18.01.11
Hecklephiles may have noticed that a certain composer has regularly gate-crashed this column, shamelessly exploiting his abiding popularity in our songful corner of the land. It occurs to me that banishment – at least temporary – should succeed blandishment. So here's his last hurrah....  

When Felix Mendelssohn died in 1847 – still short of forty – he was sadly missed in Britain. Among the ruling classes of the world's greatest empire the event was felt as a national tragedy. The court went into mourning, led by the composer's compatriot and friend Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. The Consort was also Mendelssohn’s part-time pupil, and produced songs such as 'Pretty Baby' – which dismally failed to spark off a Blues revolution at Windsor. Queen Victoria herself was distressed, but no reaction is recorded from the heir to the throne, who was the object of the Wiegenlied in question, and only a little schoolboy. To judge by the tribute offered to Mendelssohn's memory by so many distinguished representatives of British 'culture', no foreign artist had been so popular since Handel, nor had so generously refracted this warmth of feeling.

For music critics, the passing of Mendelssohn was like the premature demise of music itself – a superficially striking conceit that had been in existence ever since the fourteenth century. One writer made him 'the adopted son of England', who (added another) used music for 'peace, brotherly love and progress ... all that makes heaven on earth'. His music was seen as the touchstone of civilisation and good taste – the ideal blend of Classic and Romantic, with the former always in control of the latter. Drug-fuelled ego-trips, radical politics, histrionic posturings, overt sex-appeal, were all firmly out. Like his Windsor patroness, Mendelssohn was famously fascinated by legendary Scotland. (His Scotch Symphony is appropriately dedicated to Victoria.) His only remotely disturbing composition was The First Walpurgis Night: a cantata about a revolt of the heathen underworld, led by Druids out of (possibly Welsh) mountain fastnesses. Nevertheless, even in the quaintly Celtic fringe, national music – that is, folk-music – meant for Mendelssohn a reversion to barbarism. Thus he was an insider: he belonged.

Antisemitism was certainly not a problem for Mendelssohn. In his day, Germany's Jewish population was small and thoroughly assimilated in cultural and linguistic terms. Indeed for German as well as British fans, the most satisfying index of Mendelssohn as the unpolitical composer was his uncompromising Protestantism. Another of his symphonies celebrated a major Lutheran centenary in 1829 and was given the title Reformation. He resurrected J. S. Bach from oblivion and established him as the epitome of Protestant Genius. Any performance of Mendelssohn's oratorios in effect represented a paean of Protestant triumphalism. Hecklephone can recall feeling perplexed when in the crucial early days of the peace process in Ireland a newly-appointed conductor of the Ulster Orchestra announced on BBC Radio 3 his intention to foreground Mendelssohn as a calming, non-partisan influence. In evidence of which we heard a few bars from yet another of his symphonies – this time No. 2, The Hymn of Praise, which actually opens with a setting of a Lutheran text.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that within a year of Mendelssohn's exit, nationalist revolutions, some with proto-socialist elements, broke out all over Europe. Franz Liszt and his future son-in-law Richard Wagner were both deeply involved. The Chartists planned a massive march on Whitehall. Civilisation was saved only by an even more massive downpour of rain. From the superior perspective of one actually born in a Rue de la République, Berlioz commented that the English were no more capable of organising a revolution than Italians were of writing symphonies. At any rate London's critical establishment remained almost unanimous in their loyalty to the inimitable Mendelssohn. The rise of Wagner on the continent filled them with horror. During two London visits in the 1850s, Wagner, somewhat less enamoured of peace and brotherly love than his gentle predecessor, instinctively detected an underlying lack of empathy, and reacted accordingly.

