I was just reading the helicopter gunship music thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3455098#post3455098) , and a lot of people suggested Wagner would be an appropriate choice. I have to admit, Ride of the Valkyries is definately good music to operate miniguns to - but on the other hand, Wagner himself was an absolute monster. An antisemite, and Hitler’s favorite composer.
So, since it’s a safe bet there’s a lot of people on this board who are far, far more cultured than I - how do you feel about Wagner? Do you like his music? Does you knowledge of the sort of scum he was effect your opinion of his music? And do you like his music, but make a point of not listening to it because of the man himself?
I love the music, absolutely and utterly. the fact that he was reportedly anti-semitic really has no bearing on this for me. It really comes down to seperating the product of his talent from the man himself. If I only ever read/listened to/ watched the work of people who held no views I disagreed with, i imagine I would have rather a dull existence
Interestingly as well, and please note that am not excusing it, racism was, in the context of the times, not uncommon and for the most part accepted.
It’s worth noting that, while Wagner was a grade A jerk in many ways, he was dead LONG before there was a National Socialist movement in Germany. It seems absurd to hold him accountable, then, for the sins of Adolph Hitler.
I love Wagner’s music. LOVE it. I have read about what a horrible man he was, and I acknowledge it - but when it comes to music, it is mandatory that I learn to separate the art from the artist. I can guarantee that the majority of composers, singers and songwriters that I listen to is made up of people I wouldn’t want to hang out with. Still, they have the capability to create great (IMHO) music, and, since I’m a musician, that’s all that matters.
An interesting story: Wagner’s music is, more or less, informally banned in Israel, because of his anti-Semitic views and, thanks to Hitler, his close relationship with the Holocaust. A couple of years ago, Daniel Barenboim, a Jewish conductor who currently directs the Chicago symphony, was in Israel on tour with a German orchestra. After the concert, he asked the audience if they would like to hear Wagner. He wound up conducting the Prelude/Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, to a totally split reaction from the audience. Some yelled, made noise, screamed that D.B. was a fascist - and others stood and cheered.
It’s an interesting situation. Certainly, nobody was forcing the anti-Wagnerites to hand around after the concert and listen. Regardless, was Barenboim being ridiculously insensitive by ignoring the informal ban?
Sure, Wagner had some really hideous ideas, especially by today’s standards. But the fact that his music was so negatively appropriated isn’t necessarily his fault, I don’t think. I just try to listen to it for what it is - truly involving music.
Someone is supposed to have said “Wagner is better than he sounds” (I think it’s misattributed to Mark Twain). Wagner has great moments and some great overtures, but intolerably long dull stretches (to me at least). At his best he’s great, but there are big chunks where I’m tempted to fall asleep.
The man’s music is not related to him personally. And, no matter how bad he was, it ain’t his fault that Hitler liked him and his music. Hitler’s supposed to have loved Disney cartoons, too.
There are a lot of musicians whose work I admire, but whose real-life personalities were unpleasant at best. Mozart and Handel come to mind.
I feel the same way about artists in other fields, too. Picasso was a total dick, but I still like his early work (after 1940 or so, he gets tiresomely repetitive). In terms of supporting or sympathizing with violent regimes, Jacques-Louis David is far worse than Wagner (whose music was co-opted by Hitler many years after Wagner’s death)–in David’s own lifetime, he actively supported the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France. During that same period, David produced works like The Death of Marat, which is probably my favorite work that he ever painted.
That being said, I must say that on the whole, I love Wagner’s music. There are moments, however, that his cultural beliefs seep into his work and make me cringe. In the Ring Cycle, Siegfried is just a little too much like the blonde, Aryan super-hero, and Alberich, the power-hungry and gold-hoarding dwarf, is just a little too close to nineteenth-century stereotypes of Jews for my comfort. And the character of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger is an awful example of anti-semitic caricatures.
However, I can’t bring myself to condemn Wagner’s work as a whole for these instances of anti-semitism, which were hardly unique to him as an artist of the 19th century. Tristan und Isolde is just too damn beautiful! So I take his flaws as a person as ugly warts on otherwise beautiful body of musical work. I can’t completely overlook those warts, but I’m not going to reject the music in toto because of them.
Hitler liked dogs, too. I suppose this means that everyone who owns a poodle is a card-carrying anti-semitic National Socialist?
