The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  From the Nazi standpoint, Potsdam was a perfect choice. As a military centre and long-time residence of the Prussian kings, including Frederick the Great, it gave Hitler the ideal stage on which to woo monarchists and the army with a display of reverence for their kind of tradition. Exit the grubby, howling revolutionary, enter (however briefly) the very model of a stable statesman, spick and span with top hat, white scarf and morning coat. Miraculously, Hitler even managed to look humble when, at the Garrison Church (site of the Prussian royal tombs), he shook the hand of old Hindenburg who had bested him in the presidential race a year before. Scores of veterans from several wars looked on, eyes moist, medal-bedecked breasts swelling. So did Crown Prince Wilhelm, eldest son of the exiled Kaiser, present in uniform and seeming implicitly to offer royal benediction. Everyone was aware that exactly sixty-two years ago to the day, on 21 March 1871, Bismarck had convened the first Reichstag of the newly united Germany. That ‘Second Reich’ (presumed successor to the centuries-old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) had gone down ignominiously in 1918. For the assembled old-timers, let alone the Nazis, a new and more glorious ‘Third Reich’ was long overdue.

  The churches figured prominently in the Potsdam show, offering services for the assembled notables before the inauguration proceedings began. Two Nazi ministers, Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Frick, were among those who attended the Protestant ceremony; Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader who was already busy setting up the country’s first concentration camps, went to the Catholic one. Prayers for government and parliament were offered up at both. Hitler and Goebbels attended neither but ostentatiously paid homage to ‘fallen comrades’ at a local cemetery. Bands played, bells pealed, thousands cheered. Microphones dotted all over town at Goebbels’ behest carried the joyful sounds and pathos-soaked commentaries, minute by minute, hour by hour, to a nation long sick of deepening economic misery, ineffective government and seemingly endless wheeler-dealing in Berlin. Nazi excesses were indeed deplorable, so mused many so-far uncommitted ‘solid citizens’, but (that fateful, ever-stronger ‘but’) hadn’t there been serious provocation, especially from the communists who seemed linked to the burning of the Reichstag building on 27 February? And was it clear that Hitler himself, rather than over-zealous underlings, had been responsible for the brutal backlash? He had been appointed chancellor by ‘grand old’ Hindenburg and he certainly seemed to be cutting a confidence-inspiring figure in Potsdam. Perhaps he really was the man to get things done in Germany at last.

  Indeed he was, and henceforth with such speed that there seemed barely time to draw breath. Two days after the Potsdam show the Reichstag, amid tumult, passed an enabling act (comfortingly called the ‘Law to Remove the Distress of People and State’) that gave Hitler the constitutional basis for dictatorship. Since the Reichstag building itself had been gutted, the drama was enacted instead in the Kroll opera house, that former bastion under Klemperer of all the Nazis hated most in modern music. Social Democratic deputies, to their lasting credit, were the only ones to vote against the proposed law; the communist ones were already in flight, under arrest or dead, the Catholic ones of the Centre Party backed Hitler – believing his claim he would leave their church alone. By the end of March the regional German states were being stripped of their power; in April a boycott of Jewish business was organised and the Gestapo founded; in May independent labour unions were dissolved and books of ‘unacceptable’ authors publicly burned. In November a Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) with seven divisions was inaugurated to bring all the arts into line with Nazi doctrine. Richard Strauss was appointed president of the music chamber, an ‘honour’ he held for less than two years but to which he responded at the time with a song dedicated to Goebbels, overall boss of the new organisation. When yet another national election was held that same November the Nazis won ninety-two per cent of the vote, hardly a surprise since theirs was the only legal party remaining. Simultaneously ninety-five per cent backed a plebiscite endorsing German withdrawal from the League of Nations.

