Robert Peters:

>...  This is Richard Strauss: a vain artist who sold himself to the
>Nazis and helped them ridicule his colleagues.  Poor, isnt it?  And you
>know what: this naive, sentimental and unpolitical stance can often be
>heard in Strausss music.

You know, I'm always a little suspicious of the righteous indignation
that comes from a politically comfortable seat.  The Nazis had a terror
state on a level most of us can't conceive.  Assuming I wasn't rounded
up for the camps, I have no idea how I'd have reacted under such a regime
- probably as cowardly as anyone else.

But here's a detail: Die Liebe der Danae was highly influenced by the
Zeitopern of Hindemith, Weill, Eisler, and Krenek.  Everything I've read
about Strauss - including Del Mar's definitive 3-volume study - tells
me that he was an SOB much of the time.  However, the detail of his
Jewish daughter-in-law, and by extension her children (Strauss's
grandchildren), tells me that stage heroism would have visited suffering,
perhaps death, on innocents.  Strauss, like many artists including, as
I think you pointed out, Webern, was initially enthusiastic about the
Nazis.  He cooled very quickly, as quite a few of his letters show.
Indeed, his letters, intercepted and opened by the government, got him
into quite a bit of trouble, including not-so-subtle threats.  He was
certainly not an anti-Semite and I strongly doubt, considering his
contemporary, *written* opinion of Nazis as cultural louts, that he had
much sympathy for their artistic agenda.  Besides his Festival Prelude,
he also composed an Olympic Hymn for the Berlin games, as his letters
show, really to keep them off his back.  Strauss's real work at this
time lay in his operas, some of which got him in trouble, either because
he used a Jewish librettist (Zweig) or because the plots were found
objectionable.

As for Furtwaengler, he certainly was less involved with the regime than
either Tietjens or Karajan, and, though I have no way to prove it, he
is said to have done what he could to save Jewish musicians.  But this
never gets brought up or is trivialized, perhaps because it contradicts
the accusation.  As far as I'm concerned, *any* protest of the Reich --
for family members or not -- counts as an heroic act.

We can say the same thing for Orff, another composer branded as a Nazi.
The people who accuse him apparently have little idea that, first, he
moved in Bonhoeffer's circles and, second, so many of his friends were
implicated in one of the plots to kill Hitler, that the Gestapo picked
him up and questioned him for, if I recall correctly, three days.
Furthermore, he also got into trouble for the plot of Die Kluge (an
irrational tyrant is brought low), and the Nazis took the step of banning
the work.

I strongly suspect that the people who began these charges either were
engaging in "pious lies." That is, they disliked the music, envied the
career, or simply had other personal animus.  Certainly, when grad-student
me expressed a favorable opinion of the music, my professors brought up
Hitler, as if that trumped everything else or even spoke to the point.

Steve Schwartz