Vienna New Year’s Day concert severs link to Nazi era
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When the Vienna Philharmonic embarks on its annual rendition of the Radetzky March at its New Year’s Day concert, a connoisseur of the music of Johann Strauss Sr may notice something slightly different. Alerted to the Nazi connections of the arrangement of the piece the orchestra has played for decades, the philharmonic will this year play a new version for this year’s concert at Vienna’s storied Musikverein, which will be broadcast live to 92 countries. The old version was arranged by Austrian-born Leopold Weninger, a former member of the Nazi party who also made popular arrangements of the party’s anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied. The orchestra’s decision to ditch the old version underscores the legacy of Austria’s Nazi past and, 75 years after the end of WWII, the country’s slow reckoning with it. After the philharmonic was reminded about Weninger’s Nazi background, it sought to codify a modified version of the arrangement which has evolved over decades, spokeswoman Claudia Kapsamer told the Financial Times. “The idea was and still is to bring joy to the listeners and not to remind anyone of some war or Nazistic propaganda or ideas,” she said. The Radetzky March, first performed in 1848, was dedicated to the memory of Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky’s victory in the First Battle of Custoza, at the start of the Italian Risorgimento. The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose 1932 novel Radetzky March chronicles three generations of a family during the late days of the Habsburg empire, called the tune “the Marseillaise of conservatism”, a reference to the French call to revolution which later became that country’s national anthem. After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the philharmonic’s Jewish musicians were fired. Five of the musicians perished in concentration camps, while two died in Vienna as a direct result of deportation attempts. Another nine were driven into exile, according to research published on the philharmonic’s website. By 1942, almost half of the orchestra were members of the Nazi party — far higher than the 20 per cent in the Berlin Philharmonic. The Nazis began the tradition of the new year concert in 1939 and the Radetzky March was first played at the 1946 edition. While the concert programme varies each year, the encores are almost always the same: the Radetzky March and Johann Strauss II’s Blue Danube waltz. Both compositions are seen as unofficial Austrian anthems. The New Year’s Day concerts were part of the Nazi regime’s “propaganda-by-entertainment strategy”, said historian Oliver Rathkolb in a study. They were so important that Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels allegedly endeavoured to adjust Strauss’s baptismal record in Vienna — because it noted that the composer was partly Jewish. In postwar Austria, the Vienna Philharmonic was the “most distinctive example” of the difficulty of removing Nazis from cultural life, wrote Mr Rathkolb in a different study. Ms Kapsamer said Weninger’s version of the Radetzky March had been the only one in existence for a large orchestra because the original arrangement had been for fewer musicians. She said the new arrangement had evolved over decades, with handwritten changes passed down by generations of musicians. Daniel Froschauer, the philharmonic’s chairman, asked that these changes be incorporated into the orchestra’s own edition of the score for 2020.