.
Revising Strauss
It’s 1941 and Goebbels broods.
It may take years for Germany to win
Its Aryan war of European conquest.
As Minister of Propaganda he
Must keep up spirits all throughout the Reich.
And what are Germans better at than music?
Good, wholesome music—Wagner, Schubert, Bach.
And those enchanting melodies by Strauss!
Such polkas, overtures, Die Fledermaus,
And, naturlich, the great Blue Danube Waltz.
Vienna’s spritely music charms Berlin.
Then Goebbels checks on Strauss’s lineage
And finds that he had Jewish ancestry.
The Waltz King and his father and his brother—
Three great composers but with tainted blood.
The Aryan laws are clear: Goebbels is forced
To ban the Strausses’ music evermore.
Ach, what a shame! The Führer loves those waltzes!
And so the Minister of Propaganda
Goes to the parish church in Austria
To see the marriage records. Yes, it’s clear:
Though baptized, Strauss’s grandparents were Jews.
The Third Reich’s racial laws must be upheld.
The Waltz King and his works must be erased.
Then he conceives an elegant solution!
Herr Goebbels confiscates the register
And gives it to his aids whose skills are such
That forgery for them is now an art.
The page with Juden on it is removed
(but only after it is microfilmed)
And then replaced with documented proof
The Strausses were good Aryan Viennese.
The forgery is done and certified.
The book is then restored to the Church parish.
The Strauss tunes that Der Stürmer deems “so German”
Are safe now for the Third Reich to enjoy.
Epilogue
When Allied forces liberated Austria
The parish church recovered the original
Microfilm of what Goebbels destroyed—
The archive records rescued from Berlin
Which proved the manner of the forgery:
Erasure of the Strausses’ Jewish past.
This microfilm bears witness to the fraud
Of those who ran the Thousand Year Third Reich,
Who thought that history could be revised
To shore up evil ideology.
But truth cannot be altered by decree.
And though it may take years for some to see,
Such falsehoods can’t survive reality.
.
Poet’s Note: For more information about the Nazi “revision” of the Strauss family history, see here. https://www.johann-strauss.at/en/forschung/forschungssplitter/faelschungsgeschichte/
.
.
I Wrote Shakespeare
—London, 1623
I’m not a lunatic! I’m no imposter!
Please hear me out for just one Pater Noster.
You must believe me, though my words sound mad:
Those plays are not his plays! Friend, you’ve been had!
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Midsummer, Shrew, Twelfth Night…?
You cannot truly think the Avonite
Wrote such great plays (in fact, there’s thirty-six)
When he was just an actor from the sticks!
He’s dead, it’s true, and can’t defend his claim,
But I’m the one who should enjoy his fame—
Acclaimed and cheered for this dramatic work
From London beyond Stratford up to York!
Although some claim my sanity may teeter,
I’m perfectly adept at writing meter!
My skill with language heightens people’s senses.
The Avonite? My paid amanuensis.
You say you never saw us interact?
We kept our distance for the sake of tact.
Now this you surely see! My players speak
So beautifully because I studied Greek
A smattering of French and some Italian
While he was merely an upstart rapscallion.
He never really grasped Suetonius
Or how to coin a phrase euphonious.
I had the right schools and the finest mentors;
I read my Ovid, learned of Pan and centaurs.
He knew some Homer but could never find
Its import. His was just an actor’s mind.
The Avonite was poor and poorly skilled
Whereas I went to Cambridge which is filled
With elegance and wit among its tutors;
Thus was I suited to depict the Tudors.
I have certificates of higher learning!
Low-brow, he was, unschooled in true-love’s yearning,
Philosophy and war! To learn for pleasure?
‘Tis nobles only who enjoy such leisure!
In fact, all hail my wisdom, words profound;
My characters with moral strength abound
But also mirror sordid human nature
(And offer clever tips on nomenclature.)
And still the Avonite receives your vote?
Despite my claim that I’m the one who wrote
Macbeth, Othello, Caesar and King Lear?
Ods bodkins, I should think it all quite clear!
The Avonite could write no princely speech
When aristocracy was out of reach.
