Composers / performers - nice guys or not?

[salymap]

Smittims and I started a similar thread on the old boards.

Someone has named the great pianist Artur Rubinstein an OLD SCOUNDREL because of his private life.Does it matter?

I don't think Sibelius or even Mozart were particularly 'nice' people. It doesn't affect me when I listen to their compositions.

Wagner is a difficult one for me as he is not one of my favourites, although I realise works like The Ring are great achievements.

How much does what you know about a player or composer enter your thoughts when listening.

And who WAS/IS a really NICE person? Perhaps we know too much about them.

[David-G]

From reading his letters, Mozart has always struck me as a perfectly "nice" person.

[salymap]

From reading his letters, Mozart has always struck me as a perfectly "nice" person.

Perhaps I was too influenced by 'Amadeus'.

[mercia]

Gesualdo was a murderer [not nice]. Unlike most murderers he wrote wonderful madrigals.

so I forgive him for being not nice.

[salymap]

I was thinking more of the films shown recently on Elgar, Delius, RVW and others. There was one particular 'presenter' who really depressed me with his obvious, lip=smacking enjoyment in 'revealing'what he thought were important things about their once private lives.
I'm no prude but I would sometimes like to shout at the TV what someone keeps saying in 'The Red Shoes' =
'Nothing Matters but the MUSIC'.

[antongould]

I suppose I may not be a true music lover as yes when I read the the Old Scoundrel's life story I did cool to his music for a while and I wonder if my failure to get Wagner has anything to do with him being, as Auden said, ".......the greatest genius who ever lived but a thoroughly bad hat...."

But if mercia can forgive Gesualdo his parking tickets and worse..........

[mercia]

sorry, I was facetiously taking Gesualdo as an extreme example of not-nice behaviour, compared to which RVW's little peccadilloes [or whatever they were] are of no significance and no worse than the rest of the population ........................... who didn't write wonderful symphonies, choral music etc. etc. etc.

I don't know anything about Rubinstein - was he a bad boy ?

[gurnemanz]

I remember as a student doing German umpteen years ago writing essays about Thomas Mann, specifically his "Death in Venice", "Doktor Faustus", "The Magic Mountain" also an excellent short story "Tonio Kröger" in which he supposes that being an artist is like having a disease (or indeed making a pact with the devil). I remember the phrase "Zweideutigkeit als System " (ambiguity as a system) which he applies to all art but particularly to composers since music is the most ambiguous of art forms. In "Dr Faustus" there are lengthy discussions about diatonic music where a specific note is limited in its range of range of meanings by the key it is in - limited ambiguity, and 12 tone music where an individual note has no meaning or any meaning - total ambiguity.

Another relevant (I hope) memory is of reading a lengthy article about Beethoven in the magazine Der Spiegel. It must have been in 1970 because it was a special issue to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his birth. The writer used an image that stuck with me of Beethoven's life as a dung heap but one on which beautiful flowers could grow.

[aeolium]

I think Handel's generous support for the Thomas Coram Foundling Hospital (and also the quaintly named Fund for Decay'd Musicians) is a testament to his compassion for the less fortunate, even though he could be notoriously impatient with vain singers and Tunbridge Wells amateur performers...

[Pabmusic]

What a strange thread this is. What are our reactions to what we think might have been the personalities of people we didn't know, who (usually) lived long before we were born?

Well, I like to know something of composers, even to 'understand' their motivations - but it's mostly guesswork. A lot of it may be right, but there's no way of knowing. If a documentary maker says that RVW liked women and seems to have been very much 'hands on', it allows us to do no more than express our contemporary disgust - something that may have caused RVW and his 'victims' to look askance, for all we know. As for judging Wagner as if he were a member of the Nazi party, which is often done, words fail me. RVW seems to have been liked by most people who knew him, Wagner seems to have been a self-centred, pompous, racist genius. But should those judgements of their personalities seriously affect our opinions of their music? Of course not. They do little more than help put the music in context.

[salymap]

And I don't think I've ever heard a bad word about Gustav Holst. He seemed to be a valued friend of RVW ans other musicians, did great work at Morley College and had an interesting musician daughter to carry on someof his ideas. And left many beautiful songs, orchestral works and chamber music, not just the Planets.

[Mary Chambers]

On the whole my view is that true geniuses are unlikely to be normal, nice guys in the sense that we usually mean. They're bound to be a bit weird. I do notice their views on life, though, and that can affect me a bit, but it's very important that we 'judge' them in the context of their time.

If the music is good enough, I forgive a lot!

EDIT: We need to be wary of documentaries and biographies. Go back to first sources - letters, diaries and so on, if they exist.

[ahinton]

What a strange thread this is. What are our reactions to what we think might have been the personalities of people we didn't know, who (usually) lived long before we were born?

Well, not necessarily, since the thread topic does not specify only deceased composers whom contributors did not know when they were alive, but then, if it did specify such composers only, it would, as you write, be a strange thread whereas, if it did not, the risks of libel would clearly open themselves immediately!

Well, I like to know something of composers, even to 'understand' their motivations - but it's mostly guesswork. A lot of it may be right, but there's no way of knowing. If a documentary maker says that RVW liked women and seems to have been very much 'hands on', it allows us to do no more than express our contemporary disgust - something that may have caused RVW and his 'victims' to look askance, for all we know. As for judging Wagner as if he were a member of the Nazi party, which is often done, words fail me. RVW seems to have been liked by most people who knew him, Wagner seems to have been a self-centred, pompous, racist genius. But should those judgements of their personalities seriously affect our opinions of their music? Of course not. They do little more than help put the music in context.

The oft-cited Wagner case is interesting to the extent that, whilst he was indeed openly anti-Semitic, so was Chopin (albeit far less and far less noisily so), yet that no more affected his friendships with Jews (especially Alkan) than it did Wagner's and I think it reasonable to deduce that Chopin's influence on Wagner (certainly in harmonic terms) bears no relation whatsoever to their respective views about Jews.

So, yes, if you don't know the composer, just listen to his/her music without letting anything that may have been said (rightly or wrongly) or written about their personalities and conduct affect musical judgements - and if you do, then do just the same!

[Serial_Apologist]

The oft-cited Wagner case is interesting to the extent that, whilst he was indeed openly anti-Semitic, so was Chopin (albeit far less and far less noisily so), yet that no more affected his friendships with Jews (especially Alkan) than it did Wagner's and I think it reasonable to deduce that Chopin's influence on Wagner (certainly in harmonic terms) bears no relation whatsoever to their respective views about Jews.

In the case of at least three Jewish 20th century composers (probably more) we find music that clearly acknowledges their debt to Wagner's expansions of form, harmony and orchestral techniques, whatever they thought of him as a person; indeed I'd find it hard to believe that Mahler, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg were unaware of Wagner's views on Jewish people.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Professional musicians are a variable lot. With the cut-throat competion for jobs, there is an element of back-stabbing that goes on, which isn't particularly nice.