Today's New York Times has a review of Taking Sides, which is about the interrogation of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, just after World War 2.

… Unlike Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, conductors who fled Germany during the Nazi era, Furtwängler chose to remain. Wooed by Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, the man thought by many to be the world's greatest conductor allowed himself to be lionized by the Nazis and lived a privileged existence. Such was Furtwängler's status and importance to the Nazis as a high-minded trophy that he wasn't even pressured to join the Nazi party.

Furtwängler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic at Hitler's 53rd birthday, but ingeniously devised a way to avoid saluting the Führer. The radio announcement of Hitler's death was accompanied by Furtwängler's recording of Bruckner's majestic Seventh Symphony.

I haven't seen this film myself, but this review got me thinking once again about the love affair between Nazi Germany and classical music. A few months back I did a Samizdata posting about this. It started as a relatively light-hearted observation to the effect that an amazing number of film villains (most notably the ultimate recent film villain Hannibal Lector) love classical music. But by the end of the posting I was saying, much more seriously: it was the Nazis. They were the ones who connected classical music to villainy.

The movie pointedly compares the solemnity of German high culture with the boisterousness of American popular culture in back-to-back scenes of a German concert audience listening silently to Beethoven in a soaking rain that pours through a bombed-out roof, and American soldiers jitterbugging to a swing band playing "Route 66." The implication seems to be that the Germans' silent reverence for Beethoven is similar to their acceptance of the Nazis' agenda, which warped elements of the same mystical romanticism into national hero-worship of a tyrant and his symbols.

"Classical" music is now pretty much a living corpse. Lots of people still love it, but we love it on the same basis that earlier generations would read and love Greek plays or Latin poetry. And I'm thinking, would classical music be in such an advanced state of museum-itis, so to speak, if the Nazis hadn't been doing their worst while worshipping the stuff.

It wasn't that everyone suddenly decided that this music was wicked. It was just that it was no longer possible to say that it was definitely morally uplifting. Before Hitler, classical music was moral. After Hitler, it merely sounded moral. After Hitler, music like this couldn’t be composed to say the deepest and greatest things any more. It no longer rang true. Not to potential composers, anyway. When Hitler dies and they play Bruckner's Seventh (which is magnificent music, by the way, truly magnificent), Bruckner's music can't ever have quite the moral stature that it had before. From then on, if you're a composer, you're going to say to yourself, whatever else I do, I mustn't try to write Bruckner's Tenth. Deep feeling. Massed strings. Long, grand, slow movements. Tempestuous finales. Urrgh. You can almost smell the Zyklon B.

As I say, I don't think the audiences saw things like this, in fact we know they didn't. But the composers just couldn't keep on as if nothing bad had happened to classical music. It was as if there was a fifty-year-long, partial strike. And now the message – the non-message, that is to say – is finally making its way through to the audiences. In Germany in particular, the "classical" story has been especially arid and desiccated. How could it possibly have been otherwise? And without Germany going full tilt, classical music could only be a shadow of its former glory.

Meanwhile, the classical music equals villainy equation swept unchallengeably through the popular culture. Many of us might have wanted to challenge this stereotype. But how could we? It was too close to being true.

Okay there were lots of other things going on. Electronic guitars, microphones for singers, shortening attention spans, the emancipation of the electronic media, teenagers with serious pocket money, the Baby Boom. Little things of that sort. But it really didn't help that Hitler loved this music. It really didn't.