About the "Lost Composers"

by Timothy Jackson

Many well-established composers found that an international reputation was of little help when the Nazis came to power in 1933. The advent of the Nazis was to prove disastrous for less well-known Jewish composers like Paul Kletzki, as well as for those few German composers – like Reinhard Oppel – who were antagonistic to the regime. Kletzki narrowly escaped the Nazi regime thanks to his Swiss wife. Although Oppel – a close friend and colleague of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), the famous Viennese Jewish music theorist – was not Jewish, he was an outspoken critic of the Nazis, gradually became persona non grata and died in 1941.

But the intrinsic quality of Kletzki's and Oppel's music did not pass unrecognised before 1933. Indeed, in the late 1920s, Kletzki's career as a composer was blossoming; Oppel, too, was enjoying increasing success through publication, performance and even radio broadcast of his music throughout Germany , Austria and Switzerland . But the Nazi accession to power put a damper on both of these composers' careers, and their music was buried for many years – quite literally.

Kletzki, Furtwängler and Kletzki's Third Symphony

Before 1933, Paul Kletzki (1900–73) was a hugely successful young composer and conductor, a wunderkind who enjoyed the patronage of two of the greatest musicians of the time, Wilhelm Furtwängler, with whom he studied conducting and composition in Berlin in the early 1920s, and Arturo Toscanini. That indirectly connects Kletkzi, too, with Schenker: Furtwängler had been one of Schenker's most advanced students. On 19 May 1931 , Furtwängler had written a letter of recommendation for Kletzki which reads: ‘In Paul Kletzki I recognise not only an extremely talented composer but one of the few conducting talents of the younger generation who really has a great future ahead of them’.

The controversy concerning Furtwängler's role in Nazi Germany continues to this day. And it is relevant to the 2002 recording on Teldec of Furtwängler's Second Symphony and the BIS recording of Kletzki's Third Symphony scheduled for release in March 2004. In Phillip Huscher's programme notes to the Furtwängler Second Symphony, where the Chicago Symphony is conducted by Daniel Barenboim, the production is billed as an apologia to Furtwängler: by recording the Second Symphony, the Jewish conductor Barenboim, now head of the Chicago Symphony – who was labelled ‘a phenomenon’ by Furtwängler in the summer of 1954 – corrects the historical ‘wrong’ of the Chicago Symphony withdrawing its offer to Furtwängler to conduct the orchestra in 1948 because of protests concerning Furtwängler's alleged Nazi sympathies. Huscher writes that Furtwängler ‘conducted very little during the war’. But as anybody familiar with Furtwängler's many recordings would know, he conducted a good deal during 1939–45. As Michael Kater observes in The Twisted Muse (Oxford University Press, 1997):

Many of his [Furtwängler's] future performances were to take place within highly propagandistic frameworks, rendering his art eminently political. Among the first of these, ironically, was his directing Wagner's Die Meistersinger at the same party rally that ushered in the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935 – an action on the part of Furtwängler that made a mockery of his broad pledge to save Jews. In 1942, after Furtwängler's tour to Scandinavia , Goebbels noted that he was ‘overflowing with national enthusiasm’. Two years later [in 1944] the minister remarked that ‘the tougher things become, the closer he moves to our regime’. What is more, ‘Furtwängler shows himself from his best side. He is a genuine patriot and warm adherent and advocate of our politics and martial leadership. All one has to do these days is to tell him what one wants from him and he will immediately deliver’.

It was only as the regime crumbled in early 1945 that Furtwängler, fearing for his personal safety, fled to Switzerland .

