By LORIN MAAZEL February 20, 2008; Page A14 Last fall the New York Philharmonic accepted an invitation from the North Korean government to add a concert to our tour of Asia, currently underway. Our plans were met with excitement, shock and, in some quarters, dismay.
But the overture from Pyongyang should not have come as a surprise. The winds of change have been blowing through the split halves of the Korean peninsula. Lee Myung-bak, President-elect of South Korea, has laid out an economic program for establishing closer ties with the North, marking a departure from his prior platform.
In this light, and with the backing of the U.S. State Department, negotiations for our visit to North Korea were set in motion. We requested that the concert in Pyongyang be open to the average citizen. After practical details were settled, we sorted out a program that would showcase the vitality of American music and the New York Philharmonic's unique history. We chose Dvorak's New World Symphony, commissioned and given its world premiere by the New York Philharmonic, and George Gershwin's "American in Paris."
I have always believed that the arts, per se, and their exponents, artists, have a broader role to play in the public arena. But it must be totally apolitical, nonpartisan and free of issue-specific agendas. It is a role of the highest possible order: bringing peoples and their cultures together on common ground, where the roots of peaceful interchange can imperceptibly but irrevocably take hold. If all goes well, the presence of the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang might gently influence the perception of our country there. If we are gradually to improve U.S.-Korean relations, such events have the potential to nudge open a door that has been closed too long.
In many decades of making music I have found myself in highly charged political situations, such as driving to East Berlin and back during my tenure as music director of the Deutsche Oper (1965-71), on my way to check out a Felsenstein production at the Unter den Linden Opera. In October 1964, I was staying at Moscow's Leningradskaya Hotel the day Khrushchev was deposed, though no news of it had been given. The streets were empty, but I was eventually driven through three concentric rings of tanks to get to a rehearsal, where I found the Russian State Orchestra on stage ready to play Mahler 2.
Twenty-five percent of the singers at the Deutsche Oper during my tenure were American. New generations of former enemies were making music together. Every time an authorized American entered East Germany, it was a reminder to the authorities of our Berlin presence and our determination to reaffirm it. When I was conducting Russian orchestras in Moscow and Leningrad at this time, scores of ordinary citizens whispered surreptitiously, "Thank you for being with us." The presence of foreign artists, especially American, somehow strengthened their belief that they had not been forgotten. We Westerners were their lifeline.
Human rights are an issue of profound relevance to us all. Any citizen, anywhere, can be deprived of them -- brutally under tyrannical regimes, subtly in more open societies.
As an artist passionately devoted to freedom of expression and respect for the individual, I believe that America's reputation as a safe haven for the persecuted must remain unassailable. If we are to be effective in bringing succor to the oppressed, many languishing in foreign gulags, the U.S. must claim an authority based on an immaculate ethical record, toughened by economic clout. Woe to the people we are trying to help if we end up in a glass house. We would then be unable to defend our human-rights record with honor, would weaken our position dramatically, and could be of little help to the people who might require our aid in their time of need.
I composed an opera to a text drawn from George Orwell's scathing indictment of tyranny, "1984." I spent years of my life wrestling with its horrors: brutal torture, systematic injustice, contempt for any human dignity. One of the subtle currents flowing through the novel is the power of music, notwithstanding its official suppression by Big Brother, to nurture and inspire the populace in the face of oppression. My experience with Orwell only affirms the profoundly ethical role I believe the arts and artists have to play.
I write from Asia, where we are on the second leg of the Philharmonic's tour, after three concerts in Taiwan. The tensions surrounding the history of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China are slowly fading. What a different world it is here now from the one I knew 40 years back, when the sound of saber-rattling frightened us all.
A similar transformation may one day come to pass in Korea, where many believe the time has come to take the tiny steps that must be taken to lessen tensions, forging small accommodations and leading perhaps to a lasting reconciliation. We all wish them well on their way, long and arduous as it may be.
Mr. Maazel is music director of the New York Philharmonic.
