In the last post, I promised an exposé of a book that shows the thoroughly pernicious influence in musicological circles of Peter Viereck's right-wing rewriting of history as expounded in his Metapolitics, a dated 1941 book that is generally regarded with dismissive contempt by mainstream historians. The last post was a preliminary critique of Viereck's Metapolitics and before reading this current review, the reader should familiarise themselves with my review of Viereck's book. Further background reading to the issue can be found in my review of Viereck follower, Joachim Köhler's book.
Although it seems scarcely credible that there might be writers left in the musicology world who take Viereck seriously today, just for the skeptics amongst you, today I will show you just such a book. The book in concern is called Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis by Michael Haas. It was published by Yale Press in July, 2013 (hardback ISBN 13: 978-0300154306, paperback 978-0300205350, Kindle ASIN B00CE7NZBI):
Michael Haas is best known as having acted as record producer for the Entartete Musik series on the Decca label, which helped to renew interest in many composers who had lapsed into obscurity as a result of the National Socialist regime. According to the Yale Press website, Haas currently works as research director of the Jewish Music Institute for Suppressed Music, SOAS, University of London. He is former musical curator of the Jewish museum in Vienna.
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| CD cover design for selected music from the Entartete Musik series by Decca |
The term Entartete Musik was coined by the National Socialists and literally means "degenerate music" as they condemned modernism in art. A period poster makes allusions to Ernst Krenek's Jonny Spielt Auf:
The Decca series of recordings aimed to revive the fortunes of composers, many of whom were Jewish, whose music was suppressed by the National Socialists:
Although I am inclined to be immensely supportive of someone involved in an excellent enterprise like the Entartete Musik project, after reading the book by Michael Hass, in the end I could only be utterly appalled that an undertaking like this had been entrusted to someone who scandalously manifests frightfully reactionary right-wing socio-political and aesthetic ideologies. In the end, his book constitutes the most ridiculous rewriting of history from a right wing agenda I could imagine. It is a right-wing narrative that reads like a Nazi UFO conspiracy story. It is for this reason that this poorly written shambles of a book deserves to be thoroughly taken apart.
The most shocking aspect of Michael Haas's writing is that he exhibits absolutely no familiarity with the history of the time period that the book's title openly purports to be about. There is not a single mention anywhere in the book of Sir Richard J. Evans, Saul Friedländer, Sir Ian Kershaw, Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich, Jürgen Matthäus, Hans Mommsen, John Toland, Raul Hilberg, or Joachim Fest. These are the key authors specialising in the time period of National Socialist Germany and the Holocaust. Yet, despite working for a Jewish institute, Haas seems to live on another planet where he is so oblivious to the existence of these eminent historians that one is left wondering if he would even recognise any of their names. Glaring factual errors make it all too obvious that he has never consulted any of these authors' writings. For example, Haas states on p.219 that "Hitler himself proposed to Winifred [Wagner]" (no supportive citation). Had Haas read Ian Kershaw's monumental two-volume biography of Hitler he would have learned that:
[Hitler's] name was linked at various times with women from as diverse backgrounds as Jenny Haug, the sister of his chauffeur in the early years, and Winifred Wagner, the Bayreuth maestro's daughter-in-law. But, whatever the basis of the rumours—often malicious, exaggerated, or invented—none of his liaisons, it seems, had been more than superficial. No deep feelings were ever stirred.
Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889-1936
In the post-war memoirs of Hitler's valet, Heinz Linger, he suggests there might have been a love affair going on with Winifred, but he mentions nothing about a marriage proposal (Linge: With Hitler to the End, p69).
There are other annoying instances where Haas makes sweeping unsupported blanket statements for which he fails to provide anything resembling a bibliographic citation. One example of these is this statement about the relationship between Mussolini and Hitler:
To speak of fascists as a single block is misleading. The corporatist Mussolini and the National Socialist Hitler loathed each other until circumstances and national greed pushed them together (as would also be the case with Hitler and Stalin in 1939).
