It's one of the most curious details from a global conflict not exactly short of them.
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces launched a massive invasion on Normandy’s beaches, marking a pivotal turning point in World War II. And then, only six days after the so-called D-Day landings, the Berlin Philharmonic was in Paris entertaining an enraptured audience with Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner.
According to eye-witness accounts, the French greeted the orchestra with such frenzied enthusiasm that it had to play several encores before being allowed to leave the stage.
How the Nazis weaponised classical music
Such unrestrained French enthusiasm for German artists seems unfathomable, given that the German army had occupied Paris for nearly four years. Yet what this neatly illustrates is the premium the Nazis placed upon stellar performances of the core German repertoire for promoting their notions of cultural supremacy.
This tactic of weaponising classical music to soften up the populations in the occupied territories proved to be remarkably successful – it enabled the occupiers to secure complete acknowledgement from the occupied of German artistic hegemony while creating the myth that the two parties shared similar cultural values.
The Berlin Philharmonic was undoubtedly one of the country’s most potent assets in this process – from 1940-42, the orchestra gave well over 200 concerts outside Germany, of which the majority took place in occupied territories, though there were also tours to countries that were politically aligned to Nazi Germany. And the purpose of these concerts differed according to where they were performing.
'A brutal demonstration of German cultural policy'
Two weeks after the fall of France in 1940, the three concerts given by the Berlin Philharmonic in Paris and Versailles had three objectives. These were: to provided moral support for the German soldiers; to secure strong approval at home for the orchestra’s war efforts; and, perhaps most importantly, to stimulate potential future collaboration from French civilians.
In stark contrast, when it performed in occupied Eastern Europe, locals were forbidden to attend – these concerts were exclusively given in front of a German-speaking public. Here, the intention was far removed from securing any peaceful promotion of classical music, but rather a brutal demonstration of German cultural policy which, in the case of occupied Poland, sought to destroy all local institutions and traditions.
The Berlin Philharmonic was by no means the only cultural ambassador to be wheeled out of Germany on a fairly regular basis, as The Propaganda Ministry engaged a stream of star instrumentalists, singers and conductors to tour various parts of Europe in support of the war effort. Among the most grandiose projects were visits from leading German opera companies.
In 1941, for example, the Mannheim National Theatre appeared at the Opéra Garnier in Paris in Wagner’s Die Walküre, their presence in the French capital then immeasurably enhanced a few days later when the same forces performed the work in the French language.
Taking the Ring Cycle to Barcelona
Other ventures were even more ambitious. In 1941, the Frankfurt Opera presented a month-long season at Barcelona’s Teatro Liceu, staging Wagner’s mighty Ring cycle and works by Mozart and Richard Strauss. The entire company of singers and an orchestra of over 100 players decamped to the city, plus 30 crates of scenery and equipment that had to be transported in extremely difficult conditions over the Pyrenees.
It must have cost a great deal of money, but the Nazis provided the funds in the knowledge that some of the most influential people in Spain would be attending. Their presence reinforced the cultural and political legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and could help to secure a more proactive Spanish involvement in the war.
Chopin was played in Germany... but banned in his native Poland
On the home front, the outbreak of war necessitated a more ruthlessly xenophobic policy than had been the case in the years before. One month after the invasion of Poland, the Reichsmusikkammer issued a blanket ban on performing works by composers from enemy countries. But the law was sufficiently flexible to allow for some notable exceptions.
Bizet’s opera Carmen, for example, was deemed far too popular to be removed from German opera houses. Likewise, the music of Chopin continued to be played in Germany, whereas Poles living under Nazi occupation were forbidden to perform it for fear of stirring up local nationalist feelings.
In 1940, the Propaganda Ministry unveiled a new organisation known as the Reich Office for Musical Arrangement. Part of its brief was to recast the texts of popular musical stage works that, for various reasons, were deemed ideologically inappropriate in the context of war. A programme was also unveiled to 'aryanise' the texts of Handel oratorios that were based on episodes from the Old Testament.
