Muti: Don’t woke me
OrchestrasThe maestro has given the first of his pre-New Year’s Day Vienna concert interviews.
Sample quote on woke and cancel culture:
‘This is something I absolutely reject. Nothing must be erased, on the contrary, all the mistakes of the past must be made clear to young people.
‘History is not just about St. Francis of Assisi, but also about tyrants, dictators and bloodthirsty people. We must not build an imaginary heavenly past, but we must know it in order to correct it.
,In ‘Il Ballo in maschera’ Verdi has the judge say that the sorceress Ulrica has the ‘impure blood of the Negro’. Various theatres, including La Scala, have changed this formulation.
‘When I performed ‘Il Ballo in Maschera’ in Chicago, a city where the black presence is very strong and which was then governed by a black Democratic mayor, I did not change a single word. I explained to the singer (who was black, by the way) that Verdi was not racist; he had put that terrible phrase into the mouth of the white judge, but Verdi’s accusation was not directed against blacks, but against racist whites. And the singer agreed.’
Makes sense.
He’s simply throwing red meat to his racist Austrian public. He should propose to play a jolly Nazi anthem from the podium on New Year’s eve, lest they forget THAT past. And play a fascist song in Italy next time he’s there too.
Trump should drop his current pick and take Muti as Secretary of Education.
Yeah, he just loves the N-word. What’s the problem? Let the man be.
This maestro is a f m***nnn!! “who was black by the way”?? what would have happened if the black singer had disagreed??
He’s right, you know.
Perfectly well said by Muti.
But don’t worry folks,
Wokeism is still around but has been rejected by the majority and corporations are cutting back more and more on their DEI initiatives; Wokeism is still around, but in a zombified state as the careerists who pushed it still cling onto jobs in some institutions while having managed to alienate a majority of the public.
Not that I’m happy about him winning, but when Jan 20th comes around we can look forward to mass firings, lawsuits against discriminatory practices in colleges and loss of accreditation status for colleges that engage in racial admissions, discrimination etc… Wokeism will also be banned in the Federal government within the US.
The above will reverberate across the world and we won’t have to be scolded about how we should not play Beethoven because it is racist, or that men can menstruate, or that notions like a “sense of urgency” or “objectivity” are “white supremacy culture”… or that the solution to racism is to literally institutionalize into law racism against White people, Jews and, Asians.
Come Jan 20th it will be, for the most part, bye bye to woke and there is nothing they can do about it.
Care to define “woke”?
Woke (adjective): anything that smacks of caring selflessly for your neighbor. A highly undesirable trait in Trump’s America.
Correct. Wokeism means that all humans have value, not just a certain select group.
Easier to define “unwoke” – ignorant, complacent, intolerant, vindictive.
Wokeism: If it’s not offensive, we’ll make it to be offensive!
FWIW it’s easily defined: it’s a colloquial synonym for “awakened,” used recently with the connotation of “awakened to previously ignored or under-examined examples of society’s racism, colonialism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. etc.” As far as it goes it’s not offensive – where examples exist, one is better off being conscious of them. In practice, instead, it has become a movement for punitive intolerance within the academy and wherever else it gets a foothold, and is promoted mostly by people who have discovered inherent in hurting people you don’t like without having to consult your conscience.
Editorial note for SD – in the previous comment two words dropped out – please revise last sentence to end with “…..discovered the pleasure inherent in….”
You know what it is – unless you’ve been living under a rock. Think “enforced speech and thinking”. That ought to help. Imagination surplus to requirement.
Deluded, ignorant, divisive BS. That should cover it.
This man never talks about music, never has anything insightful to say about music but always creates controversy to attract publicity to himself.
Agree. He’s the Trump of classical music.
Ask the Chicago public: would you prefer that Muti delete the N word from Verdi, or that he does not send away David Cooper from the orchestra?
Would you prefer that he delete the N word, or that he brings interesting programming to the city?
Wait, wait – what N word are you talking about? The word Muti used was “Negroes,” plural of Negro, as in The United Negro College Fund. It has never been a slur, nor has the Italian word (“negri”) it translates. The potentially offensive thing in “Ballo” is not that word, but the description of Negroes as having “foul blood” (“immondo sangue”). You could leave it in (thinking along the lines Muti describes if you like), or you could edit it out (unlike the case of Otello or Porgy, Ulrica’s color is not really an essential part of the story). But let’s at least keep our outrage sorted properly, ok?
Seriously? He’s still talking about that silly stunt he pulled years ago?
Winds change, as do the seasons but Great Art is everlasting. Your words are filled with wisdom Maestro Muti.
He’s definitely in the “no jaGuar crowd.”
Go woke, go broke.
Thump to Trump 2024!
Where is the Rat when we need him the most?
He fills the seats…
Nope. He hasn’t done so in Chicago.
He is completely right. Making every atrocity from the past cozy and rosy in order to be politically correct, the alarming examples from the past are lost. And that is exactly what the rightwing folks want.
Nope. In Chicago he doesn’t, didn’t.
I doubt whether Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is staged very often in modern Tel Aviv.
You’ve completely missed the point.
Wokeism is about identity politics being your sole measure of societal morality.
Some black person coined “woke” a hundred years ago and now it’s the imaginary monster every paranoid crank has to rail against, thinking it proves his non-zero testosterone level.
Truly, what a pompous bore Muti is.