Rediscovering the music of Hans Gal

As a Jewish refugee, Gál fled to the UK shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War - first to London, then Edinburgh - and lived in Scotland until his death in 1987. He spent more than half of his life here, yet his music is hardly ever performed. When the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra explores his Second Symphony and Cello Concerto in a pair of lecture-concerts later this month, it will be the first time the orchestra plays his works in nearly 30 years. Thanks to the dominance of astringent modernism and its various aftermaths through the mid-late 20th century, musical fashion has blanked out Gál's generous Viennese soundworld.

The story of Hans Gál is gripping, both in personal terms and as a slice of 20th century history. Born in Vienna in 1890 and steeped in Austro-German culture, he looked set for a glittering career after the success of his early works. In 1929 he was appointed director of the music conservatory in Mainz, but was dismissed from the post in 1933 because he was Jewish. Performances of his music were banned in Nazi Germany and he returned to Vienna with his wife Hanna and their two sons. After the Anschluss of 1938, the Gál family fled to London.

They planned to travel to the United States but a chance meeting with Sir Donald Tovey, chair of music at the University of Edinburgh, diverted their route. Tovey respected Gál's talent and found him a scrap of work in Edinburgh in the summer of 1938 - just a six-month job cataloguing the Reid Music Library, but better than nothing.

The Gáls officially moved to Edinburgh the following year, but as there was still no permanent work for Hans it was Hanna who initially earned a small wage as a housekeeper for Sir Herbert Grierson, a retired English professor. They found cheap rent as caretakers of an evacuated school in Rothesay Terrace and soon sought out fellow intellectuals among their New Town neighbours and fellow refugees. Gál eventually secured a full teaching post at the university in the late 1940s.

His propensity to make music flourish around him was inextinguishable. He'd grown up on a diet of Viennese concert life - at that time the richest in the world - and was startled by mid-20th century Edinburgh's comparatively scant classical musical culture. But rather than sulk, he instigated. He founded a refugee orchestra and a little madrigal ensemble. He launched a weekly Collegium Musicum that gathered on Sunday afternoons at the evacuated school. The furniture was covered in dustsheets but the assembly hall was big enough to read through Bach cantatas and the old grand piano was perfect for chamber music. Despite rationing, Hanna somehow cooked up Viennese cakes that were legendary around Edinburgh.

In 1944 the family moved into a first-floor flat in Warrender Park Crescent, overlooking the Meadows, and the gatherings continued for years in the grand Marchmont drawing room with its high ceilings and bay windows. Eva Fox-Gál, born in 1944, remembers sneaking underneath the piano and spending long hours listening to her parents' music making.

Fox-Gál now lives in York; she moved there in the 1970s to teach German literature at the university and now works as a homeopath. Both professions run in the family, she points out. Gál's father and grandfather were homeopathic doctors, and her own love of literature developed among the bookshelves of that Marchmont flat. "I now realise how typical my parents' library was among Edinburgh's wartime refugees," she says. "They all had complete editions of Goethe and Balzac and Heine."

I ask Fox-Gál whether her father's relationship to Germanic art and literature changed after the Nazi rise to power. "Not a bit," she replies. "He absolutely maintained his roots. He would have never given Hitler the rights to expatriate him culturally. After the war he knew which artists had collaborated with the Nazis, but he understood that most people are weak and take the route of least resistance. He recognised political culture for what it was and he didn't ostracize people afterwards. In that sense he was remarkably forgiving."

Gál's role in the early years of the Edinburgh International Festival is a case in point. "Rudolf Bing asked him whether something similar to the Salzburg Festival could be done in Edinburgh," says Fox-Gál, "to which my father remarked, 'impossible!'. But he directed Bing towards key wealthy patrons and the festival did happen. The fact that the Vienna Philharmonic came with Bruno Walter in the first year... I would say my father's influence helped make that happen. The programmes were full of his mark: the repertoire and the artists, so many of them from Austria or Germany."

More than anything, says Fox-Gál, her father needed music; "he considered it of existential importance". As an Austrian refugee he was briefly interned during the early months of the war - first in Edinburgh, then near Liverpool, then on the Isle of Mann - and in a moving diary called Music Behind Barbed Wire (recently published in English for the first time) he describes how he took charge of music at the camps and organised concerts among the internees.

Three years later, he composed his Second Symphony under the darkest of circumstances. "My mother was really suffering," Fox-Gál explains. "She was keenly aware of her extended family being sent to Terezin and the fate of my father's older sister who had taken her own life. She was at such a low ebb in 1942 that she started a course in domestic sciences at Moray House to try to occupy her mind. One of my brothers was still at home and the other came home at weekends." In December 1942 the younger brother commit suicide. Hanna didn't miss more than two days of college; Hans shut himself away in his composition. "He needed the creative outlet," Fox-Gál says.

In her sleeve notes to a recent recording of Gál's Second Symphony by the Northern Sinfonia, Fox-Gál poignantly sums up the point. "Gál was not given to direct expression of his feelings, and abhorred pathos and sentimentality. The more deeply he was affected by something the less inclined he was to talk about it. But music provided an escape into a world that was still intact, an affirmation of inner strength, of creative power that remained undimmed by the chaos outside."

An English translation of Gál's wartime diary (Hans Gál: Music Behind Barbed Wire) is out now from Toccata Press. The BBCSSO plays Gál's Cello Concerto with Raphael Wallfisch on January 14 and the Second Symphony on 26