Hitleritis

August Janssen, the Dutch restaurateur who owes much of his fame to the slogan "Janssen Wants to See You,'' has had two great disappointments in his profitable life. One came with Prohibition when the chimes which accompanied the broaching of a cask of beer were stilled. The other was when his son Werner refused his offer of $250,000 to give up a musical career. When Werner Janssen left Dartmouth he took a $3-a-night job playing the piano in Leo Reisman's band in Boston. He drifted to Manhattan, conducted in cinemansions, wrote popular tunes ("Dancing Honeymoon") and New Year's Eve in New York, an ambitious work which won him a three-year fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

In Europe this winter young Werner Janssen has made a name as conductor and composer. But last week he learned that even a determined young musician cannot always rule his own actions. Bristling with energy he arrived in Berlin to conduct Rubin Goldmark's Gettysburg Requiem, a symphony by the Russian Borodin and his own Louisiana. Scarcely was he off the train when he was informed that his program had been changed for one of German music. Gettysburg had been banned. Director Lorenz Horber of the Berlin Philharmonic said, "because we are having trouble with the U. S. just now." Louisiana was finally reinstated on the program, an action which seemed inconsistent to those who did not know that Goldmark was a New York Jew.

Composer Goldmark is but one of many musicians to suffer from the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler. Conductor Bruno Walter (Schlesinger) has been forbidden to give concerts in Germany, gone to Holland to stay. Conductor Otto Klemperer was attacked and beaten by Nazis. Conductor Fritz Busch (no Jew, but a Socialist) was on the stand ready to conduct in Dresden one night last month when Nazi sympathizers raised such a disturbance that he had to hand his baton over to an assistant.

Musicians the world over are waiting to see whether or not Arturo Toscanini will fulfill his plan to conduct at Bayreuth this summer. Last week Toscanini vehemently expressed his resentment of the way his colleagues have been treated by requesting that his name be the first one signed to a musicians' protest cabled to Chancellor Hitler. In an open letter Pianist-Conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch recalled the attack made on Toscanini two years ago in Italy when he refused to conduct the Fascist anthem, how other musicians stood by him then. Sergei Koussevitzky going so far as to cancel concerts he had intended to give at the Scala, thus jeopardizing his chance of ever being invited to conduct in Italy again.

Bayreuth will suffer sadly if exposed to Hitleritis. Toscanini has not conducted in Italy since the fracas over the Fascist anthem. Boston hurt herself more than she hurt Karl Muck when she ousted him on an unproven Wartime charge of pro-Germanism. After the Revolution. Russia forced most of her musicians into exile. Many years will pass before Russia regains the musical prestige it lost with such refugees as Feodor Chaliapin, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofieff, Sergei Rachmaninoff.

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