Kurt Weill was raised in a religious Jewish home in Dessau, then moved to Berlin at the age of eighteen where he received his principal musical training from Ferruccio Busoni. In the beginning Weill concentrated on writing instrumental and vocal music, some of it in a rather modern style. From 1925m he focused increasingly on the musical theatre in collaboration with liberettists like Georg Kaiser, Iwan Goll and in particular Bertolt Brecht. He developed a new form of ‘epic theatre’, characterized by social criticism and the use of elements from popular music, especially American Jazz. Hitler’s ascent in 1933 forced Weill to leave his country. After two frustrating years in Paris, he settled down in the US. During the last period of his life, he established himself as a new and original voice in the mainstream of American musical theatre. Weill however never equalled the ultimate success of his early years, particulary his Threepenny Opera (1928), based on John Gray’s Beggar’s Opera from 1728. An opera about love and betrayal, in Brecht’s words: ‘conceived with sumptuousness only beggars can dream of – and cheapness that beggars can afford’. Only four months after the Berlin première, Weill wrote an orchestral suite for wind orchestra by adapting eight of its most successful numbers. The premiere of this version, played by the Preussische Staatskapelle, was conducted by Otto Klemperer.
Ernst Toch (1887-1964) was born in Vienna, son of a Jewish merchant. At an early age, he taught himself the basic knowledge of music and composition. After winning the City of Frankfurt Mozart Prize, het dropped out of his medical studies to become a professional musician. At the Donaueschingen Festival 1924, works by Toch were performed which turned away from the romantic style and are characterized by the New Objectivity. Toch moved to Berlin in 1929 and became one of the most frequently played living composers of his time. American performances of his works by the conductor Erich Kleiber and an invitation from Serge Koussevitzky to Boston, smoothed the way for his future in the New World. When the Nazi Party seized power (1933), Toch emigrated to London and in 1934 to New York. In 1940 he became U.S. citizen. Although he was nominated three times for an Oscar (1935-44) and awarded a Pulitzer Prize (1957) and a Grammy (1960), Toch’s career suffered from ‘the echolessness of the vast American expanses’, as one of his fellow immigrant composers (Ernst Krenek) put it. He never succeeded in re-establishing his position as a composer in Europe after such a long absence. Egon und Emilie is a satire on opera based on a charmingly mischievous libretto by the famous German poet and humourist Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914), whose work ranged from the mystical and personal lyrical to the absurd verse, inspired by English nonsense rhymes. The text, written around 1905, is a monologue by a grand diva having a nervous breakdown, caused by the indifference and lack of interest of her companion Egon. The coloratura-soprano is musically seduced to display excessively explosive emotions.
Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), born in Prague into a German Jewish family, is a composer whose contribution to early 20th-century music has fallen into undeserved oblivion. His musical talent was discovered by Antonin Dvorak when Schulhoff was only seven. Before the first World War, his compositions were in the style of the composers he idolized, Reger, Strauss, and Debussy. His experiences of trench warfare as an Austrian infantryman drastically altered his artistic outlook. He moved to Germany and threw himself into every possible avant-garde movement, including dadaism and jazz, as a pianist, composer, and concert organizer. He performed throughout Europe as a pianist. In 1923, Schulhoff became aware of a worsening in Germany’s political climate, leading him to return to his native country. During the 1930s, another artistic metamorphosis took place in Schulhoff’s life. He became a communist, and his work began to manifest a degree of ‘socialist realism.’ He remained true to his love of jazz, but only so that he could earn enough money to live on, and he sometimes used a pseudonym. When Hitler declared war on Russia, Schulhoff’s plans to emigrate to the Soviet Union were short-circuited. In 1941 he was arrested and sent to the internment camp at Wülzburg, where he died from tuberculosis a year later.
In 1930, Schulhoff, together with Otto Rombach (1904-1984), a dramatic author, writer, and journalist with the Frankfurter Zeitung, wrote the Jazz Oratorio H.M.S. Royal Oak. In Rombach’s words, it was intended to be ‘an attempt at finding a form for a radio play which not be limited to the radio.’ Rombach introduced his work in the radio magazine FUNK (may 1931) in the following words: ‘The unpredictable history of the world has provided us with the grotesque material which needed to be put into literary form: the sailors aboard an English battleship, the H.M.S. Royal Oak, were informed by their admiral that jazz music would be forbidden from that day forward. An open mutiny followed; but it was the admiral and no the mutinous crew who was indicted, a judgment which was in no small part due to the pressure of public opinion, typical of the English people.’
The inspiration for this piece was an actual even dating from 1928. On the H.M.S. Royal Oak, an enormous ship of 189 meters, which had been sailing the ocean since 1915, a violent quarrel had arisen among three officers about the music played by a small band in the officers’ mess. The dispute grew completely out of control and the men involved ended up in a court-martial. The entire affair was widely publicized in the world press. The work received its premiere on the Frankfurter Rundfunk on May 9, 1931. The first staged performance was a year later at the Junge Bühne in Breslau. After the broadcast, the Fankfurt radio station offered the recording to other radio stations, but without success: apparently people were afraid that glorification of jazz, even in a tragi-comic setting, would upset the listening audience. Ten years later, on October 14, 1939, the ship was sunk off the coast of Scotland by German torpedos; 833 men lost their lives.
The Ebony Band was founded in 1990 by Werner Herbers. Its core is made up of musicians from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The ensemble specializes in modern, adventurous music primarily from the first half of the 20th century. Special attention is focused on the (frequently unjustly) forgotten music lesser known composers, deemed to be worthy of revival.
The Ebony Band devoted many programs to German and Czech music at the time of the Weimar Republic, which the nazis called ‘degenerated music’. Other programs focused on composers involved in the Spanish Civil War, Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and unknown Russians from the twenties. Several concerts have been given in collaboration with actors, dancers and writers, or with the addition of slide or film projection. The Ebony Band has also performed operas (Wolpe, Gronostay, Grosz) and radioplays (Seiber, Gronostay, Kahn, Goehr). Many of the ensembles recordings have been awarded prizes: Edisons, Gramophone’s Editors Choice, Diapason d’Or. The extended Ebony Big Bang played and recorded jazz influenced music by cooljazz composers (Carisi, Russo, Russell) and repertoire of the legendary Innovations Orchestra of Stan Kenton (Graetinnger, Rugolo, Marks). After 17 years of performing in Europe (Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, and all over Netherlands) and North America (New York, Toronto), the group stopped regular concert giving. The goal of the group now is the registration of detailed information about the music of the interbellum on record and the internet (www.ebonyband.nl).