The Asssessments  and Reassessments of the Composer Wolfgang  Fortner (1907-1987)

A few months ago, a German magazine specialising in church music asked me for an article on Wolfgang Fortner’s liturgical compositions during the Nazi years. Though I had profiled Fortner in my book Music of  Exile, in the chapter on “Inner Exile” I could not consider myself an expert. I found Fortner fascinating because the huge number of tracks on YouTube represented a composer with a strong, singular voice. By contrast, there are disappointingly few recordings available to purchase, stream or download. He was ethically compromised by staying put during the Nazi years, but he was also politically compromised. It is not clear to me what his viable options were: Fortner’s Symphony from 1947: First Movement.

Focusing on his liturgical music was interesting because the church itself was ethically compromised, though again, it has never been clarified what options might have been available that weren’t life-threatening.  And in the worst traditions of Nazism, the danger of resistance was that innocent members of one’s family or circle of friends would be held accountable. So, a closer examination of Fortner revealed a complex situation and perhaps with the centenary of Hitler’s power-grab coming (at the time of writing) in eight years, we might be able to look back with slightly  more objectivity. Symphony from 1947: Second Movement

But first, as I wrote in my book, a tiny bit of context: Few composers who worked and thrived during the years of the “Third Reich” have come out unblemished. Even Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963), generally held as the least compromised composer of his generation had to “retro-fit” work titles and dedications written as a young pre-war Marxist in order to avoid the suspicions of the American post-war occupation. Possibly Wolfgang Fortner’s great misfortune was to have been born in Germany in 1907, meaning his coming of age as a young homosexual occurred during the relatively permissive years of the Weimar Republic, while the beginning of his professional career would coincide with the rise of Adolf Hitler. Symphony from 1947: Third Movement

J. Alexander Colpa, in his dissertation, identified Fortner as the quintessential composer of Germany’s “Zero Hour,” attributing this designation to Fortner’s complete stylistic transformation after 1947. In hindsight, his current standing resembles that of another so-called Mitläufer (fellow traveller), like the actor Gustaf Gründgens as represented in Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto. Both were regarded as controversial figures during the Weimar Republic, and both were homosexual. This aspect of their biographies provided the Nazis with leverage, making even the most rebellious talents compliant. However, Fortner’s conviction that he could still contribute positively mitigated any potential influence the regime had over him. As many of his colleagues departed, his chances of gaining recognition increased. Fortner was undeniably a gifted composer with a unique musical language, characterized by his youth and perhaps a degree of naïveté. Symphony from 1947: Fourth Movement

Conversely, our generation may be naïve, if not disingenuous, in believing that immigration would have allowed Fortner’s creativity to thrive without obstacles. Very few composers were able to maintain a sense of organic continuity while in exile. Most had their careers redirected, taking on roles as performers, conductors and teachers while others became commentators or critics. Many promising talents abandoned composition altogether. Exile resulted in the loss of commissions, publishers, and, most importantly, audiences. A non-Jewish musician who was politically unexposed and had family responsibilities in Germany had little incentive to consider emigration. Furthermore, one required financial resources and connections abroad. Fortner was neither Jewish nor a Communist, but his homosexuality made him vulnerable to those in power. Fear likely served as the primary motivation for compliance, and for a talented composer like Fortner, such compliance could lead to success, provided he exercised caution.

