The Symphony Concert In Nazi Germany
The University of Chicago Press. 384 pages. £30. ISBN-13: 978-0226839103
Reviewed by Tony Roberts
‘One cannot imagine that the people of a Mozart, a Beethoven, a
Schubert and a Bruckner can have anything to fear, as long as the ethos of
these Greats, their battle courage, their trust, their enthusiasm and their
joyfulness flames in its hearts.’
Munich Philharmonic Orchestra’s program (December
1939)
On February 20, 1935 Richard Strauss wrote to Stefan Zweig, the eminent
Jewish writer, ‘For the future
– should I have the good fortune to receive one or several new librettos
from you, let us agree that nobody will ever know about it or about my
setting them to music. Once the score is finished, it will go into a safe
that will be opened only when we both consider the time propitious. This
being so, will you take the opportunity to write something new for
me—possibly for my estate?’ It was a sign of Strauss’s naivety that he
believed he could shield his association with Zweig, for both their sakes.
It was also a sign of the times which Neil Gregor addresses in his new book
on the symphony concert from 1933 to 1945, those years of triumph and defeat
for National Socialism in Germany.
The subterfuge of the great Strauss, the wilful blindness of the eminent
conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the careerism of younger ‘star’ conductors
like Herbert von Karajan, Karl Böhm, Eugen Jochum, the removal of Jewish
musicians like Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, the obliteration of
canonical figures like Mendelssohn and the lesser-valued Mahler, and the
sudden eminence of composers like the nationalistic, anti-Modernist Hans
Pfitzner, all are part of Germany’s dark cultural history. They are
consequences of the establishment in March 1933 of the Reich Ministry of
Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels.
But these are only minor players in the story that Neil Gregor has come to
tell in The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany. His book is a rarer
thing, a comprehensive and ingenious study of concert audiences of the
period: who they were; how they were catered for and how they responded.
This is not a tale of higher morality. As he tells
us at the outset, ‘Many claimed that [the concert hall] had been a
space of retreat from the vicious violence and racism of the National
Socialist regime. As this book sets out to argue, the opposite was true.’
Most chapters open with a concert photograph which Gregor ‘interrogates’
(his word) as a means of leading into a study of a single subject. These
include the history of German orchestras in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries; the class constituents of audiences; the canon and
repertoire; concert programs and reviews; the concert hall and individual
experiences. Gregor clearly favours an academic register, which can be
off-putting at times (He writes, for instance, of exploring ‘concert-hall
listening at the interstices of a number of frames that, between them, were
co-constitutive of the experience of the event.’)
His book is fascinating up to a point, though its dramatic impact is
necessarily lessened for two reasons. Firstly, we learn that audiences in
this period were much like audiences today in their rituals and conduct, and
similarly inscrutable in their individual responses to music. ‘Most things
about the practice of concertgoing,’ he writes, ‘did not massively change
after 1933.’ They did not change until the war, since change was
unnecessary. This raises the second, more psychologically interesting point:
‘The power of National Socialism lay not in its capacity to mold a single
National Socialist subjectivity, but in its capacity to integrate many.’ It
could, as he says, ‘insert itself into pre-existing practices and
discourses’ because of ‘the ideological openness of National Socialism
itself, which drew upon multiple traditions of nationalist, racist, and
antisemitic thought, together with ideas drawn from diverse cultures of
imperialism, militarism, authoritarianism, and illiberalism that varied also
according to region and locale.’
Surprisingly, concert halls rarely boasted Nazi flags and bunting, swastikas
and busts of the Führer; one hardly saw party uniforms among its audiences.
This reflected a dilemma for N.S. at the heart of concertgoing.
On the one hand classical music is an elitist art form, the province of the
musically educated and self-educated and, especially formerly, one which
thrived on class distinctions. National Socialism, on the other hand,
professed egalitarianism. Through its leisure organisation,
Kraft durch Freude ('Strength
Through Joy'), it sought to promote the idea of classlessness —Germany as
one Volk. Consequently, upper and middle class pursuits had to be
opened out to address the needs if not the wants of the working class.
This conundrum was never to be resolved, except rhetorically. Voices from
the world of music would increasingly promote the N.S. line: ‘to
reposition musical listening as an act not so much of “understanding” as of
“experiencing.”’ It emphasized the immediacy of the listener’s encounter
with their instinctive nationalism. This itself did not tally, as Gregor
points out, with the ‘understanding’ one might expect audiences to share of
the symbolism of ‘fate,’ ‘struggle,’ or ‘superiority,’ in the music
performed. There would remain, therefore, an officially unacknowledged
tension between aim and reality. This was apparent in different ways,
including in the low take-up of subsidised seats for the working class; the
distinction of holding an elite priority season ticket; the different social
groupings observable at concerts; the dress codes practiced and the level of
understanding of concert rituals shown by audience members.
