Classical composer of ww2 germany that were buddy whit Hitler?

Started by Carlo Gesualdo, June 17, 2020, 11:37:56 AM

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Carlo Gesualdo

I'm asking this out of ignorance of world war II  and want to know, whom were close tie whit nazi german composer pal whit hitler, the purpose of this intervention is nerdhood , because I  want to know, that it, , mediocre  composer pal whit him very close friends in his final day's.

???

I politely ask the question?
I'm not a nazi

and that about it

Perhaps asking out of lack of knowledge that all.Classical composer in Japan friend whit Hitler,?

vandermolen

The French composer Florent Schmitt apparently shouted out 'Vivre Hitler!' at a concert featuring a work by the exiled Jewish composer Kurt Weill. There is some debate on the position of Carl Orff who replaced Felix Medelssohn's music for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

Mahlerian

I seem to remember that Hans Pfitzner was visited in the hospital by the "Führer" at one point and was a more enthusiastic Nazi than most.

Webern infamously referred to Hitler as a "remarkable man" but his music was sidelined by the regime.

Richard Strauss lived pretty comfortably within Germany throughout the Third Reich, and was head of the Musikkammer for a time, if I recall. He did what he could to protect some Jewish in-laws and got in a little bit of trouble for working with a Jewish librettist on one operatic project, so his position was complicated.

Franz Schmidt is often thought of as a naive apolitical figure; he started work on a cantata called "German Resurrection" but didn't finish it. Thankfully, he didn't live to see his ex-wife murdered by the regime as part of their program for forcibly euthanizing the mentally ill.
"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

vandermolen

Quote from: Mahlerian on June 17, 2020, 12:09:21 PM
I seem to remember that Hans Pfitzner was visited in the hospital by the "Führer" at one point and was a more enthusiastic Nazi than most.

Webern infamously referred to Hitler as a "remarkable man" but his music was sidelined by the regime.

Richard Strauss lived pretty comfortably within Germany throughout the Third Reich, and was head of the Musikkammer for a time, if I recall. He did what he could to protect some Jewish in-laws and got in a little bit of trouble for working with a Jewish librettist on one operatic project, so his position was complicated.

Franz Schmidt is often thought of as a naive apolitical figure; he started work on a cantata called "German Resurrection" but didn't finish it. Thankfully, he didn't live to see his ex-wife murdered by the regime as part of their program for forcibly euthanizing the mentally ill.
Interesting and totally agree about Franz Schmidt. On the other hand the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann apparently forbade the German radio (under Nazi control) from broadcasting any of his music, apart from his String Quartet, based on Jewish themes - it's amazing he survived.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

MusicTurner

Quote from: deprofundis on June 17, 2020, 11:37:56 AM
I'm asking this out of ignorance of world war II  and want to know, whom were close tie whit nazi german composer pal whit hitler, the purpose of this intervention is nerdhood , because I  want to know, that it, , mediocre  composer pal whit him very close friends in his final day's.
???
I politely ask the question?
I'm not a nazi
and that about it

Perhaps asking out of lack of knowledge that all.Classical composer in Japan friend whit Hitler,?

I once did some research regarding really fanatic, German, self-proclaimed Nazi composers, and there were some, but they are less talked about nowadays and have only rarely been recorded later.

Gottfried Müller (1914-1993) wrote propaganda works such as the large piece "The Fuhrer's Words"; Herbert Windt (1894-1965) wrote orchestral music and music to "Triumph des Willens"; the conductor-composer Robert Wagner (1915-2008) finished the big Nazi cantata, that Franz Schmidt began or was forced to begin, and premiered it in Vienna in 1940. Paul Höffer (1895-1949) became a much praised and rewarded composer during the Hitler years; Winfried Zillig (1905-1963); Karl Höller (1907-1987), etc. And there were many movie music composers too.

All of them seem to have done quite all right later financially, as teachers and musicians etc.

More well-known, German composers who had questionable relations to varying degrees with the Nazis, were Carl Orff, Werner Egk, Franz Schmidt, Webern, Richard Strauss, Furtwängler, etc. The views on Pfitzner's nazi sympathies have apparently been somewhat revised now.

