Katy Hamilton

Georges de la Tour: “The Musicians’ Brawl”

For lovers of musical blogs around the internet, the title of this week’s post will probably be ringing a bell already. It is taken from a series of articles on the site On An Overgrown Path written by Bob Shingleton, who has recently been part of an exchange with Joyce DiDonato on the subject of the political responsibilities of musicians. His most recent post, grandly entitled ‘Classical music should not be the art of compromise’, is a response to DiDonato’s letter, published on Tuesday. And whilst this is a sticky and controversial subject, I’m afraid I feel duty-bound to wade in. Buckle up, everybody.

Here’s the thing. Classical music has always been the art of compromise. Depending on how exactly you’re discussing it, the compromise comes from different directions. Composers compromised on the genre in which they were writing because their employer, Grand Duke Whathisname, needed some music for his dinner party. Ensembles compromised on the repertoire they sang and the manner of ornamentation they applied because Bishop Thingummybob didn’t go in for this new-fangled counterpoint nonsense. Performers and composers argued back and forth with each other about whether that new sonata was actually playable, and if they were expecting the pianist not to make a fool of themselves then that bar needed changing, and how dare you question my creative abilities, if they only practiced harder they could do it! And so on. From bar one, beat one – in fact, from the breath just before it – classical music is a compromise.

But politically speaking, it has also always been a compromise, and to talk about some golden age in which musicians were blissfully free from having to make politically-based decisions is to reveal a misunderstanding of history. Casals might have had the financial luxury of refusing to play for four years, and avoiding Italy, Spain and Germany (though he did perform in Vichy France). But what about Dvořák, writing symphonies to be premiered in the country which was oppressing his own? The Sixth Symphony was written for Hans Richter to perform with the Vienna Philharmonic, and the first performance had to be given elsewhere because of the difficulty of performing a Slavonic work in the Austro-Hungarian capital at the time of writing. Yet you’ll notice that Dvořák didn’t respond by boycotting Vienna – he needed Austrian and German support (from performers, publishers and audiences) to build his career, even if his politics didn’t align with those of the empire. Need I mention Shostakovich, and the tightrope he walked in Soviet Russia? Or indeed Wagner, who was busy revolting against the old order in 1848, and living comfortably under the patronage of King Ludwig II less than twenty years later, because it was the only way that he could afford to make his operatic ideas a reality? The Swedish soprano Jenny Lind spent two years touring under the auspices of P.T. Barnum. I haven’t yet found anything to suggest that she morally objected to the faking of the Fiji Mermaid, or Barnum’s treatment (exploitation?) of General Tom Thumb. What Shingleton calls ‘classical music’s cash hungry business model’ has existed in various forms and for various reasons – profit, peace and quiet, earning a living wage, attempting to build an international profile – for centuries. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own applies, in one way or another, across the board for creative professionals: if you haven’t got the money, you can’t be ‘free’ in your creativity. If you have entirely independent means, you can has as many political scruples as you like, because you can afford them (though you might need to side-step the issue of where that cash came from in the first place). Let’s not kid ourselves that ‘The Past’ was full of dewy-eyed idealists who got their way. It’s history, not fantasy.

One thing that we can now claim to enjoy at a previously undreamt-of level is international communication. Perhaps if Dvořák had his own YouTube channel, he wouldn’t have needed to do well in Vienna – he could have found markets elsewhere that were more to his political tastes. (And yes, I mean markets – they might be small and they might be specialized, but professional musicians are out to earn a living doing the thing they love, not just do the thing they love with cash as a nice unnecessary bonus.) As communication networks have improved, companies have got bigger, their range of influence and has power increased, and business personnel move countries more freely and own interests globally – as in the example Shingleton cites of Warner Classics and its Russian head man. DiDonato is absolutely clear in her letter: with our awareness of political and moral injustices in so many places, and the tangled international web of business structures, avoiding a location or company on the basis of disagreeing with its politics is extremely difficult, and can result in a rather more uncomfortable compromise – one that destroys careers by ensuring that they never get started.

And there is a difficult and, I suspect, unanswerable question to address too: to what extent do we – and should we – judge musicians, or artists, or writers by their private views and the company they keep? The all-encompassing notion of celebrity and the cut-throat tactics of the press make it difficult for the famous to pick their noses without someone reporting it. With the boundary of public and private personas so heavily eroded, what should we be judging these people on? Their artistry? Their politics? Their looks and body shape? I’ve seen all three discussed with relish and disdain in the UK press. I’m not saying that those who choose to put themselves in the public eye shouldn’t expect to be… well, in the public eye. But we don’t make it easy for them, and criticizing from your own armchair (or laptop) is a darn sight easier than trying to do what they do for a living.

So whilst I applaud Shingleton for wanting to uphold political idealism and artistic greatness, there is the small matter of current reality. A great deal is wrong with our society – and by ‘our’, I mean locally, nationally and internationally. There’s a lot of stuff we might want to fix. Internationalism means that isolating problems to fix one-by-one is extremely difficult. A musician is there, first and foremost, to be a musician. If they are also prepared to use their profile to highlight political and ethical problems, then good for them, I applaud their efforts. But it is not their job alone, and unless they are prepared to throw themselves on their own swords, compromise is inevitable if they wish to sustain a career. The kind of advocacy that DiDonato describes – in her case of of LGBTQ rights – is an amazingly powerful tool, and I salute her for her role here. Music, and music personified by particular people (composers or performers), is the thing that can get us up in the morning when nothing else will; can console us when everything is a mess; can unite us for all kinds of causes. But be realistic. Calling for musicians to spend the majority of their energies focussing on being politicians, rather than artists? That really is an unfortunate compromise.