Patrick Bade
Beethoven in World War II

Patrick Bade - Beethoven in World War II

• Morning, everyone. Morning, Patrick. Morning, Judes.

• Morning.

• Morning. Well, we’ve got a wonderful presentation to look forward to today. So, Patrick, whenever you’re ready, hand it over to you. Thank you.

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• I’m going to launch at straight in then. So EC Londres. Here I am in London. I am indeed in London, but it is kind of comical in a way that those broadcasts who occupied Europe from London began with two pieces of German music. Da, da, da, dum, of course, is Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony.” And then it goes straight into Handel’s “Water Music.” Of course, we Brits, we like to think of Handel as British. We call him George Frederick Handel, but he’s really Georg Friedrich Händel, and he was born in Halle in Germany. Well, whichever bright spark at the BBC came up with the idea that the motif that starts the “Fifth Symphony” of Beethoven, da, da, da, dum, is also the Morse code for the letter V. I mean, that person deserves a medal because in one fell swoop, he had managed to recruit Germany’s greatest cultural icon for the Allied cause. And once established, there was absolutely not a thing that the Nazis could do about it. The little jingle I’m going to play to you is part of a campaign of the BBC to get people all over occupied Europe to write the letter V on walls and on vehicles as a provocation to the Germans. I’m sure that was absolutely infuriating to Hitler and Goebbels.

A few days after the Declaration of War, Hitler gave a speech on the radio that was gloating over English cultural inferiority. As I told you before, the Germans liked to call England Anglund, , “the country without music”. Hitler said, “One single German,” shall we say Beethoven, “achieved more than all the English put together.” My next little excerpt for you is actually, I’m going to play you part of this concert later in the talk, but I’m just going to play you to start with the announcements at the end of Hitler’s birthday concert in April 1942. At these concerts, they always played Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”.

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And the announcer tells us that it’s conducted by Furtwängler, he tells us the cast. He tells us that Dr. Goebbels has given an introductory speech to the concert, and then he tells us where in the world the concert has been broadcasted, in effect, to the entire globe. So I’m quite sure there were people in Cape Town and in New York and Australia who were listening to that concert. Now the myth of Beethoven as some kind of super man predates the Nazis. It goes right back to the 19th century. This is the cover of a very interesting exhibition in Munich a few years ago which explored this promotion of the myth of Beethoven as a super man. This is a print by Max Clinger, and a lot of these images where Beethoven is depicted as some kind of Colossus.

This is the Beethoven, Beethoven monument, by Max Klinger, which was unveiled to the world in Vienna in 1902. Mahler brought the Vienna Philharmonic to play the “Ode to Joy”. Klimt made his Beethoven frieze to surround it. It’s 10 foot high. It’s what the German had this wonderful word in German, noble kitch. I think that’s what you have to describe this monument as it’s 10 foot high, polychrome, made out all sorts of semi-precious stones and different metals and so on. An absolutely extraordinary thing, worth going to Leipzig to see it in the Museum of Fine Arts there. And pretty well every piano in the Western world had a bust of Beethoven on it, not necessarily as enormous as this one on top of Liszt’s piano. And you can see all his guests either looking admiringly at the statue of Beethoven or swooning in ecstasy at his music.

Now when I go to the flea market, which I do every Saturday when I’m in Paris, I could be sure of finding dozens and dozens of these busts of Beethoven. As I said, pretty well every middle class family in the Western world had a bust of Beethoven. My grandparents had one. And this is my own bust of Beethoven made out of cast iron. And you can see a little shrine to Beethoven that’s in my back garden in London. So Beethoven, you could say the soundtrack of the Second World War is provided as far as classical music is concerned by Beethoven and as far as popular music is concerned by swing. And Beethoven was played everywhere on all sides. He was by far the most performed composer in London during the Second World War in the National Gallery concerts and the proms, this is Henry Wood. There were 128 different works by Beethoven performed during the wartime proms that the nearest to that by any English composer is Elgar with a mere 33. Now Beethoven was an inspiration and a comfort to all of humanity during the Second World War and I want to read you some reactions to his music.

I’m starting off with Fania Fenelon, who was a member of the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra and this is a very controversial book, “Playing for Time”. And she tells the story of how Alma Rose, the leader of the orchestra, wanted to perform some Beethoven and she pretended; she had a fantastic musical memory. I think I told you that before. That’s why she survived because she was able from memory to write out whole scores. And she claimed that the only score she could remember by heart of Beethoven was the “Fifth Symphony”. So this is what she said. “I’d claimed that all I could remember was the first movement of Beethoven’s "Fifth Symphony” and I suggested she put it on the programme. A rare pleasure for me. She didn’t see any malice in it, nor did the SS. They saw no connection with the signature of the free French broadcast on the BBC. For them it was Beethoven, a god, a monument to German music and they listened in respectful rapture. Their lack of a sense of humour was almost touching.

