I wrote, and reblogged, my research article Furtwängler and the forgotten new music to draw attention to some unknown music from what is described below as "this troubled period in music history." The following informed comments on the article therefore delighted me. Thank you Daniel in Frankfurt, and Garth in Washington DC, for making it all worthwhile Daniel Wolf wrote - The case of Max Trapp is fairly clear: he was a Nazi, and an early one. His "Appell an die Schaffenden" ("Call to Creative Artists"), in _Die Musik_,in which he identified himself as such, was published in June of 1933. The 1951 performance is simply a reminder that de-Nazification was slow. The most interesting musician on your list may well be Heinrich Kaminsky (photo left), and one whose career provides a useful contrast to Trapp. Kaminsky's father was an Old Catholic priest of Jewish background, and Kaminsky, who was Pfitzner's successor at the Prussian Academy of the Ar
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"It is a sign of cultural defeat when you have to keep on assuring your audience that what they are listening to is wonderful."
Amen. In recent years, CBC Radio 2 (in Canada) increasingly exhibits the same tendency. They've pretty well lost my wife and I (and our daughter is probably more negative than we are).
Yet the Spectator's Charles Moore describes himself as "a musical ignoramus" and thinks "Radio 3 is becoming stupid".
The classical stations have lost knowledgable listeners like you and me. But they are not attracting new listeners, as is confirmed by RAJAR data here in the UK.
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2011/10/bbc-shows-world-how-not-to-do-classical.html
Yet still the dumbing out continues....