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form, including a Reich Music Chamber, whose first president was Richard
Strauss. Musical life was not merely Nazified from above; to a great extent, it
Nazified itself. Even the anti-Jewish clause in the Kulturkammer laws neglected
to mention the Jews by name; cultural bureaucrats were left to decide which
artists lacked “aptitude” for cultural life. Not surprisingly, all leading Jewish
musicians were deemed inept. The April 7, 1933, law barring Jews from the
public sector had already had a devastating impact, because so many had been
employed by Weimar’s arts programs. Weill left Germany on March 22,
Klemperer on April 4, Schoenberg on May 17.
From the start, classical music blared in the background of Nazi life. Party
rallies were so immaculately choreographed to Beethoven, Bruckner, and
Wagner that the music seemed to have been written in support of the
pageantry; it was through such sleights of hand that Hitler generated his
authority. Unlike Stalin, who demanded that Soviet art mirror the ideology of the
regime, Hitler wished to maintain the illusion of autonomy in the arts. Brigitte
Hamann, in her biography of Winifred Wagner, reports that at the Bayreuth
festival of 1933 the dictator asked audiences to refrain from singing the “Horst
Wessel” song or from making other patriotic manifestations, on the grounds that
“there is no more glorious expression of the German spirit than the immortal
works of the Master.” Like so many German music lovers, Hitler claimed that
the classical tradition was an “absolute art” hovering above history, as in
Schopenhauer’s formulation.
Such was the import of Hitler’s most ambitious statement on musical policy, his
“cultural address” at the Party rally of 1938, in which he said that “it is totally
impossible to express a scientific worldview in musical terms” and “nonsense” to
try to express Party business. In contrast to Stalin, Hitler turned up his nose at
sycophantic propaganda. In 1935, he directed that no more music should be
dedicated to him, and three years later he complained that a group of works
commissioned for the Reich Party Day paled in comparison to Bruckner. Politics
aspired to the condition of music, not vice versa. Thus, when the Berlin
Philharmonic played the finale of Bruckner’s Seventh before that 1938 speech,
the implication was that Hitler’s rhetoric would follow the musical model.
Goebbels wanted his propaganda efforts to stress, in Wagnerian fashion, key
leitmotifs, renewed through ingenious variations.
Hitler, too, believed in “music for all.” He demanded, for example, that new
opera houses contain as many as three thousand seats. But in Nazi Germany,
as in New Deal America, classical music could be sold to the masses only with
pressure from above. German listeners had felt the pull of Americanized
popular music in the Weimar era, and they kept demanding it under Nazism.
Hitler’s Wagner galas met with a tepid response from the Party rank and file.
When Hitler walked into a mostly empty hall at the “official” Meistersinger of
1933, he sent out patrols to fetch high-ranking Party members from
Nuremberg’s beer halls and cafés. A Meistersinger at the 1938 Party congress
drew so few Brownshirts that patrons of the Hotel Deutscher Hof around the
corner were conscripted to fill the empty rows. During performances Hitler
would shake his associates awake whenever they dozed off.
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Great musicians occupied a special category, their ideological errors often
overlooked or excused. Hitler deemed Wilhelm Furtwängler, the leader of the
Berlin Philharmonic, Germany’s supreme musician, and looked askance at
charismatic younger artists who were rising through the ranks of Nazi culture.
The podium virtuoso Herbert von Karajan, for example, may have joined the
Party early on, but Hitler disliked him. Karajan’s habit of conducting from
memory was “arrogant,” Hitler thought—Furtwängler would never do such a
thing. Hans Knappertsbusch was also found wanting. His blue eyes and blond
hair shouldn’t fool anyone, Hitler said in one of his “table talk” monologues; this
was a mere bandmaster with a poor feeling for tempo and “no ear for music.”
Conductors like Furtwängler and Clemens Krauss exhibited a more flexible,
Romantic style, and in Hitler’s opinion they probed the music more deeply. The
critic John Rockwell has proposed that Hitler’s youthful encounter with Mahler
may have shaped his taste in conductors. Furtwängler’s philosophical, anti-
metronomic style would have naturally attracted one who had been swept away
by Mahler’s Tristan.
