Separating art from the artist

Great music has come from creators with repugnant policies, mindsets

DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY
Special to Jewish News

Salzburg, the oldest and most renowned of the music festivals, presented mainly the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics, arguably the world's finest symphony orchestras, then conducted primarily by Karl Boehm and Herbert von Karajan, both admitted Nazis.

Bayreuth, in upper Bavaria, is the site of the annual Richard Wagner Festival. That is where, in the renowned Festspielhaus, Wagner's operas are produced in yearly 6-week-long festivals. Wagner was a self-proclaimed anti-Semite, and during the 12 years of the Nazi regime, Hitler was a welcome guest in the Bayreuth mansion of Wagner's children and grandchildren. His propaganda machine touted Bayreuth as quintessentially Germanic and a symbol of the Teutonic culture that the Nazi regime identified with the "super race." But from an artistic standpoint, both the Salzburg and the Berlin festivals produced unmatched musical performances.

How, indeed, could I have done it?

There is no doubt that the Vienna Philharmonic not only makes divine music, but to this day also practices repugnant racial and male-chauvinistic policies. This year's numerous protests and picket lines greeting the orchestra on its spring tour in the U.S. addressed primarily the fact that only one woman has played in the orchestra, and up to this moment, she has not been admitted as a full member, with voting rights.

Besides its all-male policy, the Vienna Philharmonic will not admit musicians who are "visibly" foreigners (meaning, among others, Asians and blacks) and uses an unusually tenuous logic to allow a number of aging Nazi musicians, left over from the Hitler era, to remain members. The argument goes that during "Aryanization" of the orchestra, too many Jewish members were lost and that as a result of the later "de-Nazification," new additional personnel losses would do untold harm to the quality of the orchestra.

This self-governing orchestra has not had a Jewish conductor since Gustav Mahler, a Jew who converted to Catholicism to remove obstacles to his career, resigned in 1907, and Leonard Bernstein, an American Jew whose first appearance with the orchestra took place in the '60s. Mahler, notwithstanding his career-inspired conversion, was exposed to anti-Semitic harassment and resigned after only three years from the Vienna Court Opera, in whose pit the Philharmonic performs.

There now are no more music directors - only guest conductors - performing with the Vienna Philharmonic, and it is being said that the orchestra makes full use of Jewish (and otherwise "foreign") guest conductors to cleanse itself in everyone's eyes and to trumpet to the world that discriminatory racial policies do not exist anymore. In fact, few conductors have been so adulated as Bernstein, and James Levine and Daniel Barenboim are two additional Jewish favorites in Vienna.

Many greats are no saints
Early on, I rationalized that the beauty and culture these festivals had to offer transcended my emotion-based reluctance to go to Germany. Technically speaking, the orchestras and their conductors had been "de-Nazified" (several trials imposed limited non-appearance terms on Karajan, Boehm and other accused Nazis) and legions of Jewish music and art lovers began to attend these festivals.

I still felt uneasy about attending until general debates and deeper reflection provided me with better justifications for my attitude. None of the people involved (such as Karajan, Boehm and the Nazi musicians of the orchestras) actually committed any crimes other than not revolting against the Nazis. So, what was left in the way of objections to enjoying their art was the belief that these ex-Nazis were, at least from a most important standpoint, nothing more than unsavory characters.

Unfortunately, there are so many "unsavory characters" in the world of art, science, literature and general culture that if you boycotted their given genius, there would be precious little art left to enjoy.

Let's look at some of the best-known examples. The late tenor Jussi Bjoerling, in my perception the greatest operatic tenor who ever sang, literally drank himself to death after a professional life in which he often refused to rehearse (he was lazy). His character was further defined by his refusal to allow his son, also an aspiring tenor, to use the family name as long as he, Jussi, was alive. The reason, as son Ralph told me in an interview, was that "I was not good enough for him to bear the name."

Felix Mendelssohn published his talented sister Fanny's compositions under his own name. The longtime, great conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky, paid his nephew Fabian, also a conductor, a considerable sum of money so that Fabian would not use the family name, to avoid competition (he appeared as Fabian Sevitzky). Jascha Heifetz, the greatest of this century's violinists, was intractably belligerent with his entourage and refused to pay his bill to one of my relatives because the electrical automobile he had ordered was delivered a little late.

Gustav Mahler, when he married his gifted wife Alma (who loved to compose), told her that "one composer per family is enough" and forced her to desist from further musical writing.

Anti-Semitism widespread
Anti-Semitism, of course, was not confined to Wagner, Boehm and Karajan; it also was widespread in the world of literature and philosophy. Hatred of Jews was freely expressed by Robert Frost, the homespun poet who drove his own son to suicide; by poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who were notoriously anti-Semitic; and even Goethe, who also uttered anti-Semitic remarks from time to time.

And what about morality and ethics? Shall we stop reading Lord Byron, who slept with his own sister, among his many extra-marital affairs? Or Byron's friend, the gentle poet Percy Shelley, who preached peace and love but abandoned wife and child to run off to Europe with the daughter of his benefactor, driving his wife to eventual suicide? Or James Joyce, who in recent years was accused, though not convicted, of molesting his own daughter?

The self-righteous Richard Wagner, whose views on Jews we discussed earlier (we have to add that he had at least one Jewish friend, conductor Hermann Levi, who led some of his premieres), habitually seduced his friends' and associates' wives and daughters. He had a torrid "friendship" with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his benefactors; he also lived with (and later married) Cosima von Bulow, the daughter of Franz Liszt, while she still was his conductor-friend's wife. Liszt himself had no compunction about seducing other peoples' wives and daughters.

Beethoven at one time sold the exclusive rights to his Ninth Symphony to at least three different publishers. Picasso was even greedier: he dominated and abused women in his life but never gave a sou to his mistresses, who often were left in poverty when he moved on. Does genius excuse any of this? Does it, perhaps, produce these traits?

Enough examples. I merely wanted to demonstrate the necessity to separate the man from his art, and to partake of his creativity, even if the artist is less than a saint. If we were to apply to the artist standards of morality that are as heavenly as his art, there would be very little art left to enjoy.

So, when can I catch my next flight to Bayreuth, to attend the "Ring des Nibelungen"?

Dimitri Drobatschewsky, a retired music critic formerly with the Arizona Republic, is a freelance writer living in Phoenix.