Zur Rezeption Georg Friedrich Händels in den deutschen Diktaturen:Quellen in Kontext ed. by Katrin Gerlach, et al. (review)

In 1941, the fateful year in which Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and embarked on what it called ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’, the music historian Hans Joachim Moser published a small book on George Frideric Handel. Using what Victor Klemperer has called the ‘language of the Third Reich’, Moser outlined the central obstacles coming between ‘German people’s comrades’ and their appreciation of the ‘soul of Handelian oratorio’: ‘the wall of Jewish material and the wall of English imperial ambition, both of which have become unacceptable to us after the experiences of the last half century’ (i. 139).

Seventeen years later, as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) prepared to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Handel’s death, a group of Communist Party officials and academics met in Berlin at the Ministry for Culture to discuss ‘the religiosity’ of Handel’s oratorios, and specifically of his great work Messiah. The composer and party functionary Ernst Hermann Meyer dominated the meeting, stating clearly that Handel had only set religious texts because this was the accepted custom of his time: ‘One finds nothing mystical [in Handel’s music] but one finds points at which the oppressor is overcome and beaten down by the people, in which the working poor triumph.’ Handel’s music, Meyer asserted, ‘possessed a fighting note, realistic and fighting clarity and sensitivity, in a way we find in scarcely any other artist’ (ii. 745).

These extracts are from just two of the hundreds of documents gathered and reproduced in these two volumes, and which present, in extraordinary detail, the ways in which Handel’s music was interpreted and put before the public in Germany’s two twentieth-century dictatorships. The documents are contextualized by substantial essays written by experts in this field, and are accompanied by extensive notes. The first volume is divided into two sections. Volume 1 examines reworkings of Handel, concentrating largely on the efforts made in Nazi Germany to replace English-language Old Testament texts and libretti based on biblical stories with German texts imagined by their authors to correspond better to the pseudo-scientific racial theories of their society, and to its völkisch ideology. Here we find details not only of the notorious reworking of Jeptha as Das Opfer (The Sacrifice), but numerous efforts to rework Judas Maccabeus under titles such as Vaterländisches Kampfund Siegeslied (Patriotic Fighting and Victory Song) in 1937, or as Freiheitsoratorium. Ein deutscher Heldengesang von Führer und Volk (Freedom Oratorio: A German Chorus of Leader and People) in 1940.

Juliane Riepe’s introduction to this section makes it clear that these reworkings did not start in 1933, but that there was by then a long tradition, stretching back into the nineteenth century, of German nationalists seeking to represent Handel’s choral music in ways that they imagined reflected more accurately his Germanic origins, and the interests of German audiences. She quotes one writer in 1844, who asked: ‘What do we care about Israelite judges and kings? Who is interested in the heroism of a Jew who fought 4,000 years ago? Let’s have instead material from Germanic history: Karl the Great, the fight of heathens with the Christians, the Knights of the Round Table!’ (i. 22). By the early twentieth century, reworkings of Handel oratorios, and now of his operas, had become the norm. One of the most notorious practitioners of this dubious art, Hermann Stephani, whose reworking of Jeptha as Das Opfer was widely performed in Nazi Germany, had indeed written his first version of this oratorio in 1911.

The second part of volume 1 focuses on the institutional frameworks for the interpretation of Handel in the German dictatorships, under the aegis of different Handel societies. The first of these was the Göttingen Handel Society, formed in...