The German Genius

An admirer of George Gershwin as much as Claude Debussy, and deeply influenced by Freudian psychology, he began to make a name as a music critic and was an early admirer of Benjamin Britten. In 1959 William Glock was made controller of music at the BBC, and he soon afterward recruited Keller; both men shared a love of Haydn and Mozart (the latter not universally admired at that stage) but were also intent on promoting modern and contemporary music. 18 Through them musical appreciation in Britain achieved a sophistication it had never had before. His biographer described Keller as the “musical conscience” of British broadcasting. 19
    Esslin was doing much the same in BBC drama. Born in Budapest but raised in Vienna, he received a typically German education aimed at Bildung (Latin at eleven, Greek at twelve, philosophy not long after). The woman his father married after his own mother died gave Esslin an exposure to—and a passion for—Wagner, but she also gave him a puppet theater. Indirectly, this introduced him to Hauptmann, Schnitzler, and Brecht, about whom he was to write several well-received books and on the strength of which he was taken on by the BBC, becoming head of drama in 1963. 20
    As controller of BBC 2, Stephen Hearst was in charge of Britain’s most far-reaching cultural institution. An Anglophile, while at school in Vienna he had staged a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest in English. He fled Austria the day after the Anschluss , joining the BBC after Oxford and always regarded himself as lucky, in the sense that the 1960s and early 1970s were the “heroic age” of arts and culture on British television, the time of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Alistair Cooke’s America . 21
    Still in the realm of music, we have already encountered Rudolf Bing, starting the Edinburgh Festival in 1947 (he would later go on to be director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York). In that same year, 1947, Karl Rankl was appointed musical director of the Royal Opera in London. He was not the first choice—the post had been discussed with Eugene Goossens and Bruno Walter, but they were too demanding. Though Rankl was not as well known as the others, he was not without experience, having studied with Schoenberg and Klemperer in Berlin and held positions in Graz and Prague. He escaped to Britain in 1939 and was interned. It was a while before Rankl hit his stride. During the war, the opera house in Covent Garden had been let to the Mecca Café Ltd. as a palais de danse for troops home on leave, while the ballet had toured the country to great success. Rankl built the opera company solidly, and although it did not overtake the ballet in the public mind during his tenure, it would eventually do so.
    For many people, for many years, the most obvious German presence on the British musical scene were four men known to initiates as the “Wolf Gang” and, more formally, as the Amadeus String Quartet. Their first concert was given at the Wigmore Hall on January 10, 1948, appropriately with Mozart’s D Minor Concerto, K. 421. Three members of the quartet had become friendly only in exile in Britain. Norbert Brainin and Siegmund Nissel were violinists, and Hans Schidlof was a violist; all were of a similar age, and all had been students of Max Rostal; and it was another Rostal pupil who introduced them to the fourth member of the quartet, the cellist Martin Lovett. Their first performance, as the “Brainin String Quartet,” was given at Dartington, at Imogen Holst’s invitation in the summer of 1947. 22 Holst was impressed by the performance, and they eventually decided to use Mozart’s middle name; that first London concert, at the Wigmore Hall, was so well received that offers from the BBC were soon followed by others, including a tour of Germany itself, in 1950, followed by a contract with Deutsche Grammophon not long after.
    Claus Moser originally wanted to be a pianist but it didn’t work out. Born in Berlin in 1922, he moved with his family to Britain (to Putney) in 1936, where he attended the LSE. After internment on the Isle of Man, he returned to the LSE, eventually becoming professor of social statistics (1961–70). Prime Minister Harold Wilson made him director of Britain’s Central Statistical Office, an institution that had earlier turned him down because he was an enemy alien. This most loyal of all enemy aliens was knighted in 1973 and made a life peer in 2001, but this wasn’t