Despite his “apolitical” stance, Hitler did once or twice imply a link between his
favorite music and his increasingly aggressive foreign policy. It happened with
the symphonic orations of Bruckner. Derided in his lifetime as a naive country
bumpkin who lacked Viennese sophistication, Bruckner apparently represented
for Hitler the revenge of the “little” man on an uncomprehending world. In 1937,
a bust of the composer was installed in the so-called Valhalla of German
cultural heroes near Regensburg, and the Reich chancellor was photographed
gazing raptly at it. The ceremony took place in conjunction with a major speech
in which Hitler introduced the Nazi spiritual concept of Gottgläubigkeit—belief in
God divorced from religious cant and wedded to national feeling. The scholar
Bryan Gilliam suggests that the event was a kind of rehearsal for the annexation
of Austria by the Reich, with Hitler using the composer as a metaphor for the
synthesis of Austrian and German culture. As Bruckner’s bust was installed in
the German Valhalla, so would Austria be installed in the Reich.
After the Anschluss of March 1938, Hitler scheduled a plebiscite to confirm the
takeover and took a campaign tour through smaller Austrian cities and towns.
Many Austrian artists spoke in his favor. “Say a big YES to our Führer’s action,”
urged the conductor Karl Böhm. On April 3, 1938, Hitler arrived in Graz, where
twenty thousand Nazis had rioted against the Austrian government several
weeks before. He had promised that Graz would be one of the first cities he
would visit after the Anschluss. He drove down a two-and-a-half-mile-long via
triumphalis, and the city that had cheered Salome three decades before
thronged to greet the new leader. It was a “symphony of joy,” said the
Völkischer Beobachter, set against a white-blue sky. The pianist Alfred Brendel,
who grew up in Graz, remembered the “mass hysteria” of the day.
On a return trip three years later, Hitler visited the Graz Opera and inspected
the sets of a production of The Magic Flute. He did not mention having attended
Salome in 1906; his entourage had the impression that he had never been in
the city. He did, however, declare that the building would have to be rebuilt on
account of its acoustical flaws—an odd thing for someone who had never heard
a performance in the house to say.
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Was there such a thing as a “Nazi sound”? Did a conservative style steeped in
Wagner, Bruckner, and/or Strauss guarantee success in Hitler’s world? Did
more adventurous styles—those that had prospered in the free atmosphere of
the Weimar Republic—guarantee failure? The answers to these questions are
not as clear as is often assumed. The automatic equation of radical style with
liberal politics and of conservative style with reactionary politics is a historical
myth that does little justice to an agonizingly ambiguous historical reality.
By rights, the politically and aesthetically conservative composer Hans Pfitzner
should have been the official genius of the Nazi period. He had long raged
against the “Jewish-international spirit” in music and had admired Hitler from the
earliest years. In 1923, when Pfitzner spent some time in the hospital, Hitler
paid him a visit in the company of a mutual associate. The two men talked
about Jewish war crimes, then fell into a discussion of the career of Otto
Weininger, whose racial and sexual theories had fascinated Schoenberg and
Berg, and whom Pfitzner later called the “greatest self-hater and anti-Semite
who ever lived.” Hitler said that this man was “the one acceptable Jew” because
he had “rid himself from the world.” Pfitzner wondered aloud whether such a
procedure would work for all Jews, whereupon Hitler became displeased.
Pfitzner was at this time wearing a thin, faintly rabbinical beard, which gave
Hitler the false impression that the composer was Jewish. “The Führer is very
strongly opposed to Pfitzner,” Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1943. “He
considers him a half Jew, which, according to our records, is actually not the
case.”
When the Nazis took over, Pfitzner thought that his time had come. He said of
Hitler in 1934, “Today there is no one beside him with the strength of body,
spirit, or soul, him whom we have known as our German Führer for the past ten
years.” A pamphlet titled Listen to Hans Pfitzner! advertised the composer’s
relevance. But Pfitzner failed to gain hero status, and before long he was
muttering that the cosmopolitan modernism of younger composers was being
favored over his own pure German music—the same complaint that he had
repeatedly made during the Weimar Republic. He pleaded in vain for another
meeting with Hitler. In desperate need of a Nazi sponsor, he found one in Hans
Frank, the Reger-loving governor-general of Poland, who had set up his own
orchestra in Kraków. Pfitzner traveled there several times between 1942 and
1944, the last time bringing with him an overture titled Krakau Greeting. It was
first heard thirty miles from Auschwitz, while the gas chambers were being
dismantled.
