Overture of Hope, page 18
With the buzz bombs making life in London even more dangerous, Ida and Louise convinced their parents—Mary Cook had returned from Gloucester in the meantime—to sit out the rest of the war at the home of an old Duchess’s School friend in Northumberland. John and Mary Cook went to live with the Douglas family in their modest home in the small North Sea port of Amble, which is about nine miles from Alnwick where the sisters attended school. The Cook parents squeezed into the three-bedroom home, with its outhouse in the back yard, for the remainder of the war.5
Ida and Louise got out in the nick of time. They had decided to decamp to their flat in Pimlico and left Morella Road at 10:00 a.m., just hours before a buzz bomb flattened their home at 1:00 p.m. With the help of a neighbor, the sisters returned briefly to board up what remained of the house against looters, and headed to the Dolphin Square flat with Igor, the family cat, until their home could be repaired. “When we were halfway there, it dawned upon us that we were the refugees now,” said Ida. “Countless others had sought sanctuary in the famous flat. Now it was our turn.”
* * *
When Ida Cook wanted to write to Rosa Ponselle in America after the war, she didn’t let anything as mundane as not knowing her address stop her. She had read that Ponselle had married one of the sons of the mayor of Baltimore, so she addressed her letter to “Rosa Ponselle, Baltimore, U.S.A.”6
Ponselle had asked Edward Johnson, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, to stage Adriana Lecouvreur and when he refused, Ponselle, thirty-nine, and still in the prime of her career, decided to retire after nineteen seasons at the Met. So, on February 15, 1937, following a performance of Carmen, she left the Met vowing never to return. She gave up her New York penthouse, and settled with her new husband, Carle Jackson, who worked for his father’s insurance firm, in Baltimore, where the couple built a villa overlooking the city. The Villa Pace was named for her first major operatic aria, “Pace, Pace, Mio Dio” from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. Ponselle first sang the role of Verdi’s tragic Leonora opposite Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918 when she was twenty-one years old. The first lines of the aria, with notes in the shape of roses, were inscribed above the doorway of the rambling, whitewashed Tuscan-style villa, which featured large, picture windows and a terracotta roof.
But less than three months after the wedding, things had started to sour. Ida Cook’s letter reached Ponselle just as her relationship with her husband was entering its final stages. In her letter, Ida wrote about what the prima donna had meant to her and Louise and how the intense hope that they would hear her magnificent voice again had sustained the sisters during the darkest days of the war. “I tried to tell her something of what she had been to us all during those three great seasons at Covent Garden, and how she had remained in the memories of so many of us when we had nothing but memories to sustain our courage and hopes.” Ponselle was so moved that she invited the sisters to visit her and her husband at Villa Pace when they made their trip to America.
But before that, Ida dared ask for another favor: Would it be possible to phone her in Baltimore and hear that voice again? Perhaps they could call on May 28, the anniversary of her London debut at Covent Garden? Ponselle wired back almost immediately: “Will be waiting for your call. Rosa.”7
On the appointed spring day, Ida and Louise had invited some of their opera friends and a few of their refugees for the occasion. Among the group there was good news. The Bauers were on their way to Brazil after living in Croydon since the beginning of the war, and Friedl Orlando was now pregnant and expecting her first child later in the year. Her mother, Elisabeth Bamberger, had finally made it safely out of Germany, traveling to Russia and Japan bound for Quito, Ecuador, where she was living with her son Willi Bamberger.8 As they all gathered around the telephone at the Dolphin Square flat, Ida called “the Atlantic operator” to make a long-distance call to America for the first time in her life. At precisely 8:00 p.m. London time the operator rang back “and dead silence fell upon the room.”
“Go ahead,” said the operator as Ida stood nervously clutching the receiver.9
And then the voice—which one opera critic had described as “that big, pure, colorful golden voice” that would “rise effortlessly, hitting the stunned listener in the face, rolling over the body, sliding down the shoulderblades, making one wiggle with sheer physiological pleasure”10—suddenly hit Ida with exceptional force. It immediately sent her back to the canvas stools of the Covent Garden queue.
