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Would the Great Composers be Conservative, Moderate or Liberal?

23K views 67 replies 33 participants last post by  Tallisman 
#1 ·
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?
 
#13 ·
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.
 
#17 ·
I don't think great thinkers like Wagner and Nietzche fit in our narrow classifications. Maybe the best way to enter in a mindset of genius is this famous anecdote. When a group of scientists pointed out flaws in Hegel's writings about natural sciences, he said "too bad for the science". These people are completely outside of our mortal politics. Yes, we can try to put them in boxes later, but for sure they didn't think themselves in those boxes.

That's why I don't care what people think about Wagner, I just listen to his music. And it's great.
 
#19 ·
I'm a moderate, I don't see the reason why so many people are extreme one way or the other, and I think great classical composers could very well have been moderates also. It seems like there may be some historical proof for this, like the way some of them fell out of favor with certain patrons or institutions. For one thing, artistic natures are superficially said in this age to not be that united with a church, yet in the 20th Century and even now many of the greats wrote church music or openly professed still having a Christian faith. That shows some degree of moderate stance, in a way.
 
#24 ·
Hmmmmmmmmmmm

Glazunov's political profile:

-Wrote coronation cantata for the would-be last Czar of Russia. :cry:
-Had an uncle who was Mayor of St. Petersburg (politics and charity organizations ran in the family)
-Supported minority rights of Jews (did this for decades)
-Supported democratic process and students/faculty rights over Aristocratic control of academic institutions (as demonstrated by the events of 1905-06)
-Supported the "intelligentsia" class by being a part of it
-Wrote an Anthem for the first Russian Duma (congress of representatives). fun fact, Putin resurrected it a few years ago. :lol:
-Supported the proletariat/working class by giving scholarships both formalized and unformalized
-Denied his own salary so that it could be used for here said scholarship (personal charity over government subsidy)
-Worked closely with Lunacharsky during early Soviet era to maintain the Conservatory's independence (anyone who knows that name knows him for ill, but he was a huge fan of Glazunov. Wouldn't make him go to the slums! Even though basically everyone else did)
-Petitioned Lunacharsky hundreds of personal favors for students depending on their talent and situation, be it better rations, more clothes, travel money, etc (again, personal charity over government subsidy)
-Angered by the elimination of property rights and filed lawsuit against it (which he lost and consequently had to start paying rent for living in his own home even though his family owned it for generations :()
-Opposed political "decries" of older composers during early Soviet era, who were condemned for being bourgeois and nearly banned (ex. Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, basically anyone who was well-off as a musician)
-Left Soviet Union for several reasons, one of them notably that Lunacharsky was demoted and the new person in power enforced quotas on the Conservatory rather than quality standards, which was against everything Glazunov stood for. Rather than only the best be allowed to join, standards would be dropped so that a certain number was always enrolled. He considered this the end of the institution and gave up. (Fortunately things got better later)

Very complex, eh? That's why I've not been able to guess myself. He was the Music Party, I guess. Pro-music, pro-musicians, no matter who they were or where they came from. Whatever he stood for was for the promotion of higher education and quality in music. I guess that's a kind of Labor Party? But being from the bourgeois class, he was representing people who were very different from him. A free-thinking, egalitarian Liberal in the old fashioned sense, and yet extremely conservative regarding the use of money, authority, and independence of choice.
 
#30 ·
Listening to classical music is an introspective thing. I don't think it really gives away any information about a person's ideology. After all, Hitler loved classical music, and while a stereotype it is true that there have been disgraceful criminals with no regard for human life who listened to it day and night.
 
#38 ·
idk, Mozart was probably agnostic... Schubert definitely was... Prokofiev was agnostic for a time but converted to Christian Science, for the record.


More important question is: Moralist or non-Moralist? :tiphat:
 
#43 · (Edited)
Some composers changed over their lives. Beethoven seemed uninterested in religion. then in his 40s he got an interest in Eastern religions. By 1820 he had become a pretty traditional Catholic and left all that behind. His Missa Solemnis, contrary to what somebody posted, was an overtly religious work. Where many composers of masses tended to rush through the central part of the Credo, he composed, very carefully and effectively, for every line of it.
 
#45 ·
I'm not clear how this thread got side-tracked from its original purpose of asking whether the great composers would be Conservative, Moderate or Liberal to speculating on their actual religious beliefs.

The intention of the thread was presumably to raise a hypothetical question asking about the great composers' social/political attitudes either in their own time or possibly in more recent times if they were alive today. This is a different matter from speculating on their actual religious convictions, and the extent to which they were firm believers in their Christian upbringings or merely spinning things out to make a living.

On the religious aspects, I'm not surprised to see the usual cynical views being expressed by those of an atheistic persuasion and those of other faiths. It probably suits them to believe that the great composers, with few exceptions, were not materially inspired by any adherence to the Christian religion.
 
#59 ·
Prokofiev is shown to be the farthest Left on the graph. Rubbish. The only thing P was interested in was music, how and where and when he could compose it, and who would foot the bill so that he could live comfortably. The Soviet State most of the time suited him just fine, but strictly because it worked for him, not for any political/ideological reasons. It did get a bit sticky, though, toward the end.....
 
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