And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (27 page)

Delvincourt also brought important changes to the
conservatoire
, notably in its teaching methods. In 1942, by now thoroughly disenchanted with Pétain, he adopted the pseudonym of Monsieur Julien
and joined the Front National de la Musique, which occasionally met in his office at the
conservatoire
. In 1943, after young men were ordered to work in Germany, he won a reprieve for sixty of his students by forming a youth orchestra called the Orchestre des Cadets du Conservatoire. The following year, when this cover no longer protected the students, he summoned them before dawn one day. After distributing false identity cards, ration tickets and work papers provided by an organ teacher, Marie-Louise Boëllmann-Gigout, who was in the resistance, he told them to disappear. “Delvincourt was admirable at the Conservatoire where not one student left for Germany,” Poulenc wrote to Milhaud after the liberation.
⁸

Désormière led still more of a double life. A member of the Communist Party and the driving force behind the musicians’ resistance group, he was also the chief conductor at the Opéra-Comique. This required some compromises. He had to work with two successive
pétainistes
as directors of the theater, Max d’Ollone and the tenor Lucien Muratore. He also conducted a benefit concert at the opera where Cortot was the soloist, although in this case the good cause was musicians in distress. But he was free to promote French music, organizing the premieres of several French operas, among them Delannoy’s
Ginevra
^*
and Emmanuel Chabrier’s
L’Étoile
, and programming only two Germanic operas—Mozart’s
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
in 1941 and Richard Strauss’s
Ariadne auf Naxos
in 1943—during the entire occupation.

As a conductor, Désormière also won accolades in 1941 for the first complete recording of Debussy’s opera
Pelléas et Mélisande
, again with Jansen and Joachim. As a
résistant
, while taking delight in attacking d’Ollone and Muratore in unsigned articles for
Le Musicien d’Aujourd’hui
, he helped the Jewish composers Jean Wiener and Rosenthal, who were in hiding. Wiener, a leading composer of movie music in the 1930s, was even able to continue working because Désormière signed his scores for seven new movies; Wiener was later properly credited. After the liberation of Paris, Désormière was on a four-man team running the Opéra-Comique before he was named director of the Paris Opera.

It was all the more to Désormière’s credit that the Opéra-Comique was not swamped by visiting German opera companies and orchestras.
The German Institute, which managed these tours, organized no fewer than seventy-one concerts by German orchestras around France between May 1942 and July 1943. In fact, just three weeks after the occupation, the Berlin Philharmonic played in Paris and Versailles, and it returned to Paris and other cities several more times, conducted successively by Hans Knappertsbusch, Eugen Jochum and Clemens Krauss.
^*
In June 1943, it performed Beethoven’s nine symphonies in a series of sold-out concerts at the thirty-five-hundred-seat Palais de Chaillot in Paris. But if the Berlin Philharmonic could usually count on appreciative audiences, one concert under Krauss in Lyon in May 1942 ended in chaos when thousands of people protested outside the Salle Rameau, singing “La Marseillaise.” More frequently, French music lovers scrambled to buy tickets for German orchestras. In 1941, the Berliner Kammerorchester under Hans von Benda offered its own Mozart festival, including a free concert in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. The Vienna Boys’ Choir was another popular visitor to many cities, while the choir of Ratisbon Cathedral sang in Notre-Dame in Paris. Even the Luftwaffe Orchestra toured France.

