An Argument for Hearing a Work With a Nazi Reference

The Germans who invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 are represented in Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony by an unexpectedly bright tune that hardens into a bitter march. Recent Metropolitan Opera audiences may recognize it from Lehar’s operetta “The Merry Widow” as an echo of the melody to which Count Danilo sings “I’m off to Chez Maxim.”

What is this suave, sprightly music doing there? Shostakovich never quite says. But if we know, as his audience may have, that “The Merry Widow” was a favorite work of Hitler’s, a meaning of the passage comes into harsh focus. And no one who hears the work could think that it was merely a nostalgic nod to Lehar.

The issue of musical quotation, particularly as it pertains to the World War II era, came up this week in the case of Jonas Tarm, a young Estonian-born composer. Mr. Tarm was commissioned by the respected New York Youth Symphony, which planned to play his “Marsh u Nebuttya” (“March to Oblivion,” in Ukrainian) at Carnegie Hall on Sunday.

After the orchestra gave the work’s first performance last month at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights, it was brought to the administrators’ attention, in a letter of complaint signed “a Nazi survivor,” that the piece incorporates about 45 seconds of the “Horst Wessel” song, the Nazi anthem. Mr. Tarm had done nothing to prepare audiences for this interpolation: His program note consisted in its entirety of a few lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

According to Shauna Quill, the executive director of the youth symphony, Mr. Tarm declined to elaborate on his intended meaning. Mr. Tarm said Ms. Quill told him that the piece would not be played because it was offensive. The Carnegie performance was canceled, with Ms. Quill writing to students and parents in an email that the work contained material that was “problematic for an orchestra such as ours to be asked to perform.”

This misguided, mishandled decision is a blot on the reputation of the youth symphony and its justly praised First Music competition, which has awarded commissions to 139 young composers since it began in 1984. An institution so adept at fostering new work should be particularly protective of artists and the ways they choose to express themselves. And it is pernicious to cloak censorship in the guise of child protection: If “Marsh u Nebuttya” is playable by any orchestra, it should be playable by an orchestra “such as ours.”

Nor is Mr. Tarm the first composer to incorporate the “Horst Wessel” song into music as commentary. Pavel Haas, who died at Auschwitz, left an unfinished symphony that quotes the anthem. Stockhausen used it in “Hymnen.” The Swedish composer Carl-Olof Anderberg’s 1968 Piano Concerto references it in conjunction with the “Internationale” and other political melodies to illustrate reactions to the Prague Spring. “Critical Mass,” a 2007 opera by the British composer Orlando Gough, juxtaposes “Horst Wessel” with statements by Donald H. Rumsfeld.

But the controversy of this most recent example sadly comes as no surprise in an era filled with calls for “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material people are about to read or see — in a classroom or concert hall — might upset them. And the protests of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer” last fall involved the misapprehension that anything and everything expressed in a work of art — even something offensive, such as the anti-Semitic sentiments voiced by the opera’s terrorist characters — receives the endorsement of its creators. The issue in both cases is one of excessive literalism.

Lest there be a similar misunderstanding that “Marsh u Nebuttya” is sympathetic to Nazism, I examined a copy of the score. The “Horst Wessel” passage, which comes a bit more than halfway through the work, begins with quiet bassoons, instructed to play “dark and marchlike.” The musical quotation is punctuated by eerie slides and tumbling scales in the higher winds and by sardonic blasts in the brasses — a Shostakovich-esque touch — as the orchestra rises to scary fury.

It is difficult to tell from a score the full effect music will have in performance. But it is simply impossible, as it is in the “Leningrad” Symphony, that someone could hear Mr. Tarm’s sour take on “Horst Wessel” as a neutral or sympathetic presentation of this material. Obviously the melody may lead listeners to think of the Nazi period — that is its point. It is not the role of an arts institution to spare audiences from history that might upset them. Quite the contrary.

Mr. Tarm said he believed in Mahler’s adage that if a composer could say what he wanted in words, he wouldn’t have to bother writing the music. Shostakovich, after all, didn’t make a public announcement that he’d be quoting a ditty from a favorite work of Hitler’s. Reviewing Ted Hearne’s oblique yet shattering WikiLeaks oratorio “The Source” in October, I wrote in praise of musical, dramatic and political ambiguity, all too rare in art these days.

Mr. Tarm’s work revels in that ambiguity. In addition to “Horst Wessel,” he also quotes Ukraine’s Soviet-era anthem. So does that mean he intends to equate the Soviet domination of Ukraine with Nazi totalitarianism? Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, is widely despised in Estonia. Do Mr. Tarm’s charged references have to do with the region’s present-day politics?

I respect and even admire the composer’s choice not to answer these questions directly. But I’d like a chance to think about them for myself. The New York Youth Symphony should program “Marsh u Nebuttya” on its next Carnegie program and give me, and the rest of the audience, that opportunity.