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.
By Jens F. Laurson/George A. Pieler February 15, 2008 After the New York Philharmonic accepted an invitation from the North Korean government to perform at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, a flurry of commentary condemned and praised the move. Was this savvy cultural diplomacy, or merely a PR coup for one of the world's worst tyrants?
When New York's premiere orchestra takes to the stage Feb. 26, playing to a hall packed with the Politburo's elite, it will, alas, be more of the latter than the former.
In the best tradition of U.S. cultural diplomacy, it showcases some of our best culture abroad, regardless whether to friend or foe. Sound enough, perhaps, but a likely failure because the New York Philharmonic is wasting a great opportunity to underpin its cultural message with a greater truth about the value of freedom.
Were the New York Philharmonic bringing its art to the people of North Korea, the adventure would recall the history of successful U.S. Information Agency concerts in repressive nations. But the effect of spreading culture is lost without an audience actually made up of real people, not just a hand-picked crowd of the regime's loyal henchmen.
And the concert in Pyongyang is everything but public. Most North Koreans are not permitted into the capital city, much less the Grand Theater. If admitted, it's not likely they could purchase tickets. And if there were tickets for purchase, how would a regular North Korean (per capita gross domestic product about $1,000 or less) afford one? The concert will be telecast worldwide, but not in North Korea where, in any case, the allocation of TV sets would assure only the privileged and faithful few got to see it.
Instead, the North Korean people will get reports on how the New York Philharmonic, the greatest American orchestra (nothing compared to North Korea's State Symphony Orchestra, of course), serenaded their Dear Leader.
The concert opens with the two national anthems, under music director Lorin Maazel and continues with Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, the "Lohengrin" Act III Prelude by Richard Wagner, and George Gershwin's "An American in Paris."
The underlying "American Diplomacy" in this program is obvious. The Dvorak and Gershwin are considered classic Americana, both premiered by the NYPO. It's nice music that should be attractive to those having a first-time experience with Western classics. But in these circumstances, it risks being an inoffensive sham of a program, offering timid Amerikanisch repertoire while avoiding both serious American music, and serious American civic content. The North Korean propaganda spin on this concert is not in the hands of the New York Philharmonic. But the impression made in concert is. That's where the NYPO lets us down.
After North Korea so publicly courted the orchestra to perform in Pyongyang, the orchestra's administration should have accepted on condition their repertoire be Ludwig van Beethoven's Third ― "Eroica" ― Symphony, followed by Dmitri Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony. Then see if North Korea was still so keen on receiving the New York Philharmonic or if they feared the power of art.
What the works have in common is that they're monuments against dictatorship. Beethoven dedicated his Third Symphony to Napoleon in the republican spirit still felt after the French Revolution. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor, Beethoven was furious and scratched out Napoleon's name so vigorously that he went right through the paper. He re-dedicated it to "The Memory of a Great Man."
Dmitri Shostakovich was at the brink of dispatch to Josef Stalin's (artistic) Gulag because his music offended Stalin. After an "official," public critique of his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" as "petit bourgeois" and "formalist," he withdrew his about-to-be-premiered Fourth Symphony and replaced it with the (superficially) conformist Fifth. A wise choice; the shrieks, brutality and pounding relentlessness of the Fourth Symphony spell a blunt indictment of any crushing regime. It's a work in which you don't listen for the tunes like you might with Mozart. You get not unalloyed prettiness, but the 20th century at its artistically most potent and politically most repressed. Truly a message worth taking to Pyongyang.
Repertoire aside, this mission's worst enemy might just be Lorin Maazel himself. Justifying his enthusiasm for the Pyongyang outing, he asks: "Is [the United States'] reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others."
"Errors"? To equate the systematic suppression of a starving people for the benefit of one, with a freedom-loving democracy that errs on the side of security is shocking. If that's how Mr. Maazel feels, there's no cultural or diplomatic point to this trip, anyway. Perhaps the composer of the opera "1984" should re-visit his George Orwell and learn about the not-so-fine distinction between a totalitarian state and the regrettable abuse of actual, existing freedom.
As it is, it won't matter. With Richard Wagner, Antonin Dvorak and George Gershwin, the New York Philharmonic isn't going for the "Jesse Owens Award" of sticking it to the tyrant.
Jens F. Laurson is the editor-in-chief of the International Affairs Forum and Classical critic-at-large for classical WETA 90.9, Washington D.C.'s public radio station. George A. Pieler is a senior fellow with the Institute for Policy Innovation.
