Patrick Bade
Music in the German Reich at the End of the War

Patrick Bade - Music in the German Reich at the End of the War

- So Patrick, I’m going to hand over to you whenever you are ready. Why don’t you start?

• Thank you, Wendy. Thank you. I’m going to start with a famous story about Mahatma Gandhi. Somebody once asked him what he thought of Western civilization, and he famously answered, “Well, I think it would be a fine thing.” And when I think what Western civilization led to in the middle of the 20th century, sometimes I’m filled with despair and I think, “Is there such a thing as Western civilization?” Does it actually have any value if it could land up with such hideous barbarism and atrocities? Now, the Nazis like to think of themselves as the torchbearers of Western civilization. They took ideas of civilization and Kultur with a capital K very seriously indeed. I think I’ve mentioned before that in Britain, in 1939, there were only two permanent opera houses. Of course, every little town in Germany has an opera house, and the bigger towns will have more than one. They’ll have two or three.

And in London are two opera houses, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; that was shut down immediately, became a dance hall, and the Sadler’s Wells Opera House was shut down as soon as the Blitz started, and it became a refuge for people who’d been bombed out. So, the Allies’ Culture with a capital C was never so high up the agenda. Now, the image you’ve got on the screen is of the Staatsoper in Berlin, the most important opera house. And it was actually destroyed twice during the Second World War. In April, 1941, a pretty well astray bomb… I mean, at that point there was no really serious bombing of the German cities, that happened later. But a bomb managed to hit the Staatsoper and burnt it out. And it’s extraordinary to think that while Germany was invading Russia, at the height of the war, resources were diverted to rebuilding the opera house. It obviously still hadn’t occurred to the Nazi elite that they could be defeated, and that Berlin would ever be seriously bombed.

So, the opera house was renovated and completed, and reopened with a grand gala in December, 1942. Of course, the timing was absolutely disastrous. The war had just turned against the Axis powers. At the end of 1942, Rommel was defeated at El Alamein, and on the evening of the gala, the Nazi elite in the opera house, at least, knew that there was an impending disastrous defeat in Stalingrad, that Stalingrad could only hold out for, really, a matter of days. So, as I said, culture was something that was very high on the Nazi agenda, and they maintained the summer festivals of Saltzburg and Bayreuth, up until the summer of 1943, and performances were put on for munitions workers and for military personnel. This is an image on the left, you can see, of munitions workers actually not looking all that thrilled by a performance in Saltzburg. Here is Saltzburg bedecked with swastika flags. And in 1940, I’m not sure if it’s ‘42 or '43, this recording, they put on Strauss’s opera, “Arabella,” which was quite recent.

It had only just been premiered a decade earlier, in 1933. It was the last of Strauss’s collaborations with his favourite librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and they put it on with several members of the original cast, the original conductor, Krauss, and his wife, the soprano, Ursuleac, as Arabella. Here is the military audience. It strikes me as an absolutely bizarre choice to put before a military audience. It’s a delightful opera, but the plot is, you know, Mills and Boon, the whole thing is very sweet. I suppose they reckoned that it offered a certain escapism from the reality of life in the Second World War. This is an excerpt from a performance at Salzburg in that season. This is a live broadcast of the duet from act one. Here we are in Salzburg, and you can see Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, an Englishwoman of course, with two wounded soldiers.

And there was, of course, nurses and carers on hand, and performances were put on, and tired front. I mean, it’s extraordinary to think, really, that they thought that five hours of Wagner would be a way to reward these soldiers and would be relaxing for them. Here are the poor buggers being marched into Bayreuth, you can see. It’s “Bayreuth Greets the Guests of the Führer.” There was always the possibility, I suppose, that Bayreuth could be bombed. So, there were air raid shelters, as you can see here. And here are the newly arrived soldiers being offered a meal. I can see knödel there. It was one of the things that British propaganda said about German food during the Second World War, that all German food is either ball-shaped or phallic. And there is a certain element of truth in that if you go into a German supermarket and see all the sausages and the knödel. So, having had their hearty meal, and before the performance, they were forced to undergo a lecture on the forthcoming opera.

