Vol. 19 · No. 3 · Issue 60 · Fall 2001 · pp. 80-93 (14)

Steven M. Whiting

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Abstract

After Different Drummers (1992) and The Twisted Muse (1997), Michael H. Kater has presented Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits, as "the last in a trilogy on the interrelationship between sociopolitical forces on the one side, and music and musicians in the Third Reich, on the other" (264). The author is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (York University). The author of the present review, a musicologist, must express his gratitude to Professor Kater for helping to make it professionally unacceptable to restrict oneself anymore to "the music itself" when considering certain composers active in Germany of the 1930s. By the same token, Kater's reticence about "the music itself" (which presumably springs from humility) will leave many a musicologist itching to adduce (if not consult) the scores to confirm or to contest Kater's points, for Kater is writing about lives, not works, unless the works have impinged on biographical issues.