Wally Kairuz wrote: > vince, > i respect you and your views but, well, sue me.
Years of friendship and I get that comment? > the nazis listened to a lot of beethoven, especially the ninth. shall we ban > beethoven too? I have placed this out of order. That is a bullshit comment and you know it. > i have never been able to > read the nazi propaganda in the ring cycle. i have read a million different > things, but i have never found the nazi stuff. i've found the nazi thing in > tannhauser, i've found it in lohengrin, i've even found it in master > singers, but never in the ring. Tell me the Ring in one sentence: a bunch of mis-shapen, mis-formed sub-humans attempt to deny everything meaningful to the Aryans. Wagner took German mythology and molded it into an exquisitely beautiful expression of the virulent anti-Semitism that was rampant in his day - which immediately preceded Hitler's day. Wagner was a prolific writer with a very pronounced philosophy and everything he did was an attempt to purify and remake German culture into what he felt he should be. He reached his goal in the years after his death, 1933-1945. The Ring was the zenith of Wagner's work and he poured his philosophy into it: a bunch of mis-shapen, mis-formed sub-humans attempt to deny everything meaningful to the Aryans. (Always was curious to me though the amount of bestiality and incest that went along with that pure Aryan shit.) Dame Gwyneth Jones sang a wonderful Br|nnhilde. Br|nnhilde is an abomination of hatred and racial contempt. For my money, James Morris is Wotan (although I like him in Billy Budd too), and I always preferred Hildegard Behrens as Br|nnhilde and Siegfried Jerusalem is one hell of a Loge (only role I have ever liked him in). Did anyone sing Gutrune as well as Cheryl Studer ? Probably not. (You can tell what production of the Ring is the most memorable for me...) I can even tell you my best James Levine joke: Levine has said he loves Wagner so much, he could conduct it forever, and if he slows his tempo down any more, he will have achieved his goal. Damn beautiful tone poems in the Ring, yes, and some of the vilest hatred as well. The Ring stands as the triumph of the very late high culture of the 19th century and it expressed perfectly what was to immediately follow: two world wars and Holocaust. Wagner forces us to confront everything we wish to deny, that what is most beautiful to us may be most hateful to others - not hateful in their opinions, but that what we love may be the direct cause of evil to others and an expression of our evil that we have cloaked in beauty to disguise it from others, and most especially, disguise it from ourselves. Deny, or struggle with it, or sue me because I am not suing you. Vince
