# Music that was BANNED...



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

...or politically sensitive, or could have been banned but was not for some reason.

Music I know that was originally banned (& all of these have some great, to some listeners "pretty," tunes, harmless on the surface) -

*Sibelius*'_ Finlandia _- The patriotic piece was banned during the time that Finland was ruled by the Russian Empire.

*Kodaly's* _Peacock Variations_ - The folk song refers to a peacock - a flightless bird - taking off in flight, which was seen by the Horthy dictatorship between the two world wars as a symbol of aspirations for Hungarian democracy.

*Hindemith's*_ Mathis der Maler _(in both opera and symphony forms) - The story of the opera was enough of a political hot potato for the Nazis, with the peasant's revolt of 1525 as a backdrop to the story. But that mighty rousing brass chorale concluding the symphony speaks to me of a certain yearning for freedom from oppression, a feeling that ultimately German humanist values will conquer the war-mongering ones.

*Copland's* _Lincoln Portrait _was banned during the McCarthyist "witch-hunt" era, during the 1950's. Obviously due to the composer being on the left of the political spectrum, but also how the words of the_ Gettysburg Address _may well have been too sensitive for extremists like Senator John McCarthy to stomach.

I just googled this topic and found that Napoleon Bonaparte and his successors banned the revolutionary song _*La Marseillaise*_ due to it's war-like, fighting spirit. Certainly the lyrics do speak to these things. After various change of governments, banning it and allowing it in turn, it finally became France's national anthem in 1879.

Wikipedia says this of *Rimsky-Korsakov's *opera_ The Golden Cockerel _(anyone heard it?) : _Rimsky-Korsakov decided to create a work exposing the disastrous tsarist regime, and in 1906 he started work on his Golden Cockerel opera. It was finished in 1907. The opera was immediately banned by the Palace, and was not allowed to be staged - the resemblance between the Czar and the foolish King Dodon was too close._

*Any others you know, guys? I find this an interesting topic, does anyone else?...*


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## Dodecaplex (Oct 14, 2011)

Most choral music that had female parts in it was banned from churches for some time. An example would be Cherubini's Requiem in D minor, which, unlike his first one in C minor, only had male singers in it (the first one was written before the ban).

Also, there's this nice thing I've read in an article about Chopin's request to have Mozart's Requiem played for his funeral. Because of the ban, however, the authorities rejected the request. It wasn't until a few colleagues of Chopin came up with some kind of petition, which ended in the authorities giving way in the end, but only on the condition that the female singers are hidden behind some . . . something, I don't remember what it was.

I may be wrong though.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

That's a long list, eh? The goddamned Soviets and Nazi's banned lots of stuff. Jazz, and music by Jewish composers of course.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

starthrower said:


> That's a long list, eh? The goddamned Soviets and Nazi's banned lots of stuff. Jazz, and music by Jewish composers of course.


It did have some basis in their warped ideologies, but I see a lot of what happened then as nearly random. The Nazi's _Degenerate Art _and the Soviet's _Formalism_ was code word for a simple thing - music we don't like. Added to that, it could be the person producing that music that they didn't like, or various things as an excuse for legitimising their oppression...


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

starthrower said:


> That's a long list, eh? The goddamned Soviets and Nazi's banned lots of stuff. Jazz, and music by Jewish composers of course.


The Nazi Party didn't actually _ban_ jazz, they jsut gave it heaps of ridiculous rules that the performers had to follow. I don't know all of them but I think some are:


Drum solos aren't allowed to be longer than half a bar
There should be as little syncopation as possible
Double basses had to be bowed not plucked
Use violins and other "classical" instruments rather than saxophones and other "American jazz" instruments
And there was also some other stupid rule about how swung the quavers were meant to be

Easy way to turn "In The Mood" into Brandenburg Concerto no. 5.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Dodecaplex said:


> Most choral music that had female parts in it was banned from churches for some time. An example would be Cherubini's Requiem in D minor, which, unlike his first one in C minor, only had male singers in it (the first one was written before the ban)...


Yeah, I remember coming across what you say about Cherubini a while back, I attended a concert of the the _Requiem in C_, and that info was in the notes.



> ...
> Also, there's this nice thing I've read in an article about Chopin's request to have Mozart's Requiem played for his funeral. Because of the ban, however, the authorities rejected the request. It wasn't until a few colleagues of Chopin came up with some kind of petition, which ended in the authorities giving way in the end, but only on the condition that the female singers are hidden behind some . . . something, I don't remember what it was.
> 
> I may be wrong though.


