Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon

MOZART AND THE NAZIS

ERIK LEVI

MOZART AND THE NAZIS

HOW THE THIRD REICH ABUSED A CULTURAL ICON

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Copyright © 2010 by Erik Levi

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levi, Erik.

 Mozart and the Nazis: how the Third Reich abused a cultural icon/Erik Levi.

  p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978–0–300–12306–7

 1. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756–1791. 2. National socialism and music. 3. Music and state—Germany—History—20th century. 4. Music—Political aspects—Germany—History—20th century. I. Title.

ML410.M9L356 2010

780.92—dc22

2010033710

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title

Copyright

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Prologue: 1931, a Mozart year

2 Der deutsche Mozart

3 Mozart and the Freemasons: A Nazi Problem

4 Aryanising Mozart

5 The Mozart diaspora

6 ‘True humanitarian music’: exiled writers on Mozart

7 Mozart performance and propaganda: from the Anschluss to the end of World War II

8 Mozart serves German imperialism

9 Epilogue: Nazi legacies

Appendix I: Address by Baldur von Schirach, Vienna, 28 November 1941

Appendix II: Address by Joseph Goebbels, Vienna, 4 December 1941

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Title page to Mozart's Hymne an Deutschland.

2. Music examples from Don Giovanni cited by Walther Vetter.

3. Front cover and title page of Mathilde Ludendorff‘s anti-Masonic book on Mozart.

4. Mozart Die Zauberflöte. Berliner Volksoper, September 1938.

5. Front cover of the piano reduction of Don Giovanni in the Anheisser version, 1935.

6. Advertisement emphasising the widespread dissemination of Anheisser's version of Figaros Hochzeit.

7. Article from a contemporary theatre journal promoting Anheisser's Mozart translations.

8. Title pages of Mozart opera libretti for the Amt Feierabend der NS-Kulturgemeinde Kraft durch Freude in der deutschen Arbeitsfront in 1938.

9. Comparative German translations of the aria ‘Voi, che sapete’.

10. Glyndebourne in the 1930s. Glyndebourne Archive.

11. Opera director Carl Ebert, conductor Fritz Busch and general manager Rudolf Bing at Glyndebourne. Getty Images.

12. Bruno Walter – a symbol of anti-Nazi resistance in Salzburg between 1933 and 1937. Getty Images.

13. Alfred Einstein, the leading Mozart scholar of the 1930s and 1940s.

14. 1938 Salzburg Festival Poster in which Mozart is depicted as the God Apollo. Salzburg Festival Archive.

15. Embossed front cover of the Festschrift published in conjunction with the 1938 Salzburg Festival.

16. Front covers and title pages of some of the numerous books on Mozart issued in Nazi Germany during 1941.

17. A wounded German soldier being given a ticket by a fellow soldier at the 1941 Salzburg Festival. Lebrecht Photo Library.

18. Programme book for Hamburg's Mozart-Gedenktage.

19. Special programme booklet ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sein Leben und Schaffen’ transmitted by Grossdeutscher Rundfunk, Autumn 1941.

20. Front cover of the special commemorative book celebrating the Mozartwoche in Vienna, December 1941.

21. Joint declaration by Goebbels and von Schirach published at the beginning of the commemorative book of the Mozartwoche.

22. Advertisements detailing the programmes devised for the Mozartwoche in Vienna.

23. Joseph Goebbels delivering his Mozart speech at the Staatsoper in Vienna, 4 December 1941.

24. Goebbels visiting the newly restored Figarohaus in the Domgasse Vienna, 5 December 1941.

25. Mozart-Huldigung at the Albertinaplatz Vienna, 5 December 1941 Bildarchiv, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wien.

26. Magazine poster for the Mozart biopic Wen die Götter lieben (1942).

27. Front and back cover of Hans Watzlik's Mozart novel Die Krönungsoper.

28. Magazine advertisement for the film Eine kleine Nachtmusik first screened in German-occupied Prague, 1939.

29. Two specially designed postage stamps issued by the Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren in 1941 in honour of Mozart.

