MUSIC AND COLLABORATION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 358, 3 May 1946, Page 18

MUSIC AND COLLABORATION

HAT is the difference, morally, between a pianist who gives mental comfort to an enemy and a physician who ministers to an enemy’s body? The answer, if one can be found, may decide the future of half-a-dozen of the world’s greatest singers and instrumentalists. Here is the situation as set out by Winthrop Sargeant in an article in New York "Life."

OTHING is generating so much dissonancein the world of United States musicto-day as the problem of what to do with the prominent European musicians who are accused, rightly or wrongly, of collaboration. Unlike the large number of artists who left Germany and Italy after the rise of totalitarianism, these musicians elected to stay behind or to work under the Nazis in Axis occupied countries. The trouble is that by purely aftistic standards many of them are embarrassingly great. They include Wilhelm Furtwangler, a German conductor whose standing is close’ to Toscanini’s; Richard Strauss, probably the world’s greatest living composer; Walter Gieseking, who is very close to being the world’s greatest pianist; Kirsten Flagstad, the world’s most cele-

brated Wagnerian soprano; Alfred Cortot, greatest of French pianists; Beniamino Gigli, most famous of Italian tenors; William Mengelberg, Dutch conductor of international standing; Serge Lifar, Europe’s most noted male ballet dancer. Many Americans are in favour of banning them forever from our concert halls and opera houses. Many others feel that to do so would result in a substantial and unnecessary loss to culture. The problem is particularly vexing because there is no accepted legal machinery to decide it. The artists in uestion are not war criminals. The issue is basically one of morals. Philosophers and poets have, of course, pointed out that music and morals do not necessarily coincide. In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann remarked sagaciously that the art of music is "politically suspect." The disconcerting fact is that in Germany and Italy the Allied

powers have just defeated what are unquestionably the two most musical nations in the world. The degree of political guilt differs greatly in individual cases. Kirsten

Flagstad, for example, refused to sing either in Germany or under the Quisling regime in her native Norway. Her crime consists merely in being the faithful wife of Henry Johansen, a celebrated Quislingite war profiteeer who sold lumber to the Nazis and is now in a Norwegian jail awaiting trial. She is at present living in retirement in Norway, forbidden to sing and unable to get passport visas to leave the country. Richard Strauss, now living in Switzerland, has enjoyed undiminished popularity in American opera houses and concert halls, where his operas Rosenkavalier' and Salome and a sheaf of brilliant symphonic poems have been performed throughout the war. He is 81 years old. He had several run-ins with the Nazis and once publicly denounced their war, which incidentally interfered with the collection of His enormous foreign royalties. He has, however, enthusiastically accepted several Nazi honours and even went so far, in 1940, as to write a festival piece for -Emperor Hirohito. Walter Gieseking has stubbornly maintained (and still believes) that art has nothing whatever to do with politics. When the war broke out he deliberately chose to stay in Germany, where he played the piano

througfibut the "War! giving. mafiy concerts for the German» wounded. Questioned recently by Life correspondents, Gieseking stood pat. He believes a Pianist’s job is simply to play the piano. He hates war but considers that the war was not his fault. He doesn’t feel guilty at all, and is rather surprised that others consider him in that light. ; Sixty-eight-year-old Alfred Cortot, one of the greatest pianists of his generation, is living in poor health at Neuilly outside Paris. waiting for the expiration of aban’ which» has forbidden him-access to the French concert stage for a year. During the Vichy regime he became a National Councillor and_ virtual dictator of French music, openly sympathised with Nazis and expressed the regret that he’ was too old to fight with them. Serge Lifar has already served a year’s sentence similar to Cortot’s and is about to resume his career in France. An effusively cordial collaborationist, Lifar congratulated the Nazis on the conquest of his hative Russian

city of Kiev and expressed a fervent desire to.dance there under Nazi auspices. The Germans made him director of the Paris Opera. He accepted the honour gladly, remarking later, "To have directed the opera at 35 will always be the honour of my life." Beniamino Gigli, in Italy, sang for the Fascists, sang for the Nazis, was accused of collaboration, published a book describing himself as a strictly "nonpolitical" artist, accused his accusers of blackmail and was formally. acquitted by an Italian court. He is singing as lustily as ever. Willem Mengelberg greeted the Nazis: in his native Holland like longlost brothers, spent the years of occupation gleefully conducting the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and touring in triumph all over Germany. Loyal Dutchmen managed to get a little revenge by buying up all the tickets to his Amsterdam concerts and . then ‘staying away while he performed before empty houses. Mengelberg is now in Switzerland and is not likely to go home in the near future. Most Controversial Figure . Wilhelm Furtwangler, most controversial figure of all to American music lovers, started his career under the Nazis

by protesting violently against Nazi racial policies and by protecting the Jewish musicians in his Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. A patriotic German who was under no compulsion to leave the Third Reich, he chose to stay, hoping he might keep the finest traditions of German music alive in spite of the Nazis. The Nazis finally managed to get him to accept an official post as a Prussian state councillor. In 1936 he was offered the post of conductor of the New York Philharmonic where he was to have succeeded Arturo Toscanini. But public clamour in New York forced him to decline the offer. During the war Furtwangler conspicuously refrained from conducting in occupied countries, with the exception of Austria where he had long been a favourite figure. Furtwangler is now living with his wife and son at a fashionable nursing home at Montreux on Lake Geneva. In Germany and Austria he is seriously referred to as a "resistance artist." He has just made an appearance under American auspices in Vienna and has been invited to conduct again in London. Interviewed by a Life correspondent last week, Furtwangler denied any sympathy with Nazism, pointed to the record of his long fight to protect Jewish musicians in Germany, regretted that there is no tribunal before which he could be given a chance to justify his actions before the American public. There seems to be no discernible relation in these cases between degree of guilt and degree of punishment. The artloving Latins seem, on the whole, to have let their collaborationists off easier than the more systematic Nordics. Punishment or acquittal seems in most cases to have depended not on any universal principles of justice but upon public emotion. So far, the argument in the United States has been carried on along the same lines. The prosecution’s case rests mainly on the assumption that any well-known artist who deliberately chose to remain in occupied Europe under the Nazis has committed a sin against humanity for which there is no. expiation. Practical Issues On the practical side the prosecution also argues with some justice that these musical collaborators (with the exception of Flagstad) contributed to the Axis war effort by helping Axis morale. The defence contends that, whatever their past sins, the artists in question offer no threat to civilisation to-day. It also contends that their contribution to the Axis war effort was inconsequential compared with that of the Axis physicians who healed the German wounded or that of the German atom-bomb scientists who have been imported by the hundreds to United States laboratories where their knowledge may benefit the future defence of the United States. Experience of past wars indicates that the hue and cry over enemy artists will eventually die down. When it does, United States music lovers will have dropped the hottest musico-political argument that they have had since World War 1, when Wagner’s operas were banned from the Metropolitan, Legionnaires rioted at Fritz Kreisler’s concert in Ithaca, New York, and Conductor Karl Muck was plucked from the podium of the Boston Nise geaed and jailed as an enemy agent,