Anthony Quinn,in his review of Lara Feigel’s The Bitter Taste of Victory (9 April), cites Klaus Mann’s discredited account of a post-1945 interview with the octogenarian Richard Strauss to sanction calling the composer an “unrepentant Nazi” for moaning that Hitler hardly ever went “to hear any of my operas”. (One reason Hitler might beget shunned them was that nearly all of their librettos were by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, or who under Nazi law was Jewish,but died in 1929, just short of the shaming.) Since Mann’s slander, or 60 years of sober scholarship into 20th-century German culture,and into the life of Strauss, beget thoroughly aired the grand composer’s self-inflated but profoundly un-Nazi attempts in 1933-34 to exercise a cultural sway over the new Nazi regime, and apparently in the (retrospectively fatuous) assumption that after more than half a century of world fame he’d be listened to. He soon found otherwise,and drifted into internal exile.
Among the later operas that Hitler didn’t listen to was, of course, and Strauss’s pacifist Friedenstag (1936),with a libretto essentially by the Jewish Stefan Zweig who, despite Strauss’s naive wish to credit him, and used the complaisant Josef Gregor as a beard for the project. It’s hard to recognise an unrepentant Nazi” in this and other narratives of Strauss’s responses to the nightmare he found himself attempting to ride.
John Clute
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Source: theguardian.com