Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR MUSIC I found Hibbard James's October 28 music column a very welcome and long-needed addition to your excellent magazine. However, I was moved to take exception to some of his...
...The publisher, Harper's, informs us that it can be purchased by the general public only in a cloth edition priced at $4...
...It then becomes necessary to define endless subspecies of pragmatism in order to distinguish one school of thought from another...
...Rimsky may have been more acutely aware of the niceties of orchestral coloring than Mussorgsky, but I believe it is unfair to call his mind "basically pedantic...
...Hungarians, too, regard the Virgin Mary as the patroness of their country...
...John Dewey and Bertrand Russell rejected Marxism emphatically, and both stated that the Kremlin's doctrines are drawn from Marx...
...James refers to Rimsky-Korsakov as "an almost classic example of the conservatory-trained artisan...
...Russell, in his recent Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, writes: "The theoretical doctrines of Communism are for the most part derived from Marx...
...Lastly, I cite the frequent failure of composers as conductors of their own works (not always caused by a lack of conducting technique) as another reason for suspecting the "intentional fallacy...
...Indeed, I am amused by the way several people have attempted to pair Marx and Dewey philosophically, quoting Russell's opinion that this can be done...
...Thus, we can hardly convince the people behind the Iron Curtain that we are more faithful followers of Marx or advocates of his doctrines...
...Music, particularly operatic music, is a living art...
...Nor can Imre Nagy be called "romantic...
...What did Mozart intend in Don Giovanni— primarily a tragic or a comic opera...
...In his Freedom and Culture, Dewey classifies Marx as a totalitarian and comes out for Thomas Jefferson and a moral approach to politics...
...New York City John Frayne HOOK'S MARX In his article "Marx, Dewey and Lincoln" (NL, October 21), Sidney Hook writes: "My Marx is not the Marx of the Kremlin, and I regard it as unfortunate that, despite the fact that Marx's bones are buried in London, the West has lost almost by default to the Communist vandals the name of one of the great fighters for human freedom...
...Nor were their predictions based on the "character of the Russian people, who love tyranny," because none of them thought Marx's system would be established in Russia first...
...New York City Martin Gardner HUNGARY Although I substantially agree with Reinhold Niebuhr's interpretation of the Polish situation, I cannot but wonder whether his view of the Hungarian tragedy is based on facts ("The Cardinal and the Commissar," NL, October 21...
...In the West, of course, no government or party has ever attempted to do this...
...In The Yogi mid the Commissar, he refers to Marx as "a pathologically quarrelsome old sponger...
...In his autobiography, he admitted that, at the time of his appointment as professor at the St...
...True, Protestants, particularly the Reformed (Calvinist) Church, played a disproportionately large part in politics...
...If, as Hook concludes, pragmatism is the "theory of sound intelligence wherever and whenever applied," I can imagine no one who does not consider himself a pragmatist...
...It is therefore idle to speculate about how much of Russia's totalitarianism is due to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin...
...Oberlin, Ohio George A. Lanyi CORRECTION Discussing Strengthening the United Nations in his November 11 "Home Front" column, William E. Bohn states that it is available in a paperback edition for $3...
...As for the Marxian philosophy of dialectical materialism, Russell dismisses it as "mythology...
...Rimsky actually was an amateur...
...Which original intention of Mussorgsky is one to heed, since there are two "original" versions of his Boris...
...The chronology of events shows clearly that on November 1, when he appealed to the UN and denounced the Warsaw Pact, Nagy acted in desperation...
...The movement back to Mussorgsky in the raw appears to me to be fighting pedantry with an inverted pedantry, a purism that assumes the original form must be better...
...Perhaps Macbeth would be a. better comparison, but I think the parallel still holds for Shakespeare, if not for Verdi...
...The basic question is this: Is Marx to be classified with the totalitarians, or with Thomas Jefferson...
...They feel lonely with Jefferson...
...Secondly, one must recall that both his radio speech of November 3 and private reports show that Cardinal Mindszenty was very different person from the proud and intransigent prince of the Church of the immediate postwar years...
...No one can tell what would have happened in Warsaw if Gomulka had not come to power in time, and if Marshal Rokossovsky had called in Soviet troops to shoot at the demonstrators...
...James states that "polish applied to the demonic Boris is a ridiculous contradiction in terms...
...Petersburg Conservatory, he had "never written one counterpoint nor heard of the existence of the 6/4 chord...
...I strongly disagree, too, with James's evaluation of the different forms of Boris and his reasons for dismissing the Rimsky version...
...For some time now, the Kremlin has been trying to ram Marx down the throats of the 900 million people under its control...
