Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Music and conflict

The New Zealand School of Music runs a course on Music and Conflict and next week I will have the privilege of talking to the students of this course about the Holocaust. Thinking about what I might talk about I thought that I might start with the photo of the book burning in 1933. Soon after the Nazis came to power they instigated a bonfire of books. The image of this is part of our display at the Holocaust Centre of NZ. We see a large group of students, the very people who should be the guardians of culture and free discussion, saluting the conflagration of books from all corners of the world by authors whose messages the Nazis disapproved of. Goebbels announced that 'we will put an end to this Jewish intellectualism', though the books were not all by Jewish writers. It was intellectualism that the Nazis associated, perhaps not unjustly, with Jewish tradition. However, with this bonfire they put an end not only to questioning and discussion, but also to German culture. Apart from the solitary work of Carl Orff, his Carmina Burana, published in 1937, I can't think of any major work composed in Nazi Germany that stayed in the repertoire. Richard Strauss, the pre-eminent German composer of the time, fell silent, storing up his years of bitterness to give it voice in his Metamorphosen in 1945, after the war. The Nazi years were barren of culture. Contrast this with the equally ruthless, suppressive regime of Stalin's Soviet Union, just as intolerant of dissent, which however produces great masterpieces that stayed in the repertoire, Shostakovich's great symphonies, his No. 5 and No. 7, Prokofiev's War and Peace, his 5th Symphony, his great film scores. Khachaturian's concertos, Symphonies, and his spectacular ballet, Gayaneh. Not only was music sterile in Nazi Germany, there were no great books or great films produced, except for spectacular propaganda films. Contrast this with the memorable films that came out of the Soviet Union in this period. Why one oppressive regime was completely sterile, while the other managed to flourish is one question which is worth asking, a question about the role of the arts in society.

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