New information about Furtwängler's relationship with Kletzki not only sheds light his attitudes toward Jewish colleagues, but also is relevant to the genesis and semantics of Kletzki's Third Symphony (1939). Apparently, the young Kletzki had lived with Furtwängler in the 1920s, who had treated him ‘like a son’. In 1925, Furtwängler had permitted Kletzki to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic – the youngest person ever to do so – and had recommended his music for publication by Simrock and Breitkopf und Härtel. In his recently published memoir My First 79 Years, Isaac Stern recalled:

There was a very well-known conductor named Paul Klecki [the original, Polish, spelling of Kletzki], a wonderful musician with whom I've played over the years, at La Scala and in Switzerland , America , and elsewhere. He was a Polish Jew of remarkable musical ability, with a lovely Middle European sense of humor, a wry smile, and a pair of huge eyebrows – one went up and the other down, giving a unique expression to his face. He had been a protégé of Furtwängler's, had lived in his house, was virtually a member of his family, a son to him. In 1933, Klecki fled Germany and ended up in Italy , without work and nearly starving, barely managing to live on three or four bowls of spaghetti a week. He told me that when he read in the papers that Furtwängler was coming to Switzerland to conduct at the Lucerne Festival, he wrote to him there: ‘Remembering the closeness of our lives together in Berlin for so long, I ask you as a friend to send me some help here to Italy . I would ask you only when you are out of Germany so that you can do this with foreign funds that would not necessarily go through any German authority’. Klecki didn't receive an answer for a long time. Finally Furtwängler wrote, ‘My dear Paul, as your old friend, I would love to help you. As a German, I cannot’. [pp. 68–69].

In September 2003, I visited Kletzki's widow Yvonne (his second wife) at her home in Mueri bei Berne and was provided with a copy of letters from Furtwängler to Kletzki and his first wife, and the draft of a letter from Kletzki to Furtwängler. The exchange reveals much about the effect of the Nazi persecution of Jewish musicians on what had been a close friendship.

Apparently, sometime in 1937, Kletzki must have written to Furtwängler seeking his help since Furtwängler responds ( 1 December 1937 ):

Dear Kletzki,

In the middle of a great deal of work I can tell you only briefly that I have written to Budansky on your behalf. I ask you to immediately write to him and present your case.

With best greetings and wishes, your Wilhelm Furtwängler.

The correspondence continues, now with a letter to Mrs Kletzki from the Hyde Park Hotel in London , dated 3 June 1938 :

Dear Mrs. Kletzki,

Today I sent the radio in Bern a telegram concerning your husband and hope greatly that it will be successful. Your husband will hear from me in the near future.

In great haste and with heartfelt greetings, your Wilhelm Furtwängler.

The letter to which Isaac Stern seems to be referring is dated 23 June 1938 and was written from Paris . Furtwängler writes:

Dear Friend,

After receiving your letter from the 21st [June?] I immediately spoke with Simon [Budansky?] and put your case emphatically before him. He asks you now to write directly to him. He spoke about how difficult it generally is [to engage Jews] but I am indeed of the opinion that within and concerning this issue the artistic perspective is of importance and, in this respect, your case is a hundred times more worthy of consideration than so many others.

I would be glad to help you somehow, but as a German this is completely impossible [my emphasis. Instead of this I would ask you to write to [my former secretary] Miss Geissmar, London WC1, 36 Red Lion Square . Perhaps, Felix Warburg in New York can facilitate admission and immigration to America . I will write to her about this.

Keep me posted on developments. My address from now on is again Potsdam , Viktoriastrasse 36.

With best greetings – also to your wife –

As always, your Wilhelm Furtwängler

The next day ( 24 June 1938 ), Furtwängler was in Zürich, and wrote again:

Dear Mr Kletzki,

Send me word in Paris , Hotel Majestic, (Place Etoile) how your prospects look in Switzerland and how you are doing.

If there are no possibilities, then you must see if it is possible to go to America as quickly as possible. In this case, it would be best to loose as little time as possible.

I ask only, insofar as you need me and my help, to take it up.

