“Communicating emotions – you can only do that if you've mastered the craft”

Juan Allende-Blin, born in Santiago di Chile in 1928, first studied with his uncle Pedro Humberto Allende Saron and later with Webern student Fré Focke.

During the war already, he wanted to go to Europe; in 1951, he came to Detmold on the recommendation of Hermann Scherchen. He took lessons with Olivier Messiaen as part of the Darmstadt Summer Course. From 1954 to 1957, Allende-Blin taught as a professor of musical analysis at the University of Santiago. In 1957, he moved to Germany and in 1962 became a member of staff at the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg. Since 1971 he has lived as a freelance composer in Essen, together with the composer and organist Gerd Zacher.

How did you become aware of the composers who were forced into exile?

I had already heard about them as a child. It started in 1940 with the ballets Jooss, which was the only ensemble that was forced into exile as a collective because Kurt Jooss didn’t want to separate from his Jewish collaborators. I was 12 years old when I saw the brilliant ballet The Green Table in Chile. Although I was still a child, this choreography made me understand what war means, and these images remain alive for me to this day. Thereafter I was friends with Kurt Jooss. He helped my partner Gerd Zacher and me to find the apartment in Essen where I still live today.

My parents had a lot of sheet music, for example the complete piano works of Alexander Scriabin and also works by Germans who had gone into exile. I played some of these as a child, works by Alexandre Tansman, Erwin Schulhoff and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. I played Korngold’s Märchenbilder op. 3 for piano; these Märchenbilder are fine pieces, marked by a Jewish melancholy. I loved playing them as a child.

And that’s how I got from one composer to another. There was a part of the catalog printed on the back of the scores, which I read and then tried to buy. In Santiago there was an antiquarian bookshop run by a Jewish man from Prague who had works by Berg, Schönberg and Webern, so I often went there and bought many of their works.

When did you come across the three composers Kahn, Herschkowitz and Spinner?

I can’t say in which year I discovered which composer, it has developed since my childhood. This book here, Introduction à la musique de douze sons by René Leibowitz, is apart from Arnold Schönberg, Paul Dessau and Ernst Krenek also about Erich Itor Kahn. I couldn’t get any scores from him, but thanks to this book I knew who he was. In Germany, we met a young pianist from New York, Howard Lebow, at the Tage für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. Gerd Zacher and I invited him to our apartment in Essen. There he spontaneously played Kahn’s Three Bagatelles. It was through this young man that I came into contact with Frida Kahn: he invited me to New York, that was in 1962 or 1963, and that’s when I met Mrs. Kahn.

I also got to know Frida Kahn during my time in New York from 1995 to 1998, and I remember an ironic sentence of hers: “There is nothing worse than the wife of a dead composer.” She was the counterexample. Did she give you scores by Kahn?

Yes, of course. In 1987, Frida Kahn invited me to New York. I stayed with her for a month and photocopied everything by Kahn that interested me. During the day I searched for what I wanted, and after dinner we took a cab and drove to the copy shop, which in New York was open all night.

Then Frida Kahn asked me if I would be willing to organize a recording of Kahn’s works. In 1988, we recorded a CD with Nänie, a piece for cello and piano that Kahn had composed in the Gurs camp, as well as the Marienlieder and some piano pieces.

How did the concerts in Germany come about?

I organized concerts with works of exiled composers. If one played Kahn, one should also include Stefan Wolpe, and Schulhoff, too, and that’s how programs originated without me having planned it that way in the first place.

Was there any interest in this music?

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much interest. I think that’s an essential mistake of the reception in Germany. These works were usually only performed in November, because of the Pogrom Night of 1938. It was like a ritual, on November 9th and 10^th, you had to do something for the exiles, and beyond that there was no interest at all. In the Federal Republic, there was a ministry for displaced persons from the East, but there was no ministry for exiles; the traditions they represented should rather stay away. That was a big mistake. People were not willing to acknowledge the burden that had been created by the expulsion of the intelligentsia from Germany. This is still avenging itself today. One has to be very friendly to the Jews – but nothing more. This is all half-hearted.

How did you come upon Leopold Spinner?

I got to know Spinner much later. The first piece I discovered was a piano piece, very much in the style of Webern; it didn’t interest me. In his early works you can see this influence, since he was a student of Webern. It took me some time to realize what a great composer he can be.

What kind of music is that?

On the one hand, the works that were written around Schönberg were very progressive. On the other hand, however, attention was always drawn to the tradition from which these works came: Brahms, Mahler, but also Mozart and Beethoven. For Schönberg, the discovery of the twelve tones was a logical consequence of his experience with earlier music; it was not a revolution that wanted to destroy everything. This is often not understood.

The composers who’s works we recorded wrote songs. After the war, this could not be taken for granted; in contemporary music, there was a great mistrust of musical settings of texts. In addition, the loss of tonality meant that illustrative moments such as major and minor were now also missing.

