Forbidden Music (42 page)

Despite the relatively early arrival of the RMK within the political apparatus, its removal of Jews from musical life was initially fairly half-hearted owing to Strauss's insistence on following the word, rather than the spirit, of the regulations. As the statutes of the RMK did not specifically prohibit Jews, Strauss was inclined to include them. This was despite a vague RKK statement from 9 November 1933 with the implication that Jews should be excluded. It took a specific instruction from Goebbels in March 1934, stating unequivocally that Jews were inappropriate stewards of German culture, before they were officially excluded. This position was reconfirmed the following month in an internal document of the RMK.
⁵⁵

Establishing whether a person was an Aryan or not, was to be based on information provided by applicants to the RMK on a questionnaire that was otherwise meant to establish the professional suitability of musicians. As the RMK had become
de facto
a closed trade union, it was impossible to work without membership, and this was only offered on the basis of the questionnaire. Surprisingly, it was almost a year after Goebbels's instruction that Jews be removed from musical life before the legal mechanism was put into place to dismiss the remaining 8,000 Jewish musicians still in employment in February 1935.
⁵⁶
Nevertheless, according to several entries in Goebbels's diaries, the RMK even under Raabe was not purging Jews efficiently enough. The problem lay in defining exactly who should be classed as a Jew.
⁵⁷
The
Nazi answer was to count the number of Jewish grandparents. This was straightforward if the grandparents were Jews, but more complicated if the grandparents came from mixed marriages. This hair-splitting became endemic at the RMK. For example, racially pure Germans, without any Jewish grandparents, were treated as Jewish if they converted to Judaism or if conversions to Judaism had taken place in previous generations. If an Aryan musician was married to a Jew, he or she was to be classified as ‘half-Jew’. Unsurprisingly, full Jews could not be classified as ‘half-Aryan’ under similar circumstances.

The Music Business

The Aryanisation of music publishers was a much slower process. Nevertheless, the voluntary organisation of publishers and music sellers (Deutsche Musikalien Verleger Verein – DMVV) was incorporated into the RMK in January 1934. Before that, as early as April 1933, the DMVV had declared itself supportive of the new government, and although it initially did not explicitly ban Jews, Viktor Albertis, Wilhelm Zimmermann, Henri Hinrichsen, Gustav Bock and Kurt Eulenburg found themselves removed from the executive committee of the DMVV and replaced with supporters of the new regime.
⁵⁸
Once incorporated into the RMK, membership of the DMVV became compulsory for all music dealers and publishers. Between 1933 and 1938, about forty publishers were run by Jewish owners or employed Jews in key executive positions. This amounted to a mere 10 per cent of music publishers, but had a severe impact on publishers of serious music. Peters, Benjamin, Bote & Bock, Eulenburg, Fürstner and Alrobi were the leading German publishers most severely affected, and with the annexation of Austria, a further 24 publishers were added including such prestigious houses as Universal Edition, Doblinger and Weinberger.
⁵⁹
Though there were no direct anti-Semitic attacks aimed specifically against Jews in the various trade magazines that served music publishers, there were clear instructions coming from above that Aryanisation should proceed apace and that under no circumstances should German publishers collaborate with non-Aryan publishers newly relocated abroad.
⁶⁰

Hermann Göring, who had been granted dictatorial powers in the implementation of a draconian ‘Four Year Plan’, started large-scale expropriation of Jewish businesses in 1936. Such powers allowed him to justify this as an ‘economic necessity’, and the removal of the last legal obstacles before the total economic disenfranchisement of all German Jews. Following the Austrian annexation, publishing houses such as Josef Weinberger – Mahler's first publisher, and the publisher of many important operetta composers – managed
to relocate to London. Peters, Universal Edition, Bote & Bock and others were Aryanised, with many of their former employees moving to G. Schirmer in New York, or Boosey & Hawkes in London. GEMA,
⁶¹
the rights management agency charged with collecting royalties from performances and broadcasting, was disbanded in March 1933 and replaced in September by the Nazi company STAGMA.
⁶²
The Austrian AKM (Autoren, Komponisten, Musikverleger) was folded into STAGMA after the annexation in 1938, despite protests from such international figures as Béla Bartók.