“Hello, Ida! Is that you?”11
And then Ponselle asked if she could sing, and the wonderful voice began clear and steady, over 3,000 miles and a vast ocean, the heartfelt aria from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino.
Pace, pace, mio Dio!
Cruda sventura
M’astringe, ahimé, a languir; Come il dì primo
Da tant’ anni dura
Peace, peace, my God!
Raw misfortune
Forces me to languish
My suffering has lasted for so many years,
Deep as on the first day.12
In the fourth act of La Forza del Destino, Leonora, who has tried in vain to forget her South American suitor Don Alvaro who accidentally killed her father, prays to God for peace and to end her terrible suffering. But for the Cooks and their friends who stood in silent wonder around the telephone in the Dolphin Square flat, the suffering of so many years seemed to vanish in those moments as they passed the receiver around so that they could each experience even a few seconds of the glorious, golden voice.
Ida and Louise arrived in New York City on the twentieth anniversary of their first visit—January 4, 1947. Their plane was delayed so long that by the time they disembarked there was no one to meet them at the airport. But a surprise greeted them in their hotel room. “I shall never forget how it looked,” said Ida. “It was a film star’s room. There were flowers and telegrams and candy and cakes and letters and phone-call slips. I took one look around and began to cry.”13
They spent “ten magical days” in the city, where they were reunited with the Basch family, the Stiefels, and Elisabeth Bamberger, who had settled in New York after spending the war years in Ecuador.14 Ida and Louise were able to give her firsthand news of the new baby—Lucien Orlando—who was now a year old. In later years, Lucien Orlando would remind his parents and grandmother of the courage of the Cooks in saving their lives. “As a small child he often used to speculate on the fact that he would not be alive had it not been for Ida and Louise,” recalled Friedl Bamberger.15
While catching up with their refugees, the sisters also went to the Metropolitan Opera where they saw their old friend Ezio Pinza in Boris Godonov. They were also reunited with Amelita Galli-Curci and Homer Samuels when they flew to La Jolla.16
But the highlight of that American sojourn was their trip to Baltimore to visit Rosa Ponselle at Villa Pace. Carle Jackson picked them up at the train station and took them to the estate, installing them in the La Traviata bedroom. Ponselle was still in the hospital, he said. No doubt, she was recovering from one of her bouts of depression. He assured the worried sisters that he would pick her up the next day. “You realize, I suppose, that Rosa’s rather scared about meeting you?” Jackson told them, adding that she was worried that they would be disappointed because she was no longer the great prima donna that they expected to meet.17
But the two diehard opera fans refused to be put off. After all, the memory of “that dark matchless voice” had sustained them through the entire Second World War. When Ponselle arrived the next day at Villa Pace, the sisters rushed outside to greet her. She was as beautiful as they remembered her on the London stage in 1929. With her dark, wide eyes and air of drama, she “looked like a Verdi heroine.” The sisters fell on their “darling Rosa” and held her in a long embrace.
“It would be unrealistic to believe in a strict scheme of reward and punishment in this life,” mused Ida. Still, she was certain that seeing Rosa again was “God’s reward” to her and Louise for their refugee work.18
CHAPTER 10 The Trial
It was the perks that would get Clemens Krauss into trouble as the war ended in Europe: the luxurious apartment at Leopoldskron, the car and the driver, and the seemingly unlimited supply of food in the midst of chronic shortages in a devastated Germany and Austria. The denunciations against the conductor had never really abated during the war, but they rose to a fevered pitch once the Allies moved into the Reich following Germany’s surrender. An anonymous letter addressed to the Salzburg police, and later passed on to state authorities in November 1945, alleged that Krauss and Ursuleac even tried to obtain residence permits in Austria for their two German housemaids.1
The persecution of Krauss took place in Austria after the country was divided into zones of influence controlled by the triumphant Allies—the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. But in April 1945, when Soviet troops captured Vienna from the Nazis and unilaterally formed a provisional government, it seemed that Krauss was very much in favor. Russian officials asked the conductor, who had remained in Vienna with Ursuleac during the bloody siege of the city, to conduct a series of concerts for the Vienna Philharmonic. The Soviets were keen to bring some sense of order and normality to the war-ravaged Austrian capital, and an important part of that was putting the opera and the philharmonic back to work. They seemed to have little patience for the bureaucracy of vetting the Nazis’ former music-world superstar, preoccupied as they were with the reconstruction of the entire country.
