Institute for Music in Canada

The 75^th anniversary of the end of the European campaign of World War II is a good time to reflect on the contributions to music in Canada of musicians who arrived between 1937 and 1950 as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. The total number of those who were admitted from Europe during that time was small—not many musicians managed to navigate Canada’s restrictive immigration policies to find safe haven here. Abella and Troper have shown in detail in their book None Is Too Many the obstacles to Jewish immigration that were in place at the time, as well as the antisemitism that was rife in the country, up to and including the highest political and civil service offices. Despite such formidable hurdles, dozens of Jewish musicians (as well as some non-Jewish musicians who left for moral and/or political reasons) did manage to escape Europe and arrive in Canada, and went on to enjoy important professional careers in music over many decades, from the time of their arrival until well into the twenty-first century.

Background and Context

Between 1937 and 1950, ca. 100 refugee musicians from Europe immigrated to Canada. The vast majority came only after 1948, when Prime Minister Mackenzie King in his final year in office slowly began to ease the restrictive immigration laws that had been in place up to that time. The routes that these musicians travelled to arrive in Canada were as varied as their musical interests. A small number arrived directly from Europe; others followed a more indirect path—typically via Britain or the USA, but also from Shanghai (whose sector for stateless refugees provided safe haven for thousands of Jews during the war), Palestine, and other places to which Jews had fled during the Nazi era. Quite a few arrived as interned enemy aliens; they were arrested in Britain, shipped to Canada in 1940 to be placed in prison camps, but then chose to stay on in Canada after their release, as described by the late Eric Koch (1919–2018) in his book Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder. Some of the musicians had received advanced training in elite European music schools; others received much of their training only after arriving in Canada. These refugee musicians are of interest today not only because of the harrowing nature of their personal history and tortuous journeys to Canada, but also because collectively they made such a significant contribution to music in Canada during their careers in a wide variety of fields of activity, ranging from concert management to music scholarship. Collectively, they did quite remarkable work in fostering the spread of European classical music culture in Canada, but they were also involved in the growth of other fields such as Canadian music studies and ethnomusicology.

One prior source attempted to tell the story of these musicians in detail: Paul Helmer’s Growing with Canada. Helmer is a musicologist and professional pianist who taught at McGill University from 1972 to 2002. His specialization as a musicologist was medieval music; this book resulted from a late-career project to document the experiences of European émigré musicians in Canada, many of them his teachers, colleagues, and friends. His book examines the contributions to the musical life of Canada by 123 people exiled from Nazi and Communist regimes in central Europe between 1933 and 1948, who arrived in Canada between 1937 and 1965. These men and women made important and lasting contributions to the growth and development of Canada’s musical life through diverse musical activities, including performance, education, composition, administration, scholarship, and patronage.

The life and work of some of these émigrés has been the subject of previous research, commentary and analysis in monographs and other writings, but most of the figures discussed by Helmer are little known and many had not been written about before at all. The United States attracted famous émigré musicians such as Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Béla Bartók, whose contributions to the musical life of their adopted country is the subject of an extensive and steadily growing scholarly literature. Canada was much more restrictive than the United States in its immigration policies during most of the period under consideration here (the reasons for this are described in painful detail in None Is Too Many). As a result, far fewer exiled musicians found a home in Canada than in the United States, and none of those who did so are internationally renowned. Nevertheless, these refugee musicians did have a profound and lasting impact on the musical life of their adopted country in many areas.

Helmer did archival research and conducted interviews with many of the people that he discusses in his book. It was timely that he took up the project when he did, as all the musicians whom he interviewed have died in the interim. Helmer deposited recordings and transcripts of the interviews, and other primary and secondary research material for his book, in the Marvin Duchow Music Library at McGill University, where it is accessible to researchers. A description and finding aid are available online here.

The story of each refugee musician is singular and unique to that individual, but at the same time is only comprehensible within the framework of the bigger historical picture that unfolded during this time. Variable factors include the conditions of the subject’s pre-migration life (their age at the time of leaving their homeland, prior education and training, socio-economic status, severity of persecution and trauma), the circumstances of their transit (length/uncertainty of the travel, direct or indirect route, duration of time spent in intervening locales), and features related to the resettlement process (degree of economic success, relations with the host society, adaptation to new cultural surroundings). In considering European refugee musicians in Canada, all of these factors must be taken into consideration, on both individual and collective levels.

