The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  The record player was pulled out and the Führer picked out some records. First the Parsifal Prelude, conducted by Muck in Bayreuth. We sat there in his car in the slowly rolling train, and in our lonely silence there sounded the sacred tones of the last work of Richard Wagner, his Master. As they died away, he said pensively: “On Parsifal I am building my religion—serving God in a solemn way without theological Party bickering. Over a brotherly pedal point of true love, without theatrical humility and empty formal babbling. Without these disgusting frocks and hag’s skirts. Only in heroic garb can one serve God.”

  Parsifal became the subject of a tug-of-war among the Nazi leaders. Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Heinrich Himmler all wanted to have the opera removed from German stages on the grounds that its mystical Christianity traduced the Nazi spirit. According to a document that has been uncovered by Brigitte Hamann, Hitler laughed heartily when Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, told him that Rosenberg had deemed only the second act worthy of performance. Parsifal must remain, Hitler said, although directors would have to figure out a more modern setting for it. Wieland was instructed to “design a timeless Grail temple.” As Wieland put it, “[Hitler] wants to have Parsifal performed so to speak against his own Party!!!!”

  Back in 1934, Hitler had persuaded Winifred Wagner to hire Alfred Roller to design a new Parsifal, along the lines of the moody, semi-abstract Tristan that he had so admired in Vienna. The Bayreuth old guard rebelled against Roller’s shadowy setting, calling it “an orgy from hell.” The author Joachim Köhler has argued that Roller’s conception of the Grail temple influenced some of the more grandiose spectacles of Nazi culture—for example, the “dome of light” at the Party rallies of the thirties and the “great dome” that was to have risen at the center of Albert Speer’s Berlin. Six years after Hitler’s death, Wieland Wagner unveiled a minimally furnished, poetically abstract version of Parsifal, which critics at the time hailed as a renunciation of the “Nazi” Bayreuth. One wonders how far it really was from Hitler’s dream vision of the opera.

  Richard Strauss’s villa in Garmisch is still in the hands of the composer’s family, and it remains much as he left it. Next to Strauss’s desk is a small portrait of a Jewish boy by Isidor Kaufman, a painter of shtetl scenes. It belonged to Alice Strauss’s grandmother Paula Neumann, who in 1942 was deported to the ghetto turned concentration camp at Theresienstadt, in former Czechoslovakia. After she had been sent there, Strauss made numerous attempts to have her released. One day he traveled to the camp by car, announced himself at the gates with his usual aplomb (“I am the composer Richard Strauss,” he said), and declared that he wished to take Frau Neumann with him. The guards at the gate turned him away.

  From around 1935 until his death in 1949, Strauss experienced an amazing creative resurgence. That his return to form should have happened against a backdrop of genocidal insanity is the kind of paradox that Thomas Mann addressed in Doctor Faustus. In the case of Strauss, there is no direct evidence that outer events had much effect on him, consciously or unconsciously. What does seem likely is that his humiliating dismissal from the Reich Music Chamber sent him back to first principles. So often in his operas and tone poems, he used his mighty apparatus to depict a lone figure stripped of worldly illusions, moving from braggadocio to resignation. In Guntram the hero walks away from his community into solitude. In Rosenkavalier the Marschallin looks past her furnishings to a cold, empty space where time is icily ticking down. In Die Frau ohne Schatten the fairy-tale emperor faces the threat of being turned to stone. Strauss began his late period with the mythological opera Daphne, in which a woman escapes her damaged life by turning into a tree. He signposted the work’s autobiographical significance by making clear allusions to the harmonic structure and thematic material of Guntram, his painfully unsuccessful first opera: both works begin in the key of G major and end in F-sharp, and both are centered on melodies that weave gently around a triad and quicken into downward-falling triplets.

  In a wider sense, Daphne bookended the entire history of music; the story, taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, recalls the first opera for which music survives, Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1597–98. Daphne, solitary nymph, daughter of the river god, prefers the company of nature to the company of men. She refuses the advances of her childhood friend, the shepherd Leukippos, only to fall into the arms of Apollo. When Leukippos persists in wooing her, Apollo kills him in a jealous rage. Daphne, distraught, promises to stand forever over her friend’s grave, as a “symbol of never-ending love.” The gods, taking pity, change her into a laurel tree that will stay forever rooted to that spot.

