“An Impulse to Transfigure and Render New”—The Anglo-Austrian Music Society in Wartime and Early Post-War Britain

Abstract

The Anglo-Austrian Music Society was founded in London in 1942 by Ferdinand Rauter—an Austrian-born musician who had made his name arranging and performing songs from various folk traditions with soprano Engel Lund. Rauter spent much of 1940 interned on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien,’ a designation visited upon some 70,000 refugees and other foreign-born residents in the United Kingdom during the Second World War. In the wake of that internment, he founded and co-founded a series of musically oriented organizations culminating with the Anglo-Austrian Music Society. The Society was born out of and embodied a particular constellation of mobility—an entanglement of patterns of movement, mobile practices, and representations of mobility—that owed its existence to Britain’s geopolitical situation in the years leading up to and comprising the war. Drawing on work by human geographers, this article examines the intertwined elements of this constellation—including migratory movements from Nazi occupied Europe to Britain; ideas about mobility, nation, and musical creativity; and practices of regulating the movements of migrant musicians. Making sense of these entanglements is essential to understanding both the genesis of the Society and the creative successes of the mobile, contingent community its key participants cultivated in Britain.