>On the spring day in 1945 that Nazi Germany’s official radio network broke the news of Adolf Hitler’s death, the announcement was followed by the playing of a 1942 recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. The work chosen was the elegiac slow movement of Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. This was the last of countless times that classical music, most of it written by Bruckner and Richard Wagner, Hitler’s two favorite composers, was played on Nazi ceremonial occasions, or otherwise enlisted in the service of the Third Reich.
What a graceful way to end the German legacy, and mourn the death of Europe.