Mozart and the Nazis

How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon

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• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780300165814
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

A music historian uncovers Nazi Germany's use of Mozart as a WWII propaganda tool in this "intriguing study [that] comprehends a range of vital topics" ( Choice ). As the Nazi war machine expanded its bloody ambitions across Europe, the Third Reich sought to promote a sophisticated and even humanitarian image of German culture through the tireless promotion of Mozart's music. In this revelatory book, Erik Levi draws on World War II era articles, diaries, speeches, and other archival materials to provide a new understanding of how the Nazis shamelessly manipulated Mozart for their own political advantage. Mozart and the Nazis also explores the continued Jewish veneration of the composer during this period while also highlighting some of the disturbing legacies that resulted from the Nazi appropriation of his work. Enhanced by rare contemporary illustrations, Mozart and the Nazis is a fascinating addition to the study of music history, World War II propaganda, and twentieth century politics.

CHAPTER 1

PROLOGUE
1931, A MOZART YEAR

For our musicians in 1931, Mozart is – a longing.

(OSCAR VON PANDER)¹

1931 was a particularly bleak year for Germany. The after-effects of the world economic crisis, prompted by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, had cast a long dark shadow over the country. To all intents and purposes, the Weimar Republic was dying on its feet, its impotent government merely lurching from one calamity to another. Unemployment, already at very high levels at the beginning of the year, had risen to over five and a half million by January 1932.² A spate of bank failures during the summer months, culminating in the collapse of the Darmstadter National Bank on 13 July, intensified a crisis of confidence, even though in the previous month US President Herbert Hoover had tried to stabilise the situation by placing a moratorium on Germany's war reparations.

These cataclysmic events had an inevitable impact upon cultural life. After enjoying a period of relative prosperity from 1923 to 1929, Germany's heavily subsidised theatres, opera houses and orchestras experienced a drastic change of fortune. Attendance suffered particularly badly in the wake of the economic crisis. For example in Hamburg, Germany's second largest city, audiences declined by as much as 28 per cent between 1929 and 1932. With reduced box office receipts, arts organisations hoped to rely more than ever on public money for survival. But regional and local governments were no longer able to come to the rescue. In a desperate attempt to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment and shore up welfare costs, most were forced to cut their subsidy for the arts. The reductions in terms of financial support for theatre companies were particularly stringent, averaging around 27 per cent between the 1929/30 and 1931/32 seasons.³

Of all the performing arts, music suffered especially badly. Given its expense, opera was an obvious target for budgetary cuts. Many theatres resorted to reducing their number of annual opera productions and the size of their orchestras, or in the most extreme cases, abandoning opera altogether. In 1931, an estimated 1,000 of the 6,000 members of the German opera and concert orchestras lost their jobs alongside the enormous number of musicians who found themselves out of work as a result of the emergence of the sound film. Even the most hallowed of Germany's performing institutions could not remain immune from the crisis. During the same year, the city council of Berlin cut the subsidies of the Berlin Philharmonic, first by a third and then by half. It was only saved from almost certain extinction by an enforced merger with the lesser-known Berlin Symphony Orchestra.⁴

Against such a background of unrelieved misery, the musical world had little cause for celebration. Yet the 175th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which fell in 1931, provided one small opportunity for Germans to be reminded of their great musical heritage. At a time of crisis, this process was both necessary and cathartic, for it reinforced the belief, steadfastly maintained by Germany's educated classes, that music had the capacity both to preserve a sense of national identity and to renew the feeling of belonging together.

Among the many anniversary tributes that were paid to the composer, the reflections of the critic Oscar von Pander, published in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, were typical. Regarding Mozart as an object of longing rather than one of fulfilment, von Pander argued that contemporary composers, captivated by his ‘spare and objective form’, the ‘unsurpassable precision of his style’ and the ‘purity of his emotional expression’, viewed him as an ideal to which the music-making of that time ‘must turn as a reaction against a previous overreaching and overblown style’. Yet paradoxically, in the current artistic climate, such an ideal could never be realised:

It is no coincidence that today's composers, on the one hand, sense the formal perfection of his works as a paradigm and, on the other, find their beauty less or not at all worth imitating. Certainly, the barriers and restraints that are intrinsic to the contemporary human being lie almost insurmountably on the path towards Mozartian beauty. Nonetheless, only an emergence of his clarity and depth will bring fulfilment to the numerous approaches and currents of new musical creation. In this sense, we can today experience the peculiar sensation of daring to consider him, possibly the most uneducated composer from a purely human viewpoint, the educator of the German musician.⁵

Although the uncertain economic and political situation inevitably inhibited the scope of the Mozart anniversary year celebrations, which were far more modest in scale than those accorded to Beethoven for the centenary of his death in 1927, a number of Mozart-related achievements in the field of scholarship, performance and publication in 1931 set the agenda for the composer's reception during the later 1930s, both within and outside the Third Reich.

