An interesting article by William Cook in The Spectator the other week records the influence on British public life of the "vast wave of Germanic immigration" that came here from the 1930s onwards, as tens of thousands fled Nazism's "violent, superstitious tyranny". You can read it online here.
Just to list a few of the names is to get a sense of their influence - Fritz Busch, Hans Keller, Stefan Zweig, Kurt Schwitters, Oskar Kokoschka, Emeric Pressburger, Karel Reisz, Gerard Hoffnung, Kurt Joos, Rudolf Laban, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Claus Moser, George Weidenfeld, Martin Esslin, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Bing, Friedrich Hayek, Max Born, Karl Popper, Hans Eysenck, Eric Hobsbawm. Many were Jewish, but not all, and as Cook says, that "hardly mattered . . . They were champions of civilised enlightened values, rather than members of a certain religion, or a certain race".
I showed this article to my wife. She was inclined to dismiss it as a typical piece of Speccie Little Englandism. But in truth anyone familiar with the majority of the names in the above paragraph (I recognised them all apart from Kurt Joos (dance) and Max Born (mathematics)) would have to acknowledge that these were hugely influential people in 20th century Britain.
The story of how they achieved pre-eminence is one of one of amazing courage, persistence and resilience, although it's worth bearing in mind that "the English intelligentsia are Europeanized", as Orwell wrote: always ready to be critical of their own culture and cringe in the face of others. The emigres may often have been pushing at an open door.
Their story, writes Cook, "is usually told as a story with a happy ending, a triumph of progressive values over reactionary . . . But although Britain gained a great deal from this flood of foreign talent, you can't help feeling, looking back, that something was lost along the way. Before the war, British culture was much more staid, but more in tune with public opinion. Since 1945 our artistic institutions have become much more Middle European: avant-garde, conceptual and out of step with popular taste . . . modernism has become the new orthodoxy, but this Mitteleuropaische aesthetic has never really been accepted by the population as a whole . . . This is a legacy of the Hitler emigres, and the modernist movement they inspired."
"Even at the time", Cook continues, "some Britons feared this continental influx would change the nature of our island's cultural life". The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was invited to become a patron of a new Anglo-Austrian Music Society, formed by Austrian musicians who'd fled to Britain. He replied as follows. "The great thing that frightens me is that it will entirely devour the tender little flower of our English culture . . . We cannot swallow the strong meat of your culture. Our stomachs are not strong enough". I thought of this last week when I went to see the Halle play RVW's London Symphony.
As a child I loved the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending, but when I was a student in the 1980s his music was about as unfashionable as it was possible to be, its turgid pastoralism and naive parallel triads symptomatic of everything that seemed wrong with pre-war English music.
Times change though, and adults are more forgiving. Whereas, in the true Orwellian tradition, I once felt that Englishness was "slightly disgraceful" I have come round to the view that we are no worse that most countries in most things (and in some things a bit better) and this, pathetically you may feel, in turn has led me to look more kindly on the works of Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and George Butterworth, to name but three composers. RVW in particular, like Elgar, seems to epitomise the nation in music, informing our sense of what England means in much the same way of our sense of the American is shaped by Bernstein and John Williams.
Even if the Tallis and The Lark are the best of RVW (and they are pieces I would now give my right arm to have written), I've since conducted the D major 5th Symphony and the London itself too. What pieces they are! The 5th was written during the war, but gives absolutely no sense of the violence and uncertainty which was the context of its creation. The London is a much earlier piece (1913) and the London Vaughan Williams was writing about had disappeared by the time the 5th was premiered thirty years later. Today of course he would find London still harder to recognise, with its core of the international super-rich living alongside a diaspora of the poor from Far East and Deep South, a city with the specific London qualities he captured all but effaced.
The symphony is still mightily affecting though, speaking eloquently of the full-on noise and bustle of the big city as well as the grandeur of its buildings and intimate silences of its smaller out-of-hours thoroughfares. Last Thursday the Halle did it true justice, and I found it heartening to see the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens looking thoroughly immersed in the music. Perhaps he will go home and tell his colleagues in the Berlin Phil how good it is. Have they ever performed it? I somehow doubt it. That's a shame, because the London is a thoroughly convincing piece of writing, and I think the finale works much better than any Tchaikovsky symphony (apart from the Pathetique), better even - lawks - than Mahler 5, whose endless note-spinning perambulations towards the chorale finale I endured on the way to the dry-cleaners the other day.
What happened to that "tender little flower" of English music then? It has surely been erased by the mighty bulldozer of modernism. I can't think of a single composer now who you might describe as typically English. I can't even claim it for myself. My own models have always been much more the Scandinavians Sibelius and Nielsen, even in pieces like Absence of Clouds, a recent thirty-minute work rooted in the Cumbrian weather and landscape.
Blaming Hitler's emigres for this rubbing out is perhaps a bit steep. Foreign mores have always been seductively attractive to the English, as Orwell noted. We would probably have embraced modernism in the end anyway. Fritz Bush and Hans Keller did not invent Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies. But William Cook is right, in music anyway, that something has been lost, and that its loss has been accompanied by a slow cutting adrift of public taste. In the end everyone in Britain who loves classical music will be the loser for this, and I suspect I'm not alone in hearing again Matthew Arnold's "melancholy long withdrawing roar".
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized.
They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the
general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident
thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals
are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman
and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably
true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of
standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping
away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes
squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always
anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it
certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a
real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they
were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual
sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and
the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they
had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic
Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than
it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed
forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class
must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism
hastened the process.