Many of the musicians who migrated from Nazi-occupied Europe to Canada between 1933 and 1950 enjoyed significant careers in music and exercised a profound impact on the cultural life of this country. As a brief sample, here are a dozen snapshots of refugee musicians and their contributions to four areas of musical activity in Canada: composition, education, performance, and scholarship.

Composition

The composers Istvan Anhalt, Otto Joachim, and Oskar Morawetz received their early musical training in central Europe and arrived in Canada in the 1940s. Morawetz migrated to Toronto in 1940 to join his parents, whereas Anhalt and Joachim came on their own to Montreal in 1949.

Oskar Morawetz was born in Czechoslovakia and studied music in Prague, Vienna, and Paris. With abundant musical talent but no academic credentials, he enrolled in music studies at the University of Toronto and completed a BMus in 1944 and a doctorate in music in 1953. He had a lengthy career as a professor at the University of Toronto and as a frequently commissioned and performed composer. His most popular works, including Memorial to Martin Luther King (1968) for cello and orchestra and From the Diary of Anne Frank (1970) for voice and orchestra, received numerous performances across Canada and internationally. Morawetz explored novel instrumental colours and new harmonic effects in his music, but nevertheless was regarded as a conservative composer by his contemporaries at a time when this was not a prized characteristic in the academic music circles in which he operated. Despite this fact, he enjoyed a lengthy and successful career from the mid-1940s until his creative activity was curtailed by depression and mental health problems in the mid-1990s; he passed away in 2007.

In contrast to Morawetz, Anhalt and Joachim were two of the leading figures in avant-garde composition during the second half of the 20th century in Canada. Born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1919, Istvan Anhalt was conscripted into a Hungarian forced labour battalion, but managed to escape and live in hiding until the end of the war. He emigrated to Canada in 1949, making his home at first in Montreal, where he taught at McGill University until 1971, and then in Kingston, where he was a faculty member at Queen’s University until his retirement in 1984. He made use of modernist compositional techniques and media including dodecaphony, electronic music, and extended vocal techniques. Many of his most significant compositions are for orchestra, but he wrote in all of the major genres, from solo instrumental works to opera. From the mid-1970s onwards, he began to use more traditional compositional techniques, from which he fashioned an original, distinctive, and evocative idiom that was capable of expressing both musical logic and extra-musical ideas. Anhalt’s stature as a composer, together with a steadily growing body of scholarly work on his music, suggest that he will retain his place as an important voice in Canadian music of his era. In addition to his work as a composer, Anhalt had a lengthy and important career as a university professor and administrator, and he was known for his publications as an insightful and imaginative music theorist, especially for his writings on music for the human voice. He died in Kingston in 2012 at the age of 92, after being hospitalized for a year with cancer.

Otto Joachim was a pioneer in electronic music in Canada, as well as a composer in more traditional media. He was also a fine professional violist, and later in life took up painting and sculpture. Born into a Jewish family in Düsseldorf, he studied music there and also in Cologne. In 1934, he fled Nazi Germany and spent the war years in Singapore and Shanghai. With the Communist takeover of China in 1949, Joachim and his brother Walter, a professional cellist, emigrated to Montreal. Walter and Otto enjoyed prominent careers as performers in the Montreal Symphony, McGill Chamber Orchestra, and Montreal String Quartet. As a composer, Otto Joachim was at the cutting edge of modernism in Canada. He was among the first to employ aleatoric and serial methods in his compositions, and in the mid-1950s he set up an electronic music studio in his home, the third such facility in Canada and the first private one. His long and varied career as a composer, performer, and teacher continued until shortly before his death at the age of 99 in 2010.

Education

Two of the most prominent figures in Canadian post-secondary music education in the second half of the twentieth century are Helmut Blume and Arnold Walter. Both men were educated in central Europe, including studies in Berlin during the interwar years. They left Berlin in the 1930s, mainly for political reasons, although Blume did have a Jewish grandmother and so, as he remarked sardonically to Paul Helmer, “according to the racial policies of the time, I was besudelt (polluted)” (Growing with Canada, p. 325 n. 48). Both men made their way to England and arrived in Canada within a few years of each other, Walter in 1937 to take up a teaching job in Toronto, and Blume in 1940 as an interned enemy alien.

