The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  The “Beer Hall Putsch” took place on November 8–9, 1923. Siegfried Wagner had planned to commemorate Hitler’s victory by conducting his newest symphonic poem, Glück, at a concert in Munich. Defeat forced him postpone the premiere, but neither he nor his relations lost faith in the cause. Hitler, confined to Landsberg prison, wrote to express his gratitude. Bayreuth, he said, was “in the line of march to Berlin”; it was the place where “first the Master and then Chamberlain forged the spiritual sword which we are wielding today.” The Wagners kept the prisoner well supplied, sending along recordings of Wagner excerpts, the libretto of Siegfried’s opera Der Schmied von Marienburg, a variety of domestic items (blankets, jackets, stockings, foodstuffs, books), and writing materials, including typing paper of superior quality. A phonograph came from Helene Bechstein. Hitler set to composing Mein Kampf.

  Hitler’s speeches of the later 1920s often touched on cultural matters, displaying modest knowledge of the musical scenes of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. One sign of Germany’s decline, Hitler said, was its growing ignorance of the great musical tradition: “Only a couple hundred thousand know Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, only some of them know Bruckner.” Meanwhile, “little Neutöner [new-toners] come and unleash their dissonances.” He made a knowing reference to Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf: “In Germany one lets Jonny strike up and concerning South Tyrol one complains about the Untergang of German culture.” In this same period he criticized the operetta Das Dreimäderlhaus for its travesties of Schubert songs and launched an extended assault on the conductor Bruno Walter, “alias Schlesinger.” In Berlin, Hitler alleged, there were five opera conductors on the staff of the state-funded opera houses, all of them Jews. The reference to “fünf Juden” brings to mind the scene in Salome in which five Jews dispute among themselves in Herod’s court.

  Hitler took power in January 1933, and by the end of the year most of the German cultural apparatus had fallen under the control of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. But music did not become a direct instrument of the state. Hitler wanted the ministry to serve the “spiritual development of the nation,” and Goebbels agreed. As the historian Alan Steinweis shows, the minister saw artists as “creating Germans” and organized them into semi-independent organizations. It was called “self-administration under state supervision.” The Reichskulturkammer, or Reich Culture Chamber, had departments for each art form, including a Reich Music Chamber, whose first president was Richard Strauss. Musical life was not merely Nazified from above; to a great extent, it Nazified itself. Even the anti-Jewish clause in the Kulturkammer laws neglected to mention the Jews by name; cultural bureaucrats were left to decide which artists lacked “aptitude” for cultural life. Not surprisingly, all leading Jewish musicians were deemed inept. The April 7, 1933, law barring Jews from the public sector had already had a devastating impact, because so many had been employed by Weimar’s arts programs. Weill left Germany on March 22, Klemperer on April 4, Schoenberg on May 17.

  From the start, classical music blared in the background of Nazi life. Party rallies were so immaculately choreographed to Beethoven, Bruckner, and Wagner that the music seemed to have been written in support of the pageantry; it was through such sleights of hand that Hitler generated his authority. Unlike Stalin, who demanded that Soviet art mirror the ideology of the regime, Hitler wished to maintain the illusion of autonomy in the arts. Brigitte Hamann, in her biography of Winifred Wagner, reports that at the Bayreuth festival of 1933 the dictator asked audiences to refrain from singing the “Horst Wessel” song or from making other patriotic manifestations, on the grounds that “there is no more glorious expression of the German spirit than the immortal works of the Master.” Like so many German music lovers, Hitler claimed that the classical tradition was an “absolute art” hovering above history, as in Schopenhauer’s formulation.

  Such was the import of Hitler’s most ambitious statement on musical policy, his “cultural address” at the Party rally of 1938, in which he said that “it is totally impossible to express a scientific worldview in musical terms” and “nonsense” to try to express Party business. In contrast to Stalin, Hitler turned up his nose at sycophantic propaganda. In 1935, he directed that no more music should be dedicated to him, and three years later he complained that a group of works commissioned for the Reich Party Day paled in comparison to Bruckner. Politics aspired to the condition of music, not vice versa. Thus, when the Berlin Philharmonic played the finale of Bruckner’s Seventh before that 1938 speech, the implication was that Hitler’s rhetoric would follow the musical model. Goebbels wanted his propaganda efforts to stress, in Wagnerian fashion, key leitmotifs, renewed through ingenious variations.