Logic suggests that Aryanisation would have been internationally sensitive, since publishers based in Germany provided scores and orchestral material for performances around the world. Indeed, a directive from 14 April 1939 stated that works banned in Germany (including annexed Austria) could still be exported, thereby providing much-needed foreign currency and, presumably, encouraging the further ‘degeneration’ of the world's non-Aryan population.
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Until 1942, catalogues that featured Jewish composers, along with printed scores by Jewish composers, were either consigned to be pulped, or marked as unavailable for sale or performance. Sales of scores by Jewish composers from antiquarian shops were to be restricted to music historians, and clearly marked with the letter ‘J’ along with a visible explanation as to its meaning.
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However, most publishers had taken the precaution of producing multiple copies, so that when some 30,000 printed scores and books were confiscated from Universal Edition, almost everything could be recovered later. Alfred Schlee informed Kurt Weill in 1946 that some works had been destroyed, including
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
.
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Fortunately he was mistaken as most of Schoenberg's and Weill's scores had been hidden behind the organ of a provincial village church.
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Weinberger suffered the destruction of scores by Leo Fall, which had been specifically moved to safety away from their normal place of storage but were later found by Nazis.
⁶⁷
However, the same publisher managed to rescue the manuscript of Erich Korngold's opera
Die Kathrin
from the composer's villa. Along with other items in Korngold's library,
Die Kathrin
was being thrown into the furnace of the central heating system by marauding Nazis while Korngold was away in Los Angeles composing the film score to Errol Flynn's
The Adventures of Robin Hood
.
⁶⁸
Weinberger employees broke into the cellar, recovered what was left of the manuscript, and returned it to Korngold by interleaving sheets between pages of Beethoven, Mozart and other acceptably ‘Aryan’ composers and posting these to the composer in California. The orchestral material was rescued from the archive of Vienna's Staatsoper, where it had been scheduled to go into rehearsal under Bruno Walter. The opera was given its premiere in October 1939 in Stockholm, where it was met with mixed reviews, some of
them confrontationally anti-Semitic.
⁶⁹
By the time of the officially unleashed overnight pogroms of 9–10 November 1938 (Reichstkristallnacht or Kristallnacht), and the stipulation the following month forbidding non-Aryans from attending any public events, Jews found themselves effectively removed from every means of social, economic or cultural interaction in what had formerly been their native country.

The concert agency Wolff & Sachs in Berlin, formerly the representative for nearly all major performers in Germany and providing day-to-day management for the Berlin Philharmonic since its foundation in 1882, was dissolved in 1935.
⁷⁰
In Vienna, the publisher Hugo Knepler (brother of the librettist Paul Knepler, who had written texts for Leo Fall and Robert Stolz as well as for Franz Lehár's
Giuditta
) took over Vienna's Gutmann concert agency in 1907 and became the city's most powerful concert promoter, mounting over 2,000 events and managing such important artists as Maria Jeritza, Arthur Nikisch, Pablo Casals, Jascha Heifetz, Bronisław Huberman, Artur Schnabel and many others until the company crashed in 1931. After Austria's annexation, Knepler fled to France but was captured and deported by the Vichy Regime and murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Smaller Jewish agencies in Germany and Austria were broken up, dissolved, subsumed or Aryanised under the Reichsmusikkammer.

The purging of musical life of all elements not deemed Aryan was fraught with complexities. As late as 1936 and 1937, Berlin Radio had compiled a blacklist of artists who were to be banned from engagement or performance. This included musicians who were not remotely Jewish such as the Austrian composers Julius Bittner and Wilhelm Kienzl, while the Jewish Erich Korngold is conspicuous by his absence.
⁷¹
Against such blatant and obvious inconsistencies, the idiosyncratic infringements of other musical Gauleiters, such as those who banned the non-Jewish Manfred Gurlitt while allowing the premiere of
Concertante Musik
by the partially Jewish Boris Blacher by the Berlin Philharmonic under Carl Schuricht in 1937, come across as arbitrary at best, or incompetent at worst.