And here you can see them listening reverently to that lecture. And here we are at the front of the opera house. Anybody who’s been to Bayreuth will know that before each act of a Wagner opera, members of the orchestra come out and they play motifs from the forthcoming act. And there you can see the trumpeters in military uniform on the balcony at the front of the house. And so, this performance is an extraordinary thing, lavish production. The production was actually by Wagner’s grandson, Wieland Wagner, he was still in his early twenties, and it’s one of his earliest efforts. Of course he was to become very famous after the war for his radically-abstracted productions of Wagner operas at Bayreuth, but here it’s pretty traditional, except for the last scene in act four, which you can see bottom right-hand side where he makes the… It looked remarkably like a Nazi rally at Nuremberg with the kind of architecture designed by Speer. They had the greatest conductor of the day conducting, Furtwängler.

They were short of personnel. I mean, “Meistersinger” needs a big cast, chorus dancers and so on, particularly in the third act. So, they conscripted in members of the Hitler youth and, more bizarrely still, members of the SS Wiking division, associated with some of the most horrible atrocities on the Eastern Front, to make up the choruses and all the jolly Nurembergers. I’m going to play you a bit from, this is Furtwängler conducting, this is live, 1943. This is the “Dance of the Apprentice,” so you have to imagine lots of SS personnel and Hitler youth cavorting around the stage to this music.

Audio plays.

I think it must have been a pretty tense atmosphere backstage during these performances. There is Furtwängler on the left, and the cast, my guess is by this point in the war, by 1943, people weren’t expressing their opinions openly about anything political or the progress of the war. It was simply too dangerous. But the Hans Sachs, Jaro Prohaska, was an ardent Nazi. His wife was famous for fainting when Hitler entered the room. Maria Müller, the Eva, was also a passionate Nazi who wrote gushingly about Hitler.

Camilla Kallab, the mezzo who sings Magdalena, who you see at the bottom, she, I presume, was anti-Nazi, because she was one of just six singers of the entire company of Dresden who refused to sign a Nazi petition against Fritz Busch before the war. And in the middle we have Max Lorenz, who was the great heldentenor of Nazi Germany. In the notorious interviews that Winifred Wagner gave towards the end of her life, she tells a story about him that, I mean, he was in a very difficult position. His wife was Jewish, and he apparently really loved her, but he was also a homosexual. So, two black marks as far as the Nazis were concerned.

And he was actually caught in flagrante with a male member of the chorus and arrested, and might have been heading for a concentration camp, but Winfred Wagner had to contact Hitler and say, “Look, Wolfi,” as she called him, “We need Max Lorenz. He is the only half-decent heldentenor left in Germany.” Great heldentenor of the period, of course. Lauritz Melchior had gone to America, and she said, “No Max Lorenz, no 'Siegfried.’” So the thing was hushed up, and Max Lorenz took part in the Bayreuth Festivals. Recently discovered documents show that they had, actually, during this festival in 1943, somebody denounced them to the Nazi authorities, saying how disgraceful it was that Max Lorenz flaunted his Jewish wife and he actually took her into the festival restaurant, to the outrage and disgust of all the other people. So, an awful lot was depending on Max Lorenz’s vocal chords, which, on the evidence of this recording, were somewhat overstretched. I have a friend in Munich who’s a great connoisseur of singing, and he will go a long way to avoid ever having to listen to Max Lorenz. But I’m going to play you a little bit of his not very mellifluous singing in this performance in 1943.

Audio plays.

Well, enough of that. But as I think I’ve said before, if you wanted to hear really good Wagnerian singing during the Second World War, you weren’t going to find it in Germany. You were more likely to find it in New York or Buenos Aires, where many of the best singers had gone as refugees. I was going to play you a little bit of the great peroration at the end of the opera. Very controversial. I must say, it’s a piece I… Although I enjoy “Mastersingers” as a whole, it always feels like a bucket of cold water over my head when this bit comes towards the end, and Hans Sachs goes into a kind of xenophobic rant warning against foreigners. But I think I’m going to skip it today. Now, these are posters for a movie that came out during the war called “Stukas,” which is celebrating German fighter pilots. For a very, very long time, this film was banned in Germany. I’m not quite sure why, ‘cause it’s so ludicrous. I mean, I can’t imagine any young German being fired up by it, except to helpless laughter.

