Musicological Quackery: the Rubber Ducky in your Brain

Years ago there was a TV commercial featuring a rubber ducky swimming around a bathtub to the background of Berlioz's March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie Fantastique. It made little impression on me until one day a classic FM announcer said that thanks to the accursed commercial he was unable to get the image out his head. It had lodged itself in his brain as an idée fixe, and whenever he heard the March to the Scaffold all he could do was think of the damned rubber ducky.

The tendency for this sort of musical association to become an idée fixe permanently stuck in our brain is not unique to this one advertisement. In fact, this "Rubber Ducky Association" is actually as common as it is profoundly annoying, and once stuck in the brain, the association can prove frightfully hard to reverse.

The formation of the rubber ducky type of idée fixe occurs not just with TV commercials. It can also occur after the use of music in films. A good example is the name Elvira Madigan for the Mozart Piano Concerto Nr 21.

I don't know about you, but I know nobody who even knows that a film by the name of Elvira Madigan ever existed save thanks to the Mozart Concerto. Apparently it was a Swedish film from 1967, but I doubt that 99% of people have ever seen the film. Yet every time the Mozart concerto is played or recorded they have to announce it as the bloody "Elvira Madigan"! Just the emotional association from the use of the score in one film decades ago seems to have been powerful enough to make the association permanent. I wonder what they will be calling it in a hundred years time.

Equally well known is the use of the Adagietto from the Mahler 5th in Visconti's film adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. 

It is almost surprising that the symphony isn't called the Death in Venice Symphony (I cringe at the very thought). As a result, the Adagietto is often performed on its own, ripped from the main body of the symphony to which it belongs. When played this way, programme note writers and radio announcers never fail to mention the association with the Visconti film: it has become an idée fixe permanently ingrained into our collective memories. The rubber ducky effect strikes again.

Another other rubber ducky association from the use of scores in film that - painfully - always rates a mention is the use of part of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto in Brief Encounter: once again, I don't know anyone who has ever seen this 1945 film.

I also believe that there was once a film called Apocalypse Now and that the Prelude to Act III of die Walküre was used. As a result, radio announcers and concert programme note scribblers still feel compelled to unfailingly mentioning this.  Of course, this is not the only time this Prelude has been used in a film or TV sequence. Here is a good example:

So is it the Qantas Flying Elephant Theme or the Apocalypse Now Theme? Whatever . . .

However, the Rubber Ducky Effect can have rather sinister consequences. Here is an example where Les Preludes by Franz Liszt has been used for the purpose of political propaganda in the German Third Empire (Dritte Reich):

For whatever reason, the association has not persisted, and nor has the association of the name of Franz Lehár with Hitler persisted. Hitler even regarded his work, die Lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), "as the equal of the finest opera"* — the equal of any opera by Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, or even Wagner, that is!

In fact, Lehár's was about the only composer whose music was played in the Berlin bunker during Hitler's last days — not Liszt, nor even Wagner.

However, the Nazis also misused some of Wagner's music in their propaganda, and this, on the other hand, has produced a lingering association. Just like the rubber ducky, some people can't get this idée fixe implanted into their brains by the Nazi propaganda machine out of their heads. As a consequence a myth has been perpetuated about the frequency in which Wagner's music was play during the National Socialist period. Actual reports of Wagner being played in concentration camps are virtually non-existent. Israeli historian Na'ama Sheffi tells us:

Another substantial change in the attitude to German culture stemmed from reports by refugees and concentration camp survivors that Jews had been marched off to the gas chambers to the strains of Wagner's music (among others). The undeniable evidence of Wagner's sweeping popularity among members of the Nazi Party [as amongst German Jews] was now bolstered by other indictments. In the absence of any firm documentation—scarcely surprising—the story that Wagner's works had been played in the camps had never been substantiated by research. In accounts of the camp orchestras, specific references to Wagner are difficult to find. Even Moshe Hoch, one of the fiercest opponents of public performances of Wagnerian music in Israel, did not mention Wagner in the bleak description he set down in his book: "The members of the Jewish orchestra played mainly Viennese waltzes, and sometimes we would hear the music in the distance [...]" 

Fania Fenelon, one such performer, said nothing in her own book about playing music by Wagner, but mentioned music by other composers who were never banned in Israel, such as Franz Liszt and Ludwig van Beethoven. In the first days of the controversy over Wagner and Strauss in Israel at the beginning of the 1950s, former inmates of Auschwitz also testified that the camp orchestra had never played works by Wagner to those marching to their death. 

The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis by Na'ama Sheffi (my emphasis)

According to the New Yorker:

Two survivors recall hearing strains of “Lohengrin” at Auschwitz, but the vast majority of eyewitnesses make no mention of Wagner: instead, they agree that light music, such as Strauss waltzes, Suppé overtures, operetta arias, marches, and the like, prevailed at camp concerts and blared from loudspeakers. The Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz says that she still turns off the radio when she hears Johann Strauss.

