just watched a bbc4 documentary on music in the Nazi German and Stalinist regimes and it was pretty good but did a pretty unwarranted character assassination on Carl Orff at the end
the presenter called 'Carmena Burana' (really just the O Fortuna bit everyone knows) 'empty music' which supposedly embodies Nazi values perfectly which doesn't really go with the fact that it was written by one of Brecht's mates and banned for 7 years for being pornography
Orff's Wikipedia page claims Orff got racist chants at performances of Carmena Burana in the late 1930s, and I was curious to find out what these were and found a German site with it on. Apparently the hate he got was for it sounding 'Bavarian'.
Orff wasnot a perfect person to say the least (sold out a friend to the Nazis and then stole Resistance valour to get out of trouble later) but god it's so funny to imagine these snotty Munich-based Nazis sending Orff death threats for his screaming choirs sounding too Schlage
the other thing the documentary made very clear to me was that, as lame Socialist Realism is, it is still so much better than everything the Nazis were doing aesthetically to reveal just how false an equivalence the whole thing is
yeah the Russian composers were being threatened with being killed if they wrote stuff that wasn't deemed sufficiently dumb, which sucks. but it's shocking how much that aesthetic doesn't seem at all alien to us now - modern film music and municipal art is so derived from it
it's surprising how much the Stalinist idea of accessible art is actually just not any different to Western low-brow 'improve the masses' accessible art, and even commercial art. there are still elements of joy and expression in it, even some modernism creeping in there.
meanwhile all the Nazi art is just absolute anti-art, the worst parts of fake Roman kitsch. Socialist Realism had a very limited palette to communicate but Nazi art doesn't seek to communicate anything except be the equivalent of a Sargon of Akkad avi
all the supposedly impressive Nazi displays always look so pathetic, like a village fete with a Hollywood budget. the only good art direction they had was the really big banners
with the Stalinist state art, it's the inventive art of the early Soviet era getting filed to a nub, in the same way that today's art might be edited to be more commercially viable. with the Nazi state art, it's the inventive art of Weimar getting rejected entirely.
the Nazi mindset was so trainspottery, so brainwormy. they were convinced any art was in some way Jewish/Communist/Bavarian? unless it could prove it wasn't, and the only way of proving it was to be a cliched knockoff of an approved, ideally ancient style
the Stalinist murders of artists were aimed at getting rid of anyone capable of criticising his control, which included powerful artists, and is evil but logical. the Nazi murders of artists was aimed at stopping an imaginary mind control conspiracy and was pure brain worm
i think both the Socialist Realist and Nazi aesthetics have 'won' in their way, although mercifully the Nazi one only sticks around for Nazis and Nazi-adjacent 'apolitical' things like crying in the street about royal babies or whatever
you see the ghost of Socialist Realism in a lot of children's media, too - anything aimed at education, improvement and soothing of an audience you're presuming too stupid to understand anything. it's in Blue Peter, and Disney
you see the ghost of Nazi Art in that fascination-repulsion that reactionaries have with art that represents The Conspiracy. In "my grandkid could paint that!", in "modern videogame character design is catering to feminists by making women ugly"
anyway Carmena Burana slaps and while it's set in an imaginary past (with all the Latin and Old German) it's not a nauseatingly sentimentally mourned-and-revived imagined past, like when Nazis do The Past. One part is sung from the perspective of a swan roasting on a spit
the only good bit of Nazi music ever written is the opening part of Also Sprach Zarathustra which everyone knows. i'll acknowledge that's one of the hardest drops in music. rest of it is wimpy filler though
