Ring Festival LA - three years later

This is Mixed Meters third anniversary post memorializing Los Angeles Opera's attempt to hold an arts festival that would somehow make the music of Richard Wagner relevant to Los Angeles California.  I'll also discuss a history of the unofficial Wagner ban in Israel and then a Jewish actor's love letter to Wagner's music in the form of a film which, in my opinion, does a good job of discussing Wagnerian music's sordid involvement with Hitler and the Nazis.

RING FESTIVAL LA PLUS THREE

In November 2008 Placido Domingo announced:

“Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles.” 

Read the whole initial press release here.  The festival happened in 2010.  Read more about it here.

At this point I think we at Mixed Meters (we in this case being the euphemism for me, David Ocker) are the only ones who think about this subject any more.  And it's entirely possible that I'm the only person who had any sort of defining moment as a result of their festival, as it got me interested in the relationships between Hitler, the Nazis, Wagner and his endlessly turgid music.

Last December the LA Times reported that LA Opera had paid off the $14,000,000 loan which squeaked them through their Ring cycle production. That loan was controversially co-signed for by the nearly 10 million residents of Los Angeles County thanks to the actions of our 5 elected Supervisors.

Since their go-round with Wagner LA Opera has been sticking with crowd-pleasing opera classics.  Although next year they will dip their toe into living memory by presenting Philip Glass's 1976 Einstein on the Beach.  My late 70's self would be thrilled.  My current self thinks Einstein is probably somewhat less boring than Wagner but still not worth sitting through.  (Addendum: they're also doing Billy Budd, premiered when I was three months old.)

Here's a cartoon to lighten the mood.

THE RING OF MYTHS - WAGNER: BANNED IN ISRAEL

In the endless discussion of why Wagner was such a creep, a prime topic is his anti-semitism.  Of course the extreme anti-semitism of his descendants and their support of Wagner's most influential and anti-semitic fanboy, Adolph Hitler, come up repeatedly.

Often one of the talking points in these discussions is the unofficial ban on the music of Wagner in the nation of Israel.    This subject still hits the news periodically.  I mentioned a development in my LA Ring Festival 2-year memorial.    The ban dates from November 12, 1938 when conductor Arturo Toscanini removed the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from a concert by the Palestine Symphony Orchestra to protest the Nazi-organized anti-Jewish riots known as Krystallnacht three days earlier.

A fascinating book published in 2001 details the history of this ban: The Ring of Myths, The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis by Na'ama Sheffi.  

Interesting facts abound.  For example, right after the war any music with lyrics in the German language, even works by Mahler, was deemed unsuitable by the public.  The music of Richard Strauss was banned along with Wagner's (although unlike Wagner it has since achieved greater acceptance).  In 1953 Jasha Heifetz was physically attacked and slightly injured by a man wielding an iron pipe.  His motive?  The violinist insisted on playing a work by Strauss in Israel.

Throughout The Ring of Myths prominent musicians paternalistically promote adding Wagner's music to the Israeli concert repertoire despite knowing there will be strong public opposition.  Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim, I'm talking about you.  Their excuse is that Wagner is somehow essential to music history or orchestral technique.  This line of reasoning rings rather hollow in my ears - but my readers probably already know what I think of Wagner's music.

Sheffi does her best to help an outsider keep Israeli politicians, political parties and newspapers, across the entire spectrum from left to right, straight.  Uphill work!   Because most of the primary sources of this story (like newspaper articles and the archives of the Israel Philharmonic) are all written in Hebrew, this book gives a non-Israeli a chance to follow what would otherwise be a closed discussion.

The Ring of Myths clearly shows that the reasons for continuance of the Wagner ban have changed over time.  In the early years of the state of Israel anything even remotely connected to Germany would be protested.  As the relations between Israel and Germany improved (often represented by Israelis driving Volkswagens or Mercedes), Richard Wagner continued as an emotionally-charged symbol of the Nazis.   This emotion repeatedly got caught up in the arcane ebb and flow of Israeli politics.  In Israel, of course, religion colors most political debates.

Sheffi succinctly outlines these shifts in her preface:

In the 1950s and 1960s Wagner was an important argument for the factions opposing the restoration of ties with Germany; in the 1970s he was a vehicle for the anger of intellectuals at what they termed Israeli hypocrisy; in the 1980s he was a key figure in the struggle over the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust; and in the 1990s he served the national ultra-Orthodox religious ideology, which calls on Israelis to content themselves with Hebrew culture and stop copying the ways of the gentiles.

The last stage was most interesting to me since I often think that classical music has become a kind of religion for certain people.  This is most obvious in the cult-like behavior surrounding Richard Wagner's music.  People who argue in favor of Wagner seem to do so based on their deep personal, emotional belief in the power of his music.  This primary dogma informs each new debate in a logically unassailable manner.  Such fundamentalism is, in my opinion, just as basic to most organized religion as it is to Wagnerism.

Sheffi ultimately argues that Israelis can and should find better ways of commemorating the Holocaust than by symbolically banning Wagner.  Maybe.  I think that as a symbol Wagner is permanently stained by Nazism, just as the swastika has been.  Wagner and his music will continue as a symbol of Hitler and the Nazis for a long time to come.

WAGNER AND STEPHEN FRY

Stephen Fry, a famous English actor, is a Jew.  Some members of his family perished in the Holocaust.  Fry is also a big fan of the music of Richard Wagner.  He has explored the resulting existential tension  in a movie entitled Wagner and Me.  

It opens on a rehearsal of the Prelude to Act 3 of the opera Siegfried and then cuts to scenes of Bayreuth Germany home of the infamously famous Bayreuth Festival founded by and dedicated to Wagner himself.

Fry's narration, often exited, breathless, even awestruck, takes an immediate stab at explaining why this place is so important:

Well, for anyone who loves Wagner as I do this place is Stratford-upon-Avon, Mecca, Graceland all rolled into one.

Yep.  Fry's description of this shrine puts Wagner on the same level of not just great artists like Elvis Presley and William Shakespeare, but right up there with an actual religious prophet worshipped by a billion and a half people.  I keep sayin' - Wagner is a religious thing.

At first Fry wanders aimlessly around the Festspielhaus like a kid in a candy shop, gleeful, astonished and amazed by the smallest things because everything he sees or touches has some connection to Wagner.  He says "Oh, I wish I were a Valkyrie sometimes."

Then, standing in a hallway hung with pictures of conductors (we are shown Hermann Levi, about whom Wagner might have said "some of my best friends are Jewish") Fry gets around to explaining why he likes Wagner's music.

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first heard Wagner's music on my father's grammophone.  It was the overture to Tannhäuser one of his earlier operas and it did something most extraordinary to me.  I've always loved music.  I've always been hopeless at performing it, couldn't really play an instrument,  certainly can't sing, but it's made me do things inside.  It's released forces within me.  And no music has done it like Wagner's.

