Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  In 1931, Carl Flesch, who had joined the Hochschule faculty in 1928 at a time when Havemann's star was thought to be on the wane, published a book on tone production entitled Das Klangproblem im Geigenspiel.21 A comment in the book on the innate musicality of the Jewish ‘ghetto fiddler’ led to an attack by Havemann in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, in which he asserted that ‘the presumption of Jewish racial advantages in violin playing’ offended him ‘as a German’. He further accused Flesch of wanting to impose the Jewish violin tone onto Germans: ‘This is a tone that our race rejects, as it is too soft and sensuous.‘22 A heated debate then ran from 4 December to 18 December 1931 before the two teachers were persuaded to end their public argument with a statement of mutual respect.23 Much of this bickering was politically motivated and was specifically directed against Leo Kestenberg, who, as a Jew, was also adviser to the Prussian Cultural Ministry. More generally, the attack was directed against the entire Prussian Social Democratic Government's cultural policy-making, an area that happened to include Schreker's faculty appointments at the Hochschule.24

  In 1932, Flesch appointed his former pupil Stefan Frenkel, a Polish Jew, to cover his violin class during the periods he was away on tour. In light of the previous year's debate, the appointment proved explosive. It resulted in a storm of indignation from Havemann and his ‘Action League’ colleagues, including the composer Max Trapp, and less illustrious teachers such as Romuald Wikarski and Valeska Burgstaller.25 Their tedious machinations, full of anti-Semitic innuendo, ultimately forced Schreker's resignation as the school's Director in June 1932.

  As compensation, Schreker was offered a composition master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts, where Schoenberg had taken over a similar position in 1926. They both found themselves beholden to the new President of the Prussian Academy of Arts, the composer Max von Schillings, who joined the National Socialist Party on 1 April 1933. Schillings began the systematic removal of all members and faculty who were either Jewish or unsympathetic to the new regime. On 18 March, both Schoenberg and Schreker attended their last meeting at the Academy, where they were informed that they could not expect to keep their positions. The official dismissal was to take effect from 31 December.26

  Schreker's appeal to the composer Joseph Marx to help find him a position in Vienna was met with seeming callousness by his friend and former colleague, who replied in a letter dated 2 July 1933: ‘The developments in Germany followed a clear inner logic of its own; it was to be expected that this enormously gifted and industrious people would not submit to being shackled forever by every conceivable and inconceivable kind of political trick. And as far as the Jewish matter is concerned, I explained to a Jew just a short time ago that they themselves are the ones who encouraged all manner of anti-Semitism with their absolutely indescribable actions.‘27

  At his holiday home in Estoril in Portugal, Schreker worked on the monumental overture to his unfinished opera Memnon which he entitled Vorspiel zu einer großen Oper. In October he returned to Berlin, where he completed its composition in preparation for a concert in Vienna while continuing to search for projects or opportunities that would enable him and his family to leave the country. Removal of his works from performance (the Vorspiel would not be played until 1958), his inability to appear as a conductor, and a forced retirement from teaching with the knowledge that his pension was barely above subsistence level, most likely brought on the stroke in late December that eventually killed him on 21 March 1934. Not surprisingly, the ‘New Germany’ did not heap him with posthumous praise and honours. In the case of the unapologetically Nazi house magazine, the once moderate Die Musik, he received only the vilest opprobrium – indeed, it extended to well beyond his death. In May 1938, Die Musik ran a retrospective article on music since 1933:

  No less destructive was the foreign Jewish spirit which was accompanied by the bastardisation within German musical life. Heading the Central Institution of Education and Culture within the Prussian Ministry sat Leo Kestenberg, the son of a Jewish cantor. That he should appoint and promote his racial comrades will not surprise those who know the mentality, ways and means of Jews. The Directorship of the Music Academy was in the hands of the racial half-breed Franz Schreker, who poisoned the spirit of the people with his over-wrought and perverted operas.28

