What's So Degenerate About Korngold?

While blogging about Renee Fleming’s performance of “Ich ging zu ihm,” I mentioned in passing that Korngold’s opera was considered Entartete Musik (“degenerate music”). What does this mean? 

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Entartete (“degenerate” or “decadent” in English) was Nazi epithet for art and music the regime considered objectionable for racial or ideological reasons. Korngold, as a Jewish composer, was automatically in this category, but race was not the only way to be designated decadent. Ties with Jewish friends and colleagues would do it, as Anton Webern (somewhat a Hitler supporter in the early years) would learn. Content (like the black characters in Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf) would do it. Being too modern or too jazzy (i.e. “African”) qualified as well. (See our recommended books.)

The Nazi campaign against many of its best musicians was part of a larger, more notorious campaign against modern art, which in 1937 climaxed in a multi-city exhibition of “degenerate” art selected from thousands of pieces stolen from museums. The following year, an exhibit on degenerate music opened in Düsseldorf. An image of the Entartete Musik exhibition catalog can seen here. (Warning: it’s pretty offensive.)

Decca released an Entartete Musik CD series beginning in the 1990s, with special emphasis on more rarely performed works.  

“From a purely musical point of view, the “Entartete Musik” series has, with unanimous international critical acclaim, brought back to life more than 30 forgotten key works from the first half of this century by composers such as Braunfels, Goldschmidt, Haas, Korngold, Krása, Krenek, Ullmann and Waxman. These recordings may help the listener imagine what the musical life in Europe was before its destruction by the Nazis, and what it might have been if these great branches had not been abruptly cut off.” (Decca press release)

Korngold was among the lucky ones — he made it to Hollywood and wrote several popular film scores. But some of the composers mentioned in this Decca press release (Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullman) died in the Holocaust.  I will try to get together a list of the “degenerate” composers and performers along with their main works and fates. For now, I just have a great

reading list on degenerate music

"Cardillac" Arrest: Hindemith's Work is the Operatic "Caligari"

And speaking of bad guys…

A delightful development in the world of opera dvds has occurred.  Two (!) versions of Paul Hindemith’s 1926 opus, Cardillac have recently appeared.  I make the assumption that even serious opera fans may not be acquainted with this fascinating piece, except in Germany.  Maybe there are old records of Hans Rosbaud or Otto Klemperer conducting it, I haven’t looked. I assume there are cds of the work… Arkiv probably has some.

As in the cartoons, only a puff of dust was in the air to indicate where I’d been been just prior to rushing off to order the DG Munich production, featuring one of the great Wotans and my favorite Sachs, Donald McIntyre, New Zealand’s claim to operatic greatness as Cardillac, the murderous goldsmith, and the redoubtable  Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting a  production directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, from the Munich  Staatsoper (1985).

Robert Wiene’s cinematic masterpiece, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) is commonly supposed to be the definitive expressionistic statement in film; Cardillac is a sort of musical equivalent. Nightmarish obsession is coupled with grotesque humor and unexpected pathos in the opera, as in the film.  Like Fritz Lang’s “M”, one is dealing with a vicious psychopath who not only cannot help himself, but is perversely proud of his crimes; they are a part of himself, the most intimate part of himself.  Hindemith, in his “bad boy” period, is a greater exponent of Berlin asphalt grittiness than Kurt Weill, who was a theatrical master and a creator of memorable, even immortal tunes, but whose greatest works (Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny) are simple to a fault compared with Hindemith’s comprehensive musical technique.

Weirdly, I also perceived Cardillac to be a cruelly ironic gloss on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger;  the story of a craftsman in love with his craft, who takes that love a little too far; way, way too far in Cardillac.  The versatile McIntyre is as perfect for the Mr. Hyde side, Cardillac, as he is for the Dr. Jeckyll side, Hans Sachs.  A monster in the one case and a noble human being in the other (Hans Sachs, not Stevenson’s mediocre Dr. Jeckyll) these two opposites are crazily similiar in at least some of their conceits.  In fact, Hindemith ought to have altered the E.T.A. Hoffman story by setting it in Nuremburg rather than Paris.  But if he did that, Regiedirectors would inevitably bring in the Nazis. Yuck.

I recommend this opera, and the dvd mentioned, with great conviction.