Hitler's Hangman (9 page)

peers. In the words of one music critic, Otto Reitzel, Bruno Heydrich’s

YO U N G R E I N H A R D

17

appearance as Siegfried at the Cologne City Theatre in 1896 was distin-

guished by ‘musical infallibility’, while another critic praised his perform-

ance as Fra Diavolo in Brunswick in 1901 as ‘an utterly perfect

impersonation’.11 Success bred success and in 1895, the same year that he

met Bruno Walter, Heydrich was offered the lead role in Hans Pfitzner’s

Der arme Heinrich
in Mainz. Pfitzner had become acquainted with

Heydrich in Cologne and was so impressed by his ‘musically and intel-

lectually alert’ performance as Siegfried that he offered him the lead role

in his new opera.12

Alongside his professional activities as an opera singer, Bruno increas-

ingly devoted himself to composition, ultimately writing no fewer than

five operas:
Amen
(1895),
Frieden
(
Peace
, 1907),
Zufall
(
Chance
, 1914),
Das

Leiermädchen
(
The Lyre Child
, 1921) and
Das Ewige Licht
(
The Eternal

Light
, 1923). Bruno’s works were not among the finest compositions of

the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the staging of several

operas in the homeland of classical music, alongside the works of

composers like Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner and Strauss, signified

considerable success in itself. In terms of style and content, his composi-

tions were inspired by the towering example of Richard Wagner, the

leading avant-garde artist of his time, whose four-part music drama
The

Ring of the Nibelung
(1876) had revolutionized the international opera

scene, taking musical romanticism to new and potentially insurmountable

heights. The major themes of Wagner’s compositions – love, power and

the eternal clashes between good and evil, which he developed most

powerfully in his last musical dramas,
Tristan, Die Meistersinger
and

Parsifal
– deeply impacted on Bruno Heydrich’s own work, as became

evident when his first opera,
Amen
, premiered in Cologne in September

1895 to great critical acclaim.13

Like Wagner’s heroes Siegfried and Tristan, the protagonist of
Amen
,

Reinhard, is an ultimately tragic figure tested by fate and by the devious

deeds of the opera’s villain, the peasant leader Thomas, representing the

threatening rise of Social Democracy in Imperial Germany. In contrast to

Thomas, the crippled villain who kills Reinhard through a callous stab in

the back, Reinhard is a Germanic hero figure equipped with great moral,

intellectual and physical gifts – sufficiently so for Bruno to name his eldest

son after him.

The opera’s success brought national recognition and a certain degree of

material security, allowing Bruno to marry the daughter of his mentor,

Professor Krantz, in December 1897. Reinhard Heydrich’s mother,

Elisabeth Anna Amalia Krantz, was twenty-six at the time of the wedding,

and, in many ways, the extreme opposite of her husband. An imposingly

tall and slightly overweight figure with black curly hair, Bruno was jovial

18

HITLER’S HANGMAN

and entertaining, punctuating his speech with wild theatrical gestures,

whereas Elisabeth was small and of slight build, her bearing strict and well

disciplined.14 Moreover, Elisabeth was raised as a Catholic and was there-

fore a member of a religious minority. Catholics accounted for 36 per cent

of the empire’s population and inter-confessional marriages were rare.

Elisabeth’s mother, Maria Antonie, herself the daughter of a wealthy busi-

ness family in Bautzen, had brought her children up fully cognizant of

their social status as a wealthy upper-middle-class family. Her two sons

were sent to London to train as merchants and acquire foreign-language

skills, while Elisabeth was educated in a Catholic convent in Lugano

before training as a pianist in her father’s Conservatory. Such an

upbringing was common for the daughters of wealthy families: in order to

support the social aspirations of their husbands, especially in the educated

middle classes, wives were increasingly expected to have a well-rounded

education, artistic talent and musical abilities.15 Despite the couple’s

different upbringings and characters, the Heydrich marriage was a love

match. They shared a deep passion for music and their mutual affection

was strong enough to overcome the considerable differences in social

status, wealth and religious upbringing.

Encouraged by the success of
Amen
, Bruno Heydrich harboured ambi-

tious plans for his second opera,
Frieden
, which he wanted to be staged at

the Berlin Court Opera as a sign of royal endorsement. Official distinc-

tions and royal patronage mattered a great deal in Imperial Germany, but

Bruno’s high-flying plans came to nothing. Instead,
Frieden
premiered in

Mainz on 27 January 1907 to honour the forty-eighth birthday of Kaiser

Wilhelm II. The Kaiser’s lack of interest in Bruno’s opera was partly due

to its content: set in the sixteenth century, the three-act opera had a

strongly religious subtext and revolved around Catholic notions of sin and

redemption – not exactly a drawcard for the head of the German

Protestant Church.16 The mixed public reception of
Frieden
was a disap-

pointment for Heydrich and his stage appearances became less frequent.

