The former music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, which resides at the Kennedy Center, has responded to a Washington Post article criticising President Trump’s takeover.
Slatkin writes:
‘I am reminded of what Leonard Bernstein said following the assassination of JFK: ‘This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before’. Artists must stand up to what is now occurring. And audiences should not be depriving themselves of great art.
Staying away from the KC will only accelerate its decline. Go to what you wish and avoid those events that do not appeal to you. Perhaps JFK himself said it best: ‘Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artist… faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.’
From Marc Fisher’s Washington Post opinion piece:
When I covered the collapse of communist control of East Germany for The Post, I visited Kurt Masur, the world-famous conductor of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. To Germans, Masur was a confusing figure, at once a deflating example of how artists were co-opted by the regime and a stirring symbol of the East German people’s revolution against the communists.
Unlike many German artists, Masur had chosen to stay in the East and work under the Soviet-installed regime, lending it some of the shine of his global reputation. But in 1989, as violent confrontation between the communist military forces and their own people loomed, Masur suddenly shifted from close cooperation with the regime to active, even daring, opposition — a display of resistance that saved lives and accelerated the revolution.
Let’s hope American artists never face such a dramatic pivot point.
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