The younger generation of composers has returned to melody, classical form and tonality.
Yes, I’ve heard that’s true and that their big gig in the sky is to write scores for movies. Usually, it’s music professors writing for other music professors. It becomes so rarefied that only the elected know what the elected are doing.
Hitler thought he was making a connection with the great German past as filtered through Wagner.
Yes, it is opera seria or maybe opera buffa depending on how you look at it. Hitler, I believe, had a vision of an angel appear to him to tell him that the Aryans and not the Jews were now the new chosen race. The Christian God was dead — thanks to Nietzsche — and the new God had new plans for Hitler and the master race. Usually the Germans, at least dating back to Goethe, were enthralled with the Greeks and saw themselves as heirs of the Greek Spirit. This new pagan opening, this looking for “root,” shuts the door on the Jews and Christianity, both of which was a bane to German culture. Christianity especially so to Nietzsche and Judaism to the great anti Semite Wagner. Some Germans even believed that the German race were ancient descendants of the Greeks and this sets up a new tension eclipsing the old one of Athens vs. Jerusalem (reason vs. revelation). When reason is gone (by the way, Nietzsche hated Socrates) it then becomes a question of the will to power and Moira or dark fate... new gods, new Being or the return of Being, according to Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was the preeminent Nazi philosopher who saw Being or some primordial Grand Spirit rise within the Nazi movement. Sure enough something terrible was born slouching toward Jerusalem.
I could go on but I won’t bore you. The crazy thing is that I can’t prove any of this — my pet theory — but it feels right.