In an impassioned speech delivered on the United Nations in 1958, the good cellist Pablo Casals proclaimed his perception within the universality of music.
Music, he argued, was the one inventive type of expression that ‘transcends language, politics and nationwide boundaries’. Such idealism, nonetheless, stands in stark distinction to what really occurred throughout the first half of the twentieth century, when two world wars ruptured open change between music and musicians on opposing sides in these conflicts. In Britain, this course of started with a vengeance in August 1914 when the nation was dragged right into a 4 year-long wrestle with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Coincidentally, struggle had damaged out at roughly the identical time that Sir Henry Wooden was saying the repertoire for the forthcoming season of Promenade Concert events. As at all times, the programme included a considerable variety of works by international composers that might be carried out in Britain for the primary time.
A big proportion of those emanated from Germany and Austria, most notably Reger’s 4 Tone Poems after Böcklin, Webern’s Six Items for Orchestra and Korngold’s Sinfonietta. As well as, Wooden needed to pay tribute to Mahler, who had died three years earlier, and proposed to characteristic a lot of his orchestral songs, together with the British premiere of Kindertotenlieder.
All these plans, nonetheless, had been shelved on account of the brand new political circumstances. Certainly, such was the febrile ambiance at this juncture that Wooden additionally eliminated an all-Wagner live performance, changing it with music by French and Russian composers. However there was such a widespread outcry at this motion that Wagner was reinstated afterward within the season.
What occur to German music throughout the First World Battle?
Extra excessive measures had been taken within the instructional enviornment. In September 1914, the Music Committee of Company of London issued a memorandum declaring its intention to dispense with the providers of all professors of German, Austrian or Hungarian nationalities that had been contracted to show on the Guildhall Faculty of Music, and to ban all college students from enemy international locations from attending the establishment.
They adopted this with a proposal to confiscate all pianos of German origin and change them with devices manufactured in Britain. Strain teams began a marketing campaign to steer the Related Board of the Royal Colleges of Music to suppress up to date German and Austrian repertory from its examination syllabuses and, wherever potential, promote a far better proportion of British works. The composer Thomas Dunhill went as far as to castigate ‘dastardly academics’ of concord for permitting their pupils to write down the chord of the German sixth, suggesting maybe sarcastically that one ought to ‘protest towards its use within the identify of patriotism and nationwide honour’.
Following Wooden’s censorship of virtually all up to date Austrian and German music from the 1914 Proms programme, it was broadly accepted that additional performances of such repertoire could be off-limits in Britain so long as the nation was at struggle. However, there was far much less consensus as as to if there ought to be a extra widespread ban on Austro-German music.
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The problem was raised regularly within the press and was even mentioned within the Home of Commons in 1915. Tory MP Sir Arthur Markham took a very arduous line, attacking the Proms for persevering with to programme German music and advocating a complete ban.
Saner voices, nonetheless, prevailed. Sir Henry Wooden continued to characteristic the usual works of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in his live shows. His steadfast method was praised by the Musical Instances which declared that ‘the music of those composers has been our mom’s milk and we can not banish it from our reminiscence’.
Sir Charles Stanford strongly endorsed this view by drawing a transparent distinction between the good Nineteenth-century German composers, to whom he was devoted, and their newer counterparts. In line with him, ‘neither Wagner nor Brahms had any truck with the Prussianised crew who’ve arisen since their day. To establish the “frightfulness” of Strauss and the mass formations of Reger with both of them is an insult to them and their artwork.’
By and enormous, British concert-goers raised little objection to having fun with Wagner, Brahms and different Nineteenth-century German composers throughout the struggle. However sometimes, there have been some awkward moments. Maybe essentially the most conspicuous befell in March 1915 when the Oxford Home Choral Society mounted a efficiency of Brahms’s German Requiem as a tribute to the British troopers that had fallen within the struggle.
Stanford was significantly incensed by such crassness, and in a letter to the Every day Telegraph attacked the live performance organisers in no unsure phrases: ‘In the event that they desired to present the work for its personal sake as a masterpiece frequent to the world, nobody would gainsay their selection. However in saying the German Requiem as a memorial to our useless troopers, they’re doing what its composer, if he had been residing, would have resented as strongly because the efficiency of a French or English work to commemorate fallen German troopers in Berlin.’
In distinction to Wagner and Brahms, who remained largely unscathed from anti-German propaganda, the music and character of Richard Strauss attracted a lot better opprobrium. This flip of occasions was significantly shocking given that hardly a yr earlier, in January 1913, the British premiere of his current opera Der Rosenkavalier on the Royal Opera Home had elicited a very warm reception. Moreover, Strauss conspicuously averted taking a political stance so far as the struggle was involved. In October 1914, he refused so as to add his identify to the Manifesto of the 93 which had been signed by Germany’s most outstanding scientists, students and artists declaring their unequivocal help for German navy motion.
