Music Under Dictatorship
THIS does not seem the proper time to discuss certain similarities in the dictatorships of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. However, it is highly important for us to remember that, although these countries are now engaged in war, they are both dictatorships, having among great differences certain inevitable likenesses. I shall attempt to show in this article how the implicit evils of dictatorship reveal themselves in the governmental policies toward one of the arts — music. Of course I am forced to base my analysis of the Russian musical situation on activities that preceded the German invasion; to discuss the policy toward music in Germany is a simpler task, since the internal life there has not been dislocated to the same drastic extent as in the invaded countries.
Germany is the land of the Gestapo, of concentration camps, superorganized war industries, and Jewish persecution. But these generalities do not explain everything. For instance, Germany also boasts three hundred thousand choral organizations, active now in wartime, several hundred fairly good symphony orchestras, an excellent state-subsidized opera house in almost every important city, innumerable musical conservatories filled to capacity, and yearly musical festivals still being held at Salzburg, Munich, and Potsdam. Only recently the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations invited ‘foreigners’ to come to a session of a musical summer school in Salzburg and Potsdam, and in the very impressive catalogue one finds the names of such excellent musicians and pedagogues as Gieseking, Backhaus, Krauss, and Schünemann. Eminent musicologists of Old World repute such as Schering and Schünemann are writing books in Germany and editing works of the great masters.
The U. S. S. R. produces a greater amount of fairly well written contemporaneous music than any other country, and most of this music is not only printed but also performed. The Soviet Government spends a considerable amount of money for the propagation of musical culture in the various federal republics of the Union.
How can one reconcile these diametrically opposed facts of dictatorship and seemingly free cultural activity? The answer is that the life of a people under any régime is a most complex phenomenon and cannot be explained by any generalities such as ‘land of the Reds’ or ‘land of the Gestapo.’
On the one hand, the U. S. S. R. is a federal union based on fundamental principles of internationalism, and thus is interested in promoting the international element in art. On the other hand, the Soviet Government encourages and fosters the development of national schools of music based on the folklore of the various peoples of the Union.
Germany, quite to the contrary, is in the eyes of the Nazi Government an unassailable ‘fortress of the German spirit,’ and therefore every great musical work of the past, all contemporary pieces, — in short, all musical activity, — must be regarded from this point of view. Furthermore, while Russia has but a very short musical tradition, Germany has been in the last few centuries the leader of western European musical culture, and has a tradition which goes back as far as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Therefore, Russia needs a tremendous output of music to satisfy the newly awakened appreciation of its music-loving people, whereas Germany can always rely upon the works of Wagner or reinterpret in an urgermanisch way the compositions of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Bach.
I
I should like to describe in some detail the musician’s life in the U. S. S. R. as it was before the German invasion. The Soviet composer, by the law of his country, belongs to a union of composers, authors, and performing artists. In order to be elected a member of such a union he is required to pass a test which, as far as I can ascertain, is entirely professional and absolutely nonpolitical. Once a member of the union, he benefits considerably from his prerogatives. When he writes a piece of music, he is remunerated according to an established scale of prices per page for the various kinds of composition. Publication of his work is guaranteed. Frequently there is a long delay, but this is due mostly to a lack of technical equipment rather than to the interference of authorities or unwillingness of the union’s publication committee.
The Musgiz (State Musical Publishing House) is controlled by the musicians themselves, of course, under the watchful eye of government representatives. Furthermore, the work of a composermember of the union is almost always performed, and thus he comes in direct contact with the Soviet public. Hence he has a definite social status, based on a certain amount of economic security, which few composers of so-called ‘serious music’ have in the United States. In addition, there is a great demand for new music in the U. S. S. R. from all sorts of organizations, governmental and otherwise. The composer, even a moderately good one, acquires a certain amount of prestige and is regarded by the people as being among the cultural leaders.
