And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (25 page)

*
Wahl was lucky: after spending three months in Drancy, where he wrote seventy poems, he was released and eventually made his way to the United States.

*
Bousquet escaped punishment after the war and enjoyed a stellar career in banking before his past caught up with him; in 1991, he was indicted for crimes against humanity. Two years later, he was murdered in his home by a lone gunman with known psychiatric problems.

*
In practice, children were separated from their parents. Many were held at Beaune-la-Rolande, fifty miles south of Paris, before being deported on their own.

*
The three unwritten volumes planned for “her”
War and Peace
were
Captivité, Bataille
and
La Paix
.

*
Astonishingly, during some of this period, many Jews interned by Vichy remained in camps in Morocco and Algeria.

_·
CHAPTER 8
_·
Vivace Ma Non
Troppo

WHILE PARISIANS
ignored Germany’s efforts to market its literature, theater and cinema, they responded warmly to its music. And why shouldn’t they? There was no language barrier and, further, they already knew and liked German music.
^*
After all, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and so many other German greats stood at the heart of all classical music. And just as Hitler’s barbarities could hardly be blamed on German composers, not even on that infamous anti-Semite and Romantic nationalist Richard Wagner, the Third Reich could in no way claim credit for their genius.

The Nazis, however, thought otherwise. In 1941, Goebbels proclaimed the Germans to be “the first musical people on earth” and, as such, natural heirs to the great composers of the past.
¹
He also understood that music was the one area where Germany could impress the French and successfully export its culture. As a result, confident that
they would be well received by the French public as well as by cultivated Wehrmacht officers, Berlin mobilized German conductors, orchestras, opera companies and choirs to carry German music to Paris and the French provinces throughout the occupation. And to show French musicians bowing before German music, a score of French composers and critics were invited to Vienna in late 1941 for commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death.

Of course, not all German music was German enough. By the mid-1930s, the Nazis had banned the works of dead Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Mahler and living avant-gardists like Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Kurt Weill. Then, in 1938, inspired by Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art, an exhibition held the previous year in Munich, they organized a similar show called Entartete Musik, or Degenerate Music, in Düsseldorf. In 1940, expanding the blacklist to occupied France, they then included French Jewish composers, notably Paul Dukas, who had died five years earlier, and Darius Milhaud, who was already in the United States. In practice, though, works by Dukas and Mendelssohn—though not Milhaud—were performed and occasionally broadcast in the unoccupied zone. Further, Jacques Offenbach, a German-born Jew who had made his name in France in the mid-nineteenth century, remained immensely popular, with his operettas performed in the south and his cancan music heard nightly in Paris cabarets.

For the French, the particular appeal of classical music was that its abstract nature provided a unique respite from reality. When German military bands or choirs performed at lunchtime on the steps of the Paris Opera, crowds quickly gathered, not to approve the occupation but drawn by the magnet of music. And when German brass bands played in the Luxembourg Gardens, Parisians sunning themselves nearby could forget for a moment that those were the trumpets of a conquering army. Indeed, if anything, the real danger of classical music was that it risked humanizing the Nazis: If so many uniformed Germans attended concerts or operas because they, too, loved music, did this make them less than monsters? Could a man whose eyes filled with tears upon hearing Mozart also be an assassin? Was a country that had given the world Bach and the Berlin Philharmonic all bad? In truth, the emotions stirred by music are accessible to all. Hitler admired Bruckner as well as Wagner, while Mussolini
was himself a musician, a violinist. After attending a Berlin Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to celebrate Hitler’s fifty-third birthday on April 20, 1942, Goebbels wrote: “It was interpreted perfectly and with thrilling effect. I have never heard it played with such fervor. The public was deeply moved. Around me, I see soldiers and workers with tears in their eyes.”
²
In
Dolce
, the second volume of Irène Némirovsky’s unfinished epic,
Suite française
, a lonely Frenchwoman opens her heart to a German officer billeted in her home when he plays the piano.

