SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

‘Taking Sides’ and ‘Collaboration’: Plays by Ronald Harwood about Furtwängler and Richard Strauss, Duchess Theatre, London 27.5.2009 (JPr)

Note: Seen and Heard does not usually review stage plays without any music but the content of these two seemed particularly apt for our usual content. Ed


Any  review of these two  plays can hardly fail to  ask ‘What would I have done?’ Faced with the question of art, furthering a career and all the horrors of the Nazi regime simultaneously - ‘horrors’ that may not have been entirely self-evident at the time - the prime question for any of us would have to be,  'Do I collaborate  - explicitly or implicitly -  or do I run away? Another issue central to these two separate but intriguingly connected plays – as it is to much of Ronald  Harwood’s work – is the impact of guilt on the protagonists for the paths taken or not.

In the author’s other work we have seen Mahler’s guilt at abandoning his Jewish heritage in Mahler’s Conversion and in An English Tragedy, the English Nazi propagandist John Amery, pleads guilty to treason after the war and is hanged. In an interview printed in the programme,  Harwood is asked about whether he had ever considered Wagner as a subject for a play; he explains that he was not allowed to listen to this music as a child because his mother thought Wagner was anti-Semitic. The interviewer then naively comments about the composer ‘He wrote more anti-Semitic articles than Goebbels did.’

To be fair to Ronald Harwood he does have the young lieutenant say  to his superior in Taking Sides. ‘Major, show me someone who hasn’t made an anti-Semitic remark and I’ll show you the gates of paradise.’ But there we have the corinuing problem: Wagner begat Hitler and the Holocaust and his music remains banned in Israel whilst the music of Richard Strauss who served the Nazi administration as president of the Reichsmusikkammer (Reichs Music Chamber) with the conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler as his deputy, gets performed there. That is not the subject of these plays however  and since this is a review not a polemical essay, the questions raised by these two powerful – if slightly flawed – dramas are ' What did Strauss and Furtwängler really know and how much did they acquiesce to further their own ends?

These plays are essential for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century music. Nothing that either Strauss or Furtwängler could have done would have prevented the Nazi atrocities, but through fight or flight they both might have become a token symbol which possibly could have rallied greater opposition to the totalitarian regime. Who knows - and hindsight is a wonderful thing - what any of us would have done in their circumstances?

In the older of the two plays, Taking Sides, Furtwängler, whose recording of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony was played on the radio following Hitler's suicide, is questioned in post-war Berlin by an American major, Steve Arnold who is determined to uncover evidence that the maestro was not a saviour of Jews risking his life ‘to help anyone who asked him’ (as one character says) but was more a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Because of my own Austrian background,  I must compliment Harwood on distilling out the nature of the Viennese of the time with this wonderful ‘anecdote’ recounted by the Major: ‘I was in Vienna. I had with me an Austrian chauffeur, Max his name was, he spent time in the camps. We were looking at these Viennese cleaning up the bomb damage, scavenging for rotting food, butt ends, anything. I said, “To think a million of these people came out to welcome Adolf on the day he entered the city, a million of them and look at them.” And Max said, “Oh, not these people, Major. These were all at home hiding Jews in their attics.” ’ As the Major goes on to say ‘You get the point?’ The same people criticizing Hitler one day were those waving Nazi flags as his motorcade drove in the city, the next.

The new play Collaboration, concerns Richard Strauss’s pre-war relationship with his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig. Zweig wrote the libretto for the opera Die schweigsame Frau in 1935 and seven years later, committed suicide in exile in Brazil. Where Harwood – although he doesn’t admit it – does seen to side with Furtwängler while wanting the audience to make up their own minds, he is clearly less sympathetic towards Zweig. Harwood has said that ‘Strauss had half-Jewish grandchildren. The Nazis used that to put pressure on him. What would you have done? It exonerates him. I think Zweig's suicide was a dreadful act with a young wife because he couldn't face the future.’ Indeed he firmly believes that it was to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren that Strauss did not show any resistance to the Nazis rise to power.

Yet in the play, Strauss tells Zweig ‘I make you a solemn promise I will never cooperate with these Nazis and I will never desert you – never!’ Yet ‘desert’ his friend for his family is exactly what he does do. He becomes president of the Reichsmusikkammer and says to his daughter-in-law, ‘Alice, the grandchildren, they’ll be protected – I have no choice’. Later, he  says about the Nazis: ‘I thought I could use them but they used me. What would you have done? I was compelled to protect my family.’ He then reminds us of his opinion of himself ‘I may not be a first class composer but I am a first class, second rate, one.’ I couldn’t agree more.

Taking Sides is the more adversarial of the two plays and for two hours we have the sneering Major Arnold circling and attacking Furtwängler who is shown as a haughty self-regarding individual whom the Major constantly belittles by referring to him as ‘the band leader’. All the cast use generally appropriate accents and there is excellent supporting work from Sophie Roberts as the dutiful secretary, Emmi, Martin Hutson as the sympathetic Lieutenant Wills and from Pip Donaghy as ‘the second violinist’ Helmuth Rode who only gets his job in Furtwängler’s orchestra when the Jewish players are dismissed.

There were no records of Furtwängler’s interrogation so that probably gave Harwood more dramatic licence, whereas Collaboration is based on affirmed correspondence between Strauss and Zweig. Because of this, I had little real feeling that Strauss ‘loved’ Zweig as he declaims at the end of the play nor did I get any real answer as to why Zweig committed suicide with his wife since that is an act that did the Nazis’ job for them. Now without accents,  and giving the play an almost English country house feel to it, Martin Hutson excelled again as Nazi Party official, Hans Hinkel, and Sophie Roberts was very good too, this time as Charlotte Altmann, Zweig’s compliant secretary and future wife.

Michael Pennington was a straight-backed Teutonic bureaucrat as Furtwängler and a hunched nervy, indecisive white-haired Strauss who is as much in fear of his wife Pauline - who constantly demands of him, ‘Did you wipe you feet?’ – as he is of the Nazis. His closing moments as both characters are real tours de force of summation. Isla Blair is wonderfully pushy as Strauss’s wife but the role is rather underwritten.

I have a little problem with David Horovitch’s performances in both plays; undoubtedly there is a wonderful actor at work here but I found his Major Arnold much too boorish and too much of a brazen philistine. Surely the part requires us to see an acute brain at work and someone who is marshalling the sheer weight of evidence in order to get his man - think Columbo if you will. As Stefan Zweig I didn’t get from Horovitch much of the intellectual ascetic I expected him to be or see much of the humanist fervour that might have driven him to taking his own life.

This is wonderfully old-fashioned repertory theatre but since it engages the mind it is a great relief from most of Theatreland, now seemingly awash with sing-along musicals. Both plays  are performed in Simon Higlett’s single set which serves equally as a shabby office for Major Arnold in the American Zone in postwar Berlin and  the elegant residences of Zweig and Strauss between 1931 and 1946. Philip Franks’s direction is economical to the point of being rather too static though there is little more he probably could have done for two very wordy – yet extremely thought-provoking – plays which would sound well on radio.

Jim Pritchard

For further details about forthcoming performances of these Ronald Harwood plays, visit the Duchess Theatre website http://www.duchesstheatre.co.uk/.  

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