Present Music Presents ‘The City Without Jews’

×

Expand

Photo courtesy Eric Segnitz

Film still from ‘Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews)’

Film still from ‘Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews)’

In 2015, a complete print of Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City Without Jews) was discovered in a Paris flea market. It had been one of many thousands of lost films from the silent era, yet its story is singular. Shot in 1924, the eerily prophetic story concerns Jews from a big European city, expelled from their homes and pushed onto trains for uncertain destinations. Seen in light of the Holocaust, The City Without Jews, although soon forgotten after its release, stands as a prediction of things to come.

When Present Music’s Co-artistic Director Eric Segnitz saw The City Without Jews last summer at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, he knew he wanted to program it—and perform its new, original score by contemporary composer Olga Neuwirth—for the ensemble’s 2023-24 season. “The film has a lot to do with the current political climate, the rise of intolerance all around us, the rise of antisemitism. It struck me as very relevant,” he says.

The City Without Jews was a bestselling novel by Hugo Bettauer, a Viennese journalist who wrote it to satirize the city’s rising antisemitism. His story was adapted for the screen by Viennese filmmaker Hans Karl Breslauer. The two men argued over the screenplay which muted the novel’s outcry and added a device familiar from fairytales and Hollywood—a happy ending. Despite steps to avoid state censorship and public outcry, the film stirred controversy. Brettauer, who was Jewish, was murdered months after its premiere by an outraged Nazi, but Breslauer, not Jewish, survived and enjoyed a career as a journalist after Austria was annexed by Hitler. He eventually joined the Nazi Party.

Although patchy and incomplete versions of The City Without Jews had been preserved in archives, the discovery of a clean and complete copy has drawn widespread interest. Klezmatics’ cofounder-violinist Alicia Svigals and pianist Donald Sosin composed a score for the film and have performed it at screenings. Austrian Jewish composer Olga Neuwirth was also moved to set the film to music by our era’s rising populist rancor. “Antisemitism is in the DNA of Austrians,” she told The Guardian. “Maybe it skipped a generation but now it’s back—along with hatred for refugees.”

In the book and the screenplay, demagogic politicians blame the Jews for their nation’s problems, including inflation, unemployment and the degradation of social life. “The parallels are plain: toxic language is begetting hatred, now as then,” says Neuwirth.

Neuwirth has enjoyed a diverse career in music, writing piano and chamber pieces along with works for large ensembles. She composed an opera based on David Lynch’s film Lost Highway and another on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Her music is capable of playfulness as well as serious consideration, quietly dissonant yet seldom jarring, more atmospheric than melodic. Although pre-Holocaust Vienna was the home of atonal and 12 tone composers such Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, “she skipped over into her own vernacular,” Segnitz says.

“I’ve wanted to perform her music for a long time,” he continues. “I like her score for The City Without Jews. It’s a challenging thing—the plot of the film with this surreal layer of you know the real outcome, which is not how the movie ends. Her composition doesn’t shy away from that in all its complexity.”

Not untypical for composers born after 1960, Neuwirth is interested in popular culture and draws from eclectic sources. Her music for The City Without Jews encompasses many references. Scenes inside a synagogue have a liturgical gravity while music for the bustling stock exchange rises to blaring crescendos. Klezmer’s ghost stirs when some Jewish characters appear on screen, while German oompah echoes in the tavern where antisemites complain about the Jews. Neuwirth’s music can display sharp bitter humor as well as empathy.

The concert will conclude on a hopeful note with a performance of a song on its way to becoming a standard, Israeli composer Ayiva Kopelman's moving arrangment of Woody Guthrie’s defiant refusal to surrender, “Gonna Get Through This World.” Milwaukee’s Donna Woodall will sing. Israeli-born Yaniv Dinur, formely of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, will conduct.

The City Without Jews and Present Music’s performance of Neuwirth’s score will be screened and performed at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 7:30 p.m., Oct. 29. There will be a preconcert talk at 6 p.m. in Lubar Auditorium featuring Alverno College professor Amy Shapiro, UWM professor Lisa Silverman, former Milwaukee Symphony resident conductor Yaniv Dinur and (full disclosure) me; and a post-concert reception in Windhover Hall.