Excerpt from Mapping Canada's Music: Selected Writings of Helmut Kallmann edited by John Beckwith and Robin Elliott

From the Chapter 15: Mapping Canada's Music: A Life Task

The Impetus

All I wanted was to gain more insight into Beethoven's personality. I had plowed my way through three volumes of his letters in Prelinger's edition1 and was now, in the summer of 1948, reading through the second appendix. There, underneath a letter to the composer from a visitor to Vienna, it stared at me in clear print,”Theodor Molt, music teacher in Quebec, North America” [“Musiklehrer in Quebec in Nord Amerika”], December 1825.

“A music teacher in Quebec in 1825, but that's impossible! ” was my immediate reaction. I thought the eldest of the teachers I saw around the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto, men born in the 1870s, surely belonged to the first or, at most, second generation of music teachers in this new country. 2 Yet here was someone by the name of Molt who taught in Quebec City a century earlier!

What was the story behind this man? Other Beethoven literature provided details about Molt's visit to the composer, and of these I will mention only that Molt, who had first settled in Quebec in 1822, returned there in 1826 with a Beethoven manuscript in his hands, the canon “Freu' Dich des Lebens,” WoO 195. Rather, what piqued my curiosity was the Canadian aspect of the episode. Although I had arrived in Canada in 1940 as one of some 2, 000 interned refugees from Germany and Austria, our camps were enclaves of European culture, for three years linked to Canadian musical life only by radio broadcasts of the Montreal and Toronto orchestras and recorded music programs. We knew little about Canada's history.

By the time I entered the University of Toronto in 1946 I had gathered my first impressions about current musical life. Although a strong wartime morale booster, music making had been downsized, but now that the nation had returned to civilian life it was raring to emerge stronger than ever. I heard a lot about music's future. Thus, in Quebec a series of state conservatories expanded or opened, in Toronto plans matured for a senior school with master teachers, a professional opera school, and a new course for future school music teachers. Composition teachers versed in contemporary idioms at last assumed university positions. Professionalism seemed just to arrive. Indeed there was a flurry, if not an explosion, of talent and activity. And what about the past? One didn't talk about that. In my three years of music history classes under three different professors, Canadian musicians, past or present, were never subjects of discussion or even mention. Anything of importance, as though by definition, had to take place in Europe or the United States. Music in Canada “had no past” apart from folksong, and in any case one was too busy to celebrate old heroes. True, the Hart House String Quartet of Toronto, and the Montreal Opera Company were memories of older music lovers; true, a Kathleen Parlow or a Rodolphe Plamondon had won acclaim abroad, but there had been a long succession of shipwrecked orchestral and operatic enterprises—backwoods enterprises typically led by organists who found themselves suddenly in front of an orchestra and who hated what little contemporary music they knew. Or so one was told.

Till the end of the war, music was taught at some dozen universities with curricula (at least in Anglo-Canada) perpetuating the time-honoured British system emphasizing complex tonal harmony, fugue and orchestration, but not teaching research techniques, contemporary idioms or much else useful for entering the profession. Little wonder that many young composers resented the conservative academics and part-time composers whom they identified with the age of Elgar or Tchaikovsky, instead placing Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók and Stravinsky on their banner. As if to confirm this negative view of the Canadian past, the CBC’s epochal Catalogue of Canadian Composers (1947) with its generous coverage of living composers disregarded almost all those who had died.

Beside the music teacher of 1825 with Beethoven's manuscript in his hand, one other signpost made me suspicious of this negative view of Canada’s musical past. My Baedeker's Canada of 1907 contained a number of city maps that displayed an “Opera House” in a prominent location, those of Hamilton, Ottawa, Saint John, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg. 3 What cities, if any, had opera houses in 1948?

