by Michael Haas
Sadly new music is not much appreciated. The public thinks back with longing to the past twelve years: Art for the people! How nice that was: the tastes of the average-Joe were well catered for. It is because of this that someone with absolutely no artistic qualities such as Carl Orff was heaped with honours. Believe me, observing such things makes one despair of having to live amongst such people. We can only slowly build up circles and groups. At the moment, I have one that consists of only 250 people, but they're loyal and attend all events. It is for this group that I would ask permission to perform your [latest] quartet.16
The address that Hartmann gives for receipt of Wellesz's score is revealing: ‘Music Control Section; Information Control Division, APO 407; US Army.’ Given the fact that Musica Viva had been running since October 1945, it must have been frustrating to have taken more than two years to reach a mere 250 subscribers.
Even some of the most respected institutions of the postwar musical avant-garde, the summer courses in Darmstadt and the New Music Festival in Donaueschingen, are examples of modernism being used as an effective ‘seal of approval’ by the occupying Allies. Donauseschingen was in the French zone, and it was consistent with French cultural policies to leave its Nazi director, the former Schreker pupil Hugo Herrmann, in place when it restarted in the summer of 1946. This was despite the fact that Hermann had published an arrangement of the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song, as early as 1933 (along with various other Nazi songs for male chorus) before joining the party in 1939. The programmes offered during his post-Hitler tenure were hardly challenging. The occasional work by Shostakovich and Walter Piston leavened the fare of more or less the same composers featured since 1937, including forgotten names such as Joseph Haas, Ernst Lothar von Knorr, Ottmar Gerster, as well as Herrmann himself. All were highly compromised, many were party members, and Gerster had even made it onto Hitler's ‘Chosen-by-God-List’ compiled as a weapon of cultural propaganda in 1944.17 This was too much for even the culturally tolerant French who closed it down until 1950 when it later reopened with a clear anti-Nazi and avant-garde agenda.18
The origins of the Darmstadt summer courses, located in the American Zone, are more obscure. Originally led by two composers on America's blacklist, Wolfgang Fortner and Hermann Heiss, both emerged as vocal proponents of twelve-tone music after spending their years under the Third Reich composing propaganda marches and songs for the Hitlerjugend. At least in the case of Heiss, he could claim that before the rise of Hitler he had studied with both Josef Matthias Hauer and Arnold Schoenberg, thereby proving his legitimate entitlement to promote dodecaphony. They were joined by other composers and performers on the American blacklist such as Udo Dammert and Bruno Stürmer. Thacker in Music after Hitler speculates that they simply lied about their Nazi pasts when engaged to teach at Darmstadt, while American denazification officials were not really aware of what was being initiated.19 In any case, by 1948 blacklisting had ended and the most tenacious American denazifiers had returned home. The Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc had been identified as a far more important concern than the remnants of Nazism left scattered across Germany and Austria.
The Beginning of the Cold War and a Change of Policy
It would not take long for it to dawn on American Intelligence officials that former Nazis, particularly those who had fought behind Soviet lines, would be useful in battling the rapidly spreading Soviet empire. The International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Geneva, had been issuing blank refugee passes to various organisations based in Rome and Genoa for legitimate humanitarian reasons. The Vatican's Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza, headed by the future Pope Paul VI, had been operating since 1944, ostensibly aiding refugees from Catholic countries. By the end of the war it was already assisting anti-Communists flee the Soviet Union.20 Vatican committees were engaged in what they perceived as a re-Christianisation of Europe by providing refuge to fleeing Nazis, many of whom allowed themselves to be baptised or re-baptised into the Catholic faith before shipping off to South America.21 All escaping Nazi criminals had to do was to reach Italy's ethnically Austro-German region of South Tyrol where they could be placed in safe houses, receive their documentation and new identities before continuing their journey. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, labelled these escape routes ‘ratlines’ and quickly recognised their intelligence potential, subsequently co-opting many war criminals, certain of their usefulness in the emerging Cold War.
This created a complex scenario: rehabilitated Nazi criminals and sympathisers placed in culturally sensitive positions allowed a shoring up of anti-Communist defences from the right while American intelligence services were co-opting liberal and progressive groups into an anti-Communist block on the left. That the CIA fronted any number of ‘foundations’ and charitable organisations supporting anti-Communist activities in the arts has been known since the disclosure of documents in1967; their extent and long-term effects are less clear. Frances Stonor Saunders's Who Paid the Piper (1999) contends that artists participated in festivals and events with the express knowledge that they were demonstrating freedoms not enjoyed on the other side of the iron curtain. The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford, published in 2008, states that though some administrators in organisations such as the Fairfield Trust, the Ford Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) were aware of direct CIA support, most of the artists weren't; indeed, according to Wilford, even some of the senior staff of these organisations were unaware of where their money was coming from. Those who were trusted with information about the source of their funding were referred to in CIA parlance as ‘witting’. The classification of ‘witting’ or ‘unwitting’ was used internally by the CIA in describing an organisation's head, and various artists.
