Bernard Chasan schrieb:

>Robert Peters:
>
>>My quotation of today is one of the most absurd and mean-spirited I
>>could find. To say what should be perfectly clear: I quote this just to
>>show how low musicologists can go in their need to serve a dictatorship.
>
>Surely you don't mean to imply that musicologists as a class are lower
>than other professions.

No. Actually I should have said: the quotation shows that there are
always scholars (among them musicologists) who are too willing to serve
a dictatorship.

>>Richard Strauss took Bruno Walters job as president of the Reichsmusikkammer.
>>He and Furtwangler thought naively they could do some good by staying
>>in Germany but (volutarily - involuntarily?) served the regime and lied
>>afterwards about their time under Hitler.
>
>The devil is in the detail.  Strauss was considered to be detached both
>by the Nazis and by the opposition.  He did have a Jewish daughter-in-law,
>and apparently his compliance or docility protected her.

Strauss is a good example for the polititcally totally naive artist
who is too often lost in vanity.  In 1933 he called Joseph Goebbels
"culturally sensitive" (feinsinnig).  In 1938 Strauss composed and
conducted his Festliches Vorspiel for the opening of the exhibition
Entartete Musik (Perverted Music) in which the Nazis ridiculed modern
music and compared it with noise and the music of mentally ill people.
Thus Strauss helped the Nazis to insult his colleagues Eisler, Hindemith,
Schonberg, Weill, Webern, Berg, Fall, Abraham, Hollaender.  Where is the
devil in the detail here?  In 1940 Strauss wrote angry letters against
Goebbels - not because of his politics but because Goebbels wanted to
give composers of popular music more money than classical composers.
This was a cause for opposition.  In 1942 Strauss drove in his Mercedes
to the concentration camp Theresienstadt, introduced himself to the SS
guards as "Richard Strauss, the composer" and demanded that they released
some imprisoned family members.  Apart from this maybe moving but
politically totally stupid behaviour there is no evidence that Strauss
actively tried to protect Jews.  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.

Robert