The two exerted a decisive influence on music education in Canada in the post-war years, Blume at McGill University and Walter at the University of Toronto. Each man helped to lead university music education in Canada away from an outmoded British system that was geared to training church organist/choirmasters, towards a modern synthesis of European and American systems. With their elite European upbringing and education, Blume and Walter decisively transformed their respective educational institutions, creating new professional standards that exerted an enormous influence on the musical life of Canada, an influence that continues to be felt today.

In the field of vocal training, three refugee women musicians had an extraordinary influence on the musical education of young Canadian singers in the postwar era. Emmy Heim and Ruzena Herlinger both enjoyed leading professional careers as singers in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Heim associated with many of the leading composers, poets, and artists of the day (Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hoffmannsthal, and Rilke were among her acquaintances; Kokoschka made a portrait of her in 1916 –see left) and she had many contemporary works in her repertoire. Herlinger commissioned and premiered Der Wein, a concert aria for soprano and orchestra by Alban Berg. Irene Jessner enjoyed a flourishing opera career in central Europe during the 1930s. All three women had fled Europe by 1938, and eventually ended up in Canada. Heim and Jessner became highly sought after vocal teachers in Toronto; Herlinger taught in Montreal. Heim’s pupils included Lois Marshall and Mary Morrison; Herlinger’s pupils included Joseph Rouleau and Huguette Tourangeau; Jessner’s pupils included Teresa Stratas and Mark DuBois. Collectively, these three women helped to establish Canada as a vocal powerhouse in the postwar musical world.

Performance

Eminent performers among this group of refugee musicians included the harpsichordist Greta Kraus and the pianist John Newmark. Kraus (whose portrait hangs in my office) studied at the Vienna Academy of Music with Heinrich Schenker (analysis) and Hans Weisse (piano). She arrived in Toronto in 1939 and her performances and broadcasts as a harpsichord soloist and continuo player, as well as a director of early music ensembles, made a decisive contribution to the appreciation of Baroque music in Canada. Newmark studied music in his native Bremen and also in Leipzig, and later settled in Berlin. While living in London in 1939 he was interned as an enemy alien and sent to Canada. After his release, he settled in Montreal and became a much in demand accompanist. He performed thousands of recitals in Canada and during lengthy tours abroad, working with hundreds of Canadian and international artists. He also made many recordings and was frequently heard on radio and television broadcasts.

Scholarship

Canadian music studies and ethnomusicology both benefitted from the contributions of refugee musicians. Helmut Kallmann was born into a Jewish family in Berlin and as a teenager he was sent to England in 1939 as part of the Kinder­transport program. Like Newmark and Blume, he was interned as an enemy alien and sent to prison camp in Canada. Upon his release in 1943, he enrolled in music studies at the University of Toronto, graduating with a BMus degree in 1949. During his long career in music librarianship, first with the CBC and later as the founding Head of the Music Division at Library and Archives Canada, he was a tireless champion of Canadian music studies. Ida Halpern completed a PhD in musicology at Univer­sity of Vienna in 1938 on Franz Schubert, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1939. In addition to teaching at University of British Columbia (including the first courses in ethnomusicology there) and fostering classical music performances, she recorded and documented some 500 songs of First Nations peoples. As Kenneth Chen notes, Halpern’s achievement in assembling one of the most extensive collections of First Nations music of the west coast is remarkable, especially considering “the technical, techno­logical, physical, sociocultural, historical, institutional, legal, attitudinal, and many other challenges she had to overcome in her fieldwork” (1995, p. 47).

Given the widespread contributions to music in Canada that these refugee musicians made, which the above description has only begun to document, research on this topic is sorely needed. The forthcoming European Refugee Musicians in Canada research project at the Institute for Music in Canada will engage with the wider debate on the flight of artists from Nazi-occupied Europe, and position that debate within Canadian intellectual history.

