by Michael Haas
There follows a summary of the plot, which is loosely based on fictitious events in the novel of the same name by Albert Emil Brachvogel. Zuckerkandl continues:
This is, as we see, an opera about an artist. It's also, as Graener would have us understand, an opera of avowal: it is an opera that is pure music. [Graener explains:] ‘I have attempted to express Friedemann Bach's essential humanity and experience by using simple musical means. The libretto is merely an excuse to write music; in fact this is an opera that only exists thanks to its music!’ With this, we have Graener's avowal to pure music. […] And as such his music is undoubtedly pleasant sounding with lots of melody, harmonic consonance – it is music that exists well beyond any awkward complications.
Its artistic qualities are immediately apparent. It is the work of an honest and masterful craftsman. The small forms which shape most of the acts create a formal, yet lyrical structure and are easily linked together and pleasingly executed. It is filled with melody. […] What this music lacks, however, is dramatic power and originality. The libretto is conventional – and the music doesn't permit us to forget this fact. As a result, there can be no talk of a great dramatic success. The artistic avowals lack profundity as the voice that expresses them simply doesn't carry. It is without question ‘pure music’, but less pure and bit more substantial would have been preferable.39
The conflicting messages and the subsequent difficulty of establishing any consensus for what music should be in the New Germany of Goebbels and Rosenberg is reflected in H. H. Stuckenschmidt's review for Anbruch of Paul von Klenau's opera Michael Kohlhaas, based on Heinrich von Kleist's novella, premiered in Stuttgart in 1933, a year after Friedemann Bach:
Modern Music is in a difficult situation in today's Germany. The few who have held their ground are battling against a majority whose enthusiasm is matched by their lack of theoretical substance. Neither side seems to be in the position of addressing the question of what, exactly, within our artistic lives is ‘corrupting’ and what is meant by ‘Cultural Bolshevism’. The opinions are even varied amongst the different departments within our arts’ bureaucracy. The very same Stravinsky who is called a cultural Bolshevist by the journalists of the Zeitschrift für Musik is loudly applauded by the radical leader of the ‘Action League for German Culture’, Hans Hinkel. The same [Fritz] Jöde [Music pedagogue: 1887–1970] who is fought against as a separatist and anti-nationalist by ‘Action League’ musicians, led by Dr Fritz Stein, has thousands of supporters in the [NS] party. The same Max v. Schillings, who couldn't possibly be more covered with honours, certificates and medals bestowing him with the full confidence of the new regime, is defamed by the leader of the Saxon committee of music critics, Dr Alfred Heuß, as an arch-protagonist in Germany's fall during the last war and as composer of the un-German, ‘sadistic’ opera Mona Lisa. Is there even such a thing as ‘corrupting manifestations’ in music? Perhaps it's the departure from tonality, the robust basis of which is so highly praised from all sides, as a point of permanence. Is tinkering with it an obvious artistic taboo? Or is tonality, as Arnold Schoenberg writes in his book on Harmony, only one of many creative means? The official view of the music-politicians, as far as they have been able to address such detailed issues, is basically that they are against atonality. Only a few months ago, the Jury of the Dortmund Tonkünstler Festival forced the composer Peter Schacht to forgo performance of his String Quartet once it was established that the work had been composed using the twelve-tone technique.
And it is in this confusion that Stuttgart's premiere of Paul von Klenau's opera Michael Kohlhaas clarifies like a blaze of light. As here we have a work that is supported by the highest powers in the land as a ‘national work’, yet is undeniably modern, a score which is largely twelve-tone and shows a disregard, with few exceptions, of standard harmonic modulatory rules.40
Music Policies in Hitler's Germany
Sorting out such confusion, and with an eye towards the not yet enacted racial purges, demanded some sort of organisation and planning. There are extensive and detailed accounts by historians including Fred Priberg, Michael Kater, Erik Levi and, most recently, Amaury du Closel41 regarding the Nazi machinations which sought to isolate those composers who were not part of the ‘New Germany’ while promoting the Nazis’ own musical ideals.
