“Liberals Are Killing Art” is the provocative title of a recent New Republic article by Jed Perl, that magazine’s longtime art critic. The thesis is that left-leaning critics, commentators, and advocates, in their adherence to virtuous-sounding political values, have lost touch with the “unfettered metaphor and mystery and magic” of art. Averting his gaze from moralizing on the right, not to mention millennia of religious regulation, Perl discerns a campaign to judge towering, troubling creative figures by politically correct standards. I was surprised to find myself named—amid some kind words for my writing—as the lead culprit in this politicized slaughter of sacred cows. Perl misreads my work, but he raises a significant issue, one that weighs on my own mind as I engage with a classical tradition that seems, at times, unduly tormented by its recent past.
Perl isolates a few sentences in a 2013 column about the Russian maestro Valery Gergiev, in which I ponder the conductor’s public support of the Putin regime and the protests by gay activists that have ensued. I wrote, “When a Russian paper asked him"—Gergiev—"about the gay issue, he said, ‘As a director of the theatre, I have only one criterion: ability, talent.’ It appears that Gergiev wants to have it both ways: he dabbles in politics, yet insists that politics stops at the doors of art. This is an old illusion. Richard Strauss used similar language in a 1935 letter to Stefan Zweig: ‘For me, there are only two categories of people: those who have talent, and those who have none.’ ”
Perl sees this as a “brusque announcement” to the effect that art is always political. Not so. The illusion I have in mind is the belief that one can engage in blatantly political activity and then, in the face of protest, insist that politics has nothing to do with art. The rote repetition of a tidy cliché about artistic autonomy rings hollow when it is used as a protective shield. Such rhetoric poisons the art-for-art’s-sake mentality that Perl ardently defends. The problem is acute in classical music because of a longstanding devotion to the concept of “absolute music”—the idea that Bach, Beethoven, and the rest inhabit a spiritually pure sphere, far above the vulgarities of politics. As the musicologist Richard Taruskin has shown, to ascribe apolitical, universal values to certain kinds of music, notably German music, can be an intensely political gesture. Nor is this discussion a fresh development, a talking point dreamed up by postwar American liberals. In Plato's “Republic,” Socrates casts doubt on the notion of a self-contained aesthetic experience, saying, “As if music and poetry were only play and did no harm at all.”
The downfall of Strauss is a supremely painful case of aestheticism confronted with reality. (It is the dark passage that precedes the relatively sunny coda of the composer’s life, in which he consorted with American soldiers and wrote the “Four Last Songs.”) In 1935, Strauss was working with Zweig on the comic opera “Die schweigsame Frau.” In June of that year, the author told Strauss that he had to withdraw from the project because of the composer’s affiliations with the Nazis, in particular his position as the head of the Reich Music Chamber. Strauss wrote back in exasperation, complaining of the “Jewish obstinacy” that led Zweig to feel solidarity with the Jews of Germany. Strauss then insisted that his art was unaffected by politics, and attempted to excuse his official activities on the grounds that he was trying to “prevent greater disasters.” Zweig never received the letter; it was intercepted by the Gestapo. When Strauss’s impertinent remarks about the regime were made known to Hitler and Goebbels, the composer had to resign his post. For Strauss, the illusion of autonomy collapsed very quickly.
As I emphasized in my column, the situation of gays in Russia should not be equated with that of Jews in Nazi Germany—or that of gays in Nazi Germany, for that matter. Nonetheless, it’s disturbing to see the recurrence of the kind of cloudy self-justification that many German musicians once practiced. Gergiev insists that anti-gay legislation in Russia has no bearing on his leadership of the Mariinsky Theatre. He does not discriminate; therefore, gay activists should have no problem with him. Similarly, Strauss believed that anti-Jewish legislation in Nazi Germany should not have affected his relationship with Zweig, because he considered his own behavior blameless. “Be a good boy, forget Moses,” Strauss wrote to Zweig. But Zweig could not forget Moses.
Perl continues, “Could one not point out that the exquisite closing scene of Strauss’s ‘Capriccio,’ which had its première in Munich in 1942, in the very thick of Hitler’s power, can be embraced as a masterpiece that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that was going on at the time?” Yes, one could, although one should not be surprised if there were opposition to such a crisp, not to say brusque, demarcation. The première of “Capriccio” took place on October 28, 1942; on the same day, more than eighteen hundred Jews from the Theresienstadt concentration camp arrived at Auschwitz, most of them going to the gas chamber. Some people will never be at ease with an opera that gestated in such a world. They are not, in my experience, liberal ideologues bent on policing art; rather, they bear more directly the scars of the history in question.