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Paul Hindemith should have been
viciously criticized in the early Nazi era, to the point where he felt compelled to
go into exile. Yet the former bad boy of Weimar Germany tried hard to find a
place in Hitler’s world and kept trying long after he had been made to feel
unwelcome.
Nudged to the political right by his unhappy collaborations with Brecht,
Hindemith struck up a relationship with the conservative poet Gottfried Benn,
who penned for him an oratorio text entitled The Unending, a renunciation of
politics, publicity, and worldly pleasure. From 1933 to 1935, Hindemith worked
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on the opera Mathis der Maler, which partook of the holy-German-art ethos of
Wagner’s Meistersinger. Based on the life of the Renaissance painter Matthias
Grünewald, it described an artist’s solitary struggle, amid political and religious
chaos, to find roots in “the primal soil of your people,” in the words of a peasant
rebel leader. Nazi aestheticians took note of Hindemith’s new tack, and
mentioned him as a potential musical chieftain. In 1934, the composer told his
publisher that he had talked to officials about instituting “the most ambitious
program of popular musical education (together with appropriate composer
training) the world has ever seen. One can literally have the musical
enlightenment of millions in one’s hands.”
If Hindemith was politically on the right track, why did he fall from favor?
Apparently, the prudish Hitler had been scandalized by the 1929 opera News of
the Day, a rigorously up-to-date contribution to the Zeitoper genre in which a
soprano sang nude in a bathtub. “It is obvious that [News of the Day] shocked
the Führer greatly,” Hindemith wrote to his publisher in November 1934. “I shall
write him a letter (F. was very taken with this idea) in which I shall ask him to
convince himself to the contrary and perhaps visit us sometime here in the
school, where I would have the cantata from the Plöner Musiktag performed for
him—no one has ever been able to resist that. F. is to give him my letter, also
the text [of Mathis].” “F.” is Furtwängler, who proceeded to make a major tactical
mistake; instead of arguing his colleague’s case behind the scenes, he
defended him in a newspaper article, questioning the advisability of political
controls on artists. Rather than achieving Hindemith’s rehabilitation, Furtwängler
doomed him.
Still, even as late as 1936, Hindemith was attempting to regain the trust of the
authorities, promising to write a work in honor of the Luftwaffe. It was, he said,
“an opportunity not to be missed,” and he even hoped to “give them something
really good.” When the composer went to America in January 1939, he found
himself sailing with a boatload of Jewish refugees—the sort of people, he wrote
to his half-Jewish wife, whom one wouldn’t want to see on a regular basis. The
following year, he began teaching at Yale.
Other denizens of the Weimar music scene made a relatively smooth transition
into the Nazi era. With some adroit maneuvering, they were even able to carry
on in characteristic twenties styles. In January 1939, Hitler went to see Werner
Egk’s Peer Gynt, an eclectic piece steeped in Stravinsky, Weill, jazz, and Berg,
and he liked it so much that he summoned the composer to his box, in the
manner of Stalin at the Bolshoi. Hitler acclaimed Egk as a successor to Wagner;
Goebbels praised him as a “really great, original talent.” (Possibly, the Nazi
leaders enjoyed Peer Gynt because it cleverly employed modern Western
styles to satirize modern Western society; the anthem of the troll kingdom is “Do
as you like.”) Carl Orff, who had participated in Leo Kestenberg’s socialistic
education schemes in the Weimar period, scored a surprise hit in Nazi Germany
with his cantata Carmina burana. With its exotic percussion writing (modeled on
Stravinsky’s Les Noces) and its syncopated “bounce,” Orff’s showpiece was far
removed from Hitler’s favorite Wagner operas. The review in the Völkischer
Beobachter, the Nazi Party paper, identified it as “Bavarian Niggermusik.” Once
the work had demonstrated huge popular appeal, however, Nazi aesthetics
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were adjusted to accommodate it. By 1944 Goebbels was gushing in his diary
that Carmina burana contained “extraordinary beauties.”