Toronto Summer Music Festival 2019: Beyond Borders
New Orford String Quartet Tenth Anniversary Concert
Walter Hall, University of Toronto
Friday, July 12th, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Program:

Joseph Haydn String Quartet in D Major, Op. 20, no. 4
Christos Hatzis String Quartet No. 5 “The Transforming” (premiere)
Intermission
Ludwig van Beethoven String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, no. 3
     encore: François Dompierre Par quatre chemins, IV “Pavane solitaire”

The New Orford String Quartet:
Jonathan Crow and Andrew Wan, violins
Eric Nowlin, viola
Brian Manker, cello

An enthusiastic sold-out audience greeted the New Orford String Quartet with cheers and a rousing standing ovation at the conclusion of its tenth anniversary recital program. Jonathan Crow noted that the program was modelled on the quartet’s first public recital at the Orford Arts Centre in July 2009, which featured Haydn Op. 20, no. 2, Ernest MacMillan’s String Quartet, and Beethoven Op. 132 [i.e. Haydn Op. 20 – Canadian work – Beethoven].

Conventional wisdom has it that only full-time string quartet ensembles can reach the highest professional standards in this demanding medium. If that is the case, then the NOSQ is the exception that proves the rule. Despite the fact that the members all have full-time orchestral positions, the NOSQ upholds the very highest standards of string quartet performance. Wan and Crow alternate on first violin; in this case, Wan played first in the Haydn and Beethoven, while Crow took that role for the Hatzis. Each member of the quartet is a full and equal participant in creating the group’s beautiful collective sound, which ranges from the most delicate of whispers (a dynamic level often featured in the Hatzis work) to a full-on thunderous fortissimo (e.g. the glorious C-major excitement in the outer movements of Op. 59, no. 3).

Haydn’s six Op. 20 string quartets are the first collection of great works in the medium. (Hans Keller in his stimulating book The Great Haydn Quartets includes only Op. 9, no. 4 of the composer’s earlier quartets in his discussion of Haydn’s 45 masterpieces in this medium.) The Op. 20 works are very different in idiom from the later Haydn quartets, which only goes to show how far the composer travelled in this medium. The NOSQ perhaps chose Op. 20, no. 4 for this occasion to fit in with the Toronto Summer Music Festival theme “Beyond Borders,” given the references in the work to the Romani violin idiom, as explicitly stated by the tempo designation of the third movement, Menuetto: Allegretto alla zingarese (“in gypsy style”). The work gives each player opportunities to shine: the first violin dominates in the first movement, the theme and variations second movement features solos for each player, the trio of the third movement is a solo for cello, and all four players exchange rapid-fire motives in the Presto scherzando finale. It was a terrific work to show off the exceptional performance skills of each member of the NOSQ.

The longest work on the program, and the most demanding for both the performers and the audience, was the new quartet by Christos Hatzis. In his pre-concert lecture, Hatzis noted that a commission to write for the NOSQ was an invitation to include all manner of virtuosic string quartet writing, secure in the knowledge that the players would be up to the task. But he noted as well that he eschews “complexity for the sake of complexity,” and feels strongly that the music must always be expressive and convey content persuasively and meaningfully. In the case of this quartet, there is an extra-musical inspiration revolving around the story of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, completing what the composer calls a “psychological hermeneutic” begun in his String Quartet No. 4 “The Suffering” (which was premiered by the Penderecki String Quartet in 2018). Hatzis has provided a program note about the work on his website here, and a 23-page essay about it here.

Hermeneutics aside, the quartet is an engaging and varied work in three substantial movements. The NOSQ gave an entirely committed and persuasive reading of the quartet, which showcased the ensemble’s extraordinary musicianship and interpretive skills. Each movement featured varied expressive ideas, many of them extremely quiet in dynamics (and on numerous occasions, alas, all but obscured by audience coughs; good luck to the sound engineer who will be tasked with removing as much bothersome audience noise as possible from the broadcast recording of the work). The quartet incorporates a kind of late-Romantic tonality (at times bringing to mind the quartets of Janáček to this listener) and also a 24-note quarter-tone scale which was effectively employed by the composer and persuasively realized by the NOSQ. Hatzis managed to hold the audience’s attention continuously over the course of the 45-minute duration of the quartet, and both he and the performers received a warm ovation at the end.

The NOSQ have shown themselves to be outstanding performers of the Beethoven quartets on numerous occasions, and they certainly rose to the task of Op. 59 no. 3 beautifully for this tenth anniversary recital. The mysterious and still modern-sounding opening of the work, with its extraordinary meandering dissonances and hushed dynamics, was spellbinding, and the contrast with the ebullient Allegro vivace that follows was nothing short of stunning. Andrew Wan, whose superb recent recording of Beethoven’s Op. 30 violin sonatas has deservedly been getting frequent radio airplay, shone in the opening movement, which contains some of the most thrilling music in all of the Beethoven quartets.