  Christopher Hailey reminds us that the German press offered only two sympathetic obituaries. It must be counted an unexpected stroke of good fortune that only a month before Schreker's death, Julius Korngold retired from the Neue Freie Presse, meaning that Schreker's obituary was written by the more sympathetic Josef Reitler. A condolence letter to Schreker's wife from Anton Webern reminds us of Schreker's importance within twentieth-century Viennese music. If Webern's appreciation reminds us of Schreker's contribution to the shaping of the Second Viennese School, Reitler reminds us that, with his early libretto-writing instruction coming from the Austrian novelist and playwright Ferdinand von Saar, Schreker was equally part of ‘Old Vienna’ (an important differentiation from ‘Young Vienna’, the group of writers who congregated at Café Griensteidl, such as Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Altenberg and Hugo von Hofmannsthal). Reitler goes on to write:

  So much is made of the distant and near sounds to be heard in Schreker's opera texts that one starts to believe them just as one believes in the beauty of the Queen of Sheba or the invincibility of Walter's prize song in Meistersinger. It's impossible to deny his mastery or his ability to create extraordinary orchestral sounds and particularly his genius for producing colours with his extravagant orchestrations. It may be argued that the price he paid for this, however, would be a loss of the melodic and dramatic narrative, which may explain why certain works now seem pale and others were not successful at all. He once said, ‘I actually don't have a music-dramatic idea. I simply write without any plan at all and what I write is simply there.’ This ability to call up the shadows of his subconscious has been mentioned critically in these pages before […] yet the specific genius of Schreker is beyond question. If Schreker had to fight as a composer, he was revered as a teacher. His students represent an entire generation of Vienna's talent, which he replicated with his move in 1920 to Berlin. They all held on to his every word and action. He took whoever represented independence of spirit and originality and he was no pedant. […] It is a tragic coincidence that this obituary appears on what would have been his 56th birthday.29

  Hailey also reminds us of a view expressed by the musicologist Károly Csipák that Schreker's ‘persecution complex’ made him unaware of the scale of what was happening around him.30 Unlike Gál, Erich Korngold or even Schoenberg, Schreker did not identify himself as a Jew, was never raised as a Jew, and was unversed in any Jewish traditions, even if other non-Jewish composers saw him as displaying Jewish musical characteristics. Ernst Krenek's recognition of Schreker's ‘Jewishness’ has already been mentioned, and as early as 1915 the composer Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen had sensed features in Schreker's music which, though praiseworthy, could never be considered native to ‘German’ composers. Be that as it may, it's worth recalling that Schreker's Jewish father had converted before his second marriage, and so before the birth of the children that came from this union. He died when his son Franz was only nine years old. Schreker therefore never developed the antennae of his colleagues from Jewish or partially Jewish households. Yet even among Jewish colleagues, he was hardly alone: Hans Gál, as we have seen, also refused to recognise the seriousness of the changes that were taking place around him.

  Schreker's attitude may have been naïve, but his situation vis-à-vis the Nazis was similar to that of Walter Braunfels, whose father Ludwig had been baptised as an infant by his converted Jewish father. Like Gál and Schreker, Braunfels was also head of a leading music institution, the Cologne Music Academy, a school that during the nineteenth century had once been headed by the Jewish composer and pianist Ferdinand Hiller. Braunfels was married to the daughter of a notable German sculptor, Adolf von Hild
ebrand. He was thus partially immune from the loss of social status that threatened Schreker with financial ruin. Braunfels even felt that his removal from the directorship in Cologne following a denunciation by one of his faculty members, Hermann Unger (who replaced Braunfels in the next Dortmund Tonkünstlerfest), was responsible for his new-found creative vigour. Despite these injustices, and his ejection from musical life under similar circumstance to Schreker, Braunfels seems to have been confident that he would remain unharmed and moved first to Godesberg and, from 1937, to a modest home near Überlingen on Lake Constance, where he remained in near total anonymity writing some of his most important and searching music.