Now look at me! Respectable! No jugglers,
No roustabouts, or nancies, tars or smugglers.
You claim it simply takes imagination
To write of characters above one’s station?
Then breeding, per your attitude, means nought!
For shame! ‘Tis central to the work I’ve wrought!
You bring up witnesses… Why waste your time
When clearly I’m the more adept at rhyme?
Dick Burbage? His lead player? What said him?
It’s clear he lied! He’d long been rather dim.
Though Burbage acted Prospero and Lear,
He could not note my authorship for fear
Of causing scandal. I’m a well-known earl
Whose stagework might misbrand me as a churl,
Yet author of such words as all enjoy.
Still you—a member of the hoi polloi—
Remain convinced ‘tis I who boast and bluff?
You think I’d plagiarize? Enough, enough!
Don’t look at me with eyes as wide as saucers
When you can see my talent exceeds Chaucer’s.
Don’t wish me in the Tower’s gallery
When I’m more skilled by far than Malory!
None can surpass my work! Not one! That’s clear!
That shaking Avonite of blunted spear?
Not possible! And so I grrrr and rave on!
No good could come from Stratford Upon Avon…
But soft! They’ve found me! Who gave the alarm?
Gads! Now they’ll lead me hence tied wrist to arm.
Friend, fare thee well. They hate it when I roam.
Yes, look me up in Bedlam. That’s my home.
.
Poet’s Note
The First Folio of Shakespeare published in 1623—the year of this poem—contained 36 plays. Later editions add Pericles, the Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsman to the list, making a total of 38 plays.
Richard Burbage (1567–1619) was an English stage actor, widely considered to have been one of the most famous actors of the Globe Theater and of his time. Burbage was a business associate, friend and lead actor for William Shakespeare. He played the title or lead role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest.
Bedlam was the informal name for Bethlehem Royal Hospital, founded in 1247 and, by Shakespeare’s time, a notorious asylum for the insane. The word “bedlam” (which means chaos and madness) is derived from the name of this hospital.
.
.
Brian Yapko is a retired lawyer whose poetry has appeared in over fifty journals. He is the winner of the 2023 SCP International Poetry Competition. Brian is also the author of several short stories, the science fiction novel El Nuevo Mundo and the gothic archaeological novel Bleeding Stone. He lives in Wimauma, Florida.
Brian, I am in awe as I am so often of your fantastic intellect suffusing every verse you write, this time with so many erudite words and phrases for my admiration including scintillating foreign language insertions in the first poem and displaying Shakespearean play knowledge while rhyming some of it in the second. These poems are inspired and inspiring, provocative in their portrayal, and brilliant in their execution. No doubt you are in the Master Class of historic poets writing in modern times.
Roy, I’m overwhelmed by your generous comment. I know you are not a fan of blank verse and so am particularly grateful for your kind words about “Revising Strauss.” The subject matter eluded rhyme since it was such dry history, with only the closing being in rhyme for emphasis of the point. I’m also very grateful for your views on my Shakespeare poem. Shakespeare has long been my favorite playwright (though he is not my favorite poet.) And if you found these poems provocative, I am especially glad. I wanted very much to address the subject of historical revisionism. It is sometimes caused by tyranny, it is sometimes caused by insanity. And often a little bit of both.
I was surprised at the reordering of these poems with the serious one coming before the satirical one since this was the reverse of my concept — I had thought the relatively benign Shakespeare insanity would lay a foundation for the tyrannical madness of the second. But I’m glad to be shown that this combination as ordered worked as well.
Brian, you would have been a welcome dramatic reader at the Shakespeare Roundtable formerly held at the Francis Bacon Library. That Library is no longer in existence; its invaluable collection of Bacon materials has been transferred to the Huntington Library. As you might suppose from the name, it was founded in part to support the claims of Francis Bacon to have written Shakespeare’s works. The Roundtable was an occasional discussion group of the authorship question, with proponents of any candidate presenting claims. Your poem is so lively and dramatic, and so capable of being acted out, that you could have been a Roundtable star! You offer most of the arguments against William from Stratford-upon-Avon. If the Earl of Oxford could have written so well as you, his claim would be stronger!