Perhaps the most interesting activity in the cultural life of the Union is the growth of musicological research in the folk music of the various nations inhabiting the Union. Since the middle of the twenties, and until 1941, a steady stream of collected folk songs and dances with fairly good musicological comments — and fairly bad harmonization — have been appearing in Soviet Russia. These collections contain the music of peoples concerning whom little was known before the Revolution: Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Turkmenians, Lapps, and others. This work was carried out with great zeal by eminent Russian musicologists and was financed by the government. Other forms of research have resulted in new editions of the works of Russian composers of the past century, particularly Moussorgsky (including his very interesting notebooks), and the publication of memoirs, scientific and epistolary literature, and the extremely illuminating correspondence of Tschaikowsky.
However, behind the imposing surface of Soviet musical activity, developments have taken place which have been detrimental to the creative spirit. After the murder of Kirov (Stalin’s personal friend), a wave of terror spread over the Union. The artistic life of the country did not escape this wave. Censorship was tightened, individual musicians were persecuted for alleged ‘bourgeois’ tendencies, and an ‘official’ style appeared, a style which is definitely reactionary, unimaginative, and unexperimental. Endless discussions of ‘formalism’ were held in the Union. ‘Formalism’ began to mean everything which, in the eyes of the Soviet Government, was evil.
Actually, what the government wanted the composers to do was to establish a style in music that would be easily understood by the masses, and the masses, in the opinion of the government, were uneducated and had bad taste in art. The explanation is very simple; the government leaders themselves, including Stalin, judged the case of the masses by their own standards, which, unfortunately, are not high. Most of the leaders are artistically half educated, and naturally prefer everything that is obvious and easily understandable. As a result, the composers of the Soviet Union have evolved an oversimplified style in which experiment in harmony, counterpoint, or form is excluded. Thus the new music of the U. S. S. R., including that of its best composers, has little personality and progressive meaning. Looking through many scores of symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas, and piano sonatas, one finds that they all look alike, and it becomes difficult to distinguish one composer from the other.
Of course one might easily make the same remark about much contemporary music. However, Western composers are at least attempting to be more personal and advanced than their Soviet colleagues. These negative factors of the new ‘official style’ come to the fore especially when the composers embark upon some patriotic project such as an overture to the Twentieth Anniversary of the Establishment of the ‘BuriatoMongolian Republic,’ or simply an Ode to Lenin. Here the music begins to border on complete nonsense and to sound like a potpourri of military marches and a Franck symphony.
Folklore, in my opinion, is another dangerous, sentimental trap into which Soviet composers fall very readily. Folklore is good in its place, but at the present time progressive contemporary composers well realize how unendurable is music based almost entirely on folk themes. Furthermore, folk arts of various nations are more similar than dissimilar (being products of the same impulses and economic conditions), and thus it is difficult to find fresh folk sources. This insistence on the use of folk material is perhaps one of the few negative sides of the Soviet policy in developing the cultural life of every small federal republic of the Union. By following the lead of the government to the letter, artists lose their perspective and forget that the musical culture of the twentieth century needs universality rather than provincialism.
Of the many composers of the Soviet Union only two are known in America: Prokofiev and Shostakovitch. Prokofiev is universally recognized as one of the masters of contemporary music. He spent a major part of his life abroad, mostly in France. There, after the World War, he had his first brilliant successes. Prokofiev’s position in Russia is a highly privileged one. Universally admired, patronized by the government, he is regarded as Soviet Russia’s greatest living composer. Until recently he was allowed to travel abroad, a unique privilege for a Soviet citizen. Of course, even Prokofiev has to conform to a certain extent, and write such pieces of ‘patriotism’ as an ‘Ode to Lenin’ on a text by Lenin. What is particularly discouraging is to see the trade-mark of the ‘official style’ in Prokofiev’s recent musical output. Certain of these scores — for instance, his ballet, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ — are full of trivial and obvious themes, conventional harmonies, and a general artificial simplicity. In scores like ‘Peter and the Wolf’ this simplicity is genuine, but in larger works it is disconcertingly unauthentic.
