Forbidden Music (52 page)

Promoting modern music, particularly its less audience-friendly varieties, thus became a priority of postwar re-education. The Bavarian government brought back the composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who had spent the Hitler years in self-imposed internal exile, to conduct the new
Musica Viva
series at the Prinzregententheater, broadcast by Bavarian Radio. It was not a popular success, as he wrote to Egon Wellesz on 2 January 1948:

The address that Hartmann gives for receipt of Wellesz's score is revealing: ‘Music Control Section; Information Control Division, APO 407; US Army.’ Given the fact that
Musica Viva
had been running since October 1945, it must have been frustrating to have taken more than two years to reach a mere 250 subscribers.

Even some of the most respected institutions of the postwar musical avant-garde, the summer courses in Darmstadt and the New Music Festival in Donaueschingen, are examples of modernism being used as an effective ‘seal of approval’ by the occupying Allies. Donauseschingen was in the French zone, and it was consistent with French cultural policies to leave its Nazi director, the former Schreker pupil Hugo Herrmann, in place when it restarted in the summer of 1946. This was despite the fact that Hermann had published an arrangement of the Nazi anthem, the
Horst Wessel Song
, as early as 1933 (along with various other Nazi songs for male chorus) before joining the party in 1939. The programmes offered during his post-Hitler tenure were hardly challenging. The occasional work by Shostakovich and Walter Piston
leavened the fare of more or less the same composers featured since 1937, including forgotten names such as Joseph Haas, Ernst Lothar von Knorr, Ottmar Gerster, as well as Herrmann himself. All were highly compromised, many were party members, and Gerster had even made it onto Hitler's ‘Chosen-by-God-List’ compiled as a weapon of cultural propaganda in 1944.
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This was too much for even the culturally tolerant French who closed it down until 1950 when it later reopened with a clear anti-Nazi and avant-garde agenda.
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The origins of the Darmstadt summer courses, located in the American Zone, are more obscure. Originally led by two composers on America's blacklist, Wolfgang Fortner and Hermann Heiss, both emerged as vocal proponents of twelve-tone music after spending their years under the Third Reich composing propaganda marches and songs for the Hitlerjugend. At least in the case of Heiss, he could claim that before the rise of Hitler he had studied with both Josef Matthias Hauer and Arnold Schoenberg, thereby proving his legitimate entitlement to promote dodecaphony. They were joined by other composers and performers on the American blacklist such as Udo Dammert and Bruno Stürmer. Thacker in
Music after Hitler
speculates that they simply lied about their Nazi pasts when engaged to teach at Darmstadt, while American denazification officials were not really aware of what was being initiated.
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In any case, by 1948 blacklisting had ended and the most tenacious American denazifiers had returned home. The Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc had been identified as a far more important concern than the remnants of Nazism left scattered across Germany and Austria.

The Beginning of the Cold War and a Change of Policy

It would not take long for it to dawn on American Intelligence officials that former Nazis, particularly those who had fought behind Soviet lines, would be useful in battling the rapidly spreading Soviet empire. The International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Geneva, had been issuing blank refugee passes to various organisations based in Rome and Genoa for legitimate humanitarian reasons. The Vatican's Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza, headed by the future Pope Paul VI, had been operating since 1944, ostensibly aiding refugees from Catholic countries. By the end of the war it was already assisting anti-Communists flee the Soviet Union.
²⁰
Vatican committees were engaged in what they perceived as a re-Christianisation of Europe by providing refuge to fleeing Nazis, many of whom allowed themselves to be baptised or re-baptised into the Catholic faith before shipping off to South America.
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All escaping Nazi criminals had to do was to reach Italy's
ethnically Austro-German region of South Tyrol where they could be placed in safe houses, receive their documentation and new identities before continuing their journey. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, labelled these escape routes ‘ratlines’ and quickly recognised their intelligence potential, subsequently co-opting many war criminals, certain of their usefulness in the emerging Cold War.