The hero of the movie is shot down and wounded, and he goes into a kind of depression. So, they think the only way to get him out of his depression is to send him to Bayreuth, and make him sit through a six-hour performance of “Götterdämmerung.” And it works, because here he is in the audience, and he’s just been listening to “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” which is incredibly exciting. You know, Trudy loves to quote the Woody Allen joke that, you know, “Every time I hear Wagner, I want to invade Poland.” And if you’re going to invade Poland, “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” would be a good piece to use to accompany you. And so, he’s been looked after by nurse, who’s said he’s in a terrible state, psychologically, and he’s so fired up that he rushes out of the opera house, and he rushes to his unit, and he gets into a plane and he sets off, and the final scene is really extraordinary. You can see it on YouTube. I do recommend it. It’s better than “Springtime for Hitler.” It’s absolutely hilarious.

You get all these Nazi fighter planes flying in formation with all the pilots singing a very jolly tune. It’s like a kind of Nazi version of “Flying Down to Rio.” Now, we get to 1944, and there’s the bomb attempt on Hitler, the Stauffenberg bomb attempt in the summer of 1944. And it’s very clear that Germany is heading for defeat, and Goebbels puts together a great rally, and he declares total war. So, at this point, opera houses are finally closed down at the end of the summer of 1944. But we find that on the radio, very lavish opera productions are still being broadcast. I’m going to play you an excerpt from a broadcast of Puccini’s “Tosca” that dates from very late in the war. This dates from October, 1944. And it stars the bass/baritone Georg Haan as Scarpia, and the soprano Hildegarde Ranczak as Tosca. When I was a student in Munich in the early seventies, I did have some conversations with her on the phone. She was absolutely charming. Very likeable, very open, and we were going to meet, but she got the flu and we finally never met.

But I’m taking this, this is act two of “Tosca.” Now, in his autobiography, Tito Gobbi, who was, I suppose, the great Scarpia of the mid-20th century, and he was singing it quite a lot in Italy in the final stages of the Second World War, and he said in his autobiography that Scarpia had become a disagreeably topical figure. And this is certainly not the best-sung performance of Tosca that you will have ever have heard, but it might be the most vividly dramatic. And you feel what Tosca experiences in act two, where she’s pressured into having sex with the evil Scarpia in order to save the life of her lover, I’m sure these things happened. By the end of the war they were happening all over Europe, in Nazi-occupied Europe, so this performance in its violence and its crudeness has a really chilling sense of reality.

Audio plays.

So, this is what Berlin looked like in the later stages of the Second World War. There had been huge bombing raids. This is, of course, extremely controversial, both morally and militarily. Many people think that, far from actually hastening the end of the war, it delayed the end of the war. And that the, you know, bombing raids could have been much better deployed hitting economic and military targets, or even putting the concentration camps out of action. So, I think it is quite possible that we will be having a debate about this later in the series. But I show you this picture, 'cause you think, “Where did they find a studio in Berlin with a roof on, where they could make these recordings at the end of 1944?”

My next excerpt is from a performance of “Rigoletto” that was recorded in Berlin at the very end of November, 1944. It’s sung in German, of course, all Italian operas were performed in German in Germany in this period. It’s a wonderful performance and I’ve known it since I was a teenager, because I bought the LPs, five shillings it cost, at WHSmith on Godalming High Street. So, I got to know the opera in this version, and I always hear it in my head. I hear it in German, you know, even when it’s being sung in Italian. So, I don’t hear “Lo vecchio maledivami,” I hear, “Der alte Mann verfluchte mich!” And in some ways it’s still my absolute favourite recording, particularly for the Gilda of Erna Berger.

To me, she just is Gilda. She totally, totally embodies this sweet, innocent, self-sacrificing young girl. Well, in 1989, at The Bayreuth Festival, I met her, I was introduced to her. Oddly, I’d just read her autobiography and I’d written her a fan letter, and the fan letter arrived at her home while we were at Bayreuth, so I spent two days with her. One day we sat in a restaurant for seven hours and we talked nonstop. She told me all sorts of very, very interesting things about Furtwängler, about Beecham, and about other singers, of course. And I was still relatively young and I didn’t really ask her the questions I should have asked her. And because, I mean, it’s not her fault, but she’d been a favourite singer of Hitler’s, and was required to sing on many official occasions, including his birthday concert. She had been closer to evil than any other person I’ve met, except perhaps Friedlinde Wagner, the granddaughter of Wagner. And I probably could have asked her the questions, because she… I’m going to discuss this later in a later talk about reactions at the end of the war and acknowledgement of guilt.