For today in all haste,

Your Wilhelm Furtwängler

On the surface, it seems as if Furtwängler is trying to help Kletzki, if not to launch a career in Switzerland , then to emigrate safely to America . But, at the same time, in reality, he did almost nothing; without doubt, Kletzki was profoundly wounded by Furtwängler's emphasis on his ‘Germanness’ as something preventing assistance when Kletzki found himself blacklisted as a Jew and in desparate straights. Furtwängler's diffidence on this point would come back to haunt him when he tried to renew his friendship with Kletzki and his wife (who had remained in Switzerland throughout the War). At the Clinique La Prairie in Clarens, we find Furtwängler writing to Kletzki on 29 March 1945 :

Dear Mr Kletzki,

Actually I wanted to make an appointment in Zürich at least once, and was greatly pleased to see you in the streetcar. Unfortunately, I had to expect, from the reaction of your wife, that a future meeting would not be welcome. It would have been better if you had already told me this in Zürich.

With best greetings,

Your Wilhelm Furtwängler

[P.S.] Surely you do not believe the lies of the critics concerning my Nazi sympathies etc.

Kletzki responded to this letter as follows:

Dear Mr Furtwängler,

I am convinced that you have already felt that it is better that we abstain from meeting. Please consider all that has taken place, and you must understand that by far the best thing is that I am left to go peacefully on my way as I have been accustomed during long and difficult years. This has nothing to do with you personally, but is the unavoidable consequence of all that has happened to me, my country [ Poland ], and my nearest relatives. We must first wait some time for painful wounds to heal.

With best greetings, your Paul Kletzki

Furtwängler responded on 1 May 1945 , again from ‘La Prairie’:

Dear respected Mr Kletzki,

Just as the artist must fulfil his mission, which is not bound to any particular people and must be responsible to his own, individual, self, and lift himself above the reigning mass-insanity, German-hatred [is a kind of mass-madness that wants to make a whole people responsible without further consideration for the frightful crimes of a small clique. It is just like anti-Semitism; they are both cut from the same cloth.

That you earlier and until now had considered yourself to be my friend – and that just in this moment you want to distance yourself from me – disappoints me deeply, but I cannot heal you.

Live well; I wish you all the best for your future career.

Wilhelm Furtwängler

Kletzki's Third Symphony, completed in October 1939, is dedicated to Madame Olga Oboussier, a wealthy woman who had purchased music paper for the destitute refugee, is subtitled In Memoriam. This epigraph can be interpreted in various ways. It may signify the already considerable number of victims of Nazism by 1939, including Kletzki's own family: his mother, father and sister were to be murdered in the Holocaust, although he did not receive official confirmation until the Polish ambassador gave him the news before the first performance of the slow movement of the Symphony' in Paris in 1946. Or, it may be ‘to the memory’ of the great German art-music tradition that Kletzki had felt part of, but which he now believed – like Furtwängler personally – had rejected him. Indeed, it is clear that time did not heal these wounds for Kletzki the composer since he ‘lost his voice’ after 1942 – not to mention his pre-1933 music (as will be explained below). Kletzki claimed that his post-War compositional silence emanated from ‘The shock of all that Hitlerism meant [which] destroyed also in me the spirit and will to compose’.

Kletzki’s Music – A Major Discovery

Kletzki was teaching at the Scuola Superiore di Musica in Milan in 1936 when he realised that, as a stateless Jew, he was in mortal danger. He buried his music in a large metal chest, and fled first to Russia and then to Switzerland , where he lived as a refugee during the Second World War. The area where the chest was buried was heavily bombed, and Kletzki believed that his music had been destroyed. After the War, he stopped composing. His last works, his Third Symphony (dedicated to the memory of victims of Nazism) and his Fourth String Quartet, were created while he was a refugee in Switzerland . In a newspaper interview published in Australia in 1948, Kletzki observed bitterly ‘that even the copperplates from which my music was lithographed in Germany were melted down’.

In 1965, in the course of some excavations in Milan , the chest was discovered and returned. At this time, Kletzki was afraid to open it, believing that all his manuscripts and scores had turned to dust. It was not until after his death in 1973 that the chest was opened; the music was found to be perfectly preserved.

