Hate and Beauty

I've been meaning to link to this just ridiculously good piece by Erik Tarloff about how to reckon with hateful language and themes in great art without censoring or abandoning it.  This story about Mahler conducting Siegfried, and reinterpreting Wagner's intentions to allow the piece to stay alive and vibrant is particularly interesting:

When Mahler first conducted Siegfried in Vienna, the singer who performed the role of Mime came to an early rehearsal with an interpretation that was a coarse anti-Semitic caricature. Mahler quickly stopped the rehearsal and told the singer not to do it. He then said something along the lines of, "I have no doubt that is what Wagner intended, but I will not permit it in my house."

Which is all well and good, and in Mahler's Viennese production the hateful subtext of the opera was thereby suppressed, if not expunged. Mahler, himself a Jew, was no doubt responding to a deliberate and mischievous provocation on the part of a singer as well as a desire to spare the sensibilities of a substantial portion of his audience.  But he still conducted the opera. In fact, he worshiped Wagner, and conducted him regularly and lovingly.

The impact of art is difficult to fully reckon with.  Nat Hentoff's The Day They Came to Arrest The Book (Also, OMG they made a CBS Schoolbreak Special of the book, written by Melvin Van Peebles.  If anyone can help me get my hands on this, I would be eternally grateful.) is a great primer, especially for younger readers.  But this strikes me as a real must-read short meditation. Art flows from its creators, and lives a, glorious, complicated existence far beyond their reach.