Though Lustgarten continued to compose—he even staged a small semiprofessional production of his opera Helga Hal in 1945—financial difficulties plagued him for the rest of his life, and few seemed interested in his compositions. His music was strongly influenced by late Romantic composers like Brahms, Wagner, and Schubert, and over the course of the war and postwar years, his music had fallen out of style. His compositional voice did not resemble the modernism of Schoenberg, nor did it share the sweeping quality of Korngold’s grand Hollywood scores. Despite Lustgarten’s resilience and perseverance, his music is now virtually unknown and his catalogue of work lies in obscurity.

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I first came across Egon Lustgarten’s works while performing with Elysium Between Two Continents, an organization founded in 1995 by Gregorij von Leitis and Michael Lahr to illuminate the rich heritage of writers, composers, and intellectuals who were persecuted by the hate-driven regimes of the mid-twentieth century and forced to emigrate. In their collection of historical documents are the letters, musical manuscripts, and lectures of Egon Lustgarten. In January 2018, I traveled to Munich to work in the Lahr von Leitis Archive to examine and document many of Lustgarten’s musical materials and letters.