In the years after the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and throughout the Second World War, all aspects of life in Germany changed. Despite the social and political upheaval, gentile citizens continued to attend concerts. In this book, historian Neil Gregor surveys how the classical concert scene was impacted in Nazi Germany. Taking the perspective of the audience, rather than institutions or performers, Gregor delves into the cultural lives of ordinary Germans under conditions of dictatorship. Did the ways in which Germans heard music in the period change? Did a Nazi way of listening emerge?

For audiences, Gregor shows, changes to the concert experience were small and often took place around the edges. This, combined with the preserved idea of the concert hall as a space of imagined civility and cultivation, led many concertgoers and music lovers to claim after the war that their field and their practice had been innocent—a place to retreat from the vicious violence and racism of the Nazi regime. Drawing on untapped archival sources, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany reveals that the true history was one of disruption but also of near seamless adaptation. Through countless small acts, the symphony concert was reframed within the languages of strident nationalism, racism, and militarism to ensure its place inside the cultural cosmos of National Socialist Germany.