Rubble Music

RUBBLE OPERA AFTER 1945

East Berlin’s Staatsoper and West Berlin’s Städtische Oper

Staging Opera’s Rubble Hour

Wandering through the ruins of Hamburg shortly after its 1943 firebombing, writer Hans Erich Nossack asked of the cratered landscape, “Was all this just scenery for a fantastic opera?”¹ The air war’s destruction annihilated urban Germany, as old town timber buildings and narrow passageways were transformed into kindling by phosphorus bombs. Opera houses, often centrally located, were damaged along with military targets and homes, as the flames made no distinction. Walking past Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt to the Staatsoper in early May 1945, aspiring actress Sabine K. noted the opera’s decrepit condition in her diary: “Vehicles and artillery stood in ruins. . . . This [the opera] was as much my home as our flat and it should be made so once again. . . . We have truly suffered, and now this.”² Sabine K. saw the operatic ruins as a visual metaphor for German victimhood, as hardly any opera houses remained standing. By the Third Reich’s defeat, the Wiesbaden opera house was the only one in Germany left unscathed.³

Opera provided ripe grounds for the staging of German postwar suffering, as the stunning visual display of these bombed structures became a garish spectacle. Venues that remained partially intact were often repurposed by the Allies to billet or entertain soldiers. Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law, was horrified to hear American GIs playing jazz on her piano and to see Italian opera and other “desecrations” staged at Bayreuth. The Nuremberg opera house became home to the Stork Club, a popular nightclub for soldiers. At Munich’s Prinzregententheater, Allied troops threw out the seats so they could sleep in the balcony.⁴

Neither the Western Allies nor German civilians could reach a consensus about how to rebuild operatic culture. In April 1945, Richard Strauss wrote a manifesto about the genre’s way forward, proposing a radical plan of reconstruction. According to the eighty-year-old composer, each German city should (re)build two opera houses: a smaller venue for Spieloper and serious operas, and a larger hall reserved for Wagnerian opera and, of course, Strauss’s own works. Other musicians, however, were more reluctant to perform canonic nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germanic repertoire. When asked by Melos magazine how he envisioned opera’s reconstruction, the intendant of Stuttgart Opera argued that companies should begin with Gluck and Mozart, or even French and Italian Spieloper, absolutely avoiding monolithic works by composers such as Wagner.⁵ Amid shattered halls and rubbled repertoires, what was the sound of German opera in 1945?

After the cease-fire, Berlin was left with the ruined shells of its four opera houses: the Staatsoper, Städtische Oper, Volksoper, and Komische Oper. Initial efforts to rebuild the city’s operatic culture centered exclusively on the British-supervised Städtische Oper (renamed the Deutsche Oper in 1961), and the Russian-licensed Staatsoper. The Komische, now located in the Soviet sector, reopened only in 1947, and the Volksoper closed entirely. Of primary concern for the Städtische Oper and Staatsoper was to find serviceable venues, or detour theaters (Ausweichtheater). With their home on Unter den Linden destroyed, Staatsoper singers and staff helped install the opera company at the Admiralspalast on Friedrichstraße, a theater chosen for its roof. Städtische Oper management began making plans to move to the Theater des Westens on Kantstraße, formerly the home of the Volksoper, as their regular Bismarkstrasse house was in ruins. The Kantstraße venue was hardly in perfect shape, with soldiers’ bodies in the lobby and its roof partially collapsed into the orchestra pit, but it was smaller and would be easier to repair.⁶

On May 15, General Nikolai Bersarin appointed conductor Heinz Tietjen to lead the reconstruction of the city’s opera houses, placing Soviet military administration resources at his disposal. An excellent musician and unrelenting opportunist, Tietjen had served as director of the Städtische Oper in the 1920s, artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival between 1931 and 1945, and director of the Staatsoper under Hermann Göring as minister-president from 1936 onward. On June 8, Bersarin abruptly released Tietjen from his duties, most likely having learned of the conductor’s activities under National Socialism. Bersarin did not ban him from further employment in the cultural sector, however, suggesting the Soviets could tolerate Tietjen’s past as long as he was not the figurehead for the city’s operatic reconstruction. The Russians then appointed actor and director Ernst Legal to lead the Staatsoper, conductor Robert Heger as head of the Staatskapelle, and singer and actor Michael Bohnen to serve as director of the Städtische Oper. Legal, Heger, Bohnen, and Tietjen, all artists who had been active under National Socialism, would find they awaited completely disparate, if entirely arbitrary, denazification processes at the hands of the Allied occupiers.⁷

In planning the 1945/46 season, material and personnel shortages had to be quickly accounted for, as many singers had fled Berlin or were otherwise missing. The initial offerings of each house revealed a great deal about their artistic and political trajectories, as well as the divergent Cold War paths on which they would soon embark. The cultural occupation of East and West Berlin played out through opera and its production, staging, and financing—a point of convergence and controversy for the Allied occupiers and German civilians alike. Unlike orchestral music, opera could claim a new, antifascist orientation by simply changing its venues, sets, and costumes as the tense contradictions of the country’s years of National Socialism revealed themselves on postwar opera stages. While the Allies wanted to introduce German opera-goers to works from their respective nations, Berliners themselves were interested in exploring themes of civilian suffering through their staging choices. By hearing the city’s rubble in literal and figurative senses through operatic restitution, personnel decisions, and repertoire selection, civilians used opera to stage occupier-sanctioned forms of German victimhood.

Rubble and Restitution

While the Philharmonic and other ensembles began the arduous process of locating musicians, instruments, and venues, Berlin’s opera companies had the added responsibility of reassembling costumes, props, and set pieces. During the war, holdings from various German music institutions (as well as goods stolen from occupied countries) were hidden in rural salt mines and palaces. After the 1944 closing of most theaters and opera houses to mobilize personnel for the war effort, both major Berlin opera houses evacuated large parts of their collections to off-site locations.⁸

The Staatsoper sent more than one hundred fifty thousand costumes and seven tons of musical scores, including their “non-Aryan works” (nicht arischen Werke) and three boxes from the Wagner library, to Heimboldshausen salt mine in central Germany. Smaller groups of scores and costumes were also shipped to shafts in Bad Landeck (including twenty thousand props), and Salzdettfurt (ten thousand pairs of shoes and another forty-six thousand costumes). The Städtische Oper sent instruments and musical scores to Seesen in lower Saxony, a second shipment of musical scores to Neuenhagen bei Berlin, and another set of instruments valued at 127,000 Reichsmarks (RM) to Schloß Raduhn near Königsberg. Although the goods may have been protected from aerial attacks, they were susceptible to postwar pillaging, as German civilians, soldiers, and displaced persons depleted most of these caches once they discovered them. The Städtische Oper employee sent to retrieve the instruments at Raduhn, for example, found every case had already been ripped open and each instrument removed.⁹