A potential demonstration of Fortner’s transition into his own “Zero Hour” is comparing his two violin concertos from 1946: the one in D Major was premiered in February 1947 in Baden Baden by the violinist Gerhard Taschner Violin Concerto in D major First Movement (A recording with Sergiu Celibidarche and the Berlin Philharmonic with violinist Siegfried Borries) It is conspicuously more conventional than his second one, called Concerto for Violin and Large Chamber Orchestra, showcased in what would eventually become the Darmsadt Summer Music Courses. It too was premiered by Gerhard Taschner.  (the recording in the link is of the first movement with Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic with violinist Gerhard Tascher)

After a two-year period of being barred from work following his denazification hearing, Fortner became something of a national treasure. He was one of the early teachers at Darmstadt where youngsters born in the 1920s and 1930s came to work through the sins of their parents by destroying the old cultural world with a new musical language. By the time of Fortner’s death, he had received every honour the German Federal Republic could offer. He had taken over Hartmann’s new-music series Musica-viva and later, he became president of the German section of the ISCM. It could be argued that having left the nationalist Völkisch doctrine of music binding citizens into a common community, post-war musical development went in the opposite direction, alienating and challenging listeners with new concepts and ideas.  To many, the new music of the immediate post-war decades was an expression of anger at a once proud national heritage gambled away by an older, deluded generation of crazed Hitler supporters.  These were years when the German response to Nazi guilt was silence and music offered the only cry of outrage possible.

Most assessments of Fortner today have not been kind, indeed, they have been harsh. They offer a biographical trajectory that has him transforming from an exciting new spirit in the Weimar Republic to Nazi Party facilitator, followed by years of post-war denial. Each phase of his career was initially met with obstacles that were overcome leading to full acceptance and recognition. Fortner was an accomplished musician and an imaginative composer with a singular voice who confronted with barriers was able to adjust his creativity accordingly.

Wolfgang Fortner was born in Leipzig in 1907 to parents who were both professional singers.  He recalled starting to compose at the age of nine and by the age of twelve, he was accompanying his mother’s singing students.  His knowledge of orchestral repertoire came from playing four-handed arrangements with his mother at the piano. At the age of seventeen, he entered Leipzig’s Conservatory and University.  His teachers at the Conservatory were Hermann Grabner (1886-1969) for composition and Karl Straube (1873-1950) for organ. At Leipzig’s University he studied Musicology with Theodor Kroyer (1873-1945) and Pedagogy with Theodor Litt (1880-1962). With the exception of Litt, his three earliest influences reacted strongly to nineteenth century Romanticism with a return to the clarity and formalities of the Baroque. Litt, on the other hand was open to more progressive ideas evolving during the inter-war years. 

With Straube, who was Cantor of the Thomaskirche, it would seem that Fortner’s future as a church musician was predestined. On the other hand, Max Reger (1873-1916) remained a formidable influence in German music-life with Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch referring to him as their musical Godfather. The presence of Reger in Leipzig’s musical biotope provides the route by which Fortner developed his own fascination with the music of Paul Hindemith, an influence that can be clearly heard in his unpublished violin sonata from 1928 and more definitely in his Concerto for Organ and String Orchestra from 1932. In an autobiographical essay, Fortner wrote:

[…] For by then, at the age of sixteen, I had encountered new music. It was the works from Hindemith’s early and middle creative periods that had the strongest influence on me. This is perhaps not surprising. I was living in Leipzig, the metropolis of Baroque music. And there was someone who breathed new life into counterpoint, the Baroque forms, this tradition that, for me at the time, still had the character of absolute values. I felt, ‘This is how Bach might have composed and performed in our time.’

Only twenty-two years old and still a student, Fortner signed a contract with Hindemith’s publisher Schott in 1929 with his Vier marianishe Antiphonen for alto solo, chorus and orchestra. Nevertheless, it was the Leipzig Cantor Straube who was impressed by Fortner as rehearsal pianist for the Bach Choir leading him to take Fortner under his wing, moving him in the direction of church musician. 