After the war, Kletzki achieved world-wide fame as a conductor. He was warmly received in Dallas , where he served as principle conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 1958–61. In a review on 3 November 1960 , the Dallas music-critic Eugene Lewis wrote enthusiastically:

Paul Kletzki is the kind of conductor who is the despair of reviewers. He eludes their pigeon-holing, and he debases their coinage. Just when one thinks he has the measure of the man and his music, Kletzki brings forth something new and wonderful. Just when one has exhausted his supply of superlatives, Kletzki achieves something that demands a new superlative.

Kletzki was a Wunderkind. Born in Łódż, Pavel Klecki became the youngest member of the Łódż Philharmonic Orchestra, when at fifteen, he joined its violins. From 1918–21 he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw , and, in 1921, won first prize in a composition competition offered by the Warsaw Philharmonic. That year, he moved to Berlin , where he continued his studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik. In 1925 Furtwängler invited him to guest-conduct the Berlin Philharmonic. A 1933 press release issued by the record company Telefunken reproduces a letter from Furtwängler where he praises Kletzki ‘not only as a specially talented composer, but also as one of the few talented musical conductors of the young generation, who have a great future ahead of them’. Toscanini also weighed in: ‘I estimate very highly Paul Kletzki as composer and conductor and have the best opinion of his capacities’.

As a composer, Kletzki had enjoyed remarkable success in Germany – until the Nazi take-over in 1933, of course. The two most distinguished music publishers – Simrock (Brahms's publisher) and Breitkopf und Härtel – brought out all of his music. His works were premiered in the most important German concert halls. For example, the Piano Concerto, Op. 22, first performed in the famous Gewandhaus, Leipzig, was heralded by the press as ‘once again a real concerto for piano’. The musicologist Alfred Einstein praised the Berlin performance of Kletzki's Second String Quartet, Op. 13 as ‘a work of ripeness, personality, and style’.

The Nazi accession to power in 1933 forced Kletzki to flee to Italy . From 1934, as mentioned, he taught at the Scuola Superiore di Musica in Milan . In 1936, as Fascist Italy became increasingly anti-Semitic, Kletzki fled to the Soviet Union where he guest-conducted in Baku and Leningrad before being named the chief conductor of the Kharkov Symphony Orchestra in the Ukraine . But Stalin's Terror – and specifically the purges of orchestral musicians and foreigners – forced Kletzki to flee to Switzerland in 1938 (his wife, whom he had married in 1938, was a Swiss citizen, a circumstance which ultimately saved Kletzki's life). As reported in the Schweizer Illustrierte Zeitung (September 1943), Kletzki never knew when the order to expel him from Russia would be carried out:

Paul Kletzki was rehearsing Beethoven's Fourth Symphony with his orchestra [the Kharkov Philharmonic] when a detachment of soldiers, led by officers, marched in. Should they give him, one of the few remaining foreigners, the terrible news [of his deportation]? – Officers and men sat in the hall, pulled out their pocket scores of the Symphony and quietly followed the rehearsal. Until the performance, they appeared punctually every day.

In 1940 and 1941, Kletzki guest-conducted the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande; in 1943 and 1944 he served as the principle conductor at the Lucerne Festival. After the War, he toured widely, including an extended tour in Israel in 1953, where he performed with Jascha Heifetz.

Kletzki first conducted in the USA in 1958. On 19 February Harriett Johnson, the critic of The New York Post, reported: ‘Polish-born Paul Kletzki, who made his local debut last night leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, looks like a prophet and conducts like a composer, which he was in his youth’. In a review of a concert by the Baltimore Symphony (also in February 1958), Weldon Wallace wrote that

Paul Kletzki, Polish-born musician, was given a standing ovation last night in the Lyric Theater, where he directed a program by the Baltimore Symphony. Mr. Kletzki has been engaged as the permanent conductor of the Dallas Symphony. His work last night indicated that the Dallas orchestra is indeed fortunate to have acquired a leader who has such a mature approach to music.

In 1961 Kletzki returned to Montreux, which was to remain his home base for the rest of his career. Finally, in 1966, he succeeded Ernest Ansermet as the General Music Director of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande – a position which he held until his death in 1973.

