Radio music and ‘neutrality’

This is an account that begins with the Austrian radio service, Österreichische Radio-Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft, typically abbreviated with the acronym RAVAG.Footnote ²⁵ Under the Christian Social Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, RAVAG had been granted its franchise in February 1924, with a monopoly over broadcasting within Austrian borders for the next 28 years.Footnote ²⁶ As elsewhere in early European public radio, the creation of the service was closely managed by the state.Footnote ²⁷ Its major shareholders were two federal government departments (business and the post and telegraph service), two banks (the Steirerbank and the Österreichische Credit-Institut, the latter largely government-funded) and the Gemeinde Wien (the municipality of Vienna, from which broadcasts would originate). The Austrian radio industry, charged with the potentially lucrative production of equipment for domestic reception, took a minor stake in the companyFootnote ²⁸ – yet there were strict limits placed on the lining of private pockets: any profits in excess of 8% would have to be handed straight over to the state by law.Footnote ²⁹

This strong state presence led directly from ownership of the rudimentary technical infrastructure for a large-scale radio service: a national telegraphy network was already in place in Austria, and on 1 October 1924, the first broadcasts would take place from the Ministry of Defence on the Stubenring in Vienna, on account of its existing military mast equipment. But as RAVAG’s founder and first general director Oskar Czeija also confirmed, the monopoly model was intended to quell fears of fracture into private interests, not least those of investors – domestic and foreign – inspired by the new public technology of radio, and the divisive politics these might bring with them. As in Germany, moreover, early legislation would outlaw amateur experimentation in building radio equipment and in sending and receiving broadcasts outside the dominant network.Footnote ³⁰ From its beginnings, then, Austrian radio was constructed and safeguarded as a concern of the state. Implicitly, this would free the service from the acutely competitive, perhaps even scurrilous interests that had driven print media proliferation, and would instead focus its brief, as Czeija put it enigmatically, on the carrying out of specifically Austrian ‘cultural tasks’.Footnote ³¹

In turn, however, bearing in mind the huge propaganda potential of the new medium, this monopoly model raised fears of exploitation by the government of the day. Accordingly, assurances of political ‘neutrality’ (Neutralität) were woven into RAVAG’s structure, policy and rhetoric from even before broadcasting began. Political position-taking in radio programming was forbidden, for example, and news broadcasts were to be prepared by an external body.Footnote ³² The composition of the company’s management boards was also mandated by its charter to be politically ‘proportionate’, that is, to give equal representation to the three foremost Austrian political camps: Catholic-conservative, socialist and German-national.Footnote ³³ Most importantly, a Beirat (‘advisory council’) was founded alongside the other boards, the twenty-four members of which included nine representatives from the various Austrian radio ‘clubs’ – organizations populated by members of the general public (usually styled Amateure in the press) and, again, holding loose affiliation with the main political confessions. RAVAG’s Beirat was thus, as one press commentator put it, conceived as a kind of ‘Radio Parliament’, steering the service’s most prominent public-facing issues – primarily, domestic subscription fees and programming – according to perceived need and taste as defined through its debates.Footnote ³⁴

Against this background, it is not hard to see why Viktor Ergert, in his 1970s official history of the Austrian radio service, places ‘neutrality’ as its core guiding concept during the 1920s, and as one of its principal claims to universal value and adoration amongst the Austrian listeners of its founding decade.Footnote ³⁵ Yet it is no less vital to realize that, from the very beginnings of RAVAG, this ‘neutral’ stance was not simply accepted uncritically by all commentators, but rather brought into question on an almost daily basis. Consequently, what ‘neutrality’ really meant – and what, indeed, it might conceal – formed a central part of the discourse of early Austrian radio, informing much of the debate within its administrative and advisory bodies and dogging RAVAG’s every move in its endless press coverage. ‘Politics may indeed be excluded,’ as one critic trenchantly put it in a front-page column just after the service began, ‘yet as a result it sweats out of the broadcaster’s every pore.’Footnote ³⁶

Early claims of radio manipulation sometimes stemmed from the political centre and right wing. When, in December 1924, the largely social-democratic Gemeinde Wien moved to levy a public entertainment tax (Lustbarkeitssteuer) on RAVAG to cover radio broadcasts received in public venues, it was accused of issuing an ultimatum to the service: that it either align its programming with Viennese socialist themes, or be forced to pay for its freedom.Footnote ³⁷ The advisory Beirat, meanwhile, having apparently been created as a result of social-democratic pressure, was dismissed as little more than a socialist lobby group.Footnote ³⁸ In November 1925, the right-wing satirical magazine Kikeriki! joked that a broadcast of Wagner’s Lohengrin planned for Republic Day had been rejected by the ‘social-democratic Beirat’ as too monarchic, and would be replaced by its ‘red’ version – in which the knightly champion of ‘Elsa von Ravag’ was immediately sent packing to his Grail mountain, as in the following excerpted verse:

These lines are given to Michael Hainisch, the first president of the Austrian Republic; though declaredly ‘independent’, he is here mocked for his inclination to the left and the alleged whims of the Beirat in curating an appropriately Republican cultural heritage.Footnote ³⁹

Increasingly, however, accusations of politics emanated from leftist critics, who remained deeply suspicious of the radio service on account of the limited involvement of socialists in its founding, and in particular the close relationships between RAVAG, its big bank backers and Austria’s succession of Christian Social governments throughout the 1920s.Footnote ⁴⁰ For these commentators, Austrian radio was little more than a bourgeois concern tightly bound to the capitalist interests of its originating bodies and to narrow, reactionary class interests, and ultimately uncommitted to using radio’s potential for improving the prospects of the country’s poorest working audiences. This was all the more troubling as most radio subscribers lived in and around largely ‘red’ Vienna, particularly in the early days when only Viennese broadcasting masts existed and signal was weak in other regions; the service, in other words, was not seen to represent fairly the subscribers who helped to fund its ongoing operations.Footnote ⁴¹ Additionally, there were early, rather sinister reports that new radio legislation would severely curtail civil liberties, allowing police to enter private homes in order to confiscate illicit receiving equipment and arrest those who failed to respond to summons. These were powers not yet extended to, for example, the rail administration: treatment of Schwarzhörer (‘subscription dodgers’) would be far worse than that of Schwarzfahrer (‘fare dodgers’) on trains.Footnote ⁴²

It is perhaps not surprising to find that RAVAG’s extensive music programme became strongly marked as a target for such political critique of ‘neutrality’. Music, after all, formed a large proportion of early Austrian radio’s airtime, filling approximately six of its ten daily broadcast hours.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, official schedules for 1924–5 printed in Radio Wien, RAVAG’s house magazine, demonstrate that each broadcast day was structured around three two-hour music slots loosely modelled on bourgeois concert life and typically spanning entertainment and art-music genres: a matinee (11am–1pm), an afternoon concert (Teekonzert, 4–6pm) and an evening concert (8–9pm). These structural slots were interspersed with brief news, weather and stock exchange reports, as well as occasional lectures, poetry and play readings, and (non-political) special interest programmes.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some left-leaning commentators homed in on the lightness of this music programming, its pandering to the safest of Christian Social bourgeois tastes as well as the most ephemeral of dance-floor trends, and thus its utter lack of suitability for the serious socialist goal of Volksbildung (‘mass education’, or ‘popular education’) through radio.Footnote ⁴⁵ Others complained conversely of RAVAG’s musical sobriety, its focus on alienating art-music genres at peak listening times of day, and therefore its ignorance of the rhythms of working life in favour of those of bourgeois intellectual leisure. ‘Again and again, classical music is played,’ one critic complained in late 1924: ‘Dance music only comes on when the worker, dog-tired, finally wants to turn in for the night.’Footnote ⁴⁶

