The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich

Michael H. Kater's book "The Twisted Muse" is indispensable reading for any musicologist or serious music lover. The book discusses in rich detail the music and musicians of the Third Reich, a twelve year nightmare in Germany and Austria, that destroyed the creative spirit of every musician and composer living there. Mr. Kater explains the difficulty of being a musician in the Third Reich, and dramatically documents the disabling Nazi disease that infected every composer and conductor. There were no heroes, with the possible exception of Erich Kleiber who emigrated to Buenos Aires to begin a new artistic life, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, a composer who silenced himself in Hitler's Germany and offered as much resistance to Nazism as he could. The rest were victims. or worse, perpetrators of Nazi horror. Some musicans joined the Nazi Party in order to survive and feed their families; other joined the Party to further their own careers. Knappersbusch, Furtwangler, Tietjen, von Karajan, and Boehm showed amazing duplicity toward one another, frequently acting like beasts. Cultured and well-educated Germans were sometimes reduced to the bestial level of a Goering or a Goebbles. In fact, Nazi Germany, as Mr. Kater points out, was an a veritable scorpions' nest of egomaniacal conductors and composers advancing their careers at the expense of colleagues. For example, the composer Hans Pfitzner -- one of the few serious composers the Nazis could showcase -- is particularly portrayed as an embittered, pathetic man, filled with anger and duplicity. Mr. Kater brings a new and fascinating perspective to such famous Third Reich composers as Carl Orff, Werner Egk, and Rudolf Wagner-Regeny, not evil men, but far from virtuous, who used Nazism for personal advancement. The author introduces the reader to little known German composers like Paul Graener, who suffered a particularly cruel and ignominious end; Max Trapp, a mediocre composer who wrote reams of kitsch for the Party; and George Vollerthun, a composer the Nazis needed so much that he survived a homosexual scandal in the 1930's. Mr. Kater traces the careers of these composers as well as those who left Germany --Hindemith, Schoenberg, Weill, Korngold -- with brilliant perspective. Of particular interest are the many pages devoted to the controversial Richard Strauss. Mr. Kater's thesis is that the Nazis made Strauss pay for his sins against the dictatorship by permitting Strauss's grandsons to be physically molested, by harassing Strauss's family in Garmisch, and by murdering twenty-six members of his Jewish daughter-in-law's family. Ironically, her husband, Strauss's only son, was a fervent Nazi of relatively high rank. In the final two chapters, Mr. Kater discusses the institutionalized "hausmusik" written for Nazi youth, the music for brass ensembles, and the battle music for the pagan youth festivals and SS concert bands. He also devotes intriguing section