Bond of broeders: Anton Hartman and music in an apartheid state

Musical Times, Summer 2004 by Walton, Chris

Despite his ultra-conservative connections, Hartman still manages to surprise one. Thus, he was responsible for bringing Karlheinz Stockhausen to South Africa in 1972, and Mia Hartman remembers him countering her own scepticism with a remark that his was truly the 'music of the future'. There was, however, an unplanned hiccup when Stockhausen horrified certain SABC officials by extolling the virtues of 'mixing' in a live radio talk ('mixing' being a word and a concept otherwise resolutely avoided, as the South African government had been legislating against it for the previous 20 years).

After 38 years at the SABC, Hartman moved to Wits University in 1978 to become its Head of Music Department. Given the liberal traditions of Wits, he was an odd choice, not least because he was only five years from retirement. Did Wits hope to profit from his political connections? Did the SABC want rid of him, but had to find a suitable escape route so that no involved parties might lose face? By all accounts, his tenure was successful, with Hartman attracting gifted Afrikaner students to a music department that had long been regarded as a preserve of the English-speaking. In late 1979, Hartman paid an extended visit to the USA to investigate various tertiary music departments and their courses. Mia Hartman's description of the visit makes it seem, however, more of a perk than anything else. The fact that Hartman met with the then South African ambassador to the United Nations suggests that he was utilising connections beyond the purely musical - though one can, of course, only speculate. His tenure at Wits was not destined to be a long one. In 1981, he took ill with cancer of the lymph glands, and died on 3 February 1982.

ONE DOES NOT expect a book written by a close relative of its subject to achieve the degree of objectivity normally required of biography, and when the subject is as controversial a figure as was Hart-man, then one 's expectations are naturally even lower. To be sure, Mia Hart-man's prose is somewhat humdrum, occasionally repetitive, and there is no denying that Hartman comes off sympathetically; but the author, to her credit, does not shy away from difficult issues, even if at times she only touches upon them, or brings them inadvertently to light. She is keen to be fair to an uncle she obviously admired, but is also at pains to acknowledge his short-comings and to recognise the realities of today's South Africa. One does not get the impression that Mia Hartman is someone who herself harks for the past, but nor does she indulge in the hypocritical political correctness favoured today by a good many of her fellow countrymen and women.

Before embarking upon this review, the present writer spoke to a number of people who knew Hartman or worked with him. Although he was hailed in the FAK's silver jubilee Festschrift of 1955 as 'destined to become the first great Afrikaans-speaking conductor',6 the general opinion seems to be that he had a clear stick technique, but was otherwise no more than averagely gifted, and simply too emotionally repressed to be able to convey any real depth in the music. It has even been suggested to the present writer that Hartman specialised in contemporary music precisely because he realised that he was incapable of interpreting the Classical and Romantic repertoire as one should. The word 'repressed' is one that crops up continually in conversation with those that knew him. Mia Hartman too refers to this side of his character. He was by all accounts something of an authoritarian, though - and again, this ties in with what his biographer writes - his was a 'gentlemanly' authoritarianism (in as much as there can be such a thing), not that of an open despot. As an administrator, the reports that the present writer has garnered portray him as somewhere between excellent and disastrous, though my conversation partners with a negative opinion willingly admit that their views may be coloured by their distaste for Hartman's politics.