In the spring of 1945, Krauss might have been forgiven for thinking that he had emerged from the war with his reputation intact, but his proximity to Hitler and the Nazi Party hierarchy soon earned him a prominent place on an American blacklist of Nazi sympathizers alongside his mentor, Richard Strauss. It didn’t matter that they had never been Nazi Party members. Both Strauss and Krauss were popularly perceived to have made gains because of their ties to the murderous regime, and in the view of the American forces they needed to pay for those transgressions, especially if Germany was to truly cast off its Nazi past and move boldly into the future. The denazification inquiries set up by the Allies in cooperation with local authorities weren’t exactly the Nuremberg prosecutions of high-level Nazis; but they were a way to rid Austria and Germany of Hitler’s hateful ideology, although many of those attempts to prosecute fell by the wayside as the Allies increasingly focused their attention on the growing menace of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.
Nonetheless, authorities seemed particularly keen on making an example of Clemens Krauss. “We have to judge the facts as they appeared to the public,” noted a 1945 U.S. Forces in Austria communiqué. “And the fact is, that Krauss was judged by the overwhelming majority as a Nazi at this time.” It was the view of the U.S. Forces in Austria that both Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss had been particularly compromised by the Nazis.2
Strauss had been the first president of the Reichmusikkammer and had composed music for the 1936 Olympics and a hymn to honor Germany’s ally, Japan. He had even written a poem in honor of Hans Frank, a legal adviser to Hitler and the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, known as the “Butcher of Poland.” The poem, which hails Frank as “the savior of Poland,” was written in gratitude for Frank intervening when the composer’s estate at Garmisch was in danger of being requisitioned by Nazi engineers during the war.
Admittedly, Strauss curried favor with the Nazis, but he did so in a desperate bid to protect his family. The composer spent the war years deeply worried over the fate of his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice and his “Mischling” grandchildren. After Kristallnacht, Nazi storm troopers targeted Alice and Franz Strauss’s home in Garmisch. In 1942 Strauss moved with his family to Vienna, where they sought the protection of Baldur von Schirach, the Vienna Gauleiter and Hitler Youth leader who had promised the composer that he would do what he could to help them. But Strauss’s influence in the Third Reich seemed limited to those who still perceived him as a great composer. As the war dragged on, Strauss became tiresome to high-ranking Nazis, who remained unimpressed with his connection with Jewish writers and musicians. At one point he tried to secure the release of Alice Strauss’s grandmother, Paula Neumann, who had been deported to the Theresienstadt death camp. Arriving at the gates of the camp in his chauffeur-driven Horch, Strauss informed the guards, “I am Dr. Strauss, the composer.” Clearly nonplussed, the soldiers at the gates ordered him to leave at once. Neumann was eventually killed along with twenty-five of Alice Strauss’s other relatives scattered in death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In April 1945 when U.S. soldiers arrived at Garmisch, where the composer had returned to live in the final months of the war, Strauss introduced himself in broken English, fearing that they would immediately put him in jail or take over the estate. Instead, the Americans were star-struck and asked for his autograph. Later, American officers were even invited to dinner at the Strauss home. By November 1945, as the denazification investigators probed his connection to the Nazis, the eighty-one-year-old composer was demoralized and desperate, and his health was in decline. He fled his beloved Bavarian country estate and moved to a spa town in Switzerland, where the press continued to hound him and portray him as a Nazi sympathizer. Eventually, in June 1948, a denazification court in Munich cleared Strauss of all charges. The court concluded that he had not benefited from his relationship with the Nazis and had simply dedicated himself to music during the Third Reich.
