich, an Austrian Jew. But a more contentious issue emerged following a closer examination of the text. For obvious reasons, lines such as “the prince prefers the southern sun which heals and promotes life to the Nordic fog which kills”—a reference to contemporary Italian attitudes that Mediterranean fascist cultural policy was deemed far superior to and more enlightened than the uncouth approach taken by the Nazi barbarians—did not go down well with the German authorities.31 Somewhat ironically, La favola also displeased Mussolini in April 1934 when it was given its first Italian performance in Rome, but for rather different reasons. Once again, it was Pirandello’s contribution to which Mussolini took great exception, in particular the sarcastic anti-­authoritarian pose of his libretto. But the newspaper headlines suggested that the

29  Mary Ann Frese Witt, “Fascist Discourses and Pirandellian Theater,” in Plays, Movies and Critics, ed. Jody McAuliffe (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 82. 30  Untitled and undated article from the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, quoted in Tobias Reichard, “Malipiero Germanised–Traces of Cultural Usurpation in Nazi Germany,” Archival Notes 2 (2017): 19. See also Fred K. Prieberg, Handbuch deutsche Musiker 1933–1945 (Kiel: Kopf, 2009), 2146. 31  Frese Witt, “Fascist discourses,” 82.

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prudish Mussolini decided to ban the opera because he was morally offended by the second act, which takes place in a brothel.32 After the debacle both in Germany and in Italy surrounding Malipiero’s opera, the German premiere of Casella’s La Donna serpente, which took place in Mannheim in March 1934, did not attract anything like the same degree of attention. Even leading music journals such as Zeitschrift für Musik and Die Musik did not find space to publish reviews of the premiere. Melos, of course, ignored such a decision sending the influential critic Heinrich Strobel to write about the opera. Although Strobel’s review was largely positive, commending Casella’s work as “a buffo opera with fantastic impact,” his critique was not sufficiently persuasive to encourage other German theaters to stage it. Presumably, the reluctance to promote Casella’s opera more widely was prompted by the fear of similar repercussions to those experienced a with regard to Malipiero’s La favola.33 By the middle of 1934, the relatively amicable diplomatic relationship between Italy and Germany had come under considerable strain. A serious setback occurred as a result of the rather cantankerous meeting between Hitler and Mussolini that had taken place in Venice on June 14, 1934, in which both leaders clashed on the issue of Austrian sovereignty. Hitler apparently made demands to Mussolini that Austria should be directly absorbed into the Reich, whereas Mussolini equally emphatically confirmed his support for an independent Austria. Relations between the two men took on a frostier demeanor the following month after Nazi sympathizers burst into the office of the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and murdered the leader of the nation’s fascist party. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that during this period cultural contact between the two nations declined and that no new Italian operas featured on the German stage during the 1934–1935 season. A more hostile attitude toward Italy’s musical scene emanated from the pages of Die Musik, the journal most closely affiliated to the Rosenberg wing of the Nazi Party. Particularly telling are two reviews of concert and operatic activity in Naples and Rome by Maximilian Claar, the Italian correspondent for the journal, which are sharply critical of both Casella and 32  Raymond Hall, “Malipiero’s new opera ‘La Favola del Figlio Cambiato’ banned by Mussolini as immoral,” New York Times, May 13, 1934, X5. See also John C. G. Waterhouse, Gian-Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973). The Life, Times and Music of a Wayward Genius (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), 46. 33  Heinrich Strobel, “Casellas ‘Donna Serpente’,” Melos 13 (1934): 103–105.

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Malipiero.34 Perhaps the most overtly antagonistic response, however, appears in an article by Herbert Gerigk, reporting on the Venice Music Festival in September 1934. Predictably, Gerigk played off the contribution of officially approved German composers against those that met with his censure. So Richard Strauss was praised and his presence at the festival, both as composer and inaugurator of the Permanent Council, was deemed particularly auspicious. On the other hand, Gerigk complained bitterly about the preponderance of what he considered to be foreign “untalented” contemporary music featured in the program. He declared that not only was it shameful that “musical nonsense” by composers such as the “Jew” Milhaud, Alban Berg and Ernst Krenek should occupy the spotlight at such events, but by opening its doors to this kind activity, Italian fascism had evidently ignored the essential even “primordial link that existed between the blood and soil of the nation.” According to Gerigk, it seemed as if Mussolini was being duped into promoting an internationalist and soulless arts conspiracy, blatantly supported by the Bolshevists.35 By no means were all Italian musicians fully in accord with the enlightened music programming of the Venice Music Festival. Vice-President of the Permanent Council Adriano Lualdi, who was actually chairman of the programming committee, had already expressed his opposition to the music of the Second Viennese School and even went so far as to describe Schönberg’s work as a “crime against music.”36 So his decision to remove Berg’s Lyric Suite from the program could hardly have come as a surprise. Berg was deeply offended by this action, believing that it was politically motivated and that Lualdi was serving as a stooge for the vested interests of the Permanent Council. However, it transpired that at least on this occasion Lualdi had actually followed the statutes of the festival to the letter which forbade the performance of any new music that had already been heard in Italy, as was the case with the Lyric Suite. Nevertheless, his colleagues on the committee, namely Malipiero and Casella, were so appalled by the way Berg had been treated that they insisted that another new work of his be substituted on the program. This resulted in the world premiere of his Concert Aria Der Wein taking place in Venice.37 34   Maximilian Claar, “Musikleben–Konzerte Neapel,” Die Musik 26 (1934): 536; Maximilian Claar, “Musikleben–Oper Rom,” Die Musik 26 (1934): 632. 35  Herbert Gerigk, “Musikfestdämmerung,” Die Musik 37 (1934): 45–51. 36  Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, 31. 37  Mosco Carner, “The Berg Affair, Venice 1934,” The Musical Times 110 (1969): 1129–1131. See also Anna Maria Morazzoni, “Berg and Italy in the Thirties,” International

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Whether Lualdi reacted punitively to the insubordination of Malipiero and Casella in relation to their support for Berg is unclear. However, the fact remains that neither composer was represented in the Italian section of the program devised by Lualdi for the first international festival of the Permanent Council, which took place in Hamburg in June 1935. Without doubt, the long-held allegiance of both composers to the ISCM, rather than their specific musical outlooks, would have made it difficult for them to have been performed at such an occasion. Instead, the works Lualdi selected for Hamburg were more obviously parochial and late-Romantic in idiom, namely a symphonic poem Sardegna by the Respighi pupil Ennio Porrino and the Second Symphony of Franco Alfano, a composer with strong connections to Germany, having studied in Leipzig and Berlin. During this period, Lualdi maintained the most cordial relationships with the Nazi regime. Apart from appearing in Hamburg, he was also invited early in 1935 by the Dante Gesellschaft to conduct a concert of Italian music with the Leipzig Symphony Orchestra in aid of the Winterhilfswerk, the Nazi charitable foundation. As in Hamburg, his program reflected strongly conservative nationalist leanings, introducing his own Adriatic Suite and the Sinfonia italiana ‘Il Popolo e il Profeta’ by Antonio Veretti.38 Casella’s presence in German musical life, on the other hand, was much diminished during this period. In September 1935, he led the Italian delegation to the ISCM Festival in Prague. In particular, he enthused about some of the advanced new repertoire he had heard there, including Schönberg’s Orchestral Variations and Berg’s Lulu, despite the fact that such works were far removed from his own largely neoclassical mode of expression.39 Furthermore, he felt it necessary to convey to an Italian readership the resolution passed by the ISCM in response to the formation of Permanent Council, which reasserted that freedom of expression of the individual composer was paramount, and that the organization was open to all living composers who shared its ideals, without discrimination in

Alban Berg Society Newsletter 13 (Spring–Summer 1985): 10–24; Anna Maria Morazzoni, “Berg’s Correspondence with Italian Composers,” International Alban Berg Society Newsletter 13 (Spring–Summer 1985): 24–31. 38  Horst Büttner, “Musik in Leipzig,” Zeitschrift für Musik 102 (1935): 421. 39  Casella’s assessment of Berg’s Lulu Symphonie is reproduced in Fiamma Nicolodi, “Gli esordi della Scuola di Vienna in Italia fino alla seconda guerra mondiale,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 48 (2013): 228.

