'Jewish composer of AIR signature tune deserves an award'

Over half a century ago in Chhasara--a tiny village near the perennially-parched river Bhukhi in Gujarat's Kachchh--the local Brahmin priest who doubled up as the librarian would switch on the village's lone radio for an hour every morning. Even as elders gathered around the cute Murphy set to listen to the news, a gente, confluence of Hindustani, Carnatic and Western sounds would engulf them, fusing seamlessly with the cow's mooing, the rooster's call and the first azan at dawn. Waking up to the AIR signature melody--which was first broadcast in the mid-1930s-- an adolescent Amrit Gangar would often wonder: "Who had composed such beautiful music?" The answer--which spawned a book for Gangar many years later-- is bound to surprise many at the NCPA tomorrow evening.

Walter Kaufmann -- the Jewish musicologist who famously composed All India Radio's (AIR's) famous signature melody in Bombay after fleeing Nazi Germany -- will resurface during a lecture by guitarist, chamber musician and artistic director of Canada's ARC Ensemble Simon Wynberg on January 8. "I'm thrilled to be coming to Mumbai where Kaufmann spent 12 years," says Wynberg, who had not heard of Kaufmann until 2016 when Bret Werb, one of Wynberg's colleagues at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, asked him about the Jewish composer, prompting a visit to Kaufmann's archive in Bloomington in Indiana, US. It threw up a fascinating man. "His wife was a niece of Franz Kafka's, he was friends with Albert Einstein and he had an overarching ambition to settle in the United States," adds Wynberg about Kaufmann who had taught music at the Indiana University at Bloomington after leaving India in 1946.

Born into a German-speaking Jewish family at Karlsbad, which was then a spa city in Germany with outstanding symphonies and regular opera performances, Kaufmann grew up in precarious times. Anti-Semite Nazism under Adolf Hitler was on the rise and the Second World War was around the corner when Kaufmann graduated with a dissertation on the legendary Austro-Bohemian composer Gustav Mahler. He refused a degree in protest because his teacher was a Nazi supporter, points out Amrit Gangar, author of a book on the composer 'The Music That Still Rings At Dawn, Every Dawn'.

For a time, Kaufmann worked as an assistant to the conductor Bruno Walter at the Charlottenburg Opera in Berlin and for Radio Prague but, at age 27, he decided to escape to India with his wife. His reason for picking India, says Gangar, was simple: "He could get the visa easily." Besides, Kaufmann also had a friend in Bombay, Mohan Bhavnani, who had apprenticed at Berlin's Ufa studios in 1924. "It is possible that Kaufmann and Bhavnani had met there," says Gangar about Kaufmann who joined Bhavnani's film production company Ajanta Cinetone in Dadar soon after his arrival in 1934.

Bombay Talkies, the film studio established by producer Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani in the distant suburb of Malad. The studio boasted names such as filmmaker Franz Osten, cinematographer Josef Wirsching and others who had escaped Munich for Malad. "They must have drawn curious looks from locals," says Gangar about the German film wallahs of Malad, a settlement that included Paul Zils, one of the founders of the still-active Indian Documentary Producers' Association.

Kaufmann, though, lived on the other sea-lined end of the city at Breach Candy. Rewa House, the two-storey bungalow that housed him, belonged to Maharaja Martand Singh of Rewa who was fond of Western classical music, especially the compositions of Bach, Schumann and Beethoven. The bungalow--which still stands on Bhulabhai Desai road in the Cumballa Hill area--"must have been convenient for Kaufmann since the AIR headquarters was not far," says Gangar.

Besides numerous symphonies and string quartets, Kaufmann--who served as director of European Music at AIR--also wrote radio operas such as 'The Farewell', 'The King Calls', 'The Rumour'. 'Anasuya'--which debuted in 1939-- was described as India's first radio opera. "Kaufmann should be given an appropriate award," says Gangar.

(In a lecture organised by the Mehli Mehta Foundation, Simon Wynberg will speak on Walter Kaufmann at 6.30 pm on January 8, NCPA).


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