Looking to market German music, the Propaganda Staffel pushed Vichy into restarting the musical life of Paris. The city’s musicians were equally eager to return to work. Orders went out to reopen the opera houses and concert halls, along with the Conservatoire de Paris, the country’s leading music college, all still Vichy’s responsibility. Four symphonic orchestras also revived their tradition of holding Sunday afternoon concerts, each in its own venue: the Association des Concerts Lamoureux in the Salle Pleyel; the Association des Concerts Pasdeloup in the Salle Gaveau; the Association des Concerts Pierné
^*
in the Théâtre du Châtelet; and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in the Salle du Conservatoire.

In July 1941, the composer Francis Poulenc wrote to the exiled Milhaud, “Musical life is intense and everyone finds in it a way of forgetting the present sadness.”
³
Initially, though, orchestras were short of musicians: a good number were prisoners of war, others were Jews who felt safer in the unoccupied zone, and a few were Parisians who had fled the city during the exodus and were awaiting German permission to return. Paris also lost one orchestra: the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, which took refuge in Rennes during the phony war, moved to Marseille in June 1940 and was now dependent on Vichy (it returned to Paris only in March 1943, four months after the unoccupied zone was taken over by the Germans). But in October 1941, Paris gained another: Radio-Paris, the German-run French-language radio station, founded the Grand Orchestre de Radio-Paris, which soon drew good audiences for its twice-weekly free concerts at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. And since Vichy was required to finance the operation of Radio-Paris as part of its
innumerable economic burdens, it also ended up paying the wages of the eighty-member Radio-Paris orchestra.
^*

Evidently, Vichy could not ignore the Germans. For instance, Vichy’s secretary-general of fine arts, Louis Hautecoeur, named the heads of cultural institutions, but only after consulting the Propaganda Staffel. Similarly, while Vichy increased the prewar cultural budget, it had to reimburse theaters for the tickets given to the occupation forces: 20 percent of seats at the Paris Opera and the Opéra-Comique were reserved for the Wehrmacht, with other tickets sold at a 50 percent discount.

Vichy’s strongest musical asset, though, was its star performer, the concert pianist Alfred Cortot, who was acclaimed across Europe, including in Germany. Although Swiss-born, he had moved to France as a child and now, at the age of sixty-three, was a convinced
pétainiste
. Working first as an adviser to Hautecoeur and, from May 1942, to the education minister, Abel Bonnard, he was the only important artist to play an official role in the regime. In 1942, he was named president of the Comité Professionel de la Musique, and the following year he headed what became known as the Cortot Committee, a kind of advisory group made up of musical heavyweights, both moderates and
pétainistes
. He took his position seriously, using it to promote music education and to reorganize the music profession. He also gave his blessing to an excellent program called Les Jeunesses Musicales de France, or Musical Youth of France, designed to introduce young people to classical music: as many as fifty thousand students participated in the 1942–43 season, with members attending dress rehearsals at the opera and given free tickets to concerts.

At the same time, Cortot kept performing, offering recitals across France and, more compromisingly, playing with German orchestras, in France and in Germany. In June 1942, he traveled to Berlin to perform Schumann’s Piano Concerto, with Wilhelm Fürtwangler conducting the Berlin Philhamonic. At a reception upon his return to Paris, Max d’Ollone, the head of the music section of the Groupe Collaboration, congratulated him for his “useful act of collaboration” as the first French artist to perform in Germany since the occupation. Six months later, Cortot gave more concerts in Berlin and five other German cities. And it was for this musical collaboration,
more than for his work in Vichy, that he had to answer after the liberation.

The French delegation attending the 1791–1941 Mozart commemorations in Vienna, where it was received by Richard Strauss, was celebrated as another example of cultural collaboration. Led by Hautecoeur, the delegation included Jacques Rouché, who was overall head of the Paris Opera and the Opéra-Comique, the Fascist critic Lucien Rebatet, the prominent Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, the collaborationist French composers Florent Schmitt and Marcel Delannoy as well as critics and journalists, including Robert Bernard, the Swiss-born editor of
L’Information Musicale
, the Nazi-authorized music weekly. The visitors could hardly not be impressed by a program of not fewer than sixty-five concerts.