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terms of nationality, race or religious beliefs.40 Such statements, emanating from a loyal Italian fascist like Casella, must surely have irked the Nazis. They probably explain the decision by the Propaganda Ministry on September 1, 1935, to place Casella on a list of composers rejected by the regime.41 In general, the year 1935 represented a low point in musical relationships between Fascist Italy in Nazi Germany. The Germans were undoubtedly riled by Italy’s decision to bolster its support for Austria with the signing of a joint cultural treaty which resulted in a much higher proportion of Italian music, including works by Casella, being featured in programs given by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra between 1934 and 1937.42 Another sign of closer musical cooperation between Austria and its Italian neighbors was the opening of a newly designed Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna in 1935, an event pointedly celebrated in the music journal Anbruch, which reproduced speeches of support for the institution from its director Francesco Salata and from Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg.43 40  Martin, The Nazi–Fascist New Order for European Culture, 42–43. See also Alfredo Casella, “Il Festival musicale di Praga,” L’Italia letteraria, October 6 (1935): 4. For a more detailed exploration of the 1935 ISCM Festival and its response to the Permanent Council, see Anne C. Scheffler, “The International Society for Contemporary Music and its Political Context,” in Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jessica Gienow-­ Hecht (Oxford, Berghahn, 2015), 58–90. 41  Friedrich Geiger, “‘Die ‘Goebbels-Liste’ vom 1. September 1935. Eine Quelle zur Komponistenverfolgung im NS-Staat,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 59 (2002): 106. 42  The following contemporary Italian works were featured by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra: Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli, Sortilegi, symphonic poem for piano and orchestra (November 23, 1934); Alfredo Casella, Introduzione, Aria e Toccata; Gian-Francesco Malipiero, three symphonic fragments from the musical drama Torneo notturno; Virgilio Mortari, Rapsodia (December 7, 1934); Alfredo Casella, Scarlattiana (January 24, 1935); Renzo Massarani, Tema e Sette Variazioni; Antonio Veretti: Suite in C major; Luca Tocchi, Record, symphonic poem (November 24, 1935); Piero Calabrini, Suite (February 2, 1936); Leone Sinigaglia, Le Baruffe Chiozotte, concert overture to the comedy by Carlo Goldoni op. 32; Attilio Brugnoli, Concerto for piano and orchestra in C minor (June 14, 1936); Alfredo Casella, La Donna Serpente, Frammenti Sinfonici (December 4, 1936); Adriano Lualdi, Africa Rapsodia Coloniale (February 26, 1937); Piero Calabrini, “Notturno” from the Suite Agreste (May 23, 1937); Alfredo Casella, Scarlattiana and Partita (December 2, 1937). It should also be noted that the Vienna Symphony Orchestra made a highly successful tour of Italy between April and May 1937. 43  See Francesco Salata, “Das italienische Kulturinstitut in Wien,” Anbruch 17 (1935): 120; Kurt von Schuschnigg, “Das neue Italien,” Anbruch 17 (1935): 120.

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Although Italy and Germany had drifted further apart in 1935, there was a gradual rapprochement between the two nations in the following years. In January 1936, for example, Mussolini was telling a German envoy that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy should forge a common link and that their relationship was dictated by a destiny which was bound to become “stronger and stronger.”44 The thaw was certainly intensified by joint German-Italian cooperation in arming the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini visited Germany in September 1937  in a display of Fascist-Nazi solidarity, and when Hitler took over Austria in March 1938, Germany was patently the dominant partner in the relationship, with the German army perched on the Italian frontier. Hitler arrived in Rome on May 3, 1938, accompanied by Goebbels and Ribbentrop as well as some 500 party officials, diplomats, security guards and journalists, in three trains. A special station had been built for the Germans, who were greeted by Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel. Rome was adorned with political decorations, including swastikas, and a new street, the Via Adolf Hitler, had been constructed, along which the German leader was driven to the Quirinal Palace, where he stayed as guest of the king. Later in the summer of 1938, Mussolini also passed and enforced anti-Semitic Racial Laws in Italy.45 This political context explains the rising trajectory of musical relations that developed between the two countries during these years. Indeed, from 1937 onward there was a veritable explosion of concerts involving Italian musicians in Nazi Germany. These were sponsored by a variety of different organizations throughout Germany’s major cities dedicated to promoting friendship between the two nations, and many in Berlin were advertised as being given in the presence of the Italian ambassador to Germany. Another notable feature of German musical life during these years was the increased number of Italian musicians including conductors, singers and instrumental soloists who toured the country and whose programs were often broadcast on the radio. At the more ambitious end of the scale, the entire opera company of La Scala Milan gave seasons in Berlin in 1937 and 1938, and the Augusteum Orchestra of Rome and the 44  Roland Strunk, interview with Benito Mussolini, January 31, 1936, cited in Robert H. Whealey, “Mussolini’s Ideological Diplomacy: An Unpublished Document,” The Journal of Modern History l, 39/4 (1967): 435. 45  See Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy. From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2006).

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Turin Chamber Orchestra appeared in Germany around the same time.46 Among the most ostentatious displays of mutual friendship was the Italienisch-Deutsches Festkonzert that took place in Berlin’s Deutsches Opernhaus on May 25, 1938, when Italian and German soloists and conductors, as well as the Hitler Youth and the Fascio Choirs of Berlin, joined forces for a gala concert.47 The establishment of an Axis cultural accord in 1938 had a direct impact on other aspects of German musical life. For example, there was a marked increase in the number of music festivals that served to reinforce ever closer ties between the two countries. Such events were firmly established in the musical calendar already in 1938 with Italian opera festival weeks taking place in Munich and Dortmund, together with a special focus on contemporary Italian operas (Lualdi, Casella and Malipiero) at the Permanent Council Festival in Stuttgart, a noticeably increased emphasis on Italian repertory and the intensified contribution of Italian singers, performers and conductors at the Nazified Salzburg Festival.48 Even the 1938 Bayreuth Festival acknowledged current political developments by publishing an article in its program book by Guido Pannain that explores Wagner’s long-standing relationship with Italy.49 This level of activity continued with some intensity during the war. In March 1941, for example, the entire Opera Company of the Teatro Reale in Rome gave a short season in Berlin, and in the following month the 46  For the appearances of the La Scala Opera Company in Berlin, see Fritz Stege, “Berliner Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musik 104 (1937): 895–896; Fritz Stege, “Berliner Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musik 105 (1938): 747. An announcement of the Augusteum Orchestra’s eighteen concert tour of Germany in October 1937 appears in “Kleinere Mitteilungen,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 95 (1937): 503; the same journal published a review of the orchestra’s Berlin concert, see G. Thiess, “Aus Berlin: Augusteum Orchester,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 95 (1937): 552–553. A review of the Turin Kammerorchester concert in Berlin appears in Fritz Stege, “Berliner Musik,” Zeitschrift für Musik 105 (1938): 391. 47  The star soloist was Giacomo Lauri-Volpi and also featuring in the concert were a number of prominent German and Italian singers. The orchestra of the Deutsche Oper was conducted by Antonio Votto and Karl Dammer. See Führer durch die Konzertsäle Berlins, 18/31 (1937): 9. 48  See Wilhelm Zentner, “Italienische Festwoche der Münchener Staatsoper,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 96 (1938): 495–496; “Opern–Nachrichten Stadttheater Dortmund,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 96 (1938): 590; Willy Fröhlich, “Internationales Musikfest 1938 in Stuttgart,” Zeitschrift für Musik 105 (1938): 795; Roland Tenschert, “Salzburger Festpiele 1938,” Zeitschrift für Musik 105 (1938): 1024–1026. 49  Dr Paul Bülow, “Offizieller Bayreuther Festspiel Führer 1938,” Zeitschrift für Musik 105 (1938): 888.

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Berlin Staatsoper reciprocated with a sequence of performances in Rome.50 Italian opera or Italian music weeks, as well as joint Italian-German music festivals continued to feature during this period in various different metropolitan centers such as Dessau, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Hamburg and Münster.51 German musicologists and critics also responded to the new political environment. Rather than drawing clear distinctions between the music produced by the two countries, some writers were keen to emphasize shared creative objectives. In 1938, the 125th anniversary of the births of both Wagner and Verdi occasioned articles in the German musical press that fleshed out such arguments. For example, Erich Valentin, writing in the Zeitschrift für Musik, hailed both Wagner and Verdi as “educators and standard-bearers leading their respective nations.”52 In effect, they were labeled as icons of a new political age, historically bound together by their shared abhorrence at the shallowness of grand opera manifested by such figures as the Jewish composer, Meyerbeer. Valentin explored this idea also in an article entitled “Wechselspiel schöpferische Kräfte. Deutschland und Italien in der Geschichte der Musik” (Interplay of creative strengths: Germany and Italy in the history of Music) for the Nazi daily newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, extending commonalities of outlook to encompass the history of German and Italian music from the renaissance and baroque eras to the twentieth century. Perhaps, the most surprising assertion comes at the end of the article where he singles out Hans Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina as particularly emblematic of the fruitful cultural bridge that

50  See Fritz Stege, “Berliner Musik: Das Gastspiel des Teatro Reale aus Rom,” Zeitschrift für Musik 108 (1941): 375–377; E.  I. Luin “Gastpiel der Berliner Staatsoper in Rom,” Zeitschrift für Musik 108 (1941): 333–334 and 400–401. 51   Friederike von Krosigk, “Musikberichte: Musikfeste und Tagungen: Die Woche Italienischer Bühnenkunst am Dessauer Theater,” Zeitschrift für Musik 108 (1941): 194–195; Eva-Maria Schneider, “Italienische Opernwoche in Nürnberg,” Zeitschrift für Musik 109 (1942): 128; Grete Alstadt-Schütze, “Italienische Musikwoche in Frankfurt/ Main,” Zeitschrift für Musik 109 (1942): 319–321; Heinrich Sievers, “Deutsch-Italienisches Musikfest in Münster,” Zeitschrift für Musik 109 (1942): 322–323; Heinz Furhmann “Deutsche–Italienische Kunstwoche Hamburg,” Zeitschrift für Musik 108 (1941): 258; Heinz Fuhrmann “II Deutsch-Italienische Kunstwoche zu Hamburg,” Zeitschrift für Musik 109 (1942): 224–225. 52  Erich Valentin, “Verdi und Wagner,” Zeitschrift für Musik 106 (1939): 136, cited in Gundula Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans. From Unification to Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 214.