Krauss presented another problem for the Allies. “His is one of the most difficult cases we have in Austria,” wrote Otto de Pasetti, the Austro-American theater and music officer assigned to his case. “Krauss, according to our findings, is the most compromised conductor.”3
Born Otto Freiherr von Pasetti-Friedenberg in southern Austria, de Pasetti had once worked as an operatic tenor in Graz and Vienna in the 1930s, although it’s unclear whether he ever performed under Krauss. He emigrated to the United States in 1937, but found himself back in Vienna just before the end of the war as an intelligence officer for the U.S. government. Setting up his base in the devastated and divided city where he had once sung in Bertolt Brecht operas opposite his lover Lotte Lenya, he now began his probe for the theater and music section of the U.S. Forces in Austria. Of course, his knowledge of German and music made him the ideal investigator.
In November 1945 de Pasetti embarked on “the Viennese conductor problem,” with a focus on Clemens Krauss, who was well known to de Pasetti as the world-renowned conductor and a favorite collaborator of Strauss. In the introductory notes on Krauss that he presented to his superiors in the U.S. Forces, he noted that Krauss was a prodigy—a musical genius who held a professorship at the State Academy for Music and Dramatic Art by the time he was twenty-nine and who had traveled to Italy to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in the presence of the Pope. In Salzburg, he had long directed master classes for conductors at the Mozarteum Academy. In Munich, he was entrusted with building Hitler’s dream of the greatest musical empire the world had ever seen.
De Pasetti went to Munich to do his preliminary research on Krauss, arriving in the devastated city five days before Christmas in 1945 and three months after the end of the war to interview Krauss’s staff at the Bavarian State Opera. The U.S. Army’s Office of Military Government for Bavaria sent a notice to the administrators of the Bavarian State Theater instructing them not to allow Krauss “or any representative of that individual” to have access to the conductor’s private correspondence. “The files are to be locked up and no one allowed to examine them without the express written permission of Military Government.”
The profile of Krauss that emerged from de Pasetti’s interviews with administrative staff and stage crew was of a highly driven professional who had “the most intimate relations with the Nazi big shots.”
“He used his connections first for himself to get the best living conditions and a very high salary, and second for the State Opera in Munich, which he built up to a very high level,” wrote de Pasetti, quoting Bertil Wetzelsberger, director of the Munich State Opera. “He states that the bad influence in Nazism on Krauss was his present wife, Viorica Ursuleac.… He blames her for urging Krauss to leave Vienna for Berlin.” Another source called Krauss “a Machiavelli type” and “a master of diplomacy” who often told his musicians that if he didn’t get what he needed for the opera, “I shall go to the Führer and I shall get it.” When he gave out awards for loyal service to his musicians and staff at the Bavarian State Opera, Krauss also handed out copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with his own personal dedication. “Source knows that it was a rule that this book had to be distributed with the medals, but the personal dedication was absolutely his own free will,” noted de Pasetti.
In Vienna, much of the anger against Krauss stemmed from the perception that he had abandoned the Vienna State Opera and taken away its best musicians and singers when he made the move to Berlin in 1934. “There is no doubt that his leaving the Vienna State Opera was a very hard blow to Austrian theater and music,” said de Pasetti. “Whatever his reasons were for his step, the way he did it cannot be considered as fair.… The Nazi press created the impression in Germany and in foreign countries that Krauss made this step because of his sympathy with Nazism.”
But Erik Maschat, Krauss’s secretary in Vienna and Munich, told de Pasetti that Krauss had no choice but to leave Vienna because he was treated so badly by the state-opera hierarchy. The Heimwehr, or Austrian fascists, were also against him because they perceived him as pro-Nazi and helped to sabotage the renewal of his contract at the opera, Maschat said. Krauss’s bosses at the opera privately denounced him—a fellow Austrian—for bowing to German influence after the Nazis came to power, for having conducted the premiere of Arabella in Dresden and maintaining guest contracts with German singers from Berlin. In Vienna, Krauss had surrounded himself with a select group of composers and performers, sparking professional jealousy among his rivals and opera divas. In the Machiavellian world of the Vienna State Opera of the 1930s, his enemies were not above labeling Krauss a Nazi when they didn’t get their way.
