Florence and her lawyers had further talks about the collection, but as the author of the report commented, ‘they beseeched me to refrain from any further undertaking in order to avoid any difficulties for Mrs Gould … such as the possibility of her being sent to a concentration camp’. Florence had been outmanoeuvred. Such threats were especially worrying because in September Vichy’s newly established Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ), convinced that Gould was a Jewish name, had been causing difficulties for her husband, who now had to provide baptismal certificates from America proving that he was Christian.
And while Vichy was helping the Nazis with much of the bureaucratic dirty work by forcing registration as a preliminary to rounding up the Jews, suave German officers in Paris could enjoy all that the city had to offer, gastronomically, culturally and erotically. In four years of occupation the Germans spent six and a half million francs on opera tickets alone. They claimed opera as their own, especially Wagner, and there were fifty-four performances of Wagner at the Paris Opéra during the Occupation compared with thirty-five of Mozart. In May, Herbert von Karajan, the young German conductor and Music Director of the Berlin Staatsoper, came to Paris with his Berlin Staatskapelle to perform for the first time at the Paris Opéra. The stars for this gala occasion – two performances of Tristan und Isolde celebrating Wagner’s birthday on 22 May – were the German tenor Max Lorenz and the French soprano (and Hitler favourite) Germaine Lubin. Staging the opera was an enormous undertaking in wartime as it involved moving scenery, instruments and hundreds of people from Berlin to Paris. Hans Speidel, Chief of Staff of the Military Command in Paris, considered the enterprise a triumph for German logistics as well as culture, always an important goal, and was so enamoured of Lubin that he invited her the following year to perform a concert of Schubert songs, including ‘Let Us Make Peace’, for his own farewell party when he was posted to the eastern front. ‘Now I can go off to war with happiness,’ he wrote. Speidel was to remain a friend and supporter of Lubin to the end of his life.
The first performance of Tristan und Isolde was reserved entirely for German officers in Paris, and the auditorium became a sea of grey-green uniforms. The second was also quickly sold out, mostly to Parisians with influence who were keen to hear German music. Winifred Wagner, the composer’s English-born daughter-in-law and a friend of Hitler as well as of Lubin, attended both and was guest of honour at the glittering after-party. Lubin received rave reviews for her performance of Isolde. Véronique Rebatet, wife of Lucien, a true Wagner connoisseur, was in the audience for the second performance and commented afterwards, ‘I never saw a better performance of Tristan than the one with Germaine Lubin as Isolde.’ Cocteau wrote to Lubin: ‘Madame, what you have done for Isolde was such a marvel that I lack the courage to remain silent.’
But not everyone rushed to praise Lubin. The writer of one anonymous letter (the sort that was becoming all too familiar in Paris) accused her of being an ‘adored artist who has sold herself’. She always argued that art was not a matter of politics and that she lived only for her art. But there was a fine line between performing and being used by those for whom you were performing. Arguably, Lubin crossed it, but she believed that her friendship with many in the German hierarchy – including a German lover, Hans Joachim Lange, a Wehrmacht officer introduced to her by Winifred Wagner, whom she liked to entertain at her chateau near Tours – gave her useful influence, all the more necessary because everyone now had friends suddenly arrested. Lange was indeed helpful to Lubin personally, securing the release of her son who had been in a German prisoner-of-war camp since 1940. But Lubin’s later claims, when facing trial after the Liberation, that she in turn had used her influence to help release her elderly Jewish singing teacher, Marya Freund, from Drancy, were to prove unfounded.