Toscanini, Trump, and Classical Music as a Symbol of Power

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For a couple of days, the dumbfounding Presidency of Donald Trump was all about symphonies. On July 6th, in Warsaw, Trump gave a speech purporting to defend Western civilization against unnamed forces—“from inside or out, from the south or the east”—that threaten its values. Presuming to speak for that civilization, Trump said, “We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes . . .” The Internet cried with one voice: “We write what?” Like many of Trump’s utterances, the line was at once ludicrous and sinister. His veneration for orchestral music came as a surprise to almost everyone, and the implication that some cultures are incapable of creating symphonies stirred bad memories. Jonathan Capehart compared the passage to white-nationalist rhetoric about the genetic limitations of inferior races. Sentences like “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive” made me think of Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West,” a fixture of the alt-right reading list. Will Bruckner now blast at Trump rallies in place of the Rolling Stones? A Trump-approved video celebrating his G-20 trip suggests no; the soundtrack is more in the vein of the “We Are the World” parody “Musicians for Free-Range Chickens.”

The following night, probably not by coincidence, Trump went to the symphony. During the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, the Elbphilharmonie, the city’s fortresslike new concert hall, presented Beethoven’s Ninth. Trump attended in the company of Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other leaders. German television showed a chilling split-screen with protesters on one side and tuxedoed musicians on the other. Cameras caught the heads of state in various states of attentiveness: Trudeau was chatty, Macron was ostentatiously rapt, Merkel looked preoccupied. (Mark Swed, in the Los Angeles Times, has a rundown of the responses.) Joachim Lux, of the Thalia Theatre, in Hamburg, called the concert a “pornographic abuse of art.” In Lux’s view, the presence of leaders who had trampled on human rights made a mockery of the universal-brotherhood rhetoric of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the anthem of the European Union. You need not have gone that far to find the spectacle a dispiriting muddle of art and politics, with Trump oozing at the center.

Weird as all this was, I found it transfixing because it harked back to an age when, for better or worse, classical music had enormous symbolic power on the world stage. In particular I thought of Arturo Toscanini, the most celebrated conductor of the twentieth century. In the latest issue of the magazine, David Denby reviews Harvey Sachs’s monumental new Toscanini biography. The most riveting pages are devoted to the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the conductor converted his favorite repertory—Beethoven, Verdi, and Wagner—into emblems of the fight against Fascism. I couldn’t help wondering: What would Toscanini have done if he had been confronted by geomusical snarl in Hamburg? He might have had something to say.

Until the early thirties, Toscanini was mainly known as a conductor of brusque brilliance who changed his profession from a gentlemanly calling into a priesthood. He transformed every orchestra he stepped in front of, imposing standards that define music to this day. A cult grew up around him, not least among musicians; Sachs tells us that one orchestra was incensed when a rehearsal was cancelled because it wanted more time with the Maestro. In popular culture, Toscanini became a byword for charismatic authority. By the twenties, when totalitarianism was on the rise, he could be seen as the embodiment of Führerprinzip, the leadership principle: Fascists wanted to conduct the people as Toscanini conducted his orchestras, inspiring love through force of will.

When Mussolini seized power in Italy, Toscanini did not immediately strike an attitude of resistance. He was incensed by Fascist thuggery, above all when it encroached upon his turf. The musicologist Richard Taruskin, in a skeptical account of Toscanini’s behavior in the twenties, calls it “not an inspiring saga of political courage in the face of despotism but a rather less edifying spectacle of two Duci engaged in a protracted battle of wills.” That said, the regime saw Toscanini as a threat, and, in 1931, he was roughed up by a gang of Fascist youths. He did not conduct in Italy again until 1946.

Toscanini took a stronger line against Hitler. Measures against Jewish musicians infuriated him, and in the spring of 1933 he decided to stop working in Germany. His most painful choice was to step away from the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, where he had achieved immense success in 1930 and 1931, even among Nazi-sympathizing members of the Wagner family. Toscanini saw Bayreuth as the ultimate musical shrine; so reverential was his attitude that he refused payment for his first season, because the invitation was reward enough. To Friedelind Wagner, one of the composer’s grandchildren, he later wrote that leaving Bayreuth was the “deepest sorrow of my life.”

The enigma of Toscanini is that he said so little in public about the turmoil surrounding him. Even Sachs, who knows more about the conductor than anyone alive, often has to guess at his motivations. The surmises are often plausible. What we see in the later thirties is an implicit campaign to take German music back from Hitler. Sachs notes that Toscanini made a habit of conducting Beethoven and Wagner in countries bordering Germany. In 1936 and 1937, he led Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” in Salzburg, which is adjacent to Bavaria. In 1938 and 1939, he appeared at the Lucerne Festival, which was initially held on the grounds of Tribschen, where Wagner had lived during one of his periods of exile from Germany. Most remarkably, Toscanini twice travelled to Palestine, at his own expense, to conduct the Palestine Symphony. At one concert, he programmed music from “Lohengrin.” He was aware of resistance to performing Wagner in what would become Israel but argued that “nothing should interfere with music.”

In 1939, Toscanini led two complete cycles of the Beethoven symphonies, deploying them, Sachs suggests, as a “symbol of courage in the face of adversity.” It was probably because of Toscanini that Beethoven’s Fifth became sonic shorthand for the Allied cause in the Second World War: the opening notes, three Gs and an E-flat, were heard as Morse code for “V,” as in “victory.” Toscanini also led several all-Wagner programs, refusing to surrender the composer to Hitler. In 1944, in a benefit for the Red Cross, he appeared before a crowd of eighteen thousand at Madison Square Garden, conducting Wagner and Verdi—national heroes of the two leading Fascist countries. In a commemorative booklet for that concert, a program note for “The Ride of the Valkyries” was accompanied by a photograph of B-17 bombers on a run over Germany.

At the time, Toscanini’s largely unspoken argument on behalf of German music was met with general approval. Olin Downes wrote in the Times, “Never has the inherent and indestructible greatness of Wagner’s art been more triumphantly demonstrated.” But a contrary interpretation was gaining ground: the émigré philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, among others, linked Wagner’s anti-Semitism to Hitler’s. Over time, Toscanini’s faith in the ennobling influence of his favorite composers came to seem naïve, even as clichés about the “universal language” continued to circulate. Valery Gergiev’s activities on behalf of Putin and the fate of the El Sistema program in Venezuela show how easily music can fall in line with power. The G-20 concert was the latest yank of the rope in an eternal tug-of-war over the meaning of Beethoven.

Still, the decisiveness of Toscanini’s stance in the thirties commands respect. In April, 1933, he received a letter from Hitler, addressed to “Hochverehrter Meister” (“Most honored master”), essentially begging him to return to Bayreuth that summer. Few artists would have been able to resist such flattery. But Toscanini knew how it would play out: he would be photographed with Hitler, and his presence would provide cover for Nazi oppression. Nothing should interfere with music, yet interference happens all the same. It is difficult to visualize Toscanini in a scene like the one that unfolded at the Elbphilharmonie. He would not have given a speech or released a statement; he would not have explained himself in interviews. He would never have been there in the first place.

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