The Towering Musical Integrity of Christoph von Dohnányi
In September, 1943, a thirteen-year-old German boy named Christoph von Dohnányi wrote an innocuous-seeming letter to his uncle Dietrich:
The letter becomes heartbreaking when you know the context. The recipient was the dissident theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had been imprisoned several months earlier, on account of his opposition to the Nazi regime. Dohnányi’s father, Hans, was also in prison, having participated in plots to kill Hitler. Both men would be executed before the end of the Second World War. Young Christoph wrote in the knowledge that Bonhoeffer’s correspondence was being monitored and that a careless word could have fatal consequences. So he spoke in veiled terms, making a cryptic parable of the gnawing wasps.
Bonhoeffer, with his immense capacity for empathy, worried about how his nephew, who was also his godson, was faring under these circumstances. Bonhoeffer later wrote to his own parents, “What sort of image of the world must be forming in the mind of a fourteen-year-old when for months he has to write to his father and godfather in prison? There won’t be too many illusions about the world in a mind like his.” But Christoph showed signs of inner strength. “I think that he will still greatly develop in spirit,” Bonhoeffer wrote to his colleague Eberhard Bethge. Perhaps, he thought, his nephew would take up theology. In his last will and testament, Bonhoeffer saw the future more clearly: “Christoph [should have] the clavichord if he would take pleasure in it.”
Christoph von Dohnányi died last month, just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday, lionized as one of the greatest conductors of his time. What he had carried with him from his tragic childhood is not something that casual observers could assess. I interviewed Dohnányi in 2011, and although he mentioned his family’s fate he did not make a great deal of it. We were talking about the eternal problem of Wagner’s politics, and Dohnányi said, almost as an aside, “My father was in a concentration camp, and they played Wagner.” He was more interested in talking about the music itself, in all its damaged magnificence. Yet I couldn’t help sensing Dohnányi’s experience in what he said, and, more widely, in the performances that he led. He had an almost palpable aura of moral authority: he was an aristocrat of the spirit. He made you believe what history denies—that a life in music confers wisdom and virtue.
The Dohnányis came from a Hungarian noble family that traced its roots back centuries. The Bonhoeffers constituted a long line of pastors, doctors, scientists, and jurists. Music loomed large on both sides. Dohnányi’s great-grandmother Clara von Hase studied piano with Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt. His grandfather Ernst von Dohnányi was an internationally celebrated composer and pianist who, at an early age, won the approval of none other than Brahms. Cultured, cosmopolitan, generally liberal, the Dohnányis and the Bonhoeffers represented the best of the German-speaking bourgeois tradition. Dohnányi told me that Wagner was looked down upon in his family, less on political grounds than on aesthetic ones: the music was vulgar. His mother said of one of his Wagner performances, “I only come because you do it.”
In early adulthood, Dohnányi and his older brother, Klaus, both studied law. Their father had been a leading jurist, and Christoph initially wished to follow suit. Klaus went on to have a distinguished career in law and politics, serving as the mayor of Hamburg. Now ninety-seven, Klaus still weighs in on current affairs. Christoph gravitated toward music. After studying conducting, piano, and composition in Munich, he sought further guidance from his grandfather Ernst, who was teaching at the Florida State University in Tallahassee. Dohnányi also attended Leonard Bernstein’s conducting seminar at Tanglewood. Once, when another conductor presumed to correct Dohnányi’s way with Haydn, Bernstein interrupted the exchange, saying, “You may do whatever you want!”