The exceedingly ‘witting’ Nicolas Nabokov ran the CCF for some fifteen years and organised propaganda cultural events such as the festival L'Art du XXe siècle in Paris in 1952, and later the International Conference of Twentieth-Century Music in Rome, which also included a composition prize. The competition, according to Pierre Boulez, featured a ‘folklore of mediocrity’ nurtured by an obsession with the number twelve: ‘a council of Twelve, a committee of Twelve, and Jury of Twelve’ and of course focusing largely on twelve-tone music.22 Stravinsky, a close Nabokov associate, headed the jury and had only recently taken up dodecaphonic composition himself. Boulez was not far off the mark. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune on 8 February 1953, Nabokov informed readers that ‘we are going to have a composers’ contest that is unlike any other competition ever held. Twelve young and promising but internationally unknown composers are to be invited to Rome, all expenses paid. Each will bring a score and these will be performed…. [A] special jury, democratically elected by all those attending the conference, will pick from these twelve a winning work…. First, there will be a cash prize; second, there will be a promise of performance by three major orchestras in Europe and three in America; third, the work will be published, and fourth, it will be recorded by a leading company.‘23 The composition prize was won by Lou Harrison.
As with Karl Amadeus Hartmann's plans, convincing the public was more of a challenge. In The New Yorker, the writer and feminist Susan Sontag's reaction had by 1987 become more considered: ‘We were deferential – we knew we were supposed to appreciate ugly music; we listened devoutly to the Toch, the Krenek, the Hindemith, the Webern, the Schoenberg, whatever (we had strong stomachs).‘24 It was certainly not what was being performed in the USSR or the Communist Bloc, where artists did not have the freedom to perform or write ‘ugly music’ and it was this essential, but perhaps not so explicitly stated, point that anti-Communist propagandists were eager to make.
Whatever the artistic merits of the music coming out of postwar Rome, Darmstadt and Munich, it was most certainly not the Socialist Realism promoted behind the Iron Curtain. We return to Hanns Eisler's quote from 1950 with which we concluded Chapter 7; perhaps he was even anticipating Sontag's lat
er appraisal: ‘If modern – that is – serious art distances itself progressively from the broader masses, then it becomes progressively more cynical, decadent, nihilistic and formalistically isolated; monopoly-capitalism's cultural industry has always understood the masses…. “True” art becomes merely “merchandised” art.‘25 The capitalist West was certainly vulnerable on this front. Soviet cinema, ballet, classical music and theatre were not only widely available for the masses to enjoy, they maintained relatively high artistic values while remaining intellectually and artistically accessible to receptive audiences. It goes without saying however, that there was also a diet of bombastic Socialist Realism that the compliant citizens of the Eastern Block had to tolerate with varying degrees of appreciation and desperation, while secretly delighting in whatever light-weight American cinema and television could be accessed through an otherwise impenetrable ‘iron curtain’. Assertions such as those made by Eisler that these mass-market offerings dulled the wits of consumers did not appear to dampen Eastern European enthusiasm. Still, one thing the CIA and the West could not really judge was how many creative artists from Communist Europe were longing for the freedom to write music that, according to Sontag, one needed a ‘strong stomach’ to appreciate.
The American arm of the CCF, known as the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, was aware of this and concentrated on organising tours to Europe by America's most prestigious cultural organisations such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. They also began welcoming into the United States such tainted artists as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan. Wilford in his book on the CIA, and its means of infiltrating leftist non-Communist organisations and the arts, is more measured in his assessment of the CIA and music. He acknowledges that the CIA with its top people coming from Yale had a natural tendency to promote modern art and literature over ‘serious’ music. Jazz and popular music were supported but the American composers who represented an equivalent aesthetic development to, say, Jackson Pollock – such as John Cage and Milton Babbitt – seem to have been missing from CIA cultural planning.26 Contradicting this, however, is the view of the German composer Konrad Boehmer in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 30 November 2008 in which he states that the CIA was ‘always in the background’, specifically with those composers associated with Adorno's Cologne School. These included Stockhausen, Kagel and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.27 Wilford's claim that the CIA was less interested in the musical avant-garde is disputed by Boehmer, who not only specifically mentions Cage in Darmstadt, but makes it clear that thanks to Adorno's influence with the CIA, and their specialist in psychological warfare, Michael Josselson, it was an open secret in the summer courses that they were involved to a significant degree.
