The letter below from the renowned British theatre producer, Peter Hall, indicates that several decades after his death, Hannah Norbert-Miller was still doing her best to promote Soyfer’s work, always hopeful that his theatre plays would become known to wider audiences in the UK. In this final blog on Soyfer’s work I want to show how, thanks to the archive project funded by the Miller Trust last year, records of Soyfer’s work in the Miller Archive inspired performances at the University of London of a number of Soyfer’s songs, thereby raising his profile in a way of which Hannah would hopefully have approved.

Miller 2/107. Letter from The National Theatre, London, to Hannah Norbert-Miller, 1977

Whilst cataloguing Soyfer’s work I found that, although there were numerous records of the texts of his lyrics, there was only one sheet of music in the collection. This was the first page of a setting of Soyfer’s ‘Mein Bruder Vagabund’ from his play Astoria, a satire on the authoritarian state of 1930s Austria. The sheet gives no indication of the date or composer, but with the help of the Jura Soyfer Gesellschaft in Vienna I was able to establish that the music was based on a melody by Soyfer’s collaborator, Jimmy Berg, for a production at the ABC cabaret theatre in Vienna in 1937. Martin Miller was one of the cast – unfortunately I have not been able find out which character he played.

Miller 1/2/4/1/3. Musical score of ‘Mein Bruder Vagabund’, by Jura Soyfer and Jimmy Berg, copied by unknown hand, c. 1940. By kind permission of Trude Berg.

But although it was now known that the music and lyrics were written in Vienna in 1937, the printmark of this document indicated clearly that it had been written in the UK. The record was not, then, one of the cabaret texts smuggled out by Soyfer’s friends, as described in a previous post.

Miller 1/2/4/1/3. Printmark on musical score of ‘Mein Bruder Vagabund’, by Jura Soyfer and Jimmy Berg, c. 1940 By kind permission of Trude Berg.

With the assistance of archivists at the Literaturhaus Wien, I was able to obtain copies of Berg’s own manuscript score from his archive in Vienna. A comparison of the two manuscripts shows some differences: unlike Berg’s version, the London manuscript has a few short introductory bars, and after closer examination it became clear that that the score in the Miller Archive was actually a mixture of two different songs from Astoria: not just ‘Mein Bruder Vagabund’ but also ‘Willst du, zerlumpter Geselle’. These differences, and the differences between the handwriting, suggest that it is unlikely to have been Berg himself who scored it in the brief stop in the UK before going to the USA in about 1939. It is perhaps more likely to have been someone else who could remember the Soyfer/Berg composition from Austria and simply wrote it down from memory once they had arrived in the UK? Any comments about this theory would be very much welcomed!

Miller 1/2/4/1/3. 1st line of musical score of ‘Mein Bruder Vagabund’, by Jura Soyfer and Jimmy Berg, c. 1940. By kind permission of Trude Berg.

Literaturhaus Wien, Nachlaß: N1.EB-16. Berg’s own copy of ‘Mein Bruder Vagabund’ by Soyfer (text) and Jimmy Berg

With the permission of Berg’s widow in the US, the Institute decided to engage two musicians to perform these pieces publicly. The first occasion was the launch of an exhibition on the Miller Archive, ‘Theatrical Lives from Vienna to London’ at the University of London’s Senate House, when baritone Ken Eames and pianist Malcolm Miller performed the songs for 40 attendees. The response was so positive that we repeated the event at the Bloomsbury Festival 2013. This time West End actor/singer Julian Forsyth and pianist Malcolm Miller entertained 140 visitors with Soyfer songs under the heading ‘Political Cabaret in Exile: Music  from the Miller Archive’. Recordings of the songs have been performed at Bloomsbury can be heard here.

Ken Eames and Malcolm Miller performing at the launch of the exhibition, ‘Theatrical Lives from Vienna to London’, IGRS, July 2013

In fact one both occasions our musicians also performed Soyfer’s songs set to music by Marcel Rubin, whose music is not in the Miller Archive but whose archive is at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. Rubin was also an Austrian exile, and he composed the music whilst in France in an internment camp in 1940, probably without knowing who the author of the lyrics was.¹ When he was released he went to Mexico, where he worked in the exile community choir, which would almost certainly have performed his version of the song. So it seemed to me to be a nice illustration of the way that the ideas and writing of Soyfer were kept alive by the refugees after being taken out of Austria, by being dispersed to different countries across the world, where they were adapted and performed in different ways in different places.

‘Political Cabaret in Exile: Music from the Miller Archive’, at the Bloomsbury Festival, Senate House, University of London, 20 October 2013

Footnotes
1 Hartmut Krones, ‘Immer noch “auf der Flucht” (aus Wien): zu Liedern von Hanns Eisler und Marcel Rubin’, in Musik im sozialen Raum: Festschrift für Peter Schleuning zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. by Freia Hoffmann, Markus Gärtner and Axel Weidenfeld (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2011), pp. 161-187 (p. 178).