The Nazi campaign against so-called ‘degenerate music’, saw works by such composers as Weill, Schoenberg and Hindemith denounced and suppressed. More than 70 years later, much of this music is still unknown. Baritone Peter Brathwaite on his mission to bring it to a new audience.

It wasn’t until I saw a copy of the 1938 pamphlet for the Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition that I fully grasped the concept behind the Nazi’s music censorship campaign. The cover image, with its caricature of an African-American musician playing a saxophone and wearing a Star of David on his jacket lapel, encapsulated the exhibition’s themes – namely the destructive influence of “Negro Music” on Germanic culture and the “Jewish conspiracy” to sully Teutonic moral decency.

While the discovery in Munich of a hoard of Nazi-looted artworks – has raised fresh questions about the scope of the Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937, the Third Reich’s parallel music exhibit is less well known. Mounted in Düsseldorf in May 1938, the Degenerate Music exhibition was produced during a week celebrating “national music”, and presented the non-Aryan works that didn’t belong in the Nazi’s musical culture. Curated by a leading Nazi official, Hans Severus Ziegler, the event was a bizarre mix of listening booths, imagery and slogans scrawled across walls. It denounced everything from hit songs of the day to film chansons, cabaret, jazz, operetta, avant-garde pieces and, above all, music by Jewish composers. Among the repertoire vilified in Ziegler’s so-called “witches’ sabbath” was Friedrich Hollaender’s Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It), made famous by Marlene Dietrich; Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera; Ernst Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf – an opera held responsible for propagating “racial pollution” through its jazz rhythms; works by Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schönberg and Paul Hindemith, as well as the operettas of Leo Fall, Oskar Straus, Leo Ascher, Mischa Spoliansky, Hugo Hirsch, Leon Jessel, Paul Abraham and Rodolf Nelson.

More than 70 years on, much of the music suppressed by the Third Reich remains largely unknown and rarely performed. After an initial ban on their works, the composers targeted faced forced exile or death. Although Kurt Weill escaped Germany and went on to find success on Broadway, for many of the Austro-German composers who fled, expulsion from Nazi Europe meant starting over again and negotiating relationships with host countries.

Baritone Peter Brathwaite: shining light on what the Nazis tried to suppress. Photograph: Lorenzo Agius

Learning about this period of cultural barbarism appalled and saddened me in equal measure, and as I explored the banned music, I realised there was so much that deserved better exposure. So I decided to devise a show based on the 1938 Degenerate Music exhibition that would showcase some of the extraordinary richness suppressed by the Nazis.

Given the huge range of styles branded “degenerate”, the most challenging aspect of putting my performance together has been deciding what to sing. Numerous library visits and hours spent poring over scores with the London song festival’s Nigel Foster resulted in a programme that includes some of Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht’s hard-hitting agitprop cabaret; satirical numbers by Friedrich Hollaender; jazz-opera by Ernst Krenek; atonal Schönberg and early Kurt Weill.

From the outset, I knew I wanted to include spoken excerpts from Hans Severus Ziegler’s exhibition pamphlet. This document reveals the bigotry and prejudice that resulted in the death or forced immigration of performers, academics and composers. Getting to know the music of this lost era has only made it clearer just how inherently contradictory and absurd the pamphlet is. Any attempt to pin labels such as “decadent”, “alienating” or “un-German” on music was bound to fail. In juxtaposing this rhetoric with such songs as Eisler’s Abortion is Illegal, the first song protesting against anti-abortion laws, or Weill’s Song of the Brown Islands, a piece that mocks the pseudo-science behind the concept of “degeneration”, it is evident that far from representing a so-called “retreat from culture”, these thwarted composers were the leading envoys of German culture of the 1920s and 30s.

I’ve been inspired and greatly assisted by the award-winning producer Michael Haas, who was responsible for Decca’s now discontinued Entartete Musik series. His recent book, Forbidden Music: Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, has been indispensable in researching the show, and his enthusiasm for this lost generation of musical talent is infectious – he is adamant this repertoire should take its rightful place alongside the well-trodden classics.

I’m not going to claim that, in performing this selection of “degenerate” music, I can single-handedly do justice to the richness suppressed by the Nazis, but hopefully I can provoke intrigue and further enquiry into these tragically neglected works.

With the Barbican’s recent controversial decision to withdraw Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B and this autumn’s protests in New York over John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, the issue of censorship in the arts is as relevant and timely as it ever was. Confronting the reality of this music today is a reminder of how dangerous it can be for artists to deal with contemporary truths. More than this, it cautions against the devastating consequences of censoring art.

• Entartete Musik is at Rosslyn Hill Chapel, London, on 27 November as part of the London song festival. Follow Peter on twitter at @PeterBrathwaite