30. Programme book for the Semaine de Mozart à Paris 13–20 July 1941 organised by the Institut Allemand.

31. Poster advertising the opening production in the Deutsches Theater in den Niederlanden of Don Giovanni in The Hague, 19 November 1942. Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie.

32. Poster for the Mozart Commemoration in Flanders, May 1942.

33. Italy's homage to Mozart – a performance of the Requiem in the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli, Rome, 3 and 4 December 1941.

34. Playbill for one of the first post-war performances of Figaro by members of the Vienna State Opera, 1945.

Unless otherwise indicated, all illustrations are taken from the author's own archive.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people whose kindness and advice have helped me enormously in preparing this book. Among the libraries that provided me with precious documents I would like to thank in particular the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, the Musik Sammlung of the Austrian National Library, the EMI Trust, the German National Library Leipzig, the Wiener Library London, the Fred K. Prieberg Archiv at the University of Kiel, and the University of California Berkeley Music Library. Special thanks are due to Rachel Beckles Willson, Nicolas Bell, Liza Blake, Geoffrey Chew, Barbara, Tony and Jessica Ford, Michael Haas, Boris von Haken, Ernst Hainisch, Werner Hanak, Paul Harper-Scott, Simon Keefe, Lottie Levy, Paul Lilley, Eva Moreda-Rodriguez, Katarzyna Naliwajek, Ewald Osers, Francesco Parrino, Tully Potter, Jim Samson, Florian Scheding, Tim Schwabedissen, John Shepard, Nigel Simeone, Raphaël Taylor, Toby Thacker and Diura Thoden van Velzen for their efforts and expertise. I am particularly indebted to Cliff Eisen who read the manuscript and offered many invaluable comments and suggestions and to Emily Kilpatrick for her brilliant copy-editing of my text. I also wish to express particular gratitude to Malcolm Gerratt for encouraging me to complete and expand this project, which originated in 2006 when I acted as academic advisor to the Da Ponte Exhibition at Vienna's Jewish Museum. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife Jo and my daughters Mica and Francesca for their patience, love and understanding.

INTRODUCTION

They, the Nazis, claimed for themselves the glory of Germany's cultural past. They discovered the German classics, they discovered Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and of course Wagner, whose music roused the hysterical Führer into a frenzy in which he was capable of anything.

(ADOLF ABER)¹

Although many regimes have appropriated great historical and artistic figures of the past for their own political purposes, none has done so with such thoroughness as the Nazis. Exploiting the wave of national euphoria that followed their accession to power in 1933, the Nazi government sought to harness the greatest representatives of Germany's rich cultural heritage as a means of serving their particular aims and objectives. In order to lend gravitas and respectability to their actions, as well as maintain a sense of continuity with the past, they pursued a policy that necessitated recreating these icons in their own image.

This policy was particularly well co-ordinated in the sphere of music, a point powerfully emphasised by Adolf Aber, a German-born refugee and musicologist who had settled in England in 1936. Writing in June 1944 about the musical situation in Third Reich, Aber summarised Nazi intentions as ‘thinking war every minute, but shouting peace every second’. One way of shouting peace, Aber argued, was to arrange musical festivals and other such events organised ‘with almost overwhelming lavishness, usually to the accompaniment of receptions attended by ministers and high-party officials who in honey-sweet speeches tried to convince the world of Nazi Germany's peaceful intentions’.²

Almost certainly, Aber was alluding here to the most overwhelmingly lavish musical celebration to have been organised by the Nazi regime, namely the extensive and morale-boosting activities organised throughout the German Reich and its occupied territories in 1941 to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Yet Mozart seems the most unlikely candidate to have become a useful adjunct to Nazi propaganda. Although depicted at the time as the shining example of youthful German genius, whose memory German soldiers were supposedly fighting on the Eastern front to preserve, his music, unlike that of Beethoven or Wagner, does not easily fit into the mould of Teutonic heroism that was required at this particular time.

