Music Restored Celebrates the Work of Composers the Nazis Tried to Erase
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- 8 hours ago
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A chance discovery set celebrated conductor James Conlon on a 25-year mission to restore unjustly neglected music.
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by Paul Hodgins for the Colburn School & The Emma and Adam Zhu Family Foundation
James Conlon was already a renowned conductor enjoying a busy international career when something extraordinary happened that forever altered his life. While visiting Germany for a conducting engagement, he encountered an exquisite work by a composer named Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was completely unknown to him. Zemlinsky wasn’t some young undiscovered genius, but a composer who had died in obscurity 1942 at the age of 70 – a man who, until a certain fateful point, had enjoyed a very successful career himself.
As with so many other Jewish artists of that era, Zemlinsky's career was derailed by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Forced to flee from Prague to the U.S. in 1938, Zemlinsky was virtually unknown in his adopted country, and he had trouble re-establishing his career. He fell ill, suffered a series of strokes, ceased composing, and died in Larchmont, New York, of pneumonia, leaving behind a significant body of unjustly neglected work.
The discovery inspired Conlon to look for other composers whose careers were cut short or diminished by the Nazi regime. With the support of Los Angeles philanthropist Marilyn Ziering and the Colburn School in Los Angeles, Conlon established the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices in 2013. The program was renamed Music Restored: The Ziering-Conlon Center for Exiled and Suppressed Composers in 2025.
The discovery of Zemlinsky’s music “started a lifelong passion for Conlon,” said Music Restored program director Adam Millstein, who is also a violinist and a Colburn alumnus. “He became interested in recovering the music of these composers – about two generations who were taken out of history books quite literally by the Nazis, whether through exile or murder or complete cultural destruction.”
The mission to recover this “lost” music seemed daunting, but “more lost music has survived than was at first thought,” Conlon said. “It has taken decades of dedicated work to recover and publish it.”
Students from the Colburn Conservatory of Music rehearse for a concert presented as part of Music Restored: The Ziering-Conlon Center for Exiled and Suppressed Composers. Photo courtesy of the Colburn School/Abby Mahler
Suppression took many forms
As unfortunate as Zemlinsky’s career was, he at least survived. “Suppression by the Nazis took many forms,” Conlon said. “The worst and most extreme was murder in the death camps. Many were in the (concentration) camps. Others’ music was banned and the composers themselves, along with many other musicians, were forbidden from playing in public.”
Conlon said it’s impossible to know exactly how many composers were affected by Nazi suppression. “It includes the many who were forced to flee and emigrate, like Zemlinsky. Taken altogether, (the number) is in the hundreds if not the thousands.”
Conlon began conducting recovered works at the Ravinia Festival in the early 2000s. “Every summer we’d focus on a different composer. I give talks before the performances. I always put these works first on the program because of the fear that an unknown name will empty out the (audience),” Conlon said in a 2008 talk at Brandeis University. “If you don’t know these names, please don’t feel ashamed. Most of these names fell off the radar for many, many, many decades.”
Music Restored supports educational opportunities, programmatic representation in world-class performances, and competitions that inspire young musicians to not only learn about the artists but to return to their music throughout their career. In 2025, the project expanded to include the launch of a new website, MusicRestored.org, which includes complete content from the former Orel Foundation website, one of the world’s most important online resources for music suppressed by the Nazis. (The word orel means “light of God” in Hebrew and “eagle” in many Slavic languages. The name was chosen for its symbolic meaning in the context of the foundation's mission.) It also serves as a home for the digital and performance content produced by Music Restored which includes multimedia online series, album releases, livestreams, recorded performance content, documentaries and live performances and lectures around the world.
Music Restored is developing a global youth ambassador program that encourages young musicians to help disseminate the work of suppressed composers to a wider audience. Two young musicians have been standouts in this regard: Aaron Zhu, a freshman in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience at University of California San Diego; and his sister, Celine Zhu a senior at Tarbut V‘Torah Community Day School in Irvine.
"Aaron and Celine have extensively researched and frequently performed the music of repressed composers," Milstein said. "They did a lot of digging into this history. They're been spreading the good word of Music Restored in their concertizing. They're not only just playing the music; they'll speak about the composers as well. Their level of knowledge is really quite remarkable."
Conlon pointed out that not all the composers whose works are celebrated and performed by Music Restored are obscure. The list includes familiar names such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Darius Milhaud.
“Schoenberg lost his positions in Berlin and was forced to emigrate,” Conlon said. “He came to live in West Hollywood.
“Berg’s music was banned. He tragically died of sepsis in 1935, so it’s conjectural to know what might have happened to him. But the Nazis didn't like him because he associated with Jewish musicians, notably Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, and because his music was considered 'degenerate.'" (That was the derogatory term used by the Nazis to describe any art that was deemed transgressive and didn’t conform to its philosophy.)
Students from the Colburn Conservatory of Music rehearse for a concert presented as part of Music Restored: The Ziering-Conlon Center for Exiled and Suppressed Composers.. Photo courtesy of the Colburn School/Abby Mahler
Fond memories of Milhaud
Milhaud, one of the group of brilliant French composers known as “Les Six,” was of Provencal Jewish heritage, Conlon said. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence but he had to emigrate in 1940 after the Nazi invasion of France. Milhaud came to the U.S., where eventually he would teach at Mills College in Oakland, and helped to found the Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. He returned to France after the war.
Conlon harbors fond memories of Milhaud. “He taught every summer at Aspen, where I had the honor of meeting him, getting to know him and his wife, and performing one of his great jazz works, ‘La creation du monde,’ in his presence.”
Schoenberg, Berg and Milhaud weren’t included on his project’s original list of suppressed composers, Conlon said, because “we were concentrating at first on composers who were relatively unknown to the public. ‘Music Restored’ is an umbrella term. It signifies that every story is different, with one common characteristic: They were all suppressed in one way or another by the Nazi regime.”
Music Restored doesn’t have a large staff at the moment, although Conlon is optimistic that it will expand. “Our immediate purpose … is to introduce this subject to the students of the Colburn School and encourage the performance of as many works as possible. These young musicians are the ones that are charged with the challenge and responsibility of bringing this music forward for the next 50 years.”
For more information about Music Restored: The Ziering-Conlon Center for Exiled and Suppressed Composers, visit the website.
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