Not long ago, Israeli
soldiers stopped a Palestinian at a
checkpoint and made him play his violin.
The incident caused a furore because
it touched a raw nerve: the SS made
Jews in concentration camps play music
too.
This remarkable film
by Christopher Nupen seeks to understand
the meaning of music in human experience
through the prism of its role in relationships
between Jews and Germans. It is more
than a mere documentary: music plays
an integral role in its evolution. As
Vladimir Ashkenazy says "music
takes over when words leave off".
The director, Christopher Nupen adds
in his introduction, which in itself
is a masterclass in the art of filmed
music, "film remembers the artistic
personality better, more revealing and
personal", for like poetry, it
speaks as art, and is not purely literal.
The film begins with
an extract from Mahler's Ninth Symphony,
underlining the statement that Mahler
represented Romanticism giving way to
modernism, visions of beauty haunted
by a nervous sense of foreboding. Arnold
Schoenberg's anguished self-portrait
stares out balefully. It is followed
by Bach's St Matthews Passion/42. Alice
Sommer Herz, a Theresienstadt survivor,
glows with radiance as she speaks of
Bach, "Bach is like the Bible,
the music of humanity". Bach was
the master of German music, and it was
not mere coincidence that Bach's music
was loved by Moses Mendelssohn,. Mendelssohn
lived in liberal Prussia, and believed
that reason led to tolerance and was
the best route by which Jews and Germans
could meet, and through which they could
enter the mainstream of German life.
Moses Mendelssohn did not convert, but
his son did. As Leo Botstein, the eminent
music scholar says, it was no insult
to Judaism: he simply saw Christianity
as an outgrowth of Judaism, more relevant
for a modern age. When Fanny Mendelssohn
was baptised, her father wrote that
"the outward form of religion is
historical, and like all human functions
subject to change" What mattered
to him was the spirituality and goodness
inherent in all religions, adding, prophetically
that Jesus was understood by few, including
Christians, and followed by still fewer.
It was no surprise therefore that Moses
Mendelssohn's grandson was to be instrumental
in reviving his grandfather's beloved
Bach. On the eve of his revival of the
St Matthew Passion, Felix Mendelssohn
noted with glee that it was "a
Jew boy" (meaning himself) who
had brought back into the repertoire
the most sublime work of Christian music.
Yet, like a counterpoint
to this theme of spiritual goodness,
ran the poison of anti-semitism. Wagner
did not invent it, but his rhetoric
gave form to inchoate ideas. Karl Marx,
for example, identified capitalism and
its failings as a product of Jewish
intellectualism. Botstein says Wagner's
writings were like "lighting a
match in a room full of kerosene".
The guiding motivation in Wagner's mind
seems to have been envy – resentment
of what he wanted which he felt was
denied him. He railed against modernism
and the middle classes, against what
he saw were poisonous "modern"
trends which he, too, blamed on Jews,
regardless of logic. His creation of
an alternative scheme of values sprang
from this inherently negative sense
of blind hate. In music, he extended
his resentment to Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer,
indeed to Mendelssohn in particular,
for he believed that Jews could not
create spiritual music. Daniel Barenboim
says that this illustrates the stupidity
of anti-semitism. How, he wonders, can
generalisations like race be used to
define music? Wagner, he states emphatically,
does not "own" music and that
playing his game perpetuates the thrall
of his ideas. Barenboim also makes the
point that Wagner hated Mendelssohn's
"lightness" and good nature.
Shades, I think, of Alberich telling
Hagen, "Hate the Happy!" as
if goodness itself were suspect. Margaret
Brearley states emphatically that Hitler
based his ideas on Wagner and that German
Christianity fuelled the ultra-Right.
However, there is room for debate on
this and fundamentally, dogmas of hate
are inherently anti-Jesus, as Abraham
Mendelssohn perceptively noted. Whatever
sour psychosis created Wagner, the fact
remains that he ended his rhetoric with
the exhortation "Untergang":
annihilation, though in what form he
could not know.
