Happy Chanukah, Dave! What a great story. I had a tangential relationship with some faculty at JHU back in the day. Your story reminded me of it; something I haven't thought of in decades. I enjoy your lectures and have purchased a good number of discs you've lauded. Keep them coming. I look forward to hearing more. I also joined the Classics Today website and am still deciding which shirts and sweatshirts to buy. Thanks again.
Back in the early 1960's, our family ran into another family who were unreconstructed Nazis. They insisted Bing Crosby and Perry Como among other popular singers were Jewish.
Fabulous; Friday evening, vodka tonic, and your lovely story! What could be a better start to the weekend. I love your idea of playing 'big' music in the morning! Genius;
What a fabulous story - from start to finish! And I applaud your morning programming choices. When I was an undergrad student and volunteered at the local university radio station, in 1980 I co-founded a four-hour weekly Sunday morning program of 20th Century music. The music we played included works by Schoenberg, Xenakis, Stravinsky, Bartok, Boulez, Takemitsu, Carter, contemporary Canadian music (including concerts by the student new music ensemble recorded on campus). Considering that the station's dominant playlist was post-punk, alternative rock, synth pop and electronica, etc., this show was a departure from the norm - as was the jazz show on Monday nights. Anyhow, what brought us the most trouble ever was broadcasting an LP version of Stockhausen's "Stimmung" - sung, and with all those vocal harmonics. People were pounding on the (locked) door of the station studios in the Student Union Building; we received multiple angry phone calls on what were usually dormant lines on Sunday mornings ("What are you trying to do? Kill me?!?"). Nothing stirred people up like that piece. I went to hear "Stimmung" sung live in London in the later 1980s, and the audience enthusiastically applauded at the end. Nobody appeared unduly upset. But we had all chosen to attend, rather than having the music 'thrust upon' us. Mind you, with radio one can always change stations or turn it off.
Always fun to have a dedicated Nazi calling into your morning show. Kudos on playing challenging music in the morning - few classical radio stations have the guts to play anything meaner than Mozart before noon. I was born in 1983 ACE and don't remember the Hitler Diaries affair, although I do vaguely recall reading about it later on in my life. Eva Gruene (sic?) reminds me a bit of an old family mechanic who had a vaguely mittleuropean accent and emigrated to America after the war. The joke was we knew he fought in the war - just not which side he fought on. (As an adult, I found out he had fought nobly as a Yugoslav Partisan of Catholic extraction).
What a fascinating, entertaining story. Thank you, Dave. I also did graduate work in German history and am familiar with Vernon Lidtke. I also can't think of any better way to start the day than to listen to Birgit Nilsson intone, Agamemnon!
Fun story and your comment about morning classical radio could be a topic all to itsel. I can't listen to our local channel that only plays ,just like you said, baroque music or Debussy to gently awaken the soul as they say ....
I remember the Hitler diaries affair quite well. The forgery was done so badly, the notebooks used were produced after the war and was written with a ballpoint, which were not on sale in Germany at the time. I was amazed how amateurish the scientists were when they said the diaries were authentic. Did mrs Grün finance The Producers? I am sure she would have cried from nostalgia during Springtime for Hitler.....
Thanks for the fun story, Dave! I think you missed a trick, when talking about the fuhrer's dictation habit, of referring to him as the Great Dictator. (Presumably most of your audience is old enough to get a Chaplin reference...)
