Von Karajan and other musical Nazis

Not long ago, with reference to Jonathan Petropoulos’s recent book Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany, we looked at the lives of a few painters, writers, filmmakers, and composers who, faced with the prospect of working under the Nazi regime, chose either to flee the country or to stay and pursue various degrees of collaboration – some of them accepting Nazi oversight with shame and reluctance, others becoming ardent followers of the Führer.

Fritz Trümpi

Our coverage of these Nazi-era artists, of course, wasn’t comprehensive. Another new book, The Political Orchestra by Austrian scholar Fritz Trümpi, provides a highly illuminating pendant to Petropoulos’s. Trümpi’s subject, as stated in his subtitle, is “The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics During the Third Reich.” As Terry Teachout put it in a review of Trümpi’s book for the June issue of Commentary, “The story of European classical music under the Third Reich is one of the most squalid chapters in the annals of Western culture, a chronicle of collective complaisance that all but beggars belief.” Teachout makes a crucial point:

Terry Teachout

Without exception, all of the well-known musicians who left Germany and Austria in protest when Hitler came to power in 1933 were either Jewish or, like the violinist Adolf Busch, Rudolf Serkin’s father-in-law, had close family ties to Jews. Moreover, most of the small number of non-Jewish musicians who emigrated later on, such as Paul Hindemith and Lotte Lehmann, are now known to have done so not out of principle but because they were unable to make satisfactory accommodations with the Nazis. Everyone else—including Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Walter Gieseking, Herbert von Karajan, and Richard Strauss—stayed behind and served the Reich.

Wilhelm Fürtwangler

Both orchestras were equally prepared to compromise with the Nazis, firing Jewish musicians and removing compositions by Jews from their repertoires. Nor did either orchestra undergo any major postwar denazification: Helmut Wobisch, executive director of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1953 to 1968, was known to have been in both the SS and Gestapo; Herbert von Karajan – who, as musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1956 to 1989, was one of the preeminent names in classical during the second half of the twentieth centuries – had also had Nazi ties. At least in the early decades after the war, neither institution was terribly open about its tarnished history, but the folks in Vienna were even worse than the ones in Berlin, keeping a lid on their archives until Trümpi finally managed to pry it off in 2008; both orchestras now have substantial sections on their websites fessing up to their wartime collaborationist zeal.

Herbert von Karajan

When Hitler came along, as Teachout notes, the Berlin and Vienna ensembles were considered the two greatest symphony orchestras on the planet; they still are. Each had its own distinct “sound.” But they shared, in Teachout’s words, “a nationalistic ethos, a belief in the superiority of Austro-German musical culture that approached triumphalism.” This was a conviction they shared with Hitler himself. One consequence of this attitude was that even before Hitler came to power, both orchestras weren’t eager to employ Jews. In 1933, Berlin had four Jewish players; in 1938, when the Nazis marched into Austria, Vienna had 11, all hired before 1920 (seven of them ended up directly or indirectly dead at the hands of the Nazis). Despite the institutional anti-Semitism, the famous Jewish conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter were able to work in Vienna for some time after the Anschluss.

Leonard Bernstein

We’ve spent some time on this website revisiting Leonard Bernstein’s enthusiasm for the Black Panthers and other radical-left phenomena. He figures significantly in Trümpi’s account, too. Despite the known Nazi histories of both the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics, Bernstein not only chose not to boycott them (a position in which he was far from alone) but, as Teachout puts it, “went so far as to affect a flippant attitude toward the morally equivocal conduct of the Austro-German artists whom he encountered in Europe after the war.” Writing to his wife from Vienna, Bernstein told her he’d befriended von Karajan, “whom you would (and will) adore. My first Nazi.” Writing to his parents, he acknowledged: “you never know if the public that is screaming bravo for you might contain someone who 25 years ago might have shot me dead. But it’s better to forgive, and if possible, forget.”

On Holiday

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Billie Holiday

In a recent issue of Commentary, music critic Terry Teachout recounts in brief the story of the great jazz singer Billie Holiday. Jazz aficionados know some of the basics: she grew up poor, became a prostitute at a very young age, pulled herself out of poverty to become a star – but destroyed herself with drugs, alcohol, and a series of compulsively self-destructive relationships, being “irresistibly drawn,” as Teachout puts it, “to flashy, violent men who, like the pimps she had known in her childhood, lived off her earnings.”

