0:06

Hello and welcome to Sticky Notes, the classical music

0:09

podcast. My name is Joshua Weilerstein,

0:11

I'm a conductor, and I'm the chief conductor of the Alborg

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Symphony and the music director of the Phoenix Orchestra

0:15

of Boston. This podcast is for

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anyone who loves classical music, works in the

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field, or is just getting ready to dive into

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this amazing world of incredible music.

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Before we get started I want to thank my new Patreon sponsors,

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is greatly appreciated.

0:53

I am in Alborg again this week. I had an

0:55

amazing time last week with Stephen

0:57

Isserlis doing the Dvorak Cello Concerto

0:59

and also performing Nielsen's Fourth

1:02

Symphony with the Alborg Symphony. Very

1:04

special to be doing such a central core

1:06

piece of Danish repertoire with this wonderful Danish

1:09

orchestra. And this week we are doing something

1:11

also really special. It is the first time

1:13

ever a live version

1:16

of this podcast. We are going to be doing

1:18

Dvorak's New World Symphony with the Alborg

1:20

Symphony. First half, we're going to take apart the

1:22

whole piece

1:23

as we always do on this show. And then the second

1:25

half, we're going to perform the whole symphony uninterrupted.

1:28

That will be available on this podcast

1:30

feed in a couple of weeks, I hope. Really

1:33

really excited for this, something I've wanted to do for a

1:36

long time. For today, I'm

1:38

really happy to share part two of my interview

1:40

with Jeremy Eichler about his incredible book,

1:42

Time's Echo. If you did not hear

1:44

part one, I really do recommend checking

1:47

that out as we talk a lot about the background of the book that

1:49

we will not do here. For this episode,

1:51

we jump right into things talking about

1:54

Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and

1:56

then Dmitri Shostakovich. Really hope you enjoy

1:58

it.

1:59

Anyways, Strauss is

2:02

the anti-Shernberg and the

2:05

anti of what you're describing,

2:07

or what you described last week

2:09

in terms of this

2:11

sense of duality.

2:15

You quote him saying, I don't know what I'm supposed

2:17

to be redeemed from. And

2:20

he had a very kind of Nietzschean sense,

2:22

especially at this time. And this opera, Guntrum,

2:25

his first major opera, was

2:27

very important to his bildung, in a sense.

2:30

And could you talk, actually start

2:32

by telling a little bit about Guntrum and this influence

2:34

that Nietzsche had on Strauss?

2:37

First of all, my writing about,

2:39

it's important for me to say, my writing about

2:42

all four of these composers really stands on

2:44

the shoulder of incredible

2:46

body of musicological research. I

2:49

was happy to go to a whole slew

2:51

of different archives and think of some

2:54

primary sources, especially in

2:56

the work on Schoenberg. But

2:59

with all of them, I also relied on

3:00

really a vast secondary source literature.

3:03

So some of the Strauss scholars

3:04

that I found most compelling,

3:07

people like Charles Eumans and Brian

3:10

Gilliam, write about this

3:12

early opera called Guntrum, which

3:15

almost no one's heard of because it's almost never

3:17

done today. But they write about it as

3:19

key for understanding

3:22

Strauss, not so much per se, musically,

3:24

but kind of ethically and what he was going to do

3:27

with his future operatic

3:29

project. And

3:32

Guntrum, in very

3:34

brief, is a story about a medieval

3:37

order of

3:38

stuff in his trolls' eye.

3:41

And this title character, Guntrum, in

3:43

the second act of Mitzgenburger,

3:44

in the third act has to account for

3:47

his actions. In the original third

3:49

act that Strauss wrote the libretto for,

3:51

he returns to his community and

3:54

sort of stands judgment and in a sense

3:56

affirms these older norms of the community

3:59

and of what music

3:59

and can play as a kind of important

4:02

communal binding

4:04

agent and kind of ideal.

4:08

Then he went on this kind

4:10

of long trip across

4:12

Europe and North Africa where he was reading

4:15

the anarchist Max Stirner and he

4:17

was also reading Nietzsche and

4:19

he all of a sudden got this kind of critical

4:22

detachment and distance from some of

4:24

his earlier intellectual influences

4:27

including his mentor figure Alexander Ritter

4:29

and so all of a sudden when he

4:32

went to write the music for the

4:33

third act he couldn't do

4:35

it because he didn't really it seems

4:38

believe any longer that that's how this

4:41

action should play out so he rewrote

4:43

the third act of Guntram and all of a sudden this

4:46

man who has committed a murder refuses

4:48

to stand trial and he smashes

4:51

his liar and he kind of marches

4:53

off into the distance saying that basically

4:56

I will make my own rules

4:59

that my god speaks only to

5:01

me and basically that these norms

5:03

of the community should not apply so other

5:07

interpreters have seen this as a kind

5:09

of early declaration from Strauss

5:12

a kind of giving notice essentially that

5:14

basically this larger metaphysical

5:16

project of German music this ethical imperative

5:19

is kind of this connection of music and the

5:21

Bildung ideal Strauss wasn't really

5:23

going to have any of it you know he wanted to

5:26

he wanted to

5:28

update Wagner's innovations

5:31

musically speaking but he wanted to

5:33

really part ways with with

5:36

the ethical project of German music and he

5:38

very much does

5:39

that in his

5:41

subsequent operas and in his subsequent

5:43

style where he sort of in musical style

5:45

becomes a sort of newly objective take

5:47

on music history I'm not part of it I'm

5:50

looking back at it and you know with

5:52

this kind of modern objectivity that

5:54

was

5:54

in some sense very appealing to his listeners

5:56

at the time Do

6:32

you

6:58

think that attitude influenced

7:02

his behavior during, you know, from

7:04

the time of the rise of the Nazis all the

7:07

way until basically his death?

7:10

Yeah, so I think that for me,

7:13

I do, I mean, I do say I'm sympathetic

7:15

to some of his biographies who have said, basically,

7:18

that this kind of this position of

7:20

a kind of musical

7:23

nihilism, ethical nihilism, that

7:26

translated into a kind of political

7:28

nihilism and that he was able to, he

7:31

was able without a huge

7:34

stretch, he was able to see

7:37

the rise of the Third Reich as

7:40

a moment of opportunity for

7:42

him that he saw it sort of as a conservative

7:45

autocratic regime,

7:46

the Nazis as conservative autocratic

7:48

regime, maybe not that unlike other

7:51

regimes in German history that he had lived through,

7:53

you know, he was already in his 60s at

7:55

that point and had sort of seen a lot. He

7:58

thought, well, I was able to manipulate the Kaiser. and

8:00

you know, maybe I can manipulate

8:03

these senior Nazis and use

8:05

his occasion to accept

8:07

the honors and the prestige they're offering me and

8:09

use his occasion to bring about some changes

8:11

that he wanted to make in German

8:14

cultural policy and copyright law,

8:16

things like this. So he ultimately accepts

8:18

a position as the president of the Rech

8:20

Chamber of Music.

8:23

Yeah, and

8:24

you quote some of his speeches or

8:28

some accounts of his speeches, especially

8:31

ones thanking Hitler and Goebbels for creating

8:33

this new chamber of music and pledging

8:35

it would restore the art form to its 19th century

8:37

glory. And then you alternate

8:40

that with this, in

8:43

the end, doomed collaboration between him

8:45

and Stefan Zweig. And Zweig is

8:48

constantly trying

8:50

to get Strauss to see what is the reality

8:53

in front of him. And he does it through, it's

8:55

amazing to see how psychologically

8:58

Zweig is trying to do this. Clearly, Strauss

9:00

is a man with a big ego and

9:02

Zweig keeps appealing to that ego saying, you're

9:04

smarter than this, you know what's going on, how

9:06

can you not, or not really, how can you not see this,

9:09

but please see what is in front

9:11

of your eyes. And Strauss gets increasingly

9:13

impatient with this because Strauss

9:15

is trying to get this collaboration with Zweig

9:18

on some new operas. And Zweig

9:20

is not outwardly

9:22

refusing, but it sort of ends

9:24

up, you get the feeling Zweig is waiting for

9:26

Strauss to speak out against the Nazis before he's going

9:29

to allow a collaboration. And

9:31

finally, Strauss lashes out

9:33

at Zweig and says, you're enough

9:35

to make one an anti-Seme. And

9:38

I found this hard to read, and

9:41

I think a lot of people actually don't know this about Strauss, I

9:43

think everyone knows about Wagner, some

9:45

people know about Orf, but Strauss

9:48

weirdly gets away with some things. And

9:50

I found that very tough in

9:52

the book. And I guess

9:56

I wonder your thoughts about

9:58

this. I mean, as you said, there are many different... But

10:00

do you think he was really that naive, or

10:02

do you think he just felt that

10:05

he was apart from this and he didn't have any control

10:07

over it?

10:09

Yeah, so I think that for all the ways

10:11

that he liked to think of himself

10:12

as kind of broadly

10:15

modern, he was also an artist

10:19

very much

10:21

in the stream of sort of an

10:23

artist who really very much inherited this

10:27

idea of inernekeit,

10:32

the German translation of which is sort of inwardness,

10:35

right, and in Central European romanticism

10:37

that was just this ideal of that basically,

10:40

you know, that there was the world of art

10:42

and the world of the spirit and that politics

10:44

was kind of a world apart and that you

10:46

could really separate the two and that

10:49

what happens in that inner sanctum of

10:51

the spirit and of the self that that could

10:53

be kind of protected almost walled off

10:56

from the sort of messy stuff of the political

10:58

world. And I think that, you know,

11:01

that was obviously completely a

11:03

fiction, but it was one that he

11:05

leaned into and

11:07

very much so through this period to kind of authorize

11:10

his own behavior in a sense,

11:13

collaborating by day with the Nazis and then

11:15

trying to work by night with his Jewish

11:17

apprentice, which of course was just an ultimately

11:19

completely untenable position.

11:23

And, you know, what you see in

11:25

their correspondence between Zweig,

11:27

the great Austrian Jewish writer, and

11:30

Strauss, is this kind

11:32

of real time disillusion of

11:34

really the whole German Jewish symbiosis.

11:37

You know, you see Strauss saying, what,

11:39

you know, come on, why

11:41

can't we just do this together at least?

11:45

And he says, well, right, until it's,

11:47

you know, an auspicious time, you know,

11:49

this don't worry about this regime.

11:52

Yes, there's anti-Semitic bits that really

11:54

just kind of cosmetically unsavory,

11:56

but really, you

11:57

know, we can still none of them.

11:59

None of this should really affect

12:02

our partnership. And then five

12:04

saying, you know,

12:07

what are you talking about? He was talking

12:10

about, you know, I'm about to leave my country.

12:13

You know, I'm about to go into exile

12:16

because of this regime that you're working

12:18

for. So you have, you know, it's

12:20

an incredibly poignant correspondence.

12:23

And I have to say, it's been gratifying because this

12:25

is a correspondence that's been, you

12:28

know, was published, I believe, in the 1970s.

12:30

It's been around. But, you know,

12:32

it's been gratifying through the book to be able

12:34

to kind of bring some new readers to it because

12:37

I really found it very

12:39

much humanizing for its five as a

12:41

figure, but also very revealing for some

12:43

of these complexities of who Strauss

12:45

was as well.

12:47

Yeah, and I think we should say, of course, that Strauss

12:49

did try to help some of his family members who

12:51

had Jewish backgrounds. And there's, again,

12:53

a kind of tragic comic story of him driving

12:56

up to the gates of The Raisinschwein and saying,

12:58

I am Richard Strauss, the composer. And he demands

13:00

the release of I Can't Remember

13:02

Who It Was. And the guards

13:04

look at him like a crazy person and

13:06

send him home. And

13:09

this idea that Strauss had that he could rise

13:11

above all of it and just be, you know, help

13:13

his family and do his own thing. And

13:17

it brings us to the piece of Strauss's

13:19

that you discuss in the book, which is Metamorphosian.

13:22

And I was really struck

13:24

by this when I was reading the book that one of

13:26

the concepts that is very popular in today's

13:28

cultural world to the point of sometimes being very

13:30

heavy handed. It's this concept of moral

13:33

clarity, that you're supposed to be very clear

13:35

about what a piece of music

13:37

or a piece of art or a movie or

13:40

a piece of theater or whatever it's supposed to

13:42

mean. You're supposed to tell the audience basically what to think.

13:45

And Metamorphosian is kind of the inverse

13:47

of that because it doesn't leave

13:50

so many questions unanswered of what

13:52

he actually is memorializing

13:55

in this piece. So maybe could

13:57

you just talk about the origins of Metamorphos

13:59

and why he wrote this book? the piece and then maybe

14:01

we can get into some of these unanswered questions

14:04

about it.

14:34

Yeah, so he wrote the piece near the very end

14:36

of the war where he basically,

14:40

at that point, his mood was becoming increasingly

14:42

dark. His

14:44

music was still being performed and

14:47

sort of celebrated by the Third Reich. They were still

14:49

using it basically as a form of legitimation.

14:53

But meanwhile, he had become essentially

14:54

a kind of persona non grata for the

14:56

Nazi regime and completely

14:59

isolated in his mountain villa

15:02

in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. And

15:05

he started, as

15:07

you mentioned, he had a Jewish daughter-in-law

15:10

and partly Jewish grandchildren,

15:12

and so protecting them, which

15:14

he was able to do throughout the

15:16

course

15:16

of the war by calling in favors

15:18

with senior Nazi officials. But

15:21

that caused him a lot of stress as well. So

15:24

near the war

15:27

with nearing its final kind of chapters in

15:29

Europe, at least, he started reading

15:31

Gerta from the beginning,

15:34

and he fell in love with these two

15:37

poems by Gerta,

15:38

one of which begins

15:41

with the line that no one can ever know

15:43

himself or separate himself

15:45

from his inner being. And for

15:47

me, I found that powerful, the

15:49

poem itself is a kind of powerful statement on

15:51

the limits of self knowledge. And

15:54

he starts a choral setting of

15:57

this poetry, but he then stops and the scholar

15:59

Timothy Chatterjee,

15:59

and has kind of found the forensic musical

16:02

evidence and realized

16:04

that actually

16:04

he didn't fully set that setting

16:07

aside. He set aside the choral setting,

16:09

but he brought some of the musical ideas into

16:11

a new work for string orchestra that

16:14

would be called metamorphosin. And

16:16

it would ultimately be his great

16:18

memorial to the Second World War or

16:21

or or something like that. You

16:24

know, it's a beautiful. It's really an incredibly

16:27

expressive has

16:29

a kind of mournful grandeur, a sense of elegy

16:31

and rue and beauty.

16:34

It also speaks, I

16:36

think, with a certain sincerity. We're used to thinking

16:39

of these kind of all this kind of irony

16:41

and wit associated with the different stress

16:44

operas in that

16:44

proudly modern stance. But in this case,

16:46

he's really you have a sense that this that

16:49

this composer of many masks suddenly

16:52

kind of lowered them all. And

16:53

it's kind of speaking to us in this

16:55

confessional sense.

17:20

And in his own private writing,

17:23

he's he's lamenting this kind

17:25

of a downfall of German culture and how wrong

17:27

he had been to not distance

17:30

himself earlier from the Nazis. So he

17:32

is there is a sense of private

17:35

kind of introspection going

17:37

on. And then you have this

17:38

music that would

17:40

suggest also as introspection,

17:43

but

17:43

doesn't specify that because, of course, it's

17:45

just abstract music. It was

17:47

Schoenberg in a beautiful line we

17:49

once said, I think, only in music can

17:52

you can you confess

17:54

your heart while keeping your secrets. And

17:58

so that's that's what Strauss really.

17:59

does in this piece and

18:02

what kind of tilts his head just a little bit

18:04

in the very last line where he quotes

18:07

the funeral march of the

18:09

Eroica Symphony by Beethoven and

18:11

he writes under that in the memoriam.

18:13

It was just those two words and

18:16

so ever since then his question

18:18

of what exactly he's been he wanted to

18:20

memorialize as you say is not left clear

18:22

but the opposite is has

18:24

been left kind of shrouded in mystery

18:26

and has left many other people to sort

18:28

of speculate about what what what

18:31

might have been the

18:32

subject

18:34

of that memory.

18:54

you

19:25

yeah and I loved

19:27

the way you juxtaposed that those

19:30

unanswered questions by your own

19:32

visit to Strauss's hometown

19:35

of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the

19:37

very eerie lack of memory

19:39

there you talked about not being able to get access to

19:42

Strauss's letters some of Strauss's

19:44

correspondence and you also

19:46

talked about the memorials to

19:48

fallen Nazi soldiers inside of the town

19:51

and the fact that it was one of the only villages

19:53

that did not have a Holocaust memorial for a very

19:55

very long time and

19:57

it it it all kind

19:59

of came together

19:59

this sense of somebody who did

20:03

think of himself as separate, and

20:05

yet by entangling himself in

20:07

all of this, and then leaving so

20:09

many questions unanswered, really, you

20:12

get a sense of real ambiguity with Strauss.

20:14

And I'm curious

20:17

if you think it's possible, or

20:20

advisable in a sense, to judge Strauss

20:22

for his actions, or even to use

20:24

his music to do that.

20:26

Yeah, I'm so you

20:28

know, we will have to do a whole other podcast on

20:31

you know, the relationship between the

20:34

composers and their art and how to

20:36

think about all of that. And you

20:38

know, I think that I

20:44

did not go into this thinking that I was

20:47

going to come

20:49

to some kind of dramatic new conclusion. People

20:51

have been

20:52

asking these questions about Strauss and

20:54

within that literature and, and, you

20:57

know, writing books, you know, you know,

20:59

bad Strauss, you know, the Nazi good Strauss,

21:02

you know, the kind of inner resistor

21:04

or the, you know,

21:05

subject

21:07

to these forces beyond his control, basically

21:10

defending or accusing Strauss, others

21:12

have

21:12

asked sort of, what does it even really matter

21:14

at this point in history? You know,

21:17

so I, I, what I wanted to do in

21:19

writing about Strauss was really just go

21:21

back to tell the story

21:23

with a level of granularity that

21:26

I didn't, I hadn't often

21:28

found it told. And

21:30

with a, as

21:33

much kind of psychological acuity as

21:35

I could bring to it, I really wasn't interested

21:37

in some kind of, you know,

21:41

some kind of prosecution. I

21:44

do think that,

21:45

that we see in Strauss,

21:48

you know, these groveling letters

21:50

to Hitler at the same time as he's

21:53

his own close colleagues and friends have been

21:55

sent to exile Strauss.

21:59

Excuse me. It's fine.

21:59

ultimately commit suicide, you

22:03

do have a sense of a kind of moral compartmentalization

22:07

that I think it happens at a level that

22:10

I find very hard to defend.

22:11

I

22:13

think I go as far as calling

22:15

it indepthasible. What

22:18

does that mean for the music? This

22:21

is a big question, of course, and for

22:23

me, I ended up... It's

22:26

part of an approach the book takes to

22:28

trying to think about what

22:30

do any of these pieces mean today and where does

22:32

that meaning come from? There

22:36

is the meaning that Strauss launched

22:38

this piece into the world with

22:41

his own intentions. In this case, we don't

22:43

actually know them, but even if we

22:45

were to fully know them, I

22:48

believe that that can't really limit the

22:50

field of meaning that these works can take on over

22:53

time. That in a sense,

22:55

it's not that the meaning comes from the

22:57

composers or from us entirely, but

23:00

somehow in the negotiation between the

23:02

two and that in a sense, between

23:04

a performer and a listener and a composer,

23:07

the meaning is kind of triangulated anew

23:10

with each performance. One of the

23:12

ways, after sketching

23:14

such a kind of by its

23:16

nature, it seemed to have to be complicated. A

23:19

picture of Strauss, a portrait of Strauss,

23:21

the man in my book, I

23:23

asked what do we do now with this incredible

23:26

piece of music? Metamorphos in which, by

23:29

the way, is performed more than any of the other

23:31

works that I write about. I

23:34

wanted to be kind of

23:37

creative in how we approached it. My approach

23:39

to Metamorphos in the

23:42

book is to basically say, you know what, Strauss,

23:44

by writing in memoriam and not saying

23:46

what it was memorializing, he's almost

23:48

inviting us to kind of play a

23:51

role in attaching

23:53

new scripts of memorialization

23:55

to this work. At

23:57

the end of my chapter on Strauss,

23:59

end of the second chapter on Strauss, I

24:02

sort of take a stab at what might

24:04

be some meaningful ways of inscribing

24:07

this piece with other memories,

24:11

other stories from that era that were

24:13

actually precisely the one Strauss was ignoring

24:15

at the time. I tell the story of his Jewish

24:18

neighbors who were exiled from

24:20

his town and committed suicide. I

24:22

tell the story of these British pilots

24:25

who tried to bomb Munich and

24:27

then had their plane shot down into a lake

24:30

and their bodies, some of their bodies are still

24:32

underneath at the bottom of his lake

24:34

near Strauss's home and everyone

24:37

has forgotten that story. So

24:39

there are so many stories from the war and

24:41

from that era and part of the larger project

24:43

of the book is to ask whether some

24:46

of these pieces can be inscribed

24:48

not just with their own histories but some

24:50

of the adjacent histories and so

24:52

that after we've read the book my hope is

24:55

after one listens to Metamorphose and you

24:57

don't just hear you know the world

24:59

of Strauss

24:59

but also the world of his neighbors.

25:30

Well that I think would bring us to

25:33

your second set of composers and

25:35

I was going to ask you about Britain first but actually

25:37

because of what you're talking about with these adjacent

25:40

stories I think the story of Babi Yar

25:42

and Shostakovich's 13th Symphony is

25:44

extremely relevant,

25:48

not a word I like to use all the time but it

25:50

is something it's a place that is

25:52

in the news these days due to the Russian invasion.

25:55

It's a place that in the first

25:57

days of the war Zelensky

26:00

mentioned in a press conference there bombing Baba

26:02

Yar. This was something that was

26:04

very, something

26:07

that struck me a lot, especially knowing this

26:09

symphony and knowing the story of what happened

26:11

in Baba Yar. I've done an entire podcast

26:14

on Shlottukovich's 13th symphony, so I don't

26:16

think we necessarily need to detail the horrors

26:18

of what happened in Baba Yar. But

26:21

can you maybe talk,

26:24

essentially for those who don't know, it was a horrific

26:26

massacre, one of the worst massacres of

26:30

European Jews, Ukrainian Jews in this case,

26:33

I think it was 33,000 in two days. And

26:37

it is, yeah, it's

26:39

one of those, one of the dozens

26:41

and dozens and dozens of horrors that took place during

26:43

the Holocaust. But maybe more

26:46

relevant to what we're talking about now is, can

26:48

you talk about how the memory of

26:50

Baba Yar was suppressed for so long?

26:55

Yeah, it was this. So

26:57

in many ways, obviously the Soviets

26:59

and the Nazis fought on

27:02

opposite sides of the war eventually.

27:05

But in this case, it

27:08

was sort of ideology

27:11

ultimately trumped memory. And in

27:13

that sense, they were aligned because

27:16

the Nazis, as they were withdrawing

27:18

from Kiev and other areas of Ukraine

27:20

where there had been these horrendous massacres, tried

27:22

to destroy the evidence. And then after

27:25

they were gone, the Soviet Union tried

27:27

to destroy the memory. And

27:29

they did that in all kinds of ways.

27:32

The book tells the story of,

27:34

my book tells the story of some of

27:37

their real time documentation efforts

27:39

of the atrocities that were

27:41

carried out and sponsored

27:44

by Stalin.

27:45

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

27:47

had a project called the Black Book of

27:50

Russian Jewry that was documenting

27:52

in real time these atrocities and amassed

27:55

huge amounts of unbelievable

27:58

stories. And

27:59

And that all of that was eventually

28:02

suppressed, and

28:04

some of the leaders of that effort were assassinated

28:07

by Stalin when he turned on the project

28:09

after the war. There was

28:11

a sense that,

28:13

a few different aspects, but there was

28:15

a sense that Stalin felt that

28:18

the

28:22

losses of the Soviet Union,

28:24

which were staggering in their numbers, 23 million

28:27

historians who think today that they had to be,

28:29

first of all, dramatically underreported

28:32

until this time, and then also

28:34

collectivized, and that there

28:36

was sort of no, this had to be kind of found

28:39

new-founding myth for the Soviet

28:41

Union. The second hand of its 20th

28:43

century that it would be its collective

28:46

defeat of fascism and

28:50

its collective losses, and that there was

28:52

no room in that description

28:54

for the particularization

28:57

of any ethnic minorities that might

28:59

have been singled out for genocide

29:01

in this case as the Jews were,

29:04

nor was there really room

29:05

in the kind of strict

29:08

Marxist understanding of fascism

29:10

for anti-Semitism,

29:12

because fascism was supposed to be the end stage

29:14

of capitalism, and this idea

29:17

that anti-Semitism could have been a kind

29:19

of motor in Nazi ideology

29:21

was also, there was no room for that

29:23

idea. There was no

29:25

monuments allowed at Babi Yar, and they actually

29:27

tried to erase the topography of the

29:29

ravine, they tried to fill it in and

29:31

sign the landscape, they were ultimately successful

29:34

after some tragic starts and

29:36

stops with that, and

29:37

so until the 1960s, when

29:41

Yevgeniy Yevtashenko in the early 1960s

29:44

visited the site, saw there was no monument,

29:47

and then wrote a poem that, thanks to

29:49

this Khrushchev Thaw, actually saw

29:51

the light of day, his poem Babi

29:53

Yar, which was then set at the first movement of Shasa

29:55

Kavic's symphony, and then were at the

29:58

story that you probably told in the end.

29:59

in your podcast and that more people

30:02

know about this, this 13th Symphony by Shostakovich.

30:05

Yeah, and it struck me reading this,

30:08

the way you talked about this kind of

30:11

bulldozing over and trying to cover

30:14

the ravine and fill the ravine and how

30:16

you visited there and nobody knows where

30:18

this massacre took place. Still, there

30:20

are some theories about it. And you mentioned

30:23

it, it stopped me short. I was reading

30:25

this on a plane. You

30:27

talk about you were taken there by a guide where

30:30

they think this might have taken place and how

30:33

there's this slight dip in the earth. And

30:36

you talked about the banality of that location,

30:39

actually, in a sense. And

30:41

then you tried to find it the next day and you couldn't find

30:43

it. And it

30:46

really, they were successful in a sense of

30:49

destroying the monument or that

30:51

sense of it. But also

30:54

by destroying it and by covering

30:56

it up, they create

30:59

Yevtshinko's desire to

31:01

write this poem. And then Shostakovich,

31:05

you tell it in the book, Shostakovich calls Yevtshinko

31:07

and says, I would love to write a symphony based

31:09

or a piece based on your poetry. And Yevtshinko is this

31:11

young poet, he can't believe the great Dmitry

31:14

Shostakovich is asking him to write a piece on

31:16

his poetry. And he says, oh, of course

31:18

I would be honored. And Shostakovich says, great, I've already written

31:20

it. Can you come over? And it's

31:24

quite something to imagine that actually, I don't know if this piece

31:27

would have existed had the Soviet Union and of

31:29

course also the Nazis not tried so

31:31

hard to erase the memory of this massacre.

31:34

Yeah, absolutely. You

31:37

know, one of the themes of the book over in an

31:39

overarching sense is just this idea that

31:41

art

31:42

remembers what societies want

31:44

to forget.

31:46

And in this case, very

31:48

much as you say, this

31:50

piece that first stepped home and then to

31:53

my ears more powerfully than the poem,

31:55

Shostakovich's symphony itself

31:58

becomes this. first real

32:00

memorial to that massacre

32:03

and to the erasure

32:06

of the memory. It's a memorial

32:09

about

32:10

forgetting. It's a memorial that

32:13

recalls the price of society experiences

32:17

by remembering one

32:19

tragedy while erasing another. And

32:24

that was also very

32:26

striking to me, this sense that...

32:31

These other ways of remembering?