There is no doubt that comparable criticisms emerged from the right wing as well: the German-national Linzer Tages-Post complained in 1924, for example, of the shamefully ‘motley’ (bunt) music programme broadcast from Vienna, and suggested that listeners in Linz switch over to their nearby German stations instead for true artistic sustenance.Footnote ⁴⁷ But specific to the left are the citations of RAVAG’s music in larger concerns over direct censorship: the claim that socialist voices were being deliberately and strategically silenced on the airwaves. When, for example, the Arbeiter-Zeitung critic noticed the absence in the official RAVAG schedule of the full title of the well-established Arbeiter Symphonie-Konzerte (‘Workers’ Symphony Concerts’) series, he tapped into long-held anxieties over other, similar redactions within radio programming, exacerbated by rumours of direct Christian Social intervention.Footnote ⁴⁸ A quotation from the founder of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, Viktor Adler, had allegedly been removed from a lecture before it was broadcast, as had mention of trade unions; likewise, passages depicting the poor in the broadcasts of a Gerhart Hauptmann play had disappeared, alongside those treating revolutionary and anti-clerical themes in Goethe’s Egmont, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. Footnote ⁴⁹

Some critics, moreover, complained of the deliberate alignment of RAVAG’s musical calendar with a Catholic religious one, permitting, for example, no music on Good Friday; and reports from Beirat debates demonstrate its socialist members’ suspicion that imperial marches heard on the radio actually supported a covert right-wing agenda – regardless of RAVAG’s claim that they were part of its commitment to ‘historic’ repertoire.Footnote ⁵⁰ For the same reasons, many opposed the demand from the right and centre that the Austrian national anthem – based on Haydn’s Kaiserhymne – be aired every day.Footnote ⁵¹ On what was supposed to be a ‘neutral’ radio service, all such items seemed concessions to the governing Christian Socials, their friends in business, and the identities, practices and calendars of their preferred national audience. They also allowed establishment advocates to rally behind certain ‘common sense’ majority positions designed to make the opposition look ridiculous. ‘The social democratic Abendblatt claims a mortal grievance’, one such critic wrote sardonically in late December 1924, ‘because Viennese radio offered a Christmas-themed musical programme at Christmas.’Footnote ⁵²

Music programming, then, certainly formed a particularly conspicuous site of conflict over RAVAG’s neutrality, and for many socialists it audibly confirmed that their influence had languished on the outside from the very beginning, and had since been further beaten back, while bourgeois positions and representations only strengthened towards the 1930s. At first glance it might seem reasonable to place these developments under the heading of what Führer calls ‘defensive modernisation’, the deployment of new radio technology to shore up the Christian Social status quo and its accompanying atmosphere of conservative nationalism, while simultaneously fending off the perceived threat of socialism.Footnote ⁵³ Such emphasis on conservative defensiveness seems to assume, however, that the transition into Dollfuss’s Austrofascist regime received no direct prompt from its Christian Social predecessor, and instead seeks to explain radio’s sharp turn towards nationalist programming in 1933 (an ‘essence-changing structural transformation’, in Ergert’s summary) as a response to some other impetus. Most likely, as Ergert continues, this would be the new model of German Nazi radio, and in particular the airtime it gave to Austrian Nazis so that they might denounce the Austrian regime and call for its immediate subordination to German demands.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this view, German machinations provoked Austrian ones; fascism begat more fascism.

Yet it can equally be argued that Christian Socialism actively prepared the ground on which Austrofascism would stand, and delivered the impression of a stable national public consensus on which it would feed. It did so through RAVAG’s long-standing ‘neutrality’ principle and its associated radio censorship, which had demonstrably advanced Austria’s political polarization over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, heaping power into the hands of the already powerful and silencing those who would stand up to oppose them. In the introduction to this article, we saw the appointment of Richard Steidle – Christian Social politician and regional leader of the paramilitary Heimwehr – as RAVAG’s vice-president in May 1933.Footnote ⁵⁵ But long before that, as early as 1926, the leader of the Styrian Heimwehr had been permitted to serve as director of RAVAG’s Graz operations as it began to expand beyond Vienna and into the Austrian Länder. Footnote ⁵⁶ The corporative encroachment on radio by the Heimwehr, meanwhile, had begun in 1929 at the latest, when, to the outrage of onlookers, 400,000 of the group’s members had been enlisted in their representative radio club, forcing the case for greater representation on the service’s steering Beirat. Bearing down on the advisory council, the Heimwehr contingent proclaimed its mission to ‘build a dam against Austromarxist propaganda activity’ on the airwaves, for which there was little convincing evidence bar a short radio slot that had been granted to the workers’ interest lobby (Arbeiterkammer) the previous year.Footnote ⁵⁷ This barrage against ‘Austromarxism’, echoed at the time of Steidle’s appointment, sounds very much like fascist rhetoric, and indeed, the Heimwehr is usually identified as one of Austria’s indigenous fascist groups, in some regions supported by Mussolini and directly modelled on his blackshirts.Footnote ⁵⁸ Fascism, then, had clearly made its mark on Austrian radio long before the ‘structural transformation’ that Ergert sees in 1933; it had done so in and through the expansion of the public service, driven by a succession of Christian Social regimes.

From this standpoint of political polarization, perhaps most telling of all are the events surrounding the Viennese socialist revolt of July 1927. As protesters closed in on the Palace of Justice, the site where some 90 of them would be shot dead by police, government-directed forces moved quickly to occupy the Viennese radio premises in order to protect it as a key strategic asset that should not under any circumstances fall into ‘enemy’ hands. The press reacted with horror: the Christian Social Reichspost because RAVAG had subsequently broadcast a ‘tendentious’ and ‘political’ speech given by the social-democratic city councillor Hugo Breitner; the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung because Breitner’s speech had been redacted to remove criticism of the authorities, and yet the words of Johann Schober, former Austrian chancellor and chief of police, were heard in full.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is thus not surprising to find, after this point, the Arbeiter-Zeitung addressing RAVAG only in the starkest oppositional and revolutionary terms. From being the holder of a truly liberating technology for the masses, the seat of a potential national Volksbildung, it had become simply a ‘class enemy’ – a ‘terror’ that must be brought to an end by ‘a great organization of proletarian listeners’ eager to seize its valuable technological means for the purposes of the ‘class struggle’.Footnote ⁶⁰ By the late 1920s, the battle lines were already sharply drawn, not least by means of radio, radio music and their discourses. What the Christian Social Dollfuss did in 1933 was mobilize the machinery of state to build his Austrofascist edifice on one side of them.

