The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  As it turned out, atonal and twelve-tone writing was sometimes tolerated, provided the composer assumed the right ideological stance. When Herbert Gerigk, a musicologist who headed the music section of Alfred Rosenberg’s ideology bureau and worked tirelessly to identify all musical Jews, pondered the case of Arnold Schoenberg in 1934, he came to a startling conclusion: “Even so-called atonality can produce worthwhile art as long as the man standing behind it is racially and personally unobjectionable and creative.”

  Schoenberg’s pupils Winfried Zillig and Paul von Klenau used twelve-tone technique throughout the Nazi period, softening its impact with tonal material. Zillig, in his opera Das Opfer, employed a row made up of major and minor triads, as in Berg’s Lulu. Klenau, a reactionary Dane, justified the technique of his opera Michael Kohlhaas as follows: “In the opera not one note occurs that cannot be derived from one of seven underlying twelve-tone rows…The music of our time needs a new ordering regularity, which corresponds to ethical content. A future-oriented art appropriate to the National Socialist world requires ethical fellow feeling and a knack for craftsmanship that gets rid of all arbitrary individualistic activities in the realm of tones.”

  Ironically, Klenau’s nationalistic spin on twelve-tone writing was not too far removed from his teacher’s own conception of it. Although Schoenberg opposed the Nazis unstintingly, he was hardly free from authoritarian impulses, as his attack on the egalitarianism of the Weimar Republic shows. In 1931, as Germany was swinging politically rightward, Schoenberg described his music as “a living example of an art able most effectively to oppose Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony and derived through and through from the traditions of German music.” Even in American exile, he had a hard time adjusting to the concept of “We the people,” and in his 1938 essay “Four-Point Program for Jewry” he declared that democracy would be unsuitable for a mass Jewish movement. To illustrate the point, he provided an object lesson from his own biography; in the course of running the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, he said, he had become “a kind of dictator,” and on encountering internal opposition, he did something “which under other circumstances could be called illegal: I dissolved the whole society, built a new one, accepted only such members who were in perfect agreement with my artistic principles and excluded the entire opposition.” This is precisely how Hitler took power in 1933.

  Schoenberg sent the “Four-Point Program” to his fellow exile Thomas Mann, in the hope that the novelist would arrange to have it published. Mann wrote back in alarm, objecting to the document’s “fascistic bent,” its “will to terrorism.” The seed of Doctor Faustus was planted.

  Alban Berg lacked sympathy for Hitler’s program, but he was not above tailoring his résumé in order to meet Nazi requirements. In 1933 he discussed the challenges of the new German marketplace with his pupil Adorno, who himself had no desire to leave Germany, despite his partly Jewish background. Adorno advised Berg to advertise his pure Aryan origins to the Reich Music Chamber, and also to distance himself from any notion of Jewish solidarity, “about which one can have so few illusions.”

  As for Webern, he forsook his onetime socialist views to become an unashamed Hitler enthusiast, greeting the invasion of Denmark and Norway with almost orgasmic prose: “This is Germany today! But the National Socialist one, to be sure! Not just any one! This is exactly the new state, for which the seed was already laid twenty years ago. Yes, a new state it is, one that has never existed before!! It is something new! Created by this unique man!!!…Each day becomes more exciting. I see such a good future. It will be different also for me.”

  No composer more painfully exhibited the moral collapse of German art than Richard Strauss, who served as president of the Reich Music Chamber from 1933 to 1935. The composer of Salome warmed to Hitler chiefly because he thought that under the aegis of this music-loving chancellor he would be able to enact a series of long-dreamed-of reforms—new royalty schemes favoring classical composers over popular ones; the extension of composers’ copyrights; rules preventing spa orchestras from massacring Wagner overtures; guidelines discouraging young people from ruining their voices by bellowing patriotic songs.

  The record is dismaying. Strauss appeared at Nazi functions and signed a meretricious denunciation of Thomas Mann. When the anti-fascist Toscanini canceled his Bayreuth engagements in 1933, Strauss replaced him, and in the same year he stepped in as a last-minute replacement for the racially unacceptable Bruno Walter in Berlin. On the relatively rare occasions when Strauss was in the capital, he socialized with Nazi leaders at the various stately mansions that they had commandeered. In February 1934, for example, he joined Hitler for a vegetarian meal at the home of Walther Funk; after dinner, the composer accompanied the singers Viorica Ursuleac and Heinrich Schlusnus in various of his Lieder. He offered the leadership birthday wishes, congratulated them on their speeches, and bestowed holiday gifts. For Christmas 1933 he gave Hitler a copy of Joseph Gregor’s World History of the Theater.

