Violins of Hope Read online

  At the same time that he was becoming outraged by what was happening in Germany, Huberman was growing increasingly enchanted with Palestine.

  Huberman had first performed in Tel Aviv in 1929. When he returned in 1931, even he was unable to articulate why he had come back, other than to say that he was hoping to strengthen the connection between Europe and the Jewish community in Palestine. By his third visit in 1934, when he gave twelve sold-out concerts over eighteen days, Huberman was clearly growing quite attached to Palestine—and vice versa. Huberman’s enthusiasm for the Jews in Palestine was reinforced by the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. While he had initially been skeptical of Zionism, he was now starting to see the Jewish colonization of Palestine as an extension of the European culture he loved rather than as an abandonment of it.

  Huberman’s newfound excitement for Palestine was also fueled by the remarkable enhancements to the music scene that had occurred over the preceding months. Thanks to a handful of professional musicians who had fled Nazi Germany, Tel Aviv now had a modest orchestra with which Huberman played concertos by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. One of the orchestra’s conductors was Michael Taube, who had been the founding conductor of the Berlin Culture League orchestra. If a population could make such rapid progress in such a short time span, Huberman posited, then its potential for future greatness was unlimited.

  Before leaving Palestine for the third time, Huberman penned a letter to Meir Dizengoff. In addition to serving as the first mayor of Tel Aviv, Dizengoff was the president of the Palestine Philharmonic Symphony Union, which sponsored the orchestra. In his lengthy missive, Huberman outlined a proposal to bolster the quality of the orchestra by hiring wind players from Germany. Recognizing that it would be impossible to pay a reputable conductor enough to spend the entire concert season in Palestine, Huberman recommended dividing the responsibilities among two or three Jewish conductors from Europe and the United States. He even contacted two of them: Issay Dobrowen, who was serving as the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, and Hans Wilhelm Steinberg, who at that time was leading the culture league orchestra in Frankfurt. Huberman’s letter to Dizengoff also proposed a number of bold initiatives, such as regular performances in Jerusalem and Haifa in addition to the primary concerts in Tel Aviv, as well as a concert tour of Egypt. In a discussion with other musicians, Huberman further recommended the creation of music schools that could cultivate homegrown talent.

  After growing frustrated when Dizengoff and the other leaders of the Symphony Union did not agree with all his suggestions, Huberman did something even more audacious. He decided to establish his own orchestra. The historic opportunity was simply too good to pass up. First-rate musicians who had been dismissed from their positions in Europe were in desperate need of employment. Why not put those virtuosos to work in a new orchestra in Palestine?

  Huberman envisioned a world-class orchestra composed exclusively of Jewish musicians. Such an ensemble, he maintained, would be the greatest weapon against the Nazis who were claiming that Jews were incapable of great art. “Can you imagine a pro-Jewish or pro-Zionist propaganda more effective than a concert tour of the Palestine Orchestra, undertaken in a couple of years throughout the civilized world and acclaimed both by Jews and by gentiles as amongst the best in existence?” he asked. “To beat the world campaign of anti-Semitism it is not enough to create material and idealistic prosperity in Palestine, we must create there new gospels and carry them throughout the world. And the symphony orchestra, as I visualize it, would be perhaps the first and easiest step towards that highest aim of Jewish humanity.”10

  Huberman’s return to Palestine in December 1935 increased his eagerness to create an orchestra for the Jewish pioneers. Over the course of two recitals in Tel Aviv, he performed for three thousand audience members. The first performance was for classical music aficionados. The second was for common laborers, who, Huberman was happy to note, were just as enthusiastic and respectful as any audience. He later remarked that he had never felt so proud of being Jewish as he was during his performance for the workers. Indeed, it was this music-loving environment that made Palestine so endearing. Huberman estimated that the percentage of concertgoers within the general public was six to eight times higher within the Jewish community of Palestine than it was in European cities.

