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Article Excerpt
Musica Viva is a vital part of Australia's immigrant history. It was founded by, and, in its early years, largely dependent upon, the monies and hard work of central and southern European refugees. As a society, it formed a support network for 'New Australians' arriving in a country suspicious of, or simply hostile towards them. As a chamber music ensemble, it recreated a familiar cultural activity in the concert halls of an alien nation. Written histories of Musica Viva have recognised the significance it held and continues to hold for many who immigrated. What remains absent from these histories, however, is the meaning the organisation held within the wider social context of 1940s and 1950s Australia. By relating Musica Viva to the cultural environment of post-war Australia--to debates over 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' culture, to the nation's cultural aspirations and insecurities, and to the newly emerged identity of the Australian as 'urban sophisticate'--some of the missing pieces can be restored. These pieces demand a reassessment of the current explanations for Musica Viva's survival and success and they complicate conventional understandings of the relationship between 'new' and 'old' immigrant cultures in post-war Australia.
The circumstances surrounding Musica Viva's founding in 1945 have proved popular amongst several historians of Australian music and culture:
Richard Goldner, a professional violist from Vienna, arrived in Australia in 1939 having escaped the Anschluss. His initial success as a jeweller and later as the inventor of 'Secret Project No. 3' (a special zipper designed for the Allied services) earned him a mention on Cinesound and in the official Australian history of world war two. With the money he accumulated from his invention and the help of his friend Walter Dullo--an immigrant from Berlin--Goldner attempted to reinvent Viennese musical culture in Australia. He provided financial backing for 'Richard Goldner's Sydney Musica Viva'--an ensemble that imitated his late teacher's from Vienna. But on the day of its first concert, 8 December 1945, tragedy struck: there was a blackout across Sydney. An army generator was located at the last minute and the concert went ahead with success (and car headlights lighting the entrance). Central and southern Europeans flocked to the concert and a society was soon formed to support a smaller, permanent ensemble. Over the next few years of intensive touring, Musica Viva modified Australia's 'narrow and provincial' tastes by providing regular first-class performances of classical music. (1)
Richard Goldner's achievements and the circumstances in which Musica Viva was founded are both impressive and remarkable, but their appeal as fascinating stories has come at a historical price. A great way to add personal interest to an academic treatise, they have dominated the brief histories of the organisation's early years. Wilton and Bosworth, for instance, rightfully focus on the story in their work on the immigrant experience. They retell it as an example of the impact 'New Australians' had on the country's musical culture. Although cautious of the mutual incomprehension and failure to appreciate the other's culture that can arise in the process of immigration, the two historians do seem to agree with their subjects' assessment that Australia was culturally backward, or, at least, just not interested in what went on in musical life outside London, prior to 1945. Wilton and Bosworth describe an Australia that was a 'parochial world', lacking exposure to world-class performances and much repertoire, and whose 'provincial simplicity' (2) was challenged, and eventually influenced, by Musica Viva's Viennese tastes.
Wilton and Bosworth's history of Musica Viva adheres to a standard narrative in Australian cultural history. Despite their reluctance to support the argument wholeheartedly, their history--like the work of Geoffrey Serle and Donald Horne before them--allied the development of 'high-class' artistic appreciation in Australia to the arrival of European refugee immigrants. (3) Serle had identified 1930s and 1940s refugees as an important audience for 'highbrow' music and as agents of new intellectual life in his work, From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973). (4) And, although he too had reservations regarding their ultimate impact, these seem to have been lessened when he revised his text fourteen years later. By the mid-1980s, Serle appears to have accepted the narrative of Australia's cultural conversion. He replaced his previous observation that wartime European immigrants had 'relatively little impact on creative culture, except in painting', (5) with the more positive statement that, as both appreciative audience and skilled participants, immigrants 'made their chief impact on creative culture in painting and music'. (6)
Even Chapple and Covell, in their more extensive considerations of Musica Viva, kept to a narrative focus when discussing its nascent years. Chapple essentially summarised Goldner's unpublished autobiography in her chapter on the founding years of Musica Viva. (7) Covell similarly followed this storyline in his classic, Australia's Music. He distilled Musica Viva's activities from 1939 to 1952 into Goldner's arrival, engineering prowess, Musica Viva's first concert and its early cultural influence (prior to its three-year hiatus in 1952 due to financial difficulties). (8) Covell's article for Musica Viva's fiftieth anniversary publication, written twenty-eight years later, restated his earlier conception of the initial ensemble and its society as a transplantation of Viennese musical culture. It bestowed credit on European immigrants for establishing chamber music as an index of 'civilised' society and it echoed Serle's and Wilton and Bosworth's recognition of the audience immigrants provided for this 'high-class' cultural form (in Australia's Music he also suggested that American servicemen had similarly helped encourage concert attendance). Unlike other histories, Covell's did dedicate space to the support Musica Viva had received in its early years from the Australian-born who sought solace in the harsh war and post-war years. The explanations he offered for this support in his later work are, however, unsatisfying. It was, according to Covell, an Anglo-Celtic puritanism that predisposed Australians to favour the non-programmatic music and minimal instrumentation of a chamber ensemble, and it was their traits of generosity and hospitality that led them to subscribe to the society and volunteer their time to assist it (a dubious proposition considering Australia's past and current treatment of refugees). (9) Perhaps the best synopsis of Musica Viva's written histories to date are the titles of two articles from the organisation's anniversary booklet, The First Fifty Years: 'Vienna Down Under' (10) and 'Richard Goldner--the Musical Moses'. (11)
By reassessing Musica Viva's history in this article, it is not my intention to trivialise the experience of those who sought refuge in Australia and the rich cultures they brought with them. Nor is it to dismiss the determination and years of sheer hard work that Goldner and many other immigrants put into establishing the society. Their history deserves the attention and research it has received. It has, however, drawn attention away from questions that still need to be asked of Musica Viva's past. What was the society's relationship to the broader social and cultural environment of 1940s and 1950s Australia? What role did it come to play in the nation's sense of cultural identity? For Chapple and other historians it has been enough to explain Musica Viva as a demonstration of immigrants' 'conception of a civilised society', (12) but it is important to consider how it might have fitted into pre-existing notions of 'civilised' culture in Australia. By investigating how Musica Viva related to, and interacted with, its wider social context, it is my intention to do justice to a past oversimplified in histories...
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