New research: How Mozart became a Nazi
NewsSalzburg’s Mozarteum today released an investigation by Professor Oliver Rathkolb and Dr Alexander Pinwinkler into its activities under the Third Reich.
The conclusions are predictably awful.
Taken over in 1938 by the regional governor of the State of Salzburg, Albert Reitter, the Mozart Foundation was ordered to remove the word ‘international’ from its title and was harnessed in all major activities to Nazi propaganda. The 1941 festival of the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s birth was a flagship event in Josef Goebbels’s reorientation of ‘aryan culture. Mozart was reinvented as a blond hero.
Reitter, the man at the head of this operation, was an SS-Oberführer with close links to Heinrich Himmler. The IMF has not yet released details of his involvement in the persecution of minorities. In 1944 he was removed from the post over a corruption scandal.
After the war, he was interned as a Nazi criminal but by 1950 he was working again as a lawyer, living happily in Salzburg until his death in 1962.
The new research has been published by Anton Pustet Verlag as Die Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum und der Nationalsozialismus. Politische Einflüsse auf Organisation, Mozart-Forschung, Museum und Bibliothek. We have not yet received this comprehensive document.
“The 1941 festival of the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s birth ”
I hope this is not symptomatic of the level of precision in this document.
…not even worth reading the title!!!
I don’t think I like the recent headings very much. Mozart never became a Nazi and Tchaikovsky was not ‘banned’ just because a concert was cancelled.
so right and awful what’s now going on but one needs to question how on earth could the current management of the Festival in combination with former clueless President lure Gazprom to sponsor the Festival? They even invited Putin but ‘thanks’ to Covid this embarrassment didn’t happen….this was devastating news and shame on them
“The 1941 festival of the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s birth was a flagship event” must be a misprint. It would be the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death (1791).
The celebration of an artist’s death is an expression of relief that at least the man is out of the way.
An anniversary of de-composition, then.
“Commemoration” is a much nicer and more serviveable word. 😉
Living writers, composers and artists are dangerous, you never know where they are going, they can do away with themselves on unimaginable ways, and disconcert the audience that has been faithful to them until some “horrible” statement or so “goes viral”. As my cousin Billy uses to say “I’m more comfortable supporting dead people”.
https://www.reddit.com/live/18hnzysb1elcs/
Recommended Reading:
Erik Levi’s “Mozart and the Nazis ⸺ How the Third Reich abused a cultural icon”
Published in 2010 by Yale University Press.
To Mr. Norman Lebrecht:
Correction needed in my post.-
I would very much appreciate it if you remove the link http://www.reddit from my comment. It so happened that I used a page in which I had included the link about the Russian aggresion (www.reddit…. etc. etc.) to write my comment and then, inadvertently, I copied and pasted the whole page in the Slipped Disc comment section.
Worse! He was a Freemason…
Austria has made him a chocolate salesman, which might be worse.
Is there any wonder why Mozart left Salzburg? He hated the people.
Another of Salzburg’s reluctant favourite sons, Thomas Bernhard, once wrote that on the first day there one finds it charming, and by the third day you’re already succumbing to the local disease of cretinism.
Mozart was not a Nazi!! Idiots!
Here is the website for this new book, published March 1, 2022:
https://mozarteum.at/die-internationale-stiftung-und-der-nationalsozialismus/#info
It can be purchased through amazon.de and probably other sources as well