Sanierung (‘rehabilitation’)

Austrian socialists may have increasingly believed, then, that what they heard on the airwaves in the 1920s was entirely under the control of their class enemy. Even so, programming was not the sole radio battleground in which this sense of political polarization emerged. More significant on a national-structural basis, and just as closely scrutinized, were the economic relationships that had quickly sprung up between the radio service and the culture industry, not least that sector of it that centred on Austria’s considerable wealth of bourgeois musical and theatrical institutions. Since its inception, RAVAG had enjoyed large revenues from its domestic subscriptions; exceeding all estimates, these had increased more than tenfold in four years (from some 30,000 to 315,000 subscribers), prompting RAVAG director Czeija to boast with some conviction in 1928 of radio’s now-central importance to the Austrian economy, against the diminishing trend of almost all other industries.Footnote ⁶¹

Yet, on account of exactly the same success, radio rapidly became part of the discourse of public decadence, and was repeatedly attacked across the political spectrum as the ruin of most other areas of the cultural sector. Cafés, cinemas, authors and foreign-language teachers all complained of the damaging effects of radio’s burgeoning popularity on their incomes: cafés and cinemas had lost trade at peak times to radio, authors had no mechanism to receive royalties for the broadcast of their works, and language teachers had become second best to popular radio instruction courses. Similarly aggrieved were celebrated opera houses and theatres (and their attendant ensembles), many of which had already been thrown into dire financial circumstances in the long aftermath of the First World War.Footnote ⁶² If potential consumers now increasingly stayed at home to listen to the radio, the hardships faced by these other cultural providers were judged, in part, to be RAVAG’s fault, and for this – a succession of Christian Social governments decided – it would have to make a show of public reparation.

In these circumstances RAVAG took a leading role across the 1920s in the so-called Sanierung of numerous musical and theatrical institutions. This term, often associated with the Christian Social chancellor Ignaz Seipel (hence the expression ‘Seipel-Sanierungen’), had become common currency in early post-war attempts to stabilize the volatile Austrian economy; it most readily translates as the ‘rehabilitation’ or ‘refloating’ of an enterprise in financial terms, but clearly brings with it implications of ‘sanitization’ – a return to cleanliness from decadence, or health from disease.Footnote ⁶³ Immediately from its inception in 1924, RAVAG had visibly participated in Sanierung operations by channelling funds into musical institutions in return for various forms of collaboration: the building of physical broadcast links and permission to air their performances, for example, as well as the pooling of resources in terms of orchestral musicians, singers and actors. As the press records, this sometimes led to long and vituperative debate over what these connections were worth, and bitter clashes with performers’ unions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet, as a general trend, it meant that RAVAG became quickly and tightly intertwined with the Austrian musical-cultural economy over the course of the 1920s – to the extent that it not only underwrote it financially and provided a lifeline for its underemployed personnel, but also took the lead in important public-facing functions such as advertising campaigns.Footnote ⁶⁵ Czeija was correct: radio had become a central node of the Austrian cultural infrastructure, without which the latter could hardly function effectively.

Moreover, key parts of this Sanierung network were increasingly guaranteed and protected from above, since government figures often provided close continuity between radio, culture industry, banking sector and state ministries. One conspicuous example here is the Styrian Christian Social politician Jakob Ahrer, who sat on the executive boards of both RAVAG and one of its principal shareholders, the Steirerbank, and in late 1924 became the state finance minister.Footnote ⁶⁶ In mid-1926, moreover, the prominent Christian Social Anton Rintelen, also governor of Styria, stepped straight from the founding presidency of RAVAG to the role of state education minister, in which he was immediately involved in guiding the leadership succession of the ailing Bundestheater (‘Federal Theatre’), a largely autonomous organization centred on the Viennese Staatsoper and Staatstheater, and theoretically incorporating some provincial theatres as well.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Bundestheater had run at a massive loss since the beginning of the decade; across his roles, Rintelen could ensure its ongoing financial support, overseeing the flow of funds from RAVAG in return for the transmission of opera broadcasts.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet as the socialist press rapidly realized, this was not necessarily as beneficent as it first appeared: the ongoing link put radio subscription costs at the perpetual risk of increase, ultimately threatening the domestic consumer with the burden of large-scale institutional rehabilitation, and suggesting that this cultural Sanierung was little more than a Christian Social political strategy. In the hands of Rintelen, it could easily be seen as a means of refloating and maintaining favoured bourgeois institutions at the expense of workers who could not afford their high ticket prices anyway and benefited little from them, a kind of stealth tax on those of already limited means.

Above all, what such Sanierung efforts make clear is that when Dollfuss moved to dissolve parliament in March 1933, the Austrian radio service offered several key benefits to his Christian Social leadership, far beyond those of broadcast propaganda through programming alone. In the wake of the financial rehabilitation campaigns begun in the 1920s, numerous Austrian music-theatrical institutions had become dependent on the prosperity and popular reach of RAVAG. A strong grip on radio, therefore, promised further leverage over public-facing institutions that could now be pressed upon to do foundational cultural work in the transition from Christian Socialism to Austrofascism, speaking to some 500,000 registered households, an uncountable mass of unregistered ones and any number of public spaces. This was an unequalled audience share in a country of almost seven million inhabitants.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus RAVAG was drawn ever more tightly under the control of the Ministry of Education in late 1932, and once again took the lead in Sanierung efforts for the Bundestheater. Commentaries suggest, indeed, that the management and administration of radio, federal theatres (including programming decisions) and music conservatories were now to be merged under the general aegis of the Ministry of Education, its minister Rintelen and its Catholic clergy-inclined, anti-socialist ideologues.Footnote ⁷⁰ In March 1933, this reach would be extended still further: RAVAG agreed to pay to the ministry the large sum of 410,000 Schillings, to be put towards the nebulous ends of the ‘subsidy of theatres throughout the federal lands and other support for the arts’; and to use its network to run a newly scheduled Bundestheaterwoche (‘Federal Theatre Weekly’) radio programme, as an explicit form of ‘propaganda service’.Footnote ⁷¹

At the very moment of Dollfuss’s dismantling of parliament, then, RAVAG had been confirmed by these political manoeuvres in its long-held identity as lynchpin, a key component holding together others in the cultural sector and now merging them into attempts at the control of national education. It is no additional surprise to find that the service’s ‘parliamentary’ Beirat council – in effect, radio’s last bastion against political monopolization – was now wound down, finally dropping out of official reports in early 1934.Footnote ⁷² Much like the national parliament, RAVAG’s steering mechanisms, once alive to the voices of Amateure and their distinct radio clubs, were brought to a halt. On the airwaves, as elsewhere in Austria, the conceit of due democratic process was finally abandoned; Austrian national culture, like its political culture, was to be formed from the top down.