Dear David Hurwitz. You're a great speaker and storyteller! I loved listening to you. Thanks for sharing! Please allow me to share mine as a response to yours. I'm German, hence I was born and raised in the country in which Nazism grew. I left Germany when I was twenty and I've been living abroad for 27 years. Most of these years were in the US. I also spent a year in China and I'm writing you this from the city of Cannes, in France. Just to take your worries away right away, I admire the courage of Sophie Scholl and Hans Scholl, as well as Josephine Baker. Thus, three people, who stood up against leadership that what was utterly wrong. Who has that courage? Since my grandparents and parents experienced World War II, this part of German history has always been of great interest to me. In particular, because I grew up at a time when the Nazis of World War II were still alive and I experienced their coldness around me. I, however, was born twenty years after the war. As you know, not all of them were punished and so they could continue working. For example, the doctors, teachers, and students who studied or taught under this regime and with that mindset. They weren't able to just drop their beliefs from one day to the other. A brain, can't be quickly rewired like that. Just think about how much time people spend in therapy to get rid of the false beliefs they have about themselves from poor parenting. It takes years, sometimes a lifetime to get over these internalized painful beliefs. Having said this, I don't know if it helps the discourse to know that the first LP I've ever had was Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story". This was before I knew anything about the Nazis. I remember buying it in a record store in Stuttgart called die "Lerche", which no longer exists. I was eleven or twelve at the time. I used to sing "Maria" and "Somewhere" to my ill brother, who was mentally disabled and suffered from a severe form of Epilepsy. Hence, he was bound to his bed for many hours a day and for most of his life. Giving him company and singing Bernstein's sweet songs of love, seemed to calm him. One had to be very mindful around him, because loud and sudden sounds and the bright images on television, could trigger a seizure. People who said, "Wouldn't it be better for him to be dead, or under - let's call him Adolf Heiner - he would have been ....... ( I don't have to say the rest, you know what he had ordered and what his followers carried out) were cruel, cold, and heartless to me. These were the ones, I wanted to stay away from. I know it sounds sentimental and unintellectual and childlike, but it was as simple as that. This is how I felt in my young years and that's how I also felt when I learned about the story of Kunta Kinte and the family Weiss in Gerald Green's book. It was always how could people do this to each other? And I'm glad to say that I could keep that child in me alive and I'm still protecting it till today. Decades later it was probably four or five years ago, I had an opportunity to write about Bernstein's 100th Birthday at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles for an American art magazine. I had a choice of exhibits to write about, but I picked that one because it had so much personal and historical meaning to me. It is the essence of who I'm. Three days ago, I found out that a long-time friend of mine died. We had known each other for 25 years. We became very good friends when I still lived in Berlin. What made us become friends was our shared love for music and the arts. Besides, when we met, I found out he was an American who spent most of his life in Germany and I was a German who spent many years in California. He knew I loved Jazz and classical music and that I had this knack for American culture (I hold a graduate degree with a major in American Studies). He also had an understanding of what cultural assimilation means and had questions in regard to cultural identity. Who am I in a foreign country? Do I become a German, or do I maintain to be an American in Germany? Where do I want to get buried? He told me a long time ago. He loves living in Germany, but he wants to be buried in his home state on the East Coast. And for me today the question is, I feel partly American, after having spent a quarter of a century in the US, but I wasn't granted to become a permanent resident, because I didn't fit into any of the given green card categories. So, I'm an Americanized German in France, who dipped into Chinese culture and got her feet wet in London. One thing, I do know for sure is that I don't want to be buried in the soil of Nazis, although I would have liked the idea to be reunited with my brother one day. He's buried in Germany. If I could and had the power and the permission, I would take his ashes with me and pick a beautiful place somewhere in the world for both of us. Because of whatever is left of him I would want to be in a beautiful, peaceful, and lovely environment. He deserves it. Perhaps the cemetery in Nice with the view on the Cote d'Azur. Or the Pacific in Redondo Beach. And what I also feel today is that I just want to be me. I don't want to be asked anymore where I'm from and which country I belong to. I'm Simone and not any other Simone, but the one who loved Jens and Cole. She also happened to love Bernstein, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Khatchaturian, and Debussy, among other things. Well anyway, to make a long story short. My friend who passed away introduced me to Aron Copland's "Appalachian Springs" and whenever I hear the piece, I think of him as I think of my brother when I hear Bernstein's "Maria"' and "Somewhere". Now, I didn't pick my friend because he was Jewish, because I didn't know that in the beginning, nor did it make me want to end my friendship with him. And I didn't even know that Bernstein and Copland were Jewish until later. But I found that to be actually interesting and mysterious how life sometimes works. Thus, may I share two music links with you today and one thing my friend once told me referring to the English poet John Milton, who lost his eyesight? Now, you may think, what does that have to do with the fake diary and Eva Gruen? Another looney? The first one is Leonard Bernstein's "Somewhere" ruclips.net/video/RMp1NkkFLgk/видео.html The second one is "Aron Copland's "Appalachian Springs" ruclips.net/video/8e3rVcSy3IQ/видео.html Nothing, directly, I just wanted to share a line that I sometimes reflect on and that comes from a writer, who created in my opinion a valuable piece of literature and it was given to me by a friend who passed it on to me! "They also serve who only stand and wait" - John Milton In that sense, I wish you all a peaceful 2022, hence one that is filled with love and good health and lots of beautiful music!
A friend of mine who worked at WCLV in Cleveland (decades ago) told me that one Christmas morning many years ago, the announcer-on-duty played the Antheil 4th Symphony. According to legend, station manager Bob Conrad (listening at home) called the announcer screaming "Take that damned thing OFF---there are CHILDREN listening!! LR
Priceless!!! What fun you must have had! I love the Elecktra first thing in the morning!. I had a friend in the 70s who worked for a guy who assembled organs. They were huge. One job they had was working on the organ and electrinics for a church in Daley City. During the noon hour prerecorded bell tunes were played. One day the went way up into this little room and accessed the keyboard for the bells. They disengaged the auto and played show tunes for the next hour. "Talkie talkie talkie talkie talk..."
