three artistic quandaries make a post

[calimac]

1. Was Sibelius culpably tied to the Nazis? The facts aren't in dispute: he took payments and awards from the German government, did not speak out against their horrors. He was no hero, certainly, but I don't think that's enough to cast him into the outer darkness. If risking your livelihood or your life makes you a hero, then merely failing to do these things does not make you a villain, by the same token that, if praising the Nazis and fingering victims for them makes you a villain, merely failing to do those things does not make you a hero. Both heroism and villainy would be diluted were there not a huge soggy grey middle ground that is neither.

What this story does for me is not to make Sibelius evil, but to emphasize just how evil the Nazis were even in the cultural realm: they dragged everything down with them. It was fairly difficult for a composer to make a living internationally in those days without taking payments from the German government; once that became Nazi, you were stuck to the tar baby. Not impossible to extricate, just ... a huge mess, a quandary. (In any case, better that he should take their money than give them money.) I am struck by one pro-culpability argument presented in the article: "Sibelius's early fascination with Finnish mythology and nationalism resonated with Nazism." But that's not Sibelius's sin; it's the Nazis' sin. Allow me to quote another artist who shared that fascination: "I have in this War a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler. Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light." (letter by J.R.R. Tolkien, 9 June 1941)

2. For the next few days, you can listen online to a BBC radio documentary on Life of Brian. It's well done, and presents a couple things I didn't know. Naturally, it brings up the question of, is the film blasphemous? Little commentary I've seen on this question addresses what I think is the key understanding of Brian. While there is such a thing as romans a clef about real people thinly disguised under fake names, sometimes even mentioning the real name as a separate background character to add to the disguise, in this film the whole point about Brian is that, as he keeps saying, he isn't the Messiah; he just keeps getting mistaken for one. For a knockabout comedy, it's stunningly historically accurate: the Romans really did hold mass crucifixions, and the Jews were desperate for a savior and latched on to anyone who looked like they might fit the role. (A man named Jesus rode into Jerusalem and prophesied woe unto the city - accurately, I might add. Sticking to his prophecies and attracting followers, he was flogged by the religious authorities and flayed by the Romans ... who then released him, figuring he was a harmless nut. Not the story you know? This was a different Jesus, thirty years later.)

Attention to this context might shed light on how Jesus, the better-known one, could possibly have been a great moral teacher and a nut who thought he was God at the same time, cutting through C.S. Lewis's famous "trilemma" saying that it's impossible for such a teacher to claim godhood unless it was true; but if that's blasphemy, it's the historians' - it's pretty far removed from this film. As Terry Jones (its director, co-author, and co-star) keeps saying, it's not blasphemous, it's heretical. What it's pointing fun directly at is mindless worship, of anything. The church should be grateful for having the foolishness of this pointed out. The digs at political fanaticism and Jewish reverence for the name of God cut just as deep. And lucidly: being Jewish may be why I consider the "name of God" stoning scene to be the film's funniest moment.

3. This isn't moral, just linguistic. It's 2009, and Dick Tracy is still referring to classical music as "long-hair music." This is now so outdated a term that, at first, Josh "Comics Curmudgeon" Fruhlinger, who brought it up, didn't know what it meant. It's true that, back in the 19th century, the more flamboyant classical musicians were known for shaking their shaggy locks at thee. Paderewski may have been the last of that breed, though. Long before the Beatles and the hippies, even before the Beats, the term though still current had become risible. Thanks to my handy CD-ROM of the complete cartoons of The New Yorker, I am able to remind myself that in 1943 they published a cartoon by Mischa Richter showing one audience member at a classical concert whispering to his neighbor, "I don't go for this long-hair stuff." Naturally, the musicians - it's two men giving a violin and piano recital - are short-haired and nearly bald.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

In the recent IFC documentary on the Pythons, the fifth episode (I think) deals with Life of Brian. Terry Jones points out that LoB wasn't blasphemous since it didn't insult G_d, but it was heretical since it tore at the church's hierarchy.

This pretty much agrees with my long standing assessment: All major western religions (or some of their flavors, anyway) condemned the movie, and they were right to do so. It is, nonetheless, the best (and possibly most important) movie about religion ever made. Remarkably funny, too.

I somewhat agree with you on Sibelius: No hero, but no outright evildoer himself. But we can't let him totally off the hook: it reflects poorly on him and will forever be a knock on him and his musical accomplishments. He will be a cautionary tale for the next round of evil to roll around.

Hmm... who, these days, is associated with long hair? Supermodels!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have no problem listening to Wagner, the anti-semite par excellence of composers, so Sibelius - whose music I like better than Wagner's anyway - isn't going to cause me any worry.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Attention to this context might shed light on how Jesus, the better-known one, could possibly have been a great moral teacher and a nut who thought he was God at the same time, cutting through C.S. Lewis's famous "trilemma" saying that it's impossible for such a teacher to claim godhood unless it was true;

My brother, an evangelical Christian, poses this one to me periodically: Jesus said he was God, so either he was indeed God, he was a liar, or he was a madman. Since I'm a nontheist, I'll entertain any of those possibilities, but the one I lean toward is the one the literalists absolutely will not consider: he didn't say it; the people who wrote the gospels or those who later translated them put the words in his mouth.