Materials remaining in palaces and salt mines in August 1945 became the property of their respective occupation power. The Heimboldshausen salt mine (fig. 3.1) used to store the Staatsoper holdings was now located in the American zone. Cultural officers authorized thirteen German civilians to organize the collection, “for loan to BERLIN opera companies,”¹⁰ to use in the 1945/46 Staatsoper and Städtische Oper seasons. Yet, as the word “loan” suggests, the Americans begrudgingly relinquished only a fraction of the items, as cultural officers did not want to surrender the materials to the Soviets, despite the fact that the costumes belonged to the Russian-licensed Staatsoper. US cultural officers also kept much of the Staatsoper’s music, removing three truckloads of scores to become the American-controlled music lending library in Frankfurt. As late as February 1947, Sergei Tulpanov was still demanding the return of the items, and the Americans seemed delighted to finally have the upper hand, responding to Tulpanov’s inquiries that “there exists no authority under which your request for the return of the collection can be fulfilled.”¹¹

The redrawing of Germany’s postwar borders further complicated questions of restitution. Bad Landeck reverted to Polish territory (Lądek-Zdrój) after the Germans were expelled as part of the Potsdam Agreement, and the Staatsoper could no longer lay claim to the materials stored there either. Between their forfeited goods at Heimboldshausen and Bad Landeck, the company estimated their material losses to be approximately 53 million RM. As Staatsoper director Ernst Legal reported in 1946 concerning the prior year’s events, “The situation of opera was the most difficult imaginable. They [the Staatsoper] had lost their house and all their warehouses that held all kinds of decorations, costumes, materials, and furniture. We had, in the material sense, absolutely nothing.”¹² Yet despite the lack of scores, instruments, and costumes, the Soviets wanted Berlin’s opera houses to produce operas as quickly as possible, however compromised, however rubbled each company’s personnel might be.

Rubble and Personnel: Denazification

Erna Berger felt no pressing urge to leave Berlin in April 1945. As the Staatsoper’s star coloratura soprano, Berger was still performing in the city on April 15, giving a concert with several other Staatsoper singers featuring Mozart and Verdi arias. On April 17, she recorded Strauss’s Brentano Lieder at the broadcasting studio on Masurenallee, although Berger herself admitted in her memoir, “When I think of that today, it appears to me to be completely insane.”¹³ Hiding in her Dahlem cellar with friends and neighbors throughout the invasion, Berger survived, resuming her work with the Staatsoper, for, “in the middle of total devastation, cultural life was fascinatingly quick to begin again.”¹⁴ Aside from Berger, other principal singers who had remained reclaimed their former positions, including bass Josef Greindl, baritone Willi Domgraf-Faßbender, mezzo-soprano Margarete Klose, soprano Tiana Lemnitz, tenor Peter Anders, and bass-baritone Jaro Prohaska. Although the Staatsoper’s financial ledgers from April and May 1945 were destroyed, an estimated 85,000 RM remained in their coffers, some 63,330 RM of which was paid to staff who assisted in moving the company to the Admiralspalast, their new Friedrichstraße venue. The transition was not without incident, as the theater’s owner, Staatsoper management, and city officials argued for the next year about how much the city owed the Admiralspalast for repairs.¹⁵

Bersarin gave Staatsoper director Ernst Legal orders to begin staging operas by August 1, and to speed up the process, the general granted former party members permission to resume work. Some fifty former party members at the Staatsoper (including singers and technicians) helped with reconstruction. As Legal reported to city authorities, “It was only logical if the commandant’s office gave the order to resume working that party members would also be used.”¹⁶ In line with Bersarin’s recommendation, Staatsoper management would also turn a blind eye to the former political activities of its members. Karl August Neumann, a baritone engaged at the Staatsoper since 1933, could not believe there were no sanctions imposed on former party members, and in a letter to Erich Otto, president of the German Actors’ Union, Neumann complained, “As opposed to the cleaning methods that the Nazis used in the fields of Art and Propaganda . . . one encounters today an incomprehensible tolerance in all places.”¹⁷ Neumann even went so far as to attach a list of Staatsoper party members, complete with a description of their activities under the Third Reich.

By the beginning of July, Legal began casting for the rapidly approaching fall 1945 season. There were “violent arguments at the first meeting of the soloists in the foyer of the Opera,” as the director was reluctant to decide whether former party members should be allowed to sing, refusing “to set himself up as a judge.”¹⁸ Legal feared the Russian occupiers could change their lenient denazification policy, as Bersarin’s untimely death in June left many unanswered questions. For the fall 1945 season, Legal finally decided that for each role sung by a former party member, even as an understudy, he would hire a non–party member in case Soviet officials objected to any casting choices. As he later reported to the magistrate, for Eugene Onegin, the acclaimed bass Josef Greindl served as an understudy to Ludwig Hofmann’s Count Gremin, a choice motivated by Greindl’s former party membership and popularity under National Socialism.¹⁹

When the Staatsoper season opened with a celebratory concert on August 23, one quarter of its soloists were former party members. In a performance featuring music by Beethoven, Gluck, Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and Weber, Johannes Schüler directed the Staatskapelle, and Karl Schmidt led the opera chorus. Soloists included Josef Greindl, Willi Domgraf-Faßbender, Erna Berger, and Peter Anders.²⁰

Across town, similar denazification questions plagued the Städtische Oper. The company had already begun staging concerts on July 2, featuring excerpts from ballets, several Verdi arias, and other pieces to please the Russian occupiers, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Despite the rapidity with which the Städtische Oper resumed performances (some six weeks earlier than the Staatsoper), not everyone was in agreement that the Soviet’s permissive attitude regarding former party members was the best way to stamp out fascism. (The British would also adopt a lenient policy once they were installed in their sector later that summer.) Concerned that so many politically compromised employees continued working for the Städtische Oper, one Berliner complained to German city officials, “Above all a clean house must be built, and like the swastika was once esteemed, so today must it be despised.”²¹ German authorities responded that because Bersarin had permitted the Städtische Oper to reopen “without inspecting the political affiliations” of its members, paradoxically, all of the “strongly-exposed” Nazis had self-selected not to report for work.²² Despite German authorities’ confidence that due diligence had been served, following the initial impulse to rebuild and restart operatic performance, denazification scandals would plague both opera houses.

