I am not able to share your opinion that the new course in Germany might be only a nightmare lasting a few months. I am filled with the deepest pessimism because I believe that only now will we pay the price for underestimating the opponent, that only now will we see that they will maintain a better, firmer, and more ruthless hold on everything than the republicans ever dared to do during 15 years. . . . I believe that we should be prepared for anything and then let destiny take its course.
Hans Heinsheimer, Universal Edition, to Kurt Weill, 8 February 1933 1
This movement has so much that is healthy and positive that one can regard the artistic and other consequences quite calmly. The battle is directed primarily against the communists and Jews, whose influence is being checked to a considerable degree. A welcome cleaning-up has been undertaken . . . in an attempt to restore decency and order. No doubt there will be a reaction here against non-German art, but the really valuable will again be recognized as before. You must not worry about this . . .
Willy Strecker, B. Schott's Söhne, to Igor Stravinsky, 18 April 1933 2
All good music since 1850, T. W. Adorno repeatedly asserted, has renounced commercialism altogether. Extrapolating from Arnold Schoenberg's 1927 dictum that "in the end, art and success have to part company," Adorno succinctly articulated an aesthetic axiom central to modernist ideology: worthwhile art music either floats, unsullied in its autonomy, above economics, politics, and commerce or critically resists its origins and contexts by its very existence. 3 While popular musics are necessarily conditioned by the marketplace and are always, as merchandise, subject to the imperatives of commerce, "good music" exists in a pure state as "art for art's sake." Because it formulates and then obeys its own laws, this music transcends its contexts and "represents a triumph over the world and not a mere reflection of it." 4 Adhering to this axiom, most historical accounts of music in the twentieth century to date have privileged musical composition over other musical activities, including performance, publication, and reception. For example, such bias, unacknowledged and unstated in Arnold Whittall's Music Since the First World War, is manifest in the title of the revised and expanded imprint of 1999, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century. In his "Millennial Prelude" to the volume, Whittall reaffirms his approach while making a perfunctory disclaimer: "Even if much of my own text may appear to subscribe to the outmoded heresy of autonomy, treating its chosen compositions in isolation from any contexts other than the particular technical features selected by the author, some hint of the world outside the work will break in from time to time. . . . It will, I hope, be obvious that a text conceived in the way I have described cannot be regarded as a history of twentieth-century music." 5
The cultural practice of publishing new music in the twentieth century, in particular, has received scant scholarly attention. In fact, the reproduction, promotion, dissemination, exploitation, and protection of modern art music has been studied far less than analogous publication-related activities in the eras of Monteverdi and Mozart. 6 Yet, what is at stake in charting the course of music publication in the twentieth century is not just a more complete empirical description of musical commerce, as important as that might be, but rather a basis for reconsidering the continuities and discontinuities in the historical arc extending from the heady pre-War days of Weimar experimentation, through National Socialist political appropriation of music as the "most German of the arts," to the post-War "tyranny" of Darmstadt serialism. Now that the "modernist project" is being subjected to closer scrutiny, it is becoming clear that the process of composing music and getting it performed (the good, bad, and ugly alike) was usually conditioned as much by practical and financial considerations as it was by artistic impulse. During the twentieth century the publication of contemporary music has been, in fact, big business. For example, Schott Musik International, headquartered in Mainz, reports on its website: "With a permanent staff of about 250 employees and 150 free-lancers, and offices in Hong Kong, London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto and Zurich, Schott Musik International is today one of the biggest publishing houses of serious music in the classical tradition." 7
Music publishing entails large capital investments, big risks, and high stakes. As protection of intellectual property was gradually expanded and extended, publishers entrusted with copyrights enjoyed virtual monopolies over artistic products that substantially outlived their creators. Even investments in a composer who claimed to be writing for a time fifty years after his death could be amortized over a period of protection lasting a century or more, with reasonable expectations of eventual recoupment or even profit. But speculation in the music market was no less uncertain a gamble than that in commodities, currencies, or securities. Care, subsidy, and mentoring of composers, preparation of performance materials, dissemination of printed scores, and ongoing promotion, accounting, and copyright administration were expensive undertakings, with no guarantees against the vagaries of taste or much direct influence over the vicissitudes of performing organizations and institutions. Publishers counted on short-term sensations like Jonny spielt auf to offset the costs of slow starters such as Wozzeck. The fruits from the rare everbearers, such as Carmina Burana (whose earnings consistently exceed a million dollars annually), and Die Dreigroschenoper (earning several hundred thousand dollars annually) subsidized the printing and warehousing of hundreds of scores and sets of parts that did little more than gather dust on the shelves. A few such stocks, including Mahler's symphonies and Schoenberg's Erwartung, turned out to be "sleepers," lying dormant in the portfolio for decades before skyrocketing in value and paying off handsomely in the long term.
Even the most reckless firms hedged their bets with endeavors less volatile than new music: Urtext editions of "classic" steady earners, perennially in-demand pedagogical materials, music for proliferating organizations of amateurs, youths, soldiers, and workers. As the "democratizing" new media of recordings, radio, and sound films tantalized with the potential of a mass audience for "serious" music, upstarts such as Universal Edition (UE) and Bärenreiter competed within a brave new world with such venerable companies as B. Schott's Söhne (Schott) and Breitkopf & Härtel. Germany started the century as the undisputed center of music publishing (with Leipzig as its capital). By the end of the Weimar period, Schott and UE had emerged as the principal rivals for the publication of new music in Central Europe. As Hans Heinsheimer observed firsthand, "The truly spectacular battles between the big music publishers, mainly between the Schotts of Mainz, led by at least one Strecker, and the Universals of Vienna . . . were fought at the international festivals, the trade fairs of contemporary music. It was ferocious and merciless warfare, marvelous to watch and highly enjoyable to participate in. . . . When they met in hotel lobbies or concerts, they greeted each other with teeth-grinding exuberance and evil smiles." 8
Soon, however, genuine international festivals were listed among the "great sins of the time" that had corrupted "the domain of an art that until then had been seen throughout the world as the most German of all." In his speech that opened the "Entartete Musik" Exhibition in Düssseldorf in May 1938, Joseph Goebbels continued: "A certain period of transition was thus required to remove the errors, failures, and manifestations of decline through the cultivation of the true artistic strengths of our German music. . . . The German masters, who with true artistic command had created immortal works of German tonal art, were suppressed by the flagrantly commercial elements of international Jewry." 9 The following year, Peter Raabe, then president of the Reichsmusikkammer (the Reich Chamber of Music), specifically identified the fate of German music with that of German armies: "Not only musicians participated in the fate of German music, but all Germans, inasmuch as the people of Bach, Beethoven and Bruckner [are] in no other art as superior to other peoples as in music. To protect this music against all current dangers must be a sacred obligation of all those remaining at home, while the army has left to protect [the] country and the people to which fate has accorded the wonderful and magnificent gift: German music." A poster captioned "Das Land der Musik" makes explicit this link between military muscle and the wonderful gift of German music; it features a gigantic Reichsadler (Eagle of the Reich) as an acoustic backdrop with organ pipe feathers ( 1). 10
Though the arts were thus anything but peripheral to the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism, attempts at regulation and coordination (Gleichschaltung) of music in general and music publishing in particular had nevertheless been improvisatory, lethargic, and haphazard for much of the 1930s. Situated precisely in the bureaucratic cracks between culture and commerce, where the interests of Goebbel's Ministry of Propaganda intersected and conflicted with those of the Ministry of Economics, the six hundred members of the Fachverband (Assembly for a Specialized Field of Activity) for music publishing comprised by far the smallest sector of the 95,000-member Reichsmusikkammer, which required all who participated in the "creation, reproduction, intellectual or technical processing, dissemination, preservation, and sale of cultural goods" to join. 11 Founded on the principle of self-administration under state supervision, but hampered by inadequate self-financing from dues, the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) initially depended on artists and organizations to cooperate voluntarily with the regime and to police themselves--even though only 21% of its members would eventually join the National Socialist Party.
Several of Goebbels's initiatives, including extension of copyright protection in 1934 from thirty to fifty years post-mortem, directly benefitted composers and their publishers. Subsequently the Reichsmusikkammer provided an ongoing subsidy for the purchase of contemporary music by provincial performing organizations. When the Propaganda Ministry began to monitor musical performances more closely, it issued, in September 1935, a list of "musical works allowed under no circumstances, neither to be publicly performed nor broadcast." However, there seems to have been no comparable ban on the printing or sale of this music, other than an initial directive requiring chamber screening before publication or dissemination of printed music composed by "persons who have left the German Reich after the seizure of power by National Socialism" (AIENG, 139). Even after the Nuremburg Laws forced the purging of 2,202 non-Aryan members of the Reichsmusikkammer in 1936, exceptions were made in the cases of seventeen non-Aryan music publishers, including the prominent firms of Fürstner and Peters, which remained in Jewish hands for several more years. (This proved so embarrassing to the Propaganda Ministry that it directed the German press to avoid calling attention to the situation) (AIENG, 112). Non-Aryan music publishers and music dealers were Aryanized only gradually in the late 1930s. By then, a Reichsmusikprüfstelle (Reich Music Examining Board) had been established to review all music planned for German distribution. But the enormity of such a task soon overwhelmed the staff of four and persuaded Reichsmusikkammer president Peter Raabe to modify the directive so that music publishers would be obliged to submit works only on demand of the Prüf (AIENG, 141). The extent of such pre-publication prohibitions is unclear from surviving records, but the Prüfstelle managed to produce only four lists of "unerwünschter musikalischer Werke" ("undesirable musical works"), remarkable in their brevity and encompassing only 150 compositions and composers in all. The lists were eclectic, ranging from Irving Berlin to Egon Wellesz, but with a heavy concentration of American popular music. 12
In retrospect, it seems as if closer regulation of music licensed for performance by the finite number of German and Austrian music publishers would have been less cumbersome than monitoring myriad individual performances throughout the country. However, competing jurisdictions and power struggles within the Third Reich over responsibility for censorship and the conduct of business, the potential ramifications of restrictions on music publishing for international trade and foreign currency reserves, and the desire to maintain an image of "business as usual" in the "land of music" shielded the music publishing industry from the harshest scrutiny. 13 Nevertheless, as in so many other sectors of German society, even minimal threats of coercion by the state had the notable effect of creating an environment of anxiety in which self-censorship by publishers became the norm. Ultimately the purge of Jewish composers and publishers radically and permanently altered the geographical center of gravity within the industry, with many key res emigrating to England and the United States.
Because music publishing had such a low profile within regulatory agencies, surviving official government documentation of that particular Fachverband is sparse. Understandably as reluctant as Philip Morris or Microsoft to open their internal business archives to scholarly scrutiny because of continuing financial, legal, and contractual implications, publishing houses have been particularly sensitive about their history during the twelve-year period of National Socialism. The largely unreliable self-commissioned "official histories" of individual publishing companies have tended to treat this period as a brief aberration of little consequence. 14 With professional sensitivities compounded by personal ones, family-owned firms, of course, have been particularly guarded in this regard. 15 Consequently, historians must piece together a fragmentary and provisional picture from widely scattered documents extant in other repositories, principally correspondence between the publishers and their composers. 16
Two such letters comprise vivid and nearly contemporary post-War snapshots of Schott and UE. These letters also document diametric relationships after 1933 between two leading composers of the Weimar era and their respective publishers. As portals into the period from very different yet complementary perspectives, the documents warrant close reading and beg a wide array of questions about the institution of music publishing under the Nazis. (The letters appear in facsimile in res 2 and 3; they are excerpted in English translation here). The first was written by Willy Strecker from Schott:
Mainz, 16 August 1946
Mr. Paul Hindemith
New Haven
Dear Paul,
. . . From here I can report only good news about the ongoing interest in your works. It's a real stroke of luck that all your works are available here and that performance materials stand at the ready. The twelve-year hiatus hasn't done any damage, since we were always working underground and, notwithstanding the quality of the works, everyone is grabbing whatever is readily available. Almost all the other publishers can't deliver. Therefore Krenek, Schoenberg, Bartok, Weil [sic], Alban Berg, etc., etc. have fallen right into oblivion, and, of the whole group from that time, only you and Stravinsky have been spared. In Leipzig and Berlin nothing more can be produced, and most of the stock and the publishing houses are more or less destroyed.
