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Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II by István Deák (review)

on this composer for the Vienna Jewish Museum in 2005. Finally, readers curious to hear the works discussed (the majority of readers, presumably) would surely have welcomed a discography or some form of listening guide to complement the book’s substantial bibliography. Less of a quibble are the author’s allusions to a distinctively Jewish mindset, an ethos with “Talmudic” echoes said to inform the composers’ social behavior and creative processes. This amounts to essentialist thinking, and while such an approach might yield insights into the psyche of, say, the messianically-inclined Arnold Schoenberg (see, for example, Alexander Ringer’s Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew, 1990), it simply cannot sustain a group as diverse in background and creed as Haas’s “forbidden” composers. The author’s arguments make for some fascinating and often instructive reading, but I believe his book would have been stronger had he not gone down this particular path. Even if not intrinsically Jewish, the ethical impulse that motivated Felix Mendelssohn’s Bach Revival in the nineteenth century still underlies much of historical musicology, a discipline that seeks second hearings for unjustly overlooked composers whatever the cause of their neglect. Michael Haas, the longstanding advocate for those whose obscurity owes to absolutely the worst of reasons, fits squarely in this ethical tradition; his Forbidden Music is the best attempt yet to redress a historical wrong, and to reintegrate lost stories and suppressed repertoire into the mainstream of Western music.