Great story. Your Eva imitation reminded me almost word for word of a male counterpart I knew back in the late 60's, an uncle of a college friend. That guy was frightening. I remember the Hitler Diaries fiasco well. Always nice to see supposed experts deceived. Good schadenfreude.
Well, so glad Dave your selections on the radio were not 'lite' music for the commuters. Here on WQXR they don't even play any vocal music in the morning--presumably they consider it as too much caterwauling!!
interesting story...thank you...at the end of the war,1945,1946, hugh trevor ropert,with other officer made the search for to know how hitler dies....with finally a book '' the last day of hitler'',many documentaries i see talk about this story,.....this interesting you make a videos about ''entartete musik''...
Loved it-- and Brahms- perhaps apocryphal but he was reported to have declared publicly that if the anti-semitism becoming rampant didn't stop he would have himself publicly circumsized...
Those crazy Nazis usually think that I am Jewish. I was involved in a long-running argument with one of them, and it is unfortunate that he didn't get to ask me what my favorite piece of music was. I would have shaded things a bit to say the adagio from Bruckner's Seventh symphony, the official mourning music of Nazi Germany, whose playing indicated something great happening in the world, from the surrender of German forces at Stalingrad, the death of you-know-who, and finally the final capitulation of the Third Reich. (OK, I have no single favorite piece of music).
Great story to start the day! Mein Freund Eva, lol! Sounds like she was calling from an institution. Love your revenge with the Bernstein Festival, too. (I just received the very tee shirt you are wearing and got it ready to proudly put on and show off Saturday at the Met HD (Aucoin).
Regarding morning radio programming... WFMT Chicago played all kinds of cool music in the morning, but they had a policy: “No sopranos before 10 AM!” I don’t know if that still exists.
Sorry Frau Grün, but Wagner also counts as "Jewish Music" since Hermann Levi conducted the premier of Parsifal. After a thorough study, I am afraid that the only non-Jewish music is Karajan conducting Carl Orff or Hans Pfitzner.
In the 1990s, in my line of work I had to arrange the entertainment of a party of German educationalists during their visit to Ireland. They wanted to see the Giant's Causeway on the north coast, that basalt oddity of stepped rock of legend. In a hired minibus we took them, mostly females in their 20s who regarded in silence the stone causeway tipping down into the sea. My wife who accompanied me that day, fearing their disappointment, tried to colour up their experience by saying that across the horizon opposite is, Staffa, an island where the same rock formation rises out of the sea into a cave called Fingal's Cave and that they may have heard the wonderful overture composed by their German composer, Felix Mendelssohn.... She was curtly interrupted by our German visitor..." He vas not German. He vas a Jew." We drove back in silence.
As a final blow to the reasoning of Eva “Gruen,” let me note that recorded dictation technology dates to the late 19th century and the name Dictaphone was trademarked in 1907. So there were such devices, which in the 1920s still recorded on wax cylinders, and theoretically Hitler could have used such an unwieldy contraption on which to dictate the words of Mein Kampf. Of course, he didn’t - even as scandalously lenient as his prison treatment was. As many people know, he dictated the text to his fellow inmate Rudolf Hess, who had equally as much spare time on his hands. No need for “new” technology.
The internet offers all kinds of positives (access to this site being one) but an overpowering negative is its provision of means for the Evan Gruns of this world to broadcast their nonsense world-wide with little effort. There was a time when I thought so what, nobody takes them seriously anyway. I was wrong. Great story, David. I do miss those university radio stations. Through the 80s and 90s they were a source for music of all genres that the big guys never bothered with.
Lord Dacre of Glanton never really recovered his mojo after that incident, which is kind of a shame, as he was one of the more entertaining academic pugilists out there. When he was loudly wrong about the early-modern period, the circle of the offendable was rather smaller.
So true. It's hard to get too hot under the collar when someone is sloppy about Archbishop Laud--which is not to say that I have not seen members of the academics fume over less.
Great story. By the way, about these "Jew music" thing, I ask myself if Jewish composers were really interested in writing Jewish themed music, like Bloch or Bernstein (Copland's "Shalom Mexico" doesn't count). I know it's my personal ignorance but I would like to know if there are sufficient examples on record. I presume they are.
Short answer: some were, some weren't. One Jewish composer who was connected with Brahms -- Friedrich Gernsheim, whose music is enjoying a bit of a Renaissance over the past ten years or so -- seemed to have composed very few Jewish-themed pieces, at least judging by the substantial (though by no means comprehensive) repertoire released so far on labels like Toccata and CPO. Of the works known to me, only two can be said to be have a Jewish theme: a short cello piece called 'Elohenu', and the third symphony, inspired by the story of the Exodus and specifically the character of Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron (but then, many non-Jewish composers were similarly attracted to the Exodus story).
