Ross Alex. The rest is noice
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
231
Bartók, like Hindemith, apparently believed that Shostakovich was indulging in
oversimplified writing for cheap effect. Neither composer seemed to realize that
the first movement of the Leningrad was a complicated act of parody, or that
Shostakovich had little to gain, financial or otherwise, from American success.
For Bartók, who had fled fascist Hungary in 1940 and endured periods of
severe financial need in the first years of his American exile, a few high-profile
performances by the likes of Toscanini and Koussevitzky would have made a
world of difference. Fortunately, help was on the way; Koussevitzky
commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra and gave it a brilliant premiere in
Boston in December 1944.
The Concerto might be a tribute to the pluralism that Roosevelt’s America in its
ideal form embodied. There are folk melodies of the Hungarian, Romanian, and
Czech peasant traditions, Gypsy dances, North African rhythms, echoes of both
the impressionism of Debussy and the expressionism of Schoenberg (they are
unified in the Elegy movement), Stravinsky’s Rite, and, riding high above,
pealing fanfares of all-American brass. Ridicule aside, the Shostakovich
quotation adds to the polyglot diversity of the piece. Almost every instrument in
the orchestra has a solo role, even as the collective emotion swells. Bartók’s
parting gift to his adopted country—he died on September 26, 1945—is a
portrait of democracy in action.
Appalachian Spring
In Roosevelt’s last years, the chief custodian of the rapidly fading New Deal
spirit was Henry Wallace, who served as vice president from 1941 until January
1945. As Roosevelt’s agriculture secretary, Wallace had presided over some of
the New Deal’s most ambitious and controversial programs, including the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, whose demise provoked the Federal Theatre
Project production Triple-A Plowed Under. As vice president, Wallace moved
further to the left than any mainstream politician of the time, espousing radical
economic measures and universal civil rights. In a November 1942 address to
the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship—in whose parent organization
Aaron Copland was later involved—Wallace sought a balance between “political
or Bill-of-Rights democracy” and the alleged “economic democracy” of the
Soviet Union. On May 8 of the same year, he delivered a widely publicized
speech in which he dared to criticize America’s wartime mood of triumphalism.
Henry Luce, the mightily influential publisher of Time and Life, had prophesied
an “American Century,” an age of American world domination. Wallace
proposed instead the “century of the common man.” “The people’s revolution is
on the march,” he thundered, “and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail
against it.”
Left-wing intellectuals such as Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, Thomas Mann,
and Aaron Copland thrilled to the soaring rhetoric of Wallace’s speech, which
232
was immediately published in book form. When, in the fall of 1942, Copland
submitted a brief orchestral fanfare to the Cincinnati Symphony in response to a
commission, he gave it the title Fanfare for the Common Man.
The source of the title should have been obvious to anyone who followed
American politics, but Eugene Goossens, the English-born conductor of the
Cincinnati orchestra, missed the reference and formed the impression that the
Fanfare was a humorous tribute to the hardworking American taxpayer. He
therefore programmed the premiere on March 15, which was tax day at the
time. Copland wrote back: “The title was not meant to be funny. I got the idea
from Vice-President Wallace’s speech in which he talked about the next century
being the century of the common man. Even so, I think it was a swell idea to
have played it around March 15th.” As ever, Copland declined to make his
politics explicit. The Fanfare was soon enshrined alongside Billy the Kid, Rodeo,
and Lincoln Portrait in Copland’s gallery of “hits.” Decades later, the rock group
Queen incorporated part of the main melody and the stamping rhythm of the
Fanfare into its 1977 stadium anthem “We Will Rock You.”
In quick succession Copland manufactured another all-American music icon:
the ballet score Appalachian Spring. The idea for the piece came from the
choreographer Martha Graham, who wished to use her airy, athletic style of
modern dance to create a mythic picture of life on the American frontier.
Naturally, she went to Copland for the music.