32:34

I think that we tend to

32:36

try to contrast throughout the book, monuments

32:38

in stone with monuments

32:41

in sound and this

32:43

idea of monument and how each of the different

32:45

mediums works differently. And

32:48

I think that

32:50

we tend to under appreciate the power

32:52

of musical memorials for a few

32:55

different reasons. But one of them being that

32:57

we think of sound as sort of the most ephemeral

32:59

thing, right? It's there before

33:01

us and then it's gone. And for memory and memorials,

33:06

we want big granite structures that are

33:08

there in our end-to-town

33:11

center to remind us forever. But

33:14

actually, it's pretty easy to have

33:16

one of those big granite structures just kind

33:18

of fade into the background if we walk by it enough

33:20

times, we stop even seeing it. Whereas

33:22

a work of music, we

33:24

come together to listen to, we

33:27

watch it, we experience

33:30

a performance of memory

33:32

in that sense. And then it's just the

33:34

medium itself, built

33:36

monuments can be knocked down as they

33:38

have been many times, books can

33:41

be burned. Even

33:43

the landscape's memory

33:45

as was the case with the Babi Yar Ravine can

33:48

be erased because the ravine itself was filled

33:50

in. But music in this sense,

33:52

it's a temporality because it becomes its

33:54

secret strength. It is untouchable

33:57

in the best sense of the word and

33:59

so it's a reality.

33:59

has this kind of power to carry forward

34:02

memory in a way that we

34:04

see across the generations and across the

34:06

centuries.

34:40

You know, speaking of that lack of ephemeral

34:42

nature, the story of the premiere

34:44

of the Babi Yar Symphony is quite

34:46

as interesting as the story of the Schoenberg Survivor

34:49

from Warsaw premiere. Could

34:51

you just talk a little bit about the pressure campaign

34:53

that all of the performers and

34:56

also Shostakovich experienced on the day of the

34:58

premiere of the symphony and then

35:00

what the reaction from the audience

35:02

was? Because Shostakovich is,

35:05

you know, so many of Shostakovich's great symphonies have these

35:09

mythical, almost mythical stories. They

35:11

would seem ridiculous if they weren't true about

35:13

what happened at the premieres, would be the way the audiences

35:16

reacted to the premieres of these symphonies and

35:18

these other works. But this one in a

35:21

way is even more powerful

35:23

than some of the other ones. So yeah, if you just kind

35:25

of take us through that day, that would be great.

35:28

Yeah, so, you know, the

35:30

poem was published at a time, but

35:34

I think there was really an uncertain time in just

35:37

how much freedom and liberalization would

35:39

be happening versus, you know, kind of a retrenchment

35:42

towards Stalin era norms. You know, it was

35:44

all kind of up for negotiation.

35:46

And so I think that it's probably

35:49

safe to say that the regime regretted having

35:51

allowed the

35:52

regime to be published. And

35:54

certainly when Shostakovich

35:55

could have been sent in now, you know, the

35:57

country's most famous composer, most famous

35:59

composer.

35:59

that composer is going to make

36:02

that the first movement of this grand

36:05

15th symphony. The

36:07

whole symphony precisely because

36:10

it challenged these sub-present

36:11

narratives of war

36:14

and memory within Soviet society,

36:17

the symphony became perceived to be a tremendous

36:19

threat to the regime. At

36:22

that point though, they were no longer

36:24

sort of canceling things from on high, and

36:27

they wanted to sort

36:27

of pressure the participants

36:30

to either cancel it themselves or

36:32

kind of be sort of chicanery behind the

36:34

scenes. So one

36:36

of the amazing symphonies was one

36:38

of the amazing... First of all, because

36:40

it was already so controversial, several of Shostakovich's

36:43

own previous champions declined

36:45

to be involved with this symphony. The

36:48

honor of conducting an ultimately felt chiral

36:51

contraction

36:51

in the Moscow Philharmonic

36:54

Orchestra, and

36:56

they had a bass soloist to form calls

36:59

for a large orchestra

37:01

chorus and bass.

37:05

They had a bass soloist,

37:08

but just in case, because Kondrashin

37:11

had been around the block, he also appointed

37:14

an understudy. And on

37:16

the day of the premiere, the

37:19

slated first bass soloist called

37:23

in sick, very

37:25

suspiciously ruinous timing. I mean, some

37:28

version of the story, he announced that

37:30

he had another commitment. Whatever

37:32

the case he had, he withdrew, and probably

37:34

you could imagine the

37:35

powers had been thinking that that would just pretty

37:37

much take care of things. You can't perform this

37:40

thing without a bass soloist. But

37:42

Kondrashin had this other man, Rammatsky,

37:45

queued up as

37:46

a reserved soloist, but he

37:48

had already been told he wasn't going to be singing. And

37:51

so he had... Nobody

37:53

even knew if he was going to come to the dress

37:55

rehearsal or the performance, and he lived far

37:57

from the city, and he had no telephone.

37:59

This is one of the many, you know, the focus,

38:02

a real tapestry of stories that has these

38:04

big ideas about sound and memory and listening.

38:07

But I try to explore them and move them forward

38:09

through these stories. And this was one of the ones that I did

38:12

not discover, but was really a privilege

38:14

to be able to share. Gramatsky,

38:16

ultimately, after this kind of agony

38:19

of suspense that Gramatsky turns

38:21

up, you know, innocently at the dress

38:23

rehearsal thinking he was just going to listen. They

38:26

immediately pounce on him and press him into

38:28

service and say, no, no, you're not listening.

38:29

You're going to give the world premiere of this piece. And

38:32

it is able to go forward, even though throughout

38:34

the rest of the day, they pressure Shostakovich,

38:36

they pressure Kondrasheen. I did

38:39

have the chance to the privilege of interviewing

38:41

Shostakovich's widow for my work

38:43

in this. And she recalled very poignantly

38:45

just that, you know, that we think

38:47

about these figures as these historical, you

38:50

know, these larger than

38:52

life historical.

38:54

The eminence is, but then you sit down with the person's

38:58

wife, who says, you know, my husband,

39:00

what they did to him, you know,

39:03

and she recalls

39:05

the emotional stress in the toll that

39:07

took on him before he was going in

39:10

to another

39:12

meeting with officials where he knew they were

39:14

going to put the screws on him in whatever ways.

