Music: Thompson on Fantasia

Wrote Pundit Dorothy Thompson last week of Walt Disney’s Fantasia:

“I left the theatre in a condition bordering on nervous breakdown. I felt as though I had been subjected to an attentat, to an assault, but I had no desire to throw myself in adoration before the two masters [Disney and Stokowski] who were responsible for the brutalization of sensibility in this remarkable nightmare. . . . A supreme insult to the composers. . . . The perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race turned into black magical destruction. … If the man [Beethoven] who turned against Napoleon had lived to see the inside of a Nazi concentration camp his torturers might have driven him mad by the performance of Mr. Stokowski and Mr. Disney. . . .”