In fact, Mozart was probably the least easily malleable of all the great composers to have been appropriated by the Nazis. On almost every level, his philosophical and moral outlook seems at odds with their weltanschauung. For example, despite a few isolated expressions of German patriotism that appear in his letters, he does not strike one as a virulent nationalist, at least not in the sense in which such a position was understood by the Nazis. As a libertarian who generally felt at ease in most of the countries of Europe, his vision appears to have transcended national barriers rather than emphasised Germanic hegemony. Furthermore, had he been alive and working during the 1930s, his well-known activities as a Freemason and his apparent willingness to collaborate with a Jewish librettist on three of his greatest operas would surely have placed him on a collision course with the regime.

Yet even if we concede Leon Botstein's argument that the attempt to transform Mozart into a Nazi icon was ultimately rendered ineffective, largely because there was something elusive about his music that ‘permits it to resist equally the evil and good with which it is periodically allied’, it does not make an examination of the process any less fascinating.³ The manipulation of Mozart not only sheds interesting light on the manner in which the Nazis dealt with the nation's musical heritage, but also illustrates the absurd and sometimes contradictory lengths to which those supportive of the regime were prepared to go in order to ensure Mozart's hallowed status as one of the most important representatives of Aryan cultural supremacy.

The book traces the reception of Mozart throughout this period, as a victim of Nazi propaganda, and also as a beacon of hope for those who had been forced out of Germany after 1933 on racial or political grounds. The survey begins with a brief consideration of musical events relating to Mozart in the anniversary year of 1931. It introduces a number of important figures who would be closely associated with the composer throughout the next decade or so, either as supporters or opponents of the incoming Nazi regime. For the following three chapters, the focus is placed on the ways in which the Nazis exploited or subverted certain aspects of Mozart's outlook and activity to serve their ideological programme: his patriotism, his relationship to Freemasonry, and his collaboration with the Jewish-born librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Chapters 5 and 6, on the other hand, explore the reception of Mozart's work from the perspective of a number of highly influential performers and musicologists who were persecuted by the regime and forced to continue their work outside Germany.

Since the Nazis only began to take a really proactive interest in Mozart at the highest levels of government after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Chapter 7 focuses attention on Mozart propaganda and performance from 1938–1945, with specific reference to the Nazification of the Salzburg Festival and the 1941 anniversary celebrations. Chapter 8 examines the use of Mozart as a weapon of German cultural imperialism in the occupied territories. Finally, despite the failure of the Nazis to render irreparable damage to Mozart's reputation, a concluding chapter considers the extent to which the regime's legacy casts a shadow over post-war issues directly associated with the composer. As an appendix, the book includes English translations of the Mozart Speeches by Reichsleiter Baldur von Schirach and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels which were delivered in Vienna in November and December 1941. These documents provide first-hand evidence of the exploitation of Mozart for propaganda purposes at a crucial moment during the war, as the German army was advancing eastwards in an attempt to capture Moscow.

CHAPTER 1

PROLOGUE

1931, A MOZART YEAR

For our musicians in 1931, Mozart is – a longing.

(OSCAR VON PANDER)¹

1931 was a particularly bleak year for Germany. The after-effects of the world economic crisis, prompted by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, had cast a long dark shadow over the country. To all intents and purposes, the Weimar Republic was dying on its feet, its impotent government merely lurching from one calamity to another. Unemployment, already at very high levels at the beginning of the year, had risen to over five and a half million by January 1932.² A spate of bank failures during the summer months, culminating in the collapse of the Darmstadter National Bank on 13 July, intensified a crisis of confidence, even though in the previous month US President Herbert Hoover had tried to stabilise the situation by placing a moratorium on Germany's war reparations.