I think the reason why we never hear Jewish themes in Viennese composers ( f.e. Mendelssohn, Bruch) is they didn’t have an access to Jewish melodies, or culture at all. Most metropolitan cities of Europe officially didn’t allow any influence of Jewish culture. Vienna, Budapest, Paris, StPetersburg. My predecessors lived in St Petersburg since Peter the Great (1703), being Jewish they were allowed to settle in the new Russian capital because they had ,important to the Crown, business. Until Soviet times you could count jews in the city on your fingers. There was no jewish community, and hence no Jewish cultural life. My grandmother didn’t know a word of Yiddish, and even couldn’t cook. And she never heard Jewish melody. Pretty much the same situation was in other European metropolises.
@@stonefireice6058 The problem for many with Jewish folk music is, that reflecting Jewish life, it is bittersweet. I had to remind someone listening to Fiddler on the Roof of that.
Let us all play Bloch's Avodath Hakodesh tonight in memory of Frau Grun, who we must assume can no longer do anything but spin im Grab. As for Hugh Trevor-Roper, he is lucky he's dead too. Not even Oxford could, in 2021, conceivably leave unpunished his charming remarks, e.g., about the "unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe" (this was his assessment of the importance of African history). That the man lived into this century should give us the creeps--and no doubt it would, if both his spirit and Frau Grun's were not recrudescent in (once and future?) presidential remarks about "s---hole countries" and the tiki-torchlit chants and failed coups d'etat of aggrieved bigots.
In the fevered mind of the vicious anti-Semite, everything they don’t personally care for becomes “Jewish” or a Jewish conspiracy. Presumably, she only like Wagner and music from the classical era and before (as if there were no Jews at the time).
I would hope that commentators here would have the good sense to exercise their spiteful (and inaccurate) personal political bias elsewhere; say what you will, but Trump's relationship with and support of Israel was exemplary. I hope Mr. Hurwitz deletes your comment from his site; it takes the tone of the otherwise enjoyable and informative exchange of this conversation straight into the toilet. Even if you were truthful, and joked that Grun was now working for Ilhan Omar, I would feel that your comment was inappropriate for this discussion. LR
@@MayTheSchwartzBeWithYou That's not the issue (and I essentially agree with you). Mr. Hurwitz's site provides a wonderful "refuge" for many of us who want to revel in the music and its background, NOT to be confronted with snarky, current political bias. As a rule, I don;t want the original writer censored, but for the sake of preserving the overall congeniality of this particular site, I think a divisive, "off-topic" slam like this should be ...let's say "dis-allowed" by our host, who does, by his own admission, delete things he doesn't approve of. LR
@@MayTheSchwartzBeWithYou I'd be delighted by it, but then I'd immediately say: "Get Rid of It; it doesn't belong." If the curator/creator of the site agreed, it would be their decision to eliminate it; if they did, that would not be censorship, since they control content.
![Eminem - Fuel (feat. JID) [Official Lyric Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/t5H_CewqpKA/mqdefault.jpg)
Happy Chanukah, Dave! What a great story. I had a tangential relationship with some faculty at JHU back in the day. Your story reminded me of it; something I haven't thought of in decades. I enjoy your lectures and have purchased a good number of discs you've lauded. Keep them coming. I look forward to hearing more. I also joined the Classics Today website and am still deciding which shirts and sweatshirts to buy. Thanks again.
Thanks so much!
Back in the early 1960's, our family ran into another family who were unreconstructed Nazis. They insisted Bing Crosby and Perry Como among other popular singers were Jewish.
I definitely would not have been a fan of your radio show. Morning does not become Elektra.
Fabulous; Friday evening, vodka tonic, and your lovely story! What could be a better start to the weekend. I love your idea of playing 'big' music in the morning! Genius;
I first heard Prokofiev's 7th Piano Sonata when I woke up to it on morning radio. That was cozy!
What a fabulous story - from start to finish! And I applaud your morning programming choices.
When I was an undergrad student and volunteered at the local university radio station, in 1980 I co-founded a four-hour weekly Sunday morning program of 20th Century music. The music we played included works by Schoenberg, Xenakis, Stravinsky, Bartok, Boulez, Takemitsu, Carter, contemporary Canadian music (including concerts by the student new music ensemble recorded on campus). Considering that the station's dominant playlist was post-punk, alternative rock, synth pop and electronica, etc., this show was a departure from the norm - as was the jazz show on Monday nights.