Haas, p203
These sorts of statements are infuriating because of their sweeping ex cathedra character, associated with a glaring glibness, and a complete lack of supportive evidence, or genuine argument. It is hardly the sort of thing worthy of publication from Yale Press. I was forced to go out and research the veracity of these claims myself and could find little to support the claims in books such as Kershaw's two volume biography of Hitler or Bosworth's study of Mussolini. Bosworth makes it clear that Hitler admired Mussolini from the start, and, along with Franco, shared their mutual hatred of communism. As for the statement implying that communism is just another form of fascism—that would require an entire study in itself. The idea that National "Socialism" was "the same" as communism because they were both forms of "socialism" seems to be one of the unwritten assumptions underlying the whole book, yet in place of cogent academic argument you get surreptitious insinuation. Worse still, there seems to be an attempt to dissociate fascism from its tainted connection with Hitler, as though to imply that once purged of its anti-Semitism, fascism would be a highly plausible political ideology.
Also particularly unforgivable is the fact that despite clearly being a reader of German, Haas has failed to read Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich (Richard Wagner in the Third Empire available only in German) edited by the great Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer:
This book contains seminal essays by both Saul Friedländer and major Hitler biographer, Joachim Fest. It represents the most balanced and up-to-date academic overview of the subject by seminal historians specialising in the era. It is impossible for anyone who has failed to study these essays to write a book on music during the Dritte Reich era, and for Haas to have neglected this book automatically relegates his writings to the realms of total irrelevancy. It is an automatic requirement of an author writing in a field to be expected to know the literature in the field beforehand.
Another sweeping statement that painfully exposes Haas's lack of background knowledge is in his claims that the National Socialists considered themselves to be an "extreme secular" movement:
The law and the response of the church served as a reminder of the extreme secular nature of National Socialism, reinforcing the view of Austrofascists that there was little difference between Hitler and Stalin.
Haas p.205 (my emphasis)
Haas seems to be blissfully unaware of the huge body of literature discussing the complicity of the churches with the National Socialist regime and its belief in a so-called "positive Christianity". Hitler considered himself a crusader in the name of God against the Godless Marxists and the Spawn of Judah. Haas's account smacks of a right-wing attempt to rewrite history from a pro-religious perspective.
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| There is a large body of literature about the complicity of the church with the National Socialist movement |
How Yale Press editors managed to allow a book to get to print by an author who exhibits absolutely no familiarity with current scholarly understanding of the general socio-political backdrop to the historical time period he is writing about truly beggars belief. Nor does passing familiarity with the bibliographic details of composers whose music were suppressed by the National Socialist regime suffice as a substitute for a basic understanding of the broader historical background to the era. In its place all we get is the surreptitious presentation of a fictitious right-wing narrative of world history: pulp fiction in the guise of history.
The tone of the book is set from the very outset by referring first and foremost to the source from which he gets his understanding of the history of National Socialist Germany—right-wing historian, Peter Viereck, and his highly dated and proto-Goldhagenist Metapolitics. This leaves us in no doubt where Haas's political allegiances lie:
Wagner's views undoubtedly helped to shape the nineteenth century and, by extension, the twentieth. The American historian Peter Viereck in an essay from 1941 picks up on a concept communicated to Wagner by an admirer, Constantin Frantz. He called Wagner's political visions 'metapolitical', in other words, having the same relationship to normal politics as metaphysics to physics. Viereck uses the concept of 'metapolitics' to explain the evolution of Wagnerian thought into full-blooded National Socialism and by so doing, he deals with the very nature of the nineteenth century's Zeitgeist.
Haas p39
From this Haas draws the conclusion that:
To try to understand the dysfunctional relationship between Jews and non-Jews, we need to turn to Wagner, in many ways the father of German anti-Semitism based on 'race' rather than religious adherence, and as a composer, a central figure within this story.
Haas p27
Haas has taken a great deal wholesale and uncritically out of Peter Viereck's Metapolitics:
... Yet regardless of the exact physical and psychological origins of Wagner's anti-Semitism, Viereck shows how Hitler was able to quote, almost word for word, much of Wagner's musings as being the foundation of his own political ideas. Indeed, Wagner was cited by Hitler as being his favourite 'political' writer.
Haas p39
As I have demonstrated in the previous post, Viereck "shows" nothing of the sort and nor as a student in America during 1941, was he in any position to "show" anything of what went on in the innermost depths of Hitler's profoundly secretive mind. Likewise, Viereck's "citation" in Mein Kampf stating that Wagner was Hitler's "favourite political writer" is completely fraudulent, and not a single historian specialising in this era agrees with Viereck's claim.