As with similar delegations of artists, writers and movie stars, not all those accepting German invitations were Nazi sympathizers; the most frequent justification for making the trip was the promise that, in exchange, some French prisoners of war would be released. But there is also no record of anyone being freed—or of anyone turning down the invitation to Vienna to protest measures now being applied against Jewish musicians. By then, most Jews had lost their jobs in the orchestras of Paris. Eighteen Jewish-owned music publishers had been closed or Aryanized. The Jewish composer and conductor Manuel Rosenthal, who was released from a prisoner-of-war camp in February 1941, was told in July that year that he could no longer conduct the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française. Soon afterward, Paul Paray, another composer-conductor, left for Monaco rather than conduct the same orchestra stripped of its Jewish instrumentalists. The composer Reynaldo Hahn, born in Venezuela of a German Jewish father, was certified as an Aryan, but he wisely spent the war in Marseille. The Society of Authors, Composers and Editors of Music, known by its French acronym of SACEM, even asked its 12,500 members to declare in writing that they were not Jewish. Later, however, after Vichy froze royalties due to Jewish composers, SACEM secretly gave money to some composers who were in hiding and to the wives of others who had been deported. Of those deported, at least fifteen died in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.

Even if music lovers regarded classical music as a deeply personal experience, then, the world of music could not escape being politicized. And with the Nazis using music as a propaganda tool, anti-Nazis also felt called upon to respond. But what could they do?
They had already suffered losses in their ranks. Three promising young French composers—Jehan Alain, Maurice Jaubert and Jean Vuillermoz—had been killed in the Battle of France. Along with Milhaud, the revered music teacher Nadia Boulanger, although not herself persecuted, was living in New York, where she began a long and influential relationship with American composers.

Raymond Deiss, the publisher of Milhaud, Poulenc and other French composers, took the lead. Just four months after the occupation, acting entirely on his own initiative, he started printing a protest sheet with the Rabelaisian name of
Pantagruel
. In the first issue, he called on his countrymen to support General de Gaulle, who, he assured them, would triumph with the support of the British people, “whose unbreakable phlegm and determination are legendary.” Over the next year, he issued sixteen numbers of his sheet before he was arrested and deported to Germany. Two years later, largely forgotten in France, he was decapitated in a prison in Cologne. Maurice Hewitt, who had been a member of the Capet String Quartet before the war and in 1939 founded the Hewitt Chamber Orchestra, recorded works by Rameau during the occupation. At the same time, already in his late fifties, he joined a British-run resistance group helping Allied airmen to escape France through Spain. Arrested in December 1943, he was deported to Buchenwald, where he organized concerts. After his release in 1945, wearing prison-camp clothes, he conducted a performance of Fauré’s
Requiem
in memory of French deportees.

But for the tiny minority of musicians who took a stand, the battle against the Germans was fought mainly in the musical arena itself. Already in late 1941, an underground newspaper,
L’Université Libre
, recognized that it was illogical to boycott all German music, but it urged French musicians not to betray their own roots by collaborating with the occupier. Some were already doing so, such as the composers Delannoy and Schmitt, who had joined d’Ollone in the Groupe Collaboration; the conductor and composer Eugène Bigot, who attended dinners organized by the group; and Joseph Canteloube, who had offered his services to Cortot in Vichy. The following summer, the conductor Roger Désormière and the composer Elsa Barraine decided to form a resistance group linked to the Communist Party; they called it the Comité du Front National de la Musique.
^*
They were subsequently joined by an impressive list of musicians: the composers Honegger, Poulenc, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Alexis Roland-Manuel, Rosenthal and Henri Dutilleux; the soprano Irène Joachim; Claude Delvincourt, director of the Conservatoire de Paris; and Charles Munch, the permanent conductor of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, the country’s top orchestra.