Not even the NOSQ, unfortunately, could convince me of the merit of the middle two movements of the quartet, which for me mark the (rare) low-water mark in the Beethoven quartet repertoire. The second movement is plodding and dull, sounding like second-rate Mendelssohn avant la lettre, while the third movement aims for innocence but merely achieves mundanity. This is not to criticize the performance of those two movements by the NOSQ; they did what they could with the material. Beethoven was obviously saving his powers for the finale, a scintillating fugue that drives the players to the very limits of their abilities. Eric Nowlin got the movement going at a breathtaking pace, and as the others joined in one by one, the music built steadily in excitement. By the end, I am sure that the heart of pretty much everyone hearing the performance was racing as fast as the eighth notes in the music, and the audience leapt up as one to greet the quartet with cheers and sustained applause. The NOSQ obliged with an encore that contrasted completely with the fugal finale of Op. 59, no. 3: a languorous slow movement from a quartet by the Quebec composer François Dompierre, which the quartet has recorded on the Atma Classique label. The Dompierre brought the audience back to earth and restored heartbeats to a normal rate.

This was a recital to remember. If the rest of the Toronto Summer Music Festival lives up to these standards, audiences are in for a truly memorable few weeks of music making. Hats off to the Artistic Director, Jonathan Crow, for his vision, his leadership, and his incredible musicianship. To quote Honest Ed Mirvish, a talent like this comes along once in a lifetime, sometimes never! How lucky we are to have him in our midst here in Toronto.

The musicologist Carl Morey died on December 3, 2018 in Toronto at the age of 84. He served as the Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian Music and the Director of the Institute for Canadian Music from 1991 until his retirement in 2000. Obituaries are available online from the Faculty of Music website here, and from the U of T News website here.

On Thursday, 11 April 2019 in the lobby of the Edward Johnson Building from 4 to 6 pm, the Faculty of Music held a Tribute to Carl Morey to honour his memory, with speeches by friends and former colleagues, and musical performances. The program for the event is available here: PROG-Carl-Morey-tribute_Apr11.

Here are the opening remarks by Robin Elliott on that occasion:

My name is Robin Elliott and I have the honour of serving as the Jean A. Chalmers Chair of Canadian Music here at the University of Toronto. I inherited this chaired professorship from Carl Morey, who held it from 1991 until his retirement in 2000. There was talk at the time of Carl’s retirement about letting the Chalmers Chair lapse. Carl fought hard and prevented that from happening; Canadian music studies, and I personally, owe him a big debt of gratitude for that.

Carl supervised my PhD thesis The String Quartet in Canada, and I also took several courses with him during my graduate studies in musicology at the University of Toronto in the 1980s. These ranged widely, from medieval music notation, to Music in Paris at the turn of the 20th century – the latter course reflecting his deep and abiding love for the city of Paris, his home away from home. It may seem strange in retrospect that with three medievalists on staff at the Faculty of Music back then, it was Carl who taught the medieval music notation course. He was technically a Baroque specialist, having completed his PhD thesis at Indiana University in 1965 on the late operas of Alessandro Scarlatti – which reminds me, I also took a course on the Scarlatti operas with him. However, his musicological training was both broad and deep. He studied medieval music at Indiana University with Willi Apel, whose book The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600 was the bible of early music notation in those days. Carl’s studies with Apel readily equipped him to explain the mysteries of ligatures, neumes, and mensural notation to graduate students.

When Carl was himself a graduate student in musicology in the 1960s, the field pretty much ended with Beethoven, chronologically speaking; more recent music was left to performers, music theorists, and sundry other musical enthusiasts, but was not thought to be a topic worthy of serious investigation by true scholars of music. And so Carl chose a Baroque topic for his research, but that is not where his true musical interests lay. He did love Baroque music, but his real passion was for the canonic operatic repertoire from Mozart to Richard Strauss. Eventually musicology caught up with Carl’s interests, and late in his career he was very pleased to be able to offer the Faculty’s first ever course on the Operas of Puccini, when Puccini had finally become a respectable topic for serious musical study.

