The face — and sound — of British music was changed utterly as a result of the Nazi rise to power, as hundreds of émigré musicians, men and women, most of them Jewish, fled central Europe.

Now, in a new exhibition created by the Royal College of Music (RCM), that legacy is examined in a show that runs until 16 April entitled Music, Migration and Mobility.

Norbert Meyn, a fellow of the RCM and the principal researcher on the show, explains that the subject of émigré musicians and their influence on Britain had been an RCM project for more than a decade. There have been oral history interviews, 20 of which have been filmed and are available on the RCM website, and an initial conference under the banner of Singing a Song in A Foreign Land.

“It’s estimated that from 1933 onwards, there were about 400 professional musicians among the 50,000 or so mostly Jewish refugees, who came to Britain from Nazi-occupied Europe.”

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Cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

And their influence, as the exhibition makes clear, was profound — from people like the cellist and Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who arrived after the war and founded the English Chamber Orchestra, to Rudolf Bing, the first director of the Edinburgh International Festival.

Bing was also Glyndebourne’s general manager from 1936 to 1949, before going on to New York to run the Metropolitan Opera.

Other influential figures were the composer and conductor Peter Gellhorn, who was the musical director at Toynbee Hall in London before the outbreak of the Second World War, later joining the team at Glyndebourne; and, of course, three of the four members of the renowned Amadeus Quartet — Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Peter Schidlof.

What German-born Gellhorn and the three Austrian Jews in the Amadeus Quartet (later joined by English-born Jewish musician Martin Lovett) had in common was, of course, internment.

This was the policy instigated by the British government between the outbreak of war in 1939 and then on to early 1940, in which foreign-born “aliens” were classified as “enemy aliens”, rounded up and sent to internment camps.

Most ended up on the Isle of Man, and their treatment, says Meyn, “came as a big shock” to those who had believed in Britain’s more liberal and welcoming attitude, particularly after fleeing Nazi Europe.

“And there was the looming danger of invasion — in which case all the Jews were in one place, almost to be handed to the Nazis on a plate,” he says.

Some, such as Gellhorn, were able to leave the Isle of Man in a short time, after the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and the renowned pianist Myra Hess intervened on his behalf. Others made the best of their incarceration, which enabled the finest and most creative minds from central Europe to set up a sort of mini-university on the island until they were able to return to the mainland.

On display at the RCM show is a poster for a revue called What A Life, written by the Austrian Jewish composer Hans Gal on the Isle of Man. Designed by the artist Paul Humpoletz, it shows a man seated on a box containing porridge oats, the daily diet for the internees, and playing a “harp” made from barbed wire.

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Composer Mátyás Seiber

Many of these erstwhile refugees had arrived in Britain in a first wave around 1935, says Meyn. One of the artefacts in the RCM show is a book published with the names and addresses of Jewish and non-Aryan musicians who had “polluted German music”. When that book was published in Germany, says Meyn, “it was clear that people had to get out”.

Because of their more public profiles in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the musicians were often targeted more swiftly by the Nazis.

And Meyn makes the point that although the refugees were primarily Jewish, the Nazi edicts affected non-Jews too, for example Fritz Busch, the German conductor who became the founding musical director at Glyndebourne, whose ardent anti-Nazi stance had led to him being removed from his post at the Staatsoper — the State Opera — in Dresden in 1933.

The shared experience of internment created a lively society of central European Jews in Britain, many of them joining each other for musical evenings at each other’s homes after leaving the Isle of Man.

Some became closely associated with theRCM, such as composer Joseph Horovitz, its long-time professor of composition.

Meyn recalls fondly of Horovitz that though he insisted that he was “a British composer”, it was often possible “to bump into him in the corridor and have long conversations with him in his still Vienna-accented German”.

The new arrivals weren’t just classical musicians. Take Mátyás Seiber, a Budapest-born cellist who arrived in Britain in 1935.

His background was in jazz music and in 1956 he was awarded the inaugural Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically for By the Fountains of Rome, a hit that year in the UK single charts.

The émigrés passed on knowledge about recording concerts for radio broadcasts. And many of them had studied with great composers such as Gustav Mahler and so had important memories to offer their British students.

They were a perfect illustration of how music connected people, despite not initially having a common language. But Meyn is “really impressed” with how rapidly the European Jewish musicians learned English and integrated into British society.

As with the effect of Jewish refugee emigration on Hollywood, so it was with British music, which benefited, in an unlooked-for consequence of Nazi terror.

Music, Migration and Mobility runs at the Royal College of Music, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BS from 17 January to 16 April