Wally, seasons ticket holder to the opera person that I am, I don't think i am intellectually challenged. Wagner was a racist and a proto-Nazi and his librettos, especially the Ring cycle, reflect that fully. It is not happenstance or coincidence that Hitler loved Wagner, nor that Beyruth became the Nazi annual Woodstock, nor that Wagner's family (widow, off-spring) were active Nazis. Nazi ideology did not get invented with Hitler, it was floating around for a long time before that, and Wagner was an anti-semite, a racist, and fully believed that nonAryans were inferior human beings and worse.
And that is the problem. His music itself is genius. His ideology which permeates his librettos is offensive and proto-Nazi. The Ring Cycle speaks for itself as an expression fo everything that the Nazis later expressed in a different form. So this is a tab bit more than Woody Allen and Mia's daughter. I am solving my quandry by going to Die Walkure for the music knowing the context of the libretto. To admire Wagner's musical genius we must not forget the seminal role that utter hatred played in his librettos, his idelogy, and what he was all about, for he was more than just his operas. His whole devotion to "volk" and everything that went with that was a fully realized ideology of proto-Nazi-ism. And I have seen a hell of a lot more than just a Boheme and Giovanni, although those are not bad places to start for the novice. I am looking forward in February to seeing Palenthrope (spelling?) by Handel, whose operas I am currently discovering. I fell in love with his stuff when I saw Xerxes - I don't know when I have ever been so gripped by a plot! Vince
