The Twisted Muse

Abstract

Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent? These questions and their implications are explored in this broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small — from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer — are examined, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are presented. This book tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. This examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through the manner in which it manipulated its musicians, and by extension, German music, is important in understanding culture in totalitarian systems.