Ida and Louise got out in the nick of time. They had decided to decamp to their flat in Pimlico and left Morella Road at 10:00 a.m., just hours before a buzz bomb flattened their home at 1:00 p.m. With the help of a neighbor, the sisters returned briefly to board up what remained of the house against looters, and headed to the Dolphin Square flat with Igor, the family cat, until their home could be repaired. “When we were halfway there, it dawned upon us that we were the refugees now,” said Ida. “Countless others had sought sanctuary in the famous flat. Now it was our turn.”
* * *
When Ida Cook wanted to write to Rosa Ponselle in America after the war, she didn’t let anything as mundane as not knowing her address stop her. She had read that Ponselle had married one of the sons of the mayor of Baltimore, so she addressed her letter to “Rosa Ponselle, Baltimore, U.S.A.”6
Ponselle had asked Edward Johnson, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, to stage Adriana Lecouvreur and when he refused, Ponselle, thirty-nine, and still in the prime of her career, decided to retire after nineteen seasons at the Met. So, on February 15, 1937, following a performance of Carmen, she left the Met vowing never to return. She gave up her New York penthouse, and settled with her new husband, Carle Jackson, who worked for his father’s insurance firm, in Baltimore, where the couple built a villa overlooking the city. The Villa Pace was named for her first major operatic aria, “Pace, Pace, Mio Dio” from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. Ponselle first sang the role of Verdi’s tragic Leonora opposite Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera in 1918 when she was twenty-one years old. The first lines of the aria, with notes in the shape of roses, were inscribed above the doorway of the rambling, whitewashed Tuscan-style villa, which featured large, picture windows and a terracotta roof.
But less than three months after the wedding, things had started to sour. Ida Cook’s letter reached Ponselle just as her relationship with her husband was entering its final stages. In her letter, Ida wrote about what the prima donna had meant to her and Louise and how the intense hope that they would hear her magnificent voice again had sustained the sisters during the darkest days of the war. “I tried to tell her something of what she had been to us all during those three great seasons at Covent Garden, and how she had remained in the memories of so many of us when we had nothing but memories to sustain our courage and hopes.” Ponselle was so moved that she invited the sisters to visit her and her husband at Villa Pace when they made their trip to America.
But before that, Ida dared ask for another favor: Would it be possible to phone her in Baltimore and hear that voice again? Perhaps they could call on May 28, the anniversary of her London debut at Covent Garden? Ponselle wired back almost immediately: “Will be waiting for your call. Rosa.”7
On the appointed spring day, Ida and Louise had invited some of their opera friends and a few of their refugees for the occasion. Among the group there was good news. The Bauers were on their way to Brazil after living in Croydon since the beginning of the war, and Friedl Orlando was now pregnant and expecting her first child later in the year. Her mother, Elisabeth Bamberger, had finally made it safely out of Germany, traveling to Russia and Japan bound for Quito, Ecuador, where she was living with her son Willi Bamberger.8 As they all gathered around the telephone at the Dolphin Square flat, Ida called “the Atlantic operator” to make a long-distance call to America for the first time in her life. At precisely 8:00 p.m. London time the operator rang back “and dead silence fell upon the room.”
“Go ahead,” said the operator as Ida stood nervously clutching the receiver.9
And then the voice—which one opera critic had described as “that big, pure, colorful golden voice” that would “rise effortlessly, hitting the stunned listener in the face, rolling over the body, sliding down the shoulderblades, making one wiggle with sheer physiological pleasure”10—suddenly hit Ida with exceptional force. It immediately sent her back to the canvas stools of the Covent Garden queue.
“Hello, Ida! Is that you?”11
And then Ponselle asked if she could sing, and the wonderful voice began clear and steady, over 3,000 miles and a vast ocean, the heartfelt aria from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino.