Haas goes on to paraphrase Viereck:
This epiphany concerning Wagner's adherence to the German 'people' or 'nation' had already come as a defining experience with his return from France in 1843. Along with his new-found devotion to the German people or 'Volk', he abhors the French ... In fact, as Viereck goes on to explain, the Romantic notions of 'nation', 'nationhood' and 'the people' (Volk or 'folk') were the basis for a rejection of the Enlightenment and therefore required that reason be conquered by instinct, that law be conquered by passion, form by content, and scientific truth by collective mythology—ultimately that the 'dynamic' conquer the 'static'.
Haas p39 (my emphasis)
According to Haas, this dynamic view of Nature, one that "conquers the static" is, the essence of an irrationalist Romanticism that leads directly to a racist ideology:
The Romantic view of spirit, soul and nation was, on one level, a visceral identification with a geographical place and culture, while on another it was a thinly disguised lever with which to remove those perceived as not belonging. To recently enfranchised Jews, there was no contradiction in being both Jewish and German. Romantics, however, saw the individual blessed by the Almighty with a unique 'racial' identity founded on nationhood, using the more emotive description of 'blood'. To them, to be Jewish and German was not only a contradiction but a physical impossibility.
Haas p47
The comical thing is that Haas seems to have no philosophy background either. If he did, he would discover that the German Romantic philosophers all got their dynamic conception of Nature from none other than the Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. None other than the great Romantic Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said:
Spinoza is the high point of modern philosophy: either you are a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all
Geschichte der Philosophy III, p163, Suhrkamp Verlag.
Spinoza ist Hauptpunkt der modernen Philosophie: entweder Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie.
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| "Either you are a Spinozist of you are not a philosopher at all" Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel |
It was Spinoza who introduced the emphasis on a dynamic conception of reality into German Romantic thought. It was a dynamic philosophy that influenced the Jena school as well as Schopenhauer, the Young Hegelians, and Wagner (for more details see Beiser's German Idealism). Hence the reason why in Marx you get a dynamic conception of history centrally emphasising its dialectical development. Lenin famously said:
It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!
Vladimir I. Lenin: Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic (1914)
In contrast to the Romantic Spinozist philosophy of a dynamic Nature, Haas hails Brahms as a stasis loving Classicist, an anti-revolutionary, and rational-enlightened Liberal-Conservative—a supporter of the conservative Liberal Party who felt that "unrestricted capital" would lead to "the general prosperity of the age" (Haas p45). Haas then implies that political conservatives like Brahms were philo-Semitic, whereas those on the revolutionary left like Wagner were anti-Semitic. While it is true that what both Wagner and Marx wrote about the Jews was very similar, and a more radical racial anti-Semitism came first from the pen of the Socialist Democrat, Dühring, those in the Berlin anti-Semitic agitations (Berliner Antisemitismusstreit) of 1879-81 were lead by conservatives. Sir Richard J. Evans tells us that "the Conservative Party espoused radical antisemitism in 1892 in a vain attempt to shore up its declining popularity" (Evans: Rereading German History, p.153).
Haas also finds in the Brahmsian Hanslick, the absolute antithesis of Wagnerian Romanticism. This is a grotesquely oversimplified position as any who has read The Idea of Absolute Music by Carl Dahlhaus will appreciate, but Haas seems not to have read the great Dahlhaus either, leaving one to wonder if in addition to knowing little about history or philosophy, he also knows little about musicology, what academic background of any worth he has. Haas sees Hanslick's philosophical musical aesthetics as representing the:
...enlightened, outward-looking model of those rational ideals and beliefs typical of the age of Liberalism. He was dismissive of many of the emotive, as opposed to expressive, qualities that were beginning to define music in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His rigidly Rationalist view of art and music made him suspicious of showmanship and empty virtuosity, which, as we know from Wagner, was in itself often seen as a near diversionary tactic of Jewish instrumentalists. Hanslick's ideals harkened back to the purity of the age of classicism and had no time for the portentous matters of nation and spirit being crow-barred into music or, indeed, into opera.
Haas, p48. My emphasis
In other words, the mind-numbingly reductive dualistic formula (Haas clearly is no Derrida reader) is that Wagner represents irrational-romantic Nazi-Socialism, but that Brahms represents rational-classical Liberal-Conservatism. The one was a dynamic philosophy, the other static. The one anti-Semitic and the other philo-Semitic. The one evil and the other virtuous. Haas even says that:
... revolutions were fundamentally 'Romantic' in nature and brought periods of sober Classicism to an end.