Anyhow, what brought us the most trouble ever was broadcasting an LP version of Stockhausen's "Stimmung" - sung, and with all those vocal harmonics. People were pounding on the (locked) door of the station studios in the Student Union Building; we received multiple angry phone calls on what were usually dormant lines on Sunday mornings ("What are you trying to do? Kill me?!?"). Nothing stirred people up like that piece.
I went to hear "Stimmung" sung live in London in the later 1980s, and the audience enthusiastically applauded at the end. Nobody appeared unduly upset. But we had all chosen to attend, rather than having the music 'thrust upon' us. Mind you, with radio one can always change stations or turn it off.
Always fun to have a dedicated Nazi calling into your morning show. Kudos on playing challenging music in the morning - few classical radio stations have the guts to play anything meaner than Mozart before noon. I was born in 1983 ACE and don't remember the Hitler Diaries affair, although I do vaguely recall reading about it later on in my life. Eva Gruene (sic?) reminds me a bit of an old family mechanic who had a vaguely mittleuropean accent and emigrated to America after the war. The joke was we knew he fought in the war - just not which side he fought on. (As an adult, I found out he had fought nobly as a Yugoslav Partisan of Catholic extraction).
What a fascinating, entertaining story. Thank you, Dave. I also did graduate work in German history and am familiar with Vernon Lidtke. I also can't think of any better way to start the day than to listen to Birgit Nilsson intone, Agamemnon!
Fun story and your comment about morning classical radio could be a topic all to itsel. I can't listen to our local channel that only plays ,just like you said, baroque music or Debussy to gently awaken the soul as they say ....
I remember the Hitler diaries affair quite well. The forgery was done so badly, the notebooks used were produced after the war and was written with a ballpoint, which were not on sale in Germany at the time. I was amazed how amateurish the scientists were when they said the diaries were authentic. Did mrs Grün finance The Producers? I am sure she would have cried from nostalgia during Springtime for Hitler.....
Not unless Franz Liebkind morphed (by literary device) into "Franzeska Liebkind" in some obscure performance of The Producers.
Thanks for the fun story, Dave! I think you missed a trick, when talking about the fuhrer's dictation habit, of referring to him as the Great Dictator. (Presumably most of your audience is old enough to get a Chaplin reference...)
Good point!
Dear David Hurwitz. You're a great speaker and storyteller! I loved listening to you. Thanks for sharing! Please allow me to share mine as a response to yours.
I'm German, hence I was born and raised in the country in which Nazism grew. I left Germany when I was twenty and I've been living abroad for 27 years. Most of these years were in the US. I also spent a year in China and I'm writing you this from the city of Cannes, in France. Just to take your worries away right away, I admire the courage of Sophie Scholl and Hans Scholl, as well as Josephine Baker. Thus, three people, who stood up against leadership that what was utterly wrong. Who has that courage?
Since my grandparents and parents experienced World War II, this part of German history has always been of great interest to me. In particular, because I grew up at a time when the Nazis of World War II were still alive and I experienced their coldness around me. I, however, was born twenty years after the war. As you know, not all of them were punished and so they could continue working. For example, the doctors, teachers, and students who studied or taught under this regime and with that mindset. They weren't able to just drop their beliefs from one day to the other. A brain, can't be quickly rewired like that. Just think about how much time people spend in therapy to get rid of the false beliefs they have about themselves from poor parenting. It takes years, sometimes a lifetime to get over these internalized painful beliefs.
Having said this, I don't know if it helps the discourse to know that the first LP I've ever had was Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story". This was before I knew anything about the Nazis. I remember buying it in a record store in Stuttgart called die "Lerche", which no longer exists. I was eleven or twelve at the time. I used to sing "Maria" and "Somewhere" to my ill brother, who was mentally disabled and suffered from a severe form of Epilepsy. Hence, he was bound to his bed for many hours a day and for most of his life. Giving him company and singing Bernstein's sweet songs of love, seemed to calm him. One had to be very mindful around him, because loud and sudden sounds and the bright images on television, could trigger a seizure. People who said, "Wouldn't it be better for him to be dead, or under - let's call him Adolf Heiner - he would have been ....... ( I don't have to say the rest, you know what he had ordered and what his followers carried out) were cruel, cold, and heartless to me. These were the ones, I wanted to stay away from. I know it sounds sentimental and unintellectual and childlike, but it was as simple as that. This is how I felt in my young years and that's how I also felt when I learned about the story of Kunta Kinte and the family Weiss in Gerald Green's book. It was always how could people do this to each other?
And I'm glad to say that I could keep that child in me alive and I'm still protecting it till today.