Arguments and infighting between personnel hampered the rebuilding of the Städtische Oper, unchecked by the occupation powers as the British, newly arrived in July, took little interest in opera’s denazification. On September 10, director Michael Bohnen decided to fire the opera’s business manager, Ludwig Hülsen. “Laments and complaints have piled up concerning the haphazard and sheer negligence of your so-called management,”²³ Bohnen wrote in a letter to Hülsen, appointing Hugo Diederich as his replacement. It would be the first of many personnel disagreements in the early postwar years, as Bohnen alienated many of his colleagues with his unpredictable behavior. In April 1946, rumors began to circulate that he had been a Nazi informant. In response to numerous letters from Bohnen’s colleagues complaining about his brusque handling of the Städtische Oper’s affairs, the magistrate’s Department of Volksbildung made an inquiry with the German examination board, asking them to open an investigation on the director.²⁴

By October 1946, the accusations against Bohnen had been made public. The Russian sector’s Neues Deutschland ran a feature article titled, “What’s Going on at the Städtische Oper?,” which revealed Bohnen had appeared in the Nazi propaganda film, Achtung, Feind hört mit! (1940). An accompanying photograph from the film showed Bohnen in a dark suit with a swastika lapel pin.²⁵ On Bohnen’s denazification questionnaire from May 1946, he had neglected to mention a film career, simply listing his work at the Städtische Oper between 1935 and 1944 and his compulsory work at a Siemen’s factory as a result of his refusal to join the party. Whether or not Bohnen was an informant remained unconfirmed, but his propaganda film work did not help his cause to remain employed at the Städtische Oper. The Department of Volksbildung demanded Bohnen’s resignation, and in response, the British military brought Bohnen’s case before the Berlin Denazification Commission. After two witnesses claimed Bohnen had been a Nazi informant (and with no witnesses giving testimony to the contrary), the British felt unable to award Bohnen denazification clearance. Forced to leave the Städtische Oper, as of June 1947, he could not find work in either sector.²⁶

Rubble and Personnel: Operatic Rubble Women

Even if denazification failed to accurately sort through compromised personnel, at least one postwar effort to clear rubble remained effective: the rubble woman (Trümmerfrau). The rubble woman dominated postwar accounts of German reconstruction, as it was she who cleared away the debris of urban bombing. In an economy where men were absent for a variety of reasons, from wartime casualties, to infirmity and prisoner-of-war internment, this ubiquitous figure was charged with sorting through the wreckage to feed her family. With 170 women for every 100 men, or 7.3 million more female civilians than male, even by 1950, nearly one third of all German households were supported by female labor. Rubble was more than the mere physical remnant of war; it was also the remainder of psychological trauma. For the postwar female civilian, as Robert Moeller writes, “Removing these social and psychological ruins and ‘rebuilding men’ (Wiederaufbau der Männer) was essential, and as accounts of this devastation made apparent, this too was women’s work.”²⁷

Yet rubble women were also sorting through the shards of their own traumatic pasts. The violent experiences of mass rape that prevailed in Berlin and the greater Soviet zone until 1947 meant that German suffering beyond the air war took on a distinctly gendered dimension. An estimated one in three women in Berlin were raped. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s introduction to A Woman in Berlin, a diarist’s account (recently revealed to be journalist Marta Hillers) of Berlin’s early days of Soviet occupation, Enzensberger observed, “When their husbands and lovers returned, paralyzed by defeat, it was women who cleared the rubble.”²⁸ But often the same women had their own traumas to work through, as the diarist herself writes after experiencing repeated rapes. She, too, resumes her career as a journalist, despite the difficulties and dangers of traversing the ruined landscape to reach her new office.

There remains a disconnect between narratives that discuss the reconstruction of high culture and the lived experience of much of Berlin’s female population. Yet early postwar concerts were also spaces of violence, in the case of one Philharmonic performance where the Soviets interrupted the music with weapons drawn. In the first row of the balcony, female audience members fled from the hall, fearing rape. Henry Alter pondered the contradiction between Soviet cultural policies and the violence with which they governed the city, noting that the Russians were “quite humane as administrators of the occupied city . . . especially in the cultural domain,” albeit, “if one does not take into account the violent first weeks.”²⁹ Looting, mass rape, and occupier-supported cultural ventures took place concurrently, though they were not easily reconcilable with one another.

Consequently, gendered violence and the figure of the rubble woman made their mark on the way postwar operas were viewed, staged, and consumed by a primarily female audience. Opera provided a space for women to take on leading roles as artistic advisers, directors, and performers, positions that would have been unthinkable in other cultural organizations. Ernst Legal realized he could not reopen with Staatsoper without assistance from its foremost dramatic soprano, Frida Leider, and retained her services as a consultant. Before the war, Leider had frequently performed at the Metropolitan, Chicago, and Covent Garden opera houses, specializing in Wagnerian roles such as Brünnhilde and Isolde. After 1939, she continued singing in Spain, Italy, and Germany while her husband, German Jewish violinist Rudolf Deman, remained in Swiss exile. Leider spent the final years of the war at her country cottage in Pausin, but after receiving Legal’s summons in July 1945, she hitched a ride back to the city with the Russian military. The urban center of her memories was replaced by desolate ruins, as “Berlin exceeded my worst apprehensions.”³⁰ Although Legal first offered her a chance to return to the Staatsoper stage, she declined. At fifty-seven and in the twilight of her career, Leider had no desire to mount a comeback. She did, however, accept his offer to serve as an adviser, a position she maintained between 1945 and 1952, in addition to her work as a professor at the Hochschule für Musik from 1948 onward. To help cultivate and train artists, Leider started her own studio as an incubator for young talent, dedicating herself to filling the critical pedagogical gaps caused by war, deprivation, and military service. It was in this capacity that Leider auditioned Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1946, newly returned from an American prisoner-of-war camp, and she urged Legal to give him a contract with the Staatsoper immediately. Legal demurred, offering Fischer-Dieskau a spot in Leider’s studio. Much to Leider’s chagrin, Fischer-Dieskau turned the offer down and was soon appearing frequently at the Städtische Oper instead.³¹

Both Berlin houses selected opening postwar operas that dealt with themes of female empowerment and thwarted romance; storylines that more clearly paralleled the experience of the rubble woman in 1945. In Fidelio, the Städtische Oper’s first staged production, Leonore rescues her husband from imprisonment and almost certain death, a heroine with whom rubble women, rebuilding the country brick by brick, could identify. Leonore dresses up as a man to conceal her identity, a trick tried by more than a few postwar women (among them actress Hildegard Knef) in hopes of avoiding rape by Soviet troops. Inversely, in the Staatsoper’s production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, a husband is unable to save his wife from death, mirroring the emasculation of German manhood in the wake of World War II. Rehearsals for Orpheus and Eurydice began on July 9, and the opera opened on September 8. In an all-female production directed by Wolf Völker, Orpheus featured Tiana Lemnitz as Eurydice, Ilse Mentzel as Eros, and Anneliese Müller as Orpheus.³² The chorus of nymphs and shepherdesses, likewise, consisted exclusively of women. Lacking props and set pieces with which to work, Orpheus and Eurydice relied primarily on contrast lighting.³³ Publicity photos show Müller’s Orpheus with a bandaged right foot, revealing that bodily affliction had to be overcome in the service of rubble opera (fig. 3.2).

