Klarinet Archive - Posting 001313.txt from 2000/12

From: "Wolman, Kenneth" <KWolman@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Wagner vs. Straus (was Wlach a Nazi)
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 12:14:17 -0500

From: Daniel Leeson [SMTP:leeson0@-----.net]

> All in all, the most one can say about Strauss was
> that he was a naif. Personally I think it important that we reserve our
> distaste for those who truly, by their actions over a long period of
> time, deserve the opprobrium. Wagner was such a pig. Strauss was not.
> If the Nazi philosophy had been to never wear silk underwear, he would
> have gone along with that too. He would have gone alone with anything
> that would permit another performance of Rosenkavalier.

When I read the original post I felt as though I were reading an inside-out version of "All Jews are money-grubbing shysters who just wanna doodle a Christian girl" or "Negroes [sic] smell funny." Broad-brushing any ethnic, racial, or religious group is shocking at best and leads us down a garden path that has more thorns than I'd care to stumble into, thanks very much.

I know far less about Richard Strauss's life than I do Wagner's if only because Richard Wagner was a megalomanical self-promoter. Strauss, as far as I can tell, indeed was a naif. Or, put another way, he was a bourgeois gentilhomme, an ordinary and unheroic man who lived in surpassingly extraordinary times that wanted for heros. All he wanted was to keep his head down, write his music, and go about his business.

Now, if some ghastly Philip K. Dick ("Man in the High Castle") scenario came into play in this country, if Nazis came to power HERE, how many of us would not behave precisely the same way? How many of us would not keep our butts away from the whirring knives because it's not our fight? How many of us are extraordinary men and women? Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer went BACK to Germany from the safety of Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan because his country was being poisoned at its core by Hitler, and he felt obligated to fight back to reclaim decency. He spent years in prison and died on a gallows in the Flossenburg concentration camp, scarcely a month before the war in Europe ended. Bonhoeffer is one of my personal heros because I doubt in my heart that I would have the courage to leave the comforts of exile and sacrifice my life.

Hannah Senesh left safe exile in Palestine to parachute back into her native Hungary to fight the Nazis. She was caught and executed. She could have stayed in Palestine and lived.

Wagner is the counterbalance, or one among several. He was an appalling monster who nevertheless wrote some of the greatest music ever heard in an operatic theater. I haven't the slightest doubt that had he lived until the 1940s he would have cheered and applauded Hitler's efforts to make Germany and the occupied nations "Judenrein." The man was a fiend. I heard from a rabbi acquaintance in Pikesville, Maryland that Hans Pfitzner, composer of "Palestrina," was a kind of Wagner, Jr. whose arrogance may even have surpassed Wagner's own. The story as it was told to me was that Pfitzner once marched into the office of a VERY highly-placed Nazi official--maybe even Goebbels himself--and demanded a State pension for his musical services to the Reich. The official stared at him and is supposed to have said "Pension? How about retirement in Treblinka?" At which point Pfitzner is supposed to have left a jet-trail behind him.

Some people just do crappy things because they believe in them. One of the reasons Cesare Siepi, at the time a comparative unknown, made his Metropolitan Opera debut on opening night in 1950 as King Philip II in Don Carlos was because Rudolf Bing, himself a refugee from Austria, would not hire Gottlob Frick, a stupendous-voiced German bass who allegedly was a wholehearted supporter of the Reich. Frick had one of most magnificent voices I've ever heard: every time I hear his recording of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, I get gooseflesh. But I doubt I'd want to shake his hand. Nor do I think he'd want to shake mine.

And some people are just stupid. Richard Strauss as a composer belongs in the same league as Wagner: for me Rosenkavalier, Salome, and Elektra are among the supreme expressions of human emotion musically expressed. Does that mean Strauss was a more moral human being than the rest of us? No. Does the fact he hid under the bed during the war make him a boot-clicking Nazi? No. It just makes him an ordinary sad case of a human being who is rather like more of us than more of us will want to admit.

End of sermon. We return you now to our regularly scheduled programming.

Ken

Kenneth Wolman
Merrill Lynch/DCSS
570 Washington Street, NYC
212-647-2496

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