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kleinbl00  ·  2531 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What Do We Do With The Art of Monstrous Men?

I realized yesterday that Mozart was the Justin Bieber of Hapsburg Austria. He was a child prodigy with a lot of influences around him that had a rough time transitioning from the carnival sideshow his father made of him into a respected member of the existing power structure. His music was poppy in the extreme. He tried to make it without assimilating into the business and it ground him into fertilizer.

The monsters of classical music are all dead'n'buried. In addition to the chronological distance, it allows us to consider the problem academic. Wagner was 50 years dead by the time the Reichstag burned; Jeffrey Tambor is reading the exact same press about Jeffrey Tambor as the rest of us. Even the recent dead generally get a pass because the story is written. A living offender? He could offend again. Or he could redeem himself. We don't know so we're that much less comfortable.