She goes, in her autobiography, and in a TV interview with August Everding, which you can see on YouTube, she’s a lot more honest about it. I mean, you know, she says, “What did I know? Did I not want to know?” I think, you know, she clearly had sort of questioned herself, which was, I’d say, unusual amongst German performers of that period. But I’m going to play you part of the final scene. I was absolutely charmed by her. I mean, she was a very old lady. She was nearly 90. But my impression of her was, “Oh yes, she is Gilda. She’s still Gilda.” You know, if Gilda hadn’t died at the end of “Rigoletto” and had lived to be 90, this is how she would have been.

Audio plays.

Now, one of the great cultural achievements under the Nazi regime was a huge survey of the German lied, the German art song, by a pianist called Michael Raucheisen. And this was a long, drawn out project. It started before the war and it continued right through to the end of the war. And all those, 'cause the Germans, as I think I’ve mentioned before, had invented magnetic tape. The recording you’ve just heard was made on magnetic tape.

And those that were not destroyed in the bombing, we still have today. We have vast numbers of musical recordings from German radio archives. Many, many available on CD now. And this project of the German lied, you can buy the whole project on 66 CDs. I do have them, they’re behind me. But the bizarre thing is, the Germans are so thorough, they want to have everything completely complete, so everybody’s in it. Every major German song is in it, but some of the greatest German songs of all had to be left out, because they were settings of the poetry of Heine. So, no “Dichterliebe,” one of the greatest of all German song cycles. It could not be recorded and included in the series, and no “Schwanengesang” of Schubert, which also includes several songs set to texts of Heine. So, I’m going to play you two songs from this great set. First of all, a song with the very youthful Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, “Morgan,” of Strauss.

She was the protegé of Michael Raucheisen, and a pupil of his wife, the great soprano, Maria Ivogün. Now, she’s not usually a soprano that I like very much, either artistically, and certainly not, I think she was really a very, very unpleasant woman. And that comes across strongly in her autobiography, which appeared in French, oddly enough, but never in German or in English. I think it would’ve caused such a rumpus in either country if it had appeared. So, it’s actually quite difficult to get ahold of her autobiography. But she was completely shameless about her past, about her Nazi party membership. And there was, around the time her autobiography came out, there was a biography by an English critic called Alan Jefferson, who’d done his research very thoroughly and found evidence that she was being “protected,” in inverted commas. We assume the lover of a top Nazi. He didn’t identify the Nazi, but speculation that it was either Goebbels or Hans Frank, the Gauleiter of Poland. I’ve actually recently met the son of Hans Frank. He did a very interesting event together with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at JW3.

They had a discussion, and I had dinner with him afterwards, and I’m afraid I was cheeky enough to ask him, I said, “Did your father have an affair with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf?” And he said, “Yes, he did.” Although, as the son was six years old at the time, I’m not sure how reliable his evidence is. But anyway, having said all that, probably to put you off her, I actually do think this is a very beautiful performance, and it is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard from Elizabeth Schwarzkopf.

Audio plays.

Now, the other song I want to play you is Brahms, and sung by the great contralto, Emmi Leisner, who took part in many Bayreuth Festivals, has a very sumptuous voice, as you’ll hear in a minute. And the reason I’ve included her, 'cause I wanted to tell you a story about her. In the spring of 1942, she was part of a group of German artists of all kinds. There was the popular singer and dancer, Marika Rökk, there was Lale Andersen, who I talked about recently, the singer of “Lili Marleen.” Lale Andersen actually had just been released from prison after her attempt to escape into Switzerland and to meet up with her lover there.