Later he refers to Wagner's music as "gut-wrenching", but I don't think those are the internal forces he has in mind.  Blessedly, Fry never tries to project his Wagner epiphany on other people.  Although he revisits the "it does things to me" theme, he keeps the revelations personal throughout the movie at least until the very end.  Fry continues:

To experience the music I love in the composer's own theater is something I've dreamed of doing for as long as I can remember.  But it's no secret that my passion was also shared by Him.

"Him" (Fry intones "Him" dripping in villainous overtones) is Hitler who pops up on the screen just at that moment, shown seig heiling from a window of Bayreuth

And like me he felt the magnetic pull of Bayreuth.  I'm Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust so before I take my seat in the Festival House I need to feel sure I'm doing the right thing.

Fry drops back from this ominous foreshadowing and gives us fine little essays about Wagner's biography and why his music is important plus some clips of opera productions. He meets Wagner's great-granddaughter, has a piano lesson on the Tristan chord, travels to Russia.  The photography of beautiful scenery, ornate opera halls and fairy-tale castles is exceptional.  Eventually he gets back to the Hitler question in two interviews.

One is with Dr. Joachim Köhler, author of a controversial book Wagner's Hitler, The Prophet and His Disciple.  They talk in the Nuremberg stadium where the Nazi rallys were held (think Triumph of the Will) and then Fry reflects alone on the Wagner/Nazi connection.

I suppose I think of it like this, imagine a great beautiful silk tapestry of infinite color and complexity that has been stained indelibly. It's still a beautiful tapestry of miraculous workmanship and gorgeous color and silken texture but that stain is real and I'm afraid Hitler and Nazism have stained Wagner. For some people that stain ruins the whole work. For others it is just something you have to face up to.

Later he talks to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp because of her musical abilities.  He asks her "Am I betraying my Jewishness by playing Wagner and liking him?".  Her answer:

I think everybody has to come to terms by themselves.  I would never forbid anybody to listen to Wagner.  If it was the music without the drama one wouldn't probably argue with it.  But apart from the fact I would never have the patience to sit for 5 hours and listen to so much noise.

And, at the end, of course, Stephen Fry decides that indeed he can listen to Wagner at Bayreuth, that he can ignore the stain and that he is doing the right thing.  We see him, ticket and pillow in hand, eagerly entering the concert hall for opening night at Bayreuth.  And we should forgive him his besotted love of Wagner's music because he did ask the hard questions and faced up to the negative associations directly.

Finally he tells us that, if we've never heard it before, we should give Wagner's music a try.  He concludes:

I still believe, as firmly as I believe anything, that his work is important and is on the side of the angels.  It is fundamentally good.  

Yes, it comes down to a matter of belief.  He believes in Wagner the same way people believe in imaginary gods.  You accept the faith or you don't.  I think Mr. Fry is to be commended for not whitewashing the bad parts of his story but he completely fails to explain, exactly, what is so good, so angelic about Wagner or his music.  (Granted, he does explain why Wagner is so important.  Even I agree that Wagner is important.  I just wish he could be made less so.)

In the final analysis, you listen to this music and it does something inside of you, something gut-wrenching, or it doesn't.  That reaction - or lack of it - seems to determine your attitude towards Wagner and his music, probably for the rest of your life.  More than that, unless you were a Holocaust survivor, a person's attitude towards the music further seems to determine one's outlook on how Hitler manipulated Wagner as a symbol.   The entire topic has been reduced to dogma and symbols.  And just like in religion, a believer either has to accept the dogma and venerate the symbols or stay out of the church.

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Previously I've written a lot about these subjects. Here are links which will show articles marked with these tags:
Ring Festival LA
Richard Wagner
Hitler and Nazis
Naturally, there's a lot of overlap.

The most cogent discussion of Wagner's music in contemporary culture was a lecture given by Leon Botstein as part of Ring Festival LA at the Hammer Museum.  (Skip to about 40 minutes.)  This was discussed in the MM post Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish.




Beating a Dead Horse Tags: Richard Wagner. . . Ring Festival LA. . . Na'ama Sheffi. . . Stephen Fry

Inside the Gas Chambers

For the most part news is not a spectator sport. Only small groups of people directly witness major events. The rest of us must trust the media to find out what happened.

As time passes, people begin to agree that certain events were important. They observe the anniversaries, honor the heroes, slander the villains.  Stories are told, songs sung.  Books are written, movies made.  Lessons are learned, courses organized.  Eventually experts arise.  Starting with petty disagreements these experts argue with one another.  They form factions, wage verbal battles, assert opposite interpretations.  They go to court.  Their interpretations morph into articles of faith.

Beliefs have supplanted facts.

And then even more time passes. The important event is eclipsed by other important events. Direct witnesses die off, as do the rest of us. Generations disappear. The event loses relevance and becomes a dusty academic topic.  Professors vainly try to explain to bored students what actually happened and how anyone could have thought it was so special in the first place.

This process is called History.

I recently finished reading a book, the story of a direct witness to important events of history.  These  particular events were monstrously inhuman, the systematic genocide of millions of people.   Inside the Gas Chambers, Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz is an essential read because it is told by a direct witnesses to the Holocaust, one of the few who was made to work inside the Nazi crematoria and survived the war.  This book deserves our attention because, these days, there are certain people (let's call them "experts") who deny that such events ever happened in the first place.

Shlomo Venezia was a Sephardic Jew living in Greece. In 1944 the Nazis deported him to a concentration camp where they systematically murdered in the gas chambers anyone who couldn't work. Venezia was selected for a special unit, the Sonderkommando, whose job it was to move the dead bodies and burn the corpses.

The book takes the form of an interview, with Venezia responding at length to short questions.  His is not an overview of the huge ideology-driven Nazi murder enterprise.  This is not a grand history. Instead Venezia tells his own tale very simply.  He was one of many mice caught in a large trap.

(Question:) What did you see of the gas chamber when you arrived?

I wasn't one of those who had to take the corpses out of the gas chamber, but later on I frequently had to do it.  Those given this task started by pulling the corpses out with their hands, but in a few minutes their hands were dirty and slippery.  In order to avoid touching the bodies directly, they tried using a bit of cloth, but, of course, the cloth in turn became dirty and damp after a few moments.  So people had to make do.  Some tried to drag the bodies along with a belt, but this actually made the work even harder, since they had to keep tying and untying the belt.  Finally, the simplest thing was to use a walking stick under the nape of the neck to pull the bodies along.  You can see it very clearly in one of David Olère's drawings.  There was no shortage of walking sticks, because of all the elderly people who were put to death.  At least this meant we didn't have to drag the corpses with our hands.  And this was hugely important for us.  Not because it was a matter of corpses, though that was bad enough. . . . It was because their death had been anything but gentle.  It was a foul, filthy death, difficult and experienced differently by each of them.

(David Olère was an artist who also survived the Sonderkommando and documented it after the war in drawings such as this one.)

