I am not holding my breath.

I hope I will however be forgiven for expressing a thought which has often come into my mind when discussions here (and indeed elsewhere) have touched on the appalling and still-festering phenomenon that is the Third Reich. While plenty of other subjects have been used by Grew (and indeed others) as more or less successful, more or less trollish wind-up tactics, the difference with this particular subject is that some of us refuse to countenance the idea that it can be brought up in this way without this involving some kind of implicit "apologia" for Nazi atrocities.

I do intuitively incline to this view myself, as clearly does Reiner. I do think that "normalising" the discourse about this (and other issues to do with mass murder, genocide and so on - I don't think one should be pressured by the "holocaust industry" into treating the doings of Hitler's regime as a unique historical phenomenon) is one step in the direction of letting one's guard down, and thus opening the possibility of acquiescing in the face of one too many steps towards fascist ideas becoming acceptable, in whatever clever disguises, in the here and now.

For that reason I find it highly objectionable that Grew first starts up this thread with manifestly mischievous intent and then whines to the moderators when the inevitably intemperate response takes place. Without accusing anyone of anything, I note the coincidence between this kind of behaviour and the way that far-right demagogues attempt to manipulate democratic political systems. (Note to time_is_now: I son't think I'm being rude talking about Grew "as if he isn't here" because the actual person behind the Grew persona indeed is not here, and never is.) Milly has said one shouldn't rise to the bait, but I incline strongly to the view that one should always rise to this particular bait, however ridiculous it may make one look to some others, however it might encourage those with nothing more interesting to think about to indulge in their sad little game. Sooner or later they will either tire of repeatedly pressing the same buttons, or reveal themselves to be something more sinister than just a wind-up artist. Again, I wish to stress that I'm not making any accusations, but I think it's worth trying to analyse what has happened in this thread, since it's happened before and will no doubt happen again.

I don't see what the difference should be between this forum and any other situation where these things come up. The point is that I don't think certain things should go unchallenged, whatever the situation, for the reasons I set out in my last post. I'm not demanding that everyone else should share that opinion, just asking that they be understanding of it.

Regarding the music which none of us has heard: obviously, chamber or orchestral music taken "at face value" doesn't generally betray very much about a composer's political convictions and what it does convey is usually quite unspecific. The trouble with this particular composer is that a significant proportion of his vocal music seems to have been written specifically and explicitly to celebrate Nazi ideology, and would do so quite audibly if one understands the sung texts, and you'd have to agree that this a different matter. It then becomes impossible to hear any other music by such a person without the experience being besmirched by association, and it may indeed be that one then hears in the very style and material of the instrumental music a "shadow" of the unpalatable textual content of the vocal music. Certainly the restrictions and specifications applied by the NSDAP to their officially-sanctioned artists, composers, writers and film-makers (see Frederic Spotts' fascinating book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics) made it almost impossible for work of imagination, originality and profundity to slip through the net. Nazi Germany, in other words, seems not to have had its Shostakovich.

I'd agree with this too.


Or, if not an apologia as such (least of all an intentional one), at the very least a trivialisation, which is every bit as bad and in some ways worse.

I don't think one can separate this from one's appreciation of music associated with the Third Reich.  The music of Wagner means an enormous amount to me (as my user name implies) but I don't think it is really possible to escape from the way that music was used by the Third Reich - the question is always there.  I am confident that the music was abused, but Wagner's rabid anti-Semitism (in which he was far from alone - it's just that unlike Chopin, for example, Wagner sprayed his prejudices over page after page of interminable prose) is something that is quite difficult to get past. 

