Slipped disc: February 2008 Archives

I was as distressed as everyone else to read that an artist manager from CAMI, the biggest classical agency, was robbed in broad daylight on a busy Manhattan sidewalk after withdrawing $100,000 from a nearby bank, or $150,000 according to the New York Post.

That anyone should want to attack a fine upstanding artist manager, day or night, will be a mystery to all decent readers.

And what Mr Seton Ijams was doing with that amount of cash in his sack might be an even greater mystery.

After all, we have been assured time and time again that classical music is a respectable business these days with no brown-envelope payouts or tax-dodge kickbacks.

My guess is Mr Ijams, who looks after Marvin Hamlisch among others, must have had a lot of taxi drivers waiting to be tipped along the street, with maybe a waiter or two and a milkman. These people just won't take a credit card. That's how it is.

Anyhow, I'm launching an appeal for all artist agents who have been mugged in broad daylight, poor things (that's nebbich in New York).

Donations, please, in used bills only.

No artists need apply.

Responses to my personal mailbox are running 3-1 in support of my commentary on Bloomberg that the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea is morally and culturally unacceptable. That's high, but not overwhelmingly so.

There is, if course, considerable substance to the opposing case - that is is usually better to make jaw-jaw than war-war, and that the way to unfreeze tensions is not by hiding behind high walls of political preconception.

It seems to me, none the less, that there are two disabling flaws to the cultural diplomacy argument. The first is to apply it to Hitler's Germany. Would a 1938 trip by the NY Phil have averted WW 2 and the Holocaust?

In Pyongyang, New York's finest will be entertaining seasoned killers who, contrite today, may kill again tomorrow - if only by picking up the phone to Teheran and having another quiet swap of nuclear know-how.

The second qualm relates to consumption. Every calorie eaten, every bath taken, every light switched on by the 130 New York musicians and their entourage of 150 handlers and journalists is one kilojule of energy, one tub of water, one volt of energy stolen from a population that has been systematically starved by its unrepentant government. Playing a symphony concert to the Beloved Kim gives nothing back to his malnourished nation.

This weekend, CBC Toronto will be airing a conversation between Dominic Lawson and me on the question of Herbert von Karajan, and whether (as discussed on this blog) a bad man can make good music.

A comment by Richard V Harris has been rolling round my mind.

Biology, he writes, 'is the science of exceptions, and we are not dealing here in absolutes (of goodness), only tendencies. Wagner was a great composer, but we do not see him as having been a good man, largely because he was an anti-Semite. I have no idea as to whether or not he privately carried out acts of kindness more than the average person.'

Well, from the evidence in his letters and autobiography, not to mention Cosima's diaries, Wagner never knowingly performed an act of kindness without intending self-benefit. He abandoned his first wife Minna, milked the affections of rich women like Mathilde Wesendonck, seduced and impregnated the wife of his acolyte Hans von Bulow and flaunted his conquest to her father, Franz Liszt, who had done more than anyone to assist his career.

Cosima was just as bad. When Liszt lay dying in the middle of a Bayreuth Festival, his daughter was seldom at his side. Beside such wilful misanthropy, their rabid anti-semitism can appear almost incidental.

The question that arises is: did Wagner have to be such a brute in order to achieve his Ring? Every act of creation requires a degree of egotism. Do the greatest acts demand the most inhuman conduct? Discuss.

Dominic Lawson, in a typically thoughtful Independent op-ed, took my Karajan column last week as a springboard for contemplating the connection between genius and virtue.

I am inclined to agree with his argument in respect of original creators. Aesthetically, and scientifically for that matter, lack of moral fibre is no impediment to genius. Byron was a rotter. So were Shelley and Dylan Thomas. Picasso was no paragon. Rodin was a bit of a shit, and as for Klimt, Schiele and the Viennese school... decadent, the lot of them.

Music, though, for some mysterious reason, is different. In music there are few instances of a great composer who was not, in some way, a good man. Misanthropes abound, but Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Britten were decent to the core. Bach was a friendly teddy-bear for the most part. Mozart was much misunderstood. Sibelius was a moral rock hiding behind a vodka bottle.

Mahler once said - and I think he meant composers: 'there are no great men without some goodness'. Schoenberg said of Mahler: er war ein Heiliger - he was a saint.'

There is, of course, Wagner - but he's an exception to all known rules.

So why do composers tend to the good? You tell me.