Not until Gustav Mahler came to conduct the complete Ring cycle at Covent Garden in 1892 did the Wagner lobby, hitherto a dark, even menacing backwater in our Mendelssohnian heaven, meet with its big break. If Wagner's foremost British advocates, Ernest Newman and G.B. Shaw, were aware that their hero had published an abusive pamphlet excoriating the influence of Jewish composers (especially Mendelssohn) on European (especially German) music, then they kept schön stumm on the subject. In any case, appearances helped their cause. Was not Wagner's own musical and dramatic art itself influenced by the composers he denounced? Had he not spent his working life in the company of Jewish musicians? Were not his preferred Bayreuth directors Jewish? Had not Mahler himself, like Mendelssohn's family, converted from Judaism? Therefore among a people only recently governed by one Benjamin Disraeli, the son of a convert, the assimilation – even adoption – of Wagner would surely be only a matter of time.

And so it proved, if in both cases only up to a point. In 1938, like Neville Chamberlain (known satirically among leftist Parisians as 'Monsieur J'aime Berlin'), another eminent Englishman opened negotiations in Germany. Sir Thomas Beecham was looking for a big recording contract which might include The Ring. Beecham was also a renowned exponent of Mendelssohn. An anonymous German admirer urged him, in vain, to protest against the Nazi-inspired removal of Mendelssohn's statue from its prime position at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Indeed, on the contrary, Beecham preferred to comply with Goebbels's request to remove a Mendelssohn piece from his touring programme, and duly appeared alongside Hitler during the interval of his Berlin concert.

Not long ago a superb TV documentary about treatment of Mendelssohn in the Third Reich was presented by a descendant of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family. Several elderly relatives – Holocaust survivors – spoke with feeling and insight. Some viewers would have been surprised to learn about the Jüdische Kulturbund, a Nazi-sponsored organisation which allowed performances of music by Jews, on condition that no 'pure German' music featured and no 'Aryans' were present.

In those days Shakespeare was as important in Germany as Bach was in Britain. Goebbels decided that The Bard's texts were too sacred to be heard in the 'polluted' settings of a Jewish composer, and he set up an 'Aryan' composers' competition to replace Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The winner was Munich's very own Carl Orff – as some would have him, the Orpheus of Nazism. The TV show allowed us to see the title-page of Orff's score – but the music the viewer actually heard was Mendelssohn's. There is a curious correspondence between Hitler’s subjects being barred from listening to 'decadent' Jewish and Black music (Entärtetemusik), and a TV audience of 2009 being precluded from hearing 'Nazi Music'. Goebbels feared Mendelssohn's magic might pervert 'pure' Germans, and perhaps someone at the BBC feared Orff's music might risk turning us into Nazis. You see, we just can't be trusted not to enjoy music by an (alleged) Nazi composer...

Perhaps the TV show's producers were too conscious of the (fictional) pitfalls of Mel Brooks's The Producers, in which 'Springtime for Hitler' – contrary to intentions – becomes an embarrassing box-office hit. As it happens, Carl Orff is already established as one of the most popular composers from the last century. The opening chorus of his cantata Carmina Burana has occupied the top spot in every 'Classical Hits' list. The results are seen whenever it blares out around football stadiums, warming up the crowd for the bloody battle to come. However, Orff's place in musical history is probably more assured by his innovative didactic system, utilised in schools all over the world. Yet surely no one expects such musical training to churn out perfect little Nazi musicians. Arnold Schoenberg was a Viennese Jew who patented the most aurally rebarbative – yet logically pristine – compositional method ever devised. Some pro-Nazi critics argued that this ultra-modernist system (the so-called 'serial method') was so essentially totalitarian that it should be prescribed rather than proscribed by the Third Reich. Indeed, Schoenberg who (like both Hitler and Orff) fought for Germany in the First World War, himself rather unfortunately claimed that it would 'guarantee the supremacy of German Music for a thousand years'.   

A suitable coda to all this is provided by another Mel Brooks work – his sub-Shakespearean musical To Be or Not To Be. A troupe of Jewish theatre players in Berlin are hoping to avoid being closed down (and worse) by putting on some pro-Nazi numbers ... but somehow Hitler's song comes out all wrong:

I don't vont VOR! All I vont is PEACE ...peace...peace...!

A little piece ov Poland,
A little piece ov France,
A little piece ov Austria
Und Hungary, perchance!

A little slice ov Turkey
Und all zat zat entails,
Und zen zer bit ov England,
Scotland, Ireland ...

.... Und VALES!

Hecklephone