There was intense jubilation when our orchestra played the piece. It was one of my most perfect moments.“ We’re going to hear how that motto at the beginning of the "Fifth Symphony”, it becomes so entwined with the idea of ultimate Allied victory. I’m going to play you an excerpt from a piece of music by Bohuslav Martinu, great Czech composer, who, with the help of Varian Fry, had escaped from Paris and he’d gone to America.

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He was settled in New York. In 1942, there was this terrible massacre of the inhabitants of the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia. They were accused of hiding the assassins of Heydrich. And in revenge, the entire population of the town including children, were massacred. There are these terrible photographs with the, you can see the mattresses against the wall to guard the executioners from bullets that might ricochet off the walls. And shamelessly, the Nazis publicised this; this was not a hidden crime, it was an open crime. And I think it was probably the first time when it dawned on a lot of people around the globe just how monstrous the Nazis were.

And, of course, Martinu in exile was profoundly affected by this. And he wrote this very tragic piece, “The Memorial to Lidice”, which was premiered in 1943. But it slowly works up to a triumphant climax and tremendously powerful moment where he quotes the motto theme from the “Fifth Symphony” to demonstrate his belief in ultimate Allied victory over the Nazis. My next reaction to the music of Beethoven and demonstration of how it could be a comfort in the most terrible circumstances. And it comes from the wonderful Anita Lasker Wallfisch, who you all know from her recent interview with Judi. And this is, I’m going to give you a quote from her book about her experiences in Auschwitz called “Inherit the Truth”. It’s one of the, if you haven’t read it, I strongly, strongly recommend it. It is one of the best memoirs of the Holocaust. It’s a tough book. She’s a tough woman. She’s not a woman given to any kind of gush and she is always very reluctant to express her personal feelings. I’ve attended many talks where she’s been asked questions and when somebody in the audience has the temerity to say, “What did you feel?”, you can see her bristling in response.

But in this quote, she’s talking about a performance not for the guards, not for anybody else, but themselves. Four members of the orchestra, they arranged Beethoven’s “Appassionata” slow movement for a string quartet and they played it for themselves. And this is what she says in her book. “It may not sound very extraordinary, it was just a chamber music evening, but one with a difference. We were able to raise ourselves high above the inferno of Auschwitz into spheres where we could not be touched by the degradation of concentration camp existence.” And to give you some sense of what it may have sounded like, this is actually a modern performance of the arrangement of this piano piece for strings. And another quote of reactions to Beethoven and how he provided comfort this time from Janina Bauman, who was in the Warsaw ghetto. And she also wrote a really powerful book called “Winter in the Morning”, another book I strongly recommend to you. And incidentally, her daughter, Lydia Bauman, will be giving a talk about her mother and her mother’s experience for the Insider Outsider Festival on the 24th of May. But she describes how she managed to get hold of some records, which they were able to play on a little wind up gramophone because you didn’t need electricity for that.

And they were of Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” and this is what she writes, “Some other young people were already waiting for us and we went to a strange place next door. It was an empty room, half demolished by fire and terribly cold. We sat down on the floor and our host brought out two records, the only two he had not yet sold. It was of Beethoven’s "Fifth Symphony”. One was Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony”, first and second movement. The other was Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” third and fourth movements.“ I presume this must have been actually an abridged version. They did exist in those days because actually you would need two sides for each movement if you gave the whole symphony. "Freezing in our coats and gloves, we spent all evening listening to these two records. When the fourth movement was over, we started again with the first until it was nearly curfew time. After that, we met at the same place again and listened to the same records once a week until the end of winter.

We had no other records of classical music. We just had the "Fifth Symphony”.“ And I’m moving on to Helene Berr, yet another book. He’s got a long reading list for this talk. And that is "The Journal of Helene Berr”, which was only published as recently as 2008. Of course, it’s originally in French, but you can find it in English, you can buy it in English. And, of course, the enormity of the crime and the complexity, it’s something I feel we’re all trying to, in a way, explore it as a team over a period of three months. Of course, we’re only scratching the surface. And it’s amazing in the course of these lectures what new material is actually coming out, people getting in contact with us, and telling us their experiences or their experiences of their family.

