Wilhelm Fürtwangler and Richard Strauss, 1936
Convinced that he enjoyed immunity because of his relationship with Hitler, Furtwängler continued to protest against the regime’s cultural dogmatism. In July 1933 he expressed regret over the treatment of Schonberg because the composer was prized by “the Jewish International as one of the most significant musicians of the present.” Making him into a “martyr” would only harm the image of Berlin abroad, he argued.
There was no question of reinstating Schonberg, and the Nazi authorities simply ignored Furtwängler’s intervention. But they could not turn a blind eye to the conductor’s defense of another musician on the Nazis’ blacklist, Paul Hindemith. On March 12, 1934, Furtwängler conducted the premier of three symphonic excerpts from Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler, which brought howls of protest from the nazified press. Alfred Rosenberg denounced the music as kitsch and insisted that the composer, who was married to a Jewess, was unfit to belong to “the highest art institutes of the new Reich.” Further performances of Mathis were banned. Furtwängler defended Hindemith in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, insisting that no one had done more for the international prestige of German music than this young composer. Many Berliners obviously agreed, for on the evening that Furtwängler’s article appeared the audience at the State Opera gave the conductor an extended ovation when he stepped to the podium. Göring, who was in the audience, interpreted the ovation as a challenge to the regime. Seeing an opportunity to strike at Goebbels, who admired both Furtwängler and Hindemith, Göring informed Hitler about the demonstration. Despite his appreciation for the conductor’s artistry, Hitler ordered the press to attack Furtwängler. He also insisted on his resignation from the vice presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer. In response, the maestro resigned all his posts and threatened to move to America. Unwilling to lose him, Hitler had Goebbels inform him that if he left he would never be allowed to return. Furtwängler backed down, even issuing a statement that henceforth he would not interfere in the Reich’s cultural policy, which he conceded should be made “solely by the Flihrer . . . and by the expert minister appointed by him.” The conductor resumed his post at the Berlin Philharmonic and in 1936 became musical director of the Bayreuth Festival.
The career of Furtwängler’s young rival, Herbert von Karajan, showed how quickly an artist could rise if he combined superb technical skill with political opportunism. Born in Austria in 1905, von Karajan joined the Nazi Party in April 1933 in order to smooth his path as an up-and-coming conductor. At that time he was working at the state theater in Ulm, a relatively undistinguished post, but in 1935 he became chief conductor at the Aachen opera. At age twenty-seven, he was the youngest general music director in Germany. He came to the attention of Heinz Ti-etjen, who brought him to Berlin as guest conductor of the Philharmonic in 1938. His Berlin debut was such a success that he was made a Kapellmeister at the State Opera in the following year. In addition to Tietjen, he cultivated the patronage of Göring, who hoped that his new wunderkind would eclipse Furtwängler in Berlin. Like a Gustav Gründgens of music, von Karajan made excellent use of his contacts. Soon he was challenging Furtwängler for supremacy in Berlin’s musical scene. He might have prevailed in this contest were it not for the fact that Hitler considered him an “arrogant fop.” Berlin proved barely big enough to accommodate both of these supremely egoistic musicians, and their bitter rivalry pointed up the politi-cization and Balkanization of the city’s cultural life.
In addition to misusing Berlin’s renowned musical ensembles for purposes of prestige and propaganda, the Nazi regime founded an orchestra of its own, the National Socialist Symphony Orchestra of the Reich, or NSRSO, as a vehicle to advertise its commitment to high culture. Dressed in brown tailcoats personally designed by Hitler, the NSRSO performed a traditional repertoire of the German Masters. This was a Nazi version of the Boston Pops: easy listening with a message. The band enjoyed much greater popularity in the provinces than in Berlin, whose major soloists refused to perform with it.
While the Nazis’ attempt at “popular” orchestral music never made much headway in Berlin, a very different kind of music, jazz, managed to survive in the capital during the Third Reich despite the Nazi leaders’ contempt for it. As we have seen, jazz had become well established in the city during the Weimar era—so much so that when the Nazis attacked the perversions of the Kurfürstendamm they included “the death of music in the jazz band.” The fact that jazz was an integral part of the invasion of American “nigger culture” made it all the more offensive in Nazi eyes, as did the great popularity in Germany of Jewish-American jazz musicians like George Gershwin and Benny Goodman. Goebbels, who liked to impress his starlets by tinkling on the piano, considered jazz an obscenity. His flunky at the Reichs-musikkammer, Peter Raabe, promised to “remove completely foreign jazz and dance music and to replace it with the works of German composers.”
But it was one thing to rail against jazz, quite another to eliminate it—especially in Berlin. After all, the Olympics were coming up in 1936, and it would not do for the German capital to be seen as parochial. Rather than banning jazz outright, the Nazi authorities sought to tame it by expelling the most innovative players (who were often foreign) and by censoring performances in the various jazz venues that were allowed to stay open. Agents of the Reichsmusikkammer combed through the clubs in search of Jews, illegal aliens, and any players lacking the requisite license issued by the chamber. To counter the popularity of jazz broadcasts beamed in from foreign countries, Goebbels allowed some local groups to air their music on the radio. For example, in late 1934 the propaganda minister sanctioned broadcasts by a Nazi-sponsored band called the Golden Seven, which searched for a golden mean between real jazz and the sort of innocuous treacle that prompted young Berliners to break the knobs off their “People’s Receivers” dialing back to the BBC. Not surprisingly, the search failed: the Seven’s music proved too ersatz for most listeners but “too American” for the authorities, and it went off the air in 1935.