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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2014
Operetta held an ambiguous position within Nazi German entertainment culture: while suitably diverting and escapist, many of the most successful hits had Jewish authors and were thus increasingly avoided by theatre directors. To replenish the Reich’s performable repertory, Goebbels founded the ‘Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’, whose revisions of classical works including Handel’s oratorios and Mozart’s Da Ponte operas have been widely discussed. This article focuses on one of the institution’s many operetta commissions, Viennese satirist Rudolf Weys’s unfinished 1944 version of Franz Lehár’s Der Rastelbinder (1902), a box office success that featured an itinerant Jewish peddler as the central character. Weys’s revisions as well as his own story show that this kind of Reichsstelle commission could be a lifeline for artists who could not afford to attract attention or leave the Reich.
1 Most of the contributions to the topic can be found in a book of conference proceedings, Wolfgang Schaller’s Operette unterm Hakenkreuz: Zwischen hoffähiger Kunst und ‘Entartung’ (Berlin, 2007) and in Arnbom, Marie-Therese, Kevin Clarke and Thomas Trabitsch, eds., Welt der Operette: Glamour, Stars und Showbusiness (Vienna, 2011)Google Scholar, 14. See also Christoph Dompke, Unterhaltungsmusik und NS-Verfolgung, Musik im ‘Dritten Reich’ und im Exil, 15 (Neumünster, 2011).
2 Jansen, Wolfgang, ‘Von der Operette zum Musical: Zur Entwicklung des unterhaltenden Musiktheaters nach 1945’, in Arnbom et al., Welt der Operette, 243Google Scholar and Hans-Dieter Roser, ‘Kein Shimmy für Stiefel. Operette in Wien in den Jahren 1938 bis 1944: Eine Bestandsaufnahme’, in Arnbom et al., Welt der Operette, 179–97.
3 Roser, ‘Kein Shimmy für Stiefel’, 195Google Scholar.
4 Ziegler, Hans Severus, ‘Zum Geleit!’, in Reclams Operettenführer, 2nd edn, ed. Walter Mnilk (Leipzig, 1938)Google Scholar, 3–4.
5 Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, trans. Vivian Bird (Newport Beach, CA, 1982)Google Scholar, 136 and 81.
6 See Koch, Hans-Jörg, ‘“Das NS-Wunschkonzert”: Operette als Narkotikum’, in Schaller, Operette unterm Hakenkreuz, 117Google Scholar. The Reich’s theatre programmes reflect this preference for carefree entertainment: while comic and light works totaled 48 per cent of stage performances before 1939, during the war their share rose to 56.5 per cent. Steinweis, Alan E., Art, Ideology, & Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill, 1993)Google Scholar, 164.
7 Drewes, Heinz, ‘Die Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’, Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 70 (1943)Google Scholar, 25. Compare with Dompke, , Unterhaltungsmusik und NS-Verfolgung, 85Google Scholar and Potter, Pamela M., Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT, 1998)Google Scholar, 130.
8 Rainer Schlösser to Goebbels, September 12, 1934; Bundesarchiv, R55/20169, 145; reproduced in Schaller, Operette unterm Hakenkreuz, 14–16.
9 Stefan Frey, ‘“Dann kann ich leicht vergessen, das teure Vaterland…” Lehár unterm Hakenkreuz’, in Schaller, Operette unterm Hakenkreuz, 94.
10 Schlösser to Goebbels, September 12, 1934; reproduced in Schaller, Operette unterm Hakenkreuz, 14.
11 Dompke, , Unterhaltungsmusik und NS-Verfolgung, 86Google Scholar.
12 Volker Klotz, ‘Der Widerspenstigen Lähmung’, in Schaller, Operette unterm Hakenkreuz, 79–80, also 88.
13 Ziegler, ‘Zum Geleit!’, 3Google Scholar.
14 Roser, ‘Kein Shimmy für Stiefel’, 191Google Scholar.
15 Potter, , Most German of the Arts, 130Google Scholar. Drewes had started his career as a conductor of operettas and operas in Weimar. See Dümling, Albrecht, ‘“Wider die Negerkultur, für deutsches Volkstum”’, in Glitter and be Gay: Die authentische Operette und ihre schwulen Verehrer, ed. Kevin Clarke (Hamburg, 2007)Google Scholar, 147.
