The company we keep...

Bad company
I can't deny
Bad, bad company
Till the day I die

PAUL ROGERS, SIMON KIRK, Bad Company 1974

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Buddhist monks, I'm told, are all good people.  Too bad I'm not interested in meditation, gardening, and other things with which they occupy themselves in their monasteries.  What I am interested in is what composers and musicians do.  Unlike Buddhist monks, however, musical artists are a checkered lot.  The ranks of even the most distinguished ones include murderers, supporters of totalitarian regimes, plagiarists, racists, pedophiles, fraudsters, pederasts, sadistic bullies, abusive husbands, habitual liars, and just plain assholes.  In short, with respect to variations in moral character, musical artists do not differ significantly from members of other professions, which is to say that, as a group, they are worse than Buddhist monks but better than convicted felons.

Despite its triviality, this sociological fact has given rise to countless hand-wringing think pieces by musicologists, historians, critics, and assorted cultural commentators, all asking if it is morally O.K. to enjoy musical works "when good art happens to bad people".  The need for such periodic soul-searching strikes me as strange.  After all, there have been no anguished think pieces about cases when, say, good plumbing happens to bad people.  And the reason there have been none is that no-one seems to think that the function of a plumbing installation has a moral dimension, or that one's use (appreciation, enjoyment) of a plumbing installation constitutes endorsement (if only implicit) of the plumber's private life.

Great music, bad operas...

Watching an opera whose plot does not involve sex or murder (preferably both, in either order) is like attending a Hollywood party whose favors do not include cocaine:  there are vastly more rewarding ways to spend one's time.  Despite the nearly tautological certainty of this wisdom,  there is a small but distinguished group of composers whose neglect of the dramatic requirements of opera as an art form seems to border on the delusional.  From Beethoven's Fidelio to Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Janacek's House of the Dead, and Dallapiccola's Il Prigionero, these are operas in which the characters do little more than deliver impassioned pronouncements on lofty topics, as if the principal business of opera is to serve as a musically enhanced vehicle for grandiose messages on timeless metaphysical, theological, or socio-political issues.  To paraphrase one of Samuel Goldwyn's immortal quips:  Messages are for Western Union.  Operas are for entertainment.