  What did the rest of the world make of all this? There was much huffing and puffing and many democrats were genuinely shocked. On the other hand, so a popular argument ran, perhaps the chaotic Weimar experience proved that Germans more than others needed a ‘firm hand’ at the top. Besides, Europe needed a bulwark against Soviet communism and the Nazis seemed to offer that. The anti-communist aspect surely counted for much with the Vatican when it concluded its Concordat with Hitler in July, giving him his first major diplomatic success. As for Germany’s Jews, lumped together with ‘the Bolsheviks’ by the Nazis as part of a ‘world conspiracy’, they had few effective advocates abroad. When the Nazis organised the boycott of Jewish shops in April, they stuck antisemitic posters written in English as well as German on many windows to test world opinion. The world reacted, on the whole, with a shrug. One could not, it was widely argued, interfere in Germany’s admittedly unpalatable internal affairs and besides (a pernicious addition often made ‘behind the hand’), perhaps the Jews needed taking down a peg anyway. The Holocaust, of course, was still years away and inconceivable to most people – even, no doubt, to most of those aware of Heine’s century-old warning that ‘those who start by burning books will end by burning people.’1

  That is jumping on a bit, and a last ritual on that symbol-laden ‘Day of Potsdam’ still needs recalling – a gala performance at the Berlin Staatsoper of Meistersinger conducted by Furtwängler, produced by Tietjen and attended by all manner of Nazi grandees. It would be easy to dismiss the event as a postscript (admittedly a long one) to the day’s ‘real business’, but for Hitler and his master choreographer Goebbels it was surely an integral part of it. At Potsdam the Austrian-born demagogue with artistic pretensions, jailed after a failed putsch exactly a decade before, presented himself preposterously but somehow persuasively as the true heir to Germany’s monarchical and military tradition. Hours later at the opera he used a work by his beloved Wagner under his favourite conductor to identify himself, only slightly less preposterously, with Germany’s cultural and social heritage. Originally Richard Strauss’s Elektra had been billed but it was dropped at Hitler’s wish in favour of Meistersinger, with its idealised vision of community life in old Nuremberg and its rousing finale hailing Germany’s (artistic) Masters. Goebbels for one could hardly contain his enthusiasm. ‘The evening closes with a magical performance of Meistersinger at the Linden opera,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘Everything is submerged in music. Now the joyous “Awake!” chorus regains its meaning.’2 In other words, for Goebbels the true spirit of Wagner’s uplifting music drama and of Hitler’s newly stirring Germany were one and the same. Many in the ‘special’ audience that evening, particularly Hitler himself, surely thought likewise.

  The ‘Day of Potsdam’ that began with a striking display of politics as theatre thus ended with one of theatre as politics; or rather the two fields, close cousins anyway in every place and era, merged to such an extent that it became near-impossible to tell them apart. Probably those most deeply involved did not feel the need to try. As Goebbels put it, National Socialist politics was not just a technique needed to govern but the ‘noblest and truest of the arts’ – a means of fashioning the masses as a sculptor did a slab of stone or a composer did notes. Hitler evidently felt the same, only more so, as a frustrated painter-turned-Führer and an actor with a seemingly limitless ability to hypnotise himself as well as others. Did he actually believe the lies he uttered and the humble gestures he made with such seeming sincerity in Potsdam? No doubt he in effect became his role while playing it so that the question of belief barely arose. Did he identify himself with Hans Sachs, that most creative and far-sighted of Wagner’s Mastersingers, acclaimed by the adoring populace on the meadow before Nuremberg? It is hard to believe he did not, not least because year by year he addressed Nazi rallies of overwhelming theatricality on the fringe of the very same city.

  On other occasions, Hitler may well have see
n himself as Lohengrin, the mystery knight in shining armour, or as Rienzi, the tribune of implacable will with the (doomed) mission to make Rome powerful again. We know from Mein Kampf that Lohengrin was the first opera he ever saw – in his home town of Linz when he was only twelve – and that he was ‘captivated at once’.3 A few years later, according to the memoirs of a youthful pal named August Kubizek, Hitler saw Rienzi and promptly went into a kind of trance from which he emerged convinced he would lead Germans to greatness. Like the accounts of many claiming intimate knowledge of Hitler’s doings and motivation, much in Kubizek’s book is suspect; but there is enough independent evidence to suggest that at least the core of the Rienzi tale is probably true.4