  Hitler, too, believed in “music for all.” He demanded, for example, that new opera houses contain as many as three thousand seats. But in Nazi Germany, as in New Deal America, classical music could be sold to the masses only with pressure from above. German listeners had felt the pull of Americanized popular music in the Weimar era, and they kept demanding it under Nazism. Hitler’s Wagner galas met with a tepid response from the Party rank and file. When Hitler walked into a mostly empty hall at the “official” Meistersinger of 1933, he sent out patrols to fetch high-ranking Party members from Nuremberg’s beer halls and cafés. A Meistersinger at the 1938 Party congress drew so few Brownshirts that patrons of the Hotel Deutscher Hof around the corner were conscripted to fill the empty rows. During performances Hitler would shake his associates awake whenever they dozed off.

  Great musicians occupied a special category, their ideological errors often overlooked or excused. Hitler deemed Wilhelm Furtwängler, the leader of the Berlin Philharmonic, Germany’s supreme musician, and looked askance at charismatic younger artists who were rising through the ranks of Nazi culture. The podium virtuoso Herbert von Karajan, for example, may have joined the Party early on, but Hitler disliked him. Karajan’s habit of conducting from memory was “arrogant,” Hitler thought—Furtwängler would never do such a thing. Hans Knappertsbusch was also found wanting. His blue eyes and blond hair shouldn’t fool anyone, Hitler said in one of his “table talk” monologues; this was a mere bandmaster with a poor feeling for tempo and “no ear for music.” Conductors like Furtwängler and Clemens Krauss exhibited a more flexible, Romantic style, and in Hitler’s opinion they probed the music more deeply. The critic John Rockwell has proposed that Hitler’s youthful encounter with Mahler may have shaped his taste in conductors. Furtwängler’s philosophical, anti-metronomic style would have naturally attracted one who had been swept away by Mahler’s Tristan.

  Despite his “apolitical” stance, Hitler did once or twice imply a link between his favorite music and his increasingly aggressive foreign policy. It happened with the symphonic orations of Bruckner. Derided in his lifetime as a naive country bumpkin who lacked Viennese sophistication, Bruckner apparently represented for Hitler the revenge of the “little” man on an uncomprehending world. In 1937, a bust of the composer was installed in the so-called Valhalla of German cultural heroes near Regensburg, and the Reich chancellor was photographed gazing raptly at it. The ceremony took place in conjunction with a major speech in which Hitler introduced the Nazi spiritual concept of Gottgläubigkeit—belief in God divorced from religious cant and wedded to national feeling. The scholar Bryan Gilliam suggests that the event was a kind of rehearsal for the annexation of Austria by the Reich, with Hitler using the composer as a metaphor for the synthesis of Austrian and German culture. As Bruckner’s bust was installed in the German Valhalla, so would Austria be installed in the Reich.

  After the Anschluss of March 1938, Hitler scheduled a plebiscite to confirm the takeover and took a campaign tour through smaller Austrian cities and towns. Many Austrian artists spoke in his favor. “Say a big YES to our Führer’s action,” urged the conductor Karl Böhm. On April 3, 1938, Hitler arrived in Graz, where twenty thousand Nazis had rioted against the Austrian government several weeks before. He had promised that Graz would be one of the fi
rst cities he would visit after the Anschluss. He drove down a two-and-a-half-mile-long via triumphalis, and the city that had cheered Salome three decades before thronged to greet the new leader. It was a “symphony of joy,” said the Völkischer Beobachter, set against a white-blue sky. The pianist Alfred Brendel, who grew up in Graz, remembered the “mass hysteria” of the day.

  On a return trip three years later, Hitler visited the Graz Opera and inspected the sets of a production of The Magic Flute. He did not mention having attended Salome in 1906; his entourage had the impression that he had never been in the city. He did, however, declare that the building would have to be rebuilt on account of its acoustical flaws—an odd thing for someone who had never heard a performance in the house to say.

  Was there such a thing as a “Nazi sound”? Did a conservative style steeped in Wagner, Bruckner, and/or Strauss guarantee success in Hitler’s world? Did more adventurous styles—those that had prospered in the free atmosphere of the Weimar Republic—guarantee failure? The answers to these questions are not as clear as is often assumed. The automatic equation of radical style with liberal politics and of conservative style with reactionary politics is a historical myth that does little justice to an agonizingly ambiguous historical reality.