But as I said, it seems extraordinary that it took so long to publish this journal, which caused a great sensation when it came out and has been compared to “The Diary of Anne Frank”. Helene Berr was older. She was a student. She was unable to complete her studies at the Sorbonne. So I think it’s actually in many ways, quite different from Anne Frank. She’s more mature. Obviously, extremely intelligent, extremely observant of what is going on around her. So she survived into 1944 when so many of the Jews around her in Paris had been arrested and taken away. Her diary is full of hope, full of fear. By the spring of 1944, Eisenhower had broadcast that an invasion of mainland Europe was on its way, so she’s saying things in her diary like, will I see it? Will I survive it? And, of course, tragically she didn’t because she was taken a couple of months before the Normandy landings. But so here is this excerpt from Helene Berr’s diary.

“Some other young people–Had been at Nadine’s. Lessons have been suspended yet again. The pianist who played with us was arrested on Monday evening with his sister and has surely been deported, denounced. Madame and Nadine played a Beethoven sonata. Suddenly during adagio, the cruelty, the lunatic injustice of this new arrest after 1,000 others seared my heart. A boy of such talent, a boy able to offer the world such pure joy through an art oblivious to human malice up against brutality, matter devoid of spirit. How many souls of infinite worth, repositories of gifts others should have treated with humility and respect have been similarly crushed and broken by German brutality? Just as a precious violin, full of dormant capacities to awaken the deepest and purest emotions may be broken by brutal sacrilegious force.” So I suppose you could say, in fact, in this case, Beethoven’s music was actually not comforting.

It seems to have made pain of the situation even greater for her. Now I’m going to take you on a tour of the world during the war with performances of Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”, which was a fetish piece played again and again on all sides all over the world before, during, and after the Second World War. In fact, we’re starting before 1937, the year of the Paris World Exhibition. In my talk I told you about this competition between the Vienna Philharmonic and Bruno Walter. Austria still a democratic regime, but very much threatened by its bigger neighbour. And the Berlin Philharmonic sent by Goebbels and conducted by Furtwängler,. And one of the highlights of the Berlinist visit was a performance, as you can see, on the 7th of September 1937 of the “Ninth Symphony” of Beethoven. The programme which you see on the left hand side was full of Nazi propaganda. And there was an essay which defined the role of the artist in the new Nazi Germany.

And my quote here is, “The prodigious political and spiritual turnaround that national socialism has provoked in Germany has opened equally in art a new phase of development and assigned to the artists the duty to recast the new epoch in giving nobility a form that will survive it.” So in this essay, he’s saying the artist must now slavishly serve the state. And the irony, of course, is that Beethoven would’ve been absolutely incandescent at the idea that the artist should be the slave to anybody, and certainly not to the state. And as evidence for this attitude of Beethoven, I show you the famous title page of the manuscript of the “Eroica Symphony”, symphony number three, which he had originally dedicated to Napoleon. He saw Napoleon as a great liberator, a man who was going to liberate Europe from the shackles of religion and monarchies. And then, of course, in 1804, Napoleon declares himself emperor of the French and Beethoven, in a rage, you can see the rage because he’s crossed out the dedication so furiously that he’s actually torn through the paper. And when he eventually published it in the printed version, it’s dedicated to the memory of a great man. ‘Cause as far as he was concerned, Napoleon was no longer a great man, he was dead as a great man.

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So the first excerpt I’m going to play you is Willem Mengelberg with the Concertgebouw. And this dates, this is a performance in Amsterdam in the Concertgebouw and it dates from the 2nd of May, 1940. So it’s precisely a week before Holland was invaded by the Nazis. And I love this performance. I’ll be very interested to hear what people think of all these performances. Mengelberg is a wonderful conductor. He tends to make everything sound like Mahler. And you’ll hear in the slow movement how Beethoven sounds incredibly Mahlerian with this wonderfully lush string tone. In fact, the very last performance of Mengelberg’s life was of that music, was of the “Ninth Symphony”. He gave a Beethoven cycle. He gave several Beethoven cycles in Paris during the years of the occupation and the last one was in June 1944, and actually finished a couple of weeks after the Normandy landings. He went back to Holland. And where he had been previously regarded as, of course, as a national glory, but now seen as a collaborator. He was regarded as a national shame and he was forbidden to conduct for life. I’ll come back to this, I think, when we do the talk about the , the reckoning at the end of the Second World War. In fact, the ban for life was rescinded and it was turned into one for five years, but, in fact, he died before the five years were up so he never performed again in public. Ah, now we come to this absolutely terrifying performance.

