The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany by Neil Gregor

The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany

by Neil Gregor

The University of Chicago Press 2025

In The Proud Tower, her book about the years leading up to 1914, the great historian Barbara Tuchman centers her chapter on Germany around Richard Strauss, Europe’s leading composer at the turn of the twentieth century. “In one sense,” she justifies, “this made him the most important man in German cultural life, for music was the only sphere in which foreigners willingly acknowledged the superiority that Germans believed was self-evident.” By 1933, the tradition which Strauss represented, securely stretching back over two hundred years, had effectively ended. And yet it was symbolically more important than ever, as great monuments tend to be during unstable times. In a field populated with books about big personalities and bad ideology, Neil Gregor’s new study offers a fresh, more sociological look at orchestral music in the Third Reich.

We are soon informed that this is a history of listening instead of performing. The focus is the experience of the audience, naturally extending to the matter of the concert hall’s function in Nazi Germany. Gregor, a professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton, effectively argues that, while usually thought of as a space of solace, the symphony concert was really a space of “ideological and emotional mobilization.” This was naturally done through rhetoric, the framing of German music as severe and strong, a perfect model for the ideal German citizen. But, more subtly, sound and musicianship could themselves be symbols. “Quality and depth of orchestral sound,” Gregor writes, “were imagined as amplifications of civic prestige.”

Quality of sound, however, suffered. For one thing, the war deprived orchestras of younger musicians, to the extent that the uber-German symphonies of Anton Bruckner were being left out of programs due to the high demands they put on brass players, as the music director of the small town of Soest directly says in response to a publisher. Such is the immediately interesting material in this book, resulting from Gregor’s original research in the archives of provincial German orchestras. We read about officials in the city of Koblenz who, in the middle of the war, are debating the aesthetics of wooden versus iron music stands. And readers in English can now learn that, despite foreign composers being more and more excluded from concert programs, Tchaikovsky wasn’t eliminated until after the invasion of the Soviet Union. A rare moment of amusement is offered by a program note writer scurrying to justify a performance of the Pathétique Symphony through its Germanness, when it was likely simply too popular to ignore, just like it is everywhere in the world today.

The similarity of audiences in the Third Reich to those of today, or to those of the Weimar Republic, or to any other audience, is the straightest takeaway from this study. Patrons got excited for young conductors and expressed complaints about everything except hall acoustics. Factory workers were bored senseless by mandatory attendance of symphonic concerts, and “pops” programs were organized to attract interest. Photographs, which draw a disproportionate amount of the author’s attention, even show the odd disapproving frown at a chattering neighbor after the music’s started. But Gregor’s deeper point is concerned with another sort of continuity, that of discourse from the Weimar era into the Third Reich and even into the post-war period. “Many central tropes of middle-brow musical literature,” he says, “transported clichés that crossed the divide between dictatorship and democracy with impunity.” The same ideas of superiority which the Nazis exploited, Gregor argues, were used again for rebuilding after the war, when the great German music of yesterday continued to represent a “true” Germany, only now the vocabulary of “strictness” and “strength” was replaced by that of “civility” and “cultivation.”

Despite its academic language, whose greco-roman indulgences are happily confined to a recurring “telos”/“habitus” dipole, the book is quite a light read. Its relative breeziness is helped by its short length, as well as by the near complete absence of material about the treatment of Jews and other horrible topics. Those expecting a comprehensive history will be disappointed. Labels aside, this work is a treat for anyone interested in the subject. Gregor’s gallery of details from the archives and his studied, unconventional analysis make for an absorbing read.

Nikolas Mavreas is a reader living in Athens, Greece.