An acute problem was caused by one of the mainstays of German literature, the Jewish writer Heinrich Heine, who died in 1856. Hardly any other poet had been set so enthusiastically by so many of the great German composers of the nineteenth century. Karl Blessinger in
Judentum und Musik
– one of the most astounding anti-Semitic tracts of the Nazi era – makes the paranoid observation that Jews had camouflaged themselves through a clever use of language to conceal their ambitions for world domination.
⁷²
He even goes so far as to suggest that Schumann was able to stop Jewish subterfuges by setting a sufficient number of Heine texts to nip Jewish plots
in the bud.
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Nazi favourites such as d'Albert's
Tiefland
and Lehár's
Lustige Witwe
were also compromised by librettos by Jewish authors – as Ralph Benatzky pointed out in his diaries, he couldn't recall the name of a single operetta librettist who wasn't Jewish.

Hofmannsthal was another ‘difficulty’. The president of the Reichsmusikkammer, Richard Strauss, however, had seen their collaboration as artistically crucial to his own success, though he went too far in engaging Stefan Zweig, another non-Aryan, as librettist for
Die schweigsame Frau
– an act considered so reckless that it cost him his position at the RMK. Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's Jewish librettist for
Don Giovanni
,
Così fan tutte
and
Le Nozze di Figaro
, was yet another headache, as were the German translations of these operas by another Jew, Hermann Levi, the very same Jew who had conducted the premiere of Wagner's
Parsifal
. Even the other Strausses, Johann, Father and Son, had inconveniently turned out not to be of the pure Nordic stock demanded by the new rulers of the Reich. This was stealthily rectified using a pair of scissors on the Registry of Baptisms in St Stephen's Cathedral, where the names of the offending Jewish grandparents were snipped out. These doctored Strauss credentials may have helped Nazi purists save face, but it was already well known that the Strauss family lived in Vienna's Jewish district, locally known as the ‘Matzos Island'; and as two of Strauss the younger's three wives indicate, he showed a clear preference for Jewish women. Being the Waltz King's step-child did not save the daughter of his third wife Adele from deportation and the gas chambers. Still, it must have been clear to even the dimmest of wits that German and Jewish culture had become so closely intertwined that it was impossible to disentangle them without significant self-harm.

The various attempts at tabulating who was Jewish and who wasn't, and under what conditions certain works could be performed, resulted in the circulation of alarming quantities of misinformation. Advertisements were taken out by many performers offering to prove their Aryan lineage in order to avoid removal from programmes and schedules. A definitive guide was needed and it was commissioned from two leading musicologists in Rosenberg's Office, Herbert Gerigk and Theo Stengel. It appeared under the very utilitarian title of
Lexikon der Juden in der Musik
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and was first published in 1940, with regular updates and amendments until its final edition in 1943. Deplorable in context it surely was, but with its list of some 10,000 names, it offers one of the most useful references for composers and works officially removed from Nazi musical life. As it was meant as a manual for concert promoters, it does not include Jewish performers who died before 1933 but it does include long-dead Jewish composers, librettists and poets. Nevertheless – and perhaps as a
tacit admission of the utter futility of such an undertaking – the name of Heinrich Heine is absent. This is a silent acknowledgment that the authorities could not expect singers to forgo such classics as Schubert's
Die Lorelei
or Schumann's
Dichterliebe
and
Liederkreis
– and even Wagner's
Flying Dutchman
was based on a Heine source. In recital programmes featuring Heine settings by the likes of Brahms, Schumann, Schubert and Liszt, the solution chosen by most was not to mention the poet's name at all or, more iniquitously, to use alternative ‘Aryanised’ texts provided by the Reichsmusikbearbeitungen. Failing this, they simply inserted someone else's name. Heine, more than anyone, proved the futility of trying to disentangle German and Jewish culture, though tragically, this did not stop the Nazis from continuing to try.
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Jewish Cultural Leagues

It is no surprise that expelling Jews from musical institutions did little to relieve the problem of the 24,000 German musicians already out of work, or the 50,000 who were earning less than 100 Marks per month.
⁷⁶
No amount of Nazi legislation could enable inferior Aryans stepping seamlessly into positions left by more competent Jews. As such, the difference made to unemployment among musicians, beyond rank and file orchestral players, was hardly noticeable. If anything, firing such large numbers of Jews merely increased the unemployment statistics, adding to the obligation to pay benefits to individuals whose loss of employment was brought about by the government that claimed to be solving Germany's economic difficulties. This conflict had already been anticipated, however, as had the potential problem of the appearance of Nazi ghettoization of Jews to the outside world.