During World War II, classical music faced varying degrees of censorship, or lack thereof. For the most part, widespread recording technologies and commercial radio made it easy to promote classical music, especially patriotic ones. Countries like the former Soviet Union generally promoted new classical compositions to demonstrate their musical dominance.
However, some places like Nazi Germany banned classical music associated with Jewish and avant-garde influences, as well as Western jazz. Such music was seen as an attack on the Nazi regime. To ameliorate and reconstruct the German music life, the government created the Reich Chamber of Culture and its musical division, the Reichsmusikkammer — known as the RMK, or Reich Chamber of Music. They functioned under the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which regulated the state’s music industry from 1933 to 1945 in an effort to redefine societal values by controlling the art and music Germans consumed.
Among those blacklisted by the RMK were composers with Jewish ancestry or associations, such as Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Felix Mendelssohn and Arnold Schoenberg. Debussy, for instance, was banned because he married a Jewish person. Many other pieces by Jewish composers were denounced as “degenerate” music due to their non-German influences. Instead, the RMK promoted traditional German composers such as Beethoven and Richard Wagner and Austrian composers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The average German protested against this censorship, however. When the RMK attempted to prohibit jazz, many used their new radios to indulge in the banned music. Soldiers often used music to regulate their moods and uplift their spirits. Listening to jazz was a protest against the Nazi’s propaganda efforts — a symbol of artistic freedom — and it was also why the United States government commissioned a large amount of classical music at the time. Both Axis and Allied countries leveraged music to spread cultural values and ideologies.
“There was a lot of trying to keep music as the last bastion of sanity, where people would play Beethoven as a form of consolation,” Fauser said. “You also had a sense of understanding music as connected to a nation; for instance, ‘This is German music. This is French music.’ Music had a national identity.”
Indeed, much of the World War II soundtrack consisted of classical music. Adolf Hitler ordered that the overture of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” be played before Nuremberg rallies; the British Broadcasting Corporation played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to inspire wartime resistance. Despite controversy that the BBC was playing “enemy music,” the BBC insisted on playing past German composers to defy the Nazi assertion that German classical music was too “superior” for other countries.
Though some composers tried to keep their music neutral, others were more political. While Shostakovich’s “Leningrad Symphony,” inspired by the Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, was praised by Joseph Stalin for denouncing fascism, he subtly protested when asked to write war symphonies for postwar cultural reform efforts. Temporarily shelving music that would upset Stalin, he continued to defend his Jewish composer friends and quote Jewish themes in his music. In 1936, Shostakovich was denounced as “an enemy of the people.” It wasn’t until after Stalin’s death that there was a noticeable shift in his music — almost like a breath of relief.
