If Rolland’s words captured the place art could occupy in a world spinning out of control, equally powerful was the sentiment expressed by musicologist Alfred Einstein, who considered the significance of America at a perilous moment. Asking where else such a gathering could have taken place, this German who had fled Hitler’s regime for America, asserted, “Nowhere in Europe.” Quoting Thomas Mann, Einstein observed that Europe was entering a “dark age” and “the centre of Western culture” would shortly move to America.17
In these years, as I have noted, the American people were determined not to return to the anti-German policies of the past. Nor was there much inclination to lash out at German Americans, who were far more integrated into the larger population than before. A Chicago Tribune columnist spoke of the country’s “increased cultural maturity.” There was no desire to censor music, and the best reason for keeping politics and music separate, he wrote, was because “they haven’t anything to do with each other.”18
In early 1940, opera lovers in the East thrilled to performances of Wagner and Strauss, as the Metropolitan Opera not only offered the works in New York, but also took German opera on the road, with many performances under the baton of the young Erich Leinsdorf, who had left Vienna for the United States in 1937.19 A thirst for Wagner was clear in the nation’s capital, where one particularly distinguished listener asked the National Symphony to play the German’s music at the orchestral concert he planned to attend. If President Franklin Roosevelt wished to hear Wagner, it is safe to assume a hankering for such music would not be thought unpatriotic.20
The music could also be enjoyed at home. Chicago Tribune readers learned of an exciting opportunity to purchase a set of three 12-inch records containing two orchestral excerpts by Wagner. According to the ad, many critics believed the German’s creations represented “some of the most sublime music ever penned by mortal hand,” and for a mere $1.69, music lovers could decide for themselves.21
Even if some pondered the unsavory connection between Wagner and Nazism, the music was central to wartime cultural life. As several hundred Cleveland women learned in a September 1939 lecture delivered by music critic Carleton Smith, Wagner’s music had had an enormous impact on the plans and policies of Adolf Hitler. Smith was known for his compelling style as a speaker and writer and he possessed considerable knowledge of the link between Wagner and Nazism; his listeners learned that he had encountered the German leader more than once and had heard him expostulate about the composer’s gifts.22 On that same visit to Cleveland, Smith gave an evening talk to seventy-five committeemen of the orchestra, suggesting, with a touch of irony, that they ought to listen to whatever pleased them, noting they should sleep through Wagner if they found the music a “nice accompaniment for sleep.”23 However soporific, Wagner’s music, along with that of Richard Strauss, was performed by the city’s young symphonic ensemble on its opening program in October 1939, just a few weeks after the start of the European war.24
Several months later, in March 1940, the death in Germany of Karl Muck received widespread newspaper coverage. The reports assessed Muck’s career mainly on musical grounds, as the alleged sins for which he had been pilloried in more febrile times were now seen as an expression of the anti-German excesses that had poisoned the landscape.25 Upon learning of Muck’s passing, Serge Koussevitzky, the head of the Boston Symphony, halted his rehearsal at Symphony Hall and asked his musicians to rise in silent tribute to their former leader.26
Recalling Muck’s accomplishments and the tribulations he had faced, Olin Downes considered the maestro’s prowess as an interpreter of Wagner and his close association with Bayreuth, which became a “refuge” after his return to Germany in the wake of his American persecution. He was “one of the greatest . . . conductors of his epoch,” though Downes noted that this had counted for little in the face of the wartime hysteria, which led to his incarceration for transgressions he had not committed.27
While Muck’s death occasioned mention of his relationship with Hitler, the reporting on his passing was mainly benign.28 Writing to the New York Times soon after his death, Geraldine Farrar castigated those who had persecuted Muck for his alleged failure to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Providence. Reflecting upon events from twenty years before, Farrar said she was the soloist that night, and Muck had done nothing wrong.29
In December 1941, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States would begin to reorient its engagement with the world. As the country assumed a leading role in international politics, the decorous world of American classical music would be replete with highly charged developments, as performers and musical institutions were drawn into the whirlwind.