Yet through it all she remained a gifted musical artist, able (to quote Teachout again) to “make even the most trivial Tin Pan Alley ditties seem meaningful” and to bring first-class songs “to vivid life without falling victim to the temptation to over-dramatize them.” Teachout cites Holiday’s prewar recordings of such tunes as “I Wished on the Moon” and “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” as archetypal of her work at its best. Other examples: “Easy Living” and “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart (and Throw away the Key).”

But in 1939, Holiday’s career began to take a major turn – one that, as Teachout tells it, had a surprising political element. During a long-term association with a New York club called Café Society, Holiday “changed her style deliberately and dramatically,” introducing new songs into her repertoire. Among them was “Strange Fruit,” which Teachout describes as “a minor-key setting of a poem about a lynching” that is performed “at a paralytically slow tempo” and “full of melodramatic couplets whose sincerity cannot disguise their staginess.” In any event, it became a hit (and a classic) – and pushed her over the line from successful band singer to full-fledged singing star.

Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit” is powerful – as is virtually everything else she recorded. A social statement for which the word “impassioned” is far too weak, the song serves up a ghoulish image of a lynched corpse and bitterly condemns what the lyric refers to, with acid sarcasm, as “the gallant South.” It’s interesting and instructive to learn from Teachout that the lyrics were by Abel Meeropol, a fervent Communist who (small world) adopted the sons of the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after the spies’ 1953 execution. 

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Abel Meeropol

Needless to say, lynching was every bit as abominable a practice as “Strange Fruit” suggests. But for Stalinists like Meeropol, writing songs about such subjects for American consumption was a consummately cynical exercise; such productions were, quite simply, Cold War weapons, the kind that America was not in a position to counter with similar weapons of its own, given the hermetic nature of Soviet culture. And what effective weapons songs like Meeropol’s were – promoting the diabolical ideology of Stalinism by pummeling the consumers of American popular culture with reminders of the very worst aspects of American history and thus rendering them more vulnerable to the idea that the enemy’s way just might be better.

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Terry Teachout

Holiday, however addled by drugs and booze and beatings, wasn’t unaware of this aspect of her work. She was a mess, but she wasn’t stupid. “Strange Fruit” changed her style. As the music critic John Hammond has observed, her later work remained “marvelously musical” but also became “mannered” and “self-conscious.” He called Meeropol’s song “the beginning of the end” for Holiday as an artist, because it made her “the darling of the left-wing intellectuals,” which in turn caused her to start “taking herself very seriously and thinking of herself as very important.”

Teachout puts it this way: at Café Society, Holiday “reinvented herself as a politically conscious torch singer” and thus became “a magnet for leftists, many of them of the hardest possible kind.” These were people who were “more interested in her utility as a political symbol than in her artistry.”

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Robert Meeropol

Billie Holiday, political symbol? You bet. Just poke around online. The World Socialist Web Site devotes a page to the story of “Strange Fruit.” Earlier this year, in People’s World (which describes itself as “the direct descendant of the Daily Worker”), Robert Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ younger son, sought out parallels between Holiday and his mother, the traitor, paying tribute to both of them and concluding as follows: “In 2015, the centennial year of both of their births, we remember Billie Holiday for singing about lynching, and we remember Ethel Rosenberg for being legally lynched.”

The artistic results of Billie Holiday’s conversion from purely apolitical songstress to tool of left-wing propagandists were not pretty. “From 1939 on,” Teachout writes, “she resorted with fast-growing frequency to a lugubrious self-dramatization and exaggeration”; while “still capable of singing with moving expressivity,” she exchanged “unselfconscious simplicity” for “the inflated pseudo-profundity of ‘Strange Fruit.’” Was she a useful stooge? Hard to say. But she was surrounded by them, used by them, influenced by them, and paraded by them as a victim of a society that, in point of fact, was, for all its egregious faults, incomparably superior to the murderous totalitarian dictatorship for which they labored incessantly and lied without shame.