What are Russians to do, when bums like Lebrecht are bad mouthing them to any and all venues that will platform them?
Our story about Russian culture, and those hell bent on destroying it, begins in the unlikely setting of Stoke City where, as the BBC, tells us, “on 28th April 1965, the Victoria Ground was rocking to the roars of 35,000 Stoke City supporters saying goodbye to one of the most gifted footballers the world has ever seen. Stanley Matthews, the Wizard of Dribble and Son of the Potteries, was parading his awesome talents for the last time”.
More to our purposes, Sir Stanley, the Wizard of Dribble, was triumphantly carried off the pitch on the shoulders of Russian keeper Lev Yashin and Hungarian striker Ferenc Puskás, two of the greatest players, who ever laced a pair of football boots and who were amongst many others of football greats, who flocked to Stoke on that night.
Further, for our purposes, Yashin, universally recognised as the greatest keeper of all time, is on record as saying “There have only been two world-class goalkeepers. One was Lev Yashin, the other was the German boy who played for Manchester City.” That German boy was German Iron Cross winner and English FA Cup winner Bert Trautmann, whom even the New York Times was forced to praise; Trautmann took part in a 20 minute each way match between golden oldies prior to the big match.
Though this report and this video of the game are worth checking out, be sure to check out the end of this video where Yashin and Puskás carry the Potteries’ wizard of dribble off the field, whilst this song in his honour plays.
The point here is that, though all those players could be criticised, it is unacceptable for anyone who is not of their level to criticise either them or the little ditty written in praise of the wizard of dribble.
Though that is my non-negotiable position, it is not shared by the Kings’ Ears whisperers of the NATO empire with respect to anything Russian. Yashin is not our only brilliant Russian, and my earlier articles have dealt with many of them from literature, music and ballet.
Let’s lay out some obvious facts here. Yashin, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Valieva, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and Russian conductors too numerous to adumbrate did not excel by hanging around the whore houses of North London. They put in the long hours, the hard yakka, by building on the toil of those who went before, by sitting, like Matthews, on the shoulders of the giants of their chosen areas of expertise, in other words.
Take the Bolshoi ballet as a case in point. Their training schedules are so demanding that it is only for the brave of heart or the mad in mind. Unless we have some advanced idea of the more intricate steps involved, we are no more in a position to criticise them, than we are to criticise Sir Stanley or the giants, whose shoulders he sat on on that long-gone night in Stoke City.
Take Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favourite composer. I have heard performances of his works in cathedrals with fantastic acoustics and I swear you could hear and almost see the Nordic gods rise from their lairs. For me to criticise those musicians, their conductor or their church settings would verge almost on blasphemy, as I am no more qualified to criticise them than are the North London wretches, who get their rocks off terrorising Russian musicians and composers.
Bert Trautmann? A fantastic keeper, just as Herbert von Karajan was a great conductor and a first-class businessman to boot. So what if, as this account on NATO’s cultural Cold War attests, during the entire Nazi era, SS Colonel von Karajan “never hesitated to open his concerts with the Nazi favorite Horst-Wessel-Lied. Von Karajan’s relevance is he fortified classical music in its German and Austrian heartlands and he did that, in part, by having several Berlin Phils, one for tourists, one for recordings, one for public appearances and so on.
Married with government grants, von Karajan helped keep Germany and Austria the powerhouses in classical music that they are, and I salute him, though not how Sir Stanley Sieg Heiled the leaders of the Third Reich, for it.
Arts critic Norman Lebrecht sees things differently. When not writing in his slipped disc website, this bum pollutes the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and other NATO rags to snipe against his many enemies in the world of music, who seem to include every Russian, who ever picked up a baton or a musical instrument.
This is perverse, as there is no evidence that Lebrecht has ever played a musical instrument to any acceptable level himself. This is a not unimportant point as the only critics, who really impress musicians are those, who have walked the walk themselves. Although narcissistic blatherers like Lebrecht should not matter, they do because they have the King’s ear.
By this, I mean that their columns and their whispering campaigns can terrorise venues into not showing performances, no platforming as it is called.
What always impressed me, in the context of classical musicians, is the ability of weight lifters and penalty kickers to keep their nerve, a task that is as hard in figure skating or gymnastics as it is in playing in or conducting an orchestra.
Although practice may make perfect, what are Russians to do, when bums like Lebrecht are bad mouthing them to any and all venues that will platform them?
Just so we are clear on that, Russia’s ballet troupes, conductors and classical musicians do not have time for the wars in Ukraine and everywhere else that NATO is waging against them, simply because they are Russian. Their training schedules are simply too demanding for patriotic or other tangents.
Yet bums like Lebrecht, who wouldn’t know an air from a bull’s fart or the reed contrabassoon from that of the bagpipes, badmouths them, as their NAFO helpers phone up the venues to demand they no platform them. Make no mistake. Russia will win the war in Ukraine, no matter how many Russian civilians these knuckle dragging NAFO thugs bully.
My gripe here is not against the knuckle draggers but against king’s ear whisperers like Lebrecht, who pretend to be a cut above the other thugs but who, as the lower layers in Dante’s Inferno attest, are so very much worse.
