Out of Tune

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

For those of us who have given our lives over to foreign corresponding and who also share a passion for music, one of the great moments was seeing, in 1979, Isaac Stern’s film “From Mao to Mozart,” in which the Maestro flirted onstage, violin to violin, with some of Communist China’s rising musical aspirants. “Every time you take up the instrument,” he said, “you’re making a statement, your statement. And it must be a statement of faith, that you believe, this is the way you want to speak.” He lectured them only on music. “Without music, we are not alive,” he said and spoke of “my faith, my abiding belief in both music and young people, and I believe that between the two of them, the world is a better place.” One can see at youtube.com/watch?v=yZve-azUmcI, a clip from end of the movie, as those words are superimposed over Stern bringing the young (and old) communists to a rousing ovation with the Brahms violin concerto.

It is hard to imagine Stern making the kind of blunder that the music director of the New York Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel, made in an interview with the Associated Press on the eve of the orchestra’s departure for North Korea. Mr. Maazel, in a remark brought to our attention by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, responded to objections to the trip by saying, “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country — the United States — is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others.”

It’s quite a contrast with of 1984, when the Philharmonic had been scheduled to play in Kuala Lumpur but wound up canceling its appearance when the Malaysians asked the musicians not to play “Schelomo, A Hebrew Rhapsody” by Ernest Bloch. Imagine how people would have reacted had the Philharmonic shrugged and said, “Hey, there are plenty of anti-Semites in America; who are we to judge?” The fact is that not even the worst abuses in the isolated cases where there have been abuses of prisoners in American custody come anywhere near the routine mistreatment of prisoners by the North Korean communists. In the American case, the abusers — at Abu Ghraib, for example — have been investigated, tried, and punished by our own government. The investigations were initiated by our own government.

In North Korea, by contrast, the abusers are the government. If Mr. Maazel means to put official American prison conditions such as solitary confinement or Guantanamo on par with North Korean concentration camps, it is a different argument, but one in which his case is just as weak. Mr. Maazel’s strengths, at least to judge by the basis of this quote, are in the music department, not the department of political understanding. As the New York musicians fly to Pyongyang, many of their fans here, ourselves included, are hoping that they will return having burnished America’s reputation and principles. For if the point is merely to make some statement about America’s faults, that is a message, after all, that the people of North Korea hear aplenty from their own leaders and of which they don’t need a reminder from Mr. Maazel. And it will get in the way of the music that did so much to inspire China a pioneering generation ago.


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