George Dreyfus’s lifelong love of Germany

The geography of George Dreyfus’s life has certainly been shaped by many border crossings, by returns and departures and re-returns: “I have always crossed borders, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly, crossing from Germany to England and then to Australia in 1939, crossing from Australia to Italy and then back to Germany in 1954 [sic: 1955], and countless times thereafter.”

The first line of the lyrics for Hildegaard Kneff’s poignantly evocative song “Und ich dreh’ mich nochmal um” (And I turn around again) echoes the ambivalence of yearning for what has been lost, of all those turnings about, though yearning is not all that defines the complexities of George’s relationship with Germany.

As a musician and a composer George committed to the highest ideals of Central European classical music, the heritage of his German homeland. But his ambition “to keep himself alive in Australia solely by writing music” has also entailed many creative departures: “I had to split myself, I had to do anything that came along. “From Schoenbergian high art to popularist realism.”

For George, then, “departure” was more than a physical activity but a state of mind, a creative position. He applies the metaphor of border crossing to his creative outputs too: [M]y symphonies cross with my suites of film music . . . my operas cross with my Pram Factory-inspired musicals . . . my high-art and ideologically committed Didjeridu Sextet crosses with the light hearted ditties of the Galgenlieder.

It was not a compromise that came without cost: “The serious music people only like my popular music . . . The popular music people only like my serious music . . . One should not underestimate Australia too easily, a huge country with huge areas without mountains, with huge heat without rain, with huge inner strength, which an artist with a foreign, brought-with-his-own culture can hardly overcome.”