It is now an archive for my newspaper and magazine pieces. My blog can now be read at: www.spectator.co.uk/stephenpollard
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Melanie Phillips' peerless blog. Read, and learn.
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Lots of interesting nibbles - and a ruthless swatter of economic gibberish.
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Must-read left of centre blog from writers who understand the threat to the West.
Clive Davis
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Norm's blog
The thoroughly sensible thoughts of renowned left-wing academic Norman Geras, Professor of Government at Manchester. And cricket, too.
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| August | 25 |
| 2006 |
This piece of mine appears in today's Times:
Do the names Adrian Slade, Hugo Rodallega or Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Piano Quintet in C mean anything to you? If even one of them registers, then I have news for you. Whether it is good or bad news is, I suppose, a moot point: you are a friend of mine for life.
If you know about all three, then something truly weird has happened. Someone must have been cloning embryos more than 40 years ago, when I was born.
I tell you this not because I wish to use The Times to find new friends, but because this week I realised something that many people have known for ages. I am really quite weird.
What I am about to reveal next is obvious, if not from my name then at least from the accompanying mugshot. I am a man. And when I say I am weird, what I really mean is that I am a man.
A few months ago I read a fascinating book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge. He will no doubt recoil in horror at my caricature of his book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, but the basic message I took from it is that men have more “systematic†personalities and women have more “empathic†personalities. The book concentrates on autism as an extreme example of this in men.
Yes, I thought, this all makes sense. After all, Nick Hornby wrote a bestseller, High Fidelity, based on men’s penchant for making lists. I’m sure most men recognised themselves in the book’s theme. But it was only when I spotted Adrian Slade in Bloomsbury on Monday that I realised just how true it is.
Along with a couple of friends, I have a rather sad interest in long-forgotten political figures. A few years ago, for instance, I met the Mayor of Oakland, California. I cannot come close to conveying to you the sheer excitement I felt. The reason? In a former incarnation, he was Governor of California — Jerry Brown, or Governor Moonbeam as he was then known.
Mr Slade, as if you didn’t know, was the last president of the Liberal Party, from 1987 to 1988. Sitting on a bus and spying him out of the window hardly compares, but it nonetheless merited an immediate email to my friends, both of whom understood the frisson I felt.
I know. I did say I was weird.
The Piano Quintet in C is a different matter. It may be part of another obsession — obscure recordings of classical music — but it is at least culturally respectable. Wilhelm Furtwängler is, I would argue, the greatest conductor ever. He also composed, but his pieces were rarely performed, let alone recorded. So when I discovered last week that there is a new CD of his chamber music, I was ecstatic. Most normal classical music obsessives would not even be aware of its existence, let alone care.
As for Hugo Rodallega, he is a Colombian footballer who plays for Club de Futbol Atlas in Mexico. But that’s not how he fits in. This week I was having lunch, and my companion and I discovered halfway through that we have both wasted innumerable hours playing a computer game, Football Manager. In the game, I manage Spurs and Hugo Rodallega is my top scorer. My companion is a Manchester United fan, and so much does he care about his team, and the computer game, that he refuses to pretend to be that club’s manager, lest he be sacked. By a computer programme. In a completely made-up game.
I may have such weird obsessions, but I like to think I am at least relatively normal. Other men have different obsessions, but obsessions they most certainly have. Can you, however, imagine any normal woman behaving like this? Caring — really, really caring — about being sacked in a computer game? Men. Weird.
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A month ago, the road outside my flat was closed for a week. It was inconvenient but worth it. The surface was relaid and we, and all the environs, ended up with a lovely smooth new road.
Yesterday I got a letter from Thames Water, informing me that it is replacing the Victorian water tunnels where I live. It will take months and cause disruption, but everyone knows it has to be done.
And so it has begun. By digging up the bright, smooth, shiny road, laid no doubt at great expense, a month ago. Isn’t Britain wonderful?
MessageSpace
Sorry, I'm confused. Which of these people play in the Quintet?
I've spent all day avoiding the cracks in the pavement. Every year there are more of them.
"Wilhelm Furtwängler"
Unbelievable.
Stephen, delighted to find a fellow Furtwangler fan(atic). Unquestionably the greatest conductor in the history of recorded music. Toscanini? Pshaw.
"Stephen, delighted to find a fellow Furtwangler fan(atic). Unquestionably the greatest conductor in the history of recorded music. Toscanini? Pshaw."
They say Heydrich played a mean violin as well.
Furtwängler supported the various boycotts of Jewish goods and spoke out against "Jewish domination of the press." If there is a hell, I truly hope he is burning there. (And I am well aware it is said he saved a few Jewish musicians. His true feelings though were quite obvious.)
My concern is with the countless thousands of Jewish and Roma musicians and composers who were murdered by the Nazis and their millions of allies. It's a pity that the RAF couldn't have struck lucky one night and bombed a Furtwängler concert.
Furtwängler said:
"Does Thomas Mann really believe that in 'the Germany of Himmler' one should not be permitted to play Beethoven? Could he not realize, that people never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror? I do not regret having stayed with them."
Those poor, poor oppressed Germans who cheered Hitler, slaughtered millions of innocents and supported the Nazi regime to the hilt. Thus began the insane process of rehabilitation by which the Germans have transformed themselves into the victims of the Nazis. Who can be surprised that according to recent opinion polls well over 50% of Germans believe that "Israelis are little different to the Nazis" and a much greater percentage think that Israelis would do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, if they could get away with it?
But Furtwängler didn't give a toss about the victims of German terror. Oh no, all Furtwängler cared about was the preservation of German music. Thus he says:
"I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians."
"The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians"
By its own musicians? And what of the huge number of Jewish musicians who could not play? Were they not also the "German people's own musicians?" F. not an anti-Semite? Yeah, right.
This is an old debate, but worth revisitng. Furtwangler was publicly ambivalent towards the Nazis, but, unlike Strauss and von Karajan he was never active in their support nor a member of the party. He championed the Jewish composer Hindemith against the Nazi ban, and supported the Jewish members of the BPO. His secretary, Berta Geissmar, was sneeringly referred to by Goebbels as 'Furtwangler's little Jewess'. She had no doubts about his private detestation of Hitler and his party, as recorded in her memoir 'The Baton and the Jackboot'. The worst that can be said of Furtwangler is that he was a political naif and a child of his times.
After the war, no less a Jewish luminary than Yehudi Meuhin recorded some sublime performances with Furtwangler (the Beethoven, Bartok and Mendessohn concertos), responding, as he said at the time, to his French confreres who exonerated Furtwngler from the stain of Nazi collaboration. Menuhin recorded in his autobiography the grief that this caused him when playing in the liberated concentration camps at the end of the war, and how fearlessly he defencded his choice. And note that Israeli-born Daniel Barenboim has always taken Furtwngler as his mentor and idol.