  By this time, Huberman had fleshed out his plans for the Palestine Orchestra, which he shared with the New York Times in a February 9, 1936, article titled “Orchestra of Exiles.” The ensemble’s first concert would take place that October 24 in Tel Aviv. The ambitious concert season that followed would include sixty concerts over the next eight months in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, in addition to twenty concerts in smaller agricultural communities. Each program in the larger cities would be performed twice: once for affluent subscribers and once for common laborers. Adolf Busch—a non-Jewish virtuoso violinist who had left his German homeland several years earlier in protest of the Nazi regime—had agreed to appear as a soloist during the first season. Other leading artists were being invited.

  By performing for workers and insisting that his new orchestra do the same, Huberman provided a fascinating insight into his beliefs on the role of music in public life. He took a very democratic approach by maintaining that everyone—regardless of income—should have equal access to great music. He was especially careful to contend that performances for common laborers should be held to the same high standards as those for elite subscribers. The only difference between the two should be the price of admission. While many of his contemporaries felt that concerts for workers could be taken less seriously, Huberman believed the opposite to be true. Musically educated listeners are capable of enjoying substandard interpretations because they have the training to focus less on the skill of the performer and more on the craft of the composer, he argued. It is the untrained ear that is in the greatest need of flawless performances.

  Two weeks after reporting the creation of the Palestine Orchestra, the New York Times publicized Huberman’s greatest coup of all: Arturo Toscanini, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who was widely considered to be one of the finest musicians in the world, would lead the first performances of the Palestine Orchestra. Toscanini had refused to conduct in his homeland of Italy ever since the rise of fascism there. In addition to boycotting Nazi Germany, he was also speaking out about the country’s persecution of the Jews. As Huberman pointed out, Toscanini’s decision to conduct for the nascent Jewish community in Palestine while refusing to set foot in the culturally advanced countries of Italy and Germany constituted “a historical mark both in the struggle against Nazism and in the upbuilding of Palestine.”11

  On April 20, Huberman created yet another buzz about the creation of his new orchestra by announcing that Toscanini would be conducting two movements from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This represented yet another protest of Nazi discrimination. The musicians who had been expelled by the Nazis would be playing music that had been banned by the Nazis.

  In his discussions with the conductors who would lead the Palestine Orchestra, Huberman expressed an interest in pieces by Jewish composers, although such works would only end up constituting a very small percentage of the orchestra’s repertoire. Huberman was, however, very deliberate in discouraging the conductors from programming pieces by composers with connections to the Nazi regime. When one conductor suggested a piece by the controversial German composer Richard Strauss, Huberman forbade it, writing, “We cannot hold a place for a man who, on the one hand has a Jewish daughter-in-law and a Jewish librettist, but on the other hand for materialistic reasons served as president of the Nazi’s Reich Chamber of Music until the moment they kicked him out.”12

  As the excitement about the orchestra intensified, Huberman increased his efforts to raise money for the ensemble. During a concert tour of the United States, he traveled to Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, performing, organizing fund-raising committees, and col
lecting donations. On March 30, 1936, he attended a fund-raising banquet that was hosted by Albert Einstein, who also wrote personal letters on Huberman’s behalf soliciting donations. Huberman canceled several European concerts to continue his fund-raising efforts for three weeks after the Einstein dinner. By the time he left the country on April 23, he had raised $15,500 in donations, $2,000 in allocations, and $7,000 in pledges. This was a considerable amount of money, considering that the average yearly family income in the United States was $1,524. Huberman felt that if he had stayed in America for one more week he could have raised another $10,000.

  Recruiting the Musicians

  Huberman’s successful fund-raising changed his plans for recruiting musicians. At first he had planned to hire string players who were already in Palestine and focus his efforts on attracting Jewish wind players from Europe. But by 1935, Huberman had raised so much money that he decided to also replace the string players in Palestine with the very best ones from Europe. “From now on, only truly first-class musicians will be considered,” he resolved.13 In addition to reaching a musical goal by raising the quality of the ensemble, recruiting string players would serve a humanitarian function by providing employment to Jewish string players who were out of work in Europe.

