A Familiar Face

A Harvard philosopher was at grips with a moral problem. In a letter to the left-wing Nation last week, Professor Raphael Demos squinted up over his half-nelsoned shoulder and said:

"When I visit the museum of fine arts and look at the pictures, and when I happen to admire them, I don't first assure myself that the painter was a good man . . . [But] is it possible that the visible presence of the artist makes a relevant difference? For in applauding his performance we are applauding the whole man there before us--the man with his entire past peering through his present. . . I admit that I keep away from performances by [Nazi] collaborators; I don't want to go . . . [but] the point is that while my feelings point one way, my reason points another . . ."

The professor of philosophy couldn't break the half nelson, though he struggled on. But last week many U.S. concertgoers were pinning the problem to the mat in various ways.

Pickets. Outside Carnegie Hall, a handful of pickets trudged, bearing signs which read: "We protest the presence of Nazi collaborators in our concert halls." Concertgoers crushed past by the hundreds and though most tried to ignore the pickets, they did so self-consciously, some with annoyance, some defiantly.

Inside, when Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, dressed in white and gold brocade, walked onstage and took her place in the curve of the piano, the jampacked audience rose to its feet and cheered her for a full minute. As she left the stage after her fourth group of songs, she tripped and fell. The audience rose again in a hush that was loud with sympathy. They cheered again when she had finished singing her program of Beethoven, Schubert and Grieg.

Praise. Was the applause only for Flagstad's voice? (The reviews next day were unanimous: "Flagstad Returns, Greater Than Ever." The Herald Tribune called her "incomparably the most distinguished of living singers." The Times spoke of "eloquence and splendor unequaled in this writer's experience.") Or was the cheering also for Kirsten Flagstad the woman--a way of saying that the past was over, that her political sins were forgiven?

Harvard's Professor Demos had posed his problem specifically about Pianist Walter Gieseking, who had played at Joseph Goebbels' bidding. But in varying degrees other musicians had been tarred with the same brush: Conductor Wilhelm Furtwaengler, who had once taken a Nazi post, but who fought to keep the Jewish musicians in his Berlin Philharmonic;* and Flagstad, who had returned to occupied Norway to be with her husband (he died before he could be tried for collaboration). Flagstad had never sung for either quislings or Nazis.

To Flagstad, a robust 53 with a dairymaid's complexion, her return to Norway was simply a question of going home to her family, which was in danger. "I never thought of it any other way," she says.

Her prewar management, Marks Levine's National Concert and Artists Corporation (NCAC), had taken her back, and had been swamped with requests for her. She will sing in 21 U.S. cities by mid-February, then will sail for Europe, where, she says, she has been treated with none of the hostility she had sometimes met here. Her European schedule includes 21 performances in London's Covent Garden. But in her native Norway, significantly, she had no engagement.

Manhattan's Metropolitan, where before the war she had been the peerless star, had made no move to take her back. Asked if she wouldn't like to sing there again, Flagstad replied, hesitantly, with a question: "Who wouldn't?"

* The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has invited Furtwaengler to conduct for eight weeks next season, his first postwar appearance in the U.S.

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