And your “Revising Strauss” reads to me as euphoniously as a Viennese waltz. It’s a good musical argument and reminder of the famous family’s background. I am sad to remember, though, the world’s loss of Jewish families and musical virtuosity under the Nazis. Not only was music written in the past subject to scrutiny and censorship, but Nazi laws immediately caused Jewish musicians to lose their employment as performers and teachers. Fortunately, some escaped before the Holocaust began in earnest. But they needed exit permits from Germany, and if they hoped to migrate to Israel, entrance permits from the British who were in charge of the area at the time, and who issued far too few. Still, the Palestine Symphony was quickly formed, and I think I remember that Toscanini visited to conduct the opening concert of what is now the Israel Philharmonic. Light and beautiful sound emerged from deepest darkness.
It is good frequently to recount the doings of the Nazis: the effect should be to stem the present common misuse of the term. And you do so quite well, Brian. You recount the loss and phony recovery at the hands of the Nazis of one of the Germanic world’s great treasures, while making it clear that the Nazis also deprived themselves and their compatriots of so many great Jewish practitioners who served up the beloved Mozart, Brahms, and (yes!) even Wagner.
(You could do an excellent piece on that other Strauss figure, Richard, who having married a Jew had to figure out how to keep the Nazis at bay.)
Your Shakespeare piece is full of delightful rhymes (Italian / rapscallion is my favorite)–a fitting acknowledgement of our amazement / disbelief that a hick who never left England could have been the author of our language greatest treasures.
Julian, thank you so much for these insights regarding the Nazis’ ideology. I wish I was more of a fan of Richard Strauss to undertake that one. I also seem to recall that Hindemith had a Jewish wife. Before Hitler had taken power — or had acquired too much power — there was an exodus of artists from Germany and then Austria to escape. I know with certainty of the Threepenny Opera composer Kurt Weill, film composer Wolfgang Korngold and composer Arnold Schoenberg. I have a personal connetion to Schoenberg. I went to UCLA and took several music courses there. All music courses were held in Schoenberg Hall because when he arrived as a refugee from the Nazis, he ended up as a professor at UCLA. (He would turn over in his grave to see how antisemitic UCLA has become.)
I’m also very pleased you enjoyed the Shakespeare piece. I had a great time writing this poem and actually had to remove stanzas because I kept going and going with it. That’s my favorite line as well, though I also favor thr rhyme of “Suetonius” with the obnoxiously inverted “phrase euphonious.”
Thank you again, Julian, for your generous comment!
Thank you very much for your generous comment, Margaret. I appreciate your acknowledgment of the Jewish composers and musicians who were either forced to flee the Third Reich or were murdered in the Holocaust.
As for the Shakespeare piece, I enjoy creating characters who might speak aloud and actually perform the poem. I did not know there was a Francis Bacon Library roundtable regarding Shakespeare. I have long understood that Bacon was the leading candidate as an alternative author to Shakespeare’s plays but have never grasped why it was necessary to question Shakespeare’s authorship. I myself have never seriously doubted him. There is too much contemporaneous evidence. When I first studied Shakespeare at UCLA we used a lot of Folger Library materials and the strong evidence Folger discussed in affirming Shakespeare’s authorship made it clear to me that there was no reason not to accept his authorship.
The class-based and prestige-education arguments don’t impress me. Leonardo DaVinci was a poor bastard child and some of Broadway’s best composers started out from poor families on the Lower East Side. Irving Berlin never even learned how to play the piano properly. But back to Shakespeare: From a law standpoint, I think the proof of Shakespeare’s authorship — though perhaps not beyond a reasonable doubt — is at a minimum clear and convincing. A higher civil standard than a preponderance of the evidence and certainly well enough to be getting along with.
Dear Brian, the poems are exceptional. Your masterful putting yourself in the character’s shoes makes one jealous, as you amalgamate historical facts with thought processes that your conjure up to be very plausible. A narrative that one wants to continue, to keep on reading.