As a Strauss enthusiast, I have often struggled to find the right critical frame for the extraordinary works that the composer wrote in the wake of the humiliation of 1935: the mythological operas “Daphne” and “Die Liebe der Danae,” the eighteenth-century conversation piece “Capriccio,” the “Metamorphosen” for strings. Except for the last, which quotes the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica” by way of saying last rites for German culture, these scores float away into a lyrical haze, attaining a fragile, vulnerable kind of beauty quite different from the brawny lyricism of Strauss’s youth. Ultimately, I cannot forget the historical context. But forgetting is not essential to a full and passionate engagement with the music. Indeed, when I think of Strauss’s degradation—once, after Goebbels berated him, he burst into tears on the steps of the Propaganda Ministry—the beauty seems all the more convulsive. That ethereal shimmering of leaves in the coda of “Daphne,” as the nymph is transformed into a laurel tree: it is also Strauss’s own metamorphosis, into a figure petrified yet potent. Tellingly, in his last years the composer played the passage over and over on the piano.
Perl goes on to mention T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others tainted by association with anti-Semitism and/or fascism. We have hounded these artists for too long, he says; we look for their failings in every line. We must accept that great art comes from deeply flawed people. This is all reasonable, although, as in the case of Strauss, I don’t see why the work should be fenced off from the political landscape. When Pound writes, in “Notes for Canto CXX”—
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
—it is hard not to think of the poet’s plunge into the depths. The apparition of such pure words at the end of an impure volume has a dizzying effect, and the poem almost requires knowledge of what came before (“Let the Gods forgive what I / have made” are the next lines). Contemplating such works, we can think in two modes at once, the aesthetic and the historical-political—generally a wise way to navigate the labyrinth of art. To debate whether politics is always present or always absent is to play a parlor game irrelevant to the complex, ever-shifting reality in which both artists and their audiences reside.
A name curiously missing from Perl’s catalogue of blemished genius is that of Richard Wagner, who, of all the major creative figures of the past two centuries, is the one at whose door politics never stops, not least because he keeps inviting politics in. Just last month, The New Republic published a forceful article, by the historian James Loeffler, titled “Wagner’s Anti-Semitism Still Matters.” Perl’s piece might better have been presented in the form of an intramural debate, since Loeffler makes announcements more brusque than any found in my column on Gergiev. For example: “The real legacy of Wagner, one with which we are still living today, is nothing less than the sweeping imprint of racial ideology across the length and breadth of modern classical music.” Further, Loeffler dissects the attitude that Perl holds dear: “Even when we do confront the moral failings and petty biases of great composers, our instinct is to quarantine the music itself. For, of all the arts, music most retains its hallowed aura of transcendence.”
On the question of Wagner, I am a little closer to Perl’s side. Without wishing to minimize the composer’s anti-Semitism, I believe that the case of Wagner, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, has become an inordinately prolonged and relentless prosecution. The more zealous critics have identified Wagner as an architect of Nazi ideology and a prophet of the Holocaust. This position not only deprives Wagner’s music of its rapturous complexity but also dangerously simplifies the roots of Nazism. After all, Hitler never once mentioned Wagner’s anti-Semitism; he did, however, praise Henry Ford for standing up to the Jews. (Interestingly, Joachim Köhler, the author of “Wagner’s Hitler,” the most avid of those prosecutorial tomes, has since recanted, and, in an article translated in the current issue of The Wagner Journal, he argues that anti-Semitism was “not the theme of [Wagner’s] life” but “one theme among indescribably many.”) There is much in Wagner that has nothing to do with Hitler; there is much in Wagner that contradicts Hitler. That said, I would never dream of suggesting that Wagner’s operas should be detached absolutely and utterly from politics. It cannot be done; it can never be done.
In 1951, the Wagner festival in Bayreuth unfolded for the first time since 1944, under the direction of the composer’s grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang. The program guide carried a quotation from “Die Meistersinger”: “Hier gilt’s der Kunst” (“Art is what matters here”). In other words, leave politics at the door, like a wet umbrella. But the Wagner brothers missed a note of irony in their grandfather’s opera. The beautiful young Eva, offered as the prize in a song contest, tells the wise old Hans Sachs that his age does not matter, because art alone counts. Sachs asks, “Dear Eva, would you mock me?” He is right to doubt Eva’s pat little phrase; in the end, her hand goes to the dashing young knight. Art does not stand apart from reality; if it did, it would have no life in it, no light, no darkness, no power.