Interesting, I will have to look into that. I don't think I remember coming across any of this...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> The Nazi Party didn't actually _ban_ jazz, they jsut gave it heaps of ridiculous rules that the performers had to follow. I don't know all of them but I think some are...


The other thing, apart from your list, is that the composer couldn't be of Jewish heritage. On the recent thread on Nazi association with various musics, I said this, relating to how jazz was banned (or allowed) by the Nazis, how contradictory it was -

The whole thing was riddled with contradictions. I have an old recording, transferred to cd. During the occupation of France, some types of jazz was banned by the Nazis, but not others (the degenerate art thing, eg. black man's corrupting music, that kind of rubbish). But one of the jazz groups on THIS disc of recordings from that time I have, they play a piece called _Agatha Rhythm_. It's the same as_ I Got Rhythm_ by Gershwin, which of course was banned both as jazz, probably also to do with Gershwin being an American - the enemy of the Nazis - and of Jewish heritage to boot. But this record was still published at that time as far as I know. All they had to do was change the name of the song, maybe fudge the name of the composer a bit, and all was fine and dandy.

...Despite it not matching their ideology, can you imagine... Paris without jazz? (...the French have always loved their jazz - even Debussy wrote a ragtime or two in his sets of piano preludes). The Nazis couldn't swim against the tide too much. Carrot and stick...


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## opus55 (Nov 9, 2010)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> The Nazi Party didn't actually _ban_ jazz, they jsut gave it heaps of ridiculous rules that the performers had to follow. I don't know all of them but I think some are:
> 
> 
> Drum solos aren't allowed to be longer than half a bar
> ...


Umm.. I think those rules pretty much kill jazz music lol


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## Chrythes (Oct 13, 2011)

As far as I know Wagner is unofficially banned in Israel. They just try to avoid him as much as they can, but sometimes some conductors sneak him on the repertoire as Barenboim did about a decade ago.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Today I listened to a CD featuring a string sextet by *Erwin Schulhoff* (1894-1942). It was a fairly dark and generally unhappy sort of piece. Schulhoff was both a Jew and a Communist. When Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, where Schulhoff was born, he was arrested. His music was totally blacklisted as degenerate material. He ended up in the Wülzburg concentration camp and died there, leaving works including two symhonies incomplete.

Not a composer that I know much about. I just happened to listened to a string sextet of his and also another by Martinu on the same CD.


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

The Fascisti Hymn was banned in Italy after the fall of Mussolini and the end of WW11 and as far as I know still is,Toscanini famously refused to play it. The great tenor Giovanni Martinelli sang it, presumably on air, and the record company OASI issued it--it's quite catchy.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> Today I listened to a CD featuring a string sextet by *Erwin Schulhoff* (1894-1942). It was a fairly dark and generally unhappy sort of piece. Schulhoff was both a Jew and a Communist. When Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, where Schulhoff was born, he was arrested. His music was totally blacklisted as degenerate material. He ended up in the Wülzburg concentration camp and died there, leaving works including two symhonies incomplete.
> 
> Not a composer that I know much about. I just happened to listened to a string sextet of his and also another by Martinu on the same CD.


Schulhoff had an interesting and variegated career before the concentration camp. Bio here:

http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/composers/article/erwin_schulhoff/

I have several CDs of his music, covering several of his 'stages'. It is all at least interesting, and the late chamber music has considerable emotive power.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

However revolting the regimes at least Stalin and Hitler didn't ban music altogether - unlike those happy bunnies from the Taliban who outlawed music completely and entertainment in general.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

opus55 said:


> Umm.. I think those rules pretty much kill jazz music lol


Ah, yes! The absurdity of philistines making musical rules and judging art. And now we have the greater absurdity of judging the level of brutality among philistines and tyrants to decide who was slighty more noble?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

elgars ghost said:


> However revolting the regimes at least Stalin and Hitler didn't ban music altogether - unlike those happy bunnies from the Taliban who outlawed music completely and entertainment in general.


Yes I was thinking about this a few hours after I created this thread. The Taliban banned music altogether due to their extremist beliefs. I think a similar thing was done by Savanorola, dictator of Florence during the times of the Inquisition. It seems banning music goes hand in hand with horrible things like the most extreme aspects of oppression, eg. torture, mass killings, various aspects of intolerance towards "the other"...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Chrythes said:


> As far as I know Wagner is unofficially banned in Israel. They just try to avoid him as much as they can, but sometimes some conductors sneak him on the repertoire as Barenboim did about a decade ago.


