To the South Bank for the latest study weekend in their year-long The Rest Is Noise festival; this weekend it’s The Art of Fear ie music and culture under the dictators Stalin and Hitler, and straightaway you have a dilemma. The history and culture of the Nazi rise-to-power and the Bolshevik revolution are substantially different: Germany was Europe’s most advanced industrial country, Russia its most backward: so do you flit between sessions on each or focus on one? After some thought I decided I know enough about Shostakovitch – I’ve listened to all the symphonies countless times, I’ve read testimony and seen the film several times, a year ago I was reading Orlando Figes’s history of the Bolshevik revolution, but about music under Hitler I know a lot less.

Breakfast with Shostakovitch: The Leningrad Symphony Very enjoyable hour led by enthusiastic Rachel Leach who got audience members to play the vibes, drums and bash a piano along with a cellist, violinist and percussionist from the LSO to explore the component parts of Shostakovitch’s most famous symphony. He wrote it in Leningrad during the murderous siege by the Nazis during the second world war when hundreds of thousands of Russians died of cold and starvation, it was smuggled out of the besieged city and played in the West to great acclaim. The first movement is dominated by a 12 minute long repeating drum pattern which begins quietly and builds to nightmareish proportions, generally taken to represent the advance of the German army into the Russian heartland. But like everything to do with Shostakovitch the story is muddied; he later claimed a lot of it was written before the war and was about the destruction of Russian life wrought by Stalin. It is one of the biggest, longest (90 minutes), loudest pieces of classical music ever written. Over-the-top bombast or triumph of the human spirit in face of terrible adversity: you takes your pick. They were investigating it in such detail because it was the big concert being given that evening by the City of Birmingham Orchestra.

Anne Applebaum: Opening lecture The phenomenally intelligent and successful Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, author of a terrifying book about the Russian gulags, did the impossible and delivered a half hour overview of both Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Lenin’s USSR which covered the main points and offered me, at least, thought-provoking new ideas. She said the word ‘totalitarian’ was coined by a speechwriter for Mussolini, and it was defined as “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, everything for the State”. What Hitler and Lenin-Stalin had in common was a contempt for the ‘softness’ of bourgeois politics, for democracy. Both shared a completely new theory of Power. The completeness of the vision, the ambition, is unprecedented in human history: to remould human beings; to create a new race of humans (pure Aryan Germans or communist Man); to completely re-engineer Society from top to bottom leaving no quarter, no inch untouched. And to change the Mind, to change the way human beings think, both dictators realised the importance of art and culture in the broadest sense, as the field where humans learn about their society and express their feelings and ideas. if you want to completely re-engineer these thoughts and feelings into approved channels then, it follows logically, every aspect of art and culture must be meticulously controlled and regulated. Art must be realistic and comprehensible by everyone; any art which retreats from the social challenge, which obsesses with purely personal subject matter, with obscure symbolism or sets itself up into petty cliques, such art is obviously anti-social and, in effect, sabotaging the Great Plan. Any artist who is gifted with the means of helping the people towards the Promised Land but wilfully refuses the task and prefers agonising about their own petty personal problems or tinkering with obscure “formalist” theories is clearly a traitor…

A quick sandwich out on the Festival Hall balcony, and then have to choose one of the five events all happening simultaneously at 1pm: I decide not to go to Noise Bites 4×15 minute whistle-stop tours through the key artists, social movements and scientific breakthroughs of the era ie Leni Riefenstahl, Picasso’s Guernica and Nazi Architecture; not to go to a talk on Propaganda Posters presented by John Milner from the Courtauld Institute; not to see Christopher Nupen’s award-winning film “We Want The Light” which explores the relationship between the Jews and German music. My feeling from previous weekends is that films can be seen on dvd or YouTube – what is unrepeatable is lecturers talking and answering questions (and, sure enough, We Want The Light is available on YouTube.)

Erik Levi: Music and the Nazis This was a really good lecture. Erik is Reader in Music and Director of Performance at Royal Holloway. He has made a really detailed study of the documents of music in Weimar and Nazi Germany, the magazines and associations and concert programmes, and come up with fascinating findings.