Adorno's theory, taken much to heart by the CIA, was that ‘emancipated art led to an emancipated society’. It was quite clear that neither art nor society behind the Iron Curtain were particularly ‘emancipated’, but music composed in the Soviet Bloc was still able to attract audiences to a degree that ‘serious’ composers in the West could not. Extrapolating other Adorno observations on music in modern society may have sat less comfortably with the capitalist West, such as his statement that ‘society's resistance to music that represents such abused concepts as “Individualism”, “artistry” and “the technically esoteric”, are themselves manifestations of society and are to be corrected within society, rather than within music.‘28 Ultimately, Adorno seems to come to the same conclusion as his Communist colleague Eisler, as quoted above: ‘Wahre Kunst wird zur Ware Kunst’ – ‘True art becomes merchandised art’, with the German homophones for ‘true’ and ‘merchandised’ (Wahre and Ware) being put to especially effective use.
Consequences for the Banned
For composers who had been thrown out of Germany and Austria, the postwar environment was not very inviting. If former Nazis weren't in charge, then bug-eyed experimentalists were found attempting to rebuild a society amenable to the ‘technically esoteric’. Neither was interested in re-establishing the careers of those forced into exile, though Sontag's quote which specifically mentions exiled composers highlights their revival as part of the allies re-education programme in the immediate decade following the war: Egon Wellesz's First Symphony was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sergiu Celibidache in 1948, and the following year, his Second Symphony was given by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karl Rankl before being taken up by Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. Boult and the BBC then commissioned the Third Symphony, which, as we shall see, never reached performance. Hans Gál's oratorio De Profundis was first performed in Wiesbaden in 1948; Ernst Toch's first two symphonies were given their premieres by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in the early 1950s; Korngold's opera Violanta was recorded by Austrian Radio (RAVAG) in 1947 and his opera Die Kathrin had its premiere – postponed from 1938 – at the still bombed-out Staatsoper in 1949.29 In 1955, Zemlinsky's Der Kreidekreis, the controversial run of which had taken place during the early Nazi years before being banned, was broadcast on Vienna Radio and was staged in Dortmund. Interest in composers banned by Hitler's Reich may have waned after its rapid postwar recovery, but it was maintained in fits and starts until 1960 when Winfried Zillig recorded Schreker's Die Gezeichneten for Austrian Radio, after which it more or less vanished altogether from scheduling.
Yet if former colleagues were carrying the torch for those composers they had known and respected from the interwar years, something else was happening with the younger generation and their supporters. A clear discrepancy seemed to be emerging between the positive response to a new work from the public and the vehemence of its subsequent dismissal by the press. Tonal works, especially by composers forced to flee Nazi Europe, were not welcomed by a new generation of critics and composers. As Pierre Boulez observed, ‘we wanted everything [during the first years after the war], that was the context. Imagine a young German like Stockhausen discovering new music after twelve years of Nazi time. Can you imagine the desire to get out of that?‘30 It was a generation of angry youngsters who had watched helplessly as their parents’ generation brutalised their cultural inheritance. For them, there was every incentive to distance their creative identities from their cultural roots. With the CIA taking Adorno's ‘emancipation of culture’ as meaning anything that would not be permitted under Communism, the scene was set for a shift away from the past, even if the past included composers who had always seen themselves as progressive. In the words of Berthold Goldschmidt: ‘Suddenly, we were out of date!‘31
Publishers
A practical consideration for many exiled composers was re-establishing ties with former publishers, and, in rarer cases, publishers re-establishing ties with composers. On 24 October 1946 Hans Gál received a letter from the young German composer Günter Raphael. He reminds Gál of having met in 1932, ‘before the [Nazi] storm’ at the Tonkünstler Festival in Zurich. Revealingly, he defines himself as ‘half-Aryan’ rather than the preferred Nazi designation of ‘half-Jew’ and explains that this meant that he was unable to work in Germany.32 He mentions his connections with various publishers, something that piqued Gál's interest as a couple of weeks later, on 5 November, Raphael responded to inquiries regarding publishers in Leipzig. This is not only a fascinating source of information, but also a veritable time-capsule of feelings, thoughts and responses. Raphael begins with a run-down of publishers in Leipzig:
Breitkopf und Härtel was totally destroyed on 4 December 1943 – that is to say, the main building on Nürnberger Street was bombed right down to its foundations. The so-called fire-proof strong-boxes were strewn across the street and it took over a month and a half before they could be opened as sparks were still spitting out of the rubble. Once they could be opened, all of the valuable manuscripts were nothing but dust and ashes. However a number of their manuscripts along with their archive were evacuated and the publisher found a new location in the small Saxon town of Lausitz. Of the variou
