Richard Flury and the politics of the unpolitical

During the Second World War, composers in neutral Switzerland were not faced with the same difficult choices as their colleagues in occupied Europe, but most nevertheless refused to do anything to antagonise the neighboring fascist regimes. The Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) was an exception: he worked with numerous anti-fascists and Jewish emigrés and even offered a job to his friend, the conductor Gottfried Kassowitz, in an (unsuccessful) effort to get him out of Nazi-occupied Vienna.