Alfred Einstein's edition of Don Giovanni

One particularly significant milestone was Alfred Einstein's edition of the complete score of Don Giovanni, which was published by the Leipzig firm of Ernst Eulenburg in May 1931. The project had occupied Einstein since 1923, while he was working as an editor for the Munich-based publisher Drei Masken Verlag. That it took nearly eight years to come to fruition had much to do with the inaccessibility of the autograph manuscript, which had been deposited at the Paris Conservatoire in 1910. In order to compensate for this ‘loss to Germany’ of a such a precious document, as Einstein put it in the introduction to the published score, his initial idea had been to bring out a facsimile reproduction of the autograph.⁶ But this proposal hardly got off the ground, partly as a result of fraught relationships between France and Germany, and partly because it was deemed economically unviable by his publishers, who were suffering from the effects of rampant inflation. Einstein therefore had little option but to set to work on creating his own edition. To speed up the process, he gratefully utilised whatever facsimile pages the Munich firm already had in its possession.

In the introduction to the score, Einstein placed considerable emphasis on the scholarly value of his edition. He wanted to ‘offer the opera in the purest and most faithful form approaching the original as closely as it is ever possible for a print to approach a manuscript’. Einstein went further, claiming that this attempt must also help to bring about ‘a new spiritual conception of the work, or better’. Above all, he declared, it should become ‘a symbol or an invitation to allow the opera to appear again in all its purity, free from all the romantic and unromantic distortions of the 19th century … without moralistic or ethical or philosophical evaluation, without the implication of Wagnerian “Leitmotives”, and especially without the debates on the stylistic question of its typology, either as opera buffa or a mixture of buffa and seria.’⁷

The Einstein edition of Don Giovanni should be regarded as arguably the most substantial achievement of the musicologist's pre-1933 career, a career that up to this juncture had been blighted by difficulties and disappointments, not the least of which was the impossibility of securing a professorship in a German university. The brilliant scholar undoubtedly deserved such recognition, but was denied this opportunity as a result of jealousy and ‘rampant anti-Semitism’ among his academic colleagues.⁸ Nonetheless, despite these unpleasant undercurrents, the initial reaction to Einstein's edition seems to have been positive.⁹ Only after the Nazi takeover was there a sharp reversal. As one of many German-Jewish musicologists that were driven out of their native country, Einstein was now censured on racial grounds, his claim to have restored Mozart's opera from its previous misrepresentations and falsifications cutting little ice with those that were controlling musical life after 1933.¹⁰

The rival arrangements of Idomeneo: ‘tainted’ Strauss/Wallerstein versus ‘pure’ Wolf-Ferrari/Stahl

Einstein's desire to create a pure and faithful Mozart, divested from the unwanted accretions of nineteenth-century performance practice, stood in direct contrast to other musicians who were perfectly prepared to distort the composer's original intentions in various ways with the aim of making them more accessible to contemporary audiences. Among the works that proved most vulnerable to this course of action were some of the many operas by Mozart which had thus far failed to establish a secure place in the repertory.

During the nineteenth century there had been some limited but largely unsuccessful attempts to resuscitate Mozart's neglected stage works. After the First World War, however, the general artistic climate, reacting against the excesses of late-Romanticism, appeared to be far more receptive to the idea of reviving long-forgotten eighteenth-century operatic works. The most obvious reflection of this trend was the renewed interest in staging Handel's operas, which began in earnest in Göttingen under the directorship of Oskar Hagen in 1920.¹¹ Likewise, a number of opera houses also incorporated early Mozart works into their schedules. Among the novelties which were featured between the First World War and the end of the Weimar Republic was the early musical intermezzo Apollo et Hyacinthus, which was revived in two alternative versions, both translated into German. The first of these was staged at Rostock in 1922 and translated by H. C. Schott with the music arranged by Paul Gerhard Scholz and Josef Turnau, whilst the second, first performed in Munich in 1932, featured a translation by Erika Mann (daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann) with the music arranged by Karl Schleifer.¹² Other Mozart operatic revivals during this period included La finta semplice translated into German by Anton Rudolph as Die verstellte Einfalt in Karlsruhe in 1921 and Breslau in 1927, La finta giardiniera in translations by Rudolf and Ludwig Berger (Mainz, 1915), Oscar Bie (Darmstadt, 1915 and Berlin, 1916) and Anton Rudolph (Karslruhe, 1918); and Zaide, arranged by Rudolph (Karlsruhe, 1917).

