AT THE RISK of committing journalistic heresy, I am not jumping back to indulge the feeding frenzy of political commentary on Easter Sunday. The public deserves a long break from congressional investigations and is weary of them after a respite during the Holy Week.

For a change, I am writing about the dissonance of politics and music, in particular, sublime symphonic music. This piece is about the tensions between the artistic demands of providing music to the people and the ideological demands of regimes in which they are performing for public consumption.

While surfing the Internet during the Holy Week, an article in The First Post, the British online daily magazine, caught my eye, with the story that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year and is addressing a dark secret—its association with Hitler’s Nazi regime.

The BPO is coming to terms with its Nazi past only now. In 2006, the orchestra announced an investigation into its relationship with the Nazi regime. Last year, the Canadian author Misha Aster published the book “The Reich’s Orchestra,” a study of this relationship.

According to The First Post, the book’s revelations came as news to contemporary concertgoers, Germans and the world at large, including Filipinos who were in rhapsodic spell over its concerts in Manila in the 1960s and 1970s, under the direction of the legendary conductor Herbert von Karajan. The issue had been ignored by historians.

The book shows that the players became salaried Reich employees “who performed until the very last days of the war,” according to The First Post. From the late 1920s, the orchestra had struggled, says the book, and by 1933, it was desperate for survival.

“To save itself, it sold its soul, to Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry,” says the report, although its chief conductor at the time, Wilhelm Furtwangler, protected Jewish players in the first two years of Hitler’s rule and by 1935, “they had all emigrated,” and “the remaining players were able to avoid military service whether or not they joined the Nazi party.”

Aryan music

A new German film shows footage of the orchestra performing in front of banners with giant swastikas. The orchestra showcased so-called Aryan music, and Hitler was known to be fond of Wagner’s operatic works, themes of which were adapted to patriotic marches of the German Army.

The First Post said the orchestra’s repertoire excluded compositions by Felix Mendelssohn, a Jew. After Furtwangler died in 1954, the orchestra “came under the baton of Herbert von Karajan, a conductor of genius but also a one-time Nazi Party member.”

It has been three generations since World War II, and a less condemnatory revisionist view has emerged to review the difficult dilemmas faced by Furtwangler and the orchestra and its players under the Nazi regime and the patriotic demands of the war.

Pact with the devil

This dilemma of “a silent pact with the devil” is best understood by Filipinos in light of the collaboration issue that bitterly divided them during the Japanese occupation. President Jose P. Laurel claimed the government had to work with Tokyo to shield the population from Japanese atrocities and the rigors of the occupation.

The BPO’s predicament was epitomized by, and centered on, the role of Furtwangler. The Nazi past of the orchestra has not at all diminished the quality of the BPO as one of the world’s most famous orchestras.

I have collected a number of CDs of Furtwangler’s concerts (now rare collectors’ items) with BPO, mostly on the works of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner.

In 1995, I watched a play by the British playwright Ronald Harwood, “Taking Sides,” in London, set in 1946 in the American zone of occupied Berlin, about the US accusation Furtwangler had served the Nazi regime.

In that play, Furtwangler eloquently and passionately argued the point to American prosecutors that he was an artist whose higher calling was, first and foremost, to deliver good music to his audiences and that he was not a politician. Music has no politics, he said.

Never a Nazi

Wikipedia points out that while Furtwangler’s relationship with and attitudes toward Hitler and the Nazi party were “a matter of much controversy,” he never joined the party “nor did he really approve” of it.

He always refused to give the Nazi salute, Wikipedia says. “There is even film footage of Furtwangler shaking … Goebbels’ hand, then turning away and wiping his hand with a handkerchief,” it says.

At the denazification trial, Wikipedia says, Furtwangler was charged with supporting Nazism by remaining in Germany, performing at Nazi party functions and making anti-Semitic remarks against the part-Jewish conductor Victor de Sabata. He was eventually cleared on all these counts.

No one pleaded Furtwangler’s case more eloquently than himself. In his closing remarks during his trial, he said:

“I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved; that music be given to the German people by its own musicians.

“These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, for Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it is like.”

Formidable magician

Of Furtwangler’s conducting technique, Wikipedia says:

“He saw symphonic music as creations of nature that could only be realized subjectively into sound. This is why composers, such as Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner, were so central to Furtwangler’s repertoire. He disliked (Arturo) Toscanini’s approach to the German repertoire. He walked out of a Toscanini concert once, calling him a ‘mere time-beater!’”

Conductor Christoph Eschenbach is said to have paid Furtwangler the ultimate accolade, describing him as a “formidable magician, a man capable of setting an entire ensemble of musicians on fire, sending them into a state of ecstasy.”

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