Bartóók and the Third Reich 
by Jáános Breuer

Bartóók gave his first recital abroad on December 14, 1903 in Berlin, the first at which he played his own works——but he never visited Hitler's Germany. This omission is all the more conspicuous as the well-trained city orchestras of Germany and German societies aimed at popularizing contemporary music played an important role in the dissemination of Bartóók's works abroad.

Bartóók's hostility to the right-wing regimes of his times is common knowledge. Thus when Arturo Toscanini was assailed by Fascist louts in Bologna, Bartóók instantly formulated a protest. In numerous letters written in the course of the two and a half years between the Nazi occupation of Austria and his moving to America, Bartóók gave expression to his uneasiness about the expansion of Hitler's empire to the borders of Hungary. In fact, Bartóók's utter rejection encompassed all totalitarian regimes; not long before his death, in a letter yet to be published in its entirety, he expressed his concern about the Soviet occupation of Hungary.

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The last time Bartóók played in Germany he did so as soloist in the first performance of his Second Piano Concerto in Frankfurt am Main on January 23, 1933. The orchestra was conducted by Hans Rosbaud, who was well-known for his
anti-Nazi views and denounced to the Gestapo a number of times for "spreading the Jewish spirit". One wonders if the voice of the mob reached Bartóók during a week-long stay in Frankfurt, a mere week before Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reich on January 30, 1933.

It was with slight amazement, but without any emotional reaction, that Bartóók informed his mother on May 1, 1933 of the conspicuous absence of Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg from an international congress on music that he attended in Florence. Presumably he did not as yet know that both Schoenberg and Hindemith had fallen into disfavour in Germany, the former for being a Jew and the latter for not collaborating with the Nazis. Soon enough, however, first-hand information was to reach Bartóók. The Budapest and Vienna first performances of his Second Piano Concerto, on June 2 and 4 respectively, were conducted by Otto Klemperer. Since Bartóók was the soloist in Vienna, he obviously had to participate in the rehearsals with Klemperer. By that time Klemperer, the brilliant musical director of the State Opera of Berlin who had just been awarded the Goethe Prize, was already on a leave of absence in line with a law passed on April 11. The law bore the innocuous title "Restoration of the Body of Public Officials"; it was aimed at purging German institutions of Jewish as well as anti-Nazi and left-wing individuals. Apparently, the Nazis considered Klemperer's final removal from the Berlin Opera so urgently pressing that his dismissal papers were mailed to him to Budapest. One can only imagine the straight-forward terms in which the great conductor, well-known for his sharp tongue, informed Bartóók of this new turn of events in his vicissitudes in Hitler's Germany.

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Writings on Bartóók's life mention merely three performances of Bartóók's works after 1933 in Germany. Nevertheless, in the early sixties when I was collecting data concerning Zoltáán Kodáály's lectures in Germany, as a byproduct of my research I came across references to a total of forty-seven performances of works by Bartóók in musical journals which appeared between 1933 and 1942. To be sure, this figure would seem to indicate a substantial decline in frequency in comparison to the Weimar Republic period. However, judging from the experiences I had in the course of my research on Kodáály, I am almost certain that Bartóók's works were performed more frequently during these nine years. This estimate is justified because music criticism in journals provided only concise, and by no means exhaustive, summaries of the thriving musical life of German cities and towns.

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Bartóók's works were not banned in the Third Reich, even though Nazi-biassed musical critics constantly attacked him. This relative tolerance toward Bartóók's music was, it must be stressed, not a result of concessions on his part: he not only refused to submit evidence of his origin, but he also refrained from even minimal gestures that would suggest any affinity to the regime. Rather, we must look for explanation in a political guideline on cultural programmes which was formulated in June 1933 by Hans Hinkel, State Secretary of the Ministry of Culture of the Reich. This guideline advised performance of works written by composers from those countries which entertained friendly relations with Germany. This requirement was more than sufficiently satisfied by the Hungarian government of the period, Bartóók's own antipathies notwithstanding.

The relatively favourable atmosphere in Germany made possible even the international first performance of a work by Bartóók. The first performance of the Hungarian Peasant Songs (orchestrated in 1933) was scheduled by Hamburg Radio for February 2, 1934, and the concert was broadcast by the Berlin and Köönigsberg Radio stations. Originally, it was Wilhelm Furtwäängler who requested the right to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance, scheduled by him for January 14 or 15, 1934, and the new work was also featured in Furtwäängler's tour of England with the Berlin Philharmonic, which was to include concerts in Newcastle, Manchester, Bristol, and London. For reasons which are unclear to me, both the Berlin premiere and the British tour were cancelled. The 1937 Baden-Baden Music Festival also commissioned a new orchestral piece by Bartóók. The idea of such a piece did, in fact, occur to Bartóók during the composition of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, but he never completed this project. Since Bartóók intended only a first German performance, and not a world premiere, for Baden-Baden, the piece which was eventually featured at the Festival——after a world premiere in Basle——was Music for Strings. The following year saw a performance in Baden-Baden of Five Hungarian Folk Songs, a piece composed for solo voice and orchestra. In another significant event on February 3, 1937, the First Piano Concerto was performed in Dresden. The piano part, whose staggering difficulties had thus far been mastered by Bartóók alone, was played by Hans Richter-Haaser, then merely twenty-five years old.

Yielding to increasing political pressure, the German——and by far the most active ——section of the International Society for Contemporary Music dissolved towards the end of 1933. In opposition to the "destructive" tendencies nurtured by the ISCM, a Permanent Committe for International Musical Cooperation was established, which organized contemporary music festivals between 1935 and the beginning of the war. At the closing concert of the festival, held in the spring of 1937 in Dresden, Bartóók's Fourth String Quartet was performed. This choice is all the more remarkable as Bartóók, one of the founders of ISCM and the honorary president of its Hungarian section, refused any contact with the Permanent Committee, showing resolution and considerable indignation. Indeed, Bartóók did not recognize the Permanent Committee as a legitimate international organization at all, and rightly so, for it was nothing but a mouthpiece of German propaganda. Yet even more striking than the performance of the Fourth Quartet in Dresden is the favourable German reaction to one of Bartóók's chef d'oeuvres, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. According to the evidence of available documents, this work was performed twelve, perhaps thirteen, times in Germany between 1937 and 1941. In no other country was this masterpiece played so frequently in Bartóók's life-time. Even the Budapest premiere (February 14, 1938) was preceded by the first six performances of the piece in Germany, the first of which took place on March 21, 1937 at the Baden-Baden festival. Bartóók accepted the invitation of the organizers to attend this concert, and he was supposed to leave Baden-Baden for the Berlin Music Week in order to play his Second Piano Concerto. When the Berlin plans foundered, however, the visit to Baden-Baden was cancelled, too.

The German series of the Music for Strings is particularly conspicuous, indeed almost perplexing, because the official musical critics of the Nazis denounced the piece in a way reminiscent of the tenor of charges by the Gestapo; a critic who had recognized the merits of the piece was removed from his position. Nonetheless, Music for Strings was performed in Berlin by the Philharmonic under the direction of Furtwäängler on January 30-31, 1938. Bartóók, for his part, expressed his regret that he was informed too late about this concert, for he would have been pleased to attend the January 31 concert on the way back from Brussels. Beside major cities such as Dresden, Essen, Hamburg, Lüübeck, Frankfurt am Main and Munich, the Music for Strings was performed in relatively small towns, including Bielefeld, Braunschweig and Oldenburg, under the direction of such renowned conductors as Eugen Jochum, Oswald Kabasta, Paul van Kempen and Franz Konwitzschny.