Section B · Page 10
The University Daily Kansan
Thursday, September 16, 1999
Entertainment
Austrian trust brings lost musical talent home
The Associated Press
VIENNA, Austria — When New Yorker Diana Mittler-Battipaglia sat at the piano in Vienna's Karajan Center and played her father's music, it was as if she had brought him home.
"It was just overwhelming," she said. "It was something I never thought in my wildest dreams would come true. I had always said it would be so wonderful if my father could have a homecoming in Vienna. Now I feel that the circle is complete."
Diana Mittler-Battipaglia was in Vienna as a guest of Vienna's Orpheus Trust, a small non-profit organization that brings home the music of several thousand musicians, composers and musicologists
who were lost to Austria as a result of the Nazis.
One of those composers was Franz Mitterl, once among Austria's most promising musical talents. When German troops marched into Austria in 1938, Mitterl, who was Jewish, was performing in the Netherlands.
He immigrated to the United States where he remained for most of his life.
"His generation had the misfortune to be hit by two world wars and the Great Depression," said Mittler-Battipaglia, a music professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. "That he was able to withstand all of that and make a new career for himself in America when he was 50 years old is remarkable."
In the United States, Mittler arranged and composed music and toured with his First Piano Quartette. Like so many emigres, he was drawn back to Europe and in his last years worked with the Summer Academy in Salzburg, before he died in 1970.
"From the many documents, we have learned how much these people dreamed of bringing home their music," said Orpheus Trust founder, Primera Gruber.
Gruber formed the Orpheus Trust in 1996 in response to what she described as a spirit of amnesia that perved postwar Austria. She began her search for lost music in 1996.
Since then, the Trust's database has expanded to include 2,000 biographical entries, references to
4. 500 compositions and more than 60 oral history interviews with artists still living.
The Orpheus Trust tracks down and catalogs lost music and makes it available to researchers, music students and members of the public. It also promotes public awareness of the works of Austrian artists whose work has been lost to most of their countrymen.
Mittler-Battipiglia herself was responsible for finding a formerly unknown piano trio that her father had written.
"I was writing my dissertation at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, and one of my advisers suggested I write about my father. I told him that I only had about 20 pieces of music and didn't think I had enough material. He suggested
that I look in the library. I looked in the card catalog, and I found reference to a piano trio and an opus of songs that I never knew he had written." she said.
In December 1997, the Orpheus Trust was given custody of the artistic estate of another Viennese composer, Fritz Spielmann, known in the United States as Fred Spielman.
Spielmann's works are now archived and accessible to the public at Vienna's Literaturhaus. The Fritz Spielmann Fund, established by members of the Spielmann family and the City of Vienna, provides research grants to young musicians and musicologists.
Spielmann, who died in March 1997, was a musical child prodigy. In the 1930's he was one of the greatest exponents of so-called
Wienerlieder (Viennese songs).
Spielmann fled to Paris in 1938. He emigrated to Cuba and then went on to the United States where, as Fred Spielman, he wrote music for Broadway and Hollywood. His "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is now part of American popular culture.
Spielmann and Mittler are just two of several thousand musical talents lost to Austria as a result of the Nazi occupation, when the country was absorbed into Hitler's Third Reich.
When Mittler-Battipalgia played in Vienna, one of her father's nephews was in the audience. He had read about the concert in the newspaper. He didn't know his uncle had been a composer and never knew he had a daughter.
The Sixth Sense boosts Philly's film stock
The Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA — To hear locals talk about it, a new movie about dead people walking around Philadelphia is the best thing to happen since a little-known boxer named Rocky trained on the Art Museum steps.
Nearly every scene in The Sixth Sense is anchored by the city's brick sidewalks and wrought iron fences. A teacher extols the history of the city, telling a class it was once the capital of the United States. Even the troubled main character lives in a cozy South Philadelphia row house.
Is this the same trash-strewn city where Bruce Willis roamed a deserted plague-stricken Earth in Twelve Monkeys and Eddie Murphy played a fake-blind beggar in Trading Places?
Though movies made and set in Philly are nothing new, the city's stock on theater screens has skyrocketed with the success of The Sixth Sense, which has earned more than $176 million to date. And with more movie productions fleeing Los Angeles for cheaper locations in the United States and overseas, Philadelphia is happy to grab part of the windfall.