  By rights, the politically and aesthetically conservative composer Hans Pfitzner should have been the official genius of the Nazi period. He had long raged against the “Jewish-international spirit” in music and had admired Hitler from the earliest years. In 1923, when Pfitzner spent some time in the hospital, Hitler paid him a visit in the company of a mutual associate. The two men talked about Jewish war crimes, then fell into a discussion of the career of Otto Weininger, whose racial and sexual theories had fascinated Schoenberg and Berg. Pfitzner called Weininger the “greatest self-hater and anti-Semite who ever lived.” Hitler replied that this man was “the one acceptable Jew” because he had “rid himself from the world.” Pfitzner wondered aloud whether such a procedure would work for all Jews, whereupon Hitler became displeased. Pfitzner was at this time wearing a thin, faintly rabbinical beard, which gave Hitler the false impression that the composer was Jewish. “The Führer is very strongly opposed to Pfitzner,” Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1943. “He considers him a half Jew, which, according to our records, is actually not the case.”

  When the Nazis took over, Pfitzner thought that his time had come. He said of Hitler in 1934, “Today there is no one beside him with the strength of body, spirit, or soul, him whom we have known as our German Führer for the past ten years.” A pamphlet titled Listen to Hans Pfitzner! advertised the composer’s relevance. But Pfitzner failed to gain hero status, and before long he was muttering that the cosmopolitan modernism of younger composers was being favored over his own pure German music—the same complaint that he had repeatedly made during the Weimar Republic. He pleaded in vain for another meeting with Hitler. In desperate need of a Nazi sponsor, he found one in Hans Frank, the Reger-loving governor-general of Poland, who had set up his own orchestra in Kraków. Pfitzner traveled there several times between 1942 and 1944, the last time bringing with him an overture titled Krakau Greeting. It was first heard thirty miles from Auschwitz, while the gas chambers were being dismantled.

  In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Paul Hindemith should have been viciously criticized in the early Nazi era, to the point where he felt compelled to go into exile. Yet the former bad boy of Weimar Germany tried hard to find a place in Hitler’s world and kept trying long after he had been made to feel unwelcome.

  Nudged to the political right by his unhappy collaborations with Brecht, Hindemith struck up a relationship with the conservative poet Gottfried Benn, who penned for him an oratorio text entitled The Unending, a renunciation of politics, publicity, and worldly pleasure. From 1933 to 1935, Hindemith worked on the opera Mathis der Maler, which partook of the holy-German-art ethos of Wagner’s Meistersinger. Based on the life of the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, it described an artist’s solitary struggle, amid political and religious chaos, to find roots in “the primal soil of your people,” in the words of a peasant rebel leader. Nazi aestheticians took note of Hindemith’s new tack, and mentioned him as a potential musical chieftain. In 1934, the composer told his publisher that he had talked to officials about instituting “the most ambitious program of popular musical education (together with appropriate composer training) the world has ever seen. One can literally have the musical enlightenment of millions in one’s hands.”

  If Hindemith was politically on the right track, why did he fall from favor? Apparently, the prudish Hitler had been scandalized by the 1929 opera News of the Day, a rigorously up-to-date contribution to the Zeitoper genre in which a soprano sang nude in a bathtub. “It is obvious that [News of the Day] shocked the Führer greatly,” Hindemith wrote to his publisher in November 1934. “I shall write him a letter (F. was very taken with this idea) in which I shall ask him to convince himself to the contrary and perhaps visit us sometime here in the school, where I would have the cantata from the Plöner Musiktag performed for him—no one has ever been able to resist that. F. is to give him my letter, also the text [of Mathis].” “F.” is Furtwängler, who proceeded to make a major tactical mistake; instead of arguing his colleague’s case behind the scenes, he defended him in a newspaper article, questioning the advisability of political controls on artists. Rather than achieving Hindemith’s rehabilitation, Furtwängler doomed him.

  Still, even as late as 1936, Hindemith was attempting to regain the trust of the authorities, promising to write a work in honor of the Luftwaffe. It was, he said, “an opportunity not to be missed,” and he even hoped to “give them something really good.” When the composer went to America in January 1939, he found himself sailing with a boatload of Jewish refugees—the sort of people, he wrote to his half-Jewish wife, whom one wouldn’t want to see on a regular basis. The following year, he began teaching at Yale.

