Klarinet Archive - Posting 000077.txt from 2007/05
From: "danyel" <rab@-----.de>
Subj: Re: [kl] Wagner
Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 20:40:40 -0400
Tony,
Undoubtedly, nobody on this list would deserve the status of a guru more
than you. Unfortunately your temperament is just as fiery as Dan's, seducing
you too sometimes to rushed, exaggerated or unfair statements.
With all due respect, what am I supposed to think about a composer who's
desire it was that all Jews be killed? What kind of philosophy could be
expected from such a person?
And indeed, for once I have to agree with Dan, the music, plots and lyrics
he wrote are revolting. Even if it was not actually anti-Semitic--whatever
that could mean in musical terms--it deals with extremely obscure Germanic
myths in rather unauthentic 19th cent. historistic renditions, penetrated by
unbearably overstated and vulgar music. The rhymes are actually quite
ridiculous. All this is exactly what I would expect from a man of his failed
intellectual background.
Sure, you will find this merely provocative, just like your mail was
provocative to me (suggesting that criticising Wagner was a kind of public
masturbation and practiced only by feeble minds). Wagner's music and the
Bayreuth cult is so profoundly linked with the Nazi terror that this is
indeed an important subject that should be discussed between grown-up people
in a serious and rational manner. However, I tried to describe the way I
perceive Wagner. If you are unwilling to discuss the artistic merits of
Wagner with me, please be so kind and reduce my reply to the questions: Is
someone who hates all Jews not obviously an idiot? How can an idiot create
works of art? Is not a mind required to write music? Is not the music
created by the same mind that writes letters and diaries? Did not Wagner's
brain cook up the obnoxious things found in his letters and diaries? How
could the same brain be trusted to write music? Is it not suspicious, that
the Nazis were crazy about Wagner, while they hated Webern?
Best wishes,
danyel
www.echoton.de/clar.html
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Pay" <tony.p@-----.org>
To: <klarinet@-----.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 11:47 PM
Subject: Re: [kl] Wagner
On 8 May, "Vincent DiMalta" <atlamid@-----.com> wrote, in part:
> The art of whomever is always perceived by the receiver through their own
> viewpoint, but I feel to bring your viewpoint to another based upon other
> than art issues allows the door to be open for all types of personal
> issues
> to like or not to like any person, and in the process there is danger to
> negate the art based who we think the person may have been, WHICH MAY BE
> DIFFERENT THAN WHOM THE PERSON WAS [my capitals]. Even if the analysis of
> the person is correct, the conclusion that the music is negated by the
> analysis of the person is questionable at best. The art itself is the
> message, IMHO, and to which our response is ours, to like or not to like.
I agree with this, as have one or two others, whom I congratulate.
I would like, however, to say something about Dan Leeson's contribution to
the discussion, as it pertains to Wagner.
The short version is: I want to reassure members of this list that they NEED
NOT BELIEVE HIM.
Dan has, for various reasons, attained something of the status of a guru
here. His pronouncements on Wagner have therefore engendered a copycat
dismissal of that composer by various puny intellects and (highly probably)
puny musicians, who jerk off on this list by diminishing a figure whose
intellectual and musical talents dwarf their own by countless orders of
magnitude. (I'd even say that Wagner's HUMAN credentials probably dwarf
theirs, despite his despicable antisemitism.)
The subject is not new. Several years ago, reading this list, I was very
interested to find out why I had been naive to be moved, inspired and
transported by Wagner's insight into the human condition. I wanted to know
why something that I had found so compelling, so deeply TRUE, was actually
infected at root, as Dan Leeson claimed.
I was directed to various books, of which Paul Lawrence Rose's "Wagner --
Race and Revolution" is probably typical. I bought and read it.
Well.
I cannot discuss here why this book, by a Professor at two American
universities, is such intellectual crap.
But Brian Magee does the job for me, via the appendix, "Wagner and
Antisemitism" to his book "Wagner and Philosophy", AKA "The Tristan Chord".
Here you will find Wagner's antisemitism in full, unexcused technicolor,
together with reasons why the claim that Wagner's music INCORPORATED
antisemitism -- though of course, it was POSSIBLE that it did -- is actually
not borne out by the facts.
Wagner was preoccupied with very different concerns as he composed the Ring,
many of them to do with his growing relationship with Schopenhauer's
philosophy.
It is naive to think that his major concern was to portray Jewish
caricatures
-- and he said as much, actually.
Dan writes:
> His sin was not so much due to his bigotry but rather because he made his
> bigotry a part of the art works he composed. It takes a little doing and
> a
> knowledge of medieval history to recognize the rancid ideas that he
> espouses
> throughout Meistersinger or Siefried or Gotterdammerung, but there they
> are
> there in all their putrid ugliness. So I don't dismiss Wagner because I
> find
> his politics toxic. I don't listen to Wagner because I don't want to hear
> public displays of antisemitism over and over as his works are done again
> and
> again.
I would like to think that Dan could change his mind.
Tony
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