Even with America at war, classical-music devotees would not be stopped from hearing the works they had long cherished, whether composed by Italians or Germans. According to the Met’s Edward Johnson, the repertoire would not change. The war was one of ideas, not nationalities, he said, and the company would show no “sign of weakness regarding the works to be presented . . . Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini are universal figures,” he asserted.30 In Chicago, one day after Italy declared war on the United States, operagoers heard Verdi’s Il Trovatore, which, one critic hoped, indicated a tolerance for performing works from enemy lands.31
While this wish was largely realized, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, not every composition would escape such intolerance, as one beloved creation, Madame Butterfly, was swept from the stage. Because of its plot, which, according to one critic, showed the “Japanese behaving more or less properly,” and an American naval officer behaving rather “improperly,” the Puccini favorite would not be heard in New York or Chicago during the war.32
By banning the opera in New York and Chicago, those who made such decisions were guilty of bigotry and hypocrisy, especially as many in the classical-music establishment had proclaimed repeatedly that they would not embrace the unsavory policies of an earlier time. Whatever their declarations, an intense fear and hatred of Japan, which led the US government to incarcerate 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans in the western part of the United States, could not be disentangled from the country’s musical life.33 Thus, in Chicago, Butterfly, which was performed on December 3, 1941, would not return until October 1946, while in New York, the Met offered the opera in November 1941, and not again until January 1946. And out west, San Franciscans would not hear Puccini’s masterpiece during the war years.34 Clearly, America’s self-proclaimed tolerance had its limits.
If proscribing Madame Butterfly was taken in stride, some wondered whether Americans should be allowed to hear compositions by living Germans who might collect wartime royalties from American performances. But with the repudiation of the policies of an earlier time, that question had been settled. A decline in the anti-immigrant sentiment of a generation before had tamped down anti-Germanism, a point suggested by a 1942 poll in which 62 percent of Americans claimed they did not hate the German people.35
Another factor that explains America’s unwillingness to proscribe German music was the military policy of the US government. Unlike in World War I, current policy suggested the United States was waging war against particular regimes and systems, which meant America was fighting to vanquish the Hitler regime and the Nazi system, an alien ideology that threatened the United States. As an internal government document on the “nature of the enemy” made clear, America was battling Germans not because they were German or because they came from a certain part of the world, but because the German government, controlled by Nazis, sought “to impose” on the United States and the world “a form of domination and a manner of life which are abhorrent.” America’s “real enemies,” the document claimed, were the “men and parties in Germany” (and in Italy and Japan), who imperiled “peace and freedom.”36 This idea, which reflected the government’s inclination to distinguish between the German people and the Nazi regime, appeared to have concrete implications for the American population, 65 percent of whom b
elieved, until the spring of 1944, that the “German people wanted to be free of their leaders.”37 The words of the director of the Common Council for American Unity, an organization advocating cultural pluralism, made the point: The languages and cultures of Germany, Italy, and Japan were not America’s enemy; nor were “the German, Italian, or Japanese peoples,” who were “victims” of their own governments. Instead, America was fighting a “system of tyranny” and waging “a war for . . . freedom.”38
Thus, as orchestral programs, operatic schedules, and the attitudes of performers made clear, the idea of dangerous melodies had largely disappeared. As pianist Ernest Hutcheson, the president of Juilliard, one of the country’s leading conservatories, claimed, maintaining tolerance in the nation’s musical life was essential: “I call on the music-loving public to refrain from musical hysteria. . . . Let there be no talk of banning or limiting the performance of German or Italian music.” As he reminded readers, “We are fighting for, not against, art.”39
Such sentiments were accepted across the country. Writing in the Washington Post, the conductor of the local ensemble, Hans Kindler, addressed the issue on the occasion of the group’s final program of the 1941–1942 season, which included the Prelude to Die Meistersinger, chosen, as was customary, by the orchestra’s subscribers. It was remarkable, he wrote, that even American soldiers felt no hostility toward so-called “enemy music.” Unlike in the last war, there was less “chauvinistic hysteria” in America.40