The obvious rallying point for the National Socialists was Wagner. Indeed, he was very much the Ur-National Socialist, having been, at different stages in his life, both a nationalist and a Socialist. Hitler's devotion to the music and philosophy of Wagner was reciprocated by two British members of the Wagner family.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, husband of Wagner's daughter Eva, died six years before Hitler's rise to power while providing the Nazis with a quasi-scientific basis for their racist policies in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century published in 1899. His feelings for Hitler personally were nearly devotional, as correspondence from 1923 indicates:
You are not at all, as you have been described to me, a fanatic, rather I would like to describe you as the direct opposite of a fanatic. The fanatic heats heads, you warm hearts. […] That Germany in the hour of its deepest need has raised up a Hitler attests to its vitality; likewise the effects emanating from him; for these two things – personality and its effect – belong together. That the great Ludendorff openly allies himself with you and joins the movement emanating from you: what a splendid confirmation! I can now safely fall asleep at night and not even need to wake up again. May God protect you!42
Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifred (née Winifred Marjorie Williams), the wife of Wagner's son Siegfried, was to become Hitler's most devoted muse and disciple. From 1925, Bayreuth started to publish a newsletter which, by 1933, had become an instrument of virulent racist propaganda. Hitler himself proposed marriage to Winifred, widowed since the death of her older, homosexual husband, the composer Siegfried Wagner in 1930. Despite providing the paper on which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in prison after the 1923 aborted beer-hall coup in Munich, she rejected his proposal on the grounds that he did not have an ‘official position’. By the time he was appointed Germany's Reich Chancellor, he no longer needed the status of a link with the Wagner clan, though he remained a Bayreuth devotee and an extremely close friend of Winifred and at least three of her four children. Rumours of the intimacy between them were such that during her war-crime hearings, she was forced to deny that they had had sexual relations.
Despite her daughter Friedelind denouncing the family's association with Hitler and going into American exile from where she broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda in German, the rest of the Wagner family, headed by Winifred, continued to have warm feelings for the private Hitler, whom they called ‘Uncle Wolf’.43 Winifred never expressed anything other than total devotion for him. In television interviews from 1975, she called him ‘unser seliger Adolf’ (Our blessed Adolf), abbreviated in the postwar years to ‘USA’. Winifred's grandson Gottfried has recounted how his grandmother greeted other dedicated postwar Nazis using the secret number 88: the letter ‘H’, as the eighth letter in the alphabet, was repeated as ‘eighty-eight’ to escape postwar detection of fervent Nazis who still wanted to greet each other with ‘Heil Hitler!’
In musical matters, Rosenberg's ‘Revolution’ started off with some slips of policy. Kurt Weill's highly political opera Der Silbersee managed a simultaneous premiere in Erfurt, Leipzig and Magdeburg on 18 February 1933 around the same time as the premiere of Hans Gál's Violin Concerto in Dresden with soloist Georg Kulenkampff, conducted by Fritz Busch. Korngold's adaptation of Leo Fall's Die geschiedene Frau44 limped on for a few weeks at Berlin's Theater am Nollendorfplatz immediately following Hitler's appointment – intriguingly, subsequent lawsuits relating to its early closure made no mention of the Jewish authorship of the work, the libretto or the arrangement, but involved the alleged chicanery of various theatre directors.45
Even Alexander Zemlinsky had his opera Der Kreidekreis46 performed at the Berlin St
aatsoper under Robert Heger in January 1934. Heinz Tietjen, the Director of the Staatsoper, had postponed the premiere from April 1933, having reneged on his contract with Otto Klemperer – who was originally scheduled to conduct it – with the excuse that, as a Jew, Klemperer's safety at the Staatsoper could not be guaranteed. Der Kreidekreis went on to enjoy a further twenty performances in Berlin, despite the fact that Zemlinsky's Kleider machen Leute47 had been banned as early as March 1933. Der Kreidekreis had received its premiere in Zurich on 14 October 1933 with its first performance in Nazi Germany occurring at Stettin on 16 January, followed by another production in Coburg (21 January), before opening in Berlin on 23 January and further stagings in Nuremberg and Cologne. It would be the last work by a high-profile Jewish composer to be presented at such an important venue in the Reich's capital city after January 1934. It counts as a minor miracle that it happened as late as it did, during a period when Goebbels and Rosenberg were squabbling for positions of cultural dominance, thus allowing some flexibility within artistic planning.
