Levi on Mozart

Mozart and the Nazis, How the Third Reich abused a cultural icon

by Erik Levi

Yale University Press

324pp,

£stg 25.00

“One name rings out here today, but it speaks for Germany and means happiness for the whole world - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his memory we have assembled. In his sign we call the youth of Europe to war for its art”.

Just how happy Mozart would have been to have his name used to invoke a war of any kind is questionable, but those were the words with which a Reichsleiter (or Reich leader) wound up his welcoming address to the Mozart Week of the German Reich in Vienna in November 1941. The idea behind the celebrations was the 150th anniversary of the death of Mozart on December 5th, 1791, and the proceedings had been designed to put the capstone on the process of Mozart’s aryanisation which had been started some years before.

The Third Reich’s attempts at Mozart’s nazification is documented in this book by Erik Levi, and it makes for sombre reading. Firstly, Mozart had to become German, (he was born in Salzburg, then a part of Bavaria and the Holy Roman Empire), and he had to be shown to represent true German culture. Then he had to have his connections with Freemasonry extirpated. This was achieved with the assistance of a 1928 book by Mathilde Ludendorff, the wife of one of Hitler’s henchmen, who ludicrously argued that Mozart had tried to expose the Freemasons in his opera the Magic Flute, and had been murdered as a result of a revenge conspiracy between the Jews and the Freemasons. Sadly, we are told that “by 1936, 55,000 copies of the book had been published”.

Additional cleaning up of Mozarts’ aryan image involved excising the fact that his operas were based on mostly Italian texts, and that three of his libretti were by Lorenzo Da Ponte, a Jew.  Consequently, translation into German had to be done, and in the three operas mentioned (The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan Tutti), Da Ponte, the original jewish author of the texts, was omitted in all publicity.

There are two early chapters of Levi’s book devoted to the topics mentioned above. A further two chapters are devoted to the Mozart diaspora and to German writers on Mozart who were in exile during the years of the Third Reich, and these cover a more diverse field. The first examines in detail the manner in which festivals and cultural organisations abroad dealt with Mozart performance, with a large section covering the rise of the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex. The second examines how academic writers and musicologists continued to work expanding the knowledge of the composer’s work outside of the Reich.

One of the most important of these writers, Alfred Einstein, has a large section devoted to his work. Einstein was singlehandedly behind the expansion of Koechel’s 1862 catalogue of the composers output, work which he had started in Germany in 1929 under a commission from the publishers Breitkopf & Hartel,  but, having been denied an academic position and having lost his journalist position in 1933 after Hitler came to power, he left Germany and his work continued in England and Italy. Thus one of the most important pieces of Mozart Scholarship of the 20th Century was completed during the Nazi period, but outside of Germany.  Another loss to Germany was the library of Paul Hirsch, Einsteins collaborator, which contained “a vast collection of early editions of the composer’s works”, and which were smuggled out of the country when Hirsch himself had to leave because of discrimination.

The main body of Levi’s text which directly addresses the nazification of Mozart as a cultural icon occurs in the ninety or so pages which comprise the chapters “Mozart Performance and Propaganda” and “Mozart serves German Imperialism”. The thrust of much of these are the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death.  All the stops were pulled out for this event for three reasons. Firstly Mozart’s genius was seen as a “beacon of German greatness”. secondly, Mozart’s music was thought to be völkisch and accessible; and finally, Mozart could be used as a link between the home and the front, a rallying cry of German “cultural virility” for which the soldiers on the front were fighting.  Another project, one of Goebbels’s favourites, was a film on the life of Mozart which was eventually made and shown in 1942, and which apparently includes a bizarre and purely fictionalised sequence where Mozart meets a young Beethoven (another attempted Nazi icon) who improvises passages from his “Moonlight” sonata.

The appendices are comprised of two nauseating speeches, the one already mentioned above, and another by Goebbels for a similar occasion in the Staatsoper  in Vienna, for which there is an accompanying picture which eerily shows Goebbels addressing an operahouse full of people, with garlands of flowers strewn below him.

This is not a book about Mozart: it is a book about Nazis, and about the people who opposed them and lost much in their struggle to do so.  Above all, it is a fascinating and scholarly examination into how institutionalised evil could take  one of the greatest humanists who has ever lived, and twist him to their own ends.

Fergus Johnston is a composer and a member of Aosdána.