Carl’s main contribution as a scholar was in the field of Canadian music studies – a field that is thousands of miles and hundreds of years distant from his own doctoral studies, but one that nevertheless became his abiding research interest. Carl really came into his own as a publishing scholar late in his career. In the last four years of his tenure at U of T, he published numerous articles, several editions of music by Glenn Gould, and no less than four books on Canadian music, including Opera Viva, the handsomely produced history of the Canadian Opera Company that he co-wrote with Ezra Schabas, combining his love of opera and music in Canada. The article on Carl in the first edition of Encyclopedia of Music in Canada states that he was at work on a history of music in Toronto. On numerous occasions, I heard him disavow that assertion; indeed, I am sure that more than once he said there was not a grain of truth in it. I was somewhat surprised then, to say the least, when not long before his death Carl turned over to me an extensive article – more like a short book really – that is a draft of his history of the beginnings of concert life in muddy York and Toronto. It is carefully researched, beautifully written, and meticulously detailed. On that same visit, I spoke to Carl about a beautiful manuscript that I had just been examining – it is a professional copyist’s full score of Ernest MacMillan’s choral/orchestral work England: An Ode. Carl knew the score well, of course, having been responsible for the revival of England in 1993, on the centennial of MacMillan’s birth. However, his own personal favorite musical manuscript was the holograph of the final scene from Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier. He showed me his copy of the beautiful facsimile reproduction of that manuscript, published in 1964 on the centennial of Strauss’s birth, and he spoke at length and with intimate knowledge about Strauss’s beautiful penmanship and the clinical precision with which this transcendently beautiful music is laid out on the page. I was deeply touched when Carl’s daughter Rachel presented me with that very publication after Carl’s death, as a bequest from Carl. When I opened the covers of it, I discovered that tucked inside was another gem, a reproduction of Strauss’s autograph manuscript of the song “Morgen,” which Strauss had presented as a wedding gift to his bride, the soprano Pauline de Ahna, in 1894. This is why our first musical performance for this tribute to Carl was Strauss’s heart-stoppingly beautiful song “Morgen,” performed for us by Monica Whicher and Steve Philcox.

Jane Cooper.The Canadian Nightingale: Bertha Crawford and the Dream of the Prima Donna. Victoria, BC: Friesen Press, 2017. 334 pp., ill.

ISBN 978-1-5255-1740-2 (hardcover, $26.49) / 978-1-5255-1741-9 (paperback, $15.49) / 978-1-5255-1742-6 (eBook, $9.99). All prices are quoted from the Friesen Press website as of 14 November 2018. The book is also available from Indigo and Amazon. The author’s website about the book, including a video trailer for it, is here, and there is an article about Cooper and the book on Ottawa’s artsfile website here.

Jane Cooper was intrigued by a passing reference in a letter written by her great-aunt in 1924 about Berta Crawford, an English opera singer in Warsaw. She googled the singer’s name and learned that she was actually Canadian, not English. Her curiosity piqued, Cooper embarked upon what turned out to be a six-year research project that has resulted in this meticulously detailed and gracefully written biography. Undaunted by a lack of interest in her book from traditional publishers, Cooper launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money and then had the biography produced by Friesen Press, a self-publishing outfit based in Victoria, BC. The resulting book meets the very highest editorial and production standards and is a worthy addition to the not terribly extensive library of books about Canadian opera singers.

Bertha May Crawford was born in Elmvale, Ontario (ca. 135 km north of Toronto) in 1886, and died in Toronto in 1937 at the age of fifty. The limited horizons those bare facts suggest – a life lived within the confines of a small area of southern Ontario – could not be further from the truth. After lessons with Edward Schuch in Toronto, Crawford was trained in London and Milan. Her career as a professional singer began in Italy but blossomed in Poland, and subsequent travels took her across the Russian empire, from Finland to Vladivostok. In Italy she had changed her name to Berta de Giovanni as a secret nod to her father, whose name was John (Giovanni in Italian). But after leaving Italy for Eastern Europe she dropped the “de Giovanni” while keeping the Italianate spelling of her first name, so she was “Berta Crawford” in Europe but reverted to “Bertha Crawford” for concerts in North America. For most of her career she was based in Warsaw, where she was highly regarded for her appearances as a coloratura soprano in opera, in concert, and later on the radio. Her signature roles were Gilda in Rigoletto, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, and Violetta in La traviata.