This created a complex scenario: rehabilitated Nazi criminals and sympathisers placed in culturally sensitive positions allowed a shoring up of anti-Communist defences from the right while American intelligence services were co-opting liberal and progressive groups into an anti-Communist block on the left. That the CIA fronted any number of ‘foundations’ and charitable organisations supporting anti-Communist activities in the arts has been known since the disclosure of documents in1967; their extent and long-term effects are less clear. Frances Stonor Saunders's
Who Paid the Piper
(1999) contends that artists participated in festivals and events with the express knowledge that they were demonstrating freedoms not enjoyed on the other side of the iron curtain.
The Mighty Wurlitzer
by Hugh Wilford, published in 2008, states that though some administrators in organisations such as the Fairfield Trust, the Ford Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) were aware of direct CIA support, most of the artists weren't; indeed, according to Wilford, even some of the senior staff of these organisations were unaware of where their money was coming from. Those who were trusted with information about the source of their funding were referred to in CIA parlance as ‘witting’. The classification of ‘witting’ or ‘unwitting’ was used internally by the CIA in describing an organisation's head, and various artists.

The exceedingly ‘witting’ Nicolas Nabokov ran the CCF for some fifteen years and organised propaganda cultural events such as the festival
L'Art du XXe siècle
in Paris in 1952, and later the International Conference of Twentieth-Century Music in Rome, which also included a composition prize. The competition, according to Pierre Boulez, featured a ‘folklore of mediocrity’ nurtured by an obsession with the number twelve: ‘a council of Twelve, a committee of Twelve, and Jury of Twelve’ and of course focusing largely on twelve-tone music.
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Stravinsky, a close Nabokov associate, headed the jury and had only recently taken up dodecaphonic composition himself. Boulez was not far off the mark. Writing in the
New York Herald Tribune
on 8 February 1953, Nabokov informed readers that ‘we are going to have a composers’ contest that is unlike any other competition ever held. Twelve young and promising but internationally unknown composers are to be invited to Rome, all expenses paid. Each will bring a score and these will be performed…. [A] special jury, democratically elected by all those attending
the conference, will pick from these twelve a winning work…. First, there will be a cash prize; second, there will be a promise of performance by three major orchestras in Europe and three in America; third, the work will be published, and fourth, it will be recorded by a leading company.‘
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The composition prize was won by Lou Harrison.

As with Karl Amadeus Hartmann's plans, convincing the public was more of a challenge. In
The New Yorker
, the writer and feminist Susan Sontag's reaction had by 1987 become more considered: ‘We were deferential – we knew we were supposed to appreciate ugly music; we listened devoutly to the Toch, the Krenek, the Hindemith, the Webern, the Schoenberg, whatever (we had strong stomachs).‘
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It was certainly not what was being performed in the USSR or the Communist Bloc, where artists did not have the freedom to perform or write ‘ugly music’ and it was this essential, but perhaps not so explicitly stated, point that anti-Communist propagandists were eager to make.

Whatever the artistic merits of the music coming out of postwar Rome, Darmstadt and Munich, it was most certainly not the Socialist Realism promoted behind the Iron Curtain. We return to Hanns Eisler's quote from 1950 with which we concluded Chapter 7; perhaps he was even anticipating Sontag's later appraisal: ‘If modern – that is – serious art distances itself progressively from the broader masses, then it becomes progressively more cynical, decadent, nihilistic and formalistically isolated; monopoly-capitalism's cultural industry has always understood the masses…. “True” art becomes merely “merchandised” art.‘
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The capitalist West was certainly vulnerable on this front. Soviet cinema, ballet, classical music and theatre were not only widely available for the masses to enjoy, they maintained relatively high artistic values while remaining intellectually and artistically accessible to receptive audiences. It goes without saying however, that there was also a diet of bombastic Socialist Realism that the compliant citizens of the Eastern Block had to tolerate with varying degrees of appreciation and desperation, while secretly delighting in whatever light-weight American cinema and television could be accessed through an otherwise impenetrable ‘iron curtain’. Assertions such as those made by Eisler that these mass-market offerings dulled the wits of consumers did not appear to dampen Eastern European enthusiasm. Still, one thing the CIA and the West could not really judge was how many creative artists from Communist Europe were longing for the freedom to write music that, according to Sontag, one needed a ‘strong stomach’ to appreciate.

