The Boycott

When I heard last month that the marvelous German violinist Christian Tetzlaff was canceling all his forthcoming U.S. concerts, my first reaction was “Good for him!” I am a big fan of everything he does—musically, socially, and politically—and I was glad he was taking a vocal stand when so many of us in America are just silently deploring. It was only secondarily that I felt sorry for myself, since it meant I would not get to hear him at Carnegie this spring.

Now the esteemed pianist Andras Schiff has joined the boycott. I am quite sure there will be many others to follow, and they are all right to take this position. We have become an authoritarian country, approaching the condition of Hungary, Russia, or even Hitler’s Germany, and we fully deserve to be abandoned by the Europeans, the Canadians, and everyone else who will soon come to hate us. The fact that nearly half of us voted against the monster in power—and that no one at all voted for his fellow presiding monster—does not absolve us. We classical music fans are probably mainly anti-Trump, if I had to take a guess, but that does not mean that we as Americans should get to avoid punishment for our nation’s bad deeds. Contemplating the silence of the “good” Germans in 1933–45, my postwar generation always wondered, “Why didn’t they speak up? Why didn’t they do anything?” Now we are in their position, and for the most part we—including the elected Democratic members of the House and the Senate—are remaining equally silent. So we share in the guilt, and we deserve whatever comes to us.

There is some debate about whether such cultural boycotts are justified. From the point of view of the individual musician, this seems to me undebatable, in that, as Tetzlaff pointed out, 32% of his earnings in America would go to support a government he violently objects to. It is his right and perhaps even his obligation not to submit to that tax. When he announced his decision, he said that other musicians had tried to talk him out of it—their argument being that “music crosses borders” and is therefore especially valuable as a form of exchange in these circumstances. When I repeated this line to a European friend of mine, he scoffed, “Infantry crosses borders too.” Agreed.

In the course of the next couple of months, I am scheduled to hear a range of musicians who come from elsewhere: Mitsuko Uchida, the Danish String Quartet, Evgeny Kissin, Gidon Kremer…  It will be very sad for me if they all cancel this year or next, and and continue to abandon us for the entire time that this regime remains in place. But the much sadder thing is what we, as a country, are now doing to the rest of the world—and to ourselves.