Artists are Citizens

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 412, 16 May 1947, Page 5

Artists are Citizens

wangler has been permitted to conduct again in Berlin, and probably bad that Kirsten Flagstad has been booed off a concert platform in the United States. But it is good too when artists are reminded of their obligations as citizens, and bad wheg they are allowed to believe that for them such responsibilities don’t exist. Furtwangler seems to have made some attempt at least to resist and repudiate Hitlerism. Flagstad’s offence was perhaps only loyalty to a collaborationist husband. In both cases the charge of personal collaboration was successfully resisted, and there is no justification for repeating it. But there was justification for inquiring into it in the first place if the only reason for not inquiring was that one of the suspects was Germany’s greatest conductor and the other the world’s greatest Wagnerian soprano. Although art can be supernational, or become so with time, artists are usually men and women like the rest of us, demanding protection from their country as well as bread, and the privileges of citizenship as well as the réwards of their labour. It is very rarely indeed that they live and work so far above the battle as to have no hand in it, and when they do they are creators and not just performers. So far as the performers are concerned, the singers, players, conductors, and transmitters generally, there are precisely the same obligations on them as on every other man or woman who shelters in the country and accepts its citizenship. Even if the privileges they enjoy are few, and the advantages are bought at a great price (as they were in Nazi Germany), it is impossible to claim them in peace and repudiate responsibility «for them when war comes. Internationalism has not yet come, however desirable it may be. Until it does come, we must all accept the rough justice of the group that breeds, feeds, and protects us. ie is probably good that Furt-