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can be achieved from combining Germanic depth of feeling with Italianate beauty of form and expression.53 Valentin’s article may have inspired the musicologist Hans Engel to explore similar issues in greater detail in his book Deutschland und Italian in ihren musikgeschichtlichen Beziehungen (1944). But whereas Valentin’s article focuses purely on musical orientations, Engel uses racial theories as the basis of his argument. For Engel, the constant interplay between historical developments in German and Italian music is bound together by an evident racial kinship between those born in Southern Germany and Northern Italy, both of whose peoples he claims to be biologically Nordic.54 What differentiates Italian music from the German is a loss of Nordic qualities when moving from North to South. Indeed, Engel suggests that the predominant influence of Italian composers during certain eras such as the baroque is predicated by their frequent encampment in Nordic regions. As Mauro Fosco Bertola argues, this phenomenon enables Engel to make the claim that such predominance does not result in an “embarrassing disenfranchisement of Germany, but rather a temporary discovery of a healthy Nordic roots on the part of Italian composers mostly active in Northern Europe … thereby legitimizing the superiority of German culture even on the level of concrete accomplishments.”55 Perhaps the most tangible demonstration of a shift in Nazi attitudes up to and after the signing of the Axis cultural accord is reflected in the more accommodating reception accorded to the music of Gian-Francesco Malipiero and Alfredo Casella. Despite the evident opposition to his opera La favola del figlio cambiato in 1934, Malipiero already began to restore his reputation in Germany in April 1936 at the Baden-Baden Contemporary Music Festival where his Second Symphony was given its German premiere. Other works by the prolific composer soon entered the repertory of various German orchestras, Malipiero receiving praise in several quarters 53  “Zeitschriften-Schau. Dr Erich Valentin:Wechselspiel schöpferische Kräfte. Deutschland und Italien in der Geschichte der Musik, Völkischer Bebobachter 10 Mai 1938,” Zeitschrift fur Musik 105 (1938): 570. 54  Hans Engel, “Historische und rassische Grundlagen,” in Deutschland and Italien in ihren musikgeschichtlichen Beziehungen (Regensburg: Bosse, 1944), 9–30. 55  Mauro Fosco Bertola, “Beyond Germanness. Music’s History as ‘Entangled History’ in German Musicology from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the Second World War,” in Nazi Germany and Southern Europe, 1933–45: Science Culture and Politics, eds. Fernando Clara, Cláudia Ninhos, and Sasha Grishin (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 25–36, here 32–34.

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for music that “demonstrated a healthy sense for lyricism,” that refreshingly “avoided any symptoms of degeneration” or “excessive addiction to experimentation,” and that “demonstrated his strong connection to Italian soil in his quest to revive an aesthetic ideal of Italy’s glorious past.”56 In contrast, Malipiero’s colleague Casella was at least initially regarded far less favorably. There is little doubt that Casella’s continued allegiance to the ISCM as well as his adventurous programming for the 1937 Venice Festival, which featured works by Schönberg, Prokofiev, Bartók, Szymanowski and Stravinsky, would not have gone down well in Germany.57 Yet as Germany and Italy moved closer together in terms of musical co-operation, especially from 1938 onward, Casella was no longer stigmatized. Indeed, in the veritable explosion of new Italian music that was heard in Germany, his work featured just as prominently as that of his colleague, Malipiero. An indication of the way things were developing is that his chamber opera La favola di Orfeo now shared a triple bill with a revival of Malipiero’s 1920s opera Il finto Arlecchino and Lualdi’s Il diavolo nel campanile at the Permanent Council Festival in Stuttgart in May 1938, whereas in previous years Casella’s strong allegiance to the rival ISCM would have ruled him ineligible to be featured at such an event. A few months later, Casella had been replaced by his younger colleague Goffredo Petrassi as organizer of the Venice Festival. Petrassi complied with the new fascist regulation that any music by Jewish composers could not be programmed at such a prestigious event. Yet as Italian musical life increasingly mirrored the racist and xenophobic policies of the Nazis, Casella was no longer ostracized in Germany. Mention of the triple bill featuring Lualdi, Casella and Malipiero, as presented at the 1938 Permanent Council Festival in Stuttgart, highlights another interesting consequence of the Axis cultural accord, namely the sudden rise in the number of contemporary Italian operas premiered in German theaters from 1937 onward, in contrast to the extremely limited amount of such repertoire featured between 1933 and 1936. Malipiero, in particular, benefited from this level of exposure, since four of his most recent operas were performed on the German stage between 1938 and  Reichard, “Malipiero Germanised,” 20–21.  The majority of German music journals did not publish reviews of this festival. One exception was the Zeitschrift für Musik, whose Italian correspondent, Max Unger, responded with contempt to the inclusion of Schoenberg’s Suite op. 29 in the program. See Max Unger, “Internationales Musikfest in Venedig,” Zeitschrift für Musik 104 (1937): 1274. 56 57

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1943.58 But a substantial number of other opera composers, many of whose names completely disappeared from the spotlight in the postwar period, were given a platform in Germany during this period including Alfano, Allegra, Renzo Bossi, Camussi, Lualdi, Marinuzzi, Mulè, Napoli Pedrollo, Pizzetti, Respighi, Scuderi, Wolf-Ferrari and Zanella. Needless to say, not one of these figures was of Jewish descent. It is almost impossible to get an accurate sense of whether these works were deemed particularly successful. Reviews emanating from German music periodicals at that time tended to be critically neutral, confined to describing the plots of the respective opera and the quality of performance, but not presenting a clear indication as to the merits or otherwise of the actual operas. Perhaps more telling is that almost all these operas barely survived for more than a couple of performances, and were not generally revived in the following season, or staged in more than one theater. Nevertheless, the amount of effort and expenditure involved in staging such a large number of new works must have been considerable. As was customary during that period, all repertoire had to be performed in the German language. This required considerable planning, with specific theaters commissioning translations of libretti and publishers preparing vocal scores. Soloists, chorus, conductor and orchestra needed sufficient time and energy to learn and master unfamiliar repertoire. Even before this could take place, Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser had to sanction his approval of the respective operas. In most cases, this was merely a formality, since the theatrical subject matters and musical idioms of most operas were sufficiently conservative not to offend Nazi sensibilities. Only on one occasion did a new Italian opera fall foul of German censorship. After the successful premiere of Dallapiccola’s Volo di notte in Venice in September 1938, the young composer was encouraged to try and secure a staging in Germany. He was advised that Braunschweig, 58  The four operas by Malipiero that were given German premieres during this period were Giulio Cesare (December 6, 1938, Gera), Antonio e Cleopatra (February 25, 1939, Bremen), I capricci di Callot (March 12, 1942, Dortmund) and La vita è sogno (June 20, 1943, Breslau). It should be noted that apart from Guilio Cesare, staged in the 1940–1941 season in Hamburg, none of these operas were performed in other opera houses. Extended reviews of three of these operas appeared in the specialist musical press, see Artur Breitenborn, “Opern-Uraufführungen: G. Francesco Malipiero: Julius Cäsar,” Zeitschrift für Musik 106 (1939): 84–85; Prof. Dr. Kratzi, “Opern-Uraufführungen: G. Francesco Malipiero: Antonius und Kleopatra,” Zeitschrift für Musik 106 (1939): 418; Erwin Völsing, “Das Musikleben: Francesco Malipiero: Das Leben ein Traum,” Musik im Kriege 1 (1943): 61–62.

