Line-shooting
The exchange between Richard Ingrams and Hans Keller makes me wonder whether Mr Ingrams saw my programme, Bartok's Breakthrough, which was given a repeat showing during BBC TV's Bartok Centenary celebrations. If so, it would appear that he neither enjoyed nor learnt much from it. This is a pity, but not really surprising, since Mr Ingrams, on his own admission, cannot even hear the rather drastic difference between Bartok and Schonberg.
That is his loss; but it's a different matter when he suggests that those of us who devote our lives to sharing music we love with as many people as possible may be 'shooting a line'. In this case, we are entitled to ask who he thinks he is and whose side he is on. Is he, as he seems to think, standing up for the rights of citizens against an obscurantist minority? Or is he merely justifying his own mental lethargy by appealing to the same quality in others, thereby encouraging self-satisfaction and a mind-crippling fear of anything even remotely challenging or unfamiliar? And is he implying that Bartok himself was 'shooting a line'? If so, for what purpose? Bartok died in poverty, so money wasn't the motive, unless we are to dismiss his life's work as an opportunist lie that failed. If Mr Ingrams is suggesting that Bartok was musically incompetent, then he might just as well accuse Einstein of mathematical ignorance. Bartok's Renaissance style scholarship, which embraced Ethnology, Entomology, and Linguistics, as well as the whole history of music; his brilliance as a pianist, and his unimpeachable intellectual integrity and active social and political conscience, place him securely beyond the reach of any suspicion of pseudo-intellectuality.
David Wilde 6 High Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire
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