In 1931, the spotlight fixed upon Idomeneo, primarily because it was 150 years since Mozart's first great opera had seen the light of day in Munich. Long considered a problem child among Mozart's mature stage works on account of its unwieldy libretto, Idomeneo had been revived relatively infrequently during the nineteenth century. Whenever it was performed, the opera was subjected to considerable modifications and re-arrangements. This happened as early as August 1806 in Berlin, where the work was presented with extra arias composed by Ferdinando Paer, Bernhard Anselm Weber and Vincenzo Righini.¹³ The tendency to meddle with Idomeneo persisted into the early twentieth century with a new version staged in Karlsruhe in 1917 and Dresden in 1925 by Ernst Lewicki, director of the Dresden Mozartverein. As was the convention at that time, Lewicki translated the Italian libretto into German. Basing his arrangement on the principles of Gluck and Wagner, he compressed the action into two acts, reducing in particular the prominent role allotted to Electra. Lewicki sought to excise most of the stylistic features associated with Italian opera seria, shortened the recitatives and eliminated some of the music Mozart composed for the closing Ballet and Intermezzo at the end of Act 1.¹⁴

Although nowadays Lewicki's Germanic interventions would be regarded as a gross distortion of Mozart's original intentions, they nonetheless paved the way for the four different versions of Idomeneo that were to be featured during the opera's anniversary year. Two of these, an arrangement by the conductor Arthur Rother presented in Dessau on 19 February and one by Wilhelm (Willy) Meckbach heard in Braunschweig on 31 May, made relatively little impression having only been performed in provincial opera houses.¹⁵ In any case, both were overshadowed by two high-profile versions given at major opera houses. The Vienna State Opera provided the prestigious venue for the first of these arrangements, by Richard Strauss and Lothar Wallerstein, which was given its premiere on 16 April. Two months later another version, by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and Ernst Leopold Stahl, was first heard in Munich on 15 June.

Irrespective of their claims to have served Mozart first and foremost, both composers and librettists opted to make sweeping changes to the original work. In the case of Strauss/Wallerstein, the libretto was translated into German, abandoning Varesco's original rhymed verse in favour of prose, cutting down the length of the recitatives and dividing each act into clearly defined but continuous scenes. Even more drastic was Strauss's decision to replace the role of Electra with that of Ismene, Priestess of Poseidon. Although it has been suggested that he had no wish to represent this character on the stage for a second time, such a strategy alters the opera's plot in a very fundamental manner, not least in imposing an ideological framework that, according to the musicologist Chris Walton, might have proved attractive to the Nazis. Thus Ismene, unlike Electra, no longer acts as a rival for Idamante's love, and becomes ‘a veritable Goebbels in petticoats, jealously guarding the racial purity of her people and determined that her future king should not defile his race by marrying Ilia, a mere Trojan slave’.¹⁶

Yet these alterations to the libretto were nothing as compared to the treatment of Mozart's music. Unable to inhibit his own larger-than-life musical personality, Strauss created a score that veers between a more or less faithful adaptation of the original and clear reminiscences of his own style, with echoes of Der Rosenkavalier and Die ägyptische Helena percolating through the texture from time to time. Although some critics remained sympathetic to Strauss's intentions, others reacted with considerable hostility to the concoction.¹⁷ Leading the charge against Strauss and Wallerstein was Alfred Einstein, who was so outraged by the whole enterprise that he famously described the arrangement as ‘a gross ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Prologue: 1931, a Mozart year
• 2 Der Deutsche Mozart
• 3 Mozart and the Freemasons: A Nazi Problem
• 4 Aryanising Mozart
• 5 The Mozart diaspora
• 6 ‘True humanitarian music’: exiled writers on mozart
• 7 Mozart performance and propaganda: from the Anschluss to the end of World War II
• 8 Mozart serves german imperialism
• 9 Epilogue: Nazi legacies
• Appendix I: Address by Baldur von Schirach, Vienna, 28 November 1941
• Appendix II: Address by Joseph Goebbels, Vienna, 4 December 1941
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index