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which had premiered Malipiero’s La favola del figlio cambiato in 1934, would be the most suitable theater in which to bring it before the German public. Negotiations with the theater’s intendant Karlheinz Gutheim ensued, and there seems to have been a genuine commitment on the part of Braunschweig to put the opera into its repertoire. However, the Reichsdramaturg appears to have blocked any possibility of its being staged there, on the grounds that he believed Dallapiccola’s musical language to be too atonal to appeal to German theatergoers.59 The Nazi rejection of Dallapiccola’s opera reveals that a potential fault line still existed beneath the surface displays of mutual friendship between the two nations. It leads us to question whether the commitment to performing new Italian music in Germany was merely a cosmetic exercise supporting a well-oiled propaganda machine. Equally germane is how much the cultural accord was reciprocated on the Italian side. Of course, it is important to bear in mind that the structures for regular concert and operatic activity were far less intensively developed in Italy than in Germany. Yet even after taking this into account, the amount of Nazi-­ approved contemporary German repertoire performed in Italy remained far more limited. True, a number of visiting German conductors inserted Nazi-approved contemporary repertoire into their orchestral programs,60 and Italian conductors such as Lualdi reciprocated on occasions with a token gesture of performing a new or previously unheard German orchestral work. On the other hand, in statistical terms, the Italians seemed far less accommodating, presenting far fewer new German operas on the Italian stage than were the Germans to their Italian allies. At the height of their accord during the 1940–1941 season, for example, three German novelties were premiered in Italian opera houses. Yet only one of these works, Ottmar Gerster’s Enoch Arden (Rome), was at all well-known in Germany. As for the others, Max Donisch’s Soleida (Milan), based on a tale from the 1001 Nights, predated the Nazi era, having been premiered in a provincial German theater in 1927. It was presumably approved for 59  Fiamma Nicolodi ed., Luigi Dallapiccola: saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1975), 133–34. 60  The most enterprising German conductor to visit Italy frequently during this period was Carl Schuricht (1880–1967). Programs he conducted with Italian orchestras in Florence, Milan, Rome and Turin between November 1940 and June 1943 demonstrate a clear objective of combining unfamiliar contemporary Italian and German works with long-established German classics. See List of Concerts, Carl Schuricht Page, accessed June 25, 2019, http:// carlschuricht.com/concert.htm.

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performance abroad not because its composer enjoyed a strong reputation in Germany, but rather because he had been a loyal Nazi and also happened to be director of the radio station Deutschlandsender. The third opera, Familie Gozzi (Naples) by Wilhelm Kempff, premiered in 1934 in Stettin, was no less obscure than Donisch’s contribution. Its inclusion in the Italian opera season was undoubtedly due to the famous pianist opting to dedicate the score to Mussolini. As with the new Italian operas performed in Germany, the impact of these performances is difficult to gauge, but it is telling that all the works received relatively few performances. Indeed, judging by the reviews of Italian musical life which Alfredo Casella provided for American newspaper Christian Science Monitor, there is more than a hint of frustration that the programming of musical repertoire had become far less adventurous in 1940. Casella did not go so far as to blame this situation on the undue influence of German cultural policy, but he was certainly prepared to single out German artists for criticism, particularly when they had not paid due respect to the work of his Italian colleagues. Reading his review of the first performance of Petrassi’s Piano Concerto, in which the soloist was Walter Gieseking, it seems perfectly clear that the great German pianist had not even bothered to prepare the work. As Casella reported quite candidly to his American audience, “It is to be regretted that the playing of a pianist as outstanding as Gieseking was not what one had a right to expect from him, for it was evident that he was far from having mastered the work and the word ‘reading’ would certainly be more appropriate than ‘interpretation’ in describing his performance.”61 The spurious nature of joint national musical enterprise, at least on the Italian side, was highlighted by the repertoire performed at the 1941 Venice Contemporary Music Festival. Although advertised in the Zeitschrift für Musik as a joint German-Italian music festival, the German component was hardly contemporary and restricted to an all-Wagner concert program and a Mozart opera with exclusive focus being placed on Italian contemporary music.62 In many respects, this program planning accorded with 61  Alfredo Casella, “The Music Season in Rome,” Christian Science Monitor, February 10, 1940, 13. 62  Max Unger, “Deutsch-italienisches Musikfest in Venedig,” Zeitschrift für Musik 108 (1941): 744–745 and 795–796. Unger’s report is corroborated by reviews of the Festival that appeared in Italian journals. See, for example, “La VII Festa internazionale Musica a Venezia [Concerti dedicati a musiche Wagner, Rossini, Mozart, Cimarosa, Tommasini, Dallapiccola, Malipiero, Ghedieni, Pizzetti, Petrassi, Previtali],” Rivista Musicale Italiana

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the current drive, steered by Education Minister Giuseppe Bottai and apparently supported by Petrassi, Lualdi and Casella, to achieve musical autarky. Bottai’s objective was to purge all foreign works, apart from a limited number of classics of the musical literature, from teaching materials presented in Italian schools and music conservatories. It seems to us inconceivable that the same musicians who supported autarky could also claim that the Italian regime was equally committed to promoting the most advanced musical styles in Europe. Yet this is exactly what Petrassi argued in a speech entitled “International Relations in the Field of Music,” which he delivered to a meeting of the Permanent Council on September 5, 1942. Petrassi went out of his way to praise Mussolini and wartime Italy for protecting the musical avant-garde and for reflecting a strong European consciousness.63 Petrassi’s speech can be interpreted in two ways. First and foremost, it looks like a brazen attempt to boost Italian claims to European musical hegemony in the face of Nazi domination of most musical institutions in the occupied territories. Of course, one way of asserting Italian independence was to support performances of music by leading European figures that were banned by the Nazi regime. This was certainly the case with the continued performance of works by modernist composers, Stravinsky and Hindemith, both of whom continued to enjoy regular exposure in Italy during this period. For instance, thanks to the efforts of Hungarian choreographer Aurel Milloss, many of Stravinsky’s major ballets were staged in Rome during the war, from L’Histoire du Soldat and Apollon Musagète to Mavra and Le Sacre du printemps. Milloss even secured special dispensation through Mussolini’s firm support for his Rome ballet company to bring Petrushka with them when on tour in the German Reich during 1942, thereby defying the official proscription of his music imposed by the Reichsmusikkkammer.64 XLV (1941): 376–379; “Vita Musicale: La 7a. Festa Musicale di Venezia,” Musica d’oggi XIII (1941): 278. See also 7. Festa internazionale della musica : programma ufficiale, Venezia, 8-27 settembre 1941 / Biennale di Venezia (Venice: C. Ferrari, 1941). Petrassi perhaps compensated for this exclusive focus on Italian contemporary music by organizing a program of contemporary German chamber music and song in the 1942 Venice Festival with works by Theodor Berger, Helmut Bräutigam, Harald Genzmer, Fritz von Borries and Karl Höller. However, it should be noted that all the performers in this concert were German. 63  Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, 219–20. 64  Patrizia Veroli, “The Choreography of Aurel Milloss, Part One: 1906–1945,” Dance Chronicle 13 (1990): 21–25. It should also be pointed out that in 1941 an extended article

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Although Petrassi may well have been thinking of his fellow musicians’ support for Stravinsky and Hindemith when he delivered his speech on September 1942, it is equally likely that he was preparing the ground for the most audacious display of Italian artistic autonomy in the era of Nazi domination, namely the season of contemporary operas and ballets that was mounted in Rome in 1942. The program was truly ambitious and included such dazzling anti-war pieces as Busoni’s one-act opera Arlecchino, originally premiered in neutral Zurich during the First World War. But the main spotlight was placed on two works receiving their first performances in Italy that would have been branded as degenerate in Nazi Germany: Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin and Berg’s opera Wozzeck. Bartók shared an intriguing triple bill with Honegger’s Amphion and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, the latter presumably featured in this context in an attempt to appease potential German objections to the whole program.65 Daring as it was to stage the Bartók ballet, there is little doubt that the decision to present Berg’s opera, given on November 3, 1942, in Rome, was an act of cultural defiance. Despite high-level attempts to stop the performance on the part of the German Ministry of Propaganda, the Italian authorities stood firm and refused to capitulate to outside interference. A first-rate cast, featuring Tito Gobbi in the title role and conductor Tullio Serafin, was assembled, and Aurel Milloss again proved to be an enterprising and enlightened director. It should be further emphasized that putting on such a difficult and unfamiliar work would have required a huge number of rehearsals, and there was always the potential danger that the audience might react with hostility to Berg’s advanced musical idiom. But the defiantly anti-militaristic message of Berg’s libretto, translated into Italian by Alberto Mantelli, certainly struck a chord with a war-­ weary public.66 Remarkably, Wozzeck was also broadcast by Italian radio, and many of the reviews that appeared in the Italian press were extremely on Stravinsky’s most recent work appeared in the journal, La rassegna musicale, see Alberto Mantelli, “Igor Strawinsky e le sue opere più recenti,” La rassegna musicale 14 (1941): 41–56. 65  Orff’s Carmina Burana also enjoyed a staging at La Scala, Milan, the only example of a contemporary German theater work being heard in two Italian opera houses during the same season. 66  To emphasize that the Berg Wozzeck performance was no clandestine affair, but one which enjoyed official support, it should be noted that Mantelli’s Italian translation of the opera was published concurrently, see Wozzeck: opera in tre atti (15 quadri) da Georg Buchner: musica di Alban Berg/Alberto Mantelli (Milan: La Lampada, 1942). Six years ear-

