Let's start with the most famous / and most painful example of / a modern musician in crisis with a political regime. The conductor 'Wilhelm Furtwangler, who, when quizzed about why he stayed in

Nazi Germany, said he wanted to save German culture. So how far should you go to save culture before compromising your own integrity?

T I.. Well, not as far as mass murder. But artists are free spirits and we need to be able to understand that some people might feel so strongly about their own culture that they're ready to support a system that many people believe shouldn't be supported.

RC But how sympathetic are you to the people who decide that enough is enough, and leave? TI I am sympathetic. If it got to the stage where things were changing so much for the worse in my country, as in Nazi Germany, I would go. For sure.

RC compared the behaviour of Furiwangler with that of his countryman, violinist Adolf Busch. Busch had left Germany in 1933, soon after Hitler's rise to power. Tully Potter, Busch's biographer, compared the conductor unfavourably.

TPIf Busch could see how things were going, how did these other people not see? What the Nazis were doing became quickly apparent.

There were two great tyrannies in the 20th century - communism and Nazism. They are not equal though, or even equal and opposite. The problems faced by Russian musicians was different from that facing the Germans. We know that Stalin was responsible for many people's deaths but it was never an outward expression of government policy, it was always done under subterfuge. So it did not present the same kind of moral dilemma. I have every sympathy with Shostakovich signing denunciations of other people because he knew they were signing denunciations of him, and it became a grim game.

RC Is that what actually happened?

TP Yes, he was quite blatant about it and didn't seem to hold it against his friends if they were forced into signing things against him. One has to make choices at any time in one's life; for myself, I couldn't stay in apartheid South Africa because I felt that was a terrible tyranny. I was lucky to be able to leave - there are people who can't for various reasons.

In the case of musicians they may not be famous enough and may not have an easy career outside. And there are people who quite happily can get Out but don't, and Furtwangler is an outstanding example of that. I think he knew an awful lot and he just stayed and stayed. I believe he had too much that he couldn't bear to give up.

RC At what point do you think involvement with politics becomes dangerous for a creative artist? Is there a line?

TP The ancient Greeks had a word for people who didn't get involved with the affairs of the state and that word was "idiot". I think that everybody needs to be involved in the politics of their country.

RC So as soon as there's a wind-change and you sense it, you start speaking out straight away in one way or another?

TI There are some very notable artists who have taken that a step further, such as the conductor Kurt Masur, who was so important to German unification. He almost became a politician and used his position in that way. That's where having stayed inside the system can be beneficial.

RC But taking another view, could you also say that the public expects an artist to keep totally separate from all political considerations? That great music inhabits a sort of spiritual realm that should be above and beyond politics? And that the public, whether or not they are caught in the throes of some evil regime, expect to look to an artist for an experience beyond the reviled detritus of the everyday? So you could say that it's up to a musician, as it is up to a priest, to live in a realm above and beyond so that people have a spiritual refuge. Whatever terrible things are happening, they have musicians who can help to take away this terrible pain.

TI The arts elevate the spirit. Music is also a great healer. It can remove pain. I've lost track of the number of people who have approached me or written to me after performances to say thank you, because

I have helped them through a grieving process or they've been very ill, whatever. The music has made them feel better.

As they explored this idea, the conversation turned to musicians who may have the power to make listeners feel spiritually enriched, but who themselves have worsying political views. RC suggested that perhaps the strain of their talents sapped other areas of their humanity. He cited Wagner, who held deeply antiJewish beliefs.

RC He was overwhelmed by this great surge of creative genius and was left with so little spiritual, emotional ability to deal with people, politics and philosophising.

TP An artist is entitled to have all the failings of any human being. We can all think of examples - Wagner was entitled to be an absolute so-and-so but not to be anti-Semitic. There is a boundary beyond which it's both tasteless and inhuman to proceed.

Music does elevate the spirit, but it can't be elevated in a situation where everything is being degraded around it. You could say that music elevated the spirit in the concentration camps where people were able to put on their own music. However, I don't think that making music in a public sense in Nazi Germany was at all elevating. This is where Furtwangler, if he really was trying to save culture, was completely deluded. He was actually presiding over its deepest degradation. And I feel terribly guilty listening to a recording made in Germany during the Third Reich, or in the Soviet Union under certain circumstances.

It was generally agreed that there were times when music could have a helpful political and social effect. TPpointed to the murk of Elgar and Vaughan Williams as giving the British a sense of national identity. But there is a balance to be kept. "it's when that kind of thing starts getting perverted that Iget qualms", he cautioned. RC pursued the argument further.

RC There's a big difference between someone like Shostakovich presenting a narrative of specific events in Russian history, as with the Eleventh Symphony, for example - which has a sense of history - and someone like Elgar who is giving us a more general sense of national identity and heritage. One is political and one, I think, goes far deeper than politics.

TL Very much so. You can appreciate both, though, without knowing any of that.

RC What about artistic strictures imposed by specific governments? For example, the Russians and the Germans during their totalitarian periods - formalist music being banned, or the decadence that the Germans decried?

TI Shostakovich did a pretty fantastic job even under those terrible conditions. So is it right to say that he should have simply stopped composing?

RC And yet, I was listening the other day to his Fourth Symphony. It occurred to me that this represented the last utterance of a composer before he changed his style, before he was obliged by the authorities to apologise - which he did with the Fifth Symphony. In a way it did completely change the way he wrote. Then we got all these political narratives, works that celebrated the Russian Revolution and other specific events in Soviet history.

TL And isn't it interesting that those are the ones that are most often performed.

RC Why is that?

TI 'Well, because there's a story! Because people are interested in a historical background. I did a radio programme about music and melancholia - why do people like listening to sad music? The same ideas can be extended to question why people like listening to music that might be about oppression. It's a sort of safe vehicle for people to experience certain emotions. At the end of a Shostakovich symphony listeners have had the sufferings of others brought closer to their hearts. PC Is it possible with a symphony like

Shostakovich's Eleventh, which is so incredibly programmatic, to listen without knowing what's going on? Does it still make the same sort of sense?

TI No, it doesn't. You can appreciate it, however there's no doubt it makes it more real, more poignant, if you understand the background.

TP Shostakovich did not change his style, simply the way that he used it. He put his symphonies into his chamber music after the Fourth Symphony. He went private - he had a private face and a public face. He knew exactly how to go his own way even while appearing to toe the line. He was canny in that way, though he suffered an enormous amount.

Turning from past to present, the debaters approved of Daniel

Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Comprised ofArahs, Palestinians and Israelis, it deliberately uses musk to try to influence politics.

TI It's a marvellous thing to do. Musicians publicly saying that they can make music together is fantastically symbolic. If they can make music together, surely there's hope? TP Music as an international language is extremely useful in this regard. Anything that brings people together, that stresses our common humanity, is essential.