The city of Salzburg has voted against naming a street
in the city after the governess to the Von Trapp family, Maria. She was, of course, celebrated by Julie
Andrews in that memorable musical film The
Sound of Music which today forms the backbone of Salzburg’s tourist
economy. As a coach driver, I used to
get very annoyed doing tours of Salzburg when everyone went on about The Sound of Music; “I don’t know
anything about that”, I would glibly tell my passengers, “but this is where
Mozart was born”. (Which often met with
a quizzical stare; who is Mozart?) The grounds for the city council’s
rejection, according to a report last night on the BBC, is that she advocated
in the 1950s corporal punishment for children.
We live in an age where we refuse to accept history
unless it conforms to the convoluted moral code which we, as a contemporary society,
accepts. We see this in the big debate
in the USA where statues of Confederate figures such as Robert E. Lee are being
removed because their actions in the past are actions which society today would
not condone.
(I readily confess I know nothing of Robert E.
Lee. His name only ever crossed my consciousness
when, during the 1970s I was addicted to the TV series The Dukes of Hazard - my addiction was prompted purely by
Daisy Duke and her tight shorts, and to this day I retain an admiration for the
female form which far outstrips any interest in the automotive one. Their iconic car - red and white, unlike Daisy’s
unforgettable blue denim shorts - was named after General Robert E. Lee.)
Whether those who demand the removal of memorials to
Lee are right or wrong is immaterial. It
seems to me that they are attempting to expunge from history a figure who,
whatever he did, clearly was worthy of honour amongst a section of society in
years gone by and therefore has some part to play in the evolution of that
crazy, mixed-up society which is the USA today.
Statues of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler are removed (and
controversially re-erected) because their actions, much praised and admired by
many people in their day, are now seen to have been wholly reprehensible. There is an argument that to allow statues to
such figures to remain in the public arena might prompt extreme groups to use
them as focal points for a revival of what we now regard (but did not at the
time – how else did these figures achieve such prominence, uncomfortable though
it is for us to accept this?) as abhorrent moral positions. But that, surely, is a problem with today’s
society and should not affect our recognition of the part these figures played
in the society of their day.
In the 1950s my parents were quite unusual in their
sparing use of corporal punishment to us children. If I got a smack, I recognised I deserved it,
and I am not sure it did me any harm. At
school in the 1960s, corporal punishment was meted out with great
generosity. I even got the slipper when
Billy Weir, our French master, realised I was the only boy in the class who had
not had the slipper, and felt that was a good enough excuse for me to get
punished. (Today you will read that with
horror; at the time it was painful but hilarious, and it did me the world of
good, as Billy Weir knew it would, by raising my status in the class from that
of “Slimy Little Creep” to “One Of Us”.)
This might all seem horrific to modern-day readers, luxuriating in a
society where corporal punishment is seen as wrong, but it was the norm and
accepted as such without too much question.
As a postscript, I would never dream of physically punishing my
daughter, no matter what the provocation, simply because the ethics of today
oppose it. It would be wrong to smack a
child today; it was not considered wrong in the 1950s and 1960s.
If we try to expunge from history those people whose
morals and ethics, perfectly acceptable in their own time, are different from
those of our own time, we expunge history.
We only understand the past – and therefore the very roots of our
present – when we open our eyes to its totality.
This is especially true in music where morals and
ethics are inseparably woven into the historical context of the music we
play. An interpretation has no validity
if we do not understand the composer both as a person and as a product of a particular
society. Music history for too long has side-stepped
moral and ethical issues adopting, instead, an appallingly simplistic attitude
which formulates totally false and pointless generalisations about Baroque,
Classical or Romantic ideals to which none of the composers in history ever wholeheartedly
subscribed. Students are taught that Bach,
Handel, Scarlatti, Byrd, Rameau are all the same, had the same moral outlook
and the same artistic goals because they happened to live in this mythical “Baroque
Era”. More shockingly, ignorant teachers
apply the same uniformity of attitudes to the likes of Richard Strauss, John
Cage, Sergei Rachmaninov, Pierre Boulez, Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ives
because they were all “20th century”.
We know this is not true, yet ill-informed and
unthinking teachers still peddle the same rubbish to today’s generation of
students. Pupils know all about
non-existent “eras” and nothing at all about things like the French Revolution
and Soviet Ideologies; yet for composers, it was the reality of existence which
flavoured the creative process, not some meaningless label retrospectively
adopted from another field of artistic study
This approach to music history has meant that the
private lives, the morals and the ethics of even the greatest composers have
usually by-passed the prurient gaze of today’s self-righteous moral
guardians. When we think of Bach merely
as a “Baroque” composer, we can put him on a pedestal and not worry that he
was, in reality, prone to fits of drunken violence, addicted to sex (even in
the organ loft of the church), rebelled against authority and spent time in
prison. Similarly how much more comfortable it is for
us to identify Bruckner and Mahler as “Romantics” and not acknowledge that,
were both living in today’s moral climate, the former would be serving several
life sentences for his approaches to young girls – seen as the actions of a harmless
eccentric in his society but condemned as blatant paedophilia in ours – and the
latter strung up by modern-day feminists, incensed by the mistreatment he meted
out to his wife, forcing her to sign a contract of marriage which forbad her
from any musical activity. Glibly
placing him in history as a “Classical” composer, we happily overlook the
fact that Mozart was a dreadful social misfit.
Surely the good burghers of Salzburg would immediately rip down the name
of Mozart from the city’s streets, hotels and chocolates, rename the Mozarteum after
some innocuous but morally acceptable crooner when they realise that in his day
he was the city’s most outspoken critic, showering contempt on it and its
people and taking every opportunity to get away from the place. If we really want to show our admiration for
Mozart, we should avoid Salzburg like the plague, not flock there in our
droves. 
No trip to Vienna is complete for musicians without a
visit to its many musical statues and memorials. Yet how many of these should still be
standing if the current trend for re-evaluating historical significance through
the prism of contemporary moral values were allowed to spread to composers. Johann Strauss opposed his father, Schubert
was addicted to hard drink, Haydn’s treatment of his own wife does not bear
close scrutiny, Beethoven indulged in anti-social behaviour with a vengeance…the
list goes on.
We must accept that previous moral and ethical attitudes
were not the same as ours. In so doing
we understand what created the key figures of the past, even if we cannot
morally agree with them. Ii is not the job
of musicians to exercise retrospective moral censorship, even if city
councillors in Salzburg have adopted that role.
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