Pace, pace, mio Dio!
Cruda sventura
M’astringe, ahimé, a languir; Come il dì primo
Da tant’ anni dura
Peace, peace, my God!
Raw misfortune
Forces me to languish
My suffering has lasted for so many years,
Deep as on the first day.12
In the fourth act of La Forza del Destino, Leonora, who has tried in vain to forget her South American suitor Don Alvaro who accidentally killed her father, prays to God for peace and to end her terrible suffering. But for the Cooks and their friends who stood in silent wonder around the telephone in the Dolphin Square flat, the suffering of so many years seemed to vanish in those moments as they passed the receiver around so that they could each experience even a few seconds of the glorious, golden voice.
Ida and Louise arrived in New York City on the twentieth anniversary of their first visit—January 4, 1947. Their plane was delayed so long that by the time they disembarked there was no one to meet them at the airport. But a surprise greeted them in their hotel room. “I shall never forget how it looked,” said Ida. “It was a film star’s room. There were flowers and telegrams and candy and cakes and letters and phone-call slips. I took one look around and began to cry.”13
They spent “ten magical days” in the city, where they were reunited with the Basch family, the Stiefels, and Elisabeth Bamberger, who had settled in New York after spending the war years in Ecuador.14 Ida and Louise were able to give her firsthand news of the new baby—Lucien Orlando—who was now a year old. In later years, Lucien Orlando would remind his parents and grandmother of the courage of the Cooks in saving their lives. “As a small child he often used to speculate on the fact that he would not be alive had it not been for Ida and Louise,” recalled Friedl Bamberger.15
While catching up with their refugees, the sisters also went to the Metropolitan Opera where they saw their old friend Ezio Pinza in Boris Godonov. They were also reunited with Amelita Galli-Curci and Homer Samuels when they flew to La Jolla.16
But the highlight of that American sojourn was their trip to Baltimore to visit Rosa Ponselle at Villa Pace. Carle Jackson picked them up at the train station and took them to the estate, installing them in the La Traviata bedroom. Ponselle was still in the hospital, he said. No doubt, she was recovering from one of her bouts of depression. He assured the worried sisters that he would pick her up the next day. “You realize, I suppose, that Rosa’s rather scared about meeting you?” Jackson told them, adding that she was worried that they would be disappointed because she was no longer the great prima donna that they expected to meet.17
But the two diehard opera fans refused to be put off. After all, the memory of “that dark matchless voice” had sustained them through the entire Second World War. When Ponselle arrived the next day at Villa Pace, the sisters rushed outside to greet her. She was as beautiful as they remembered her on the London stage in 1929. With her dark, wide eyes and air of drama, she “looked like a Verdi heroine.” The sisters fell on their “darling Rosa” and held her in a long embrace.
“It would be unrealistic to believe in a strict scheme of reward and punishment in this life,” mused Ida. Still, she was certain that seeing Rosa again was “God’s reward” to her and Louise for their refugee work.18
CHAPTER 10 The Trial
It was the perks that would get Clemens Krauss into trouble as the war ended in Europe: the luxurious apartment at Leopoldskron, the car and the driver, and the seemingly unlimited supply of food in the midst of chronic shortages in a devastated Germany and Austria. The denunciations against the conductor had never really abated during the war, but they rose to a fevered pitch once the Allies moved into the Reich following Germany’s surrender. An anonymous letter addressed to the Salzburg police, and later passed on to state authorities in November 1945, alleged that Krauss and Ursuleac even tried to obtain residence permits in Austria for their two German housemaids.1
The persecution of Krauss took place in Austria after the country was divided into zones of influence controlled by the triumphant Allies—the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. But in April 1945, when Soviet troops captured Vienna from the Nazis and unilaterally formed a provisional government, it seemed that Krauss was very much in favor. Russian officials asked the conductor, who had remained in Vienna with Ursuleac during the bloody siege of the city, to conduct a series of concerts for the Vienna Philharmonic. The Soviets were keen to bring some sense of order and normality to the war-ravaged Austrian capital, and an important part of that was putting the opera and the philharmonic back to work. They seemed to have little patience for the bureaucracy of vetting the Nazis’ former music-world superstar, preoccupied as they were with the reconstruction of the entire country.