You can get it on CD and it’s very, very fascinating of the “Ninth Symphony”. Actually, you can this film of it, too. So I think on YouTube you might certainly this film of the last part of the performance. This is Hitler’s birthday concert in April 1942. It’s the only one of the Third Reich, I think, that was conducted by Furtwängler. Furtwängler always desperately tried to avoid. It was notorious that Furtwängler was always ill in April every year. Didn’t go quite so far as the Czech conductor, Vaclav Talich, who in the same year was told by the Nazis he had to conduct a performance of “Lohengrin” to celebrate Hitler’s birthday and he turned up at the hospital and he said, “Take my appendix out,” although it didn’t need to be taken out. But he wanted to have an excuse not to perform on Hitler’s birthday. And bottom right, you can see a still of a very famous moment; it’s been much discussed. I think you’ll be able to see this on YouTube. So have a look at it and see what you think. Hitler was not present, but Goebbels was. And at the end of the performance, Goebbels approaches Furtwängler and puts out his hand to shake hands with Furtwängler. Furtwängler has to shake hands with him. And then he turns around and he pulls out a handkerchief and he wipes his hand. So you can make of that what you will, but it’s the most manic performance of the “Ninth Symphony” that I’ve ever heard.

And the distinguished critic, Michael Tanner, describes it. He said, he describes it as “a nightmare of nihilism, a stampede towards the abyss.” Now I’m not going to play it to you, but if you get hold of that recording, if you go to the end, there’s a quite, there’s at least a minute of total silence. And then it’s though somebody’s standing there with a stopwatch and gives a signal to the audience to applaud and the entire audience starts to applaud simultaneously, in unison. And I think it’s very interesting. I love recordings of live concerts and I love picking up the audience reaction. And I think that reaction tells you quite a lot about the atmosphere of the concert. Now we’re going to the other side of the world to Argentina and another live performance conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who was based in America at this time and was clearly on a good will visit to South America and it’s a very exciting performance, too. And I’m going to play you the beginning of the last movement where the bass has a solo. And on this occasion, it was the great Ukrainian bass, Alexander Kipnis. He’s somebody who’s cropped up in several lectures so far, and I’m sure he’ll crop up again. In my opinion, he was the greatest Wagnerian bass of the 20th century. A marvellous, huge sonorous, smooth, gorgeous voice. And it’s wonderful to hear the voice rolling out into the great space of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. It’s also wonderful to hear this music sung.

I mean, so often you get some dreadful, woolly, wolfy bass who sounds like the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard of Oz”. But he was later interviewed about his relationship with Toscanini and this is what he said, “The "Ninth Symphony” was in a way a surprise to me. I expected Toscanini to take the recitatif in tempo, but he made it very flexible. It was very simple and easy for me to sing that way. As for my impression of the performance, certainly it was different from others; it had more fire, more drive, more fanaticism.“ I don’t think that’s true. That’s even more fanatical than the Furtwängler, And he says, "It was not what we used to call ,” very cosy. So I’m quite surprised in a way that nobody amongst our extended Wendy family has written in to say anything about Kipnis. We’ve had so many messages from people connected with other singers and performers that I’ve talked about. Must be somebody out there connected with the wonderful Kipnis who can share some information with us.

Now the music was used by both sides as a diplomatic weapon. So charm offensives, orchestras, top performers, conductors were sent from America to South America. Even the Brits, Malcolm Sergent was sent to neutral countries like Sweden and Portugal. And the chief musical diplomatic weapon of the Third Reich was the Berlin Philharmonic and it was sent all over Europe, to occupied Europe. Furtwängler always declined to go with it to occupied countries, but he went with it to Sweden. Here you can see this is a report from a French newspaper of the first time that the Berlin Philharmonic made a journey in an aeroplane. And I’m going to play you a performance again conducted by Furtwängler in Stockholm from December 1943. Furtwängler was such a spontaneous conductor and you can have the same piece of music in various performances and it sounds quite different. And certainly this performance in Stockholm in 1943 is a great less, great deal less hectic and fanatical and crazy than the one for Hitler’s birthday. And my last excerpt from the “Ninth Symphony” is actually from a post-war performance in Paris.