...Given a situation similar to that in Poland, it is very likely that Mindszenty would have behaved essentially like Cardinal Wyszynski...
...Russell would be delighted, because it is his subtle way of calling pragmatism false...
...It was the very suddenness with which Russian musical life blossomed in the 1860s and 1870s that prompted a spirit of inter-reliance among the legendary "five...
...This, it seems to me, is the technique Max Eastman objected to in his criticism (NL, October 14) of Hook's broad use (NL, March 18) of the word "pragmatic," and which Hook employs once more in his reply to Eastman (NL, October 21...
...Some who came to Thomas Jefferson belatedly want to bring their old father-image, Marx, with them...
...They all predicted that the Marxist system would produce "a police state," "a slave state," a regimented society resembling a labor prison, or "the worst tyranny in all history...
...Finally, if Dewey's views coincide with Marx's, as Hook suggests, Dewey should have acknowledged it...
...The task would be impossible even if we could prove that we have a dozen major philosophers who admire Marx—which is itself highly doubtful...
...There has to be something more than a passing coincidence...
...Iago is a demonic villian, yet his treatment both in Shakespeare and in Verdi is triumph of polish and subtlety...
...In his History of Western Philosophy, Russell characterizes pragmatism as "a contempt for the truth...
...Often these intentions are beside the point, particularly when expressed years later...
...I suspect it is for this reason that "pragmatism" has almost ceased to be a useful word in philosophic discourse...
...Although a good tradition of performance is essential, every age must create its musical tradition anew...
...That doesn't sound like "default," but like utter detestation...
...My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he is muddle-headed...
...and the other, that his thinking was entirely inspired by hatred...
...Arthur Koestler is less philosophical and less polite...
...Hook objected strongly to this technique of "conversation by definition," to defining "religious" so broadly that it included even opponents of religion...
...Honneger, for years, tried to explain away Pacific 231 and take out the steam engine...
...If Nagy went further to the right than political wisdom warranted, he did this to a large extent under pressure from non-Communist members in his cabinet...
...Both Admiral Horthy and Premier Count Bethlen, the two main figures between the two CONTINUED ON NEXT PACE world wars, were Calvinists...
...Anyone who ever saw peasant women kneeling on the floor of an overcrowded village church and even in the dusty street in front of it, and singing the Magyar hymn to "Our Blessed Lady," could not belittle the popular nature of the Catholic Church...
...But Jefferson is such a great fighter for human freedom that he can get along very well without help from the London cemetery...
...It seems to me that, if we appeal to the people in Communist countries in the name of Marx, we can get nowhere...
...First of all, with 65 per cent of the Hungarians being Catholics it is impossible to call the Roman Church in Hungary "the religion of the feudal aristocracy...
...There was so little technical training available that whatever existed had to be spread around...
...I believe that all too much reverence has been paid in recent years to the composer's intentions...
...After Hook had finished his defense of naturalism, Niebuhr arose, waved his hand in Hook's direction, and said in effect that there sat one of the most religious men he knew...
...In rejecting the Rimsky version, James argues on the basis of the composer's original intentions...
...Nevertheless, Catholicism occupied a privileged position...
...The evaluation is a matter of taste, and I prefer Rimsky's version, particularly in the mighty choral scenes...
...We must also recall that unlike Gomulka, Nagy, though honest and courageous, was fundamentally a weak person...
...Those who knew Marx personally, men like Heine, Arnold Ruge, Proudhon and Bakunin, had no better opinion of him...
...despite the impressive amount of technique he acquired, he always remained one...
...The predictions of a police and slave state were based on the main tenets of Marxism: seizure of power by force, the abolition of all private property, and the establishment of an absolute dictatorship...
...The two Boris Godunovs should be available to the public, at least until the present-day public decides which one it wants to hear regularly...
...Attractive as Niebuhr's Polish-Hungarian contrast seems at first sight, I feel it is not based on a close analysis of the facts...
...However, I was moved to take exception to some of his opinions...
...One of Hungary's major national figures, Ferenc Rakoczi, Duke of Transylvania, who almost united Hungary into » national kingdom by fighting the Hapsburgs, was a devout Catholic and is buried in the Cathedral of Kassa...
...New York City Bernard Herman A few years ago I heard Sidney Hook, in public debate with a theologian, recall an earlier occasion on which he had shared a platform with Reinhold Niebuhr...
...Their views were not influenced by Stalin's character or crimes, since they never heard of Stalin...
...I deny this, if James means by polish a purely technical proficiency of style...
...Often they are not clear...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 46
