Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers under Fascism

This book is the first collection of multi-disciplinary research on the experience of Italian-Jewish musicians and composers in Fascist Italy. Drawing together seven diverse essays from both established and emerging scholars across a range of fields, this book examines multiple aspects of this neglected period of music history, including the marginalization and expulsion of Jewish musicians and composers from Italian theatres and conservatories after the 1938-39 Race Laws, and their subsequent exile and persecution. Using a variety of critical perspectives and innovative methodological approaches, these essays reconstruct and analyze the impact that the Italian Race Laws and Fascist Italy's musical relations with Nazi Germany had on the lives and works of Italian Jewish composers from 1933 to 1945. These original contributions on relatively unresearched aspects of historical musicology offer new insight into the relationship between the Fascist regime and music.

Autorentext

Annalisa Capristo is a librarian at the Center for American Studies in Rome, Italy. Her research focuses on anti-Semitic and racial laws in Fascist Italy, on which she has published several books and papers. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Modern Italian Studies on the eightieth anniversary of the Racial Laws.

Alessandro Carrieri is an independent scholar. He was previously Visiting Research Fellow in Holocaust Studies at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has also held a research position at the University of Trieste, Italy, and an honorary research position at the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies, Australia.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Alessandro Carrieri.- Part I.- Music, Antisemitism and Persecution.- 2. Italian Jews and the Race Laws of 1938 by Michele Sarfatti.- 3. La Scala, the Jews and Erich Kleiber. An Anti-Semitic Episode of December 1938 by Annalisa Capristo.- 4. Antisemitism and Propaganda at the Teatro La Fenice Between 1937 and 1943 by Luca Lévi Sala.- 5.- Exiled Italian Jewish Musicians and Composers by Alessandro Carrieri.- Part II.- Music, Memories and Cultural Relations.- 6. Aldo Finzi (1897-1945), Witness of the Culture and Contradictions of the Fascist Period by Eleonora Carapella.- 7. Wir treffen uns am Schluss We Shall Meet at the End. Kurt Sonnenfeld (1921-1997), His Music During His Imprisonment in the Concentration Camp of Ferramonti, Calabria by Raffaele Deluca.- 8. An Expedient Alliance? Musical Relationships Between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Period Between 1933 and 1945 by Erik Levi