German Music

How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate? The final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), this is a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight outstanding German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Noted historian Michael H. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime--and if so, whether this is evident in their music. He also considers the degrees to which the Nazis politically, socially, economically, and aesthetically succeeded in their treatment of these individuals, whose lives and compositions represent diverse responses to totalitarianism.

Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent? These questions and their implications are explored in Michael Kater's broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small--from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer--are examined by Kater, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are laid out before the reader. Kater tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. Kater's examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through the manner in which it manipulated its musicians, and by extension, German music, is of importance for understanding culture in totalitarian systems. This work, with its emphasis on the social and political nature of music and the political attitude of musicians during the Nazi regime, will be the first of its kind. It will be of interest to scholars and general readers eager to understand Nazi Germany, to music lovers, and to anyone interested in the interchange of music and politics, culture and ideology.

The most informed reference book on nineteenth-century music currently available, this comprehensive overview of music in the nineteenth century draws on the most recent scholarship in the field. Essays investigate the intellectual and socio-political history of the time, and examine topics such as nations and nationalism, the emergent concept of an avant garde, and musical styles and languages at the turn of the century. It contains a detailed chronology, and extensive glossaries.

During the Second World War the 'Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg' was set up, an organisation which aimed for the elimination of Jewish cultural life in the rest of Europe. A 'Sonderstab Musik' was also established, staffed by distinguished German musicologists whose task was to locate musical manuscripts, books and instruments. Its initial target was the possessions of Jewish musicians and composers who had fled the Nazi regime, but in the end it boiled down to a general confiscation and removal of Jewish possessions, including those connected with music-making. This book describes the activities of the 'Sonderstab Musik' in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.