The music community enthusiastically embraced such inclusiveness. According to conductor Alfred Wallenstein, it would be “primitive if we in America refused to listen to German music.”41 Chicago’s Frederick Stock was equally clear: “We are not at war with axis [sic] musicians, poets, and authors,” many of whom currently lived in the United States.42 And even Bruno Walter, whose persecution by the Nazis had forced him to flee Germany, would not limit his repertoire. “I detest Strauss as a person and I abhor everything for which he stands,” he said about the man whose relationship with the German regime had caused considerable distress. “But Strauss is a genius and some of his works are masterpieces. I cannot . . . boycott masterpieces because I detest their composer.”43
Across the country there was widespread support for musical tolerance. America is “not fighting German music,” it is “fighting the Nazi idea of life,” asserted George Marek, the music editor at Good Housekeeping and (later) a record company executive. Nor did the works of the German masters have any connection to “political theories.”44 Chicagoans learned that German composers were no longer seen as “dangerous aliens.” And for those sensitive to hearing German pieces, the Tribune suggested they “put cotton plugs in their ears and retire to a cave.”45
In Pittsburgh, the subject assumed an equally lighthearted tone in a 1942 story in the Musical Forecast, a monthly chronicling the city’s musical life. Recalling the last war’s “queer pranks of musical patriotism,” when the city banned German music and German and Austrian musicians, the article said things were different this time. Secret service agents no longer eagerly investigated the activities of piano instructors, and the chief of police could attend to his job, since he would not have to approve the purity of local concert programs.46
Rejecting the mistakes of the past, the Metropolitan Opera offered a wartime repertoire replete with Wagner, both in New York and on tour. Audiences imbibed a rich selection of compositions, from the Ring cycle, to Parsifal, Tristan, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin.47 According to Musical America, in an about-face from the Met’s World War I stance, performances of Wagner and Strauss demonstrated America’s faith in the “art of all mankind.” The country was “fighting the Nazis,” not the pieces by the “great German composers whose masterpieces are as much ours as they are those of the race that produced them.”48 And throughout the country, America’s symphony orchestras also offered generous portions of Wagner, which audiences consumed with gusto.49
Nevertheless, some discomfort occasionally crept into the music scene. In the case of Die Meistersinger, a lingering sensitivity about the relationship between German music and German politics suggests that distress over Wagner had not evaporated entirely. Consequently, the piece, an audience favorite, would be struck from the Metropolitan’s wartime repertoire, a decision that met with a mixed response.50 Writing to the New York Times, an informed operagoer expressed displeasure with the decision to exclude the work from the 1940–1941 season, asserting this was likely a result of the “Teutonic flag-waving which is implied in the opera.”51
But not everyone agreed. Musical America thought the Met’s position was wise, though if the war continued for several years, it might be necessary to reintroduce Die Meistersinger in English because performing it in German, with its “glorification of German art,” might prove embarrassing in a way that was unlike other Wagnerian works sung in German.52
Several months later, Herbert Peyser argued that banning Die Meistersinger was wrong. He reminded readers of the “hysteria of the last war,” when “nonsense and sophistries” were deployed to keep Wagner from the stage. Those years permitted “any nitwit” to cause trouble over the performance of a Beethoven sonata or a Schubert song, he said. But today’s Americans had demonstrated a capacity to learn from their mistakes and behave, by and large, with good sense. The Nürnberg celebrated by Wagner, Peyser wrote, was the “lovable picture-book town of Albrecht Dürer,” not the den of Nazi criminals it had become. And the warning by Hans Sachs, a key character in the opera, that Germans should obey their masters was no admonition to follow blindly the contemporary “warriors” who had stirred “the hell broth of politics.” That was to misread the opera and wed it to ideas Wagner never intended.53
Whatever Peyser thought, Die Meistersinger would not be heard at the Metropolitan for some five years, at which point the war in Europe was nearly over. This was so, even as the nation’s orchestras frequently performed the opera’s prelude. Indeed, in 1943 American symphony orchestras played the Meistersinger Prelude (along with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony) more than any other piece. And two years later, American troops chose the Prelude as one of three works to be played in an upcoming New York Philharmonic broadcast, which would be beamed to American forces around the world.54 Clearly, the purely instrumental character of the piece did not cause the concerns produced by the fully staged opera, with its evocation of German nationhood.