One lonely force of noncompliance among German composers was Karl
Amadeus Hartmann, who had connections to the anti-Nazi resistance, such as
it was, and coded his music with messages of opposition. His orchestral score
Miserae bore the inscription “To my friends, who had to die in the hundreds …
Dachau 1933/1934.” Historians have long honored Hartmann as the “good
German” composer, the one who held fast against Nazification. But even this
case becomes a little ambiguous on close inspection. As Michael Kater
demonstrates in a painstaking study of German music under Nazi rule,
Hartmann had the luxury of living off his father-in-law’s ball-bearing fortune. And
when Miserae had its first performance, in Prague in 1935, the inscription about
Dachau was seen only by the conductor, Hermann Scherchen. The audience
had no knowledge of it. Hartmann’s anti-Nazism was equally invisible to Munich
Nazi Party operatives, who noted in a report that he had greeted them with a
Party salute.
Only in Mussolini’s Italy—admittedly a less oppressive environment than Hitler’s
Germany—did a composer register an unmistakable public protest against
totalitarian government in the form of a musical work. Luigi Dallapiccola, who
found his personal style by synthesizing Stravinsky’s neoclassicism with
Schoenberg’s dissonant language, initially thrilled to Mussolini’s pseudo-heroic
poses, as did many impressionable artists of the prewar years. Indeed,
Dallapiccola believed in Fascism so fervently that he “sometimes annoyed us,
his friends,” as his colleague Goffredo Petrassi told the historian Harvey Sachs.
Then, when the Italian-German Axis formed in the thirties, Dallapiccola, whose
wife was Jewish, lost faith in Mussolini, and, unlike so many others, he wrote his
disenchantment on the surface of his music. His Canti di prigionia, or Songs of
Imprisonment (1938–41), a choral work of shadowy, secretive beauty, employs
words of Mary Stuart, Boethius, and Savonarola to represent all those who had
been thrown in prison for speaking their minds or for simply being who they
were: “I implore you to set me free … Happy is the one who breaks the bonds of
heavy earth … The world may press down, enemies may attack, I fear nothing.”
Dallapiccola found the first of these prayers in a book by Stefan Zweig,
Strauss’s former librettist. Two months after Canti di prigionia was first
performed, Zweig committed suicide in Brazil, unable to see any hope in the
deepening gloom.
Atonality and other modernist trends suffered an interesting fate in Nazi
Germany. When an exhibition of Degenerate Music opened in Düsseldorf in
May 1938, its organizer, Hans Severus Ziegler, decreed that atonal composition
was a “product of the Jewish spirit” of Schoenberg. Yet, as Michael Kater points
out, a committee led by Strauss had declared that “the Reich Music Chamber
cannot forbid works of an atonal character, for it is up to the audience to judge
such compositions.” In the end, Ziegler’s exhibition was poorly received, even in
official circles. There was some embarrassment over the fact that Stravinsky
had been included in the gallery of degenerates, and the German Foreign
Affairs Office issued a quasi-apologetic explanation. (Stravinsky, who had yet to
acquire the more or less liberal views that he would boast in America, grumbled
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back in 1933 that he was being unfairly neglected in the new Germany, in spite
of his “negative attitude toward Communism and Judaism … not to put it in
stronger terms.”) Strauss made a particularly acid comment about the
“degenerate music” concept; in a conversation with Ziegler, he asked, with a
“half-bitter, half-mischievous” laugh, why the decadent operettas of Franz Lehár
and his own “pure atonal” Salome had been omitted. The answer was implicit:
Hitler liked them.
As it turned out, atonal and twelve-tone writing was sometimes tolerated,
provided the composer assumed the right ideological stance. When Herbert
Gerigk, a musicologist who headed the music section of Alfred Rosenberg’s
ideology bureau and worked tirelessly to identify all musical Jews, pondered the
case of Arnold Schoenberg in 1934, he came to a startling conclusion: “Even
so-called atonality can produce worthwhile art as long as the man standing
behind it is racially and personally unobjectionable and creative.”
Schoenberg’s pupils Winfried Zillig and Paul von Klenau used twelve-tone
technique throughout the Nazi period, softening its impact with tonal material.
Zillig, in his opera Das Opfer, employed a row made up of major and minor
triads, as in Berg’s Lulu. Klenau, a reactionary Dane, justified the technique of
his opera Michael Kohlhaas as follows: “In the opera not one note occurs that
cannot be derived from one of seven underlying twelve-tone rows … The music
of our time needs a new ordering regularity, which corresponds to ethical
content. A future-oriented art appropriate to the National Socialist world requires
ethical fellow feeling and a knack for craftsmanship that gets rid of all arbitrary
individualistic activities in the realm of tones.”