I've never talked about this until now; it's such a weight, it's so heartrending, that I find it difficult to speak of those visions of the gas chamber.  You could find people whose eyes hung out of their sockets because of the struggles the organism had undergone.  Others were bleeding from everywhere, or were soiled by their own excrement, or that of other people.  Because of the effect that their fear and the gas had on them, the victims often evacuated everything they had in their bodies.  Some bodies were all red, others very pale, as everyone reacted differently.  But they had all suffered in death.  People often imagine that the gas was thrown in, and there you were, the victims died.  But what death it was! . . . You found them gripping each other - everyone had desperately sought a little air.  The gas was thrown onto the floor and gave off acid from underneath, so everyone tried to find some air even if each one needed to climb on top of another until the last one died.  I personally think - I can't be sure but I think - that several people died even before the gas was thrown in.  They were crammed in so tightly against one another that the smallest and weakest were inevitably suffocated.  At a certain moment, under that pressure, that anguish, you become selfish and there's only one thing you can think of: how to save yourself.  That was the effect the gas had.  The sight that lay before us when we opened the door was terrible; nobody can even imagine what it was like.

Shlomo Venezia was an eye witness to history.  In the many decades between the events and the interview I expect he forgot some small details.  I would also expect that his overall story is true, corroborated as it is by so many other sources.

---

However, there are doubters.  These are the "Holocaust Deniers", people who argue that no one died in the Nazi gas chambers.  I didn't have to scour the Internet very long to unearth Bishop Richard Williamson as a good example.  Williamson is a piece of work who spreads notions of hate and conspiracy with an aura of calm logical discourse..

The Bishop believes that no one died in Nazi gas chambers.   He believes that they never existed.   As you listen to him talk, notice his emphasis on his own belief.  He has made this issue not about what actually happened but about what and who he believes.  Religion does that to a guy, I guess.

He supports his beliefs with logical-sounding explanations given by experts.  In the video below he argues that poison gas had to be vented by tall chimneys, but wartime reconnaissance photos show no chimney shadows, so therefore - his experts have concluded and he agrees - there could have been no gas chambers.  This sort of argument, where a small inconsistency is used to undermine a large body of fact, seems very common in denial literature.

This small bit of feeble expertise is enough support for Williamson's beliefs.  He doesn't need much support from facts or logic.  I'm sure he'd find some contradiction in historical memoirs like Shlomo Venezia's.  What this cleric is telling us are his beliefs.  In his mind what he believes is more than sufficiently supported by his fundamentalist religious faith and his amply evident anti-Semitism.

Watch him in action.

I'm not here to debate the details of the Holocaust with people like the Bish.  If you're a friend of his don't bother to leave comments.  I won't publish them.

As time passes, each succeeding generation will have more difficulty distinguishing the facts of the Holocaust from the dogma and obfuscations of the deniers.  The lessons of Nazi inhumanity might fade and the resolve to Never Forget could be slowly lost if the Bishop gets his way.  Such a loss will pave the way for history to repeat itself.  How slowly the loss happens depends on how well the deniers are countered right now.

Here's a quote by Robert McAfee Brown from the preface to Night, Ellie Wiesel's Holocaust survival memoir:

Having confronted the story, we would much prefer to disbelieve, treating it as the product of a diseased mind, perhaps.  And there are those today who - feeding on that wish, and on the anti-Semitism that lurks near the surface of the lives of even cultured people - are trying to persuade the world that the story is not true, urging us to treat it as the product of diseased minds, indeed.  They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.  Perhaps there is is a greater indignity, it is committed by those who believe them.

Reading books like Inside The Gas Chambers and other first hand accounts of the Holocaust are good ways to fight the ignorance and hatred of people like Richard Williamson and anyone who might believe him.

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You can watch and listen to Shlomo Venezia on YouTube (he speaks in Italian, of course.)

Bishop Williamson was excommunicated from the Catholic church in 1988 on a technicality.  Then the Vatican rehabilitated him in 2009.  Later the Pope asked him to recant his views on the Holocaust.  Williamson apologized but didn't admit he was wrong.  Pope Benedict said he should have done an Internet check on Williamson before rehabilitating him.  To its credit, the Catholic church has largely disapproved of Williamson's views.  Here in Los Angeles former Cardinal Mahony banned Williamson from all local Catholic institutions because of his views on the Holocaust.

Read other news stories of Bishop Williamson here.  He was fined by Germany for denying the Holocaust.

Most everything Williamson says in this video about the gas chambers is wrong.  The expert he cites is Fred Leuchter.  The discredited Leuchter was the subject of an excellent movie documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. by Errol Morris.

Williamson's manner and British accent reminded me of Alan Watts, a wise Episcopal priest who spread notions of  Eastern religion to Americans during the fifties and sixties.  The comparison ends there.  Watts' lectures are still very relevant to modern life.

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Nazi concentration camps appear in a previous MM article: Ring Festival L.A. Begins

Death is the subject of What Is It Like To Be Dead, one of Mixed Meters' most popular posts.

Sonder Tags: Shlomo Venezia. . . Bishop Richard Williamson. . . Holocaust. . . gas chambers. . . anti-Semitism

Hitlerdammerung

Recently I wrote about Composers of the Nazi Era by Michael Kater the third book in a fascinating trilogy about Nazis and music.   I've also finished reading another third book in another fascinating trilogy.  This one, published last year, is called The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans.

The first two books of Evans' trilogy are called The Coming of the Third Reich (ending with Hitler becoming chancellor) and The Third Reich in Power (ending just before the outbreak of war).  Evans deals with a comprehensive list of political, economic, cultural and social issues on both homefront and warfront.  Together the three books tell how and why the Nazis rose to power, how they prepared German society for war and then how they set out to conquer Europe or die trying.  The subject is vast and complex, but the writing is clear and well organized.

I started this trilogy back in the days of George II, the U.S. President known for WMDs in Iraq, "faith based" intelligence, and Guantanamo Bay.  For his efforts Bush was regularly compared with Adolf Hitler.  "Could that be true?" I wondered.   

The Coming of the Third Reich, which only dealt with Hitler's rise to power, made it clear how patently absurd a Bush/Hitler comparison was -- on any level.  Since then, the details I've learned about Nazi history, filled as it is with vicious, immoral, absurd and obscene behavior, have made me more proud to be an American citizen (and, coincidentally, less tolerant of Ring Festival L.A.)

This is a picture of dead bodies collected after the firebombing of Dresden.  The Third Reich at War is filled with death.  People die on nearly every page.  On many pages hundreds die, or thousands, or even tens of thousands.  Much of the slaughter was directly from combat or mass extermination.  Countless military prisoners on forced death marches and slave laborers in work camps died from starvation, disease and exposure.

At certain points in the book Evans reveals the number of calories provided daily by German food rationing.  On page 43 he reports:

The rations allotted to Poles in Warsaw were down to 669 calories a day by 1941, in comparison to 2,613 for the Germans (and a mere 184 for the Jews.)

Just imagine doing backbreaking work on 184 calories per day.  No doubt Jews who complained were told that they were lucky to get that much.