Kletzki left a series of distinguished recordings, which have recently been re-issued. His cycle of the Beethoven Symphonies, recorded by Supraphon with the Czech Philharmonic orchestra in the 1960s, was re-issued to critical acclaim in 2000 (SU 3451-2012, SU 3451-2012, and SU 34552012). He was especially well known for his Mahler and Sibelius. He made three recordings of Mahler's First Symphony – with the Israel Philharmonic in 1954, the Vienna Philharmonic in 1961 and the Philharmonic Orchestra, also in 1961 – all released by EMI. His recording of the Fourth Symphony with Emmy Loose and the Philharmonia Orchestra (1957) is widely considered definitive (EMI CZS 7 67726 2). His interpretation of Das Lied von der Erde with singers Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Murray Dickie, and the Philharmonic Orchestra (1959) has just been re-issued (EMI 5735292). His readings of the first three Sibelius symphonies are a revelation: Symphony No. 1, Philharmonia Orchestra, Testament SBT 1049 (1955, 1994); Symphony No.2, Philharmonia Orchestra, EMI CZS 7 67726 2 (1955, 1993); and Symphony No. 3, Philharmonia Orchestra, Testament SBT 1049 (1955, 1994).

Bridge Records has just released seven songs from Kletzki's Opp. 2 and 3. As the writer of the booklet text remarked:

The early songs recorded here display a composer who has not merely mastered the late-Romantic tonal language of Mahler and Strauss, but has already found a quite individual voice. His oeuvre contains piano music, four string quartets, three symphonies, several concerti and much else besides. Judging from the scores, the level of inspiration seems to remain remarkably high. We are confident that, as more works of Kletzki are released, he will be recognized as one of the major discoveries of the past decade.

Reinhard Oppel, an Unknown Master

Reinhard Oppel (1878–1941) was born in Thüringen, in the grand duchy of Coburg-Saxony-Weimar, the home province of Luther , Bach, Goethe, Nietzsche and Wagner. Later in life, he often returned to home, where he accompanied the Duchess of Saxony – an amateur singer – in her palace in Coburg . Indeed, many of Oppel's Lieder and chamber pieces were composed for a small circle of the Saxon aristocracy and educated bourgeoisie. Oppel was a close friend of Schenker sending him many of his compositions for critique and discussion.

During the War Oppel's music was hidden by his widow Elfriede. When the Oppel family fled from East Germany , Oppel's music was buried in his old First World War soldier’s trunk in a garden house in the vicinity of Leuna, near Halle . In 1990, with fall of the Berlin Wall, Oppel's son, Kurt, was able to return and dig up the chest; he then brought it to his home in West Germany near Frankfurt . Oppel's books had been hidden in the church steeple of the town. In 1998, the University of North Texas invited Kurt Oppel to visit, and in 1999, the Oppel Collection, comprising the bulk of Oppel's surviving music and analytical work with Schenker, was placed on deposit in the UNT library.

Coincidentally, Schenker's music, too, was preserved in a trunk hidden by Erwin Ratz in Vienna . He took possession of the trunk just before Frau Schenker's deportation to Terezín, where she perished in 1945, a few weeks before the camp was liberated. After the War, Ratz sent the music to Schenker's student Oswald Jonas, who had emigrated to California and landed a position at UC-Riverside. Schenker's music is therefore now in the library of that university.

Oppel's friendship with Schenker was initiated in a letter dated 15 October 1913 , and the correspondence extends until Schenker's death in 1935. The importance of composition for the friendship is revealed by Oppel's very first letter, since he introduces himself by sending one of his own pieces (preserved in the Oppel Collection in the University of North Texas , Dallas ).

Dear Dr Schenker,

For a long time it has been my intention to write to you and to thank you for the stimulation and instruction that I have received from your writings and works. Already I have your new edition of the Beethoven Op. 109 under my fingers. It is unfortunate, terribly unfortunate, that Vienna is so distant; I would, even today, like to spend considerable time as your pupil benefiting from your verbal instruction.