• Number one, it is astonishing how central culture is to Mein Kampf. Hitler is obsessed with the centrality of culture in promoting a pure strong Aryan Germany; to be strong again Germany must think itself proud and strong. Looking around he saw George Grosz and a host of contemporary artists and composers revelling in German’s defeat and poverty and humiliation: this would be changed!
• Two: we all think about the cool revolutionaries in the Weimar Republic, but there was a deep fund of “conservative bitterness”, a large number of composers and musicians who disliked the new music and thought it was betraying the nobility of what is, after all, the greatest musical tradition in Europe – Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner. As early as 1920 Hans Pfitzner wrote a pamphlet attacking the new music (presumably of Stravinsky) and identifying the Jews with controlling music establishment and ruining German music. (Levi points out that in fact Jews did hold positions of power, running various symphony orchestra and operas and figuring heavily among the controversial new composers – Weill, Eissler). The Nazis, ostensibly a political party, thought it worth their time and energy organising protests against the (hugely popular) Threepenny Opera and the jazz opera, Jonny Spielt Auf.
• It is striking that Goebbels, shrewdly, is contributing to the conservative and reactionary music periodicals, infiltrating and conscripting conservative musical discourse for the Party’s goals. Levi quotes a passage of Goebbels calling for a “steely Romanticism” which faces reality without flinching.
• The Wall Street Crash and the arrival of talkies had the joint affect of throwing thousands of musicians out of work. Through the twenties each town had a cinema (Germany had a massive film industry) which employed a full orchestra. With talkies and then musicals all these musicians were sacked, joining the ranks of the unemployed which Hitler offered work.
• Hitler comes to power and does give them work. The Nazis invest a huge amount in music. they save the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bayreuth Festival from bankruptcy. They fund concerts of good German music in every city, they sponsor festivals celebrating anniversaries of Bach, Wagner etc. The flight of so many eminent Jews creates vacancies in numerous institutions. In music as in economics the Nazis institute protectionism: German music by German musicians. The most eminent German composer, Richard Strauss, notoriously writes: “Thank God we have a new regime which takes music seriously” and is made President of the Reichskammer.
• Levi discussed the fate of six iconic pieces from the period:
  • Berg’s Lulu is banned, for both its corrupt subject matter (a prostitute) and its twelve tone experimentalism
  • Stravinsky’s Jeu de Cartes is, surprisingly, welcomed and widely played. Stravinsky was a big fan of Mussolini’s fascism and wanted (and needed) his music to be played in Germany so he was careful not to offend the authorities. They ignored his revolutionary ballets and played his easier neoclassical stuff.
  • Bartok was vehemently anti-fascist but his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste was widely played. Why? Because Bartok could be portrayed as a nationalist, devoted to folk art, to blood and soil (in contrast to the stereotype of the rootless, urban, decadent Jewish influence which the Nazis saw as the key enemy)
  • Hindemith was banned and left.
  • Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana was probably closest to Goebbels’ idea of steely Romanticism; it is full of modernist, post-Stravinsky rhythms, but harnessed to colossally simple tunes and harmonies.
  • Richard Strauss: poster boy for the regime who secretly despised the top Nazis but was happy to take all the awards and positions they offered him.

At 2.30 another set of difficult choices: I decide not to go see Phil Walker from the University of Surrey discuss the origins of The Nuclear Era; the Noise Bites whistle-stop tour through Mass Observation, Orwell and David Gascoyne, or Irish actor Jack Healy performing his one-man show about Shostakovich.