Unsurprisingly, Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, was the most performed German opera composer in occupied Paris, accounting for fifty-four performances at the Paris Opera, compared with thirty-five for Mozart. In 1943, the Mannheim National Theater brought a production of
Die Walküre
to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the opera’s first performance in Paris, while the Paris Opera reprised its production of
Der fliegende Holländer
thirty-six times and that of
Das Rheingold
on thirteen occasions. Other German and Austrian composers were also well represented. For instance, the Deutsche Opernhaus of Berlin presented the rising soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Johann Strauss’s
Die Fledermaus
, with all seven performances of the popular operetta reserved for the Wehrmacht. Franz Lehár traveled from Vienna to conduct his operetta
Das Land des Lächelns
(The Land of Smiles) at the Gaieté-Lyrique theater and, on the same trip, conducted a concert uniting the German army, navy and air force orchestras at the Palais de Chaillot. The Paris Opera also revived several prewar productions of German operas, starting in December 1940 with Beethoven’s only opera,
Fidelio
,
itself an odd choice since it is a stirring paean to freedom.
^*
Later seasons included
Le Nozze di Figaro
and other operas by Mozart, Richard Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
and Handel’s
Alceste
. Along with Pfitzner’s
Palestrina
, there was the French premiere of
Peer Gynt
by Werner Egk, a Nazi favorite who won a musical competition linked to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In all, 31 percent of opera performances were of works by German composers. The most performed composer, though, was Verdi, with ninety-four performances, including fifty-five of
Rigoletto
and thirty-two of
Aïda
. Gounod ranked second, with seventy-eight performances of
Faust
, making it the single most performed opera during the occupation. These endless reprises evidently reflected the Paris Opera’s need to save money by reusing existing stage sets and costumes.

One instant celebrity was the dashing young conductor Herbert von Karajan, a member of the Nazi Party since 1933 and the new music director of the Berlin Staatsoper and its orchestra, the Staatskapelle. On several occasions, he filled the Palais de Chaillot, but it was a trip sponsored by Hitler himself in the spring of 1941 that thrust him into the limelight: for the first time, the Berlin Staatsoper was to perform on the revered stage of the Paris Opera. On May 18 and 20, von Karajan conducted
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
. Then, for performances of Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
on May 22 and 25, he brought together something of a dream team: the heralded German “heroic” tenor Max Lorenz and the great French soprano Germaine Lubin.

Lubin, a longtime admirer of Pétain’s, was also a Nazi favorite. When she had performed
Tristan und Isolde
at the Bayreuth festival in 1938, Hitler had been in the audience. She was then introduced to him in a restaurant after the show; she told a journalist that this was the highlight of her visit. Later, the Führer sent her a bouquet of red roses and a photograph of himself in a silver frame inside a red leather casket stamped with an eagle and a swastika. One performance of
Tristan und Isolde
was reserved entirely for Wehrmacht officers; the other was also sold out. Lubin in particular was acclaimed. Cocteau promptly wrote to her: “Madame, what you have done for Isolde was
such a marvel that I lack the courage to remain silent.” Presiding over the occasion was Wagner’s British-born daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, an ardent admirer of Hitler’s who became friends with Lubin in Bayreuth. She later boasted that she personally intervened with Hitler to obtain the release of Lubin’s son from a German POW camp. In fact, days before the
Tristan und Isolde
performance in Paris, Hitler reportedly again stepped in, this time to free Lubin’s Jewish singing teacher, after the soprano refused to sing while he was in jail. Winifred Wagner was in turn delighted that Lubin’s latest lover was none other than her old friend Hans Joachim Lange, a Wehrmacht officer who was posted to Paris.
⁹
Lubin’s days of glory, though, were numbered. After the war, her public identification with the Nazis, whether by attending receptions in the German embassy or performing in Germany, brought an end to her career.

Reviewing music for the German-language newspaper
Pariser Zeitung
was an unlikely critic who, over a seven-year period, found himself on all sides of the conflict. In 1938, given the choice of leaving his Jewish wife or losing his job in Germany, Heinrich Strobel moved to France, where he wrote for the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
and resumed work on his biography of Debussy. When, in 1939, France declared war on Germany, he was interned as an “undesirable foreigner” in the Camp des Milles. After the German victory, he stayed in France and, in 1942, began writing for the
Pariser Zeitung
and gave lectures at the German Institute. What served him well later, though, was that he reviewed French music with sympathy and understanding. As a result, after the war, the French military appointed him to run the Südwestfunk, the Southwest Radio, in Baden-Baden, which was the capital of the region of Germany occupied by France. In the following years, Strobel not only loyally promoted modern French music but he also created an experimental studio that encouraged research into electroacoustic music.

