Unheil Hitler!

John Maucari on the neglected composers hated by the Nazis

With the bankruptcy of the San Antonio Symphony, 2022 has been a rough year for classical music. But for writer/conductor John Mauceri, the real problems for classical music arose in the last century. Mauceri recognizes that Classical music has gotten less popular over the last century, but Mauceri doesn’t try to explain this. He is more interested in what gets played and what does not, and why. Why are some pieces of music in the classical repertory, while others are not? Essentially, he has three main villains—Mussolini, Stalin, and especially Hitler. But has plenty of gripes for Italian futurism and Pierre Boulez. This is the subject of his new book, The War on Music.

Mauceri identifies individuals whose careers as European composers were ended by the Nazis’, primarily because they were Jews, who made it to the USA and mostly became film composers. Mauceri points out that even after the war and the destruction of the Nazi regime, the composers that the Nazis banned are still mostly not in the classical repertory. So perversely, being banned by the Nazis resulted in a ban that stayed in place after 1945, after Hitler’s defeat and suicide. These include composers that you may have have heard of, even if you have never heard any of their works performed by a symphony: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, and Kurt Weill. They were Jews who immigrated to the U.S.A. because of Nazi antisemitism. Each found work writing music for popular entertainments—movies for the first two and musical theater for Weill.

Mauceri writes at great length about Arnold Schoenberg, who devised the 12-tone system to produce atonal compositions. He had produced atonal compositions before inventing the 12-tone system which was an even more radical step. But as a Jew, he had to flee Europe and ended up washed ashore in L.A. But unlike other exiles, he never wrote for films.

But remember that Nazis didn’t just hate music by Jews—they also hated any modernist art, including music. So Mauceri spends a lot of time discussing Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky. Although he tried to make accommodation with the new regime, Hindemith’s music was eventually banned because of its modernism, and he left because his Catholic wife had Jewish ancestors. He ended up teaching composition at Yale. Stravinsky, like Schoenberg, ended up in Los Angeles. One can see why Korngold and Rózsa ended up there—there was work to be had—but Schoenberg and Stravinsky could have picked anywhere in the US to end their careers. They picked a city that was by many accounts hostile to classical music.

But the point Mauceri makes is that these composers continued to suffer a kind of cultural amnesia despite surviving the Nazis. The music they composed after World War II has not been made a part of the repertory. Did they just become worse composers after they came to the U.S.A.? Mauceri doesn’t think so. He writes, “Like most classical music snobs, I thought that movie music wasn’t worth my serious attention. I have no idea how I ‘knew’ this, but I did. Like many people, I believed that Hollywood film music was mostly stolen from real classical composers.” But a cello concerto by Korngold changed his mind because after hearing it, he learned it was composed as part of the soundtrack of Deception, a 1946 movie starring Bette Davis. Mauceri subsequently embarked on a mission to rediscover this music—not just film music, but the music of composers whose post-war reputations had been demolished.

The thesis he lays out is that the Futurists laid out a theory that involved new art destroying old art. In 1908, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of futurism, wrote a manifesto for the art movement, writing “Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!... Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!” This made a hard break with the past the goal of advanced modern art. Then along comes Stalin, suppressing music in the Soviet Union that wasn’t comprehensible to the citizens, and then Hitler, who suppressed music for the same reason, adding the destruction of music by Jews. Then in the postwar era, tastemakers were enlisted in the Cold War, especially opposing the USSR’s anti-modernist stance with a vengeance. Building off Schoenberg’s tone rows, especially enamored of the music of Schoenberg’s follower, Anton Webern, composers like Pierre Boulez developed serialism, music that was profoundly difficult and unpopular. Boulez becomes the villain of the postwar era.

Mauceri writes “Born in Vienna in 1883, Anton Webern was shot and killed in Mintersill, Austria, by an American soldier when, it was claimed, he stepped off his porch after curfew to put out a cigar on September 15, 1945. His death was tragic, but the event also had an air of martyrdom that elicited suppressed rage at the ignorance of the occupying Americans. How dare Private First Class Norwood Bell murder the great Austrian composer after the war ended?” The implication was that Americans are unsophisticated boobs, and the art of music should be left in the hands of sophisticated Europeans like Boulez.

The U.S. was engaged in a cold war with the USSR and needed to convince European intellectuals to support the democratic West, as opposed to the communist East. The CIA, in order to help this happen, secretly funded a bunch of cultural institutions to make our case. One of these CIA front-groups was the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

For fifteen years the Congress for Cultural Freedom, under the tireless leadership of Russian-born composer Nicolas Nabokov, had fought a cultural cold war to win over the intelligentsia of Europe and Asia. Nabokov, a White Russian with a political score to settle with his native country, developed the idea of creating spectacular festivals of new music and art in Paris, Berlin, Milan, Brussels, Tokyo, Venice, and Rome that brought American performers and creators, along with their European and Asian counterparts, into the very heart of the war’s wreckage, confronting and confounding the skeptics who were suspicious of America and dismissive of its cultural bona fides. His first festival, called “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century,” took place in Paris in 1952. Nabokov brought the Boston Symphony to play great works that remained outlawed in the Soviet Union.