Ironically, Klenau’s nationalistic spin on twelve-tone writing was not too far
removed from his teacher’s own conception of it. Although Schoenberg
opposed the Nazis unstintingly, he was hardly free from authoritarian impulses,
as his attack on the egalitarianism of the Weimar Republic shows. In 1931, as
Germany was swinging politically rightward, Schoenberg described his music as
“a living example of an art able most effectively to oppose Latin and Slav hopes
of hegemony and derived through and through from the traditions of German
music.” Even in American exile, he had a hard time adjusting to the concept of
“We the people,” and in his 1938 essay “Four-Point Program for Jewry” he
declared that democracy would be unsuitable for a mass Jewish movement. To
illustrate the point, he provided an object lesson from his own biography; in the
course of running the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, he
said, he had become “a kind of dictator,” and on encountering internal
opposition, he did something “which under other circumstances could be called
illegal: I dissolved the whole society, built a new one, accepted only such
members who were in perfect agreement with my artistic principles and
excluded the entire opposition.” This is precisely how Hitler took power in 1933.
Schoenberg sent the “Four-Point Program” to his fellow exile Thomas Mann, in
the hope that the novelist would arrange to have it published. Mann wrote back
in alarm, objecting to the document’s “fascistic bent,” its “will to terrorism.” The
seed of Doctor Faustus was planted.
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Alban Berg lacked sympathy for Hitler’s program, but he was not above tailoring
his résumé in order to meet Nazi requirements. In 1933 he discussed the
challenges of the new German marketplace with his pupil Adorno, who himself
had no desire to leave Germany, despite his partly Jewish background. Adorno
advised Berg to advertise his pure Aryan origins to the Reich Music Chamber,
and also to distance himself from any notion of Jewish solidarity, “about which
one can have so few illusions.”
As for Webern, he forsook his onetime socialist views to become an
unashamed Hitler enthusiast, greeting the invasion of Denmark and Norway
with almost orgasmic prose: “This is Germany today! But the National Socialist
one, to be sure! Not just any one! This is exactly the new state, for which the
seed was already laid twenty years ago. Yes, a new state it is, one that has
never existed before!! It is something new! Created by this unique man!!! …
Each day becomes more exciting. I see such a good future. It will be different
also for me.”
No composer more painfully exhibited the moral collapse of German art than
Richard Strauss, who served as president of the Reich Music Chamber from
1933 to 1935. The composer of Salome warmed to Hitler chiefly because he
thought that under the aegis of this music-loving chancellor he would be able to
enact a series of long-dreamed-of reforms—new royalty schemes favoring
classical composers over popular ones; the extension of composers’ copyrights;
rules preventing spa orchestras from massacring Wagner overtures; guidelines
discouraging young people from ruining their voices by bellowing patriotic
songs.
The record is dismaying. Strauss appeared at Nazi functions and signed a
meretricious denunciation of Thomas Mann. When the anti-fascist Toscanini
canceled his Bayreuth engagements in 1933, Strauss replaced him, and in the
same year he stepped in as a lastminute replacement for the racially
unacceptable Bruno Walter in Berlin. On the relatively rare occasions when
Strauss was in the capital, he socialized with Nazi leaders at the various stately
mansions that they had commandeered. In February 1934, for example, he
joined Hitler for a vegetarian meal at the home of Walther Funk; after dinner, the
composer accompanied the singers Viorica Ursuleac and Heinrich Schlusnus in
various of his Lieder. He offered the leadership birthday wishes, congratulated
them on their speeches, and bestowed holiday gifts. For Christmas 1933 he
gave Hitler a copy of Joseph Gregor’s World History of the Theater.
Strauss’s behavior was not always as contemptible as it seemed. In the case of
the Bruno Walter affair, the outside world had no idea that Strauss accepted the
assignment with reluctance, and only after a Jewish-owned concert agency,
Wolff and Sachs, informed him—truthfully or not—that Walter himself had asked
Strauss to step in. In general, Strauss refused to take part in the de-Jewification
of musical life. He avoided signing papers that would have set in motion the
removal of Jews from the Music Chamber. He resisted the ban on Jewish
composers and announced that the symphonies of Mahler, among other things,
should continue to be performed. Planning an international music festival in
Hamburg in 1935, he became exasperated when the Propaganda Ministry
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demanded an “Aryan French” substitute for Paul Dukas’s opera Ariane and
Bluebeard. Strauss promptly declared his “total lack of interest in the Hamburg
Festival from now on … I am not coming to Hamburg and, for the rest, Götz v.
