AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

98 Friday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
A smaller number of Kropiński’s compositions were written solely for the pleasure of his closest
friends and performed clandestinely in the barracks.
Kropiński himself smuggled approximately 120 of these works out of the camp, carrying
them with him during a forced death march; these eventually made their way to various archives
in Poland, Germany, and the U.S. after the war. Yet despite the value of this music to an
understanding of the cultural life of Buchenwald camp, and twentieth-century Polish musical
culture more broadly, Kropiński and his music remain virtually unknown to scholars today.
In this paper, I will bring to light a selection of Kropiński’s compositions and explore
their genesis, style and performance contexts. I will consider the conditions that fostered
Kropiński’s astonishing creativity in Buchenwald, and his subsequent total withdrawal from
musical composition after the war. I will also compare Kropińki’s musical activities to those
of prisoners in other Nazi camps who turned to music as a form of psychological escape and
survival. By doing so, I wish to demonstrate that music making in the camps, although to
date almost exclusively represented by materials and testimonies from the “so-called” model
camp, Terezin, was a much more widespread phenomenon than most scholars realize. An
examination of Kropińki’s music thus offers the opportunity to consider the similar coping
strategies that various prisoners turned to despite differing circumstances of imprisonment at
the hands of the Nazis.
SIBELIUS AND THE SS
Timothy Jackson
University of North Texas
There is, even among “serious” scholars, a strong tendency to excuse, even suppress and falsify,
information about heroes, especially those who, like the internationally famous Finnish
composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), have inspired a small country like Finland (with all too
few gods in its Pantheon). Looking through the biographies and works lists of famous and
not-so-famous twentieth-century composers in the grove dictionary—and even the new German
music encyclopedia Mgg (not to mention the old Mgg)—frequently does not tell the
real story of what they did—and did not—do during those infamous twelve years 1933–1945.
But if we assume that Propaganda Minister Goebbels was correct that the artist had to take
a position vis-à-vis the National Socialist revolution, then it is unlikely that Sibelius could
remain “unpolitical.” Drawing upon a wide range of previously unknown sources, primarily
drawn from German archives, the paper cites documents showing that Sibelius himself was
not a passive “unpolitical” observer but an enthusiastic, active proponent of the political use
of his music by the Nazi regime. There are many indicators of Sibelius’s sympathetic attitude
to Nazism and the SS. After the Nazis assumed power in 1933 and the wind was blowing from
a different direction, Sibelius repeatedly broke his promise to assist the half-Jewish composer
Gunther Raphael (1903–1960), even though he was the grandson of his esteemed teacher Albert
Becker, falsely claiming that he never wrote recommendations. The tendentiousness of
Sibelius’s excuse is shown by the fact that he did provide references for the SS conductor Dr.
Helmuth Thierfelder (1897–1966) in 1938, which helped him to assume the directorship of the
Lower Saxony Symphony Orchestra that year, and continued to collaborate with Thierfelder
throughout the war. The normally highly-reclusive Sibelius allowed himself to be interviewed
in his home by SS war reporter Anton Kloss in mid-1942, and Kloss’s interview resulted in
various publications in 1942 and ’43. Of special interest are Kloss’s activities up to the time of