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And this was conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, who was, of course, originally Russian and of Jewish origin. And he escaped the Russian Revolution and he first established himself as a major conductor in Paris in the 1920s before going to America and then becoming the chief conductor of the Boston Orchestra. He’s curiously a little forgotten today, I’m not quite sure why. As but rather like Mengelberg, certainly not for the same reasons as Mengelberg, but he was considered one of the greats. He was up there with Toscanini and Furtwängler and so on. And this is certainly a wonderful performance. And we’re going to hear a bit of the last movement again. And the soprano in this performance is Janine Micheau, very beautiful top notes, very, very pure sound. And I think this is quite interesting because she had been the soprano in Mengelberg’s last Paris performance in June and here she was singing it now on the other side, so to speak, for Koussevitzky.

The sharp eared will have noticed that, of course, was sung not in German, but in French. I suppose just after war, it would’ve been too painful for many people to hear it sung in German. Now I’m going to finish off talking about Beethoven’s one opera, “Fidelio”, which is, of course, a great song of praise to freedom and a song about, and an opera about resistance to tyranny. So Thomas Mann, who you see on the left hand side, famously said, “It was a scandal that "Fidelio” was not forbidden in Nazi Germany, that highly refined performances were given and that singers were prepared to sing it, musicians prepared to play it, and the public prepared to listen.“ I think people were aware of the ironies. The great French soprano, Germain Lubin, who I’ll be talking about in in the talk about recriminations at the end of the war. She sang it in French at the Paris Opera during the war. And she said, "When "Fidelio” was resolved, there was an interminable ovation after my aria, “Abscheulicher”, whose text is a hymn of defiance towards injustice. With so many Germans in the audience, I did not want to create an incident and refused to take my usual solo bow. Now I played you an excerpt from a marvellous performance of “Fidelio”.

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It’s a MET broadcast from February 1941, conducted by Bruno Walter, fine Belgian tenor, Rene Maison, the great Alexander Kipnis again, and that absolute wonder of nature, the Norwegian soprano, Kirsten Flagstad. In its in its way, the voice of the century, the most, the hugest, smoothest, most spectacular, amazing, dramatic soprano voice. And I told you that this was, in fact, her last broadcast performance before she made the very momentous decision to give up her career and go back to Norway to spend the war with her husband. She completely gave up her career until after the end of the war. And I mentioned how all the artists involved in this performance, it must have really affected them very deeply and very personally, the subject of the opera. So I’m going to play you the climax of the dungeon scene. Tremendously exciting moment we have. First of all, we’re going to hear that the villainous, the sort of Nazi character, Pizarro. He really is a proto Nazi. He’s a sadist and totally evil.

So he’s come to take his revenge on his old enemy and just as he’s about to stab him with a dagger. Leonore, who’s been dressed as a man throughout the opera, she very dramatically reveals that she’s a woman and he says, “I’m going to kill Florestan.” And with a tremendous top note, she sings, “First kill his wife.” Then she pulls, unleashes her hair or rips open her blouse or whatever to reveal her breasts. All different productions, it’s different. But she has to show that she’s a woman and she socks it to you with a tremendous high note. Certainly after the war, everybody got the message of “Fidelio” and in pretty well every case, all the German opera houses, which had been systematically destroyed in the destruction of the German cities, as they reopened one after another, they always reopened with “Fidelio”, including, of course, the Vienna Opera in 1955. And there were productions like this design I’m showing you, which make the connection between the Nazi regime and the theme of “Fidelio”, resistance to tyranny, very explicit. And there are a number of productions which have been set in prison camps or concentration camps. This is, in fact, the production that reopened the Vienna Opera in 1955. And I’m going to play you the famous prisoner’s chorus.

Again, you can imagine how moving this must have been, the resonance it must have had for German audiences or audiences anywhere after the Second World War and the death camps and the prison camps have been opened and people had staggered out into the sunlight exactly as they do in Beethoven’s opera. This, again, is from the MET performance of 1941. On the left is Anton Dermota who sang Florestan in the 1955 performance that reopened the Vienna Opera. And you can see how the image was then taken up for a commemorative stamp by the Republic of Austria. And I’m going to leave the last word of this talk to Billy Wilder. And he says, . So what he’s saying there is that the Austrians have brought off the brilliant artistic trick, you could say, of turning Beethoven into an Austrian and Hitler into a German. And that’s it. So let me see what there are in the way of questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, somebody’s asking about the flea markets in Paris. Well, my favourite one is the Port de Vanves one. But, of course, you need to go to the Clignancourt, as well. The name of the composer to the “Memorial to Lidice”, it’s Martinu. Always love Martinu, he’s a Czech composer. “Pathetique”, so thank you, yes, yes, correct me.

