About three decades ago, I worked as an announcer at a classical music radio station. One afternoon, I put the afternoon's scheduled featured work on the turntable, announced what it was and who was doing it, started the turntable, flipped off the mic switch, and sat back with my feet propped up, a fresh cup of coffee in my hand, and enjoyed the music.

The light on the telephone lit up (the phone in the studio didn't ring in case the mic was open; a light told you that you had a caller). I picked it up and said, "Good afternoon. KXA."

The caller—with a European accent—was furious! He launched into a tirade about the station playing "Nazi music," and threatened alternately to have me fired or have the station's FCC license pulled. There was no calming the man. He was in a frenzy of rage. Finally, he ran out of steam and hung up.

I did a little research, and eventually discovered that the featured work of the afternoon had been a favorite of Adolf Hitler's.

It was a Beethoven piano concerto.

Hitler was also fond of Richard Wagner's operas, and to compound the felony, Wagner was known to be fiercely anti-Semitic. But this didn't prevent him from writing some pretty magnificent music.

Somehow, I don't think listening to—or performing—Beethoven or Wagner, or for that matter, Richard Strauss (another of Hitler's favorites), is an endorsement of Nazi politics, or that going to a Wagner opera means one approves of anti-Semitism. It isn't exactly as if Wagner is still receiving royalties and you are supporting him financially.

I have a repertoire of a few hundred songs. Since the vast majority of them are traditional, and the authors—and the beliefs, peculiarities, and peccadilloes of the authors—are not only unknown, but unknowable to me, I take a song or other work of art on its own merit, not on what kind of an odd-ball the composer or artist might have been, or who else might also like the work.

Don Firth