  The metamorphosis itself is enacted almost entirely by the orchestra, with Daphne’s voice returning just before the end to execute wordless arabesques. Scattered instruments, like trembling leaves, flicker around an F-sharp-major chord. As if in very distant echo of Ravel or Stravinsky, the orchestra takes up a delicate layering of rhythms, units of two against units of three, with occasional asymmetrical bursts of units of five. Even Apollo is lost in wonder at Daphne’s song. “Are we still gods,” he asks, “or were we overshadowed long ago by human emotion, obliterated long ago by such gentle greatness?”

  The theme of indifference to the world resurfaced in Strauss’s next opera, Die Liebe der Danae, or The Loves of Danae, in which the composer again lost himself in Greek mythology, though not without oblique references to his spiritual state. Jupiter, in the manner of Wagner’s Wotan, eventually comes to grips with his powerlessness and renounces the dream of love. “The great restless one bids farewell as twilight falls,” the god sings. He is presumably speaking also for the composer, who saw himself not only at the end of his life but at the end of history, the last in the procession of German masters that began with Bach.

  Every time Strauss bade farewell, though, he found himself living a little longer. While the German Blitzkrieg was moving through Poland, in 1939, he conceived the peculiarly irrelevant notion of writing a short chamber piece about the art of opera itself, with the action or lack thereof set in the Paris of the ancien régime. It was eventually given the title Capriccio. After receiving inadequate ideas from the hapless Gregor, Strauss decided to write the libretto himself, although he called in the conductor Clemens Krauss to help.

  Once more, a sophisticated, ambivalent, fascinating woman is at the center of the action. The countess Madeleine has commissioned an opera from the poet Olivier and the composer Flamand. The two men compete for her favor, and so, too, do the arts of poetry and music—which is more central to drama? At the end, the countess looks into a mirror, asking, “Can you help me to find the ending, the ending for their opera? Is there one that is not trivial?” At this moment her majordomo walks in to say, “Countess, dinner is served.” A lovely irony colors Strauss’s setting of that line. “The last words of the opera could not be more trivial,” Michael Kennedy writes in his Strauss biography. “But they are set to an unforgettably touching, lyrical phrase, prolonged by the orchestra.” The countess walks off humming the melody to herself (the orchestra hums for her), words forgotten.

  It is at once touching and unsettling to picture Strauss immersed in the artifice of Capriccio in the early months of 1941, when German forces were gearing up for the invasion of Russia and Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen were set to slaughter Jews and Slavs in their wake. Touching, because one can sense Strauss’s need to disappear into a realm of tones. Unsettling, because his work was so at odds with the surrounding reality. On August 3, 1941, the day that Capriccio was finished, 682 Jews were killed in Chernovtsy, Romania; 1,500 in Jelgava, Latvia; and several hundred in Stanisławów, Ukraine. On October 28, 1942, the day of the opera’s premiere in Munich, the first convoy of Jews from Theresienstadt arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 90 percent of them went to the gas chamber.

  The Holocaust accomplished the murder not only of millions of individuals but of entire schools of composition. The energetically middle-of-the-road, eclectic style that had prospered in B
erlin, Vienna, and Prague between the wars was effectively wiped out. One of the more prominent victims was the Czech-Jewish composer Ervín Schulhoff, who died of tuberculosis in the Wülzburg concentration camp, in August 1942.

  Schulhoff’s career neatly maps the early twentieth century: he started off writing in a Romantic, folk-inflected style, then took up jazz piano and indulged in Dada provocations (his sardonic Symphonia germanica has a singer shrieking “Deutschland über alles” while a pianist bangs out dissonances). In the twenties he produced toughly lyrical chamber music in a Bartókian vein. In the next decade he embraced socialist realism and went so far as to set the Communist Manifesto to music. He was on the point of emigrating to the Soviet Union when the Nazis arrested him. Even in Wülzburg, he continued to compose, sketching a heroic Eighth Symphony in which the sayings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin would have pointed the way to victory.

