The 1924 silent film Die Stadt ohne Juden – The City Without Jews in German – warned against the dangers of antisemitism, and it was met with controversy from audiences when it was released. In the film, a fictional city in Austria expels its Jewish population by train, carrying a chilling resemblance to the Holocaust, which happened almost 20 years later.
Present Music opens its latest season on Oct. 29 with a screening of the film, recontextualized with a 2018 score written by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth. The project is a collaboration between the organization and nine other Milwaukee cultural partners, including the Jewish Museum Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee’s Stahl Center for Jewish Studies.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
“We knew that we needed to do some work around the film, to educate ourselves and let people know the type of experience they were going to be in for,” says David Petry, Present Music development manager.
The performance is surrounded by educational programming such as exhibitions and facilitated discussions. A panel preceding the screening includes Yaniv Dinur, a former assistant conductor with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and the performance’s guest conductor.
Dinur says he was brought on to the project because of his Jewish and Israeli background and his experience conducting concerts set to films. But instead of a full orchestra, Dinur will lead an unusual, striking chamber ensemble of clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, violas, cellos and electronic noises.
“[The composer Neuwirth] herself is Jewish, and she said that she had to really restrain herself from what she was feeling,” Dinur says. “She was feeling just fury, but she didn’t want the music to be furious or go into kitsch.”
The composition juxtaposes the dark-comedy tone of the film and the audience’s present-day knowledge to create unsettling tension. Quotations of klezmer music and classical works such as Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches occasionally surface in a kind of irony, Dinur says.
“At the same time, you hear this electronic sound underneath like something that is very ominous, like something bad is going to happen. When you watch the movie together with this music, you kind of go into a trance – like time stops.”
The film ends with the fictional city realizing its mistake and bringing back its Jewish population, and it’s revealed that the whole story was a dream. “We know that’s not what really happened in real life, so [Present music co-artistic director Eric Segnitz] felt there was a need for something else to close the evening, something more hopeful,” Dinur says.
As a result, Present Music commissioned an arrangement of Woody Guthrie and Lisa Gutkin’s song “Gonna Get Through This World,” arranged by Israeli composer Aviya Kopelman and performed by vocalist Donna Woodall. The lyrics penned by Guthrie depict someone hardened and determined for a better future, and American klezmer group The Klezmatics wrote music to accompany the words decades later.
The performance and programming come as the Israel-Palestinian conflict has intensified and left thousands of Palestinians and Israelis dead in and around Gaza. “When we scheduled this performance months ago, I didn’t imagine it would take this new layer,” says Dinur, who grew up in Israel. “In musical terms, everything you experience affects you as an artist, affects your approach.”
“I don’t think it’s going to change the actual performance; the film is the film and the score is the score,” Petry says. “The film is looking forward, whereas the contemporary score written for that film, the composer is able to look back and frame the film in a way to create a different type of understanding.”
The screening and score performance of Die Stadt ohne Juden will take place at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Windhover Hall on Oct. 29 at 7:30 p.m. The panel discussion will be at the Lubar Auditorium at 6 p.m., and a reception will follow the performance with tables of Present Music’s cultural partners. For a full list of programming, visit Present Music.