Michael, I am so grateful for this kind comment. Thank you! I hoped you would have a chance to read “Revising Strauss” since it keys into so many of the issues of historical revisionism we are facing today — especially when it comes to the history of Israel and the attempts to erase the deep Jewish connection to the Holy Land. Everything from claiming that the Temple never existed to the claims of fabrication of Jewish sites and artifacts to the outlandish claim that Jesus was a Palestinian. Historical revisionism is a powerful force for evil and must be eliminated as an instrument of propaganda and state-craft.
Wonderful – I particularly dislike the cretins who keep trying to prove Shakespeare did not write his plays (though I think Brian you’ll find there are now 37+!) despite there being so much evidence that he did. Indeed, the notion that he didn’t only occurred as late as the C19th, so Dr Johnson for one would have laughed it out of court. And as for seeking another link between your two excellent poems: the best and most authoritative book/research establishing the validity of Shakespeare’s authorship comes from New York! Yep, Professor James Shapiro’s Contested Wills: Who Wrote Shakespeare? A brilliant book demolishing all the pretenders. And the connection with your first poem? The name, surely? Shapiro – Jewish! (Of course, the other name, James, is invariably a sign of genius – but we’ll leave that for now).
James, I’m so delighted to get your comment! Thank you! I also cannot grasp the fools who think — or NEED to think — that Shakespeare was not the author of his work. There’s more concrete evidence that Shakespeare wrote his plays than there is that Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales or that Malory wrote Morte d’Arthur. Perhaps the prejudice against our favorite Bard really is one of class — how can somewhat with the loose character of an actor who was from the sticks have written such sublime works as King Lear or The Tempest? And yet talent transcends class, creed, sex and wealth.
I think you are right about the number 37+ (I think 38 total, actually) but I chose the number 36 for the number of plays written because Shakespeare’s first folio of 36 plays was first published in 1623 — the year of this poem. Mr. AI has more specific information on the subject so I’ll let him do the talking:
“There are 38 surviving plays by William Shakespeare, though the exact number can vary depending on how collaborations are counted. It’s widely accepted that he wrote or co-wrote about 38 plays, including a number of works with other playwrights like John Fletcher and Christopher Marlowe.
Surviving works: 38 plays, along with 154 sonnets and other poems.
Collaborations: Some of the plays considered to be written or co-written by Shakespeare include The Two Noble Kinsmen (with John Fletcher) and the Henry VI plays (possibly with Christopher Marlowe).
First Folio: A collection published in 1623, about seven years after his death, contained 36 of his plays and was prepared by his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell.”
As for “Revising Strauss” the thematic connection I had conceived was one of historical revisionism. I had originally thought to show the madness of the speaker-lunatic from Bedlam in the Shakespeare poem and then demonstrate cause and effect: the brutally logical and nefarious consequence of allowing such “benign” revisionism to go unchallenged. Thank you for mentioning that Jewish connection — I’ve not heard of Professor James Shapiro but love his agenda as well as the highly witty name of his book. Shapiro works for me.
And, yes, based on the exceptional work of at least two Jameses here at SCP (yourself and Mr. Tweedie) “James” is a name undeniably redolent of poetic genius. 🙂 Nor should we forget about James Wright and James Joyce!
Brian’s satiric poem “I Wrote Shakespeare” is a dramatic monologue in the voice of an imagined lunatic, whose words are a cobbling together of all the absurd claims and conspiracy theories of the anti-Stratfordians. The silent interlocutor, on the receiving end of the speaker’s ravings, could be someone from the Jacobean period, or in a wider and more figurative sense, anyone who rejects the bourgeois snobbery that seems to motivate most anti-Stratfordian partisans.
This particular poem demonstrates that in a dramatic monologue set in a specific time (in this case. soon after Shakespeare’s death), the silent interlocutor must necessarily be understood as a contemporary of the speaker. But that is only in terms of the poem’s dramatic situation. In the actual world of those who read the poem, the silent interlocutor is us, who sit as an audience to the speaker’s words. We are being shown that anti-Stratfordian claims are the stuff of lunacy, academic hauteur, and social contempt for inferiors.
