On the spring day in 1945 that Nazi Germany’s official radio network broke the news of Adolf Hitler’s death, the announcement was followed by the playing of a 1942 recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. The work chosen was the elegiac slow movement of Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. This was the last of countless times that classical music, most of it written by Bruckner and Richard Wagner, Hitler’s two favorite composers, was played on Nazi ceremonial occasions, or otherwise enlisted in the service of the Third Reich.

That Wagner’s music should now be retrospectively tainted by these dark associations has a certain rough justice, since he was a sometime political activist whose anti-Semitic writings are favorably cited to this day on neo-Nazi web sites and whose most popular opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, is both a romantic comedy and a nationalist tract.¹ But there would seem to be no grounds for thinking that Hitler and his henchmen actually read Wagner’s notorious 1850 essay, “Das Judentum in der Musik” (“Judaism in Music”), or his writings on any other subject, prior to the establishment of the Third Reich. As for Bruckner, he is not known ever to have uttered a word about politics at any time prior to his death in 1896, and he cannot reasonably be supposed to bear any responsibility, however speculative, for the misuse of his music by Hitler and the Nazis.

How, then, did the cultural commissars of the Third Reich find it so easy to appropriate the music of these composers and use it to their own ideological ends? Could there have been anything intrinsically political about their musical style—a style, moreover, the best-known interpreters of which included a number of Jewish conductors who, like Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, were forced by the Nazis to give up their careers in Germany and Austria and flee for their lives? And if it was not a matter of style, how did this Austro-German classical music come to be seen by the German people as a symbol of the regime in which so many of them believed?

These familiar questions are addressed to freshly illuminating effect in Karen Painter’s Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945, one of the first books in English to take a wider historical view of the phenomenon of the politicization of classical music in Nazi Germany.² Instead of concentrating on the institutional life of the Third Reich, Painter, an associate professor of music at the University of Minnesota, has examined the ways in which symphonic music was portrayed by Austrian and German journalists throughout the first half of the 20th century. As she explains in her introduction:

This book is not a study of composers—their creative development or even their response to the political turmoil and world wars—but rather a history of what critics and commentators believed was at stake, artistically and culturally, in the works they reviewed and the composers they presented to the public.

To this end, Painter has examined hundreds of German-language newspaper articles and books about music, most of them never before translated into English. They date from a time when, as I wrote recently in connection with the British critic Neville Cardus, “it was taken for granted that the critics of major papers would write in detail and at length about the events they covered.³ Nor were these critics talking to themselves: their ongoing debates over the meaning and significance of Austro-German music were read and pondered by a large and well-educated general audience. What, then, did they have to say, and what effect if any did it have on German culture under Hitler?

_____________

Abstraction is the natural state of Western classical music. A song can be meaningfully experienced apart from its lyrics, and one need not know what Beethoven thought his “Pastoral” Symphony was “about” in order to respond emotionally to the musical events embodied in it. Conversely, the capacity of instrumental music to convey ideas is nugatory. No one listening to Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra for the first time and without knowledge of its program would be likely to guess that it “tells” the story of Nietzsche’s prophet-philosopher.

The radical ambiguity of music might seem at first glance to ensure its political autonomy. At the same time, though, it inevitably encourages verbal interpretation—and the more abstract the music, the wider the range of possible interpretations. Arguments over the political content of Die Meistersinger may be limited (albeit modestly) by the plain meaning of Wagner’s libretto, but the same does not apply to arguments over the political content of a symphony. As Painter points out, “Instrumental music, without programmatic guidance, has no concrete meaning to restrict the interpreter,” thus making it “the art form most capable of embedding ideology.”

Robert Schumann remarked in 1837 that when listening to Beethoven, “a German feels in spirit that he won the battles lost to Napoleon.” Already by then it had become common for Germans to view their musical heritage as central to their national identity. Nor were they wrong to do so, since the history of 19th-century music is in large part a string of Austro-German triumphs. Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms: these were the composers who revitalized the classical tradition by romanticizing it.

All of these composers, except for Wagner, saw the four-movement symphony as the Ur-form of large-scale musical expression, the ultimate test of a composer’s mettle. Typically, their symphonies describe a dramatic arc, beginning with tonal uncertainty and ending in decisive major-key resolution. This is a form especially susceptible of verbal explication, and of a specifically heroic kind. Partly because so many romantic symphonies seemed to suggest just such interpretations, the symphony came to be seen by German listeners as the quintessentially German musical genre, one whose ubiquity symbolized their country’s dominance not only of the culture of classical music but of the realm of the human spirit altogether.

_____________

Then came the 20th century and the emergence of the modern movement in art, which was widely perceived as a threat to German cultural stability, Accordingly, Painter observes, the state of the symphony became a subject of increasingly heated critical debate. The template had been updated once from classicism to romanticism; could it be updated yet again to suit the tastes of modern Germans?

For his part, Anton Bruckner had infused traditional symphonic forms with explicitly Wagnerian musical content, thereby bringing into being the works that his opera-loving “master of all masters” (as he referred to Wagner) had disdained to compose. Gustav Mahler, by contrast, produced grandiose symphonies whose innovative structures and sonorities challenged the received definition of the genre. The way in which a critic responded to the works of these two composers generally reflected the extent to which the critic himself was prepared to embrace the possibilities of modernity.

Thus, conservative critics judged by the degree to which composers hewed or failed to hew to tradition, and in particular by the degree to which their work portrayed (in Painter’s words) “the actions and emotions of a heroic figure, and therefore of an individual who spoke for the collective.” By that criterion, it was all but inevitable that the Jewishness of Mahler, the anti-traditional symphonist, should have become a point of contention.