B.” Götz von Berlichingen is the Goethe play whose hero famously says, “Lick
my ass.”
Strauss also could not comprehend the banning of Felix Mendelssohn. Since
his youth he had loved Mendelssohn’s music—all his exalted horn solos are
descended from the Nocturne of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and he ridiculed
the “terrible, Aryan ersatz music” that German composers (including Orff) were
hastily concocting to replace Mendelssohn’s forbidden score.
When Stefan Zweig criticized his friend’s accommodations with the Nazis,
Strauss answered with a tortuously self-justifying letter. “Do you believe that I
have ever let myself be guided in any act by the notion that I am Germanic
(perhaps, qui lu sa)?” he asked Zweig. “For me there are only two kinds of
people, those with talent and those with none, and for me the Volk does not
exist until it becomes the public.” The parenthetical remark is a fittingly
cosmopolitan blending of French and Italian; Strauss probably meant to write
“Chi lo sa” (“Who knows”). Which is to say, he neither knew nor cared whether
he was a true Aryan.
For some time the Nazis had been keeping a file on Strauss’s poor attitude. In
February 1934, he and Furtwängler were denounced for failing to give the
Fascist salute during a singing of the “Horst Wessel” song at a public event
(reportedly, they were greeted with shouts of “Concentration camp!”). When it
became known that several Jews had assisted in the creation of Die
schweigsame Frau, Der Stürmer editorialized: “If [Strauss] wishes to use Jewish
collaborators for his coming works we shall have to draw conclusions which are
not very pleasant.” And if later recollections by Albert Speer are to be believed,
Hitler himself began to see Strauss as an “opponent of the regime,” in league
with “Jewish riff-raff.”
But only when the Gestapo intercepted that remarkable letter to Zweig—“the
Volk does not exist until it becomes the public”—did Strauss’s situation as an
“official” composer become untenable. He was immediately forced to resign his
Reich Music Chamber post. In a private memorandum Strauss finally let down
his cynical facade and issued a private cry of principled disgust: “I consider the
StreicherGoebbels Jew baiting as a disgrace to German honor, as evidence of
incompetence, the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a
higher intelligence and greater talent.”
If Strauss had fled Germany in the wake of this fiasco, Hitler’s regime would
have suffered a severe embarrassment. But for various reasons the idea of
leaving Germany probably never crossed his mind. By then well into his
seventies, he could hardly have conceived of starting a new life on foreign soil.
More important, if he had left by himself, his extended family would presumably
have been sent to the concentration camps. Strauss had little choice but to
undergo a humiliating process of self-rehabilitation. He began by writing an
obsequious letter to Hitler, hailing him as “the great designer of German
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existence.” In 1936 Strauss made a high-profile appearance at the opening
ceremony of the Olympics in Berlin, conducting a trite ceremonial piece titled
Olympic Hymn, whose manuscript he had presented to Hitler. Thousands of
white pigeons were released into the air as the music played. The program also
included “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles,” the “Horst Wessel” song, the
“Hallelujah” Chorus, and the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth. In Leni Riefenstahl’s
film Olympia, Strauss can be seen wearing the poker face that he displayed
through the first half of the twentieth century.
Strauss wasn’t merely trying to repair his wounded pride; he was also trying to
protect his partly Jewish family. On Kristallnacht, in November 1938, Richard
and Christian Strauss, the composer’s beloved grandsons, were stopped on
their way to school and forced to spit on a group of Jews who had been
gathered in the village square; then they were spat on themselves. Later,
Michael Kater relates, Franz and Alice Strauss were repeatedly harassed by the
Gestapo, and on one occasion they were dragged from Richard’s house in the
middle of the night and interrogated for several days. All the same, Franz
remained a Nazi supporter. An intelligence report from 1944 stated that he
responded angrily when acquaintances expressed doubts about the progress of
the war or about Party institutions. It was also reported that Alice did not
contradict him. Inside the house, however, arguments raged. Franz generally
spoke up for the Nazis, while Richard railed against them.
