1946: Josef Krips

The greatly-undervalued Josef Krips in Vienna in July 1946.

________________________________________________


Conductor Calls Off His American Debut

New York, New York July 18, 1950 (AP)—Orchestra conductor Josef Krips called off his American debut today and flew back to Europe to escape being deported. The 48-year-old chief conductor of the Vienna State Opera left after immigration authorities gave him a choice of going voluntarily or being deported without a hearing. He was to have conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra tonight.

________________________________________________


Conductor’s Rebuff: New York Detention For Josef Krips

London, July 21, 1950 (Reuters)—“I shall not conduct in America again until I have had an apology,” declared Josef Krips, the Austrian conductor, when he arrived in London yesterday. He had been ordered out of America after a three-day detention on Ellis Island. Krips was to have made his American debut conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “Although I had a visa and a passport in order, they told me I could not stay,” he said. “They gave no reason.” He said that New York immigration officials asked him if he were a Communist and whether he had been a Nazi.

________________________________________________


Following Krips’s 1950 expulsion from America, numerous newspapers and magazines—The New Republic and Musical America leading the charge—published stinging editorials, sharply rebuking immigration officials for treating Krips in so shabby a manner.

Ironically, it had been American officials that had installed Krips at the helm of the Wiener Staatsoper as soon as the war was over, Krips being one of the few conductors in Central Europe in 1945 entirely untainted by the Period Of National Socialism.

Krips, unable to secure work in The Reich owing to Krips’s Jewish antecedents (Krips himself was Roman Catholic), had spent the war years working in a factory in Belgrade.