Beyond mere death, The Third Reich at War contains countless stories of brutal, vicious savagery.   In the preface Evans describes his subject matter as "shocking and depressing almost beyond belief."  While one might sympathize with an historian, it is impossible for us to comprehend how people actually endured such conditions - sometimes for years on end.

Beyond the stories of politicians, generals and armies, Evans also draws on memoirs, diaries and letters of average people caught up in events.  These perspectives give the book some of its most vivid and personal moments.  In the following excerpt (page 217), he quotes a German Lieutenant-Colonel who investigates a cheering crowd of people in Lithuania where women are holding up their children to get a better view of what is going on.

On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting.  The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest.  At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead and dying people.  Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away into the drainage gully.  Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission.  In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wood club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience.

The complete tale of the Nazis has an aura of inevitability about it.  Today, of course, we know how the war turned out.  But as early as 1941, even before Pearl Harbor, Nazi military planners realized that Russia and England (with U.S. help) could produce enough military equipment to win the war.  At some point even Adolf Hitler must have realized that Germany would inevitably lose.  What did he decide to do when faced with this situation?  Rather than concede defeat, he decided to take Germany down in flames.

Since I was reading all this during Ring Festival L.A. I laughed with the realization that the story of Adolf Hitler's destruction might make a good opera.  But such an opera already exists.  It is Gotterdammerung, the conclusion of The Ring of the Nibelungs, by Richard Wagner, Hitler's musical muse.  Instead of "Twilight of the Gods" this real-life story becomes "Twilight of Hitler".

Yes, Hitler actually got to perform his part from a Wagnerian plot and recreate a bit of German mythology at the same time, spilling real blood and burning real cities.  Hitler's military code name was "Wolf" - the Wagner family called him "Uncle Wolf".  The god Wotan uses the name Wolf in Die Walkure while slumming with mortals.  Wotan eventually goes down in flames as Valhalla falls in ruins.  Hitler's body is cremated outside his bunker in a bombed out Berlin.

I wonder if the Ring has ever been produced that way - with swastika-wearing Valkyries riding motorcycles and Wotan with a little toothbrush mustache in a snappy military outfit.     Over the last year or so I've gathered that Wagner's fans don't much like being reminded of Hitler's fondness for Wagner - so I'm guessing such a production has yet to be mounted.

"The Stab in the Back" is an interesting point of correlation between Nazi history, German mythology and Wagner's Ring.  Hitler and indeed any German who had endured the loss of World War I understood the phrase "the Stab in the Back" - blaming loss of the war not on military defeats but on internal sabotage, especially by Jews and socialists.   There was no truth to it but it served as a rationale for violent suppression of internal dissent and resistance.  Here is a 1919 political cartoon showing the Stab in the back.

Evans writes how the Stab in the Back motivated Hitler near the end of the war (on page 687)

[Field Marshall] Model's murderous actions paralleled those of Hitler himself and reflected a similar mentality.  The more desperate the military situation became, the more vital it seemed to such men to eliminate anyone who might threaten the regime from within.  Obsessed to the end with the imaginary precedent of 1918, Hitler did not want another 'stab in the back'.

The Stab in the Back would have been a familiar concept to all Germans from centuries of folklore.  It can be found in the Niebelunglied, a 12th century epic, where the hero Siegfried, whose body is impervious except for one spot on his back, is killed by Hagen who has tricked Siegfried's wife Kriemhild into revealing the location of that spot.

Wagner's Stab in the Back happens in Act 3 of Gotterdammerung when Siegfried is murdered by Hagen.   Siegfried, Brunhilde's lover, is given a magic potion to make him forget about her and then, disguised as Gunther, seduces her for him as a favor.  When Brunhilde discovers she's been duped she accuses him but he swears that it didn't happen.  Later, given the antidote to the potion, he admits to the seduction and is killed for lying about it.  Or something like that.  (I don't think this aspect of the plot is reflected in Third Reich history.  Maybe someone will suggest a connection.)

This picture shows the moment of the Stab in the Back from the Metropolitan Opera production (watch this bit on YouTube).

William L. Shirer, in his 1959 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes specifically about how The Ring of the Nibelungs and especially Gotterdammerung is reflected in the course of Nazi history (page 102):

It is the stupendous Nibelungen Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the great German epic myth, Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer worked for the better part of twenty-five years, that gave Germany and especially the Third Reich so much of its primitive mythos.  Often a people's myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany.  ...  Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen -- these are the ancient heroes and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves.  With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs -- an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Goetterdaemmerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. ...  It is not at all surprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of Germany so that it might go down in flames with him

I'm not sure how historian Richard Evans would react to journalist Shirer's notion of the mythic precedents for Nazi behavior.  In The Third Reich at War Evans does tell us about Hitler's relationship to Wagner during the war years.  After discussing Hitler's love of Anton Bruckner's music, he writes (page 579):

Despite all this, there was ultimately, in Hitler's view, still no substitute for Wagner.  In 1940, on his way back from his brief visit to Paris, he called in at Bayreuth to attend a performance of Twilight of the Gods.  It was to be his last.  Immersed in the conduct of the war, and increasingly reluctant to appear in public, he went to no more live musical performances after this.  Yet he never lost his belief in the power of music.

In 1943 Hitler must have decided that Gotterdammerung was too close to real life because he canceled performances at Bayreuth.  After the loss at Stalingrad, the bloody turning point of the war in which as many as two million people died, he stopped listening to Wagner entirely.

In 1945, for the last concert by the Berlin Philharmonic before evacuating the city, they performed the final immolation scene - that's where Brunhilde, riding her horse, carries the ring onto the funeral pyre and perishes in the flames.  With the city soon to be overrun by Soviets, do you think anyone could miss the connection between opera and real life?

In private, Hitler, under intense pressure from the war, started listening to more escapist fare.  His favorite operetta was The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar, a work filled with lovers who attend parties.   The sheer power of this light-hearted music apparently overcame Hitler's essential anti-Semitism since he must have known that the libretto was written by two Jews and that Lehar himself was married to one.  Recently the record collection from Hitler's Berlin bunker has surfaced.  Remarkably, it contains recordings of performances by Jewish musicians such as Artur Schnabel and Bronislaw Huberman. 

It's amazing that the Fuhrer himself could not avoid personally enjoying certain Jewish music.    His rise to power had been based on the premise that anything Jewish was bad.  He had commanded all traces of Jewishness in Germany to be wiped away.  Anti-semitism was the one essential, non-negotiable Nazi dogma.  But if those Mozart librettos which were created by a Jew had to be rewritten, why not Lehar's?   One can only wonder how Hitler rationalized such contradictions to himself.

Chances are that he tried not to think about any of this.  Guilt was not something anyone accuses Hitler of being riddled with.  We'll never know how well he succeeded in avoiding these subjects.  Probably quite well.  I suspect he could enjoy The Merry Widow without ever once being bothered by the fact that it was a partly Jewish creation.  Faced with loss of the war, a few Jews probably didn't seem relevant.  And he was The Fuhrer - no one would dare criticize him for his listening choices.  He never had to make the excuse "But I can separate the Jew from the music."