Shostakovitch is well known to the American public. Having been in ‘disgrace’ in the U. S. S. R. for several years, he emerged in 1937 with a triumphant performance of his Fifth Symphony in Leningrad. This work obviously bears the ‘official’ stamp. Despite its great success in the United States, it seems to me less convincing than his First Symphony. It is rhapsodic, emphatic, and voluble, yet always reminiscent of late nineteenth-century music. At times it is banal and even trite; and the underlying ‘political’ subject — a sort of bus ride from the time preceding the Revolution to the light of Stalin’s constitution — does not improve the work. His quintet for piano and string quartet, which was first performed in Moscow on November 23, 1940, and won him the Union’s highest reward, is an attractive piece, every bar of which rings absolutely true.
Many other gifted composers of the young and old generations active in Soviet Russia suffer from the same governmentally sponsored policy of artificial simplification. One name especially deserving mention, for it is little known in America, is Miaskovsky. Miaskovsky is one of the ‘old guard’ composers. He is older than Prokofiev, and has written eighteen or nineteen symphonies. It is unfortunate that most of them are unknown to the American public, for Miaskovsky is certainly one of the best living symphonists. His somewhat oldfashioned and academic symphonies are full of a particular melancholic charm; his thematic language is as personal as that of Berlioz. However, even the ascetic and independent Miaskovsky has submitted to the general trend in Soviet Russian music. His Symphony Number Seventeen bears the stigma of the ‘new’ style. It is full of obvious folk material, and the whole harmonic structure has become even more conventional.
To sum up the musical production of the Soviet Union, one may say that the composers are technically better trained and equipped than many in the United States; yet there is a certain provincialism in everything they create. They conform readily to reactionary doctrines of art, they lack a sense of experimentation, and this gives to most of their music a colorlessness and impersonal uniformity.
II
The façade of musical activity in Germany is much more impressive than that in the Soviet Union. All the old famous institutions seem to be prospering; new names have emerged, among both performers and composers. Well-known musicians such as Strauss, Gieseking. and Furtwängler are actively engaged in building the Kultur of the Third Reich. But actually, behind this façade, the picture is grim, far more so than the one in the U. S. S. R. For the wrongs which are done to Russian cultural life are — or at least are claimed to be — of a temporary nature. The policy of cultural reaction and provincialism is not necessarily a permanent feature of the Soviet régime. The Nazi Kultur is, on the other hand, an ideal which has been attained. Its doctrine is permanently incorporated into the law of the State, and its philosophy is unchangeable.
The first thing to do in studying Nazi Germany is to rewrite the dictionary. Such terms as ‘culture’ are certainly not synonymous with what the Nazis call Kultur; terms like Volk, Blut, Erde (people, blood, earth) mean something entirely different to the Nazis from what they do to us. It is very often difficult to understand what this new ‘meaning’ includes. New sciences are practised in Germany, such as Rassenpsychologie and Erbbiologie (racial psychology and biology of inheritance), sciences which are considered as exact as chemistry or mathematics. The term Wissenschaft (science) itself has acquired a new significance, for there can be the true Aryan Wissenschaft and the perverse Jewish Verfallswissenschaft (science of decline).
The same confusion of ideas and terms occurs when the Nazis enter the domain of art. Music is, according to Hitler, ‘exclusively the language by which man expresses his stream of overflowing emotions and feelings.’ To him, music has nothing to do with intellectual reasoning. He continues, ‘Our composers know that the real godfather of a work of music is the overflowing Gemüth .’ Rosenberg adds, ‘Music is only one part of a total cultural war waged by the German Reich against the elements of decline,’ and another Nazi spokesman, Walther Kuhn, writes that ‘the predestined art of the German people is music which spontaneously grows out of their prehistoric past in a blood and earth determinism.’ One can easily see that our own concepts and values cannot comprehend this confusion and nonsense. Yet, unfortunately, it is just such Ersatz philosophy that now dictates the cultural destinies of the German people.