Fortner completed his studies in 1931 and was soon offered a position as lecturer at the Protestant Chruch Music Institute in Heidelberg, where he taught composition and theory. Fortner must have believed that he would be able to develop his interests in the emerging trends of Gebrauchsmusik and Lehrstücke more easily in the Heidelberg institute than as a teacher in Leipzig.  Indeed, early correspondence with his publisher encourages Fortner to move more clearly into these directions, while also suggesting to him that light music was an important market. His school opera Creß ertrinkt, based on a story by Hermann Hesse, was written in 1930 with performances in 1931. It came in the wake of such didactic works as Kurt Weill’s Der Jasager, and Hanns Eisler’s Die Maßnahme – both with libretti by Bertolt Brecht and both premiered in 1930. All of these works in their own way deal with the existential dilemmas of the individual in a complex and inter-connected society.  

The Zeitgeisst, the mood of the era in the immediate years before Hitler encouraged communal singing and education. Erich Katz was a composition and theory teacher in Freiberg and editor of Schott’s anthology Das neue Chorbuch- The New Choir Book in which he had already included a work by Fortner in Volume 1. Such anthologies were intended for a-cappella groups, a genre Schott discovered to be profitable. The works were largely secular and Katz had already included settings by such presumed “subversives” as Alfred Döblin, Bertolt Brecht and Franz Werfel. What would continue to haunt Fortner and Schott well into the years of Hitler’s “Third Reich” was Fortner’s three-part setting of Erich Kästner’s Chor der Fräuleins – Chorus of Young Women for sopranos and altos accompanied by a toy drum. Fortner’s music was less of an issue than Kästner’s text. In its five verses, it deals with social injustices, hypocrisy and sexual freedom. Later in the same year, Fortner set Alfred Döblin’s Arberterlied – Workers’ Song from his play Die Ehe –The Marriage, originally performed with music by Karol Rathaus. It was set for a-cappella men’s chorus and it too made its way into Katz’s anthology.

Fortner’s publisher warned him on the potential dangers of being labelled a “cultural Bolshevik”. The dilemma of the Strecker brothers, owners of Schott, was their sympathy for National Socialism while at the same time being publisher of many composers such as Ernst Toch, Hans Gál, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Paul Hindemith who were either Jewish or labelled as “cultural Bolsheviks”. Their warnings were well founded and with Hitler’s arrival, the attacks on Fortner and his provocative choruses increased. In spite of this, Fortner’s more conventional works continued to be performed with some degree of recognition.  The veiled suggestions of Fortner moving in the hated Leo Kestenberg circle were unsettling. Kestenberg, was not just the Cultural Advisor to the Prussian Government, he was also a Jew and a Social Democrat. Such an association after 1933, even if only an implication, threatened the reception of Fortner’s more recent output.

In 1934, his Trauer und Aufblick  – Grief  and Hope  Concerto for String Orchestra was premiered in a concert held by the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in Mannheim. The same year, his cantata for May First Arbeit ist Ruhm – Work is Glory also received positive notices. He increased his profile by founding and conducting the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra in 1935, an ensemble that toured Germany and even appeared at international events.  In 1936, Fortner had taken over Heidelberg’s Hitler Youth Orchestra and by 1937, reviews and recognition of Fortner had seemingly forgotten or forgiven his earlier “Kestenberg” associations.  In 1940, he joined the Nazi Party during a period when party membership had opened up. Until then, membership was restricted and there was good reason to believe that he would not have been accepted. It was an opportunistic rather than idealistic move that would cost him dearly after the war. Regardless of his motives, he had already become a willing collaborator and facilitator in Hitler’s “New Germany”. He delivered numerous propaganda works and a number of his large symphonic works composed between 1933 and 1945 were well received by particularly doctrinal critics. Fortner’s enthusiastic support for the Nazi Party could have been due to his fear of being exposed as a homosexual, or as over compensation for his pre-1933 acts of subversion such as his setting of the Chor der Fräuleins.  In addition to everything else, many musicians similarly place with Fortner had little or no regular income.  Fortner had financial obligations and dependents to support and could not forfeit his income from Heidelberg.

