August 5, 2006
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:20 PM EST Fred Schwarz blogged about Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whose obituaries all discuss her membership in the Nazi Party. He remarks that he loved her recording of the Messiah; I owned and loved her recordings of the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier and a few other things, especially several of her Mozart roles. He remarks that he doesn’t feel qualified to offer an opinion on that controversy. Neither do I. I know that Schwarzkopf lied thrice on her Fragenbogen—her de-nazification questionnaire—in which she claimed never to have been a party member, and that she lied about her affiliation with the Nazi party thereafter. Failing to honestly answer a questionnaire distributed by conquerors feels different from lying later in a career, but neither seems like the crime of the century. An awful lot of people did both. But while it seems too easy to condemn people a priori for succumbing to temptations and pressures one has never faced, it also seems too easy to assume that almost everyone does the same thing under those same pressures and temptations. So without judging Schwarzkopf in the absence of all the facts, what might the relevant considerations for judgment actually be? In the case of membership in the Nazi party, one relevant consideration may be whether the member betrayed or ignored friends from groups persecuted by the regime, or instead sought to help such people. There are famous examples on both sides. Did one stop with simple membership, or participate in conspicuously nasty activities? Wilhelm Furtwängler did very well under the Nazis, but apparently never joined the party, tried to help Jewish friends, and apparently managed to avoid giving Hitler the Nazi salute on one very public occasion, by the simple expedient of tucking his conductor’s baton under his saluting arm when Hitler approached. I have never heard that Schwarzkopf engaged in such ideological sabotage, or went out of her way to help others. There is some evidence that Schwarzkopf engaged in ideological supervision of others. She was Führerin of the youth wing of the Nazi Student Association in 1935. She was a favorite of Goebbels and may have worked in the propaganda ministry. There has been a fair amount of recent scholarly work on musicians under the Third Reich. I have read about that work, but not actually read it; Fred Schwarz’s post made me resolve to do so. Judging people from perfect safety, and doing so more than 60 or 70 years on, feels unpleasant, even a bit nasty. Americans have generally been spared the sorts of choices Schwarzkopf faced and made, but if you keep your eyes open, and have taken up certain lines of work, you may not have been spared the unattractive sight of exhilarated heresy hunters. The problem with not doing judging in almost any case is that one may thereby risk the logical possibility of duly honoring people who behaved better than Schwarzkopf did. If almost everyone behaved timidly, with only a few villains or heroes, the past would be simpler. But there were small heroes, and small villains, along with others distributed all along the scale. And it feels condescending to say Schwarzkopf did all that could be expected of a ravishing soprano. That sounds like a dumb blonde joke on a very grand scale. The idea that artists are excused from the obligation to exercise ethical and political judgment on the strength of their genius makes good poetry (Auden’s elegy on the death of Yeats comes to mind) but is not necessarily wholly persuasive. When this came up a decade ago—some new books had appeared—Edward Rothstein made an interesting observation in the New York Times. When speaking about the Nazi years, Schwarzkopf famously quoted Tosca, “Vissi d'arte”: “I lived for art.” This has since been taken as a pretty good exculpatory statement, but Rothstein pointed out that when Tosca says that, she has just rethought her hitherto apolitical life and is off to assassinate a tyrant. Of course, Schwarzkopf had sung Tosca. Come to think of it, I also have a recording of Schwarzkopf singing Leonora, in Fidelio. One wonders how carefully she listened to herself.
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