Unlike most other Vaughan recitals of chamber and world music, "Vienna to Hollywood" is an original performance in mixed media.
In the format of a "lecture-recital," the two visiting artists have woven together stories from the lives of the composers. These stories have been mixed with their own vocal repertoire, which includes pieces sung in German, English and Hebrew that were written in the United States both during and after the war. "We tell a story of the composer, which involves bits of history, the poems they write [and] quotes from things that they said," Heyn said. "Then we sing their songs."
Heyn, a graduate of the University of Southern California, conceived the idea for the show while researching early 20th-century lieder music, a style of romantic art songs in German, for her thesis at the Wien Conservatory in Vienna. Since she has lived in Los Angeles, she felt a special affinity to these artists, who left Vienna many decades ago to struggle for survival in the city she calls home, according to Heyn. She began to collaborate with Brenner, who double majored in engineering and music at Dartmouth, when Brenner moved to Vienna six years ago to study lieder, according to Heyn and Brenner.
During the period just before World War II, the careers of many intellectuals, some of them composers, were permanently disrupted by the rising Nazi power. The works produced by many of these composers were condemned by the Nazis as "degenerate art," according to the "Vienna to Hollywood" program notes. To find a city that would foster and nourish their creative freedom, many of them moved to large American cities such as New York and Los Angeles. They came just like any other immigrant to this country, trying to build a new life and re-establish their position professionally, according to Brenner.
"I think many of the composers had both positive and negative reactions to this new place," Brenner said. "It must be a difficult experience to go from a city where you were not only very successful professionally but also very well-known to a big country where nobody acknowledged you."
Some of the emigre composers featured in the performance, such as Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Korngold, are well-known modernist composers of the 20th century. A selection of early songs in the late Romantic style by Schoenberg, who pioneered a musical style that heavily features atonality, will be included in the program. Some of his later works, which experiment with Sprechstimme, an expressionist vocal technique that shares characteristics with both singing and speaking, will also be featured.
The week of Korngold, a prominent film composer, will be featured as well through a few musical excerpts from the scores for three blockbusters starring Errol Flynn "The Adventure of Robin Hood" (1938), "Captain Blood" (1935) and "The Sea Hawk" (1940), according to the program notes.
The other composers highlighted in the program Hanns Eisler, Ernst Krenek, Ernst Toch and Erich Zeisl were all greatly influenced by their Austrian heritage and are less widely known, but they are equally important in providing a wider perspective of the styles at the time. Despite their relative obscurity, their music which serves as a record of the Jewish diaspora before the outbreak of the war reflects how art reacts to political circumstances, Heyn said. Elements of culture, such as the visual arts and music, can transform political events into personal and more accessible narratives, she said.
"We would like to tell the story [of these composers] in sometimes humorous and sometimes serious ways," Heyn said. "The audience gets a deeper understanding of the artists as individuals and the artists as reacting to the times."
The pair of musicians is currently on tour with the project. They are traveling from Massachusetts, where they just performed, and will be stopping at two more venues in New York after their performance at the College.
"For me, it's always wonderful coming to Hanover," Brenner said. "I used to play at Faulkner a lot. Some of my old professors are coming, and I just look forward to catching up."
Heyn and Brenner's performance was sponsored by the Vaughan Recital Series, the music department, the film and media studies department and the Jewish studies program.
The performance will begin at 12:30 p.m. at the Hopkins Center.