When Hans Wilhelm Steinberg, who was chased away from the Frankfurt Opera as General Music Director in 1933 because he was Jewish, who stayed in Nazi Germany until 1936 and then fled to the USA, when this man, who now called himself William Steinberg, appeared in Germany again just ten years after the end of the Second World War, in the very place where he was no longer wanted, at the podium of the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra, there was a lot of hesitation from music critics. If not, racist thinking immediately came to the fore.
In March 1955, Walter Dirks, a music critic for the “Frankfurter Zeitung” in the 1930s and a radio journalist and reviewer for the FAZ after the war, couldn’t think of anything better than to write about Steinberg’s nose and bald head, before finally exclaiming in astonishment: “How can such an inelegant man play music so elegantly!” The reviewer concluded with a description of how the conductor was made an honorary member of the municipal theater during the interval – on behalf of the mayor, who apparently didn’t show up himself. “That was and is a good gesture,” commented Dirks, thus completing the confusing mixture of resentment, enthusiasm and evident goodwill. One would like to know how this honor for Steinberg went down: As an apology for the hardly excusable? As a cheerful attempt to sweep the past under the carpet?
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Not a word in the review about what Steinberg had to endure: that as a Jew he was forbidden to conduct shortly after the Nazis came to power, that he was finally dismissed without notice by the city of Frankfurt, against which he took legal action. A tactic of silence that continued among music critics for years. When the conductor conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time again in 1958, an author in the Berlin Tagesspiegel, who had also worked for Nazi newspapers, wrote succinctly that William Steinberg “disappeared from European musical life” in 1933. Just like that. No reasons given.
At that time, the conductor was once again appearing in front of the orchestra in Frankfurt. When he touches on the conductor’s biography, the author of a review, again in the FAZ, switches unerringly to the impersonal: “This is what a career that had to take place outside of Germany looks like.” So it was not Steinberg who had to “go” abroad, but his career. Similar things happened in 1961 in the “Frankfurter Neue Presse”: “Many good connections broke off, Steinberg went to Palestine, later to New York, Buffalo, Pittsburgh.” Escape reinterpreted as a career path.
Gerhard R. Koch spoke the truth
The way in which the return of Steinberg was reported in Germany clearly shows how parts of German post-war journalism refused to confront the past. It took a 25-year-old to be the first to state clearly in this newspaper in 1964 what had actually happened: that he, Steinberg, had been “driven out of his position and out of Germany by the National Socialist rulers.” The young Gerhard R. Koch, who later became music editor of this newspaper, came to this decisive conclusion.
There was unbridled enthusiasm for William Steinberg’s artistic abilities. The “thematic and tonal clarity” of his performances was celebrated, as was his “self-contained grandeur” and his “bright temperament”. There were reports of “triumphantly acclaimed concerts”. This can now be understood through new editions of earlier recordings. They are being released to mark the conductor’s 125th birthday, which would have been celebrated on August 1st, and commemorate Steinberg’s two most important periods in the United States: the twenty-four years as head of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (from 1952 to 1976) and the three years as director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1969 to 1972.
Steinberg intuitively does the right thing
The Pittsburgh period is impressively documented by recordings for the “Command Classics” label, which have now been released by Deutsche Grammophon (Universal). Seventeen CDs show a conductor who trusts his intuition, who is not subject to any pressure to be original, who is not burdened by the burden of will and knowledge. What is striking is the great inner strength that all the recordings show, the beauty and health of the sound, the attentive articulation, the enchanting singing.
The complete recording of the Beethoven symphonies also stands up to modern ears, familiar with historical performance practice – simply because Steinberg intuitively does the right thing. To create a ghostly, pale sound in the funeral march of the “Eroica”, he had the strings play without vibrato, the violin touches at the beginning of the fourth symphony are all the more sonorous, they fizzle out like little colored clouds, but the final movement is of blazing brilliance – an unheard-of example of orchestral perfection.
This conductor did not believe in genius-like posturing or mystification: Anton Bruckner’s seventh symphony sounds almost strikingly matter-of-fact under his hands, and the recording of various pieces by Richard Wagner is disarmingly clear. “Siegfried’s Funeral March” from “Götterdämmerung”, for example, shows a taut force, yet remains free of multiplying demagogy.
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The powerful, radiant Steinberg sound can also be heard in the recordings of his Boston years, made for RCA and now released by Sony. In a very modern way, William Steinberg saw himself as a facilitator, as a conductor who wanted to create “an atmosphere of goodwill,” as he himself once explained. The musicians also noticed that Steinberg was one of the most reflective representatives of his profession. Otherwise they would not have given him such an open-hearted, singing recording – as the Bostonians did in the case of Franz Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony. Robert Schumann’s words about the “heavenly lengths” of this work were rarely as justified as here.
In this aesthetic of a completely natural beauty, one can also recognize the tradition in which Steinberg stood. Born in Cologne in 1899, at the age of twenty-one he became Otto Klemperer’s assistant at the Cologne Opera. Five years later, Alexander Zemlinsky brought him to the Deutsches Theater in Prague, entrusting him with the Prague premiere of his opera “The Dwarf” in the very first season. In 1927, Steinberg succeeded Zemlinsky and two years later went to the Frankfurt Opera, where his duties included the premiere of Arnold Schönberg’s twelve-tone one-act opera “From Today to Tomorrow”. After being expelled as Frankfurt’s General Music Director, Steinberg was involved in setting up an orchestra for the Jewish Cultural Association, in which the discriminated Jewish artists were still allowed to organize themselves. At the same time, he worked with the Polish violinist Bronisław Huberman to found the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra).
When Arturo Toscanini came to Tel Aviv in 1936 to conduct the inaugural concert, Steinberg had already conducted the preparatory rehearsals. Toscanini was impressed and took the conductor with him to New York. Steinberg’s American career began. The fact that William Steinberg performed again so soon after the war in the country from which he had been exiled can be seen as an insistence on his own dignity. The fact that the German public’s enthusiasm for his artistic ability soon outweighed their resentment was probably a late triumph.