From the Chapter 17: At Home with the Kallmanns: A Schöneberg Family in the 1930s (1992/2001)

“Write him and he'll have to mend his ways”

It is early 1933. The grownups talk about very important matters. Serious, exciting matters. The Nazis have taken over the government. They plan evil. They lock up their opponents, they rule with orders and scaremongering, they are brutal and without mercy. Some people are sent to a camp (Sonnenburg I believe) where they are tormented and beaten. The greatest enemies of the Nazis are the communists, the objects of their fiercest hatred the Jews. But as organizers of parades and festivities—in this they are great, as even their opponents admit. “If Hitler is such a bad person, then write him a letter and explain to him how bad he is. Then he will have to mend his ways,” I as a ten-year-old advise my parents. Soon there is a day of boycott during which Jewish lawyers may not enter the law courts. “But, papa, if you simply walk up the steps to the law court, how can anyone stop you?”

The Notary Sign Is Stolen

One morning in 1933 or 1934 one of us notices that my father's notary sign with the Prussian eagle is missing from the railing in the front garden. Overnight it has been unscrewed and stolen.

Herr Engwicht Disappears

A portent of the dark future is a rather disquieting phone call from Mr. Engwicht, who up to this point in 1933 has given my father more work than any of his other clients. It is late evening and he calls from one of the big hotels. He has met some foreigners, possibly Dutch people, and they work out some grand business plan. Something very important and urgent. My father advises them lengthily over the phone. Engwicht and his people will either call back or come to us around midnight. My father waits for a long time. No further phone call. Did Engwicht explain later on? Was he going to mock my father, or did the contract come to naught? I know only that something was fishy.

The Law Practice Goes Under

Other Jewish lawyers are soon forbidden to practise; only those who fought at the front line in the First World War and those with many years of practice are allowed to continue in a limited way. 6 My father belongs to the latter, though he was not a combatant in the war. Now he represents only Jewish clients. The office secretary, Fräulein Fohgrub, stays another year or two; later we children sometimes have to help (e. g. , typing legal documents or expediting letters). Day after day the government law gazette prints new laws, laws which have simply been proclaimed without parliamentary debate, laws that trample on procedure and decency. My father is incensed. Jewish lawyers now form “cartels,” groups of four who meet on occasion and discuss events. Eventually my father is no longer allowed to plead before a judge, can only advise his clients. Then, about 1937 or 1938 that too stops. 7 For him, there is no other means of earning money, as he has now turned sixty-five.

Excerpt from Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer by John Beckwith

From the section entitled Compositions, chapter 13 Choirs, pages 282 to 285

I had greeted Elmer Iseler’s 1964 appointment as conductor of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir as a case of “the right person at the right time. “5 When that historic large choir pondered what to do with a commission for the Canadian Centennial in 1967, he suggested my name. This was a major challenge. Where to find a suitable text? As usual, my thoughts ran to a newly written libretto. The choir agreed to let me share my commission with a librettist. When I consulted with some of my writer friends, the name of Dennis Lee came up. Like Margaret Atwood, he had been part of Pamela’s Victoria College cast for Epicoene and was becoming known as a poet: his Civil Elegies, then about to be published, had pertinence to the modern city, and Toronto in particular; the children’s collection Alligator Pie, for which he was later renowned, was still several years in the future. Lee and I discussed some ideas about living in contemporary Canada and specifically in Toronto, and he developed a text calling for chorus and three soloists (speaker, Heldentenor, and blues singer). His first idea for a title was Civitas, but I thought that was too high-toned, so we settled on Place of Meeting, which some historians claim is the meaning of the Aboriginal word “Toronto” (“the [Toronto] meeting-place” and “the carrying-place” are terms found in historical accounts). The text depicts the commercial sleaze of the modern city (“this shambles”) and wonders how human dignity can survive in such surroundings. The blues singer laments,”This country ain’t my country, and this city ain’t my home. “ When the speaker climaxes a diatribe by shouting,”There is no Canada; there is NO Canada! “ the chorus overlaps his sustained “NO” with the beginning of “O Canada. “ The tenor part represents a more optimistic and hopeful view, overriding the critical/editorial elements with penetrating high Bs and Cs. We took our commission seriously and ambitiously. Northrop Frye said of the Centennial that what we were all celebrating was the Canada we had yet to create; 6 that was, I thought in retrospect, what Lee and I had tried to convey in Place of Meeting.