Crawford enjoyed a lengthy professional and personal relationship with Zofia Alexandra de Słubicka (née Kosińska), a wealthy and widowed Polish aristocrat whom she met in London. The two were inseparable friends by the end of 1912, and remained so for the next eighteen years. They lived together in Warsaw – perhaps, Cooper speculates, in a Boston marriage – and experienced the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the creation of an independent Poland together, only to have a bitter falling out for unknown reasons in the early 1930s. After the break with her patroness and friend, Crawford returned to Toronto but died just three years later. Despite repeated attempts throughout her career, Crawford was unable to translate her successes in Poland and Russia into an international opera career. Aside from one appearance in a semi-professional production of Rigoletto in Washington, DC, she never sang in an opera production in North America. She did sing with orchestras and in solo recitals in Canada, and to a limited extent in the USA, but the “dream of the prima donna” eluded her on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The  Great Depression, followed by the break with Zofia, left Crawford all but destitute. At the time of her sudden death from pneumonia in Toronto her career was effectively over and she was living on the edge of poverty. Her life was memorialized in numerous obituaries, but after her death Crawford quickly faded from memory. There were no recordings to preserve her voice for posterity, and no pupils to keep the memory of her career alive. The entry on Crawford in the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada reduced her life story to a mere four sentences. If Cooper’s curiosity had not been aroused, Crawford would remain all but unknown, the details of her life forgotten. But now Cooper has done a remarkable job of constructing a detailed narrative of Crawford’s life and career from countless bits and pieces of information that she unearthed in Canada, Poland, Russia, and online. In addition to this excellent biography, she has also contributed a fine Wikipedia entry on the singer.

Cooper presents two biographies within the covers of this one book. A factual biography unfolds chronologically in the course of the book’s fifteen chapters. There is a certain amount of conjecture, but it is always presented as such – the evidence of what happened is given first, followed by a number of possible interpretations, often presented as questions. Each chapter is followed by what Cooper labels an “entr’acte,” and these taken together comprise a second biography – or rather, a charming biographical novel. The entr’acte chapters consist of vignettes that illustrate important events in Crawford’s life. Each one was inspired by an actual historical artifact – a newspaper clipping, a photograph, and so on – but Cooper uses these concrete objects as springboards for her invention, presenting imagined conversations and richly detailed descriptions to provide a more rounded, if somewhat speculative, character portrait. In the wrong hands, this approach could have fallen flat, but happily Cooper is just as adept at historical fiction as she is at biography. The entr’acte chapters are entirely engaging and, to this ear at least, strike just the right tone. They capture the manners, customs, and conversational idioms of a bygone era without being at all contrived or awkward.

The extensive research that Cooper undertook is detailed in the acknowledgements, notes, archival sources, and bibliographical materials listed at the end of the book. She got in touch with Crawford’s living relatives, including a nephew, since deceased, who recalled having met Bertha, and others who had photos and clippings to share. Research trips to Poland and Russia resulted in many helpful contacts and unearthed further archival sources, and the Ancestry website proved useful in detailing not only Crawford’s family lineage but also her transatlantic crossings, thanks to that source’s extensive passenger records. Each phase of Crawford’s life and career, from her church choir positions in Toronto to her Polish radio performances, is presented in compelling and impressive detail. After a twenty-five year career as a policy analyst in Ottawa, Cooper has found a new calling as a Canadian music researcher. I look forward with keen anticipation to her next project, whatever it may be.

I have not read anything by Zadie Smith. Not White Teeth, not On Beauty, not even Swing Time. Those are all on my wish list, but I have such a backlog of great books on my wish list that I may not get around to Zadie Smith for quite a while. But when I noticed that her most recent book, an essay collection titled Feel Free (released on 29 Jan. 2018), includes an essay on Justin Bieber … well, that couldn’t wait. I’m not a Belieber – at least, I don’t think I am – but I have taught a class on Bieber in years past as part of a unit on celebrity culture in my Music in North America course. So, curious to see what the British celebrity author had to say about the Canadian celebrity musician, I put a hold on Feel Free via the Toronto Public Library online catalogue. However I was number 36 on the waitlist and I couldn’t wait for my number to come up – it might be weeks from now, by which time this would all be such old news. I had to read the essay on Justin Bieber now. So I parted with $18.07 and bought the eBook. Was it worth it? Was that one essay worth $18.07?