Just as Hitler could ignore a Jewish librettist or pianist, today's Wagner fans can enjoy The Ring of the Nibelungs without ever once being bothered by an anti-Semitic composer.  The quality common to the most zealous, most impassioned fans of opera is an ability to be completely absorbed in the music.  Rochus Misch, a survivor of Hitler's bunker, described how Hitler listened to music during his last days:

He just sat there, completely sunk in the music. The Fuhrer needed distraction.

In this year of 2010, the year of the Los Angeles Ring cycle and County-sanctioned Ring Festival LA, our musical and political leaders have shown real talent for avoiding the subject of Hitler's connection to Wagner.  Faced with a smattering of dissent, they chose to argue that Wagner's personal anti-Semitism is no longer relevant.

L.A. Opera offered the reward of an evening of musical escapism at the opera for those who wanted it, an evening of separating the anti-Semite from the music.  Decades earlier, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Hitler used music the same way when he needed to cope with bad news from the front, except that he spent his evenings separating the Semite from the music. 

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How about a cartoon where Bugs Bunny meets both Goring and Hitler.  The music, by Carl Stalling, has a few good Wagner references. It's called Herr Meets Hare - you can watch it here, but here are some stills.

The painting of the horny, hairy Nazi arm holding a score marked Nibelungenring is by Arthur Szyk from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.   Thanks to my buddy Kubilay Uner for the George Grosz drawing called "Memory of Wagner".

What would Hitler be listening to if he were still alive?

Here's a Timewatch episode (in 5 parts) about Hitler's last days and what most likely happened to his body.

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This post is a loose sequel to Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi

Other Mixed Meters posts which flog a dead composer or a dead dictator or a local opera company:

• Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish (Leon Botstein's comments on the video are highly recommended)
• Typography can remind us that Wagner was a bad guy: Wagner with an Asterisk
• How Ring Festival LA could have avoided problems: Ring Festival LA, Wrong Festival LA
• Wagnerites and Nazis march in Los Angeles on the same day: Ring Festival LA Meets Hitlers Birthday
• Wagner in the Nazi extermination camps: Ring Festival LA Begins
• One California composer's response to the Ring: Listen to Wagner's Entire Ring in One Second
• Another California composer's response to the Ring: Kenton Wagner
• Not all music was influenced by Wagner: Wagner Inspires Pop Music
• Just Say No to Drugs and Wagner: Wagner Invades Poland
• The man who couldn't make LA an opera town: Placido Domingo, High Culture Meets Pop Culture

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Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi

(This is a sequel to my previous post Suppose Wagner Had Been a Jew)

When Richard Wagner and his Ring of the Nibelungs is discussed these days (as it has been repeatedly in Los Angeles because of L.A. Opera's production and county-wide Ring Festival) there is an elephant in the room.   Wagner fans do not want to talk about that elephant.  The elephant is Adolf Hitler.

Hitler, who was inspired to dictatorship by Wagner's opera Rienzi, who failed in his attempt to write a Wagnerian opera, who carried Wagner scores in his backpack during World War I, who began Nazi rallies with Wagner's music, who ordered his officers to attend Wagner operas, who sent wounded soldiers to the Bayreuth Festival for spiritual recovery, who was a groupie of Wagner's family and used that connection as a legitimization of his own right to power over Germany,  said:

Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.

Conversely, whoever wants to understand Wagner must confront Hitler's negative influence over the composer's legacy.  This legacy takes two forms: musical and political.  Wagner wrote both operas and essays.

Even today Hitler exerts real and pernicious influence over our views about Wagner.  At least it should.  Some people try to forget that these two guys are linked together in hell for all eternity.

We must never forget that the destruction which Hitler brought to Europe, and to the Jews, stains Wagner's memory and artistic creations.  Hitler used Wagner in a way which no other composer has ever been used.  In this respect Wagner is unique.  When Wagner is performed or discussed, Hitler must be mentioned. 

Here's a picture of Adolf dedicating a German national monument to Wagner on March 6, 1934 in Leipzig. The little kid in uniform is a nice touch.  Hermann Goebbels, on the right, looks bored.  Not all Nazis liked Wagner but all Nazis did what Hitler told them to do.  He told them to listen to Wagner.

At the mention of Hitler, fans of Wagner's music bristle and quickly respond with stock, pre-scripted disclaimers intended to absolve Wagner.

They say "Wagner died before Hitler was born."  True enough.  Today we need to remember not only the effect Wagner had on Hitler, but also how Hitler influenced the general perception of Wagner, as a person, as a writer, as a musician.  To make the point yet again: the important issue is remembering how Hitler used Wagner to further hatred and destruction.

They say "Some of Wagner's best friends were Jewish." Equally accurate.  Of course Wagner tried to convert those Jewish friends to Christianity.  That was not friendly.  Later, Nazis used Wagner's vile essay about Jewishness In Music as a study text for school children.  Nothing that the Nazis did to the Jews was friendly.

They say "There are no specific references to Jews or anti-Semitism in Wagner's operas."  I tend to agree.  Others have pointed out anti-Semitism in the operas.  In his writings -- the second pillar of Wagner's patrimony -- there is a great deal of anti-Semitism which should make us sensitive to even the most obscure anti-Semitic reference in the operas.  And with certain audiences, such as those during Wagner's or Hitler's lifetimes when anti-Semitism was rife, even an obscure reference would have been enough to make a strong anti-Semitic point.

They say "Lots of other famous artists were anti-Semitic."  Again, this is correct.  Those other artists did not repeatedly author essays of political hatred to accompany their art and did not inspire insane military dictators.  Wagner is an exclusive case in that he was influential both as composer and as political commentator.  It is improper to excuse Wagner because of our feelings about other artists.

They say "Wagner is not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust."   Of course Wagner was not directly responsible for the Holocaust.  Even Hitler never issued a written order to kill all the Jews.  However, Wagner was one of many foot soldiers in the long crusade of hostility which ended with an entire supposedly civilized European nation simply winking as their government murdered millions of innocent people.  All German anti-Semites who lived before 1945 bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, if only indirectly.  Wagner, through his written suggestions that the Jews should be gotten rid of, deserves a larger share than many others.

They say "The Nazis chose only those ideas of Wagner with which they agreed and ignored the rest."  And I say "How is that different from what you do?"  We all interpret Wagner's writings and music so that they best support our personal opinions and aesthetics.  The Nazis did it and now both supporters and detractors of Wagner do it. 

They say "We love Wagner's music so much that we don't care about all the bad stuff."  And I say "That could be a problem for you."  Ignoring the facts is not a good life strategy.

They say "You can't tell me what not to listen to."  You're right, I can't.  And I won't because censorship is bad.  What I am telling you is that there are lots of required program notes to read before you decide to listen to Wagner.  One important topic in those notes is how and why the Nazis censored music.

