Interview by Kathleen Campion

March 15 (Bloomberg) — When Lorin Maazel, music director of the New York Philharmonic, ventured to North Korea late last month with the orchestra, he provoked both praise and censure for entertaining a notoriously repressive regime. I recently spoke with Maazel about the trip.

Maazel: It was a very good decision, and it never worried me that we would be used. Used for what?

Campion: Propaganda.

Maazel: The reason they opened their doors is that there is a recognition in some part of the government, starting at the very top, that the time has come to move on. It would never have happened had there not been a realization in high government circles in North Korea that they are in deep trouble and they have to come to a conclusion, they have to move forward.

I think, in a way, it was alerting the populace that the party line had changed. Americans are no longer criminals and mad people and fanatic warmongers.

Campion: I know you made efforts to assure that the Philharmonic’s performance would in fact be heard by the people to the extent possible. Did you ever get any feedback or any indication that that indeed happened?

Maazel: Yes, the program was televised on North Korean television.

Campion: But there isn’t much electricity. Did the little people ever get to hear anything?

Maazel: Just a moment. It is a one-channel television, and instead of seeing our dear leader or the great leader, they saw on their black-and-white television sets an American orchestra playing classical music. And to answer your question, yes, people stopped me, just ordinary people. They said, “We heard the show, we saw the show, we loved it and we thought it was great.”

All-Male Orchestra

Campion: Some of the Koreans in the New York Philharmonic are women, whereas the Korean orchestra, as I understand it, that you rehearsed, was all-male there?

Maazel: The one that I conducted was an all-male Korean Philharmonic, their national orchestra. I kept reading in various newspapers that there is no musical culture there, that no one has ever heard of orchestras, there is no concert-going public. Well, where did the symphony orchestra come from? You can’t put a top-flight group together like that out of nowhere.

The government has been furthering classical music and theater and ballet and, for that matter, painting, the socialistic realism school, very actively, and also the sports. I was in Hong Kong just maybe 10 days before the visit to North Korea, and the first two winners of the Hong Kong Marathon were from North Korea.

East German Example

So very much like East Germany, there is a great deal of support for specific areas of activity, the arts and sports programs, for the purpose obviously of bringing “glory” to the regime.

When the regime fades away, these elite cadres remain to the benefit of humanity at large. That certainly was the case in East Germany when I was there in West Berlin. I used to watch East German television because they had the best theater imaginable — wonderful theaters, government supported. They could rehearse for a month or two months or six months or a year and not worry about the box office…

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