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OPINION 7/20/2014 @ 6:10PM 2.311 views

Renewing CultureComment Now

The world­famous musician Lorin Maazel died on July 13 at his home inCastleton, Virginia. Maazel was a distinguished violinist and a greatconductor with a profound feeling for the romantic and modern repertoire.He was also a composer, whose opera 1984 gives musical form to Orwell’snightmare, and shows that Maazel was one of the rare intellectuals whograsped the inner reality of totalitarian government. In addition to his verygreat virtues as an artist and a musician, Maazel deserves to be rememberedalso for his public spirit, inherited in part from his mother, who founded thePittsburgh Youth Orchestra in her adopted city. Lorin Maazel was endowedwith the democratic reciprocity of spirit that has been, over the centuries,one of the glories of America. He looked for ways to give back to others someof the joy he had, in his life, received from them. While pursuing his callingas a conductor all around the world, he sought to encourage, teach andpromote young musicians wherever he encountered them. Together with hiswife Dietlinde he founded and ran the Castleton Festival on his farm in thebeautiful region around Culpeper. Young singers and performers wouldcongregate here over the summer, attending master classes, and performingin an increasingly ambitious repertoire of instrumental and operaticmasterpieces.

For six happy years of my life I lived near Castleton, and was able toexperience at first hand what such a festival can bring to an otherwiseisolated community, not only by way of enjoyment, but also through creatinga shared sense of the value of being here, now, in this place. In the world thatwe inhabit live music is a rare gift, which we must search out in the fewplaces where it occurs, and usually at great cost in terms of money, time andtravel. To have, within reach of our old Virginia house, a source of musicaland artistic life that matched anything that could be offered by the averageAmerican city, but in a calm rural setting and an atmosphere of neighbourlygoodwill, was a transforming experience. It showed me that culture rescueslife, just as life rescues culture. They are not two things, but one, and thedivorce between them is a threat to both.

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Roger Scruton Contributor

Our world is hungry for meaning and I explore our ways of finding it.

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18/08/2015 Renewing Culture ­ Forbes

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Conductor Lorin Maazel; date and place of original photograph are unfortunately not given. (Photo credit:Wikipedia)

This impression is not new, nor is it mine only. Festivals of the arts andliterature sprang up all across England during the post­war period, andtoday form an important part of the life of rural communities. Thesecommunities would otherwise be starved of the social and economic activityon which they now depend. The festivals sprang up not because theindigenous population wanted them but because the incomers broughtthem. Farmers create the landscape, and it is thanks to the farmers ofVirginia that it is still the kind of place to which people like Lorin Maazel willgravitate. But farmers don’t, on the whole, see the point of Brahms orSchoenberg, and apart from Church, bowls and the rescue squad, they don’tmuch see the point of neighbours either.

The lead in this matter was taken by Benjamin Britten. In 1942, Returningfrom America to his native countryside around Aldeburgh in Suffolk, hewrote the great masterpiece – Peter Grimes – that invoked the landscapeand seascape that had filled his emotions as a child. Britten’s opera isimbued with the rhythms of the fishing life, elevated to a poetic level thatthey had achieved perhaps only once before, in The Borough, the great cycleof poems by the Reverend George Crabbe, which contained the original storyof Peter Grimes.

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Other towns have moved in the same direction: Bath, whose music festivalwas established by the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, another man ofimmense public spirit and devotion to the young; Edinburgh, whose festivalof literature and the arts served to revive the capital of Scotland in a way thatno other industry has managed; the tiny village of Hay­on­Wye, with itsbook fair in waterlogged fields; the equally tiny village of Presteigne; lovelyneglected Buxton in the Pennines, even tourist­crammed Oxford, where theliterary festival attracts more people than any lecture in the university. Allover Britain country life flourishes during those short months of the summerin which the middle classes emerge from their urban redoubts to travel fromtown to town, spending their money in restaurants, and pausing for picnicsin the fields. And many of them settle, to be regarded at first with suspicionby the farmers, but usually accepted when they take the trouble to becomepart of the landscape.

There are those who don’t take that trouble. And this is as true of America asit is of Britain. The Western counties of Virginia were staunchly Republicanduring the early years of the twenty­first century when we lived there. Eachyear, however, the incomers from Washington increase in numbers.Andwith their wealth and their culture they bring views about the Americansettlement that question the values and habits of the natives. This is one ofthe most troubling aspects of the festival culture. For reasons that it is hardto explain, people who attend theatre, read books and appreciate art andmusic tend to be liberal. Precisely because their culture teaches them toquestion, to argue, and to define their views, they cease to believe inobjective truth, question all certainties, regard Church going and Biblereading as quaint survivals, and are often unsound on the questions about

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which the locals demand a rigorous orthodoxy – hunting, for instance, orrodeos, not to speak of the best recipe for squirrel or the way to brew yourown moonshine.

I am happy to say that there has been nothing remotely opinionated in theCastleton Festival. For culture­starved Virginians it has been an open­minded and generous addition to their life, adding a haunting beauty of itsown to the serene and settled countryside where it happens. I look back onthe great performances that I heard there with immense gratitude to LorinMaazel – remembering especially his hair­raising version of Britten’s TheTurn of the Screw, conducted in the tiny theatre that was later replaced by afull sized venue in the grounds. Thanks to Dietlinde, a visit to Castletonbecame a moment of festive joy, in which neighbours and friends werebrought together by music and food, regardless of their walk of life, theireducation or their opinions. The events were exciting and instructive; butthey had another and higher purpose too. For they were designed to hand onMaazel’s impeccable musical culture to the many young people who came toacquire it. The presence of these young musicians was a constant reminderthat culture is a source of renewal, as well as a way to mourn life’s passing.Although I mourn the passing of Lorin Maazel, my hope is that Dietlinde willcontinue his work, and that his spirit will live on in her.

Visit the Castelton Festival website if you would like to know more about theprogram or if you would like to donate to the charity in memory of LorinMaazel.