Yet, how strong is
the connection between conscious rhetoric
and unconscious music making? Where
does music come from? Can the hate attached
to Wagner's music be redeemed by the
power of the human spirit to prevail
over evil? Ehud Gross, director of the
Israel Philharmonic, said of the first
public performance of Wagner in Israel
that it was a declaration that Nazism
had no right to hijack music for their
own purposes. The film footage shows
the conductor saying "Let the music
speak for itself". Relatively few
people left the hall – many applaud
the music. The incident caused a political
storm. Yirmiyahu Yovel, the Israeli
scholar, says this might be because
some people still believe that Wagner
and the Bayreuth ethos are still worshipped.
In the four hours of additional footage,
Uri Töplitz, who played for thirty
years with the Israel Philharmonic tells
the original story behind the ban on
performing Wagner. They had been due
to play Meistersinger, but after Kristallnacht
substituted Weber’s Oberon. The idea
of a ban just evolved. But was the Holocaust
a death of the spirit of music?
At this point the film
shifts from the theoretical to direct,
personal testimony from camp survivors.
Alice Sommer Herz describes the nightmare
of life in the ghetto, the deportation
of her husband and her elderly mother,
whom she last saw "all alone, a
rucksack on her back". In her despair,
she played her piano, even though the
other tenants in her building were Nazis.
When the time came when she too was
deported, with her young son, one of
the Nazis called and wished her well.
"I am eternally grateful to you"
he said, for the music had helped his
family, too. Music saved her life, literally,
for in Theresienstadt she became one
of the musicians in the camp orchestra,
playing over one hundred concerts. She
said that even though she was starving,
the idea of looking forward to playing
music in the evening kept her happy
and mentally healthy. At the age of
98, she still practised 2˝ hours a day,
every day.
Jacques Stroumsa arrived
in camp and was asked to play a violin.
He was astounded because he could not
believe that music and the evil of concentration
camps could coexist. But play he did,
and everyone around was moved. The Nazi
said he hoped Stroumsa would not die
for he played so well. "I'm not
planning to" said Stroumsa boldly.
"You don't know", said the
Nazi, "what a concentration camp
is". The shock of this statement
reverberated in my mind against the
strains of the Mozart concerto Stroumsa
played that fateful day. The film showed
a peaceful country scene in summer,
with blue skies and white clouds – the
site of the death camp.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
was the cellist in the camp orchestra,
whose conductor and leader was Alma
Rosé, niece of Mahler, and a
great musician in her own right. She
describes the "crazy group"
of music they had to play, operettas
and above all marches for the slave
labourers. Once Josef Mengele visited
and asked her to play Schumann's Traümerei.
Camp guards used to
step in and listen on breaks from their
work. Yet, Lasker-Wallfisch says, there
was never any doubt that they could
all be suddenly killed, and would leave
the camp "as smoke". Alma
Rosé was murdered in April 1944.
Then comes the music,
the "Song of Terezin" by Franz
Waxman, to a poem written by a 12 year
old girl held prisoner. "Oh God,
do not desert us in our pain. ... we
seek a better world, we want to live,
we want the light". It is an affirmation
that even in the depths of such horror
the human instinct is to overcome. The
drawings of children in the camp are
shown repeatedly: if they did not survive,
their pictures did. Sommer Herz says
that music in the camps was "proof
that music can be magic, the most beautiful
thing a person can experience. It helped
me and it made my life beautiful even
in very difficult times, and it made
me happy". Quite the opposite of
Wagner and his motivations.
After the film itself
follows the music, now shown without
commentary. This is a wonderful idea,
because the listener can now meditate
on what was said before, and "let
the music speak". It is an exercise
in contemplation. One section shows
Jacqueline du Pré playing Bruch's
Kol Nidrei, eternally preserved in youth.
At the end, we see Sommer Herz again,
her face dignified with the serenity
that only comes to those who have resolved
hatred. It is heart-breaking to realise
that the Bloch Méditation Hébraïque
is being played by her son, Raphael
Sommer, who was with her in the camp,
and who passed away himself in 2001.
Next follow four hours
of additional interviews. I listened
and took notes, for all were interesting,
including those which one might call
unscholarly, and several which directly
contradict each other. There is some
excellent material here which surprisingly
didn't make it into the original film.
