Mengelberg and Mahler

I attended an amazing performance this evening, not at Tanglewood but at Shakespeare and Company. It was a one-man, one-act play by Daniel Klein, acted by Robert Lohbauer, called Mengelberg and Mahler.

The play's character is Willem Mengelberg, the famous Dutch conductor who had been conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for decades when Germany invaded and occupied Holland in 1940. Mengelberg was the world's foremost promoter of the music of Gustav Mahler. Mengelberg was not Jewish, Mahler was (or had been; he died in 1911), and sixteen members of the orchestra were Jewish. The Nazis "purified" the orchestra, shipping its Jewish members off to "work camps" that turned out to be extermination camps. Three orchestra members died in the camps.

In the play, it's after the war and Mengelberg is trying to come to terms with the fact that he's been exiled to Switzerland by the Dutch Council for Honor in the Arts for collaborating with the Nazis during the war. He doesn't see his actions as collaboration, of course, and thinks he's been greatly wronged by the pigheaded Dutch committee. There's all sorts of ambiguity and unanswerable questions, such as: Did his actions rise to the level of collaboration? What about all the others in Holland who "went along" with the Nazis? Was Mengelberg punished by the Dutch because he was such a prominent figure and they were disgusted by their own wartime actions? Could anything he might have done have had any real effect? At one point, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi Reichskommissar in Holland, asked Mengelberg if the sixteen Jewish orchestra members were indispensable. Mengelberg said no, and was given the chance to take anyone he wanted from the Rotterdam Philharmonic to fill their places. What if he had said yes, they're indispensable? Would anything have happened differently?

Mengelberg clearly thought the world of Mahler, but at one point his deeply-buried antisemitism comes through against Mahler. Like almost everyone, he's a very complicated person.

I was riveted by the play, which was performed in Shakespeare & Co's new, small theater. There are only five rows of seats, on three sides of the stage, so those in the audience are almost part of the action (I was on the front row). A fascinating evening.

I have tickets to two other plays, both Shakespeare: Richard III and The Winter's Tale. I've not seen either of them before.