In September 1945, the Städtische Oper opened their season with Fidelio. The opera’s themes of liberation and redemptive love served as a musical allegory for the postwar rubble woman’s suffering, providing an attractive escape from the stark realities of bombed homes, occupation powers, and insufficient rations. The company first gave a private performance for soldiers and occupation officials on September 2 and only two days later for a German audience. Featuring Karina Kutz (Leonore) and Günter Treptow (Florestan) and conducted by Robert Heger, Fidelio was performed six times that fall. The poster advertising the event proudly proclaimed it was the first of its kind in the city, touting that its opening had beaten the Staatsoper’s by just under a week.³⁴ Another advertisement for Fidelio prominently featured a sketch of the prison’s foreboding dungeon (fig. 3.3). The imagery evoked parallels with the confines of an air raid shelter, scenery with which the audience would have been familiar. Already in 1944, writer Ursula von Kardorff had written of Berlin’s Zoological Garden bunker, “The walls of the shelter, made of massive blocks of stone, look like a stage-set for the prison scene in Fidelio”³⁵ (fig. 3.4).

Aside from parallels in the staging’s aesthetics, Fidelio’s characters even embodied the contradictions of the postwar period; Rocco, the prison warden who watches over Florestan, is torn between his duty to the tyrant Pizarro and his own moral sense of justice. When Rocco admits in act 2, “I do what my duty demands. Though I hate all brutality” (“Ich thu’, was meine Pflicht gebeut. Doch hass’ ich alle Grausamkeit”), he walks the ambiguous line between collaboration and unwilling acceptance. Rocco’s willingness to follow many of Pizarro’s demands (with the notable exception that he refuses to kill Florestan himself) mirrored the nearly ubiquitous defense of many war criminals in 1945. Performances of Fidelio soon took place across ruined Germany. Eleven days after the opera’s opening in Berlin, singers in Dresden performed a concert version to benefit the city’s rebuilding, and in November, the Munich Staatsoper staged Fidelio at the Prinzregententheater.³⁶

Ultimately, the highest grossing opera of Berlin’s rubble years was Madame Butterfly; the Staatsoper performed the piece twenty-four times in 1947 alone. In West Germany, too, Puccini’s opera was among the most frequently programmed twentieth-century works, second only to Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.³⁷ Cio-Cio-San’s disgrace and ultimate suicide after her marriage to the insincere American lieutenant undoubtedly resonated with the occupied German population. Though not all scholars have heard her suicide as defeat; Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon have argued that Cio-Cio-San’s decision to take her own life can be heard as a gesture of female empowerment rather than one of submission.³⁸ Suicide was another social issue of astounding contemporary relevance for Berlin audiences; in 1945 over 7,000 Berliners took their lives, an astounding number when compared with the 2,000 of 1938.³⁹

Rubble and Repertoire: Reconstructing the Städtische Oper and Staatsoper

After Fidelio, the Städtische’s season continued with Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni), Pagliacci (Leoncavallo), The Bartered Bride (Smetana), Otello (Verdi), Martha, or The Market at Richmond (von Flotow), Simon Boccanegra (Verdi), and The Barber of Seville (Rossini). By 1947, as Bohnen’s denazification defense was unraveling, the Städtische Oper was mounting its first contemporary opera production since the war. Information Services Control had secured the rights for Peter Grimes, and it was subsequently produced in other British-occupied cities, including Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and Mannheim. The opera’s misunderstood and spurned protagonist paralleled, in many ways, Bohnen’s own expulsion from the fold, and more broadly, Peter Grimes was the ideal operatic parable for postwar Germany with its themes of alienation, repression, and mistrust. Conducted by Robert Heger and directed by Werner Kelch, the opera opened at the Städtische Oper on May 23, 1947, starting a weeklong celebration of English culture in Berlin. To ensure its pedagogical import was not lost on the audience, the opera was sung in German, and the cast received thirty-three curtain calls after the Berlin premiere.⁴⁰ A critic for Die Welt considered Britten’s topic, “the mass and the individual,” to hold such relevance for the Berlin audience that he observed “not only demonstrative applause, but also tears of devastation”⁴¹ on opening night.

Yet Peter Grimes received mostly mixed reviews in the press. Another critic for Melos could hardly contain his anti-British sentiment by rendering Britten in Wagnerian terms, arguing that the composer would have been better off writing a “Volksoper” rather than a “Musikdrama,” as the piece in its current form was of little interest to German audiences.⁴² Berliner Kurier remained skeptical about the Städtische Oper’s motivations for staging Peter Grimes, noting the production could be considered a success only “if the house’s acceptance means more than a curtsy before the licensor.”⁴³

Two more premieres would follow shortly after Peter Grimes, though not during Bohnen’s tenure. Heinz Tietjen was named the new Städtische Oper director for the fall 1948 season, his career having survived his work under National Socialism, his dismissal by the Soviets, and a hefty denazification fine.⁴⁴ Among the works Tietjen programmed for his first season were Verdi’s Don Carlos, in which the young Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau made his Berlin debut as Rodrigue, and Die Flut, a contemporary work by Berlin composer Boris Blacher. Werner Egk’s Circe, premiering in December 1948, was the high point of the season. Egk was the former leader of the composer’s section of the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK) under the Third Reich, and another musician who continued his career in West Germany unimpeded by his activities during National Socialism. (In contrast, the Soviets premiered only two other German operas between 1945 and 1950, in Zwickau and Radebeul, hardly urban centers where such performances would have attracted much attention or scrutiny.)⁴⁵

Meanwhile, the Soviet-licensed Staatsoper’s 1945 season consisted of operas carefully tailored to appeal to both Russian and German audiences: Rigoletto (Verdi), Eugene Onegin (Tchaikovsky), and Hansel and Gretel (Humperdinck). As Legal admitted in a report to the magistrate, the repertoire selection “could of course not be completely free choice,” but was mostly dependent on “the possibilities of obtaining the materials.”⁴⁶ Leider was more forthcoming in her assessment: “The management had to take into consideration the preference of the Russians for their own operas.” ⁴⁷ Eugene Onegin opened on November 7. Starring Josef Burgwinkel, Erich Witte, and Ludwig Hofmann, and directed by Wolf Völker, the opera’s set, designed by Karl Doll, was reminiscent of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, uniting the Russian classic with German Romanticism. Legal was ecstatic to report that Eugene Onegin earned Staatsoper management the support of Lieutenant Colonel A. Sudakow, leader of the Department of Volksbildung, the division responsible for supervising German cultural life. Legal was pleased; the number of Russians in the audience began to climb.⁴⁸

Staatsoper productions were soon successful in attracting all of the occupation powers, not just the Soviets, collapsing the new borders of the city. In December, Erna Berger played Hansel in the December production of Hansel and Gretel, directed by Frida Leider. Enthusiastically received, British soldiers threw real chocolate onstage. Marjorie Clay, wife of American military governor Lucius Clay, loved the production so much that she invited the singers to give a benefit performance in the American sector. The set featured a real gingerbread house, which Berger ate parts of after the performance.⁴⁹

