Finlandia sung by Joan Baez - wouldn't this make a wonderful, wonderful national anthem?

[formercia]

6. A Composer's Ties to Nazi Germany Come Under New Scrutiny


 
 
 
 
 


November 29, 2009



By Peter Monaghan
The composer Jean Sibelius is arguably as important to early 20th-century music as Ezra Pound was to literary modernism. Now, more than 50 years after the Finnish composer died, in 1957, at the age of 91, a musicologist in Texas is claiming that Sibelius was culpably entangled with Nazi Germany, and should join Pound, Richard Wagner, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline in the select group of artists who have been cast into anti-Semitic ignominy.
Sibelius's associations with National Socialism amount to active support of Nazism and its propaganda efforts in Germany and the Nordic countries, says Timothy L. Jackson, a professor of music at the University of North Texas.
Other Sibelius experts say Jackson is making a Nazi out of a man who needed to deal with the Third Reich to earn his living, and who, along with most of the world, was perhaps too complacent about the rise of Hitler.

More at the link:

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Composers-Ties-to-Nazi/49256/