Writing of the Berlin performance, H. H. Stuckenschmidt praised the opera as being worthy of the best opera house in the Reich's most important city, highlighting the objections made by the Head of Police following the work's premiere in Stettin, where further performances were banned for reasons of ‘public decency’ (due to some scenes being set in a ‘tea house’ which was in fact a brothel). This ban was then taken up by some of Germany's smaller opera houses. Stuckenschmidt applauded the fact that the central government had thwarted locals who had worked themselves into a state of indignant outrage and writes that it is a relief ‘to see the limb being sawn off by those from above, upon which small-town protectors of local morality are seated’.48 It was to be a tragically short-lived false dawn. The Nazi critic Rudolf Bilke called Zemlinsky a ‘wolf in sheep's clothing’, pointing out that if performances by Zemlinsky were permitted, then nothing could stand in the way of Schoenberg and Schreker also being brought back.49 Viktor Zuckerkandl writing for a Viennese readership was far more welcoming. For him, it represented exactly what opera managements were looking for: a modern opera with music that didn't frighten the public.50
Following Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, there had been suggestions that he might abandon some of the anti-Semitic rhetoric of his campaign. In spite of these misplaced expectations, the revolutionary machinery disrupted performances of Ernst Toch's ‘capriccio’ Zeitoper Der Fächer51 in mid-rehearsal at Cologne, while Berthold Goldschmidt's Der gewaltige Hahnrei never made it to the Charlottenburg Städtische Oper in Berlin after a successful Mannheim premiere. Die beiden Klaas by Hans Gál was struck off the schedule at Hamburg, and with the open Nazi harassment of Fritz Busch in March 1933 during rehearsals of Rigoletto, there was no chance of it being mounted, as planned, in Dresden. Clemens Kraus dropped Egon Wellesz's Die Bakchantinnen in Munich; Jascha Horenstein's dismissal from Düsseldorf kicked the premiere of Marcel Rubin's opera Prinzessin Brambilla into the long grass; and Karl Böhm's forthcoming performance of Max Brand's Requiem at the Berlin Staatsoper was also quietly shelved. Even Manfred Gurlitt, a supporter of the Nazi regime and a party member since 1 May 1933, had the Mannheim premiere of his opera Nana cancelled as it was wrongly believed that he was Jewish – a position the Nazis maintained at the expense of all of his works including his treatments of Soldaten and Büchner's Wozzeck.
Jews, such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, were not allowed to conduct for so-called ‘security reasons’, spurious excuses made along the lines that the public and musicians would no longer tolerate Jewish conductors, singers and instrumentalists and, therefore, ‘their safety could not be guaranteed’. It was just an extension of Nazi double-speak – similar excuses were made for the official boycott of Jewish shops and professional services on 1 April 1933, when it was claimed that if the boycott had not been officially sanctioned, it would have been carried out by a mob and public safety would have been at risk.
Mass resignations of conductors were demanded: Josef Rosenstock in Mannheim, Jascha Horenstein in Düsseldorf, and Fritz Stiedry in Berlin; Otto Klemperer's Staatsoper contract was torn up by the same man who had made Hans Gál's Heilige Ente such a success with Maria Schreker only a few years before – Heinz Tietjen – though it was the same Heinz Tietjen who put on Zemlinsky's Kreidekreis the following year. Gustav Brecher, Director of the opera in Leipzig who had premiered both Krenek's Jonny spielt auf and Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, was forced out of Leipzig after having a performance of Weill's Der Silbersee interrupted in March 1933. He and his wife committed suicide in Ostend in 1940 as Belgium fell to the Nazis. Non-Jews also protested, resigned and left the country, including Erich Kleiber, Fritz Busch, Karl Rankl, the opera director Carl Ebert, the theatre director Josef Gielen (father of Michael Gielen), and the composers Robert Stolz and Ralph Benatzky.