The Staatsoper’s three 1946 productions—Tiefland (d’Albert), Madame Butterfly (Puccini), and Tales of Hoffmann (Offenbach)—found increasing financial success. Already in September 1945, the Staatsoper took in 100,000 RM, which grew to 250,000 RM in November, and by January 1946 had topped 500,000 RM per month. The 210 Staatsoper performances between September 1945 and May 1946 produced a gross sum of 3.5 million RM. At the invitation of the Soviets, Nicolas Nabokov reluctantly attended Madame Butterfly during winter 1946. Arriving late to the performance, he squeezed past officers from all occupation powers, finally reaching his seat in the eighth row. He could scarcely sit down before an American general began pestering him with questions about the opera’s plot, relieved Nabokov could “tell us what this G.D. thing is all about.”⁵⁰ Nabokov’s description only enraged the general, who took offense that an American officer, Lieutenant Pinkerton (or “Linkerton” as the program notes called him), behaves so dishonorably.⁵¹

Just as opera was a status symbol of bourgeois culture in prewar Germany, so too would the opera house become a place for the Allies to flaunt their cultural reeducation programs and musical achievements. The Soviets cultivated Russian German operatic culture as a formative part of Socialist Unity Party (SED) politics, inviting German officials and other Allies to the Staatsoper as a form of cultural diplomacy. As Frida Leider recalled, “Audiences came from all four sectors of Berlin, and one saw Berliners, English, French, Americans and Russians sitting peaceably side by side in the stalls. . . . Every language was spoken in the intervals.”⁵² The Russian occupiers catered to the needs of the German operatic community, providing better rations, improved working conditions, and higher salaries than the western occupiers.⁵³ In the late 1940s, there remained great optimism concerning the creation of a socialist, antifascist state, as Joy Calico has noted, and the Soviets quickly mobilized Berlin’s operatic culture to create a partnership between the Soviet Union and East Germany.⁵⁴

Rubble and Repertoire: Germans, Jews, and the Ruins of Operatic Works

Aside from works like Peter Grimes and Eugene Onegin, programmed in a deferential nod to their respective occupiers, the repertoire of both Berlin houses remained largely the same as it had been during the National Socialist years. Beethoven was the most frequently performed composer in 1945 Berlin, and Fidelio became a staple of the Städtische’s offerings. Wagner, too, was often performed in Berlin’s opera houses.⁵⁵ Yet what did it mean to stage works by these composers in ruined spaces, monolithic operas of the nineteenth century amid the shattered debris of aerial warfare? As Leon Botstein notes of 1945, “The appearance of innocence in the normalcy and presumed neutrality of musical life during and after the war is strikingly seductive. That alone recommends it as an object for scrutiny.”⁵⁶

Critical reception of Fidelio in postwar Germany was overwhelmingly positive, with reviewers hearing a polyphony of connections to contemporary events. In Berlin, one critic argued that Beethoven’s music was well suited “to describe a totalitarian system.”⁵⁷ Suggesting Fidelio’s imprisonment was a result of his antifascist ideals and making him into a kind of resistance fighter was certainly an appealing reading of the opera in the immediate postwar period, an era searching for a redemptive narrative of German cultural production. Similarly, musicologist Georg Knepler, who returned to East Berlin in 1949, argued that Fidelio encouraged the idea “that one must be prepared in the struggle against injustice to take up arms.”⁵⁸ Antifascist interpretations of Beethoven’s opera represented a speedy reversal from its many stagings during the Third Reich, collapsing historical eras to suggest that the opera could be heard as a critique of totalitarianism. As Thomas Mann, despaired to a friend in 1945, “For what utter apathy (Stumpfsinn) was required to be able to listen to Fidelio in Himmler’s Germany without covering one’s face and rushing out of the hall!”⁵⁹ Yet how could Fidelio be both a marker of fascism’s perversion of German culture and a work embodying resistance to the Third Reich? A playbill in Munich went even further, deeming the opera to be “an anti-concentration camp”⁶⁰ work and problematically conflating German and Jewish suffering. By relating the nineteenth-century cultural sphere to Nazi barbarity, the review revealed the absence of adequate language to discuss the camps and problems of representation in postwar evaluations of them. Effacing Jewish suffering by recasting the genocide as largely perpetrated against Germans (and not by them), the reviewer’s response was endemic of postwar erasure. As Joy Calico and Amy Lynn Wlodarski have pointed out, there were no models in 1945 around which these discussions and critiques of musical works and the Holocaust could be based. The genocide had not yet been given the name of the Holocaust, and it is unsurprising that postwar German debates about who did the most suffering (and where they did it) largely omitted Jewish narratives.⁶¹

But if Beethoven’s music represented one set of postwar reception challenges, Wagner’s presented quite another, especially when considering the Nazis’ patronage of the Bayreuth Festival or the oft-repeated axiom of Wagner as Hitler’s favorite composer. The composer’s music had sounded at countless propaganda events, from the 1935 Nuremberg rally, at which Hitler promulgated the race laws formally excluding Jewish citizens from German public life, to Hitler’s birthday celebrations and various Nazi Party events at Bayreuth.⁶² As Carolyn Birdsall argues, during the Nazi period, “the unity and synthesis associated with the Gesamtkunstwerk offered ideological currency as a metaphor for the national community.”⁶³ But did the destruction of one signal the downfall of the other?

Even the collapse of the Third Reich was rendered by many eyewitnesses in Wagnerian terms. As the Russians encircled Berlin in April 1945, Albert Speer attended a concert that featured, among other repertoire, Brünnhilde’s final aria from Götterdämmerung. The architect and armaments minster described the performance as “rather bathetic and also melancholy,”⁶⁴ recalling that afterward, he walked across the rubbled Potsdamer Platz for the last time. Similarly, Allied occupiers and historians from Nicolas Nabokov to Ian Kershaw could not resist the metaphor of the Götterdämmerung to describe the downfall of the regime, linking the ruinous urban landscape with the end of Valhalla. The monumental, as Andreas Huyssen notes, was perceived in the postwar era as “politically suspect,” considered to be “representative of nineteenth-century nationalisms and of twentieth-century totalitarianisms.”⁶⁵ Adorno, however, heard the regime’s Wagnerian tendencies slightly differently. He argued that the Germans fully expected revenge after National Socialism, and therein lay the Third Reich’s enduring connection to the composer. It was the anticipation of retribution, and not a shattering downfall, Adorno wrote, that “may suffice as an example for speculations on the innermost secrets of Nazi mentality and Nazi reality as suggested by the Wagnerian work.”⁶⁶

Whether due to themes of retribution, monumentality, or collapse, Wagner’s music was never absent from German stages or concert halls. The composer was heard frequently on postwar concert programs for everyone from German civilians, American troops, and even displaced Jewish survivors.⁶⁷ In 1947 and 1948 alone, the Staatsoper staged Tristan and Isolde, The Flying Dutchman, and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, while the Städtische Oper produced The Valkyrie. RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) sponsored weeklong celebrations of Wagnerian opera, including concerts at the Titania Palast. Further afield from Berlin, as Emily Richmond Pollock notes in her work on Munich’s Bavarian State Opera, the public clamored for the composer, demanding his music be played with increasing frequency.⁶⁸ Although Wagner might have been unsoundly in the zero hour narrative of new beginnings, he was as much the sound of Germany’s rubble years as Mendelssohn.

