A PURGE OF MUSIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 4, 5 July 1938, Page 19

A PURGE OF MUSIC

NAZI CENSORS AGAIN

A BAN ON THE MODERNS

Last summer Der Fuhrer and his Minister of Propaganda, Paul Joseph Goebbels, staged an exhibition of "degenerate," Jewish, and "Bolshevistic" art in Munich alongside a show of officially blessed, purely "Aryan" painting and sculpture, says the "San Francisco Chronicle." Whereupon the forces of darkness prevailed, while sweetness and light played to coffee and. In other words, the works of the "degenerate" modernists drew the crowds, and the "Aryan" exhibition in the main tent went begging for attendance. Shortly the whole thing was closed. In a recent week they were^ at it again, but this time with music. An exhibition of discountenanced music was held in connection with the Reich Music Congress in DusseldorfiMay 22 to 29. Phonograph records,,-printed music, and books and articles by and about the "degenerates" were seenv and these horrible examples were made still more vivid through occasional performances. Details of the proposed Chamber of Musical Horrors are still somewhat vague. Hitler's publication, "Der Angriff," singles out for especial condemnation 42-year-old, blonde, 100 per cent. non-Jewish Paul Hindemith, former violist of the famous AmarHindemith Quartet, and spearhead of German musical modernism, who has organised an elaborate system of Western musical instruction in the public schools of Turkey since becoming persona non grata in his native country. A POPULAR IDIOM. The double-twist here is that Hindemith, during his last years in Germany and after, largely foreswore his allegience to dissonant modernism and created a new, eminently popular, and straightforward idiom based on German folk song and the Lutheran chorale. "Der Angriff" seems to realise this when it says, "Hindemith is an art-for-art's-sake composer, without musical ethics, a virtuoso in ambiguities and fake sincerity, who succeeds with the help of his mere technical skill in depriving of their conscience and responsible sense of music the youths entrusted to him or who imitate him." (Note. —Hindemith refused to, throw over his Jewish friends after establishment of the Nazi regime, made records, internationally issued, with the Jewish violinist, Simon Goldberg, and the Jewish cellist, Emanuel Feuermann.) , Naturally, Jewish composers are on the condemned list. Foremost here are Alban Berg, composer of the sensationally successful'opera, "Wozzeck," who died in 1936, and Arnold Schoenberg, the famous musical revolutionary and theoretical high priest of musical, modernism, now professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. One "Kesternberg," a composer unknown to fame outside Germany, is also named. Jazz, which was as widely popular and widely imitated in the Reich as it is everywhere else in Europe, falls equally under the ban. So the Dusseldorf Congress, in demonstrating "degenerate" music, witnessed what was probably the first strictly antiseptic jam session in history. EXPOSURE AIMED AT. Whether or not the music of Mendelssohn and other long dead German- j Jewish composers was included in the .exhibition has not yet been clarified. 9t' is possible. Among the announced objectives were to "deprive certain composers of the honours of masters which have' been conferred upon them," as well as to "pillory without compromise those who speculate in music hostile to the people, of identify* ing the namjes of authors and works,: and exposing those who engage in destructive propaganda behind the scenes, and those who write Press and other comments and expound false doctrines disguised as science, of exposing the business practices of these elements, their lying aesthetics, -and their Jewish internationalism." Chief elder statesman of German music at the present time is Richard Strauss, whose most successful operas have been written to libettos by Jewish poets, particularly Hugo yon Holmans* thai and Stefan Zwejg. His name is not mentioned by "Der Angriff" in its preliminary announcement, but he no longer holds a position of honour in the Nazi State.

, One thing was sure; the music of Richard Wagner, whose advanced views and practices eighty years ago were the foundation -of what Schoenberg, Berg, and Strauss have done since, were not exhibited in this division of the congress. Wagner revived the Nordic gods, and anyway Hitler likes Wagner.