Music and Musicians During the Third Reich
In
the 1940s, Karlrobert Kreiten was considered one of the most talented young
pianists in all of Germany –and by no less than Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor, who was one of Hitler’s favorites.
Kreiten had made his debut at age
11 with Mozart's Piano
Concerto in A major in a live broadcast. He was taught in Berlin by Claudio
Arrau, the world-famous pianist.
But Kreiten made negative
comments about Adolf
Hitler and the war effort after listening to
the BBC. His comments were reported to the Gestapo by his landlady. Kreiten was indicted and condemned to death. Friends
and family frantically tried to save his life -- unsuccessfully.
The family only accidentally
learned that Karlrobert, on Sept. 7, 1943, had been hanged.
He was 27.
We do have a few pieces of piano
music he recorded. You can listen to him play on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYp-0pGyKDU
Life in Nazi Germany could be terrifying.
No wonder so many of its musicians and composers cooperated with the Nazis. A few careless
words and you might be quickly and quietly executed. Or your relatives might be
punished—especially if they had any Jews in their ancestry—like composer Richard
Strauss. Besides which, jobs for musicians were scarce during the Nazi years.
Supporting the Nazis helped ensure your employment—there are statistics showing
this And whether or not you advanced as a musician depended a good deal on
whether you were a member of the Nazi party.
To
succeed in Nazi Germany as a musician, however, you were not REQUIRED to be a
Nazi. Furtwangler, to his credit, never joined the Nazi Party—the way conductor Herbert von Karajan did. Twice. And
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the soprano. And pianist Walter Giesiking.
Today, I’m going to talk about famous
musicians and composers during the Nazi era, which began in 1933. They included
truly evil people, like the pianist Elly Ney. They included an evil orchestra:
the Vienna Philharmonic And they included a good many musicians who fall into a
gray area—where the verdict is ambiguous. Or conflicting.
One example: Kirsten Flagstad. The great
Norwegian soprano was celebrated for singing Wagnerean roles at the Met. During
the war, she left the US and went to occupied Norway because her husband was
there, and he had asked her to relocate. Americans asked her not to return.
Norway asked her not to return. But she did. But while there, she did NOT sing
in any occupied countries, apart from Norway, and she did NOT sing at any Nazi
concerts.
Her husband, it turned out, was a crook,
and he died while he was still being
prosecuted.
After the war, Flagstad returned to the US.
There were protests against her returning to sing at the Met—led by baritone
Lawrence Tibbett. But Rudolf Bing, the director of the Met, said it was ok for
what he called the world’s greatest soprano to sing there. (And Bing was
Jewish.) And when Flagstad agreed to sing at benefits for Jewish organizations
in this country, she went a long way to being forgiven. Obviously, she fell
into a gray area. Not the best, not the worst.
In judging the behavior of musicians during
the Third Reich, there are a few touchstones. Were the musicians willing to
perform in occupied countries? Did they serve in the Nazi government? Did they
continue to perform music written by Jews or Jewish converts—like Mahler and
Offenbach and Mendelssohn? Did they try to protect Jews, and Jewish musicians
in particular, from losing their jobs and being arrested and sent to
concentration camps?
And
at the end of my talk, I’ll tell you which musicians proved, in the opinion of
historians, true heroes during the Third Reich.
The
Nazis believed that profoundly German music was the very best, and it would
unite the German people and boost morale. They focuseed on. conservative
music—and the music of that arch-antisemite, Wagner. No jazz, no music associated
with black people, no music by Jews or Jews who had converted, No modern
music—by the likes of Hindemith or Stravinsky or Alban Berg.
Duing the war years, the Andrews sisters
were a very popullar trio, and their rendition of Bei mir bist du schon was
very popular in Nazi Germany. It was banned when the Nazis learned that bei mir
bist du schon was a Yiddish song.
The Nazi made other mistkes. After all,
deciding who is Jewish can be tricky.They thought, for example, that Alban Berg
was Jewish. The composer of the operas Wozzeck and Lulu. Not Jewish. Neither were Stravinsky or
Hindemith. Stravinsky, in fact, was something of an anti-semite. Or the
conductor Erich Kleiber. Still, some Nazis identified them as Jewish. Along
with Leopold Stokowski and Camille Saint-Saens. And then there was the Nazi who
thought Mahler, a convert, was NOT Jewish.
