Bond of broeders: Anton Hartman and music in an apartheid state

Musical Times, Summer 2004 by Walton, Chris

IN 1958, Hartman conducted the world premiere of the radio opera Asterion, commissioned from the Dutch composer Henk Badings and the Afrikaans writer NP van Wyk Louw. Louw towered above his contemporaries (his epic masterpiece Raka has a raw narrative force equalled by few writers of the 2oth century), and although his writings and attitudes displayed obvious dissent from the Afrikaner orthodoxy of the day, he too was a Broederbonder (thus having his cake and eating it). His libretto is a strange, disturbing tale of a young magician whose obsession with 'perfection' turns all living things into inanimate objects; at the close, he is killed in order that the natural 'flow' might be re-established. The libretto can be (and has been) read as critical of the National Party's obsession with a false notion of 'purity' that would inevitably bring only stasis and death;4 but the metaphor, in as much as it was intended by the librettist, was probably vague enough for neither Hartman nor the SABC to take offence. Furthermore, Badings had collaborated with the Nazis in Holland during the second World War. While this left him a marked man in his native land, it probably made him all the more sympathetic to Hartman and the former Nazi sympathisers in the Afrikaner cultural establishment.

In 1959, Piet Meyer became Chairman of the Board of Control of the SABC; the following year, the administrative post of 'Head of Music' at SABC was created, with Hartman as the first incumbent. he did not stop conducting, however, and did so at the official declaration of the Republic of South Africa in 1961; at the fifth anniversary celebrations in 1966, he conducted a choir of 3500 (the photo of this in the book, although blurred, smacks not a little of Nuremberg). Between 1962 and 1964, Mia Hartman tells us, her uncle and his fellow conductors at the SABC performed 178 school concerts and 51 evening concerts across the country; in 1966, he was jointly responsible for creating an SABC 'Junior Orchestra'; and he made a point of giving gifted young South Africans the chance to play concerti. There is indeed no doubting the missionary zeal of the man to bring music to his fellow (white) citizens. he also continued commissioning works from the leading South African composers, and toured Europe on his own for the SABC, auditioning musicians for its orchestra (there remained a remarkably high foreign contingent in South African orchestras until the 19903). Visits from foreign guests also brought prestige to Hartman, to the SABC and (of course) the country - Igor Stravinsky being the most prominent, his visit taking place in 1962. he was accompanied by Hartman throughout, from Cape Town to the Kruger Park.

In 1964, at his own request, Hartman transferred to the post of Principal Conductor of the SABC Orchestra; three years later, he moved back to the administrative position of Head of Music. One gets the distinct impression that Hartman had carte blanche (if one may be forgiven the colour pun) to do just about whatever he wanted at the SABC. This impression has been confirmed by the present writer's conversations with certain of Hartman's contemporaries. The man who made it possible, by all accounts, was fellow Broederbonder Piet Meyer. Meyer was a close confidante of yet another Broederbonder, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and as Chairman of the Executive Council of the Bond from 1960, Meyer presided over a massive increase in that organisation's influence. he also utilised the propaganda possibilities of the radio to shore up support for the National Party.5