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positive.67 Recalling the performance over 60 years later, the composer Roman Vlad claimed that hearing Berg under such circumstances was one of the greatest moments in his life: “It was a miracle. Rome was an oasis of intellectual and spiritual fervor in the war. Even more remarkable was the extensive presence of many Germans in the audience who travelled especially to hear a work that was now denied to them in their homeland.”68 It should be noted that not only were there no German press reviews of the Rome performance of Wozzeck, but that potential gestures of defiance from the most recent music by Italy’s foremost composers to have been performed in Germany were largely overlooked. Take, for example, the Third Symphony by Alfredo Casella, which the composer conducted in Berlin and Vienna in January 1942 with further performances in Augsburg, Essen, Dresden and Mainz. In his program notes to the Symphony, Casella went out of his way to claim that there was no hidden program behind the work and that the composer’s prime intention was to create something that was purely abstract in concept. Yet a closer look at the score reveals how much the Symphony owes to the musical outlook of Gustav Mahler, the Austrian Jewish composer whose work was proscribed by the Nazi regime. Anyone who had a good working knowledge of Mahler’s output would have immediately recognized these allusions (especially in the Scherzo and the slow movement) to the composer Casella described before the First World War as the “greatest musical influence on his life.”69 But to admit as much in the current climate of virulent anti-Semitism promoted by both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany would have been an extremely risky and foolhardy strategy. In this context, Casella’s personal circumstances become directly relevant. Although for the purposes of expediency he was prepared after 1938 to pay lip service from time to time to the Italian regime’s official anti-Semitic policy, Casella had also been the victim of vicious anti-Semitic attacks by the composer Francesco

lier, Mantelli had published an extremely detailed and sympathetic article in Italian on Berg; see Alberto Mantelli, “Note su Alban Berg,” La rassegna musicale 9 (1936): 117–132. 67  For a useful summary of press reaction to the Rome performance of Wozzeck, see Konrad Vogelsang, “Alban Bergs ‘Wozzeck’ in Rom 1942,” Die Musikforschung 42 (1989): 150–154. 68  Valerio Cappelli “Interview with Roman Vlad,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), September 30, 2003, 50. 69  The quotation derives from a fiftieth birthday tribute to Mahler cited in Dietrich Kämper, “Alfredo Casella und Gustav Mahler,” Die Musikforschung 47 (1994): 122–24.

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Santoliquido in the Roman newspaper Il Tevere..70 Although the composer vigorously defended his position, in particular affirming his Italian patriotism and loyalty to the Italian race and even publishing an article in the Christian Science Monitor on March 18, 1939, minimizing the impact of the Racial Laws upon Italian musical life,71 he spent the war years fearful that his Jewish wife and their daughter might be taken from him at any time.72 So although the Third Symphony was designed as a very public symphonic statement, the allusions to Mahler expose an underlying sense of anxiety which works against the surface grandeur of the music. The last major contemporary Italian opera to grace the German stage, Malipiero’s La Vita è sogno (Life is a Dream), first performed in Breslau in June 1943, nearly six months after the disastrous German capitulation at Stalingrad, also calls into question both the solidity and longevity of the Italian-German musical alliance. Based on a well-known play by the great Spanish playwright, Caldéron, the opera’s plot concerns a conflict between the fictional Segismundo, Prince of Poland, who has been imprisoned in a tower by his father, King Basilio, following a dire prophecy that the prince would bring disaster to the country and death to the king. Basilio briefly frees Segismundo, but when the prince goes on the rampage, the king imprisons him again, persuading him that it was all a dream. Is it too fanciful to view Malipiero’s opera as a commentary on the illusory or fictional relationship existing between Italy and Germany at this time, a conflict between reality, free will and fate? A review of Malipiero’s opera that appeared in the journal Musik im Kriege in 1943 gives relatively little away about the impact of the work, either in dramatic or in musical terms.73 However, one remark does stand out regarding the opera’s final bars. The critic in question noted that instead of resolving on the expected 70  Francesco Santoliquido, “Gli ebrei e la musica in Italia,” Il Tevere (Rome), December 1–2, 1937, 1–3; Francesco Santoliquido, “La piovra musicale ebraica,” Il Tevere (Rome), December 14–15, 1937, 1–3. 71  Alfredo Casella, “Music and the State in Italy,” Christian Science Monitor 18 (March 1939): 6. For more on Casella’s position after 1938, see Camilla Poesio, “Alfredo Casella, l’avanguardia musicale, il jazz e una campagna antisemita degli anni Trenta,” Contemporanea XVIII/2 (2015): 267–285. Also see Annalisa Capristo, “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale,” in Scripta sonant contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, eds. Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva (Milan: IAML, 2018), 365–381. 72  Ben Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy, 69. 73  Erwin Völsing, “Das Musikleben: Francesco Malipiero: Das Leben ein Traum,” Musik im Kriege 1 (1943): 61–62.

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diatonic chord, Malipiero’s work ends with a harsh dissonance. Could Malipiero’s musical gesture have been a deliberate calculation, designed to cast doubt and feelings of ambiguity among those war-weary German citizens who were able to attend such an event?

Bibliography Bauer, Erwin. “Italienfahrt des N-S Reichs-Symphonie-Orchesters.” Zeitschrift für Musik 101 (1934): 37–41. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Italian Fascists and National Socialists: the Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship.” In Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, edited by Richard A. Etlin, 257–286. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Berg, Alban. Wozzeck: opera in tre atti (15 quadri) da Georg Buchner: musica di Alban Berg/ Alberto Mantelli. Milan: La Lampada, 1942. Bertola, Mauro Fosco. “Beyond Germanness. Music’s History as ‘Entangled History’ in German musicology from the End of the Nineteenth Century to the Second World War.” In Nazi Germany and Southern Europe, 1933–45: Science, Culture and Politics, edited by Fernando Clara, Cláudia Ninhos, and Sasha Grishin, 25–36. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Bontempelli, Massimo. “Kunst und Faschismus.” Melos 12 (1933): 323–327. Capristo, Annalisa. “Fonti per lo studio della persecuzione antiebraica fascista nel settore musicale.” In Scripta sonant contributi sul patrimonio musicale italiano, edited by Annalisa Bini, Tiziana Grande, and Federica Riva, 365–381. Milan: IAML, 2018. Carner, Mosco. “The Berg Affair, Venice 1934.” The Musical Times 110 (1969): 1129–1131. Casella, Alfredo “Alfredo Casella spricht.” Melos 12 (1933a): 189–192. ———. “Il Festival musicale di Praga.” L’Italia letteraria, October 6, 1935, 4. ———. “Moderne und traditionelle Faktoren in der faschistischen Musik.” Melos 12 (1933b): 336–339. ———. “The Music Season in Rome.” Christian Science Monitor, February 10, 1940, 13. Claar, Maximilian. “Musikleben–Konzerte: Neapel.” Die Musik 26 (1934a): 536. ———. “Musikleben–Oper: Rom.” Die Musik 26 (1934b): 632. Earle, Ben. Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Frese Witt, Mary Ann. “Fascist Discourses and Pirandellian Theater.” In Plays, Movies and Critics, edited by Jody McAuliffe, 73–102. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Garberding, Petra. “‘We take care of the Artist’. The German Composers’ Meeting in Berlin, 1934.” Music & Politics, 3/2 (2009), http://quod.lib.umich. edu/m/mp/9460447.0003.204?view=text;rgn=main.