. . . Soon I will send you the list of important recent performances that is being compiled right now. By all means do send me whatever you have, and let me know your wishes about what should be held back. 17 [Begin Page 9]
Remembering their first meeting during the summer of 1946, Hans Werner Henze described Willy Strecker as "a witty and affable individual then in his sixty-third year. . . . A native of Mainz, he had an Argentinian passport and a house in Wiesbaden, which . . . contained some of the finest Picassos, Klees, and Braques." 18 Hindemith had come to Schott more than a quarter century earlier than Henze, at almost the same time that Willy Strecker and his older brother Ludwig became partners in their father's company, as the First World War gave precarious birth to the Weimar Republic. While Hindemith's reputation and portfolio grew and Willy Strecker assumed more responsibilities within the firm, their professional relationship evolved onto a first-name and Du-basis. Schott's strategic stewardship of Hindemith's career on a global scale helped him to weather the turbulence of "Der Fall Hindemith" in 1934, subsequently to remain viable within Germany's musical life (even securing a commission from the Luftwaffe), and simultaneously to explore options outside Germany. 19 When those efforts finally failed and Hindemith took up residence in Switzerland and then the United States, he maintained direct personal contact with Schott, except during the years of total war. Continued promotion and publication of Hindemith's works abroad by a network of partially or wholly owned foreign affiliates minimized the impact of the 1936 Nazi ban on performance of his works, furnished a firm foundation for his move to the United States, and assured his preeminence in immediate postwar German musical culture.
While Willy Strecker's son Hugo oversaw from the London office an orderly transfer of rights, Schott's affiliate in New York, Associated Music Publishers (AMP), secured conducting and performing engagements for Hindemith, served as an operational base for his American tours, and provided ongoing support services during his residency in New Haven. 20 "The Pub shop in New York," Hindemith wrote Willy Strecker "is a kind of substitute for the Weihergarten," the address of Schott's palatial headquarters in Mainz. Grateful for such constancy, Hindemith, in turn, volunteered that under the circumstances of 1941 his monthly stipend should be decreased to only what was necessary to sustain his mother and mother-in-law, who had remained behind in Germany. Hindemith wrote Strecker:
I have received your statement of accounts from last July, and a statement from Stagma has arrived as well. It would be foolish to expect more in the present circumstances--in spite of that, the Stagma soared up to a sum greater than I have seen for years!--and I should be glad if things were to begin to look better for you. Though I am certain that things will work out to the advantage of the publishing firm in the long term, even if we ourselves don't all live to see it, I should not want to win for myself more advantages from the situation than seem reasonable. I should therefore like to suggest that we bring our contractual and publishing relationship more into line with present circumstances
. . . . You will doubtless find the fairest, best, and most practical way for us both. 21
Having lost direct contact after December 1941, composer and publisher managed only sporadic communications through intermediaries until August 1945. Emerson Kailey, an American bandsman, for example, visited Strecker in Mainz in May 1945 and reported back to Hindemith that no manuscripts or plates of his works had been lost and "they have been publishing everything that came through from America. The Ludus Tonalis has sold 1,200 copies in the three months it has been out in Germany." Kailey told Hindemith that he didn't see Dr. Ludwig Strecker because the brothers "alternate in going to Mainz. One goes one day and the other the next day. The reason for that is that they have only one bicycle." The soldier concluded, "Herr Strecker asked me to tell you that Germany needs you." 22 Strecker's own hand-carried note reported that "the old Weihergarten has come through it all more or less intact, [but] the printing works are completely destroyed." The relationship between the composer and his German publisher had also survived the war more or less intact. It remained symbiotic and monogamous; copyrights were systematically reassigned to Schott, and works composed in America were soon available for sale in Germany. All of Hindemith's music was (and continues to be) published exclusively by Schott.
Six weeks after Hindemith had received the encouraging letter from Strecker of August 1946, Kurt Weill found in his rural mailbox near New City, New York, a very different sort of letter from Alfred Schlee, the new de facto Director of UE:
Vienna, 26 September 1946
Sehr verehrter Herr Weill!
I don't know if you remember me. During the last stages of your time in Berlin, I visited you a few times as representative of Universal Edition and probably left you with a very bad impression.Meanwhile, following the liberation of Vienna, I've taken over management of Universal Edition, as you might have already heard from [Hans] Heinsheimer.
. . .
During the period of the Nazi-Regime, there were still several employees with me at Universal Edition (especially Fräulein Rothe and Herr Deczey) who tried very hard to save as many of our properties as possible. Unfortunately, we could not prevent the Gestapo from seizing a few items and carrying them off. To my greatest regret, Mahagonny was one of them. Since performances of this work would now be possible, especially in the first version, we want to ask if you might have some of that material. If so, please do send it to us as soon as possible. Do you have any new orchestral or chamber music which could be played over here? I hear that you are working very successfully on Broadway. But perhaps you may nevertheless have written something that might be appropriate for Europe.
Schlee's letter is the first extant contact between composer and his Austrian publisher since 1938. Prior to his flight from Berlin in March 1933, Weill had corresponded with UE on almost a daily basis, most often with Hans Heinsheimer, the head of the stage department. Already then, the exchange had frequently been plaintive or accusatory rather than collaborative in tone, especially as the political environment grew more hostile to performances of Weill's works and the composer's frustrations with his publisher's efforts intensified. In June 1932, Heinsheimer attempted to reassure Weill: "Financial considerations . . . can play a role only to the extent that we remain aware of the interaction between artistic and financial concerns. . . . In the case of Kurt Weill, you can continue to be fully and absolutely assured of our most generous and far-sighted publishing policies." 23 But Weill had hardly arrived in Paris when UE informed him in April 1933 that, because the prevailing political situation discouraged performances of his stage works in Germany and there was little interest in them elsewhere, the firm would have to reduce his contractually mandated monthly stipend from 1,000 to 500 marks. 24 In June UE proposed that the payments be discontinued temporarily or, alternatively, their contract be suspended, with rights in Weill's works returned to him for a year. When Weill rejected this proposal and UE ceased its monthly payments anyway, further acrimonious negotiations culminated in back-payment of five months' reduced stipend and mutual release from contractual obligations. UE stipulated, however, that it reserved the right to recoup the unearned balance in Weill's account from a small percentage of future earnings he might receive from another publisher. 25 Their contract would never be reinstated, and none of Weill's subsequent compositions would be published by UE.
The arrival of Schlee's letter after almost a decade of silence would not have surprised Weill as much as its signatory would have. Because UE's owners and virtually all of the senior staff had followed Weill into emigration, he would have been unaware that the post-Anschluss leadership vacuum at UE had been filled internally by Alfred Schlee, whom he would have remembered only as a minor functionary within the firm. Schlee's name crops up only a dozen or so times in the nearly 1,400 surviving letters between Weill and UE written prior to Weill's emigration.
Prior to joining UE in 1927, Schlee, a native of Dresden, had studied piano with Erwin Schulhoff and served as chorusmaster in Gera and dramaturg in Münster. Allied with the Wigman school of dance, he accompanied Wigman's protégée Yvonne Georgi, and, as a prolific critic, proselytized for the Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) in general and the theories of Rudolf von Laban in particular. 26 Laban's innovations in the notation of dance are better known today than his controversial theories of choral dancing, which became the core of what was later understood to be a National Socialist aesthetic. Although Laban allied himself closely with the National Socialists, he fell out of favor in 1938 and emigrated to England. (In dance he is a prime example of the fallacy in assuming that "progressive" aesthetics naturally ally themselves with "leftist" politics). 27 In his first contribution to Modern Music in 1931, Schlee asserted that art must foster an ethics that would support a strong national aesthetic identity: "The German does not consider art as a luxury but as an all-important element of his life and culture. And he is serious about the responsibility which this conception of art entails. It distinguishes him from almost every other race. . . . For this reason also the ethical content and not the appeal to the senses most concerns the German." 28
Having proposed to UE the founding of a dance periodical, Schlee had freelanced in 1926 as Paul Stefan's uncredited assistant for Tanz in dieser Zeit, a special issue of UE's journal, Musikblätter des Anbruch. The following year he officially joined UE's Propaganda-Abteilung, to assist in the founding of a new quarterly journal, Schrifttanz, to be edited by Laban. However, Schlee soon took over sole editorship of the journal and remained in that capacity until its demise in 1931. That year he accompanied the tenor Otto Pasetti (who would later sing opposite Lotte Lenya in the Vienna production of Mahagonny in April 1932) in a recording on the Paloma label of Weill's "Muschel von Margate." 29 In autumn 1931, UE dispatched Schlee to Berlin, where his two-room apartment on Bonner Straße doubled as UE's "Berlin office." Prior to 1933, the responsibilities of the "bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Schlee," as Heinsheimer derisively characterized him to Weill, had not extended much beyond delivering and retrieving scores and parts from copyists, theaters, and composers. 30
Schlee's contributions to Modern Music after January 1933, in contrast to Heinsheimer's courageously outspoken reports, are guarded if not timid. In 1934, Schlee reported, "The year has been marked by all the phenomena traditionally associated with periods of great change, the principal effect having been to restrict the production of new works and works in new styles. Although Gleichschaltung has been consummated, different interpretations of it prevail everywhere. A unified artistic policy cannot yet be guaranteed; it is apparent only in its broad outlines. . . . The great success [of Arabella]--though the text is derived from the non-Aryan Hofmannsthal--is chiefly due to the general worship of the great German personality, Richard Strauss. . . . This last season has been one of change; the next will determine the fate of opera" 31
Schlee remained in Berlin until mid-1938, when he returned to Vienna as one of the very few employees permitted to continue working in the "nazified" UE. The only hint in the surviving correspondence concerning an event which might have left the composer "with a very bad impression" of Schlee is Weill's response to Heinsheimer's report of 28 January 1933: "Schlee told us very proudly that you couldn't work even with Rene Claire, because he, too, had capitulated to the film industry." Weill replied on 6 February: "Mr. Schlee's strange remarks are quite misleading." Considering the enormity of events during the intervening thirteen years, this minor irritation would seem an unlikely cause for Schlee's post-war concern.
Schlee's letter infuriated Weill. Although there is no reply extant in the UE archives, Weill characterized the circumstances to Georg Kaiser's widow as an "unbelievable breach of a publisher's responsibility to its authors." "Unfortunately from here it's very difficult for me to determine with much clarity the overall publishing situation," he explained in response to her inquiry about performance possibilities for the Weill-Kaiser works. "I had a letter from Universal Edition with the casual notification that all my full scores had been confiscated by the Gestapo. . . . I don't have a single full score of my European works and therefore right now I can't say if one can procure them anywhere." 32 (According to the terms of its standard agreement with composers, holograph scores of works printed by UE became the property of the publisher). Weill died without knowing that all but one had, in fact, survived. When in the mid-1950s, they emerged quietly and mysteriously, not from Gestapo warehouses, but from UE's own wartime caches, Weill's widow Lotte Lenya refused to re-assign to UE the twenty-eight-year renewal term of U.S. copyright. She placed with Schott several unpublished works, including Die sieben Todsünden, which UE had declined in 1933.
Shortly before Weill's death, Schlee demanded that Weill now repay the outstanding pre-War balance on his account (14,607.05 Austrian schillings) out of the earnings from Die Dreigroschenoper or from what Schlee assumed Weill must have been earning from his Broadway success. 33 Weill expressed some doubt after the war about UE's right to represent any of his works, but neither he nor Lenya followed through with such a claim. Eventually UE deducted the balance of the unrecouped advance from payments due Weill's estate. As late as 1954, when The Threepenny Opera began its recordbreaking run at the Theater de Lys in New York, UE's share of royalties (5%) was still impounded by the Custodian of Alien Property. UE subsequently allowed many of Weill's works to go out of print and published only two full scores of his stage works in the fifty years following his death. Today, therefore, Weill's oeuvre remains fragmented, individual copyrights literally splintered, with half a dozen publishers picking up pieces in different domains.
Why were the experiences of Schott and UE and their two respective composers so different? On the surface, the firms seem similar: both were small, family-owned businesses, the former headquartered in the heart of Rheinhessen in Mainz, the latter located symbolically within the opulent and tradition-soaked Musikverein on the Karlsplatz in Vienna. The National Socialists so closely identified both of them with decadent developments in music that their house journals, Schott's Melos, which was renamed and retooled in 1934, and UE's Anbruch, which ceased publication in 1937, shared a panel at the 1938 "Entartete Musik" in Düsseldorf, captioned: "In these pages was Cultural Bolshevism nurtured!" ( 4). 34 Despite the inclusion of Hindemith and Stravinsky, UE and its composers held pride of place at that exhibition. After Stravinsky had vociferously protested his inclusion as "absolutely inadmissible," he received (and relayed to Strecker) assurances of "benevolent neutrality" henceforth. 35 An upstart founded in 1901 and specializing in new music, UE was considered by the National Socialist officials to be the Jewish publishing house. Founded and still owned by Jews at the time of the Anschluss, managed largely by Jews, with a catalogue populated by a Jewish majority and a radical leftist minority, UE was also the principal agent in the West for the Soviet State Publishing House. Any nationalist halo emanating from its original Bruckner and Strauss holdings had long since dissipated.
