They called him Dr. Kallmann even though the only doctorate Helmut Max Kallmann ever received was an honorary one, in 1971, from the University of Toronto.
He never asked to be called that during his 17 years as chief of the music division of what was then the National Library of Canada, now Library and Archives Canada. As his step-daughter recalled the other day, "he wouldn't have put on airs if his life depended on it; he never lived on his reputation."
But such was the respect accorded this short, soft-spoken, unfailingly polite man with the photographic mind and encyclopedic memory that using the honorific "just fell naturally to us," said his long-time friend and fellow musicologist Elaine Keillor recently. "He was just so knowledgeable … but never overbearing in presenting that information. He was a gentle guide."
Helmut Kallmann died at 89 on Feb. 12 in an Ottawa seniors residence of kidney failure – a member of the Order of Canada, secure in his reputation as one of Canada's foremost music historians and administrators, a man, in the words of long-time friend composer John Beckwith, "who affected a lot of areas and a lot of people." Among his many monuments: the first (1981) and second (1992) editions of the canonical Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, for which he was co-editor, and the ground-breaking A History of Music in Canada 1534-1914, which he authored and published in 1960.
That Kallmann lived so long and accomplished so much is something of a miracle. Born Aug. 7, 1922 into a liberal Jewish household in Berlin, he could easily have perished in a Nazi death camp in the 1940s, as his lawyer father (and sometime piano teacher) Arthur did along with his homemaker mother Fanny and older sister Eva, a kindergarten teacher. Fortunately, just before the start of the Second World War, one of Kallmann's teachers recommended that his student be included on the lists of the Kindertransport, the rescue movement that eventually saw an estimated 10,000 unaccompanied German Jewish children, 17 years and under, spirited to Britain. With no chance to emigrate, the father forced to quit the legal profession, the desperate family agreed that at least Helmut should escape the Nazi maw.
Kallmann arrived in England in 1939. But in May 1940, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill fearing for Britain's internal security, he found himself among the estimated 26,000 Germans and Austrian refugees living in the U.K. arrested as "enemy aliens." Designated a "prisoner of war, second-class," he was readied for deportation that summer.
"They were all grouped together," recalled Kallman's step-daughter, Liora Salter, a much-published author and sociology professor at York University, Toronto. "And they were numbered off… all the 1, 3, 5s and 7s were put on a boat to Australia and all the 2,4, 6, 8s went to Canada." Assigned an even number, Kallmann and 700 other internees boarded a ship in July bound for Halifax. Landing in Nova Scotia's capital, they were then sent by train to an improvised POW camp in a sports centre in Trois-Rivières, Que. Hardcore Nazi prisoners were already there. Later, Kallmann would recall their voices raised in song as he arrived: "When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then it's twice as good."
Blessedly, young Kallmann's stay there was short. By the fall he was behind barbed wire in another, but purpose-built camp, this one about 20 km east of Fredericton, N.B. It would be his "home" for the next three years. Eventually, the Canadian government permitted a Jewish internee to leave the camp if he had a Canadian civilian sponsor ready to be "financially responsible for [him] for life," Salter explained, adding, "this was the 'none-is-too-many' Jewish world of the time." A Toronto Jewish family agreed to sponsor Kallmann. By 1944 he was working in a bookstore and taking piano lessons. By fall 1946, after completing his senior matriculation, he was a naturalized Canadian citizen and enrolled in the University of Toronto as one of the first students in its new music education program, earning a bachelor's degree in 1949. The year previous he'd graduated Grade 10 in piano at the Royal Conservatory.
While Kallmann liked to play music – Beckwith has fond memories of performing Mozart and Schubert duets on the piano; Robin Elliott, now associate dean of the faculty of music at the U of T, recalls playing Mozart sonatas for violin and keyboard with him – "he never saw himself as having a future as a musician," according to Salter. "His real passion was history and collecting." The two would, in fact, inform the entire span of his career and, in turn, lay the foundation for contemporary Canadian music studies.
