Erik Levi's Mozart and the Nazis represents a valuable addition to the literature on music during the Third Reich, in large part because of its focus on the reception of a single composer. For a long time the music of this period suffered almost total neglect. Indeed, only two major studies were published before 1990: Musik im dritten Reich by Joseph Wulf and Musik im NS-Staat by Fred K. Prieberg.Footnote ¹ In the past twenty years, however, a number of valuable publications have appeared, including Erik Levi's Music in the Third Reich, Michael H. Kater's The Twisted Muse, Pamela Potter's The Most German of the Arts, and the essay collection Music and Nazism, edited by Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller.Footnote ² All of them are highly informative in exploring how political figures and institutions of the Nazi régime influenced Germany's musical life in the 1930s and 40s. Yet they remain general in scope, thereby leaving both room and need for more focused discussions such as Levi's in this latest book.Footnote ³

One could agree with Leon Botstein's claim, as indeed Levi does, that there was something ‘about the music of Mozart […] that rendered the Nazi attempt at appropriation truly ineffective’.Footnote ⁴ It is precisely the resistance of Mozart's music and biography to National Socialist appropriation that makes his case a particularly interesting one. As Levi states, his study ‘sheds interesting light on the manner in which the Nazis dealt with the nation's musical heritage, but also illustrates the absurd and sometimes contradictory lengths to which those supportive of the régime were prepared to go in order to ensure Mozart's hallowed status as one of the most important representatives of Aryan cultural supremacy’ (2). Levi examines Nazi attempts at appropriating Mozart in two sections of the book: Chapters 2 to 4 focus on the years 1933–8, while Chapters 7 and 8 cover the period from 1938 until the end of the war. In the two chapters in between, Levi's focus shifts from the Nazis to the Jews, surveying Mozart's reception in the 1930s among Jewish musicians and writers both in Germany and abroad. Levi frames his study with a Prologue and an Epilogue that offer the reader some historical context of Mozart's reception before and after the Third Reich.

Levi's narrative begins in 1931, a Mozart year of some importance in that it marked the 175th anniversary of Mozart's birth and the 150th anniversary of the première of Idomeneo. He then addresses aspects of Mozart's operas and biography that the Nazis co-opted for their ideology: Mozart's patriotism was promoted, while the connections to freemasonry were brushed under the rug.Footnote ⁵ Yet, had the adored canonic operas based on librettos by Jewish-born Lorenzo da Ponte (namely, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte) been removed from the repertory, it would have made the anti-Semitic laws seem ridiculous. Instead the Nazis attempted to downgrade Da Ponte's contribution to the operas, thus making them more consistent with the ideology. A common strategy, discussed by Levi, was to omit Da Ponte's name from programmes and scores and to present the work in new German translations, thus emphasizing the operas' Germanness. This approach was complicated, however, by the fact that the most popular translations had been done by Hermann Levi, the Jewish-German conductor. Consequently, several new translations appeared in the 1930s, with Georg Schünemann's winning the government's endorsement in 1941.

As might be expected, the Nazis used Mozart's hometown of Salzburg to further their propaganda after the annexation of Austria: this was exemplified by changes in the Salzburg Festival's political policies. Prior to the Anschluss the Festival had banned demonstrations of Nazi support and made great efforts to hire exiled German musicians. After 1938, however, it was turned into a vehicle for Nazi propaganda. The 1939 Festival is the focus of Levi's seventh chapter; it was, he writes, ‘one of the last important musical events […] before the invasion of Poland’ (151). The reasons he cites are twofold. First, it ‘acted as a further signal to the outside world of the strengthening alliance between the Germans and the Italians’, through the inclusion of Verdi and Rossini on the programme and the performance of Mozart's operas in the original Italian. Second, it attempted to create ‘an atmosphere of unbounded cheerfulness that served to deflect attention away from the increasingly fraught political situation in Europe’ (151–2). Once the fighting escalated, the Festival became even more propagandistic: the operas were performed in German and between ten and twenty thousand German soldiers were invited, as the festival was designated as a Kriegsfestspiel (War Festival).

The festivities for the 1941 Mozart year, the 150th anniversary of Mozart's death, are of particular interest to Levi. He focuses on the two keynote speeches made at the Viennese festival by high-ranking Nazi attendees: the ‘Welcome Address at the Mozart Week of the German Reich in Vienna at the Inaugural Concert’, given by Reichsleiter Baldur von Schirach on 28 November 1941, and ‘Address for the 150th Anniversary of the Death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the Vienna State Opera’ by Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels on 4 December 1941. These two speeches link Mozart's music with the current political situation and received much attention from the press, positive in Germany and negative in the USA – ‘first-hand evidence of the exploitation of Mozart for propaganda purposes at a crucial moment during the war’ (3). Full transcripts of the speeches are included as appendices.

Among the institutions and figures included in Levi's discussion of the Jewish and exiled communities' engagement with Mozart are the Berlin Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), which was banned from performing Mozart in 1935; the English Glyndebourne Festival, founded in 1934 by exiled German conductor Fritz Busch and producer Carl Ebert, among others; and the scholars Otto Erich Deutsch and Paul Nettl. The central figure in this discussion, however, is Alfred Einstein. Levi tells of the struggles Einstein faced while finishing the third, expanded edition of the Köchel Catalog in the 1930s after moving to America. As he was banned from accessing German archives, he completed the project, which nearly doubled the size of the older edition, with materials and support from archives in Sweden, Italy, Russia, England, and the USA. Despite his Jewish ethnicity, the German firm Breitkopf & Härtel published his edition in 1937. German reviewers, who praised the edition, avoided the issue of Einstein's Jewishness by omitting mention of his name. Levi paints Einstein as the voice of reason, a scholar who, though he acknowledged Mozart's occasional patriotism, also emphasized his international travels and foreign-language operas, while working to refute the claims in contemporary German scholarship about the composer's nationalism.

Levi also discusses popular books and films as examples of appropriation, both by the Nazis and by their opponents. This is particularly valuable, as the popular reception of Mozart and other great composers is often overlooked. Among his examples Levi includes pacifist Annette Kolb's pseudo-biographical novel Mozart (1937); the biographical film about Mozart in Prague, Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1939); and Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods Love), a feature film commissioned by Goebbels (1942). Surprisingly, the latter would circulate in the USA after the war, dubbed in English and with no mention of its Nazi origins. Perhaps the most interesting case discussed by Levi is Hans Watzlik's 1935 novel Die Krönungsoper, a fictional retelling of Mozart's last visit to Prague. The book was promoted heavily in the later 1930s, as it strongly espoused the idea that the Czech lands were fundamentally German, creating a sort of artistic justification for the German invasion of Prague in 1939 (196–7).

One of the principal contributions that Levi's discussion makes to Mozart scholarship is regarding what he calls Germany's musical imperialism. Whereas scholarship of music and totalitarianism usually focuses on a single country, Levi explores the relationship that other countries had with Mozart's music and how their ties to Germany influenced that relationship, including a total of ten European countries in his concise account: the Republic of Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Spain, and Italy. For example, even in a non-belligerent country such as Spain, it can be argued that musicology was influenced by the interpretations of Mozart furthered by Nazi propaganda, with the crucial difference that there Catholicism remained central to Mozart's music, as distinct from Germany, where Nazi musicology sought to remove the traces of religion from his works. According to Levi, however, Spain also recognized ‘Mozart the German’, insofar as its musicologists were ‘prepared to celebrate the nationalist [German] trends […] undoubtedly shaped by the intensification of political alliances between Nazi Germany and Spain’ (230).

In France there was some resistance to the Germans' use of Mozart and other music as Nazi propaganda, as exemplified by French writer Jean Bruller in his 1942 novel Le silence de la mer. In an attempt to warn his countrymen ‘not to succumb too easily to the efforts of the occupying forces to win them over’, Bruller's protagonist realizes ‘that the true intention of the German army is to exploit and ruin the country, rather than build bridges’ (222). The musical community in Paris seemed less wary. Levi describes the Parisian festivities in the 1941 Mozart year as a clear demonstration of camaraderie between France and Germany – surprising, even if organized for most part by Germans. As Levi explains it: ‘A generously funded propaganda machine swung into action, using Mozart both as a means of healing wounds and creating a sense of rapprochement through stressing shared values and common goals’ (191).

Although this international overview helps to contextualize the case of Germany, it represents something of an over-simplification, as the author acknowledges, at least with respect to the situation in France. To be sure, scholars of any of the individual countries may find the relevant section lacking in nuance. For example, when discussing Italy, Levi rightly focuses on the anti-fascist critic Massimo Mila, who resisted Germany's attempts at appropriating Mozart. He reports that Mila based his opposition on the conviction that propaganda ‘annihilated [music's] aesthetic significance’ (235). While this is correct, it would have been just as important to acknowledge Mila's indebtedness to Crocean idealism, prevalent at the time, which emphasized art's spiritual and autonomous nature.

With this section, even in its brevity, Levi does an excellent job of telling a two-sided story: how Mozart was called upon ‘to serve both the interest of the ruling German authorities and that of the oppressed […] population’ (190). On the one hand he cites plenty of evidence to show how Mozart was used for propaganda purposes in Germany and in occupied lands. Patriotic appropriation was quite blatant in the 1941 concert in Hamburg in which soprano Erika Rokyta substituted the words of the German national anthem (‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!’) for the last line of ‘Alleluja’ in Mozart's motet Exsultate, jubilate K165. Performances of Mozart in occupied lands, especially in the former Czechoslovak Republic, promoted German cultural hegemony, with the hope that ‘with the passage of time [the Czech people] could be “Germanised”’ (190). Some countries even used their own performances of Mozart to show their allegiance to Germany. Croatia's ‘enthusiasm for honouring the composer’, Levi writes, ‘was emblematic of the desire among several Eastern European countries to reinforce their cultural collaborative ties with Germany’ (228).

On the other hand Levi emphasizes that occupied lands also used Mozart's music to counter German imperialism. Even in the face of war and German propaganda, the people of Bohemia, like those of Moravia and Hungary, wanted to solidify their own relationship with Mozart by placing his achievement within their own national narrative. Especially in the case of Hungary, ‘[a]lthough the musical establishment remained resolutely anti-German in outlook, Mozart could not be tarred with the same Teutonic brush as Wagner or Richard Strauss’ (229). As the war continued, however, there were fewer and fewer attempts by occupied lands to reject Nazi propaganda and appropriate Mozart to their own national identity. In Hungary, for example, there began an effort to reconcile local and German nationalistic claims. Speeches made by Hungarian politicians at the 1941 festivities were made to appeal to both their German and their Hungarian audiences.

Levi is quick to point out, as some of these examples show, that attitudes towards Mozart and Germany were not static throughout the twelve years that the Nazis remained in power. This acknowledgement is one of the strengths of Levi's book. England, for example, initially a haven for German exiles, was no longer welcoming them in the 1940s. As bombings escalated, Germans, Jewish and otherwise, were interned in English camps because they were now classified as enemy aliens. Against this military strife Levi explains the significance of Austrian musicologist Hans Ferdinand Redlich's performance of Mozart's unfinished opera L'oca del Cairo in 1940: ‘Given that many of the musicians' colleagues had already been interned, the final chorus of the opera, acclaiming the fall of tyranny and affirming the capacity of true love to rise above adversity, must have sounded unbearably poignant’ (119). The changes in attitude were most evident in occupied lands. Despite local nationalist identification in the 1930s, using Mozart to ‘Germanize’ the population was effective, at least in the concert halls. While the 150th anniversary of Don Giovanni had been celebrated in Prague with a performance in Czech in 1937, by 1941 the performance was in German and the guests were high-ranking Nazi officials, sitting in ‘swastika-bedecked boxes’ (203).

In addition, Levi draws attention to continuities between the pre- and post-war periods, the implications of which are not always flattering. While discussing Mozart's connection to freemasonry, Levi addresses the work of Mathilde Ludendorff in the 1930s, which revived the rumour that Mozart was poisoned by the masons (thought to be an agent of conspiracy for the Jews). This theory did not die with the Nazis but continued to be researched in the post-war period, until it was finally refuted in William Stafford's The Mozart Myths in 1991.Footnote ⁶ Levi offers a provocative comment on the longevity of this myth: ‘the sheer determination with which [these scholars] pursued their ideas appears unsettling, and raises the disturbing question of the extent to which a neo-Nazi strain still impinges upon post-war German Mozart scholarship’ (239). This speculation may seem far-fetched, but it echoes other scholars' claims that there is an ‘occasional brown residue’ in post-war German musicology.Footnote ⁷ Levi points also to the work of Gert Kerschbaumer and Oliver Rathkolb, who have shown that the Austrians' post-war appropriation of Mozart has disturbing parallels in terms of ideas and rhetoric with that of the Nazis (244). Problematic as it is, connecting the Nazi period with the post-war period is one of the overall goals of Levi's scholarship, as he states outright in his first book: ‘one of the central preoccupations [is] to establish a sense of continuity in 20th-century German music.’Footnote ⁸ This continuity is important to expose, both for the historical story that it tells and for the implications it has for current views of German music and scholarship.

The prominent trend in Mozart scholarship of the post-war period was the attempt to restore Mozart as a universal cosmopolitan composer. Unlike other Germanic composers such as Wagner, whose ideological baggage was far weightier, Mozart's new image was quickly accepted. Paradoxically, because of this swift rehabilitation the ‘brown residue’ was allowed to remain: ‘many of the performers and musicologists most closely associated with Mozart, including those who had willingly served in politically compromised events such as the Nazified Salzburg Festivals […] emerged unscathed to reclaim their prominent positions in Austro-German musical life after 1945’ (236–7). For example, Levi points to the way in which the aforementioned retranslations of Da Ponte's librettos by Georg Schünemann were promoted again in the 1950s, with reprints by Peters in Leipzig and again in the 1970s and 80s by the New-York-based publisher Dover, the only change being the deletion of the preface indicating the Nazi patronage.

Mozart and the Nazis represents a valuable addition to the scholarly literature on music under National Socialism, not only because of its focus on a single composer but also because of the significant light it sheds on the contradictions and tensions of Nazi cultural policies. The book's value can be said to reside above all in the way that it explores the consequences of Nazi appropriation in the later twentieth century. It should appeal to a broad constituency of scholars and may well serve as a model for reception studies of other composers during the Nazi period.