  Several other Czech-Jewish composers ended up in the former prison of Theresienstadt, which had been converted into a “model camp” for wealthier and more notable Jews. Music flourished there for a time; the great Czech conductor Karel Ančerl led a performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as late as April 1944. The community of composers included Pavel Haas, a reserved but eloquent pupil of Janáček’s; Viktor Ullmann, whose aesthetic overlapped in many ways with that of Alban Berg; Hans Krása, who showed the softer-edged influence of Alexander Zemlinsky and Albert Roussel; and Gideon Klein, who, in his early twenties, was already developing an individual voice.

  The Theresienstadt composers became pawns in a grisly game when Nazi propagandists decided in 1944 to remodel the camp in preparation for a visit by the Red Cross. In the pseudo-documentary film Theresienstadt, a cast of children is seen singing Krása’s opera Brundibár, and Haas takes a bow for his Study for Strings. It is practically unbearable to see the thin smiles on their faces. When the project was complete, the Nazis deported eighteen thousand Theresienstadt prisoners in eleven transports. On October 16, 1944, a train left for Auschwitz containing Klein, Ullmann, Haas, Krása, and the children who had performed in Brundibár. All but Klein were killed in the following days. The young composer was fit enough to survive Josef Mengele’s selection process, and held on until January the following year.

  Even in Auschwitz, music was still heard. Men’s orchestras formed in 1941 and 1942 and played for the edification of members of the SS. An ambitious female SS officer decided to found a women’s orchestra in 1943 and assembled a ragtag band of amateur and professional players. The quality of the women’s group improved dramatically when the gifted Viennese violinist and conductor Alma Rosé—Gustav Mahler’s niece—took over as director. As Richard Newman and Karen Kirtley recount in their biography of Rosé, she succeeded in putting together a disciplined ensemble of some fifty players and persuaded the SS to give her supplies, including a baton and a podium. The repertory included marches, Strauss waltzes, operatic excerpts, the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, parts of Dvoák’s New World Symphony, and Schumann’s Träumerei, the last a special favorite of Mengele’s.

  “She lived in another world,” a survivor said of Rosé. “Music to her meant her love and her disappointments, her sorrow and her joys, her eternal longing and her faith, and this music floated high above the camp atmosphere.” One Polish cellist recalled how Rosé had violently upbraided her for playing an F-natural instead of an F-sharp. At the time, the young musician was furious; in retrospect, she thought that this seemingly futile insistence on perfection had saved her from insanity. Another time Rosé angrily halted a performance when she heard SS guards talking too loudly in the background. It was an eerie echo of her uncle’s remonstrations of inattentive audiences in Vienna.

  Alma Rosé fell ill in April 1944, apparently of botulism. She died quickly, despite Mengele’s apparently sincere attempts to revive her. Many of her musicians survived, thanks in large measure to the special status that their conductor had obtained for them. Paula Neumann, Alice Strauss’s grandmother, was not so lucky. One day the Strauss family received a package containing her death certificate; “spotted fever” was given as the cause of death, although in all probability she died in Auschwitz. The package also contained Isidor Kaufman’s portrait of the Jewish boy, which Strauss hung next to his desk.

  Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, an allegorical portrait of prewar Europe in the guise of a mountaintop sanatorium called the Berghof, has a scene in which Hans Castorp, the feckless young hero, falls in love with a phonograph and hears in its songs a “sympathy for death.” Castorp goes on to fantasize about using a simple song to conquer the world: “One might even found whole empires upon it, earthly, all-too-earthly empires, very coarse, very progressive, and not in the least nostalgic.” The young man appoints himself the operator of the gramophone, piloting his fellow inmates through the wonders of the record library. Both Hitler and Stalin liked to hold listening parties of the Magic Mountain kind. Stalin had a good American gramophone in his dacha and, according to an eyewitness, “changed the discs and entertained the guests.” It was much the same with Hitler, who assembled an extensive record collection at his Berchtesgaden retreat—the Berghof—and subjected his guests to long disquisitions with phonographic accompaniment.

  Typically, the evenings would revolve around Wagner excerpts, songs of Strauss and Hugo Wolf, and, of course, melodies by Lehár, whom Shostakovich had quoted mockingly in the Leningrad Symphony. The guests might hear, out of thousands of discs on hand, Karl Muck conducting Parsifal, Heinrich Schlusnus singing Strauss’s “Heimliche Aufforderung,” or Hermann Abendroth’s recording of Sibelius’s Finlandia. (The catalog of the Berghof record library fills three thick red-brown volumes; they can be seen at the Library of Congress.) Martin Bormann stood watch over the gramophone itself. Hitler habitually gave amateur music-appreciation lectures about each disc as it played, informing his captive audience that “Bruckner was the greatest organist of his time,” that “Mozart was buried in a mass grave,” that “Tristan is surely [Wagner’s] greatest work. We have the love of Mathilde Wesendonck to thank for it.”

