c. 1996 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) In Berlin these days, the wall is blasted to rubble. But among the fine arts, the ashes of World War II still smolder with unnerving heat.
A new biography of soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, published this fall, ignited a firestorm with its mention of her membership in the Nazi Party. The Broadway play “Taking Sides” imagines a confrontation between German conductor Wilhelm von Furtwangler and a U.S. Army major over von Furtwangler’s alleged Nazi sympathies. The current exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, “Max Beckmann in Exile,” features works informed by the artist’s escape from Germany on the very night Hitler declared war on what he called “degenerate art.” And “Love Letters to Hitler” _ a collection of passionate missives written by ordinary German women to Der Fuehrer _ is scheduled for production as a play in December.
Now, the American Symphony Orchestra pokes the embers with Music Director Leon Botstein’s latest project. On Friday (Nov. 22) at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, the conductor will lead the Arnold Schoenberg Choir in the New York premiere of Austrian composer Franz Schmidt’s 1938 oratorio, “The Book of the Seven Seals.”
How controversial can such a piece be? It’s just a setting for chorus and orchestra based on the book of Revelation. Its structures adhere precisely to 18th century models (recitative and aria, followed by choral response) _ albeit colored by harmonies of Brucknerian lavishness. But sometimes chords mean more than chords.
“You must remember that the neo-romantic conservative style was the style embraced by Nazi culture in the ’20s and ’30s,” Botstein says. “Schmidt was extraordinary _ a learned (historian) but possessed of his own unique voice _ and I would offer `The Book’ as one of the choral masterworks of the 20th century. But there’s no denying that after the war, both Schmidt, and this piece in particular, became the darlings of extremely right-wing _ not to say Fascist _ Austrian forces.”
Indeed. “The Book” premiered to resounding success in 1938, prompting the Nationalist Socialist Party to commission an anthem “for the greater glory of Germany” from Schmidt. He managed only to sketch the outlines of “German Resurrection” before dying in 1939, but a student completed the work under his name _ an action that would later discredit Schmidt politically.
After 1945, his works, including “The Book,” were rarely performed outside Austria; even a famous revival of the oratorio at the 1959 Salzburg Festival failed to resuscitate it completely. And the festival’s planned restaging of “The Book” in the late 1980s sparked such an outcry that the performance was ultimately canceled.
Thus, the American Symphony Orchestra’s revival raises an eternal question: Can one separate art from how it is used? Artists generally wish it so. “What has all this to do with singing?” was Schwarzkopf’s plaintive response to her critics. In “Taking Sides,” von Furtwangler serenely maintains that “a single performance of a great masterpiece (is) a stronger and more vital negation of the spirit of Buchenwald and Auschwitz than words. … Human beings are free wherever Wagner and Beethoven are played.”
Contemporary audiences often disagree.
Former New York Philharmonic Music Director Zubin Mehta vividly remembers the uproar over his first attempts to perform Wagner’s orchestral literature in Tel Aviv. And opera enthusiast Lawrence Mass, in the title essay of his recent book, “Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite,” sees all too few efforts to separate Wagner the genius from Wagner the bigot. In fact, he argues, recent productions of “The Ring of the Nibelungen” seem to uncritically echo, rather than mute or downplay, the blatant anti-Semitism written into that opera cycle.
Botstein’s answer? “We must appreciate a work’s original socio-political context, while at the same time claiming the freedom to listen to it in our own.”
Defining that context can throw off some surprising insights into even the most abstract, text-free music. “What newer generations of concert-goers may not understand is that the early prestige of modernist composers like Schoenberg and his heirs _ Boulez, Stockhausen _ was primarily political,” Botstein says. “The neo-conservative idiom was too strongly identified with repellent ideologies for them to use it with a clear conscience. It’s important to hear their modernist music as much for what it wasn’t as for what it was.”
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It’s that thinking that makes “The Book of the Seven Seals” more political than it might seem from its antique religious text. For example, Wagner’s own essays on the Jews of Europe make an anti-Semitic interpretation of his musical and verbal depiction of the dwarves in his “Ring” cycle impossible to refute. But, unless you knew Austrian history, you’d never know _ you’d never HEAR _ “The Book’s” political resonance from its text.”
“The way `The Book’ is usually performed _ heavily, slowly, devotional to the point of the ponderousness _ is inseparable from the Fascist reverence for the piece,” Botstein says. “I’ll lead it more briskly, stressing its brilliant quality over its religiosity, primarily because I feel that’s a stronger way to present the writing. But, yes, even the tempo choice carries some small political content.”
His comments seem to argue for an approach to hearing “The Book of the Seven Seals” not unlike that of attending a cocktail party: Go, enjoy, but stay responsible.
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“The American Symphony Orchestra delights in presenting this extraordinary unknown repertoire to audiences,” Botstein says. “We’ve hardly scratched the surface of what’s out there from all historical eras _ not even to mention new music. And it’s worth remembering that if we were to make stringent moral judgments on every composer whose work we value, we’d lose too many critical contributions to the repertoire. We simply need to be aware of the political context of the work without being excessively judgmental. To remember, but without forgetting.”
MJP END ADAMO
