Last week, the New York Philharmonic’s Executive Director and President Zarin Mehta announced that his orchestra accepted an invitation from Pyongyong to play in the communist dictatorship of North Korea. As the orchestra performs Handel’s Messiah this week, our city is alive in jubilant anticipation of Christmas. It is also an occasion to consider whether Mr. Mehta’s own jubilation at the prospect of performing in Pyongyong hasn’t been misplaced.
Mr. Mehta’s announcement attributes to music a diplomatic power to bring about peace on earth: “This journey is a manifestation of the power of music to unite people. It is our sincere hope that this visit will aid in the beginning of a new era between the peoples of our nations.” This noble sentiment is common among those who do not look beyond their own good intentions to see the enemy for who he is.
Musicians, moved by the music they play, make a mistake when they believe it is a “universal language” fostering goodwill among men. The Nazis played chamber music near the gas chambers. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Ninth for Hitler’s birthday. Van Cliburn’s triumph in Moscow, where his piano playing won him the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in 1958, did not end the Cold War. Culture, no matter how glorious, is powerless in the face of barbarism.
Musicians are not diplomats. Yet Mr. Mehta indicated otherwise when he said the orchestra’s visit meant his group’s role as “cultural ambassadors of the United States” would “rise to a higher level.” The role of the serious musician is elevated and difficult enough in a society that scorns aspirations to high art. The complex business of international politics is best left to our statesmen.
The New York Philharmonic might consider the sober assessment of an experienced diplomat like John Bolton, our former ambassador to the United Nations. He told the New York Sun that North Korea’s invitation to the Philharmonic “makes them appear less despotic than they are.” The trip “reduces the Philharmonic to the level of doing ping-pong diplomacy with a bunch of terrorists” and “legitimates the regime, which is still on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, has kidnapped people from South Korea and Japan and never given an adequate explanation, and not done a single thing on the nuclear front.”
The futility of cultural “ping-pong” with Pyongyong is also apparent from the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2007 , which says “genuine religious freedom does not exist” in North Korea. According to another report by Open Doors, an organization which tracks and combats the persecution of Christians, North Korea is “the worst violator of religious rights for Christians.” The Christian news service, AsiaNews.it reports: “Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 about 300,000 Christians have disappeared in North Korea—any priest or nun who was alive then has disappeared, most likely persecuted to death. About 100,000 are surviving in labour camps with hunger and torture as their main companions and, for some, with death just around the corner. This is corroborated by former North Korean officials and ex prisoners who have said that Christians in the camps are singled out for especially harsh treatment.” And according to this Asia Times article, the only tolerated form of religion is the ideology of juche, meaning “self-reliance,” which deifies the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il. Needless to say, the public celebration of Christmas is forbidden there.
Thus, cultural exchange at the invitation of the People’s Republic can only be a propaganda ploy to foster the illusion of openness to the detriment of North Koreans. Even the program for the February 26, 2008 concert in Pyongyong is somewhat surreal. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout has this to say: “Somehow I doubt that playing Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Dvorak’s New World Symphony for 1,500 hand-picked servants of the regime will bring joy to the inmates of the North Korean Gulag.” Indeed. Mr. Teachout makes the compelling suggestion that it might be more fitting for the Philharmonic’s Music Director, Lorin Maazel, to conduct Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, composed as it was during the nightmarish years of Stalin’s reign: “Instead of handing out musical bonbons to Kim Jong Il, Mr. Maazel and the Philharmonic could pay tribute to his innocent victims by performing a piece that speaks with shattering eloquence of the devastation wrought on an equally innocent people by an equally vicious tyrant.”
Alternatively, if the Philharmonic really wanted to take a stand for true openness, it would dare to perform Handel’s Messiah in Pyongyong this February, in solidarity with the innumerable oppressed and persecuted Christians who barely survive under Kim Jong Il’s iron fist. Instead, one of America’s top orchestras, blinded by its own Messiah complex, is setting itself up to be the plaything of a tyrant.
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