Norbert Meyn: ‘Musical Migrants – Refugee Musicians from Nazi-Germany and Austria in Britain’

Norbert Meyn from Guildhall School of Music and Drama presents ‘Musical Migrants – Refugee Musicians from Nazi-Germany and Austria in Britain' 

Since 2012, Norbert Meyn has been curating the performance and research project ’Singing a Song in a Foreign Land’ at the Royal College of Music, exploring the legacy of musicians who emigrated from Germany and Austria in the 1930s and settled in Britain. The project’s online resource includes many hours of oral history interviews, performance footage and biographical profiles of more than 40 musicians. In this lecture recital, Norbert will tell the stories of some of these musicians, including the pianists Ferdinand Rauter and Paul Hamburger, the conductor/composers Peter Gellhorn and Karl Rankl as well as the composer and academic Hans Gál, who created the brilliant revue ‘What a Life!” during British internment on the Isle of Man in 1940. Norbert will perform a selection of songs from this revue as well as Lieder and English Songs written by these composers before and after their emigration. Finally, Norbert will discuss the protectionist policy of the Incorporated Society of Musicians that campaigned to prevent these refugees from ‘taking the bread out of the mouth of native musicians’ as well as ideas from the book ‘The Freedom of the Migrant’ by the philosopher Vilém Flusser. 

This is a joint seminar with the Department of Music and includes a musical recital.