The original scenario, which Graham had changed considerably by the time
Copland finished composing, was set in western Pennsylvania before and
during the Civil War, its cast of characters populated with nameless American
archetypes. The Mother embodies the purity of the preindustrial American soul;
the Daughter is a plucky pioneer type; the Citizen, who marries the daughter
and carries her across the threshold of his newly built farmhouse, is a fighter for
civil rights, perhaps something of an intellectual, certainly an abolitionist; the
Fugitive represents the slaves; and the Younger Sister “suggests today.” The
central drama arrives in the “Fear in the Night” episode, when the Fugitive
enters and brings with him all the pain and fear of the Civil War. Once the
struggle is over, the music subsides toward a final Sabbath scene, which,
according to Graham, “could have the feeling either of a Shaker meeting where
the movement is strange and ordered and possessed or it could have the
feeling of a negro church with the lyric ecstasy of the spiritual about it.”
The title comes from Hart Crane’s great, flawed poetic cycle The Bridge, and
specifically from the section “The Dance”:
O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks! …
Graham decided on the title only after Copland had completed the score, but
according to Howard Pollack the idea of somehow using The Bridge as a
233
source was present from the start. Crane and Copland had met in bohemian-
modernist circles in the twenties, and although they had little contact, both were
striving to create modern American myths. The bridge at the center of Crane’s
poem is the Brooklyn Bridge, which is said to “lend a myth to God.” It is a
sacred symbol in a city given over to flashing images and frantic movement.
Elsewhere in the poem, Crane finds moments of transcendence variously in
transient sexual connection—love, he says, is “a burnt match skating in a
urinal”—and in the emptiness of the American wilderness. Lines from the
section “The River” prefigure Copland’s Popular Front vision in their
simultaneously celebratory and critical evocation of modern American life:
RADIO ROARS IN EVERY HOME…
So the 20th Century—so
whizzed the Limited—roared by and left
three men, still hungry on the tracks…
This is the famous 20th Century Limited, the luxury train that whisked
passengers from New York to Chicago in fifteen hours. Crane may have been
thinking equally of the century itself, with its perennial sacrifice of superfluous
human material to the idea of progress. He was one of the unlucky ones;
beaten down by financial hardship, alcoholism, and guilt over his
homosexuality, he committed suicide in 1932.
Appalachian Spring tries to stop the speeding train. Like so many other Copland
works, it offers images of an ideal nation, the America that could have been or
might still be. It begins with fifty bars in pure A major—white-key music,
meaning that if it were transposed to the key of C it would use only the white
keys of the piano. There are gentle pangs of dissonance as one simple strand is
interwoven with another. A string of bucolic sketches culminates in variations on
the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” whose words spell out Copland’s aesthetic in
brief: “When true simplicity is gained / To bow and to bend we shan’t be
ashamed.”
In the “Fear in the Night” episode—which in Graham’s final version becomes a
fire-and-brimstone dance by a Revivalist—the idyll is cast in shadow. There are
mechanical driving rhythms, icy passages for strings sul ponticello (as in the
Schoenberg String Trio), percussive thuds like a fist rapping on a door. The
finale brings reconciliation. A reprise of “Simple Gifts,” stunningly harmonized
over a descending scale, gives way to a bluesy passage marked “Like a
prayer,” whose phrases fall into the kinds of asymmetrical patterns that Copland
identified with black music. This is perhaps the “negro church” of Graham’s
initial plan. In the final section, the frontier music of the opening alternates with
the prayer music in evenly divided paragraphs—as if a divided country, black
and white, were being made whole.
There is an affecting recording of the elderly Copland leading a rehearsal of
Appalachian Spring. When he reaches the end, his reedy, confident Brooklyn
voice turns sweet and sentimental: “Softer, very sul tasto, misterioso, great
mood here…That’s my favorite place in the whole piece…organlike. It should
234
have a very special quality, as if you weren’t moving your bows…That sounds
too timid. It should sound rounder and more satisfying. Not distant. Quietly
present. No diminuendos, like an organ sound. Take it freshly again, like an
Amen.” Copland conjures a perfect American Sunday, like the one at the end of
Ives’s Three Places in New England, when the music of all peoples streams
from the open doors of a white-steepled church that does not yet exist.
