Hans Franke (1882-1971)

[Alan Howe]

This is the actual newspaper review of the 5th Symphony "Deutscher Wald" reproduced in the 2006 concert programme notes provided by Golo Berg:

<<,,In vier grandiosen Sätzen entwirft der Komponist ein romantisches Bild von farbiger Eindringlichkeit. Ein Idyll lässt uns der erste Satz ,Waldleben' erschauen, wir erleben freundliche Stimmung, hören einen Jagdtross vorüberziehen. Im zweiten Satz ,Der Zauberwald' zieht ein reiches Geschehen an uns vorüber, manchmal mit lieblicher Innigkeit,  manchmal mit geradezu Puccinischer Realistik. Unbändige musikalische Leidenschaft beherrscht diesen Satz. [...] Bei modernster Prägung lässt diese Musik doch mühelos in ihr Gedankengut eindringen und die oftmals komplizierten Harmonien münden doch immer wieder in die befreiende Klarheit des Dreiklangs. Ganz auf Stimmung ist in der Instrumentation der dritte Satz ,Abendstimmung am Waldsee. Idyll' berechnet. Der vierte Satz ,,Die Jäger und die Jagd" schildert ein lebhaftes Treiben von irgendwie königlicher Größe, anhebend mit meisterhafter Fuge und in Jubel und Glanz ausklingend.>>

Maybe this review could be traced. The reviewer was Richard Pflegshörl and the review was published in the "Teplitz Schönauer Anzeiger" on 10th June 1943.

[John Boyer]

Note, though, that these took place [...] in all likelihood under card-carrying Nazi conductor Bruno C. Schestak. Does this make them any more suspicious?

Alan, what do you mean by "suspicious" in this instance?   What would the conductor's NSDAP membership have to do with the authenticity of the event or the actual authorship of the work performed?   I'm just curious as to what you were driving at. 

[Alan Howe]

It appears that Franke worked closely with this particular conductor in German-occupied Sudetenland; Schestak was also a high-ranking Nazi. Who knows what was going on between the two of them? A plagiarist and his willing co-conspirator, perhaps? Or his useful idiot? The Nazis were, after all, rampant myth-makers - and anti-modernists concerned to establish High German Art, which included music.

[Mark Thomas]

There's a difference between a verifiable contemporary notice of a performance and one which reports performances years before, surely? Teplitz and Bruno C. Schestak rather than Leipzig and Furtwängler may indicate Franke's marginal standing rather than an imaginary event. After all, why would others join Franke in his fantasies?

[Ilja]

At that time (from 1938 onwards) Teplitz-Schönau was part of Germany and a rather posh spa town, which explains the presence of its own symphony orchestra.

Bruno Schestak was quite an active Nazi (source: Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat), who was Landesleiter for the Reichsmusikkammer in Saxony in 1935 (p. 184). Prieberg mentions him one other time (p. 168):

[Speakers at a National Socialist meeting in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin] drew up a general plan for the German music industry, announced the introduction of a licence card to streamline the profession and screen members, and made it clear that the Reichskartell already formed the preliminary stage of a German Chamber of Music [Musikkammer]. It was the first organisational united front. Pressures brought about corporate membership of existing music associations. Even at this stage, the aim was to achieve total control, and this claim did not even stop at the border:
We will gladly open the gates to Germany for foreign artists of world renown, but not through business-minded and capitalist Jewish concert organisers, whether they are in Germany or abroad. But all foreign artists must also receive their licence from the Reichskartell or later from the Musikkammer, which entitles them to be engaged as soloists.

To prepare for this, the NSDAP Gauleitung Sachsen made local preparations and commissioned Bruno Schestak on 16 August 1933 to organise the Saxon musicians in a "Department of Music of the NSDAP Gau Sachsen". At this time, work on the Reich Chamber of Culture legislation had already reached the final drafting stage and existing musicians' organisations had largely been brought into line - often through the actual occupation of their executive offices and the replacement of the once democratically elected board of directors with one that was determined according to the "Führer principle" and loyal to the system.

I think it's important, and possibly relevant, to realize just how many brownie points could be won in the Nazi years by producing "real" German music. The farce of the attempts to replace Mendelssohn's music to A Midsummer Night's Dream by an "aryan alternative" is the most eye-catching episode perhaps, but far from the only one.

[cypressdome]

1942 Zeitschrift für Musik reports the performance of Franke's Symphony No.4 in E-flat major (or E major as they reported in the second blurb) "Frühling im Tal der Müglitz" on Jan. 12, 1942 in Teplitz-Schönau by the Städtische Orchester under Bruno C. Schestak. First mention (Jan. 1942), second mention (Feb. 1942).

[Alan Howe]

Same place, same conductor...