These cataclysmic events had an inevitable impact upon cultural life. After enjoying a period of relative prosperity from 1923 to 1929, Germany's heavily subsidised theatres, opera houses and orchestras experienced a drastic change of fortune. Attendance suffered particularly badly in the wake of the economic crisis. For example in Hamburg, Germany's second largest city, audiences declined by as much as 28 per cent between 1929 and 1932. With reduced box office receipts, arts organisations hoped to rely more than ever on public money for survival. But regional and local governments were no longer able to come to the rescue. In a desperate attempt to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment and shore up welfare costs, most were forced to cut their subsidy for the arts. The reductions in terms of financial support for theatre companies were particularly stringent, averaging around 27 per cent between the 1929/30 and 1931/32 seasons.³

Of all the performing arts, music suffered especially badly. Given its expense, opera was an obvious target for budgetary cuts. Many theatres resorted to reducing their number of annual opera productions and the size of their orchestras, or in the most extreme cases, abandoning opera altogether. In 1931, an estimated 1,000 of the 6,000 members of the German opera and concert orchestras lost their jobs alongside the enormous number of musicians who found themselves out of work as a result of the emergence of the sound film. Even the most hallowed of Germany's performing institutions could not remain immune from the crisis. During the same year, the city council of Berlin cut the subsidies of the Berlin Philharmonic, first by a third and then by half. It was only saved from almost certain extinction by an enforced merger with the lesser-known Berlin Symphony Orchestra.⁴

Against such a background of unrelieved misery, the musical world had little cause for celebration. Yet the 175th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which fell in 1931, provided one small opportunity for Germans to be reminded of their great musical heritage. At a time of crisis, this process was both necessary and cathartic, for it reinforced the belief, steadfastly maintained by Germany's educated classes, that music had the capacity both to preserve a sense of national identity and to renew the feeling of belonging together.

Among the many anniversary tributes that were paid to the composer, the reflections of the critic Oscar von Pander, published in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, were typical. Regarding Mozart as an object of longing rather than one of fulfilment, von Pander argued that contemporary composers, captivated by his ‘spare and objective form’, the ‘unsurpassable precision of his style’ and the ‘purity of his emotional expression’, viewed him as an ideal to which the music-making of that time ‘must turn as a reaction against a previous overreaching and overblown style’. Yet paradoxically, in the current artistic climate, such an ideal could never be realised:

It is no coincidence that today's composers, on the one hand, sense the formal perfection of his works as a paradigm and, on the other, find their beauty less or not at all worth imitating. Certainly, the barriers and restraints that are intrinsic to the contemporary human being lie almost insurmountably on the path towards Mozartian beauty. Nonetheless, only an emergence of his clarity and depth will bring fulfilment to the numerous approaches and currents of new musical creation. In this sense, we can today experience the peculiar sensation of daring to consider him, possibly the most uneducated composer from a purely human viewpoint, the educator of the German musician.⁵

Although the uncertain economic and political situation inevitably inhibited the scope of the Mozart anniversary year celebrations, which were far more modest in scale than those accorded to Beethoven for the centenary of his death in 1927, a number of Mozart-related achievements in the field of scholarship, performance and publication in 1931 set the agenda for the composer's reception during the later 1930s, both within and outside the Third Reich.

Alfred Einstein's edition of Don Giovanni

One particularly significant milestone was Alfred Einstein's edition of the complete score of Don Giovanni, which was published by the Leipzig firm of Ernst Eulenburg in May 1931. The project had occupied Einstein since 1923, while he was working as an editor for the Munich-based publisher Drei Masken Verlag. That it took nearly eight years to come to fruition had much to do with the inaccessibility of the autograph manuscript, which had been deposited at the Paris Conservatoire in 1910. In order to compensate for this ‘loss to Germany’ of a such a precious document, as Einstein put it in the introduction to the published score, his initial idea had been to bring out a facsimile reproduction of the autograph.⁶ But this proposal hardly got off the ground, partly as a result of fraught relationships between France and Germany, and partly because it was deemed economically unviable by his publishers, who were suffering from the effects of rampant inflation. Einstein therefore had little option but to set to work on creating his own edition. To speed up the process, he gratefully utilised whatever facsimile pages the Munich firm already had in its possession.

