Tunes for Tyrants with Suzy Klein...

[Lat-Literal]

The whole series was worth it for Anita Lasker-Wallfisch's comment to the effect that the Nazis couldn't take Schumann from her.

But ... the value of deeply-felt emotions from SK (who repeated the guff about how Music by-passes the intellect) really showed up the flaws of the whole series. Somebody mentioned earlier the trite alliteration of the title - and this was shown up in the first quarter of the final programme: exactly which "tyrants" were Vera Lynn's "tunes" meant to be "for"? The BBC chiefs of the time? Walton's? Tippett's? What happened to Russia this week? Why no mention of Poland - the Panufnik/Lutoslawski piano duet defying the Nazi ban on Classical Music? Surely more interesting (and more to do with the series title) than SK's singalong?

Hugely frustrating for me - and left me once again wondering why, if documentary series on Cosmology can be presented by Professor Brian Cox; on Quantum Physics by Professor Jim Al-Khalili; on Roman History by Professor Mary Beard; on Evolutionary Biology by Professor Alice Roberts; on Neurology by Professor David Eagleman ... why can't we have a documentary on Music in the Soviet Union by (for example) Professor Marina Frolova-Walker?

Interesting comments. Also, I own a copy of the CD "Modern Times - Dutch Jewish Composers 1928-1943" (Channel Classics) which features Ignace Lilien, Rosy Wertheim and the brilliant Leo Smit (that's the Dutch Leo Smit; not the American Leo Smit). Not having watched every minute of every episode of this series I just wonder whether the Dutch composers were mentioned at all. My guess is that they weren't mentioned.

Re your earlier comment about the Austrians, ferney, I think, on reflection, I might have to mainly disagree. While it is true that the period 1875-1885 included the births of Kreisler, Shrecker, Webern and Berg, all arguably noteworthy, and Schoenberg was born just one year earlier in 1874, the only significant composer born after 1885 and no later than 1925 was Krenek who was born as early as 1900. In fact, you will be hard pushed to find more than a tiny handful of Austrian composers, major or minor, born between 1901 and 1925. Very far from most of this was because of Nazi atrocities. A hiatus predated those.

So, I think I return to my point that there was something of a cultural vacuum, at least in breadth, in Germany and Austria, which ultimately gave the Nazis an easier ride when it came to spinning music for their own aims. Contrast with Britain and France; even US and Russia? I am surprised myself by the facts involved here which are reluctantly leading me to this conclusion but I guess WW1 took its toll and in Weimar etc the emphasis was on fringe fun as a means of escapism rather than serious pursuits like classical music? That might partially account for it but where were Germany and Austria's WW1 composers?

[jean]

...and left me once again wondering why, if documentary series on Cosmology can be presented by Professor Brian Cox; on Quantum Physics by Professor Jim Al-Khalili; on Roman History by Professor Mary Beard; on Evolutionary Biology by Professor Alice Roberts; on Neurology by Professor David Eagleman ... why can't we have a documentary on Music in the Soviet Union by (for example) Professor Marina Frolova-Walker?

And why couldn't Dr David Skinner have presented the Evensong programme instead of merely acting as consultant to the programme Lucy Worsley presented?

[jean]

...exactly which "tyrants" were Vera Lynn's "tunes" meant to be "for"? ...

None - but didn't the 'tyrants' pick up the We'll meet again idea and run with it?

[Serial_Apologist]

None - but didn't the 'tyrants' pick up the We'll meet again idea and run with it?

That's the problem with veal.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Re your earlier comment about the Austrians, ferney, I think, on reflection, I might have to mainly disagree. While it is true that the period 1875-1885 included the births of Kreisler, Shrecker, Webern and Berg, all arguably noteworthy, and Schoenberg was born just one year earlier in 1874, the only significant composer born after 1885 and no later than 1925 was Krenek who was born as early as 1900. In fact, you will be hard pushed to find more than a tiny handful of Austrian composers, major or minor, born between 1901 and 1925. Very far from most of this was because of Nazi atrocities. A hiatus predated those.

So, I think I return to my point that there was something of a cultural vacuum, at least in breadth, in Germany and Austria, which ultimately gave the Nazis an easier ride when it came to spinning music for their own aims. Contrast with Britain and France; even US and Russia? I am surprised myself by the facts involved here which are reluctantly leading me to this conclusion but I guess WW1 took its toll and in Weimar etc the emphasis was on fringe fun as a means of escapism rather than serious pursuits like classical music? That might partially account for it but where were Germany and Austria's WW1 composers?