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Geiger, Friedrich. “‘Die ‘Goebbels-Liste’ vom 1. September 1935. Eine Quelle zur Komponistenverfolgung im NS-Staat.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 59 (2002): 104–112. Gerigk, Herbert. “Musikfestdämmerung.” Die Musik 27 (1934–1935): 45–51. Haefeli, Anton. “Politische Implikationen einer ‘unpolitischen’ Organisation: Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik zwischen 1933 und 1939.” In Musik im Exil. Die Schweiz und das Ausland 1918–1945, edited by Chris Walton, and Antonio Baldasarre, 103–120. Berne: Peter Lang, 2005. Hall, Raymond. “International Congress: New Organization Presided Over by Richard Strauss Meets in Venice.” New York Times, October 28, 1934 X7. ———. “Malipiero’s new opera ‘La Favola del Figlio Cambiato’ banned by Mussolini as immoral.” New York Times, May 13, 1934 X5. Kämper, Dietrich. “Alfredo Casella und Gustav Mahler.” Die Musikforschung 47 (1994): 118–127. Labroca, Mario. “Neue italienische Musik im faschistischen Staat.” Melos 12 (1933): 339–342. London, John. “Non-German drama in the Third Reich.” In Theatre under the Nazis, edited by John London, 222–261. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Mantelli, Alberto. “Note su Alban Berg.” La rassegna musicale 9 (1936): 117–132. ———. “Igor Strawinsky e le sue opere più recenti.” La rassegna musicale 14 (1941): 41–56. Martin, Benjamin G. The Nazi–Fascist New Order for European Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nicolodi, Fiamma. Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Fiesole: Discanto, 1984. ———. “Gli esordi della Scuola di Vienna in Italia fino alla seconda guerra mondiale.” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 48 (2013): 211–242. ——— ed. Luigi Dallapiccola: saggi, testimonianze, carteggio, biografia e bibliografia. Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1975. ———. “Übereinstimmungen und Unterschiede in der Musikpolitik des Faschismus und des Nationalsozialismus.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 69 (2012): 363–372. Pirro, Nicola de. “Sindacato dei Musicisti.” Melos 12 (1933): 327–332. Poesio, Camilla. “Alfredo Casella, l’avanguardia musicale, il jazz e una campagna antisemita degli anni Trenta.” Contemporanea XVIII/2 (2015): 267–285. Reichard, Tobias. “Malipiero Germanised-Traces of Cultural Usurpation in Nazi Germany.” Archival Notes 2 (2017): 17–29. Rose, Fritz. “Das italienische Musikmanifest und wir!.” Zeitschrift für Musik 100 (1933): 6. Rotunno, Aristide. “Musikerziehung durch den Dopolavoro.” Melos 12 (1933): 332–335 Sachs, Harvey. Music in Fascist Italy. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987.

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Index1

A Acadêmia Brasileira de Música, 139n109 Albert Hall (London), 117, 118 Alfano, Franco, 29, 183, 190 Alfieri, Dino, 16, 32, 69, 71 Aliens Control Regulations (Australia), 123, 128 Alighieri, Dante, 119 Allegra, Salvatore, 190 American Jewish Year Book (periodical), 107 American Minstrel Shows, 64 American Secret Service, 76 Amicucci, Ermanno, 27, 36 Annuario della Stampa Italiana, 26, 36 Ansermet, Ernest, 58 Armstrong, Louis, 64 Associação Brasileira de Críticos Teatrais, 139 Atterberg, Kurt, 175

Augusteum Orchestra (Rome), 185 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 118, 129, 130, 132, 133 Australian Military Force, 129 Australian Red Cross, 129, 130 Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action), 102–104 B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 133, 159, 160 Baden-Baden Contemporary Music Festival, 188 Baker, Josephine, 63, 64 Bampton, Claude, 66 The Bandits (gig band), 66 Bardi, Pier Maria, 26, 30, 36 Barilli, Bruno, 29 Bartók, Béla, 42, 58, 189, 194 Barzizza, Pippo, 71, 74 Battistessa, Franco, 123n52

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Carrieri, A. Capristo (eds.), Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52931-4

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INDEX

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 5, 85, 133, 159, 161 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 67 Berg, Alban, 84n2, 182, 183, 194, 195 Bergen-Belsen (concentration camp), 7 Berliner Zeitung (newspaper), 179 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 171, 176 Berlin Staatsoper, 85n2, 187 Bernstein, Henri, 95n29 Bernstein, Leonard, 157, 158n14 Bertola, Mauro Fosco, 188 Bertonneau, Thomas, 159, 165 Bezanzoni Lage, Gabriele, 137 Bianchi, Cesare, 123n52 Biberach an der Riss (internment camp), 7 Billi, Vincenzo, 159 Binički, Stanislav, 159 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 119 Bodanya, Natalie, 95 Boghen, Felice, 117 Bon, Silvia, 101n57 Bonifica fascista della cultura (Vecchi di Val Cismon’s book), 34 Bontempelli, Massimo, 23, 29 Boselli, Angela, 155 Bossi, Renzo, 164, 190 Bottai, Giuseppe, 12, 15, 22, 22n1, 89, 90, 171, 193 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, 61 Brahms, Johannes, 58, 119, 159 Brema, Sylvia, 98, 99, 99n54 Bright Young People, 59 Bucci, Moreno, 98n53 Buratto, Luca (Renzo Massarani’s great-grandson), 136n98 Busoni, Ferruccio, 118n33 Buti, Carlo, 159 C Camurri, Renato, 140 Camussi, Ezio, 190

Caniglia, Maria, 169 Capristo, Annalisa, 5 Caraceni, Augusto, 73 Carrieri, Alessandro, 6 Casali, Davide, 7 Casella, Alfredo, 29, 31, 42, 43, 45–47, 58, 62, 63, 114n12, 115, 116n18, 139, 141, 178, 181–184, 186, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195 Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario, 2, 43, 113, 115, 115n17, 137, 141–143, 158 Catalan, Tullia, 7 Catholic Church, 72, 73 Cavallo, Pietro, 78 Central Institute of Statistics (Italy), 12 Cetra (dance band), 66, 67, 74 Cetra (recording house), 66, 71 Cherubini Music Conservatory (Florence), 117 Chiappani, Carlo, 159 Chiodelli, Raoul, 65 Chiuminotto, Antonio, 57 Chopin, Fryderyk, 133, 159 Christian Science Monitor (newspaper), 192, 196 Ciano, Galeazzo, 27 Cicioni, Mirna, 7 Civico Museo Teatrale “Carlo Schmidl” (Trieste), 100 Claar, Maximilian, 181 Claudel, Paul, 143 Code, Percy, 130 Coen Luzzatto, Laura, 47 Colorni, Gina (Renzo Massarani’s mother), 114n11 Consolo, Ernesto, 117 Conte Rosso (ship), 121 Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro, 119, 134, 135 Corporazione delle nuove musiche (CDNM), 42 Corra, Bruno, 67

 INDEX 

Corriere dei Piccoli (weekly), 116 Corriere della Sera, Il (newspaper), 28, 87, 92, 100, 101, 117 Cortot, Alfred, 118n33 Costa, Roberta, 33 Costantini, Costantino, 85n6 Costantini, Elda (Massaranis' wife), 115 Cotton Club, 55 Crabb, Paul, 151 Crawford, Joan, 58 Crispolti, Filippo, 91, 91n19, 91n21 Critica fascista (fortnightly), 22, 24 Croce, Benedetto, 97 D D’Amico, Fedele, 29 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 29, 47, 190, 191 Damerini, Adelmo, 31 De Angelis, Alberto, 117 De Bonis, Nicola, 160 De Gasperi, Alcide, 165 De Vecchi di Val Cismon, Cesare Maria, 34, 42 Debussy, Claude, 58 Declaration on the race, 14 Degenerate music, see Entartete Musik (Degenerate music) DELASEM (Aid Committee for Emigrants), 157, 159n20 Deluca, Raffaele, 6 Desderi, Ettore, 164, 165 Diario da Noite (newspaper), 136 Die Musik (journal), 181 Difesa della razza, La (fortnightly), 45 Direttive per la Stampa, 25 Doctrine of Fascism, 24, 26n32 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 181 Donald, Jim, 126 Donisch, Max, 191, 192 Dvorák, Antonín, 58

203

E Ellington, Duke, 55, 57, 64 Engel, Hans, 188 Entartete Musik (Degenerate music), 2, 3, 5, 7, 69 Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche (EIAR), 42, 65, 66, 70, 74, 106 Evans, Allan, 129, 133 Eysler, Edmund, 156, 157 F Fabre, Giorgio, 103 Fanfulla: o jornal dos italianos (newspaper of the Italians), 136 Fano, Vitale, 7 Farinacci, Roberto, 44 Federal Publicity Section (Australia), 118 Ferramonti di Tarsia (internment camp), 6, 17, 154, 155, 157, 159–161, 164, 165 Festival Viktor Ullman, 3 Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino), 16 Foa, Vittorio, 91, 113n10 Fofi, Goffredo, 78 Fondazione Centro di documentazione ebraica contemporanea (CDEC), 116n20 Fracchia, Umberto, 22, 26 Franco, Luisa, 7 Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 159 Friedman, Ignaz, 129, 129n71, 133 Frugatta, Giuseppe, 116n18 G Gable, Clark, 58 Gacioppo, Amaryllis, 7 Gaddi, Giuseppe, 96 Gallarati Scotti, Gian Giacomo, 103, 103n62

