Hitler, the arts and how do we revive them
OrchestrasFrom my latest essay in The Critic:
The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani tweeted the other day asking, how many handshakes to Hitler? Most respondents touched Adolf at three or four removes. I managed it in one contact.
John Denison, his name was. A 20-ish horn player in the London orchestras, he was sent by Sir Thomas Beecham to Bayreuth in 1934 to buy Wagner tubas for a Covent Garden Ring cycle. John located the pub where the brass players drank….
Read on here.
I wish you weren’t so right in that article, but you are.
“Music makes its case not by spouting diversity and equality mantras, but by reaching out to every citizen from cradle to grave.”
Well, slogans, ads, and protests are available, alienating everyone from music, in various ways.
The erosion of classical music is the result of a certain materialistic, quasi-scientific, quasi-objective worldview that isolates, unmoores and undermines the subjective Self of Western people. It is a wrong-headed idea of ‘modernity’. This leads to doubts about their own civilisation because they ‘see’ only the material side, while a civilisation has at its heart a collection of psychological and spiritual ideas, an awareness of things beyond the basic material. In this way, the common good in general is eroding, and of course the arts are the first to suffer.
Another result of this materialistic worldview is the idea that inherited arts are museum pieces and irrelevant to contemporary concerns. Thus they are devalued, thus civilisational standards in general are eroding, and the primitive ignorati climb from their hiding places and try to fill the vacuum.
Norman’s link with fascism may appear far-fetched, but it does indeed make sense entirely, because often the arts are the canary in the colemine.
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Excellent! And, add to that, the herd instinct which occurs on the Internet via social media. Perfect, fertile ground for Totalitarianism.
Does “them” refer to “Hitler and the arts” or just “the arts”? Hopefully the latter…
Excellent article. I trust that you have sent it to Lisa Nandy and Sir Chris Bryant.
By the way, I too am only one handshake away. My grandfather was Bürgermeister of a small town in Thuringia during WW2. I have a photo of him with AH and my ten-year-old uncle, whom I later knew well.
I’d like to contribute that I am one handshake away from Wilhelm Furtwangler, Arthur Nikisch, and Bruno Walter. To me, that carries a lot more spiritual weight compared to a handshake with a autocrat. Although, on further thought, at least two of those gentlemen may have shaken hands with Hitler, which means, I am 2 handshakes away from that act of pollution.
If you managed it in one contact, you would have shaken his hand yourself! With on intervening contact, you got him in two.
Decades ago, someone I worked with showed me an article about a man who deliberately collected handshakes so that he could work out how many connected him with various famous (and infamous!) people.
I started thinking about this and found that I too could have had Hitler in three, or even two. In early 1974, when the lights were going out all over the country after the middle east war the previous autumn, a friend and I wernt to see Cosi Fan Tutte at Covent Garden, conducted by Karl Böhm. Afterwards, we passed the stage door, where a limousine was waiting. A small group of people was gathered to catch a glimpse of the maestro. Eventually, he emerged – he was unsteady on his feet and, I seem to remember, aided by walking sticks. He smiled as we all applauded and as he passed by me he shook my hand!
I later started thinking about whom else’s hand he had shaken. I worked out that, with his dubious credentials during Hitler’s regime, he might well have shaken the Fuehrer’s hand – so I could have had him in two. However, he would almost certainly have shaken Richard Strauss’s hand, giving me Hitler in three.
By another route, a few years ago I went to a talk by Nik Frank, the son of the murderous Gauleiter Hans Frank. He gave a talk about his father, whom he loathed and about whom he wrote a book exposing all his murderous exploits and what an obnoxious father he was. I shook hands with Nik too. He was only seven years old when his father was hanged. However, he was seven months old when his father was appointed Gauleiter and on that occasion the Fuehrer might have shaken his little hand. Thus by this route, I would also have him in two. But if his father had ever shaken Nik’s hand, I would have had Hitler in three.
On a happier note, with a bit of research based on the Böhm-Strauss handshakes, I was able to work my way back to Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn! I also once shook hands with Yehudi Menuhin, thus probably getting Enescu, Furtwangler and Elgar in two – and lots more further back.
If I could achieve all that as a mere dilletante who just listens to music, I am sure many of you regular posters could do far better! Any offers?
Didn’t the Nazi regime give generous financial support to some of those “summits of Western civilization” — at least to those deemed to be truly “German” ?
I’m not surprised Hitler would make a point to greet the “Englander.”
In 1934 Hitler was thinking England and the West would want to join him in a war against Bolshevism. An idea he never quite abandoned until that big tantrum scene in the Fuhrerbunker.
Handshakes from Hitler?
I shook Neil Armstrong’s hand.
Armstrong shook Werner von Braun’s hand.
Von Braun shook Hitler’s hand.
In the early 90s I worked in Spain, and had the questionable obligation of publicly shaking hands with Manuel Fraga (rehabilitated late propaganda minister under Francisco Franco).
Two degrees of seperation from Hitler was far too close for me.
A well constructed and argued article from Norman puts us all on our guard.
Chapeau!
An excellent article on the whole. But is this correct: “Bayreuth this summer is laying off a third of its chorus to meet wage bills”?
Elsewhere, NL wrote that the number had been reduced from 134 to 113. That’s 16%, not 33%.
Certainly nothing to be proud of but I am one handshake away from Hitler. Ca.1954 as history major at Brooklyn College, Egon Hanstaengl, son of Hitler’s Foreign Press secretary Putzi, spoke to the history club. Afterwards, we met him and he told us that, as a child, he would sit on Hitler’s lap and always call him “Uncle Wolf”. Hitler was, also, his god father.
Interesting: so it wasn’t just Wagner’s grandchildren who called him “Uncle Wolf”.