I think that you are "onto" something here, Lats - but again, I would suggest that you set your dates too late. Granted my "dozens" of Austrian composers born in these periods is an ovestatement (!), you still omit Wellesz, Eisler, Spinner, and Korngold from your list of "noteworthies" born between 1885 - 1925. Add to those supplied form Germany, we get Hindemith, Hartmann, Weill, Krenek, Korngold, Spinner, Wellesz, Eisler, Orff, Goldschmidt, Blacher, and Zimmermann - all of whom can be described as "noteworthy" if that is defined as "having their work still performed in concerts". A dozen names - which isn't bad for a forty year period.


I don't think it's so much a "cultural vacuum" at the start of the Twentieth Century that created an intellectual environment beneficial for the rise of Nazism. Going back further, it's interesting to look at how children were brought up in Germany in the Nineteenth Century - whilst there was Fröbel with his idea of the Kindergarten, this was in reaction to a much more draconian "system" of child-rearing, which imposed very strict discipline and enforced gender roles. It's seen in the way Ferderich the Great was brought up, and the generational hostility between all the Hanoverian English Kings - and in the "character-building" methods which Prince Albert imposed upon his sons in England. It was based in theories that strict obedience and harsh punishments were essential to a successful society. Harsh, emotionally distant fathers who would impose strict physical and mental penalties on wayward children. The conductor Hans von Bulow was a victim of such an upbringing - and he is representative of the character that was "built" from such regimes - emotionally closed-off, snivelling subservience to those he regarded as authority figures, sneeringly bullying to those he regarded as his inferiors. Adolf Hitler was also brought up under such domestic conditions - bolstered by a doting but ineffectual mother who reinforced the boy's sense of self-importance, and who died at a critical moment in his life.

So, what has this to do with the Austro-German Musical tradition? Well, it, too,was based on strict devotion to "tradition", to honouring your German masters - to strict obedience and harsh "punishment" for miscreants. Essentially, composing was rooted in Species Counterpoint - and with good reason; 18th Century composers could not have built huge, abstract (ie, not based on settings of words) Tonal structures without the foundations inherent in such studies: they themselves saw them as essential (Beethoven turned away from study with Haydn because the older composer lacked the time to give him the detailed discipline he knew he needed to undertake in order to develop as a strong and individual voice - Schubert agreed to give up composing in order to devote the five years he believed were needed to study Counterpoint with Simon Sechter - Bruckner actually undertook such strict studies with Sechter, and regarded it as essential for his own students). But by the mid-late Nineteenth Century, the Tonal language upon which the opportunities offered by such studies relied was being undermined by the expressive opportunities of increasing chromaticism - student composers found themselves torn between the requirements to honour the German masters, and the temptation to discover new means of Musical expression.

How to reconcile chromaticism with older compositional procedures not appropriate to them - that is the conflict faced by composers reaching maturity around the time of the First World War. It's the impulse that took both Schönberg and Hauer to develop their own, different methods of working with Twelve-note collections. And those methods - the only ones which successfully fused total chromaticism with ancient contrapuntal techniques - were not attractive to all composers. Not until after the First World War, when many younger German composers for a time were glad to reject the Ancestor Worship of their ancestors, did other composing means and styles - based on Popular entertainment, "fringe fun" Musics - become a viable alternative.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

None - but didn't the 'tyrants' pick up the We'll meet again idea and run with it?

Hmmm. The emphasis seemed to be on SK chortling about 1940s BBC standards for most of the first ten minutes. And were you convinced by this bit of the programme? I mean, given the common experience of young men in both countries being sent away to fight, the coincidence of the phrase "we'll meet again" didn't seem so revelatory as SK wished to imply. (Where would the more famous Lily Marlene fit into SK's theory? I don't know - she didn't choose to mention it.)

And were there really male German soldiers playing the part of the angels in the background? Why? Why take men from active service to do something that women could have done as easily? I suspect that - as with her confident, but unsubstantiated claim last week that Hitler attended a performance of Wagner conducted by Mahler, I think we were given rumour and wishful thinking here.

And that's a real problem - because of her cavalier attitude to facts and evidence-based comments, I found it difficult to take anything she said on trust. She was not a reliable guide through some of the most complex and disturbing aspects of history - and those complex and disturbing aspects needed, and should have been given, a reliable guide.

