Tracking Composers on the Run

From that lone spark came Fugitives, a program that Mr. Blier presented with Kate Lindsey, a mezzo-soprano, and Joseph Kaiser, a tenor, at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday night.

The overarching theme was the disruption in European music and culture caused by Hitlers rise to power. Starting with works of late Romantic opulence, Mr. Blier followed a thread through the arch, politicized cabaret of the Weimar period to songs by artists whose careers (and in some cases lives) were ended by the Nazis, finishing with music by composers who fled to America. All were Jewish, and all had their output branded as entartete degenerate.

The conductor James Conlon has asserted that Hitler changed the course of musical history through censorship, displacement and genocidal policies that caused the deaths of creators like Hans Krasa and Victor Ullmann, represented here. Mr. Blier proposed a similarly sweeping thesis: that Hitler destroyed the German art song tradition, exemplified by a group of selections by Zemlinsky (Meeraugen included), Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker and Erich Korngold.