Despite his huge reputation, Strauss was acutely conscious that he ultimately failed to achieve the standing of his great predecessors like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner (‘I may not be a first-class composer, ’ he is once said to have remarked with resigned self-deprecation, ‘but I am a first-rate second-class composer’). His father, the illegitimate son of a Bavarian court clerk, had risen through his own musical talents to become a famous horn player, but the knowledge of his origins gave Strauss a sense of social insecurity that he was never quite able to shake off. Born in 1864, the composer had achieved conspicuous social and financial success in the Wilhelmine Reich, and during the Weimar Republic, not surprisingly, he was very much a political conservative. He was recorded by one observer at a private lunch in 1928 - the aesthete Count Harry Kessler - as condemning the Weimar Republic and calling for the establishment of a dictatorship, though Kessler, somewhat charitably, thought the remark may have been made ironically.193 Strauss grasped the chance to become the leader of the musical profession in Germany. He accepted the Presidency of the Reich Music Chamber as his birthright. For many years, he had been campaigning and organizing on behalf of musicians over issues such as copyright, which had become more acute than ever in the age of the radio and the gramophone. Frustrated by the Weimar Republic’s seeming inability to defend the position of the German musical tradition against the flood of popular music, operettas, musicals and jazz on the one hand, and the emergence of atonal and modernist music on the other, Strauss thought that the Third Reich would cut through the delays and confusions of the legislative process and deliver him, and his profession, what they wanted.194
Strauss was an experienced cultural politician, therefore, and expected something from Goebbels in return for his loyalty. The Propaganda Minister duly obliged, creating a central state agency for the protection of music copyright in 1934 and acceding to the Berne Copyright Convention, which extended protection over musical compositions from thirty to fifty years after the composer’s death. But Goebbels was less enamoured of Strauss’s attempts to use the Reich Music Chamber to enforce his own detestation of cheap operettas, jazz and light entertainment music, and Strauss’s appointees to the Chamber were no match for Goebbels’s men in the black arts of bureaucratic in-fighting and political intrigue. Soon the Ministry’s representatives were complaining that the Chamber was not being run properly. Strauss was unable to defend himself because he was often away composing. He did not get on with his Vice-President, the eminent conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. And, crucially, both men were soon at odds with the regime over the employment of Jewish musicians. During his younger years, Strauss had made many derogatory remarks about Jews, and Furtwängler too accepted commonplace right-wing shibboleths about ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ and Jewish ‘rootlessness’. But, as with many casual rather than fanatical antisemites, this did not prevent either of them from working with Jews if it suited them. 195
In Strauss’s case this meant the librettists Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who died in 1929, and Stefan Zweig, a best-selling author with whom he collaborated happily on a new opera, The Silent Woman (Die schweig-same Frau), in 1933-4. Alfred Rosenberg saw this as an opportunity to undermine Goebbels’s control of the musical establishment, and pointed out that not only was the librettist of The Silent Woman Jewish, but the director of the opera house where the premiere was to be held had a Jewish wife. When Strauss insisted on Zweig’s name being included in the programme, the director, who was held responsible, was forced into retirement. For his part, Zweig, who lived in Austria, had already signed a protest against the regime’s policies, along with the novelist Thomas Mann, one of the Third Reich’s most vociferous critics. He now declared himself unwilling to continue the collaboration with Strauss on the grounds that he could not approve of his work being produced in a Germany that subjected his fellow Jews to such persecution. Attempting to dissuade him, Strauss wrote to Zweig on 17 June 1935 claiming that he had not become President of the Reich Music Chamber because he supported the regime, but ‘simply out of a sense of duty’ and ‘in order to prevent worse misfortunes’. By this time, the Gestapo had Zweig under observation and were opening his mail. They intercepted the letter, copied it and sent it to the Reich Chancellery. Strauss was already under attack from various quarters in the regime not only for his collaboration with Zweig, but also for using a Jewish-owned music house to print his works and commissioning a Jewish musician to make the piano reduction of the opera. Under growing pressure, and disappointed by the composer’s inefficient management of the Reich Music Chamber, Goebbels decided that Strauss finally had to go. The composer was persuaded on 6 July 1935 to hand in his resignation as President of the Reich Music Chamber ‘on account of a deterioration in his health’. Meanwhile, The Silent Woman was withdrawn after the second performance and banned for the duration of the Third Reich.196
Attempting to rescue something from the débâcle of The Silent Woman, Strauss wrote a personal letter to Hitler on 13 July 1935 asking for an audience. The intercepted letter which had led to his dismissal had, he protested, been ‘misinterpreted . . . as if I had . . . little understanding for antisemitism or for the concept of the people’s community’. Hitler did not even bother to reply. Attempts to obtain an interview with Goebbels were also brusquely rejected. Privately, Strauss noted bitterly: ‘But it’s a sad day when an artist of my standing has to ask a little lad of a Minister what he may compose and perform. I too just belong to the nation of “servants and waiters” and I almost envy my racially persecuted fellow Stefan Zweig.’197 This did not stop him from trying to make a comeback. He composed the official hymn for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but it was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee, not by the German government. The commission, and the hymn’s success, did make Goebbels realize that Strauss’s international prestige could be useful to the regime, and he was permitted to travel abroad as a cultural ambassador for Germany and to receive once more the plaudits of the international music-loving public. Goebbels arranged for him to conduct his work at the Reich Music Festival of 1938 in Düsseldorf, and with his blessing Strauss served on prize juries, received awards and birthday congratulations from the regime. The composer continued to launch new operas, including The Day of Peace (Der Friedenstag, 1938), designed to be acceptable to the regime, with libretti written by the safely Aryan Joseph Gregor, whom Strauss regarded as greatly inferior to his previous collaborators. But these were poor compensations for his removal from the centre of power, where other, more up-to-date composers were now finding favour with the regime.198
