Posted on 10/18/2018 9:00:18 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The Nazi years lie like a bolt over the memory of a good Germany, of the composers, poets and philosophers who gave the world so much beauty and enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries: Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Wagner and the Romantics. Nevertheless...in only a few years, a nation of culture was turned into one of modern barbarians.
Could the philosophical abstraction, artistic elation and yearning for collective salvation that drove the country also have contributed to its ultimate derailing into the kind of mania that defined the years of National Socialism? After all, it wasn't just the dull masses that followed the Führer. Members of the cultural elite were also on their knees.
Music and the Holocaust come together in that shadow: one of the most beautiful things created by man, and one of the worst things human beings have ever done. Wagner, the mad genius, was more than a composer. He also influenced Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, even though he was already dead when the 12-year-old Hitler heard his music live for the first time, when he attended a production of "Lohengrin" in the Austrian city of Linz in 1901. Describing the experience, during which he stood in a standing-room only section of the theater, Hitler wrote: "I was captivated immediately."
Many others feel the same way. They listen to Wagner and are captivated, overwhelmed, smitten and delighted. Nike Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter, puts the question that this raises in these terms: "Should we allow ourselves to listen to his works with pleasure, even though we know that he was an anti-Semite?" There's a bigger issue behind this question: Can Germans enjoy any part of their history in a carefree way?
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
I am a FANATICAL Wagner fan and when people find that out, that is the first thing they say “Wasn’t he a Nazi”? They are unaware that it was Hitler that adopted Wagner’s views. |
Wagner was a anti-semite asshole, but so was most of Europe at the time.
I hope this doesn’t offend anyone.
Flame away.
If you're going to blacklist the work of anyone perceived as "racist", "anti-Semitic", "sexist" or "homophobic" by today's PC standards, you're going to wind up blacklisting and banning pretty much everything of any value. Which is precisely what the politically correct Left wants to do.
“Some day a king will come, and the sword will rise again.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ll4qS4anGo
Wagner wrote the Ring years before Tolken wrote the Rings.
If anything Tolken took Wagner’s Idea.
Johnny Batch
Freddy Handle
Ricky Wagner...
“Wernher von Braun is a rocket engineer forever associated with Hitler.”
Pretty good work at NASA too.
Most amazing ending to any movie ever. Sigfreids Funeral March fit so perfectly.
I like yours better. ;)
I'm surprised that the people who try blacklisting Wagner's music haven't lobbied to shut down NASA for this same reason (or ban Ford vehicles, while they're at it). Politically correct, virtue-signaling madness is a beast with an insatiable appetite.
Funny, I did the same thing, but used Joey Batch and Dick Wagner.
One does not have to be a Socialist demagogue--or the supporter of Socialist demagogues--to recognize beauty in art. You counter Socialist demagogues, who build totalitarian monolithic regimes, with reasoned argument, not by a compulsive need to demonize culture. The Socialist war is on culture & beauty, and this sort of hand-wringing is truly grist for the mill of the next Socialist tyrant.
“Pretty good work at NASA too.” London got to see his early work.
I very much enjoy Wagner as well especially the Wagner without words. I like the big brass instrumentals without the interference of opera voices.
See my tag line
And wake up
People
Platonic collectivism, then Kant's assault on reality, reason, and man's happiness, then German idealists + romanticists, then Hegelian worship of statism, then the literature of Palmieri & Gentile, who upheld fascism on a Hegelian foundation, + theoretical racism of Wagner, Gobineau, Lapouge, and Chamberlain + Darwin's survival of the fittest = nazism
In America we celebrate some anti-semites like Farrakkan. And oddly, so many Jewish people support Dems who don't support Israel. What an odd world.
Not being a big opera fan, I mostly agree - I wish Wagner had written symphonies instead, as he's unmatched when it comes to creative harmonies and orchestral color. I mostly listen to the overtures and preludes, or to orchestral arrangements of the vocal music (Leopold Stokowsky made some great arrangements of opera excerpts for orchestra).
I have the Ring with out words and his overtures and preludes without words. It is simply amazing.
I LOVE Wagner operas, especially the ring epic. What I detest are people trying to selectively rewrite history and impose modern day values on historical figures. Wagner was indeed an anti-semite and white supremecist, and I’m sure he would have disapproved of gay marriage as well, but he was no different than most other people in his country or continent. He was a musical genius who is responsible for the wedding march that is probably played in 99% of American weddings.
Those who try to blacklist Wagner's music have the same mindset as the people trying to take Andrew Jackson off the $20 and tear down Confederate monuments and flags.
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