Wagner's Musical Religion: Art, Politics, and Genocide

[@lewars1912]

Interesting. I especially liked listening to Dr. Margaret Brearley.

[@robertjones4709]

Shall we laugh or cry? I can.t believe such a complex subject becomes so superficial. These egos are even bigger than Wagner.s Its the old Wagner plus Hitler equals Wagner. bit.

[@JohnBorstlap]

If you read Wagner's writings about 'Jewishness', it becomes clear that he attacked capitalism and materialism and cultural emptiness in racial terms, which is a stupid mistake, like thinking that redhaired communists came to their convictions because of their hair colour. It were later generations which turned cultural antisemitism into racial venom. Wagner was stupid to provide some of its munition but that is all. SIegfried in the Ring is a completely flopped protagonist, a sorry attempt to depict heroism. We merely listen to his music not his heroism. Nobody takes this type seriously, so whatever intention Wagner had to provide a role model for German nationalist heroism, he completely failed.

[@aaalltcringeieeettaaalltcr1491]

Calling it a ''mistake'' is downplaying Wagners foaming at the mouth antisemitism - he was a monster that actively wanted to spread hate to enitre groups of people.

[@JohnBorstlap]

@@aaalltcringeieeettaaalltcr1491 It is always wrong to project our contemporary situation and experiences into the past without understanding the historic context. We look back to 19C antisemitism with the holocaust in the back of our mind. In W's time such thing was unimaginable (it still is). He saw enemies everywhere, sometimes rightly so, sometimes wrongly, and translated his anger into racist terms. He was right in his cultural critique but his connecting this with ethnicity was a mistake, and many people made that mistake and still do. A bad banker is a bad banker and whether he was Jewish or not, has nothing to do with that. Etc. etc....

[@aaalltcringeieeettaaalltcr1491]

​@@JohnBorstlap No, you don't even HAVE to take the holocaust into consideration to say he was a monster, the man declaring that "all Jews should burn to death" reached a similar conclusions without that future knowledge. I don't buy the ''don't judge the past by our standards'' thing entirely, because our values are better (for the most part), we should reaffirm those values strongly and not in a weak ''it was right for us but for them dunno ://'' sense, and we shouldn't trivialize the suffering of victims in the past by making excuses for the victimizer. By your logic, if there was a culture raping kids and smashing their head against rocks, we shouldn't judge them bc ''it's their culture''. I'm gonna say it's better to judge them, and just acknowledge that bad culture can create bad people by virtue of their actions. I have no problem saying most people in the past were bad, and I've not heard a good argument why judgement is wrong here. With that said I don't automatically judge historical people negatively even if they have some problematic attitudes, you always have a choice to side with more inclusive/less hateful impulses in your culture. If you're pushing culture towards being inclusive/less hateful while still having adopted problematic aspects of your culture, I'm gonna say you're a good person all things considered. Wagner though was the opposite of that, in how he created more hatred for what was already one of the most oppressed groups in Europe. You can think that I'm extreme in how little leeway I give to cultural relativism: The thing is you can have a normal ''don't judge most people in history because they're products of their culture'' stance, and still judge Wagner as a monster. Wagners antisemitism went beyond the common antisemitist attitudes of his day, and consciously created a wannabe-intellectual/ideological foundation for it. The whole trope about jews basically being culture-less parasites who can only take from others, that's all Wagner, and that was in his time. He didn't simply have antisemitic impulses like his culture at large, but promoted that people actively >should< indulge in their intuitive sense of disgust against jews.

[@JohnBorstlap]

@@aaalltcringeieeettaaalltcr1491 Similar expressions at the time referring to the French during the Napoleonic wars, or to Germans during the 1870 war, or to the bourgeoisie in the Russian revolution, or to Muslems in some areas of Europe, all uninhibited expressions of blind hatred, merely show the sorry way lots of people react to events they don't understand or from which they suffer. W's hatred of Jews was merely an extreme example of such hatred, a matter of degree, not something to particularly filter out from the mass of human depravity to give it a special status in the perspective of the Holocaust. Also it was fuelled by all kinds of quasi-religious and philosophical 'reasoning' (as the admirable conference shows) which made it cumulative. People are not black and white, or monsters on one side and pure angels on the other. W clearly saw the beginning degradation of the world, of culture, of everything of value to man, threatened by the developing scientific world view which was entirely materialistic, and the industrial revolution, both developments destroying Nature and human nature. W saw all of this as the product of a one-sided, exaggerated rationalism which left the entire emotional field desolate. Hence his cultivation of 'instinctive knowledge'. That he got lots of things wrong, is easy for us to see, with hindsight, but many of his observations were right. Which were, by the way, already prepared by the early Romantics (Hölderlin, Goethe, Novalis).

[@123must]

Thanks !

[@agnon777]

can't get over the dress of Mrs. Breadley' absolutely magnificent !

[@mcfrdmn]

Tov me'od !

[@donaldreed2351]

All great geniuses are monsters.

[@ug-ei6xw]

Wagner is Amalek!

[@JohnBorstlap]

All very interesting.... If Wagner had not fallen into the habit of wild philosophizing and just written very good operas, like Verdi, his works would never be problematic. But his philosophies are confused, and have something hilarious about them, cobbled together excitedly from many different sources and often contradictory ones. His philosophies about religion, Germanness, etc. are a self-defeating flop, but at the time they helped mobilize frustrations of primitive people, who had no ears for his music - in spite of their claims. Wagner can only be 'redeemed' by digging-out what is good and compatible with truly civilized values. And they are not particularly German but universally human. Therefore it is artists and composers like Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler who represent the true 'spirit' of German culture - and Beethoven at the top: the most German composer is in the same time the most European and universal one. This is what is best of German culture. All that pagan war mongering and crazy Jew hunting is stuff for Freud rather than Einstein or Wittgenstein.....