As a result Haas puts his support unequivocally behind Brahms:
That Brahms was a full generation younger than Wagner only heightens the tone of the dialectic that was bandied about: the younger composer represented the old, the older composer represented the new.
Haas p49
In other words, the Brahmsian liberalism that supported "unrestricted capital" was a progressive classical-liberalism while Wagnerian socialism was regressive and lead straight to Nazi-socialism. The fundamental polemic, however, that Haas is driving out is this:
The obvious rallying point for the National Socialists was Wagner. Indeed, he was very much the Ur-National Socialist, having been, at different stages in his life, both a nationalist and a Socialist.
Haas p218
The exasperatingly reductive formula goes nationalist + socialist = National Socialist. So if someone is a nationalist plus a socialist, then this equates to being a Nazi. This is exactly the same formula found coming from right-wing polemicist, Dinesh D’Souza:
The trouble is that by Haas's ridiculous argument someone in Israel (or any other country) today who was both a pro-democratic patriot and a socialist would be a Nazi.
Haas goes further by insinuating that socialists are all Nazis:
Wagner's view—not that different from issues Karl Marx was grappling with—was that Jews were avaricious capitalists and that giving them the same rights as Germans would not allow the new state to develop into the anti-capitalist society he envisaged, and for which he had fought on the Dresden barricades in 1848.
Haas p23
Wagner and Marx are thus both proto-Nazis, hardly different from one another, making them equally Ur-National Socialists. National Socialism is a left wing movement according to Haas, just as with D'Souza.
Admittedly, as anyone familiar with Wagner's Fatherland Union Paper would know, there was a nationalistic component to Wagner's musket toting pro-democracy rally behind the barricades in Dresden together with his friend, Socialist Anarchist, Michael Bakunin:
... the daughter of a baker belonging to this particular barricade ... stood in sight of all, when ... a shot was suddenly heard, a piercing shriek, followed by the fall of the girlish patriot. ... Wagner seized a musket and mounting a cart called out aloud to all: “Men, will you see your wives and daughters fall in the cause of our beloved country, and not avenge their cowardly murder? All who have hearts, all who have the blood and spirit of their forefathers, and love their country follow me, and death to the tyrant.”
Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him
The insinuation Haas wants to make is that Wagner's participation in the Dresden pro-democratic revolutionary movement as a democratic socialist caused the rise of National Socialism and the Holocaust. As for Marx, Haas makes the argument that Marxism is just the same thing as National Socialism. Marx, Bakunin, Wagner and Hitler—to Haas they are all clones. National Socialism is, according to Haas, a predominantly "socialist" movement. The bottom line for Haas is that the political left were therefore responsible for WWII and the Holocaust. If only Germany had stuck with a right-wing Classical Liberalism supportive of "unrestricted capital" instead of embracing a dynamic and Spinozan Romanticism that lead to Hitler's enactment of grand opera on the world's stage.
Yet, next thing, once again blindly following Viereck's misguided path, Haas completely contradicts everything he said:
Hitler, however, turned Wagner's view of the 'dynamic versus the static' onto its head and by 1935 had ushered in a period of stifling conventionalism.
Haas, p40
Despite this, Haas makes it plainly clear that he blames Wagnerian Romanticism for having set the scene for the inevitable enactment of National Socialism on the stage of world history:
According to [Ludwig] Stein [the Jewish philosopher and theologian], it was implicit from [Houston] Chamberlain's writings that the world was now about to enter a new age of Romanticism [i.e. Nazism]:
For the Romantic, nothing is more characteristic than worshipping at the cult of genius. Emotions are the progenitors of all values [...] yet the highest of all values is that of 'the genius'. ... The Romantic cries that the artist stands atop humanity as Nature stands atop a pedestal... an idea in which both Wagner and Schopenhauer luxuriate.
Haas p180
In other words, Wagnerian romanticism set the stage for the histrionic performance of an irrational National Socialist operatic show on the world's stage. And this was the terrible result:
Nazi anti-Semitism, much of which was inspired by Wagner himself, had driven non-Jewish Germans to perform acts of cultural barbarity that would bankrupt for generations any ethical legacy bestowed by its greatest writers, artists and philosophers.
