Eric Kisch wrote:

>It's one thing to admire the work of a painter or writer who was
>a deplorable human being.  But somehow (to me, at any rate) it's different
>with music - we are too wrapped up in it emotionally, too desirous of
>wanting to be taken into "eine bess're Welt" that the personality of the
>creator and also recreator has to matter, too.  I think it is our intense
>emotional investment in the music that cries out for some consonance with
>the creator of it.

I guess this is just a personal difference that can never be reconciled,
but I don't feel this way at all.  When I'm listening to the Ring, for
example, I'm caught up in the story and the way it is expressed in the
music, and forget all about the composer--it could have been written by
a two-headed octopus with purple spots, for all I care.  The music is the
only thing that matters.

>Perhaps far afield - but imagine yourself having a passionate, intense
>love affair with a beautiful, intelligent, sensitive woman (ladies make the
>appropriate gender switch), in which you (seem to) share your innermost
>feelings and secrets -- only to discover later that this person was a
>concentration camp guard or worse.  What does this do for your sense of
>judgement of other people? For your feelings about yourself for having
>given so much to a person who was not worthy of that giving?

Again, I was never tempted to fall in love with RW.

>In one part, IIRC, he cites the critic/philosopher Adorno as saying that
>an artist (composer?) is responsible for the uses to which his art/music
>is put, even after his death.

I don't consider Adorno as an unerring fount of truth.  He was wrong about
a lot of things.

>In fact, only Mozart seems to have been spared appropriation by some
>political faction or other.

That's the whole problem with this line of thought.  Once people with a
political bee under their bonnet get to work, they can drag anyone and
anything into their argument.  But it always strikes me as garden-variety
monomania.

When the subject of Wagner and antisemitism comes up, I always react the
same way:  if you want to really fight antisemitism and similar forms of
prejudice, and that certainly is a laudable objective, there are plenty
of examples of this evil around in the world right now that you can go to
work on.  Picking on poor Wagner, who has been dead and buried these many
years, seems to me like attacking an easy target, in fact a pseudo-target.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]