Maestro: Context

"The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933. They believed that Germans were "racially superior." They claimed that Jews were "inferior" and a threat to the so-called German racial community." Explore this Introduction to the Holocaust to explore and better understand the Nazi treatment of the Jews during World War II.

This database article covers the background to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and its impact. "Auschwitz is the largest concentration camp network established by Nazi Germany for the mass killing of Jews and other political prisoners during World War II. The Nazi Party's systematic murder of millions of Jewish people from 1941 to 1945 is known as the Holocaust ... "

Learn who Adolf Eichmann was and the role he played in World War II. "Adolf Eichmann was the architect responsible for planning and implementing the Holocaust, the Nazi "Final Solution" that tried to exterminate all of European Jewry. Eichmann was executed in Israel in 1962, after having been prosecuted and found guilty of war crimes in an Israeli court ... "

"As Wagner's bicentenary dredges up old debates, Germans struggle to celebrate the virulent anti-Semite The story goes that Adolf Hitler first heard Richard Wagner's music when he was 12. The year was 1901 -- and the setting was Linz, Austria, where the young boy had gone with his friend Gustl to see a production of the opera Lohengrin. "In one instant I was addicted," Hitler would write of his first encounter with Wagner. Decades later, Hitler -- by then a budding führer -- was said to hum Lohengrin tunes while pacing a room ... "

"When Hitler banned modern and abstract art as degenerate, the style that replaced it in German museums was kitsch neo-Classicism. But in the case of degenerate music, a more convincingly nationalistic alternative was readily available. Reaching back into the 18th and 19th centuries, Hitler mobilized Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner to stir the masses in a musical language that was purely Germanic ... "

"That music (even “absolute music”) aptly and effectively conveys ideological attitudes is proven by how often it was, and still is, the frequent object of censorship. The question of why it, possibly more than other arts, has the ability to be ideological has seldom been addressed directly. Nonetheless, work done during more than a century in the social sciences does, at least in part, shed some light on where to look for the mysterious power music has to reflect or challenge social order or, even when not intended to do so, to collect symbolic meaning and functions that easily escape the intentions of its makers.

Wagner wrote the librettos and scores of some of the world’s greatest operas, such as Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen. A conductor, musical director, and writer as well as a composer,

"Liszt revolutionized the art of piano playing and established the vogue of the recitalist. As a composer, he attempted to reconcile the trends of French and German Romanticism, created the musical genre of the symphonic poem, founded new innovations in harmony and form, and in his late works anticipated many devices of twentieth century music."

Rachmaninoff is best remembered as the composer who was the last great figure in the Romantic tradition and the leading pianist of his era. His music is noted for its melancholy and long melodic line.