In the spring of 1945, Krauss might have been forgiven for thinking that he had emerged from the war with his reputation intact, but his proximity to Hitler and the Nazi Party hierarchy soon earned him a prominent place on an American blacklist of Nazi sympathizers alongside his mentor, Richard Strauss. It didn’t matter that they had never been Nazi Party members. Both Strauss and Krauss were popularly perceived to have made gains because of their ties to the murderous regime, and in the view of the American forces they needed to pay for those transgressions, especially if Germany was to truly cast off its Nazi past and move boldly into the future. The denazification inquiries set up by the Allies in cooperation with local authorities weren’t exactly the Nuremberg prosecutions of high-level Nazis; but they were a way to rid Austria and Germany of Hitler’s hateful ideology, although many of those attempts to prosecute fell by the wayside as the Allies increasingly focused their attention on the growing menace of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.
Nonetheless, authorities seemed particularly keen on making an example of Clemens Krauss. “We have to judge the facts as they appeared to the public,” noted a 1945 U.S. Forces in Austria communiqué. “And the fact is, that Krauss was judged by the overwhelming majority as a Nazi at this time.” It was the view of the U.S. Forces in Austria that both Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss had been particularly compromised by the Nazis.2
Strauss had been the first president of the Reichmusikkammer and had composed music for the 1936 Olympics and a hymn to honor Germany’s ally, Japan. He had even written a poem in honor of Hans Frank, a legal adviser to Hitler and the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, known as the “Butcher of Poland.” The poem, which hails Frank as “the savior of Poland,” was written in gratitude for Frank intervening when the composer’s estate at Garmisch was in danger of being requisitioned by Nazi engineers during the war.
Admittedly, Strauss curried favor with the Nazis, but he did so in a desperate bid to protect his family. The composer spent the war years deeply worried over the fate of his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice and his “Mischling” grandchildren. After Kristallnacht, Nazi storm troopers targeted Alice and Franz Strauss’s home in Garmisch. In 1942 Strauss moved with his family to Vienna, where they sought the protection of Baldur von Schirach, the Vienna Gauleiter and Hitler Youth leader who had promised the composer that he would do what he could to help them. But Strauss’s influence in the Third Reich seemed limited to those who still perceived him as a great composer. As the war dragged on, Strauss became tiresome to high-ranking Nazis, who remained unimpressed with his connection with Jewish writers and musicians. At one point he tried to secure the release of Alice Strauss’s grandmother, Paula Neumann, who had been deported to the Theresienstadt death camp. Arriving at the gates of the camp in his chauffeur-driven Horch, Strauss informed the guards, “I am Dr. Strauss, the composer.” Clearly nonplussed, the soldiers at the gates ordered him to leave at once. Neumann was eventually killed along with twenty-five of Alice Strauss’s other relatives scattered in death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In April 1945 when U.S. soldiers arrived at Garmisch, where the composer had returned to live in the final months of the war, Strauss introduced himself in broken English, fearing that they would immediately put him in jail or take over the estate. Instead, the Americans were star-struck and asked for his autograph. Later, American officers were even invited to dinner at the Strauss home. By November 1945, as the denazification investigators probed his connection to the Nazis, the eighty-one-year-old composer was demoralized and desperate, and his health was in decline. He fled his beloved Bavarian country estate and moved to a spa town in Switzerland, where the press continued to hound him and portray him as a Nazi sympathizer. Eventually, in June 1948, a denazification court in Munich cleared Strauss of all charges. The court concluded that he had not benefited from his relationship with the Nazis and had simply dedicated himself to music during the Third Reich.