If performing Die Meistersinger was problematic, the composer’s other works were heard with enthusiasm, even though many were troubled by the notion that Wagner’s ideas and music were entangled in the Hitlerian vision and in developments in Nazi Germany. Commentary on the Wagner-Hitler link appeared frequently in newspapers, popular magazines, and in the pages of music publications both before and after America entered the war.55 In assessing the many wartime reflections on the link between the composer and the dictator, one hears echoes of the debate between the nationalists and the universalists, with the former perceiving a toxic connection between Wagner and Hitlerism, and the latter discerning nothing of the kind.
A genuinely thoughtful analysis of the Wagner-Hitler bond had appeared in late 1939 in two issues of Common Sense, the progressive monthly. Authored by Peter Viereck, who would achieve recognition as both a poet and a historian, the first article pointed out that Hitler had seen Die Meistersinger more than a hundred times and maintained close relations with the Wagner family. Calling Wagner a “warped genius,” Viereck asserted that a careful reading of the composer’s prose writings had convinced him that the musician was “perhaps the most important single fountainhead of Nazi ideology.” According to Viereck, Nazi appeals were based on “Wagner’s social thought,” a toxic stew that mixed “Pan-German nationalism; economic socialism; fanatic anti-Semitism . . . ; hate of free speech and parliamentary democracy . . . ; [and] . . . Nordic primitivism.”56
In January 1940, Common Sense published a lengthy commentary on Viereck’s ruminations by the writer Thomas Mann, who had left
Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. Visiting the United States in the 1930s and deciding to settle there, Mann became an American citizen in 1944 and would spend more than a decade in Southern California among a community of European transplants.57 A great “admirer” of Wagner’s music, Mann said he had read Viereck with “nearly complete approval.” Indeed, this was the first time that one encountered in America an astute assessment of the “intricate and painful interrelationships” between Wagner and national socialism.58 Calling Nazism “filthy barbarism,” Mann probed the link between Wagner and the German ideology. While it was music he loved, Mann called Wagner’s work the “exact spiritual forerunner” of Nazism.59
Shortly after the Viereck and Mann pieces appeared, the Berlin-based journalist Otto Tolischus asserted in the pages of the New York Times Magazine that Wagner was dominating the current war. It was not the Wagner of magnificent melodies, however, but the Wagner who had revived the “forgotten world of German antiquity.” This was a world of “fighting gods and fighting heroes.” In fact, Tolischus wrote, Wagner was the “first totalitarian artist.” Quoting Hitler, Tolischus, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his overseas reporting, said the dictator told friends that to understand Nazi Germany, one “must know Wagner.” For Tolischus, too, the Nazi regime was unfathomable without Wagner.60 Moreover, he explained, the key elements of Nazism, which had originated with Wagner, were comprehensible only to Germans.61
Reflections on the link between Wagner and Nazism even entered the concert hall, as suggested by the remarks of Artur Rodzinski, the Cleveland Orchestra’s conductor, who spoke from the Severance Hall stage in 1942 before leading a performance of an early Wagner concert overture, “Rule Britannia,” based on the British patriotic air. It was well known, Rodzinski remarked, that many regarded Wagner as a “spiritual co-editor of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The conductor asserted that “Hitler’s queer conception of the superiority of the German race” rested mainly on the “mythology” in Wagner’s Ring. Nevertheless, Rodzinski insisted, the music in the four operas belonged to the entire “civilized world.”62
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