Читать онлайн «The Rest Is Noise Series: Death Fugue: Music in Hitler’s Germany»
Автор Алекс Росс
This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music,
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode The Art of Fear: The music of oppression and war.
Alex Ross, music critic for the
DEATH FUGUE
Music in Hitler’s Germany
From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
Contents
About the Publisher
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 twenty-three-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.
