Authors: Michael Haas
Margot Asquith died in July 1945, only two months after the fall of the Third Reich.
A Confused Beginning
The Wagnerian tendency to write new stage works on ancient Germanic themes in the late 1920s and early 1930s has already been mentioned in the context of the diminishing popularity of
Zeitoper
. This trend was accorded a more sinister meaning by the youthful head of Universal Edition's opera department, Hans Heinsheimer, who saw a continued ‘Teutonisation’ of the
repertoire being conceded by conservatives as a means of tossing a bone to the rowdy Nazi opposition.
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One of these works would have been
Friedemann Bach
, by Paul Graener, who would become very much a Nazi favourite. As it happened, Graener would eventually take over one of the positions left vacant by the enforced retirements of Schoenberg and Schreker at the Prussian Academy in 1933. He also took on one of the positions at the
Allgemeiner deutsche Musikverein
(ADMV) left vacant after the removal of Berg, Gál and Toch, two of whom were Jewish and one of whom was tainted by association with Schoenberg. Not only were all three Austrian citizens, but their works were deemed to be inappropriate to the ‘new’ Germany. Graener would also head the composer's division at the Reich's Musikkammer, the Nazi office for musical affairs.
Friedemann Bach
shares its Jewish librettist Rudolf Lothar with Eugen d'Albert's
Tiefland
– another popular work among National Socialists and reputed to be one of Hitler's favourites. Despite conflicting messages coming from those close to Hitler's inner circle, Viktor Zuckerkandl's review of
Friedemann Bach
’s 1932 Berlin performance reveals the direction in which the politico-musical wind would ultimately blow:
Paul Graener, the composer of many successful orchestral and chamber works, along with his opera
Don Juans letztes Abenteuer
[
Don Juan's Last Adventure
], which has been seen on most stages throughout Germany, is also director of the Sternschen Conservatory in Berlin and has only recently celebrated his 60th birthday. A few days following this event, the Städtische Oper [in Berlin-Charlottenburg] mounted its first performance of his new work,
Friedemann Bach
. It was an occasion for friends and pupils to join in the celebratory festivities.
There follows a summary of the plot, which is loosely based on fictitious events in the novel of the same name by Albert Emil Brachvogel. Zuckerkandl continues:
This is, as we see, an opera about an artist. It's also, as Graener would have us understand, an opera of avowal: it is an opera that is pure music. [Graener explains:] ‘I have attempted to express Friedemann Bach's essential humanity and experience by using simple musical means. The libretto is merely an excuse to write music; in fact this is an opera that only exists thanks to its music!’ With this, we have Graener's avowal to pure music. […] And as such his music is undoubtedly pleasant sounding with lots of melody, harmonic consonance – it is music that exists well beyond any awkward complications.
Its artistic qualities are immediately apparent. It is the work of an honest and masterful craftsman. The small forms which shape most of the acts create a formal, yet lyrical structure and are easily linked together and pleasingly executed. It is filled with melody. […] What this music lacks, however, is dramatic power and originality. The libretto is conventional – and the music doesn't permit us to forget this fact. As a result, there can be no talk of a great dramatic success. The artistic avowals lack profundity as the voice that expresses them simply doesn't carry. It is without question ‘pure music’, but less pure and bit more substantial would have been preferable.
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The conflicting messages and the subsequent difficulty of establishing any consensus for what music should be in the New Germany of Goebbels and Rosenberg is reflected in H. H. Stuckenschmidt's review for
Anbruch
of Paul von Klenau's opera
Michael Kohlhaas
, based on Heinrich von Kleist's novella, premiered in Stuttgart in 1933, a year after
Friedemann Bach
:
Modern Music is in a difficult situation in today's Germany. The few who have held their ground are battling against a majority whose enthusiasm is matched by their lack of theoretical substance. Neither side seems to be in the position of addressing the question of what, exactly, within our artistic lives is ‘corrupting’ and what is meant by ‘Cultural Bolshevism’. The opinions are even varied amongst the different departments within our arts’ bureaucracy. The very same Stravinsky who is called a cultural Bolshevist by the journalists of the
Zeitschrift für Musik
is loudly applauded by the radical leader of the ‘Action League for German Culture’, Hans Hinkel. The same [Fritz] Jöde [Music pedagogue: 1887–1970] who is fought against as a separatist and anti-nationalist by ‘Action League’ musicians, led by Dr Fritz Stein, has thousands of supporters in the [NS] party. The same Max v. Schillings, who couldn't possibly be more covered with honours, certificates and medals bestowing him with the full confidence of the new regime, is defamed by the leader of the Saxon committee of music critics, Dr Alfred Heuß, as an arch-protagonist in Germany's fall during the last war and as composer of the un-German, ‘sadistic’ opera
Mona Lisa
. Is there even such a thing as ‘corrupting manifestations’ in music? Perhaps it's the departure from tonality, the robust basis of which is so highly praised from all sides, as a point of permanence. Is tinkering with it an obvious artistic taboo? Or is tonality, as Arnold Schoenberg writes in his book on Harmony, only one of many creative means? The official view of the music-politicians, as far as they have been able to address such detailed issues, is basically that they are against atonality. Only a few months ago, the Jury of the Dortmund
Tonkünstler Festival forced the composer Peter Schacht to forgo performance of his String Quartet once it was established that the work had been composed using the twelve-tone technique.