The musical life of the country is organized and governed by a set of laws first promulgated by a special decree of Hitler in September 1933. This edict incorporated all cultural activities of the country into one Reichskulturkammer (RKK, State Office of Cultural Activities). The RKK has several subdivisions, one of which is the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK). The Minister of Propaganda and ‘Public Enlightenment’ is ex officio president of the RKK. To him are attached several special advisers whose task is to take care of the various branches of the RKK — radio, theatre, fine arts, and music. The Minister of Propaganda, thus the president of the RKK, is Goebbels, and his advisers in the musical fields have in the last years been Drewes, Röder, and Ludwig. Before 1933 all of them were obscure people, and their only fame was that they had been party members from an early date. Yet it is they who advise Goebbels on the musical policies to be adopted by the RMK. The president of this RMK has no independence whatsoever. The position is nominal, and the occupant thereof must blindly execute the orders of his superiors. Until 1935 the president was a certain Mr. Ihlert, a musical bureaucrat with great party zeal. Since then the position has been occupied by Peter Raabe, an older man, once conductor of a provincial opera house. He is a weak and insignificant, yet fervent, lackey of the régime. He must obey orders from Goebbels and he has done so faithfully.
Last year the RMK published a booklet, Das Musikrecht, containing the laws and decrees of the RKK which concerned the musical life of the nation. In this edifying piece of writing one first discovers that every person who wants to pursue his musical profession publicly must be a recognized member of the RMK. The next law states that ‘membership in the RMK may be refused or withdrawn from anyone if certain facts come to the attention of the President of the RMK which make that person unreliable and unfit for the exercise of his profession.’ What this means is simply that anyone whom Goebbels or his ‘stooges’ do not trust cannot follow his musical profession in Germany. Only ‘pure Aryans’ are admitted as members of the RMK. One must therefore ‘prove’ one’s Aryan ancestry. This is a very complicated process, necessitating the certificates of one’s grandparents on both sides, and the legalization of these certificates at the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung (Governmental Bureau for the Study of Ancestry).
A special ordinance of the RKK deals with the publication of music and books on music in the Reich. The RMK is advised to exercise careful supervision over everything that is being published. Permits for publication must be obtained from the RMK. These permits may be withheld if the President of the RMK decides that the publication is ‘contrary to the needs of the State.’ In order to open a music store or publishing house a permit is necessary. Another permit to exercise the teaching profession is required. Once this permit is granted, the teacher must make a report about every one of his students. A special questionnaire has to be filled out, giving detailed information — the name, age, religion, parentage, and race of the student. A teacher is not allowed to advertise in newspapers or in magazines without the approval of the RMK, and the fees he asks for his instruction are established by the RMK.
All these laws give the RMK — and, in the final instance, Goebbels — complete control over the musical life of the nation. Actually, these laws do not operate as tightly as Goebbels would like, but this is only because the free musical tradition is so firmly entrenched in Germany that it takes time to modify and, finally, to curb it to the will of the Party. Legally, the State has absolute power over the musician in the practice of his profession, but in fact much of the musical life of Germany still escapes the rigidity of these regulations.
The average programs of the concerts and the repertories of the opera houses in Germany have undergone little change since the rise of the Nazis to power. The programs are still based chiefly on the works of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Haydn, Richard Strauss, and lately Mozart (who for a long time was taboo because of his freemasonry). Towering like an idol above all stands the late ‘Führer of Bayreuth,’ the ‘mythical Urgermane,' the ‘pre-Nazi Nazi,’ Richard Wagner. (The epithets quoted are taken from Nazi literature about Wagner.) The works of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart are trifles in comparison with this ‘highest achievement of the German spirit,’ this ‘precursor of Hitler,’ and this ‘genius of German blood and soil.’ His influence goes far beyond the ‘frontiers of music.’ He and Nietzsche were ‘the first authentic German thinkers who, in the time of decline and corruption, raised their mighty prophetic voices and showed the German people their destiny.’ He was ‘the first farsighted anti-Semite whose anti-Semitism was born on the solid ground of natural racial instinct’ (Karl Richard Ganzer, Richard Wagner und das Judentum). Wagner’s work is played over and over again in the opera houses and concert halls of Germany. Research concerning his music, his literary work, and his life is carried out with everincreasing zeal. The Führer and his entourage make yearly pilgrimages to Bayreuth, and the whole of the German people are called to stand in awe of every note and word ‘the bard of Bayreuth’ has written.