Regarding musicians, there were many Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, such as Elly Ney, Oswald Kabasta, Karl Böhm, Gieseking, Schwarzkopf, etc.

knight66

Quote from: Mahlerian on June 17, 2020, 12:09:21 PM
I seem to remember that Hans Pfitzner was visited in the hospital by the "Führer" at one point and was a more enthusiastic Nazi than most.

Webern infamously referred to Hitler as a "remarkable man" but his music was sidelined by the regime.

Richard Strauss lived pretty comfortably within Germany throughout the Third Reich, and was head of the Musikkammer for a time, if I recall. He did what he could to protect some Jewish in-laws and got in a little bit of trouble for working with a Jewish librettist on one operatic project, so his position was complicated.

Franz Schmidt is often thought of as a naive apolitical figure; he started work on a cantata called "German Resurrection" but didn't finish it. Thankfully, he didn't live to see his ex-wife murdered by the regime as part of their program for forcibly euthanizing the mentally ill.

Referring to Strauss, from my reading, he was cold shouldered after his support for the Nazi Regime was shown to be a front. Here is an article which gives some detail.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140610-richard-strauss-a-reluctant-nazi


Mike
DavidW: Yeah Mike doesn't get angry, he gets even.
I wasted time: and time wasted me.

vandermolen

I remember an interesting TV series about the cinema in Nazi Germany where they interviewed the composer of the song 'Bombs over England'. I recall him saying that Josef Goebbels had sat down at the piano with him to show how the song could be improved.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

Mahlerian

Quote from: knight66 on June 17, 2020, 12:45:52 PM
Referring to Strauss, from my reading, he was cold shouldered after his support for the Nazi Regime was shown to be a front. Here is an article which gives some detail.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140610-richard-strauss-a-reluctant-nazi

Thank you for the article. It does give a few bits of detail that I hadn't known.

I think there's a tendency in a lot of retrospective commentary to tar everyone with the same brush, as if all Germans were equally complicit in genocide. Some were naive and most turned a blind eye to the atrocities taking place in their country.
"l do not consider my music as atonal, but rather as non-tonal. I feel the unity of all keys. Atonal music by modern composers admits of no key at all, no feeling of any definite center." - Arnold Schoenberg

Roy Bland

Anton Webern

There are different descriptions of Webern's attitude towards Nazism; this is perhaps attributable either to its complexity, his internal ambivalence, his prosperity in the preceding years (1918–1934) of post-war Red Vienna in the First Republic of Austria, the subsequently divided political factions of his homeland as represented in his friends and family (from Zionist Schoenberg to his Nazi son Peter), or the different contexts in which or audiences to whom his views were expressed. Further insight into Webern's attitudes comes with the realization that Nazism itself was deeply multifaceted, marked "not  a coherent doctrine or body of systemically interrelated ideas, but rather [by] a vaguer worldview made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the term 'ideology.'"

In broad terms, Webern's attitude seems to have first warmed to a degree of characteristic fervor and perhaps only much later, in conjunction with widespread German disillusionment, cooled to Hitler and the Nazis; but he was no antisemite. On the one hand, Willi Reich notes that Webern attacked Nazi cultural policies in private lectures given in 1933, whose hypothetical publication "would have exposed Webern to serious consequences" later. On the other, some private correspondence attests to his Nazi sympathies, though he denied these to Schoenberg when asked (only once), who heard rumors, never confirmed to him by Rudolf Kolisch and Eduard Steuermann, denied to him by Louis Krasner, and then very strenuously denied to him by Webern.(As such, Schoenberg's Violin Concerto of 1934 (or 1935)–36 continued to bear a dedication to Webern.) Webern's patriotism led him to endorse the Nazi regime, for example, in a series of letters to Joseph Hueber, who was serving in the army and himself held such views. Webern described Hitler on May 2, 1940 as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany; thus Alex Ross characterizes him as "an unashamed Hitler enthusiast