The rebirth of the Symphoniker and Entpolitisierung (‘depoliticization’)

Much like other Austrian musical and theatrical organizations, the Wiener Sinfonie-Orchester had become dependent on RAVAG over the course of the First Republic.Footnote ⁷³ Refounded in 1922 as a professional orchestra-for-hire, the ensemble had soon turned to radio performance to provide one of its streams of income, alongside concerts organized by Viennese agencies and music associations.Footnote ⁷⁴ Under this arrangement it had taken part in exactly the kinds of religiously inflected public broadcasts to which the socialist press had long objected. We find the orchestra, for example, presiding over radio performances of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung on Easter Saturday in 1925 and Mozart’s Requiem on All Saints’ Day in 1927.Footnote ⁷⁵

This relationship with radio strengthened over the course of the decade, largely displacing other orchestras sometimes heard on the air; it became particularly tight in late 1931, when, facing acute financial hardship and lacking sufficient subsidy from federal and regional government, the Sinfonie-Orchester entered into a contract to provide a large proportion of the radio service’s daily concerts.Footnote ⁷⁶ RAVAG’s recently appointed music director Kabasta was one of the initiators of this arrangement: according to his categorization, the orchestra would now give ‘symphony concerts’ using its full deployment of at least 70 players, smaller ‘entertainment concerts’ featuring ‘easy-to-grasp, popular programmes’, and, as a synthesis of these opposites, ‘orchestral concerts’ consisting of ‘lighter genres by our great masters’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In so doing, the orchestra paved the way to its own financial Sanierung by becoming something like the service’s ‘house’ ensemble, working across the various musical genres that still filled the majority of airtime. As some press reports noted, this was a model typical of German broadcasters.Footnote ⁷⁸ It also brought the Sinfonie-Orchester closer to perceived public mores driven by the new practice of radio listening, while simultaneously meeting widely held aspirations to improve public taste and awareness of Austria’s musical heritage.

In April 1933, however, on the heels of further financial crisis deepened by the collapse of one of its key concert promoters, the Sinfonie-Orchester had no option but to negotiate an even more extensive agreement with radio.Footnote ⁷⁹ This also meant that it could be forced to enter explicitly into the Austrian political sphere. Since its inception, the ensemble had claimed artistic distance from any direct political affiliation. It had nonetheless attained a political colouring from the manner of its operations: as Clemens Krauss had noted in 1923, opposite the stately, more leisurely, far older Wiener Philharmoniker, the Sinfonie-Orchester was the professional Viennese orchestra of hard graft, playing a concert every day of the week, often on very few rehearsals.Footnote ⁸⁰ It had also long been associated with the social democratic initiative of the Workers’ Symphony Concerts and other popular series, and its principal union, the Vereinigung der Wiener Musiker, held strong socialist affiliations throughout the 1920s.Footnote ⁸¹ In the immediate political context of early 1933 – particularly Dollfuss’s dissolution of parliament due to alleged socialist disruption – this identity made it a clear political target. The ‘neutral’ RAVAG refused to be involved with such a dangerous ‘red’ enterprise and broke off discussions over the Sinfonie-Orchester’s new radio contract, bringing the ensemble’s existence into dire jeopardy.Footnote ⁸²

To save the situation, the orchestra’s leadership at this point offered the unoccupied presidential position above them to the prominent Christian Social politician Alexander Hryntschak.Footnote ⁸³ Numerous factors make this a significant appointment. Hryntschak’s background was not in the cultural sector but in finance. Since his election to parliament in 1929, he had regularly appeared in the press as commentator on and policymaker for issues relating to housing, transport and industry and, in early 1933, had been widely tipped as Austria’s next finance minister.Footnote ⁸⁴ This specifically political – as opposed to musical – capital sets him apart from the Sinfonie-Orchester’s former head, Leopold Hlawatsch, a well-known dignitary in Viennese musical life; it distinguishes him, too, from Hugo Burghauser, the bassoonist of the Wiener Philharmoniker who would be elected to the chair of his ensemble in June 1933.Footnote ⁸⁵ Hryntschak was also, as the Sinfonie-Orchester surely knew and perhaps calculated, amongst the most strident of the early Christian Social ideologues of Austrofascism. Indeed, around the time of his appointment to the Sinfonie-Orchester, the press would accuse him of attempting to implement a national ‘Hitler-system’ of Gleichschaltung (‘equalization’) after his maverick proclamation that ‘free-thinkers, spiritual nihilists and Austromarxists’ would not be welcome in the country’s new all-encompassing Vaterländische Front (‘Patriotic Front’) movement, Dollfuss’s intended replacement for party-political affiliations.Footnote ⁸⁶ Hryntschak took to the print media, moreover, to present himself as a public theorist of the Stände, the professional ‘estates’ of the new Austria, within which employer–employee interests were supposed to be fully aligned and party politics therefore made redundant.Footnote ⁸⁷

In fact, we might even see the Sinfonie-Orchester as a testing ground for the cultural implementation of these theories. Clearly drawing on them, Hryntschak immediately demanded a programme of what he called Entpolitisierung within the ranks of the Sinfonie-Orchester.Footnote ⁸⁸ This term, in spite of its literal translation (‘depoliticization’) was a buzzword of Dollfuss’s political agenda after the closure of parliament – and what it really meant, as commentators well knew, was the strategic marginalizing of opposition, particularly socialist opposition, to make intervention more difficult; it therefore institutionalized the cultural work that the radio service had been carrying out for almost a decade.Footnote ⁸⁹ In the specific case of the orchestra, Entpolitisierung entailed its expansion through the hiring of another 30 or so players. But the auditionees for these new places were allegedly vetted for their readiness to join the so-called ‘independent’ or ‘yellow’ union – that is, the union unaffiliated with socialism and closely bound to the employer – as well as Dollfuss’s Patriotic Front; ‘the new patriotism’, as the Arbeiter-Zeitung put it, thus entailed ‘the breaking up of union solidarity’.Footnote ⁹⁰ All existing permanent contracts were, moreover, substituted by one-year arrangements, giving RAVAG – which now provided some two-thirds of the orchestra’s business – a high level of flexibility over the future size and shape of the ensemble. Finally, in order to facilitate these changes from a legal perspective, Hryntschak refounded the orchestra under the name by which it has been known ever since: the Wiener Symphoniker.

Ernst Kobau, closely following Ergert’s official radio history, suggests that the obvious political intervention in this affair was a reaction against a sudden drop in subscriptions caused by the simultaneous launch of radio’s patriotic programming – the commemorations of fatherland and celebrations of Heimat broadcast from early 1933 onwards.Footnote ⁹¹ On this view, RAVAG deliberately tightened its grip on a Viennese orchestra of note and used the allure of professionally played music to soothe public resistance to Austrofascist propaganda and stabilize radio’s revenues. (Subscription numbers did indeed recover towards 1935, though it is hard to assess the orchestra’s specific role in this.)Footnote ⁹² Yet surely Hryntschak’s negotiations had achieved far more than an attempt at public appeasement. The new Wiener Symphoniker had undergone a process of Sanierung in two senses: it was fully financially ‘rehabilitated’ (saniert) but in return, to translate the term more literally, it was ‘sanitized’ in the name of ‘depoliticization’, those members deemed undesirable forced out or made unwelcome by an influx of carefully vetted newcomers.

