Playing the Political Changes

Abstract

Playing the Political Changes Sally McKee (bio) Jonathan Rosenberg, Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2020. xxv + 485 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. In the March 16, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, the magazine's music critic, Alex Ross, began his review of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman with an account of a protest. Less than two weeks before COVID-19 forced the premature closing of the Met Opera's season, a group of activists standing on the plaza at Lincoln Center held up signs that read, "Gergiev signed letter backing the annexation of Crimea and war in Ukraine."1 Valery Gergiev, the renowned Russian conductor reportedly close to Russian president Vladimir Putin, was the conductor that evening of the production's première. The protestors were objecting, in the first instance, to Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. They and the opera-goers would also have been aware of the media's coverage of Russian attempts to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. With their signs, the protestors were posing a question to those arriving at the opera: what business did an artist with ties to a regime threatening the sovereignty of the United States and other nations have conducting the orchestra of this country's premier opera house? According to Jonathan Rosenberg in his new work, Dangerous Melodies, the answer to that question depends, in part, on whether you are a universalist or a nationalist in matters of art and culture. Musical universalists, as Rosenberg calls them, are those who believe that classical music has nothing to do with politics. Music transcends borders. Over the increasingly perilous twentieth century, proponents of peace looked to the performance of music as a means of fostering amity between nations whose leaders shook sabers at each other. If the universalists view music as an instrument of world peace, musical nationalists look to make distinctions along national lines, between Us and Them, between our art and their art. To a musical nationalist, the music of an enemy culture, or a musician from an enemy country, should not be performed lest it lull a malleable public into thinking the enemy is less dangerous and malign than jingoistic rhetoric encourages people to believe. [End Page 418] As Rosenberg works his way through World War I to the Second World War and through the subsequent Cold War, it becomes clear that the aims of musical universalists and nationalists do not map neatly onto political inclinations. Universalists are not always on the left; nationalists do not always lean to the right. What Dangerous Melodies suggests is that, while both universalists and nationalists view art as an agent of political change, art's impact on politics is, at best, fleeting. On the contrary, the reverse is more apparent. Politics influences what kind of music is composed and performed, who performs the music, and where it can be performed. The first part, "Terrorized by the Kaiser," consists of three essays in which Rosenberg examines the heated public discourse about the repertoires of symphony orchestras in the United States, and the conductors who led them, after the U.S.'s entry into World War I in 1917. As debated in news reports, private correspondence, and letters to the editors of newspapers, American classical music impresarios, critics, and devotees were divided as to whether it was appropriate for orchestras to play music by German and Austrian composers while U.S. soldiers and their allies were fighting the Kaiser's army. Private citizens of a nationalist bent urged the management of symphonies and opera houses to remove Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss, and other Germans and Austrians from their programs for the duration of the war. Others called for a boycott only of living German-language composers. Few were in the mood to listen to Richard Wagner. Right-wing musical nationalists measured a German conductor's loyalty to the Allied cause by what his orchestra did and did not play, while left-leaning musical universalists proclaimed the transcendent value of German music...