The Staatsoper’s most eagerly anticipated opera of the postwar period was Tristan and Isolde, conducted in 1947 by the recently denazified Wilhelm Furtwängler. Frida Leider directed the production, which starred Ludwig Suthaus as Tristan, Erna Schlüter as Isolde, Margarete Klose as Brangäne, Jaro Prohaska as Kurwenal, and Gottlob Frick as King Mark. Legal and Leider decided to pare down the Staatsoper’s Tristan, as Leider believed “the younger generation of music lovers, after their bitter experiences, would hardly have had much sympathy for an exaggerated romantic approach.”⁶⁹ Furtwängler’s three performances (and two concerts with the Staatskapelle) proved to be the highest grossing five events in the house’s history to date. Management raised ticket prices to double and even triple their standard cost, as Legal recognized that Berliners were willing to pay top price to hear Furtwängler. Perhaps even more astonishing was that the conductor was able to command 10,000 RM per appearance, a staggering sum in postwar Berlin, and one that not even the Philharmonic could pay for their director.⁷⁰

Aside from his performances for German civilians, Furtwängler also conducted the Staatskapelle in an open rehearsal on October 2 for Jewish refugees living in Schlachtensee, the largest displaced persons camp in Berlin. The rehearsal featured the Beethoven Violin Concerto (with visiting artist Yehudi Menuhin), Gluck’s Alceste Overture, and perhaps surprisingly, the act 1 prelude from Tristan and Isolde, the same music they would perform for their German audience that evening.⁷¹ There is a strange asymmetry in thinking about one of the more famous conductors of the Third Reich, in the ruins of Berlin, leading his ensemble in a rousing performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde for Jewish survivors.

And yet, throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, the myth persisted that Wagner’s music had somehow been taboo or even banned in the immediate postwar period. This reckoning, as Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate have noted, was part of “a worldwide backlash against anything that seemed a reflection or a product of German nationalism.”⁷² Paradoxically, the Wagner myth served several pragmatic functions—namely, if his music could become the postwar locus of anxieties concerning Nazi music, then he could serve as the Persilschein (whitewash) for the rest of German classical music. By supposedly excising the offending element, German musical culture could be quickly and simply rehabilitated.

In the 1950s, Wagner was recast as a hero of the German Democratic Republic, while in the west, productions emphasized his internationalist qualities, as Wieland Wagner’s stagings at the “New Bayreuth” eschewed realism and featured sparse set designs with experimental lighting. (It is worth noting, however, that he had already dabbled with more streamlined stagings of The Ring during the 1930s.) As Adorno wrote in the 1960s, to stage Wagnerian opera for contemporary audiences, one must “force what is false, flawed, antinomical out into the open, rather than glossing over it,” concluding that “only experimental solutions are justified today; only what injures the Wagner orthodoxy is true”⁷³—the rubbled music of a rubbled people.

In the immediate postwar period, opera became a sonic platform to explore notions of German suffering through repertoire choices such as Beethoven and Wagner, staples of the nineteenth-century operatic tradition now resounding in the ruined shells of once grand venues. Through its use of literal and figurative rubble, opera presented a unique forum for visual and sonic representations of German victimhood through staging choices, repertoire selections, and personnel. Questions of restitution were complicated by postwar political and geographic divisions, as well as the difficulties of moving materials across a cratered landscape. Compromised singers and other managerial personnel resumed their work immediately, reinstalling their respective companies in new venues, rarely (if at all) slowed by denazification proceedings. Women’s roles in rebuilding operatic culture empowered them to leading positions within the Staatsoper and Städtische Oper, yet they, too, took on the arduous job of sorting through the rubble. Operatic repertoire remained much the same after the war as during (with the notable exception of productions that featured music of Allied composers), creating the illusion of continuity. Perhaps Wagner’s inexhaustible hold on audiences in postwar Germany is not so surprising. After all, it is the redemption leitmotive that features most prominently at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung; resonating above the flames, ashes, and rubble.

Notes

1. Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg, 1943, trans. Joel Agee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 38.

2. Sabine K. quoted in Susanne zur Nieden, ed., Alltag im Ausnahmezustand: Frauentagebücher im zerstörten Deutschland 1943 bis 1945 (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993), 194. Sabine would later join the ensemble of the Maxim-Gorki Theater.

3. Andrew Oster, “Rubble, Radio, and Reconstruction: The Genre of Funkoper in Postwar Occupied Germany and the Federal Republic, 1946–1957” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), 114–17.

4. David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 24; Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 347; and “De-Requisition of the Opera House of Nürnberg thru the U.S. Army,” Box 20, Records of the Office of Military Government, Bavaria: Records of the Education and Cultural Relations Division, NARA II.

5. Richard Strauss, “The Artistic Testament of Richard Strauss,” Musical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (January 1950): 1–8; Alfred Mann Papers, Box 6, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY; and Bertil Wetzelsberger, “Wie sollen wir aufbauen?” Melos, November 1946, 15. My thanks to Dr. David Peter Coppen, who was kind enough to send me copies of the materials on Strauss.

6. The Staatsoper’s Unter den Linden house was damaged by an aerial attack in April 1942 and destroyed in February 1945, while the Städtische Oper on Bismarkstraße was bombed in November 1943. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Die Oper nach 1945,” folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK; “Wiederaufbau der alten Städtischen Oper: Michael Bohnen über seine Pläne,” Der Berliner, February 2, 1946; Allied Forces, Supreme Headquarters, Manual for the Control of German Information Service, May 12, 1945, 196; and Memorandum, May 11, 1945, B. Rep 207, Nr. 645, Landesarchiv.

7. Heinz Tietjen Papers, “Bescheinigung Nr. 125,” May 15, 1945, and “Von der zweitweiligen Ausübung der Befugnisse . . . ,” June 8, 1945, Folder 27, AdK; Michael Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8–9; Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Die Oper nach 1945,” folder 2015, AdK; and “Stadtkommandanten von Berlin für Opern und Konzertwesen,” Rep. C 120, Nr. 1484, June 11, 1945, Landesarchiv.

