BARENBOIM AND MAAZEL……A MUSICAL MORONS….FROM 2008
Musical Morons Ruth S. King
http://www.fsmarchives.org/article.php?id=1386817
Lorin Maazel was once hailed as a “wunderkind”…a child prodigy who started conducting only a few short years after being potty-trained. In fact, there is absolutely no doubt that his career in classical music is dazzling and spans decades of conducting the major orchestras in the world.
However, in his recent concert in North Korea, arranged with the help of our hapless State Department, it is obvious that Pyongyang played the New York Philharmonic – not the other way around. Like so many “artistes” dazzled by their reflections in the mirror, Maazel played useful idiot to one of the most brutal regimes in the world.
The U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, reports that 200,000 people in North Korea’s concentration camps are starved, tortured and murdered.
This did not stop Maazel from burbling inanities which ignored North Korea’s record and smeared the United States. In the Wall Street Journal on February 20th, Maazel averred: “If we are to be effective in bringing succor to the oppressed, many languishing in foreign gulags, the U.S. must claim an authority based on an immaculate ethical record, toughened by economic clout. Woe to the people we are trying to help if we end up in a glass house.”
And to add libel to insult, before departing he added: “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, should they? Is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example to be emulated all over the world?”
His colossal vanity and preening did not stop there. Did he notice that the audience looked more like the old KGB thugs and party apparatchiks who were set up on May Day parades in Moscow? They applauded with a methodical beat and wanted an encore only of the Korean music.
Nonetheless, Maazel stated “When we received this very warm, enthusiastic reception, we felt that indeed there may be a mission accomplished here. We may have been instrumental in opening a little door, and we certainly hope that if that is true, in the long run it will be seen as a watershed.”
Earth to Lorin: Wake up! Did you forget the trip that former United States Secretary of Defense Madeleine Albright took in October 2000 to Pyongyang? Kim Jong Il, who missed the concert actually shook her hand warmly and noted that he was “really very happy” and that the visit was a “new one from the historical point of view.”
Madeleine left and the “Supreme Leader” returned to his pastime of torture, murder and starvation and speeding up development of nuclear weapons.
Condoleezza Rice, also a musician with another day job, has been equally inept in formulating any policy which deters the nuclear and bellicose ambitions of Korea.
And finally Maestro Maazel, do you remember how the visits to the Soviet Union of the Boston Symphony in 1956 or the New York Philharmonic’s own visit 1959 ended the Cold War and opened the gulags and freed the enslaved nations of Eastern Europe, and crumbled the Berlin Wall, and ended the systematic persecution of Russian Jews….not? Well…..so much for your culture campaign.
Another “wunderkind” of the Classical world who made a splash recently is Daniel Baremboim, the Israeli pianist and conductor, when he was granted “Palestinian” (read: Arab) citizenship at the end of a piano recital in Ramallah, for his work in promoting cultural exchange between young people in Israel and the Arab world.
“Under the most difficult circumstances he has shown solidarity with the Palestinian people,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian MP and former leader of Arafat’s terrorist organization Al Fatah.
Baremboim was a great friend of the late Edward Said, with whom he founded an orchestra meant to bring Israeli and Arab musicians together called the East-West Divan workshop. However, in his lectures he went far beyond bringing harmony with increasingly harsh criticism of Israel while ignoring Arab provocation and terrorism.
In the first Edward Said lecture at Columbia University, delivered in 2005, two years after Said’s death, Baremboim stated that the failure of the Israeli government to accept the Palestinians’ “narration” led to anti-Semitism, and that suicide bombings in Israel had “to be seen in the context of the historical development at which we have arrived.”
In the fall of 2006, Baremboim gave a six part lecture series at Harvard University’s under the aegis of the Charles Eliot Norton Petry Center. His lectures focused on music as a catalyst for political change. Too bad the Nazis, who listened to Brahms and Beethoven, had not heard Baremboim describe how music can be a model for human collaboration. And, for good measure, he continued his scolding of Israel.
In April of 2006 in one of the Six Reith lectures on music sponsored by the BBC, he answered a question of being sour on Israel: “I have more and more the feeling that after the war in 1967 this country went drunk, but the hangover is still felt today. Unless we are in a position that we can examine this, in my view there is no way that you will be able to recapture your love affair with this country, because your love affair with this country is precisely what draws you now to Ramallah. This is one of the reasons why I feel it is not my duty but it is my privilege to bring whatever I can to the Palestinian people.” And, surprise, surprise….while rockets from Gaza continued to rain on Israel, Baremboim refused to give an unqualified condemnation of Arab terrorism.
While Baremboim is not reticent to take bread with terrorists whose averred and repeated aim in life is to destroy Israel, he gets extremely upset when anti-Semitism is directed against him. In 2000 a furor erupted in Germany when he was compared to a native conductor. Klaus Landowsky, a leading Berlin politician from the Christian Democratic party said: ”On the one hand, you have the young von Karajan in Thielemann, on the other you have the Jew Barenboim.”
Within hours Mr. Barenboim asserted his ”astonishment” to discover that ”my Jewishness could have anything to do with my position at the Staatsoper or with my music.” He added that it frightened him and: ”I find this sort of anti-Semitism so incredible, I do not want to believe it.”
Earth to Baremboim: Hey! Was this the fault of Israel’s “occupation” and in your solipsism did you not know anything of the alarming growth of anti-Semitism throughout Europe?
Maazel and Baremboim are not the first political cretins in the world of symphonic music.
One is of course reminded of Leonard Bernstein in January 1970, who, in the words of the late William Buckley:
“… threw a big cocktail party for the Black Panthers in New York. The Panthers, you will recall, were a group of revolutionaries whose planted axiom was that the United States was racist and unjust, and had to be destroyed. Their leader rejoiced over the assassination of Robert Kennedy, featuring a picture of him lying in a pool of his own blood, his face transformed to the likeness of a pig. At Mr. Bernstein’s luxurious apartment, his guests were lectured by Black Panther Donald Cox, who began by announcing that if business didn’t provide full employment, then the Panthers would simply take over the means of production and put them in the hands of the people, to which prescription Mr. Bernstein’s reply was, “I dig it absolutely.”
What is next in the careers of these “wunderjerks?” A concert in Teheran? Chamber music in the caves of the Taliban? A sonata for Osama bin Laden?
William Congreve wrote in 1697 in “The Mourning Bride”: “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast.” Don’t believe it. The gun is far mightier than the baton.
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