Check out this damning spreadsheet an Armenian piccolo player in Venice sent me. It is a long list of Russian composers and performers, such as Valery Gergiev, Denis Matsuev and Yuri Bashmel and the more than 700 or so times times this rabid Lebrecht dog, who has never played an instrument himself, has vilified them on his slipped disc blog. In all this, Lebrecht is like a brain dead football hooligan, who has been given licence to attack Yashin, Matthews, Puskás and the other stars, who graced Stoke City on that night of nights.
Lebrecht practices his hooliganism in a slightly different but much more effective manner than those other thugs. He accuses these Russian greats of being war criminals, because they do not follow NATO’s demands to condemn Putin, the Russian Armed Forces and, by extension, all things Russian. If these Russian musicians fail to do that, they and the venues booked to host them are relentlessly targeted by the NAFO riff raff.
Though such bullying should never be countenanced and Lebrecht and his Sunday Times and Jewish Chronicle collaborators should be barred from commenting on anything of a cultural nature, it cannot be over stressed that, as a perusal of his published books show, they are totally unqualified for the role of informed critic.
Far from being the result of years at the coal face of conducting or playing, or even doing in depth research on Beethoven, Mahler, von Karajan and the rest of the greats, their fare is just washer-woman gossip, innuendo, and naked displays of their rank ignorance of this dog eat dog world, where the spoils are very unevenly and very unfairly, distributed.
Lebrecht’s work on the deaf but infinitely complex Beethoven (or von Karajan, for that matter) exemplifies all that is wrong with his attacks on any and all Russians. Though not even the best amongst us could add much to our received insights into that German genius, Lebrecht’s glib, offhand, shallow woefully superficial collections of biases and uninformed opinions make him almost uniquely unqualified to comment on any Germans or Russians, great or small.
Let’s take the Mass to exemplify how Lebrecht does not know his arse from his elbow. The Mass consists of five movements: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, with The Credo being the longest movement and forming the centre of the Mass, with the other movements arranged symmetrically around it. Now Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Bruckner, Dvořák, Fauré, Mozart, Schubert and Verdi have all written superlative Mass scores and I daresay von Karajan has conducted them all in churches and cathedrals the length and breadth of Germany and Austria. Whatever about von Karajan, South Germany’s churches brim with orchestras and Lebrecht is not qualified to comment on any single one of them. I, as an unabashed cultural snob, love all of it and the more icons and incense of East or West the better. In such ambiance, mangy dogs like Lebrecht do not belong.
And the same argument goes with that Russian fellow, Tchaikovsky, another tortured soul to be sure, but one that Lebrecht is totally unqualified to comment upon. If we go to Slipped Disc, we see this Lebrecht clown show-casing Ukraine’s Minister for Culture calling for a boycott of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, which is rightly one of the world’s (of which Russia is an intimate and inseparable part) most loved ballets and which, as often as not, is children’s first introduction to that wonderful, magical cultural world that Lebrecht and the oxymoron that is a Zelensky Minister for Culture must have no hand, act or part in.
All of which, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, brings us right back to Stoke City on that beautiful night in 1965, and on the Sir Stanley song they sang. Say what you like about that song, but Lebrecht and his knuckle dragging NAFO goons are in no way qualified to lace the boots of that wizard of the dribble, who was carried off Victoria Park on the shoulders of (Russian and Hungarian) giants of football.
And no way are they qualified to lace the shoes of Shchedrin, “the close friend of the Putin conductor Valery Gergiev” as this Lebrecht bum puts it, when spoofing about Rachminoff, who is one of the Russian giants, on whose shoulders Sanhedrin, Gergiev and today’s bountiful crop of Russian conductors and classical musicians proudly stand on.
As for Putin, as chief executive of Russia, his team will undoubtedly open new doors in China. Russia, Japan and the rest of the civilized world for the Russian classical giants of today, on whose shoulders the giants of tomorrow will proudly stand.
Although I have expressed my opinions on Lebrecht, just as I would on any other piece of dung that gets stuck to my shoe, there is one further core issue that cannot go unaddressed. That is of those in the Sunday Times, in the Jewish Chronicle and in the bowels of MI6, who have collaborated with him to coerce others to wage cultural jihad against Russians and, thus, against the world. If they want to take on Putin, then they should join Ukraine’s Reinhardt Heydrichs in the meat grinders prepared for them, not least because they so perfectly epitomize Heydrich’s own views on the arts.
A week before his assassination, Heydrich, a gifted violinist in his own right, had inaugurated “Cultural Week,” with a series of concerts by German composers which would be in his words a “festive manifestation of German Power.” And the night before his death, a violin concerto, composed by Heydrich’s own father, was performed at the Wallenstein Palace as a further demonstration of the need to replace Czechoslovakian identity with Germany’s NATO-style rules-based values. Just as Heydrich failed in Prague, so also will Lebrecht and his fellow Philistines fail in London and anywhere else they hold unwarranted sway.
The fortunes of war are changing and not just in Ukraine but in England as well, where its own Heydrichs and Lebrechts must be held to account, so that little English children, like their mothers and grand mothers before them, will be able to enjoy The Nutcracker, Masha and Mishka and all the other great fruits from the bountiful orchard that is Russia’s contribution to our common cultural inheritance that Lebrecht and his fellow runts despise, almost as much as they should be themselves despised.
By Declan Hayes