Joe, thank you so much for a) acknowledging that “I Wrote Shakespeare” is pure satire and b) for your insightful comments regarding a subject which has always irritated me since I was an undergrad at UCLA in the early 1980s: the conspiracy theories of the anti-Stratfordians.
I created a speaker who is indeed a lunatic who has escaped from Bedlam but who talks a good talk. There are many such in academia who believe everything they think and who gravitate towards fringe theories because they arrogantly believe they have a deeper insight into the issue being spotlighted than other “lesser” people. You are quite right that my silent interlocutor serves double duty — he (or she) is a mildly interested listener with some knowledge of Shakespeare (enough to know the plays, the identity of Richard Burbage, etc.) But this character is also a stand-in for the reader who gets to judge the sanity and quality of argument offered by the speaker.
Bourgeois snobbery does come to mind as the prime factor in acquiring anti-Stratfordian views. Such a snobbish person will question the ability of a writer who is a “mere” actor who does not have much in the way of class standing and whose primary education was probably limited by the standards of the nobility. But it is entirely possible for people from lower classes and unimpressive education to manifest genius. This is one of the reasons it was difficult for both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking to get a firm foothold in science. No wealth. Bad academic histories. But no amount of breeding or book-learning can compete with TALENT and AMBITION. There is no correlation that I can see between an impressive class or education background and genius in art, music, science or writing. Frederick the Great was the King of Prussia but only a mediocre composer whose mediocrity shown through when he met Johann Sebastian Bach who had no aristocratic status and who faced perpetual financial challenges. It was Bach who was the genius. Not the King.
And then there is the contemporaneous evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship — abundant evidence at that including legal documents licensing performances of his works, writing by Ben Johnson acknowledging Shakespeare’s authorship in this first folio of 1623, and many others. More documentation exists for Shakespeare than just about any other author of the period.
Joe, getting to the satiric point: there is a class of people who want to believe in conspiracies despite overwhelming contrary evidence. Such people are not funny. They are dangerous. They think themselves reasonable as they cherry-pick through minutiae that is mostly relevant. They cannot be persuaded by the obvious nor even by Occam’s razor. For unknown reasons, they WANT to believe in the conspiracy. They NEED to believe in the conspiracy. One has to question what is in the mind of a person who WANTS to believe things that are so clearly wrong. We see this with those denying the moon landing. We see this with people who so hate Jews and Israel that they absurdly claim that Jesus (a rabbi from the House of David) was “Palestinian.” We see this with people willing to believe any absurd Trump theory (saying he stage his own attempted assassination) or people who say the CIA was responsible for 9/11. These people are divorced from reality — apparently by choice. They will never look at evidence objectively. They will take it as a challenge to cherry-pick anything they can come up with to support their cockamamie ideas.
What can one do with them but ignore them? Conversing with the mad will only drive a person mad.
Thank you Brian for your powerful poem about the Strausses and for giving me a much-appreciated history lesson. I think your use of blank verse is very effective here, and yet you rhyme the last four verses– it’s almost like gongs ringing from the parish church. Chilling and reverberating!
Theresa, I am so happy to receive this comment. Thank you! I don’t think I could have written this poem with regular rhyme — the subject matter is too a) upsetting and b) forensic. I questioned my sanity in even trying to turn this slice of Third Reich history into a poem in the first place. But in an time when Jews are being defamed and persecuted across the globe, I could not imagine giving any member of the Third Reich a pass. I love what you say about the gong-sound from the parrish church for those last four lines. That never occurred to me! I just wanted to bring the blank verse back into the realm of “poetic” poetry, to sort of thematically restore order after the disorder of Nazi history, and to underline the point regarding the supremacy of Truth. Thank you again!
Brian, your poems are always a treat to read. As you have probably guessed, “I Wrote Shakespeare” is my favorite – I love the highly entertaining way the poem mocks the snobbery of the elitists who claim it’s impossible that a mere actor from Stratford could have written with such genius by employing the delusional voice of a lunatic nobleman, skewering intellectual vanity beautifully! Your choice of rhymed couplets to spit classist venom from a raving liar’s mouth is perfect, and I just love these lines: “You claim it simply takes imagination / To write of characters above one’s station?” – which smacks of the “experts” of today telling all beneath their sneer that they’re simply not qualified to speak.
