Power Politics: Orchestra Conductors Versus Tyranny

Unlike Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, the renowned German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler refused to give the straight-armed fascist salute even when coming face to face with Adolf Hitler.

Furtwängler defied Der Führer but would not leave Germany. He referred to Hitler as “a hissing street peddler” and “an enemy of the human race.”  So as not to salute, he held the conductor’s baton in his right hand.

He could have escaped the Third Reich but stayed to resist and make beautiful music. Furtwängler used his prestige to get a Jewish musician out of Dachau and to display defiance. In exchange, the Nazi regime used his prestige to tout the “new Germany.”

I have at home, and can see with YouTube, a stunning 83-year-old recording of Beethoven’s remarkable 9th Symphony. It was a performance honoring Hitler’s birthday, coerced by propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels. The performance is passionate. The symphony’s slow passages are beautifully drawn out, the scherzo meticulously detailed, and the concluding “Ode to Joy,” based in part on Friedrich Schiller’s poem, is overflowing. It is as if the musicians were trying somehow to convey Schiller’s message of brotherhood to Nazi bigwigs in the audience.

Dr. Goebbels sprang from his front row seat to shake Furtwängler’s hand, a gesture that figured in the conductor’s postwar denazification trial. He had repeatedly defied the regime — once to Hitler’s face — and defended Jewish musicians as vital to the orchestra’s performance. 

“If concerts offer nothing, then people will not attend,” he wrote to Goebbels. “That is why quality is not just an ideal. It is vital.” It was a cultured, conservative German’s distaste of ruthless barbarians.

Sound familiar? Musicians and artists have often faced such political choices. Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Erich Leinsdorf escaped or were kicked out of Germany. The Soviet Union exiled human-rights advocates. Arturo Toscanini faulted Furtwängler for staying: “Had Furtwängler been firm in his democratic convictions, he would have left.”

Others collaborated. Wunderkind conductor Herbert von Karajan joined the Nazi Party and accepted the patronage of Herman Goering. Karl Böhm and Richard Strauss lent prestige to the regime, and Strauss conducted at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

If you have guts and ingenuity, there is opportunity. Furtwängler put Smetana’s “Moldau” on the program for a Prague concert marking the fifth anniversary of German occupation. He featured exiled German musicians in a concert at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. 

It’s a long jump, but Leonard Bernstein assembled a pickup orchestra to perform Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War” at National Cathedral on the eve of Nixon’s second inaugural. 

The Concert for Peace at the National Cathedral was in protest of the 1972 Christmas Eve bombing of Hanoi. The cathedral, of course, was scene of an Episcopal bishop’s truth-to-power plea for Trump to have mercy.

On the other hand, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra were performing for Nixon. Conductor Daniel Barenboim performed for Israeli troops during the 1967 war, conducted a celebratory concert at that war’s conclusion, but has since brought Israeli and Palestinian musicians to perform together in a rare collaboration.

I stood on the Reichstag lawn in Berlin with friends on the night of Germany’s reunification. The German Democratic Republic went out with a performance of “the glorious Ninth,” the unified country celebrating the next day to the vibrant sounds of Brahms’ Second Symphony. 

This time, the music was joyous with the lifting of communist tyranny. Bernstein would lead a performance of the Beethoven 9th, substituting “freedom” for “joy” in the choral movement. We proceeded to Prague, witnessing an equally stirring performance of the Dvorak cello concerto.

Of course, tyrants have used music. More often, however, musicians have sounded truth to power. The first bars of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony served as a call to resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. Furtwängler soldiered on almost to the end, doing Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony on January 28,1945, with the Vienna Philharmonic.

The Red Army was closing in on Vienna and Berlin from the east.  The Gestapo was set to arrest Furtwängler for such criminal acts as refusal to give the Heil Hitler greeting and refusing to conduct the Horst Wessel anthem. The maestro had associated with the plotters who tried to assasinate Hitler.

Furtwängler escaped to Switzerland. Cleared by the denazification court, he participated in the revival of his country. He would conduct a stirring Beethoven’s 9th in 1951, marking rebirth of the Bayreuth Festival.

I would hope Americans will hear the “Ode to Joy” performed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in January of 2029.