II
Who those composers were, however, was by no means clear in 1933. Mere adherence to the Nazi Party in a political sense was only a matter of secondary importance. What really counted was, first of all, the racial affiliation of a given composer, living or dead. Jews, according to Nazi precept, were superficial, imitative, incapable of genuine creativity; worse still, they were subversive, degenerate, destructive of true music in the German tradition. The composer Felix Mendelssohn, for instance, was alleged to have been a successful imitator of genuine German music, not the real thing; Gustav Mahler was the composer of degeneracy and decay; Arnold Schönberg’s atonal music disrupted the idea of a harmonious German racial community with its dissonance. The Propaganda Ministry encouraged the publication of anything that helped to undermine the reputation of such composers with the concert-going public, from pseudo-scholarly tomes such as Richard Eichenauer’s Music and Race, published in 1932, to dictionaries like Musical Jews A-B-C, which appeared in 1935. Regular articles in the specialist musical press and the cultural sections of the newspapers reinforced the message carried by such books.199 And Nazi musicologists did not rest content with words alone.
In May 1938, inspired by the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich, Hans Severus Ziegler, manager of the national theatre in Weimar, organized an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Music’ in Düsseldorf as part of the first Reich Music Rally. Assisted by st
aff from Rosenberg’s office, Ziegler hurriedly gathered a staff of cartoonists, technicians, designers and others and mounted a large exhibition, with sections on Jewish composers and conductors, music critics and teachers, modernist and atonal music and much more besides. ‘What’s been gathered together in the exhibition “Degenerate Music” ’, he thundered at the opening ceremony, ‘constitutes the portrayal of a true witches’ sabbath and the most frivolous spiritual-artistic cultural bolshevism and a portrayal of the triumph of subhumanity, of arrogant Jewish insolence and total spiritual senile dementia.’ The exhibition dealt with the problem of how to show people what such music was actually like by installing six audio-booths where visitors could listen to specially cut gramophone records with extracts from music by Arnold Schönberg, Ernst Kenek and others. One, featuring excerpts from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, was particularly sought after. Long queues formed in front of it, testifying to the music’s enduring popularity amongst a public that had been deprived of the opportunity to hear it for half a decade. Yet there is good reason to believe that many of the other exhibits confirmed the prejudices of a conservative musical public that had never much liked the modernists anyway.200 This action, and the radical intent behind it, were not wholly to the liking of Goebbels, who preferred instead to use the Reich Music Chamber as a means of regulating performances. ‘Dr Ziegler’s exhibition “Degenerate Music”, he noted in his diary, ‘is getting a lot of criticism. I get the objectionable parts removed.’201 The exhibition closed after a mere three weeks.202
Meanwhile, a Reich Music Censorship Office had been established within the Chamber and issued lists of banned composers and works, including those of Irving Berlin, who was Jewish. Not only performances, but also records and broadcasts of anything or anyone on the list were banned. Mendelssohn posed a particular problem because many of his works were very popular. Individual conductors continued on occasion to perform his work - Furtwängler, for example, conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in three movements from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in February 1934 to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the composer’s birth - but when this happened, the newspapers simply did not mention it, so the impact was confined to those who attended the concert. In November 1936, when the British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham arrived with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for a guest performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, he obtained the permission of the city’s conservative Lord Mayor, Carl Goerdeler, to lay a wreath at the memorial to Mendelssohn, who had done so much for Anglo-German musical relations in the nineteenth century. But when they looked for the memorial the morning after the concert, it was no longer there; the local Party boss, taking advantage of Goerdeler’s absence on holiday, had removed it during the night and had it smashed to pieces. Furious, Goerdeler resigned as mayor shortly after his return and became increasingly hostile to the Nazi regime. As far as Mendelssohn was concerned, this also proved the turning-point. If Mendelssohn’s music was still performed, it was from now on without attribution. By 1938 Mendelssohn’s name had finally been removed from music publishers’ and record company catalogues, and public performances of his music had virtually ceased. No fewer than forty-four different attempts were made between 1933 and 1944 by a whole variety of composers to provide an alternative to Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; every one of them was inferior, as critics reviewing these performances were frequently forced to confess.203
