THE SOUND OF MUSIC
‘Inconceivable, really, that someone should care that much about classical music that they should forbid its being played … a weird kind of flattery, being banned by the Nazis.” That’s a line from the 2009 documentary made by New Zealand actor and filmmaker Danny Mulheron about his German Jewish grandfather. The Third Richard tells the story of Richard Fuchs, the talented musician, architect, artist and composer from Karlsruhe, Germany, who was sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass – the night in November 1938 of violence against Jews throughout the German Reich choreographed by the Nazis and carried out by them and by willing civilians and neighbours.
Fuchs managed to get a visa to New Zealand and emigrate with his wife and two daughters in 1939. Survival. It wasn’t the end of the story. Fuchs was fleeing almost certain death back home for being too Jewish. In New Zealand, he was too German, an enemy alien. The Wellington music scene at that time wasn’t impressed. “They wanted a New Zealand composer,” wrote Fuchs’ daughter, Eva, “not a Jew from Germany.” As Mulheron puts it in the film, “He fled to the last bus stop in the world, the booming monotone of New Zealand in the 1940s, no longer persecuted, just ignored.”
He is ignored no longer thanks to his grandson, who looks uncannily like Fuchs, and to a steady revival of the music suppressed by the Third when we speak, can report that there are two new concerts involving his grandfather’s music coming up early this year in Germany. “There’s one in Dortmund, which is a commemoration of Richard’s brother Gottfried, who was the soccer player. They’re playing some of Richard’s music there.” On January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Fuchs’ (The Jewish Fate), will be played at the Badisches Staatstheater in his home town of Karlsruhe. It’s a large oratorio on which he worked with poet Karl Wolfskehl, who would also escape to New Zealand.
