Photo courtesy Wikipedia
Tomorrow we start rehearsals on a very busy program – the first half is Haydn’s Symphony No. 37 and the rarely heard Hindemith Violin Concerto (with the always stunning and insightful Leila Josefowicz). The second half is a distillation of the orchestral music from the final opera of Richard Wagner’s titanic four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen – Götterdämerung.
Aside from the plethora of knotty notes that Wagner presents us string players, he also presents me with a moral dilemma. I always seem to have trouble reconciling the enormity of the beauty and craftsmanship of his music with the enormity of his bigotry and hatred towards the Jews. Add to this the near worship that he later was subjected to by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and it’s a witches brew of moral ambiguity (at the very least) that is hard to get one’s head around.
If you go along with the posit “hate the sin, not the sinner”, it would be safe enough to say “hate Wagner, but not his music”. That’s all fine and good, but then you’ve got to deal with the aspect of the composer’s personal life and how much you allow that to color the music that you listen to. It’s hard not to think of Mozart’s impending death when you hear his Requiem, or to realize the depths of Brahms’ love for his recently departed mother when you listen to Ein Deutsches Requiem. There has been a controversy raging ever since the publication of Shostakovich/Volkov’s Testimony [Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich] about what role politics played in Shostakovich’s music, and indeed what role Shostakovich himself played in Soviet political intrigue. It’s easy to get caught up in the KGB, and knocks on the door and flowers at Auschwitz when you listen to nearly any of his string quartets – but does that serve the music, or the other way around?
I guess I’ll take the safe path, and get lost in the sheer beauty of the score, but afterwards be mindful of the man who was Richard Wagner, and the dangerous path that he trod. Perhaps I’ll also ponder how his situation is really a microcosm of the situation that mankind finds itself in: namely that we do many terrible things out of ignorance and fear, but in our best moments we transcend our humanity through our artistic creations. That’s why we continue to make art in all of its many and delightful forms, and why people come to enjoy it: it makes us better than ourselves.
On the iPod:
