Politicized Orchestras: The Viennese and Berlin Philharmonics during the Nazi Era, the first book from a young Swiss historian, draws a comparison between these two leading musical institutions and their political and sociocultural relevancy. Based on extensive research in the archives of the Berlin and Viennese philharmonics, Trümpi's well-researched and carefully crafted study goes well beyond the Nazi period. In six chapters, Trümpi follows and compares the development of the two orchestras starting from the last decades of the nineteenth century, the founding period of the Berlin philharmonic (chapter 2), over the period of the Weimar and First Republic (chapter 3), to Fascism and the Nazi period in the 1930s and 1940s (chapter 4). This chronological first part is accompanied by a second set of chapters structured thematically around “political dependency and protection” (chapter 5), “media presence” (chapter 6), and “political aspects of the orchestra's repertoire” (chapter 7).

One of the most noteworthy aspects of Trümpi's study is his detailed analysis of the entanglement of economics and politics and its importance for the development and instrumentalization of cultural institutions. For these very reasons, Trümpi also argues for an integrative view of Fascism and National Socialism and interprets the beginning of the Nazi regime less as a radical rupture than as a continuous development. The increasing economic dependence and the expectation of services in return had created a strong political influence on the orchestras well before the Nazi period. The Gleichschaltung was, according to Trümpi, already prepared between 1929 and 1932 (96).

Continuity is also the main characteristic that dominates Trümpi's view on the relation between the Berlin and Viennese philharmonic orchestras. According to his interpretation, continued tensions marked the relation between the two institutions. In this narrative the Viennese philharmonic represents a backward oriented tradition, whereas the Berlin orchestra becomes the representative of modernity, characterized by a contemporary repertoire, a larger sociocultural spread of the audience, and an openness toward the new recording technology. In some aspects Trümpi may overstress his interpretation, underestimating, for example, the importance of the collaboration of Richard Strauss with the Viennese philharmonic and thus some strong contemporary aspects of its repertoire. But he also makes very convincing arguments, particularly when he shows the continuity of music and the Viennese philharmonic's role as a sort of compensation for the loss of power and political importance, not only in the post-World War I period but also during the Nazi regime: “Überhaupt halte ich für richtig, dass der künstlerische Charakter Wiens mit der Zeit stärker und stärker zum Ausdruck kommt. Diese Stadt hat politisch so viel aufgeben müssen, dass man versuchen muss, ihr dafür künstlerisch und kulturell Äquivalente zu bieten” (Goebbels, Diaries II, Vol. 3, 469 quoted by Trümpi, 177).

The strength of Trümpi's interpretation lies in the fact that he is able to connect his comparison of the two orchestras to various larger historical and cultural discourses of and about the time. There are, however, two important conceptual aspects of his approach that significantly limit the outcome of his book. On the one hand, Trümpi's understanding of politicization is restricting. He focuses almost exclusively on economic dependency and the influence of politics on the orchestras' administrative structures and decision-making processes. Second is his attempt to approach questions concerning the orchestras' repertoires mostly through a statistical analysis. As a consequence of these decisions, Trümpi's book can add only little to an understanding of how the orchestras followed a political agenda and contributed to the politicization of music itself. The outcome of Trümpi's statistical analysis, which indeed finds little to no change in the repertoire compared to the pre-Fascist and pre-Nazi period (235), and thus points toward the importance of an ongoing semantic reinterpretation of music and the relevancy of performative changes, makes this lack even more evident. Even though Trümpi discusses the public discourse on the orchestras and their concerts, the chapter that he dedicates to these questions is of little help. He presents an eclectic overview that demonstrates the wide range of media and genres, including film and novel, that feature the two orchestras as a subject, but he does not frame these as central to the political instrumentalization. One would wish to know, for example, how “the Berlin philharmonic in hundreds of concerts in Berlin, the Reich and abroad had contributed so immensely to the German intentions” (“in hunderten von Konzerten in Berlin, im Reich und im Ausland … der deutschen Sache unermessliche Dienste geleistet haben.” Oswald Schrenk, Berlin und die Musik, quoted by Trümpi, 208), or what exactly the positive response to the German program of Furtwängler's Paris concerts with the Berlin philharmonic consisted of. For example, one wonders whether the Parisian audience or the French newspapers shared this interpretation, who decided upon the concert program, or what the program included. All such questions remain unanswered. Where Trümpi once in a while discusses the repertoire in more detail, such as in the case of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, he does so in the context of the pension funding of the Viennese philharmonic and not in the context of a possible political agenda behind the choice of Beethoven's symphony (53–56). Thus in the end, Trümpi's study can only partly satisfy his own claims to have analyzed the orchestras' image constructions. However, leaving unanswered questions may be the most stimulating outcome of any academic work, especially as Trümpi himself urges further research and his book can well be a stimulating guide to that.