[vinteuil]

.

... ferney - your #127 insofar as it treats of child-rearing and education is caricatural and anecdotal - and I think based on a Prussian stereotype. What do we know of further south, and Catholic Germany? If you look at Austria, you could adduce a very different approach from the writings of Adalbert Stifter -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalbert_Stifter

.

[Serial_Apologist]

Just to add to ferney's thoroughgoing addition to the thread, Vienna was of course a hotbed of radical ideas intimately known to Mahler and the Second Viennese composers in the cultural, if not so much the political fields (to make an overfine distinction), at the turn of the C20, as was undermentioned as detail in the otherwise informative, if hurried documentary TV series on the Hapsburg Dynasty, shown over the past few weeks: Freud; the Sezession movement in the arts; Olbrich, Hoffmann, Loos and Otto Wagner in architecture...

[jean]

...And were there really male German soldiers playing the part of the angels in the background? Why? Why take men from active service to do something that women could have done as easily? I suspect that... we were given rumour and wishful thinking here.

Yes, that really was extraordinary (and impossible for us to verify).

And why would anyone want to believe it?

[Alain Maréchal]

I suspect that - as with her confident, but unsubstantiated claim last week that Hitler attended a performance of Wagner conducted by Mahler, I think we were given rumour and wishful thinking here.
.

Its an intriguing idea, (as is the theory that Wittgenstein may have been a fellow-pupil) but was there any suggestion of time and place? I have not seen the programme, nor can I, so I ask for my information.

[Lat-Literal]

I think that you are "onto" something here, Lats - but again, I would suggest that you set your dates too late. Granted my "dozens" of Austrian composers born in these periods is an ovestatement (!), you still omit Wellesz, Eisler, Spinner, and Korngold from your list of "noteworthies" born between 1885 - 1925. Add to those supplied form Germany, we get Hindemith, Hartmann, Weill, Krenek, Korngold, Spinner, Wellesz, Eisler, Orff, Goldschmidt, Blacher, and Zimmermann - all of whom can be described as "noteworthy" if that is defined as "having their work still performed in concerts". A dozen names - which isn't bad for a forty year period.


I don't think it's so much a "cultural vacuum" at the start of the Twentieth Century that created an intellectual environment beneficial for the rise of Nazism. Going back further, it's interesting to look at how children were brought up in Germany in the Nineteenth Century - whilst there was Fröbel with his idea of the Kindergarten, this was in reaction to a much more draconian "system" of child-rearing, which imposed very strict discipline and enforced gender roles. It's seen in the way Ferderich the Great was brought up, and the generational hostility between all the Hanoverian English Kings - and in the "character-building" methods which Prince Albert imposed upon his sons in England. It was based in theories that strict obedience and harsh punishments were essential to a successful society. Harsh, emotionally distant fathers who would impose strict physical and mental penalties on wayward children. The conductor Hans von Bulow was a victim of such an upbringing - and he is representative of the character that was "built" from such regimes - emotionally closed-off, snivelling subservience to those he regarded as authority figures, sneeringly bullying to those he regarded as his inferiors. Adolf Hitler was also brought up under such domestic conditions - bolstered by a doting but ineffectual mother who reinforced the boy's sense of self-importance, and who died at a critical moment in his life.

So, what has this to do with the Austro-German Musical tradition? Well, it, too,was based on strict devotion to "tradition", to honouring your German masters - to strict obedience and harsh "punishment" for miscreants. Essentially, composing was rooted in Species Counterpoint - and with good reason; 18th Century composers could not have built huge, abstract (ie, not based on settings of words) Tonal structures without the foundations inherent in such studies: they themselves saw them as essential (Beethoven turned away from study with Haydn because the older composer lacked the time to give him the detailed discipline he knew he needed to undertake in order to develop as a strong and individual voice - Schubert agreed to give up composing in order to devote the five years he believed were needed to study Counterpoint with Simon Sechter - Bruckner actually undertook such strict studies with Sechter, and regarded it as essential for his own students). But by the mid-late Nineteenth Century, the Tonal language upon which the opportunities offered by such studies relied was being undermined by the expressive opportunities of increasing chromaticism - student composers found themselves torn between the requirements to honour the German masters, and the temptation to discover new means of Musical expression.

