Description

A piercing investigation showing how a glittering Mozart music festival in 1941 Vienna became a powerful instrument of Nazi propaganda in both annexed Austria and occupied France.

Vienna, November 28, 1941. At the Konzerthaus, the overture to Don Giovanni opened a monumental "Mozart Week of the German Reich" orchestrated by National Socialist authorities for the 150th anniversary of Mozart's death. In the ensuing days, the best German artists performed an astounding musical program intended for the broadest audience-military, officials, and residents of the Reich, as well as citizens of some twenty neutral, allied, or occupied countries. Among them, the French delegation, comprised of twenty-two French guests including renowned composers Arthur Honegger and Florent Schmitt, was the explicit target of a veritable charm offensive.

Based on wide-ranging German and French sources, this book interrogates this significant instance of music propaganda by the Nazis, which led to major repercussions for collaborators within the French musical elite. Far from being the result of unified propagandist intentions, the details of the event's organization reveal notable political disharmony between several Nazi party authorities. Yet these tensions remained invisible to the French delegation, who were seduced by the grandeur and exceptional quality of the festival. Upon returning to Paris, they published glowing accounts, enabling the transmission of a propagandistic discourse that presented Mozart as an Aryan, German, and (by this definition) universal composer.