The Twisted Muse : Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich

Department of History York University Michael Kater Distinguished Research Professor

Dec 1996 · Oxford University Press, USA

About this ebook

Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent? These questions and their implications are explored in Michael Kater's broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small--from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer--are examined by Kater, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are laid out before the reader. Kater tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. Kater's examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through the manner in which it manipulated its musicians, and by extension, German music, is of importance for understanding culture in totalitarian systems. This work, with its emphasis on the social and political nature of music and the political attitude of musicians during the Nazi regime, will be the first of its kind. It will be of interest to scholars and general readers eager to understand Nazi Germany, to music lovers, and to anyone interested in the interchange of music and politics, culture and ideology.

Ratings and reviews

I have read this book and disagree with the author. I have been researching the music and life of Max Kowalski (1882-1956) for over 15 years. I have all of his Romantic lieder, all of the 17 Song cycles (one is a piano cycle) and all but four of his 17 manuscript cycles. I met his last family members and his daughter left me all of her father's personal music collection. I perform his works and lecture about his life. I beg to differ about Max Kowalski being anything but a wonderful lieder composer who loved the singers of his time and they loved him. This author has evidently done very little research. I am interested in learning how he can call a composer mediocre, who wrote a 12 song cycle called "Pierrot Lunaire" Opus 4 which has been published since 1913, has been recorded in the past and is still being recorded by performers in not only in USA but in Europe. I have a 1936 Columbia Masterworks recording of V. Ernst Wolff playing and singing the cycle. I also have Kowalski's personal recordings of Pierrot performed by his friend, Hans Hotter, I have recordings of his manuscripts of Opus 28, 29, and 30 performed by Willy Berling and Otto Von Ruhr. I have copies of recitals of other performers performing Kowalski's works not only in Europe but in the USA, Walter Olitski from the Met performing in NYC. Alexander Kipnis placed Kowalski's songs last on a recital in Germany. Any one who is a performing artist knows what you program last on your concert. The best is last and the philosophy for this is that after 45 minutes or more of listening to a recital, the audience becomes a little tired and you have to program something that will catch their interest. Speaking with Igor Kipnis about his father, Alexander Kipnis, several years back, I got the impression that Alexander Kipnis was not the type of performer who would sing just anything. In addition, the songs were orchestrated in the 1930's and performed in the Judische Kulturbund orchestra in Frankfort. I guess that being on the same program as these artists was not important. I know many modern composers and to have someone arrange your works and then have them be performed in an orchestral concert is a miracle in itself. Also, further proof of his music's worth, is a letter to Kowalski from Max Rudolph, a famous director of orchestras and known by his work at the Metropolitan Opera. In this letter he mentions that he had orchestrated songs of Kowalski's. I had undertaken the job of recording and putting Kowalski's music on the web, CDBaby and other digitals and Opus 1 can be found on about ten of them. This CD is "Suzi More sings Max Kowalski (1882-1856) Opus 1, at this site you can find a short but detailed biography on a forgotten composer who many of his peers thought to be a wondeful composer. A German Music magazine in 1954, two years before Kowalski died, called him a "Master of German Lied." It wouldn't have taken much for this author to Google Max Kowalski's name and find the Leo Baeck Institute, there he could have found some of this information. Sadly, I feel he has done a disservice to another great man whose music has been lost for over fifty years due to the Third Reich and it's hateful rule in Germany. Suzi More