With a history almost parallel to that of German music itself, Schott, on the other hand, was still regarded in the 1930s as the venerable publisher of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen. Its owners, Ludwig Strecker, Sr., and two of his sons, Wilhelm and Ludwig, Jr., were Aryan. Each of them had dutifully submitted a completed questionnaire to that effect to the Reichsmusikkammer, Fachverband Musikalien-Verleger (Assembly of Music Publishers). 36 Tracing their Aryan lineage back through the requisite two generations on both mother's and father's sides, they confirmed that the "Konfession" of their forebears in every case had been "evangelisch," i.e., religion: Protestant. All three Streckers also certified that they had never belonged to the Communist Party or any other subversive political entities.
Although Willy left unanswered the question concerning former and present party affiliations, Ludwig Jr. listed his as Deutschnationale Volkspartei. However, by the mid-thirties it was widely rumored in Mainz that Ludwig Jr., a doctor of law and tournament tennis player, was "a Nazi"--if not an actual member, then a strong supporter of the party. 37 But Robert Craft's published report of Samuel Dushkin's assertion that "Ludwig was a Nazi party member" cannot be verified from existing records; among the applications for party membership or the membership rolls themselves there is no listing for Ludwig Strecker, Jr. or any of his known pen-names. 38 Hermann Reutter, a composer published exclusively by Schott, recalled in 1980 that he had joined the Nazi party in 1933 at the prompting of Ludwig Strecker. 39 That same year, under the pseudonym of Ludwig Andersen, Strecker supplied the text for Reutter's cantata Der große Kalender , which was performed at the opening of the Reichsmusikkammer in 1933 and then hailed by Hans Hinkel as "the oratorio of the Third Reich." 40 Strecker also wrote the librettos for some of the Reich's most successful nationalist operas (many of which were published by Schott), including Werner Egk's Die Zaubergeige which received 198 performances prior to 1945, and Reutter's Doktor Johannes Faust , which received 116 performances. 41 Besides the questionnaire, the only document preserved in Ludwig Strecker's Reichsmusikkammer file is a letter of 27 October 1942, requesting a fifteen-minute appointment from then Ministerialdirektor Hans Hinkel. It ends with the nearly obligatory "Heil Hitler!" Hitler himself had sent official congratulations to Ludwig, Sr., on the occasion of his diamond wedding anniversary earlier in the year. 42
With few exceptions (most prominently Ernst Toch and Erich Korngold), at the time of Hitler's ascent to power the vast majority of Schott's composers were also "Aryan," and largely untainted by radical politics of the left. During the next decade, the Streckers took into the Schott catalogue the most performed composers of the period, including Egk, Reutter, Ernst Pepping, and Wolfgang Fortner, as well as more than a few politically correct but musically insipid composers such as Hans Gansser. With Carl Orff headlining a roster left largely intact after the purge of non-Aryan composers (and eventually also Hindemith and Stravinsky), Schott could now claim undisputed first place in the publication of new music in Germany. In 1940 the firm boasted that seven contemporary operas it had published were in permanent repertory, including several with librettos by Ludwig Andersen (MiTR, 163). The firm enjoyed similar success in the domain of orchestral music. During this time Schott also discreetly deleted from its catalogue compositions that were likely to be most offensive to the new regime. Orff's cantatas with texts by Werfel and Brecht, and Hindemith's early one-act operas, including Nusch-Nuschi and Sancta Susanna, were "taken off the market" and placed in what Strecker called "the poison cupboard." 43 Prior to the ban on performance of Hindemith's music, Strecker tried to convince cultural administrators that the composer had never written "cheap successes" as Weill and Krenek had, Hindemith did not owe his success to "Jewish cliques and critics," and his "positive, constructive music" should not be compared with "the decadent intellectual musical efforts of a Schoenberg." 44 Without any attempt to disguise the family's and firm's anti-Semitism, Strecker persuaded both Stravinsky and Hindemith to take the precaution of certifying their racial purity and ideological indifference well in advance of any necessity to do so. 45
If Breitkopf & Härtel had led the march into the field of Nazi propaganda music, Schott was not too far behind. Already in 1931, Schott had published a collection of "hearth and home" songs under the title Deutsche Heimat (German Homeland) edited by Ludwig Andersen. It was reprinted several times during the next decade and often took pride of place in Schott's advertisements. 46 Soon after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Schott published the Badonviller Marsch, Hitler's "official entrance music" (roughly the equivalent of "Hail to the Chief" for the President of the United States). The following year Hermann Blume's "Adolf Hitler Fanfare" appeared in the same series of Märsche für Blasorchester. Schott also printed in 1934 Neues Deutschland (or: New Germany), a songbook intended for use by the SA, and Junges Deutschland (or: Young Germany), a set of newly composed songs by Armin Knab extolling the achievements of National Socialism (MiTR,152). 47 In the early 1940s Schott issued Das neue Soldaten Liederbuch, edited by Fr. J. Breuer, in three volumes, with color-coded covers adorned by the same picture of two young German soldier-singers in full uniform ( 5). "The best-known and best-loved songs of our armed forces," Schott advertised. Many of the songs in the collection had been previously published by other firms. 48 Hans Gansser's Kämpfen heißt leben: Weihe-, Kampf- und Sturmlieder der Zeit für Gemeinsamkeits- und Einzelvortrag (or: To Struggle is To Live: Contemporary Songs of Dedication, ting, and Attacking for Group or Individual Delivery) comprised fourteen songs for voice and piano; its frontispiece carried an explicit dedication to Adolf Hitler. Published in 1944, it contained songs entitled "Gelöbnis an den Führer" ("Praise to the Führer") and "Ein Führer, Volk und Reich" ("One Führer, People, and Reich") ( 6). An advertisement on the back cover for other compositions by Gansser published by Schott included "Der Frontsoldat" ("The Sodier at the Front") and "Kampfesmut und Treue" ("Courage for Combat and Sadness") for unison mass chorus, "Heldische Trauermusik" ("Heroic Music of Sadness") and an arrangement of the Marschlied der SS von Kurt Eggers, "Kamerad, die Schicksalsstunde schlägt" ("Comrade, the Hour of Destiny Calls"). 49
Such displays of loyalty to the cause apparently afforded Schott considerable latitude in the conduct of its daily operations, in addition to an uninterrupted cash flow. Even after the ban on performances of Hindemith in 1936, Schott continued to publish his works, including the second part of Unterweisung um Tonsatz in 1939, which Willy Strecker didn't bother to pass by the Reichsmusikprüfstelle. Hindemith expressed his surprise and gratitude: "I had many doubts that it would prove possible, so I'm now all the more delighted. . . . I have the feeling that, for you personally, this little work was not just a routine publishing item, it is as if an unusual amount of goodwill and good wishes on the part of the publishers were printed alongside it (perhaps in this connection with the evil signs attending its birth), and for this I give you special thanks." 50 "It was a sport," Strecker later told the composer, "for me to bring out all these things [including the violin and cello concertos, Symphony in E-flat, The Four Temperaments] despite the Nazi ban, and fortunately we weren't caught." 51 The Streckers' considerable diplomatic and tactical skills also kept Stravinsky viable in Germany through 1939, even managing to export his royalties despite the general embargo against doing so. But the Streckers were not always successful in working both sides of the street. Schott's new edition of Riemann's Musik-Lexikon, replacing Alfred Einstein's eleventh edition of 1929, was halted in February 1939 after the letter "D" and 128 pages because, as one critic objected, although "the Reich of Adolf Hitler has carried out the ultimate separation between what is non-Jewish and what is Jewish in the area of cultural, intellectual, and scholarly life, . . . all the Jewry that had embedded itself in our culture in the last decades is still being honored with extensive tributes." 52
Meanwhile, the situation at UE was far more complicated. After Emil Hertzka's death in 1932, ownership of UE vested in Hertzka's widow Yella, as well as his nephew Alfred Kalmus and niece Marianne Teich, all of whom were Jewish. Under dire circumstances, Hugo Winter assumed the position of Geschäftsführer (Executive Director) within a managing triumvirate that included Kalmus and Hans Heinsheimer. Crusades by the Kampfbund fuer deutscher Kultur had already all but wiped UE works from the major stages in Germany, the firm was still reeling from effects of the worldwide depression, and it was precipitously overextended in its composer obligations for a relatively youthful catalogue, which had already surpassed ten thousand titles. The large number of Soviet publications which UE had acquired in the late 1920s at the initiative of Kalmus, who was fluent in Russian, would also soon become a liability.
Nearly bankrupt, UE was particularly ill-equipped to weather the impending crisis, as it had assembled only the most haphazard array of foreign representatives and subpublishers. When Alban Berg reported to Schoenberg in October 1933 that UE had suspended payment of his monthly stipend of 1,000 schillings, Schoenberg replied from Paris: "What you tell me about UE is very unfortunate. I'd like to make a suggestion to you: perhaps UE would be prepared to join forces with a second publisher. I imagine one could find a wealthy publishing house willing to advance the necessary funds if UE gave them a share of the profits!" 53 Although eventually UE reinstated to Berg a monthly stipend of 500 shillings, he suggested to Schoenberg and Franz Schreker that they consider forming an association of UE composers in order to protect their interests. Schreker had also complained to Schoenberg that an engaged and indolent UE was doing "nothing more than allowing things to take their course and is quite possibly in league with the prevailing current." 54 Schreker confronted Heinsheimer directly: "Isn't it about time for the publisher to undertake some initiative for my works? Especially now, at least abroad, despite the fact that I'm not under any kind of boycott here." 55 Weill was even more adamant:
I get the impression that you've already thrown in the towel. . . . I find it indefensible to have all of you sitting in Vienna and moping instead of doing the only thing possible under today's circumstances: to go abroad and to explore every possibility of finding new markets for your works, to establish new contacts, to track down or create new performance opportunities. . . . It is simply a shame that the incredible possibilities which Paris now offers me (and no doubt Krenek and Alban Berg, as well) have remained entirely unexplored. I myself am doing what I can. . . . I can put all my friendships and contacts at your disposal, but there is no point if you are going to sit in Vienna and wait for a miracle. 56
Alfred Kalmus did indeed travel to Paris, London, and New York (where he was disappointed to find that the 1933 Broadway production of Threepenny Opera was a dud), but his efforts yielded very few immediate tangible results. In August 1935, Berg reported on UE's continuing misfortunes: "several weeks ago director Winter's wife and [Erwin] Stein's father both died on the same day. (Shortly before that, Heinsheimer's father and uncle). And poor Stein has been seriously ill for a terribly long time now." 57 Responding to the recent trends in German theaters, UE opened a new operetta division (Wiener Operetten Verlag) to address the burgeoning demand for such entertainments. In January 1935, Heinsheimer informed Weill, who was then living in Paris: "We have now expanded our stage activity and have branched out from the narrow confines of opera. We're already preparing several plays-with-music, and one of them has been placed in the Theater in der Josefstadt here, in London, and in Prague. . . . I would be very pleased if we could also do business together again." 58
UE continued to publish and promote new works by the dwindling group of composers in its catalog still performable, including Berg's Symphonische Stücke aus "Lulu" and violin concerto, Kodály's Tänze aus Galanta and Te Deum, Bartók's fifth string quartet, Webern's op. 27 Variations for Piano, as well as works by Alfredo Casella, Othmar Schoeck, Franz Schmidt, and a number of minor Austrian composers. Building on the precedent of Weill's Die Bürgschaft, Wagner-Régeny and Caspar Neher picked up some of the slack in the opera department, with Der Günstling (The Favorite) premiering in Dresden in 1935. But soon, one by one, UE's leaders fled the firm. Alfred Kalmus relocated to London in 1936 and opened a branch of UE there, but he failed to transfer or fully safeguard copyrights, manuscripts, and stock. During the war Universal Edition London operated under the aegis of Boosey & Hawkes, which had also offered employment to UE's house editor, Erwin Stein, and its head of publications, Ernst Roth. Arriving in New York the day before Hitler marched into Vienna, Heinsheimer decided not to return; he joined the American branch of Boosey & Hawkes. Hugo Winter hung on at UE until 1939, when he moved to New York as vice-president of Associated Music Publishers. UE therefore lost its entire management team to other firms in London or New York.