  Even leaving aside such doubtful sources, Hitler’s passion for and knowledge of Wagner’s music dramas is well documented. The love affair that began in Linz soon intensified when the budding artist with big dreams and empty pockets reached Vienna and somehow inveigled his way night after night into the Court Opera. No wonder he felt bewitched. At least one of the Wagner performances he attended was conducted by Mahler to stage designs by Alfred Roller, one of the greatest teams in the entire history of opera. The future Führer does not seem to have been unduly fazed by the fact that Mahler, a convert to Catholicism, was Jewish-born. As for Roller, an influential professor of fine arts as well as one of Mahler’s closest collaborators, Hitler was simply in awe of him; so much so, he later confessed, that although he had a letter of introduction to the great man in his pocket he felt too shy to make use of it. By the time he made his first visit to Wahnfried in 1923, Hitler could probably have hummed his way through many of the Master’s works from memory and he had firm ideas on how they should be staged. Just over a decade after that, his memories of Vienna still vivid, he persuaded Winifred to engage the aged and ailing Roller for the new Bayreuth Parsifal, a less than happy experiment, as it proved.

  If Wagner is still widely thought of as the ‘house composer’ of Nazi Germany, this is thanks mainly to Hitler’s mania for the Master, made manifest even to the casually interested in often re-run film footage showing a beaming Führer greeting delirious crowds during the Bayreuth festival. But of course Wagner’s music regularly thundered or wafted through the Reich even when the spotlight was not wholly on Hitler. Meistersinger was the frequent opera of choice on ‘gala’ occasions and was the cultural high point, in theory at least, of the programme on the sidelines of the Nuremberg rallies. The Walkürenritt (Ride of the Valkyries) was used to accompany wartime newsreel of German air attacks; part of the Rienzi overture often heralded solemn pronouncements in Nuremberg and elsewhere; an abrupt radio broadcast of the funeral march from Götterdämmerung would signal that some notable had died – in 1945 Hitler himself.

  Alongside such ‘bleeding chunks’ hacked from the Master’s music dramas, the Reich was awash with works either popularly thought to be by Wagner or at any rate vaguely identified as ‘Wagnerian’. The latter, near-endless category included pieces like Liszt’s melodramatic tone-poem Les Préludes, used to herald radio bulletins on the war in the east, and the background music (only a scrap of it by Wagner himself) to Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious propaganda film Der Triumph des Willens (The Triumph of Will) about the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Not that ‘Wagnerian’ automatically meant ‘ear-splitting’. It surely covered the solemn Adagio of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony that was regularly used to precede statements by the Führer on culture (and was another of the pieces broadcast at his death). In this case the term even had a certain justification since the Adagio was in part composed in the Master’s memory and makes use of Wagner tubas.

  Several false conclusions can be, and often are, drawn from all this. It is, for example, widely assumed that under the Nazis the Master’s works became still more popular and that, thanks especially to the Führer’s example, they must have been played more often than those of supposedly ‘less Teutonic’ composers. Precisely the opposite is in fact true. In the repertoire for the 1932–3 opera season, largely mapped out before Hitler came to power, four of the six works most frequently performed throughout Germany were indeed by Wagner. Bizet’s Carmen easily took top place with Weber’s Der Freischütz second, but these were followed by a strong quartet from the Master – Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Meistersinger and Lohengrin. By 1938–9 the ranking had changed greatly, but not as one would expect after years of Nazi music policy rammed home via Goebbels’ Kulturkammer. Only one Wagner opera still appeared fairly near the top of the rankings: Lohengrin at number twelve. The most performed German work of the season was an undemanding ‘opera for young and old’ called Schwarzer Peter (Black Peter) by Norbert Schultze, a contemporary composer and sometime cabaret performer later to win vastly greater fame with his song ‘Lili Marleen’, especially after it was taken up by Marlene Dietrich. Schwarzer Peter took fourth place in the popularity stakes, just ahead of Albert Lortzing’s light-hearted perennial Zar und Zimmermann (Tsar and Carpenter). And the top three positions? They all went to Italy: Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at number one closely followed by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (two shortish works nearly always given as a double bill on a single evening), with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly rolling in third.

