The German label CPO publishes an anthology of orchestral works by Walter Kaufmann, who was, in 1948, the first music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, before emigrating to the United States and becoming professor of musicology at the Indiana University in 1957.
Will the rediscovery of the music of Walter Kaufmann (1907-1984) be one of the greats of the present decade? It all started in September 2020 with a CD from the “Musicians in Exile” series by the ARC Ensemble, from the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, at Chandos. It revealed the music and unusual destiny of a Jewish musician from Bohemia, born in the spa town of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad).
The promising musical career of Walter Kaufmann, assistant to Bruno Walter at the Berlin Opera at the age of 20, keen on the music of Mahler, was disrupted by the rise of the Nazis. The young musician fled in 1934. He did not go, like so many others, to the United States, but to India, to study Indian music. We found him, in Bombay, director of European programs for Indian Radio (1938-1946).
Impregnation
In Bombay, Walter Kaufmann composed. Not only classical works, but also Indian Radio credits, and film scores for a nascent industry that would become Bollywood. He set up a chamber music society where the violinist Mehli Mehta (1908-2002), father of Zubin Mehta, worked. We begin to imagine for a moment what the music of the 20th would have beene century if India had become in the space of a decade the haven of Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas or Hans Krása, these “Theresienstadt musicians” exterminated in the fall of 1944 in Auschwitz.
When Kaufmann left India after the war, he passed through London. He renounces a return to Prague, where his mother was robbed of all her possessions. The latter emigrated to Canada. Walter follows her with his wife. He settled in Halifax, where the Conservatory entrusted him with its piano department, then in Winnipeg (1948-1956), where he was the first musical director of the newly created symphony orchestra. He will end his career and his life, naturalized American, at the famous University of Indiana.
Walter Kaufmann’s passion for ethnomusicology makes his music captivating. His time in Bombay colored a whole section of his inspiration in a very personal way, as shown by the supreme 11e Quartet in the ARC Ensemble chamber music disc.
Even Mahler
The CPO disc by the Berlin Radio Orchestra, conducted by David Robert Coleman, with the excellent pianist Elisaveta Blumina, includes four compositions. A Piano Concertoo 3 from 1950, therefore from the Winnipeg periodSix Indian miniatures quite ethnomusicological, from his American period (1965), a Symphony no 3 (1936) dating from his training in Indian music and An Indian symphonymore cinematic, from 1943.
THE Piano Concertoo 3, which opens the CD, is very contrasting. On the one hand, movements 1 and 3, which take after Prokofiev or some festive painting inspired by some Petrouchka transformed into a concerto (Final). And then there is 2e movement. Even if the notice makes no allusion to it, the comparison with the sentence “ Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen… “, of the Kindertoten songs by Mahler, jumps to the ears. We end up with a fatal Dies irae, as if this movement were a ghostly reminiscence of the Shoah, under the guise of homage to Mahler. Has Kaufmann commented on this?
The other three scores will satisfy those who seek to explore Kaufmann’s legacy for the symbiosis between India and Western art. There Symphony no 3 evokes the styles of Balinese music. Interestingly: the year of composition is the same (1936) as Tabuh-Tabuhan, by Canadian Colin McPhee. A stimulating association for the moment when “diversity and inclusion” will give way to “heritage awareness and rediscovery”.
More clearly assimilated to India, the Indian Symphony and the Six miniatures are distinguished by the orchestral strength, the first being more generous, the second a bewitching crafted jewel.
With the Austrian publisher Doblinger working to make Kaufmann’s scores accessible, we can hope to see these skillful, erudite and exotic compositions enter concert halls. Released a few weeks ago in Europe and accessible on on-demand listening platforms, this disc will be on sale in physical form on April 19 in Canada.