Sunday 30 June 2019

Music and Politics

During my lifetime, I have listened to many, many conductors, violinists, singers and pianists. I have always judged them, I hope, on their prowess as conductors, violinists, singers, or pianists. In my early teens, in my school library during the 1950s, I read a book on music by someone called “Bacharach”. Even at an early age I was scandalised that he denigrated Wilhelm Furtwängler -- because he had stayed and worked in Nazi Germany -- and eulogised Arturo Toscanini who had left Italy and found lucrative employment in America (from which he never returned except for visits, despite the fall of fascist Italy in 1944). History has decided the respective merits of Furtwängler and Toscanini. What did Mr Bacharach's evaluation have to do with the respective conducting merits of the German and the Italian?

Music is an art form -- along with painting and ballet -- that transcends frontiers of language, nationality, culture, politics, race and religion. I therefore still -- after over 60 years -- become irate when composers, musicians or artists are pilloried because of their race, religion, politics, or nationality. It still goes on, 60 years later viz the “sage” Norman Lebrecht lambasting the highly talented Russian conductor Valery Gergiev as “Putin's henchman”. Herr Lebrecht may not like Gergiev's conducting (but, usually, I do). But what do Gergiev's politics have to do with his conducting of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique?

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