On the whole I would say that yes, the essay – titled “Meet Justin Bieber!” – was worth the price of admission to the book. To start with, it is a new essay that has not been published elsewhere, unlike most of the other essays in the book. So this is not recycled Zadie Smith, it is original material. More to the point, it is an entertaining yet also thought provoking article. It dates from around 2013 (Smith is a bit vague on that point) which makes it ancient history as far as Bieber’s life story is concerned, but there are timeless elements to it that render its date of origin a moot point. I think the essay was likely written sometime after January 2014, when Bieber was charged with DUI in Florida, a fact that is alluded to obliquely in the essay. A very brief postscript was added more recently, perhaps in 2016.

Smith begins by ruminating on what it must be like to be Justin Bieber: “What does it feel like? Does it still feel like being a person? If you met Justin Bieber, would he be able to tell you?” Side note: I have not met Justin Bieber, but one of the students in my class a couple of years ago went to high school with Bieber in Stratford, and did not have nice things to say about him. But high school was a long time ago in Bieber years. I’m sure that Bieber is a very different person nowadays. Maybe, as Smith intimates, he no longer even feels like he is a person. To anticipate the philosophical thrust of Smith’s essay, it is possible that Bieber has transcended the Heideggerian Dasein to become a hyperreal Baudrilliardian simulacrum, leaving behind the mundane day-to-day reality that the rest of us inhabit. Or maybe he is just bummed out by being stalked by freaks on the sidewalk and is hiding out in his basement.

In an attempt to answer her provocative questions, Smith engages in a little thought experiment: she imagines a meeting between Justin Bieber and Martin Buber. It is an exercise in the “random input” technique of lateral thinking that Edward de Bono developed in 1968: you are stuck for an idea, so you pick two words that have nothing in common, try to figure out how to relate them to one another, and watch the creative sparks fly. But this is not quite a textbook example of that process, as the names were not chosen entirely at random: Smith observes in a footnote that Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German name. [That name, incidentally, means “beaver,” a singularly appropriate moniker for a Canadian celebrity musician.] This similarity of names has not gone unnoticed on Twitter, where an account that goes by the handle of “Justin Buber” offers tweets that combine “the pop stylings of Justin Bieber with the existential wisdom of philosopher Martin Buber”; it features an avatar that photoshops Buber’s bushy beard onto Bieber’s boyish face.

One point of contact that Smith discovers between Buber and Bieber is relationships: Bieber sings about them, Buber ruminates about them. Bieber’s relationships revolve around adolescent heteronormative mating rituals; Buber’s revolve around God. Smith observes that personal relationships range from the casual contact of a fan meet-and-greet (“I just touched Justin Bieber!”) to a life-changing experience in which one’s deepest essence is altered by another, e.g. holding your newborn child and watching her open her eyes for the first time.

Smith riffs for a while on Buber’s I and Thou and the two types of relationship that it explores: I-It and I-Thou. The former Smith likens to the meet-and-greet, in which the celebrity (Bieber) is an object to be approached, touched, and narrated about (on social media, inevitably); as Smith observes, it is “As if he [Bieber] were not a person at all, but a mountain range they had just climbed.” The characteristic communication mode of an I-It relationship is monologic; Smith cites Bieber’s 2012 single “Boyfriend” (700 million views on YouTube to date) by way of example. In this song, Bieber (who was only 18 years old at the time) is not looking for Buber’s ideal “living mutual relation” with the anonymous girlfriend; he is talking at her rather than with her. An I-Thou relationship, on the other hand, is dialogic, and Socrates is the model: the subject is continually in communication with others, “Recognizing the reality of other people – and having them recognize the reality of you.” If only Bieber could be more like Socrates… But this type of deep, meaningful connection is difficult to maintain – rather like Bieber’s on-again, off-again relationship with Selena Gomez, Smith wryly observes. Fans of Bieber will be happy to see that in the brief postscript Smith finds evidence in the album Purpose (2015) that the singer is moving from the superficial I-It mode to the deeper and more intimate I-Thou. He may yet transcend his Dasein to reach a new level of existence. Ever better, if current reports are to be believed, he might get back together with Selena Gomez.