  A special warmth came over Hitler when Tristan appeared on the playlist. His mind would drift back to the Vienna of the prewar period. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his memoir Hitler Was My Friend, recalled one fireside monologue: “‘I would scrape and save every farthing,’ he would tell us, gazing with a far-away look into the leaping flames, ‘to get myself a seat in “the Gods” at the Imperial Opera. And the gala performances! What a superb spectacle of pomp and magnificence it was, to watch the members of the Imperial family arriving, and to see the Grand Dukes in their glittering gold uniforms and all the great ladies, adorned with their scintillating diadems, stepping out of their carriages!’”

  Party officials began to entertain the notion that Hitler was losing his mind. “I had the impression that he had gone crazy in ’43,” Baldur von Schirach said during the period of Nuremberg trials. “I had that impression in ’42,” Hans Fritzsche replied. As the eastern front began to collapse, Hitler worked to perfect a music policy that no longer had meaning. One of his initiatives was to ship wounded soldiers to Bayreuth, so they could have their own Wagner epiphanies. The Führer also studied plans for a Bruckner Orchestra in Linz and for a Bruckner festival that would rival Bayreuth in magnitude. In the weeks following the Normandy invasion, Hitler feared for the safety of Furtwängler, his favorite conductor, and ordered that a bunker be built to protect him from bombs. Furtwängler, who was staying in a castle outside Berlin, told Hitler that such precautions were unnecessary. So workers were dispatched to the conductor’s Berlin home to reinforce the cellar with bricks and beams.

  Hitler also fretted over Strauss, who had committed a new outrage in 1943. When the local Garmisch government instructed Strauss to give over parts of his villa to evacuees and wounded soldiers, the composer replied that he wanted no strangers in his house. “No soldier needs to fall on my account,” he supposedly said. “I did not want this war, it is
nothing to do with me.” He appealed to Hitler for assistance. “My achievements as composer and conductor,” he wrote, “were last known to you, my Führer, in Bayreuth, where I had the honor of meeting you during Parsifal.” Perhaps Strauss was trying to remind Hitler of his supposed attendance at Salome in Graz. Hitler was unmoved. The next day he ruled that Strauss would have to accommodate the refugees and that Nazi officials should have nothing more to do with him. When it came time to mark the composer’s eightieth birthday, in June 1944, Hitler and Goebbels were at first inclined to snub him, but they relented under pressure from Furtwängler, who advised them, absurdly, that international opinion might turn against Germany if Strauss’s birthday were ignored. Before the Garmisch fiasco, Hitler had intended to give the composer a new Mercedes along with a ration card for one thousand liters of fuel. Now he sent only a curt telegram. Goebbels mailed off a copy of Houdon’s bust of Gluck.

  Both Nazi officials and anti-Nazi émigrés made the same complaint about Strauss—that he acted like “a total bystander,” in the words of a Reich Culture Chamber official. “His music, in particular his songs, is certainly wonderful,” Hitler apparently said to Goebbels, “but his character is simply miserable.” In an angrier mood, Hitler once announced to Speer that Strauss was “completely second-rate.” Perhaps it is the ultimate insult to have one’s morals impugned by Hitler, although the consternation that Strauss continuously created in the upper reaches of the Nazi hierarchy points up something stubborn and irreducible in his personality. He was a quantity that could not be controlled and could not be removed.

  In the summer of 1944, Strauss began to plan a large-scale piece for string ensemble in the nature of a funeral oration or lamentation. It had been decades since he had written a major instrumental work; his last truly significant effort in that line had been the Alpine Symphony, composed in the wake of Mahler’s death. The new piece would be called Metamorphosen—another homage to Ovid. Strauss had in mind the process by which souls revert from one state to another—though, as the scholar Timothy Jackson has suggested, the transformation may be a negative one, in which things devolve to their primordial state. The composer also took inspiration from a short poem by Goethe, whose complete works he read from beginning to end in his last years: