Moral and political dilemmas

Robert Gore-Langton

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Robert Gore-Langton talks to Ronald Harwood about musical life in Nazi Germany

Harwood wrote the play partly because he is obsessed with moral and political dilemmas faced by artists and partly as an antidote to war documentaries with titles like (as he puts it) ‘I was Hitler’s chiropodist’. ‘I was put on to Strauss when writing about Furtwängler in Taking Sides,’ he told me down the phone. ‘Years ago I was given a book of letters between Strauss and Zweig. I forgot about it and it came back to mind. The Strauss story is not well known, even in Germany.’

With plays about Mahler, Furtwängler and now Strauss, Harwood is doing for the lives of musicians on the stage what Ken Russell did on the screen. His latest play will certainly be much nicer about Strauss than Ken Russell was in his 1970 Omnibus film about him, The Dance of the Seven Veils. Russell’s controversial film — never shown and unavailable on DVD — sounds lavishly over the top even by his own lurid standards. Russell regarded Strauss as not just a second-rate composer but also a bedroom pervert and a Hitler sycophant to boot. In it (I am told) there’s a moment when Hitler plays the piano and Strauss dances to his tune. The play Collaboration is an extension of that metaphor. But Harwood comes at Richard Strauss without prejudice and makes it clear that the man was horribly blackmailed. The story goes that Strauss followed orders because the Nazis discovered that he had a Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice. The price of her survival was his co-operation with the State Music Bureau. His one moment of defiance seems to have been in his refusal to allow the librettist Zweig’s name to be removed from the poster for Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman), an act which cost the opera its run and the theatre manager his job.