One night in May 1939, an audience of Czechs and their Nazi masters packed Prague's National Theater. At the concert's end, Czechs and Germans began applauding. After a while the Germans stopped; the Czechs went on clapping stolidly — not cheering, just beating their hands together as if they would never stop. The Germans looked baffled and angry. Finally, Conductor Vaclav Talich held up the score, kissed it and, with an expansive gesture, presented it to the audience. It was Smetana's Má Vlast (My Country}, a cycle of symphonic poems breathing Czech patriotism; its last section tells of a glorious Czech liberation.
The Germans did not dare arrest Talich for his act of defiance; he played all through the occupation and through Czechoslovakia's second liberation. Last week Talich, who made the Czech Phil harmonic Orchestra world-famous, was fired.
Czechoslovakia's Communists had not been in full power a fortnight before their hand fell upon music. Last week, they expelled Pianist Ruda Firkusny from the syndicate of Czechoslovak composers.
They confiscated the estate of Baron George Daubek, central European representative of International Business Machines and husband of New York Metropolitan Opera Singer Jarmila Novotna; they announced that Daubek no longer had "an open protector" in the Czech cabinet. They did not say who the protector had been. The late Jan Masaryk had played piano accompaniments for Novotna on U.S. recordings of Czech folk songs.
Policemen of the Soul. To the Czechs, their songs are symbols of their liberty.
Communist cunning decreed that the mu sic of Czechoslovakia be "cleansed" be cause it was in music that the Czech spirit of independence was most likely to break forth.
Conductor Talich's dismissal was a measure of public order as natural for a Communist as it would be for a New York cop to take a pistol out of a maniac's hands. Once in power, the Communist de fines crime as whatever may undermine him; he wants to stamp out "crime" be fore it has been committed. This kind of preventive policing is more concerned with thoughts, attitudes, feelings, than it is with overt acts.
The police-state mentality, which the Communists have carried to systematic lengths beyond Heinrich Himmler's sadistic dreams, has sent tens of millions to die in Russian labor camps ; it has reduced the Russian people to an inarticulate mass of helplessness ; it has, in the last three years, fastened itself on 100 million Europeans outside Russia. This week it was lapping at Rome, frightening the spokesmen of 16 nations conferring at Paris, driving the U.S. to a belated recognition that the Axis had never been as dangerous as the imperial oligarchs of Communism.
The police state marching west across Europe, south across Asia, was embodied in the person of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, Marshal of the Soviet Union (he never fired a shot), Hero of Socialist Labor (he never swung a pick), Member of the Politburo. He is a steady, quiet type who .has a wife, two children and a suburban villa to which he commutes in a Packard —with the shades always drawn.