And so it continued in subsequent years. While opera-goers with a predilection for the new were making the Kroll their house of choice, more conservative patrons escalated their protest. At a production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale in fall 1927 the audience included Einstein, Brecht, Weill, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Gustav Stresemann. All were enchanted. But the Volksbühne subscribers were deeply upset, wondering once again why they weren’t seeing Carmen. Matters became even worse when Klemperer turned to Wagner, who by the 1920s had been appropriated by the nationalist right as the chief deity of Deutschtum. In 1929 the Kroll mounted a futuristic Flying Dutchman that did away with all the pious traditionalism that most Wagnerians had come to expect. The (beardless) Dutchman’s sailors looked like a gang of dock laborers and Senta came off as an unsubmissive visionary a la Käthe Kollwitz. Fearing that there might be violent protests, the police ringed the hall on opening night. As it happened, there was no violence inside, but plenty of heat in the reviews. The critic Fritz Stege, who later became the Nazis’ chief oracle on music, said the performance was “an act of unparalleled cultural shamelessness, with which a sneering grin has reduced a German cultural monument to ruins.” Paul Schwers, in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, labeled Klem-perer’s “proletarianized” Dutchman “an artistic betrayal of the people.” It was, he added, another example of the way in which the conductor was wasting the public’s money and “damaging Berlin’s reputation as a cultural center.” Either the Kroll’s “methods must be changed . . . or it must be shut,” he insisted.
While Klemperer was battling for his artistic life at the Kroll, Wilhelm Furtwängler was struggling to establish himself as musical director at the illustrious Berlin Philharmonic. Unlike his beleaguered colleague, however, Furtwängler prevailed and became an institution in his own right. No doubt it helped that Furtwängler saw himself more as a custodian of traditional musical values than as a prophet of the avant-garde.
Not that Furtwängler eschewed the new. On December 2, 1928, he presented Schonberg’s Variations for Orchestra. Many people in the audience rattled their house keys, which was the upper bourgeoisie’s accepted manner of expressing displeasure. The conductor sprinkled other new works through the Philharmonic’s programming without occasioning too much protest. He caused more consternation because of his frequent absences, made necessary by the fact that he was also principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. He also conducted often in New York, even toying with the idea of settling there permanently. But in the end he opted for Berlin as his central base, and his alliance with the Philharmonic became the most solid attachment in his life.
While Berlin’s musicians, especially its jazz composers and performers, tended to think of America as the promised land, the city’s dramatists often disparaged the world’s richest democracy as a rapacious predator. A long-running review entitled “Oh, USA” portrayed Uncle Sam as a bill collector before whom Russia, Germany, and Italy had to bow in submission. America’s middle classes were depicted as bigoted and hypocritical, while its workers came across as mere machines. The play was so stridently anti-American that the U.S. embassy lodged a protest with the German government.
