6 - The Jewish Culture League
from Part Two
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 September 2019
Summary
At the beginning of September 1933, with Singer at the helm, the league had eight separate sections. Landau led the league's lecture department, which included Julius Bab, who also directed the drama department. Heinz Condell, Hans Sondheimer, and Werner Levie supervised the décor and costume division, the technical department, and the management division, respectively. Levie, who worked as economics editor of the Vossische Zeitung until 1933, acted as league secretary as well. (He would assume a more prominent role as Singer's replacement in 1938.)
Along with Singer, Joseph Rosenstock was head of the opera department. Rosenstock's participation in the league was an early indication of the high musical caliber of the group's offerings. A child prodigy as a pianist, Rosenstock attended the Kraków Conservatory and, from 1912, the University and Academy of Music in Vienna. In 1927 he succeeded Otto Klemperer at the Staatstheater in Wiesbaden, and in 1929 he served as guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He worked at the Mannheim National Theater from 1930 until his dismissal in 1933.
The concert department, linked with the opera division, would similarly benefit from talented leadership. The department was supervised by Rosenstock and Singer, but also by the concert director Michael Taube, who had been Bruno Walter's assistant at the Municipal Opera in Berlin. Taube acted as conductor of the league's small orchestra until he immigrated to Palestine at the end of 1934. After his departure Rosenstock, as its conductor, worked to expand the group. When he too left, for Tokyo in 1936, Hans Wilhelm Steinberg replaced him. After only three months Steinberg traveled to Moscow and then Tel Aviv to conduct the newly founded Palestine Symphony Orchestra, established by the violinist Bronislaw Huberman and soon known as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Though he was scheduled to return to the Berlin League in February 1937, he continued to work in Palestine and eventually immigrated to the United States in 1938. There, as William Steinberg, he conducted in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York, at the Metropolitan Opera. In Berlin he was succeeded by Rudolf Schwarz, who had served as the main conductor under chief music director Josef Krips at the Badisches Landestheater in Karlsruhe from 1925 to 1933.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Anneliese Landau's Life in MusicNazi Germany to Émigré California, pp. 40 - 44Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019