Although AMP was nominally as much UE's American representative as it was Schott's, it seems barely to have functioned as such. Because UE had suspended its contracts with many of its "entartete" composers, who then signed on with other publishing companies, it could not merely transfer its publishing obligations and operations to London or New York, as Schott had done in the cases of Stravinsky and Hindemith. In July 1937, Weill, in New York for almost two years but still apparently unaware of AMP's existence, felt it necessary to write directly to Kalmus in Vienna (apparently unaware that he had already departed for London): "After such a long time, my main reason for writing is to ask you to send me as soon as possible several copies of all my works that appeared with Universal Edition. . . . I am starting to get requests from different quarters for my earlier concert and theater works . . . but unfortunately I don't have any scores to show people. . . . What is happening at UE? When are you coming over here again?" 59 Kalmus replied:
You may not know yet that we have founded a London branch of Universal Edition and that since October of last year I spend most of my time in London in order to exploit the Universal catalogue there, and we have also begun a new line with English composers. . . . It would be nice if, as far as possible, you gave us the opportunity to turn a profit, either here in Vienna or in London, with the plays on which you have collaborated. We have heard a great many wonderful things about The Eternal Road. Most of your works (or perhaps all) should be with our New York representative, the Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 25 West 45th Street, and you will find there every kind of publishing support or advice you might need. . . .
I would also like to take this opportunity to recall the contract we signed years ago and ask you sometime to send us an accounting as set forth in this contract. 60
More than a year later, a curious reverberation of Weill's request appeared in "The Lyon's Den," Leonard Lyon's regular "out-and-about" column in the New York Post:
Kurt Weill, the Viennese [sic] composer who now is in America wrote to his music publisher in Vienna and notified him that--although his music has been banned in Germany--there was demand for it here, and a sale could be arranged. . . . The publisher notified Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, who became interested because the purchase-money would be delivered in Vienna. Goebbels consented to the shipment of the music, under certain conditions--and so the music arrived here yesterday. . . . It had been kept at the Hotel Metropole, where Schuschnigg is a prisoner. Six Storm Troopers removed and shipped it, but--pursuant to Goebbels' orders--didn't look at the notes, lest their Nazi souls be affected by the music of an exile. 61
The substance of so colorful a tale might be dismissed with its fanciful embellishments were it not corroborated, in part, by more reliable sources. William Shirer confirms that the deposed Chancellor of Austria Kurt von Schuschnigg was indeed incarcerated by the Gestapo on the fifth floor of the Hotel Metropole in Vienna for seventeen months, beginning 28 May 1938:
Dr. Schuschnigg had been arrested and subjected to treatment so degrading that it is difficult to believe that it was not prescribed by Hitler himself. Kept under house arrest from March 12 until May 28, during which time the Gestapo contrived to prevent him from getting any sleep by the most petty devices, he was then taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, where he was incarcerated in a tiny room on the fifth floor for the next seventeen months. There, with the towel issued to him for his personal use, he was forced to clean the quarters, washbasins, slop buckets and latrines of the S.S. guards and perform other various menial tasks thought up by the Gestapo. By March 1, the first anniversary of his fall, he had lost fifty-eight pounds, but the S.S. doctor reported that his condition was excellent. 62
Internal documents also confirm that UE was allowed, even encouraged, to export degenerate music to enemy territories, thereby benefiting from both the influx of foreign currency and the material's potential for moral corruption abroad. A comprehensive directive dated 14 April 1939 ( 7) declares that works by Jewish composers that could no longer be sold in Germany and Austria could still be exported. Editions by Jews of classical works, exemplified by Heinrich Schenker's volume of Beethoven sonatas, are exempt from the domestic ban for the time being. Anthologies must be cleansed of Jewish contributions by the new year, while the manner in which historical res such as Mendelssohn are to be handled remains unresolved for the time being. Doubtful cases are to be referred to Mr. Deczey (whom Schlee also mentioned in his 1946 letter to Weill). Deczey would then check the "Jüden-Alphabet" ("Alphabetical Listing of Jews") and pass on still unresolved cases to Herr Schenk, who had signed the directive.
The "Jüden-Alphabet" seems to have been supplemented eventually by an annotated list of all of UE's publications, ordered by plate number and assembled from several printed "Nummernverzeichnis" and handwritten addenda, including one for the Wiener Operetten Verlag. The lists were color-coded, with red lines drawn through items which could no longer be sold domestically and blue lines through editions of Aryan composers by Jews and other questionable titles. The list of "red composers" extended from Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Thalberg, and Offenbach to all Jewish contemporary composers and many Russian composers. The remaining "white" group included Webern, Berg, Stravinsky, Krenek, Casella, Szymanowski, Tiessen, Malipiero, Benatzky, Zemlinsky, Bartók, Kodály, Janácek, Satie, and Johann Strauß (whose Jewish heritage had by then been officially suppressed). 63 The three categorizations are sometimes self-contradictory and misinformed: for example, Roy Harris is "red," but Aaron Copland is "white"; Bie's editions of Mozart, Friedman's of Liszt, and Mahler's version of Weber's Oberon are "red," but Heinrich Schenker's edition of Beethoven, Pisk's and Geiringer's of Haydn are "blue" (res 8 and 9 present two pages from this catalogue).
When Arnold Schoenberg, who would soon be one of UE's "red" composers, heard of the "Rally of Liberation" in Vienna on 15 March 1938, with a quarter million Austrians cheering Hitler's entry into the city, he wrote a bitterly satirical text for Lehár's "Wien, Wien nur Du allein." And less than a month later, Béla Bartók wrote to a friend: "not only my publisher (UE) has gone Nazi (the proprietors and directors were simply turned out) but also the AKM (the Viennese performing rights society), to which I belong (and Kodály, too), is also being 'nazified'. . . . As far as UE is concerned, we have just heard of certain plans on the part of a very important foreign country to [Begin Page 24] release us from them." 64 Bartók continued: "The day before yesterday I received the notorious questionnaire about grandfathers, etc., then: 'Are you of German blood, of kindred race, or non-Aryan?' Naturally neither I nor Kodály will fill in the form. . . . Another question runs like this: 'Where and when were you wounded?' Answer: 'On the 11th, 12th, and 13th of March, 1938, in Vienna!" A letter to Dorothy Parrish of February 1939 reports: "These Germans cling to me like ticks. What efforts, what a lot of scribbling it required to become a member of the English Performing Rights Society. In this I succeeded at long last, thank God! To get rid of Universal Edition is a harder nut to crack: I failed in this so far." 65
Officials first placed UE under the supervision of the brothers Robert and Ernst Geutebrück and impounded assets of the company. Then Schott was chosen to take over ownership of its archrival. But soon both Goebbels and Göring were displeased with Schott's "unreliable" stewardship. Goebbels's diary entries in mid-December 1940 make brief reference to the matter: "We are absolutely right about the Schott affair. This firm has no right to put on airs as if it's been Aryanized" (14 December 1940). The following day, he wrote, "The question of Schott-Universal Edition occupies me far too much. But I want to finally clarify matters" (15 December 1940). 66 He apparently intervened directly, and a chastened Schott was forced to sell UE to Peters, another once-Jewish firm which had already been Aryanized in 1939 under the former head of Schott's own periodical division, Johannes Petschull. The firm thereafter was known as Petschull-Universal Edition. After the war, Willy Strecker confirmed to Hindemith's soldier-messenger that he had indeed "bought Universal Edition but was forced to resell it to a friend of Göring's under threat of expulsion from the council of publishers." 67
Very little is known about the activities of Petschull-Universal Edition during the war. 68 Official histories of UE present variations on a theme: "After the annexation of Austria by Hitler, the structure and leadership of the publishing house underwent important changes. Despite the changed circumstances, several department heads worked tirelessly in collaboration with Betty Rothe and Alfred Schlee to stay as close as possible to the course UE had previously followed, in order to lead the firm through the ensuing war years without making too many concessions." 69 Schlee had remained in Berlin until spring or summer 1938. (Fifty years later, he recalled that his earlier suggestion to Kalmus and Winter that UE establish a satellite firm in Switzerland had been rejected as too alarmist and pessimistic at the time.) 70 After the Anschluss Schlee returned to Vienna with his Jewish wife, photographer Anni Taussig, who committed suicide the following year. 71 Schlee, whose name did not appear in the April 1939 directive, recalled that UE was fortunate to have decent individuals as commissarial administrators, who even made possible the emigration of Hugo Winter in 1939. Prior to the war, "export to foreign countries still functioned," Schlee observed, "as the Nazis' need for foreign currency exceeded their concern over promulgating the same kind of cultural goods they had been ting against." 72 Publishing continued on a greatly reduced scale, with Bohuslav Martinu entering the catalogue in 1939; Frank Martin, Eugen Suchon, Willy Burkhard, and Karl Schiske in 1940; Theodor Berger and Alfred Uhl in 1941; Gottfried von Einem in 1943. Among the important works that appeared after March 1938 were Webern's Das Augenlicht and the op. 24 Concerto , Frank Schmidt's Buch mit 7 Siegeln , Martinu's Concerto grosso , Bartók's Piano Concerto #2 , and Martin's In Terra Pax . UE seems to have been spared coercion to publish the type of obsequiously patriotic material that its German counterparts were producing at the time. UE continued its series of regional folk-song collections, including Volkslieder und Jodler um den Schneeberg und Semmering in Niederdonau (Folksongs and Yodels from the Area of Schneeber and Semmering in Lower Donau) . It also published works by such minor composers as Leo Justinus Kauffmann, whose Abendkantate appeared under the imprint of "Universal Edition Dr. Johannes Petschull."
Without access to internal correspondence files, it is impossible to determine the degree of autonomy from Petschull and Peters that UE actually enjoyed. Schlee said nothing about his own day-to-day function within the firm, except to claim that his "immediate concern was not dedicated to the present, but to the future." 73 He emphasized, however, that he had employed his friend Anton von Webern to arrange, proofread, make piano-vocal scores, and appraise submissions. Webern accompanied Schlee to Switzerland in 1943, despite stringent passport regulations, to hear Hermann Scherchen conduct the premiere of the op. 30 Variations for Orchestra, for which UE had furnished the newly copied orchestra parts. Dallapiccola gives an eyewitness account of an evening in March 1942 at Schlee's apartment, with the "usually subdued" Webern turning red in the face and exploding at the mention of Kurt Weill's name: "What trace can you find in such a composer of our great Central European tradition?"--an almost verbatim recitation of the indictments of Weill in official Nazi publications. 74
In Schlee's only published firsthand account of this period, barely a page long, he recalled that "even in Nazi circles there existed something akin to an Austrian patriotism," which allowed the musical treasures of UE to be "semi-officially transported out of town and hidden mostly in churches" as a precaution against destruction by Allied bombing--with Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach looking the other way. Schlee said that in one rural church the "works of Weill and Schoenberg were stored behind the organ," and that other "precious materials" were stored in the Ransau region, others in a monastery near Zwettl and in his own family's summer house near Semmering. The husband of Susan Kalmus, Stephan Harpner, who became a director of UE after the war, remembers that some materials had also been hidden in the bakery of Erwin Ratz. 75 Inconsistencies in chronology, personnel, and geography within UE's corporate memory are probably suggestive of the improvised and clandestine nature of these various attempts to preserve UE's valuables. Apparently no inventory lists were made or kept, because even years later UE was unsure of what had been preserved. In February 1952, for example, UE responded to a cabled request from AMP for a copy of the full score of Die Dreigroschenoper: "We suppose it has been lost during the war." A day later, however, the head of UE's stage department wrote, without any apparent sense of irony: "We are able to send it to you. This full score is Kurt Weill's handwritten copy and very precious. We therefore ask you kindly to take care of it." 76 Mahagonny, which, Schlee said, had been carried off by the Gestapo, did not turn up for several more years.
"The Gestapo," Schlee recollected in 1988, "came to UE only once and confiscated strangely enough, only Weill and Schenker." (So peculiar a pairing are Weill and Schenker that subsequent retellings of this tale have treated Schenker as a typographical error and invariably transformed Schenker into Schreker.) UE's internal records are informative on this point, actually documenting two visits by the Gestapo, on 9 April and 26 April 1940. According to entries in the archive books of the production department, during its first visit the Gestapo confiscated approximately 33,000 copies of forty-five different publications of songs, choral music, piano-vocal scores and librettos of operas. With one exception (862 copies of the Arbeiterlieder by Anatol Rathaus), they were all compositions by Eisler (totalling 24,064 copies) and Weill (8,305 copies). Most of the items boasted texts by Bertolt Brecht. 77 On its second visit, on 26 April, the Gestapo took away much less material: approximately 160 copies each of three songs from Bela Reinitz's 1930 Singspiel Schatten über Haarlem, plus 226 copies of two other songs by Reinitz; and some 800 copies of writings by the hypernationalist Heinrich Schenker, including Harmonielehre II/1 , II/2 , Der freie Satz, Textband , Notenband . 78 In the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, Schenker is, in fact, denounced as "the principal representative of an abstract music theory favoring that kind of Jewish philosophy which disavows any inner psychological content and instead confines itself to detecting arbitrarily and out of context an 'Urlinie'." 79 Asserting that Schenker's basic ideas had been widely disseminated, the entry proves the point of Kurt Tucholsky's bon mot, "The Nazis weren't interested in an artist's body of work, only his foreskin."