DEATH FUGUE
Music in Hitler’s Germany
Classical music was one of the few subjects, along with children and dogs, that
brought out a certain tenderness in Adolf Hitler. In 1934, when the new leader of
Germany appeared at a Wagner commemoration in Leipzig, observers noted
that he spoke with “tears in his voice”—a phrase that appears infrequently in
Max Domarus’s twentythree-hundred-page edition of the Führer’s utterances.
The previous year Hitler saluted the first Nuremberg Party Congress with a
quotation from Wagner’s Meistersinger—“Wach’ auf!” (“Awake!”). Nor was Hitler
the only Nazi who expressed reverence for the German musical tradition. Hans
Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland, said that his favorite
composers were Bach, Brahms, and Reger. The Berlin Staatskapelle played
Siegfried’s Funeral Music at the funeral of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard
Tristan Eugen Heydrich, whose father had played in Hans von Bülow’s
orchestra and sung major tenor roles at Bayreuth. And Josef Mengele whistled
favorite airs as he selected victims for the gas chambers in Auschwitz. There
are many such anecdotes about music in the Third Reich, and they reinforce
Thomas Mann’s controversial but not easily refuted contention that during
Hitler’s reign as dictator of Germany great art was allied with great evil. “Thank
God,” Richard Strauss said after Hitler came to power, “finally a Reich
Chancellor who is interested in art!”
In the nineteenth century, music, especially German music, was considered a
sacred realm sufficient in itself, floating far above the ordinary world. In
Nietzsche’s caustic phrase, it became a “telephone from the beyond.” Arthur
Schopenhauer claimed in all earnestness that art and life had nothing to do with
each other: “Beside the history of the world the history of philosophy, science,
and art is guiltless and unstained by blood.” Hans Pfitzner quoted those words
as the epigraph to his 1917 opera Palestrina, which celebrated a composer’s
ability to rise above the politics of his time. Later, the composer used that same
page of his score to write a dedication to Mussolini. That action made nonsense
of the claim that music can achieve total autonomy from the society around it.
Precisely because of its inarticulate nature, it is all too easily imprinted with
ideologies and deployed to political ends.
235
In the wake of Hitler, classical music suffered not only incalculable physical
losses—composers murdered in concentration camps, future talents killed on
the beaches of Normandy and on the eastern front, opera houses and concert
halls destroyed, émigrés forgotten in foreign lands—but a deeper loss of moral
authority. During the war the Allies did their best to rescue the masterpieces of
German tradition from Nazi propaganda, reappropriating them as emblems of
the struggle against tyranny. The first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth were matched
to the Morse code signal for V, as in “Victory.” As the years went by, however,
classical music acquired a sinister aura in popular culture. Hollywood, which
once had made musicians the fragile heroes of prestige pictures, began to give
them a sadistic mien. By the 1970s the juxtaposition of “great music” and
barbarism had become a cinematic cliché: in A Clockwork Orange, a young
thug fantasizes ultraviolently to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth, and in
Apocalypse Now American soldiers assault a Vietnamese village with the aid of
Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Now, when any self-respecting Hollywood
archcriminal sets out to enslave mankind, he listens to a little classical music to
get in the mood.
The ultimate correlation of music and horror is found in Paul Celan’s 1944–45
poem “Death Fugue,” in which a blue-eyed German instructs death-camp
inmates in the art of digging their own graves. As he speaks, he mutates into a
conductor urging his violin section to “bow more darkly,” for “death is a Meister
from Germany.”
The aftermath of Hitler’s corrosive love of music is unavoidable. Much of
subsequent twentieth-century musical history is a struggle to come to terms with
it. Although there is no point in trying to restore Schopenhauer’s separation of
art and state, it is equally false to claim the opposite, that art can somehow be
swallowed up in history or irreparably damaged by it. Music may not be
inviolable, but it is infinitely variable, acquiring a new identity in the mind of
every new listener. It is always in the world, neither guilty nor innocent, subject
to the ever-changing human landscape in which it moves.
