Pamela McElwain-Brown responds to Laurence Glavin:

>>...  The thought crossed my mind that there might have been persons in
>>the audience who take great exception to Wagner in any form...I wondered
>>if there was any kind of promotion, like in the program booklet if they
>>had one (I've been to a P.H.C.  broadcast and there wasn't one then),
>>giving people so disposed a warning that Wagner was coming up?
>
>It's my impression that there is no such issue in the Upper Midwest.
>There is not a huge percentage of Jewish people here, and they tend
>to be rather accepting, from what I have seen.

As a Midwesterner myself, I can tell you that there are all sorts of
folks there, as elsewhere, all too willing to point out their moral
superiority by dumping on what others like.  I can understand Holocaust
survivors uncomfortable with hearing Wagner, but too many anti-Wagnerians
have no connection to the Holocaust whatsoever, other than what they've
read.  They also haven't quite learned or realized that Wagner has no
direct connection either to the Holocaust or to Nazi Germany.  But then
again, these are very often people who don't seriously listen to music
itself, who don't engage music as music, but as a sociological tract.
Music becomes an occasion for taking the political or moral temperature
of oneself and, more frequently, of other people.  Furthermore, many
hold the quaint idea that only a great moral human being can produce
great art, when history is full of counter-examples.  If I listened only
to those composers who weren't anti-semitic, perverts, philanderers, or
just general SOBs, I'd be listening to a very short list.  Great artists
aren't necessarily nice people - although I admit I enjoy the confluence
when I find it.

Steve Schwartz