204 

INDEX

Gallarati Scotti, Tommaso, 103n62 Galli Curci, Amelia, 118 Garbo, Greta, 58 Gatti, Guido Maggiolino, 29, 35 Gazeta–S. Paulo, A (newspaper), 137 Geiger-Eichhorn, Antonija, 158 Gentile, Giovanni, 26, 37 Gentili-Tedeschi, Massimo, 7 Gerbi, Sandro, 96 Gerigk, Herbert, 182 Gerster, Ottmar, 191 Ghislanzoni, Alberto, 32, 33 Gieseking, Walter, 192 Gigli, Beniamino, 169 Giordano, Umberto, 159 Giornale Italiano, Il (newspaper), 121–123, 180 Giuseppe Verdi Theatre (Trieste), 100 Glaros, Maria, 123n54, 128 Gobbi, Tito, 194 Goebbels, Joseph, 35, 69, 174, 180, 185 Goodrich, Ruth (Kleiber’s wife), 93n25, 106n72 Gorin, Paul, 158 Gramsci, Antonio, 61 Grand Council of Fascism, 14 Grégor et ses Grégoriens (orchestra), 64 Grgošević, Zlatko, 159 Gruber, Gerold, 154n8 Gui, Vittorio, 117 Gutheim, Karlheinz, 191 H Halévy, Fromental, 159 Hatzopoulos, Damaskinos, 159 Hewitt, Andrew, 33 Hilberg, Raul, 84 Hindemith, Paul, 58, 116n18, 176, 193, 194 Hinsley, Arthur, 106 Hitler, Adolf, 17, 69, 170, 172, 176, 177, 181, 185, 186

Hobsbawn, Eric, 77 Holy See, 87–89, 92, 101, 103–105, 105n67 Honegger, Arthur, 42, 58, 194 Horowitz, Vladimir, 94n26 Hylton, Jack, 58 I Impero, L’ (newspaper), 115 Interlandi, Telesio, 45, 104 International Festival of Contemporary Music (Venice), 95, 116, 175, 182, 192 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), 42n114, 115, 173–175, 183, 189 Isnenghi, Mario, 36, 40 Italia letteraria, L’ (weekly), 29 Italian Red Cross, 117 Italian Social Republic, 18 J Jacopini, Alberto, 23 James, Billy, 129, 133 Jazz Scandale (theatrical review), 64 Jewish Advocate, The (newspaper), 96, 97 Jewish Chronicle, The (newspaper), 96, 97 Jewish Exponent, The (newspaper), 95 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The, 96 Jews in Italy, The (Orano’s pamphlet), 11 Jornal do Brasil (newspaper), 138 Judson Agency, 133 K Kalk, Israel, 152n3, 156 Kater, Michael H., 63 Kelly, Ethel Knight, 122n49, 125 Kelly, Patricia (Gualtiero Volterra’s wife), 118, 121, 122, 133

 INDEX 

Kelly, Thomas Herbert (Patricia’s father), 121, 125 Kempff, Wilhelm, 192 Kern, Jerome, 67 Kittel, Bruno, 171 Kleiber, Carlos (Kleiber’s son), 93n25, 106n72 Kleiber, Erich, 1, 5, 84–87, 84–85n2, 86n7, 92, 93, 95–98, 100, 101, 106, 106n72, 107, 107n74 Kleiber, Veronica (Kleiber’s daughter), 94n25 Kowalski, M., 159 Kramer, Gorni, 71 Krenek, Ernst, 182 Kress Foundation (New York), 134, 135 L Labroca, Mario, 29, 43, 98, 99, 114n12 La Fenice Theatre (Venice), 2, 98n52 Lage, Henrique, 137 La Scala Theatre (Milan), 84, 86–88, 86n7, 92, 93, 100, 101, 103, 106–108, 107n74, 117, 185 Lateran Pacts, 92 Lax, Joseph, 155, 157 League of Nations, 10, 65 Lecache, Bernard, 97 Lee Thomas, Linda (Porter’s wife), 59 Leggi fascistissime, 22, 25 Lehár, Franz, 156 Lehmann, Arthur, 160, 161 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 159 Lescano Sisters, 70 Leslie Hutchinson Band, 59 Levi, Erik, 6 Levi, Pierpaolo, 3 Levitch, Leon, 158–160, 165 Linton, Noel, 125 Linton, Sir Richard, 125–126 Liszt, Franz, 159 Locatelli, Armida, 152

205

Lopinot, Caliste, 160 Lualdi, Adriano, 61, 174, 182, 183, 186, 189–191, 193 Lulli, Giovanni Battista, 143n125 Luzzatto, Guido Ludovico, 88n11 M Maccari, Mino, 23 Mackensen, Hans-Georg von, 170, 171 Maggio Musicale (Florence), 174 Mahler, Gustav, 195 Malaparte, Curzio, 23 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 42, 45, 46, 72, 178, 179, 181, 182, 186, 188, 189, 191, 196 Maly Trostenets (extermination camp), 156 Manchester Guardian, The (newspaper), 96, 107, 108 A Manhã (newspaper), 138 Manifesto di musicisti Italiani per le tradizione dell’arte romantica dell ‘800, 24, 33, 34, 37, 177, 178 Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, 26n32 Mantelli, Alberto, 47, 194 March on Rome, 24 Marella (ship), 121 Margottini, Guido, 30 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 67 Marinuzzi, Gino, 190 Martin, Benjamin G., 172 Mascagni, Pietro, 57 Massarani, Andrea (Renzo Massarani’s son), 115n16, 120, 137, 143, 143n125, 144 Massarani, Daniela (Renzo Massarani’s granddaughter), 7, 120, 136n98 Massarani, Giulio (Renzo Massarani’s father), 114n11 Massarani, Giulio (Renzo Massarani’s son), 115n16

206 

INDEX

Massarani, Laura (Renzo Massarani’s daughter), 115n16 Massarani, Renzo, 6, 29, 112–115, 114n11, 114n12, 119, 120, 135–139, 135n97, 137n103, 141–146 Massenet, Jules, 159 Melli, Adele (Gualtiero Volterra’s mother), 114n11 Melos (journal), 178 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 159 Menzies, Robert, 121 Metropolitan Opera (New York), 95, 99 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 187 Mila, Massimo, 29, 64 Milano, Attilio, 105, 105n67 Milhaud, Darius, 42, 58, 143, 158, 182 Military Allied Government-­ Lombardy, 165 Milloss, Aurel, 193, 194 Milwaukee Journal, The (newspaper), 96 Ministry for the Press and Propaganda (Italy), 27, 32 Ministry of National Education (Italy), 89 Ministry of Popular Culture (Italy), 22, 32, 71 Ministry of the Interior (Italy), 12, 67, 127 Ministry of the National Education (Italy), 42 Mirador orchestra, 65 Mirski, Lav, 157–159, 161 Monti, Vittorio, 159 Morgan, John Pierpont, 58 Moritz, Edvard, 159 Mozart, Wolfgang A., 159, 169–171, 173, 192 Mulè, Giuseppe, 190 Muller, Yvonne, 47 Musica d’oggi (journal), 29, 37, 115

Musical Times, The (journal), 96 Music Conservatory (Lecce), 165 Music Conservatory (Milan), 117, 152, 154n8 Music Conservatory (Padua), 165 Musicista, Il (journal), 31–33, 41, 45, 46 Musik im Kriege (journal), 196 Mussolini, Benito, 10–12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22–24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 44, 45, 60, 61, 94, 94n26, 102n59, 103, 104, 137, 137n102, 170, 172, 177, 178, 180–182, 185, 192, 193 N Nathan, Arturo, 7 National Fascist Party, 10, 16, 17, 22, 32, 103n62, 123–125, 127, 127n66, 165n33 National Fascist Union of Musicians, 31, 31n59, 32 National Security Act (Australia), 123 National Union of Journalists (Italy), 27 Nazi Party, 106n69, 181 Neptunia (ship), 136n97 Neues Konservatorium (Vienna), 156 New York Times, The (newspaper), 87, 88, 91, 95, 96, 106n69 900 (journal), 24 O Observer, The (newspaper), 100 Office of Strategic Services (USA), 76 Ojetti, Ugo, 29, 34 Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, 33 Oppo, Cipriano Efisio, 23 Orano, Paolo, 11, 48 Orchestra Sinfônica Brasileira, 144 Orff, Carl, 194 Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 55

