Great Music Did Not Save Them

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, November 6 2018:
"... I Am Ashurbanipal is a portrait of the banality of empire. Just as Hannah Arendt argued that the Holocaust was perpetrated by characterless paper-pushers, not flamboyant sadists, so we find here that Assyrian atrocities – including the forced resettlement of thousands of Israelites – were not the product of random mayhem but diligent organisation..."

Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann in “Conspiracy,” HBO’s 2001 dramatization of the 1942 Wannsee Conference

 

General Reinhard Heydrich: Ah, Schubert. The adagio will tear your heart out.

Adolf Eichmann: [puts on a record and listens to the music] Does it tear your heart out?

Supervising Butler: [moved by the music] Beautiful, Sir.

Adolf Eichmann: I have never understood the passion for Schubert's sentimental Viennese shit.

Wikipedia: "Franz Schubert's final chamber work, the String Quintet in C major (D. 956, Op. posth. 163) is sometimes called the "Cello Quintet" because it is scored for a standard string quartet plus an extra cello instead of the extra viola which is more usual in conventional string quintets. It was composed in 1828 and completed just two months before the composer's death. The first public performance of the piece did not occur until 1850, and publication occurred three years later in 1853. Schubert's only full-fledged string quintet, it has been praised as "sublime" and as possessing "bottomless pathos," and is generally regarded as Schubert's finest chamber work as well as one of the greatest compositions in all chamber music."