News

After Court Restores Research Funding, Trump Still Has Paths to Target Harvard

News

‘Honestly, I’m Fine with It’: Eliot Residents Settle In to the Inn as Renovations Begin

News

He Represented Paul Toner. Now, He’s the Fundraising Frontrunner in Cambridge’s Municipal Elections.

News

Harvard College Laundry Prices Increase by 25 Cents

News

DOJ Sues Boston and Mayor Michelle Wu ’07 Over Sanctuary City Policy

Wagner Music Should Not Be Banned In Wartime, According To Leinsdorf

Composer Would Have Been Anti-Nazi, Conductor Says

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED

"There would be no point in banning Wagnerian music during the war merely in the grounds that Wagner was a German," Erich Leinsdorf, the world's leading Wagnerian conductor, who is now in Boston to lead three of the Metropolitan's German productions this week, said in a special interview yesterday afternoon over the Crimson Network.

"If Wagner were living today, he would not have fallen in with the Nazis," Leinsdorf said. "Wagner, like all great artists, was an individualist, and individualists have no place in Germany today," he stated. Wagner would probably have chosen to leave Germany, as more than one writer and composer has already done, rather than be forced to compose under the dictates of the Nazis, according to Leinsdorf.

Nor is there anything typically German in the characters in Wagner's music dramas, Leinsdorf asserted. "The acceptance of Wagner all over the world," he pointed out, "indicates very clearly that his characters are more than merely nationalistic symbols." Wagnerian characters are not German, but are drawn almost completely from Scandinavian folk-lore.

The number of people attending Wagnerian operas has not, as some people may have supposed, fallen off since the war began, according to Leinsdorf. There has been in this war, as there was in the last war, a lively controversy as to whether or not the music of composers from enemy countries should be played.

In 1918, Wagnerian music was ruled out of the Metropolitan Opera, and there are some who would like to see the same thing happen now.

Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.

Tags