--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > There is a big difference between calling a person you are sharing a forum with stupid and calling a libretto stupid. I do not like Wagner's librettos. I am aware that he was into Gesamtkunstwerk, and I have read all of them. Hell, I've even gone to see some of them performed at the Bayreuth Wagner festival when I was at the university there. You need to reserve tickets years in advance, but I have a fairly close friend who sang the female lead in many of them, and so I got in free. You can't really assume that I don't know what I'm talking about on the basis of a few emails, especially when you've already decided that I'm silly. a
Angela, if I were encountering you for the first time, I'd decide you didn't know what you were talking about, because you don't. It doesn't take more than one major blooper to make that obvious. I grew up steeped in Wagner almost from the cradle. My father was an eminent Wagner scholar. I've attended the operas at Bayreuth, have seen them in New York at the Met, have listened to hundreds of hours of recordings following along in the score. I'm not a Wagner scholar myself, but I know more than enough of his work to know you're blowing large volumes of hot air. Nobody "likes Wagner's librettos." To single them out for critical evaluation in isolation from the music is itself a sign of profound ignorance.
