Carl Orff Talk 25 May 2014 Part Two (original) (raw)
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Abstract
Austrian composer Gottfried von Einem (1918 - 1996) was asked by a biographer what sort of music the Nazis wanted German composers to create. “The opposite of Schoenberg,” he answered. “Music in C major.” The question before us: when composer and music educator Carl Orff (1895 - 1982) presented his scenic cantata “Carmina Burana” in 1937, did he give the Nazis the work they wanted, or did he give them the work he wanted?
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2010
Recent scholarship on Nazi music policy pays little attention to the main party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, or comparable publications for the general public. Most work concentrates on publications Nazis targeted at expert audiences, in this case music journals. But to think our histories of Nazi music politics are complete without comprehensive analysis of the party daily is premature. One learns from this resource precisely what Nazi propagandists wanted average party members and Germans in general, not just top-level officials and scholars, to think-even about music. Therein, we see how contributors placed a Nazi "spin" on music history and composer's biographies. Using heretofore untranslated materials, this article will fill part of this gap in our historiography of Nazi music policy. It will first detail Völkischer Beobachter attacks on prominent representatives of musical modernism in the Weimar era. Thereafter, this presentation will cover "acceptable" alternatives to Weimar decadence that the Völkischer Beobachter posited from the so-called Era of Struggle [Kampfzeit ] through the Third Reich. With the war, however, the theme most emphasized in Völkischer Beobachter cultural coverage was militarism. My paper will conclude with a survey of how revered figures such as Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner were scrutinized for indications that they could serve as inspiration for the German Volk at war. "WEIMAR MUSIC" IN THE VÖLKISCHER BEOBACHTER With its outlook so strongly rooted in the romantic German music tradition, what the Völkischer Beobachter found most disgraceful in Weimar culture was cultivation of musical modernism, the whole of which it referred to as, at best, the "farcical imitation of a carnival barker selling a tent full of musical freaks,"[1] and, at worst, " Jewish terror in music."[2] The newspaper stood firm in its rejection of works by "Jews and assorted foreigners" or Germans who supposedly associated with "international, Jewish circles"[3]-applauding "brave acts of resistance" such as when a lone Nazi [Hakenkreuzler] stood up and shouted "pfui" at a concert of Schoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Bartok.[4] The "musical foreigner" whom the Völkischer Beobachter derided most was Igor Stravinsky. While an early attack identified him as a "spiritual Polack," [5] Fritz Stege described Stravinsky as a "Russian composer with half-Asiatic instincts hidden under the cover of French civilization" who simply knew how to
Opera by the Book: Defining Music Theater in the Third Reich
Journal of Musicology, 2018
In 1944 with Nazi Germany just months from defeat, a curious and now little-known book was published in Regensburg: a collection of essays and biographies that strove to define the contemporary state of opera. Titled Die deutsche Oper der Gegenwart (German Opera of the Present Day), this substantial and lavishly produced volume documents the aesthetics of opera during the Third Reich through its profiles of sixty-two composers, more than 250 design drawings and photographs, prose essays on drama and staging, and an extensive works list. The National Socialist alignment of the book’s primary author (the theater historian Carl Niessen) and publishing company (Gustav Bosse Verlag) contextualizes the volume’s problematic scholarly priorities. Niessen interleaved explanations and endorsements of viable manifestations of contemporary German opera with anti-Semitic rhetoric and venomous critiques of rival aesthetic views. The book’s time-capsule version of the “state of the art” also includes evidence that contradicts postwar claims by composers, such as Winfried Zillig, who later recast themselves as persecuted modernists but whose statements within the volume demonstrate their complicity. Pamela Potter has recommended that musicologists address the longstanding historiographical problem of defining “Nazi Music” by paying detailed attention to particularities. Analyzing the form, contents, and rhetoric of a single printed object permits insights into the definition, valuation, and canonization of contemporary opera near the end of the Third Reich.
2011
Recent scholarship on Nazi music policy pays little attention to the main party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, or comparable publications for the general public. Most work concentrates on publications Nazis targeted at expert audiences, in this case music journals. But to think our histories of Nazi music politics are complete without comprehensive analysis of the party daily is premature. One learns from this resource precisely what Nazi propagandists wanted average party members and Germans in general, not just top-level officials and scholars, to think-even about music. Therein, we see how contributors placed a Nazi "spin" on music history and composer's biographies.
Musicology in the "Third Reich": A Preliminary Report
Journal of Musicology, 2001
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2012
In his book on aesthetics and Nazi politics, translated as The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Eric Michaud wrote that the National Socialist attention to the arts was intended "to present the broken Volk with an image of its 'eternal Geist' and to hold up to it a mirror capable of restoring to it the strength to love itself." 1 In preparing the conceptual framework for my own book, just released by Cambridge University Press, I came upon this, among other ideas of Michaud, who is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, somewhat late in the game. His book was originally published by Gallimard in 1996, and then translated into English in 2004. Considering it last year, I found a number of his concepts very intriguing, but was only able to make general references to them in my Introduction and Conclusion. Many of these ideas will be familiar to readers of George L. Mosse, whom Michaud should have cited more vigorously. However, I found that Michaud put some of the key concepts of the History of Nazi Culture more strongly than I have read elsewhere, and also that they seemed to resonate with much of the material I uncovered in my research.
