Arts and Politics (or Why I Love Carl Orff, But...)

I went to the Symphony last night. Well, the Houston Symphony, but it's still the symphony (please don't shoot me for saying that; the symphony is still one of the ways in which Houston is a wannabe big city: it wants to play with the grownups but hasn't quite gotten the hang of it yet).

I was actually pleasantly surprised. The program was awkwardly chosen, in the sense that it consisted of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, followed by Orff's Carmina Burana. Why put two contemporary choral works in the same program? If you have a limited tolerance for this, then you obviously won't go at all -- as opposed to coming to a mixed concert that contains one piece outside of the mainstream, and therefore getting a chance to stretch your experience a bit. And if you love these pieces, the fact that they are both choral works may result in some sensory overlap, with the second piece obliterating your memory of the first one.

This is definitely what happened to me. I remember loving the Chichester Psalms, which I don't think I had ever heard before. But after Carmina Burana, I don't remember much about them.

Now, the program notes for Orff's piece are completely devoid of the usual biographical sketch. Instead, they totally focus on the work itself: its origin, the history of the manuscript (lost, found, and almost forgotten again), the orchestration. I have heard Carmina Burana in concert several times (including an impressive performance by the San Francisco Symphony, at Davies Hall, with two full choirs combined -- the "O Fortuna" almost blew me out of my seat -- and I don't remember which program was a bit more explicit about Orff's life, but it made the point that Carmina Burana was largely overlooked for many years because Orff had been associated, in somewhat disputed ways, with the Nazis (see the Wikipedia article for more information).

At minimum, Orff "collaborated" with the government by responding to a call for alternate music to the Midsummer Night Dream, to replace the famous version by Felix Mendelssohn, whose music was banned because he was a Jew. Surely, he could have simply abstained from responding to this request without incurring much risk. The omission of this controversy in last night's program bothered me. For one thing, the same program talks about Tchaikovsky in the notes for another concert, and clearly mention his homosexuality, which was long ignored in such publications. So if it's now become all right to acknowledge this aspect of the Russian composer's life, which may or may not have a relationship with his work, then why the silence over Orff's controversial relationship with Hitler's minions?

Then I remembered another instance of controversy over the relationship with art and politics: the cinema industry was active in Paris in 1940-44, during the German occupation. It is claimed that the Germans encouraged it because it served their propaganda purposes (the book "Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation" by Evelyn Ehrlich seems to provide particularly in-depth treatment of the subject).

Is it fair to expect artists to essentially "go on strike," emigrate, change jobs, or otherwise abandon either their environment or their families, or their profession, rather than work under the regime of the moment? Why do we tend to expect this from artists, and not from butchers or postal workers? I think there are two reasons: we assign morality to art, and art has a different ratio of "appearances vs. necessity." What I mean by the second point is that the butcher's work is necessary if people are to eat meat, and that work doesn't really make the regime look good (although in some places and times this point could be debated); the artist's work can be stopped as a form of passive resistance without damaging anyone's immediate well-being (other than the artists') and if the work goes on, the regime can, as was perhaps the case in Paris during WWII, use this as a way to project normalcy: "see those happy Parisians going to the movies, clearly we're not what the evil American propaganda is trying to tell you."

I tend not to provide answers in these pages -- I'm content enough to raise what I think are important questions. In fact, I don't know what to think about this, other than what I wrote above about Orff's options. Similarly, should Marcel Carné have put his camera away and waited until after the war to film his masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis? The inspiration might have been gone by then. Was he complicit in the Nazi propaganda machine -- or, as has been claimed, did he help shelter resistance fighters by providing them with jobs on the set, knowing that his work enjoyed some level of protection from the authorities?

The work itself was beautiful, the Houston Symphony was actually pretty good at it... I just had this nagging feeling all evening that something needed to be discussed, and that the program author had missed a chance to make people reflect about a moral issue of great importance.