It would be presumptuous, however, to conclude that Hryntschak’s ‘depoliticizing’ treatment of the Wiener Sinfonie-Orchester turned solely on political identities. According to Michael Mann’s statistic, some three-quarters of the Viennese Jewish population at this time voted socialist; thus it seems plausible that what appear to be political motivations for Sanierung were bound up with racial and religious ones.Footnote ⁹³ Indeed, according to some contemporary newspaper reports, Jewish members of the orchestra were no longer welcome from 1933 onwards, reigniting the accusations of a deeply ingrained antisemitism that had often surfaced against RAVAG programming in the preceding years. Certainly, the Jewish leader of the orchestra, the prominent violinist Hugo Gottesmann, was the only existing member to lose his post outright (though his subsequent lawsuit against the orchestra complained only that he was dismissed as ‘red’, not on the basis of antisemitism).Footnote ⁹⁴ And certainly, there is no shortage of evidence that the Jewish members of the Symphoniker’s chief Viennese competitor, the Wiener Philharmoniker, were subject to frequent attacks and the threat of dismissal at about the same time.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is perhaps best, then, to point to a broader overall conclusion: the Symphoniker’s new one-year contracts projected a close shaping process – on political or racial grounds, or both – into the immediate future. This would be overseen by a new management board that comprised not only a RAVAG representative but also various members of Austria’s political, spiritual and commercial elite. As one correspondent saw it (with a direct echo of Sanierung rhetoric), these changes represented the letting in of a ‘draught of fresh air’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Structurally, the Symphoniker’s expansion also made possible its division into two separate, permanent ensembles, a 65-player großes Orchester and a 32-player Funkkapelle (‘radio band’).Footnote ⁹⁷ The latter was to be dedicated entirely to what Kabasta termed ‘entertainment music of almost all kinds’ and thus, in continuation of processes begun several years before, entailed an end to radio’s ‘engagement of bands and orchestras thrown together largely on an ad hoc basis’.Footnote ⁹⁸ As this rhetoric suggests, RAVAG’s principal argument for this change was one of musical standards. Kabasta writes elsewhere of the ‘considerable raising of artistic level’ offered by a permanent orchestra.Footnote ⁹⁹ But it meant too, of course, that unvetted musicians, many of whom had existing affiliations to the strongly socialist-leaning unions of the First Republic, would no longer be employed by the service. Furthermore, the fixed two-part division of the orchestra meant that some of those who were successful in joining the ranks of the new Symphoniker could be threatened with demotion if they refused to align with what its leadership demanded of it. The Funkkapelle players had far longer hours than the großes Orchester, and anecdotal evidence suggests the fear amongst players of the former’s ‘chain gang’ work – endless performance, direct to broadcast, of music of questionable quality played with little rehearsal.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The new orchestra of Austrofascism, then, still relied on age-old aesthetic hierarchies of music and musical work: in addition to new social and political pressures, these also exerted force on the Symphoniker’s membership and kept it in line with what now rolled forward as its contribution to Austrofascist culture.

Austrian Composers of the Present, pan-Germanism and Ernst Krenek

The detailed weekly schedules printed by RAVAG’s house publication, Radio Wien, indicate the refounded Symphoniker’s contribution to Austrofascism. Specifically, they reveal the new national emphasis in the repertoire it now played. This development was largely driven by the Kulturverband vaterländischer Rundfunkhörer (‘Cultural Association of Patriotic Radio Listeners’), a pressure group whose chief spokesperson, the composer Joseph Rinaldini, was appointed to the RAVAG advisory council in January 1933. In Rinaldini’s words, the Kulturverband saw an opportunity in radio programming for the ‘nurturing of patriotic art and patriotic spirit’: this could be achieved not only by ‘lectures and reports focused on Heimat’ and through certain ceremonials such as the broadcast of Haydn’s Kaiserhymne at the end of each evening, but also by means of special emphasis on the lives and music of Austrian composers of the present.Footnote ¹⁰¹ RAVAG immediately accepted this recommendation and created from it a weekly programme (Stunde österreichischer Komponisten der Gegenwart) that began on 7 April 1933, and often involved members of the Symphoniker playing the works showcased. The first episode focused on Egon Kornauth, and over the next five years, some 100 or so other Austrian composers were featured; each was profiled by an essay in Radio Wien, typically written by a leading Austrian music critic or music scholar. The strong impression is therefore of an attempt to generate a musical network, again with radio as its central node, comprising national composers, performers, critics, readers and listeners.Footnote ¹⁰²

Rinaldini’s new composers series can be seen as a continuation of numerous other contemporary music series and one-off contemporary concerts that had been delivered by the Symphoniker and broadcast by RAVAG over the past few years, some of which had centred on Austrian composers of the day.Footnote ¹⁰³ Likewise, it served as an ‘art music’ counterpart to the countless Vienna-themed light music concerts that the Symphoniker Funkkapelle had now taken over from the ensembles that had established them over the past decade, broadcasts with wistful titles like Mein Lebenslauf ist Lieb und Lust (‘Love and Joy are the Story of my Life’).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As Rinaldini’s written introduction to it confirmed, however, the new series was also intended to give the limelight to significant Austrian individuals, one only per programme. ‘Each time,’ he writes, ‘a duration of 40 minutes or so will be dedicated to a sole composer, delivering a fully rounded impression of unique artistic individualities.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵

At first glance, therefore, the new series seems potentially artistically deep and rich; it also appears to some extent inclusive, since its 100 or so subjects prove to be of various ages, backgrounds, compositional styles and institutional links, their common bond being the simple fact of connection by birth or career to the Austrian Republic. Numerous composers of Jewish heritage – Gál, Pisk, Weigl and Schulhof, for example – were profiled early in the series, and Korngold’s programme in October 1937 was the occasion for the public premiere of his song cycle Unvergänglichkeit, op. 27.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Three (but only three) women composers were also featured: Müller-Hermann, Bach and Kern.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Bortkiewicz, though born in the Russian Empire in 1877, was included on account of his residence in Austria since the early 1920s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that an exclusionary cultural politics is in force in Rinaldini’s new series, although it is difficult to discern whether it excludes according to precise criteria, and if so, what these might be and how they might combine – religious and racial background, perhaps, or overt socialist links, or modernist compositional aesthetics, or age, or ‘absentee’ status (the simple fact of having left Austria some years before and being domiciled elsewhere). Schoenberg and Eisler, for example, were never profiled; nor were Krenek, Wellesz, Reznicek and Schreker. Berg and Webern were also excluded, but, perhaps in deference to their continued presence and influence in Austria, were instead given a programme under the sui generis rubric Moderne österreichischer Musik (‘Modern Austrian Music’) in the usual Wednesday evening slot, a broadcast that saw them condemned as ‘Jewish’ by neighbouring Nazi-controlled Bavarian radio.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Most surprisingly, bearing in mind his place as doyen of Austrian symphonic music after Bruckner, Franz Schmidt was never profiled by the series. He was instead given a separate radio broadcast in 1934 on the occasion of his 60th birthday – but then again, so was Schoenberg, though he was only represented by his early works up to the Six Piano Pieces, op. 19 (1913).Footnote ¹¹⁰