Instead queue to see BBC History Commissioning editor Martin Davidson give an enthusiastic talk titled The Vile and The Sublime: Hitler and Art. I think this was meant to be about Leni Riefenstahl and her notorious documentary film about the 1934 Nurenberg rally, Triumph of the Will. Martin has made various documentaries about Nazi Germany including one on this very subject. But it was his swift overview of the cultural trends which led up to Nazism which I found riveting: the Romantic movement posited that there is more to the world than the prosaic reality we face day to day; there are higher levels, numinous realms of the imagination accessible to poets and artists and imaginative heroes who can show us the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age: Arnold and Ruskin and Morris told us that only Art can save us from the mundane and the philistine and encourage idolisation of the great Poets who shape and transmit these precious spiritual values to us masses. It is Thomas Carlisle who takes the fateful step of carrying this Romantic adulation into the realm of Politics, with his series of essays and books delineating the political Hero, the Cromwell and Napoleon, the Strong Man who bends the destinies of nations to his will. Meanwhile, in another strand, Richard Wagner writes his pamphlet, Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850), stereotyping the rootless, cosmopolitan Jew as the enemy of pure nationalist music, by extension the underminer of the Modern Nation. And elsewhere Charles Darwin’s epigones spin the idea of natural selection into theories of spiritual or physical or political evolution,  whereby nations are engaged in a life or death competition to survive and any elements or aspects of society which are backward or diseased risk jeopardising the survival of the entire nation, of everyone.

And then the whole world exploded in the unprecedented disaster of the Great War, an unparalleled catastrophe, murder on an industrial scale, which ushered in the 20th century and all its immeasurable evil, vileness and horror. The War leaves the defeated utterly bereft of hope, amid the wreckage of ruined empires, all illusions destroyed. It was a war of the entire nation coming together on an unprecedented scale and when Germany lost, it wasn’t some remote army, it was the entire society from top to bottom which failed. From all of these strands Hitler concocted what Davidson quotes Hugh Trevor-Roper as describing as “bestial Nordic nonsense”. But to the majority of people who voted for Hitler in 1933 it made sense:

Germany had been comprehensively betrayed: the Weimar democrats and socialists and Jews had stabbed this mighty nation in the back and betrayed her noble army to the Jews on Wall street and the Bolshevik Jews and the Jews within, the degenerate, rootless intellectuals. The noble German worker and soldier needed to be saved from unemployment and humiliation by a strong Leader who could unite the nation, and defeat its enemies within and abroad.

Speer built the gleaming modernist Zeppelin stadium outside the quaint traditional volkish town of Nurenberg, Goebbels staged the rally, Leni Riefenstahl filmed it.

4pm more difficult decisions. I chose not to attend Frank Whitford on the Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art; or to join the enormous queue for novelist Helen Dunmore talking about The Long Shadows Of War, what society chooses to memorialise and what to forget; more Noise Bites whistle-stop tours through Picture Post, Orwell and the Paris International Exhibition; nor to go watch three British Wartime Propaganda Films, tempting as this was, on the principle that you can always see these things on dvd or YouTube; ditto Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky.

Instead I went to see A listening guide to the weekend’s music presented by very English music professor, critic and broadcaster David Fanning and the excruciatingly giggly, girlish Iranian pianist and musicologist Michelle Assay. Half way through one balding guy in front of me turned to the balding guy next to him and stage whispered ‘This is rubbish’. They had decided David would be the teacher and Michelle the cheeky pupil who needed to answer questions about Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovitch correctly to pass her test. Which led to excruciating ‘jokes’ in an uncomfortably kinky atmosphere, and didn’t very well convey the Wikipedia-level trot through the careers of the three composers. Didn’t learn anything: Stravinsky the chameleon modernist who unleashed wild pagan rhythm for everyone else to explore; Prokofiev the optimistic futurist associated with urban, sporting, energetic music who somehow never created the big masterpieces; Shostakovitch who started off as a jokey satirist but was chastened into the morbidly grandiose symphonist of popular memory. I should have kept to to my Nazi theme and gone to the talk on Degenerate Art.

There was more. I didn’t go to see the Southbank Sinfonia play Music from Terezin concentration camp; Will Self deliver a lecture about Kafka’s influence on totalitarian music; another opportunity to see Jack Healy be Shostakovich; the pre-concert talk about Shostakovich, Prokofiev & Stalin by music journalist and radio presenter Stephen Johnson; a screening of Tony Palmer’s film about Carl Orff, “O, Fortuna!”; or the evening’s big concert, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra performing Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, preceded by an introductory talk by historian Orlando Figes.

You can have too much of a good thing…

The bad guys