The recent resurfacing of allegations against Woody Allen have brought up one of the great questions about art and artists. What do we do when a really terrible human being makes great art?
Musically speaking, the greatest efforts to address this question have been spent on the work of Richard Wagner. Wagner was a great composer who made unquestionably beautiful music. He was also a petulant human being.
I will never forget the first time I taught him in history class. I made the mistake of sketching his biography first before playing the music. When we got toward the end, I waded through Wagners’ call to purge Jews and Jewish influence from music, return to the sacraments, and eat only vegetables. I brought up the possibility that he may have had a heart attack from a fight with Cosima about one of his affairs with a chorus girl. A student in the class said out loud, “Good!”
The class was unable to hear how beautiful his music was because his biography made them too angry. So, I had to make up a rule. When it comes to teaching Wagner, do music first and then the biography.
Let’s approach the question from the opposite direction. If a composer is exceptionally morally “good”, does some of that morality make it into the music? Is Messiaen’s music somehow more spiritual because he was so devout? Is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ great treasury of religious music somehow less spiritual because he was an atheist?
The general problem in this approach is not the idea that who you are and what you believe somehow affects your work. I think it does. The problem is that people are much more complex than that. As Father Owen Lee says somewhere in his book on Meistersinger, Wagner may have been a horrible human being, but his portrayal of Hans Sachs shows that he knew what a beautiful human being was.
In the same way, Woody Allen isn’t getting a prize for being a boyfriend, father, or moral champion. He may even, for all I know, deserve criminal prosecution. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t a great artist. It would be nice sometimes if it did mean that, but it doesn’t.
I might also add: Picasso, Josquin, Dostoyevsky, King David, etc.
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Let me try again with less snide.
First of all, holding disgusting views and molesting a child are different in kind, not in degree. And yes, I believe that the charges are true. It is a belief, just as thinking they are not true is a belief. We will never know the truth, but that gets into epistemology and could be discussed forever.
That having been said, the issue is different for someone currently working than it is for historical work. I mean that in this way: I can safely admire Wagner's work with a caveat that I think he is a despicable human. He's dead and therefore no longer profits from his work.
Woody Allen is still creating films, and as such can profit from them. It seems to me that rewarding his work without addressing these accusations is tantamount to ignoring the accusations. If Woody Allen wants to write "brilliant" screenplays (I've yet to understand his appeal in any way) in isolation, and have them published years later and admired, set to. But anyone that rents one of his movies, attends one in the theater, etc. is complicit in supporting him.
And lastly, marrying a child you had a hand in raising is abusive. There is an imbalance of power of such massive scope there it is difficult to express.
Someone recently called my attention to Charles Dickens which has recently been featured in a film, "The Invisible Woman".
I fear that in different ways all human beings have flaws–more or less.