Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887-1975)

Discussions on the music in the Third Reich. Hosted by Ivan Ž.
Post Reply
bonzen
Member
Posts: 144
Joined: 17 Nov 2003, 06:17
Location: chicago

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887-1975)

#1

Post by bonzen » 28 Dec 2003, 05:08

[Several topics dealing with Ernst Hanfstaengl have been merged by the host, Ivan Ž.]

If you recognize the Harvard fight song in an early Nazi song don't be surprised. Ernst Hanfstaengl went to Harvard and lifted the melody for a Nazi song.

User avatar
Zapfenstreich
Member
Posts: 630
Joined: 10 Mar 2002, 20:58
Location: The Old Northwest Territory

#2

Post by Zapfenstreich » 29 Dec 2003, 11:00

I heard Hanfstaengl tell the story about this incident. He was attending some sort of social event where Hitler was present. The Hitler Jugend had been one of the subjects of discussion. While Putzi was sitting at the piano he suddenly played and sang the Harvard Fight Song. Hitler was fascinated and when he finished, Hitler exclaimed, "Daß brauchen wir, Hanfstaengl!" (That's what we need, Hanfstaengl!) and from that recital the song "Jugend marschiert" was born.

Z


User avatar
Ivan Ž.
Host - Music section
Posts: 8467
Joined: 05 Apr 2005, 13:28
Location: Serbia

#3

Post by Ivan Ž. » 30 Jun 2005, 14:31

Yes, but there is no resemblance between the two songs whatsoever.

Ivan

User avatar
Taymur
Member
Posts: 21
Joined: 14 Mar 2002, 20:26
Location: Germany

#4

Post by Taymur » 19 Aug 2006, 15:19

Hello folks and musicians here!

Today I´ve a very special request, any help and solutions are welcome...
If there are the scores, notes availlable, it would be pleasant for me.

The composer is Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl. The songs, pieces:

Deutscher Föhn

Jugend marschiert

Jugend trauert
(in "Triumph of the Will" they perform this piece partially)

Skagerrak-Marsch

Schlageter-Marsch

Hitler-Suite


Thanks for help and answers, infos about the creation of these pieces also welcome...

Taymur 8-)

[Titles corrected by the host.]

User avatar
Annelie
Member
Posts: 5053
Joined: 12 Mar 2002, 03:45
Location: North America

#5

Post by Annelie » 02 Sep 2006, 14:20

Interesting article in which I learned a few things I didn't know. :|

http://theovergrownpath.blogspot.com/20 ... rvard.html

Hitler's court composer was Harvard alumnus

In Leni Riefenstahl's celebrated film of the 1934 Nazi Nuremberg there is a chilling sequence as Hitler and the other leading Nazis pass through the massed ranks of the Deutsche Arbeiterfront (German Labor Front). The soundtrack for this sequence captures a military band playing Deutsche Largo, a march from the same composer as Junge Marschiert (Youth Marches), which was played as the combined forces of the dreaded SA and SS paraded down Wilhelmstraße in Berlin on January 30th, 1933 to celebrate Hitler's appointment as Chancellor.

rally2.2.jpg
rally2.2.jpg (49.61 KiB) Viewed 1639 times

'Hitler's Piano Player' is a new book that tells the remarkable story of the composer of these marches. Ernst Hanfstaengl was a German who was educated at Harvard, and lived in America through the First World War before moving to Germany where he worked closely with Hitler as head of the Nazi foreign press bureau. Then, in an extraordinary example of poacher turning gamekeeper he fled the fascist regime, eventially moving to the US to lead an anti-Nazi psychological warfare project for his friend, president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Ernst Hanfstaengl, (known as "Putzi"), was born in Munich in 1887, the son of a wealthy and famous German art publisher and an American mother. He spent most of his early years in Germany before moving to the United States to study at Harvard where his circle included members of the Roosevelt family, Hamilton Fish and T.S. Eliot. During his time at Harvard he also became a cheerleader for the football team and a pianist renown for his spirited performances of Wagner and other martial music. These two unlikely skills were later to heavily influence his stage-management of the Nazi rallies.

rally4.jpg
rally4.jpg (26.2 KiB) Viewed 1639 times

After graduating Hanfstaengl returned to Germany to perform voluntary military service before studying lithography in Vienna and joining the family art publishing business in Munich. In 1911 he returned to America to run the prestigous family owned Galerie Hanfstaengl on Fifth Avenue. Hanfstaengl remained in the US through the duration of the First World War, but following his mariage and birth of a son (whose godfather was to be one Adolf Hitler) returned to Germany in 1921.