But although a major breakthrough as a composer was to elude him, he

left behind an extensive oeuvre, including five operas, several piano

compositions, choral works, lyrical triplets and chamber music pieces:

sixty compositions altogether by the outbreak of the Great War, securing

him a more than negligible place in the history of early twentieth-century

German music.17

Bruno’s greatest success, however, was as a teacher of music. After his

marriage into the Krantz family, and aided by the substantial inheritance

left to Elisabeth by her father upon his early death in 1898, the Heydrichs

moved to the city of Hal e – the birthplace of Georg Friedrich Händel –

where Bruno founded the Hal e Choir School, an institution based on the

YO U N G R E I N H A R D

19

famous model of Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch’s international y acclaimed

Prussian Sing-Akademie. Although long established as one of Germany’s

finest university towns, and home to international y renowned academics

such as the economist Gustav Schmol er (1845–1917) and the Leopoldina,

Germany’s oldest academy for science, Hal e had been a sleepy medium-

sized provincial town with no more than 50,000 inhabitants for most of the

nineteenth century. By the time the Heydrichs arrived, however, it had

become one of Germany’s booming cities whose prosperity was based on a

rapidly expanding mining and chemical industry, as wel as a growing

number of regional banks that transformed Hal e into the sixth-largest

German city with a population of 156,000.18

Of the many beneficiaries of this radical transformation process, the

middle classes prospered most. With their growing wealth, the social

status attached to a distinct bourgeois culture of
Bildung
– education and

cultivation through engagement with literature, music and the fine arts –

increased. For all the backwardness of its political elite, Imperial Germany

was a country with a hyper-modern cultural scene, a country in which

these arts where widely cherished and officially promoted.19 By the time

Bruno Heydrich opened his business in Halle, music had become a

middle-class commodity which formed an essential part of a bourgeois

education. Its representative medium was the piano, which became an

affordable asset of many middle-class living rooms in the late nineteenth

century. With the shift in piano manufacture from craft shop to factory by

the mid-ninteenth century, the production of pianos increased eightfold

in Germany between 1870 and 1910. Their cost was accordingly cut by

half and the piano became the centrepiece of middle-class cultivation.

Hausmusik
or simple compositions for amateur players was a central

feature of middle-class entertainment and culture.20

In 1901, Bruno Heydrich’s small Choir School became a fully fledged

conservatory specializing in piano and singing lessons. It was the first

establishment of its kind in Halle. Progress was swift in the following

years. The citizens of the increasingly wealthy and fast-growing city were

well able to afford to send their children to the Conservatory. Several

times a year Bruno’s pupils staged public concerts, which soon became an

important feature of Halle’s cultural life.21 Parallel to his professional

success, Bruno Heydrich managed to integrate himself fully into Halle’s

social circles. As in other European cities at the time, clubs and associa-

tions in Halle remained the preferred framework for middle-class social

interactions. The Halle registry of 1900 listed 436 private clubs and asso-

ciations, many of them learned societies that catered for the interests of

the university-educated and wealthy middle classes, and arranged litera-

ture evenings, concerts, balls and similarly edifying social events. One of

20

HITLER’S HANGMAN

the most socially influential of these organizations was the Freemason

lodge of the Three Sabres, whose membership included both university

staff and members of the wider business community. It is unclear when

Bruno Heydrich joined the lodge, but he repeatedly organized concerts on

its premises in the first years of the twentieth century.22

Bruno was also one of the founders of the Halle branch of the

Schlaraffia society, an all-male organization founded in Prague in 1859

with the purpose of advancing the arts, conviviality, and friendship across

national borders. Membership of the Schlaraffia was not atypical for an

artist like Bruno Heydrich. More eminent contemporaries such as the

famous Hungarian composer Franz Lehár and the Austrian poet Peter

Rosegger were members of the society, which operated across Central

Europe. As a local celebrity, Bruno was also made an honorary member of

several of the town’s musical societies such as the Hallesche Liedertafel, a

men’s choir founded in 1834. At the Liedertafel’s seventy-fifth anniversary

in 1909, he composed a ‘Hymn to the Men’s Choir’ and repeatedly staged

choral performances involving both members of the Liedertafel and

students from his Conservatory.23

Meanwhile, the Halle Conservatory continued to thrive. The number of

students grew rapidly, from 20 in 1902 to 190 in 1904, requiring eleven

permanent teachers, four teaching assistants and a secretary. At this point,

the Heydrichs could also afford to employ two maids and a butler.

Elisabeth ran the financial and administrative side of the family business,

holding together what would otherwise have soon disintegrated had it

been left in the hands of her artistically talented but financially inept

husband, who spent money more quickly than he earned it. Bruno’s

musical talents and social skills, combined with his wife’s fortune, secured

the Heydrich family a respected place in the Halle community. They

cultivated personal relationships with the Mayor of Halle and the editor

of the local newspaper, the
Saale-Zeitung
. Another close family friend was

Count Felix von Luckner, who would rise to fame during the Great War

as one of Germany’s most celebrated naval war heroes.24

Reinhard Heydrich was therefore born into a family of considerable

financial means and social standing, a family that endeavoured to lead an

orderly life characterized by regularity and hard work, as was typical for

an upwardly mobile German bourgeois family at the turn of the century.

While Heydrich’s mother devoted herself entirely to the household and

the children’s wellbeing, occasionally working as a piano teacher in her

husband’s Conservatory, his father Bruno primarily gloried in his profes-

sion as a director. The gender-specific distribution of roles in the Heydrich

household was normal for the time: the father was the unchallenged head

of the family and made all important decisions concerning child-rearing

YO U N G R E I N H A R D

21

and education, while the mother – together with governesses in the case

of the Heydrich family – looked after the children’s everyday needs. Girls,

including Reinhard’s elder sister Maria, were prepared for their antici-

pated roles as mothers and wives, whereas boys were raised as future