16 Drewes to personnel division, March 7, 1942 and Leiter M. [Drewes] to Abteilung H. (in the Propaganda Ministry), 10 September 1942; Bundesarchiv, R 55/240; quoted in Potter, Most German of the Arts, 130.
17 For detailed accounts of the revisions of Handel’s works see Potter, Pamela M., ‘The Politicization of Handel and His Oratorios in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Early Years of the German Democratic Republic’, Musical Quarterly, 85 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 311–41; Roters, Katja, Bearbeitungen von Händel-Oratorien im Dritten Reich, Schriften des Händel-Hauses in Halle, 16 (Halle, 1999)Google Scholar, 33–42; Pečman, Rudolf, ‘Georg Friedrich Händel im Dritten Reich: Alttestamentarische (jüdische) Oratorienthematik im Blickfeld der nazistischen Fälscher Georg Friedrich Händels’, in Socialist Realism and Music: Colloquia Musicologica Brunensia, 36, ed. Petr Macek, Mikulá Bek and Geoffrey Chew (Prague, 2004)Google Scholar, 97–100. On Third Reich revisions of Mozart’s works, see, for example, Levi, Erik, ‘The Aryanization of Music in Nazi Germany’, The Musical Times, 131 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 19–23 and Levi, Erik, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon (New Haven, CT, 2010)Google Scholar.
18 See Moser, Hans Joachim, ‘Von der Tätigkeit der Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’, in Jahrbuch der deutschen Musik 1943, ed. Hellmuth von Hase (Leipzig, 1943)Google Scholar and Drewes, ‘Die Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’. This focus was clearly based on Goebbels’s order rather than on his officers’ personal preference: as Moser admitted, he was challenged by the operetta editing work since the art form was alien to him at first, his area of expertise being early German music, particularly Heinrich Schütz. See Moser, ‘Selbstbericht des Forschers und Schriftstellers Hans Joachim Moser’, 21 and ‘Schlußwort Hans Joachim Moser am 19.9.1947’, 3; Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Hans Joachim Moser Papers, N. Mus. Nachl. 31, Boxes 5 and 15 respectively. Similarly, Goebbels’s diaries from 1939 to 1941 suggest that Drewes temporarily fell out of the minister’s favour because he showed ‘too little understanding for the entertaining part of music’ and was reluctant to spend more of the Reichsstelle budget on the popular genres. Goebbels, diary entry on November 23, 1940; see Goebbels, Joseph, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, part I vol. 8, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1987)Google Scholar, 432; quoted also in Levi, Erik, Music in the Third Reich (London, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 37–8.
19 Potter, Pamela M., ‘Musicology under Hitler: New Sources in Context’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 95–6 and Levi, Erik, ‘Opera in the Nazi Period’, in Theatre under the Nazis, ed. John London (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar, 147. Both these authors offer the same examples as cited in Moser, ‘Von der Tätigkeit’, 80. Alfred Einstein’s 1946 review of this compilation in Notes – suitably angry for its time – already shows the trends to focus on the office’s work with ‘serious music’ and to condemn Moser as the ‘most unsavory fellow’ of all.
20 Klotz, , ‘Der Widerspenstigen Lähmung’, 88Google Scholar.
21 Sikorski to Moser, n.d.; Wienbibliothek, Handschriftensammlung, Weys Papers, ZPH 1011. Unless otherwise noted, all the archival documents cited in this article are from Weys’s papers in this archive.
22 Lehár himself called it this, since Wiener Frauen (1901) had involved a lot of piecing together of different materials in order to fit the contemporary operetta conventions. See Stefan Frey, liner notes to Franz Lehár, Der Rastelbinder with Fritz Muliar, the ORF Choir and Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hans Graf, recorded November 1981, CPO, 777 038-2, 2004, compact disc, 14.
23 Frey, Rastelbinder CD liner notes, 17.
24 See Frey, ‘Dann kann ich leicht vergessen’, 96–7.
25 Frey, Rastelbinder CD liner notes, 15. Louis Treumann recreated this character, his first big success, in the 1926 silent film version.
26 Levi, ‘Aryanization of Music’, 20Google Scholar and Prieberg, Fred, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main, 1982)Google Scholar, 355.
