Censored: Art & Power Is The Newly-Announced Name Of The Cleveland Orchestra's Citywide Festival In Spring 2020

The Cleveland Orchestra announced the name of its groundbreaking citywide festival, Censored: Art & Power, scheduled for spring 2020. The festival is centered around the Orchestra's performances of Alban Berg's opera Lulu in May 2020, and seeks to spur discussion about the role of art in society, government censorship, and prejudice, taking as a starting point the Degenerate Art & Music movement in Nazi Germany. As a major focal point of the Orchestra's 2019-20 season, the festival will feature a variety of collaborative presentations surrounding and leading up to the opera performances (May 16, 19, and 22).

Additions to the festival include:

Education programming in collaboration with Facing History and Ourselves, which will provide Cleveland area teachers and students with resources to help them engage in meaningful conversations about racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism;

An exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art honoring artists from its collection whose work was removed by Nazis and featured in Germany's 1937 Degenerate Art presentations;

A Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque screening of G.W. Pabst's 1929 German film Pandora's Box, which was inspired by the same plays in Frank Wedekind's "Lulu" cycle that Berg adapted for the libretto of his opera;

And a series of collaborative lectures hosted by Beachwood's Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. Additional details of these and other partner events will be announced throughout the 2019-20 season.

During the festival in May 2020, The Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director Franz Welser-Möst will focus on the opera Lulu, which German composer Alban Berg wrote during the Nazi rise to power in the early 1930s. Looking at both the abusive and oppressive subject matter of the opera itself and how government censorship halted the work's premiere, Censored: Art & Power is designed to explore the ways in which music and composers during this era were damaged by prejudice, propaganda, political control, and hate that surrounded what became known as the Degenerate Art & Music movement instigated across Germany in the decade before the Second World War. In addition to banning artworks, musical performances, and literature that didn't conform to the Third Reich's idea of classical beauty, the Nazi Party held a series of widely-attended public exhibitions providing examples of art and music it believed was harmful or decadent - due to Jewish, Communist, African American, Modernist, and other minority influences.

"One of the highlights of this season is the opera Lulu," says Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. "It is an intense and challenging work both musically and in its subject matter. Yet this kind of programming is successful in Cleveland because we have such an extraordinary, adventurous, and open audience. With the festival we are creating around Lulu, we will look at the relationship of art and politics in Berg's lifetime - of how certain music in the 1920s and '30s was politically abandoned and prohibited. We are featuring works by [Erwin] Schulhoff, [Ernst] Krenek, and others - works that the Nazis labeled 'Entartete Musik' or Degenerate Music. It was a period of autocratic, authoritarian regimes who condemned any artistic expression outside of their narrow view with a heavy hand. Artists and their work were prohibited through censorship. Just as the character of Lulu is abused and abusive in her own way, we will look into how music and art can be abused by a system - and how a system can turn people on one another. These are important topics, not only from the past but in today's world."

Festival Features Various Composers and Collaborations with Local Arts Organizations

A week-long series of concerts at Severance Hall will showcase Berg's Lulu alongside other pieces, primarily from the 1920s and '30s, including compositions by Mary Lou Williams, Bohuslav Martinů, George Antheil, Krenek, and Schulhoff. The festival also features a piece commissioned by The Cleveland Orchestra in 1944 from American composer William Grant Still. Although Censored: Art & Power will expose audience members to banned works from an earlier time, the performances are intended to inspire introspection and discussion about the role music and art can play in contemporary society.

For this festival, The Cleveland Orchestra is collaborating with distinguished arts organizations across Northeast Ohio, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland School of the Arts (Cleveland Metropolitan School District), Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, Facing History & Ourselves, and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage to co-present associated events, film screenings, and education programs. These partnerships will form a citywide festival to inspire reflection and dialogue around Degenerate Art & Music and the effects of weaponizing art today. The events will illustrate how artists and their work were affected by stringent political control, prejudice, and propaganda during the years around the Second World War and to what extent these conditions continue to exist in present-day society. Further details about these projects, events, programs, and exhibitions will be announced in the coming months.

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