Ian Pace is a pianist, and professor of music at City University.
It wouldn’t be difficult to construct a history of 19th-century Germanic music that left out the name of Hugo Wolf entirely. Part of the reason is the mixed reputation of Lieder, or solo song. Accounts of Beethoven afford a central place to his symphonies, concertos, string quartets and sonatas, but the status of his songs, with the possible exception of the cycle An die ferne...
During a time of war, it is inevitable and not necessarily inappropriate to limit some cultural interactions with an enemy nation, not least as part of a strategy of isolating an aggressor. If Russians cannot compete in international sporting events, should musical competitions be different? Is it any more unreasonable to want to postpone a performance of the bombastic and militaristic 1812 Overture than it was for the British conductor Mark Elder to express doubts about conducting the Last Night of the Proms following the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War? (Elder was promptly replaced.)
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