Records for rented performance materials in UE's hire library indicate that only those for Weill's Bürgschaft (Security)and two versions of Mahagonny and Reinitz's Schatten über Haarlem were confiscated, and no date is specified. A list of printing plates that were either sent to Peters in Leipzig or consigned to the Reichstelle für Metalle to be recycled for the war effort is much longer. Because this list of 100 items contains no "entartete" composers and several revered ones (including Bach, Beethoven, and Verdi), this selection appears to be a combination of expendable titles with negligible future potential and classic works that were to be taken over by Peters. There is no extant record of confiscation of any holograph scores. Given the highly selective nature of the list of materials that were confiscated, it is intriguing to speculate whether the Gestapo had entered UE with a carefully considered shopping list of symbolic works or if the secret police were advised by Petschull-UE employees, with only the currently most unperformable or unsalable works conveniently laid out for their consideration. In either case, the event is worthy of a film script: imagine a close-up of Schoenberg's holographs piled atop Weill's (the only music in the world in which, Schoenberg had claimed, he could find no quality whatsoever) as they both hid behind the monastery organ; then crossfade to copies of the 1935 edition of Der freie Satz by Schenker rubbing spines in the crates with Brecht, Weill, and Eisler as they are carried off by the Gestapo.
Schlee's letter to Weill in 1946 can now be read in a more nuanced context. The Gestapo had indeed confiscated Mahagonny--not Weill's holograph score, but UE's printed materials, thus begging several questions: at that time, where were the plates from which the music would eventually be reprinted in the mid-1950s? And where, fifteen months after war's end, was the holograph score? (Perhaps it was still waiting with Schoenberg's Erwartung behind the organ?) Why were these treasures, which allegedly had been Schlee's primary concern between 1938 and 1945, now unretrieved? Most of Weill's holographs would eventually turn up at UE in the mid 1950s, but only after repeated inquiries from Lenya and would-be producers. If Schlee's account of the Gestapo's visit seems incomplete and partially secondhand, he may have had more direct knowledge about the loss of some other Weill materials. Still missing, for example, is an item prominently displayed in facsimile at the "Entartete Musik" exhibition in Düsseldorf, which opened ten weeks after the Anschluss. The musical excerpt displayed in the poster ( 10) comprises the final three measures of Weill's holograph pre-rehearsal score of the "Ballade vom angenehmen Leben," which he had sent UE in 1928 for the purpose of preparing rehearsal and performance materials. Only someone with access to UE's archives could have made this contribution to Weill's defamation. His identity remains a mystery. 80
An event which may have left Weill with what Schlee called "a very bad impression" was the disappearance, in 1933, of a parcel containing virtually all of Weill's unpublished early works, including, most likely, the op. 5 Divertimento, the orchestral cycle of Rilke's Stundenbuch, Recordare, Zaubernacht, and the symphonic Fantasia, Passacaglia, und Hymnus. In 1932 Weill had lent these and other scores to musicologist Walter Fleischer, who was working on a volume about the composer to follow one on Stravinsky. Fleischer vividly recalled the circumstances: "I was in Italy, and knowing nothing of Weill's whereabouts after March 1933, I mailed the package of scores to the Berlin office of Universal Edition, in care of Alfred Schlee. In December 1933, when I saw Weill again at a performance of Mahagonny in Rome, I told him what I'd done with his manuscripts. Although he expressed no surprise at the disappearance of the package, at the mention of Schlee's name, Weill silently wagged his right forefinger twice: left-right, left-right." 81
The only essay published after World War II by the once prolific Schlee was a report to Modern Music, printed in the April 1946 issue under the title "Vienna Since the Anschluss." 82 Schlee opened with a brief disclaimer explaining why he hadn't written anything for the journal in a decade:
When your request for an article reached me, I was deeply affected. Since my last review, many years had passed and even when I saw that in print, I knew it was no longer possible to write for you. I could not dare then really to express my thoughts, and if I wrote between the lines, how could you, living in a country where every man's right to freedom of expression is taken for granted, understand?
. . . I wrote nothing for publication thereafter.
Characterizing the period from 1934 to 1938 as one of "hopeless lethargy," Schlee says almost nothing, despite the title of his contribution, about the "seven years of trumpets and concentration camps" since the Anschluss. Noting that Berg, Webern, and Hauer had been "neither honored nor oppressed," but rather "treated with derision," Schlee thanked the "alien nations that supported all those whom the brutal northern invader drove out of their country," including Schoenberg and Krenek. Schlee devotes the remainder of his brief essay to an emotional account of the "tragedy" of Anton von Webern, who "did not survive to enjoy his destined rehabilitation after so many injustices":
It is a tragedy for us too, for we need his counsel and his wisdom. I can speak of this great and heartwarming musician only with the humblest reverence. His modest demeanor cloaked an unbelievable knowledge and goodness. He led a life dedicated entirely to music.
. . . . He ran the risk of being forced into factory labor. I was able to get him a position with the Universal Edition, where he was sheltered by the excuse of essential work. 83
Schlee's poetic portrayal of the martyred Webern seems to have been calculated to discourage doubts about any unresolved discords still reverberating from Schoenberg's anguished and unanswered question put to his former student in June 1937: "Is it true that you have become a supporter, or even a member of the Nazi Party?" 84 (Although there is no evidence that Webern ever joined the party, virtually everyone in his immediate family did, with his son Peter, who was killed in the war, and one of his sons-in-law particularly rabid partisans. Until recently, most biographers and critics have accepted the testimony of Webern's daughter, Amalie Waller: "The occupation of Austria by Hitler was a terrific blow for my father. Not only was his music banned and outlawed because it belonged to the category of 'degenerate art,' but all doors and gates were barred for the conductor and teacher Webern." 85 Peter Stadlen recalled an exchange with Webern later that same year, when he was working intensively with the composer in preparation for the premiere of his Piano Variations:
One day we went through the Prater. Suddenly he said: "If the Nazis come, I will go to Goebbels and tell him that he is misinformed and that twelve-tone music is not Kultur-Bolschewismus. "Of that you will perhaps persuade him, Herr Doktor," I replied, "but could you ever persuade him that Schoenberg is not a Jew?" "No," said Webern, "but that he is nevertheless a decent man!" 86
By recounting the hardships which the "other-worldly" bystander Webern had endured during and immediately after the war at the hands of both its perpetrators and, inadvertently, its victors, his friend and publisher Schlee was still looking "beyond the present" to "a time afterwards" and laying the groundwork for the heroicization of the "anständiger Mensch" ("decent man") Webern. But as the disturbing "trotzdem" ("nevertheless") of Webern's own case, his enthusiastic embrace of Hitler and National Socialist ideology, has gradually and painfully been revealed in subsequent decades, Schlee's messianic mythology has collapsed into willful historical fiction. A more accurate, and necessarily less sympathetic, portrait suggests a metaphor more apt than Schlee's biblical one. Webern had indeed suffered, but as a tragic Greek hero, whose fatal flaw was an inability or unwillingness to integrate or reconcile his life and art. Absent evidence to corroborate the testimony of Webern's daughter that the occupation of Austria by Hitler was a terrific blow for her father or Robert Craft's claims that the Nazis banned his music, burned his writings, and forbade him all activity, Webern's purported persecution for his aesthetic allegiance to twelve-tone composition now must also be doubted. 87 The wartime neglect of his music can no longer believably be ascribed to official governmental proscription or censorship on racial, political, or aesthetic grounds.
Although his music had been performed only rarely before the National Socialists came to power, Webern's portrayal as a "suppressed" composer of "subversive" music became a crucial component of post-war modernist strategies to turn away from a corrupt recent past and claim for serialism the highest moral ground, as the only alternative truly responsive to the horrors of the recent past. 88 However, with Webern as standard bearer, post-war serialists, asserted Hans Werner Henze, actually sought to restore music to "a state of purity as if nothing had happened; as if there were no class struggle, no imperialism, no wars, as if society were in order; as though everything were as untouched as blades of grass high in the Alps." 89 "It was precisely its utopian (its 'scientific') aspect, as well as the myth of its political suppression," Richard Taruskin has observed, "that facilitated serialism's seeming natural selection as the neomodernist lingua franca from out of the ashes of the Second World War." 90 Because the post-war construction of a new ethical framework for music after Auschwitz depended on the belief of the historical imperative and aesthetic superiority of serialism, the depoliticization of modern music required the depoliticization of Anton Webern.
By detaching the discovery which was supposed to have assured the supremacy of German music for a hundred years from its ideological origins and socio-political ramifications, Schlee posited, already in 1946, a key component in what would become the dominant historical narrative of twentieth-century music. (Its prevalence and longevity is evinced in so recent a survey as Arnold Whittall's Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century [1999], which still glosses Webern's politics and wartime conduct as merely "right-wing sympathies" and then dismisses them as irrelevant because "the music's qualities transcend rather than helplessly implement its ideological context.") 91 Thus, years before Pierre Boulez, one of UE's first post-war recruits, announced that "Schoenberg Is Dead" and admonished the musical world not "to forget that a certain Webern also labored," Schlee had anointed his friend as the only reliable guide into "the Promised Land," the rightful interpreter of "the sacred Tablets of Law." 92
When Alfred Kalmus decided to remain in London after the war, Schlee took over operations in Vienna. From that strategic base, he quickly claimed the role of chief architect of its high modernist edifice, built substantially on the foundations of the already proliferating martyrology of Webern. 93 Schlee recruited a youthful roster of composers rivaling Hertzka's, but with few of the eclectics, dissenters, and populists who had balanced the Second Viennese School within UE's catalogue during the interwar period. 94 With Boulez and Stockhausen quickly emerging as its principal spokesmen and, after 1955, the new UE-periodical Die Reihe: Information über serielle Musik serving as its propagandist mouthpiece, what Henze described as "official musical thinking" adopted Webern's procedures as its foundation, "whose maxims the body of lesser mortals now had to put into practice (allowing for seasonal variation) with religious devotion, esprit de corps and slavish obedience"(BFAA, 43). Disillusioned by the confusion of moral and aesthetic criteria which "demanded that every deviation from the officially prescribed rules and regulations be denounced and punished without a moment's delay," Henze came to equate the enforced homogeneity of serial music in the 1950s with lingering fascism in his homeland: "so many people who had had a hand in things were now carrying on as if nothing had happened. . . . With the coming of the first strict serial compositions, the least glimmer of any political spark was finally extinguished in the midst of their creators" (BFAA, 34).
