Hans Pfitzner - The Nazi Era

The Nazi Era

Pfitzner's biographer Hans Peter Vogel wrote that Pfitzner was the only composer of the Nazi era who attempted to come to grips with National Socialism both intellectually and spiritually after 1945. Sabine Busch, in a comprehensive study, "Hans Pfitzner and National Socialism" published in 2000, made a long-overdue examination of the ideological tug-of-war of the composer's involvement with the National Socialists, based in-part on previously unavailable material. She concludes that, although the composer was not exclusively pro-Nazi nor purely the antisemitic chauvinist often associated with his image, he engaged with Nazi powers who he thought would promote his music only to be embittered when the Nazis found the "elitist old master's often morose music" to be "little propaganda-worthy." The most comprehensive English-language account of Pfitzner's relations with the Nazis is by Michael Kater.

Increasingly nationalistic in his middle and old age, Pfitzner was at first regarded sympathetically by important figures in the Third Reich, in particular by Hans Frank, with whom he remained on good terms. But he soon fell out with chief Nazis, who were alienated by his long musical association with the Jewish conductor Bruno Walter. He incurred extra wrath from the Nazis by refusing to obey the regime's request to provide incidental music to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that could be used in place of the famous setting by Felix Mendelssohn, unacceptable to the Nazis because of his Jewish origin. Pfitzner maintained (quite rightly) that Mendelssohn's original was far better than anything he himself could offer as a substitute.

Central to understanding how the Nazis treated him was a meeting between Pfitzner and Hitler during a hospital as early as 1923, not quite on Pfitzner's own initiative. Pfitzner was recovering from a gall bladder operation when a mutual friend, Anton Drexler, arranged a visit. Hitler, not surprisingly, did most of the talking, but Pfitzner dared to contradict him regarding homosexual and antisemitic thinker Otto Weininger, causing Hitler to leave in a huff. Unbeknownst to Pfitzner, Hitler told Nazi cultural architect Paul Rosenberg that he wanted "nothing further to do with this Jewish rabbi." Pfitzner, however, still believed Hitler was sympathetic to him. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Rosenberg recruited Pfitzner (a notoriously bad speaker) to lecture for the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur that same year and he accepted, hoping it would help him find an influential position. Hitler, however, saw to it that the composer was passed over in favor of party hacks for positions as opera director in Düsseldorf and generalintendant of the Berlin Municipal Opera, despite hints from authorities that both positions were being held for him.

Moreover, in the early years of Hitler's rule, Pfitzner received an injunction from Bavarian Justice Minister Hans Frank and Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick against traveling to the Salzburg Festival in 1933, where he was to conduct his violin concerto. Pfitzner had managed to gain a stable conducting contract from the Munich opera in 1928, but ran into demeaning treatment from chief conductor Hans Knappertsbusch and intendant Franckenstein. In 1934 he was forced into retirement and lost his positions as opera conductor, stage director and academy professor. He was also given an absurdly low pension of only a few hundred marks a month, which he fought until 1937 when the matter was resolved by Goebbels himself. Moreover, he was rejected as conductor at a Nazi party rally in 1934 where he learned for the first time that Hitler deemed the composer half-Jewish, as insinuated by Bayreuth Festival directress and Hitler confidante Winifred Wagner. Pfitzner was forced to prove his racial purity, something intensely offensive to this legendarily tactless man. By 1939, he was thoroughly disenchanted with the regime.

Pfitzner's views on "the Jewish Question" were both contradictory and illogical (Kater, p. 160), and it is perhaps best put that he viewed Jewishness as a cultural trait rather than a racial one. A 1930 statement that caused difficulty for him in the pension affair was that although Jewry might pose "dangers to German spiritual life and German Kultur," many Jews had done a lot for Germany and that antisemitism per se was to be condemned. He was willing to make exceptions to blanket antisemitism; e.g., recommending the performance of Marschner's opera Der Templer und die Jüdin based on Scott's Ivanhoe; protecting his Jewish pupil Felix Wolfes of Cologne; along with conductor Furtwängler aiding young conductor Hans Schwieger (who had a Jewish wife); maintaining friendship with Bruno Walter and especially his childhood journalist friend Paul Cossman, a "self-loathing" non-practicing Jew who was incarcerated in 1933. His petitions to help Cossman may have caused the composer to be summoned and investigated by Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich (son of the Heldentenor who had premiered Pfitzner's first opera). These petitions likely contributed to Cossman's release in 1934, although he was eventually re-arrested in 1942 and died of dysentery in Theresienstadt). In 1938, Pfitzner quipped in jest that he was afraid to see a celebrated eye doctor in Munich because "his great-grandmother had once observed a quarter-Jew crossing the street." He worked with Jewish musicians throughout his career. In the early thirties he often accompanied famed contralto Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann (murdered in Auschwitz) in recitals and had dedicated his four songs, Op. 19 to her as early as 1905. He had dedicated his songs, Op. 24 to Jewish critic and Jewish cultural society founder Arthur Eloesser in 1909. Still, however, Pfitzner maintained close contact with virulent antisemites like music critics Walter Abendroth and Victor Junk, and didn't scruple to use antisemitic invective in pursuit of certain aims.

His home having been destroyed in the war and his membership in the Munich Academy of Music having been revoked for his speaking out against Nazism, Pfitzner was left mentally ill and homeless. But after the war he was denazified and re-pensioned, performance bans were lifted and he was granted residence in the old people's home in Salzburg, Austria, where he died. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted a performance of his Symphony in C major at the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the summer of 1949, just after the composer's death. Following long neglect, Pfitzner's music began to reappear in opera houses, concert halls and recording studios during the 1990s, including a controversial performance of the Covent Garden production of Palestrina in Manhattan's Lincoln Center in 1997.