s editions, at least one copy was evacuated, but of course, only of those desirable, that is to say, Aryan composers. I wouldn't wish to guess if your violin concerto has by happenstance found its way into one of these piles of aryanised editions. I can only tell you that everything of mine is completely gone. (I had approximately forty-five works with Breitkopf und Härtel)…. I haven't dared venture into the Russian Zone yet, though my flat with two grand pianos, an upright and a Baroque organ is in Meiningen in Thüringen and therefore in the Soviet Sector. (The Russians seem keen to have me and have offered professorships in Leipzig, Halle and Weimar but as long as they maintain their Zone frontiers, I shan't take a single step towards the East. I wish to remain free to go from one place to another). Well, anyway, that was Breitkopf in Leipzig. Dr [Hellmuth] von Hase has gone to Wiesbaden and is trying to set up an alternative head office of the business…. Dr von Hase is compromised as he was a former member of the Nazi party and his brother Martin is now supposed to run the company from Wiesbaden. New editions are to be produced thanks to photo-mechanical means of reproduction. I've seen what they intend to release in the first year, Classics, Romantics and more Classics. They wouldn't so much as consider releasing any works by contemporary composers. In any case, only Germans and Americans were represented:33 Pfitzner with his Op. 1 cello sonata, Hindemith with his Op. 8 cello works. Nobody gave Hans Gál, Paul Kletzki or me a single thought. Now to Leuckart. Sander Junior [Horst Sander: 1904–45] fell in the last days of the war in one of the battles around Leipzig. De mortuis nihil nisi bene34 Sander was a big Nazi. The publisher apparently was burnt right to the ground. Who should now run it is unknown to me. Perhaps it will be merged with Kistner und Siegel which is presently run by Dr Walter Lott. Perhaps it will be taken over by Sander's other son [Erich] who is sitting with his family and mother in Upper Bavaria (in the American Zone) from where he's presently managing their business affairs. I haven't heard anything about Simrock yet. They have two of my chamber works. Peters Verlag is totally intact (including the Peters Library). Walter Hinrichsen came back as a young American lieutenant and reclaimed his father's property with his own hands. Just as the Russians arrived, he disappeared in the American Sector and put Dr [Johnannes] Petschull (who also has Universal Edition) in charge. It's all now run from Berlin. Peters doesn't deliver anything – actually, they haven't for years now. The Russians are now taking all of C. G. Röder's printing plates to Moscow … (along with all of the Peters printing plates and eight complete local paper factories!). Are you by chance acquainted with Max Hinrichsen?35 … As we're on the subject of publishers, Schott has been given a licence by the French – the Americans would never have issued one to them since they published [one of Hitler's favourite marches] Baden-Weiler March. It's now back in business despite the fact that the Mainz printing presses are still not working. The offices in Weihergarten were hardly damaged. There are no paper shortages in the French Sector (the best magazines are published there as well and enjoy huge print-runs). I'm working a good deal with Willy Müller, a publisher in Heidelberg (Süddeutscher Musik Verlag) who for years has been taking works by North German composers. Now to [Karl] Straube and [Günther] Ramin: Straube has been through a lot, but he's still alive. On the same infamous 4 December, he was bombed to smithereens. His marvellous library however was stored in the cellar of the Gewandhaus, which remained undamaged even if the actual building itself was reduced to rubble (along with half of the Conservatory). Kippenberg's wonderful collection of Goethe and Rilke etc. was also stored in the cellar. Everything was saved. Straube who is now seventy-three years old admitted to our amazement that he had been a member of the Party since 1933! … Of course he has been relieved of all of his positions by the Russians (the Communists!).36 Slowly however, he's regaining influence, especially in the field of church music. He's been able to return to giving organ lessons though I feel very sorry for him. It is unfathomable what could have possibly driven him to take the step of joining the Nazi Party. There were of course many exceptionally intelligent and cultivated people such as Straube who did the same. They believed that, by being members, they could raise the level of things…. This war had probably to be fought to the bitter end, if only to stop the myth of ‘the greatest battle commander of all time being felled as a martyr for a just cause …’. Ramin runs Leipzig's musical life: he's the Thomascantor (both the Thomaskirche37 and the Nikolaikirche are still standing), he's conductor of the Bach Society and the Gewandhaus Chorus. Organist, harpsichordist etc. We also have, as of late, a new conductor of the Gewandhaus: Herbert Albert who used to be in Stuttgart. Abendroth left Leipzig in a dreadful sulk and has become an alderman for the Weimar ‘Thüringer’ local council and head of all music provision. His swastika would not have gone down well in the West! But perhaps he carried the red flag long before it had a swastika in the middle! This is also why I don't return to Middle-Germany [The Soviet Sector]: Everywhere you go, you meet the same old ‘good’ friends (even still in their same old uniforms) who look down on you.38