And it is in this confusion that Stuttgart's premiere of Paul von Klenau's opera
Michael Kohlhaas
clarifies like a blaze of light. As here we have a work that is supported by the highest powers in the land as a ‘national work’, yet is undeniably modern, a score which is largely twelve-tone and shows a disregard, with few exceptions, of standard harmonic modulatory rules.
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Music Policies in Hitler's Germany
Sorting out such confusion, and with an eye towards the not yet enacted racial purges, demanded some sort of organisation and planning. There are extensive and detailed accounts by historians including Fred Priberg, Michael Kater, Erik Levi and, most recently, Amaury du Closel
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regarding the Nazi machinations which sought to isolate those composers who were not part of the ‘New Germany’ while promoting the Nazis’ own musical ideals.
The obvious rallying point for the National Socialists was Wagner. Indeed, he was very much the Ur-National Socialist, having been, at different stages in his life, both a nationalist
and
a Socialist. Hitler's devotion to the music and philosophy of Wagner was reciprocated by two British members of the Wagner family.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, husband of Wagner's daughter Eva, died six years before Hitler's rise to power while providing the Nazis with a quasi-scientific basis for their racist policies in his
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
published in 1899. His feelings for Hitler personally were nearly devotional, as correspondence from 1923 indicates:
You are not at all, as you have been described to me, a fanatic, rather I would like to describe you as the direct opposite of a fanatic. The fanatic heats heads, you warm hearts. […] That Germany in the hour of its deepest need has raised up a Hitler attests to its vitality; likewise the effects emanating from him; for these two things – personality and its effect – belong together. That the great Ludendorff openly allies himself with you and joins the movement emanating from you: what a splendid confirmation! I can now safely fall asleep at night and not even need to wake up again. May God protect you!
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Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifred (née Winifred Marjorie Williams), the wife of Wagner's son Siegfried, was to become Hitler's most devoted muse and
disciple. From 1925, Bayreuth started to publish a newsletter which, by 1933, had become an instrument of virulent racist propaganda. Hitler himself proposed marriage to Winifred, widowed since the death of her older, homosexual husband, the composer Siegfried Wagner in 1930. Despite providing the paper on which Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
while he was in prison after the 1923 aborted beer-hall coup in Munich, she rejected his proposal on the grounds that he did not have an ‘official position’. By the time he was appointed Germany's Reich Chancellor, he no longer needed the status of a link with the Wagner clan, though he remained a Bayreuth devotee and an extremely close friend of Winifred and at least three of her four children. Rumours of the intimacy between them were such that during her war-crime hearings, she was forced to deny that they had had sexual relations.
Despite her daughter Friedelind denouncing the family's association with Hitler and going into American exile from where she broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda in German, the rest of the Wagner family, headed by Winifred, continued to have warm feelings for the private Hitler, whom they called ‘Uncle Wolf’.
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Winifred never expressed anything other than total devotion for him. In television interviews from 1975, she called him ‘unser seliger Adolf’ (Our blessed Adolf), abbreviated in the postwar years to ‘USA’. Winifred's grandson Gottfried has recounted how his grandmother greeted other dedicated postwar Nazis using the secret number 88: the letter ‘H’, as the eighth letter in the alphabet, was repeated as ‘eighty-eight’ to escape postwar detection of fervent Nazis who still wanted to greet each other with ‘Heil Hitler!’