Chance took Hanfstaengl to the Kindkeller in Munich in November 1922 to hear an unknown politician speak. The speaker was Hitler, and Hanfstaengl fell under his spell and quickly became a close friend and advisor to the future dictator, the photo below shows him with Hitler. Hanfstaengl became one of the earliest political 'spin doctors', and his bizarre achievements included allegedly devising the Sieg Heil chant, and financing the publication of Mein Kampf. His musical talents appealed to Hitler, and for years he was personal pianist to the Fuhrer specialising in spirited renditions of Wagner and Liszt. Hanfstaengl recalled that "I must have played Tristan und Isolde hundreds of times, and Hitler couldn't have enough of it, it did him good physically .. he chuckled with pleasure".

rally5.jpg
rally5.jpg (7.22 KiB) Viewed 1639 times

Hanfstaengl's own compositions included the marches Deutscher Föhn and Deutschland Trauert, and the monumental Volkschoral Hymne an das Deutsche Erbe (People's Hymn to the German Past). In 1932 he was assistant producer and composer for a film based on a book by Hanns Heinz Ewers. The subject was the life of the martyred Nazi, Horst Wessel, who had been murdered by communists in 1930. It was the Deutsche Largo from this score which caught Hitler's ear, the dictator commanded that it should be used at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where it was captured for posterity in Leni Riefenstahl's film.

Below is An Overgrown Path Leni Riefenstahl photo exclusive - this may just be the first time that this photo has been published in context. It was taken inside Luipold Hall at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. I discovered the photo last year when I was researching my article on the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection, and Andy Eskind who catalogued the photo archive at George Eastman House in Rochester identified the cinematographer visible centre-right in the photo below as Leni Riefenstahl. The Triumph of Will was filmed the previous year, Riefenstahl was apparently in Nuremberg in 1935 working on another project.

rally7.0.jpg
rally7.0.jpg (15.57 KiB) Viewed 1639 times

In 1934 Hanfstaengl visited Harvard to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary reunion of his class, a visit that was surrounded by controversey and anti-Nazi demonstrations. He brought with him a bust of his favourite composer Gluck, which he planned to present to Harvard's music department. The planned gift met with little enthusiasm, although it was finally reluctantly accepted by the department's head, and composer, Edward Burlingame Hill. While Hanfstaengl was in Harvard the Nazis murdered more than 200 senior Nazis including SA leader Ernst Röhm, in the infamous 'Knight of the Long Knives' on June 30th, 1934. It was this event that sparked Hanfstaengl's disillusionment with the Nazis, and his subsequent activities included helping 'non-Aryan' violinist Fritz Kreisler to recover his confiscated property. Hanfstaengl progressively fell out of favour with Hitler and was branded 'not politically reliable'

rally1.jpg
rally1.jpg (24.81 KiB) Viewed 1639 times

Finally in 1937, in fear of his life, he chose an evening when Hitler, Göring and Goebells were attending a Berlin Philharmonic concert conducted by Furtwängler to cross the border into Switzerland. In Zurich he fitted in a consultation with Carl Jung before moving to to England where he was interned at the outbreak of war, and formed a piano quartet in his detention camp. With a German invasion a real possibility enemy aliens were moved to Canada, and Hanfstaengl spent further time in detention reading the Bible simultaneously in English, Greek, Latin, French, German and Dutch, and comparing the quality of the translations. When this exercise was completed he moved on to the Koran. He was finally transferred to the custody of the fledgling US government Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence-gathering service that was replaced in 1947 by the CIA.

rally3.jpg
rally3.jpg (27.76 KiB) Viewed 1639 times

Hanfstaengl was moved to Virginia and installed in Bush Hill, a secluded property some twenty-five miles outside Washington. Here he was the star of Roosevelt's 'S-Project' which provided the White House with biographical information on four hundred top Nazis, analyses of Hitler's speeches, and a detailed dossier covering Hitler's psychological condition, education and sex life. This dossier also contained Hanfstaengl's observations on Hitler's musical tastes. As noted previously Tristan was a favourite, while Meistersinger was preferred when the Fuhrer was facing adversity. Hitler's adoration for Wagner also meant that he apparently knew the libretto of Lohengrin by heart. As well as Wagner, Verdi and selected Chopin and Richard Strauss Hitler also enjoyed Liszt and Grieg. The dictator's musical dislikes tell us more about him than his likes - he disliked Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

In an even more bizarre development the US intelligence service arranged for Hanfstaengl to record a piano recital of Debussy and his own works interspersed with appeals for Hitler to sue for peace. CBS pressed thousands of copies of the recital as a single-sided phonograph record. These were then dropped by parachute over Germany addressed to the Nazi leaders, with instructions that the packages be delivered unopened to the addressees - I wonder how many of the brittle shellac discs survived the parachute drop?. The recording of the recital was also beamed to Germany from a radio transmitter here in East Anglia where I write these words.

rally8.1.jpg
rally8.1.jpg (19.32 KiB) Viewed 1639 times

Eventually Hanfstaengl lost his appeal for Roosevelt's intelligence experts, and he was returned to England, from where he was transferred to a former punishment and starvation camp in Germany. He was released in 1946, but still had to undergo the mandatory denazification process. His final years were spent in Germany, where the publication of his memoirs in 1970, the continued controversy caused by his Harvard connections, and a stormy private life ensured he remained in the public eye. Ernst Hanfstaengl died in Munich in November 1975 aged eighty-eight.

