Wagner Music Should Not Be Banned In Wartime, According To Leinsdorf

"There would be no point in banning Wagnerian music during the war merely in the grounds that Wagner was a German," Erich Leinsdorf, the world's leading Wagnerian conductor, who is now in Boston to lead three of the Metropolitan's German productions this week, said in a special interview yesterday afternoon over the Crimson Network.

"If Wagner were living today, he would not have fallen in with the Nazis," Leinsdorf said. "Wagner, like all great artists, was an individualist, and individualists have no place in Germany today," he stated. Wagner would probably have chosen to leave Germany, as more than one writer and composer has already done, rather than be forced to compose under the dictates of the Nazis, according to Leinsdorf.

Nor is there anything typically German in the characters in Wagner's music dramas, Leinsdorf asserted. "The acceptance of Wagner all over the world," he pointed out, "indicates very clearly that his characters are more than merely nationalistic symbols." Wagnerian characters are not German, but are drawn almost completely from Scandinavian folk-lore.

The number of people attending Wagnerian operas has not, as some people may have supposed, fallen off since the war began, according to Leinsdorf. There has been in this war, as there was in the last war, a lively controversy as to whether or not the music of composers from enemy countries should be played.

In 1918, Wagnerian music was ruled out of the Metropolitan Opera, and there are some who would like to see the same thing happen now.