Great blog, great review. I’d certainly agree that just because Beethoven is a Dead White Male, this doesn’t mean he should not be performed outside the West, or by non-Westerners. To quote Said: the idea that ‘if you’re a white man you can say you have Beethoven, and the black man’s not supposed to listen to Beethoven, he’s supposed to listen to Calypso’ is a trap—rather such cultural objects should be understood as ‘part of the possession of all… humankind’ (Power, Politics and Culture, 116).

Of course Said does not mean this as a romantic idealist assertion implying music is a ‘universal language’–for the historical and cultural specificity of a work like Fidelio remains inescapable, whoever performs it, and wherever, it is performed. Rather that a belief today in an authentic culture, is itself inauthentic, that there is for all us inescapably, ‘a sort of messing up and involvement of everyone with everyone else’.

What that means, of course, is that the continuing inequtable treatment of the Palestinian people at the hands of the international community (including, of course, Israel itself) is only more offensive, more politically and morally unsustainable. What we do to them we indeed do to ourselves.