Recovered Voices Symposium October 2016 Jeffrey Kahane

Jeffrey Kahane
Lecture: Beethoven and Κurt Weill in “the Garden of Exile”
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is among the most politically charged works of music ever composed. As the child of a German-Jewish refugee mother and the descendent of Holocaust victims, the problem of the malleability of this towering masterwork with respect to its use and abuse for political and propaganda purposes, and specifically my “memory” of Himmler and Goebbels in the audience at a Berlin Philharmonic performance in 1942 under Furtwängler has haunted my experience of studying and performing the work. While Beethoven himself almost certainly believed that his work had an intrinsic ethical and moral force, a performer today struggling to defend that concept must answer to the commonplace argument that the Nazis' enthusiastic embrace of this work proves that any ethical imperative associated with the Ninth Symphony is extrinsic to the work itself. Kurt Weill's final opera, "Lost in the Stars" which, like the Ninth Symphony, is an exhortation to honor the idea of universal brotherhood, was composed by a German-Jewish refugee in exile. My talk will address the question of music's ethical power, or lack thereof, with respect to these two works, both of which will be performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra this season, from the perspective of a "child of exile."
www.colburnsch...
The Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at the Colburn School