When Henze returned to Darmstadt in 1955 to give a composition class with Boulez and Bruno Maderna, he recalled that "anything that wasn't Webernian was brusquely dismissed" (BFAA, 43). Other than Henze, very few composers managed to resist the imperatives of what was already being called "The Age of Webern." As a consequence of Webern's prime directive that "all art must be constructed according to laws," on both sides of the Atlantic "his scores were pored over in theory and composition classes like Talmudic texts," with disdain heaped on any who resisted. 95 When Boulez dared even to assert that "any musician who has not experienced . . . the necessity for the dodecaphonic languages is useless, for his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of the epoch," dissenters began to speak of a new sort of "tyranny" surrounding Webern's oeuvre. 96 Even the seventy-three year old Stravinsky "came under the spell" and penned a short preface for the second issue of Die Reihe, dedicated exclusively to Webern on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death: "We must hail not only this great composer but also a real hero." 97
"There are heroes, and there are composers," quipped Schoenberg in 1944, suggesting that Shostakovich had (unfortunately) allowed politics to influence his compositional style: "Heroes can be composers and vice versa, but you cannot require it." 98 That admonition pertains to music publishers as well. On the occasion of their ninetieth birthdays, Ludwig Strecker (who had outlived his brother Willy by 20 years) and Alfred Schlee were both duly feted on a heroic scale. In honor of Strecker, Schott published a 425-page Festschrift für einen Verleger. Among its 46 distinguished contributors were composers Francaix, Henze, Ligeti, Tippett, not to mention Philipp Jarnach and Werner Egk; musicologists and critics included Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Rudolph Stephan, H. H. Stuckenschmidt, and Helmut Federhofer. Carl Orff contributed the opening rhapsody, "Dank an Ludwig Strecker"; Hermann Reutter followed up with an "Hommage á Ludwig Emanuel Strecker." There is, of course, no hint anywhere in the volume of Strecker's own "right-wing sympathies." The Festschrift was edited by the doyen of German musicology, Carl Dahlhaus. 99
Conversely, in 1991, in honor of Schlee's ninetieth birthday, no fewer than 37 UE-composers wrote tribute pieces, which were then played by a string quartet at a celebratory concert. Boulez was the official spokesman for the occasion. "Universal Edition meant for us young composers the Second Viennese School, and we wanted to belong. . . .  He extolled the virtues of his publisher in terms that now seem rather ambiguous:
Alfred Schlee always had his nose to the wind. . . . Nevertheless, the man is extraordinarily private. He never talks about himself. If you want to know something about him, you have to ask someone else. You can hardly pull anything out of him about what role he played after joining Universal Edition in 1927, most of all, about the time of National Socialism and the war years when he practically saved Anton von Webern. 100
By then, Schlee had, in fact, broken his silence about his pre-1945 years at UE by consenting to be interviewed for a retrospective issue of the Oesterreichische Musikzeitschrift on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss. The brief published excerpt from a "detailed interview" with Lothar Knessl began with a disclaimer that Schlee "did not want to make a contribution concerning his special service in securing the survival of UE." 101 But his comments were almost entirely restricted to the preservation of materials that "would ensure that nothing would happen to put UE into a situation in which reestablishment of its international work at 'a time afterwards' might be rendered impossible." "My immediate concern," he said, "was not dedicated to the present, but to the future, something which has always been in the forefront of my considerations." 102
Such elliptical generalities, of course, beg for precise particulars: What did Schlee do in Berlin on a daily basis from 1933 to 1938, or in Vienna from 1938 to 1945, other than looking beyond the present to preserve UE's future? Was he a double-agent, an apolitical, modernist "mole" in the enemy camp, pretending to answer to Petschull but actually looking out for Kalmus's interests? Why had so prolific a writer, so public a performer, so vociferous an advocate prior to the Anschluss, chosen to remain virtually silent about his activities thereafter? His "legendary privacy" would be maintained even in death, as his demise was not announced, even within UE, until after his burial. Obituaries, cobbled almost exclusively from an official press release belatedly issued by UE, offer no new information to affirm, contradict, or supplement the hazy picture of a modest and largely unsung hero of modern music. 103 Somehow, therefore, it was not a shock to discover that even the obviously well-thumbed folder labelled "Alfred Schlee" among the official files of the Reichsmusikkammer was empty--by the time it was microfilmed. Not even the required application for membership remained between its covers.
When Lotte Lenya returned for the first time to Vienna and Berlin in 1955, after twenty years' absence, she reported to a friend back home: "By now we're used to the rubble, which they clean up religiously and indefatigably.  But you can't find a single Nazi in Germany today. It's as if there weren't any." 104 Apparently not in music publishing, a field in which collective amnesia has conspired to rehabilitate the opportunists, collaborators, and stalwarts alike. The deeds of the Petschulls and Streckers were quickly forgotten, forgiven, or transred, those of the Schlees filtered, blandished, and mythologized--all no less quickly and fully than their "black," "grey," and "white" political and industrial counterparts under the utilitarian policies adopted first by the occupation forces and then Christian-conservative politicians, as they tried to reconstruct Germany and Austria. Despite the difficulty today of disentangling aesthetic and musical issues from ideological, political, racialist, and personal ones, it is imperative that we begin the process of shedding light on the dark side of modern music publishing under the Nazis and its continuing impact on contemporary music. 105 Within those shadows remain many unanswered, and perhaps already unanswerable, questions.
* * *
In 1973 Schott and UE joined forces to found the Wiener Urtext Edition. The two firms also began to serve as each other's agent in various territories, including Germany and Austria. In 1977 they jointly established European American Music Distributors Corporation to represent their catalogues in the United States and Canada. In the 1990s Schott Musik International purchased a 30% minority interest in MUVA, the Swiss holding company for Universal Edition, from Music Sales, Inc., which had, in turn, acquired its shares from Susan Kalmus, one of Alfred Kalmus's two daughters. Currently the managing director of Schott is Dr. Peter Hanser-Strecker, the maternal grandson of Ludwig Strecker, Jr. Also trained as a lawyer, though neither a librettist nor tournament tennis player, Hanser-Strecker has adopted a now-familiar pseudonym when publishing his avocational photographs of such notable Schott composers as Ligeti and Penderecki: "Peter Andersen."
Kim H. Kowalke is Professor of Musicology at the University of Rochester. He is the author or editor of four books, including Kurt Weill in Europe and Speak Low: The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Current research interests include Whitman settings, Hindemith, Orff, Sondheim, and the American musical theater.
1. I am grateful to Heidi Owen for research assistance in preparation of this essay; to Tamara Levitz for sharing with me her research on Alfred Schlee and Rudolf von Laban; to David Drew, David Farneth, Ronald Freed, Stephan Harpner, Marion von Hartlieb, Elmar Juchem, Michael Kater, David Monod, Albrecht Riethmüller, Eva Smirzitz, Lys Symonette, and Robert Thompson for answers to specific inquiries; to Universal Edition for its cooperation in granting me access to relevant documents, and to Bruce McClung, Joan Evans, Elizabeth Keagy, and Jean Caruso for their helpful responses to earlier drafts of this essay. A preliminary version of this study was presented at the "Music and Nazism" conference at York University, Toronto, on 15 October 1999. My research was supported with a sabbatical leave from the University of Rochester. Translations from the German are my own, unless otherwise noted.
The surviving correspondence between Weill and Universal Edition (hereafter UE) will soon be on deposit at the Sibley Music Library, University of Rochester; complete sets of photocopies reside at the Weill-Lenya Research Center in New York and the Weill/Lenya Archives in the Music Library of Yale University, New Haven. Letters cited here were consulted at the Weill-Lenya Research Center and are cited by permission of UE and the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. A volume of selected correspondence, edited by Nils Grosch, will be published by Metzler Verlag in 2001.
2. Translated and quoted by Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 3:218. Craft's translation has been silently corrected by removing the extraneous "no" from the phrase, "that no one can regard."
3. Arnold Schoenberg, "The Future of Opera," Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 336. Although Adorno's attempts to define the relationship between the "autonomy-," "critical-," and "commodity character" of music were lifelong occupations, a key document is the 1932 essay, "Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik," ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1984) 18: 719-77. See also Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 97-107.
4. The formulation here is Arnold Whittall's in Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.
5. Arnold Whittall, Music Since the First World War, 2nd ed. (London: Dent, 1977, 1988), 2-3.
6. Most of the book-length studies of music publishing are anecdotal memoirs. The best of them are Hans W. Heinsheimer's Best Regards to Aida: The Defeats and Victories of a Music Man on Two Continents (New York: Knopf, 1968), Fanfare for Two Pigeons (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), Menagerie in F Sharp (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947), and Ernst Roth's The Business of Music: Reflections of a Music Publisher (London: Cassell, 1969). An entertaining but almost entirely derivative and frequently unreliable account of the business of publishing "serious music" comprises Chapter 12 of Norman Lebrecht's Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics (Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Publishing, 1977), 322-42. Currently there is no study of serious music publishing comparable in scope to Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology Online lists as in progress: Lillian Necker, Musikverlage im Dritten Reich (Ph.D. Musicology, Hamburg).
7. Schott Musik International's website is www.schott-music.com.
8. Hans W. Heinsheimer, Best Regards to Aida: The Defeats and Victories of a Music Man on Two Continents (New York: Knopf, 1968), 95.
9. Joseph Goebbels, "Speech for the Düsseldorf Music Festival," trans. Robert P. Morgan, Source Readings in Music History, vol. 7: The Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 126.
10. Peter Raabe, "Ueber den Musikbetrieb während des Krieges," Zeitschrift für Musik (October 1939): 1030; trans. Michael Meyer in The Politics of Music in the Third Reich (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 179.
"Das Land der Musik" is reprinted in Entartete Musik, 47; its origins are unidentified both there and in the credited source, Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 2. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984); it also appears in the English translation by Erica Carter and Chris Turner, Male Fantasies, vol. 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 411.
11. Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 5, 44-45; hereafter cited by as AIENG, followed by a page reference. Even in Steinweis's invaluable chronicle of the evolution of the Reichsmusikkammer, music publishing receives only passing mention. Neither Schott nor UE, neither its owners nor its employees, appear in Joseph Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dikumentation (Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1963). Music publishers and dealers comprised Division E, the Deutscher Musikalien-Verleger Verein, of the Reichsmusikkammer. In 1938 the Verein was dissolved and reconstituted as the Council of Music Publishers.
12. Facsimiles of "Amtliche Mitteilungen der Reichsmusikkammer" that included lists of "unerwünschte Musik" are reproduced in Entartete Musik: Dokumentation und Kommentar, ed. Albrecht Dümling & Peter Girth (Düsseldorf: dkv, 1993), 67-70
13. On the subject of "Musical Foreign Policy," see Michael Meyer, The Politics of Music in the Third Reich, 142-179 (hereafter referred to as Politics).
14. In Gedruckte Musik: 223 Jahre Musikverlag Schott in Mainz (Mainz: Gutenberg-Museum, 1995), for example, Marlene Hübel's otherwise detailed history of the firm makes only oblique reference to the period of the Third Reich. In "Schott in the Twentieth Century" at www.schott-music.com, the publishing company focuses on its long-term relationship with Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Orff ("reviver of the German musical theatre tradition"). The chronicle concludes: "Ever since, Schott has concentrated on long-term relationships with their authors." The select list includes Werner Egk, Wolfgang Fortner, and Hermann Reutter. See also 200 Jahre B. Schott's Söhne. Historisch-bibliographische Schau in 300 ausgewählten Titeln (Tutzing: Musikantiquariat Hans Schneider, 1970); Der Musikverlag B. Schott's Söhne, Mainz (Mainz: Schott, 1954). With respect to Universal Edition, see Ernst Hilmar and Otto Brusatti, eds., 75 Jahre Universal Edition (1901-1976) (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1976); Rudolf Stephan, "Ein Blick auf die Universal-Edition. Aus Anlass von Alfred Schlees 80. Geburtstag," Oesterreichische Musikzeitschrift 36 (December 1981): 639-45. Stephan's history of UE between 1938 and 1945 is restricted to two sentences: "Die Besetzung Oesterreichs zwang führende Männer in die Emigration (Kalmus, Roth, Heinsheimer) und veranlaßte eine Aenderung der Personalstruktur des Verlags; schließlich kam ein Großteil der Aktien in deutschen Besitz.
15. To date Schott has apparently rarely allowed scholars access to its internal files; UE has recently initiated an in-house inventory and vetting of documents dating from 1933 to 1945, but they are not yet available to researchers. I am grateful, however, to Marion von Hartlieb, Managing Director of UE, and various department heads, who have answered specific inquiries and provided photocopies of key documents relevant to my research. In 1998, the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann appointed an internationally constituted panel of scholars to examine its disputed history during the Nazi era, when it became the leading publisher of reading material intended for German soldiers. In a preliminary report summarized in the New York Times, 18 January 2000, the commission reported that the company's earnings increased eleven-fold from 1938 to 1941 and that one of its family leaders, Heinrich Mohn, belonged to a circle of sponsoring members of the SS. After the war Mohn had explained that "on occasion in earlier years" he had contributed sums to the Nazi Party "in order to be left alone."
16. UE, for example, has deposited nearly 40,000 pieces of correspondence with its composers in the Musiksammlung der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, including those of Schoenberg , Berg , Webern , Krenek , Schreker (1,805), Zemlinsky , Weill (1,428), Casella , Milhaud , Bartók , Kodály (1,124), and Janácek . In some of these cases, however, it is clear that these collections are not complete, especially during the period from 1933 to 1945. The most helpful overview of music publishing during this period is "Responding to the Market: Music Publishing in the Third Reich," Chapter 6 of Erik Levi's Music in the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 147-65; hereafter cited within the text as MiTR. Surprisingly, Fred K. Preiberg is virtually silent about music publishing in Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1982). Michael Meyer's Politics devotes a single page to the topic "Music Publishers and Dealers" (119-20).
17. The Paul-Hindemith-Institut, Franfurt am Main, holds photocopies only of the correspondence with Willy Strecker, as Hindemith's original letters are still in the possession of Schott; Strecker's letters to Hindemith survive only in carbon copies, also held by Schott. The letter is cited here by permission of Giselher Schubert, Director of the Paul-Hindemith-Institut.
18. Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Steward Spencer (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 62; hereafter cited within the text as BFAA.
19. See Gudrun Breimann, Mathis der Maler und der "Fall Hindemith": Studien zu Hindemiths Opernlibretto im Kontext der kulturgeschichtlichen und politischen Bedingungen der 30er Jahre. (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1997).