“There is too much music in Germany,” Romain Rolland wrote, back in the
heyday of Mahler and Strauss. Something was lurking, the French writer
suspected, in these humongous Teutonic symphonies and music dramas—a
cult of power, a “hypnotism of force.” Germans themselves recognized the
demonic strain in their culture. During the First World War, the not yet liberal-
democratic Thomas Mann wrote a manifesto titled Reflections of a Nonpolitical
Man, in which he praised all the backward German tendencies that he would
later come to lament in the pages of Doctor Faustus. In the earlier work, Mann
states that art “has a basically undependable, treacherous tendency; its joy in
scandalous antireason, its tendency to beauty-creating ‘barbarism,’ cannot be
rooted out …”
The melding of German music with reactionary politics goes back to Wagner.
The composer’s 1850 pamphlet Das Judentum in der Musik, or Jewry in Music,
decried the “Jewification” of German music and demanded that the Jews
undergo Untergang and Selbstvernichtung—destruction and self-annihilation.
236
“Vernichtung” is the word that the Nazis used to describe the mass murder of
the European Jews, as Wagner’s most astringent latter-day critics, such as Paul
Lawrence Rose and Joachim Köhler, have emphasized. Jens Malte Fischer and
other scholars have countered by pointing out that Wagner, in line with Hegel
and other German thinkers, conceived “annihilation” not as a physical process
but as a spiritual one, akin to Buddhist self-abnegation. Yet, even amid the
chorus of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, Wagner’s rantings stood out for
their malicious intensity. The Jews, he once said, were “the born enemy of pure
humanity and all that is noble in man.” They were also, he said, the “plastic
demon of the ruin of mankind”—a phrase that Joseph Goebbels often employed
in his speeches, and that appeared in the foul anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew.
In Wagner’s waning years, Bayreuth became a mecca for all manner of anti-
Semites, Aryan priests, and social Darwinists. The monthly publication
Bayreuther Blätter broadcast the racist theories of Paul de Lagarde, Arthur de
Gobineau, and, most noxiously, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married
Wagner’s daughter Eva and became the intellectual leader of Bayreuth after
Wagner’s death. Although the composer feared that his disciples would make
him look ridiculous, he failed to restrain them. Indeed, he singled out for praise
several articles that delivered tendentious racial interpretations of his works.
Inevitably, anti-Semitism seeped into discussion of the music itself. Even in
Wagner’s lifetime the jabbering, gesticulating villains in the operas—the
dwarves Alberich and Mime and the half-human Hagen in the Ring, the pedant
Beckmesser in Meistersinger, the evil magician Klingsor in Parsifal—were
sometimes understood as cartoons of Jews. Gustav Mahler believed that Mime
embodied the “characteristic traits—petty intelligence and greed” of the Jewish
race. “I know of only one Mime,” he added, “and that is myself.” The names of
Wagner’s villains could double as code words for Jews. When the right-wing
composer Max von Schillings complained in a letter to Strauss that “Alberichs”
in the Prussian Culture Ministry were undermining true German art, we can
guess that the Jewishness of those agitators, chief among them Leo
Kestenberg, prompted the Wagnerian association.
No work by Wagner acquired a more threatening aspect than Parsifal, which the
composer created concurrently with his late prose writings on race and
regeneration. According to Cosima, he once read aloud from Gobineau’s Essay
on the Inequality of Human Races and then went to the piano to play the
opera’s Prelude. The plot lends itself all too easily to racial exegesis. King
Amfortas is suffering from an obscure wound, which appeared on his body after
he succumbed to the mysterious Kundry; he would seem to be the modern
German whose blood has mixed with inferior races, thus becoming “Jewified.”
Kundry is the female version of the Wandering Jew, who laughed at Christ on
His way to the Cross and is now condemned to wander the earth; in a previous
life she was Herodias, Salome’s mother. Klingsor prepares to use her again to
strike his final blow against the knights. Only Parsifal, the “pure fool,” can resist
the advances of Klingsor’s slave. “Verderberin!” he shouts. “Corrupter! Stand
away from me! Forever and ever, away from me!”
