Quartet cellist links Germany’s far-right to Putin’s Kremlin
NewsIf the name Matthias Moosdorf does not instantly ring a bell, it may be because he hasn’t played much music of late.
Moosdorf, 59, was fired by the Leipzig String Quartet in 2019 over his provocative online messaging in support of Germany’s AfD rightwing party. Before that he was occasional front-man for the quartet in its long-running legal difficulties.
Today, Moosdorf is foreign affairs spokesman for the AfD in the German Bundestag.
He has just accepted an honorary professorship at the Gnessin Institute in Moscow, where such appointments require Kremlin approval. He gave an inaugural lecture there last month. ‘Music knows no ideological boundaries,’ saysMoosdorf.
Few current cello careers are quite so colourful.
Except, maybe, Sergei Roldugin.
What a tragedy: once a musician has been cancelled, he cannot be cancelled again.
He even dares speaking his mind despite being cancelled.
Since 1-1+1-1+1-1+1 is not 1-(1+1)-(1+1)-(1+1), It depends on how you cancel them.
Cancellation is entirely the correct approach, there can be no place in music for the extreme right.
Thesed days, any political party that stands for national interests vs EU bureaucracy and US dominance is labelled “rightwing” or “leftist” or “populist” or maybe even “Putin’s fifth column”, and such labels are never skipped when the party is mentioned. Thus, every time AfD is mentioned, they never forget to add “right-wing” etc.
By analogy, I propose a new rule: every time Ursula von der Leyen is mentioned, the word “unpopular” should preceed her name. After all, her ratings in April poll of 26,000 EU citizens were positive only in 3 member states, Denmark, Portugal and Spain, and in France just 18% respondents had positive opinion of her.
None of the chaps on the picture is Moosdorf.