39:17

And he clearly had this kind of – he

39:19

clearly carried the Stalinist era, the

39:22

Stalin era inside of him and had

39:24

all of these kinds of ghosts from that

39:26

period within himself. So you just

39:28

get a sense of the incredible emotional toll

39:31

that the whole thing took on him. To

39:33

get to the last part of your question, the premiere itself

39:36

was a

39:36

tremendous success, even before

39:38

it happened, Shostakovich didn't know it would be. He

39:42

gripped the

39:42

hand of his good friend Isaac Lichtman and

39:44

said, listen, if they spit on me, don't

39:46

defend me. I can handle it. You

39:49

know, he was ready to be pilloried by his own

39:51

society, which I just found so heartbreaking. But

39:54

of course, you know, that was not the case. And

39:56

after the Babi Yar movement, after the first

39:59

movement, it's so hard. So the audience, very educated,

40:01

they knew deeply we don't applaud between

40:04

movements, but the

40:06

applause was torrential, so much so

40:09

that Kardashian had to immediately silence

40:11

the applause in the hall because he worried

40:13

that

40:14

the officials were going to perceive it

40:16

as a political demonstration, which of course

40:18

in some basic sense it was.

41:01

courtptotecom continuous

41:18

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41:25

own human

41:35

a human

41:43

a a

41:47

a a

41:51

a a

41:55

a a to

42:01

displaced persons camps after the war.

42:05

Maybe you could just give a little bit of a sense of what that tour

42:07

was and Britain's

42:10

reaction to it.

42:12

Right, so Britain was one of the century's

42:14

great musical pacifists. And

42:18

he had seen the sort of war clouds on the horizon

42:20

and was sort of experiencing a dearth

42:22

of professional opportunities in the UK. So he

42:25

spent the early years of the war in

42:27

the US actually. And sort

42:31

of missed what he, I

42:33

think sort of a defining moment

42:36

in his country's history with

42:42

the Blitz and other aspects

42:45

of the British experience during the Second

42:47

World War. So when he was back in the country,

42:50

he became a conscientious objector. And so

42:53

kind of then missed the very final

42:55

stages in that sense kind of opted

42:57

out. In 1945, you have a sense

43:00

that he really was

43:03

hungry for some kind of felt contact with

43:06

this historical moment that had just occurred.

43:09

And he meets Yehudi Menuhin at a

43:11

party. And hears about

43:13

this recital tour that Menuhin is about to

43:15

take with the pianist Gerald Moore

43:18

of the displaced person

43:21

camps in Germany. It's

43:23

July 1945. So, you know, the

43:25

rubble is still smoldering. There

43:27

are still, you know, horse cadavers.

43:30

There are still, you know, there's

43:33

just incredible destruction in

43:35

all the German cities. And

43:38

so under these circumstances, Britain

43:41

actually prevails on Menuhin to let him be

43:43

his pianist instead. And Britain

43:45

and Menuhin go and they have

43:47

this tour and I think nine

43:50

different spots. But the one that seems to have

43:52

left the greatest impression on him was his performance

43:55

in the Belfin DP camp where

43:57

they played for...

43:59

former prisoners who were hearing music

44:02

for the first time. And, you know,

44:05

Menuhin leaves behind these beautiful descriptions,

44:08

very moving of how, you know, it almost

44:10

felt to him like, you know, like

44:12

the family, I think, as language as it

44:14

was like the first friend

44:16

or the first water or the first food

44:19

that, you know, that a human being experiences

44:22

after, you know, after

44:24

being beaten or after, you know, after their

44:28

starvation, and that in

44:30

this case, it was music that they were giving them. And,

44:34

you know, it was an amazing

44:36

moment that seems to have left a very impression

44:39

on Britain as well. He came home unable

44:41

to speak about it, actually. And

44:45

according to his partner,

44:46

Peter Peers, it wasn't until the

44:48

very end of his life that he could talk about that

44:50

trip, and then went on to say that it colored,

44:53

really,

44:53

everything that he had written since.

44:56

And at the Belsen camp,

44:58

there was a cellist who was there

45:01

named Anna Lasker, and she ends up

45:03

being quite a part of the war requiem.

45:06

And her reaction to Britain also is very

45:08

interesting. His

45:11

completely uncompromising pacifism seemed

45:14

quite naive to me, you know, reading, of course, with

45:16

hindsight. And I was kind

45:19

of, I was kind of a little surprised that myself I started

45:21

pairing him a little bit more with Strauss in the book,

45:24

which is, I don't think

45:27

a fair comparison to make for,

45:29

to Britain. But

45:32

with Britain, do you get a sense that

45:34

it was naivete, or was it such

45:37

passionate idealism that, you

45:39

know, a lot of people talk about World War II as the

45:41

just war, the war that had to be fought, unlike

45:43

World War I, which is so complicated

45:46

in all of its reasons

45:48

or non-reasons for happening. Do you think

45:50

Britain just didn't understand what was going on?

45:53

Yeah, this gets, this is a, these

45:55

are big, huge questions, and they get into

45:58

an area where I ultimately.

45:59

felt like, you

46:02

know, one should only speculate so far. And

46:06

I do think that he had a really deeply-filled

46:09

pacifism. One

46:12

of his biggest champions, the music critic

46:14

Hans Keller, once called him something

46:16

like that, one of the century's

46:18

great and most uncomplicated believers

46:21

in pacifism. And

46:23

in a sense, that idea

46:27

of a kind of an uncomplicated

46:29

approach to this, I think, was

46:32

part of

46:34

how Britain held his own pacifism.

46:37

So you do have the sense of, you

46:40

know,

46:44

about what should

46:46

be the pacifist response to

46:48

a

46:48

war like Second World War.