Yes, Wagner was banned in Israel in the decades immediately after the Second World War. I don't know what's going on now exactly, but I know the ban was lifted, the big advocate for that being Barenboim as you say. They may well have reverted to a ban in practice if not in law.

Two other composers were also banned in Israel, due to their ties with the Nazi regime, Carl Orff and Richard Strauss...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

The Taliban banned music altogether due to their extremist beliefs. I think a similar thing was done by Savanorola, dictator of Florence during the times of the Inquisition. It seems banning music goes hand in hand with horrible things like the most extreme aspects of oppression, eg. torture, mass killings, various aspects of intolerance towards "the other"...

*Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.*

-Heinrich Heine, _Almansor_ 1821

Yes, Wagner was banned in Israel in the decades immediately after the Second World War. I don't know what's going on now exactly, but I know the ban was lifted, the big advocate for that being Barenboim as you say. They may well have reverted to a ban in practice if not in law.

Two other composers were also banned in Israel, due to their ties with the Nazi regime, Carl Orff and Richard Strauss...

The sad irony of Israel is that they are far too willing to emulate the very behavior of the Nazis, whom they so abhor. It seems to me that ideas that are "banned"... censored... buried away in an attempt to pretend they don't exist are far more dangerous... far more likely to fester and grow... than ideas... however repugnant... that are allowed open expression and logical debate. There is a certain hypocrisy to pointing out that the Taliban bans all music, while Israel bans Wagner, Orff and Strauss, and repeatedly in the US this or that small town and school district goes out of its way to ban _Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, the Bible, Romeo and Juliet,_ and the Harry Potter novels.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

They ban the Bible?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

StlukesguildOhio said:


> ...
> *Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.*
> 
> -Heinrich Heine, _Almansor_ 1821...


A prophetic quote and sadly true in the case of the Nazis.



> The sad irony of Israel is that they are far too willing to emulate the very behavior of the Nazis, whom they so abhor. It seems to me that ideas that are "banned"... censored... buried away in an attempt to pretend they don't exist are far more dangerous... far more likely to fester and grow... than ideas... however repugnant... that are allowed open expression and logical debate. There is a certain hypocrisy to pointing out that the Taliban bans all music, while Israel bans Wagner, Orff and Strauss...


Well Israel has long lifted the ban on those three composers. East European countries (the former Eastern Bloc during Communist rule) also did not play many composers, Wagner was one of them. I don't know if there was an official ban (eg. in law) in these countries, but that's what practically happened until the detente (thaw) period of the Cold War in about the 1970's.

I think it's obvious why Israel and these East European countries did this. In the case of Israel, many of the people going to live there after it was founded in the late 1940's, would have either escaped from, been relatives of survivors, or actual survivors of the Holocaust. In the case of East Europe, these countries had been invaded by the Nazis who committed many atrocities there.

So it's obvious, put two and two together. Hindsight is good to have, but you have it now, they didn't have it back in 1945 when the wounds of the HOlocaust and German occupations were still very fresh, they were living memory.

The other thing is that Wagner is expensive to stage, so maybe the bans were financially pragmatic as well. These countries were focussed for many decades after 1945 in building up basic infrastructure and the economy, etc. Arts would have been their least priority. Israel fought a couple of wars with the Arabs, and there were a number of uprisings in East Europe against Soviet domination (which cost money to recover from too). I'm not an expert in their histories but I'm making a fairly reasonable assumption.

Also, I don't know how far Israel went in banning Wagner's and the other's musics. Was only public performance banned? Was public broadcast as well, & what about recordings? I don't know.



> ...and repeatedly in the US this or that small town and school district goes out of its way to ban _Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, the Bible, Romeo and Juliet,_ and the Harry Potter novels.


I can't comment on your country, but here in Australia,_ Lady Chatterly's Lover _was banned up till the 1960's for it's sexual explicitness and also swear words. Again, in hindsight, it's probably harmless compared to what we have today.

But better I think if we stick in this thread to music, otherwise it will kind of maybe lose focus?...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

HarpsichordConcerto said:


> Today I listened to a CD featuring a string sextet by *Erwin Schulhoff* (1894-1942). It was a fairly dark and generally unhappy sort of piece. Schulhoff was both a Jew and a Communist. When Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, where Schulhoff was born, he was arrested. His music was totally blacklisted as degenerate material. He ended up in the Wülzburg concentration camp and died there, leaving works including two symhonies incomplete.
> 
> Not a composer that I know much about. I just happened to listened to a string sextet of his and also another by Martinu on the same CD.


