Tudor Ghosts in Black Shirts: The British Union of Fascists, Nazi Germany and the Quest for Musical Greatness in Britain

Abstract

Abstract The United Kingdom has for centuries suffered the reputation of an ‘unmusical nation’ that could not produce a great composer or compete with the rich musical cultures of Germany, Italy or Russia. In the 1930s, members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) who worked in the musical professions began to challenge and reject this long-standing stereotype. These self-described Blackshirts hoped to achieve a ‘rebirth’ of British classical music under the leadership of Oswald Mosley and expel racially impure ‘alien’ performers from Britain’s houses of culture. As British fascists conceived and debated these plans, the example of Nazi Germany loomed large in their imaginations. BUF Blackshirts professed admiration for Joseph Goebbels’s campaigns against ‘degenerate’ music and imitated the Nazi Party’s völkisch criticisms of jazz, modern art and consumerism. Especially intriguing to Mosley’s followers was the Nazi cult of Richard Wagner, which offered a compelling illustration of how a hypothetical fascist Britain might revere a historical composer as an emblem of racial nationalism. The Third Reich’s glorification of Wagner prompted debate within the BUF about which figure, or figures, could fulfil such a role in Britain, with two schools of thought predominating: either the late Victorian generation of composers or the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tudor masters. If Nazi cultural policy was a source of inspiration for British fascists, it was equally one of intimidation and self-doubt, reviving insecurities that the British people were a ‘musically inferior race’ unable to produce a composer rivalling Wagner’s genius.