Quite right. yes, it’s the “Pathetique”, not the “Appassionata”.

Q: What was the name of her book? And which one was that?

A: “Inherit the Truth” is Anita’s book. Yes, that’s probably one you’re talking about.

Q: Somebody’s saying, “Can you mention the two books?”

A: And the book by Lydia Bauman is “Winter in the Morning”. And, of course, there is also “The Diary of Helene Berr”. Let me see. Who wrote “Inherit the Earth”?

Anita Lasker Wallfisch. That recording is a modern one of the “Pathetique”. Yes, I think you should. I got it off Amazon; I’m sure you can get it on Amazon. Post the titles of the books.

Did I not put them on the? I can’t remember whether I put them on the thing that Judi sends out or not. But just in case, I’ll put them again on the next one.

Again, ask about the names of the memoirs.

Q: Was Karajan active in the Nazis?

A: Very. He was very active and the extraordinary thing about Karajan is that he joined the Nazi party twice. He joined it first before it was even expedient or useful then. Later, his excuse was, oh, I only joined the Nazi party because to help my career. That’s not true; he actually believed the crap.

Q: Do I think Furtwängler was trying to say something conducting at that speed?

A: I doubt whether he was. Yes and no. I think he was, as I said, a very instinctive conductor and I think he was affected by the moment. I doubt whether he said, right, I’m going, he sat down beforehand and said, “I’m going to play this at breakneck speed as a protest against Nazism.” I don’t think it works like that. But I think subconsciously, unconsciously, I think there was an element of protest. I hope they caught the train. I can’t remember what that’s referring to now.

Somebody’s saying that Portugal was not neutral. Well, that’s very, very complicated actually, 'cause Portugal was a vital supplier of, what’s that metal that’s needed for the making of steel? I mean, Portugal, like Sweden, both of them were, of course, extremely ambiguous. Both of them have been accused of profiteering. But on the other hand, of course, what choice did they have? It would’ve been easy peasy for Hitler to invade either one of the countries, so I’m not making any judgments really.

Furtwängler was interrogated by two US intelligence officers after the war. I think most of you’ll have seen the Harwood play about that and I think there’s a film based on it, as well. 50 years later, Levin was a highly successful businessman and special advisor to British Airways for a time. He interviewed me and I partnered him for a while in the USA in continuance of his work for BA. Thank you, that’s a very interesting connection.

Q: What was Karajan up to at this stage?

A: He was conniving and well, you need to read Goebbels’ diaries about all of this. Goebbels was, Goebbels actually was not that impressed by Karajan as a conductor, but he knew that Furtwängler was absolutely paranoid and very competitive. So Goebbels was very deliberately using Karajan as a means to control Furtwängler. There was a play about Furtwängler, you’re quite right, 20 years ago, Ronald Harwood. I think. But overall, a Harwood play is actually quite favourable to Furtwängler, because again, he’s an ambiguous figure.

You’re quite right, it didn’t sound much like an “Ode to Joy” in that performance for Hitler’s 1942 birthday. It sounded pretty frightening.

Q: Who is the baritone in the “Fidelio”?

A: He’s good. He’s an artist. He was an American singer of German origin called Julius Huehn, whose career was interrupted because he joined up during the Second World War and he never really managed to resume his career properly after the war.

Q: Why do the scores reflect the name?

A: Yes, that’s interesting. Ludwig van Beethoven, I suppose it was just smarter to have your French name. Yes, Ludwig van Beethoven again. The secret knock of Anne Frank’s family when in hiding was based on first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, Morse code for V, short, short, long. Yes, thank you.

My next book is about anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

May I contact you? Yes, please do. That’s Joanne Gilbert. Please contact me, I would love to talk to you about it. Right.

What are the names of the play in the film? Oh, what is it? It’s the Ronald Harwood thing. No, that’s not. It’s gone. But if you look up Furtwängler, Ronald Harwood, you’ll find it on the internet.

I think that’s it, I think we’re out. How large was the cello section in the Concertgebouw recording? Big, I would think at that date. “Taking Sides”, thank you, is the name of the play. Somebody’s asked me to add the flea markets. I’ll do that next time, yeah. Good. So that’s it.

• [Judi] Thank you very much, Patrick.

• [Patrick] Yeah, thank you.

• [Judi] Wonderful. Thank you so much and thank you to everyone who joined us and we’ll see everybody next week.

• Good. Thank you. Thank you, Judi.

• [Judi] You’re welcome. Thanks, everybody, bye-bye.

• [Patrick] Bye-bye.