How do we interpret these choices? Krenek, one of those excluded, had little trouble formulating a summary. Responding in a journal article to the decennial celebration of RAVAG music in September 1934 – a succession of broadcast festival performances presided over by the Symphoniker and closely interlinked with Rinaldini’s Austrian Composers of the Present series – he wrote the following:

By this ‘different direction’, Krenek meant specifically ‘representatives of the new music […] that same music that is being forced into silence in today’s Germany, heaping massive spiritual and material damage on to its creators’.Footnote ¹¹² This seems, bearing in mind the exclusions noted above, a reasonable conclusion to draw: that RAVAG’s principal musical attitude was anti-modern, antisemitic, suspicious of international renown, and thus dancing to Nazi Germany’s protectionist tune. Yet, as Krenek also acknowledged, one of the RAVAG festival concerts of 1934 had featured the premiere of a work by Gál, namely the op. 43 Concertino for piano and string orchestra. This was hardly representative of Krenek’s idea of the maligned ‘new music’, perhaps, but still it was the music of a Jewish Austrian recently removed from his post at the Mainz Conservatory by its new German Nazi administration.Footnote ¹¹³ Counter to Krenek’s claim, this premiere could equally be interpreted as an Austrian gesture of solidarity with Gál and against German antisemitic oppression.

It is ultimately the Radio Wien essays on Austrian Composers of the Present that illuminate this complex situation and the murky cultural politics shaping it. Rinaldini’s overall introduction to the series lamented what he saw as the contemporary critical tendency to ‘rant, in a party-political fashion, for one small avenue or another’ – for which he gave the example of what he simply called ‘atonality’. Echoing surrounding Austrofascist calls for ‘depoliticization’, he instead demanded the honouring of the exceptional Führer-like individual who transcended such party lines: that is, public engagement with the ‘special characteristics of an autonomous mentality [Geistigkeit]’, not with the ‘bland expression of a Zeitgeist measured according to genre’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Rinaldini’s new radio series, with each programme dedicated to an individual composer, would of course privilege such engagement, and in so doing would highlight the ‘eternal fundaments’ of art that, whatever party factions might proclaim, had not changed, and were now to be shown as the specific preserve of the Austrian musical mind.

As the series proceeded through its profiles week by week, however, this projected exploration of the Austrian mind devolved rapidly into the endless repetition of a collection of core tropes of ‘Austrianness’, all of which had long existed in discourses of national music: Austrian melodiousness, for example, or the close bond to nature and landscape, or the healthy suspicion of modernism, or the sure sense of form derived from Viennese classicism.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Crowded out by these tropes, Jewishness in music – as one example of possible difference against the reinforced norm – was never thematized, even for Jewish composers like Gál. It was Schubert, Bruckner, Mozart and Haydn who were repeatedly cited as the primordial models for Austrian composition of the present, never Mahler; Gál’s simple ‘joy in music-making [Musizierfreudigkeit]’, indeed, ‘leads straight back to Schubert’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Likewise, although the prior reputation of the Viennese composer Ernst Kanitz was as Atonaler, the reader and listener were strongly reassured (by the musicologist Robert Konta) that he actually composed because of his great Austrian passion for melody. His harmony is ‘predominantly tonal’, however it might sound, and it is ‘certainly not based on any of the atonal systems (the 12-note row)’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

An extended example of the same strategy – we might tentatively call it ‘musical Austrofascistization’ – concerns Vinzenz Goller, the second composer to be profiled by the radio series, in April 1933. The introduction to Goller, written by the musicologist Andreas Weissenbäck, presented him as a Bruckner-like naïve, his father an organist and teacher in the Volksschule, his mother a singer in the church. Members of the Symphoniker presided over a 45-minute broadcast of his accompanied choral music, intended – predictably – to showcase what Weissenbäck identified as his ‘melodic invention’ and ‘utmost dexterity in formal construction’, and, through these qualities, his ‘inward bond to nature’. But it is the specifics of Goller’s given curriculum vitae that are still more telling. Born in St Andrä bei Brixen (part of the formerly Austrian Tyrol, granted to Italy by the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919), he had spent years in and around Regensburg, bringing his Austrian mastery to the German Catholic church and (so the introduction goes) at last overcoming the unfruitfulness of musical Cecilianism. This reputation he had brought back to Vienna and the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst, where he had founded the department devoted to church music in 1910. Thus Goller’s personal-musical qualities were matched by civic credentials (Austrian citizenship, Viennese service) and ethnic ones (Catholicism, Tyrolean ancestry). He united all this through a sense of ‘artistic mission’, as Weissenbäck put it, that both served Austria and was symbolic of Austria’s influence beyond its immediate state boundaries.Footnote ¹¹⁸

As this example suggests, it would be simplistic to view RAVAG as enshrining a consistent and unilateral exclusionary policy in its music, whether antisemitism, anti-modernism, anti-socialism or anti-absenteeism. Its policy combined all of these; but over and above them, and marshalling them flexibly, was an identity politics closely aligned with what Julie Thorpe has termed ‘Austrian pan-Germanism’ at the beginning of the period of Austrofascist rule. Pan-Germanism, for Thorpe, was a nationalist ideology operative across numerous fields including education, media and local government: it brought together civic features with ethnic ones and, at its fringes, also made use of racial ideas reminiscent of National Socialism.Footnote ¹¹⁹ From this platform, pan-Germanism extolled the hegemony of German Austrians, their right and mission to Germanize and govern their non-German counterparts in central Europe, and the immutable identity of Christian Austria as a stronghold of German thought and culture. Moreover, despite the obvious implications of the term and its historical links to the ‘pan-German’ movements of the nineteenth century, its proponents did not necessarily advocate territorial union with Germany, particularly a union in Hitler’s terms that might leave Austria as the silent partner and lesser power.Footnote ¹²⁰

If we accept this pan-Germanism as strongly operative in Dollfuss’s new corporative Austria from 1933 onwards, and likewise Thorpe’s definition of Austrofascism as ‘the process of forging a community of citizens who conformed to the official pan-German identity’, then Rinaldini’s composer series can easily be seen as part of the Austrofascist process, accessing and shaping the national community via the medium of state-controlled radio.Footnote ¹²¹ Thus it smoothly advanced the fortunes of the Catholic church composer Goller and his gentle motets in the manner of Bruckner. It could also flex, however, to embrace the likes of Kanitz and Gál. The decisive factor in all these cases was seemingly that all could be claimed as ‘forgotten by the fatherland’ (and, in Gál’s case, perhaps, rejected abroad).Footnote ¹²² This ‘overlooked’ status played at least a twofold role: it gave Rinaldini the opportunity not only to chastise radio listeners for ignoring significant artists in their midst (and thus failing in their own pan-German civic duty), but also to project aspects of pan-German nationalist identity on to figures and musical works that in the public mind were still little more than blank canvasses. Thus Goller is made ‘the pure [echt] Austrian man who cleaves to a high ideal without losing the ground beneath his feet […] his art prepares countless people to receive the most noble of joys’. Gál is the ‘pure Austrian master […] whose dignified seriousness ever remains that of the people [volkstümlich]’. Kanitz binds the ‘positive achievements of recent times’ to the ‘more practical musical [musikantisch] character of us Austrians’.Footnote ¹²³