237
By remaining pure of blood, Parsifal is able to banish Klingsor, regain the lance
that pierced Christ’s side, and preside over the healing of the company of the
Grail. As Parsifal holds the spear aloft, Kundry falls dead. Many anti-Semites
wished that the Jews themselves could disappear so magically, with a stroke of
the Meister’s bow.
Richard Strauss, circa 1933, was the model of the Jewified German. His son,
Franz, had married Alice von Grab, the daughter of the Czech-Jewish
industrialist Emanuel von Grab. Writers of Jewish ancestry had contributed to
almost all of his operas to date: Hedwig Lachmann had made the translation on
which Salome was based; Hugo von Hofmannsthal had written the play Elektra
and the librettos for Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne
Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella; and Stefan Zweig was by then
working on the libretto for Strauss’s next opera, Die schweigsame Frau. Two
years later the Propaganda Ministry would note in horror that the vocal score of
Die schweigsame Frau displayed the names of no fewer than “4 Juden”: Zweig;
the publisher Adolph Fürstner; the composer Felix Wolfes, who made the piano
arrangement; and, curiously, the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson, who wrote
Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, on which the opera was based, and who was
not Jewish in the least.
How Strauss became a prize exhibit of Nazi culture is a tangled tale. In his
youth he had hardly been a poaitical or cultural reactionary; his first opera,
Guntram, unsettled conservative Wagnerians with its anti-collectivist message,
and in following years he became Germany’s foremost representative in the
marketplace of international modernist decadence. In 1911, Siegfried Wagner, a
composer far more modestly talented than his father, bemoaned the fact that
Parsifal was being performed in theaters “contaminated by the misfortune-
gestating works of Richard Strauss.” The sardonic, anarchic side of Strauss’s
character persisted as late as 1921, when he proposed to the critic Alfred Kerr
the idea of a “political operetta” set against the chaos of postwar Germany,
featuring “workers and industrial councils, prima-donna intrigues, tenor
ambitions, resigning directors of the old regime,” together with “the National
Assembly, war societies, party politicking while the people starve, pimps as
Culture Ministers, criminals as War Ministers, murderers as Justice Ministers,”
and, somewhere in the middle, a “true German Romantic” composer who
engages in uncouth behavior, flirts with conservatory girls, and, “as a respected
anti-Semite, takes donations from rich Jews.” Alas, nothing came of this
promising plan.
The Weimar era brought many disappointments. While Krenek’s Jonny and
Weill’s Threepenny Opera played to packed houses, Strauss’s artful if
sometimes overprecious operatic comedies—Intermezzo, Die ägyptische
Helena, Arabella—met with mixed success. By the end of the twenties he had
gone a long time without a hit, and insecurities were gnawing at him.
Coincidentally or not, his politics slid to the right. When, in 1925, a young
journalist named Samuel Wilder—soon to become Billy Wilder, director of
Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot—knocked on Strauss’s door to ask his
opinion of Mussolini, the composer expressed admiration for the dictator.
Strauss met Mussolini more than once, and the two men evidently shared their
238
disgust for artistic modernism. Later in the decade, Count Harry Kessler
attended a luncheon at Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s and recorded in his diary that
Strauss had spoken in favor of a dictatorship. But the composer had little to say
about Hitler himself. The name first crops up in Strauss’s published utterances
in November 1932, when, in the wake of the most recent German elections, he
matter-of-factly wrote, “Hitler is apparently finished.”
The protagonist of Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf,
is a stubborn, tough-minded, self-reliant man who finds himself transformed into
a Nazi stooge. In much the same way, Strauss’s philosophy of self—“The laws
of my mind determine my life,” to quote Guntram—left him defenseless before
Hitler’s seductions. Nazism was itself the product of egoism, nihilism, cynicism,
and amoral aestheticism. Hitler relished the role of the munificent prince: he
displayed avid interest, made knowledgeable comments, behaved bashfully
around his favorites. That the master of Germany should have assumed a
servile air in Strauss’s presence was thoroughly flattering. The two men first
talked at length at the Bayreuth festival of 1933, when Strauss stepped in to
conduct Parsifal after Toscanini had withdrawn in protest. The composer
mentioned various matters that concerned him, including the idea of using film
and radio revenues to support theater. He also put in a good word for the
Jewish conductor Leo Blech. “I thank you,” Hitler said simply.
