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The Pursuit of Knowledge

The Ring of Truth

By from the May 2011 issue

Wrestling with the awesomeness and beauty of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung.

People make mistakes, and often the full cost of these mistakes is paid only long after their deaths. One of the most tragic instances in the history of music is that of Richard Wagner, whose essay on “Jewishness in Music” might have been set aside, or at any rate not held so vehemently against him, had it not been for Hitler, and the admiration that Hitler felt toward an artist who, in Hitler’s crazy vision of things, had laid the foundations for the Nazi plan for national redemption. In retrospect, despite his record as a revolutionary and a fugitive, Wagner’s anti-Semitism is now widely assumed to provide the clue not only to his personality but also to his art. It is true that Wagner’s ideal hero could not possibly be taken as a model by socialists, liberals, urban intellectuals, or anybody attached to the idea of human equality. But that is only the beginning of Wagner’s problems. For the dramatic context makes it all too easy to suppose that the composer’s anti-Semitism is of a piece with his hero-worship, and that both are founded in an ideology of racial supremacy.

In his recent biography Joachim Köhler has filled in the picture, with the kind of no-holds-barred insolence that only the defenseless dead encounter. In Köhler’s version, Wagner was an emotional parasite who demanded complete loyalty without returning it, who sponged ruthlessly off both friend and foe, who shamelessly exploited those who most generously loved him — from his cuddly servant girls to his half-crazed patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria — and who was pinned down at last by the straightlaced and “bigoted” Cosima, in a warm bath of luxury from which he nevertheless wished to slip out by the plug-hole. He quickly saved himself from his early social and political ideals, when in the aftermath of the failed Dresden uprising of 1849 he saw the cost of retaining them, and thereafter gave himself up to one all-consuming political passion, which was anti-Semitism. This was directed first toward Meyerbeer, to whom Wagner had every reason to be grateful and to whom, for that very reason, he wasn’t, and then, with the notorious pamphlet, to the entire Hebrew race. Cosima encouraged this passion, since it was also hers, and in time anti-Semitism became a comprehensive Weltanschauung, which blended nicely with Cosima’s naïve bigotries. Many people loved him, but all were rewarded in the end with some gesture of repudiation, when it was discovered that they too belonged to the ever-growing conspiracy by which he thought himself surrounded. The roll call of victims extends from Mendelssohn, whose music taught Wagner so much, to Nietzsche, the philosopher who first penetrated to the moral center of the composer’s art.

As a convinced Wagnerian, who honestly believes The Ring of the Nibelung to be not only the greatest work of art conceived in modern times, but also the one that contains, as no other work contains, the truth of what we are now living through, I want to defend the composer against the tide of detraction that flows across his memory. I want to protest with a resounding “so what?” So what is so bad about these vampires who suck our blood in order to remind us (what we are always in danger of forgetting) that our veins really do contain some? So what if Otto Wesendonck’s wife was loved by someone who immortalized not only her, but the name of Wesendonck, in music whose beauty will never until the end of time be surpassed? How lucky for Minna that, her second-rate promiscuous character notwithstanding, she has gone down in history as the abandoned wife of someone worth being abandoned by; how lucky for the mad King Ludwig that he ruined the public purse of Bavaria on behalf of someone who turned mortal money into immortal music. How unlucky for Germany that more of its petty monarchs did not follow suit, but instead chose to invest in the worst of all possible causes, namely the war on France which was to lead in due course to the temporary destruction of Europe and the permanent psychosis of Germany.

BUT I KNOW THAT the excuses don’t quite carry conviction, either their conviction or mine. Wagner’s justification lies in his art and nowhere else, and the best excuse that can be made for him is that his creative labors required not only the enormous sacrifice that he made on their behalf, but also the sacrifices that he demanded from everyone else. But how to persuade the skeptics, who have such a powerful advocate in Nietzsche, the only great artist who has taken another artist as a target, and set out to destroy him? Nietzsche invites us to see Wagner’s characters as one-dimensional people, sick remnants of the bourgeois order, dressed up in heroic costumes and enjoying a spurious sovereignty over their fate in a fairy-tale world. The whole thing, in Nietzsche’s view, is a fake, a blown-up bubble of nothingness.

In response to Nietzsche I would say that Wagner’s dramas are not fairy tales. Nothing is more impressive in them than the grim realism with which wholly intelligible motives are carried through to their crisis. At the same time, these motives are placed in a pre-historical, mythical or medieval setting. Wagner’s purpose was not to fill the stage with fantasies, but to create the kind of distance between audience and drama that would endow the drama with a universal significance. Hence his preoccupation with myths and legends — i.e., stories that depart from realism only in order to convey universal truths about the human condition.

When Wagner applied himself to the study of the surviving literature of the early Germanic tribes, and to the poetry of medieval Germany, it was not to identify exemplary people and historical events but to acquaint himself with a culture in which the real had been through and through penetrated by the ideal: a culture in which people did not merely do things, but also lived up to things. He discovered myth not as a collection of fables and beliefs, nor as a primitive religion, but as a distinct category of human thought, as open to us, Wagner thought, in a world of scientific skepticism as it was open to the inhabitants of ancient Greece or Iceland. Myth dawned on Wagner as a form of social hope. It was a way of thinking that could restore to modern man the lost sense of the ideal, without which human life is worthless.

A myth, for Wagner, is therefore not a fable or a religious doctrine but a vehicle for human knowledge. The myth acquaints us with ourselves and our condition, using symbols and characters that give objective form to our inner compulsions. Myths are set in the hazy past, in a vanished world of dark forces and magniloquent deeds. But this obligatory “pastness” places the myth and its characters before recorded time, and therefore in an era that is purged of history. It lifts the story out of the stream of human life, and endows it with a meaning that is timeless.

Wagner’s original impulse, therefore, which was to discover in the ancient legends of the Germanic people the living record of the time of heroes, led him back to his starting point in the modern world. The time of heroes was a mythical time-and mythical time is now. Myths do not speak of what was but of what is eternally. They are magical-realist summaries of the actual world, in which the moral possibilities are personified and made flesh. Hence the Ring, Wagner’s synthesis of the Germanic and Icelandic myths as they were reflected in the dark mirror of early Germanic literature, became the most determinedly modern of his works, the one which more than any other provides a commentary on modern life and on the hopes and fears that thrive in it. Yet, planted within the bitter and often cynical drama, like a seed that survives in the desert and which suddenly flowers at the first drop of rain, is the heroic ideal — the ideal that Wagner had searched for as a past reality, but which he discovered to be a myth, and therefore all the more real for us, being written not in the past tense but in the eternal present.

Everybody with ears knows that the Ring is full of meaning, that plot, character, music, and motives are to be understood as multi-dimensional symbols, and that there unfolds on the stage, in the words, and through the music a complex argument about the nature of human life, about the hopes and fears of our species, and about the cosmos itself. Yet what exactly does it mean? I have wrestled with this question for many years, have been helped by this or that critical discussion or this or that striking performance. But much became clear to me when I discovered what is probably the only complete commentary on the Ring, which goes step by step through the text and the music, and explores some of its many allegorical meanings with relentless devotion and ardor. This is the commentary composed over many years by Paul Heise, which he has now made available to the public on his remarkable website, wagnerheim.com. The site contains a forum for discussion, and will surely be the place where the many interpretations can contend with each other, and so do what I, in this short article, have no hope of doing, which is to establish the claim of the Ring to be the truth of our condition.

THE RING BEGINS with an evocation of nature — a nature from which we humans have departed in our collective search for order, freedom, and power. This lost and longed-for natural world remains in the background, a haunting and lamenting presence in the music. The forests and rivers, the fires and storms, the dragons and mermaids, the voices of the woods and the birds — all these are re-created in the Ring, with a freshness and poetry that owe everything to music, but with a directness that recalls the rich tradition of German children’s literature. And against this background Wagner presents a tale whose every crisis has the quality of a pagan ritual: Brünnhilde’s announcement to Siegmund of his impending death; Sieglinde’s blessing of Brünnhilde; Wotan’s farewell; Siegfried’s first encounter with Brünnhilde — and so on. Virtually all the turning points of the drama are conceived in sacramental terms; they are occasions of awe, piety, and transition, in which a victim is offered and a promise of redemption received. The world of the Ring is a world in which human beings are awakening to a consciousness of their predicament, and seeing that predicament in religious terms.

But a peculiar Wagnerian twist is given to each of the dramatic turning points. While the sacred has in the past been interpreted as man’s avenue to God, for Wagner it is God’s avenue to man. It is the gods, not mankind, that need redemption, and redemption comes through love. But love, for Wagner, is possible only between mortals — it is a relation between dying things, who embrace their own death as they yield to it. This Brünnhilde recognizes during her great dialogue with Siegmund, resolving in her heart, but as yet not fully conscious that this is what she is doing, to relinquish her immortality for the sake of a human attachment.

But what, on this view, are the gods? Mere figments, as Wagner’s philosophical mentor, Ludwig Feuerbach, had argued? Or something more deeply implanted in the scheme of things, something that precedes and survives us? Wagner’s answer is not easily explained in words, although it is transparently obvious in music, and Heise’s commentary does the best that mere words can do to make it plain. And it is an answer that makes Wagner supremely relevant to us. For, despite our attempts to live without formal religion, we are no more free than people ever have been or ever will be from the religious need. Wagner accepted Feuerbach’s view of the gods as human creations. But human creations include some very real and lasting things, like St. Paul’s Cathedral. Gods come and go; but they last as long as we make room for them, and we make room for them through sacrifice. The gods come about because we idealize our passions, and we do this not by sentimentalizing them but, on the contrary, by sacrificing ourselves to the vision on which they depend. And it is by accepting the need for sacrifice that we begin to live under divine jurisdiction, surrounded by sacred things, and finding meaning through love. Seeing things that way we recognize that we are not condemned to mortality but consecrated to it.

That is an abstract and philosophical way of putting Wagner’s point. And whatever else we say about the Ring cycle, it is not an abstract argument, but a vivid drama, containing unforgettable characters in astonishing situations, presented through music of immediate emotional power. It is precisely this that establishes the cycle’s claim to greatness: it does not moralize about our modern predicament, but immerses us in it, and brings us face-to-face with what we are. 

About the Author

Roger Scruton is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism, has just been published by Oxford University Press.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (27) |

alice moore| 5.27.11 @ 7:38AM

It seems that many who condemn Wagner's morality are quick to forgive their own shortcomings. They will, however, forgive a politician's peccadilloes and personality defects if it seems in their best interests. I's day their priorities are skewed. With Wagner there is the legacy of beautiful music. Can anyone say the same of today's politicians and celebrities?

Alan Brooks| 5.30.11 @ 8:11PM

Germans are the most gifted-- the music of tanks rumbling through Polish villages in 1939.

D| 5.27.11 @ 7:57AM

Good article. A few thoughts on what it requires of the artist who must perform it, both the singers and the instrumentalists, would have been an interesting addition.

Gretchen| 5.29.11 @ 7:06PM

As the late Birgit Nilsson answered, when asked what was the most important thing for someone singing a Wagner opera: "A confortable pair of shoes."

JP| 5.27.11 @ 8:12AM

I find a common strand in the literature of Tolkien and the music of Wagner. Tolkien believed (like Heidegger) that language was the center of "Being". And his investigations of ancient Norse and Saxon dramas and stories led him to believe that thier "myths" contained a truth about human nature that science could never explain. Wagner came to the same conclusions through his "Gesamkunstwerk".

The biggest difference between the 2 was Tolkien's Catholicism. His Ring Trilogy contained several Catholic themes, which touched upon Redemptive Suffering, Humility, and the Kingship of Christ. However, without creating an outright Christian allegory( like his good friend CS Lewis), Tolkien was able to write a fable that didn't push Christianity down one's gullet.

Wagner's music-dramas can best be described as Pagan. Its beauty is atavistic to be sure; but it jolts the listener out his easy-going bourgeois life. The person who listens and watches is reminded that there were once heros and villians whose battles shaped the affairs of both men and the cosmos. This is surely what inspired Nietzsche's early love for Wagner's operas. He was convinced that Wagner's music had the force to rediscover and recover the forces that made European Culture. It was only when Nietzsche believed Wagner was inserting Christian themes into his operas that Nietzsche lost condfidence in him. For Nietzsche, Christianity represented a force that could no longer inspire and inform Culture. For him, it was a total act of Faith for the artist to dispense with it altogether.

I do find Nietzsche's atheistic, cultural interpretation of Christianity interesting. He didn't say Christianity was wrong, per se. But like the romantic poet Hoelderlin, he believed that the "Gods" went to sleep and could not be awaken. Or, like the Owl of Minerva, Christianity flew at dusk. Science, in his view demythologized Christianity to a point that not even the Bourgeoisie could believe in it. Wagner's attempt at reconstructing a new Norse Mythology was the artist's attempt to reclaim what is highest in Man. And for a generation of Germans (at least those wealthy enough to see his operas in Bayreuth), his music was truly awe inspiring.

Dee See| 5.27.11 @ 8:25AM

A doctor once casually informed me from exerience that people who hate classical, or traditional music one and all hate their own memory ---and emotional memory in general.

We can report, from furthur experience on our own, he's right.

-------------KEEP reachin' for that 'Pop slop' kiddies.

JUST KEEP A GOIN'------------------------------

JimH| 5.27.11 @ 8:33AM

Sam Clemens said of Wagner’s music that it was better than it sounded. Actually I do enjoy listening to his music, but having seen ‘What’s Opera Doc’ I find it difficult to take seriously.

Al Adab| 5.27.11 @ 12:41PM

Great comment Jim:
My favorite. Bugs Bunny was a true social critic. But "what did you expect, a happy ending?"

Artsy| 5.27.11 @ 9:32AM

It is said that Hitler was a decent painter, and some of his Nazi officers would listen to Beethoven before heading off to deliver "final solutions" to the Jews.
Arts of enthralling beauty could come from severely perverted minds, and hearts void of love.
The devil is sexier than a cherubim.

Petronius| 5.27.11 @ 10:05AM

The Ring Cycle has always had an operatic corner to itself, primarily because of the scope. 4 operas in a sequence is a lot of listening. I've never been able to get through it, even piecemeal. Except for the Ride, name another memorable passage or aria to draw one into hearing the whole work. There is much leaden recitativ. It's thick, like dopplebock. And unfamiliarity with the mythos is a handicap. I'll stick to Tannhauser and Meistersinger.

alice moore| 5.27.11 @ 12:29PM

Yes, the Ring Cycle has as Rossini pointed out those abominable quarter hours. There are many more highlights than Ride.

For starters there is: drumroll

1. Overture to Das Rheingold
2. Entrance to Valhalla in Das Rhiengold
3. Seigmund's Spring song Aria in Die Walkure
4. The Final scene of Wotan and Brunhilde in Die Walkure.
5. The Magic Fire Music
for Siegfried:
6. Forest Murmurs
7. The Final scene for Siegfried and Brunhilde
Gotterdamurung:
1. The prelude scene with the Norns
2. Siegfried's Rhine Journey
3. The Death and Funeral March of Siegfried
4. The final Immolation scene of Brunhilde

There are many musical highlights of the Ring

Al Adab| 5.27.11 @ 12:45PM

My favorite scene is where Siegfried finds Brunhilde on the mountain, decides to help the poor fellow and discovers, when he removes the breastplate armor, "This is no man". All I can do not to laugh.

alice moore| 5.27.11 @ 9:07PM

Siegfried was not the brightest crayon in the box.

C Smith| 5.27.11 @ 10:06AM

The following regards another pamphlet that regrettably more than rivals Richard Wagner's "Das Judenthum in der Musik": 

The Endl"sung “

A mighty fortress is our God never failing…” I love that song and the passion for the Word the man who wrote it professed: “My conscience is so bound and captivated in these Scriptures and the Word of God. … Hereupon I stand and rest: I have not what else to say. … turning to the emperor and the nobles … confirmed …’I am tied by the Scriptures.’... Before the Diet of Worms was dissolved, Charles V caused an edict to be drawn up … that Martin Luther be … henceforward looked upon … separated from the Church, a schismatic, and an obstinate and notorious heretic” (John Foxe, William Byron Forbush ed., Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, IX).

Despite Luther’s alleged passion for the Scriptures, he often compromised them: Regarding The Epistle of James, Luther writes: “Therefore St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it” (Luther, M., Preface To The New Testament, 1522, emphasis added). Regarding The Revelation of Jesus Christ, Luther writes: “I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it. … Christ is neither taught nor known in it” (Luther, M. Preface to the Revelation of St. John, 1522, emphasis added). However, regarding Paul’s love for his Jewish brethren in the book of Romans: “For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises,” from Luther, there is only silence. Although Romans is the crux of his “by faith alone” theology, in his commentary (Romans 9 through 11), an affirmation of Paul’s kinsmen according to the flesh is neglected entirely. Luther translated thousands of His promises and blessings for Israel as a people and a nation into the German tongue. However, consistent with his Augustinian order, Luther spiritualized them all, and consequently composed perhaps the most anti-Semitic work ever written:

What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? … First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord. … Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. … Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. … Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. … Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. … Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them. … Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow (Martin Luther, Martin H. Bertram, tr., The Jews and their Lies, 1543).

Almost five hundred years later another German read and implemented Luther’s seven step program, but added one step more: The Endl"sung (Final Solution: Wannsee Conference, Berlin, January 20, 1942).  

http://theisraelofgod.blogspot.com/2007/02/13.html

Dee See| 5.27.11 @ 10:21AM

----MEANWHILE 'feel good' pop culture
has been the program of choice for our 4 decades
of the adultery, divorce, abortion and sodomy
'EUGENICS friendly' lifestyle ---even as
America itself was sold out to the most awesomely
genocidal regime (and 'fave' Globalist creation).
history has ever seen.