The American arm of the CCF, known as the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, was aware of this and concentrated on organising tours to
Europe by America's most prestigious cultural organisations such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. They also began welcoming into the United States such tainted artists as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan. Wilford in his book on the CIA, and its means of infiltrating leftist non-Communist organisations and the arts, is more measured in his assessment of the CIA and music. He acknowledges that the CIA with its top people coming from Yale had a natural tendency to promote modern art and literature over ‘serious’ music. Jazz and popular music were supported but the American composers who represented an equivalent aesthetic development to, say, Jackson Pollock – such as John Cage and Milton Babbitt – seem to have been missing from CIA cultural planning.
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Contradicting this, however, is the view of the German composer Konrad Boehmer in an interview with the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
from 30 November 2008 in which he states that the CIA was ‘always in the background’, specifically with those composers associated with Adorno's Cologne School. These included Stockhausen, Kagel and Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
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Wilford's claim that the CIA was less interested in the musical avant-garde is disputed by Boehmer, who not only specifically mentions Cage in Darmstadt, but makes it clear that thanks to Adorno's influence with the CIA, and their specialist in psychological warfare, Michael Josselson, it was an open secret in the summer courses that they were involved to a significant degree.

Adorno's theory, taken much to heart by the CIA, was that ‘emancipated art led to an emancipated society’. It was quite clear that neither art nor society behind the Iron Curtain were particularly ‘emancipated’, but music composed in the Soviet Bloc was still able to attract audiences to a degree that ‘serious’ composers in the West could not. Extrapolating other Adorno observations on music in modern society may have sat less comfortably with the capitalist West, such as his statement that ‘society's resistance to music that represents such abused concepts as “Individualism”, “artistry” and “the technically esoteric”, are themselves manifestations of society and are to be corrected within society, rather than within music.‘
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Ultimately, Adorno seems to come to the same conclusion as his Communist colleague Eisler, as quoted above: ‘Wahre Kunst wird zur Ware Kunst’ – ‘True art becomes merchandised art’, with the German homophones for ‘true’ and ‘merchandised’ (
Wahre
and
Ware
) being put to especially effective use.

Consequences for the Banned

For composers who had been thrown out of Germany and Austria, the postwar environment was not very inviting. If former Nazis weren't in charge,
then bug-eyed experimentalists were found attempting to rebuild a society amenable to the ‘technically esoteric’. Neither was interested in re-establishing the careers of those forced into exile, though Sontag's quote which specifically mentions exiled composers highlights their revival as part of the allies re-education programme in the immediate decade following the war: Egon Wellesz's First Symphony was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sergiu Celibidache in 1948, and the following year, his Second Symphony was given by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karl Rankl before being taken up by Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. Boult and the BBC then commissioned the Third Symphony, which, as we shall see, never reached performance. Hans Gál's oratorio
De Profundis
was first performed in Wiesbaden in 1948; Ernst Toch's first two symphonies were given their premieres by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in the early 1950s; Korngold's opera
Violanta
was recorded by Austrian Radio (RAVAG) in 1947 and his opera
Die Kathrin
had its premiere – postponed from 1938 – at the still bombed-out Staatsoper in 1949.
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In 1955, Zemlinsky's
Der Kreidekreis
, the controversial run of which had taken place during the early Nazi years before being banned, was broadcast on Vienna Radio and was staged in Dortmund. Interest in composers banned by Hitler's Reich may have waned after its rapid postwar recovery, but it was maintained in fits and starts until 1960 when Winfried Zillig recorded Schreker's
Die Gezeichneten
for Austrian Radio, after which it more or less vanished altogether from scheduling.