But, as
I said, it was tricky. At some Nazis pointed out, if you executed someone who
was one-quarter Jewish, weren’t you executing someone who was three-quarters
Aryan?
At
one point, the decision was made:If you had just one Jewish grandparent, you
were ok. Though the fraction changed—someone with as little as one
great-grandparent being Jewish made you Jew. Of course if your spouse was
Jewish…you and your spouse were probably in trouble.
“Privileged
marriages” were those made with a Jewish spouse before 1935
.
And
there were “honorary Aryans.” Some famous opera singers, like Richard Tauber,
applied to become honorary Aryans. He didn’t make it and left Germany for
England.
Herman
Goering, not the worst of the Nazis, was apparently fed up. He announced: “I
decide who is Jewish.”
Hilde Gueden, you may remember, was a
soprano at the Met opera. In 1941, she was lving in Germany, age 24. She had
told everyone that she had only one Jewish grandparent. Turned out she
had---three! In August 1943, an anthropological institute in Vienna determined
that quote “in terms of her racial appearance she exhibits none of the
characteristics typical of Jews.” By then, Guden had moved to Rome—and then to
the US and the Met. One historian writes: “Had she remained in Germany she
probably would have been killed.”
Die Meistersinger was the most performed
opera in Germany during the war—very German-oriented. The opera has a famous
aria in which Hans Sachs, one of its heroes, urges Germans to avoid non-German
music. And there’s a character, Beckmesser, who has been interpreted as a
representative Jew. Natually, he’s a loser.
Michael
H. Kater is the author of an authoritative book about music in Nazi Germany:
THE TWISTED MUSE: Musicians and Their Music During the Third Reich (1997).He’s
a professor of history at York University in Toronto. Overall, he is more
forgiving of Richard Strauss than other commentators are, less forgiving of
Wilhelm Furtwangler. Much of what I’m writing here comes from Kater.
A very popular piece of music in Nazi
Germany was Carmina Burina by Carl Orff. Several music critics consider Carmina
Burana to be Nazi music — Michael Kater actually called it “a calling card for
the Third Reich.” It’s a simple catchy,
militaristic piece of music. Someone dismissed it as circus music. Alex Ross of
the New Yorker said that as a piece of music it’s meaningless. It carries no
message at all.
At
first the Nazis were suspicious of Carmina, but then they came around. Composer
Carl Orff was acceptable to the Nazis. When they wanted a composer to write new
music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to replace the music written by the Jew
Mendelssohn, Carl Orff volunteered. Alex Ross called it “one of the shabbiest
acts in musical history.” After the war Orff claimed he had quietly worked for
a famous anti-Nazi organization. Kater maintains that he lied. By the way, it’s
possible that Orff was especially cooperative with the Nazis because he knew he
had some Jewish ancestry.
Some conclusions that Michael Kater arrived
at:
“… there was no consistent correlation
between musical conviction and musical talent.” In the Third Reich “…excellent
musicians could also be fanatical Nazis, and, conversely, mediocre musicians
could be ardent defenders of democracy and the inalienable rights of man.” Just
as a brilliant neurosurgeon can be horse’s ass when he ventures opinions
outside of neurosurgery.
Another conclusion of Kater’s: Musicians
during the Third Reich were rarely complete sinners and rarely complete saints.
“One and all … emerged in May 1945 severely tainted, with their professional
ethos violated and their music often compromised: gray people against a landscape of gray.”
Now, films and novels and biographies about famous
artists – Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Mozart -- may have led many people to believe
that they were also splendid human beings … with the possible exception of
Richard Wagner. So it may be surprising that certain famous musicians were, to
one degee or another, Nazi collaborators. Among them: pianist Walter Gieseking,
composer Anton Webern, singer Erna Berger, conductor Hans Knappertsbusch,
composer Franz Lehar. In short, gifted artists probably don’t differ much from
ungifted artists… in terms of human decency. As much as we’d like to believe
otherwise.