8. For more on the restitution of art objects, see Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 327–406.

9. Legal to Magistrate, March 27, 1947 and March 2, 1949, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv; Rihoko Ueno, “Monuments Men inside the Mines,” Archives of American Art Blog, https://www.aaa.si.edu/node/3516; Memorandum, June 11, 1945, B. Rep 207, Nr. 645, Landesarchiv; J. H. Hills, “Inventory of Orchestra Scores in Salt Mine near Heimboldshausen,” August 30, 1945, RG 260, Box 134, Records of the Information Control Division: Central Decimal File of the Executive Office, 1944–49, NARA II; and “Städtisches Symphonie Orchester,” C Rep. 120, Nr. 294, Landesarchiv.

10. “In Accordance with Arrangements Made, Information Control Division,” August 11, 1945, RG 260, Box 134, Records of the Information Control Division: Central Decimal File of the Executive Office, 1944–49, NARA II.

11. William M. Kinard to Colonel S. Tulpanov, February 3, 1947, RG 260, Box 134, Records of the Information Control Division: Central Decimal File of the Executive Office, 1944–49, NARA II; and “Operations at Mippe Salt Mine, Heimboldshausen, Germany,” November 9, 1945, RG 260, Box 134, Records of the Information Control Division: Central Decimal File of the Executive Office, 1944–49, NARA II.

12. Legal, Report to the Magistrate, March 27, 1947, and May 3, 1946, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv.

13. Erna Berger, Auf Flügeln des Gesanges: Erinnerungen einer Sängerin (Zurich: Atlantis Musikbuch, 1998), 79.

14. Ibid., 80.

15. “Über die Prüfung der Kasse und Wirtschaftsführung der ehemaligen Staatstheater,” November 22, 1946, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv.

16. Ernst Legal, Report to the Magistrate of Berlin, May 3, 1946, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv.

17. Karl August Neumann to Erich Otto, “Betrifft Deutsche Staatsoper (ehem. Staatsoper), jetzt Admiralspalast,” undated, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1676, Landesarchiv. See also Karl August Neumann, Bach Cantatas Website, http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Neumann-Karl-August.htm.

18. Frida Leider, Playing My Part, 1888–1975 (New York: Da Capo, 1959), 199.

19. Ernst Legal, “A Report Concerning the Number of Party Members in the Staatsoper,” October 8, 1945, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1676, Landesarchiv.

20. “Report of the Intendant of the Former Staatstheater,” August 9, 1945, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1486, Landesarchiv; and Neumann to Otto, “Betrifft Deutsche Staatsoper (ehem. Staatsoper), jetzt Admiralspalast,” undated, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1676, Landesarchiv.

21. Quotation from Georg Rebentisch to Charlottenburg District Office, June 19, 1945, B Rep. 207, Nr. 645, Landesarchiv. Information on the repertoire can be found in “Programm für Woche vom 2. bis 8. Juli 1945,” B. Rep 207, Nr. 645, Landesarchiv.

22. Amt für Volksbildung, Charlottenberg to Georg Rebentisch, June 23, 1945, B Rep. 207, Nr. 645, Landesarchiv.

23. Michael Bohnen to Ludwig Hülsen, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1485, Landesarchiv.

24. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Oper nach 1945,” folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK; and Abteilung für Volksbildung beim Magistrat der Stadt Berlin to Deutschen Prüfungsausschuss für die Kulturschaffenden, April 18, 1946, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1485, Landesarchiv. See also Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2005), 140–41.

25. The piece failed to mention that Bohnen had also appeared in Gold (1934), a Nazi science fiction film where he played a greedy English businessman, and in The Rothschilds (1940), an anti-Semitic propaganda film about the illustrious family’s finances during the Napoleonic Wars.

26. Janik, Recomposing German Music, 140–42; “Was geht in der Städtischen Oper vor?” Neues Deutschland, October 20, 1946; and Michael Bohnen, Fragebogen, May 15, 1946, B Rep. 207, Nr. 641, Landesarchiv. About Bohnen’s work in film, see Rolf Giesen, Nazi Propaganda Films: A History of Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 106, 235; “Kino Lorber Releases Gold on Blu-ray and DVD,” https://www.kinolorber.com/news/article/id/29.

27. Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 11. See also Geoffrey Giles, ed., Stunde Null: The End and the Beginning Fifty Years Ago (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1997), 6; and Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 95.

28. Introduction to A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005). For more on the gendered experience of the cease-fire, see Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–140; Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 48–87; and Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Battleground Berlin, 1945–1948 (New York: Paragon House, 1984), 16–17.

29. Henry Alter, interview by Brewster Chamberlain and Jürgen Wetzel, May 11, 1981, B Rep. 037, Nr. 79– 82, Landesarchiv, Berlin. For an account of the first postwar Philharmonic performance, see Peter Muck, ed., Einhundert Jahre Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1982), 2:190.

30. Leider, Playing My Part, 197.

31. Ibid., 205–9.

32. “Report of the Intendant of the Former Staatstheater,” August 9, 1945, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1486, Landesarchiv; “Aufnahme des Betriebes nach dem 1.5.1945,” C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv; and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Oper nach 1945,” folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK.

33. As Time magazine noted, early postwar Staatsoper productions were “done with a sort of theatrical efficiency that is typically German and intensely dramatic.” Winthrop Sargeant, “Europe’s Culture,” Time, November 4, 1946, 54.

34. Michael Bohnen, “Bericht über den Aufbau der Städtischen Oper in der Zeit vom 1. Mai 1945 bis 30. April 1946,” May 6, 1946, Rep. C 120, Nr. 1484, Landesarchiv; and F Rep. 290 Photograph, and Deutsches Opernhaus Berlin, B. Rep 207, Nr. 645, Landesarchiv.

35. Ursula von Kardorff, Diary of a Nightmare: Berlin 1942–45 (New York: John Day, 1966), 85.

36. That the opera spoke to this cultural moment can perhaps best be heard in Swiss composer Rolf Lieberman’s twelve-tone “peace opera” (Friedensoper), titled, Leonore 40/45, a work he wrote as a kind of homage to Beethoven’s Fidelio. With a libretto by Heinrich Stroebel, the opera premiered in Basel in 1952, and featured the story of Alfred, a German soldier in occupied France, and Huguette, the young Parisian woman with whom he falls in love. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Leonore 40/45,” Die Neue Zeitung, March 28, 1952.

37. Oster, “Rubble, Radio, and Reconstruction,” 123–24; Erläuterungen zum Jahresabschluss 1947,” C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv. Madame Butterfly grossed 408,229 RM by December 1947. See also Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Oper nach 1945,” Folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK.

38. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: The Art of Dying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 135.

39. Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147; and Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 60.

40. Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 91–92; Gabriele Clemens, Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949: Literatur, Film, Musik und Theater (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 194; Kurt Westphal, “Internationale neue Musik in Berlin,” Melos, August/September 1947: and 292–94; Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Oper nach 1945,” Folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK.

41. Josef Marein, “Brittens Peter Grimes,” Die Welt, March 27, 1947, http://www.zeit.de/1947/13/brittens-peter-grimes.

42. H. W. Kulenkampff, “Auf dem Weg zur englischen Oper,” Melos, April 1947: 176–78.

43. “Blick in die Zeit,” Melos, April 1947: 175.