However, if changes in concert attendance were minimal, subtle and
undramatic through the years, they did occur, and Gregor seizes on them with
a shrewd eye. For instance, he notes that ‘the practice of concertgoing was
gradually repositioned semantically and symbolically. That which had
previously been described as “the public” (das Publikum) … with its
connotations of a bourgeois sphere of civility …was increasingly termed the
“listening community,”’ with ‘community’ being the key word. Also when war
came, German nationalism —a theme of the 1930s —took on an increasingly
martial tone musically. With other nuanced changes it added up to ‘shaping
the subjectivity’ of listeners and readers by the language of National
Socialism in all its forms. And this again relied upon tradition: ‘The
history of Laeiszhalle [a Hamburg concert hall] from the 1920s through to
the end of the war was less one in which Germany’s cultivated social elites
were rudely marginalized by the demands of the National Socialist Movement
than one in which liberal, middle-class ownership of a space, practice, and
institution was supplanted by a more conservative, nationalist and
Nazi-identifying set of actors in tune with the wider forces dominating
Germany at the time.’
Another instance of Gregor’s subtlety is his analysis of a review of the
Jewish cellist Emanuel Feuermann’s performance of Schumann’s Cello Concerto:
‘In describing Feuermann as playing with “superior sense of culture and a
singing tone, but also with a soft emotional rapture, which is not helpful
to this already thoroughly sentimental piece, and which ought rather to be
balanced out by a somewhat firmer execution focused on bringing out the
rhythmic element,” [Oscar von ] Pander was mobilizing a language of gender
—encompassed in the juxtaposition of “softness” and “firmness” — that for
many contemporaries was racially encoded. It could be read as levelling the
accusation of “femininity” at Feuermann, and thus as reaching for the
deep-seated antisemitic trope of absent masculinity.’
By 1938 Jews were banned from concerts, as composers, performers and
audience members, and by wartime sixty percent of the Jewish population had
emigrated (In many cities the entire population halved over the war years).
What remained of them were their possessions: ‘There are hints in the
sources that valuable musical instruments stolen from Jewish citizens found
their way to German orchestras. In this way the listening pleasure of
ordinary Germans in concert halls at home was enhanced with the spoils of
mass murder.’
They lingered also in the stereotype we meet in the chapter on concert
programs, a chapter which also gives a good illustration of Gregor’s method
in the book. He first analyses a high- angle photograph of a performance by
the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra from 1940, noting the seating arrangements
and audience comportment. He picks out the dark collars that suggest
Wehrmacht officers and the white bonnets of nurses among the concertgoers,
as well as instances of evening dress. He then points out the concert
programs –impossible to
distinguish in any detail. The question the chapter poses is ‘What—if
anything—changed about these to turn them into artifacts of a specifically
National Socialist social practice?’ Gregor is looking for evidence of
community building. One tactic, he observes, was to drop the overly formal
language of programs in favour of a slightly more egalitarian, less fussy
rhetoric.
A more immediately obvious sign of change was in the lettering. The
‘modernist’ fonts were slowly discarded in favour of ‘the nationally encoded
archaism of Fraktur or Broken Gothic styles’, with their ‘black-white-red
aesthetic and its National Socialist encodings.’ Advertising within the
program changed, also, he notes. A sense of community could be fostered by
advertising more democratic civic institutions —cinemas and theatres, for
example —rather than maintaining the traditional implication that the
concert hall was a superior, independent cultural institution. Other program
advertisements had hitherto offered middle class material goods and music
services, restaurants and cafes. The Nazis tolerated but despised this
‘Jewish commercialization’. Programs in Darmstadt in 1937 offered a
liberating wealth of products: ‘home furnishings, cosmetics, kitchenware,
washing powder, and underwear’. The author notes the gender target, as he
does the increased numbers of women in the audiences.
The war intruded into programs in the form of requests for war materials and
advertisements for life insurance policies, while the increase in antique
shop advertising suggested the wealth of confiscated goods available.
Leaflets appeared indicating the direction of air raid shelters, though
‘cultural administrators and commentators sought to conjure up an ideal of
concertgoing under the bombs that gave ongoing meaning and purpose to the
concerts.’
Program notes foregrounded the martial nature of the music to be performed,
as well as deploying the ideological language amenable to the Nazis: talk of
folk and folksiness, celebrations of the outdoors, of forests, of power.
Gregor explains that such appeals, which the Nazis tapped into, had long
been a vital part of German nationalism. The notes for a Düsseldorf
performance in 1936 include the following: ‘Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony
reflects the worldview of the mature conqueror, who experiences the
immediate world with conciliatory superiority.’ Beethoven, and especially
his ninth symphony, personified the German spirit.
Moral myopia takes different
forms. By 1945 Beethoven was no longer a ‘conqueror’ and, in a widely held
view among German people, they were the victims of the Nazis. So, the
disgraced Wilhelm Furtwängler could claim a certain heroism in playing to
German audiences through the war years: ‘All those who became emigrants or
demanded that one should emigrate, have relieved Hitler of having to prove
one thing: his claim that he was the true representative of the German
nation. They thought that one had to leave a Nazi Germany, but this
is wrong. Germany never was a Nazi Germany but a Germany subjugated by the
Nazis.’
I would certainly recommend this book for the detailed evidence it unearths
and the insights it offers into the conditions of classical music
consumption. What we learn from The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany,
in sum, is that like almost everything else in Germany in those years—and
with remarkable ease —music played into the hands of the Nazis.