  Strauss’s behavior was not always as contemptible as it seemed. In the case of the Bruno Walter affair, the outside world had no idea that Strauss accepted the assignment with reluctance, and only after a Jewish-owned concert agency, Wolff and Sachs, informed him—truthfully or not—that Walter himself had asked Strauss to step in. In general, Strauss refused to take part in the de-Jewification of musical life. He avoided signing papers that would have set in motion the removal of Jews from the Music Chamber. He resisted the ban on Jewish composers and announced that the symphonies of Mahler, among other things, should continue to be performed. Planning an international music festival in Hamburg in 1935, he became exasperated when the Propaganda Ministry demanded an “Aryan French” substitute for Paul Dukas’s opera Ariane and Bluebeard. Strauss promptly declared his “total lack of interest in the Hamburg Festival from now on…I am not coming to Hamburg and, for the rest, Götzv. B.” Götz von Berlichingen is the Goethe play whose hero famously says, “Lick my ass.”

  Strauss also could not comprehend the banning of Felix Mendelssohn. Since his youth he had loved Mendelssohn’s music—all his exalted horn solos are descended from the Nocturne of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and he ridiculed the “terrible, Aryan ersatz music” that German composers (including Orff ) were hastily concocting to replace Mendelssohn’s forbidden score.

  When Stefan Zweig criticized his friend’s accommodations with the Nazis, Strauss answered with a tortuously self-justifying letter. “Do you believe that I have ever let myself be guided in any act by the notion that I am Germanic (perhaps, qui lu sa)?” he asked Zweig. “For me there are only two kinds of people, those with talent and those with none, and for me the Volk does not exist until it becomes the public.” The parenthetical remark is a fittingly cosmopolitan blending of French and Italian; Strauss probably meant to write “Chi lo sa” (“Who knows”). Which is to say, he neither knew nor cared whether he was a true Aryan.

  For some time the Nazis had been keeping a file on Strauss’s poor attitude. In February 1934, he and Furtwängler were denounced for failing to give the Fascist salute during a singing of the “Horst Wessel” song at a public event (reportedly, they were greeted with shouts of “Concentration camp!”). When it became known that several Jews had assisted in the creation of Die schweigsame Frau, Der Stürmer editorialized: “If [Strauss] wishes to use Jewish collaborators for his coming works we shall have to draw conclusions which are not very pleasant.” And if later recollections by Albert Speer are to be believed, Hitler himself began to see Strauss as an “opponent of the regime,” in league with “Jewish riff-raff.”

  But only when the Gestapo intercepted that remarkable letter to Zweig—“the Volk does not exist until it becomes the public”—did Strauss’s situation as an “official” composer become untenable. He was immediately forced to resign his Reich Music Chamber post. In a private memorandum Strauss finally let down his cynical facade and issued a private cry of principled disgust: “I consider t
he Streicher-Goebbels Jew baiting as a disgrace to German honor, as evidence of incompetence, the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher intelligence and greater talent.”

  If Strauss had fled Germany in the wake of this fiasco, Hitler’s regime would have suffered a severe embarrassment. But for various reasons the idea of leaving Germany probably never crossed his mind. By then well into his seventies, he could hardly have conceived of starting a new life on foreign soil. More important, if he had left by himself, his extended family would presumably have been sent to the concentration camps. Strauss had little choice but to undergo a humiliating process of self-rehabilitation. He began by writing an obsequious letter to Hitler, hailing him as “the great designer of German existence.” In 1936 Strauss made a high-profile appearance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Berlin, conducting a trite ceremonial piece titled Olympic Hymn, whose manuscript he had presented to Hitler. Thousands of white pigeons were released into the air as the music played. The program also included “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles,” the “Horst Wessel” song, the “Hallelujah” Chorus, and the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth. In Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia, Strauss can be seen wearing the poker face that he displayed through the first half of the twentieth century.

  Strauss wasn’t merely trying to repair his wounded pride; he was also trying to protect his partly Jewish family. On Kristallnacht, in November 1938, Richard and Christian Strauss, the composer’s beloved grandsons, were stopped on their way to school and forced to spit on a group of Jews who had been gathered in the village square; then they were spat on themselves. Later, Michael Kater relates, Franz and Alice Strauss were repeatedly harassed by the Gestapo, and on one occasion they were dragged from Richard’s house in the middle of the night and interrogated for several days. All the same, Franz remained a Nazi supporter. An intelligence report from 1944 stated that he responded angrily when acquaintances expressed doubts about the progress of the war or about Party institutions. It was also reported that Alice did not contradict him. Inside the house, however, arguments raged. Franz generally spoke up for the Nazis, while Richard railed against them.

  Music remained Strauss’s refuge from politics, yet political issues shadowed the successor to Die schweigsame Frau—the one-act drama Friedenstag, or Day of Peace. The scenario for this work originated with Zweig; the libretto was written by the theater historian Joseph Gregor, who took over as Strauss’s librettist when collaboration with Zweig became impossible. The story opens with a town starving under siege in the Thirty Years’ War. Its commandant is determined to burn it to the ground rather than surrender, but he is released from his destructive mission by the abrupt arrival of the “day of peace.” Some latter-day interpreters have tried to explicate the opera as a covert act of protest, but in truth the antiwar message blended all too well with Hitler’s cynical manipulation of European pacifists; the Führer loved to twist the minds of democratic leaders by arguing that his territorial acquisitions would prevent war, not start it. (“Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe,” Hitler said in 1935, “can only wish for chaos.”) The emptiness of the sentiment bleeds through Strauss’s blandly triumphant ending, a souped-up pastiche of the finales of Beethoven’s Ninth and Fidelio with echoes also of Mahler’s Eighth. The score comes to life only when Maria, the commandant’s wife, complains about how dreary her life has become. As so often, Strauss identified most strongly with his lead female character.