Posmysz told the New Yorker in an interview that:

In Auschwitz it was impossible for female inmates to listen to the male orchestra, or vice versa. So the concert scene in the film is an artistic reinterpretation of reality. There were concerts in the female camp. Bach was not played, his music was not allowed. All we heard were operettas, over and over again, especially Johann Strauss. I turn off the radio, whenever I hear his music, I can’t stand it. At the time my musical knowledge was rather limited. It was in Auschwitz that I got to know some masterpieces, like the famous quartet from “Rigoletto.” After the war I was very surprised when I learned that it was not a piece for four female voices; that is what we had in the concentration camp, four very good female singers. I was a strong girl, yet I remember how this music made me cry.

On the grounds of this, there would appear to be more reason to ban the music of Johann Strauss in Israel than the music of Richard Wagner.

All of the hysteria surround Wagner attests to the emotive power of music, which in this case has been used by evil propagandists to brainwash people. As David Hume said: "reason shall always be the handmaid of the passions". And as Schopenhauer said: "music is the language of passion and emotion". Once you throw in all the emotions raised whenever you even mention the Nazis, the brew turns out to be potent one, with the result that the Nazis have created an enduring legacy—a rubber ducky so permanently stuck in people's brains that no amount of reasoning can possibly dislodge it. If, on top of it, you were the victim of the Nazis, then the impact of the post-traumatic stress can be to effectively suture the rubber ducky permanently into the brain.

Unfortunately, it takes an enormous amount of psychological insight to realise that this idée fixe about Wagner was implanted into our collective memories by the Nazis. We have collectively had our brains tinkered with by the Nazis. The impotence of people to see that they are the hapless victims of this Nazi brainwashing even compels their minions to write lengthy books about how Wagner was the singular cause of WWII and the Holocaust. Here are a few examples of books written by such authors:

Joachim Köhler

Peter Viereck

Christopher Nicholson

Jacques Bazun

Paul Rose

Hartmut Zelinsky

Robert Gutman

Barry Millington

The sad thing about them, is that these musicological quacks fight to secure a Nazi Victory that would procure them eternal ownership over the legacy of Wagner on the basis of little more than the strength of a Rubber Ducky Association. They exhibit obsequious credulousness towards Hitler's psychopathic rantings on the subject, which they would defend to the death as their Eternal Truth. They exhibit a damning failure to expose this propaganda-engendered association as the lies perpetuated by a twisted madman—for in truth they infinitely prefer to glorify these lies, which they believe in with the dogmatism of a religious Faith. They are so blindly held in the thralls of the power of the Nazi propaganda machine's ideology, that they are powerless to see through its lies. If this is the terrifying might of the power their propaganda hold over minds even today, long after they have being deposed, it is little wonder that they managed to rise to absolute power in their day.

It turns out that, as a musicologist, Hitler's level of knowledge and understanding of Wagner were extremely laughable, that it is little more than the miserable beer-hall musicology of an art school reject. If it were not for the fact that he murdered so many people, we would never have been even discussing his musicological credibility. Nor should his monstrous acts of bloodshed be allowed to give his ideas an iota of credence.

Wagner's theoretical writings are indeed so immensely difficult to read that not even Theodor Adorno managed to comprehend much of it, even though ideologically they actually belong to the same Young Hegelian school of liberal thought. If Adorno stood no chance of understanding the complex writings of Wagner, then someone of Hitler's immeasurably lower level of education would have had stood no chance whatsoever of understanding even so much as a single letter of it. Modern historians, such as Richard J. Evans are in agreement that there is no evidence that Hitler ever actually read any of Wagner's theoretical writings.

Any fool should be able to see it, but the tyrannical emotive power of the idée fixe the Nazis have planted into people's brains has such intensity, that reason is reduced to utter powerlessness against the towering might of the Nazi propaganda machine. It is indeed a massive Triumph of the Will over reason.

This is why on the subject of Wagner interpretation, the Nazis and the marching legions of their apologists are tragically winning the battle over people's hearts and minds. The truth is being trampled down in their wake. It looks like it is going to be a long time before the real situation comes out, and the appalling Nazi lies are fully exposed as being the pernicious perversions that they are. Indeed, Barenboim was to say that "not playing him [Wagner] in Israel is like giving the Nazis one last victory." However, his is the lonely voice of reason crying out in the wilderness. In the meanwhile, the Nazi propaganda machine marches on relentlessly to the chant of "hail victory": Sieg heil!

The fight to wrest back ownership of Wagner artistic legacy from the clutches of Nazi jaws has scarcely just begun. It can only be hoped that one day reason, truth and justice will eventually prevail over the emotive power of propaganda to sway the mind of the masses.

Further Reading

The major post published to this blog on the same topic is my in-depth review of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler.

As the following up post on to this present one (which has proven highly popular), I would also suggest reading The Banality of Evil: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Another post that further develops some themes here include The Spiritual Struggle over Wagner's Grave.

Notes:

* ibid p113 of Adolf Hitler: a psychological interpretation of his views on architecture, art, and music by Sherree Owens Zalampas, Popular Press, 1990, ISBN 0879724889]