Haas p273
The lecture goes that one must be a sober and rational Classical Liberal rather than fall into the trap of becoming an irrational Wagnerian socialist because that would only lead to one becoming a Nazi (National "Socialist"). The polemic against Wagner is merely an attempt to purge the political right of the sins of fascism by blame-shifting all responsibility for Nazism to the left. Little wonder that Haas conveniently skips over the fact that Theodor Herzl's favourite composer was Richard Wagner, and that Herzl felt he derived the inspirational energy to write his book, die Judenstaat (Jewish State) from listening obsessively to performances of Tannhäuser.
Nor does Haas forget to mention Schenker—another one of his heroes whose hallowed name he utters in the same breath as Hanslick:
On the one side, there was Eduard Hanslick and Heinrich Schenker, who held to the ideals of classical sobriety and balance, along with the scholar Guido Adler [Anton Webern's PhD supervisor], who [like Webern and Schoenberg] chose to classify Wagner as a conservative, in stark contrast to the prevalent view of the time.
Haas p69 (my asides in square brackets)
Such "classical sobriety" is the antithesis of hysterical Wagnerian Nazi-socialism, says Haas. Yet he conveniently forgets the fact that although Schenker was Jewish, he supported Nazism:
The historical achievement of Hitler, the extermination of Marxism, will be celebrated by posterity (including the French, the English, and all exploiters of crimes against Germany) no less gratefully than the great deeds of the greatest Germans. If only a man were bom to music, who would finally exterminate the musical Marxists: for this it would be necessary for the masses to become better acquainted with this inherently elusive art—but this is, and must remain, a contradiction in terms. 'Art' and the masses have never belonged together: so where would one ever find the quantity of musical 'brownshirts' necessary to chase away the musical Marxists? I have already provided the weapons; but the music, the true German music of the great [composers], is in no way understood by the masses who are supposed to bear the weapons.
Schenker, letter 14th May 1933 quoted in The Schenker Project (my emphasis)
Once you see through the facile neoliberal polemic that Haas is running, it should hardly be necessary to explain the sheer absurdity of his position. It should be totally unnecessary to point out that the National Socialist Party only came to power through financial support from the industrialists and bankers who traditionally supported the political right. If there originally was a left-wing faction within the National Socialist Party, that took its twisted brand of "socialism" more seriously, it was soon eliminated in a purge culminating in the Night of the Long Knives.
In the Weimar Reichstag, the National Socialists occupied the Tory position—the dominant right-wing party in opposition to the left formed by the SPD and KPD. The Nazi use of the word "socialist", is more like the use of the term "liberal" in the phrase "neo-liberalism" (of the kind associated with Margaret Thatcher) or as in the "liberal" of the conservative Liberal Party that Brahms supported. The dominant Tory parties of both Japan and Australia are both called the "Liberal" party for this reason. The phrase "socialism" in National Socialism likewise represents a perverted form of socialism that was more like a hateful and harshly reactionary populist (Völkisch) movement that claimed to be the "true voice of the people (Volk)". It is a right-wing populism that is beginning to see an alarming resurgence both in Europe as well as the rest of the world.
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| Today we are seeing a resurgence of right-wing populism everywhere that claim to be the vox populi. The National "Socialists" called this brand of populism Völkisch from Volk meaning "people" |
Theodor Adorno
Michael Haas's attitude to Adorno is snide and sarcastic in its overt hostility. For a start Haas writes:
Theodor (Wiesengrund) Adorno was director of a social research project called the Radio Project, which would lead to collaboration with Hanns Eisler on the use of music and him, and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, a source of income that must have left many Marxists culturally bemused.
Haas p260
These snide shots continue when Haas writes:
Adorno's theory, taken much to heart by the CIA, was that 'emancipated art led to an emancipated society'. It was quite clear that neither art nor society behind the Iron Curtain were particularly 'emancipated...
Haas p285
Although there is a bibliographic citation to the same edition of the complete works of Adorno published by Suhrkamp Verlag that I own, Haas demonstrate little familiarity with Adorno's social philosophy in general. Haas seems even seems to be unaware that Adorno was as scathing in his criticism of Eastern Communist bloc states as he was of National Socialism, and was in no way a friend of Stalinism.