They say "We can separate the man from the music."  To which I respond "Living with your head in the sand is a bad way to listen to music."

They say "Wagner's music is about universal themes of love and redemption."   If you say so.  I doubt it matters.  In any case Wagner does not hold a monopoly over that subject.  You might try searching out some other artworks on the same theme.  Maybe attend a movie.   Movies love love and redemption.

Here's a picture of Hitler kissing Winifred Wagner's hand at Bayreuth.  Were they lovers or redeemers?

They say "Wagner would have not supported National Socialism."

Over 35 years passed between Wagner's death and the creation of the Nazi party so of course there's no way Wagner could have formally supported it. But I suspect Wagner would have joined the party if it had been around early enough.   Wagner liked attention.  The Nazis, especially the most important Nazi, Hitler, paid lots of attention to Wagner.

Some in Wagner's family actively supported Hitler.  This is most especially true of his daughter-in-law Winifred, who might have slept with Hitler, and his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who joined the party and wrote extensively in support of it.  Hitler visited Chamberlain on his deathbed. Maybe he attended Chamberlain's funeral - I've read both.   Wagner's grandson Wolfgang, who went on to run Bayreuth, was a Nazi officer.

To be fair, Wagner's granddaughter Friedelind (in the hat) supported the Allies during World War II by helping create a psychological profile of Hitler.  And Wagner's great-grandson Gottfried has been excommunicated from the family for suggesting that they come clean about their connections to Hitler.  I suspect lots of juicy details are still secret.

Let's do an easy thought experiment about the importance of Richard Wagner's failure to support National Socialism.  Ask yourself: how would history have changed if Wagner had in fact joined the Nazi party?

This thought experiment involves the use of alternative history, similar to what I did in my last post Suppose Wagner Had Been a Jew.  Alternative History means positing a slight revamping of actual events and then asking how history would have been changed because of it. 

The alterations I'm suggesting are small.   We must only move the founding of the Nazi party several decades earlier so Richard Wagner can formally join during his last years.   The party would likely remain a fringe crackpot group until after World War I when the loss of the war, political strife and economic disaster allowed them to seize control of Germany.  As a Nazi member Wagner, both famous and controversial, would have given the party much higher standing.

Meanwhile, the philosophical bases of Nazism were already in place during Wagner's life and some were well known to him.  For example, Arthur de Gobineau wrote about racial theory and strongly influenced the Nazis.   Gobineau met with Wagner.  As the Rush Limbaugh of his time Wagner wrote a positive essay about Gobineau.  Wagner's future son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose writings would also strongly affect Nazi attitudes, attended Bayreuth the year before Wagner died.  It is not unreasonable to assume that he met Wagner and that they talked politics.

But who would have been a plausible founder of the Nazi party?   Many people around Wagner could have done the job.  Even his wife Cosima.  She was quite the anti-Semite.  There were many German politicians who we could pick. 

I have a different suggestion based less rigidly on history.  My candidate is more volkish than any politician.  I think that the original founder of the National Socialist party in the early 1880s should have been Hitler's father Alois.  He wasn't really a politician but, judging by his picture, he certainly looks like a demagogue.  So much so that Adolf Hitler might have gotten his oratorical style via heredity.   Once Alois passes on, Adolf would rise to become "leader" in place of his father - like another Kim Jong-Il.

 (Here's a picture of Alois Hitler, fun guy.)

Once Adolf Hitler himself assumes leadership of the Nazis it doesn't matter much whether the party has already existed forty years or one year.   Either way Hitler would still claim that the best way to understand his politics is to understand Wagner.  His statement was true then and it's true today.

So save yourself the trouble of denying that Richard Wagner would have supported National Socialism.  It's a moot question.  It doesn't matter whether Wagner would have joined the Nazis and worn a red swastika on his arm.  Things would turn out very badly either way.

Today in 2010 Los Angeles, now that cheering for the Ring has stopped and Placido Domingo has flown to his next gig, and even in the future after the Opera's deficit is paid off, the responsibility to remember the victims of Wagner's greatest fan will remain.  It is too soon to forget so great an evil.  Remembering Nazi history should remain an essential duty for anyone who chooses to listen to Wagner.

Adoring Wagner does not allow you to ignore Hitler. 

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Here's an interesting essay about Wagner's role in late 19th-century German anti-semitism.

The pictures of the Wagner monument dedication and of Wini with Wolf came from YadVashem.org photo archive

Wagner with an Asterisk: a Mixed Meters post suggesting a simple method Los Angeles Opera could have used to make the Wagner-Hitler connection obvious to everyone.

Hitler was mostly called just "Der Führer", the leader.  Here's a list of Kim Jong-il's titles.  Very amusing.

The picture of the elephant wearing a swastika comes from here. It may not be a Nazi elephant, only an Aryan one.

Before the LA Opera Ring performances, Rabbi Harold Shulweis wrote this article suggesting that Wagner's music be heard and Wagner's writings be read

Here's a fun comment by Elise, a fan of Wagner.

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Love and Redemption Tags: Richard Wagner. . . Adolf+Hitler. . . Ring Festival LA. . . Gobineau. . . Houston Stewart Chamberlain

Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish

Much to their credit, Ring Festival LA has done a great deal to reinforce the image of Richard Wagner as an anti-Semite. This was probably not their initial intention. More likely they couldn't have cared less about publicizing Wagner's personal failings until their world was rocked by the Antonovich resolution.

Badmouthing their own Festival's artistic hero, Richard Wagner, probably made the job of introducing new listeners to his Ring Cycle more difficult. But as Ring Festival LA "leader" Barry Sanders said "We're not putting lipstick on a pig in this thing."

As a thought experiment, imagine how our contemporary musical world might be different today if Wagner had not hated Jews and instead had been Jewish himself.  Science fiction authors indulge in this sort of imagination all the time.  It's called Alternative History.

Had Wagner been born into a 19th-century German Jewish family he could well have had to convert to Christianity in order to have a successful career as a composer.  After his death he would not have inspired Hitler but instead been rejected by him simply because of his Jewishness.  This would have been true even if Wagner had composed the same identical operas.

Under the Nazis Wagner's music would have inevitably suffered the same fate as that of other Jewish composers.  It would have been completely banned.  It's even possible that today, in 2010, endless Wagnerian potboiling would have come to represent anti-Nazi resistance and maybe even gotten him included in L.A. Opera's now concluded Recovered Voices series which seemed to specialize in certain Jewish composers who wrote like Wagner.

Like all good premises for a book of alternative history this one might begin with a grain of truth.  Wagner himself wondered if he was actually of Jewish ancestry because he suspected that his stepfather, who could have been Jewish, was really his biological father.

