How much should we forgive a great artist?

Hollywood is quite sure that Roman Polansky should be forgiven for raping a 13 year old because, considering his value to the artistic world, it wasn’t really rape.  It was so long ago, he’s so talented, she’s so over it, whatever . . . .  “All is forgiven, dear.  Come home.  I miss you terribly.”  (And for those wondering, that’s the caption to a 1940s Esquire cartoon that shows a typically gorgeous Esquire woman, in a filthy kitchen, on the phone to her obviously henpecked husband.)

The reason I’m doing a sort of free-flowing rumination about this is because, on Pandora, I just heard a passage from Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, one of my favorite operettas.  Or at least it once was one of my favorite operettas.  Now, I listen to it with my mind operating on two tracks.  One glories in the gorgeous fin de siecle music that represents the last gasp of a more innocent time.  The other track cannot forget that Lehar did nothing when his lyricist for so many successful operettas, the Jewish Fritz Löhner-Beda, was taken, first to Dachau, then to Buchenwald, and then to Auschwitz, where he was beaten to death.

Admittedly, doing something in the Reich of 1938-1942 (when Löhner-Beda met his brutal end) wasn’t necessarily easy or safe.  But there is still something dreadfully wrong about the fact that Hitler’s favorite living composer, one who could have gotten favors, did nothing.  It makes it awfully hard to listen to his music with the same pleasure I once enjoyed.