Place of Meeting was my largest composition project to date. Starting to work on it amid other commitments in the summer of 1966, I planned to produce it in stages, the score for chorus and soloists (with rehearsal cues) first, reserving completion of the orchestra’s score and the instrumental parts for later (I was promised the full Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the largest instrumental group I had yet worked with—six horns! ). Elements in the work would, I figured, coexist on different planes of dynamics and speed, as in my radio collages—and with these multiple forces it would be necessary to have two conductors. When I checked out these ideas with Iseler he was supportive, indeed gung-ho. The vocal score was ready for the choir in the spring of 1967; it had timings (twenty seconds here, forty-five seconds there) for the orchestral passages I had yet to write. The soloists were booked: the speaker would be the musically sensitive actor Colin Fox; the tenor would be Jacob Barkin, one of the musical Barkins of Toronto, then a cantor in a synagogue in the US, and a singer with a powerful, ringing high register; Al Harris, well known from many CBC broadcasts, would play the guitar accompaniment for the blues singer Phil Maude.

The second conductor position was as yet unfilled. This was still the situation at the start of choral rehearsals in the early fall. With some hesitation, I said to Iseler that if necessary, since I knew the score, I could be the second conductor. He found this an acceptable solution and even asked me to take one or two of the rehearsals, which I did. This experience revealed to me a mood of unrest among the choir members: some were tremendously keyed up about the project, while others were doubtful or even hostile. The piece was turning out to be not just new but controversial. At that point in its history, the Mendelssohn Choir had, I think, never attempted any more advanced contemporary repertoire than Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, so Place of Meeting seemed to many of the singers further off the choral-music norm than it actually was. Moreover, if the musical content was unfamiliar, Lee’s text was, to some, pretty strong stuff. In one passage the choir shouts a miscellany of advertising slogans then seen on billboards or heard in radio jingles, among them a particularly blatant one from a subway placard,”Shrink Hemorrhoids Now! “ For some of the more squeamish sopranos, that exceeded the bounds of good taste. It certainly wasn’t the B Minor Mass.

Iseler and I divided the conducting chores; for sections in simultaneous but conflicting metres (a large portion of the work), the choir was directed to watch him and the orchestra was directed to watch me. I was nervous for my rehearsals with the orchestra but felt I had good support from the players, some of whom I knew well. Audiences gave Massey Hall a superior rating for acoustics, but those who performed there regularly had a different opinion of the acoustics onstage. I understood this when I corrected the tuba on a wrong entry, only to be told that what I was hearing was the bassoon from the other side of the stage; the echoes played tricks. The speaker and the blues combo were positioned in a balcony overlooking the choir, and we asked for them to be miked. It turned out that the hall had no regular sound system in place (its transformation into a rock concert palace was still some years off). A part-time technician would come in when required and set up what amounted to a public address system intended for travel lectures or political meetings. There was delay and distress before this was prepared more or less adequately (it proved inadequate in the performance). Our dress rehearsal made everyone nervous, especially Elmer Iseler. He told me when it was over that he thought the performance would have to be cancelled. He was a veteran professional performer and I was making my first appearance leading a professional orchestra, but I found I was the one who had to rally his spirits. Somehow I must have managed to, because we went ahead with the show.

The night of the concert, the work came off more smoothly than in the dress rehearsal. As so often happens, the performers rose to the occasion and gave it their best. There were moments of audience reaction where it seemed our intentions got across. Fox’s voice commanded attention despite the erratic miking, and in the ironic final fade-out Harris’s blues guitar created a hush. I was told by two orchestra players afterwards (Gene Rittich and Bob Aitken) that my beat was clear; they had advised me as a novice that what most players want from a conductor is a strong upbeat, and I tried to remember that. There were however some bad, uncertain moments. The passage where the choir suddenly launches into “O Canada” was to be capped by the tenor soloist’s most exultant phrases, but Iseler hit “O Canada” at a faster tempo than he ever had in rehearsal—so much faster that Barkin found it impossible to sing his lines, so the effect was ruined. Dennis Lee and I were called to the stage for several bows with the conductor and soloists. It seemed something of the work had connected with our audience, but there were to be no more performances.

5 “Music in Toronto 64—65,” Canadian Forum 45, no. 534 (July 1965): 83—85.

6 Northrop Frye, The Modern Century: The Whidden Lectures, 1967 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 122—23.