And so, they were touring Eastern Europe, entertaining the troops on the Eastern Front. And the man in charge, a certain Hinkel, you know, I get all this, actually, from Lale Andersen’s very, very revealing, very interesting autobiography. And he was an absolute sadist, and, you know, a horrible Nazi of the worst kind. And he really wanted to rub these artists’ noses in it, so he made them go on a bus tour of the Warsaw Ghetto. Conditions are already very terrible. So, this is relevant to that big question that people always ask. What did people know? How much did they know about what was going on? Well, if any of these artists didn’t know up to that point, they certainly did after going on this bus tour. And then the bus stopped, and the artists were ordered to get off and walk in the street. Emmi Leisner became completely hysterical and she threw herself on the floor of the bus, refused to get off the bus, and screamed and wept with horror at what she’d seen out of the window. So, I think that’s an interesting story, because I think it does tell you that obviously the full horror had not really dawned on them ‘til that moment, 'til they were actually forced to witness it. So, here is the very beautiful, sumptuous voice of Emmi Leisner.

Audio plays.

As I said, the Germans kept up this cultural programme to the last minute, 'til April, 1945. It should have been evident that Germany was defeated, but the one hope, of course, was in superior… Think of the old advertisement for Volkswagen. “Vorsprung durch Technik.” Technik was what they thought, or some people believed, was going to save them. The miracle weapons, the V-1s, the V-2s. Luckily, they didn’t get the ultimate miracle weapon of the atomic bomb, because they rejected nuclear physics as Jewish science, but they had the jet engine, of course. They pioneered the jet engine. And in all aspects, they were still pioneering cutting edge technology, including stereo recording. So, I’m going to play you a bit of the absolute best quality, technically best recording, made up to that point, and, actually, for a very long time afterwards. This is an experimental recording in stereo sound, made, amazingly, on the 23rd of January, 1945. Again, where you think, “Well, where did they find a studio in Berlin to make this recording?” Fantastic clarity of sound. This Walter Gieseking, playing Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto.” And, in a quiet moment in the cadenza at the end of the first movement, we hear the distant sound of anti-aircraft fire, clear as a bell.

Audio plays.

This is Ernst Gombrich, great art historian, a very revered figure, a man who really, he came to this country as a refugee in 1935, and I had the great privilege of being taught by him as an undergraduate. And then, after I’d written him, you see, I spent half my life writing fan letters, I wrote him a fan letter after I heard him do a wonderful talk at the St. Johns Wood Synagogue, and he invited me 'round, and I spent two wonderful days talking with him. Very, very inspiring, and I still use material that he gave me in those conversations, in lectures. So, of course, initially, he was interned as an enemy alien when the war broke out. But he was, of course, useful, and he was a listener. Towards the end of the war he was listening to all the German radio broadcasts, and translating anything that might be important or useful. And, towards the end of April, 1945, he noticed a sudden change in the music on the radio.

The radios were mainly playing cheerful music and martial music to try and keep the war effort going. Suddenly, all that stopped, and it went into a performance of the slow movement of Bruckner’s “Seventh Symphony,” which was dedicated to the memory of Wagner. As soon as that happened, I mean, it’s a very long movement, it’s 22 minutes of music, I won’t play the whole thing to you, I’ll play you a little bit. As soon as that music began, he knew, that’s it. Hitler’s dead. And he immediately contacted the Prime Minister’s office and informed Churchill, “If you wait for the end of this piece of music, there will be an announcement of Hitler’s death.” And that’s what happened. Now, I don’t know which particular performance it was, but it is actually quite likely to be this performance that I’m going to play to you, which is a wartime radio recording with Furtwängler conducting.

Audio plays.

Now, I wanted to end this talk with something a bit more upbeat, so I’m going beyond the end of the war, into 1946. The great tenor, Richard Tauber, who’d been in Britain all the way through the war, and I talked about him before, how he sang every day of the war in Britain, trying to raise morale, and what he sang most often was “The Land of Smiles” of Franz Lehár. Now, he once said he regarded Lehár as his second father. So, Tauber happened to be in Zürich in 1946, and Lehár there at the same time, so they met up with one another, and it was a great joy to both of them to be reunited. And they went to the radio station in Zürich, and they recorded an impromptu concert together. So, I’m going to play you an item from that concert. I think it’s the final item of the concert, and I think it’s very clearly… It was made in the hope that the world could move on and that wounds could be healed. It’s a quadrilingual version of their most famous song, “You Are My Heart’s Delight,” so we hear it in English, French, German, and Italian.

Audio plays.

So, that’s Tauber singing in four languages, and being accompanied by the composer Franz Lehár. So, let’s see what we’ve got in the way of questions. So I’ll.. Do I come out of… Oh, it’s chat. Let’s see.

