>James here..... > >This comment concerns me. I would hope classical musicians paid more >attention to music history ! >Hitler is reported to have liked Wagner. This is where the assoc. of Hitler >and Wagner started. So if Hitler liked dogs should we all hate dogs ? Not >very logical. Someone also pointed out that Wagner was 19 th century and >Hitler was 20 th century, these two men did not know each other.
I can see both sides here -- Wagner's music and the opera house at Bayreuth were used by Hitler to propagandize his ideas of an "Ubermensch", a ruling Arian race, and the association is very strong. For a long time Israel wouldn't play music by Wagner, and such strong aversion must be born of an overwhelming awareness of terrible personal pain and injustice. Although Wagner's music is consciously Nordic I know of no clear evidence that he wrote it to specifically champion Germans over the Jews. Wagner's wife, however, was a rabid anti-Semite, and she lived much longer than Wagner, right into the Nazi era. Strauss took over the role of musical symbolizer of Nazi domination. (Note I didn't say German! Dietrich Bonhoffer was German, and fought against what was happening.) If we used the "ad hominum" argument with respect to art, and say that the idea is bad if the person who espouses it is bad, we would decide not to laugh at jokes told by Peter Sellers nor read novels by Evelyn Waugh if we discover that they were nasty human beings. Similarly, we cannot judge an entire nation of individuals by the decisions of its leaders. Karen Jensen
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