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  • Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon
  • Toby Thacker
Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon. By Erik Levi. pp. vii+324. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2010, £25. ISBN 978-0-300-12306-7.)

At first sight, Mozart seems an unlikely historical figure to have been enrolled as a Nazi. His music was—and is—widely understood as communicating a humane and cosmopolitan view of the world, and several of his most important late works embodied and celebrated the ideals of Freemasonry. His sacred and liturgical music expresses a devout Roman Catholicism, and if that were not enough, three of his best-known and most popular operas were set to librettos by a Jew, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Above all, the lightness, delicacy, and transcendent serenity that characterizes so much of Mozart’s music seems light years away from the crudity, brutality, and insensitivity that Nazism exalted.

This book, by the distinguished early pioneer of the history of music under the Nazis, Erik Levi, is thus all the more valuable. Levi, who states that Mozart was ‘the most unlikely candidate to have become a useful adjunct to Nazi propaganda’ (p. 2), demonstrates in compelling detail the length the Nazis were prepared to go to in order to appropriate Mozart, explores the different mechanisms they used, and provides new insights into the cultural vision of the Party. He uses a wide range of primary sources, and the fact that most of this primary material was actually published highlights the way in which the differing visions of Mozart analysed by Levi were part of wider public discourses in Nazi Germany, and well beyond.

Having written elsewhere about the sad decline of a pluralistic music culture in Germany in the later years of the Weimar Republic, Levi takes as his starting point the 175th anniversary celebrations of Mozart’s birth in the German-speaking world in 1931. At an International Mozart Congress held that year in Salzburg, Ludwig Schiedermair ‘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’ (p. 13). Levi notes the absence from this Congress of Albert Einstein, elsewhere described as ‘unquestionably the leading Mozart scholar during the ’30s and ’40s’ (p. 121), and speculates that he may have been deliberately excluded by the organizer Erich Schenk, who was already working on the establishment of a ‘Central Institute for Mozart Research’, and preparing to staff this with an inner group of academics who shared ‘similar political and cultural values’ (p. 14).

Most of this book is devoted to an exploration of the subsequent development of these two opposed positions. After January 1933 Mozart was put into a ‘Nazi strait jacket’ (p. 18), and represented in Germany as ‘der deutsche Mozart’. Much was made by Nazi propagandists of quotations extracted selectively from two letters written by Mozart, one ‘a letter of desperation’ to his father written in 1778, the other to Anton Klein, written in 1785, about the establishment of a German National Theatre in Vienna. In the first of these letters Mozart expressed his identification with ‘the whole of the German nation’; the second was interpreted as ‘a rallying cry for national renewal’ (p. 20). In a more blatant distortion, a so-called ‘Hymn to Germany’ by Mozart was published in May 1933. ‘One need hardly add’, Levi notes, ‘that [End Page 409] Mozart’s output does not contain a work with this title’ (p. 23). Efforts were made to stress the musical and aesthetic connections between Mozart and Wagner, and Mozart’s name was declared to be derived from ‘an old sobriquet of Wotan’. Mozart’s indebtedness to French and Italian culture was minimized, and in 1938 at an academic conference at the Reich Music Festival in Düsseldorf, the musicologist Walther Vetter (who enjoyed a distinguished career in the GDR after 1949) attempted to demonstrate how Mozart’s musical language was ‘essentially Germanic’ (p. 30).

Levi devotes a fascinating chapter to the Nazi effort to deal with Mozart’s relationship with Freemasonry, focusing on the contested interpretations of Die...

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