46:51

And I'm not sure that Britain

46:54

had an answer to that question. And

46:56

I think that that may have been, and

46:58

again, totally in the domain of speculation

47:01

here, but that may have been one

47:03

of the aspects that accounts for

47:06

either this profound displacement

47:08

at the heart

47:09

of his Second World War

47:11

memorial, which is that what we know

47:13

in his war Requiem, which was written to

47:15

commemorate the Second World War, and specifically the

47:18

bombing of the Coventry Cathedral by

47:20

the Nazis. Britain takes

47:22

the Latin Requiem Mass for the

47:24

dead and incorporates into

47:27

it the first World

47:29

War poetry of Wilford Owen. So

47:32

you do have this incredible statement about the

47:34

futility of war. It is this great pacifist

47:36

work. It's an extraordinarily effective piece

47:38

on its own terms.

47:39

But there is this sort of mystery

47:41

that hangs over it that why, in commemorating

47:44

the Second World War, does

47:47

Britain turn to the First World War

47:49

and the language of the First World War? And

47:52

I think looking at the kind of the

47:54

stress that that Second World War would have

47:56

placed on his pacifist beliefs, that's what

47:59

one way of thinking possibly about why

48:02

he did that. The other reasons I explore

48:04

in the book are the larger kind of

48:07

contours of British war

48:09

memory at the time where it turns out Benjamin

48:13

Britten was not the only one to commemorate

48:16

the Second World War through the prism of

48:18

the first. For various

48:20

ways I explore in the book, various reasons,

48:23

the First World War seemed to haunt the entire

48:25

collective imagination of

48:28

the UK in these ways that

48:31

were very profound.

49:33

And as a final question, we've

49:36

talked about this idea of unconscious

49:38

chronicles, but the four

49:41

pieces that you talk about in this book are kind of

49:43

the opposite. They're very conscious. Well,

49:45

maybe not stressed, but to a certain extent it is. They're

49:48

conscious chronicles of their time

49:50

and their place, and you wrote many

49:52

times in the book about the fact that World War II and the Holocaust

49:55

are rapidly fading from living

49:57

memory. There are very few people left who

50:00

experience those things in any sense that they can relate

50:03

to us. How

50:05

do you feel like these four pieces

50:08

can keep those chronicles alive? And

50:10

I again, I don't like to use this

50:12

word, but I think it's appropriate. Do you think those these

50:14

pieces keep it relevant in our time?

50:18

I'm so glad you asked about that, Josh. I

50:20

think that one of the, you

50:23

know, starting out this project, it's sort

50:25

of this world really need another book

50:27

about the pair of Second World War and all of

50:29

us, isn't there, you know, enough literature

50:32

on this already to fill entire libraries?

50:36

And I

50:36

obviously decided

50:38

to write one. And

50:40

the reason I wanted to press

50:42

forward with it was because I really did feel like

50:44

there was an underappreciated sense

50:47

of how music fits into this picture

50:49

of memory. And that actually

50:51

we have, you know, in those libraries,

50:54

in these archives, we have an incredible amount

50:56

of information. We know more

50:58

about that era than any other,

51:02

than we know more about history in general than

51:04

any other time prior to our own. You

51:07

know, the amount of information and the ease

51:09

with which we can access it, you know, flip

51:11

over to Wikipedia and make our little query, get

51:14

our little factoid and return to our day,

51:16

you know, the ease with which we can access this vast amount

51:19

of information about the past. It's

51:21

really incredible. At the same time,

51:23

as you mentioned, the generation

51:26

with living memory of the wartime era is

51:28

disappearing. And in general,

51:31

I feel like there is a sense in which, as

51:34

the information has proliferated,

51:36

our ability to have a really sense of self-contact

51:39

with those times,

51:40

to really feel a deeper

51:42

sense of empathy or connection to, or to

51:44

practice kind of active commemoration

51:46

that's separate from, you know, the

51:49

national holidays or the kind of civic scripts

51:51

for commemorating our idea, our ability

51:54

to feel ourselves as

51:56

the inheritors of these times for

51:59

good and for bad.

51:59

that those, that ability

52:02

is really on the wane in our culture. And

52:05

so my hope was

52:07

that the book might invite readers to think

52:10

differently about music as

52:12

a bridge backwards to these times that offer

52:15

something that certainly your

52:17

Wikipedia query doesn't offer and

52:19

in some ways that maybe may not other

52:22

art forms may not even offer with the

52:24

same amount of power. You know, there was a survivor

52:26

on the read talked about books

52:28

that take this kind of unbelievable

52:32

sort of morally unassimilable past

52:34

and place them in the cold storage

52:36

of history. That was his phrase.

52:39

And so, music's ability to

52:41

burn through history's cold storage

52:44

was something that I felt we all, I

52:46

wanted to think more about and invite readers to

52:49

think more about with me.

52:52

Well, it's really an amazing, amazing

52:55

read. We've just talked for almost two hours

52:57

about it. And it's, I

52:59

feel like we could go on for another six. It's,

53:02

it's such a pleasure to talk to you about it and truly,

53:04

I highly, highly recommend

53:07

people pick up the book times echo. And

53:10

it's just been such a pleasure talking

53:12

to you so thank you so much for

53:13

joining me. Thank you so much, Josh.

53:16

It's really,

53:16

really a pleasure

53:18

is mine and I appreciate the

53:20

chance

53:20

to open up the book with

53:23

such an awful interviewer.

53:41

Thanks so much for listening to sticky notes today

53:44

and thank you so much to Jeremy Eichler for joining

53:46

me on the show. We'll have some more exciting stuff

53:48

for you next week. So don't miss our next episode.

53:50

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53:52

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53:55

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53:57

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53:59

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54:02

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54:04

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54:07

Slash sticky notes podcast. Thanks,

54:10

and I'll talk to you again after a while

54:30

you you