.
Let’s start by looking at pure evil.
Elly
Ney (1882-1968) joined the Nazi party in 1937. It’s been suggested that she
hated her first music teacher, a Jew, and that hatred made her an anti-Semite.
She certainly worshiped Hitler, and once said that the highlight of her entire
life came when she shook his hand. It’s rumored that Hitler said she was his
favorite pianist. I’ve listened to her play the piano on YouTube. Not
impressed.
In
the 1930’s Elly Ney was noted among German musicians for her enthusiastic
anti-Semitism. She considered, for example, the work of Richard Strauss’s
librettist, Stefan Zweig, to be “ugly, Jewish-demonic.” Jazz to Elly Ney, was
also dangerous due to its racially “impure” qualities.
In
1933, Ney refused to perform in Hamburg after she was asked to replace a Jewish
pianist, Rudolf Serkin. For her, replacing a Jew was unbearable.
In Wikipedia, you can see a bust of her, somewhere in modern
Germny. And Youtube has a collection of her piano playing.
More
about pure evil:
The
Vienna Philharmonic is one of the oldest and best orchestras in the world.
A poll conducted in 2008 by Gramophone magazine
of 11 music critics from different countries named the Vienna Philharmonic the
third-best orchestra in the world, after the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and
the Berlin Philharmonic. (The highest rated U.S. orchestra: Cleveland, in fifth
place.)
And on New Year’s Eve the Vienna
Philharmonic’s festive concert is televised almost all over the world.
Yet just a few years ago, there was
serious talk of dissolving the Vienna Philharmonic because of its sordid past —
its enthusiastic and unrivaled cooperation with the Nazis before and during
World War II.
No one is suggesting that members of
today’s Vienna Philharmonic be punished for the sins of their fathers. But the
fathers’ sins should not be totally forgotten….
For many years, the Vienna Philharmonic
withheld information about its complicity with the Nazis, but in 2013 a panel
of three historians released a thorough study.
In the mid-1930s, the panel found, only 20%
of the orchestra had belonged to the Nazi party or its affiliates. By
1942, some 49% – 60 out of the 123
active musicians – belonged. Two were members of the SS, the powerful
paramilitary organization that rivaled the German army. (At the Berlin
Philharmonic, by contrast, barely 20% were Nazi members; party membership in
Austria as a whole was 10%.)
After the Nazis took over Austria, the
panel found, 13 Jewish musicians in the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra were
fired; six of them escaped abroad, and seven wound up being murdered – five in
concentration camps. About half of the musicians who replaced the 13 were
members of the Nazi Party. Clearly, becoming a Nazi and eliminating Jews from
the orchestra could lead to one’s advancement — from, perhaps, second violinist
to first.
Eleven members of the remaining orchestra
were stigmatized for being married to Jewish women, or stigmatized as
“half-Jewish” or “closely related.”
The first New Year’s Eve concert, given in
1939, was approved by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, one of the very
worst of the Nazis, as a propaganda tool. It was moved to New Year’s Day from
1941 to 1945, and returned to New Year’s Eve in 1947-- when it was conducted by
Josef Krips. He had not been allowed to conduct during the war because he was
half Jewish.
When the war ended in 1945, the orchestra
fired ten of its members for their Nazi activity. Two were later re-hired. One
of them, trumpet player Helmut Wobisch, had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and
the SS in 1934, and during the war had worked as a spy for the Gestapo. He was
re-hired in 1950, appointed executive director in 1953, and remained there
until 1967.
Baldur von Schirach was a member of the
orchestra and at one time the head of Hitler Youth. He served 20 years in
Spandau Prison for crimes against humanity – namely, overseeing the deportation
of 65,000 Viennese Jews. In 1942, he said in a speech that their deportation was a “contribution
to European culture.”
Apparently he had misplaced a high award
he had received from the orchestra, the Ring of Honor. Wobisch in 1966
privately gave him a replacement copy.
In recent years the
orchestra has been making amends. In 2013, it voted to revoke all the honors it
had bestowed upon Nazi officials. It also voted to return to their owners
looted artwork that a Nazi officer had presented to the orchestra. In 1997, the orchestra even accepted as a
full member its first woman, a harp player. Jewish conductors like Leonard
Bernstein and Daniel Barenboim have been invited to lead the orchestra.