Peter Conradi's excellent life of Hanfstaengl ends with his death. But there is a fascinating coda to this extraordinary story, where fact is often far stranger than fiction. On the penultimate page of Conradi's book the author writes: '(Hanfstaengl) took great pride in his grandchildren - especially Eynon, the eldest, who had inherited his grandfather's musical talent, taking an impressive twenty-fourth place in the prestigous Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June 1974.' The pianist career of the junior Hanfstaengl seem to have been obscured by the mists of time, and my researches found no further information on this. But tantalisingly my search found a German German film actor and writer called Eynon Hanfstaengl. One of his acting roles was Count Durkheim in the 1972 movie Ludwig - Requiem Fur einen jungfraulichen Konig. The film is a cinematic requiem for Wagner's patron Ludwig ll of Bavaria, and the music credits include excerpts from Furtwängler's Tristan, and Karajan's Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. Is this Ernst Hanfstaengl's grandson?

Heinrich George
Member
Posts: 117
Joined: 25 Oct 2003, 17:49
Location: Falls Church, Virginia

#6

Post by Heinrich George » 05 Sep 2006, 17:03

Eynon Hanfstaengl's rather brief filmography:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0359830/

He's not shown as appearing in "Ludwig" but cast lists aren't always complete, especially for non-English language films.

Putzi himself is listed as the composer of the music for "Hans Westmar:"

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0359829/

GregSingh
Member
Posts: 3877
Joined: 21 Jun 2012, 02:11
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Re: Ernst Hanfstaengl

#7

Post by GregSingh » 05 Jun 2016, 08:39

Hi,

Does anyone have any information about earlier mentioned Volkschoral Hymne?
Was it instrumental or also vocal? Any recordings, lyrics?
There seems to be no info available about that composition...
Thanks,

Greg

J. Duncan
Member
Posts: 3767
Joined: 02 Aug 2008, 11:22

Re: Ernst Hanfstaengl

#8

Post by J. Duncan » 05 Jun 2016, 18:16

There are some interesting clips of Putzi playing samples of music from his piano. These are at 30:20 and 109:50
respectively from youtube's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". In the first he plays a Russian lullaby by Irving berlin and explains how this calmed Hitler when he was under stress. In the second he explains how Harvard marches he played for Hitler got him excited for what the NSDAP needed and Putzi further plays his own composition of a youth march he wrote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEw0RIaYrtE

User avatar
Fallersleben
Member
Posts: 266
Joined: 03 Jun 2010, 20:52

Re: Ernst Hanfstaengl

#9

Post by Fallersleben » 06 Jun 2016, 17:20

I have a record from NS-Schallplatten-Industrie (Nr. 2035) with one of Hanfstaengl's own compositions, "Deutscher Föhn". His signature was cut in the shellac on that side.
EH.jpg
EH.jpg (27.24 KiB) Viewed 3618 times
1024px-Ernst_Hanfstaengl_-_Signatur.jpg
Source: wikimedia.org
1024px-Ernst_Hanfstaengl_-_Signatur.jpg (20.12 KiB) Viewed 3618 times
On Nr. 2059 from that series with his work "Jugend marschiert" there is no signature.

User avatar
Nicolas7507
Member
Posts: 562
Joined: 22 Jun 2016, 18:53
Location: Germany

Six-movement Piano-Suite Hanfstaengl

#10

Post by Nicolas7507 » 04 Oct 2017, 16:40

Does anyone have the complete recording of this Suite? Or any more information?

Thanks,
Nicolas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCZbZOVMi3E

User avatar
Ivan Ž.
Host - Music section
Posts: 8467
Joined: 05 Apr 2005, 13:28
Location: Serbia

Re: Six-movement Piano-Suite Hanfstaengl

#11

Post by Ivan Ž. » 04 Oct 2017, 17:53

Hello, Nicolas

Those are the 6th and 5th movements of his "Hitler-Suite", recorded (by himself) in the Berlin Hochschule für Musik on 25.04.1934, for the Grammophon company. The suite consisted of six movements and it was recorded in six parts, and released on three records. The last record is heard in the youtube video, only not in the right order: there's side B first (Jugend marschiert), followed by side A (Jugend trauert). I don't know whether there's a full recording of the suite available anywhere.

Hitler-Suite
1. Sturm, Sturm, Sturm
2. Deutscher Föhn
3. Kamerad, nun laß dir sagen
4. Skagerrak-Marsch
5. Jugend trauert
6. Jugend marschiert


Cheers,
Ivan

User avatar
Nicolas7507
Member
Posts: 562
Joined: 22 Jun 2016, 18:53
Location: Germany

Re: Ernst Hanfstaengl

#12

Post by Nicolas7507 » 12 Oct 2017, 17:34

Thank you very much Ivan!!!

Post Reply

Return to “Music of the Reich”