It was just as Lady Oxford had predicted to Rosenberg: Germany was haemorrhaging its most important intellects and talents. What was happening in music was being replicated in academia, the law and medicine. Jewish doctors were rounded up and thrown out of hospitals, and patients who allowed themselves to be operated on by Jewish surgeons were themselves subject to persecution. These were not the ‘minor injustices’ that Rosenberg spoke of, but major outrages that would damage the country for generations. What this meant in practical terms for music is explained by Viktor Zuckerkandl, writing from Berlin in July 1933:
It is a remarkable phenomenon, that the general movement that is currently sweeping across Germany and is the fruit of a younger generation of politicians has not succeeded in establishing equivalent young voices to achieve similar breakthroughs in music. After all, when all is said and done, music must ultimately be considered the most characteristic means of national self-expression. But, in fact, it appears that the opposite is more the case. The men we see coming forward today were all born in the 1890s and hail from older generations, if not perhaps in actual age, then certainly in attitude: stolid bourgeois taste resulting in worthy Romantic expression has been the trend. We're treated to picture-book scenes from the countryside of yore, rich with the naïve joy of kitschy costumes and trite sets. We are reaching back to the times of Richard Strauss and Pfitzner. It's not difficult to understand what drives this counter-revolution against rationalist trends that have dominated music in Germany for the past two decades. Perhaps the criticism that modern German music has too assiduously avoided direct association with its forests and fields, or even its own folk traditions is legitimate, at least if compared with Slavic and Latin cultures. If we recall the many new forms that have resulted from this most recent revolution in the political sphere, it is astonishing that such ambitions for new beginnings are totally missing within music. Of course, the truly ‘new’ can only come about as an act of genius, and the present trend of reaching into the past is mere compensation for having nothing original to say.52
Zuckerkandl's last sentence offers an eerie, if unintentional echo of Wagner's comments on Jewish composers.
Furtwängler
On 12 April, reports appeared in the Neue Freie Presse of an appeal to Goebbels made by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler with the heading ‘There is only good and bad art’:
Furtwängler has presented an appeal to the Propaganda Minister Dr Joseph Goebbels in which he places his entire authority upon the belief that in Germany, much that is presently taking place has absolutely nothing to do with the restoration of the nation's cultural heritage. Furtwängler is dismayed that ‘lines are being drawn between the confessional persuasions of individuals’ – even in circumstances where this must have little or no bearing on professional and state affairs. According to Furtwängler: ‘rather than drawing a division between confessions, one should draw it between good and bad art. This is the only line that should not be crossed and should be the only line that we heed. Musical life has been damaged already by both the world financial crisis and the advent of the ra
dio – it cannot bear further social experiments. If nothing worthwhile can be offered in concerts, the public simply turns away. Questions of quality are not just questions of aspirations and ideals, but become questions of our very existence as musicians. Of course one should fight the destructive kitsch that is rootless, dry and soulless; but it can never be in the interest of our cultural life to turn this fight against real artists. It has to be said very clearly that men such as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Max Reinhardt are necessary for the future cultural life in Germany and must be allowed to continue to have their say.’
Goebbels's response was that ‘there is not only the dividing line between good and bad art, but the only art that can be considered good is that which springs from the eternal well deep inside the people and this art must also mean something to these people’. Dr Goebbels takes the view that true German artists have been forcibly silenced over the past fourteen years, though he conceded that mistakes had perhaps been made and wrote that ‘any true artist need not worry about his position’. It is to be understood that Goebbels is expressing polite respect towards Furtwängler rather than any actual intention of rectifying previous excesses. Reading between the lines, one may, however, sense a hint of an admission that perhaps they have on occasion been over-zealous.53
The article goes on to list the many German scientists and doctors who would be without employment under the conditions dictated by the new regime and makes the point that 20 per cent of Germany's Nobel Prize winners would also find themselves unemployed. The journalist then turns to a quote by the Nazi minister Hermann Göring, which he follows with an analysis by the conservative German press: