German composer Walter Braunfels, who was part Jewish, turned down Adolf Hitler when asked to write an anthem for the Nazi party, and that, plus his ancestry, got him landed on the government's Entartete Kunst blacklist in the 1930s. It's ironic, for his music was conservative at the beginning of his career, and by the time he emerged at the end of the war and promptly resumed his conducting post in Cologne, it was very conservative. It is often entertaining, though, and a number of his works have been revived in recent ...
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German composer Walter Braunfels, who was part Jewish, turned down Adolf Hitler when asked to write an anthem for the Nazi party, and that, plus his ancestry, got him landed on the government's Entartete Kunst blacklist in the 1930s. It's ironic, for his music was conservative at the beginning of his career, and by the time he emerged at the end of the war and promptly resumed his conducting post in Cologne, it was very conservative. It is often entertaining, though, and a number of his works have been revived in recent years. The Fantastical Apparitions of a Theme by Hector Berlioz, Op. 25, were written near the end of World War I. The work is inventively structured: it dramatizes the "Song of the Flea" scene from Berlioz's La damnation de Faust even as it is cast as a set of variations, throwing in some patriotic wartime music for good measure. The work is absolutely never dull, and it ought to become a presence on summer festival evenings; it will engage an audience whose senses have been...
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