Certain of Hitler’s defining musical experiences took place against the familiar
backdrop of Austria in the spring of 1906. He made his first trip to Vienna at the
beginning of May, venturing forth from his hometown of Linz. On May 7 he sent
his friend August Kubizek a postcard mentioning that he would see Tristan at
the Court Opera the following night and The Flying Dutchman the night after. In
a second card he gave his impression of the acoustics: “Powerful waves of
sound flood the room, and the murmur of the wind gives way to a terrible frenzy
of surging sound.” The third card said: “Today 7:30–12 Tristan.” Hitler stayed in
Vienna for several more weeks, and he would have had time to go see Salome
in Graz. Manfred Blumauer, the only scholar who has thoroughly investigated
the matter, leaves open the unanswerable question of whether or not Hitler
actually made the trip. Either way, he did tell Franz and Alice Strauss, in 1933
or 1934, that he had attended the Graz performance. Alice recounted the
conversation to Blumauer decades later. At this meeting or another like it, Hitler
apparently kissed Alice’s hand, despite the fact that she was Jewish.
The Tristan that Hitler saw in Vienna in 1906 was the famous production that
originated under Gustav Mahler. Alfred Roller, the painter and stage designer,
used a semi-abstract, Symbolist interplay of color and light to heighten the
mysteries of Wagner’s score. Riveted by the spectacle, Hitler formed the
ambition of studying painting and opera direction under Roller. He managed to
obtain a letter of introduction from his mother’s landlady, who had connections
in Vienna. But when he moved to the imperial city, in February 1908, he failed
to follow up on the invitation, even though Roller had spelled out where and
when he could be found. Hitler later claimed that he had gone up to Roller’s
door before turning away in a state of anxiety. Images of Tristan stayed with
him: in a sketchbook from the period 1925–26 he reproduced the image of the
lovers huddled under a canopy of stars, and in 1934, when he finally met Roller,
239
he could still recall the production in detail, including “the tower to the left with
the pale light.”
Biographies of Hitler have generally overlooked the fact that the conductor of
Tristan on May 8 was Mahler himself. Kubizek, whose recollections can be used
only with caution, states that his friend admired Mahler “because [he] concerned
himself with the music dramas of Richard Wagner and produced them with a
perfection that for its time literally shone.” The story is partly confirmed by a
comment that Hitler made to Goebbels in 1940, to the effect that he “did not
contest the abilities and merits” of select Jewish artists such as Mahler and Max
Reinhardt.
Hitler had worshipped Wagner from an early age. On various occasions he
reported that a performance of Wagner’s Roman drama Rienzi had inspired him
to enter politics. In Vienna, Hitler became uneasy over the fact that
masterpieces of Aryan culture were being performed in a city thronged with
Jews. Once, in conversation with Hans Frank, he recalled hearing
Götterdämmerung at the Court Opera and encountering “a couple of yammering
Jews in caftans” on his way home. Hitler said: “It’s impossible to think of a more
irreconcilable combination. This glorious mystery of the dying hero and this
Jewish filth!”
The spectral figure of the ghetto Jew also appears in Mein Kampf. Hitler claims
to have met such a person during a long walk and asked himself: “Is this a Jew?
… Is this a German?” At that moment, he said, hatred of Jews first welled up in
him. There is a strange displacement going on here, given that a Jew occupied
the podium during what may have been the most tremendous musical
experience of Hitler’s life. Was Mahler a tormenting symbol of Jewish power
amid Hitler’s failures? Or did the young man identify with Mahler’s aura, his
ability to command forces with a wave of his arms? In photographs, certain of
the Führer’s oratorical poses seem vaguely characteristic of Mahler’s
conducting—the right hand raised in a clenched, rotated fist, the left hand
drawing back in a clawlike motion.
