Concerning the French pianist Alfred Cortot, Terry Teachout writes:
"Cortot was the greatest of all French classical pianists, a recreative genius — no lesser word is strong enough — whose recorded performances of the music of Chopin, Schumann, Debussy and Ravel are incomparably beautiful. But he became a Nazi collaborator who served as Vichy's High Commissioner of Fine Arts and performed in Hitler's Germany, and that despicable fact will taint the memory of his artistry to the end of time.” (Google: Questions of Conduct Terry Teachout [Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28, 2014])You can be sure that Mr. Teachout reserves no such infamy for anyone who collaborates with the Israeli government or Israeli settlements. He does not hector musicians who are Zionist collaborators the way he hectors, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev.
According to the Babylonian Talmud, the Roman emperor who fulfilled Jesus Christ’s prophecy and destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem in 70 A.D., is burned to ashes, then reconstituted, and burned to ashes again, "to the end of time."
Teachout personifies the moral superiority of the Talmudists who self-authorize themselves to judge the world, damn the memory of anyone who displeases them, while exempting those who collaborate with their blood-drenched Holy State from similar scrutiny or condemnation.
With the 2012 release of the 40-CD set, "Alfred Cortot: The Anniversary Edition 1919-1959" (EMI 04907), the accompanying booklet, written by François Anselmini and translated by Yehuda Shapiro, contains information about Cortot's politically incorrect associations:
"Like his friend Furtwängler, (Cortot) thought that art and artists were above political contingencies and tried to maintain that position admidst the grave antagonism of the wartime period. Then there is the matter of Cortot's supposed anti-Semitism. In order to occupy his official posts, he did, indeed, like every functionary, declare that he did not belong to the 'Jewish race,' but there is no evidence that he was actively anti-Semitic.
"While he appears to have remained indifferent to the fates of certain of his (Judaic) pupils, such as Clara Haskil and Vlado Perlemuter, and of colleagues such as Lazare-Lévy, who came to ask for help for his son, other (Judaic) musicians such as Marya Freund and Manuel Rosenthal bear witness to his support. There is also a story that he presided over a jury tasked with removing the Jewish members of the Orchestre Nataional, but these so-called 'Cortot auditions' in May 1941 had a purely musical focus; it was not until later that Jews and foreigners were excluded from the orchestra, and Cortot had no involvement in the process.” (Emphasis supplied).
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1 comment:
Teachout also wrote a dreary and malicious biography of the "anti-semite" H.L. Mencken.
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