Reviews for The twisted muse

The average rating for The twisted muse based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-01 00:00:00 Kyle Blanks This is an extremely dry and granular accounting of Nazis and the composers and performers they loved and hated. I can't imagine anyone not specifically interested in this topic would find it an engrossing read. Kater discusses some of the big names (Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Otto Klemperer, Arnold Schoenberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Paul Hindemith) at some depth, but also reams of the lesser-knowns. The text is only 239 pages but feels much longer. Kater was given unrestricted access to Strauss's papers by his family, and is able to provide a reassessment: ...it can be shown that Strauss's engagement with the Nazi regime, deplorable as it was, was far less committed and durable, and far less motivated by personal, egocentric concerns, than has hitherto been held. Besides Hindemith, whom Strauss respected despite his dislike of the Weimar modernists, he also tried to help other victims of the regime, although not with the public fanfare of a Furtwängler. In addition, there is now a large body of evidence to prove that Strauss and his family were punished by the regime to a degree of viciousness never thought possible in the case of a supposed Third Reich collaborator.(*) Hence, it is fair to conclude that, just as Furtwängler's portrait in the Third Reich has, for decades now, been far too flatteringly drawn, that of Strauss has been painted much less charitably, and redressing this imbalance is in order. These are fascinating stories of both collaboration and resistance, occasionally in the same individual. The famed conductor Furtwängler was Hitler and Göring's favorite, yet he also intervened on behalf of some of the Jewish players in his orchestras. (He could do so because of his lofty position; he wasn't likely to suffer disastrous consequences.) Kater details some of the attempts of those who had been cozy with the Nazis to deny it when the Americans came to interview them in the postwar "denazification" process. Herbert von Karajan, for instance, had joined the Nazi Party twice, but denied it. The soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had also joined the Party young, like Karajan, for opportunistic career reasons, and repeatedly denied it until confronted with the evidence. She declined to speak to Kater for the book, although he pursued her for two years. (*) Strauss's son Franz, although a fervent Nazi, was actually married to a Jew, and by 1945, 26 members of her family had been murdered in Nazi camps or otherwise. Richard Strauss himself drove to the gates of the Theresienstadt death camp in his car in an attempt to help them, but was turned away. In 1938, Nazi officials came to the town of Garmisch where Franz Strauss and his Jewish wife Alice lived, to arrest her; she was away, but they took the young Strauss sons (grandsons of Richard) to the town square in tears, and forced them to spit on the Jews who had been assembled there.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-10-16 00:00:00 Gerson Enamorado This compelling book examines a wide variety of musicians - from struggling performers to world-renowned composers - and how they and their music interacted with the Third Reich. Kater looks at the degrees to which these musicians complied, collaborated, or resisted. He also looks at the value Hitler and his regime placed on music, the ways they manipulated it to serve their political and social ends, and the degree of success they had in these endeavors. Although I feel like Kater could have tightened up the organization of his material, I really enjoyed his writing. His prose was clear and flowed well. I also like the fact that, when referring to Nazis and their atrocities, he almost entirely eschewed the kind of sanitized, objective prose typical of scholarly writing. Kater directly and bluntly described Hans Frank, governor of occupied Poland, as "that butcher of Poles and Jews". He also described a musician who did not survive as having been "sent to Auschwitz to be murdered", rather than saying that he died in the camp. The picture Kater paints is often complicated, without a lot of clear heroes or villains among the musicians profiled. Nonetheless it was still chilling in many ways, and there was a sense in which it all read a little like the non-fiction equivalent of a horror novel.