In the introduction to the score, Einstein placed considerable emphasis on the scholarly value of his edition. He wanted to ‘offer the opera in the purest and most faithful form approaching the original as closely as it is ever possible for a print to approach a manuscript’. Einstein went further, claiming that this attempt must also help to bring about ‘a new spiritual conception of the work, or better’. Above all, he declared, it should become ‘a symbol or an invitation to allow the opera to appear again in all its purity, free from all the romantic and unromantic distortions of the 19th century … without moralistic or ethical or philosophical evaluation, without the implication of Wagnerian Leitmotives, and especially without the debates on the stylistic question of its typology, either as opera buffa or a mixture of buffa and seria.’⁷

The Einstein edition of Don Giovanni should be regarded as arguably the most substantial achievement of the musicologist's pre-1933 career, a career that up to this juncture had been blighted by difficulties and disappointments, not the least of which was the impossibility of securing a professorship in a German university. The brilliant scholar undoubtedly deserved such recognition, but was denied this opportunity as a result of jealousy and ‘rampant anti-Semitism’ among his academic colleagues.⁸ Nonetheless, despite these unpleasant undercurrents, the initial reaction to Einstein's edition seems to have been positive.⁹ Only after the Nazi takeover was there a sharp reversal. As one of many German-Jewish musicologists that were driven out of their native country, Einstein was now censured on racial grounds, his claim to have restored Mozart's opera from its previous misrepresentations and falsifications cutting little ice with those that were controlling musical life after 1933.¹⁰

The rival arrangements of Idomeneo: ‘tainted’ Strauss/Wallerstein versus ‘pure’ Wolf-Ferrari/Stahl

Einstein's desire to create a pure and faithful Mozart, divested from the unwanted accretions of nineteenth-century performance practice, stood in direct contrast to other musicians who were perfectly prepared to distort the composer's original intentions in various ways with the aim of making them more accessible to contemporary audiences. Among the works that proved most vulnerable to this course of action were some of the many operas by Mozart which had thus far failed to establish a secure place in the repertory.

During the nineteenth century there had been some limited but largely unsuccessful attempts to resuscitate Mozart's neglected stage works. After the First World War, however, the general artistic climate, reacting against the excesses of late-Romanticism, appeared to be far more receptive to the idea of reviving long-forgotten eighteenth-century operatic works. The most obvious reflection of this trend was the renewed interest in staging Handel's operas, which began in earnest in Göttingen under the directorship of Oskar Hagen in 1920.¹¹ Likewise, a number of opera houses also incorporated early Mozart works into their schedules. Among the novelties which were featured between the First World War and the end of the Weimar Republic was the early musical intermezzo Apollo et Hyacinthus, which was revived in two alternative versions, both translated into German. The first of these was staged at Rostock in 1922 and translated by H. C. Schott with the music arranged by Paul Gerhard Scholz and Josef Turnau, whilst the second, first performed in Munich in 1932, featured a translation by Erika Mann (daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann) with the music arranged by Karl Schleifer.¹² Other Mozart operatic revivals during this period included La finta semplice translated into German by Anton Rudolph as Die verstellte Einfalt in Karlsruhe in 1921 and Breslau in 1927, La finta giardiniera in translations by Rudolf and Ludwig Berger (Mainz, 1915), Oscar Bie (Darmstadt, 1915 and Berlin, 1916) and Anton Rudolph (Karslruhe, 1918); and Zaide, arranged by Rudolph (Karlsruhe, 1917).

In 1931, the spotlight fixed upon Idomeneo, primarily because it was 150 years since Mozart's first great opera had seen the light of day in Munich. Long considered a problem child among Mozart's mature stage works on account of its unwieldy libretto, Idomeneo had been revived relatively infrequently during the nineteenth century. Whenever it was performed, the opera was subjected to considerable modifications and re-arrangements. This happened as early as August 1806 in Berlin, where the work was presented with extra arias composed by Ferdinando Paer, Bernhard Anselm Weber and Vincenzo Righini.¹³ The tendency to meddle with Idomeneo persisted into the early twentieth century with a new version staged in Karlsruhe in 1917 and Dresden in 1925 by Ernst Lewicki, director of the Dresden Mozartverein. As was the convention at that time, Lewicki translated the Italian libretto into German. Basing his arrangement on the principles of Gluck and Wagner, he compressed the action into two acts, reducing in particular the prominent role allotted to Electra. Lewicki sought to excise most of the stylistic features associated with Italian opera seria, shortened the recitatives and eliminated some of the music Mozart composed for the closing Ballet and Intermezzo at the end of Act 1.¹⁴