Still, as Clemens Hellsberg, former
president of the orchestra, said recently, the
Philharmonic cannot now shrug and claim that, during the Nazi period, “it was
those other guys” who did it.
Also
talking about pure evil:
Willem
Mengelberg (1971-1951), who was Dutch with German ancestry, conducted the
Concertgebouw from 1895 to 1945. On hearing that the Dutch had surrendered to
Hitler, he proposed a toast with champagne. He proceeded to conduct in Germany
and in Nazi-occupied countries. He was photographed in the company of
high-ranking Nazis like Arthur Seyss-Inquart, whom the Nuremberg court
sentenced to death by hanging for crimes against humanity.
After the war Mengelberg was banned from
conducting in the Netherlands.
His friends attributed his Nazism to political
naivete – or to his blind support of anything German, considering that was his
ancestry. I’ve heard him conduct on recordings; very good.
Someone who was also clearly black and
not gray was a pianist, Walter Gieseking.
He was a fervent Nazi, eager to meet
Hitler, eager to perform in occupied countries. His career flourished in Nazi
Germany. Why did he support the Nazis? A reason he gave: He thought they were a
last defense against the Communists.
Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, was at a
party and saw Gieseking standing alone. So he and invited him to join him and
others in his group. “But don’t let that Nazi, Berman, come,” he told
Gieseking.
“What do you mean by that?” Gieseking
responded angrily. “I am a convinced Nazi. Hitler is saving our country!”
Like many other German artists, Gieseking
was blacklisted right after the war. But by January 1947, he had been cleared by the U.S. military
government, enabling him to resume his career -- although his U.S. tour
scheduled for January 1949 was cancelled owing to the protests of such groups as
the Anti-Defamation League and the American Veterans Committee. In 1953 he
finally returned to the United States, and his concert in Carnegie Hall was sold out and well
received. Well, being a celebrity seems to conquer everything. Bill Cosby keeps
getting cheered, too.
Now
we come to the musicians who were neither black nor white.
In evaluating a musician’s degree of
turpiitude, one should consider:
+Did the musician perform in countries
occupied by the Nazis?
+Did the musician try to help Jews and
others threatened by the Nazis?
+Did the musician join the Nazi party or
work with the Nazi government?
+ Did the musician have a decent excuse—such
as that he was protecting relatives who were Jewish?
One
common excuse Nazi collaborators used was the “Vissi d’arte” excuse. “I lived
for art,” as La Tosca sang in Puccini’s opera. Herbert von Karajan, the
conductor, employed this excuse. “I lived only for art.” Actually, he had
joined the Nazi party not once but twice, and regularly lied about it. And he
performed in occupied countries. And he never tried to protect Jews in his
orchestras.
Another
excuse: Some Germans supported Hitler and the Nazis at the auspicious beginning
of their reign. When Hitler came into office the German economy was in the
pits. Hitler and his minions began spending money on public and military
projects, and thus raised the employment rate; they talked about how superior
the Germans were and claimed that they deserved superior treatment. No wonder
Hitler was elected democratically, and no wonder that even some decent people
were fooled -- before Hitler began his campaigns against Jews, Gypsies, and
other non-Aryans, and pursued his unbridled militaristic ambitions.
Let’s
look at some musicians in this gray aea.
Herbert von Karajan was, above all, an
opportunist. He wanted to be No. 1, and in Nazi Germany joining the Nazi party
was a good way to achieve that. (That was singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s
excuse, too.) Von Karajan DID conduct in occupied countries. But Hitler didn’t
like his conducting or his showing off by not reading from a score.
I heard von Karajan conduct the New York
Philharmonic in the 1960s, and I interviewed a member of the orchestra later
on. The musician was amazed: von Karajan had conducted without a score! (When
von Karajan finally reached our advanced age…he needed a score.)
von K even married a
woman who was ¼ jewish—not a good career move—it got him into trouble—and
later, at least twice, he said joining the party was a misake—
but
he was not totally blameless—he conducted concerts in countries conquered by
movie--the nazis—film
As
for his arrogance, there was a joke about him…mozart was born in salzberg, the
birthplace of herbert von karajan--
went
to a dept store, started walking away without paying—sir, you didn’t pay!