20. Hindemith wrote Willy Strecker on 26 April 1940: "I have had a long letter from Hugo regarding the transfer of the rights and possible reprint there. He makes some very good and farseeing proposals that will allow everything to be maintained here on a permanent basis without in principle making any changes in our mutual relationship--about which I am very glad" (trans. in Skelton, Selected Letters of Paul Hindemith, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], 161-2, hereafter referred to as Letters of Hindemith). Associated Music Publishers (AMP) had been founded in 1927 by Paul Heinicke as an agency to represent European publishers, including both Schott and Universal Edition, in the United States. It was subsequently purchased by BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated). After the war, AMP returned copyrights in many wartime compositions to the European parent firms. For example, on 8 November 1946, it assigned to Schott the copyright in Stravinsky's Danse concertante, Danse sacrale, and Symphony in Three Movements. This sort of "shell game," when successfully played, exempted such works from the administrative bureaucracy of agencies such as the U.S. Office of the Custodian of Alien Property, which administered copyrights that fell under the provisions of the Enemy Alien Act. In contrast, Weill requested the Custodian of Alien Property "to take over the copyrights" of Die Dreigroschenoper in 1942, because Felix Bloch Erben and Universal Edition "have been taken over long ago by the Nazis and since Die Dreigroschenoper was one of the first plays which was banned by the Nazi government" (Letter to Howard Reinheimer, 10 November 1942; copy in the Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York).
21. Letter from Hindemith to Willy Strecker, 30 May 1941; Letters of Hindemith, 177. In 1933, at the urging of Richard Strauss, Goebbels's Ministry had established STAGMA (Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Urheberrechte) as a new system for collecting and distributing royalties for the use of copyright music. Even after they had been expelled from the Reichsmusikkammer or the country, many non-Aryan or otherwise undesirable composers were allowed to keep their memberships in STAGMA so that foreign royalties would continue to flow into Germany, where they were often then impounded. Kurt Weill, in contrast, had resigned from the German organization, effective 30 September 1933, and joined the parallel Italian society.
22. Hindemith quoted the letter from Kailey in his own letter to Karl Bauer at Associated Music Publishers, 15 June 1945; published in Letters of Hindemith, 186-88.
23. Letter from Heinsheimer to Weill, 21 June 1932.
24. On 3 April, Heinsheimer wrote Weill that "the last eight days have been so catastrophic that we are at present absolutely in the dark about the further conduct of German business. Director [Hugo] Winter has gone to Berlin in order to get information there and to see if there are any prospects at all there. Under such circumstances, we will have to ask you to accept 500 marks for April." Heinsheimer enclosed a personal note with the official letter: "We are naturally quite aware of your difficult position and will not leave you high and dry. But you must understand the disastrous situation in which we find ourselves. The German boycott, whose unofficial effects will be still worse than the official ones, hits us squarely in the face." Weill responded immediately: "I would like to say once again that I made a concession on this point only because the understanding and trust that you and UE have for my works seems great enough to warrant my making financial sacrifices, which are not easy for me at the present time" (3 April 1933).
25. The matter was finally resolved, after months of heated correspondence, in October 1933 at a meeting between Alfred Kalmus and Weill. The terms of the settlement were summarized in a letter from Weill to UE dated 19 November 1933: UE would pay Weill the reduced stipends, and Weill agreed to pay UE two percent of his future income deriving from his works, plus additional sums if his income should exceed 100,000 francs. Meanwhile, on 31 October 1933 Weill had signed a new contract with the Parisian music publisher Heugel.
26. For a more detailed account of Schlee's pre-1927 career, see Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller, ed., Schrifttanz: Eine Vierteljahresschrift. Schriftleitung Alfred Schlee. 1. Jahrgang 1928 bis 4. Jahrgang 1931. 11 Hefte und 2. Beihefte in einem Band. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1991), 1-19. Among Schlee's essays are: "Wo steht Laban?" Der Tanz 2 (December 1929): 2--7; "The Modern German Dance," Theatre Arts (June 1930): 419-29; "The Stage at the 'Bauhaus'," Theatre Arts (April 1931): 343-50; "The Dance in Soviet Russia," The Dancing Times (July 1932): 339-43; "La musique de danse en Allemagne," Archives internationales de la danse (October 1933): 158-60.
27. On the appropriation of the Ausdruckstanz by Nazi aesthetics, see Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
28. Schlee, "Expressionism in the Dance," Modern Music 8 (May-June 1931): 13. Thereafter Schlee was a regular contributor to the American journal: "Laban and the Berlin Staatsoper," 9 (Nov.-Dec. 1931): 24-27; "Under the Red Flag," 9 (Mar.-Apr. 1932): 108-13; "The Germans in Paris," 10 (Nov.-Dec. 1932): 42-46; "Decline of the Prima Ballerina," 11 (Nov.-Dec. 1933): 24-29; "German Opera in Transition," 11 (Mar.-Apr. 1934): 147-49; "Dancers in Germany Today," 12 (Jan.-Feb. 1935): 82-85.
29. The disk, Paloma 3501, also included Schlee accompanying Olga Antosch-Levko in Hanns Eisler's "Lied vom Trockenbrot"; the Weill song has been reissued on Capriccio CD 10 347. During rehearsals for Mahagonny, Pasetti and Lenya began an affair which lasted two years. In a strange twist of history, after World War II, as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, he served three six-month terms as de-nazification official for American occupation authorities in Austria--in charge of the cases of both Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan.
30. Letter from Heinsheimer to Weill, 28 January 1933.
31. Schlee, "German Opera in Transition," 147, 147.
32. Letter from Weill to Margarethe Kaiser, 1 May 1947; photocopy in the Weill-Lenya Research Center. It is not clear whether Weill's mention of "a letter from UE" refers to Schlee's of the previous September or another which has not been preserved.
33. Letter from Schlee to Weill, 17 January 1950.
34. After Hans Mersmann had been relieved of its editorship, Melos ceased publication in 1934; in November 1934 it reappeared for six issues as Melos Neue Folge and then Neue Musikblatt until the "total war" of 1943. See Hans Oesch, "Das Melos und die Neue Musik," in Festschrift für einen Verleger. Ludwig Strecker zum 90. Geburtstag, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne, 1973), 287-94.
35. On 27 May 1938, Stravinsky wrote Willy Strecker: "Some friends who just came from Germany have informed me of an exhibition in Düsseldorf entitled "Entartete Musik" in which my name, along with that of Hindemith, heads the list. And this after the great success of Jeu de cartes and Perséphone (repeated the day before yesterday in Braunschweig), while Firebird is played . . . all over Germany!" On 6 August 1938, Stravinsky reported to Strecker that an official response to his protest had arrived: "you and your publisher may count on a benevolent neutrality." On 21 November 1938, Strecker reassured Stravinsky that "the exhibit seems already to have been forgotten in Germany." For an account of their reactions to the incident, see Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, 3:265-70.
36. Microfilms of the personnel files of the Reichsmusikkammer, now in the Berlin Document Center, are held by the National Archives 2 on the campus of the University of Maryland in College Park. The Streckers' files can be found on reel A-3339-RKK-No. 36. A law effective 1 October 1934 required that all music publishers be card-carrying members of the Reichsmusikkammer.
37. Lys Symonette, née Bertlies Weinschenk, who lived in Mainz until 1936, recalls: "I remember Ludwig Strecker [Jr.] mostly as an ace tennis player, since he was invited to play in national tournaments. I shared gymnastic lessons with his daughters Elsbeth and Marion and also played a great deal of tennis with both of them. His only son, who went to school with my cousin Fritz, died in the war from a fever contracted at the Russian front. There had always been rumors that Ludwig Strecker was a Nazi, but he was probably too shrewd to become a registered party member. According to my friend Gretel, a violent anti-Nazi, Willy had never been a Nazi" (Letter to the author, 30 May 2000).
38. Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, 218. Microfilms of both sets of documents are housed in the National Archives 2. Neither register, however, has survived intact.
39. See Albrecht Riethmüller, "Komposition im Deutschen Reich um 1936," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 38 : 241-78, esp. 268-74. I am grateful to Professor Riethmüller for sharing with me information from his interview with Reutter. Reutter, though included by Hans Severus Ziegler in the "Entartete Musik" exhibition, enjoyed official recognition and support during the Third Reich as the director of the Frankfurt Musikhochschule. See also Erik Levi, "Atonality, 12-Tone Music and the Third Reich," Tempo 178 (Sept. 1991): 17.
40. Riethmüller reports that Schott advertised Reutter's and Andersen's cantata as "das neue Oratorium des deutschen Menschen" in Melos 12 : 259. See Riethmüller, "Komposition im Deutschen Reich um 1936," 270.
41. Strecker also provided the libretto for Joseph Haas's Tobias Wunderlich and Die Hochzeit des Jobs , and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's Der Kuckuck von Theben . See Karl Gustav Fellerer, "Ludwig Strecker und Joseph Haas in der Arbeit an Tobias Wunderlich," and Friedrich Schultze, "Einige Ueberlegungen und Anmerkungen zum Thema: Libretto," in Festschrift für einen Verleger, 191-202, 358-71.
42. See Zeitschrift für Musik (April 1942): 183.
43. Geoffrey Skelton, Paul Hindemith: The Man Behind the Music (New York: Crescendo, 1975), 120. Concerning Orff's works that were hidden away in Schott's poison cupboard, see Kim H. Kowalke, "Burying the Past: Carl Orff and His Brecht Connection," Musical Quarterly 84 (Spring 2000): 58-83.
44. Skelton, Paul Hindemith, 127.
45. Stravinsky apparently made no effort to refute an article ascribed to Richard Strauss, which appeared in a Nuremburg newspaper in 1934, stating that the composer was "enthusiastic about the ideas of Adolf Hitler." See Levi, MiTR, 99 (Levi incorrectly identifies the Fränkischer Kurier as a Frankfurt newspaper).
46. Edition Schott Nr. 2222, "Eine Sammlung der 222 schönsten Volks-, Wander- und Studentenlieder für Klavier, leicht spielbar, mit Text herausg. von L. Andersen." The texts were also issued alone, and an obligato violin part (Nr. 2223) also supplemented the original publication. In the 1940s, it was still featured on the back cover of the three volumes of Das neue Soldaten Liederbuch.
47. The two-volume Neues Deutschland appeared as Edition Schott 2324 and 2580. Edited by Erwin Schwarz-Reiflingen, the collection included "die meistgesungenen nationalen Lieder." Schott also issued Das Allotria-Buch, "fidele Lieder für fidele Gesellschaft," (Nr. 2590), Das frohe Rheinlieder-Buch, "die meistgesungenen Lieder vom Rhein und dem Wein," (Nr. 2500), and Soldaten singen alte und neue Lieder, bearb. F. Josef Breuer, for chromatic accordion (Nr. 2536).
48. Edition Schott 2799, 2888, 2899.
49. Several of these titles are among some 375 items in the "Nazi Imprint Collection" in the Ruth T. Watanabe Special Collections of the Sibley Music Library of the University of Rochester, assembled shortly after the war by agents of the Library of Congress, who deposited duplicate copies in major libraries in the United States.
50. Letter from Hindemith to Willy Strecker, 18 October 1939; trans. Skelton, Letters of Hindemith, 137-38. II. Uebungsbuch für den zweistimmigen Satz; I. Theoretischer Teil had appeared in 1937, also published by Schott.
51. Letter from Strecker to Hindemith, 7 February 1946, photocopy in Paul-Hindemith Institut.
52. Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 208. Schott had commissioned Josef Müller-Blattau of the University of Königsberg to prepare the new edition.
53. Letter from Schoenberg to Berg, 16 October 1933; The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, ed. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (New York: Norton, 1987), 446.
54. Letter from Schreker to Schoenberg, 25 August 1933; quoted in Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker 1878-1934: A Cultural Biography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 291.
55. Letter from Schreker to Hans Heinsheimer, 16 June 1933; quoted in Hailey, Franz Schreker, 289.
56. Letter from Weill to Heinsheimer, 14 March 1933.
57. Letter from Berg to Schoenberg, 28 August 1935; The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence, 467.
58. Letter from Heinsheimer to Weill, 24 January 1935.
59. Letter from Weill to Alfred Kalmus, 28 July 1937.
60. Letter from Kalmus to Weill, 6 August 1937. Kalmus also told Weill that "the artistic success of the year was Alban Berg's opera Lulu, which had received its posthumous premiere in Zurich." Although Max Reinhardt's production of Franz Werfel's and Weill's biblical spectacle The Eternal Road had run 153 performances at the Manhattan Opera House and garnered high critical praise, the huge weekly running costs, which exceeded even maximum box office income, prevented the producers from paying the authors any royalties.