No doubt the Nazis have good reason to admire Wagner. There seldom has been a more confused thinker, a more insipid and obvious poet (‘torturer of the German language,’ as Rilke used to call him), a more blatant, ungrateful, and brutal anti-Semite than Wagner. It is quite enlightening to read his Judentum in der Musik, as well as his recently published Diaries for King Louis II of Bavaria. In both of these books Wagner foreshadows Rosenberg or even Goebbels himself.
Contemporary music contributes only a minor part to the average German concert program, and this part is surely the drabbest of all. The more advanced contemporary composers and the most gifted ones have left the country. Hindemith left Germany in 1937, but actually has had little music performed there since 1933. A young and highly promising composer, Mohaupt, left in 1938. Others escaped at an even earlier date. The place of these people has been taken over by older composers. Their harmonic language is conventional; their technique is sound but uninteresting; and in normal times they would probably never have been well known outside their native provinces. A few of these, especially Gräner, Julius Weissmann, and Grabner, are now quite prominent and occupy high positions in the Reich. There are, undoubtedly, a great number of talented young men in Germany whose works are occasionally performed, but the best of them live secluded lives in the provinces and do not actively participate in the musical life of the country. Those who do participate in this musical life are either faithful Nazis or opportunists and conformists.
Two names of old repute dominate the ‘contemporary’ musical scene, Richard Strauss and Pfitzner. Both are very old men who definitely belong to the nineteenth or the early twentieth century, and do not represent, anything progressive. Strauss is well known in America, and there is little new to say about him except that in Nazi Germany he seems to prosper as never before. He had his quarrels with Goebbels because of his collaboration with Stefan Zweig, but now his position is firmly entrenched as the Number One living German composer. Pfitzner is little known in America, and let us hope will remain so. He had a considerable following as far back as the twenties. Many German towns then held Pfitzner Wochen (Pfitzner festivals). He is a highly prolific writer, and among his many works is an endlessly long and endlessly dull opera, Palestrina, which won him great fame in Germany. His music is definitely oldfashioned, ‘routine-romantic,’ imperfect in form and academic in spirit.
The amount of foreign contemporary music played in Germany is limited. However, contemporary Italian music is fairly well represented, and there are a few scores of Ravel, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky which are still performed. In Nazi Germany the rest of modern music falls under two headlines, verboten and unerwünscht (undesirable). Verboten is every work by a composer of Jewish origin or with Jewish ties, and unerwünscht includes most of the music of the twenties and early thirties, which, in the eyes of the Nazis, represents the period of German decline and Verjudung (‘Jewification’).
Since the beginning of the war a new kind of ‘patriotic’ music has been steadily appearing, and it is with the themes of this war that it is essentially concerned. A typical example of such music is a Sonata for Viola and Piano by Gerhardt Meyer: First Movement, ‘The Battle’; Second Movement, ‘The Fa len Heroes’; Third Movement, ‘Songs and Legends of the War.’
The racial and anti-Semitic policy of the RKK is a separate problem. This is the ugliest scourge of the Nazi régime, and it is well known to the American public. However, few people know to what extremes, to what minutest detail the Nazis have gone in the pursuance of this racial policy, how methodically they have organized racial discrimination and Jewish persecution. A dictionary giving all the names of Jewish and verjudete musicians has been published under the auspices of the RMK. In it you will find names like Mendelssohn and Hiller next to Schönberg, Weill, Heifetz, Hubermann, Kreisler, and others. The preface to this dictionary warns the German people to be careful about their tastes in music, for ‘no one knows to what extent the Jews have influenced and polluted the German mind.’
