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I would like to submit some interesting recent research regarding the close collections between the Nazi Reichsmuzikkammer (RMK) and the German Orgelbewegung in the 1930's. As you might know, the members of the Orgelbewegung were among the most important contributors to discussions of harpsichord playing in the generation between Landowska and Leonhardt. I think their ideas shed light on some Modernist assumptions that have become part of the intellectual landscape surrounding harpsichord playing. The extent to which the ideas of the Orgelbewegung supported and nourished the aesthetic of Goebbels is also central, I feel.
It should be noted that, until very recently, the musical careers of Distler, Schwartzkopf and other Nazi musical collaborators have been "rehabilitated," even in such sources as MGG and the New Grove's Dictionary. But the book cited - although it raised a firestorm of controversy in Germany, where dozens of critics objected to what they perceived as unnecessary German-bashing - has withstood all the arguments raised against it. I note that Oxford University Press, who brought it out, is not a house known for publishing hare-brained pseudo-research, and there is no indication that this book is an exception.
Here goes.
Excerpts from "The Twisted Music; Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich" by Michael H. Kater (Oxford University Press, 1997).
...Fortner, born in 1907 in Leipzig and raised in that city's formidable church-music tradition, took the Gymnasium teachers' examination in 1931, and in the very same year was appointed to the faculty of Heildenberg's Protestant conservatory as an intructor of music theory and composition. His activities were prodigious, including directing the noted Collegium Musicum and later on founding the Heildelberg Chamber Orchestra. His predilection for church modes and pentatonic and whole-note scales soon became apparent; and he cherished linear counterpoint, the canons and fugues of the Baroque period - those halcyon years of Lutheran-inspired church music - even treading on pre-Bach terrain. Fortner came to prefer sparse instrumentation and linear voice-leading, professing these to be dry, sober, objective antidotes to Romanticism (and, as Jöde and Söngen would add, to liberalism, pomposity, and virtuosity). As in the case of many of his contemporaries, such music was in the new mold of neoclassicism, which had evolved after World War I all over Europe in reactin to "the increasingly exaggerated gestures and formlessness of later Romanticism." Its most prominent exponent certainly was Stravinsky, but in Germany its practitioners included Hindemith and others. Here, neoclassicism articulated itself specifically, and characteristically, through the "Back-toBach" movement, to which, both before and after January 1933, Fortner, Spitta, Pepping, Distler, and their friends solidly adhered. The purist simplicity in religion (and its liturgical music) striven for by Söngen and his cohorts was to merge with the simplicity of neoclassicist revival structures.
In the Third Reich the austerity of Fortner's music - like that of his friends - naturally matched the authoritarianism of the political rulers and the Protestant church elders alike. The fascist thought processes were in gear by then; already in 1931 Fortner had created a musical school play entitled Cress Is Drowning, which evoked the sacrificial altruism of the individual for the sake of the greater community. In 1932 he collaborated with the anti-Semitic harpsichordist Li Stadelmann, another Baroque purist; Rosenbergs' Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur sponsored the German premiere of his new concerto for string orchestra in nearby Mannheim a few months after Hitler's takeover.
...The combination of polyphonic reformism, Hitler adoration, dogmatic and liturgical restoration and anti-Romantic crusading reached its apex in conjunction with the "Organ Movement," which originally was also associated with the Back-to-Bach drive. It was sustained by most of the previously mentioned sealots and led by true masters of the kind of instruments such as Karl Straube, Gotthold Frotscher, and Günther Ramin. It became tightly aligned with the Confessionalist church-music crusade, which it predated by some years, for, as a subsidiary development of neoclassicism, it had its origins in the early 1920s. At that time Straube, Wilibald Gurlitt, and the doyen of German musicologists Arnold Schering had wanted to restore the organ to its Baroque foundations, demanding for it a drier, cleaner sound than that with which the practitions of ther Romantic period had allegedly corrupted it...
For purposes of the May 1933 declaration, co-signed by Gurlitt and Distler and their colleagues and calling for a revival of Protestant church music, the concerns of the Organ Movement were part of the agenda...Distler and David, both superb organists themselves, provided the strongest personal linkage between those two sets of objectives, and that close relationship became manifest during the 1937 Berlin church-music festival, a second Freiburg organ conference in 1938, and the "Berlin Organ Days" held in 1942. The aims were, consistently, a return to Schützian or Bachian organ style as archetypally both Protestant and German, a reconciliation of the organ's role with orthodox Lutheran liturgy in the churches, and a fruitful integration between astringent neo-Gothic organ music and congregational singing, to exemplify unity and community.
...At the time of the infamous party rally of September 1935, which ushered in the anti-Semitic Noremburg Race Laws, Hitler decided to construct Europe's largest organ in the Nuremberg rally grounds for the next year's celebrations. This turned out to be a Walcker organ with 16,000 popies...Ramin, Germany's best organist and once a pioneer of the Organ Movement, was then chosen to demonstrate the instrument in a private sitting for the Führer, and he also worked the manuals, pedals, and stops during the 1936 party rally.
The symbolic value of this action cannot be overestimated, for now, beyond narrow neoclassicist and church-liturgical objectives, it had inexorably established the organ as a preeminent tool of Nazi ceremonials....As Müller-Blattau said, the organ was "the total instrument of a total state;" the allusion to Hitler as the "omnipotent organist" was hypnotic...
At the second Freiburg organ festival of 1938, the paradigm of the organ as the "total instrument" was reiterated and engraved in stone when it was decided that a permanent Hitler Youth organ workshop should be created. This would benefit many of the music students who had been training at the conservatories and academies with a view to becoming church organists or Hitler Youth music instructors. From then on, and into the war, the organ became an integral part of the Hitler Yough music scene, especially as far as the young musicians' involvement in specifically Nazi celebrations was concerned. A tall, blond Youth leader in a smartly tailored brown uniform, flawlessly able to rattle off a Bach toccata on the organ, would possess all the desired social and political attributes; he would be universally admired, popular with the girls (to aid master-race procreation), a contemporary idol, the prototype of a new Führer. He was the model for the maching gun-totin SS soldier displaying his fine piano skills in Spielberg's movie Schindler's List."
I think the above raises worthwhile questions about the legitimacy of changes to the Bach performance tradition that took place under the auspices of the Organ Movement (Orgelbewegung). |