Yes, that work by Schulhoff was great, I have heard the version for string quartet. A very unique "take" on Czech folk music.

The Czechs seems to have gotten the brunt of Nazi oppression, in terms of their composers being killed during the Holocaust. Two others were* Pavel Haas,* whose _String Quartet "From the Monkey Mountains"_ has been played often in this country thanks to the Australian Chamber Orchestra (their leader Richard Tognetti even made an arrangement of it for string orchestra); and also* Viktor Ullmann *whose opera _The Emperor of Atlantis _was written in Theresienstadt holding camp (it was being rehearsed and was to be performed there, but the Nazis pulled the plug after finding out that it was a thinly veiled critique of their brutality - death goes on strike during the opera!).

*Martinu*, who you mention, was lucky to get away with his life, & his music was also banned. The Nazis were esp. not happy with _Double Concerto for piano, strings and timpani_, that was a protest against their invasion of his country in 1938. This is a case of the composer not being of Jewish heritage, but writing music that was not in accord with Nazi ideology for whatever reason, which was also the case with Hindemith...


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## Renaissance (Jul 10, 2012)

Hitler was an extraordinary hypocrite. So many millions of Jews and Russians had to die because of him, and all he did was to site there and listening to their "sub-human" music....How much hypocrisy...Not even he could resist Rachmaninoff.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...n-Jewish-Russian-composers.html#ixzz23prVpDnc


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Such nonsense just burns me up. Makes me just wanna play a dissonant chord of defiance. A big tri-tone middle finger at such totalitarian scum.


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

I recently read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Roslavets


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Hitler showed his ugly hypocrisy by denying the works of Mendelssohn and Mahler because of their racial origins but you can imagine him possibly loving the works of both composers in normal circumstances. The hypocrisy is heightened by his attempts to woo the Jewish Imre Kalman by his offer of bestowing upon him honorary Arayan categorisation purely because he was his favourite operetta composer. To his utmost credit Kalman refused and emigrated while he still had the chance.


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## jani (Jun 15, 2012)

Beethovens Eroica was banned on Prague.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

jani said:


> Beethovens Eroica was banned on Prague.


What?! Why???


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## techniquest (Aug 3, 2012)

I may be wrong (often am), but I believe Shostakovich's 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' and later his 13th Symphony - or at least the poem 'Babi Yar' on which the first movement is based - were banned in the Soviet era.


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## Renaissance (Jul 10, 2012)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> What?! Why???


I assume that it was because of the context it was written, few years after the triumph of the Enlightenment. So, it is a great piece of art that really mirrors the mentalities of that time. Communists really didn't want that kind of "heroes", for the same reason that bats hate light. They wouldn't allow anything that could compromise the control of their ideology on the people. Enlightenment of the mass was not exactly what they had in their minds. Well...not ideology itself was the problem, but how it was applied, but we all know such things.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

techniquest said:


> I may be wrong (often am), but I believe Shostakovich's 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' and later his 13th Symphony - or at least the poem 'Babi Yar' on which the first movement is based - were banned in the Soviet era.


That's right - the 13th created controversy even before a single note was played, not least because the text's author, the young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, was starting to court official disfavour. And when no less a figure than Mravinsky refused to conduct it (possibly anticipating which way the wind was blowing) then the outlook was never going to be too rosy. Apparently the premiere of the work - conducted by a fairly courageous Kirill Kondrashin - was ecstatically received which must have made the Taste Commissars even more upset. Even when Yevtushenko provided more sanitised text for future performances the work was by then too much of a hot potato and, like most hot potatoes, hastily dropped, not just in the USSR but also virtually throughout the Eastern Bloc. Nice to hear that Yevtushenko is still alive and well.


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## powerbooks (Jun 30, 2012)

How about almost all western music were banned in China during cultural revolution, just merely 40 years ago?

I guess this does not count because it did not happen in Europe, or America?


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## powerbooks (Jun 30, 2012)

Not totally politics related, but mainly religion censorship, Cecilia Bartoli did released an album "Opera Proibita" singing all the arias that were banned sometimes in history:


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

In Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976) some western classical was allowed, but Beethoven, all of it, was banned: it was thought that listening to Beethoven evoked / provoked thoughts of individualism


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