 INDEX 

Osservatore Romano, L’ (newspaper), 18, 87–90, 102–105 Otto, Natalino, 71 P Pacelli, Eugenio (Pius XII), 102, 105 Palestine Post, The (newspaper), 96, 97, 107, 108 Pan (monthly), 29, 34, 44, 64 Pannain, Guido, 29, 44, 186 Paribeni, Giulio Cesare, 164 Parrini, Eugenio, 154 Pasero, Tancredi, 169 Pavese, Cesare, 57 Pavolini, Alessandro, 22, 25n28, 32 Pazzi, Sandro, 134 Pedrollo, Napoli, 190 Pegaso (journal), 29, 43 Pekelis, Carla, 133n85 Pende, Nicola, 144 Perseo (monthly), 28, 40, 45 Petrarca, Francesco, 119 Petrassi, Goffredo, 29, 72, 189, 192–194 Pfitzner, Hans, 187 Pianoforte, Il (journal), 29 Piccolo, Il (newspaper), 101 Pick-Mangiagalli, Riccardo, 164 Pinzauti, Leonardo, 99n55 Piovene, Guido, 44 Pirandello, Luigi, 179 Pius XI, Pope, 101, 103, 103n62, 105, 106n69 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 29, 34, 72, 177, 190 Podrecca, Vittorio, 114, 114n13, 115 Poesio, Camilla, 3, 5 Poletti, Charles, 165 Polverelli, Gaetano, 25, 25n28 Popolo d’Italia, Il (newspaper), 11, 26, 69 Porrino, Ennio, 45, 46, 183 Porta, Arturo Francesco della, 45

207

Porter, Cole, 59, 67 Pratella, Francesco Balilla, 29, 37–40 Press Office of the Head of Government (Italy), 27 Previtali, Fernando, 170 Preziosi, Giovanni, 28 Primato, Il (journal), 22n1 Prokofiev, Sergej S., 116n18, 189 Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 11 Provisions for the Defense of the Race, 88, 119 See also Racial Laws Puccini, Giacomo, 159 Puccini, Mario, 23 Pugliese, Stanislao G., 7 Q Queensland Figaro (newspaper), 121n48 R Racial Laws, 2, 4–5, 30, 77, 111, 113, 137, 153, 165, 171, 185, 196 Racial Manifesto, 27, 144 Raeli, Vito, 31 Rassegna dorica (journal), 29, 30, 33, 39 Rassegna Musicale (journal), 28 Ratti, Achille, see Pius XI, Pope Ravel, Maurice, 58, 159 Reale Theatre (Rome), 186 Redlich, Hans Ferdinand, 180 Regime fascista, Il (newspaper), 28 Renaissance, 118 Respighi, Ottorino, 114, 116n18, 176, 177, 183, 190 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 185 Ricordi (publisher), 67 Rieti, Vittorio, 2, 113, 114, 114n12, 116, 116n18, 137, 141–143 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolaj A., 159 Risorgimento, 107

208 

INDEX

Rivista Musicale Italiana (journal), 29 Rivista Nazionale di Musica (journal), 31 Robert, Richard, 157 Roberti, Ercole de, 135 Rocca, Enrico, 23 Rocco, Alfredo, 25 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 56 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 56 Rosenberg, Alfred, 181 Rossini, Gioacchino, 159 Rothschild, Lord, 106 Roussel, Albert, 175 Royal Academy of Santa Cecilia (Rome), 117 Royal Conservatory (Milan), see Music Conservatory (Milan) Royal Philharmonic of Rome, 117 Rubinstein, Arthur, 94, 94n28, 95n29 Ruggeri, Luciana, 86n7 Russell, John, 93 Russolo, Luigi, 57 Rutland, Suzanne D., 131 S Sabata, Victor de, 169 Sachs, Harvey, 112 Sadero, Geni (pseud. Scarpa, Eugenia), 159 Saint-Cyr, Mario, 39, 40, 42 Sala, Luca Lévi, 2, 5 Salata, Francesco, 184 Sannino, Gerardo, 165 Santa Sede, see Holy See Santoliquido, Francesco, 45, 195–196 Sarfatti, Michele, 4 Satie, Erik, 58 Saunders, Kay, 123 Savarino, Santi, 71 Scarpa, Eugenia, see Sadero, Geni (pseud. Scarpa, Eugenia) Schaeffner, Pierre, 42, 43n115 Schalk, Franz, 114

Schillings, Max von, 175 Schlösser, Reiner, 190 Schmidl, Carlo, 117 Schmidt, Franz, 157 Schönberg, Arnold, 42–44, 115, 182, 183, 189 Schreker, Franz, 158 Schubert, Franz, 130, 159 Schumann, Robert, 133, 159 Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 184 Schwarz, Heinrich, 164 Schwarz, Therese, 156 Scuderi, Gaspare, 32, 190 Secretariat for Press and Propaganda (Italy), 27 Secretariat of State (Holy See), 103 Segre, Sergio, 44 Seidmann, Michael, 165 Selvaggio, Il (monthly), 24 Semprini, Alberto, 71 Serafin, Tullio, 194 Sibelius, Jean, 175 Sieben, Wilhelm, 85n4, 86, 93 Silva, Mario da, 120 Singakadem Philarmonie (Berlin), 117 Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), 115, 119 Society for Concerts (Parma), 117 Soffici, Ardengo, 23 Soir, Le (newspaper), 96 Solari, Pietro, 24 Sonnenfeld, Kurt, 6, 152, 154–157, 159, 159n20, 161, 164, 165 Sonnenfeld, Leopold (Kurt’s father), 156, 161 Sonzogno, Nino, 144, 144n126 Spanish Civil War, 56, 185 Spezzaferri, Làszlò, 165 Stampa, La (newspaper), 28, 106 Starace, Achille, 177 Steinfeld, Sigbert, 158 Sternberg, Ladislav, 158 Stignani, Ebe, 169 Strauss, Richard, 72, 182

 INDEX 

Stravinsky, Igor F., 42, 43, 58, 115, 116n18, 189, 193, 194 Strobel, Heinrich, 181 Stuckenschmidt, Hans-Heinz, 179 Sydney Morning Herald, The (newspaper), 121, 122, 130 Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 130 Szymanowski, Karol, 189 T Tacchi Venturi, Pietro, 104 Tagliacozzo, Mario, 120 Tardini, Domenico, 102 Teatro dei Piccoli, 120 Tebaldini, Giovanni, 171 Telegrafo, Il (newspaper), 99 Telegraph, The (newspaper), 96 Temps, Le (newspaper), 96 Tevere, Il (newspaper), 28, 40, 45, 95, 95n29, 104, 105n66, 106, 115, 196 Thaler, Isak, 158, 159, 161 Tiepolo, Gianbattista, 119 Times, The (newspaper), 96 Tirindelli, Pier Adolfo, 159 Toni, Alceo, 69 Toscanini, Arturo, 94, 97, 98, 112n6 Tosti, Francesco Paolo, 159 Tribuna, La (newspaper), 28 Truth (newspaper), 126 Tura, Cosmé, 135 Turati, Augusto, 25 Turi, Gabriele, 41 Turin Chamber Orchestra, 186 U Ugolini, Giuliano, 74 Union of Italian Jewish Communities, 15 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 160n23

209

V Valcarenghi, Renzo, 139 Valentin, Enrich, 187 Vanderbilt University (USA), 135 Varèse, Edgar, 61 Vatican City, see Holy See Veneziani, Vittore, 85, 85n6, 86n7 Verdi, Giuseppe, 100, 159, 187 Veretti, Antonio, 183 Victor Emmanuel III of Savoy, King of Italy, Emperor of Ethiopia and King of Albania, 18, 185 Vienna Symphony Orchestra, 184 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 139 Vita italiana, La (fortnightly), 28 Vittoria, Albertina, 22 Vlad, Roman, 195 Völkischer Beobachter (newspaper), 187 Volterra, Amedeo (Gualtiero’s brother), 116n20 Volterra, Beppino (Gualtiero’s brother), 116n20 Volterra, Gastone (Gualtiero’s brother), 116n20, 134n86 Volterra, Gualtiero, 6, 112–114, 114n11, 116–130, 116n20, 122n50, 132–136, 133n84, 144–146 Volterra, Gustavo (Gualtiero father), 114n11 Volterra, Sara (Tatia) (Gualtiero’s daughter), 118, 122 Volterra, Umberto Angelo (Gualtiero’s brother), 134n86 W Wagner, Richard, 159, 186, 187, 192 Washington Post, The (newspaper), 86, 96, 100, 108 Weill, Kurt, 42 Weimar National Theatre, 69n37 Weimar Republic, 56, 178

210 

INDEX

Werner, Alexander, 93n25, 106n72 Whiteman, Paul, 64 Wolff, Carlo Felice, 116 Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno, 190 Wooding, Sam, 58 World War I, 56, 59n7, 73, 114, 122n49, 172, 194, 195 World War II, 6, 7, 15, 73, 77, 86n7, 123, 123n52, 128, 133n82, 151, 153n5

Z Zandonai, Riccardo, 177 Zanella, Amilcare, 190 Zaninelli, Fulvia, 134 Zeitschrift für Musik (journal), 177, 178, 181, 187, 192 Žganec, Vinko, 159 Ziegler, Hans Severus, 69n37 Zins, Bogdan, 157, 159 Zuccotti, Susan, 101 Zurlo, Leopoldo, 67