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Klarinet Archive - Posting 000068.txt from 2007/05
From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] art and "circumstances"
Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 19:12:13 -0400
There may be something of a misunderstanding here. I would not
dismiss a musical genius and artist like Wagner, simply because
he was a hateful bigot and an antisemite of enormous magnitude.
There have been lots of jerks who behaved that way, but whose
music, or art, or poetry I still value.
But not Wagner. His sin was not so much due to his bigotry but
rather because he made his bigotry a part of the art works he
composed. It takes a little doing and a knowledge of medieval
history to recognize the rancid ideas that he espouses throughout
Meistersinger or Siefried or Gotterdammerung, but there they are
there in all their putrid ugliness. So I don't dismiss Wagner
because I find his politics toxic. I don't listen to Wagner
because I don't want to hear public displays of antisemitism over
and over as his works are done again and again. And I stopped
playing his music some years ago. If I were hired to play
Wagner, I just turned down the job, saying that I was playing
somewhere else that night. No big stink. No marching around
with signs. I just refused to associate with his music (and his
writings) in any way. It is too painful for me to do so.
Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net
-----Original Message-----
From: Rien Stein [mailto:rstein@-----.nl]
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 1:53 PM
To: klarinetlijst
Subject: [kl] art and "circumstances"
It will be clear that there has always been an uneasy
relationship between
art and the life situation of the artist. From the very first
moment I got
acquainted with Messiaens masterpiece "Quator pour la fin du
temps"
(quartett for the end of times) I considered it a masterpiece. My
appreciation for it however greatly increased when I learned
about the
situation in which Messiaen composed it. I was so happy to be
informed by th
Maestro himself, and whenever I hear it (and I hear it on any
occasion I can
hear it!) I remember what Messian told me about it.
But when I read poems of Latin poets from the beginning of our
christian
era, I often am well aware that those poets mainly wrote what
thay wrote to
move a sponsor to open their purse, wallet, or whatever people
had at that
time to keep their money in. And that sometimes increases my
appreciation
for them, usually however it makes me sharper for recognizing
fill-ups.
Funnily: the real great poets do not suffer from this!
Probabely that is why my appreciation for Richard Strauss is
great, for
Richard Wagner and Carl Orf is low. Mengelberg, the conductor of
the
Concertgebouw orkest in Amsterdam, can be compared to Strauss:
both seem to
have been hardly aware of what really was going on. Strauss
continued to
compose under the Nazi regime, Mengelberg continued to conduct
the "gebouw".
From Mengelberg it is know he tried to save Jewish musicians, but
not on the
grounds they were humans, but because they were unmissable in the
orchestra -- an argument the anticulturist Nazi's were insensible
to.
Richard Strauss can be compared to Mengelberg. What was going on
in the
"real" world was not important, only their art's world was real.
Wagner however was a real antisemite. As I wrote before, my
grandfather was
a great admirer of him. He possesed his complete works, but
obviously never
had read them all: Wagner writngs were sufficiently clear to
expose his
antisemitism. Even as a child I felt uneasy on reading them.
Ciao
Rien
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