Jacques Rouché had the trickier job of running the Paris Opera. The director of the opera since 1913, Rouché was seventy-seven in 1939 when he took over the Réunion des Théâtres Lyriques Nationaux, which included both the Paris Opera and the Opéra-Comique. After Hitler’s visit on June 23, 1940, however, it was the Paris Opera that most interested the Germans and became a “must” for visiting Nazi dignitaries. In 1940, Rouché was forced to dismiss thirty Jewish musicians from the orchestra, decimating its string section, although he kept paying them secretly for another two years
and even retained a Hungarian Jewish decorator, Ernest Klausz, until late 1943.
¹⁰

In theory, Rouché was answerable to Vichy, but his principal headache was managing German officials, who constantly tried to influence the opera’s programming and, even with their quota of free tickets, frequently demanded more. On the other hand, he had no worries about filling the house. Michel Francini, the music-hall actor, recalled that his father, who worked in the opera house’s administration, complained loudly about armies of German boots damaging the Palais Garnier’s sweeping marble staircase.
¹¹
French opera lovers followed these boots, Jean Guéhenno observed caustically in his journal: “Every evening at the Opera, I am told, German officers come in large numbers. During the intervals, as is the custom in their country, they stroll around the foyer, in three and fours, all going in the same direction. The French, despite themselves, unconsciously join the procession and keep in step. The boots impose the rhythm.”
¹²

Adding to Rouché’s troubles, from late 1942 he faced increased meddling by Vichy’s new education minister, Abel Bonnard, whom he tried to appease by sending copies of laudatory letters he had received from Ambassador Abetz. But there was also labor unrest within the company, often promoted by the clandestine Front National de l’Opéra, which had been organized by an upholsterer, Jean Rieussec, and included just twenty members, in the main technicians rather than musicians. After the war, when Rouché was accused by this group of collaborating with the Nazis, he was not helped by rumors that his wife had had an affair with a German officer. “In Paris, musical life resumes as best it can, very disturbed by questions of the purge,” Poulenc wrote to Milhaud in March 1945. “There is also a terrible crisis at the Opera. We lament the departure of dear Rouché. The social indiscretions of his wife and the fascism of Lucienne
^*
have, as you can imagine, complicated things.”
¹³
But Poulenc, Désormière and Auric jumped to Rouché’s defense and he was acquitted. Now eighty-two, he was happy to retire. Today, he is remembered as a skilled manager who “saved” the Paris Opera in the interwar years and did what he could to protect it during the occupation.

Serge Lifar, the flamboyant ballet master at the Paris Opera, had an easier war. An infamous self-promoter, he was quick to ingratiate himself with the Germans, so much so that after the war he claimed that he had persuaded them to confirm Rouché in his post in 1940. It helped that, while the Germans considered themselves masters of opera, they recognized ballet to be a French specialty. Nazi officers loved going to the ballet, and a few found mistresses among the beautiful young ballerinas who paraded in the gilded
Foyer de la danse
behind the main stage.

If ballet held its own during the occupation, however, this was also a measure of Lifar’s enormous talent. Born in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, he was just eighteen when he joined Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris in 1923, and he soon became the company’s star dancer as well as a rising choreographer. In 1930, he joined the Paris Opera Ballet, starting as a principal dancer, then becoming ballet master. By the late 1930s, he had transformed the company, professionalizing it as never before. When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, he saved his male dancers from being sent to the front by hurriedly organizing a trip to Australia and, in the spring of 1940, a tour of Spain and Portugal. The troupe had just returned to Paris when the German army arrived, but Lifar seemed unfazed: he resumed dance classes in the historic rehearsal room in the coupole of the Palais Garnier. By August 1940, when the opera house reopened to the public, he was ready to present an exciting program of ballets.