Although nowadays Lewicki's Germanic interventions would be regarded as a gross distortion of Mozart's original intentions, they nonetheless paved the way for the four different versions of Idomeneo that were to be featured during the opera's anniversary year. Two of these, an arrangement by the conductor Arthur Rother presented in Dessau on 19 February and one by Wilhelm (Willy) Meckbach heard in Braunschweig on 31 May, made relatively little impression having only been performed in provincial opera houses.¹⁵ In any case, both were overshadowed by two high-profile versions given at major opera houses. The Vienna State Opera provided the prestigious venue for the first of these arrangements, by Richard Strauss and Lothar Wallerstein, which was given its premiere on 16 April. Two months later another version, by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and Ernst Leopold Stahl, was first heard in Munich on 15 June.

Irrespective of their claims to have served Mozart first and foremost, both composers and librettists opted to make sweeping changes to the original work. In the case of Strauss/Wallerstein, the libretto was translated into German, abandoning Varesco's original rhymed verse in favour of prose, cutting down the length of the recitatives and dividing each act into clearly defined but continuous scenes. Even more drastic was Strauss's decision to replace the role of Electra with that of Ismene, Priestess of Poseidon. Although it has been suggested that he had no wish to represent this character on the stage for a second time, such a strategy alters the opera's plot in a very fundamental manner, not least in imposing an ideological framework that, according to the musicologist Chris Walton, might have proved attractive to the Nazis. Thus Ismene, unlike Electra, no longer acts as a rival for Idamante's love, and becomes ‘a veritable Goebbels in petticoats, jealously guarding the racial purity of her people and determined that her future king should not defile his race by marrying Ilia, a mere Trojan slave’.¹⁶

Yet these alterations to the libretto were nothing as compared to the treatment of Mozart's music. Unable to inhibit his own larger-than-life musical personality, Strauss created a score that veers between a more or less faithful adaptation of the original and clear reminiscences of his own style, with echoes of Der Rosenkavalier and Die ägyptische Helena percolating through the texture from time to time. Although some critics remained sympathetic to Strauss's intentions, others reacted with considerable hostility to the concoction.¹⁷ Leading the charge against Strauss and Wallerstein was Alfred Einstein, who was so outraged by the whole enterprise that he famously described the arrangement as ‘a gross act of mutilation’ in his 1937 revision of the Köchel catalogue of Mozart's Works.¹⁸ Strauss responded to such objections in a characteristically defiant manner, declaring that although the critics could say what they wanted, ‘I know my Mozart better than these gentlemen do, and at any rate I love him more ardently than they!'¹⁹

Although Wolf-Ferrari did not succumb to such flights of creative fantasy as Strauss, his arrangement of Idomeneo also presents the work in a post-Wagnerian manner, with the greatest emphasis placed upon achieving continuity within each act. In setting Stahl's new German translation, he decided to made drastic cuts to the recitatives, presenting many of them in a different orchestral garb to that of Mozart's original score. Furthermore, he eliminated some arias, altered the sequence of set numbers in the Ballet and compressed Act 3. Writing about his approach in 1931, the composer admitted both recomposing as well as jettisoning many of the opera's ‘insufferably long recitatives’, but argued that his intention had always been to preserve as much of Mozart's music as possible. In an obvious attempt to draw a distinction between his concept of the work and that of Strauss, he suggested that although some of the recomposed material might sound surprisingly modern, he could nonetheless prove that everything he had written ultimately derived from Mozart.²⁰

While the Wolf-Ferrari Idomeneo did not occasion anything like the same degree of controversy as the Strauss/Wallerstein version, its cause appears not to have been helped by the original performers. Certainly initial reviews in German music journals were dutiful rather than enthusiastic.²¹ Herbert F. Peyser, reporting for the New York Times, was far more disparaging, suggesting that for all its earnestness, Wolf-Ferrari's arrangement had proved to be dramatically lifeless. In a damning indictment of performance standards in the Bavarian capital in 1931, he criticised the vocal contributions as dull and undistinguished. But Peyser saved his most vitriolic comments for Hans Knappertsbusch, whom he felt had conducted Mozart with a ‘hand of lead and in an otherwise unimaginably crude and undistinguished fashion’. Nor was the orchestra spared: it played ‘execrably’, sounding ‘as if it had not troubled to tune in the space of six months, at least’.²²