Decades later it was probably four or five years ago, I had an opportunity to write about Bernstein's 100th Birthday at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles for an American art magazine. I had a choice of exhibits to write about, but I picked that one because it had so much personal and historical meaning to me. It is the essence of who I'm.
Three days ago, I found out that a long-time friend of mine died. We had known each other for 25 years. We became very good friends when I still lived in Berlin. What made us become friends was our shared love for music and the arts. Besides, when we met, I found out he was an American who spent most of his life in Germany and I was a German who spent many years in California. He knew I loved Jazz and classical music and that I had this knack for American culture (I hold a graduate degree with a major in American Studies). He also had an understanding of what cultural assimilation means and had questions in regard to cultural identity. Who am I in a foreign country? Do I become a German, or do I maintain to be an American in Germany? Where do I want to get buried? He told me a long time ago. He loves living in Germany, but he wants to be buried in his home state on the East Coast. And for me today the question is, I feel partly American, after having spent a quarter of a century in the US, but I wasn't granted to become a permanent resident, because I didn't fit into any of the given green card categories. So, I'm an Americanized German in France, who dipped into Chinese culture and got her feet wet in London. One thing, I do know for sure is that I don't want to be buried in the soil of Nazis, although I would have liked the idea to be reunited with my brother one day. He's buried in Germany. If I could and had the power and the permission, I would take his ashes with me and pick a beautiful place somewhere in the world for both of us. Because of whatever is left of him I would want to be in a beautiful, peaceful, and lovely environment. He deserves it. Perhaps the cemetery in Nice with the view on the Cote d'Azur. Or the Pacific in Redondo Beach. And what I also feel today is that I just want to be me. I don't want to be asked anymore where I'm from and which country I belong to. I'm Simone and not any other Simone, but the one who loved Jens and Cole. She also happened to love Bernstein, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Khatchaturian, and Debussy, among other things.
Well anyway, to make a long story short. My friend who passed away introduced me to Aron Copland's "Appalachian Springs" and whenever I hear the piece, I think of him as I think of my brother when I hear Bernstein's "Maria"' and "Somewhere". Now, I didn't pick my friend because he was Jewish, because I didn't know that in the beginning, nor did it make me want to end my friendship with him. And I didn't even know that Bernstein and Copland were Jewish until later. But I found that to be actually interesting and mysterious how life sometimes works.
Thus, may I share two music links with you today and one thing my friend once told me referring to the English poet John Milton, who lost his eyesight? Now, you may think, what does that have to do with the fake diary and Eva Gruen? Another looney?
The first one is Leonard Bernstein's "Somewhere"
ruclips.net/video/RMp1NkkFLgk/видео.html
The second one is "Aron Copland's "Appalachian Springs"
ruclips.net/video/8e3rVcSy3IQ/видео.html
Nothing, directly, I just wanted to share a line that I sometimes reflect on and that comes from a writer, who created in my opinion a valuable piece of literature and it was given to me by a friend who passed it on to me!
"They also serve who only stand and wait" - John Milton
In that sense, I wish you all a peaceful 2022, hence one that is filled with love and good health and lots of beautiful music!
A friend of mine who worked at WCLV in Cleveland (decades ago) told me that one Christmas morning many years ago, the announcer-on-duty played the Antheil 4th Symphony. According to legend, station manager Bob Conrad (listening at home) called the announcer screaming "Take that damned thing OFF---there are CHILDREN listening!! LR
I remember Bob Conrad. Boston's Richard L. Kay on WCRB exchanged programs with Conrad in the 70s.
Priceless!!! What fun you must have had! I love the Elecktra first thing in the morning!. I had a friend in the 70s who worked for a guy who assembled organs. They were huge. One job they had was working on the organ and electrinics for a church in Daley City. During the noon hour prerecorded bell tunes were played. One day the went way up into this little room and accessed the keyboard for the bells. They disengaged the auto and played show tunes for the next hour. "Talkie talkie talkie talkie talk..."
Great story. Your Eva imitation reminded me almost word for word of a male counterpart I knew back in the late 60's, an uncle of a college friend. That guy was frightening. I remember the Hitler Diaries fiasco well. Always nice to see supposed experts deceived. Good schadenfreude.
I LOVE Leonard Bernstein. He was a great musician and a great humanitarian. And your comment involving him here gave me a good laugh.
Well, so glad Dave your selections on the radio were not 'lite' music for the commuters. Here on WQXR they don't even play any vocal music in the morning--presumably they consider it as too much caterwauling!!
interesting story...thank you...at the end of the war,1945,1946, hugh trevor ropert,with other officer made the search for to know how hitler dies....with finally a book '' the last day of hitler'',many documentaries i see talk about this story,.....this interesting you make a videos about ''entartete musik''...
