Revolution, Totalitarianism, and Music

Abstract

ALTHOUGH the interrelationship between music and the more extreme political ideologies in vogue from the time of the French Revolution until the first World War manifested itself primarily in the censorship of theatrical and patriotic music, the effects of modern totalitarianism upon the tonal art and its exponents have been far more diverse. Even before Hitler's advent to power, the NationalSocialists attempted to extend their policy of exaggerated nationalism to music. All radical innovations in musical technique were deemed degenerate, and linked to Semitic influence. This attitude was formulated definitively in Eichenauer's Musik und Rasse, in which it is baldly stated that each forward step in musical progress is due to Nordic influence, whereas each relapse into decay is of Near-Eastern (Jewish) origin. The elimination of Jewish and other non-Nazi composers, critics, conductors, and performers from the profession of music, and the boycott of compositions by men who either were non-Aryan or had expressed themselves in an advanced idiom were aspects of the act of purification which took place during the first years of the Third Reich. An attempt was made by Goebbels to forbid all art criticism, which was to be supplanted by mere description and contemplation. Most of the musical organizations existing before 1933 were suppressed, especially those which had been international in scope, and others, Aryan and conservative, were set up in their places. A positive, socialistic step was the campaign to provide cultural (especially musical) entertainment for the masses by assigning large blocks of concert and opera tickets to employees who were banded together under the auspices of the Kraft durch Freude organization and the Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde. On the other side of the ledger, the German inheritance of folk-song was partially contaminated by its combination with new, hate-inspiring and militaristic texts, in order to stimulate the combative instincts of German youth. The artistic policy of Fascist Italy was comparatively liberal and constructive until it was revised as a result of National-Socialist indoctrination. Soon after the establishment of the Axis, Hitler's cultural principles of anti-modernism and anti-Semitism were adopted in Italy also. It is in Soviet Russia that the influence of an ideology upon the