“Revising Strauss” anchors the reader in the factual moment with smooth and measured diction that chills in the way it mirrors the cold logic of propaganda. The hypocrisy is tangible – a regime claiming “racial purity” forging the truth it claims to defend. I love the way the Epilogue reveals the literal record of truth beneath the layers of lies, which brings me to my favorite line in this poem: “But truth cannot be altered by decree” – exactly!
The poems are perfectly paired. Both speak through history with a warning that echoes in the present. The tools of deceit may have changed, but the motive is still the same – skewing facts to feed ideologies and egos. Brian, thank you for defending the truth through poetry that entertains as it educates. Both poems shine!
Susan, I’m over-the-moon delighted that you enjoyed these poems! You have a gift for both reading my mind and accurately reading the text. This makes your comments especially gratifying to me. I appreciate your appreciation of my skewering of the snobs in the aristocratic class — the airs they put on as if they lived in a palace rather than the lunatic asylum. You are quite right — I am also skewering the “expert” class. As has been said from time to time, it was experts who built the Titanic and an amateur who built the Ark. It’s the inspiration and talent that matter. And your mention of the couplets — how could it be any other way? Egads! This is Shakespeare! He practically demands either couplets or a sonnet.
I’m also very glad for all that you see in “Revising Strauss.” I’m glad you found it chilling. I myself found this piece of history to be unspeakably cynical, cold and calculating. It is precisely the type of mindset we encounter daily in the Leftist brain where — in the name of compassion and virtue — they make up shit about the climate, about police brutality, about Israeli misbehavior, about the need to protect transgender kids. They falsify evidence, they cherry-pick evidence and then somehow claim they have the high ground. Greta Thunberg is their lying POS patron saint. And it’s utterly revolting.
Susan, thank you for piercing right to the heart of these poems. I’m always grateful for your support in the pursuit of truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. Truth is truth and it will always come out. Always.
Dear Readers, thank you all for your kind comments. I’m glad you enjoyed the poems.
The irony of the first poem is that the “defender of the fatherland” worked so hard to destroy the German cultural legacy. Hitler denounced Einstein’s discoveries as “Jewish physics,” and probably put an end to any hope of Germany’s scientific or technological dominance in WWII. Please read Philip K. Dicks’ The Man in the High Castle or watch it on the TV series with the same name. Hitler was no more and no less stupid than the current spokespersons for the Democrat Party. All lyric poetry is music, and all music is food for the mind.
Back when some people were claiming that Francis Bacon wrote the Bard’s plays, someone quipped, “Shakespeare ate Bacon.” And when someone said of Shakespeare that he had little Latin and no Greek, someone replied that other playwrights had little laughing and no grief. Nice stuff, Brian.
From Delia Bacon back in the 19th century right up to Gilbert Wesley Purdy today, the anti-Stratfordians have been as tenacious for their hopeless cause as those Japanese soldiers who hung on for forty or more years after 1945, refusing to believe that the war was over and that Japan had lost. Sort of like the Flat Earth Society, and the geocentrists (yes, there are still a few of them).
Your comment, Joe, inspired me to conduct a little bit of research regarding Delia Bacon. What an interesting coincidence that her last name corresponds with her preferred selection of authorial substitute for Shakespeare. She is the perfect example of the ideologue — the person who becomes so invested in their narrative that they lose all sense of scale and perspective. She was going to prove that Shakespeare was an imposter, Goddammit, or she was going to die trying. Batty. And yet she talked such a good talk that she made friends of Emerson and Whitman. Good progressive writers. I shudder to think what Ms. Bacon would have been like during the 1930s.
