artist + art = worthwhile?

I was reading this article on the New York Times’ website, about the attempted revival of the music of Franz Schmidt. It seems like an uphill battle, and possibly for good reason:

It doesn’t help your legacy as a composer to give the Nazi salute in 1938 at the premiere of your greatest work. Nor is it good for your cause to tell a young Herbert von Karajan that he has no future in conducting. So it may not be a total surprise that the Austrian composer Franz Schmidt is little known to the wider world, given his difficult character and distasteful political associations.

But the article goes on to talk about Schmidt’s music and how interesting and really good it is and how perhaps the reason that his music has gone more or less unheard since his death is perhaps mainly because no conductor championed his work, like Bernstein did for Mahler. (It also points out that von Karajan maybe could’ve done it, but Schmidt had called him a failure.)

So I’m wondering about separating the artist from his work. On the one hand, it’s kind of like just desserts — like when the arrogant jerk you met at college auditions doesn’t get in anywhere. But on the other hand, what if the artist himself is blocking the rest of the world from something beautiful? We should be able to look past that. After all, it’s not as though any of us is perfect.
And yet. Don’t we put something of ourselves into our own art? I’m prone to daydream, for instance, and perhaps this is why I love playing the slow, dream-like movements of concerti. There is a lot of Rachel in my playing. There is, no doubt, a lot of Franz Schmidt in Franz Schmidt’s music. But music also has the power of transcendence, I think. At my best playing, when everything comes together, I’m more than myself or the bassoon or even the notes on the page. Couldn’t Franz Schmidt have transcended his own apparently terrible personality and questionable political views in his music? Couldn’t it be more than the sum of the ego and the id, no matter how twisted they were inside his mind?
Maybe he did or maybe he didn’t. But shouldn’t we give him a chance? There’s not too much to lose, except maybe an hour of time.

Anyway, I’m going to give him a chance and take a listen.