As for the CIA association Haas mentions, I have looked through many books on Adorno but not a single one mentions a working association with the CIA. Nor does Haas have the decency to provide a supportive bibliographic citation to chase up. This does not stop him from continuing his unsubstantiated speculations:
[T]hanks to Adorno's influence with the CIA, and their specialist in psychological warfare, Michael Josselson, it was an open secret in the summer courses that they were involved to a significant degree.
Haas p285
The insinuation here seems to be that Adorno was some kind of CIA agent who had infiltrated the often extremely left-wing post-war European avant garde music scene. It is a bizarre conspiracy theory for which Haas fails to provide even the slightest scrap of evidence. Merely stating something is an "open secret" (sic) does nothing to convince us of a fact's veracity—not any more than saying "it's an open secret that the truth about UFOs is being suppressed by the CIA". Such theories all too closely resemble the paranoid conspiracy theories of the Nazis who argued it was an open secret that Marxism was a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to take over the world. It's a wonder that after evoking the CIA in the Adorno conspiracy, Haas didn't evoke the aliens too.
In actuality, Adorno's reason for moving back to Germany after the war was because in America things had swung from an anti-fascist political mood to a McCarthyist anti-communist witch hunt. As one of the leading post-Marxist thinkers of his age, Adorno quickly got out of the American crucible. Yet, Haas nonetheless incorrectly asserts that:
As Germany did not have a period of anti-Nazi fascist government prior to Hitler, it did not experience the remigration of returning anti-Nazi fascist supporters after 1945.
Haas, p300
Haas clearly regards Adorno as a phoney commie non-person who turned into an agent of the CIA and the Rockefellers. Haas even fails to mention that Adorno was a composition pupil of Alban Berg or that he left a legacy of musical composition in addition to his extensive social and philosophical writings. Little surprisingly, none of Adorno's compositional output was recorded for the Decca Entartete Musik series.
Entartete Musik
The greatest failure of all in the book is that Haas simply fails to mention the fact that the term Entartete Musik represented the National Socialist hostility to radical modernism in the arts. On the contrary, Haas keeps mentioning that Goebbels was supposedly highly sympathetic to modern music with the claim about "Goebbels' professed belief that the Nazi government should support modernism" (no supportive citation). Nor does he offer a supportive citation for the insinuation that Goebbels liked serial music. Haas even condescends to defending Goebbels by suggesting that his anti-Semitism was not a deeply held conviction but an "opportunistic add-on" (Haas p213), but again fails to provide any supportive citations for his sweeping claims. So I went and did my own research on the subject, and found a collection of diary entries on Jews by Goebbels where he could easily be found to be saying things such as this:
27th of April, 1942:
I talked to the Fuehrer once more in detail about the Jewish question. His attitude is unrelenting. He wants, under all circumstances, to push the Jews out of Europe. That is right. The Jews have brought so much misery to our continent that the severest punishment meted out to them is still too mild....
How Haas could condescend to defending the anti-Semitism of Goebbels as merely being that of an "opportunistic add-on"? The mind boggles. Haas deserves to be fired from his job for statements like this and Yale Press should be ashamed of itself for allowing itself to have published such an appalling defense of Goebbels.
It is all too obvious where Haas's political and musical allegiances lie. Extraordinarily, Haas fails to even mention Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, the Ode to Napoleon or the Survivor from Warsaw. These are seminal Holocaust era works that Schoenberg wrote in defiant opposition to National Socialism. Yet Haas insists on pretending they do not even exist. In contrast to this, more conservative Jewish composers, who write in a more populist and reactionary style such as Korngold seem to get endless fawning admiration. Haas is even happy to quote Hans Gal's comment about "twelve-tone tinkerers", which clearly reflects Haas's own attitude to Schoenbergian dodecaphony. Elsewhere Haas refers sardonically to Schoenberg's "isolating musical language".
The best that Haas can manage is a backhanded praise for Schoenberg's earlier works:
Schoenberg anticipated the horrors of Hitler and even acknowledged this in his Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16 from 1909, the first of which is called 'Vorgefühl' - 'Premonition'.
Haas, p88
How could Schoenberg have "acknowledged" something that had not yet taken place? The whole suggestion that Schoenberg's extraordinarily profound and beautiful music is a horrific depiction of future brutal mass murder is clearly meant as little more than an insult.