An ‘official’ author discusses the question of the Mischling (in Nazi vocabulary, ‘part-Jew’). He comes to the conclusion that ‘in so far as some people mature only very late in their lives and acquire their full psychological personalities only at the age of sixty, and in so far as psychology has proved that certain hereditary traits may appear and disappear at irregular intervals during their lives, there should be found a scientific method of establishing at what periods the work of a Mischling represents Aryan tendencies and at what period his work is Jewish.’ One could find innumerable quotations of the same irrational order which indicate to what lengths the Nazis have gone in their persecution and hatred of the Jews. In the past a good half of Germany’s best musicians were of Jewish origin.
The performing artist in Germany, soloist or orchestral musician, has his life well organized by the RMK. His fees are strictly regulated; they are based on professional skill and reputation. Thus Gieseking, for example, is paid more than a second-rate pianist, but the difference between his fee and that of his inferior colleague is smaller than the difference in the United States. The salary of the orchestral musician varies from 150 to 170 marks monthly for four hours of work a day, and from 220 to 250 marks monthly for seven hours of work a day. The variation depends upon the quality of the player and the cost of living in the different provinces of Germany. For every extra hour of work which he is obliged to give, if called upon by the RMK, he receives one mark and 50 pfennigs. This is a much lower standard of wages than in the United States, but it is reasonably good pay in Germany and sufficient to maintain a middle-class standard of living. However, these price scales have simply been taken over from those of the old Social Democratic professional unions and adjusted by the Nazis to present conditions. A soloist, if he wishes to go on tour in a foreign country, must receive a special permit from the RMK so that his appearance will not conflict with that of another German artist in the same country.
Since Goebbels’s edict of October 1936, musical criticism is tolerated only within the bounds of newspaper reporting. The expression of personal opinion is discouraged. All criticism is carefully censored and brought ‘in line with the wishes of the German people and the needs of the Party.’ Criticism, in such Nazi organs as the monthly Die Musik, lauds everything that is in line with the Party and slanders everything else.
There has been less interference in musicology than in the other musical fields. Monumental works like Schünemann’s edition of Beethoven’s notebooks and Laurentz’s work on Wagner are standing examples of an excellent scientific tradition. But even in this field the doctrine of German superiority, of nationalistic megalomania, has exercised its negative influence. Writers stress the urgermanisches Element of German music, and minimize such obvious facts as, for instance, the influence of the Italian sixteenth century.
Since this war began, considerable changes in the musical life of Germany have occurred. First, a crusade against England has been launched in newspapers and magazines. England, which was always described by the Germans as a land without music, has become the source of all cultural evil. Some Nazi writers have gone so far as to say that ‘since Shakespeare England has been culturally extinct,’ and that Purcell was the only English musician whose music resulted directly from North German influences (sic!). The greatest change, however, has taken place in the concert life of the Reich. The German State now sends out its best orchestras, operatic troupes, and soloists to perform for its armies in occupied countries. Inhabitants of these unfortunate countries are not admitted to the performances, and in Paris, for instance, the German soldiers are advised not to attend concerts organized by the French. The censorship over the musical life of the occupied countries is absolute, and no concert organization or radio station may perform a program without the approval of the German authorities. The performance of works by German composers, even Bach and Beethoven, is discouraged. German music is thus reserved exclusively for the Germans.
This is a brief and necessarily incomplete picture of the musical situation under the Russian and German dictatorships. It is clear that in such an atmosphere music cannot develop freely; it is clear too that the musical life of those countries, however full it may seem on the surface, is nothing but a façade behind which lies a great despair. It is evident also that no really great work of music can be born from such systems. However, there are in these countries highly gifted musicians who will, once free of dictatorship, take their places again in the international musical culture of the Western world.