For all you Wagner Queens
Mike McKinley
> The Wagner presented by Köhler is a figure damaged from the earliest age by an unloving mother and usurping stepfather, but consoled during childhood and adolescence by the tender love of a favorite sister. Wagner idealized this sister as the good anima of his dreams, and wandered through adult life in the hope of meeting her. Her role was to redeem him, to assuage all guilt, suffering and rejection by sacrificing herself on the altar of his need—and all this not only as a sister but also as a lover and a bride. The actual women in Wagner’s life were unable to carry out this demanding agenda, and even the heroines of the operas sometimes fall short, by asking some damn fool question, or by getting hitched against their will to some damn fool of a man.
Jack Hamilton
>http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/feb05/scruton.htm
Interesting article, especially his explanation of Wagner's supposed
anti-Semitism. I'm not saying I believe it, just that it was
interesting.
An odd thing about Wagner is that despite his early revolutionary
leanings he turned into a great proponent of the establishment - just
which establishment he (or the characters in his music dramas) favored
might change from year to year or scene to scene, but nevertheless there
was the underlying idea of the existence of a power structure which must
be honored.
Very different from the portrait of Richard Strauss presented by Alex
Ross in his New Yorker essay
(<http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/richard_strauss.html>), that of
a man who believed in the power of disorder.
Ob Dennis, Alex Ross appears to be a cutie-pie,
<http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/wake_up_the_cou.html>, and his
musical blog often has interesting entries.
Just to end the thread, I'll mention Hitler; from the Strauss essay
above:
=====
On May 16, 1906, in the Austrian city of Graz, the curtain went up on
modern music. Richard Strauss conducted his opera “Salome,” a shockingly
faithful adaptation of a play by Oscar Wilde. The piece had first been
heard in Dresden, five months before, but it was the Graz performance
that amazed the musical élite. Gustav Mahler, the director of the Court
Opera in Vienna, attended with his wife, having been thwarted by
imperial censors in his attempts to stage “Salome” himself. Giacomo
Puccini made a special trip to see what his German rival was up to.
Arnold Schoenberg brought along his pupil Alban Berg. Strauss took
particular note of the crowd’s demographics; he mentioned, in a letter
to his wife, Pauline, the “young people from Vienna, with only the vocal
score as hand luggage.” Strange to say, one of them was an Austrian
teenager named Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler conduct “Tristan
und Isolde” in Vienna. No less strange, there was a fictional character
in attendance—Adrian Leverkühn, the antihero of Thomas Mann’s “Doktor
Faustus,” a tale of a cold-hearted German composer in league with the
Devil.
=====
Incidentally, Mike, Ralph turns out not to have TB, according to the DNA
test.
--
Incest, revolution, suicide, miscegenation, black magic,
religious heresy, pessimism, free love, and the abolition
of private property are glorified and advocated nightly at
the Metropolitan Opera House.
- Virgil Thompson
Mike McKinley
> Ob Dennis, Alex Ross appears to be a cutie-pie,
> <http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/wake_up_the_cou.html>, and his
> musical blog often has interesting entries.
And, he seems gay to boot!
Brian Kane
>Jack Hamilton:
>><http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/wake_up_the_cou.html>
>And, [Alex Ross] seems gay to boot!
And Maulina is is cat?
--
Brian Kane (Washington, DC) |
astroplace.com/brian.asp |
>bri...@SPAMastroplace.com<|
http://phornax.livejournal.com|
David W. Fenton
news:d1c9bj$sse$1...@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu:
Freudians remind me of Marxists/Communists: they live in a world
that makes sense only if you accept every iota of the orthodoxy.
These kinds of things make no sense to *me*, for instance. The
reality seems both much simpler and far more complex than these
people would have it.
These kinds of critiques become more about the system than about the
subject. In that respect, it's like Schenkerian analysis of music,
which often tells you little about the piece of music, other than
the degree to which it can be shoehorned into the Schenkerian
analytical system.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
dfenton at bway dot net http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
David W. Fenton
news:d1ct0m$icg$1...@news.doit.wisc.edu:
> Mike McKinley:
>>Jack Hamilton:
> He's a *great* critic, maybe the best around.
I second that. I've never read anything he's ever written that did
not seem interesting and amazingly new, while also seeming
inevitably right, once Ross has laid out his argument.
He's also a damned good writer.