Here's a quote from an article by Derek Strahan:

The question arises: was Wagner Jewish ? Or, to be more accurate in terms of the facts, did Wagner think he might be Jewish? Or, to be even more specific, did Wagner think he might be of Jewish descent? From which arises the even more germane question, was Wagner afraid that he might be thought to be Jewish? While the probable answer to the latter question is "yes", a definite answer to questions relating to his parentage could only be provided by conducting a DNA testing

We may well believe that Richard Wagner, author of self-serving diatribes against Jewish composers of his time, poster boy for German music under the Nazis, poster boy for anti-Semitism-forgiven by people who like his music in contemporary Los Angeles, might have believed that he himself was actually a Jew.  He certainly would not have wanted that to become public knowledge.

Such self-doubt must have been unbearable for him.  Did he live an agonizing double life, constantly in fear that he might be discovered?  Did he rationalize his baser personality traits - for example his adultery - on unavoidable Jewish character flaws?  It must have been hell being Richard Wagner.

You may wonder how a person who imagined he might be Jewish could write such anti-Semitic tracts as Wagner did.  It turns out that even real Jews can be anti-Semitic.   These people are called "Self-Hating Jews".

One notable self-hating Jew was Daniel Burros, a New Yorker who for a time belonged to George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party.  Later he joined the KKK where he rose to the rank of Kleagle (a more interesting job title than "leader").   In 1964, when Burros was publicly outed as a Jew by the New York Times, he committed suicide.  Reportedly he did this while listening to the music of ... (wait for it) ...  Richard Wagner.  How poetic.

Did Wagner's imagined Jewishness have any effect on his music?  Strahan's article suggests a few Jewish interpretations of Wagner's operas.  These are just as implausible as the endless discussions of anti-Semitic elements in those same operas.  To my ear there is nothing Jewish about Wagner's music itself.  (If you want to imagine Jewish Wagnerian music you could listen to Mahler.)

Much to my surprise the subject of whether Wagner wrote "Jewish music" came up in a Ring Festival L.A. press release earlier this year.  Here is the final paragraph from the release announcing Wagner and Anti-Semitism.  This was a symposium at the Hammer Museum held on Feb. 9, 2010.  No author of the release is mentioned.

Finally, can one venture to speculate about whether Wagner has indeed been, in certain ways, “good for the Jews”? That is, how have Jewish musicians, writers, and artists appropriated and deployed Wagner’s radical innovations for their own purposes, leading to otherwise unavailable transformations? (e.g., Schoenberg, as well as the various “Recovered Voices” composers – Schreker, Zemlinsky, Ullmann, Schulhoff, etc. – many of whom adored Wagner and composed very much in his wake, and used him to create “Jewish” works like Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron). Is there such a thing as a Jewish attraction to Wagner? And if so, how might we account for it? Might we even go so far as to suggest that there is something “Jewish” about his music, despite his own evident anti-semitism?

I confess to being knocked off my chair the first time I read this.  I wondered whether the very suggestion -- that Wagner's music was "Jewish" because several of his imitative followers were Jews -- was slyly anti-Semitic.   In reality those Jewish composers had suffered because they were German Jews not because they imitated Wagner.  Their Jewishness got their Wagnerian music consigned to the very backwaters of music history.

If it can be argued there was "Something 'Jewish'" about Wagner because he influenced Jewish composers, couldn't one argue that there was "Something National Socialist" about Wagner because he influenced Nazis?  

I briefly wondered if Ring Festival LA endorsed this crazy idea from one of their own press releases.  I also wondered if it was a troll intended to provoke an argument.  I concluded that it was just pseudo-academic speculation intended to blur the real issue: whether it's okay for Wagner's fans to ignore his political influence over generations of dangerous anti-Semites.  (my opinion: it's not okay.)

I didn't attend this symposium.  I just discovered that the Hammer museum has provided a nearly two-hour video of the event online. In Kenneth Reinhard's introduction he vaguely echos the bizarre press release.  That makes me wonder if he's the anonymous author who is suggesting that we need to discuss Wagner's Jewish music.  I was happy to discover that the particular subject did not come up.

(I suggest you let the long video download completely before watching.)

I'm also happy to report that I found the seminar fascinating.  The standard tropes about whether the Wagnerian plots or characters are anti-semitic got discussed (my opinion: they're not).  Also much energy was given whether it's time to quit talking about the subject of Wagnerian anti-semitism (my opinion: it's not).

I was extremely impressed with the comments of Leon Botstein.  In the performative sense he stole the show.  Also in the informative sense.  I found myself in complete agreement with a great deal of what he said.  I found more agreement with his notions of Wagner's proper place in modern culture or modern Los Angeles than with anything I've heard or read on the subject for the last year.  Botstein is a respected academic and talented orchestra conductor whose opinions carry a lot more weight than my own.

I'm going to close this post with selections from Botstein's opening remarks.  These begin at the 40 minute mark.  Clearly he was not reading from a prepared script.  You'll find him much more entertaining on video.

First of all, I don't think more productions of the Ring are necessary.  Not because he was an anti-Semite but because it's just boring. 

I was reminded, genius that Wagner was, I'm tired of this.  And I find its bombast and its inflated character hard to sit through.  And I also think ... there's nothing redeeming about this work and it needs to be put to rest.  There's so much more good music and good opera to be put on the stage.  I don't know why people are doing this any more.  ...

The only thing interesting about Wagner is the capacity to write brilliant musical prose and to repeat himself without musically losing your interest.  The craft of this composer is enormous.  And the innovation that he brought to the writing of music really has very few parallels in the history of music.  You can't avoid him if you're a musician.  But if you're not a musician I don't know what you're doing here.

Hooray for Leon Botstein!  Too bad that his opinions didn't get more widely reported.

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You can read a dour review of the seminar here.

Here's an article about Daniel Burros and other similar cases.

A 1998 New York Times article, The Specter of Hitler in the Music of Wagner by Joseph Horowitz, speaks about Wagner's recognition of Jewish traits in himself:

If Wagner relied in practical ways on certain Jewish supporters, he also experienced a psychological dependency: the Jews embodied aspects of Wagner himself, aspects he wished to transcend and could not. The Jew in the mirror was the negative image of an unfulfilled personal identity.

A great alternative history novel -- about European Jews who settle in Alaska when the State of Israel does not survive - is called The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon.  It's a murder mystery.

Some other Mixed Meters writings on why Los Angeles is not a Wagner town.

• Typography can remind us that Wagner was a bad guy: Wagner with an Asterisk
• How Ring Festival LA could have avoided problems: Ring Festival LA, Wrong Festival LA
• Wagnerites and Nazis march in Los Angeles on the same day: Ring Festival LA Meets Hitlers Birthday
• Wagner in the Nazi extermination camps: Ring Festival LA Begins
• One California composer's response to the Ring: Listen to Wagner's Entire Ring in One Second
• Another California composer's response to the Ring: Kenton Wagner
• Not all music was influenced by Wagner: Wagner Inspires Pop Music
• Just Say No to Drugs and Wagner: Wagner Invades Poland
• The man who couldn't make LA an opera town: Placido Domingo, High Culture Meets Pop Culture

Botstein Tags: Richard Wagner. . . Hammer Museum. . . Ring Festival LA. . . antisemitism. . . Kenneth Reinhard. . . Leon Botstein. . . Daniel Burros

Composers of the Nazi Era

I recently finished reading the third book of the trilogy by Michael H. Kater about musical life in Nazi Germany.  His three books are:

• Different Drummers, Jazz in the culture of Nazi Germany (1992)
• The Twisted Muse, Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich  (1997)
• Composers of the Nazi Era, Eight Portraits (2000)

You can buy all three in a bundle  from Amazon for $260.82.