27 Even Hans Veigl, the author of the most critical account of Weys and the Wiener Werkel so far, reckons that the cabaret artist’s work for Nazi organisations was solely a ‘survival strategy’. Veigl, Hans, Tränen und Gelächter: Kleinkunst im Wiederaufbau (Straden, 2009)Google Scholar, 18.
28 See, most recently, Alfred Dorfer, ‘Satire in restriktiven Systemen Europas im 20. Jahrhundert’, Ph.D. diss., Vienna University (2011), 77.
29 See, for example, Kreissler, Felix, Kultur als subversiver Widerstand: Ein Essay zur österreichischen Identität (Munich, 1997)Google Scholar, 188–9; Manfred Lang, ‘Kleinkunst im Widerstand: Das Wiener Werkel, das Kabarett im Dritten Reich’, Ph.D. diss., Vienna University (1967); Veigl, Hans, Lachen im Keller – Von den Budapestern zum Wiener Werkel: Kabarett und Kleinkunst in Wien (Vienna, 1986)Google Scholar; and Haider-Pregler, Hilde, ‘Das “Wiener Werkel” – ein “Wiener Januskopf”? Kabarett zwischen Opportunismus und Widerstand’, in Die ‘österreichische’ nationalsozialistische Ästhetik, ed. Iljana Dürhammer and Pia Janke (Vienna, 2003)Google Scholar. There seems to be no English-language literature on Weys.
30 Goebbels to the president of the Reichstheaterkammer, December 8, 1937; Östa, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Oper 1940/40; quoted in Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner, ‘Nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik in Wien 1938–1945 unter spezieller Berücksichtigung der Wiener Theaterszene’, Ph.D. diss., Vienna University (1980), 123. See also Jelavich, Peter, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, 1993)Google Scholar, 246.
31 Jelavich, , Berlin Cabaret, 249Google Scholar.
32 Ibid., 245 and 257.
33 Veigl, Hans, Bombenstimmung – Das Wiener Werkel: Kabarett im Dritten Reich (Vienna, 1994)Google Scholar, 10–11.
34 See Lang, ‘Kleinkunst im Widerstand’, 7Google Scholar.
35 Veigl, Tränen und Gelächter, 19–20.
36 Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, 34–5.
37 Lang, , ‘Kleinkunst im Widerstand’, 43Google Scholar.
38 Kreissler, , Kultur als subversiver Widerstand, 189Google Scholar.
39 Merz, Carl and Qualtinger, Helmut, Der Herr Karl (1961) (Vienna, 2007)Google Scholar.
40 For a detailed discussion see Schmitz-Berning, Cornelia, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 2000)Google Scholar, 365.
41 Quoted in Herbert Staud, ‘Das Ostmark-Kabarett “Wiener Werkel” – Kollaboration oder Demonstration?’, Österreichische Literatur im Exil, www.literaturepochen.at/exil/lecture_5034.pdf, 8 (accessed 3 February 2013). For a detailed discussion of the concept of Gemütlichkeit in Vienna, see Lutz Musner, ‘Eine Archäologie der Wiener Gemütlichkeit’, in idem, Der Geschmack von Wien: Kultur und Habitus einer Stadt, Interdisziplinäre Stadtforschung, 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 2009) 173–204.
42 Rudolf Weys, ‘Der Wiener Januskopf’; reproduced in Österreichische Literatur im Exil, www.literaturepochen.at/exil/multimedia/pdf/weysjanuskopf.pdf (accessed 1 February 2013).
43 Goebbels, diary entry on December 9, 1940; see Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part I vol. 9, 42. See also Weys, Rudolf, Wien bleibt Wien und das geschieht ihm ganz recht (Vienna, 1974)Google Scholar, 249 and Kühn, Volker, Die Zehnte Muse: 111 Jahre Kabarett (Cologne, 1993)Google Scholar, 97.
44 Goebbels, diary entry on April 9, 1945; see Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part II vol. 15, 692.
45 On the Wien Film see, for example, Fritz, Walter, Kino in Österreich, 1928–1945: Der Tonfilm (Vienna, 1991)Google Scholar, 118–25 and Schlemmer, Gottfried, ‘Wien-Film’, in Wien – Berlin: Stationen einer kulturellen Beziehung, ed. Hartmut Grimm, Mathias Hansen and Ludwig Holtmeier (Saarbrücken, 2000)Google Scholar, 178–86.
