Conference Agenda

“Art and cultural criticism in general is baffled by the new issues that are now suddenly confronting it,” declared Heinrich Guthmann in 1935, complaining of the hidebound conservatism of “excessively aged critics […] who grew up in a completely different era and are unable to adapt”. Guthmann was writing in Die Musik, a journal controlled by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, to defend Ludwig Maurick’s opera Die Heimfahrt des Jörg Tilman (The Homecoming of Jörg Tilman) against music critics who were distressed by the opera’s atonal score and use of “collectivist” theatrical devices from the Weimar avant-garde. Once a bastion of reactionary conservatism, Rosenberg’s functionaries rebranded as the Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde (NSKG) in 1934 and began to promote and publish starkly modernist works of music theater that aimed to foster a supposedly organic, racialized community through a ritual depiction of revolutionary political life.

Explicitly revolutionary in character, Die Heimfahrt des Jörg Tilman was the first operatic work to depict the first World War, and used its imagery as part of a foundational myth of collective experience in which spectators and performers alike were united as the political and racial subjects of the new Germany. As Guthmann put it, in Maurick’s opera, “the experiment was undertaken to allow the community of the people [Gemeinschaft des Volkes] itself to take part ritually in opera”. Taking this as a starting point and drawing from recent scholarship on both German identity and cultural memory (Pollock: Opera after Zero Hour, 2019; Potter: Art of Suppression, 2016) and depictions of violence in opera more broadly (Cusick et al: “Sexual Violence in Opera”, 2018), this talk examines the efforts of the NSKG to cultivate Nazi ideology and mythology through the paradigm of modernist opera, with special attention to the aesthetic, dramatic, and political strategies deployed by the works it promoted. Combining original archival work, music analysis, and theatre studies, it argues that Nazi cultural institutions co-opted modernist strategies of musical form and ritual theater (Fischer-Lichte: Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 2005) to advance a political program of racialized difference.

Many visitors to Liszt’s birthplace in Raiding may have seen a plaque on the wall of his childhood home, dedicated “solemnly, by the German people, to the German master Franz Liszt”. They may have been puzzled too, given that Raiding, though now Austrian, was unquestionably part of Hungary at the time of the composer’s birth in 1811, and Liszt himself had always identified as Hungarian. Yet arguments over Liszt’s national identity, and by association that of his music, have raged with surprising vehemence ever since a truculent Milanese journalist described him in 1838 as “a Frenchman pretending to be Hungarian”. They were, remarkably, still smoldering over a century later, when Liszt’s best-known modern biographers, Alan Walker and Serge Gut, bickered cantankerously over the topic.

I do not seek again to fan the flames, but instead address one of the most blatant attempts to exploit Liszt for political purposes, in the town of his burial, not his birth, in 1936: the oft-ignored "Franz Liszt Memorial week" in Bayreuth--a celebration of his 125^th birthday and a recent German-Hungarian “cultural agreement”. NSDAP officials joined “honorary protector” Winifried Wagner in the gargantuan Ludwig Siebert-Festhalle for a staged performance of Liszt’s oratorio Die Legende der Heiligen Elisabeth by the Hungarian State Opera company, imported en masse from Budapest to Bavaria. And of course there were speeches, notably by Peter Raabe, Liszt scholar and President of the Reichsmusikkammer. Yet, counter-intuitively, his oration emphasized Liszt’s Hungarian background, rather than the Austrian ancestry of the allegedly “German” master. The reasons why constitute the kernel of this paper.

On August 23^rd, 1943, Greek composer Dimitrios Levidis documented a professional triumph in his journal: “This afternoon I finished the orchestration of my Iliad, the first official performance of which is scheduled for the evening of September 14, in the ancient theater of Herodotus Atticus under the Acropolis… unless events of extreme violence delay us until the next day!” The violence in question was that of the brutal Axis occupation of Athens, which itself came on the heels of the authoritarian 4^th of August Regime of the 1930s. Led and informed by dictator Ioannis Metaxas, the regime’s idealized “Third Hellenic Civilization” drew partly on the legacy of Greek antiquity to create a modern “Greekness” which would cement the nation’s position as both unified with, and the true source of, western European culture.

This paper examines Dimitrios Levidis’ L’iliade, an oratorio based on the Homeric epic, as a musical response to the Nazi occupation of Athens, composed following a time of renewed national interest with Greece’s ancient past. Previous studies on Metaxist propaganda have focused largely on visual media, such as photography, theater, and tourism, and while there is a wealth of literature discussing the popular urban genre of rebetiko music, which had been heavily censored during the regime, and would not resurface until after the war, less attention has been given to the more “high-brow” classical music of the same period, particularly during the war itself.

Drawing on George Sakallieros’ studies of Greek musical modernism in the 1930s, as well Marina Petrakis and Katarina Zacharaia’s research on Metaxist propaganda, which sought to draw a direct line between modern day Greeks to their ancient counterparts, I explore the internal tensions of Greek identity as both ancient and modern, alternately invoked by the Greeks themselves and imposed on them by foreigners, through the musical language of Levidis’ L’iliade. Through this research, I add to the ongoing study of the question of Greek continuity in the modern period, as well as enrich the discourse surrounding music written during times of occupation and survival.