Loved it-- and Brahms- perhaps apocryphal but he was reported to have declared publicly that if the anti-semitism becoming rampant didn't stop he would have himself publicly circumsized...
I don't know about that, but he did call it "madness."
Those crazy Nazis usually think that I am Jewish. I was involved in a long-running argument with one of them, and it is unfortunate that he didn't get to ask me what my favorite piece of music was. I would have shaded things a bit to say the adagio from Bruckner's Seventh symphony, the official mourning music of Nazi Germany, whose playing indicated something great happening in the world, from the surrender of German forces at Stalingrad, the death of you-know-who, and finally the final capitulation of the Third Reich.
(OK, I have no single favorite piece of music).
Great story to start the day! Mein Freund Eva, lol! Sounds like she was calling from an institution. Love your revenge with the Bernstein Festival, too. (I just received the very tee shirt you are wearing and got it ready to proudly put on and show off Saturday at the Met HD (Aucoin).
Thanks very much!
Regarding morning radio programming... WFMT Chicago played all kinds of cool music in the morning, but they had a policy: “No sopranos before 10 AM!” I don’t know if that still exists.
How about no countertenors, ever?
Time to write the memoirs.
I’d rather hear Elektra in the morning than something that puts me back to sleep.
Yes, morning becomes Elektra.
My three year old asked for music in bed this morning as it happened, so we did the first 20 minutes of Elektra. He approved.
@@smileydts Bravo!
"Eva Grun is real." (Israel : serves her right.)
WOW! I had forgotten teh Hitler Diaries mess. LOL. Surely someone will compse an opera based upon them...
2:45 one of the great post-WW2 operas without a doubt :)
Sorry Frau Grün, but Wagner also counts as "Jewish Music" since Hermann Levi conducted the premier of Parsifal. After a thorough study, I am afraid that the only non-Jewish music is Karajan conducting Carl Orff or Hans Pfitzner.
In the 1990s, in my line of work I had to arrange the entertainment of a party of German educationalists during their visit to Ireland. They wanted to see the Giant's Causeway on the north coast, that basalt oddity of stepped rock of legend. In a hired minibus we took them, mostly females in their 20s who regarded in silence the stone causeway tipping down into the sea. My wife who accompanied me that day, fearing their disappointment, tried to colour up their experience by saying that across the horizon opposite is, Staffa, an island where the same rock formation rises out of the sea into a cave called Fingal's Cave and that they may have heard the wonderful overture composed by their German composer, Felix Mendelssohn.... She was curtly interrupted by our German visitor..." He vas not German. He vas a Jew." We drove back in silence.
Sigh. I've been to Giant's Causeway though, and it's awe-inspiring.
Dave, I had a German language professor at c c n y,Herbert Liedke
He would cringe when
One pronounced ich would.that was in mid 1960s.
What a hoot! Thanks.
Great story!
David-how about a new Classics Today T-shirt… “Eva Grün is listening”?
I love it!
More seriously, in Hitler's Table Talk he reveals that he prefers Bizet to Wagner!
As a final blow to the reasoning of Eva “Gruen,” let me note that recorded dictation technology dates to the late 19th century and the name Dictaphone was trademarked in 1907. So there were such devices, which in the 1920s still recorded on wax cylinders, and theoretically Hitler could have used such an unwieldy contraption on which to dictate the words of Mein Kampf. Of course, he didn’t - even as scandalously lenient as his prison treatment was. As many people know, he dictated the text to his fellow inmate Rudolf Hess, who had equally as much spare time on his hands. No need for “new” technology.
I love this story
The internet offers all kinds of positives (access to this site being one) but an overpowering negative is its provision of means for the Evan Gruns of this world to broadcast their nonsense world-wide with little effort. There was a time when I thought so what, nobody takes them seriously anyway. I was wrong.
Great story, David. I do miss those university radio stations. Through the 80s and 90s they were a source for music of all genres that the big guys never bothered with.
I wonder if the anti-Jewish lady took tea on occasion with the "Mozart's son" lady ....
Play Misty für mich.
By the way, Dave, Dictaphones DID exist in those days. I do not know whether Hitler had access to one while imprisoned.
I know they did, but perhaps she knew at first hand that Uncle Adolf didn't have one.
@@DavesClassicalGuide LOL
Lord Dacre of Glanton never really recovered his mojo after that incident, which is kind of a shame, as he was one of the more entertaining academic pugilists out there. When he was loudly wrong about the early-modern period, the circle of the offendable was rather smaller.
So true. It's hard to get too hot under the collar when someone is sloppy about Archbishop Laud--which is not to say that I have not seen members of the academics fume over less.