In some ways, Kallmann was an unlikely pioneer. Certainly he had curiosity, determination and smarts to burn and his time at university had shown him the distressing lack of Canadian materials for music history courses and how little sophisticated research had been done in Canadian music history. But he lacked both post-graduate certification in musicology and a degree in library science. Moreover, he had "this tremendous shyness," Salter said. "Eventually he would give keynote addresses, but in the beginning he could barely put a sentence together in the right order." Salter credits her mother, Ruth Proctor, whom Kallmann married in 1955, with "infusing him with enough confidence and energy that he could actually do what he had the capability of doing."
Kallman's musical career started humbly enough, as a clerk in 1950 at the music library of CBC Toronto. Moving steadily through the ranks, he became the library's head in 1962, holding the position until 1970. During his tenure at CBC, he got to flex both his scholarly and organizational skills. In 1952, he revised, edited and published the CBC's Catalogue of Canadian Composers. Five years later, he helped found and chair the Canadian Music Library Association (now the Canadian Association of Music Libraries). In 1965, he co-wrote Music in Canada, a 13-part history series broadcast on CBC. Sometimes he, Ruth and Liora would "drive around these little towns in Ontario and go to every used furniture store and look in the piano benches to find the old Canadian sheet music" – some of which ended up in the National Library archives and informed the writing of A History of Music in Canada.
When the National Library decided to establish a music division in 1970, Kallmann was the obvious choice to head it. By the time he retired in 1987, the division had mounted numerous exhibitions and accumulated tens of thousands of artifacts – scores, books, recordings, concert programs, instruments, letters, the papers of such luminaries as Glenn Gould, Healey Willan and Sir Ernest MacMillan, among others. In 1982, Kallman helped found, then chaired the Canadian Musical Heritage Society, dedicated to finding, preserving and promoting Canadian music in all idioms pre-1950.
A decade before that, he'd agreed to be one of the three editors of the planned Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, with seed funding of $100,000 courtesy the Floyd S. Chalmers Foundation. An ambitious, even revolutionary undertaking, not least because of its willingness to seriously consider all kinds of music (including folk, pop, jazz, native), the 1,076-page tome with the 3,100 articles was hailed as "the most important book ever written about Canadian music" upon its publication in fall 1981. Within two months it had sold out its 2,800-copy print-run. Similar huzzahs greeted the second edition, again co-edited by Kallmann, when it was published in 1992, this time running to 1,524 pages and weighing almost 4.5 kilograms.
Mark Miller, author and former jazz critic for The Globe and Mail, worked as a researcher and editor on both volumes. With the first, he noted recently, Kallmann was nominally in charge of content while fellow chief editors Ken Winters and Gilles Potvin concentrated on style and Quebec music, respectively. "But in truth they freely assumed each other's mantle. Those of us who worked with them … remember well, if ruefully, the 'triangling' sessions that would find them sitting in a room together for two or three days, once or so a month, going over every word of every article. Helmut was especially good when it came to details."
Added his step-daughter: "He taught me to write; he must have taught hundreds of people to write. Because he corrected every piece of paper that came in front of him," usually using "this tiny stub of a pencil." Once, during a post-retirement visit to the reunited Berlin, Kallmann attended an exhibition that dealt with Jews and the city during its Weimar and Nazi days. Noticing mistakes in where the street-car lines had run and train stops positioned, among other errors, he subsequently sent a list of corrections, including maps, all of which were gratefully received and acted upon. Later he received the keys to the city for his effort.
Kallmann seemed to take a philosophic view of his life. "I have drifted where fate took me, to Canada, to Toronto, into a career specialty, even a happy marriage," he once wrote in an article for the Jewish magazine Outlook. "I do not want to erase my fond memories of my family and my many anti-Nazi friends, my early summer holidays, my love of Berlin geography and dialect. I do not, cannot deny my strong German nor my somewhat weaker Jewish roots."
Receiving the annual Friends of Canadian Music Award in 2006, Kallmann told the assembled well-wishers how the U of T yearbook, Torontonensis, had once asked him to describe his ambition. Kallmann's reply? "To be useful." It was a mission he seems to have accomplished.
Kallmann was predeceased by his wife Ruth in 1994. Besides his step-daughter Liora, he leaves his companion of the last 14 years, Waltraut Weinberg, three grandchildren and six great grandchildren. A memorial service was held recently in Ottawa and another is planned for Toronto in April. Carleton University in Ottawa, meanwhile, has established the Helmut Kallmann Chair in Canadian Music and is inviting contributions.