  When Toscanini signed on to conduct the orchestra, Huberman had to raise his sights even higher. Huberman had originally planned for an orchestra of around sixty musicians, which would suffice for works from the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. But Toscanini was likely to program masterworks from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that would require a larger ensemble. Asking Toscanini to conduct an incomplete orchestra was out of the question, so Huberman was compelled to increase the size of the ensemble from sixty to seventy-five musicians.

  Since Huberman refused to return to Germany for any reason, he put Hans Wilhelm Steinberg in charge of selecting German musicians for the orchestra. Steinberg had conducted the culture league orchestras in Frankfurt and Berlin. He therefore had contacts in two ensembles that had already amassed outstanding Jewish musicians. Joining the Palestine Orchestra ended up saving these musicians’ lives. Many of the culture league musicians who remained behind perished in the Holocaust.

  One of the musicians Steinberg recruited from the Berlin Culture League was trombonist Heinrich Schiefer. Born and raised in Berlin, Schiefer had made a living in his hometown by playing in coffeehouses, in silent-movie theaters, and in the German Film Orchestra before being dismissed from all of his positions in 1933. After accepting various jobs in Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, Schiefer joined the Berlin Culture League orchestra in 1934. But by March 1936, the increasing discrimination had convinced him to leave Germany for good.

  Schiefer auditioned for Steinberg in Berlin’s elegant Hotel Fürstenhof that May. The entire process lasted just five minutes. Steinberg asked Schiefer to perform an excerpt from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde that Schiefer had never seen before. After listening to Schiefer’s interpretation, Steinberg had him play it again. This time Steinberg conducted Schiefer to see if he could adjust to Steinberg’s interpretation. That was all Steinberg needed to hear.

  Steinberg accepted Schiefer into the orchestra on the spot, but the trombonist already had two other job offers on the table. One was from a former colleague from Berlin who was starting a jazz band in Argentina. The other was from a symphony orchestra in Baku, the capital of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Two of Schiefer’s colleagues from the Berlin Culture League orchestra joined the jazz band in South America, but Schiefer opted to join Huberman’s orchestra. He was convinced by Steinberg’s urgings, as well as by the prospect of later bringing his parents to Palestine. “Enough with the jazz and communists,” his father advised him. “Stick with the Jews.”14

  Another performer from Berlin was Horst Salomon. Salomon had studied the French horn at the music conservatory in Berlin for five years before the purging of the conservatory’s Jews in the spring of 1933 had prohibited him from taking the final examination. He joined the Berlin Culture League orchestra that fall as principal horn and played under Steinberg’s baton. Since Steinberg was already familiar with Salomon’s playing, the hornist was admitted into the Palestine Orchestra without an audition.

  In addition to Schiefer and Salomon, Steinberg was able to recruit violinist Basia Polischuk and percussionist Kurt Sommerfeld from the Berlin Culture League orchestra. As with Salomon, Steinberg vouched for Sommerfeld’s playing and waived his audition. From the orchestra in Frankfurt came clarinetist Heinrich Zimmermann, violinist Rudolf Bergmann, violist Dora Loeb, and cellist Ary Schuyer, as well as bassist Ernst Böhm, who had joined the ensemble after being fired from the West German Radio Orchestra.

  Also recruited from the Frankfurt orchestra was flutist Erich Toeplitz. Toeplitz was studying piano and music education at the music conservatory in Cologne when that institution expelled its Jewish students in 1933. He was readmitted shortly afterward under a quota system, but was isolated and ostracized by his Nazi schoolmates. He made up his mind to leave Germany as soon as he completed his studies.

  To make himself more employable, Toeplitz started taking lessons on the flute, an instrument he had played informally since his childhood. In the spring of 1934, he answered an advertisement for the new culture league orchestra in Frankfurt. He auditioned in Cologne and was appointed principal flutist. A year later, he heard a rumor that Huberman was starting an orchestra in Palestine. He asked Steinberg to recommend him. Steinberg replied that he had already done so, and that Toeplitz would be given a position. When Toeplitz left Frankfurt, he was replaced in the culture league orchestra by Günther Goldschmidt.