Look at clerk contemptuously, I am von
karajan—
His
assistant paid--
I
saw VK conduct for nyphil--orchestra memberlater otld me, in awe, VK’s eyes
were closed the entire time—
his
nemesis, wilhelm furtwangler, had NOT joined the party—but he cooperated with
the nazis to a certain extent-- he certainly helped a great great many
jews—keeping them in his orchestra—after war, banned from performing in the US-
von
Karajan was treated more leniently after the war—a play about it—
Harvey
sachs wrote:Karajan seemed to have opted instead for an all-purpose, highly
refined, lacquered, calculatedly voluptuous sound that could be applied, with
the stylistic modifications he deemed appropriate, to Bach and Puccini, Mozart
and Mahler, Beethoven and Wagner, Schumann and Stravinsky ... many of his
performances had a prefabricated, artificial quality that those of Toscanini, Furtwängler, and others
never had... most of Karajan's records are exaggeratedly polished, a sort of
sonic counterpart to the films and photographs of Leni Riefenstahl. (nazi movie maker, did triumph of the will)
all
in all, a genius--with the whiff of
sulphur
Will Crutchfield, 1988 on von Karajan
In the case of Mr. von Karajan, one
can say more: that, very early on, he saw fit to make himself persona grata with
a movement that was already in the business of displacing Jewish musicians -
some of them conductors whose continued activity in Germany and Austria might
have slowed somewhat the ascent of ''Das Wunder Karajan.'' It is quite likely
that nothing worse than blind careerism lay behind the conductor's party
membership; still, even in a civilized regime, that is not a very admirable
trait.
Furtwangler, the older conductor, helped a
great many Jewish musicians… He didn’t cooperate FULLY with Nazis… He never
joined the Nazi party… He tried to avoid conducting on Hitler’s birthday…or
where there was a prominent Nazi flag… But Hitler loved his conducting.
Furtwangler actually wangled a meeting with
Hitler, possibly to argue that the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign was hurting
Germany’s reputation. When Hitler and Furtwangler met, apparently they just
yelled at each other.
Furtwangler was certainly not a hero,
though he could have been worse. He had severl golden opportunities, but he
didn’t flee Nazi Germany, as he was urged to. Also, he insisted that he had
never conducted in an occupied country….but he did. He, too, winds up in a gray
area.
In
1946, the conductor Bruno Walter, who had fled Germany and was then living in
the United States, wrote to Furtwangler:
“Please bear in mind that your art was used over the years as an
extremely effective means of foreign propaganda for the regime of the devil;
that you, thanks to your personal fame and great talent, performed valuable
service for this regime and that in Germany itself the presence and activities
of an artist of your rank helped to provide cultural and moral credit to those
terrible criminals or at least gave considerable help to them…. In contrast to
that, of what significance was your helpful behavior in individual cases of
Jewish distress?”
Furtwangler is hard to evaluate;
Michael Kater comes down hard on him.
Richard Strauss, the composer, was not
enthusiastic about the Nazis…and he had a Jewish daughter in law, Alice, whose
lifeand whose chidlren were threatened by the Nazis. P 209
So he had reason to cooperate. There’s a story
that at one point he naively drove to one of the most famous concentration
camps, Terezin, trying to visit his daughter-in-law’s mother. The guards
refused him admittance. Still, they were — to quote one writer—“dumbfounded.”
Let’s look at a few more musicians who
flourished during the Third Reich.
Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the soprano, was
blue-eyed, blonde, and beautiful, as well as ruthlessly ambitious. And she
possessed a lovely voice.
While young, Schwarzkopf joined the Nazi
party. She did it, she explained, just to advance her career. Kater tried again
and again to interview her, but she kept putting him off. After the war, she
came here and sang at the Met. The Met’s Rudolf Bing let her sing, joking that
she had atoned by marrying Walter Legge, a noted and difficult music producer…
who was Jewish. (I don’t think he was. But you shouldn’t let facts get in the
way of a good story.)