Peyser's contention that Wolf-Ferrari had failed to revitalise Mozart's opera seems to have been borne out by the initial performance statistics. In the following season, only Munich remained loyal to Wolf-Ferrari and Stahl. By contrast, Strauss's greater prestige as a composer ensured more widespread interest in his version, with performances staged in Bremen, Magdeburg and Mannheim. Berlin followed suit in November 1932 with a production at the Städtische Oper.

After the Nazis came to power, the reputations of the rival versions fluctuated. Initially, during the 1933/34 and 1934/35 seasons, Idomeneo disappeared completely from the repertory of all German opera houses. Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser, the theatre censor appointed by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, sought to rectify this neglect through a document dated 21 June 1935 issued to all opera house administrators, which contained a substantial list of works considered acceptable for the German stage. Among the operas by Mozart which were recommended for the standard repertory, Strauss's arrangement of Idomeneo received specific endorsement.²³

At this juncture Schlösser must have been unaware that Strauss's arrangement contravened Nazi law as the librettist Wallerstein was Jewish. Perhaps this problem may even have been overlooked, given Strauss's influential position in German musical life, in particular his appointment in November 1933 as President of the Reichsmusikkammer. Yet only three days after the issue of Schlösser's directive, Strauss committed a further and much more high-profile transgression in the eyes of the Nazis with the world premiere in Dresden of his latest opera Die schweigsame Frau, which featured a libretto by the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig. Although the work drew a warm response from the public, the regime was particularly displeased that the composer had stubbornly refused to suspend his collaboration with Zweig. Hitler and Goebbels made their position on the matter perfectly clear by declining the opportunity to attend the first performance, and after the interception by the Gestapo of a letter from Strauss to Zweig which contained remarks that were critical of Nazi cultural policy, the composer was forced to resign from his post as President of the Reichsmusikkammer on 6 July.²⁴

These events had a direct impact on the subsequent fate of the two Idomeneo versions. If Schlösser's initial recommendation to effect a revival of Strauss's adaptation carried little weight, his subsequent endorsement of Wolf-Ferrari ensured that it was the latter racially unimpeachable version (both Wolf-Ferrari and Stahl being pure Aryans) that thereafter held full sway.²⁵ Idomeneo thus enjoyed a modest resurgence in German opera houses between 1936 and 1940, beginning with a revival of the Wolf-Ferrari arrangement in Munich on 27 May 1936. Further confirmation that the Wolf-Ferrari version commanded official approval came with the publication two years later of the vocal score.²⁶

After his fall from grace, Strauss wisely refrained from commenting on the demise of such a cherished project as Idomeneo. Yet on the evidence of a letter written in September 1941 to the conductor Clemens Krauss, he continued to harbour resentment that Wolf-Ferrari's ‘totally inadequate’ version had eclipsed his own.²⁷ The proscription of Strauss's Idomeneo nonetheless proved to be only temporary. In the autumn of 1940 the Reichsdramaturg unexpectedly lifted the embargo on the arrangement, having granted permission for it to be performed by the Leipzig Opera House as part of their 1941 complete cycle of Mozart operas celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer's death.²⁸ Surprised as well as delighted by this unforeseen reversal, Strauss began to revise the score.

