The Twisted Muse

Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent? These questions and their implications are explored in Michael Kater's broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small - from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer - are examined by Kater, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are laid out before the reader. Who collaborated? And to what extent? Who was persecuted, and to what effect? Along the way, Kater manages to debunk, authoritatively, old arguments and expose collaborators - notably Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. This major opera diva of the 1950s and 60s, who has for years adamantly denied her affiliation to the Nazi party, is shown to have ingratiated herself with the Nazi rulers. . More widely, Kater tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. Kater's examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through its manipulation of musicians and German music adds much to our understanding of culture in totalitarian regimes.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.