Consequently, there was a quasi-official artistic position by the countries of the non-communist west. Communist countries outlawed modernism, so we will embrace it. We won’t add any tonal works to the standard classical repertory written after World War II. Mauceri relates a story about a meeting between André Previn and Pierre Boulez. Boulez was the music director of the New York Philharmonic (which means he conducted mostly tonal works in the classical repertory). Boulez told Previn that he would never program any Dimitri Shostakovich for the Philharmonic. The implication is that Boulez, while he was happy to play pre-atonal classical pieces, once Schoenberg and Webern came along, he wasn’t interested in composers who continued writing tonal compositions. It would be interesting to know if in Boulez’s sparkling career as a conductor if he never played Shostakovich or Aaron Copland or Stravinsky, etc. Mauceri implies this, though. Previn is aghast. But ironically, Previn is also one of Mauceri’s villains—a Los Angeles conductor who worked in the movie industry, he had no respect for film music.

Mauceri makes a good case that a lot of tonal orchestral music was unjustly ignored by the powers that be who program symphony programs. And it is truly disturbing that the composers who fled the Nazis are still shut out of the major concert halls. In this small corner of culture, Hitler apparently won. Can this music be “rediscovered”? It has happened before.

We know about the rediscovery of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music was unknown to most music lovers for more than half a century after his death in 1750. In 1829, the twenty-year-old Felix Mendelsohn fulfilled a dream he had had five years prior, when his grandmother gifted him with a copyist’s complete score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, considered now to be one of the greatest compositions in the history of music. [. . .] In my lifetime, the symphonies of Mahler have gone from the fringe of the standard repertory to its very heart, due principally to the championing of this repertory—in concerts, recordings, and broadcasts—by Leonard Bernstein beginning in the 1960s.

It has been Mauceri’s mission as a conductor to revive interest in this music.

He recorded a CD in which he conducts several of Schoenberg’s late tonal works called Schoenberg In Hollywood (1997), which is very entertaining. There is a delightful Suite for String Orchestra in G, and somewhat formless (to my ears) Chamber Symphony No.2, Op.38, and Theme and Variations, Op.43b. Below is my favorite movement Suite for String Orchestra in G, the gavotte.

Later in the book, Mauceri writes about how current-day musical critics are still under sway of what they had been taught about modern classical compositions. He writes “another [critic] in London stated, with astonishing insensitivity, that ‘in general, it was a bad thing for Schoenberg to go to America,’ we have to consider the prospect that these younger voices profoundly disdain this music—or feel that they ought to.” I was astounded. I wanted to see who this critic was, so I looked at the end-notes. There was perhaps the funniest footnote I have read in a while: “The author begs the indulgence of the reader. This sentence appeared in The Guardian in a review of his recording Schoenberg in Hollywood. The author does not keep his bad reviews, preferring to memorize them.” I looked on The Guardian website to see if I could find the review, but they didn’t have any Schoenberg reviews older than about 2000. Too bad, because I wanted to hate this critic by name.

But the critic was just stating what had become a kind of orthodox opinion since the end of the war, beginning with an incendiary essay by Pierre Boulez in a bomb-throwing mood entitled “Schoenberg Is Dead.” It was indeed not unlike the Futurist manifesto, an oedipal renunciation of Boulez’s artistic parentage. But somehow, this became the received wisdom about Schoenberg.

What did Schoenberg do in Hollywood? He kept composing music, as we know, teaching. and living a life that Hitler would have gladly snuffed if Schoenberg and family hadn’t wisely moved to the USA in 1933. Mauceri writes about the games he played with his children in Los Angeles. “While in America, Schoenberg wrote a fairy tale called Die Prinzessin (The Princess) and would entertain his children with stories of “Little Arnold.” His daughter Nuria wrote in 2018 that Little Arnold’s adventures (when his mother left him home alone) included “going to China on his tricycle.” He made up stories of resistance fighters who saluted each other with “Unheil Hitler!” ”

There was in the postwar era a feeling that if you didn’t support avant garde modernist art, whether visual, musical, or literary, you were somehow wrong. I have definitely been guilty of this—like Mauceri, I just “knew.” It was a satisfyingly snobbish attitude to hold. But unlike with music, the kind of visual art outlawed by the Nazis and Soviet Union ended up being quite popular in the non-communist West. Mauceri doesn’t really explain why this was the case with visual art but not with classical music. Nonetheless, he is a very talented writer and The War on Music is a pleasure to read—and readers may find themselves wanting to listen to some Erich Wolfgang Korngold or late Arnold Schoenberg after reading it. Mauceri’s thesis makes too many logical leaps for me to completely fall in line, but he did successfully introduce me to some musical works I hadn’t previous listened to—which I think is his underlying mission with The War on Music.

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