Yirmiyahu Yovel, for example, says that
what Wagner complains about in Jews,
such as their "rootlessness"
and envy, reflects himself, projected
onto others. As a historian of ideas,
Yovel's analysis of Wagner's politics,
and its effect on Hitler is particularly
perceptive. Wagner's idea of a teutonic
prehistory is "fabricated narrative",
wishful thinking, a past without evidence.
Hitler only quoted the anti-semitism
that reflected his own purposes. Wagner
was bad enough and exaggerating his
influence detracts from other sources
of evil. Barenboim notes that anti-semitism
exists even where there are no Jews:
it fills an illogical need that is deeply
insane. Lebrecht compares German nationalism
to other nationalisms. Other states
gained their identity by rebelling against
oppressors, but Germany existed as three
hundred disparate units, so nationalists
there needed to define themselves by
seeking an internal demon to struggle
against. Some interviewees refer to
an essential evil in the German race.
One even says that those who do not
hate Wagner must be getting a guilty
kick from enjoying the shock value of
the Holocaust, as if it were some kind
of pornography. Botstein pinpoints the
irony that Hitler liked children and
dogs, and Bruckner rather than Wagner.
Asked if abstract music can be political,
he replies that music itself is neutral
and can be shaped by external political
needs. For example, Beethoven's personal
politics were radical, yet he was turned
into a "Sherman tank of conservatism"
by those who wanted to demolish innovation.
Music doesn't have a racial identity
– Aaron Copland, the East Coast urban
gay created music that helps define
the image of the American West. If we
were to eliminate all artists with politically
incorrect ideas, we'd have little left.
But again, it is the
camp survivors who speak with the greatest
profundity. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch describes
the horrors she endured in Belsen and
Auschwitz yet insists "above all
I am against hate". Speaking in
German, she suddenly switches to English
to spit out the word "hate".
It is, she says, again reverting to
German, "a poison that destroys
all around it and those who practise
it." Most dramatically, she says,
it is people who have not experienced
the camps, Americans especially who
are the most "radical" in
their views, as if they have some unconscious
guilt and cannot "be caught forgiving".
People who have been in camps as a rule
do not seek "radical condemnation"
because they have, more than anyone
seen what human nature can descend to,
and cannot indulge yet more hate. Despite
the traumas of her own life, she sees
parallels with refugees today, whom
host countries reject, just as they
rejected Jews in the 1930s. She eschews
labels, for to her "music is music".
Alice Sommer Herz,
born in 1903, loves Wagner's music,
and calls him a genius, but his political
ideas were the result of ignorance.
She cannot understand why Hitler had
so many followers but is generous enough
to suggest reasons in mitigation. All
people are a combination of good and
bad; no one is "an angel".
Asked how she had survived a life of
extreme hardship, she says she was an
optimist. Her twin sister was a pessimist
and "tension" shortened her
life. "Nature and music, that is
my religion" she says, her face
lighting up radiantly. Love is the centre
of any human being: she glows with the
memory of her beloved only son, who
made her laugh in the ghetto when he
sang songs from Brundibar. What has
she learned from life? "I am grateful
to my mother who wanted us to learn,
to know, to be thankful for everything
..... seeing the sun, seeing a smile,
hearing a nice word. Everything is a
present to be thankful for".
After this words would
not suffice. Evgeny Kissin then plays
the andante espressivo from Brahms'
F minor piano sonata, Op 5, a work of
youth and optimism. His face and body
language seem to express what Sommer
Herz, Lasker-Wallfisch and Stroumsa
mean.
Perhaps I have described
too much, without analysis. But the
impact of this DVD is such that it would
be picky to comment on things like playing
(which is very good). There is so much
to ponder on. Here is proof of Mahler's
statement that music exists other than
"in the notes". Ultimately
it links to something fundamental in
the human spirit. There is a lot in
these five and a half hours of viewing
and listening to take on board, but
it is an undertaking well worth the
effort.
Anne Ozorio
Directed and written by Christopher Nupen. 
BBC/OPUS
ARTE OA CN0909 D [330:00] 