All of Elektra! Whahahaha! Early Morning Pipe, or what!!!
Historian David Irving also cast doubt on the Hitler Diaries.
Bruckner for breakfast!
Great story!🤣
Great story. By the way, about these "Jew music" thing, I ask myself if Jewish composers were really interested in writing Jewish themed music, like Bloch or Bernstein (Copland's "Shalom Mexico" doesn't count). I know it's my personal ignorance but I would like to know if there are sufficient examples on record. I presume they are.
Short answer: some were, some weren't. One Jewish composer who was connected with Brahms -- Friedrich Gernsheim, whose music is enjoying a bit of a Renaissance over the past ten years or so -- seemed to have composed very few Jewish-themed pieces, at least judging by the substantial (though by no means comprehensive) repertoire released so far on labels like Toccata and CPO. Of the works known to me, only two can be said to be have a Jewish theme: a short cello piece called 'Elohenu', and the third symphony, inspired by the story of the Exodus and specifically the character of Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron (but then, many non-Jewish composers were similarly attracted to the Exodus story).
@@ugolomb Thank you.
I think the reason why we never hear Jewish themes in Viennese composers ( f.e. Mendelssohn, Bruch) is they didn’t have an access to Jewish melodies, or culture at all. Most metropolitan cities of Europe officially didn’t allow any influence of Jewish culture. Vienna, Budapest, Paris, StPetersburg. My predecessors lived in St Petersburg since Peter the Great (1703), being Jewish they were allowed to settle in the new Russian capital because they had ,important to the Crown, business. Until Soviet times you could count jews in the city on your fingers. There was no jewish community, and hence no Jewish cultural life. My grandmother didn’t know a word of Yiddish, and even couldn’t cook. And she never heard Jewish melody. Pretty much the same situation was in other European metropolises.
Mahler's First Symphony supposedly has some themes with Jewish folk music in it.
@@stonefireice6058 The problem for many with Jewish folk music is, that reflecting Jewish life, it is bittersweet. I had to remind someone listening to Fiddler on the Roof of that.
One wonders why she kept listening if it bothered her so much.
many nazis were sado-masochists high in meth... just sayin'
Let us all play Bloch's Avodath Hakodesh tonight in memory of Frau Grun, who we must assume can no longer do anything but spin im Grab. As for Hugh Trevor-Roper, he is lucky he's dead too. Not even Oxford could, in 2021, conceivably leave unpunished his charming remarks, e.g., about the "unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe" (this was his assessment of the importance of African history). That the man lived into this century should give us the creeps--and no doubt it would, if both his spirit and Frau Grun's were not recrudescent in (once and future?) presidential remarks about "s---hole countries" and the tiki-torchlit chants and failed coups d'etat of aggrieved bigots.
LOL. I am curious, what classical music did Frau Grun NOT consider "Jew music"?
"Springtime for Hitler" by Mel von Brooks.
In the fevered mind of the vicious anti-Semite, everything they don’t personally care for becomes “Jewish” or a Jewish conspiracy. Presumably, she only like Wagner and music from the classical era and before (as if there were no Jews at the time).
@@patrickcrowley9523 LOL
Hilarious!
...in a related story, Eva Grün was last seen working with the Trump administration.
I would hope that commentators here would have the good sense to exercise their spiteful (and inaccurate) personal political bias elsewhere; say what you will, but Trump's relationship with and support
of Israel was exemplary. I hope Mr. Hurwitz deletes your comment from his site; it takes the tone of the otherwise enjoyable and informative exchange of this conversation straight into the toilet. Even if you were truthful, and joked that Grun was now working for Ilhan Omar, I would feel that your comment was inappropriate for this discussion. LR
@@HassoBenSoba I've read a lot of comments on the Internet that I don't like. Not once have I ever even thought about wanting them censored.
@@MayTheSchwartzBeWithYou That's not the issue (and I essentially agree with you). Mr. Hurwitz's site provides a wonderful "refuge" for many of us who want to revel in the music and its background, NOT to
be confronted with snarky, current political bias. As a rule, I don;t want the original writer censored,
but for the sake of preserving the overall congeniality of this particular site, I think a divisive,
"off-topic" slam like this should be ...let's say "dis-allowed" by our host, who does, by his own admission, delete things he doesn't approve of. LR
@@HassoBenSoba Fair enough. It would certainly annoy me to see "LeT's gO bRaNdOn" on a classical music video.
@@MayTheSchwartzBeWithYou I'd be delighted by it, but then I'd immediately say: "Get Rid of It; it doesn't belong." If the curator/creator of the site agreed, it would be their decision to eliminate it; if they did, that would not be censorship, since they control content.