Deryck Cooke raised the question years ago - if we knew nothing of Wagner's life and opinions, and only had the music, would we recognise him as an anti-Semite and what he called "an appalling proto-fascist".  Cooke concluded that we wouldn't but, even if that were true, that would not really be the point; the fact is that the music is tainted by the way it was used, even if one can see the profoundest irony in the image of Hitler and his henchmen sitting mesmerised in front of a performance of Das Rheingold or Gotterdammerung.  The associations are inevitably there. When one hears Rienzi, for example, can one ever get away from Hitler's description of his first encounter with this work:  "In that hour, it began" (which was very much the starting point for ENO's admirable production of the work in the 1980s).  I don't think one can - and I think that whenever one listens to Wagner - even though he died six years before Hitler was born and fifty years before Hitler came to power - it is difficult not to ask whether there is something at work in this deeply insistent and all-embracing music, and in one's response to it, that is, for want of a better word, fascistic - however confident one is in one's own explicit rejection of absolutist ideology.  The same is true of Pfitzner's less potent but - because of the position of the composer - more compromised music.

A similar issue must exist with official Soviet music.  I don't know a note of Khrennikov's music but, even if it were any good, could one really listen to it without reflecting on his role in denouncing Shostakovich and Prokofiev?  Could one really apply Deryck Cooke's test in isolation, and put what one knows of his public role out of one's mind?

I agree quite emphatically with all of that.

I do think - possibly this follows from the above - that it's worth 'playing devil's advocate', as it were, in order to look more closely (even if only for oneself) at those kinds of distinctions between one's different responses. I appreciate that there are probably public contexts in which that's a dangerous game to play, appearing as PW suggests to trivialise if not to become an apologia in the moral dimension. On the other hand not to play that game is to risk losing sight of the possibility of moral distinctions. As I said in a PM to richard last night, the danger of a knee-jerk "this has the word Nazi in it so it must be bad" may possibly be as great as the danger of, as he put it, "letting one's guard down".

I suppose, therefore, that when the Nazis said of Mendelssohn's music "This has the word Jew in it so it must be bad" that was also "a pretty fair initial reaction"?

Baz

With respect I beg to differ. The "This" in TF's quote refers not to Trunk's regrettable membership of a political party (the voluntary nature of which has not yet been satisfactorily verified upon this thread) but to his MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS. These are the entities for which aesthetic examination is being proscribed by certain contributors to this thread - even to the point of proclaiming that while not even a single note is known by them, the thought of even hearing any would cause physical nausea!

The consequent "This" in my analogy reciprocally referred to Mendelssohn's MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS and not to his ethnicity. But it also - liked the first quotation - implied a quite ridiculous attempt to rubbish any possibility for there being anything worthwhile in the music because of a particular non-musical view of the qualities and attributes of the person.

I am no less a victim of PC than is anybody else, but it is not my own!

Baz

hh, thanks.

I can indeed speak for myself.

Baz is the only person that is misunderstanding me, I think. Others can correct me if I'm wrong about that, and then I'd be happy to "revise and extend" what I say. I am not, however, going to have a dialogue with him on these boards that is to no one else's benefit.

I will, however, try to be more circumspect in my use of demonstrative pronouns.

Funnily enough, I had forgotten that TF had said this. The Member that I was thinking of in this context was Reiner.


With regard to the first sentence above, whether or not it does or doesn't is completely irrelevant (in my view) to the question Mr Grew has posed in this thread. He has not asked us to decide through Trunk's music whether the composer's connections with Nazism affected structurally or aesthetically the music he composed (has he?). Now while other contributors have decided - completely without any reference whatsoever to any of his music (which they have no knowledge of in any case) - that there was necessarily a connection so (they presume) repugnant as to render it actually immoral to undertake any investigation of that music, I have merely suggested that such connections as may or may not exist can only be objectively revealed by actually examining the music within its context. This is not (in my view) an act of "immorality" but one of genuine enquiry - an enquiry through which such connection, if exposed, can be more fully understood.

With regard to the second sentence, of course I respect your (and everybody else's) right to come to their own view over these matters (without any prejudice at all that such views may or may not agree with a perceived 'concensus'). But what I do not respect is a position whereby a pre-judgement (and in that sense a 'prejudice') is so initially deeply ingrained as to proscribe absolutely from the outset any possibility of examining the music at all! That position reveals nothing of any value whatsoever, and merely gives assent to such prejudice.

Baz