  The above might be construed simply as a temporary setback for this or that piece by Wagner, but the overall statistics tell a different story. After the Nazis came to power, the total number of performances of Wagner’s works fell pretty steadily – from more than 1,800 in 1932–3 to just over 1,300 in 1938–9. The latter figure still narrowly left the Master as the most performed opera composer in the Reich, but that was soon to change. In the war years Verdi moved into top place. Even Puccini and Lortzing came to be staged more often than Wagner.5 The question is why. The particularly strong showing by Italy cannot plausibly be ascribed to a surge of German enthusiasm for Mussolini’s fascist state! Puccini and – to some extent – Verdi are less complex and costly to stage than Wagner and this no doubt played a role, especially in the war years. But even that explanation does not get to the root of the matter.

  The truth is that Wagner’s popularity was already in relative decline during the Weimar Republic and simply fell further, more quickly, under the Nazis. During the last years of the Kaiser’s Germany (and despite the cost and privation of the First World War) the Master’s works were still hugely popular, accounting for over eighteen per cent of all opera performances, a share no other composer came close to matching. By the mid-1920s, though, the figure had dropped to around fourteen per cent. That is not quite the setback it seems at first sight. Wagner was by then being performed even more often than during the war years, but the competition had become hotter, notably from the Italians but also from contemporary composers despised by traditionalists and especially by the Nazis. In other words, with more opera overall being performed Wagner was still on top but less dominant than before. Hitler in particular railed against ‘unnatural, Bolshevik, Jewish’ trends in music and looked to the day when he would be able to steer things in a ‘healthier’ direction. Once in power he moved swiftly to try to make good his threat; but neither the witch-hunt against Jews, atonalists and (harder to define) ‘unacceptable modernists’, nor the drive to boost the work of ‘pure German’ composers past and present brought a Wagner renaissance. On the contrary, the Master’s works were performed less often and his ‘market share’ finally plunged to well below ten per cent.6

  As early as 1911 Thomas Mann, locked throughout his life in a love-hate clinch with Wagner, had pointed out that the Zeitgeist was not working wholly in the composer’s favour. In an article entitled ‘Sinkender Stern?’ (Sinking Star?), written appropriately enough in Venice where the Master had expired nearly three decades earlier, Mann poured scorn on Wagner’s theoretical writings. No one, he firmly (and not quite accurately) claimed, would take the prose seriously for a moment were it not for the greatness of the music – but even the latter was in the meantime being treated with suspicion or simply ignored by many yo
ung people. Mann found this development far from surprising. Wagner was ‘nineteenth-century through and through’; the trend in the current century was towards a ‘new classicism’ that sought to make its impact more with coolness and logic, less with sheer size and emotional frenzy. Mann indicated that he felt this to be no bad thing, but typically rounded off his piece by confessing that he only had to hear a spot of Wagner to fall under the old wizard’s spell again.7

  The terms ‘new classicism’, ‘neo-classicism’ or ‘new objectivity’ (neue Sachlichkeit) certainly do not cover all the music being written around 1911, the year Mahler died, and Mann’s argument does not take account of the rise of the Italian school, including the melodramatic verismo of Leoncavallo and Mascagni. Still, with composers like Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky also increasingly to the fore, and Schoenberg in firm retreat from the gigantism of his early Gurrelieder phase, it is easy to see what Mann was thinking of. He was surely right to note that a new generation was far from ready automatically to sit at the Master’s feet, even before the First World War during which the ‘old world’ came crashing down. That point was later stressed by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, twenty-six years younger than Mann and one of the most perceptive of German musicologists and critics. Writing in 1928, Stuckenschmidt recalled that, ‘We who were born around 1900 no longer went through the narcosis of Wagner-mania. The idol of the nineteenth century was for us a composer of the past, almost like any other.’ For a time it had even been quite common to ridicule Wagner, Stuckenschmidt wrote, but that period had now passed. What remained beyond idolatry for Wagner and reaction against him was simply ‘a great German musician. A person who eminently widened the musical horizon (like every Master) and paved the way for the revolutions in music that still shake us today.’8