Well-known works by non-Jewish composers were also subject to disapproval when they involved lyrics by Jewish writers such as Heinrich Heine, whose poem The Lorelei was so widely known that the regime decided to try and convince the general public that it was a folk-song rather than a poem written by a Jew. Problems of a different kind were posed by the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Three of the best-loved, Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, not only used libretti written by his Jewish collaborator Lorenzo da Ponte but were usually performed in German translations by the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi. By commissioning new translations from a non-Jewish author, Siegfried Anheisser, which were soon in use all over Germany, Rosenberg’s office managed to distract attention from the inescapable fact that the original version had been written by a Jew. Rosenberg’s encouragement of the ‘Aryanization’ of Handel’s oratorios, which included a good deal of Old Testament material, aroused the hostility of Goebbels’s Reich Music Chamber, which banned changes to their texts on 19 September 1934. This did not, however, prevent performances of Handel’s Judas Maccabeus going ahead with the Jewish names and biblical references removed, and the whole oratorio appearing under the title The Commander.204
Non-Jewish composers were likely to incur the wrath of Rosenberg’s office if they were in any way modernist or atonal or had aroused controversy in some way. If they were not German, then whether or not their music was performed was a matter of secondary importance as far as the Reich Music Chamber was concerned. This was why attacks on the music of Igor Stravinsky, one of the major butts of ridicule at the Degenerate Music Exhibition, failed to prevent it from being performed throughout the 1930s. Performances in Germany were encouraged by the composer himself, whose legendary business acumen even extended to obtaining special permission for royalties to be sent to him in Paris, where he had lived since before the First World War. Diplomatic considerations were never far from the mind of the Propaganda Ministry when dealing with foreign composers, so the modernist compositions of Béla Bartók were not banned because he was Hungarian, and Hungary was an ally of Germany. Bartók himself, an ardent anti-fascist, changed his German publishers when they were Aryanized, declared his solidarity with banned composers and protested to the Propaganda Ministry when he discovered that he had not featured in the Degenerate Music Exhibition, but all to no avail; his music continued to be performed in Germany, like that of Stravinsky.205
Where the composer in question was German, or even Austrian (which in the eyes of the Nazis was the same thing), matters stood quite differently. The pupils of Arnold Schönberg were singled out by the regime for their adherence to twelve-note atonality. Anton von Webern’s music was banned from the beginning, while a performance of an orchestral concert suite from Alban Berg’s as yet unfinished opera Lulu under the conductor Erich Kleiber in Berlin in November 1934 created a major uproar, with cries of ‘Hail, Mozart!’ from outraged members of the audience. The leading critic Hans-Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who had given the work a positive review in a Berlin newspaper, was expelled from the German Music Critics’ Association (part of the Reich Chamber of Literature) and denied further employment as a result. The critic had already made enemies through his stubborn insistence on the virtues of composers like Stravinsky. They successfully blocked his subsequent attempts to find work for himself in Germany, and he was forced to leave for Prague. The work’s conductor Erich Kleiber, dismayed at the hostility his performance had aroused, emigrated to Argentina two months later. Berg’s music was not performed again in public under the Third Reich.206 Doubtless the sensational character of Lulu, which included depictions of prostitution and featured Jack the Ripper as a character, also had something to do with the scandal. Another non-Jewish pupil of Schönberg’s, Winfried Zillig, continued to use twelvetone techniques, though in a relatively tonal way, but he escaped censure and continued to get work as a conductor and composer. His works included scenes from peasant life, the depiction of self-sacrificing heroism, and similar themes close to Nazi ideology. Here, as in the work of one or two other composers, the message triumphed over the medium.207
In one notorious case, however, neither the medium nor the message proved acceptable to the authorities, despite the fact that both appeared superficially to be reconcilable with Nazi aesthetics. Paul Hindemith, perhaps Germany’s leading modernist composer under the Weimar Republic, had earned a reputation in the 1920s as an enfant terrible but changed his style to a more accessible neo-Classicism around 1930. This transition was recognized by some influential fig
ures on the Nazi cultural scene in 1933, including Goebbels, who was keen to keep him in Germany as he was widely recognized as the country’s second-most important composer after Strauss. At the beginning of the Third Reich, Hindemith was engaged in writing to his own libretto an opera, Matthias the Painter, which centred on the medieval German artist Matthias Grünewald, a figure much beloved of Nazi art historians. The opera told of the painter’s rebellious struggle to establish himself as a German artist, and its culmination in his acceptance of patronage from a state that finally recognized his talents. A new element of Romanticism in the score testified to its composer’s continuing efforts to render his somewhat academic style more accessible to a wider public. Although he had made no secret of his opposition to fascism before the Nazi seizure of power, Hindemith had evidently decided to stay on and take his chances. He was duly appointed to the governing council of the Composers’ Section of the Reich Music Chamber in November 1933. A three-movement symphony drawn from the music to Matthias the Painter was premiered by Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic on 12 March 1934 and further performances were scheduled, together with a gramophone record. All seemed set for Hindemith’s acceptance as the leading modern composer of the Third Reich.208
The Third Reich in Power Page 24