This is not to imply, however, that pan-German concerns were the sole preserve of RAVAG, Rinaldini and his exclusive register of Austrian composers of the day. That they were also important to one not so favoured, Krenek, is clear from the 1934 essay cited above, in which he too writes of an ‘Austrian mission’, namely ‘to ensure the continuity of the true German culture and keep it alive for the future of Germanness in its entirety [Gesamtdeutschtum]’. Krenek fully agreed that RAVAG was an artistic institution perfectly placed to accomplish this; his title puns on this point, in fact, as Sendung translates as both ‘mission’ and ‘broadcast’, and so Austria’s mission is presented as intertwined with its radio service. Even so, he complained that RAVAG had missed its opportunity through series like Rinaldini’s Austrian Composers of the Present, and had instead clung to an ‘oppressive one-sidedness’, not least in what he hears as its Nazi-like preference for conservative tonal styles.Footnote ¹²⁴ Thus the radio service had, to paraphrase Krenek’s critique, forced little-known composers into its own narrow vision of a pan-German rank and file and then paraded them before its considerable public, all the while ignoring those figures who, more obviously technically progressive, already enjoyed international renown as Austrian leaders of the compositional fraternity. In that case, the new Austrian corporative state had in fact become fundamentally indistinguishable from ‘the totalitarian state of mechanical coordination [Gleichschaltung]’ in Germany: the Austrofascism promulgated by RAVAG’s music was no different from, and no better than, Nazism.Footnote ¹²⁵

This is, then, an instructive polemic, as it interjects Krenek across the stereotyped alliances we might otherwise assume between artistic styles and political positions in this period. He summarily rejects political and territorial union with contemporary Germany; he writes of Austria taking the world lead against Nazi ‘barbarism’ and passionately rejects any claim for the ‘natural’ basis of the received laws of harmony and melody.Footnote ¹²⁶ But he also implicitly accepts cultural union with Germany: the reaching out of the ‘brotherly hand’, in his phrase, with the caveat that it must be extended from the Austrian side to those deemed ‘sincere’ (aufrichtig). Moreover, he envisions contemporary Vienna – home of the tradition-devoted Wiener Schule – as the true stronghold of German culture, its radio transmitters bringing ‘the real Austrian soul before the entire world’.Footnote ¹²⁷ This last is actually a quotation from the new Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg in a speech given at a Musikverein concert for the tenth anniversary of RAVAG’s founding, at which Kabasta and the Wiener Symphoniker played both Wagner and Bruckner.Footnote ¹²⁸ In citing it, Krenek seeks to reinforce his essay’s own advocacy of ‘the will and decisive acts of our Führer’ in forming the new Austrian stronghold-state, as well as the ‘Christian and corporative principle of cooperation’, the ‘ideal vision of orderly multiplicity’ and the principle of shared devotion to the ‘proclaimed national interest’ (Staatsraison) that should properly underpin it.Footnote ¹²⁹ Krenek may clearly be, in short, what we might endeavour to call an ‘Austromodernist’; yet he comes across also as a venerator at the shrine of the assassinated Führer Dollfuss (shot dead by Austrian Nazis just before the essay appeared) and a vocal supporter of Dollfuss’s successor Schuschnigg. In his own anti-RAVAG and anti-Nazi terms, he is a pan-German Austrofascist.

Indeed, Krenek tried hard to deliver his alternative vision of an Austrofascist music, launching his own series of contemporary Austrian music concerts in October 1934. The first of these featured piano works by Schoenberg (including the 12-note op. 25), Schmidt’s Second String Quartet (1930) and songs by Julius Bittner: all these composers had turned 60 in 1934, and, as Krenek’s introduction states, the point was to display the diversity within the Austrian contemporary whole, the stylistically old alongside the new, regardless of the homology of chronological age.Footnote ¹³⁰ In the final concert in April 1935, moreover, he extended a ‘brotherly hand’, programming new works by himself, Wellesz and Robert Leukauf alongside those by Germans drawn to Vienna: Hans Erich Apostel’s Sonata ritmica and some Lieder by Theodor Adorno.Footnote ¹³¹

Yet Krenek’s series took place at the inconspicuous, outmoded Ehrbar Saal in the fourth district of Vienna, and attracted little press commentary.Footnote ¹³² Crucially, it was not broadcast on national radio, which at the time of the first concert preferred to deliver two Wiener Symphoniker programmes to its listeners, one entitled ‘Sport in Music and Song’, the other ‘From Old Myths and Tales’.Footnote ¹³³ Such picturesque and easily assimilable offerings, alongside RAVAG’s Austrian Composers of the Present, continued for the next five years, and were galvanized along the way by other similar series that held this most prominent of national podiums as they continued to shape the pan-German community of Austrofascism – in ways that, even if they could be read as gently critical of Nazi Germany, never stiffly opposed it. Krenek and his conception of Austrian music had no such mouthpiece and no such audience; increasingly, they were drowned out of the public discourse, and friends discussed his failing energies in promoting his concerts.Footnote ¹³⁴

Conclusion: pan-Germanism, Austrofascism and National Socialism

Austrian pan-Germanism, then, is one useful means of capturing the principal ideological thrust that developed out of Christian Socialism and one way of approaching Austrian public musical life around and after 1933. As we have seen, a platform of German Austrian superiority and mission operated across the boundary lines that this historiography implies, inflecting not only Rinaldini’s new radio series but also Krenek’s counterpunch against it. Both camps, I think, would have seen a prevailing common sense in a turn of phrase like ‘Austro-German music’. Krenek, to reiterate, wrote of the need for Austrian intervention in the struggle to preserve the ‘true German culture’.Footnote ¹³⁵

To this it might be added that a comparable pan-German drive also fed into the concert programmes that the Symphoniker delivered outside RAVAG’s direct purview. The evening of 4 December 1933, for example, saw Dollfuss, Schuschnigg, Hryntschak and countless other Austrofascist dignitaries attend the Vienna Konzerthaus to hear the Symphoniker play a so-called Monsterkonzert, a special performance for which the ensemble had been massively expanded to some 140 players. This event was organized by Dollfuss’s Patriotic Front, soon to be Austria’s only permitted political organization, and for which Rinaldini served as music advisor.Footnote ¹³⁶ At first glance, its programme appears simply to pander to the tastes of Viennese opera- and concert-going elites through its presentation of short works by Rossini, Wagner and Richard Strauss. The centre of gravity of the ‘monster-concert’, however, was a performance of Schubert’s ‘Great’ Symphony, dwarfing the surrounding Italian and German offerings and seemingly condescending to them – not least because it gave Viennese critics, amongst them the establishment composer Joseph Marx, the opportunity to extol superior Austrian musical virtues (for example, Melodienseligkeit, ‘melodic bliss’) and to admonish the conductor, the Italian Arturo Lucon, for inevitably failing to grasp them.Footnote ¹³⁷