[John Boyer]

Very well, but I still think the NSDAP connection is merely coincidental.  The party (or rather, Hitler, since I've read that party members found classical music as boring as did Joe and Jane Sixpack) liked composers like Wagner, Strauss, Pfitzner, Orff, Schillings, and Schmidt, all of whom composed music far more advanced than the fossils that Franke was resurrecting under his own name. 

Working with a member of the Reichsmusikkammer would have been merely coincidence, like working with a CP member in Stalinist Russia. 

[Ilja]

By the way, around that time there was an art and music critic in the Stuttgart area called Hans Franke - not our guy, though.

[Alan Howe]

I think Ilja's right. The Nazis were attempting to create their own High German/Aryan Music. If Franke wasn't much of a composer himself, what better way would there be to promote himself and curry favour with the Nazi hierarchy than by 'creating' his own music from the obscure works of forgotten German/Austrian/Liechtensteinian composers from the past, such as Woelfl, Hill, Rheinberger and Kauffmann, and getting it performed by a Nazi party musician?

It's just a theory.

[Ilja]

But it fits. The performance of a new piece of music in the Nazi years was never coincidental. This is one of the reasons the RMK was formed in the first place: to ideologically screen performances and certainly new works.

[Alan Howe]

Agreed. The music that was performed under the auspices of the Nazis was never merely coincidental. This was the era of 'Degenerate Music', which encompassed modernism, jazz, non-Aryan (especially Jewish) music, etc. All music performed, especially as the Nazis' grip on the culture became ever tighter, had to be officially approved - and Franke would have derived great benefit, not only reputationally, but also financially as a result. Music sourced from 19th century German/ic scores by 'safe' composers would have been particularly well received by party and public alike.

[John Boyer]

No, there is nothing to learn from what the Nazis liked or disliked.  Richard Taruskin, himself a Jew and the author of the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music, had this to say in his article "The Golden Age of Kitsch", first published in The New Republic (21 March 1994) and later reprinted in his anthology, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays:

***
The Nazi concept of artistic degeneracy was incoherent and opportunistic [...]. It took very little to
run afoul of the Nazis then, and it costs very little to deplore them now.
Their opposition, especially when it was passively incurred, conferred no
distinction, unless their approval is thought to confer distinction on the
likes of Beethoven or Wagner. There are no lessons to be learned from
studying the Nazi index of banned musical works, which, like the Nazi
canon, contained masterpieces, ephemerae, kitsch, and trash, covering a
wide stylistic and ideological range.

[...]

Strauss's collaboration, like that of Wilhelm Furtwangler, offered the Nazis
the most potent insurance they could buy against the charge of barbarism.
Which is why, for the Nazis, the first question about a work of art was never,
What does it say? It was, Who is speaking, friend or foe?

Thus the Slav-blooded, naturalized Parisian Igor Stravinsky, because he was
assumed to be a foe, became an exhibit in the Dusseldorf show. The mortified
composer, through his German publisher, B. Schotts Sohne, protested to the
German Bureau of Foreign Affairs at his inclusion, explicitly disavowing "Jewish
cultural Bolshevism" and objecting in particular that the insulting caption
under his portrait in Dusseldorf read, "Whoever invented the story that Stravinsky
is descended from Russian noble stock?" As he had previously taken the precaution
of submitting an affidavit to his publisher, in lieu of the Reichsmusikkammer's
official questionnaire establishing Aryan heredity (and as the
publisher had placed an item in the papers quoting Richard Strauss on Stravinsky's
enthusiasm for Hitler's ideas), he was able to receive the satisfaction of a
declaration from the German government affirming its "benevolent neutrality"
toward him, and his career suffered no further setbacks in the Third Reich until
the war. In 1938 he came to the German capital and recorded his ballet Jeu de
cartes with the ganz judenrein Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

And it was because he was a national of an Axis ally that Bela Bartok, like
the composers of Mussolini's Italy, was assumed to be a friend of the Reich
and was therefore left out of the exhibition of Entartete Musik. The Hungarian
composer, who had refused his publisher's request to fill out what
he called "the questionnaire about grandfathers," attached the e-word to
himself in protest at his exemption, and tried to prevent the performance
of his music in Germany and Italy. Early in 1939 he wrote to an official of
the Deutscher Rundfunk about his own First Piano Concerto that he was
"astonished that such 'degenerate' music should be selected for—of all
things—a radio broadcast."
***

No, they were concerned only with Jewish identity and nothing else.  Everything else, from Bach to Bartok, was acceptable.  Pursuing the Nazi Conspiracy theory regarding Franke is just going down a rabbit hole.

[eschiss1]

Mr. Boyer, as far as I know, there's a complete- or at least practically-complete, but a whole lot of effort has been put into it by the Furtwängler estate - database of Wilhelm Furtwängler's live performances available online.

[eschiss1]

There's a book-length treatment of music under Nazi rule that I know of that may be more exact than the late Mr. Taruskin's treatment (at the least, I expect it takes into account more the arbitrariness of a 12-year regime and that what was true in one year was not always true in another.)