NEW YORK, NY.- As fascism spread in Europe in the 1930s, Jewish artists and composers struggled to have their music heard. They faced persecution by the Nazis, and were banned by orchestras and cultural institutions because of their Jewish identity. Many fled abroad.

As a result, hundreds of works by promising composers were lost or neglected. But a group of researchers and publishers is now working to ensure that their music is heard again.

G. Schirmer, a major music publishing house, and Exilarte, an organization at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, announced Thursday an initiative to publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers whose careers were disrupted by the Holocaust, making it possible for them to be performed and recorded on a wider scale.

“Our understanding of the 20th century is incomplete without these composers,” Robert Thompson, the president of G. Schirmer, said in an interview. He added that it was vital to guarantee that “composers who were silenced during World War II are not forgotten and their legacies are restored.”

The list of music to be published includes more than 300 songs, 100 chamber music pieces, 50 orchestral works and other pieces, in genres including classical, opera, jazz and film music. The first works will be published next spring.

“The Nazis wanted a world in which the music of Jewish composers would have been banned and forgotten,” Gerold W. Gruber, Exilarte’s founder and chairman, said in a statement. “It is therefore our obligation to counteract these policies by rescuing the music of exiled composers from oblivion.”




More than two dozen composers are represented. They include Walter Arlen, a 102-year-old who was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. He longed to study music professionally in Austria, but he and his relatives fled in 1939 to escape persecution by the Nazis.

Arlen’s songs and piano pieces will be among the first to be published by G. Schirmer. In a telephone interview from his home in California, Arlen said that he was humbled his works would reach a broader audience.

“It’s a lovely experience,” he said. “It’s not easy to be published. I lived long enough to be part of it, to see it happen.”

He added that it was important that Jewish voices are remembered. “Six and a half million Jews were killed in the Holocaust,” he said, “including a lot of composers and musicians.”

Other notable artists whose work will be published include Julius Burger, a Vienna-born pianist, composer and conductor, who fled to the United States in 1938; and Walter Bricht, whose career in Austria was cut short after it was revealed that he had Jewish grandparents, and who also left for the United States in ’38.

The initiative builds on long-standing efforts by Exilarte, which was founded in 2006 to recover, restore and study music banned by the Nazis. Michael Haas, a senior researcher at Exilarte, said that the works by these composers represent an overlooked part of the repertory.

“It has the potential to be enormously appealing to the public and to musicians,” he said in an interview. “This is an opportunity to start investigating an area of 20th century music which has been completely unrecognized.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.