"Philadelphia is photographed so beautifully and with so many people coming to see the movie it can't help but help us," said Kevin Feeley, the mavor's representative.
Philadelphia has long been the backdrop for stories about blue-collar heroes earning respect, from Paul Newman's social climber in The Young Philadelphiaians to Jimmy Stewart's snobby writer pining after Katharine Hepburn's debutante in The Philadelphia Story. Rocky and Trading Places were also about bottom-skimmers pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
In between have been movies using the city to look like somewhere else Independence Day, The Peacemaker and Seven, and films like The Age of Innocence and Beloved that filled the streets with dirt to recall the city's 19th-century heddy.
Philadelphia credits its latest bout in the limelight to native son M. Night Shyamalan, a 29-year-old who wrote and directed The Sixth Sense. He also filmed last year's Wide Awake, about a 10-year-old
boy's search for God, in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr.
"I have a strong affinity for this place," Shyamalan said from his office in Consohocken, outside Philadelphia. "It's a city where you can borrow its natural character or use it as a stand-in for other cities. You can literally do anything here."
The buzz around Philadelphia can only help Shyamalan and other hometown directors such as Brian De Palma and Elaine May, because every movie strengthens the city's infrastructure of crew, production support and experience.
"Whether it's Philadelphia or The Sixth Sense, it gives Philadelphia an identity as a feature film place. It's entertaining people, and it's giving them just a hint of what is here, and that's a nice benefit," said director Eugene Martin, a native Philadelphian who has made two independent films here.
Actor Steve Buscemi is directing his second movie, Animal Factory, with Willem Dafoe and Edward Furlong at Holmesburg Prison in suburban Philadelphia; NYPD Blue director Darnell Martin is planning his movie, *Prison Song*, here.
Philadelphia has always had a stable of homegrown stars, from W.C. Fields and Grace Kelly to Bill Cosby and Sylvester Stallone. Kevin Bacon, Richard Gere, Blythe Danner and Linda Florentino were all born in Philadelphia.
Native son Will Smith has proposed a sound stage and production studio in South Philadelphia — a plan that has gained momentum because of The Sixth Sense.
"I can't imagine anyone on this planet who would benefit more from what they are planning than myself," said Shyamalam, who anticipates making a movie every 18 months. He said he planned to talk with Smith's brother, Harry, about supporting the project.
In the end, any movie featuring Philadelphia is good, as far as the city's film office is concerned.
"People's attitudes about a place are very much influenced by movies, and when the world gets to see Philadelphia on the big screen, it almost doesn't matter what movie it is," said Sharon Pinkenson, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office. "The more movies the better."
Miss America pageant gets up close, personal
The Associated Press
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. Eager to lure new viewers and desperate to bring back old ones, Miss America has tried just about everything to appeal to viewers in recent years.
She held a call-in poll on the bathing suit competition. She let viewers choose their favorite contest. And she has tinkered endlessly with nearly every aspect of the annual live telecast from Convention Hall.
No luck. The ratings still sag like a wet one-piece.
Once a prime-time winner, the pageant's Nielsen ratings have set record lows in each of the past three years. NBC-TV, which had carried it for more than 40 years, gave up on it in 1996.
ABC hasn't had much success, either.
But network and pageant officials are trying another first this year, and it just may work for the 79th annual Miss America Pageant airing 7 p.m.
Saturdav.
ABC will air a one-hour special at 9 p.m. tonight to introduce the 51 women vying for the crown.
Up Close & Personal: The Search for Miss America 2000 with Miss America 1999 Nicole Johnson and Access Hollywood anchor Nancy O'Dell as hosts, gives brief profiles of each contestant. The individual segments, which average about 40 seconds apiece, showcase the women in their own hometowns, talking about their lives and their values.
The idea stemmed from an up close and personal experiment in last year's telecast. Videos of the 10 semifinalists, shot in their hometowns, were incorporated into the show. Viewers loved it, according to Robert Beck, CEO of the pageant.
By expanding the idea into a prime-time special airing two days before the pageant itself, ABC and the pageant hope to snag viewers early and give them a reason to tune in Saturday.
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