In musical matters, Rosenberg's ‘Revolution’ started off with some slips of policy. Kurt Weill's highly political opera
Der Silbersee
managed a simultaneous premiere in Erfurt, Leipzig and Magdeburg on 18 February 1933 around the same time as the premiere of Hans Gál's Violin Concerto in Dresden with soloist Georg Kulenkampff, conducted by Fritz Busch. Korngold's adaptation of Leo Fall's
Die geschiedene Frau
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limped on for a few weeks at Berlin's Theater am Nollendorfplatz immediately following Hitler's appointment – intriguingly, subsequent lawsuits relating to its early closure made no mention of the Jewish authorship of the work, the libretto or the arrangement, but involved the alleged chicanery of various theatre directors.
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Even Alexander Zemlinsky had his opera
Der Kreidekreis
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performed at the Berlin Staatsoper under Robert Heger in January 1934. Heinz Tietjen, the Director of the Staatsoper, had postponed the premiere from April 1933, having reneged on his contract with Otto Klemperer – who was originally scheduled to conduct it – with the excuse that, as a Jew, Klemperer's safety at the Staatsoper could not be guaranteed.
Der Kreidekreis
went on to enjoy a further twenty performances in Berlin, despite the fact that Zemlinsky's
Kleider machen Leute
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had been banned as early as March 1933.
Der Kreidekreis
had received its premiere in Zurich on 14 October 1933 with its first performance in Nazi Germany occurring at Stettin on 16 January, followed by another production in Coburg (21 January), before opening in Berlin on 23 January and further stagings in Nuremberg and Cologne. It would be the last work by a high-profile Jewish composer to be presented at such an important venue in the Reich's capital city after January 1934. It counts as a minor miracle that it happened as late as it did, during a period when Goebbels and Rosenberg were squabbling for positions of cultural dominance, thus allowing some flexibility within artistic planning.
Writing of the Berlin performance, H. H. Stuckenschmidt praised the opera as being worthy of the best opera house in the Reich's most important city, highlighting the objections made by the Head of Police following the work's premiere in Stettin, where further performances were banned for reasons of ‘public decency’ (due to some scenes being set in a ‘tea house’ which was in fact a brothel). This ban was then taken up by some of Germany's smaller opera houses. Stuckenschmidt applauded the fact that the central government had thwarted locals who had worked themselves into a state of indignant outrage and writes that it is a relief ‘to see the limb being sawn off by those from above, upon which small-town protectors of local morality are seated’.
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It was to be a tragically short-lived false dawn. The Nazi critic Rudolf Bilke called Zemlinsky a ‘wolf in sheep's clothing’, pointing out that if performances by Zemlinsky were permitted, then nothing could stand in the way of Schoenberg and Schreker also being brought back.
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Viktor Zuckerkandl writing for a Viennese readership was far more welcoming. For him, it represented exactly what opera managements were looking for: a modern opera with music that didn't frighten the public.
50
Following Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, there had been suggestions that he might abandon some of the anti-Semitic rhetoric of his campaign. In spite of these misplaced expectations, the revolutionary machinery disrupted performances of Ernst Toch's ‘capriccio’ Zeitoper
Der Fächer
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in mid-rehearsal at Cologne, while Berthold Goldschmidt's
Der gewaltige Hahnrei
never made it to the Charlottenburg Städtische Oper in Berlin after a successful Mannheim premiere.
Die beiden Klaas
by Hans Gál was struck off the schedule at Hamburg, and with the open Nazi harassment of Fritz Busch in March 1933 during rehearsals of
Rigoletto
, there was no chance of it being mounted, as planned, in Dresden. Clemens Kraus dropped Egon Wellesz's
Die Bakchantinnen
in Munich; Jascha Horenstein's dismissal from Düsseldorf kicked the premiere of Marcel Rubin's opera
Prinzessin Brambilla
into the long grass; and Karl Böhm's forthcoming performance of Max Brand's
Requiem
at the Berlin Staatsoper was also quietly shelved. Even Manfred Gurlitt, a supporter of the Nazi regime and a party member since 1 May 1933, had the Mannheim premiere of his opera
Nana
cancelled as it was wrongly believed that he was Jewish – a position the Nazis maintained at the expense of all of his works including his treatments of
Soldaten
and Büchner's
Wozzeck
.