Hitler made his political reputation by bellowing out bilious speeches in Munich
beer halls and soldiers’ barracks, but his knowledge of music helped win him
entrée to more rarefied circles. Edwin Bechstein, the renowned piano
manufacturer, and Hugo Bruckmann, the publisher who printed the works of
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both welcomed Hitler into their salons. When
Hitler met Carl von Schirach, the intendant of the National Theater in Weimar,
he launched into a detailed analysis of Die Walküre, comparing recent Weimar
performances with legendary ones that he had heard in Vienna. Schirach
promptly invited him to tea. Such connections proved crucial in Hitler’s rapid
ascent from provincial to national fame.
The Wagner family fell deeply under Hitler’s spell. Winifred Wagner opened the
gates of Wahnfried for the man she considered Germany’s savior. Hitler first
visited the Wagners on October 1, 1923, as he was preparing his initial attempt
at seizing control of Germany. The ailing Chamberlain rose from his sickbed,
like Amfortas in Parsifal, to say that Hitler had come to save Germany in its
240
“hour of highest need.” In a later essay Chamberlain called Hitler a true man of
the Volk who would rid Germany of the “ruinous, indeed poisonous influence of
Jewishness on the life of the German people”—words echoing his own
summary of Wagner’s writings on “regeneration.” Hitler was also told that he
had a “Parsifal nature.”
Hitler quickly absorbed the Bayreuth lifestyle—vegetarianism, agitation for
animal rights, dabblings in Buddhism and Indian lore. Later, he would dote on
the younger Wagners and served as a substitute father for the grandsons,
Wieland and Wolfgang. When he came to Bayreuth, as he did every summer
from 1933 until 1940, he became a different being. “He obviously felt at ease in
the Wagner family and free of the compulsion to represent power,” the Nazi
architect Albert Speer observed.
The “Beer Hall Putsch” took place on November 8–9, 1923. Siegfried Wagner
had planned to commemorate Hitler’s victory by conducting his newest
symphonic poem, Glück, at a concert in Munich. Defeat forced him to postpone
the premiere, but neither he nor his relations lost faith in the cause. Hitler,
confined to Landsberg prison, wrote to express his gratitude. Bayreuth, he said,
was “in the line of march to Berlin”; it was the place where “first the Master and
then Chamberlain forged the spiritual sword which we are wielding today.” The
Wagners kept the prisoner well supplied, sending along recordings of Wagner
excerpts, the libretto of Siegfried’s opera Der Schmied von Marienburg, a
variety of domestic items (blankets, jackets, stockings, foodstuffs, books), and
writing materials, including typing paper of superior quality. A phonograph came
from Helene Bechstein. Hitler set to composing Mein Kampf.
Hitler’s speeches of the later 1920s often touched on cultural matters,
displaying modest knowledge of the musical scenes of Berlin, Munich, and
Vienna. One sign of Germany’s decline, Hitler said, was its growing ignorance
of the great musical tradition: “Only a couple hundred thousand know Mozart,
Beethoven, Wagner, only some of them know Bruckner.” Meanwhile, “little
Neutöner [new-toners] come and unleash their dissonances.” He made a
knowing reference to Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf: “In Germany one lets Jonny
strike up and concerning South Tyrol one complains about the Untergang of
German culture.” In this same period he criticized the operetta Das
Dreimäderlhaus for its travesties of Schubert songs and launched an extended
assault on the conductor Bruno Walter, “alias Schlesinger.” In Berlin, Hitler
alleged, there were five opera conductors on the staff of the state-funded opera
houses, all of them Jews. The reference to “fünf Juden” brings to mind the
scene in Salome in which five Jews dispute among themselves in Herod’s court.
Hitler took power in January 1933, and by the end of the year most of the
German cultural apparatus had fallen under the control of Goebbels’s
Propaganda Ministry. But music did not become a direct instrument of the state.
Hitler wanted the ministry to serve the “spiritual development of the nation,” and
Goebbels agreed. As the historian Alan Steinweis shows, the minister saw
artists as “creating Germans” and organized them into semi-independent
organizations. It was called “self-administration under state supervision.” The
Reichskulturkammer, or Reich Culture Chamber, had departments for each art