44. After Bohnen’s dismissal in 1947, the Städtische Oper was led by a series of interim directors, including Peter von Hamm, Robert Heger, and Werner Kelch, all of whom had conflicting visions for the future of the company. Entnazifizierungskommission für Kunstschaffende to Heinz Tietjen, Folder 28, Heinz Tietjen Papers, AdK. The fine amounted to 2,185 DM. See also Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 8–9; and Janik, Recomposing German Music, 140–42.

45. Joy H. Calico, “The Politics of Opera in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1961” (PhD diss., Duke University), 33. In Zwickau, Robert Hanell’s Der Bettler von Damaskus was staged in May 1947, and in Radebeul, Fritz Reuter’s Ein Funken Liebe premiered in January 1948. See also Ernst Kroll, “Berliner Opern-Chronik in drei Teilen,” in Musikstadt Berlin zwischen Krieg und Frieden: Musikalische Bilanz einer Viermächtestadt (Wiesbaden: E. Bote & G. Bock, 1956), 76; Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Oper nach 1945,” Folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK; and Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 3–30.

46. Ernst Legal, Report to the Magistrate of Berlin, May 3, 1946, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv. “Die Wahl des Spielplanes konnte unter den geschilderten Umständen natürlich keine ganz freie sein, sondern sie wurde wesentlich mit durch die Möglichkeit der Materialbeschaffung beeinflusst, fand jedoch alles in allem neben dem wachsenden Publikumserfolg auch die Billigung der Presse.”

47. Leider, Playing My Part, 201.

48. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Oper nach 1945,” Folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK; Ernst Legal, Report to the Magistrate of Berlin, May 3, 1946, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv; Edward N. Johnson, Fünf Monate in Berlin: Briefe von Edward N. Johnson aus dem Jahre 1946, ed. Werner Breunig and Jürgen Wetzel (Munich: de Gruyter, 2014), 181; and Brewster Chamberlin, Kultur auf Trümmern: Berliner Berichte der amerikanischen Information Control Section Juli-Dezember 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 55.

49. Berger, Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, 81–82.

50. Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends, New Music (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 258.

51. Ernst Legal, Report to the Magistrate of Berlin, May 3, 1946, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv; Staatsoper Program, Madame Butterfly, 1946, F Rep. 280, 305–1384, Slide 42, Landesarchiv; “Erläuterungen zum Jahresabschluss 1947,” C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv; and Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Theaterstadt Berlin. Oper nach 1945,” Folder 2015, Stuckenschmidt Papers, AdK.

52. Leider, Playing My Part, 206.

53. In 1948, the Staatskapelle concertmaster earned 1,500 RM per month, compared to the concertmaster’s 1,000 RM at Städtische Oper.

54. Ibid. For more on East Germany identity and opera, see Calico, “The Politics of Opera in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1961,” 1–47; and Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 109–39. See also Janik, Recomposing German Music, 140; and “Bezüge der Orchestersolisten,” July 21, 1948, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1692, Landesarchiv.

55. Janik, Recomposing German Music, 314.

56. Leon Botstein, “After Fifty Years: Thoughts on Music and the End of World War II,” The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 227.

57. Der Kurier, June 7, 1949. “Beethoven ist nicht von ungefähr darauf gekommen, ein totalitäres System zu beschreiben.”

58. Quoted in Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 48.

59. Thomas Mann to Walter von Molo, Briefe, 1937–1947, ed. Erika Mann (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1961), 2: 444. See also William Kinderman, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130.

60. Quoted in Friedrich Prinz, Trümmerzeit in München: Kultur und Gesellschaft einer deutschen Großstadt im Aufbruch 1945–1949 (Munich: Prinz, 1984), 146. From playbill, November 18, 1945, Archiv der Bayerischen Staatsoper, Munich.

61. For more, see Joy H. Calico, “Jüdische Chronik: The Third Space of Commemoration between East and West Germany,” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 95–122; Joy H. Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 1–40; and Amy Lynn Wlodarski, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–35.

62. For more on the relationship between the regime and Bayreuth, see Pamela Potter, The Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–27; Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate, “Germans as the ‘People of Music’: Geneaology of an Identity,” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 24; and Michael Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1–42, 200.

63. Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 142.

64. For accounts of final concerts under the Third Reich that featured Wagner’s music, see Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970), 463; and Nicolaus von Below, At Hitler’s Side: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Luftwaffe Adjutant, 1937–1945 (London: Greenhill Books, 2001), 234.

65. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 189. See also Nicolas Nabokov, “Boris Blacher,” in Henrich and Eickhoff, Boris Blacher: Archiv zur Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Fuldaer, 2003), 7:11; and Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2011), 3–15.

66. Theodor Adorno, “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 375.

67. Historian Toby Thacker writes that the French banned Wagner’s music in postwar Germany, along with the music of Richard Strauss and Anton Bruckner. Toby Thacker, “‘Gesungen oder musiziert wird aber fast in jedem Haus’: Representing and Constructing Citizenship through Music in Twentieth-Century Germany,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 169.

68. Emily Richmond Pollock, “Pride of Place: The 1963 Rebuilding of the Munich Nationaltheater,” in Dreams of Germany: Music and (Trans)national Imaginaries, ed. Neil Gregor and Tom Irvine (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 145–68.

69. Leider, Playing My Part, 207.

70. “Erläuterungen zum Jahresabschluss 1947,” C Rep. 120, Nr. 1639, Landesarchiv; Abteilung für Volksbildung to the Berliner Philharmonische Orchester, December 11, 1947, C Rep. 120, Nr. 1692, Landesarchiv.

71. For more on Menuhin’s visit and his performances with Furtwängler, see Tina Frühauf, “Five Days in Berlin: The ‘Menuhin Affair’ of 1947 and the Politics of Jewish Post-Holocaust National Identity,” in The Musical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 14–49.

72. We might contrast this 1947 dress rehearsal with the 2001 Berlin Staatskapelle’s performance of the prelude to Tristan and Isolde under Daniel Barenboim. Arguably, the context was markedly different and separated by decades, with a German orchestra playing in the traditional Jewish homeland, and the conductor himself was an Israeli citizen. Barenboim played the prelude as a surprise second encore but performed it only after he had taken a poll of the audience to gauge support for the idea. He paused before the piece to allow those who wished to leave time to do so. Potter and Applegate, “Germans as ‘the People of Music’,” in Potter and Applegate, Music and German National Identity, 30–31; and Anthony Tommasini, “Music: A Cultural Disconnect on Wagner,” New York Times, August 5, 2001.

73. Theodor Adorno, “Wagner’s Relevance for Today,” translated by Susan Gillespie. In Grand Street no. 44 (1993): 32–59. The quotation is from pp. 57. See also Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic, 67–71; Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 263–309; and Monod, Settling Scores, 260.