  Hitler confirmed Strauss’s temporary return to grace by attending a gala performance of Friedenstag in Vienna in 1939. (The premiere had happened in Munich the previous year.) The Führer was awarded a stormy ovation when he appeared in his box. He then ceded the spotlight to Strauss, who was saluted with his own Fanfare for the Vienna Philharmonic. At a sort of press conference with Goebbels the next morning, Strauss delivered his thanks and expressed the hope that German art would prosper forever under the protection of the Third Reich. Then, in a two-hour-long private breakfast with Goebbels, he talked about various problems that beset him, including the effect of anti-Jewish measures on his family. “He is unpolitical, like a child,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. Apparently, Strauss received assurances that his daughter-in-law and grandsons would have Hitler’s official protection, although this was not forthcoming. Alice Strauss was given a passport in which she was assigned the middle name “Sara,” like all the female Jews in Germany.

  Two years later the composer suffered a public breakdown as a result of Goebbels’s psychological games. Strauss had been heard to make dismissive remarks about the operettas of Lehár, whom, everyone knew, Hitler loved. Goebbels called Strauss in for a meeting, which he ironically recounted in his diary: “I say a few sweet nothings to him about his insolent letters. He cannot stop writing letters, and it has already brought him much misfortune. Next time I will show him.” In fact, this intimate exchange took place in front of a large delegation of composers. Werner Egk described the scene in his memoirs. “Lehár has the masses, you do not!” the minister screamed. “Stop once and for all your chatter about the significance of ‘serious music’! You are not helping your case! The art of tomorrow is different from the art of yesterday! You, Herr Strauss, are yesterday!”

  Afterward, Egk reported, Strauss stood for a while on the steps of the Propaganda Ministry, tears streaming down his cheeks, his head buried in his hands. “If only I had listened to my wife and stayed in Garmisch,” he murmured.

  On January 30, 1939, Hitler celebrated the sixth anniversary of his regime by delivering a major address to the Reichstag. Since the burning of the Reichstag building in 1933, the German parliament had carried out its business, now purely ceremonial, in the Kroll Opera House—where, in the Weimar time, Otto Klemperer had conducted Hindemith’s News of the Day and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. In the same hall in 1933, a crippled parliament had passed the Enabling Act, which granted the Reich chancellor dictatorial powers. Now, in 1939, Hitler gave notice that his dominion would in short order encompass much of Europe and that those who stood in the way of destiny would face destruction. Goebbels, in his diaries, described Hitler’s speech as a “spacious” conception that built through an extended development of familiar themes to a potent climax. “Posterity must cherish his speech as a masterwork,” Goebbels wrote. “The ending of the speech is gripping and devastating. All are totally enthralled by it. The Führer is a true genius.”

  This speech added two new themes to the familiar denunciation of the Jews: laughter and annihilation. “Very often in my life,” Hitler said, “I have been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at [ausgelacht].” He announced that it was now finally time to bring the Jewish problem to a “solution” whose sheer scope might wipe the smiles from the faces of his enemies: “I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat.” Hitler made another prophecy: “If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.”

  Hitler repeated these themes in subsequent speeches. In September 1942 he said, “The Jews in Germany once laughed [haben einst…gelacht] at my prophecies. I do not know if they are still laughing today, or if their laughter has not already died down. I can only affirm now: their laughter will everywhere die down.” And in November of that year he said, “I have always been scorned [ausgelacht] as a prophet. Of those who formerly laughed [die damals lachten], untold numbers are no longer laughing today, and those who are still laughing may not be doing it for much longer.”

  Hitler was announcing in coded language that the Final Solution was under way. What makes these speeches especially disturbing from the musical angle is that they may contain a Wagner reference. The sound of laughter echoes all through Parsifal. Kundry tells Parsifal of how she mocked Christ’s suffering on th
e way of the cross:

  I saw—Him—Him—

  and—laughed…

  And He looked at me!

  Otto Weininger, whom Hitler described in his monologues as the “one good Jew,” said of the laughter in Parsifal, “The laughter of Kundry comes from Jewry. The metaphysical guilt of the Jews is their grinning at God.” Later, in the scene of Good Friday Spell, the boy-messiah looks out over a blossoming meadow and thinks of the flower maidens who tempted him. “I saw them wither,” he murmurs, “those who once smiled on me [Ich sah sie welken, die einst mir lachten].”

  Hitler’s obsession with Parsifal is well documented. Hans Frank, in his not always reliable autobiography, reported the following more or less believable scene, which took place in the Führer’s private train car in 1935: