Dangerous Melodies
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More critically, the Musical Courier suggested the maestro could have waited for the Austrian situation to develop before cutting ties with Salzburg. The Courier questioned Toscanini’s repeated assertions that “politics and art should not mix,” arguing that the conductor’s “political prejudices” often influenced his behavior.140 But in challenging Toscanini’s actions, the journal misconstrued the essence of his idealism. What the conductor repudiated was not the overlap of art and politics, but the deployment of art to advance the fortunes of antidemocratic political systems. Such manipulation of art, Toscanini believed, debased the purity of artistic expression.
Reports from Austria indicated surprise and doubt concerning Toscanini’s decision to turn his back on Salzburg. One festival official, who said he had heard nothing from the conductor, suggested that slanted American press reports had misled Toscanini about conditions in Austria. At the same time, the official indicated that if Toscanini refused to perform in Salzburg, he would likely be replaced by Furtwängler.141 Once Austria’s surprise had passed, the festival directorate sought to persuade Toscanini that conditions in Austria had been “exaggerated.” The Austrian consulate in New York and the legation in Washington were enlisted to help change the conductor’s mind.142
After several days of speculation about Toscanini’s state of mind, the Austrian consul general in Washington announced that the maestro could not be persuaded to return to the festival and that negotiations had begun with Furtwängler.143 The New York Times reported that the Austrians believed Toscanini’s absence from the festival meant no one would be able to act as a “bulwark” against Nazi control in Salzburg.144
Despite Toscanini’s decision, just days before the Anschluss, a Vienna newspaper continued to plead with him to return. As if writing to a fleeing lover, the paper practically begged him to help preserve a free Austria: The “unchanged Austria you loved and honored, cannot understand what separates you from us. The Salzburg Festival [reflects] your own spirit. . . . Our little country can only call to you.”145
But that ship had sailed, quite literally, and Toscanini was on board. On March 9, the conductor left New York for Europe on the Queen Mary. Through a spokesman, he said he would not perform at the Salzburg Festival. Shortly before the ship departed, the press reported that Toscanini had received a telegram from the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League congratulating him on his courage to oppose those who threatened freedom.146
Toscanini’s resignation meant the Salzburg Festival would not be the same. Worse still, the Austrian city would soon be subject to the debasement Nazism had visited upon Germany. In late April, plans for the festival were announced, and not surprisingly, Toscanini and Bruno Walter were not included. The press noted that several “non-Aryan” singers would also be excluded from the proceedings and that all the opera productions originally staged by Max Reinhardt, who was Jewish, would be dropped.147 On the last day of April 1938, fifteen thousand people watched the burning of approximately two thousand books, some written by Jews and others containing anti-Nazi material, in Salzburg’s Residenz Square. It was reported that thirty thousand additional volumes, gathered from the local university and from other libraries, would be burned at a later date.148 In July, the Salzburg Festival began with Furtwängler conducting Die Meistersinger. Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi officials were in attendance.149
Readers of Time learned about “Nazi Salzburg.” Rather than experiencing a city filled with foreigners, especially large numbers of British and American visitors, one now encountered “droves of enthusiastic Nazis, including hundreds of members of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s ‘Strength Through Joy’ movement.” The master of the proceedings was Furtwängler.150 An American visitor to the festival, Ruth Kelley, shared her thoughts with New Yorkers in a lengthy account describing the transformation that had made Salzburg different from what it had been. Swastikas and images of Hitler covered the buildings, and local restaurateurs no longer accompanied the bill with a cheerful “Gruess Gott,” but instead shouted, “Heil Hitler!” Aside from some Italians, the town was nearly devoid of foreigners, and “the idea of art for anything but politics’ sake ha[d] been abandoned.” While the performances were all fine, none was outstanding. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the old Salzburg was gone.151
But that summer, an unanticipated opportunity would be granted Toscanini, who would lead two concerts at the Lucerne Music Festival, where his presence added luster to a gathering of eminent artists that included instrumentalists Adolf Busch, Emmanuel Feuermann, and Rudolf Serkin, along with conductors Bruno Walter, Willem Mengelberg, Fritz Busch, and Ernest Ansermet. The festival was extraordinarily successful, and the enthusiasm among those in Lucerne in the summer of 1938 was so great as to cause Musical America to proclaim the emergence of a “new Salzburg . . . in Switzerland.”152
The following year, as Americans learned, Salzburg’s “rival” would again be steeped in music during August, as another clutch of superb musicians, including Toscanini, Bruno Walter, pianist Vladimir Horowitz (Toscanini’s son-in-law), cellist Pablo Casals, and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, would grace Lucerne’s churches and concert halls. The Swiss city, which embraced artists who could no longer perform in Germany, made Toscanini an honorary citizen, cementing its reputation as a luminous refuge on a continent descending into darkness.153
As one reviewer commented, Toscanini’s contribution was not confined to memorable interpretations of the Verdi Requiem or works by Beethoven, for as the festival’s “artistic and spiritual leader,” he offered concertgoers something more than brilliant performances. Listeners who heard his Verdi were aware of the importance of the event. At the festival’s concluding concert, with Toscanini conducting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Brahms’s B Flat Piano Concerto with Horowitz at the keyboard, there was a palpable awareness of the coming crisis.154 Indeed, just days after the last notes sounded at Lucerne that summer, Germany invaded Poland, plunging Europe into war.
Throughout the 1930s, the world of classical music in the United States provided a powerful lens through which to view European affairs, and those inclined to read a newspaper or a magazine would have become acquainted with unsavory musical developments across the Atlantic.155 The persecution of artists and the constraints on creative life in Italy and Germany helped illuminate the depredations fascism was visiting upon Italians, Germans, and Austrians, intensifying the distress Americans felt about the plight of Europe.
Despite an avalanche of news stories and opinion pieces on Europe’s deepening gloom—including countless pieces on the persecution of musicians—a majority of Americans refused to believe that fascism directly threatened the United States. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there was never a time when more than 17 percent of the American people supported a declaration of war against Germany or Japan. Nevertheless, by the fall of 1940, most Americans believed—however contradictorily—that defeating Hitler was more important than staying out of the European conflict.156 Though reluctant to fight, the American people were increasingly aware of the toxic character of fascism. When war finally came to America, the country was still preparing for battle. But it would not take long for musicians and musical institutions to mobilize, as artists and ensembles readied themselves to confront the dictators.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Let Us Conquer Darkness with the Burning Light of Art”
Shostakovich and Toscanini Confront the Dictators
ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking or damaging eighteen American ships and striking some three hundred American planes, which never got off the ground. The Japanese attack killed 2,403 Americans and wounded nearly 1,200 more. It was a shocking blow, both to the nation’s armed forces and to its psyche, for few Americans had believed that the Japanese, who were widely seen in the United States as an inferior race, were capable of accomplishing such a spectacularly bold and com
plex operation. The next day, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his war message to the US Congress and the American people, calling December 7 “a date which will live in infamy,” and declaring, “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” The United States was at war with Japan, and three days later, on December 11, Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States, with the German leader claiming the American president was a madman. For the second time in less than twenty-five years, the United States was involved in a world war, which, in the magnitude of its scope, carnage, and barbarism, would dwarf the horrors of the earlier conflict.1
On the night Roosevelt spoke to the nation, pianist Arthur Rubinstein was playing a recital at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The plan that evening was to broadcast the speech into the concert hall at the conclusion of Rubinstein’s performance, which had no intermission and no pauses for applause between pieces. According to the astute chair of Mount Holyoke’s music department, Rubinstein played the final piece by Chopin a bit faster than usual to make sure the recital concluded before the president began speaking. There would be no encores, Rubinstein said.2
Out west, fear of a Japanese attack led cities near the coast to initiate blackouts, which inevitably influenced concert life. Two days after the strike on Pearl Harbor, violinist Nathan Milstein began his performance in Seattle earlier than usual, taking only a brief intermission and moving quickly from piece to piece to allow the audience to get home before the start of the 11:00 P.M. blackout.3 In the early days after Pearl Harbor, San Franciscans also endured blackouts, which seemed to have little impact on musical events, including an orchestral concert featuring the singer Paul Robeson, conducted by Pierre Monteux, which drew more than six thousand concertgoers.4 Back east, one week after the attack, the managers of sixteen leading symphony orchestras gathered in New York for their annual conference where they agreed that though the war might cause a slowdown in ticket sales, the effect would likely be temporary. In fact, they anticipated an increase in attendance at orchestral concerts. “During wartime,” a spokesman observed, music would be essential for maintaining “civilian morale.”5
While the attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, the conflict in Europe had begun two years earlier, in September 1939, when German forces invaded Poland, setting off a conflagration that would last six years and kill between fifty and sixty million people.6 Although it took more than two years for the United States to go to war, the American people had felt its impact well before that. As had been true during the First World War, this struggle would have a profound impact on the classical-music landscape. But if World War II would raise crucial questions about the relationship between art and politics, its effect on the music scene differed markedly from the way the earlier conflict shaped the country’s musical life. This was in part because American xenophobia toward Europeans was not nearly as intense in these years, and, more specifically, because America’s perception of Germany in the 1940s was different from what it had been during the Great War.
Once America entered the war in 1941, there was little appetite for revisiting the restrictive musical policies of an earlier time. While a paroxysm of anti-Japanese hatred exploded across the country, the anti-German sentiment that had contaminated America during the First World War did not reappear. German music engendered virtually no hostility during World War II, as those earlier policies were seen as an overreaction. The country harbored few anti-German feelings during the 1930s and 1940s, which meant symphony orchestras and opera companies could perform whatever they wished. Nevertheless, even as Americans heard an abundance of German compositions, the music pages of newspapers, magazines, and music journals were replete with stories about the relationship between Wagner’s music and Nazism. Indeed, those interested in music, as well as those unable to distinguish Mozart from Mahler, could not have missed the idea that a powerful connection linked the music of Wagner and the policies of Nazi Germany, a bond, it was said, that Adolf Hitler had forged. Despite this, Americans would hear Wagner throughout the war.