With reference to his own Sonata for Violin in D minor, composed in 1910 (now in the Oppel Collection), Oppel continues, ‘Please accept as a small token of my thanks the enclosed opus, which I incorrectly called a Sonata rather than a Suite. It would give me great pleasure if it found favour in your eyes’. The main body of the letter concludes with a request for information about Schenker's own compositions. Schenker's diary reveals that he sent Oppel a detailed critique of the Sonata. Over the next twenty years, Schenker sent Oppel many detailed comments on his music, and also tried to help secure performances. In 1929 and 1931, Oppel composed two sets of Waltzes especially for Frau Schenker, an accomplished pianist. In his letters, Oppel kept Schenker abreast of his compositional activities, announcing concerts and radio broadcasts of his music.

Years later, in a letter ( 27 January 1978 ) to Franz Eibner (a professor at the Vienna Conservatory, who had written inquiring about documents now in the Oppel Collection), Oppel's wife Elfriede stressed his early autonomous development:

According to my recollection, the friendship between H. Schenker and my husband began shortly before..the First World War, as the two, independently from one another, investigated analytically the compositional principles of Bach's works and discovered the so-called 'Urlinie.' Through Schenker's publications they then became acquainted, they exchanged their research for years and saw each other often, in Vienna or Galtür or in Bad Ischl until Schenker's death. My husband died in 1941. About the political situation and the tragic death [in concentration camp] of Frau Schenker let us be silent.[I would be grateful if] it would be rewarding and possible for you, based on the extant materials, to mention the significance of the collaboration between H. Schenker and R. Oppel for the history of music.

At the beginning of 1935, deeply concerned about Schenker's health, Oppel had sent a letter of inquiry to Schenker's student Felix Salzer. In a letter from Salzer preserved in the Oppel Collection dated 3 February 1935 , approximately two weeks after Schenker had passed away, Salzer replied with a report on the circumstances of his death. Not only does Salzer's letter provide important details concerning Schenker's last days, it testifies to his and Oswald Jonas's efforts to publish Free Composition and to the aspirations of the next generation of Schenkerians to continue the ‘new teaching’ in the context of an ‘Institute for Schenkerian Studies’ to be based in Vienna, with summer courses in Salzburg:

Planned are summer courses on Schenker and his teaching eventually [to be located] in Salzburg as a 'Prelude' for the establishment of a Schenker Institute. But all of this remains Zukunftsmusik! In any case, now we must spread his teaching with all the required intensity [of effort]. Naturally, I will do so with all of my own resources, nevertheless everything is still very much in the planning stages.

Unfortunately, the Nazis put an end to budding Schenkerian movements in Vienna and Leipzig . The new Center for Schenkerian Studies at the University of North Texas , established in association with the Reinhard Oppel Memorial Collection, represents an effort to realise these aspirations.

Like Schenker, Oppel was a member of the German ‘cultural aristocracy’. Bitter over Germany 's defeat in the First World War, Oppel briefly hoped that the Nazis would rid Germany of ‘cultural Bolshevism’, but both he and Schenker quickly came to regard Hitler with contempt. Oppel's and Schenker's opposition to the new government are clearly documented in Schenker's diary: in an entry for 13 July 1933 , Schenker noted receiving a letter from Oppel: ‘evidence of [his] disenchantment with the new regime.’ On 23 July, Schenker reported ‘Letter to Oppel dictated: I confirm him in his scepticism.’ Oppel refused to join Nazi organizations and maintained critical distance from the regime. His son Kurt recalls his refusal to give the Nazi salute, and his implacable – and imprudent – opposition to the Nazis. Until 1938, Oppel often played the organ not only in Protestant and Catholic churches, but also in synagogues in Leipzig .