Thank you for reading and commenting, Kip! I am very familiar with the Third Reich’s attempts to discredit “Jewish Physics” and perhaps it is a good thing that they did because — as you point out — if they had embraced Einstein earlier, they may well have won the race to creating the atom bomb — a technology derived from the simply “Jewish” formula E=mc2 as a consequence of the Theory of Special Relativity. The tortured story of how Einstein ended up in the U.S. is a fascinating one, which could have ended very differently since his immigration was almost disapproved. He was seen with great suspicion by J. Edgar Hoover due to his pacifist views. Ironic since it was Einstein’s letter of deep concern to Franklin Roosevelt which launched the Manhattan Project — which he was never allowed to join because of unfounded security suspicions. So Einstein ended up with a serene professorship at Princeton while the world raged with war. If Hitler had mined the Jewish population of Europe for all their gifts, he would have handily won the war. It just goes to show how bigotry and an irrational investment in an irrational narrative can cause enormous damage.
Love the Bacon joke! It took me a minute to get the “little laughing and no grief” joke. Thanks again!
Thank you, Brian, for bringing attention to the ability of the Third Reich to cancel and invalidate great artists in your poem “Revising Strauss”.
Even though I was too young to understand as a child, my father used to speak of the systematic exclusion, banning, or deprecation of musicians and artists identified as Jewish by the Nazis, thus nullifying their contributions from German and occupied-European cultural life. Can you imagine ‘disappearing’ the backgrounds of Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, Paula Abdul, Bette Midler and Neil Diamond from the American (or the world’s) consciousness today? And that’s just M.O.R. pop!
And a standing ovation for “I Wrote Shakespeare”. Your Bedlam guest probably wrote “The (Re)turn of the Screwball” as well.
Laura, thank you so much for your generous comment and important insights. Yes, the Nazis truly impoverished themselves by engaging in a genocide of Europe’s Jews. One may think of Hollywood figures like Hedy Lamarr, Billy Wilder, Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang who fled; scientists like Einstein; artists like Marc Chagall. For every Jew who escaped hundreds perished. With the horrific normalization of antisemitism in the United States, the idea of erasing Jewish cultural contributions seems even more inconceivable. You mention only a few of the performers. Since my poem concerns a composer consider the American composers lost to prejudice: even self-limiting to Broadway composers, it would mean “erasing” George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers (and lyrcists Oscar Hammerstein and Lorenz Hart) , Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Jerome Kern, Frank Loesser, Kurt Weill, the Sherman Brothers (Disney), Kander & Ebb. Or in the movies, there would be no Max Steiner, Andre Previn, Bernard Hermann, Elmer Bernstein… We would truly be musically impoverished.
A timely piece for Strauss’s 200th, and an interesting episode I learned for the first time — and enjoyably. You give us one of your classic dramatic monologues without a monologue (or almost a monologue with Goebbels’s thoughts), and a deft use of “microfilm” in a poem! I’m glad you touch on this episode: Strauss was the Hapsburg Empire personified: not just part German and Jewish, but also Italian, Czech, and (I believe) Hungarian. The Nazis went to no such lengths, though, for Mendelssohn and Mahler.
“I Wrote Shakespeare” gives us a real dramatic monologue in your inimitable style (and another history lesson, too).
Adam, thank you so much for your generous comment. As a student of history I often find extraordinary stories that have fallen by the wayside and which deserve to be told and remembered. This was one of them and I’m glad you were glad to learn about it. I’m smiling broadly at your “microfilm” comment — I worried greatly about the forensic language in this blank verse piece and am glad an inherently unpoetic word somehow worked. I’m so glad of what you say in terms of the symbolic importance of Strauss. He truly was the King of Waltzes and had a popular touch that Mendelssohn did not have and that Mahler — rather later — most certainly did not. I know few people who think of Mahler and smile.
Thank you also for the appreciation of “Shakespeare.” I found this one great fun to write.
An additional thing to mention, Adam — I have long remembered your own beautiful poem “Elegy on a Strauss Waltz”. Because of your own love of Strauss and your composition-prowess, I feel doubly honored that you enjoyed my Strauss piece — one rather coldly different from your own. I just reread your poem and still find it so haunting and beautiful. I am going to post the link here: https://www.classicalpoets.org/2020/06/elegy-on-a-strauss-waltz-by-adam-sedia/