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"I'm sure that in viewing ‘Mahagonny,’ people will draw many conclusions, maybe contradictory ones, and that’s what makes it a great work. It poses more questions than it answers,” said Conlon. “You don’t leave ‘Mahagonny’ feeling that you have all the answers, but you do feel that you have been able to take a very careful look at humanity and many of its behavioral patterns and excesses, and you come away certainly challenged, if not wiser from it.

“Kurt Weill was able to take the remnants of the tradition of classical Viennese music with all the elegance and grace and sentimentality of the turn of the century Viennese music and put it in a political context and theatrical context that was anything but that, and I find the combination absolutely on the level of genius,” he said.

CONLON’S MISSION: REVIVING THE LOST MUSIC

Kurt Weill’s “Mahagonny” is the first work Conlon is performing for L.A. Opera by a composer who was forced to flee his native Germany during the Nazi era. Categorized as “Entartete” or “degenerate” music, Conlon is on a mission to revive the lost music of composers who were not as fortunate as Weill and immigrants like Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold who became famous in the United States after the war. Some of the forgotten composers perished in concentration camps, while the luckier ones escaped to America but had to reinvent themselves and find new professions to survive. Conlon is attempting to ensure that their silenced Holocaust music finds its place in classical music history.

It all started when he discovered Alexander von Zemlinsky. “I fell in love,” he said. “I had the means with which to perform and record [his music]. I didn’t know when I started performing Zemlinsky that I was going to end up recording all of his works. This fulfills for me one of the definitions of classical music, which is that you can go back to it over-and-over again and find it richer on each repetition; so for me, that’s enough. It belongs in the repertoire.”

Conlon has made nine recordings of Zemlinsky’s works and said that along the way, he became interested in and recorded the music of other mostly Jewish composers of that era, including Viktor Ullmann, who was sent to the Terezín concentration camp and later died in Auschwitz; Erwin Schulhoff, who died in a camp in Wülzburg, Bavaria; Franz Schreker, who died in Berlin in 1934; Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu; and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, an anti-fascist Catholic who refused to allow his music to be performed in Germany while the Nazis were in power, but attempted to rebuild musical life in Munich after the war. Conlon also plans to focus on the music of Walter Braunfels, Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Ernst Krenek and the pre-1940 operas of Korngold. He is performing these composers’ works all over the world and is now concentrating his efforts in the United States, specifically in the summer Ravinia Festival, where he is music director, and at L.A. Opera.

But it’s not all about being a moral person that drives Conlon. “You don’t have to be Jewish to be horrified by the atrocities of the Holocaust,” he said. “I’m not doing this because of a religious conviction,” although he added that if he could reverse the injustices done to these composers, he would.

The artistic value of their music is his primary concern. “It carries with it what the Germans call ‘Zeitgeist,’ which is the feeling or spirit of the time, and that spirit of the time is necessary to be heard,” he said. “If somebody found 5,000 paintings from a particular era of history, I cannot imagine that museums would not be interested in putting them out as representations of that time. Music is different because you can’t put it in a museum -- you have to play it."

Historically, these silenced composers either died or fled from countries including Germany, Austria and the former Czechoslovakia, thus leaving a creative void. Their music was never revisited in those countries, and no one in the composers’ new homes was interested either. Serial and then electronic music took over, and their music was wiped out of classical music history. “These composers were murdered twice, first during their lifetime and a second time in the postwar period, “Conlon said.

“The Nazis ruptured a tradition which is one of the greatest cultural accomplishments in Western civilization, which was the uninterrupted flow of the development of Western classical music.”

Various musicologists, composers and conductors in Europe have performed or written about this lost music, which has only served to spur Conlon on. “There comes a time suddenly when there is a confluence of influences that make people interested and open to this, and that time is now,” he said. “It [the trend] is coming to America, and I’m pushing it here because I think that curiosity and awareness will bring great benefits.”

“My take on it is that the problem a lot of these composers had was that there was no champion for them,” said E. Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg and former chairman of the now defunct Orpheus Trust, which documented information about these persecuted composers. “Now they have a champion,” he said.

Conlon is planning two concerts in March which are part of the Los Angeles Opera’s new “Recovered Voices” project, initiated by a $3.25 million gift from philanthropist Marilyn Ziering to expose the music of these forgotten composers, plus $750,000 from other donors. He will conduct Zemlinsky’s “A Florentine Tragedy,” a one-act opera based on Oscar Wilde’s play on a love triangle between a merchant, his wife and her lover. He will also conduct excerpts from Ullmann’s opera, “The Emperor of Atlantis,” which was composed in the Terezín concentration camp and mirrors much of the tension and hopelessness therein; Schulhoff’s “Flames,” a musical tragicomedy about Don Juan; Schreker’s “The Stigmatized,” about a deformed nobleman who decides to give a paradisiacal park (Elysium) to the people of Genoa; Krenek’s jazz opera, “Jonny spielt auf”; Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt,” which depicts the inner turmoil of a man who is mourning the death of his wife in a decaying city; and Braunfels’ spiritual escapist opera, “The Birds.”

This spring, Conlon is set to conduct “Simon Boccanegra” at the Paris Opera and “Falstaff” in Bologna in June. He will retain his duties as music director of the Cincinnati May Festival, and then this summer, it’s off to Ravinia.

“My dreams are to see the works of Zemlinsky, Ullmann, Schreker, Schulhoff, Korngold and others become a regular part of the operatic repertory,” he said. “ ‘Recovered Voices’ and ‘Mahagonny’ are a first step in that direction.”