Even Mozart's Requiem fell victim to the Nazi propaganda machine
Fanatical anti-Semitism afflicted the performance and reception of other hallowed masterpieces – Mozart’s Requiem was performed and recorded in Berlin in 1941 with a new text that removed all Hebrew words, and there was even an attempt to reconfigure Schumann’s song-cycle Dichterliebe with lyrics that replaced the poems by Heine, though it is unclear whether any performances of this new ‘arrangement’ ever took place.
In the foreword to his notorious Lexicon of Jews in Music of 1941, Nazi musicologist Herbert Gerigk proudly claimed that the Jewish influence on German music had been eradicated. Soon after, however, he had to eat his words after discovering to his horror that several wartime recordings of the Beethoven and Brahms violin concertos featuring German soloists retained the cadenzas by violinists Joseph Joachim and Fritz Kreisler, both Jews.
The Nazis and Mozart
Although works by moderrnist and Jewish composers had not featured in Germany for several years, political expediency with countries that were wartime allies ensured modest representation of Italian, Hungarian and Spanish music in concerts from 1939-45. Russian music also found unexpected, albeit temporary, favour from 1939-41 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. But for the most part, the Nazis relied heavily on promoting and celebrating the great German composers of the past.
Undoubtedly, the most ambitious wartime project in this respect was the Mozart commemoration that took place throughout the German Reich and some of the occupied territories throughout 1941, 150 years after the composer’s death. The climax took place in December in Vienna, where all of Mozart’s mature operas were staged and delegations from all over Europe were in attendance to hear rabble-rousing speeches from political leaders such as Baldur von Schirach, who claimed that performing Mozart formed a ‘vital part of what our soldiers are fighting for in defending our country against the wild assault of the barbarians from the East’.
Carmina Burana: a Nazi favourite
Inevitably, the war prompted a number of contemporary German composers to churn out patriotic cantatas which used texts glorifying heroic exploits on the battlefield from previous eras, but the regime was far more supportive of contemporary music that deflected attention away from the horrors of conflict.
For example, Carl Orff’s cantata Carmina Burana was one work that fitted this bill, and it enjoyed frequent performances during the war. The Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter described the work in 1940 as ‘the kind of disciplined music that is entirely appropriate for our era’. Yet the texts that inspired Orff, drawn from bawdy poems written by Benedictine monks in the Medieval era, have nothing whatsoever to do with the imagery of war.
A more extreme example of musical escapism took place on 28 October 1942 at the Munich National Theatre, with the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio. By all accounts, the opera house was filled to capacity, and the audience gave the work a rapturous reception. Correspondents from all over Germany were sent to Munich to review it, their articles taking up extensive column inches in many newspapers and journals.
The opera that became an unlikely Nazi favourite
That the performance was given under the ‘patronage of Reichsminister Dr Goebbels’ signified official approval of the work, even if the relationship between composer and politician had become distinctly frosty by this stage. More significantly, Strauss’s Mozartian idiom and the opera’s scenario, debating the primacy between words and music set in aristocratic 18th-century France, exude a timelessness which are as far removed from the catastrophic external environment of wartime Europe as could be imagined.
This begs the obvious question as to what motivated Goebbels to support such an ideologically opaque work as Capriccio. Perhaps the answer lies in the morale-boosting circumstances in which the performance took place. We have to remember that at that time, Munich was under constant bombardment from the Allies, and that the opera, which was performed without a break, could easily have been curtailed by the sounding of a fire alarm. Yet the spirit of determination that motivated the audience to attend the opera, whatever the odds, counted for a great deal, and represented for Goebbels that spirit of self-sacrifice that formed a vital element in bolstering the nation particularly when it was under the cosh.
Several years later, Rudolf Hartmann, who directed the first performance of Capriccio, vividly recalled the excitement surrounding this performance: ‘Who among the younger generation can really imagine a great city like Munich in total darkness, or theatre goers picking their way through the blacked-out street with the aid of small torches giving off a dim blue light?
'All this for the experience of the Capriccio premiere. They risked being caught in a heavy air raid, yet their yearning to hear Strauss’s music, their desire to be part of a festive occasion and to experience a world of beauty beyond the dangers of war led them to overcome all these material problems. Afterwards, it was difficult to relinquish the liberating and uniting atmosphere created by the artistic quality of the new work.’
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