Just as one realizes that the idea of “enemy music” had disappeared, one also recognizes that many Americans embraced the notion that classical music, German compositions included, could help vanquish malevolent regimes. As will be seen, this idea—that classical music had inspirational value that could help win the war—came to the fore in these years, as did the related belief that the music was interwoven with the democratic aspirations of the American people.
Even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, observers around the country hoped the war would leave musical life unscathed. In the fall of 1939, a letter writer to the Chicago Tribune applauded the paper’s editorial position, which had declared that because the war was in Europe, it should not affect how Americans interacted with one another. Recalling World War I, when Germans were treated abysmally in the United States, the writer asserted that no one wanted to revisit those shameful days. This enlightened correspondent reminded Tribune readers about the tolerant perspective Walter Damrosch had advocated during the Great War. As did Damrosch, he believed music knew “no country” and was “above hate.”7
Beyond a single Chicagoan’s reflections, it was reported that the city’s operatic and symphonic life was expected to unfold without incident, as no important changes were anticipated in the key personnel of local musical institutions. Large audiences turned out for the season’s opening concerts in October 1939, which included a recital by the celebrated Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler, whose American performances had caused an uproar a generation before. Frederick Stock began the season conducting the city’s orchestra in performances of Beethoven’s Eroica, which led a local critic to assert that the classic works of German composers must continue to be heard even in wartime, unlike in 1917 and 1918 when such music was often banned. This time around, “our rational temper is quite different.”8
In San Francisco, the 1939–1940 opera season began with notable performances of Wagner’s Die Walküre.9 In Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, there was widespread confidence that the war would not undermine the plans of those cities’ distinguished ensembles. The words of Eugene Ormandy, who led Philadelphia’s celebrated orchestra, resembled those of a diplomat, when he declared his programs would reflect a “strict neutrality.” To demonstrate that music stood above “national prejudices,” this transplanted Hungarian would conduct a number of all-German and all-Russian programs during the 1939–1940 season.10 While Boston experienced a touch of concern over the whereabouts of five French-born string players who were still somewhere in Europe, symphony officials believed the season would be largely untouched by the war. Nor was Maestro Serge Koussevitzky inclined to alter the orchestra’s special focus, which would showcase the works of a German and an Austrian: Bach and Mozart.11
Similar feelings were expressed in New York, where observers of the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Company indicated that, despite events in Europe, the 1939–1940 season would be filled with a wide variety of offerings. Philharmonic audiences could look forward to a twenty-eight-week season under the direction of John Barbirolli, an Englishman who intended to become an American citizen.12 In the operatic realm, the general manager of the Metropolitan, Edward Johnson, said he expected things to proceed as planned. If any of the singers could not fulfill their contracts, capable Americans would be available. Moreover, Johnson pointed out, the company had few performers with German passports, so there was little chance of a problem.13
The most interesting aspect of Johnson’s preview of the coming season, which was surely shaped by the policies of twenty years before, concerned the company’s thoughts on offering Wagner in English. He noted that the current struggle was not “against the German people, German art or German culture.” This was a battle against “an ideology, not a race. Wagner is . . . not particularly racial.” Articulating idealistic
notions that had been heard for years, Johnson said Wagner’s music represented an “international language.” He insisted there was no resentment for the “German language,” and observed that no one opposed German music. The Met would move forward with no ill effects.14
Suggesting the war would not dampen New York’s musical spirit, just days after the fighting began in 1939, the city was the site of the International Congress of the American Musicological Society. The conference attracted leading American and international academics to consider everything from Babylonian musical notation; to the music of ancient Greece, medieval Europe, and contemporary Latin America; to American folk music. In addition to choosing from a menu of scholarly talks, participants could hear music around the city: from medieval works at the Cloisters at Manhattan’s northern tip, to Puritan psalms at Fraunces Tavern in southern Manhattan, to twentieth-century music at the New-York Historical Society on the West Side, to eighteenth-century chamber music at the Metropolitan Museum on the East Side. There was even a recital of cowboy ballads sung by Alan Lomax, the celebrated folklorist, and an appearance by a Hopi Indian from Arizona who sang ceremonial songs.15
While the war might have seemed distant to scholars listening to traditional Hopi melodies, it could not have been far from their consciousness, especially for those who had crossed the Atlantic to participate in the event. The French writer Romain Rolland, unable to come to New York because of poor health, sent a message brimming with universalist sentiment, which was read to the participants: “In the field of art . . . there should not be any rivalry among nations. The only combat worthy of us is that which is waged . . . between culture and ignorance, between light and chaos.” Music, proclaimed Rolland, was “the sun of the inner universe.”16