  The works that came out of this period in Braunfels's life included a powerful String Quintet, three string quartets, a number of church cantatas and three large-scale stage works: Die Verkündigung (1933–5), Der Traum ein Leben (1937), and Szenen aus dem Leben der heiligen Johanna (1939–43).31 The reason he gave later for not choosing emigration was ‘the conviction that, merely through my continued presence, I was a stone in the dam that was keeping evil from flooding everything; but also I realised that should I decide to leave my homeland, I would be ripping out the most important roots to my own creativity. I was well rewarded for keeping to this position […] the source of inspiration welled up.‘32

  For his part, he refused any participation in German musical life on the rare occasions it was offered, initiating an internal boycott of his own. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he relocated to Florence, where he continued to work on his opera Heilige Johanna before returning to Lake Constance in the spring of 1940 eking out a living teaching local children. It is miraculous that in the course of the war he was neither denounced nor deported, but kept himself safe and anonymous among the villagers of Überlingen – coincidentally the same village where Winifred Wagner died in 1980 at the age of 82.

  If the professional circumstances of Schreker and Braunfels appeared to be almost identical, Schreker spent his adult life in fear of having to return to the horrors of the genteel poverty of his youth, an insecurity that did not trouble Braunfels.33 Schreker's most successful years were during the period of Germany's hyper-inflation, meaning that he never achieved true financial security despite immense popularity. The shock of losing all sources of income at the age of 55 was more than his nervous state could bear. Braunfels, with a far larger family, followed a deeply devotional life as an observant Catholic. Schreker kept no such faith, and with his death in 1934 he can be counted as the first important musical victim to fall to Nazi persecution.

  The Mechanics of the Purge

  Scholars of National Socialism's music policies relate a never-ending tug-of-war for the cultural soul of the Nazi Party and, by extension, the German nation between the ministers Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg concerning questions of party dogma versus image and propaganda. Rosenberg, along with members of the younger Wagner clan, the virulently anti-Semitic editor of the Zeitschrift für Musik Alfred Heuß, and the editor of the Bayreuth newsletter, Hans von Wolzogen, formed the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur in 1929. Rosenberg remained its director and gave the appearance of having the upper hand in musical matters prior to 1933. Goebbels, perhaps owing to his hate-inspired rhetoric, gained Hitler's confidence and was permitted to incorporate music policy within his own Ministry of Propaganda. He was certainly the cleverer and more sophisticated of the two. There are even indications, such as the supervision of his doctorate by Jewish professors, that his anti-Semitism was an opportunistic add-on.

  Goebbels was amenable towards new trends in the arts and he wanted to find a means of keeping Hindemith in Germany as the standard-bearer for contemporary music under National Socialism. For the purposes of selling Germany's image – especially abroad – it was important for Goebbels to challenge the perception that National Socialism, in common with other European Fascist regimes, was culturally backward-looking.

  Rosenberg, despite what many took to be a Jewish-sounding name and his rather un-Teutonic appearance, took Nordic imagery as his reference for political dogma. Hitler told Rosenberg on 24 January 1934 that he expected him to act as his personal representative in all educational matters relating to National Socialist culture and the interpretation of its ‘world view’. In 1936–7, Rosenberg fused his money-losing Action League with Kraft durch Freude,34 an organisation that provided education and entertainment for the masses. Bundled together, they became known as the ‘Reich's Supervision Bureau’,35 colloquially referred to as ‘The Rosenberg Office’. This was subdivided into the various disciplines of Education, ‘The Cultivation of Literature’, ‘The Cultivation of the Arts’, ‘The Department of Early and Pre-History’, as well as an archive of ‘Clerical, [church]-Political Issues’, and the more general field of the sciences. The Department for Music, a subdivision of the Arts section, was under the responsibility of the musicologist Herbert Gerigk, later the co-author of the notorious Lexikon der Juden in der Musik.36 With this increase of influence, Rosenberg's department became a counter-balance to Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda.