And, for the record, Wagner’s politics ran pretty far to the left. He was an active participant in the 1848 Revolution, and he hung out with anarchists. It’s not his fault that a weasel like Goebbels dug his ideas about a German national identity. (And remember that when Wagner came up with this idea, there WAS no German state.)
Wagner’s music (and ideas about the arts) had an enormous effect on over one hundred years of serious composition…artists either adopted his concepts (Bruckner, Mahler, early Schoenberg) or openly revolted against them (Debussy, Stravinsky, later Schoenberg).
I don’t have time at the moment for a full-scale discussion of Ricky-baby, but I would direct interested parties to Bryan Magee’s important and intelligent 1969 book, Aspects of Wagner. At 114 pages, it’s a quick read, and gives a lot of food for thought. Easily available at finer independent bookshops everywhere.
I love that quote. I don’t know who actually said it, though. Mark Twain seems to be the default attribution for everything. But while I was searching to see who said it, I found this one:
‘Parsifal’ is the kind of opera that starts at six o’clock. After it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6:20.
— David Randolph
Personally I do not like Wagner’s music, but not because of his lifestyle. Rather his assaults on tonality are what most annoy me.
People sometimes unfairly condemn someone because Hitler liked that person. However, in his efforts to manipulate the public, Hitler misinterpreted and misappropriated nearly everyone if it could serve his purpose. Some good examples are my beloved Martin Luther (who was not racist), and Charles Darwin.
Because it was a nationalistic movement, the Nazis seemed to celebrate nearly every “great German” with lots of pride and pomp, especially Wagner.
I’ll back up Slithy Tove re: the gloves remark.
I think I read it in opera news long ago. If memory still hold a seat in this distracted brain.
I love Wagner’s music.
With regard to money, and other fellow’s wives, he was a total jerk. That doesn’t affect my enjoyment of his work though.
At “Kovanschina” (sp?) I met a russian woman, and we conversed a bit. I asked her if she liked Wagner, or something like that. (It’s been a looong time) "I don’t listen to fascist music was her curt reply.
Oooooookay. How about those 49ers?
I would add Nietzsche to this list. Nietzsche despised both anti-semitism and the movement towards German nationalism (he also grew completely disenchanted with Wagner, whose music had inspired Nietzsche’s early work, The Birth of Tragedy). It wasn’t Nietzsche’s fault that he had a proto-Nazi for a sister, who did a hatchet job editing his unpublished writings to make them reflect her own anti-Semitic biases*. She lived long enough to befriend Hitler, who helped to perpetuate her distortions of her dead brother’s writings.
Wagner’s legacy suffered a similar fate. His descendants were pretty complicit in Hitler’s attempt to make Wagnerian music the soundtrack for National Socialism. His daughter-in-law, Winifred, may have been the most extreme Nazi-supporter, but his son Siegfried** didn’t seem to have any qualms about hosting Hitler at Bayreuth. It doesn’t seem quite fair to blame Wagner for what his family did with his music after his death.
*which she shared with her crackpot husband, with whom she tried to set up a “utopian” colony of pure Germans in Argentina.
**yes, “Siegfried,” as in the hero from Germanic mythology, who just happened to be the major character in the Ring Cycle. Good one, Richard.
Thoughts on Wagner? WHAT DID YOU SAY? I CAN’T HEAR YOU, THE MUSIC IS REALLY LOUD!
I think he is a great composer and a pretty interesting person.
I love the story of how he suprised his wife on her birthday by not only writing a special piece of music for her but he snuck an orchestra into the house and woke her up with the music.
But you know, as Victor Borge once said, the kid really got off pretty easy. If he’d been born a couple years later, he probably would have been named Gotterdammerung. (Aside: is there a way to do umlauts in vB code?)
I had a music professor in college who believed, somewhat anachronistically, that the ability to compose was literally a gift from God. Wagner troubled him greatly, as he could never quite understand why God would have bestowed such phenomenal musical talent on a man who was otherwise pretty reprehensible. Me, there are many moments in Wagner that I absolutely adore. But like CalMeacham, I also find a lot of boring stretches as well. I have a difficult time imagining sitting through one of his operas in its entirety. I think it’s Rossini who was supposed to have said, “Wagner has some great moments…and some terrible quarter hours.”
(Aside: is there a way to do umlauts in vB code?)