Whereas it is generally agreed that music has charms to soothe a savage breast, Congreve might have added that music also has the power to inflame bellicose fervour. Patrick Bade, who lectures at Christie’s Education and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, has written a commendably exhaustive history of how all sorts of music were used to strengthen civilian and military morale and to demoralise enemies immediately before and during the second world war.
The BBC radio programme Music While You Work, for example, was believed to help make British factory workers contentedly productive. Musical propaganda broadcasts were supposed to convince Germans that we were patriotically more ardently motivated than they. ‘Music wars’ of the 20th century were waged with demonstrations of high culture and popular entertainment. Every national anthem was a militant Christian proclamation of superior righteousness, strength and joy. According to Bade:
The endless stream of military marches broadcast from German radio stations was intended to induce a state of mindless obedience and aggression in the German military and civil population, particularly towards the end of the war, when authorities feared a breakdown of resolution and discipline.
Although his anti-Semitic policies forfeited any just claim to civilisation, Hitler cited Germany’s musical tradition in an attempt to assert cultural superiority. In a speech broadcast in November 1939, he asserted that: ‘One single German, shall we say Beethoven, achieved more than all the English put together.’ Of Wagner, his favourite composer, he said: ‘Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must first know Wagner.’ Bade goes on to quote Woody Allen’s later response: ‘Every time I hear Wagner I feel like invading Poland.’
As it is obviously true that Germany’s classical musical heritage outweighs any other, Britain continued to perform the Germans’ music during the war and played it back to them, most notably Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, whose opening bars reminded European resistance fighters and ourselves of the morse code dot-dot-dot-dash of V for Victory.
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