Musical History As Seen Through Contemporary Eyes, 2021
But the real evil is what causes us speechless horror, when all we can say is: This should never have happened. 1 The totalitarian regime does not need censorship; it prohibits silence and instead insists on singing hymns of freedom in chorus. 2 Newspapers and journals are a crucial part of the core source material of music research. They provide valuable information not merely about the status of musical research, repertoire, performance and reception history but they offer view of the state of society and culture more broadly. This study focuses on early twentieth-century German music periodicals in general, 3 and on the wartime journal Musik im Kriege in particular. This journal was published bimonthly in two volumes only, in 1943 and 1944 (totaling 20 single 1 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 75. 2 "Das totalitäre Regime hat die Zensur nicht nötig; es verbietet das Schweigen und läßt dafür die Hymnen auf die Freiheit im Chor singen." Manès Sperber, Die Achillesferse
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Dancing with devils: Carl Orff and National Socialism revisited
Nordic Research in Music Education, 2023
Orff's work, particularly Carmina Burana and the Schulwerk, has been popular for many decades. But since Orff established himself as a successful composer and educator during the Third Reich, there has always been the issue of his relation to National Socialism. Historical research has so far presented an unclear picture, oscillating between seeing him as a supporter or a resistance fighter. Most recent research offers much more complex perspectives. The purpose of this article is to utilize the most recently published German research to revise the notion the international music education community has of Orff's connection with National Socialism.
Carl Orff Talk 25 May 2014 Part One
Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” is among the most famous and frequently-performed 20th century musical works, and is performed somewhere in the world nearly everyday. Its prologue, “O Fortuna”, is instantly recognizable and has been appropriated by television, film and popular culture. But what are we to make of the “Carmina Burana” and its composer? Was the “Carmina Burana” a work of Nazi propaganda written by a Nazi composer? Who was Carl Orff? . Events and influences on Carl Orff in his childhood will be shown to be of particular importance to his personal and creative life, and the placing of the work’s inception and performance in the proper context of time and place will demonstrate and establish the importance and greatness of the “Carmina Burana” and its composer to the history of 20th century world music and culture.
Neglected Muse: Nazi Music Policy
BRILL eBooks, 2023
Spring 1942, the Rositabar on Bayerischer Platz in Berlin. Alongside jazz musician Tullio Mobiglia, who styled himself the most beautiful saxophonist in the world, Jewish guitarist Heinz Jakob Schumann, just eighteen years old, made his debut. The Italian Mobiglia, who had been an apprentice to Coleman Hawkins, and his sextet offered the best swing to be heard in the 'Third Reich'. In the middle of the war, the Berlin nightclub seemed to be a refuge for everyone who wanted to flee the cruel reality of renunciation, loss and persecution. A horde of female admirers had their sights set on the beautiful Tullio, but Schumann also seems to have enjoyed himself amply. That spring of 1942, he was given a nickname by a French friend, who called him Chérie Coco because she couldn't pronounce Heinz; henceforth he was to make his career under the name Coco Schumann.1 One of the regulars at the Rositabar was Heinrich Kupffer, born like Schumann in 1924. Before Kupffer was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1942, he had paid a visit to the jazz club one last time with his 'half-Jewish' girlfriend from Neukölln and may well have enjoyed Mobiglia's and Schumann's swing standards. He had met this woman just a few days earlier. She had already lost her father, though we do not learn how. Yet she had been 'in no way gloomy or withdrawn' , recalled Kupffer, but fully 'involved in the colossal and crazy normality of this city' .2 Of course, the Rositabar was not in the public eye to the same extent as the Berlin Philharmonic, for example. Coco Schumann was nowhere near as wellknown as the likes of Friedrich Hollaender, who had long since left Germany. Furthermore, in the spring of 1942, only a short time after the United States had entered the war, the Nazi regime had other things to do than raid a jazz club in Schöneberg in order to send yet another Jew off to a prison camp; Schumann was admitted to Theresienstadt a year later. Ultimately, this vignette in the Rositabar reflects individual experiences that contrast with the displacement and murder of many Jewish musicians and many more Jewish listeners. And yet Kupffer's 'crazy normality' should be taken seriously as an attempt to describe everyday life in the Nazi state, not least with a view to musical
The American Historical Review, 1996
Music in the Third Reich Music is one of the most powerful entities in the universe. It has the ability to speak to the deepest part of the human psyche. Because of this ability, music can be used in countless ways to bring about the desired effects of anyone from a televangelist attempting to elicit an emotional response from an audience to a business professional endeavoring to sell more of his products to a dictator scheming to change the course of history. As has been clearly demonstrated throughout the history of civilization, music has been a driving force in the development of culture, society, and religion, and this was no exception in Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Music had a direct impact on the character and beliefs of Hitler himself, and those beliefs and views affected the policies that he implemented during his reign of horror. His beliefs in the greatness and purity of the Aryan race were directly displayed in his policies regarding art and entertainment. The government of the Third Reich implemented strict policies on 'acceptable' music, composers and performers, and they also made extensive use of music in the media, public life of the individual citizen, and the Hitler Youth movement. Music played a prominent role in the rise of Nazi politics and culture in Germany and was used extensively by the party in propaganda and indoctrination of the entire country. Hitler's views on music and art were the product of his life experiences, circumstances, and the influence of specific individuals. To understand the mindset of Adolf Hitler, one must look back into the formative years of his childhood. In her book entitled Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture Art and Music, Sherree Owens Zalampas emphasizes the role that art played in the life of Hitler. He desperately wanted to be an artist, and he immersed himself in artistic pursuits-it was almost as if he was completely