Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits

Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits

Michael H. Kater

Language: English

Pages: 416

ISBN: 0195099249

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


How does creativity thrive in the face of fascism? How can a highly artistic individual function professionally in so threatening a climate?

Composers of the Nazi Era is the final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that includes Different Drummers (OUP 1992) and The Twisted Muse (OUP 1997), which won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. Here, historian Michael H. Kater provides a detailed study of the often interrelated careers of eight prominent German composers who lived and worked amid the dictatorship of the Third Reich, or were driven into exile by it: Werner Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss. Kater weighs issues of accommodation and resistance to ask whether these artists corrupted themselves in the service of a criminal regime--and if so, whether this may be discerned from their music. After chapters discussing the circumstances of each composer individually, Kater concludes with an analysis of the composers' different responses to the Nazi regime and an overview of the sociopolitical background against which they functioned. The final chapter also extends the discussion beyond the end of World War II to examine how the composers reacted to the new and fragile democracy in Germany.

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Him were based was wrong; as has been shown earlier, the extent to which he had actually been a follower of Hitler and the Third Reich was complex and extremely difficult to define, and it certainly eluded the judicial categories of the postwar era. 178 c o m p o s e rs o f t h e n a z i e r a As in the case of most of Pfitzner’s colleagues, the trial proved farcical beyond belief, manifested, from the beginning, by the fact that the jurists could not even get the date of his political.

Egk, scheduling interviews with him and portraying him as a composer ideally representative of his Bavarian home province. In 1944 Egk was placed into the most preferred category for a radio list of indispensable German composers.81 At the height of World War II, Egk scored what may have been his most spectacular coups outside the German Reich proper, namely, in Axis-ruled countries and, more frequently, in Wehrmacht-conquered and wholly Nazicontrolled territory. Already on 1 March 1941, before.

Career path: to remain in Germany beyond 1938, to stay in Switzerland after 1940, never to return 56 c o m p o s e rs o f t h e n a z i e r a from the United States at all, or to come back to a post-Hitlerian Germany with a desire wholly to reintegrate himself. Clearly, none of these possibilities appealed to him. Hindemith’s was an artistic fate quite unique: He was the reluctant émigré who, once having left his country after much procrastination, was just as reluctant to go back to it.

Gershwin, that lady of course was Lenya, who was standing at Weill’s side.63 Kurt Weill 69 But although Gershwin facilitated for Weill and Lenya important contacts and his Porgy and Bess, just premiered, did not fail to make a great impression on Weill, the émigré from Europe rightly felt that in the United States, Gershwin would always be his senior. Hence Weill continued his malicious remarks about Gershwin to Lenya, even though the entire Gershwin clan was taking an increasing interest in.

Farmlike house in Diessen on the Ammersee and who then became Orff’s last wife.218 Consider egocentricity, disregard for other people’s interests, unwillingness to become personally committed or emotional, tremendous charm and charisma, and bursts of creativity alternating with bouts of disease or lethargy during which work was sluggish (as in the creation of the Midsummer Night’s Dream music). Moreover, consider extreme moodiness and a talent for making up fantasy, legends, or lies which, as.

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