Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Art and the performance

Friday, 1st February 2008

Dominic Lawson has a very good piece today on that old perennial - whether great art can be made by a shit:

On Monday, the Berliner Morgenpost criticised the first of many celebratory television documentaries which, it claimed, "wiped off the table" the awkward issue of Karajan's membership of the Nazi Party. The newspaper reminded us that he joined the Salzburg branch of the NSDAP as early as 1933; then, showing a certain determination in the matter, he joined again in Aachen in 1935. After the war, Karajan was restricted in his work by the Allies' "de-Nazification" committees; somewhat paradoxically, he fetched up in London, where he became the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1948 and rebuilt his career with spectacular effect. Yet there was, in fact, no paradox. Karajan was a supreme opportunist – or careerist, if you prefer.
...Much as we would like it to be the case, there is no connection between good character and good art – in music as in anything else. Bobby Fischer, who died a fortnight ago, regularly expressed a violent and abusive anti-Semitism which would not have been out of place in Der Stürmer; but Fischer's best chess games have an elegance and creativity which compares with a Mozart symphony. He had, in that sense, a beautiful mind. He was also a hateful person.

My own view - irrelevant to the point at issue - is that Karajan was in any case greatly overrated. I have - it's impossible not to if one is serious about collecting CDs - a great number of his recordings. How many do I listen to? Hardly any. His Richard Strauss is superb, and I would say unsurpassable. But that says so much about Karajan's music . It is full of the sheen - the velvet, if you like - which so much Strauss demands.

But however good Karajan might have been earlier on his career - some of his Philharmonia recordings are wonderful, such as his Falstaff - he became a one-dimensional conductor who could nothing other than produce beautiful sounds, which often obscured the music. I remember hearing him being interviewed and questioned on this. His reponse was to ask why anyone would want to hear ugly sounds, which of course missed the point. Music is not simply about producing a sound akin to being smothered in whipped cream.

As for the issue of character, my hero - Furtwangler - was not a Nazi, but he clearly had what one might best call moral issues. Take this recording:

Before the onset of YouTube, I used to be able to put out of my mind the image of the concert halls in which many of Furtwangler's greatest performances were given. I have hundrerds of CDs of those concerts and adore them. But now that one can see the videos so easily, how can one possibly ignore what they show? Can one simply forget the swastikas? I can't.

Even if the composer had been inoffensive the image is simply disgusting. Add the frisson of the piece performed being by Wagner, and the combination is foul.

And yet. I have flown across oceans to hear and see Wagner being performed. We went to Tannhauser on our honeymoon. And listen. Listen to the Meistersinger overture. It is a performance which surpasses almost any other recording. How can one ignore that, either?