The Symphoniker’s foreign tours, too, can be viewed through this particular pan-German lens. In the first two weeks of May 1935, the orchestra gave concerts across cities in Italy, a schedule that must be seen in the context of contemporary political overtures to Mussolini and the promise of solidarity against Hitler’s aggression towards Austria; an Italian Cultural Institute had been opened by Schuschnigg in Vienna only two months previously.Footnote ¹³⁸ Yet press reports emphasize not only this tour’s enthusiastic reception by Italian audiences but also, in overtly military terms, its success as a ‘triumphal march of Viennese art’ – to which, apparently, Mussolini, the Pope and Queen Elena had bowed in deference, the last expressing her delight, symbolically, in German.Footnote ¹³⁹ Similarly, in Great Britain in late 1936 – according to Ernst Decsey’s report in Radio Wien – the very mention of the name ‘Vienna’ brought audiences around the country flocking to their local concert halls, so that they might witness the ‘fundamental Austrianness [das Urösterreichische]’ of the Symphoniker’s flagship Bruckner performances.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Once again, this neatly intersected with Austrian state propaganda, which sought at precisely this time to soothe British foreign policy fears over the fragility of central Europe and, simultaneously, to attract renewed patronage for Austrian culture from Britain’s wealthy elites.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The Symphoniker’s tour was thus, to use Decsey’s word, a ‘crusade’ on several fronts at once: a display of cultural superiority and political stability communicated through the ‘Austrian orchestral art and Bruckner, the most Austrian of all its masters’, and delivered by a ‘first-class orchestra on the march’.Footnote ¹⁴²

Nonetheless, just as Krenek had seen in 1934, the new Austria was in perpetual danger of failing to become the stable, autonomous, unified nation that such Brucknerian symphonic excellence seemed to mobilize through sounding forms. As Krenek’s essay confirms, numerous points of overlap clearly existed between the Austrian pan-Germanism projected by the radio service and National Socialism; at times, indeed, their ideas, claims, personnel and practices were difficult to separate, and this proved as productive for both these camps as it was ostracizing for their critics. Certainly, it had sometimes suited RAVAG to silence Nazi voices: as, for example, in June 1932, when the ‘neutral’ service had refused to broadcast a speech given by the prominent German Nazi Gregor Strasser, leading to demonstrations in the streets and a march on the Viennese RAVAG premises.Footnote ¹⁴³ But, far more frequently, the radio service had ignored obvious Nazi sympathies amongst those it broadcast, thereby granting an implicit acceptance that had the benefit of shoring up the Austrian state’s cultural provision on the airwaves and simultaneously formed a precarious solidarity against social democracy and ‘foreign’ incursion into hallowed German territory. The leadership of the Symphoniker is here a case in point. Leopold Reichwein, one of the orchestra’s star conductors, well known to the Viennese public through radio and concert life, had been a highly active member of the German Nazi party since March 1932. From that time onwards he fronted a range of propaganda activities in Austria on its behalf, with only the occasional intervention from the authorities for fear of the civil unrest that his vehement politics might cause.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Leading up to the German annexation, Reichwein also acted as informant on the Austrian radio service: in a report of February 1937, he complained to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry about Kabasta’s orchestral concerts with RAVAG for their continued reliance on ‘dyed-in-the-wool Jews’, ‘rejected Aryans’ and other ‘questionables’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Likewise, of the 100 or so composers profiled by Rinaldini’s Austrian Composers of the Present series, many can be shown to have held allegiances to Austrian or German Nazi organizations; and while it is sometimes hard to discern whether these were politically expedient responses to the annexation of 1938, in some cases it is absolutely clear-cut that they were convictions professed many years before.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Perhaps the most conspicuous example is that of the Viennese composer Friedrich Bayer, who in April 1933 had his symphonic poem Deutschland premiered by Reichwein at the Vienna Konzerthaus to an audience of some 5,000 people, as part of permitted nationwide Nazi party celebrations for Hitler’s birthday.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Nonetheless, only a month later, Bayer was featured in Rinaldini’s composers series as a key contemporary Austrian, praised for his peculiar ability – specifically as an Austrian German – to maintain his creative faculties ‘free from extramusical reflection’ and, in so doing, to synthesize ‘northern rigour’ with ‘southern melodic bliss’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Even after the proscription of National Socialism in Austria in June 1933 and Dollfuss’s assassination by Austrian Nazis the following year, Bayer could still surface as an Austrian establishment composer. As Krenek pointed out, although Bayer’s piano concerto was initially removed from the RAVAG celebratory programme of September 1934 owing to ‘political concerns’, it nonetheless reappeared, unannounced, in the last broadcast of the series.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Moreover, Bayer was the author of a 1934 article for Die Kunst in Österreich (‘Art in Austria’, a periodical much vaunted by the education minister Rintelen) in which some of RAVAG’s implicit biases had been turned into strident statements of fact. As Krenek protests, Bayer had launched an attack on atonal composition as ‘rootless, alien to the land and the people’ and had placed it in sharp contrast to the ‘joyful melodies and charming harmonies of indigenous Austrian music’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Bayer, therefore, was one example of a pan-German composer who could be representative of both Austrofascist and National Socialist musicianship, depending on the immediate context and function in which he and his works appeared. What this impresses upon us is that, ultimately, to study Austrian institutions like RAVAG and the Wiener Symphoniker must also be to add another strand to the already complex skein: it is to consider the emergence of National Socialism, the other major fascist grouping in Austria during the First Republic, and to track its development within and against Austrian pan-German ideology towards the crucial annexation year of 1938.

To commentators like Krenek, this was initially an era of great possibility, of productive political forces that might shape a path towards a higher Austrian culture, born of rich tradition and leading Europe and the wider world; indeed, as we have seen, the regimes of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg continued to make overtures to foreign powers such as Great Britain and Italy, even after the political rapprochement with Hitler of July 1936.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Simultaneously, however, the many points of close contact between pan-Germanism and Nazism enabled sympathetic transformation of the one into the other, a change led and disseminated by prominent figures who saw the advantages of holding a stake in both. This included well-known cases, politicians like the founding RAVAG president and education minister Rintelen, who was imprisoned in 1935 for having taken part in the Nazi assassination of Dollfuss; but it also included those acting primarily, and perhaps somewhat less conspicuously, within the cultural sphere that surrounded and informed the political one – figures like the Symphoniker conductor Reichwein and the Viennese composer Bayer. It is in the efforts of this latter group, in particular, that we might account for the frictionless interface between Austrofascism, pan-Germanism and the National Socialism of the annexed state, a slick Bruderkuss proclaimed from the Großer Saal of the Vienna Konzerthaus and broadcast to Austrian and German audiences on the now-integrated national radio network in April 1938.Footnote ¹⁵² It is in these efforts, too, and in the Christian Social and Austrofascist contexts that nurtured them, that we might locate a contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century European culture that has proved rather more enduring: the tightening of the fraternal bond between Austria and Germany that maintains ‘Austro-German music’ as a valid currency even into the twenty-first century.