Fortner’s Four Songs with Texts by Friedrich Hölderlin written in 1933: 1: An die Parzen 2: Hyperions Schicksalslied  3: Abbitte 4: Geh Unter schöne Sonne Ulrich Schütte barione, Gary Holt piano  

With the end of the war, Fortner was issued a work-ban for two years,  though as early as 1946, he became involved in what would eventually become the International Holiday Course for New Music in Darmstadt. He withdrew nearly half of the orchestral works he had composed during the years of the Hitler regime, especially those that had been jubilantly received by the party’s most chauvinistic supporters. These included works that had enjoyed frequent performance as a well as works premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic. His aesthetic accommodations towards what would find favour within the Nazi Party were clearly inconvenient in light of his own “zero hour” reinvention of himself.

Only a year after having his work ban removed, he was awarded the Schreker Composition Prize by Berlin’s Music Hochschule. The irony is clear: Schreker was removed as the Hochschule’s director in 1933. There was a ban on performances of his works and a removal of his pension. He died of a stress inflicted stroke in 1934. Fortner, having disparaged Schönberg and 12-tone composition during the Nazi years became a composer of serial music in his own right. His opera Bluthochzeit- Blood Wedding, based on Lorca’s play was enormously well-received and his standing as a one of the prominent teachers at the Darmstadt Summer courses, where his pupils number Hans Werner Henze and Bernd Alois Zimmermann confirmed his position within Germany’s own post-war cultural “zero hour”. In an interview  with the historian Fred Prieberg he said:

[…] But should we bring all of that up again? Naturally, I could spend an evening talking about annoyances and difficulties. […] Making all of this official would be awkward and would open a can of worms. Having had to deal with these matters for the famous ‘1000 years [Reich],’ one is immensely grateful that a few more years have been granted to one, where one can let the past rest in silence […]

Wolfgang Fortner as Church Musician 1933-1945

The conflict between Deutsche Christen, founded in 1932 and the Bekennende Kirche (Confessional Church) is too complex for this short focus on a single composer. Put in its broadest and most simplistic terms, the conflict was less about dogma (though this became more and more divergent) and more about a reverence for the past in opposition to a positive belief in the future. Badly bruised national esteem would inevitably lead to reactionary extremism and obsessive nationalist convictions among certain groups. At its most bewildering, the Deutsche Christen began to “Aryanise” the New Testament, rejecting all things Jewish, including the Jewishness of Jesus himself, along with discarding the Old Testament. They saw the Nazi state and Christianity joining together. The Bekennende Kirche rejected such ideas as nationalist and parochial and held to traditional beliefs of separation of Church and State, though with support from the likes of Fritz Stein and Peter Raabe both directors within the Reichs Musikkammer, it too had merged into the state. So, nationalism was present in both variants but expressed in different ways. It was believed that many of the social ills the country faced resulted from the “decadence” of nineteenth century Romanticism. “Back to Bach” stripped away layers of effusive interpretations of Bach’s organ works, while the Bekennende Kirche believed that church music had to be removed from the emotional arena altogether and fully homogenised within the liturgy, thereby synthesising congregation and religious service into a singular communal experience. There was no room for liturgical music in the concert hall, and liturgical music in the church should never be exploited as shows of virtuosity. 

Fortner’s earliest works, the subsequently withdrawn Vier Marianische Antiphonen as well as other student works reflected a contemporary re-imagining of the transitioning from the modal to the diatonic. Polyphony, counterpoint and fugue were common characteristics and seen as a uniquely Germanic discipline within liturgical composition and at the same time, a turning away from nineteenth century Romanticism.  The Vier Marianische Antiphonen were later dismissed by Fortner as a “youthful indiscretion”. Other liturgical works however were performed and published, following Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, such as Drei Choral Motetten, (1933); Christus Oratorio for soloist and mixed chorus, (listed as composed in 1933 yet missing, probably withdrawn)

