Likes: Would the great composers be conservative, moderate or liberal?
Seems like we know what a few of them were. Does anyone know which were which?
Would the Great Composers be Conservative, Moderate or Liberal?
Would the great composers be conservative, moderate or liberal?
Seems like we know what a few of them were. Does anyone know which were which?
The Political Compass has this to offer:
Dispute it as you like, but it's generally based on the composers' stated political positions or their stances towards various issues.
So Wagner really was a Nazi then!Originally Posted by Mahlerian
The Political Compass has this to offer:
Dispute it as you like, but it's generally based on the composers' stated political positions or their stances towards various issues.
It was Nietzsche who people say was proto-Nazi. Since they had the split, could they still be agreed?
Ridiculous in both cases, but Nietzsche particularly despised political movements and populism. Given that Nazism was a populist political movement, there's little doubt that he wouldn't have seen much to admire.
Holst, Vaughan Williams, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Aaron Copland were socialists or 'progressives', I believe. Bartok and Luigi Nono were known to be strongly anti-fascist in their views. Presumably Frederic Rzewski is also a socialist.
Fascinating graphic.The Political Compass has this to offer:
Dispute it as you like, but it's generally based on the composers' stated political positions or their stances towards various issues.
SixFootScowl liked this post
Poor Schumann - no friends in his box!
Hmmm...'left', 'right', authoritarian', 'libertarian'...
...but no 'conservative', 'liberal', or 'moderate'.
Thread drift?
N/A liked this post
I think we can say that corruption in any form the great composers would be against. Corruption can manifest in a right, left or moderate position.
I believe English composer Cornelius Cardew was a leftist. I dunno, just a hunch.
N/A liked this post
You may be on to something there.
Just to be clear, his death was an accident.
Regarding Nietzsche and Fascism, I find this quote interesting, perhaps even true:
"If Marx is inseparably linked to the growth of communism, it must be admitted that Nietzsche is linked to the emergence of fascism in the twentieth century. The relation of fascism to Nietzsche recalls the relation of the French Revolution to Rousseau. The problem of Nietzsche's connection with fascism is unfortunately not resolved by claiming, as many interpreters of Nietzsche are prone to do, that Nietzsche was no fascist, that he was a violent critic of German nationalism, and that he would have loathed Hitler. These things are undoubtedly true, and uttering them shows the absurdity of a crude identification of Nietzsche's doctrines with Hitler's ravings. Nietzsche was a man with a noble vision of man's future. His own delicacy, integrity, and courage shine through his writing. He was also free of the crude racism which was to be an important element of fascism, and he had only contempt for political anti-Semitism. But the fact remains that in various ways Nietzsche influenced fascism. Fascism may have abused the words of Nietzsche, but his words are singularly easy to abuse."
-Werner J. Dannhauser, "Nietzsche", in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds. History of political philosophy 3rd ed. (1987)
Nietzsche was not a Nazi, not an anti-Semite, but he was quite anti-liberal, reactionary and elitist in many ways, so there's quite a lot of stuff in Nietzsche's writing that fascists can like.
Last edited by Dim7; Jul-20-2016 at 16:31.
If anything most of the great composers were not Americans and they would not identify themselves in within these limits.
The one thing I can say is that few of the composers have been liberals most composers seems to have been socialists, conservatives and nationalists. I can´t think of any liberal composer.
Maybe not a Great Composer, but Leonard Bernstein was a prototypical American liberal.
Wagner was a friend of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and he had to go into exile for participating in the anarchist uprising of 1848. He detested political and religious institutions, he hated militarism and violence, he refused to be associated with movements to abridge the civil rights of Jews, and even when ideas of the Aryan "master race" were introduced to him late in life by proto-Nazi ideologue Gobineau he rejected them. His operas dramatize, among other things, the disastrous oppressiveness of artificial institutions and the lust for power that sustains them, and show, in mythic form, the individual soul's struggle against forces that would constrain it.
So no, Wagner was not a Nazi, and this associating him with the "authoritarian right" is just more of the usual ignorant nonsense. An error of this magnitude thoroughly discredits the entire graph.
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