61. In 1976 I found the newspaper clipping, identified only as "Lyon's Den (Post)," among "miscellaneous Weill clippings" in the collection of the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center. I have not yet been able to pinpoint its date of publication. No surviving correspondence between Weill and UE corroborates the assertion that Weill "wrote to his music publisher in Vienna and notified him that. . . a sale could be arranged." It may be just an embellishment of Weill's letter to Kalmus of 28 July 1937.
62. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 479.
63. The listing contradicts the conclusions of Kathryn Bailey, one of the few scholars who has tried to come to grips with the historical record of Webern's interactions with National Socialism: "Very soon Universal Edition was taken over by the Nazis, and both publication and performance of [Webern's] music were banned" (The Life of Webern [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 165).
64. Letter in German from Bartók to Frau Müller-Wedmann, 13 April 1938; Béla Bartók Letters, ed. János Demény, trans. Péter Balabán and István Farkas (London: Faber, 1971), 267-8.
65. Béla Bartók Letters, 276.
66. Goebbels, quoted in Entartete Musik: Dokumentation und Kommentar, 72.
67. Letter from Hindemith to Karl Bauer, 15 June 1945; Letters of Hindemith, 187. Schlee's account also confirms this scenario ("50 Jahre Danach," 191).
68. At the time of this writing, Dr. Johannes Petschull (b. 1901) was living in Königstein, near Frankfurt am Main. My letter to Dr. Petschull of 1 August 2000 was answered on 11 September by Karl Rarichs of C. F. Peters: "Unfortunately Dr. Petschull is ill and at 99 years of age, no longer in the position to answer your questions."
69. 1901 bis 1951 Universal Edition Wien, 10. Betty Rothe had been Hertzka's secretary.
70. Alfred Schlee mit Lothar Knessl, interview in "50 Jahre Danach," Oesterreichische Musik Zeitschrift 43 (April 1988): 191. In the same interview Schlee declared: "Meine Einstellung zum Nationalsozialismus war eindeutig. Als Student hatte ich ein einziges Mal eine Rede Hitlers gehört und es für unmöglich gehalten, daß dieser Mensch je einen bedrohlichen Erfolg werde haben können."
71. Interview by the author with Eva Smirzitz, Anni Taussig's neice, 30 June 2000. Eva recalled that when new regulations prohibiting Jews from possessing driving licenses were enacted, her aunt could bear no more persecution. Eva's father, who lost his job with Bayer Pharmaceuticals because the firm wanted no Aryan employees in mixed marriages with Jews, took over Schlee's apartment in Berlin in August 1938. His family joined him there in 1939. Schlee married almost immediately the diseuse Anna Marie Hegener, but he remained in amicable contact with his first wife's family.
72. See "50 Jahre Danach," 191.
73. Ibid.
74. Diary entry, 9 March 1942; quoted in "Meeting with Anton Webern (Pages from a Diary)," trans. John C. G. Waterhouse, Tempo 99 : 5. An analogous indictment had appeared as early as 1931 in the mouthpiece of the NSDAP, the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte: "So the people that brought forth a Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner need to be rejuvenated with Negro blood. . . . In summary, one can only say over and over again that Brechtian texts and Weillian music are never to be regarded as German art" (Dec. 1931, 378, quoted by Schebera, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, 204).
75. Letter from Stefan G. Harpner to the author, 31 October 1999.  One of UE's salesmen, Rudolf Friedrich, hid the scores behind the organ at the monastery in Zwettl.
76. Cables from from UE to AMP, 1, 2 February; letter from 4 February 1952; photocopies in the Weill-Lenya Research Center, New York. See Kim H. Kowalke, "The Threepenny Opera: The Score Adapted," in Die Dreigroschenoper: A Facsimile of the Holograph Full Score, Kurt Weill Edition, Series 4, Volume 1 (Valley Forge, Pa.: European American Music, 1996), 11. UE had not printed a full score of Die Dreigroschenoper, as it supplied theaters with only a cued piano-conductor score. In 1985, during my first trip to Vienna as the administrator of Weill's legacy, I met Alfred Schlee, who was still serving as Artistic Director of UE at age 84. I requested to see the holograph score of Die Dreigroschenoper, which was on deposit at the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek. From his office in the Musikverein where pride of place was given over to Webern's piano, Schlee dispatched Karl Heinz Füssl, who had edited the score for the 1972 Philharmonia Partitur No. 400, to retrieve the manuscript. Füssl returned, score in hand, its frail overleaf covered with raindrops (their effects are still visible on it today). "It's pouring out there," he muttered. Rendered almost speechless with the realization that he had carried the holograph from the library without any protection whatsoever during a heavy rainstorm, I suggested that such treatment was inappropriate for so precious an artifact. Füssl laughed nervously, and, directing his comment more to Schlee than to me, said that "Weill and Eisler didn't care about such things anyway." Since 1998 all holograph scores of works published by UE have been on deposit in the Sibley Music Library at the University of Rochester.
77. The Eisler items included libretto, piano score, and choral parts of Die Maßnahme; Tagebuch; and many individual songs and Männerchöre. Weill's included "Berlin im Licht," the 1929 Song Album, the piano score and libretto of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, the choral parts for Das Berliner Requiem, and the piano score and libretto of Die Bürgschaft. These statistics were furnished to me by Universal Edition, and they may not be complete.
78. The Hungarian-born composer Bela Reinitz (1878-1943) had produced left-wing political compositions, especially workers' choruses, to texts by Brecht and Tucholsky. His Singspiel Schatten über Haarlem had been premiered in Vienna in 1930.
79. Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, ed. T. Stengel and H. Gerigk (Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefel Verlag, 1941), cols. 240-41.
80. See Stephen Hinton, "Die Dreigroschenoper: the 1928 Full Score," in Die Dreigroschenoper: A Facsimile of the Holograph Full Score, 6.
81. Herbert Fleischer gave this account to David Drew, who shared it with me in a letter of 3 September 1999. See also David Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 437-39.
82. Modern Music 23 (Spring 1946): 95-99. In this essay, Schlee says that "two works by Hanns Eisler which he had written to anti-fascist texts shortly before the Nazi occupation . . . were hidden in the home of Eisler's friend, Erwin Ratz, behind the flour sacks out of which he fed the Underground Railroad during the long years."
83. Ibid., 96. For a detailed account of Webern's work for Universal Edition, see Hans W. Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work (New York: Knopf, 1979), 534-36.
84. See Bailey, 154. Although Kathryn Bailey considers the full range of documentation, she does so with an obvious agenda: "damage control." In contrast, David Schroeder has utilized the same evidence to hypothesize that Webern's death at the hands of an American soldier may have been "assisted suicide." ("Not Proven: Was Webern's Death an Accident?" Musical Times [June 1996]: 21-23.)
85. "Mein Vater Anton Webern," Oesterreichische Musikzeitschrift 23 (June-July 1968): 332.
86. Peter Stadlen, contribution to the composite memoir "50 Jahre Danach," 195. Stadlen also recounts Eduard Steuermann's reactions to Webern's views of National Socialism.
87. Robert Craft, Notes to Anton Webern: The Complete Music (Columbia K4L 232), 6. In "Atonality, 12-Tone Music and the Third Reich," Erik Levi notes the success in the Third Reich of Winfried Zillig, another of Schoenberg's students, and Paul von Klenau, who defended the twelve-tone compositional principle as "totalitarian" and thus "entirely appropriate to the future direction of the 'National Socialist World.'" Levi speculates that if Webern had possessed a similar degree of political acumen, he might have been successful too, given the conflicting and haphazard non-racialist cultural policies of the Third Reich.
88. See Leon Botstein, "Preserving Memory," Musical Quarterly 83 (Fall 1999): 295-300; and Joseph N. Straus, "The Myth of Serial 'Tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s," idem., 301-343.
89. Hans Werner Henze, Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953-81 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 154.
90. Richard Taruskin, "Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology," Nineteenth Century Music 16 (Spring 1993): 301.
91. Whittall, 217. Whittall attempts to differentiate Webern's case from Wagner's, in which the evidence of a relationship between Wagner's anti-Semitism and his works is "impressive." Whittall objects to Richard Taruskin's characterization of Webern's String Quartet as his "most stringently constrained and dehumanized work" and invokes a trope on the "Webern as victim" conceit: "Taruskin can only offer opinion, supposition, not fact, and to see the music quite so abjectly reduced to the status of a sonic sponge absorbing external, cultural factors--though common in New Musicological writing--is unpersuasive to anyone who feels that, at the very least, the music's qualities transcend rather than helplessly implement its ideological content."
92. Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 268-76. "In any case we should guard against seeing Schoenberg as a sort of Moses who died in view of the Promised Land after having brought down the sacred Tablets of the Law from a Sinai that some people obstinately want to confuse with Valhalla. (Meanwhile, the 'Dance Round the Golden Calf' is in full swing.)"
93. In 1951 the firm was finally reinstated to its pre-war owners; Schlee emerged from the proceedings and negotiations as a minority shareholder in the new UE.
94. The August 1946 issue of the Oesterreichische Musikzeitschrift carries an advertisement by UE announcing the catalogue's acquisition of twenty new composers, including Gottfried von Einem, Friedrich Wildgans, Olivier Messiaen, Frank Martin, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Boris Blacher.
95. Anton von Webern, The Path to New Music, ed. Willy Reich (Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser, 1963), 10; Anthony Tommasini, "Mid Century Serialists: The Bullies or the Besieged?," The New York Times, 9 July 2000.
96. Pierre Boulez, in the Revue musicale , trans. as "Serialism" and reprinted in Josiah Fisk, ed., Composers on Music: Eight Centuries of Writings, 2nd ed. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 419.
97. Igor Stravinsky in Die Reihe: A Periodical Devoted to Developments in Contemporary Music, ed. Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen, vol. 2 Anton Webern (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Theodore Presser in association with Universal Edition, 1955/8), vii. Ten years later, Stravinsky noted with regret that "the Webern cult [had] made the mistake of switching from the music to the musician, a barren devotion in any case, but especially so in this one because of the unexploitable nature of the mahatma-to-be." Nevetheless, he concluded, "If you are seeking strange gods you might do worse than continue to revere St. Anton." (Introductory Interview with Igor Stravinsky in Anton von Webern: Perspectives, comp. by Hans Modenhauer, ed. Demar Irvine [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966], xix, xxvii).
98. Letter (written in English) from Arnold Schoenberg to Kurt List, 17 October 1944; reprinted in Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 219. "It is perhaps not [Shostakovich's] fault that he has allowed politics to influence his compositional style. And even if it is a weakness in character--he might be no hero, but a talented musician."
99. Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Festschrift für einen Verleger: Ludwig Strecker zum 90. Geburtstag. Several contributions specifically address Schott's continuing role in the Gesamtausgaben of Wagner (Dahlhaus) and Schoenberg (Stephan).
100. Heinz Josef Herbort, "Der Geburtstag der Geburtshelfer: Der Komponist Pierre Boulez über das Verlegen von Musik," Die Zeit (15 November 1991), 70. I am grateful to Ilse Heinisch of Universal Edition, who provided me with a tape recording of Boulez's speech for the concert.
101. "50 Jahre Danach," 190-91. In a letter of 22 September 1999, Marion von Hartlieb informed me that UE did not have a copy of the entire "Gespräch" with Knessl: "It was never published because, according to Mr. Knessl's wife, Schlee never wanted it to be published." One is struck by the similarity to Carl Orff's restriction of the eight-volume documentation Carl Orff und sein Werk to "everything that the composer wished to have known about his career." It too makes little or no mention of his relationship to the Third Reich. "Let them pick over my bones after I'm dead," he told Andreas Liess (Carl Orff, trans. Adelheid Parkin and Herbert Parking [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966], 27).
102. UE's press release, "Music Publisher Alfred Schlee Celebrates His 95th Birthday on 19 November 1996" offers few additional specifics: "His representation of UE for Germany, based in Berlin, took on a deeper significance when Hitler's takeover created a difficult situation between Universal Edition and German cultural institutions. Between 1938 and 1945, Schlee worked in Universal Edition's Vienna office. At that time, he successfully resisted the transfer of UE to Germany."
103. Even the most accurate and detailed obituaries [Gerhard Rohde, "Zum Tod des Musikverlegers Alfred Schlee," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 March 1999; Martin Anderson, "Alfred Schlee," The Independent (London), 22 March 1999] derive entirely from the press release and previously published official histories of UE. The obituaries do not mention Schlee's first two wives, but only Margarethe Molner, whom he married in 1960 and with whom he had two sons.
104. Letter from Lenya to Mary Daniel; quoted in David Farneth, ed., Lenya, the Legend: A Pictorial Autobiography (New York: Overlook Press, 1998), 142.
105. See Richard Taruskin, "The Dark Side of Modern Music," The New Republic (5 Sept. 1988), 28-34.