Joshua Kosman Cuts Off The Wiener

(1997 Riccardo Muti © Foto Terry)

We all know that there's a perfect place in American life for politically-correct adolescent posturing -- it's called college. It's a made-to-measure outlet for the formerly (read: back in high school) unpopular kids who can cloak their middle class resentment under the pretense of political engagement. But whenever actual grownups living outside the great walls of academia seriously argue that one should boycott the Wiener Philharmoniker because of their stubborn refusal to follow other people's (mostly American liberals) guidelines whenever it comes to hiring new musicians, well, the easily amused among us cannot resist a polite eye-rolling motion. 

The case in question, Joshua Kosman's rant against the Wiener that can be summed up in its final paragraph::

Or to put the matter more bluntly: How can a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony truly give voice to the composer's all-embracing humanism when the performing ensemble, by its very nature, stands in opposition to those values?

If one disagrees with VPO's hiring policies one is, of course, free to not go to their concerts and to boycott their CDs and DVDs; short of a government intervention -- not Kosman's government, by the way -- to change the VPO there's little else one can do. Opera Chic, personally, is content to notice that the best living interpreter of Mozart's keyboard works is Japanese and that the foremost Wagner conductors throughout the decades have consistently been Jewish, from Levi to De Sabata to Barenboim.

But then of course the classical music lover, following Kosman's quota theory, must follow-up the VPO boycott with a merciless analysis of her classical music collection and make sure it's diverse enough: with at least a 50/50 ratio between male and female composers and a significant quota of non-European classical music composers from the 19th century. Well, good luck with that! This is just as viable as OC boycotting Wu-Tang Clan because they don't emphasize racial diversity in their hiring practices.