However, Strauss was now introduced to the British public because the musical embodiment of the enemy. This presumably explains the extraordinary resolution by HM Customs in 1916 to impound the rating and elements for his wartime orchestral work Ein Alpensinfonie in Liverpool docks. It had been positioned in transit to the US the place numerous orchestras had vied with one another for the privilege of presenting the work’s American premiere. A lot to the annoyance of the Individuals, British officers delayed releasing the fabric for a number of months earlier than they had been solely happy that no secret codes had been embedded within the music.
Strauss’s place because the bête noire of German music was bolstered in a number of vituperative articles on the composer that appeared between 1914 and ’18. Colin McAlpin, writing within the Musical Instances, advised that ‘Strauss undoubtedly voices the fashionable spirit of Germany. He’s of Berlin – bombastic, blatant, given to a brutish outspokenness and liable to cynical candour. In his music, we detect a sinister revolt towards inside regulation and order and the ear is bruised and battered by an inartistic anarchy of noise that renders worthless any afterthought of potential loveliness.’
In the one entry on a musician within the wartime dictionary Who’s Who in Hunland, Frederic William Wile castigated Strauss for his ‘intentionally sensual and degenerate musical artwork’. Because the ‘most profitable producer of sheer din the world has ever recognized, his cyclonic results in such noise-poems as Elektra, Salome, The Rose Cavalier and his mid-war twister, An Alpine Symphony, cut back the Niagara-like roars of Wagnerian “themes” to the size of a whisper.’
What occurred to German music as soon as the struggle ended?
Following the cessation of hostilities in 1918, tentative steps had been taken to rehabilitate up to date German and Austrian music and as soon as extra give it a platform in Britain. A check case befell in March 1920 when Sir Henry Wooden programmed Strauss’s Don Juan for the primary time since 1914. Anticipating potential objections from the viewers, he judiciously positioned the work proper on the finish of the live performance, thereby enabling folks to depart the corridor in the event that they so wished. Within the occasion, solely a handful of the viewers walked out, and the conductor felt sufficiently emboldened to programme extra Strauss in later live shows.
A extra contentious episode blew up two months later. The primary orchestral programme of the newly fashioned British Music Society was to characteristic Elgar’s overture Within the South and Vaughan Williams’s just lately composed A London Symphony. But a proposal to finish the live performance with Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, barely two years after the top of the struggle, aroused appreciable outrage. Composer Sir Granville Bantock was sufficiently incensed to write down a letter of protest to The Instances, lambasting such programming as a ‘gratuitous insult to British music and its musical heritage. Plainly the outdated parasitic system is to be resumed; we’re to return like canine to our personal vomit and the mendacity guarantees with which we now have been deluded are to be forgotten.’
The organisers of the British Music Society caved in to this stress and agreed to take away the Strauss, although the choice to switch it with music by Ravel was additionally closely criticised. Writing in The Manchester Guardian, critic Ernest Newman deplored this complete episode. He reminded readers that ‘if the objection to Ein Heldenleben is that Strauss is a German, a few of us are constrained to level out that we’re now not at struggle with Germany and that we see no motive to deprive ourselves any additional of no matter pleasure German music may give us. Allow us to by all means encourage British composers, however why want music be an affair of nationality in any respect? Why should we be so narrow-minded and glory so overtly in our indestructible insularity?’
What did the Nazis do throughout WW2?
Throughout World Battle II, the Nazis centralised musical censorship in tandem with their political alliances: whereas music by Italians, who had been allied to the Germans, was carried out, composers from enemy international locations comparable to France and Poland had been banned. Exceptions included Bizet’s Carmen, which remained a preferred favorite in German opera homes, and Chopin, who loved the patronage of Hans Frank, the Governor of Occupied Poland. Russian music briefly loved favour between 1939 and ’41 with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, however largely disappeared after Germany invaded Russia.
What did the British do throughout WW2?
The British had been much less regimented, preferring the fluid insurance policies that guided musical life throughout World Battle I. However, the BBC issued an inventory of composers whose work was deemed unsuitable for British audiences. The voluminous correspondence to be discovered within the BBC Written Archives reveals that the researchers who compiled the record of forbidden German and Austrian music had didn’t do their homework correctly. Amongst these proscribed had been a number of composers who weren’t solely victims of Nazi persecution, however who had additionally been granted refugee standing in Britain.
