Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars

3. Modernism and Baroque as Counterpoint in a University Town, 1920–28

73 Chapter 3 Modernism and Baroque as Counterpoint in a University Town, 1920–28 Walking home from the theater on the night of 26 June 1920, Oskar Hagen could feel good about what he had accomplished. His sold-out performance that evening of George Händel’s opera Rodelinde marked the first time any of the composer’s operas had been performed in nearly 200 years. Hagen had joined the GeorgeAugust University’s art history faculty in the fall of 1918 and began directing the struggling University Orchestra (Akademische OrchesterVereinigung ) the next year. Soon after he and his wife moved to town, they put together an ensemble of like-minded devotees who played Händel’s music late into the night. They managed to convince the recently formed Göttingen University League (Universitätsbund) that the world needed to hear Händel’s sublime operas, especially if tailored to modern tastes. Rushed rehearsals in 1920 were squeezed between the musical season’s end and the start of summer engagements . Göttingen’s City Theater donated the use of its facilities. Performers received no compensation and slept on guest beds. Volunteers made costumes from old clothes and odds and ends like cigarette-wrapper foil. But despite the rag-tag preparations, reviews bore out Hagen’s good feelings. Critics , scholars, and music friends all over Germany immediately acknowledged the success of this local enterprise. Suddenly, small-town Göttingen had a bigcity stage.1 The summer Festival revived more Händel operas in the years that followed and made Göttingen internationally famous as the “Händel Bayreuth” and the wellspring of a “Händel Renaissance” spreading across Europe. Festival leaders believed that their use of Expressionist staging and modernist choreography best articulated Händel’s essence. During the 1920s this “Göttingen style,” combining Expressionism and Baroque, inspired opera directors and critics across Europe. By 1928, however, Hagen and other principals had left Göttingen, and the Festival foundered artistically and financially. Expression- 74 Becoming a Nazi Town ism and the “Göttingen style” no longer promised to rejuvenate modern music and art. Many critics and scholars increasingly claimed that “historically accurate ” (Werktreue) performance best realized the significance of Baroque music .2 The Festival languished for six difficult years. In 1934 Third Reich support allowed organizers to stage Händel again. By 1935 the Göttingen Händel Festival was featured prominently among a Reich-wide celebration of Bach, Händel, and Schütz. In 1937 Reich Music Chamber President Peter Raabe was the guest director of a mostly “historically accurate” Händel performance, one that looked very different from the avant-garde work of the 1920s. Therefore, between 1928 and 1935 the Festival changed significantly, replacing Hagen’s modernist aesthetics and liberal textual alterations with more conservative stagings of the complete operas that strove to reproduce the text and aesthetics of Händel’s era. Many critics and supporters of the Göttingen Händel Festival had begun to embrace “historical accuracy” in the 1920s, even as Hagen kept promoting modernist renderings of Händel. As well, Festival organizers in Göttingen continued to use modernism in the 1930s, especially through dancing and movement at Festival performances and as a positivist, progressive, yet politically conservative notion that underscored the Festival’s development. The history of the Göttingen Händel Opera Festival, in other words, makes clear that cultural purveyors used many of the same ideas to promote their activities in both the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. The political shift of 1933 served chiefly to bring to fruition trends begun in the 1920s. Like the changes in sharpshooting that began around 1925, we can identify 1928 as a turning point in the Händel Festival’s history. The Festival’s absence—what one supporter called “the big break”—that began in 1928 helped to crystallize ideas and aesthetics that would make the Festival an important pillar of Third Reich culture in Göttingen.3 The Festival gave Göttingers a way to promote cultural experiment and reinforce conservative ideas about “German music” at the same time. In so doing the Festival helped anchor Nazism in Göttingen’s musical culture. This chapter explores the Festival’s development through 1928. The Händel Opera Festival represented a unique, major attempt by members of the George August University and the middle-class elite to develop a national reputation for Göttingen’s music life between the world wars. The university provided...