Can you twist your mind around these strange facts? Richard Wagner was a vociferous anti-Semite and wrote operas full of cosmic love. Frank Baum wrote THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, but as Kimberly Roppolo pointed out last week, also called for the genocide against the American Indians. Luigi Pirandello had his Nobel Prize medal melted down into a bullet for Mussolini's soldiers. Ezra Pound supported Mussolini loudly. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, an anti-Semite and Fascist, is considered one of the master novelists of the last century.
How can the same mind churn with hate and produce art of extraordinary beauty? The Lakota visionary Lame Deer pointed out that, even if a shaman is a bad man, Spirit may speak through him. Does something similar happen with artists?
Even the first minute of Wagner's "Prelude to Tristan and Isolde," with its surges of love and longing, convinces me.
How and why? Who knows? Maybe art transcends all and lifts the artist above his ordinary self.
Should we read/listen to such artists? For me, how can we not? What are your thoughts?
8 Comments