46 Weys, ‘Hans Wurst im Keller’, n.d.
47 Weys to ‘Robert’, March 12, 1946.
48 Moser to Sikorski, June 3, 1944.
49 Weys to Moser, June 23, 1944.
50 Weys to Lehár, July 27, 1944.
51 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung zu meiner Bearbeitung des “Rastelbinder”’, n.d.
52 For example, the dialogue of the prologue is significantly altered to make the children’s engagement more plausible to a 1945 audience.
53 Moser, , ‘Von der Tätigkeit’, 79Google Scholar. The Reichsstelle also applied the same principle to the music, particularly the instrumentation: with a ‘cautious hand’ the editors aimed to raise the standard of the – for modern audiences, sometimes ‘scanty’ – orchestration to match that of the ‘master himself at the height of his artistry’. They treated what they considered to be ‘weak numbers’ next to ‘valuable pearls’ with a ‘careful blood transfusion … in order to breathe juvenile vitality into any works of the light muse with an elderly appearance’. See Drewes, ‘Die Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen’, 25.
54 Ibid. In order to bring old operettas up to date, the Reichsstelle considered it necessary to change several libretto locations to what were then German or German-occupied locations: Millöcker’s Bettelstudent was moved from Cracow to Breslau, Nedbal’s Polenblut was renamed Erntebraut and set in Bohemia, and Suppé’s Fatinitza was removed from its original 1854 setting at the Battle of Sebastopol and updated to Bulgaria’s 1940s ‘war of liberation’.
55 Moser to Sikorski, October 7, 1943, transcript.
56 ‘daß so ä dumme Sitt’ besteht? Die Leut sind doch verschroben!’ Franz Lehár and Victor Léon, Der Rastelbinder: Operette in einem Vorspiel und zwei Acten, Vollständiger Clavier-Auszug mit Text (Vienna, 1902), 20.
57 ‘daß immer noch der Brauch besteht, ich find das zu verschroben’; Weys, ‘Der Rastelbinder’, libretto manuscript, 20–1.
58 Lehár, Franz and Léon, Victor, Der Rastelbinder: Operette in einem Vorspiel und zwei Akten, libretto (Vienna, 1980)Google Scholar, 59.
59 Weys to Moser, July 1, 1944.
60 Frey, Rastelbinder CD liner notes, 15.
61 Moser to Sikorski, June 3, 1944. Indeed, contemporary critics, for example of the Völkischer Beobachter, praised operettas that ‘could entertain a full house without salaciousness and ambiguous suggestive innuendos’. Vonsien, Karl F., ‘“Liebe lacht im Lärchenhof”: Erfolgreiche Operette Schweriner Autoren’, Völkischer Beobachter, 9 May, 1942Google Scholar; reproduced in Klotz, , ‘Der Widerspenstigen Lähmung’, 80Google Scholar. On the de-eroticising of operetta under the Nazis, see Kevin Clarke, ‘Einleitung: Homosexualität und Operette?’, in Clarke, Glitter and be Gay, 8.
62 See Lehár and Léon, Der Rastelbinder, libretto, 48–9; Weys, ‘Der Rastelbinder’, libretto manuscript, 58–60.
63 Weys to Moser, June 23, 1944. See also Weys to Moser, July 1, 1944.
64 Moser to Sikorski, October 7, 1943, transcript. In 1943 Moser had already written to Sikorski about Zampach’s ‘boring and hardly effective’ edition.
65 Weys to Sikorski, July 1944. In order to persuade Moser and Lehár, Weys even wrote a ‘psychological analysis’, showing what each of the main characters would most naturally be doing immediately after the end of Act I, and that for the characters to meet again, all other locations would look forced. Weys to Moser, July 19, 1944 and Weys, ‘Beilage A’, n.d.; see also Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
66 Weys to Moser, July 19, 1944.
67 Weys to Sikorski, July 9, 1944 and Weys to Moser, July 19, 1944.
68 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
69 Moser to Sikorski, June 3, 1944.
70 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
71 Weys, reporting to Seidel about his meeting with Lehár in Ischl, August 9, 1944.
72 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
73 Weys, ‘Der Rastelbinder’, libretto manuscript, 30.
74 Ibid., 31.
75 Ibid., 56.
76 Staud, ‘Das Ostmark-Kabarett “Wiener Werkel”’, 2Google Scholar.
77 Fritz Eckhardt and Franz Paul, ‘Das chinesische Wunder: En Spiel um den Chinesen, der net untergeht’, Österreichische Literatur im Exil, www.literaturepochen.at/exil/multimedia/pdf/eckhardtchinese.pdf (accessed 13 October 2010).