Different Drummers was the most fascinating to me.  This is because the Nazis were largely unsuccessful in controlling the people's desire for popular music, swing jazz.   Jazz was anathema to Hitler and his cronies who viewed it as Jewish and Black (i.e. racially inferior).  Once in power they worked hard to repress the thriving Weimar jazz scene.  Read more here.

Still, it seemed that the people's attraction to this music was stronger than the government's ability to ban it and the Nazis were forced to meet the public demand for jazz as best they could.  Jazz also became a focal point for anti-Nazi resistance -- most amazingly by Hamburg's Swing Kids.  (More info here.)

The second book, The Twisted Muse, deals with classical music under the Nazis.  It is largely a story of governmental bureaucracy.  Along with their belief in the supremacy of German people over everyone else, the Nazis leaders believed in the supremacy of German music.  They were big time classical music fans, especially of opera.

Using dictatorial powers, they promoted (or demoted) composers, conductors, singers, orchestras and opera companies, according to personal tastes and dogmatic bigotry.  They worked this magic through an official government agency called Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Chamber of Music).  Meanwhile, Jewish musicians were forced into separate organizations through the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League).  Jews were prevented from performing "true" German music.

Such official meddling in the arts should make us feel fortunate that the US government ignores the arts as much as it does.  One of my earliest Mixed Meters posts, In Which David Imagines George Bush and Charles Ives, was written after reading this book.

The eight subjects of Composers of the Nazi Era all appeared in The Twisted Muse as well.  Instead of getting bit parts in a complex story which ends in 1945, this book gives each composer a complete career biography.   Those who lived under the Nazi regime were all forced to justify themselves after the war in order not to completely lose their musical careers under the new political system.  The stories of how they revised their biographies and recast their personal histories, often with outright lies, to make themselves seem less involved with the Nazis is the most interesting part of Composers of the Nazi Era.

Here are the eight composers Kater chose for his book, along with my short biographical sketches.

• Werner Egk became an official of the Nazi's Reich Chamber of Music and was called "a worthy successor to Richard Wagner" by Hitler himself, but managed a successful post-war career.
• Paul Hindemith didn't really want to leave Germany but his early atonal music colored his reputation with the Nazis - who also didn't like that he was married to a half-Jew - and they banned his music.
• Kurt Weill, forced out of Germany in 1933 because he was Jewish, became a hugely successful composer in the US and then spent a good deal of his time pursuing sexual affairs.
• Karl Amadeus Hartmann, a composer with leftist political sentiments, gave up his career as composer during the Nazi years and as a result was a safe choice for appointment by the Allies to post-war positions of musical authority.
• Carl Orff, composer of that one big popular hit, was still distrusted by the moralistic Nazis.  At their request he attempted to compose replacement music for Mendelsshon's "Jewish" A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Orff hid the fact that he was one-quarter Jewish and after the war falsely claimed to have been part of the anti-Nazi resistance.
• Hans Pfitzner was a composer with medium talent paired with an oversized ego. He was an early and life-long supporter of the Nazis and an anti-semite.  Since Hitler had personally decided (erroneously) that Pfitzner must be half-Jewish (after Pfitzner defended a few talented Jewish musicians), Pfitzner never got the respect and recognition he was certain he deserved.
• Arnold Schoenberg, forced to leave Germany because of his religion, was, like Pfitzner, hugely egotistical and concerned with his place in the history of music.  This biography deals mainly with Schoenberg's years of stagnation in Los Angeles.
• Richard Strauss, the greatest German composer of the times who possessed a correspondingly large ego, tried at first to accommodate the Nazi regime.  But he was a lightweight politician and gradually lost favor with the Nazis.  They resented both that Strauss' son had married a Jewish woman (which meant Strauss' grandchildren were Jewish) and that his favorite librettist was Jewish.

Michael Kater writes in the conclusion of Composers of the Nazi Era that he decided to write this book of biographies as a sequel to his two earlier exhaustive narrative histories because of the "often seemingly contradictory patchwork-quilt [of] evidence" making it impossible to describe any character as fully guilty or fully innocent.

One and all -- musicians and singers, composers and conductors, all of whom had to make a living as artists in the Third Reich -- emerged in May 1945 severely tainted, with their professional ethos violated and their music often compromised: gray people against a landscape of gray.

He also tries to explain how the Germans came to take their music so seriously.

Certainly until 1945, the Germans as a people... defined themselves and their history decisively through Kultur -- they say they always had it, and nobody else did.  In their collective view, this is what set them apart from materialistic British moneybags, degenerate French hedonists, insensitive American pragmatists, work-shirking Italian fools, and the alcoholized denizens of a half-Asiatic Russian empire.  Moreover, nothing in the German mind has defined Kultur so quintessentially as its music -- German music.

The most terrifying exponent of genuine music as exclusively German was Hans Pfitzner, who throughout the 1920s sharply polemicized against all the enemies "of our national art, especially music."  Once in power, through their various propaganda speeches, the Nazi leaders made very sure that they understood well Richard Wagner's original dictum that "the German has the exclusive right to be called 'musician.'"  Germany was "the first music nation in the world," insisted Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels.

What moral, I hear you ask, do I draw from all this ancient musical history? What am I, as a pragmatic (and probably insensitive) American Jewish musician, to think of the moral dilemmas and social upheavals endured by German musicians between 1933 and 1945?   Their story is so singular that I have to question whether any comparison at all can be made with contemporary times.

My answer lies in the notion that music can somehow represent universally knowable "higher" religious, spiritual or nationalistic truth - that's what the Nazis believed.  This idea seems vestigal in my day and age.  It's different than simply liking or disliking music.  It's about the (mistaken) belief that music somehow contains certain essential, substantial revelations which are the same for everyone who hears it and which don't change through history. 

Such a faith still lives primarily in a subset of the classical music audience, they who reverently gather, church-like, in concert halls and opera houses to hear their musical "gospels" sung and played.  I suspect that these listeners would agree with the notion that certain music is good for you, ennobling.  And if some music is good, I suppose it follows that some other music is bad, degenerate.  This attitude is the beginning of a slippery slope.  At the bottom of that slope you will find the story of how the Nazis used and abused music. 

 
Portrait Tags: Michael Kater. . . Werner Egk. . . Paul Hindemith. . . Kurt Weill. . . Karl Amadeus Hartmann. . . Carl Orff. . . Hans Pfitzner. . . Arnold Schoenberg. . . Richard Strauss