  The relationship between the culture league orchestras and the Palestine Orchestra was friendly at first. There was even talk of having the Berlin orchestra visit Palestine and for the Palestine Orchestra to undertake a tour of Jewish communities in Germany. Not surprisingly, this idea was quickly rebuffed by Huberman. “I am utterly opposed to giving concerts in Germany, in the same way that I am opposed to collaborating with Jewish institutions of the German ghetto in general,” he maintained. “Besides, it would be against my sense of self respect to ask permission from the German authorities and then get denied. As far as I am concerned, the entire idea is out of the question.”15

  Kurt Singer and other culture league leaders later sent a telegram to the Palestine Orchestra congratulating them on their inaugural performance. But the goodwill would not last long. As the Palestine Orchestra continued to recruit musicians from the culture leagues, Singer naturally became resentful of having his musicians poached by a foreign orchestra. He was also rightfully worried about the future of his ensemble. “Everything now depends on keeping our orchestra intact,” Singer wrote to Sommerfeld, who had already immigrated to Palestine to join the orchestra. “For this reason I have addressed an urgent appeal to your conductor, my friend Steinberg, requesting that no more musicians from our orchestra be recruited to Palestine. We can barely find young talent in Germany anymore, and I do not want to unnecessarily complicate the work of our hard working and highly talented [conductor] Rudolf Schwarz.”16

  Huberman himself conducted the auditions in Vienna. Although Austria was still independent of Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism was on the rise. Both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Symphony retained their Jewish musicians, but had stopped accepting additional Jews into their ensembles. In response to the growing anti-Semitism, Huberman gave up his residency at Vienna’s Hetzendorf Castle and discontinued his masterclass at the Vienna State Academy in the summer of 1936. He then appointed three of his finest masterclass students—Heinrich Haftel, David Grünschlag, and Alfred Lunger—to the first violin section of the Palestine Orchestra.

  For the initial screenings of musicians from Warsaw, Huberman turned to Jacob Surowicz, a violinist in the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. At first, Surowicz assumed that Huberman was interested in his orchestra’s section members. He ask
ed whether the very best musicians in his orchestra should also audition for the Palestine Orchestra. Huberman smiled and responded, “not also, but only the very best musicians should apply.”17 Huberman was committed to establishing an ensemble that would rival the top two or three orchestras in Europe. Surowicz himself ended up joining the Palestine Orchestra, along with six of his colleagues from the Warsaw Philharmonic.

  Instead of waiting for Huberman to come to them, several musicians traveled to Palestine in the hopes of auditioning for him there. Not knowing Huberman’s travel schedule, they arrived on tourist visas that sometimes expired before they had the chance to meet him. To them, it was well worth the risk. A successful audition carried with it the promise of a permanent visa. During Huberman’s successful tour of Palestine in December 1935, musicians waited for him in hotel lobbies, hoping for auditions. Although Huberman’s schedule was already full, he made time to hear them all.

  The Palestine Orchestra provided a safe haven for musicians who were already planning on leaving Europe, as well as for a few performers who otherwise may have never considered emigrating. Eighteen-year-old Hungarian violinist Lorand Fenyves did not even know what he was auditioning for when his teacher Jenő Hubay told him to play for Huberman. Several days later, Fenyves received a telegram from Huberman instructing him to be ready to leave for Palestine within a week. Fenyves’s parents wanted him to honor the contract he had already signed to become the concertmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony in Sweden, but conductor Felix Weingartner convinced him to not pass up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play with the best Jewish performers from Europe under Toscanini’s baton. Lorand’s sister Alice Fenyves came with him to Palestine, joining the orchestra’s viola section.

  Although Huberman was not able to attract every musician he wanted to join his orchestra, the performing backgrounds of those he was able to recruit were remarkable. Of the seventy musicians who are listed in the orchestra’s first program, fifty-two had once been members of leading orchestras such as the Budapest Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Vienna Concert Orchestra, and Warsaw Philharmonic. Of those fifty-two, an impressive thirty had held leadership positions in their orchestras. The final roster of musicians would include performers from Argentina, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, the United States, and Yugoslavia. Huberman was creating not just an orchestra of exiles, but an orchestra of all-stars.