78 Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
79 The same melismatic melody was also woven into the introduction to the prologue; however, one easily could have cut out the corresponding parts there.
80 Ludwig Karpath; quoted in Frey, Rastelbinder CD liner notes, 16.
81 Weys to Sikorski, July 9, 1944 and Weys, ‘Kurze Vorbemerkung’.
82 On Orientalism in music see, for example, Scott, Derek B., ‘Orientalism and Musical Style’, The Musical Quarterly, 82 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 309–35 (on the use of the oboe, see particularly page 327); also, Locke, Ralph P., ‘Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East’, 19th-Century Music, 22 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 20–53. On the importance of the clarinet in Klezmer, see Feldman, Walter Zev, ‘Jewish music; 3 (ii) Klezmer’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London, 2001)Google Scholar. Version at Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41322pg4 (accessed 10 November 2010).
83 Weys to ‘Doktor Hecker’, August 14, 1944.
84 Steinweis, Art, Ideology, & Economics in Nazi Germany, 169–70.
85 Frey, , ‘Dann kann ich leicht vergessen’, 100Google Scholar.
86 Weys to Seidel, August 9, 1944.
87 Weys to Sikorski and wife, August 9, 1944.
88 Lehár to Weys, October 1, 1944.
89 Weys to the Vienna employment office, August 16, 1944.
90 Goebbels, Joseph, ‘Der totale Kriegseinsatz der Kulturschaffenden’, Die Reichskulturkammer: Amtliches Mitteilungsblatt … 2 (1944)Google Scholar, 121–7.
91 Weys to Sikorski, to Lehár, and to Moser, August 24, 1944.
92 Weys to Lehár, September 25, 1944.
93 Lehár to Weys, October 1, 1944.
94 Frey, , ‘Dann kann ich leicht vergessen’, 100Google Scholar.
95 Weys to Lehár, September 25, 1944.
96 Weys to Sikorski, November 15, 1944. The Organisation Todt was a civil and military engineering organisation founded by Fritz Todt and led, after 1942, by Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments. The institution was notorious for using forced labour for their often dangerous large-scale construction work.
97 Weys to the Vienna employment office, December 30, 1944.
98 Sikorski to Weys, November 27, 1944.
99 Weys to the Vienna employment office, December 30, 1944. See also Weys to the Vienna employment office, September 12, 1944.
100 Lehár to Weys, October 1, 1944.
101 Weys to Louis Barcata, December 19, 1944.
102 Weys to unknown recipients (a couple), December 14, 1944.
103 Weys to Lehár, March 26, 1945.
104 See also Levi, , Music in the Third Reich, 76Google Scholar and Glanz, Christian, ‘Grautöne und blue notes: Zur Popularmusik in Wien zwischen 1938 und 1945’, in Musik in Wien, 1938–1945, ed. Carmen Ottner (Vienna, 2006)Google Scholar, 278–9.
105 Prieberg, , Musik im NS-Staat, 355Google Scholar.
106 See Alfred Einstein, review of Jahrbuch der deutschen Musik 1943, ed. Hellmuth von Hase, Notes 3 (1946), 289. For recent literature on Moser, see Gerhard, Anselm, ‘Musicology in the “Third Reich”: A Preliminary Report’, The Journal of Musicology, 18 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 517–43.
107 Pamela P. Potter, ‘Moser: (2) Hans Joachim Moser’, in Sadie and Tyrrell, The New Grove. Version at Grove Music Online, ed. Macy, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/19191pg2 (accessed 14 March 2013); and eadem, Most German of the Arts.
108 Moser, ‘Schlußwort Hans Joachim Moser am 19.9.1947’; Moser Papers, Box 5.
109 Moser, December 10, 1947; Moser Papers, Box 1. Also Moser, ‘Selbstbericht des Forschers und Schriftstellers Hans Joachim Moser’, 22; Moser Papers, Box 15.
110 Moser to Curt Sachs, December 25, 1948; Moser Papers, Box 6.