Ney's Troubling Legacy Today

ONE OF THE HAUNTING QUESTIONS addressing the role of musicians during the tumultuous period from World War I to the Third Reich concerns the deeply troubling but also highly ambiguous relationship between their musical sensibilities and their political ideologies. As Fred K. Prieberg notes, the history of musical activities during the National Socialist period is replete with composers and performers whose careers were marked by political compromises, betrayals, willful repression of memory, and biographical falsifications. The pianist Elly Ney (1882–1968) is a case in point. Ney promoted herself as an ultimate authority of German classical music, especially of the music of Beethoven, which she regarded as the heroic revelation of a religious mystery transcending rational analysis and demanding a performance style dogmatically faithful to the score and the composer's intentions. The rigor of this artistic self-fashioning tallies suspiciously with Ney's political dogmas. In a double biography of Ney and the young pianist Karlrobert Kreiten (1916–43), a highly promising artist who was executed after making several critical remarks about Hitler and the war, Hans Hinterkeuser has documented the astonishing extent to which Ney fanatically and self-righteously aligned herself with National Socialist politics to promote her own career and fame. Beate Angelika Kraus attributes three factors to Ney's enthusiasm for the Hitler regime: her profiting from the Beethoven mania in all areas of culture, politics, and society during the National Socialist period; her eagerness to reach a wide mass audience including workers, young people, soldiers, prisoners, and refugees; and her obsessive vanity and desire for recognition.

Born in 1882 in Düsseldorf, Ney became an indefatigable concert pianist famous throughout Europe and the United States. Cultivating the contradictory façade of an artist presumably only dedicated to the pure realm of classical music and yet ferociously engaged in politics, Ney was appointed professor of piano by Hitler in 1937 and was a member of several Nazi organizations. She unabashedly confessed to having been deeply moved by the immense power of a Hitler speech, endorsed the public burnings of books staged by the Nazis, displayed racist sentiments, and promoted Beethoven festivals in Bonn for mass audiences under the auspices of the Nazis, although she collided with the organizers’ programming policies.