The clearest turning point in Fortner’s professional life would have taken place in 1936 during a festival in Weimar held by the Allgemeine Deutesche Musikverein (ADMV) or the “General German Music Society”. Fortner’s Deutsche Liedmesse was scheduled for performance on October 12^th. Local journalists and cultural arbiters Hermann Ambrosius and Hans Severes Ziegler requested the removal of several composers, one of whom was Wolfgang Fortner. The named composers were denounced as “Cultural Bolsheviks”. The request for their removal went to Paul Graener, then head of the Composers’ Section of the Music Department within the Reich’s Ministry of Culture, who after some deliberation dismissed the charges. Ambrosius and Ziegler who had denounced Fortner along with Hugo Hermann and Hermann Reuter were informed that they no longer represented the present policies of the RMK. With that, Fortner’s pre-Hitler youthful political misadventures with his setting by Erich Kästner and Alfred Döblin had been officially forgiven and consigned to the past.

In addition to his strictly liturgical works there are his concert works that one could argue grew out of his liturgical environment. His Organ Concerto from 1934 for example is virtually an homage on Paul Hindemith, while remaining far more closely aligned to the instrument’s liturgical provenance than the Hindemith’s starkly neo-classical work. His works for solo organ would also have grown out of Fortner’s liturgical environment. These included his Bach influenced  Introduction und Passacaglia from 1931, Zwei Stücke für Orgel (1936) using modal harmonies and counterpoint and with its references to Lutheran choral traditions, and firmly in the aesthetic expectations of the Bekennende Kirche music policies. His Choralpartita, “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort- Oh Eternity, you Thunderous Word” from 1937 was another example of contemporary “Back to Bach” composition, culminating in his Fuge auf B,A,C,H from 1942. Other secular works with liturgical echoes would be his Feierkantata – Festive Cantata of 1937 for the Jubiläum der Universität Göttingen, a work that provided a further political and artistic success, with the Nazi Party mouthpiece, the Völkische Beobachter writing on 31 July 1937:

Wolfgang Fortner, barely thirty years old, is today one of the most distinctive and clearly defined figures of the young composing generation. With each work he presents to the public, there is a continuous development that represents more of an elevation of his style, his craftsmanship, and his creative power. The present ‘Feierkantate’ shows influences from Fortner’s practical musical work and is structured as representationally solemn music. With fanfares, two short orchestral movements, four-part choirs with orchestra, a canon for four groups, and a concluding song to be sung together, this is a hymn-like choral cantata built on the power of community, expressed through a tight rhythm and immediate expressiveness, showcasing a robust and powerful sound as functional music in the best sense.

A year later, and it was performed again as part of a commemoration of Hiter’s appointment as Chancellor five years earlier.  By 1940, Germany’s new religious aesthetic was being used by Fortner to compose a number of propaganda choruses such as Setzt ihr euren Helden Steine – Build a Monument to your Heroes or Wer zur Fahne rennt – Whoever Runs to the Flag.

Yet what conclusions might be drawn? As the composer Berthold Goldschmidt pointed out, we who did not live through these times are ill-placed to judge those who did.  Goldschmidt was forgiving to various Nazi facilitators who had not seen the full extent of what was yet to come. Decisions were made in real time and not with hindsight.

The embrace of artistic sobriety and stark realism that followed the defeat of Germany in 1918 found its counterpart in an even more violent rejection of the cultural past after the Nazi defeat in 1945. That Fortner embraced this rejection with every bit of his exceptional talent and ability is something that might be seen as penitence. He would probably have argued that it was an unleashing of inhibited creativity duing the Hitler years. What Fortner could not, nor would not pursue was the re-instatement of those colleagues who were banished, murdered or suppressed.  That too might have been an act of penitence, but the times demanded a tabula rasa of all the pre-war composers who represented the “wrong sort of Modernism”,  suggesting thereby that they had effectively facilitated Hitler’s rise to power. With  the re-assessment of his role during the Nazi years, the tabula rasa has most recently carried Fortner off as well.