The second week of April, the Philharmonic gave a final concert. The program, execrable, was entirely in the taste of that period—Brünnhilde’s last aria, the Götterdämmerung of course, and to end it all Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony—but I went all the same. The icy auditorium was intact, the chandeliers shone with all their lights; I could see Speer, from a distance, with Admiral Dönitz in the box of honor; at the exit, uniformed Hitlerjugend holding baskets offered members of the audience cyanide capsules: I was almost tempted to swallow one on the spot, in a fit of pique.
