Clive James on Music and Politics

I mentioned a while back that I'm reading Cultural Amnesia by Clive James, Australian critic, broadcaster and journalist. It is a rather substantial book, over 800 pages, organized in a very interesting way. He has a long list of writers, poets, musicians, philosophers and other cultural figures and he has organized this list into alphabetical order. Then he writes an essay on each figure, but ranges widely in each essay. So you never quite know what you are going to stumble across. For example, in his essay on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke he gets into a lengthy discussion of Bertolt Brecht which leads him into art and politics. Then he gets into music:

In my first year in London I heard Walter Gieseking play at the Festival Hall. I was not much bothered by his connection with Nazi Germany. If I had known then just how much of a Nazi he had been, I might have walked out, but I would have missed some good Beethoven. At least Gieseking was a German. Alfred Cortot was a Frenchman, and therefore would have been something worse than a Nazi sympathizer even if he had just played the piano at Parisian soirées well peopled with grey and black uniforms—a Sacha Guitry of the keyboard. Actually he did more: he was an active collaborator, denouncer and thoroughgoing rat. But he is not famous for it and probably shouldn’t be. After Rubinstein, two of the major players of Chopin are Rachmaninoff and Cortot. Rachmaninoff fled from totalitarianism and Cortot stayed to profit: but they both sound wonderful. At Covent Garden and the Festival Hall during my first years in London, you could hear German conductors who had been forced to flee and others who had chosen to stay: I heard, among others, Rudolf Kempe, Karl Böhm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer. Everyone knew that Klemperer went into exile and that Karajan had a Nazi party number, but who knows now, of Kempe, Böhm and Knappertsbusch, which one stayed on in the Third Reich? (Trick question: they all did.) And who cares?

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (pp. 619-620). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

I have to say I feel a certain affinity with Clive James and Australians in general. Like so many involuntary Aussie immigrants, my family arrived in Canada as criminal deportees, exiled from England, Nottingham to be precise, for poaching the King's deer. That was in 1740 so we might have been the first Townsends in what was then Upper Canada and is now Ontario. Anyway, I like the brash directness of Australians. He goes on:

Well, of course we should care. The question is how. In the brains department, and therefore in the area of moral responsibility, conductors traditionally rate above performers. Hearing and watching Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” with maximum purse-lipped projection of the umlauts, I had no trouble resisting the impulse to throw her a Hitler salute as a reminder of the sort of audience she had once wowed in Berlin. But if Furtwängler had been conducting the band it might have been a different matter.

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (p. 620). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Let's listen to a little Gieseking, shall we? This is his 1951 recording of the Moonlight Sonata.