1943 onwards – War Years of Emptiness & Loneliness, ‘Degenerate Music’ and Resonant Resilience

To my astonishment, Hans now seemed to lose interest in violin playing, and one dark and rainy day in 1943, he took me to the London store of the well-known Violin Makers, William E Hill & Sons, in New Bond Street, and asked them if they might be interested in purchasing me and my Tubbs bow!  Back to the ‘land of my birth’ again!

And so it was.  I changed hands yet again!  I must say I was taken great care of, and given a complete ‘overhaul’, with my twice-broken neck and fingerboard lovingly adjusted so that it was difficult to notice either the join at the top end of my back or the scar created by the new scroll.  It felt like a good health check, but I languished in my case in the basement of Mr Hill’s store, while this terrible war was no longer ‘phoney’, with fear filling the air.  There was so much music already in my body, expressed over so many years, which ought not to be buried in a basement. I sensed that the world needed the sounds of music more than ever during these dark days. The ‘kenotic’ idea that God ‘emptied himself of all but love’ (Charles Wesley) came to mind. I wanted to break out of this dark tomb.  Surely, I was made to make sounds, not to be cosseted with ointment, polish and varnish!

Being ‘emptied’ and deserted in this way made me realise that, even in the darkest days of war, the world cannot live without music or resonance. While I was cosseted in Hill’s basement, just across the way in the National Gallery by Trafalgar Square, the remarkable pianist Myra Hess was attracting huge audiences for regular concerts, 1,700 in all.  At times during the air raids, concerts had to be relocated into a cramped basement (like mine). Once a clarinettist had to heat her instrument on a stove, and most infamously, a bomb exploded just rooms away during a Beethoven Quartet.

Even though a few British voices were calling for a boycott of all ‘German’ music (Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Bach….), the public strongly resisted and longed for the sounds and resonances of great music, whatever its origin, whoever composed it, wherever they had lived.

What a contrast to the Nazi obsession to ban so-called ‘Degenerate music’ (Entartete Musik)!  Jewish composers – Mendelssohn, Mahler, and so many others, along with jazz writers and players – were cruelly disparaged and condemned.

And ironically, the people who ran the concentration camps spent their evenings listening to Beethoven and playing their violins?

As we have seen, there was extraordinary resilience and irrepressible music-making in Internment Camps, in Teresienstadt, in Gorlitz – and I have heard that music could not be silenced even in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, and all those other places of unspeakable horror and destruction.

It was as if their sounds were a resurrection into new life bursting from the tomb, the prisons, the ghettos and the gas chambers.

I have often wondered what the resurrection of Jesus sounds like!