• [Wendy] Patrick, it’s in the Q&A. There’s a Q&A button.

Q&A and Comments:

• Oh, right, yeah, good. Yeah, good. Good.

Q: “Can I talk about Hans Alpert, who was married to a Jewess? I was in the occupation near Hamburg, Germany, and he was particularly popular on the Reeperbahn.”

A: Yes! He was absolutely adored by women, and apparently used to stand on a balcony. He’d stand outside the theatre and there’d be thousands of screaming women, and he’d say, “Come and get me.” It’s quite a common story of people, well-known actors or performers, who had Jewish husbands or wives. Some stuck with them, I don’t know about him, and some divorced their spouses when it was convenient.

“There was an obituary in The Garden yesterday of Christa Ludwig.” Yes, yes indeed. That’s very sad. She was 93, great artist, only caught her a few times late in her career.

Q: “How did Lorenz’s wife feel about that?”

A: Well, I can only speculate. It must have been a dreadful feeling being in the lion’s den in Bayreuth, knowing people were denouncing her and whispering about her.

Somebody’s disagreeing with me about Max Lorenz’s Walther, “Fine, heroic timbre.” Well, he’s an interesting… what I’ll say about Max Lorenz is he’s never boring. He means what he says, what he sings about. This great sense of sincerity. I must admit, in the climax of what I played to you, I didn’t find it very agreeable to the ear, but that’s a matter of taste. Right.

“I was a student in Munich in 1966, stayed in the Geschwister Schollheim, was an eye-opener for my housemates who had never met anyone Jewish before. This was the generation who became so estranged from their parents.” That’s very, very true that it’s, of course, the Baader Meinhof generation, all that terrorism. I think it was partly a sense of rejecting their parents. This is going to be a subject of a talk coming up. I’m going to talk about this conspiracy of silence, the kind of amnesia that came across Germany for a generation, I suppose '66 was about the time when young people were beginning to question that amnesia.

Somebody’s saying, “In the final concert of April, 1945, Hitler youth were handing out cyanide to the audience.” Oh god.

Somebody who’s saying, “The Tosca performance sounded like Monty Python.” I think it’s very exciting, actually.

“Gilda’s name,” Erna Berger. Erna Berger. Should be on your list, I think, that you’ve been sent.

If you understand German, there was a wonderful series of interviews with famous singers, many from this period, and just after the war, with August Everding. You can see all those on YouTube.

“What questions would…” Well I would’ve, you know, I’d like to have known what she felt about taking part in Hitler’s birthday concert in 1942. We have film, a little excerpt of film of her, at the end she’s sort of smiling. I’d like to have probed a little bit more about what she said in her autobiography about not knowing, or perhaps not wanting to know, what was going on.

“Can you ask Patrick if he believes the world should enjoy the talents of individuals regardless of their Nazi, anti-Semitic views. Should they be shunned for all eternity?” It’s such a difficult one. And, of course, you know, we’re getting the same… I was appalled, actually, on Radio 3 to hear a discussion about whether we should ever listen again to recordings conducted by, you know, the former director of the Met, who’s just been accused of all these, you know, paedophilia and all this kind of thing. I don’t know. I mean, I can’t give you a clear answer to that. I mean, there are certain… I’m very, very inconsistent and I know that. I don’t tend to listen to Karajan or Schwarzkopf, I find, but it’s partly 'cause I just don’t like their music making, and partly I don’t like their personalities. There are other artists from that period who I know were party members or had Nazi sympathies that I do listen to. So, I’m not really the person to be able to give you an answer to that one.

Somebody’s saying they’re glad I don’t like Schwarzkopf. Well, she’s a very artificial singer, I would say. Very completely artificial technique, and I find her insincere as an interpreter.

“Ernst, full name of Ernst,” Gombrish, was that at the end? Ernst Gombrish, probably. Oh, it was Audi, the “Vorsprung durch Technik.” Thank you.

“Do I think,” no, I don’t think, I’m quite sure that Furtwängler was not a Nazi. That’s not really the question. The question is how far did he collaborate, and how far can he be blamed for that? But, I’m going to be discussing this with regards to Strauss in my next talk. Again, for me, there was nothing in Strauss’s thinking that was Nazi. But that’s not the question. The question is, can he be blamed for collaboration?