Music remained Strauss’s refuge from politics, yet political issue shadowed the
successor to Die schweigsame Frau—the one-act drama Friedenstag, or Day of
Peace. The scenario for this work originated with Zweig; the libretto was written
by the theater historian Joseph Gregor, who took over as Strauss’s librettist
when collaboration with Zweig became impossible. The story opens with a town
starving under siege in the Thirty Years’ War. Its commandant is determined to
burn it to the ground rather than surrender, but he is released from his
destructive mission by the abrupt arrival of the “day of peace.” Some latter-day
interpreters have tried to explicate the opera as a covert act of protest, but in
truth the antiwar message blended all too well with Hitler’s cynical manipulation
of Euaopean pacifists; the Führer loved to twist the minds of democratic leaders
by arguing that his territorial acquisitions would prevent war, not start it.
(“Whoever lights the torch of war in Euaope,” Hitler said in 1935, “can only wish
for chaos.”) The emptiness of the sentiment bleeds through Strauss’s blandly
triumphant ending, a souped-up pastiche of the finales of Beethoven’s Ninth
and Fidelio with echoes also of Mahler’s Eighth. The score comes to life only
when Maria, the commandant’s wife, complains about how dreary her life has
become. As so often, Strauss identified most strongly with his lead female
character.
Hitler confirmed Strauss’s temporary return to grace by attending a gala
performance of Friedenstag in Vienna in 1939. (The premiere had happened in
Munich the previous year.) The Führer was awarded a stormy ovation when he
appeared in his box. He then ceded the spotlight to Strauss, who was saluted
with his own Fanfare for the Vienna Philharmonic. At a sort of press conference
with Goebbels the next morning, Strauss delivered his thanks and expressed
the hope that German art would prosper forever under the protection of the
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Third Reich. Then, in a two-hour-long private breakfast with Goebbels, he talked
about various problems that beset him, including the effect of anti-Jewish
measures on his family. “He is unpolitical, like a child,” Goebbels wrote in his
diary. Apparently, Strauss received assurances that his daughter-in-law and
grandsons would have Hitler’s official protection, although this was not
forthcoming. Alice Strauss was given a passport in which she was assigned the
middle name “Sara,” like all the female Jews in Germany.
Two years later the composer suffered a public breakdown as a result of
Goebbels’s psychological games. Strauss had been heard to make dismissive
remarks about the operettas of Lehár, whom, everyone knew, Hitler loved.
Goebbels called Strauss in for a meeting, which he ironically recounted in his
diary: “I say a few sweet nothings to him about his insolent letters. He cannot
stop writing letters, and it has already brought him much misfortune. Next time I
will show him.” In fact, this intimate exchange took place in front of a large
delegation of composers. Werner Egk described the scene in his memoirs.
“Lehár has the masses, you do not!” the minister screamed. “Stop once and for
all your chatter about the significance of ‘serious music’! You are not helping
your case! The art of tomorrow is different from the art of yesterday! You, Herr
Strauss, are yesterday!”
Afterward, Egk reported, Strauss stood for a while on the steps of the
Propaganda Ministry, tears streaming down his cheeks, his head buried in his
hands. “If only I had listened to my wife and stayed in Garmisch,” he murmured.
On January 30, 1939, Hitler celebrated the sixth anniversary of his regime by
delivering a major address to the Reichstag. Since the burning of the Reichstag
building in 1933, the German parliament had carried out its business, now
purely ceremonial, in the Kroll Opera House—where, in the Weimar time, Otto
Klemperer had conducted Hindemith’s News of the Day and Stravinsky’s
Oedipus Rex. In the same hall in 1933, a crippled parliament had passed the
Enabling Act, which granted the Reich chancellor dictatorial powers. Now, in
1939, Hitler gave notice that his dominion would in short order encompass
much of Europe and that those who stood in the way of destiny would face
destruction. Goebbels, in his diaries, described Hitler’s speech as a “spacious”
conception that built through an extended development of familiar themes to a
potent climax. “Posterity must cherish his speech as a masterwork,” Goebbels
wrote. “The ending of the speech is gripping and devastating. All are totally
enthralled by it. The Führer is a true genius.”
This speech added two new themes to the familiar denunciation of the Jews:
laughter and annihilation. “Very often in my life,” Hitler said, “I have been a
prophet, and have generally been laughed at [ausgelacht].” He announced that
it was now finally time to bring the Jewish problem to a “solution” whose sheer
scope might wipe the smiles from the faces of his enemies: “I believe that the
formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its
throat.” Hitler made another prophecy: “If the international Jewish financiers
inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more
into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and