In spite of his well-known criticism of prominent contemporary composers (Schoenberg, Strauss, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Reger), Schenker believed a few of his close associates and students to be accomplished composers. In a letter to Oppel from 16 August 1932 that survives in the Oppel Collection, Schenker makes further reference to the songs of his student, Otto Vrieslander, to the music of Hans Weisse, and Oppel himself:

What you have written concerning the difficulties in securing performances of your compositions grieves me perhaps even more than it does you. While I firmly believe that the appreciation of the true value [of works of art] can wait, nevertheless I consider it especially helpful to find a practical way to get them into circulation. This is because, in my opinion, the composer requires the power of the work like his own physical [strength], and additionally should benefit from the judgement of the work by his contemporaries. For this reason, then, I am pleased that Vrieslander – although with outside patronage – could publish the Lieder. All the more do I wish that you too would receive such assistance! Many years ago I preached the same thing to Dr. Weisse. Think then, how much more convincing all of our efforts would have been if your's and Weisse's music were [widely] available.

The Reinhard Oppel Memorial Collection has recently acquired the letters from Oppel to his dear friend, the composer and choral conductor Josef Knettel. Oppel died in November 1941, before the tide of war had turned against Nazi Germany. Indeed, at the height of Hitler's success, Oppel voiced his opposition to the war, and to the Nazis, to Knettel quite openly:

4 April 1941

My dear Josef, for a long time I wanted to write to you, but always failed do so – I am sleeping; although things are going somewhat better.... each train trip exhausts me. I took the [Orchestral] Variations with me. But what use is the will if the body fails. My sleep is better again, and I read more again, even a great deal of Shakespeare... My heart is not in this war!!! Where will it lead? Communism will not be destroyed by Hitler. The victims! Our finances are catastrophic. The Party's arrogance! [...] How long did the empire of Alexander the Great last? None of the peoples who are forced under our control want to know anything of us. But concerning all of this one can only speak in person….

Within 20 years we have war again in another combination. My Symphony, Variations for Orchestra, and Bach research, everything is put aside. – And how far ahead are we spiritually and culturally of Shakespeare and those like him? Not one atom further, in spite of all discoveries and machines and devilish inventions... Mrs Schenker's fate is despicable; she is driven from apartment to apartment and now must share a single room with two others! Where he [Schenker] had done so much for Germanness, German spirit and German art.

Although many letters from Schenker to Oppel have been lost, a document testifying to Schenker's high regard for Oppel's music has survived. Preserved in the Oppel Collection is a copy of a letter from Oppel to Knettel in which Oppel quotes extensively from remarks concerning his piano pieces Opp. 21, 26, 27 and 28. Since these collections were published in the late 1920s, Schenker's comments probably date from 1929–30:

Your music came to me in my darkest hours like a ray of sunlight. I did not think it possible that a German musician could write a piece of music today like the first one in Op. 26, in which every note, together with the other notes (like human beings), is a complete event in itself; in which everything is expressed in a manner which is pure, heartfelt, elegant and profoundly German. Number 3 from the same book is also strikingly beautiful. Number 2 from Op. 27 is full of poetry and sadness. And Number 2 from Op. 21 is so exquisite and heartfelt. There is much that, to my ears, sounds harsh and unmelodious, but that stems from the complexity of your nature: S. Bach's world of feeling and voice-leading [Stimmführungswelt], in which you are so well grounded and which you are able to transmute into a new synthesis in your own distinctive way – this is an achievement of daring. Where it succeeds it exerts a strange magic, offering something new, something of you; but it is too difficult to be able to succeed all of the time. No matter. Anyone (like me) who insists on perfection, as you might say, to redeem the material and enable the artist to redeem himself, only requires one single piece for which he can express his gratitude, like the one mentioned above, for example. In years gone by I would have drawn attention to these works straight away in a music journal, but these days all the journals keep their distance from me. It would not be too wide of the mark to say that I am 'boycotted' or 'sabotaged,' which does not shock me in the least even though it slows my work down and makes it more difficult. That is enough for now; do continue to compose music that is pure and comes from the heart. I played your works to my pupils and they were all amazed that there could still be music that was so profoundly moving.