“I had the opportunity to programme Gerhard Wagner in Toronto in 1997, descendant of Richard Wagner, humanitarian, supporter of Israel, outcast by his family.” Yes. You should also think about the great Friedlinde Wagner, the granddaughter. An incredibly brave woman. As a teenager, despite death threats from her own mother, she turned her back on Hitler and the Wagner family at the time.

“Who were the people who told Germany what was happening?” “Were the people who told Churchill what was happening in Germany rewarded by Churchill?” That I don’t really know. And I’m not sure if you’re talking about people in Germany who provided information. My guess is they probably weren’t rewarded.

“Frank Whittle developed the jet engine before the Germans.” I can’t comment on that, but I think, you know, I know that Germans jets were sort of technically superior. Yes.

“You Are My Heart’s Desire,” sorry, did I say delight? Thank you, yes.

Somebody’s saying that “Rigoletto” is their favourite. “Rigoletto” is perfection. What can you say? It’s just the perfect opera.

Somebody’s saying they found it hard to sit through a filmed version of “Siegfried.” Yeah, and “Siegfried” is… I have big problems with, I mean, he’s such an unpleasant… He’s such a thug. And he’s so dim. He’s a very irritating character.

Try listening to Anna Russell’s version of “Ring Cycle.” I think that might help you.

Q: “Do you think Nazi appreciated fine music more than fine art?”

A: Possibly. I think it’s probably because Germany’s achievements in music are so great. I mean, there are wonderful German artists. Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, great German artists often underrated in this country. But everybody appreciates German music. It was clearly the art form in which Germans had excelled.

Really what… “I’ve heard that Wagner’s "Flying Dutchman” is based on a poem by Heine. Yes, it was. I don’t think that, I mean, they were willing to turn a blind eye. I didn’t mention, for instance, that, well I did mention that “Arabella,” that the librettist was Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was half Jewish, and therefore a banned poet. And, of course, “Merry Widows’” librettists were Jewish as well. So, when it suited them, they would turn a blind eye to these things.

Q: “What was the name of the famous Swedish singer who sang for the Germans and has a wonderful…”

A: Oh, I think, are you talking about Zarah Leander? Perhaps you are. And I will be talking about her. I think you must be talking about Zarah Leander. I will be talking about her.

James Levine, thank you very much. Another one of my senior moments.

“There was a terrific series made about the generation of artists in Munich area in the 1950s and sixties. Second Heimat.”

Somebody’s saying, “I had the privilege of working with her in the seventies.” I wonder who you’re talking about. “And she told me she never heard Marah or Manson for obvious reasons until after the war.” That would’ve been, I dunno who it was, but that would be the case, obviously. I have mentioned, I didn’t give a whole, well, I have given whole talks on Tauber at the London Jewish Cultural Centre. He’s one of my greatest heroes. It’s his birthday coming up, 16th of May, so I’m going to go down and lay flowers on his tomb in the old Brompton Cemetery. “Is there a comparison between the pro Nazism of Gieseking, Bernd, and artists like…” I will be talking about that in a lecture coming up. Sounds like we’re running out of time, so I think that is it, probably, is it? Yes. That’s it.

• Patrick, thank you. That was absolutely riveting and outstanding.

• Thank you.

• Thank you, once again, for a brilliant presentation. And I’d love to take you up on what you said about examining attitudes towards the war, you know, of Nazi supporters.

• Yes. So, that’s going to come up in a few lectures, actually, I think. Yeah.

• Yeah, yeah you said that. Well, thank you. Thanks on behalf of all of us. It was another outstanding lecture.

• Thank you very much. Thank you so much for inviting me, Wendy.

• No, no. Patrick. You’re core. You’re part of the foundation.

• Right, thank you.

• I’ve locked down, so thank you everybody for joining us today. Thanks Jude. And of course to you, Patrick, a huge hug from LA, a huge warm hug.

• Right, and from me to you.

• Thank you so much. Take care, everyone.

• Thank you, bye-bye.

• Bye-bye. Thanks Judes!

• [Participant] Thanks!

• Always hope for you, too, bye.

• [Participant] Thank you, bye-bye.