Haas fails to demonstrate basic knowledge about Schoenberg for whom he clearly has little but contempt. For example Haas writes:
Unlike Gal, Erich Korngold or even Schoenberg, Schreker did not identify himself as a Jew, was never raised as a Jew, and was unversed in any Jewish traditions, even if other non-Jewish composers saw him as displaying Jewish musical characteristics.
Haas p211
Schoenberg was born and raised Catholic but converted to Protestantism. Only with the rise of National Socialism did he convert to Judaism, but mostly out of political protest, and never kept a kosher household. Works like Moses und Aron were the consequence of this conversion. Before that, Schoenberg belonged to a generation who considered that they had earned their right to be considered "equal and without difference" to use Wagner's words from Judaism in Music. Schoenberg was proud of his military service in WWI when he fought alongside other Austrians in service of the Kaiser and later emphasised the fact that he remained a loyalist long after the end of the Habsburg monarchy.
Throughout the Decca Entartete Musik series you notice a clear bias towards conservative composers. Haas clearly dislikes modern music. Yet that was exactly the point of the term "Entartete Musik" which denigrated radical modernity in music as a degeneracy. It is ironic in the extreme that Haas, of all people, should perpetuate the exact same attitude as the Nazis, right to the point of denigrating Adorno with the unfounded suggestion that he was a CIA agent who had infiltrated the ranks of the Darmstadt generation composers to spy on them.
Conclusions
Not recommended.
Although I applaud the efforts by Haas to revive the fortunes of Jewish composers who have tragically fallen into neglect due to persecution by the National Socialists, this still does little to change the awful truth of the fact that this must be one of the worst books I have ever read. At least Joachim Köhler keeps you entertained with the huge padding of groundwork to built up his spurious case. This allows you to go chase up a lot of citations to see if they really support his case. Haas, by comparison, is far more disorganised and superficial in quoting verbatim from Viereck or only providing simplistic paraphrases.
Haas has no idea how to write either. There are unbroken quotations that go on for pages. The book begins with a rambling narrative of nineteenth century historical events surrounding the 1848 revolution, conflict with the Austro-Hungarian empire, through to German unification—one that strikes the reader as being as relevant to the point of the book as a summary of the Punic Wars. The reader is left wondering what the point of it is in a book that purports to be about the National Socialist era. Haas harps on longer about the Congress of Vienna than he does about the Theresienstadt concerts, or the background to the Entartete Kunst exhibitions. It seems Haas wants to solely trace the origins of WWII and Holocaust back to the nineteenth century, but without accompanying it with anything resembling a cogent argument, other than that Richard Wagner caused everything. Then once you get to discussing Jewish composers from the relevant Dritte Reich era, there is virtually no meaningful discussion about the historical background to this period at all, which he seems to regard as irrelevant now he has exposed Wagner as the evil genius manipulating twentieth century events from beyond the grave. The results are a turgid and disorganised Nazi opera conspiracy book that makes for tedious reading.
Add in the ludicrous rewriting of history from a right-wing neoliberal perspective, with parts bordering on a veiled apology for non-Nazi fascism, and the book becomes a complete waste of time and space. You might as well be reading a Nazi UFO conspiracy theory. It would be taken just about as seriously by historians. One simply wonders what someone like Richard J. Evans would think if he read this mess of a book that arrogantly ignores all of the published academic literature about the National Socialist era and condescends to replace it with a comical opera conspiracy theory so badly argued that it falls short of the academic standards expected of a first year undergraduate student in its lack of quality supportive citations to back up comically grandiose statements about world history. The book is an embarrassment to musicology.
Books like this makes it look like musicology has been overtaken by a group of fanatical right-wing apologists rewriting history according to their own bizarre Nazi opera conspiracy theories. Here, it is perfectly fine to ignore the vast body of academic literature being published by academic historians writing on the era, since history can be assumed to be the enactment of opera by the Great Man on the world's stage. In place of studying history, you can read all sorts of political conspiracies into opera libretti. It is a complete joke that shows up everything that is wrong with musicology today.
I am afraid that musicologists, reviewers who peer review publications, and editors simply must be better read beyond looking at scores alone like practicing musicians. It is critical to study other disciplines such as history, socio-political theory, general art theory, and philosophy. Wagner, Schoenberg and Adorno managed to be polymaths. To be able to engage with these minds and write intelligently about their legacy, musicologist today are going to have to be better read. Otherwise, we will have to take a leaf out of Boulez's book and blow up all musicology departments along with the opera houses.
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