Mary, when I was working at a classical music radio station a few decades back, I received a phone call from a listener who exploded all over me. He sounded like a somewhat older man, which he was, and he had a fairly thick German accent. He had taken extreme offense at a piece of music I had just played.

He told me that he was Jewish, and he had barely escaped death in one of the concentration camps. Because of the painful memories invoked by his surroundings in Germany, his homeland, he emigrated to America as soon as he was able. Now, he told me, I had invoked those painful memories again by playing a piece of music that he knew to be one of Hitler's favorites.

When I finally identified which of the selections I'd played that afternoon that he was talking about (when I asked him, he insisted, "You know which one I mean!" But I didn't), I had no luck at all in trying to explain to him that that particular piece of music had been in existence long before Hitler had, and it had nothing really to do with Hitler or the Nazi regime. He was not mollified and he continued to be furious with me.

This was on a Sunday afternoon and I was alone in the station. I suggested that if he had any complaints to lodge against me or the music programming of the station, both the station manager and the program director would be in Monday morning. He did call and he talked to both of them, and neither of them were able to satisfy him either. The end result was that we lost a listener. He said he would never again listen to our station because we played "Nazi music."

The piece of music in question was a Beethoven piano sonata.

God knows what he might have done if I'd played the Siegfried Idyll by Richard Wagner or Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss. Hitler liked Wagner and Strauss even better that he liked Beethoven.

Because someone perceives an association between two different things, it doesn't necessarily mean that an association of significance between the two actually exists. I'd suggest that rather that worrying about it, you should express your concerns to the priest and see what he has to say.

Don Firth