The Rest Is Noise Series: Death Fugue: Music in Hitler’s Germany. Alex Ross

of select Jewish artists such as Mahler and Max Reinhardt.

      Hitler had worshipped Wagner from an early age. On various occasions he reported that a performance of Wagner’s Roman drama Rienzi had inspired him to enter politics. In Vienna, Hitler became uneasy over the fact that masterpieces of Aryan culture were being performed in a city thronged with Jews. Once, in conversation with Hans Frank, he recalled hearing Götterdämmerung at the Court Opera and encountering “a couple of yammering Jews in caftans” on his way home. Hitler said: “It’s impossible to think of a more irreconcilable combination. This glorious mystery of the dying hero and this Jewish filth!”

      The spectral figure of the ghetto Jew also appears in Mein Kampf. Hitler claims to have met such a person during a long walk and asked himself: “Is this a Jew? … Is this a German?” At that moment, he said, hatred of Jews first welled up in him. There is a strange displacement going on here, given that a Jew occupied the podium during what may have been the most tremendous musical experience of Hitler’s life. Was Mahler a tormenting symbol of Jewish power amid Hitler’s failures? Or did the young man identify with Mahler’s aura, his ability to command forces with a wave of his arms? In photographs, certain of the Führer’s oratorical poses seem vaguely characteristic of Mahler’s conducting—the right hand raised in a clenched, rotated fist, the left hand drawing back in a clawlike motion.

      Hitler made his political reputation by bellowing out bilious speeches in Munich beer halls and soldiers’ barracks, but his knowledge of music helped win him entrée to more rarefied circles. Edwin Bechstein, the renowned piano manufacturer, and Hugo Bruckmann, the publisher who printed the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both welcomed Hitler into their salons. When Hitler met Carl von Schirach, the intendant of the National Theater in Weimar, he launched into a detailed analysis of Die Walküre, comparing recent Weimar performances with legendary ones that he had heard in Vienna. Schirach promptly invited him to tea. Such connections proved crucial in Hitler’s rapid ascent from provincial to national fame.

      The Wagner family fell deeply under Hitler’s spell. Winifred Wagner opened the gates of Wahnfried for the man she considered Germany’s savior. Hitler first visited the Wagners on October 1, 1923, as he was preparing his initial attempt at seizing control of Germany. The ailing Chamberlain rose from his sickbed, like Amfortas in Parsifal, to say that Hitler had come to save Germany in its “hour of highest need.” In a later essay Chamberlain called Hitler a true man of the Volk who would rid Germany of the “ruinous, indeed poisonous influence of Jewishness on the life of the German people”—words echoing his own summary of Wagner’s writings on “regeneration.” Hitler was also told that he had a “Parsifal nature.”

      Hitler quickly absorbed the Bayreuth lifestyle—vegetarianism, agitation for animal rights, dabblings in Buddhism and Indian lore. Later, he would dote on the younger Wagners and served as a substitute father for the grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang. When he came to Bayreuth, as he did every summer from 1933 until 1940, he became a different being. “He obviously felt at ease in the Wagner family and free of the compulsion to represent power,” the Nazi architect Albert Speer observed.

      The “Beer Hall Putsch” took place on November 8–9, 1923. Siegfried Wagner had planned to commemorate Hitler’s victory by conducting his newest symphonic poem, Glück, at a concert in Munich. Defeat forced him to postpone the premiere, but neither he nor his relations lost faith in the cause. Hitler, confined to Landsberg prison, wrote to express his gratitude. Bayreuth, he said, was “in the line of march to Berlin”; it was the place where “first the Master and then Chamberlain forged the spiritual sword which we are wielding today.” The Wagners kept the prisoner well supplied, sending along recordings of Wagner excerpts, the libretto of Siegfried’s opera Der Schmied von Marienburg, a variety of domestic items (blankets, jackets, stockings, foodstuffs, books), and writing materials, including typing paper of superior quality. A phonograph came from Helene Bechstein. Hitler set to composing Mein Kampf.

      Hitler’s speeches of the later 1920s often touched on cultural matters, displaying modest knowledge of the musical scenes of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. One sign of Germany’s decline, Hitler said, was its growing ignorance of the great musical tradition: “Only a couple hundred thou sand know Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, only some of them know Bruckner.” Meanwhile, “little Neutöner [new-toners] come and unleash their dissonances.” He made a knowing reference to Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf: “In Germany one lets Jonny strike up and concerning South Tyrol one complains about the Untergang of German culture.” In this same period he criticized the operetta Das Dreimäderlhaus for its travesties of Schubert songs and launched an extended assault on the conductor Bruno Walter, “alias Schlesinger.” In Berlin, Hitler alleged, there were five opera conductors on the staff of the state-funded opera houses, all of them Jews. The reference to “fünf Juden” brings to mind the scene in Salome in which five Jews dispute among themselves in Herod’s court.

      Hitler took power in January 1933, and by the end of the year most of the German cultural apparatus had fallen under the control of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. But music did not become a direct instrument of the state. Hitler wanted the ministry to serve the “spiritual development of the nation,” and Goebbels agreed. As the historian Alan Steinweis shows, the minister saw artists as “creating Germans” and organized them into semi-independent organizations. It was called “self-administration under state supervision.” The Reichskulturkammer, or Reich Culture Chamber, had departments for each art form, including a Reich Music Chamber, whose first president was Richard Strauss. Musical life was not merely Nazified from above; to a great extent, it Nazified itself. Even the anti-Jewish clause in the Kulturkammer laws neglected to mention the Jews by name; cultural bureaucrats were left to decide which artists lacked “aptitude” for cultural life. Not surprisingly, all leading Jewish musicians were deemed inept. The April 7, 1933, law barring Jews from the public sector had already had a devastating impact, because so many had been employed by Weimar’s arts programs. Weill left Germany on March 22, Klemperer on April 4, Schoenberg on May 17.

      From the start, classical music blared in the background of Nazi life. Party rallies were so immaculately choreographed to Beethoven, Bruckner, and Wagner that the music seemed to have been written in support of the pageantry; it was through such sleights of hand that Hitler generated his authority. Unlike Stalin, who demanded that Soviet art mirror the ideology of the regime, Hitler wished to maintain the illusion of autonomy in the arts. Brigitte Hamann, in her biography of Winifred Wagner, reports that at the Bayreuth festival of 1933 the dictator asked audiences to refrain from singing the “Horst Wessel” song or from making other patriotic manifestations, on the grounds that “there is no more glorious expression of the German spirit than the immortal works of the Master.” Like so many German music lovers, Hitler claimed that the classical tradition was an “absolute art” hovering above history, as in Schopenhauer’s formulation.

      Such was the import of Hitler’s most ambitious statement on musical policy, his “cultural address” at the Party rally of 1938, in which he said that “it is totally impossible to express a scientific worldview in musical terms” and “nonsense” to try to express Party business. In contrast to Stalin, Hitler turned up his nose at sycophantic propaganda. In 1935, he directed that no more music should be dedicated to him, and three years later he complained that a group of works commissioned for the Reich Party Day paled in comparison to Bruckner. Politics aspired to the condition of music, not vice versa. Thus, when the Berlin Philharmonic played the finale of Bruckner’s Seventh before that 1938 speech, the implication was that Hitler’s rhetoric would follow the musical model. Goebbels wanted his propaganda efforts to stress, in Wagnerian fashion, key leitmotifs, renewed through ingenious variations.