When I was a kid, I heard her talk to a
group of New York City high school students. They laughed when they heard someone
announce her Schwarzkopf’s ususual name. She proceeded to berate them for
laughing. I thought: She must be missing some gray cells to seriously scold
teenagers for laughing at anything at all.
So, Schwarzkopf was, I think, a shade of
gray. Along with Furtwangler, von Karajan, and Richard Strauss.
And then, of course, there were the smart
heroes: Jewish and non-Jewish musicians who condemned the Nazis and fled.
Among
them: Adolf Busch, a violinist married to a Jew. With the rise of Nazism, he
left Germany for Switzerland. Asked to come back, he said he would “return with
joy on the day that Hitler, Goebbels,
and Goering are publicly hanged.” Busch started the legendary Busch
Quartet; his daughter, Alice, married Rudolf Serkin, the pianist. At the start
of World War II, he immigrated to the United States.
Another hero was Erich Kleiber, an
Austrian conductor. He led a performance of an Alban Berg opera in Berlin, and
someone who disapproved shouted, “Heil Mozart!” Kleiber callled back: “You are
mistaken—that piece was by Alban Berg!”
Kleiber left Germany for Argentina. And when
La Scala refused to let Jews into its theater, Kleiber declined to conduct
there, too. His son, Carlos Kleiber, was not long ago voted the world’s
greatest conductor by a group of critics. Carlos learned a lot about conducting
while in Argentina…listening to a conductor who regularly visited Argentina:
Wilhelm Furtwangler.
Another hero was Titto Ruffo. An Italian
baritone. The Voice of the Lion. Unlike so many other Italian singers—like
Gigli, like Ezio Pinza—he was opposed to Mussolini and the fascists. Mussolini put him in jail, but there were
worldwide protests. So Ruffo was let out. Ezio Pinza, by the way, boasted so
much about his frindship with Mussonli—that he was putin jail! In New York!
A
genuine hero: Arturo Toscanini.
"If I were capable of killing a man,” he once said, “I
would kill Mussolini."
(Italy’s standin for Hitler.)
He refused to conduct at Bayreuth after
Jewish musicians were banned. Hitler himself wrote a flattering letter to
Toscanini asking him to return. Toscanini refused.
And Toscanini was the first person to
conduct the Palestine Orchestra, made up
mainly of Jewish musicians who had lost their positions because of the
Nazis. (It’s now the Israel
Philharmonic.)
A final question:
Should
decent people avoid the music of Nazi collaborators – as Israel itself
generally has done? Or ignore the backgrounds of those who wrote the music or
played it, and try to just enjoy whatever they created?
It’s an individual decision. How much do
you like the music or the playing? How forgiving can you be about the musician?
In my case, it’s fortunate that I don’t
particularly like Richard Wagner’s music.
I agree with Mark Twain, who actually
visited Bayreuth, Wagner’s opera house. Twain’s verdict: Wagner’s music was
better than it sounds. He also said he hadn’t heard anythinhg like it since the
orphan asylum burned down-
I also concur with Woody Allen, who said that
whenever he listened to Wagner’s music he felt like invading to invade Poland.
Still, I love the voice of Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf and the conducting of Wilhelm Furtwangler, and they weren’t the
worst. And I don’t even hear anything fascistic in Orff’s Carmina Burana. As
for pianist Walter Gieseking, there are so many OTHER great pianists whom I can
listen to that I can readily deny myself the pleasure of listening to a Nazi
sympathizer.
it’s not a matter of being rational. I
used to love an italian tenor named Titto
Schipa…until I discovered that he, too, supported mussolini—I’m not
enthusiastic anymore—
Finally, let me quote Michael White,
journalist:
“As
for Furtwängler and the others who performed under the swastika, there was an
undoubted mixture of foolishness, delusion, opportunism and cowardice. You can
say of all these people that they should have had more courage, more integrity,
and been prepared to sacrifice careers, futures and maybe lives. But that’s a
big ask. What would you or I have done? I like to think I’d have been brave,
but I can only thank God that I’ve never had to find out.”