Painter cites numerous examples of invidious references to the supposed relationship between Mahler’s ethnicity and the purely stylistic innovations of his music. This excerpt from Rudolf Louis’s 1909 book Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (“Contemporary German Music”) is typical:

If Mahler’s music would speak Jewish, perhaps it would simply be incomprehensible to me. But I find it repulsive because it judaisizes. That is, it speaks German, as it were, but with an accent, tone, and above all the gestures, of Jews from the East, too much from the East.

Discussions of Mahler’s Jewishness were not limited to German-speaking critics. Samuel Langford, who covered the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra’s Mahler festival for the Manchester Guardian in 1920, remarked of the composer’s conversion to Christianity that “while there is every reason why a Jew should show sympathy with Christianity from its origin and make it prominent in his art, the Jewish-Catholic standpoint is complex to the normal sensibilities.” But Langford wrote as a (qualified) admirer of Mahler’s music, whereas the Austro-German critics who made a point of his Jewishness used it as a weapon against him.

_____________

The devoutly Catholic Bruckner, by contrast, was portrayed as a bulwark against modernity, to the point where one critic actually described his symphonies as “more perfect, more beautiful, and more sublime than Beethoven’s.” This attitude was well embodied in Neville Cardus’s description of a concert in England given by Otto Klemperer and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1933:

He was about to begin the Ninth Symphony of Bruckner; he stood arms outstretched before the Vienna Philharmonic, baton poised. The concert hall was hushed and tense. Next to me was sitting a middle-aged Viennese, and before Klemperer moved his baton, before a single note of Bruckner was attacked or heard, this middle-aged Viennese burst into tears, and buried his head in his hands.

The fact that Klemperer was Jewish adds a sharp point of irony to the anecdote. He had only just emigrated from Germany, and within a few years the famously anti-Semitic Vienna Philharmonic would find it possible to dispense with his services altogether. By then the politicization of music criticism in Central Europe was for all intents and purposes complete. Even progressive critics had embraced the notion that symphonic music could have political implications.

The groundwork was thereby laid for the emergence of a politician-artist who understood the power of music to sway men’s minds, and who would use it to malign effect.

Hitler’s love of the music of Wagner and his close relations with the Wagner family are well known.⁴ But Bruckner’s symphonies meant no less to him, and the use that he made of them was at least as theatrically effective. The musicologist Bryan Gilliam has described the most spectacular of these latter occasions:

National Socialists and members of the International Bruckner Society gathered in Regensburg [in 1937] to consecrate a Bruckner bust installed in the Valhalla, an 1841 replica of the Parthenon, filled with statues commemorating Teutonic cultural heroes. Photographs of the highly publicized event show Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and others in full military regalia, gazing reverently at the Bruckner likeness.

In practice, the Nazis were unable to exert total control over Germany’s musical life, if only because Nazism was a mass movement led by men who, except for Hitler and (up to a point) Goebbels, were musical philistines. But by the time they came to power, much of the job of enlisting German music in the service of politics had already been done for them. All that remained was to reap the whirlwind.

_____________

The debates discussed in Symphonic Aspirations will have a familiar ring to anyone conversant with American art in the days of the 1930’s Popular Front, when Communist artists and their fellow travelers succeeded in persuading a considerable number of Americans that the best art was that suitable for use as a “hammer” with which to batter fascism into submission. They are no less relevant to the work of contemporary musicologists who re-interpret the classics in light of their quasi-Marxist ideological views, a practice that has given us such exercises in absurdity as a “homosexual analysis” of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.

The ultimate effect of such interpretations, of course, is to diminish the power of music itself. For when the Third Reich was reduced at last to ashes, so, too, was the German dream of continued dominance over the culture of classical music. This dream had been so powerful that it even haunted a Jewish modernist like Arnold Schoenberg, who famously remarked that his “discovery” of the twelve-tone system of composition would “ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” Instead, Austro-German composers, with the partial exception of Paul Hindemith, ceased to be a significant force in the postwar musical world.⁵

And what of the symphony itself? It, too, is in retreat. To be sure, symphonies—or, more precisely, pieces called symphonies—continue to be written, even by postmodern composers like Philip Glass whose styles are antithetical to the essence of the form. But since the death of Dmitri Shostakovich in 1975, no symphonist has emerged whose work has commanded the general attention of the worldwide concert-going public. The only symphony to enter the international repertory in recent years, Henryk Górecki’s Third (1976), is written in a spare “holy minimalist” style whose stripped-down musical vocabulary has little in common with the structurally unifying tonal rhetoric of the romantic symphony.

It is, I suspect, no coincidence that Górecki’s Third Symphony, whose subtitle is “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” contains at its heart a vocal setting of a prayer whose source is described by the composer with stark and terrible simplicity:

Prayer inscribed on wall 3 of cell no. 3 in the basement of “Palace,” the Gestapo’s headquarters in Zakopane; beneath is the signature of Helena Wanda Blazusiakówna, and the words “eighteen years old, imprisoned since 26 September 1944.”

Those words could also serve as an epitaph for the aspirations of the 19th-century Austro-German symphony and its fervently misguided latter-day advocates.

1 See Samuel Lipman, “Wagner Comes to Broadway” (COMMENTARY , January 1976).

2 Harvard, 354 pp., $49.95.

3 “The Amateur as Critic” (COMMENTARY , November 2007).

4 Jonathan Carr’s newly published The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany’s Most Illustrious and Infamous Family (Atlantic Monthly Press, 409 pp., $27.50) contains a highly readable account of Hitler’s friendship with the Wagners and his patronage of the Bayreuth Festival.

5 Carl Orff, whose Nazi ties are described by Painter in Symphonic Aspirations, won international acclaim after World War II, but Carmina Burana (1936) is the only work of his that has retained its popularity.