Krauss presented another problem for the Allies. “His is one of the most difficult cases we have in Austria,” wrote Otto de Pasetti, the Austro-American theater and music officer assigned to his case. “Krauss, according to our findings, is the most compromised conductor.”3
Born Otto Freiherr von Pasetti-Friedenberg in southern Austria, de Pasetti had once worked as an operatic tenor in Graz and Vienna in the 1930s, although it’s unclear whether he ever performed under Krauss. He emigrated to the United States in 1937, but found himself back in Vienna just before the end of the war as an intelligence officer for the U.S. government. Setting up his base in the devastated and divided city where he had once sung in Bertolt Brecht operas opposite his lover Lotte Lenya, he now began his probe for the theater and music section of the U.S. Forces in Austria. Of course, his knowledge of German and music made him the ideal investigator.
In November 1945 de Pasetti embarked on “the Viennese conductor problem,” with a focus on Clemens Krauss, who was well known to de Pasetti as the world-renowned conductor and a favorite collaborator of Strauss. In the introductory notes on Krauss that he presented to his superiors in the U.S. Forces, he noted that Krauss was a prodigy—a musical genius who held a professorship at the State Academy for Music and Dramatic Art by the time he was twenty-nine and who had traveled to Italy to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in the presence of the Pope. In Salzburg, he had long directed master classes for conductors at the Mozarteum Academy. In Munich, he was entrusted with building Hitler’s dream of the greatest musical empire the world had ever seen.
De Pasetti went to Munich to do his preliminary research on Krauss, arriving in the devastated city five days before Christmas in 1945 and three months after the end of the war to interview Krauss’s staff at the Bavarian State Opera. The U.S. Army’s Office of Military Government for Bavaria sent a notice to the administrators of the Bavarian State Theater instructing them not to allow Krauss “or any representative of that individual” to have access to the conductor’s private correspondence. “The files are to be locked up and no one allowed to examine them without the express written permission of Military Government.”
The profile of Krauss that emerged from de Pasetti’s interviews with administrative staff and stage crew was of a highly driven professional who had “the most intimate relations with the Nazi big shots.”
“He used his connections first for himself to get the best living conditions and a very high salary, and second for the State Opera in Munich, which he built up to a very high level,” wrote de Pasetti, quoting Bertil Wetzelsberger, director of the Munich State Opera. “He states that the bad influence in Nazism on Krauss was his present wife, Viorica Ursuleac.… He blames her for urging Krauss to leave Vienna for Berlin.” Another source called Krauss “a Machiavelli type” and “a master of diplomacy” who often told his musicians that if he didn’t get what he needed for the opera, “I shall go to the Führer and I shall get it.” When he gave out awards for loyal service to his musicians and staff at the Bavarian State Opera, Krauss also handed out copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with his own personal dedication. “Source knows that it was a rule that this book had to be distributed with the medals, but the personal dedication was absolutely his own free will,” noted de Pasetti.
In Vienna, much of the anger against Krauss stemmed from the perception that he had abandoned the Vienna State Opera and taken away its best musicians and singers when he made the move to Berlin in 1934. “There is no doubt that his leaving the Vienna State Opera was a very hard blow to Austrian theater and music,” said de Pasetti. “Whatever his reasons were for his step, the way he did it cannot be considered as fair.… The Nazi press created the impression in Germany and in foreign countries that Krauss made this step because of his sympathy with Nazism.”
But Erik Maschat, Krauss’s secretary in Vienna and Munich, told de Pasetti that Krauss had no choice but to leave Vienna because he was treated so badly by the state-opera hierarchy. The Heimwehr, or Austrian fascists, were also against him because they perceived him as pro-Nazi and helped to sabotage the renewal of his contract at the opera, Maschat said. Krauss’s bosses at the opera privately denounced him—a fellow Austrian—for bowing to German influence after the Nazis came to power, for having conducted the premiere of Arabella in Dresden and maintaining guest contracts with German singers from Berlin. In Vienna, Krauss had surrounded himself with a select group of composers and performers, sparking professional jealousy among his rivals and opera divas. In the Machiavellian world of the Vienna State Opera of the 1930s, his enemies were not above labeling Krauss a Nazi when they didn’t get their way.
