(click the pic for a few minutes worth)
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 ...
Love Wagner! Listen to the ending of Parsifal, such beautiful and inspired music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgx8AxG3fe4
A composer of some very great music. But thankfully there are many other great compositions by others I’ll pass on Wagner.
Dick Wagner played some pretty Wagnerian guitar on this song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqpWTC-rvhQ
In other words they have pals on this forum
A handful of loud folks
Used to be a lot more
Here’s a thread from memory lane to demonstrate
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1053265/posts
(click the pic for a few minutes worth)
The Tristan Chord
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcE3kSX_y_c
Antonio Pappano discusses Wagner’s ‘Tristan’ chord (The Royal Opera)
On a ‘59 Les Paul Junior, in fact. With Steve Hunter. Some of my favorite guitar work.
I know the “Entrance of the Gods to Valhalla” quite well, it’s a magnificent piece of music with great writing for the brass section.
“What I detest are people trying to selectively rewrite history and impose modern day values on historical figures.”
They don’t realize that people in the future will detest what we think is acceptable now. They may nor realize that people in the past would detest what we think is acceptable now as well.
The best composers in history follow an arc from Mozart to Wagner to Gershwin to ... Led Zeppelin?
That mindset goes with the territory of Bush-brand Republicanism. They're basically Democrats with a somewhat more aggressive foreign policy and slightly lower taxes.
“She loves the way Puccini lays down a tune”
Angela Gheorghiu Tosca - Vissi d´Arte
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH1JrHsyaVs
“We must separate the artist from the art.”
Not sure who first said that, nor indeed if I’m remembering it accurately, word for word.
But my sense of the public debate in the United States is that the statement is frequently quoted by the Left, in defending depredations by Roman Polanksi and others like him.
Wagner really should have hired a competent librettist.
Indeed. Wagner wrote some great music. And it’s anazing how a few musical notes can impact human emotions
Wagner is a personal fav.
Rules....
Zepparella: Led Zeppelin When The Levee Breaks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH-_9cwdLug
I’m willing to purge Wagner from our collective lives, if, using the same logic, we can purge the Democrat party, which also has a history of racism and anti-semitism (one could argue it’s not just history either).
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