A new relationship to the text had to be found: How can you set a text to music without the nuances of major and minor, which are often equated with a happy or sad atmosphere? But this is not true for Schubert: the saddest moments of his songs are in major. I think Schubert played a role in the detachment from the dichotomy of minor and major.

Why did these composers write so many songs precisely in the German language, from which they had had to emigrate?

Because the roots of this culture were very deep. I met many exiles in Chile who couldn’t separate from Goethe or Heine. There were second-hand bookshops where they could buy novels and poems in German, and from this attitude they also composed.

Was there also a fear of losing this tradition?

I think so. In Lyrisches Konzert, Erich Itor Kahn found a completely new form of setting that has hardly anything to do with the Lied. It is like a cantata, the piano part is very independent and so is the solo voice, so there are actually two soloists.

By setting poems by Paul Celan to music, Herschkowitz also implemented the trauma of the Holocaust into music. Do you know how he came upon Celan?

Herschkowitz is the only one of the three composers who set Celan to music. Celan’s language is so radical that it was not easy for this generation to understand. I don’t know how Herschkowitz came upon Celan. Perhaps it played a role that they both came from Czernowitz. I think in Bukovina there was a kind of nationalism in small-format: This man lived where I was born. That was not unimportant for Herschkowitz.

What is the quality of this music for you?

These works are well composed, with a solid basis, all the fundaments are right, and the realization is then correspondingly deep. They are complex works in which melody, harmony and rhythm are composed in such a way that everything forms a unity. You can only communicate emotions if you have mastered the craft. It’s the same as with earlier composers, whether it’s Monteverdi or Josquin de Pres.

Why are these works still so unknown?

It’s because of politics: At first twelve years of Hitler, and then nothing at all. After 1945, hardly anything was done for these composers. And then there were real tirades of hate against this music, for example from the composer Werner Egk. German church musicians had an aversion to anything Jewish; it’s both a religious and artistic Anti-Semitism. Their works were said to be too intellectual, and the Jewish composers imitators without heart. This old pattern is still around.

In order to write good music, you have to be able to think and to compose. The composers who stayed in Germany at the time lacked this creative energy. When I arrived in Hamburg on a ship from Buenos Aires in 1951, I very soon went to the composers’ association in Rothenbaumchaussee and asked where I could hear works by Schönberg, Berg, Webern, Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler. The responsible official informed me that these composers were of no interest to anyone in Germany. The important contemporary composers were Ernst Gernot Klussmann, Philipp Jarnach and the young Hans Poser. Who still knows these names today?

If one looks at the programs from back then, one can see: With Richard Strauss the music world ends.

Was the avant-garde at that time around Stockhausen or Boulez interested in the composers in exile?

Hardly at all. At the time, my generation was fixated on Anton Webern as a role model. All parameters were evaluated according to the criteria of how Webern’s ideas could be logically expanded. My colleagues were not interested in other composers – not even and especially not in those in exile, because they would not have distanced themselves sufficiently from the tonal tradition. In addition, intensive research was needed to get hold of their works.

Did they at all know composers like Kahn, Herschkowitz and Spinner?

Kahn was dead, the few years he had lived after 45 he was unreachable in New York and even there he was first of all known as a pianist. Stefan Wolpe was also unavailable. These composers could not play the role that was desired: as the godfather of new music. Only Webern could have done that, and he was no longer alive.

There was one exception, however: Luigi Nono took an early interest in his father-in-law Arnold Schönberg and in the Russian Futurists in his later years. At his request, I sent him many scores by Nikolaj Obouchov, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Nikolaj Roslawez, Aleksandr Mossolow and others.

You have played a pivotal part in ensuring that the exile composers are still played at all. Our project wouldn’t exist without you.

Yes, it has all remained within a very small circle. If you look a little to the left or the right to see if there are other people who are interested, you come to the conclusion that the general interest was not so strong.

After the end of the war in 1945, it took a very long time for our society to become aware of the Shoah. It was a purely political perception, art didn’t play a fundamental role. Although the older generation had often heard good reproductions of German classical music between 1933 and 1945, this did not include Jewish music. That left a strong imprint: For the listeners of the time, there was no other art than that which was actually authorized. And contemporary works still do not have this mark of authority to this day. For later generations, works that exceed the boundaries of tonality are additions from another world.

The successful progressive compositions were welcomed by a small group at that time, and moreover they were seen as an eminent political statement. But our small group is getting old and older every day.

As a pianist, I play Kahn’s music, but I’ve also played a lot of your music. What strikes me is that you’ve been very committed to Kahn for many years, but your own music is radically different. Just looking at the notes shows that: In your scores there are few events, in the scores of Kahn the pages are black with notes. Is there a tradition that leads from Kahn to you?

When composing, I deliberately stayed away from composers that I hold in high esteem. I wanted to develop my own language and not copy what others had already done better.