Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

BERLIN.  - “Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,” wrote Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), one of Germany’s greatest poets and most famous Jews, “Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht” - “If I think about Germany during the night, it robs me of my sleep.”  A partially sleepless night preceded the writing of this review, for it forces me - especially as a recently naturalized German citizen - to cope with the composer Hans Pfitzner, one of the most problematical figures in German musical history, especially during Hitler’s twelve years that murdered millions and brought incalculable suffering to many more who survived.

As the current season began, the Deutches Symphonie-Orchester plastered Berlin with posters brandishing its new conductor Ingo Metzmacher and this season’s motto, which galvanized me: “Von deutscher Seele” - approximately “Of the German soul.”  The word Deutsch remains, to use a psychoanalytic term, intensely cathected, charged with myriad associations downright neuralgic to pro-democratic Germans.  To me that phrase signifies a major Pfitzner work I knew only about, a huge choral score for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.  Metzmacher would devote the DSO’s first concert in the Philharmonie this season to it - and, meaningfully, on the national holiday called Day of German Unity.

I emailed my own apprehensive reaction to several personal contacts in the DSO’s administration - which remains unanswered.  Clearly Metzmacher anticipated other allergic responses, for before the concert the weekly newspaper Die Zeit devoted exceptional space to an exhaustive interview conducted by Claus Spahn, whose first question cornered Metzmacher: “Why this ‘quest for the German soul?’”  Metzmacher’s response boils down to his personal quest for the essence of German: “Where do I come from?  Where lie my roots as a musician?”  - questions, he said, that have long preoccupied him.

So far, so good …  but why, I myself ask, specifically Pfitzner?  His music does have a few fans, but on exclusively musical grounds they do not include me.  He has left a thoroughly documented reputation as an anti-Semite - but as Manuel Krug’s review for Die Welt points out, that applies also to Chopin and Wagner, to name only two racist bigots whose music gets widely performed.  During a pre-concert discourse between the DSO’s Intendant Ernst Elitz and the prominent Social Democrat leader Egon Bahr, Willy Brandt’s right hand during Brandt’s chancellorship, I learned the most revolting bit yet about Pfitzner to come to my attention.

Politically thinking music-lovers have difficulty with the fact that some of even the most villainous Nazis sincerely loved music.  Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (whose murder by partisans brought the savage eradication of the village Lidice and its entire population, regardless of age) loved to play the violin, which he reportedly did quite well.  Hans Frank, the butcher of Kraków in occupied Poland, cultivated personal friendships with a number of top-echelon German musicians - among them Hans Pfitzner.

Now brace yourself for the real shocker.  Translated verbatim from Switzerland’s impeccably neutral Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “As [Frank] in October 1946 already sat in his Nuremberg death cell …  he received a telegram: “Dear friend Frank.  Take this hearty greeting as a sign of solidarity [Verbundenheit] also in a difficult time.  Always yours, Dr.  Hans Pfitzner.”

Musically, this concert (involving three vocal soloists and the Rundfunkchor Berlin) went well - as had another a few days earlier, which had combined powerful performances of Richard Strauss’s autobiographical tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” and Edgar Varèse’s still prickly “Amériques.”  The DSO can rejoice in a brilliant successor to Kent Nagano.

Metzmacher’s disingenuous Pfitzner sally promptly brought him an accusation of “provocation” from Germany’s Central Council of Jews.  Naturally he rejected that: “Pfitzner’s anti-Semitic utterances are inexcusable.  At no time did I have the intention to distract from that.”  He called Pfitzner’s 1921 cantata “a document of the time long before National Socialism” and the Day of German Unity an occasion “on which we remember our so varied [wechselvolle] history….  In that context came my decision to play Hans Pfitzner’s music on that day.  Not to whitewash it, not to celebrate it, but to offer it for discussion.”

Okay, done.  But in view of its mediocre quality as predominantly assayed - especially in comparison with so many other far more meritorious works performed far too infrequently - one wonders whether, ex post facto, he would still regard that decision as justifiable.