How to reconcile chromaticism with older compositional procedures not appropriate to them - that is the conflict faced by composers reaching maturity around the time of the First World War. It's the impulse that took both Schönberg and Hauer to develop their own, different methods of working with Twelve-note collections. And those methods - the only ones which successfully fused total chromaticism with ancient contrapuntal techniques - were not attractive to all composers. Not until after the First World War, when many younger German composers for a time were glad to reject the Ancestor Worship of their ancestors, did other composing means and styles - based on Popular entertainment, "fringe fun" Musics - become a viable alternative.

I'm very grateful for your contribution which is detailed and informative. I have always wanted more of the context and would welcome further comments. Given vinteuil's post it also seems I have inadvertently started something here. That might not be a bad thing. It all looks like the start of an interesting and educational discussion. I will take Eisler and Korngold as noteworthy and, if you advise, Wellesz. Dare I say I was unaware of Spinner. Whoops. Re Germany, yes, I guess, for the most part but I am dogmatically not accepting Orff.

On the framework you are putting forward, may I say that I do largely accept it. Having said it, I can now do my ifs and buts. First, I am not sure that I was suggesting that a "cultural vacuum" created an intellectual environment beneficial for the rise of Nazism. Rather - and this was initially picking up on the television series - I was focussed on what the Nazis did with music once in power. It was only an outline sketch. I hadn't really thought it through. But the feeling, I think, concerned the preceding periods - and 1875-1925 is a very long time. Had Germany and Austria in the 1920s been choc-a-bloc with not only impressive but internationally renowned composers, that would have provided a substantial power base for opposition whatever the extreme nature of any attempted clampdown. And if together the composers had established on overriding sense of modernity it might have made any harking back to traditionalism seem cranky even to the ordinary public. As things were, popular sentiment was in line with hyped up nationalistic music nostalgia.

Secondly, any read-across to Britain re children's upbringing is surely fraught. For if there were similarities, and I agree there were, then what accounts for the large numbers of British composers in that period comparatively speaking, even if one accepts that many were not hugely groundbreaking? Also, why is it that the beginnings of twelve tone etc did not play a huge part? It seems to me that British composers of the period were musically closer to earlier tradition while finding ways of updating it for the modern age. So in other words, while there was a similarity in upbringing the dynamics were very different. Thirdly, I have no idea how children were raised in France but I do think it is a question that needs an answer given what was occurring there with Les Six and many others including as was shown by SK in the series in "the jazz scene". That would at least be another means of cross-checking some of the conclusions we are making for consistency. Fourthly, and this actually is a bit of a curve ball in full support of what you are saying, Charles Ives. Sometimes all it takes is for one individual to be so different that he is capable of blasting almost everything from the past out of the water. What the Nazis would have made of his unique twists on tradition I wouldn't like to say but I am sure American music could not have possibly done anything after him but move on and it does seem that he got on very well with his father.

[vinteuil]

.

... we should, perhaps, re-read our Matthew Arnold :

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/7th-august-1886/9/mr-matthew-arnold-on-french-and-german-schools

.

http://amzn.eu/3aogm6c

.

[Lat-Literal]

Just to add to ferney's thoroughgoing addition to the thread, Vienna was of course a hotbed of radical ideas intimately known to Mahler and the Second Viennese composers in the cultural, if not so much the political fields (to make an overfine distinction), at the turn of the C20, as was undermentioned as detail in the otherwise informative, if hurried documentary TV series on the Hapsburg Dynasty, shown over the past few weeks: Freud; the Sezession movement in the arts; Olbrich, Hoffmann, Loos and Otto Wagner in architecture...

I accept this - but these people in the main were born before 1875, the turn of the century was a long time before the 1930s (composers born in 1875 would have been only 25), and I was especially thinking in terms of classical music, rather than other arts in line with the programme. (Also, the Sezessionists were often at war with each other as early as 1905).

[HighlandDougie]

Ah, if only Germany were all that simple to understand. For anyone interested in how Germany came to be, well, Germany, I much recommend these programmes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016btb4

It's all the fault of the Swedes (and I don't mean what I would call turnips).

[Serial_Apologist]

Ah, if only Germany were all that simple to understand. For anyone interested in how Germany came to be, well, Germany, I much recommend these programmes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016btb4

It's all the fault of the Swedes (and I don't mean what I would call turnips).

It's all a load of double deutch to me!