  Other denizens of the Weimar music scene made a relatively smooth transition into the Nazi era. With some adroit maneuvering, they were even able to carry on in characteristic twenties styles. In January 1939, Hitler went to see Werner Egk’s Peer Gynt, an eclectic piece steeped in Stravinsky, Weill, jazz, and Berg, and he liked it so much that he summoned the composer to his box, in the manner of Stalin at the Bolshoi. Hitler acclaimed Egk as a successor to Wagner; Goebbels praised him as a “really great, original talent.” (Possibly, the Nazi leaders enjoyed Peer Gynt because it cleverly employed modern Western styles to satirize modern Western society; the anthem of the troll kingdom is “Do as you like.”) Carl Orff, who had participated in Leo Kestenberg’s socialistic education schemes in the Weimar period, scored a surprise hit in Nazi Germany with his cantata Carmina burana. With its exotic percussion writing (modeled on Stravinsky’s Les Noces) and its syncopated “bounce,” Orff’s showpiece was far removed from Hitler’s favorite Wagner operas. The review in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party paper, identified it as “Bavarian Niggermusik.” Once the work had demonstrated huge popular appeal, however, Nazi aesthetics were adjusted to accommodate it. By 1944 Goebbels was gushing in his diary that Carmina burana contained “extraordinary beauties.”

  One lonely force of noncompliance among German composers was Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who had connections to the anti-Nazi resistance, such as it was, and coded his music with messages of opposition. His orchestral score Miserae bore the inscription “To my friends, who had to die in the hundreds…Dachau 1933/1934.” Historians have long honored Hartmann as the “good German” composer, the one who held fast against Nazification. But even this case becomes a little ambiguous on close inspection. As Michael Kater demonstrates in a painstaking study of German music under Nazi rule, Hartmann had the luxury of living off his father-in-law’s ball-bearing fortune. And when Miserae had its first performance, in Prague in 1935, the inscription about Dachau was seen only by the conductor, Hermann Scherchen. The audience had no knowledge of it. Hartmann’s a
nti-Nazism was equally invisible to Munich Nazi Party operatives, who noted in a report that he had greeted them with a Party salute.

  Only in Mussolini’s Italy—admittedly a less oppressive environment than Hitler’s Germany—did a composer register an unmistakable public protest against totalitarian government in the form of a musical work. Luigi Dallapiccola, who found his personal style by synthesizing Stravinsky’s neoclassicism with Schoenberg’s dissonant language, initially thrilled to Mussolini’s pseudo-heroic poses, as did many impressionable artists of the prewar years. Indeed, Dallapiccola believed in Fascism so fervently that he “sometimes annoyed us, his friends,” as his colleague Goffredo Petrassi told the historian Harvey Sachs. Then, when the Italian-German Axis formed in the thirties, Dallapiccola, whose wife was Jewish, lost faith in Mussolini, and, unlike so many others, he wrote his disenchantment on the surface of his music. His Canti di prigionia, or Songs of Imprisonment (1938–41), a choral work of shadowy, secretive beauty, employs words of Mary Stuart, Boethius, and Savonarola to represent all those who had been thrown in prison for speaking their minds or for simply being who they were: “I implore you to set me free…Happy is the one who breaks the bonds of heavy earth…The world may press down, enemies may attack, I fear nothing.” Dallapiccola found the first of these prayers in a book by Stefan Zweig, Strauss’s former librettist. Two months after Canti di prigionia was first performed, Zweig committed suicide in Brazil, unable to see any hope in the deepening gloom.

  Atonality and other modernist trends suffered an interesting fate in Nazi Germany. When an exhibition of Degenerate Music opened in Düsseldorf in May 1938, its organizer, Hans Severus Ziegler, decreed that atonal composition was a “product of the Jewish spirit” of Schoenberg. Yet, as Michael Kater points out, a committee led by Strauss had declared that “the Reich Music Chamber cannot forbid works of an atonal character, for it is up to the audience to judge such compositions.” In the end, Ziegler’s exhibition was poorly received, even in official circles. There was some embarrassment over the fact that Stravinsky had been included in the gallery of degenerates, and the German Foreign Affairs Office issued a quasi-apologetic explanation. (Stravinsky, who had yet to acquire the more or less liberal views that he would boast in America, grumbled back in 1933 that he was being unfairly neglected in the new Germany, in spite of his “negative attitude toward Communism and Judaism…not to put it in stronger terms.”) Strauss made a particularly acid comment about the “degenerate music” concept; in a conversation with Ziegler, he asked, with a “half-bitter, half-mischievous” laugh, why the decadent operettas of Franz Lehár and his own “pure atonal” Salome had been omitted. The answer was implicit: Hitler liked them.