Should we suppress good music by bad people?

See more about MusicaNova Orchestra of Scottsdale at
www.MusicaNovaAz.org

On April 11 4 PM at Scottsdale Center for the Arts Scottsdale Center for the Arts we will be doing our annual concert of "Forbidden Music"-music that owes its obscurity to its active suppression by political forces. We have, of course, mostly focused on music suppressed by the Nazis, but suppressing music for political reasons goes back to Plato (Bertrand Russell famously suggested that for Plato the only acceptable music was "in modern terms, 'Rule Britannia' and 'the British Grenadiers'"). It is fascinating to look at the Communist approach to artistic suppression because it is so different from the way the Nazis went about it. But they had in common a desire to suppress not just specific pieces of music but the musical expression of certain composers. The Nazis based a great deal (but not all) of their choice on what they called "racial" grounds; the Communists had an ever shifting ground of acceptable music and much of the suppression seemed purely personal; certainly the fact that Myaskovsky was condemned at the infamous 1948 Congress but Kabelevsky was not had as much to do with their relative political maneuvering as their music. (I tend to think that the big three-Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian would have been condemned even if they had been better politicians).

The Soviet suppression, being so supremely personal, makes you wonder about suppressing music on the basis of personal factors at all. There is the interesting case of the implicit ban on the music of Wagner in Israel (which has been breached a few times in recent years); there is the complete collapse of the reputation of the Norwegian composer Christian Sinding, who, suffering from dementia in the last weeks of his life, joined the Nazi party. There is the supremely complex and heartbreaking case of Jon Leifs, an Icelandic composer married to a Jewish woman. During the war Leifs joined the Nazi party under circumstances no one should have to endure. There is the far less ambiguous case of the Nationalist Norwegian composer Geir Tveitt, who, like many of his generation, bought into a good deal of Fascist racist nonsense.

These cases are all different, but all these composers have suffered neglect because things they did or believed became popular knowledge and created revulsion against the person.It has nothing to do with their music. But such revulsion is very selectively and inconsistently applied. Schoenberg, before his Jewishness created problems, actively promulgated notions of German cultural superiority; Stravinsky loudly proclaimed his anti-semitism to his German publisher in the hopes that this particular bigotry would help him get performances in Nazi Germany, and at one point he was an unabashed admirer of Mussolini. I have never heard anyone suggest we should not perform Stravinsky because of his fascist or anti-semitic views.

Of course Wagner was more than an anti-semite-he was a sociopath, with many unsavory personality traits, all of which are well known. But ultimately the reason for Wagner's ban in Israel has more to do with the way his music was used by the Nazis, and the fact that his daughter in law-who ran the Bayreuth Festival-was personally close to Hitler. But Wagner died before Hitler was born, so it is unfair to condemn him for the use Hitler put his music to.

Should Sinding, a very fine composer, be relegated to obscurity because of something completely uncharacteristic he did while suffering from dementia? As for Jon Leifs-who I consider a great composer-his music celebrated the "purity" of primitive Icelandic chants and sagas, which made him attractive to the Nazis. He lived in Germany from the 1920's through almost to the end of World War II, and he joined the same Nazi organization that at one time was nominally headed by Richard Strauss (a somewhat similar, classically ambiguous case). Leifs later claimed his Nazi collaboration was done to insure the safety of his Jewish wife and children. His wife did not buy it-she divorced him. On the other side, Goebbels banned further performances of Leifs' music after hearing his Organ Concerto, (wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall when, expecting heroic "music of the volk", he heard this ) making him the only composer both accused of Nazism and banned by the Nazis. As for Tveitt, he was probably a victim of his unpleasant and humorless personality. True, he did subscribe to a proto-fascist philosophy and was an anti-semite- but, as we have seen, these were traits he shared with the funny and charming Stravinsky, who was never called to task for these views. And Tveitt was a wonderful composer

Where do you draw the line? Should we not play the music of these composers? Should we be censoring them because we disapprove of things they did? I am personally very wary of making such judgments. Quite apart from the unfair and arbitrary way such bans are enforced, I feel that in most cases we simply do not have enough information or understanding to make the sort of blanket condemnation that people want to make. And there is the fact that perceptions of acceptable behavior change radically over time. It is hard for us to imagine it, but most people seventy-five years ago believed that each "race" of people had certain immutable personality characteristics and innate talents. It was perfectly acceptable at all levels of society-and within any political culture-to attribute specific racial characteristics to any people. As late as twenty-five years ago I heard people seriously discuss whether Claudio Arrau could be a proper exponent of Beethoven given that he was born in Chile.

We also need to remember that people are morally weak for reasons of perceived self-interest, and when they seem strong, that strength is often motivated by less than admirable things as well. Life, people and reality are awash in paradox and irony. Wagner's assistant conductor at Bayreuth was Jewish, and Wagner sided with anti-authoritarian causes throughout his life. Even that sociopath is not a clear cut case-it is possible, just possible, that Wagner might have hated Nazism-for all the wrong reasons.