Strauss's Idomeneo arrangement was heard not only in Leipzig but also in Vienna, where the composer conducted the opera as part of the Mozartwoche des deutschen Reiches (Mozart Week of the German Reich) in December 1941. Judging by the playbill, the performance could only have been sanctioned as long as the identity of his collaborator was suppressed. Wallerstein's name was thus excised from the programme – a ploy designed to avoid offending Nazi sensibilities or reminding the Viennese public of their former theatre director, who had fled Austria after the Anschluss and was now living in exile in the United States.²⁹

Setting the agenda: The International Mozart Congress and the Central Institute for Mozart Research

Ten years earlier, Wallerstein could hardly have imagined that his adaptation of the Idomeneo libretto would have remained unacknowledged in such a manner. In fact in the months that followed the premiere, Wallerstein proved to be just as staunch an advocate of his arrangement as Strauss. So confident was he of the value of his work that in early August 1931, four months after the Vienna premiere, he gratefully accepted an invitation to deliver a paper on Idomeneo at the International Mozart Congress in Salzburg.³⁰

The Congress can be regarded as perhaps the most important Mozart event of 1931 in the German-speaking world, bringing together eminent scholars from Germany and Austria as well as a select few from the rest of Europe. Judging by the papers that were featured in the published proceedings, the Congress covered a wide range of topics, many of which were specifically current to the modern aims and objectives of Mozart scholarship. Among these were two questions that would cause particular difficulties for the Nazis. First was Mozart's relationship to Freemasonry, an issue that had occasioned much intensive research over recent years, including a probing discussion of the Masonic background to Die Zauberflöte which was presented to the Congress by the Czech-born scholar Paul Nettl.³¹ Second, and no less contentious, was the question of Mozart's national identity, in particular the extent to which German or non-German elements determined his musical development. This debate brought forth passionate support on both sides of the argument. On the one hand, the German Ludwig Schiedermair, in his paper ‘Das deutsche Mozartbild’ (The German view of Mozart), laid out the essential ingredients for establishing a proto-nationalist view of the composer that would subsequently find a sympathetic response during the Third Reich.³² On the other, the Italian musicologist Fausto Torrefranca argued, in his paper ‘Mozart e il quartetto italiano’ (Mozart and the Italian quartet), that eighteenth-century Italian composers were the genuine forerunners of Mozart, exerting a much stronger influence on the composer than the Mannheim School and such figures as Johann Christian and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.³³

One prominent Mozart scholar notable for his absence from the 1931 Salzburg Congress was Alfred Einstein. Whether he was invited remains unclear. Undoubtedly it is possible that his duties as a music critic – which, according to his personal diaries, necessitated attending performances at the Bayreuth Festival during this period – could have prevented him from being present.³⁴ Nevertheless, while Einstein's non-appearance can be explained on purely professional grounds, it is tempting to wonder whether he might have been deliberately excluded from the Congress. Certainly such conclusions could be drawn from the evidence of a short article entitled ‘Organisation der Mozartforschung’ (Organisation of Mozart Research) by Erich Schenk which appeared in the published proceedings. Given that Schenk's brief was to outline some of the ongoing projects which had recently been undertaken by leading Mozart scholars, it is worth noting his failure to mention any of Einstein's important contributions, in particular the recent edition of Don Giovanni and, perhaps more significantly, the well-known information that from 1929 he had started work on compiling a much-needed third edition of the Köchel catalogue.

These suspicions could be further substantiated by taking a closer look at Schenk's career and his political outlook. A highly ambitious musicologist born in 1902, he had studied in his native Salzburg, then in Munich, Vienna and Berlin. In 1928 Schenk was appointed to a lectureship in music at the University of Rostock, whilst always harbouring ambitions of returning to Austria. Tracing Schenk's background, Matthias Pape notes that he was a typical representative of the Salzburg educated classes, manifesting anti-Semitic attitudes and remaining strongly supportive of the Großdeutschen Volkspartei, a political party which in the post-war era advocated union between Austria and Germany. Schenk's political and racial attitudes may well have helped him to retain his post in Rostock after the Nazis came to power, but following the Anschluss he returned to Austria, where at the age of 38 he was promoted, becoming professor of musicology at the University of Vienna.³⁵

In the light of this biographical information, Schenk's actions at the Salzburg Mozart Congress are particularly revealing since he seems to have taken a prominent role in organising the event and editing the papers for publication. Determined to influence the future direction of Mozart scholarship, he felt it was vitally important to fill the void that followed