  A Contemporary Account of Rosenberg in London

  On 10 May 1933, the Neue Freie Presse gleefully recounted a story reported in a ‘London Telegram’ of the right-wing, anti-Nazi German paper, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, regarding the intellectual drubbing Rosenberg received at the hands of Margot Asquith, ‘Countess of Oxford and Asquith’ and widow of the former Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Rosenberg was in England in his capacity as Head of the National Socialist Party's Foreign Affairs Office. His stay had not been a success, and when Rosenberg laid a wreath on the Cenotaph, one of the monument's guards later tossed it into the River Thames. As related in the ‘London Telegram’, the encounter with Margot Asquith was even more humiliating:

  Lady Oxford [Margot Asquith] told Rosenberg that he was a brave man to come to a country where there was only one opinion to be heard on the horrors and stupidities emanating from the new regime in Germany. She asked if Hitler had no God, and assuming he hadn't, ‘couldn't he at least leave those who had one in peace?’ Rosenberg explained that there was a huge job ahead and that she had misunderstood the nature of the miracles that Hitler had already brought forth. ‘They were not fighting against religion as such, but against various people, particularly the Jews, who everyone knows are opposed to the new regime.’ He told her of the hunger, the desperation and the despair of Germany before Hitler and how now, everyone was filled with hope and new ideals. Lady Oxford countered that these things did not apply to Germany's great men, but to Germany's sheep. She asked Rosenberg what was happening to the country's many scholars, the doctors, the lawyers, the musicians and writers – all the people who had made Germany a country of cultural greatness. Rosenberg explained: ‘These things will settle down again. There can be no revolution on this scale without some injustices being committed. But these are minor in comparison with the great act of unity currently under way.’ Lady Oxford replied that ‘Creating fear is not the same as creating unity’ and that she ‘would shudder’ should she find herself in Germany today. Rosenberg retorted that the National Socialists know that the German people are on their side; but the Jews are against them. ‘After the previous war, the Jews managed to secure all of the best positions for themselves. They are corrupt, easy to bribe and have promoted Communism.’ Lady Oxford again: ‘It is intelligence that makes a country great, and if Germany expels all of its most capable intellects amidst shouts of “Heil Hitler”, they make themselves a laughing-stock.’ Rosenberg's response was that ‘no revolution as large as the National Socialist Revolution has been carried out with so little loss of life. Had the NS Revolution come only a month later, Germany would have descended into even greater bloodshed. The network of intrigues and Communism was only waiting for the right moment.’ He ended by stating that he hoped she would live long enough to see how Germany would be saved by the acts of this one great man, Adolf Hitler.37

  Margot Asquith died in July 19
45, only two months after the fall of the Third Reich.

  A Confused Beginning

  The Wagnerian tendency to write new stage works on ancient Germanic themes in the late 1920s and early 1930s has already been mentioned in the context of the diminishing popularity of Zeitoper. This trend was accorded a more sinister meaning by the youthful head of Universal Edition's opera department, Hans Heinsheimer, who saw a continued ‘Teutonisation’ of the repertoire being conceded by conservatives as a means of tossing a bone to the rowdy Nazi opposition.38 One of these works would have been Friedemann Bach, by Paul Graener, who would become very much a Nazi favourite. As it happened, Graener would eventually take over one of the positions left vacant by the enforced retirements of Schoenberg and Schreker at the Prussian Academy in 1933. He also took on one of the positions at the Allgemeiner deutsche Musikverein (ADMV) left vacant after the removal of Berg, Gál and Toch, two of whom were Jewish and one of whom was tainted by association with Schoenberg. Not only were all three Austrian citizens, but their works were deemed to be inappropriate to the ‘new’ Germany. Graener would also head the composer's division at the Reich's Musikkammer, the Nazi office for musical affairs. Friedemann Bach shares its Jewish librettist Rudolf Lothar with Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland – another popular work among National Socialists and reputed to be one of Hitler's favourites. Despite conflicting messages coming from those close to Hitler's inner circle, Viktor Zuckerkandl's review of Friedemann Bach’s 1932 Berlin performance reveals the direction in which the politico-musical wind would ultimately blow:

  Paul Graener, the composer of many successful orchestral and chamber works, along with his opera Don Juans letztes Abenteuer [Don Juan's Last Adventure], which has been seen on most stages throughout Germany, is also director of the Sternschen Conservatory in Berlin and has only recently celebrated his 60th birthday. A few days following this event, the Städtische Oper [in Berlin-Charlottenburg] mounted its first performance of his new work, Friedemann Bach. It was an occasion for friends and pupils to join in the celebratory festivities.