[eddyerrol.livejournal.com]

Many biblical scholars these days do not believe that Jesus believed he was God, or the son of God; these beliefs were attributed to him by (some of) his followers. In the gospel of Mark (believed to be the earliest gospel) Jesus does not often refer to himself as the son of God (although it does happen), whereas in the gospel of John (believed to be the latest gospel written, and the least historical of the 4 canonical gospels), he often equates himself with God. I think it's sometimes natural for religious believers to shift focus from what a "religious leader" is pointing to (which in Jesus's case was what he called the Kingdom of God), and instead focus on the religious leader him/herself. I get the impression (though I may be wrong) that something similar may have happened with the founder of the original Buddha.

I've always thought that Lewis's "trilemma" was an embarrasingly weak argument.

Ed Pierce

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I agree, but even without that argument, Lewis's formulation supposes a very all-or-nothing idea of madness (or specifically a kind of folie de grandeur) as something incompatible with being a great moral teacher. Human beings are more complicated than that, I believe.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What your brother is saying is indeed the "trilemma" as formulated by Lewis. I agree that yours is also a possibility, and further note that even the reported words are cryptic and contradictory about what the speaker thinks he is. Lewis says elsewhere that Jesus never gives a straight answer.

Anyway, the trilemma is the golden example of an argument that simultaneously impresses the heck out of people who don't need it to convince them of its conclusion, while appearing totally shoddy to those who don't share that conclusion.

He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

"You're only making it worse for yourself."
"How can I possibly make it any worse? Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah!"

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Jon Leifs makes an interesting contrast to Sibelius in re the Nazis.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I knew that Leifs was living in Germany for part of WW2. But I don't know enough about his life to know what the heck he was doing there.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I was going to wave at the Jon Leifs home page, but it is gone. There's Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3n_Leifs) and also a recent Leifs posting at Unquiet Thoughts (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/alexross/2009/11/the-life-of-leifs.html).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

So he had been living in Germany continuously since his student days. I did not know that. Ross says so specifically; the Wikipedia article, which I looked at first, says so by implication, but not explicitly. Like many Wikipedia articles, it is clear only if you already know what it's talking about.

Ross notes the same thing the other article noted re Sibelius: "Leifs embraced a kind of Aryan-Icelandic supremacist philosophy, holding that his native land had preserved Nordic culture in an unusually pure and uncontaminated form. Such notions went over well in the early years of the Nazi regime."

I wonder, however, if "supremacist" is the proper word for Leifs' approach. Ethnic boosterism with a chauvinistic tinge is found among almost all nationalistic composers, and it's not their fault, even if they're Nordic, that the Nazis poisoned this by corrupting it into racial supremacy theories.

What seems to have saved Leifs from complete co-option is that the Nazis eventually decided they didn't like his newer music. Well, their not liking the music is what saved Hindemith, and it'd be possible to argue for hours over what the Nazis thought of Orff.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

If I could read Icelandic, I'd have a better idea of whether "supremacist" was the right word or not. :)

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

The Leifs page was maintained by the author of the biography Alex Ross discusses in the Unquiet Thoughts posting.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

I'm backreading here, so pardon the posting way out of date, but...I saw the Timothy Jackson paper (entitled "Sibelius and the SS") under dispute, at AMS this year, and I thought it was badly argued: no historical context at all, some outright errors (such as the supposed exceptionalism of the interview), etc. There's some material of potential interest there (the Deutsche Bank records, among other things), but not in the way that he's set it forward.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No apologies needed: I leave these posts up in case anyone wants to read them. Thanks for the confirmation of my skepticism on the point. Since writing this, I've read three other books on Nazism and music, and am intrigued that each author has a different idea of who the "real" Nazis among the composers and musicians were, usually whoever the author is not studying closely. Richard Strauss replacing the banned Bruno Walter in conducting a concert is horribly culpable if you're not studying Strauss, complex, mixed, and basically excusable if you are. Once you peer in detail at non-political people who got caught up in the terror of their times, it's all one shade of grey or another. The real real Nazis are unquestionable, and they signed up with enthusiasm.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

And on the Bruno Walter thing--in the latest Michael Kennedy biography, he notes that there is documentation that Louise Wolff, the concert agent, at Bruno Walter's request, got to Strauss through a network of connections and asked him to conduct, otherwise the orchestra would suffer a serious financial loss. He agreed, and the orchestra was paid his fee. But Walter never said anything at the time, and now this additional information is only slowly filtering into the record--and of course, the older accounts such as Marek's are still out and about.

It's a slow process, but I hope that we are finally getting past the "who was a Nazi? who was a bad person?" phase and getting into asking more interesting historical questions.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Michael Kater's Composers of the Nazi Era gives pretty much the same story excusing Strauss as Kennedy does. Frederic Spotts' Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics discusses the incident only in passing, and does not attempt to excuse Strauss.

On the other hand, Kater repeatedly describes Hans Knappertsbusch as a dedicated Nazi, without going into any detail, while Spotts depicts him as another hapless dupe rather like Furtwängler and that Hitler never liked his work anyway.

This sort of disjunction occurs frequently between any two books on the topic I've read.