I

On 7 March 1933, two days after the Reichstag election, a gang of sixty brownshirts broke into a rehearsal of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at the Dresden State Opera led by the famous conductor Fritz Busch. They shouted and heckled the conductor and disrupted the proceedings until he was forced to stop. This was not the first time that such an incident had occurred. On a previous occasion, a large contingent of stormtroopers had bought up almost all the tickets for one of his concerts, and, as he had mounted the rostrum, they had greeted him with raucous chants of ‘Down with Busch!’ until he had been forced to withdraw. But it was the incident at the rehearsal that prompted the newly Nazified government of Saxony to dismiss him from his post. His musical reputation was considerable, but as far as the administrators in Dresden were concerned, he was a nuisance. Busch was not Jewish, nor was he particularly identified with modernism, atonality or any of the other things the Nazis abhorred in the music of the early twentieth century. Nor was he a Social Democrat, indeed, politically he was on the right. Busch had got into bad odour with the Nazis in Saxony because he had strenuously objected to their plans to cut the state cultural budget as part of economy measures during the Depression. On coming to power in Dresden, they accused him of employing too many Jewish singers, of spending too much time away from Dresden, and of demanding too much pay.¹ Busch left for Argentina and never returned, becoming an Argentinian citizen in 1936.²

The disruption of Busch’s concert and rehearsal gave regional state commissioners the pretext for banning concerts and operas on the grounds that they might give rise to public disorder. The disorder was fomented, of course, by the Nazis themselves, a neat illustration of the dialectic that drove the seizure of power onward from both above and below. Music was a particularly important target for co-ordination. For centuries the Central European classical and Romantic composers had delivered to the world the backbone of the musical repertory. Great orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic possessed a worldwide reputation. The Wagner music dramas played at Bayreuth held a unique place in world musical culture. Every city precinct, every small town or larger village had its musical clubs, its choirs, its tradition of amateur music-making that was central not just to middle-class life but also to the cultural practice of the working classes as well. The Nazis had not been the only party on the right to feel that this great tradition was being undermined by the musical modernism of the Weimar Republic, which they attributed in their usual crude way to ‘Jewish subversion’. Now was their chance to put the situation to rights.

On 16 March, when the principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, Bruno Walter, who was Jewish but, like Busch, in no way a proponent of modernist music, arrived for a rehearsal, he found the doors locked by the Reich Commissioner for Saxony, on the grounds that the safety of the musicians could not be guaranteed. Due to give a concert four days later in Berlin, Walter applied for police protection, but this was turned down on the orders of Goebbels, who made it clear that the concert could only go ahead under the baton of a non-Jewish conductor. After the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, had refused to conduct in his stead, the composer Richard Strauss agreed to take the rostrum, amidst a blare of triumphant celebrations in the Nazi press. Shortly afterwards, Walter resigned his post in Leipzig and emigrated to Austria. Attempts in the Nazi press to demonstrate that he had Communist sympathies were unlikely to have disguised from many the true reasons for the campaign against him, which were exclusively racial.³

Among Germany’s leading conductors, Otto Klemperer was the one who most nearly fitted the Nazi caricature of a Jewish musician. A cousin of the literature professor and diarist Victor Klemperer, he was not only Jewish but had also, as director of the avant-garde Kroll Opera House from 1927 to 1930 (in whose building, ironically, the Reichstag convened after the fire of 27-28 February 1933), pioneered radical productions, and made a name for himself as a champion of modernist composers such as Stravinsky. On 12 February Klemperer conducted a controversial production of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser in Berlin, which was condemned by the Nazi music press as a ‘bastardization of Wagner’ and an affront to the composer’s memory. By the beginning of March the furore had forced the withdrawal of the production; soon, Klemperer’s concerts were being cancelled on the usual specious grounds that public safety could not be guaranteed if he appeared on the rostrum. Klemperer attempted to save himself by insisting that ‘he was in complete agreement with the course of events in Germany’, but he soon realized the inevitable. On 4 April he, too, left the country.⁴ Shortly afterwards, the Reich Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service led to the dismissal not only of Jewish conductors such as Jascha Horenstein in Düsseldorf, but also of singers, and opera and orchestra administrators. Jewish professors in state music academies (most notably, the composers Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schreker, both teachers at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin) were also dismissed. Music critics and musicologists were sacked from their official posts and ousted from the German press; the best known was Alfred Einstein, probably the most distinguished music critic of his time.⁵

Jewish musicians now had their contracts cancelled all over the land. On 6 April 1933, for example, the Hamburg Philharmonic Society announced: ‘The choice of soloists, which had to be made in December last year, will of course be amended so that no Jewish artistes are participating. Frau Sabine Kalter and Herr Rudolf Serkin will be replaced by artistes who are racially German.’⁶ In June 1933 Jewish concert agents were banned from working. Musical associations of all kinds, right down to male voice choirs in working-class mining villages and music appreciation societies in the quiet suburbs of the great cities, were taken over by the Nazis and purged of their Jewish members. Such measures were accompanied by a barrage of propaganda in the musical press, attacking composers such as Mahler and Mendelssohn for being supposedly ‘un-German’ and boasting of the restoration of a true German musical culture. More immediately, the regime focused on expunging obviously avant-garde composers and their works from the repertoire. Demonstrations forced the withdrawal of Kurt Weill’s The Silver Sea in Hamburg on 22 February, and his music, long associated with the plays of the Communist writer Bertolt Brecht, was shortly thereafter banned altogether. That Weill was Jewish only made him a more obvious target as far as the Nazis were concerned. He, too, emigrated, along with other left-wing composers such as Hanns Eisler, another of Brecht’s musical collaborators and also a pupil of the atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg.⁷

A Jewish musician who managed to stay on was an extreme rarity. One such was the conductor Leo Blech, a popular and pivotal figure in the Berlin State Opera, whose performance of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods received a standing ovation in June 1933; Heinz Tietjen, the Intendant of the Opera, managed to persuade Goring to keep him on until he left for Sweden in 1938. Other prominent Jewish musicians like the violinist Fritz Kreisler and the pianist Artur Schnabel, who had both lived in Germany for many years, found it relatively easy to leave because they were not German citizens and in any case were famous enough to make a living anywhere in the world. The opera diva Lotte Lehmann, a sharp critic of Goring’s interference in the business of the Berlin State Opera, was by contrast a non-Jewish German citizen, but she was married to a Jew, and she left for New York in protest against the regime’s policies. Others, humble orchestra players, teachers, administrators and the like, had no such option available to them.⁸