And, hardly finished as 'suicide culture' and
YOU-thin-Asia, to say nothing of an unparalleled police state
---are UNDENIABLY on the way!

-------------STAY in that loop kiddies!

----------------------JUST KEEP A GOIN'

Al Adab| 5.27.11 @ 11:06AM

Probably the most impressive single opus by any composer. Bach is magnificant, St. Matthew Passion, for example, but The Ring cycle is of such a scale as to be almost beyond belief.

tdiinva| 5.27.11 @ 11:12AM

I would like to deliver a yes but to this article. Actions are more important than mere words. When Wagner's father-in-law asked him to sign a petition stripping Jews of citizenship in the new German Empire Wagner flatly refused. Both his favorite interpreter of his music and lead soprano were Jewish.

There is an alternative explanation for Wagner's paper anti-Semitism. He always suspected that a German actor by the name of Ludwig Geyer was his actual father. Geyer was Jewish. (See his autobiography). His anti-Semitism is as much a reflection of his possible ancestry then a real hatred. It is almost oedipal.

Wagner was most certainly a self centered, ungrateful and a compulsive womanizer. He wasn't a great guy but he was the greatest composer of Opera in history.

Frekki| 5.27.11 @ 11:54AM

"Like German opera, too long and too loud."

I couldn't watch that triptych of a movie either.

http://books.google.com/books?.....age&q=like german opera, too long and too loud&f=false

Kristal| 5.27.11 @ 1:05PM

Is “Tristan und Isolde” part of the Ring cycle?

Whether it is or not, as a young pup, circa 1960, I was told I “should” like classical music, because I was “smart enough” to get it.

So, the FIRST record I bought was of the “Love Death” and Prelude”, sans the singing. When I played this, it sounded like so much chaotic noise!

As a math major, and a cheapskate determined to get my money’s worth, though, I knew that REPLAYING it was the way to go. Sure enough, after many hearings it all made sense, and lived up to its reputation as the “most ecstatic music ever written”.

As for the wonderful article---

Yes, SACRIFICE is the essence of all reality, not only humans.

Indeed, physically from the elementary atomic level, our bodily expression of light-from-the-mystery is constantly sacrificing previously consumed “parts”.

We are not any different than a river---see Siddharta by Hermann Hesse.

Flow on, brothers and sisters.

As the rephrased song, “Born Free” went when I was in the army in Vietnam---

“Born dead, the army was born dead, it came out with no head.”

We live a paradoxical existence. Born to live and become dead—i.e. un-born.

“Be Consciousness.

Contemplate Consciousness.

Transcend everything in Consciousness.

This is the epitome of the Way of Truth” Da Free John from “The Liberator”

Al Adab| 5.27.11 @ 1:15PM

Morning Kristal:
No, T&I is not part of the Ring, but worth it in its own right nonetheless. I also enjoy Der Fliegender Hollender, The Flying Dutchman. It carries the same theme music as Ride of the Valkyries.

Dee See| 5.28.11 @ 1:27AM

"In the 1920's the Soviets actually
kidnapped some highly skilled New York
jazz musicians in order to learn the precise
techniques of degrading culture through
rythm and dissonant harmonies and 'pop'
music culture generally."
-ALAN WATT
(invaluable online coverage)

Absolutely TRUE.

The science of programming via music
happens to be very ancient, but known to
a few.

Forget even the 'sexiness' program,
the loud bang, bang, bang static rythms
---unlike even march rythms --are not so much
about 'discipline' (like marches) ----as ownership.

Scholars even inform us that loud clanging
static rythms were a major part of the rituals
connected with immolating infants before
the idol Molech in Babylon.

They were used specifically to drown out
the cries of the children and to bring the
mothers to heel.

"That's the trouble with the past,
it isn't even past."
-William Faulkner

INDEED----------------------

WRJonas| 5.28.11 @ 4:25PM

While I am a lover of good music I cannot reach the point of pretending to love The Ring. It is so overly pretentious that it can only be called dreadful to the ear . Perhaps I am not German enough, but that involves a completely different list reasons of love The Ring .
I remember Carl Haas , bless his soul , was not a big fan either.

JonZurich| 5.28.11 @ 6:12PM

Interesting you brought up Wesendonck. They lived in Zurich where Wagner spent a few years in exile. Today, the villa Wesendonck houses one of the finest Asian art collection word-wide (Museum Rietberg). Same as Wagner, Eduard von der Heydt who donated his collection to Zurich has been closely linked to Nazi Germany. A place where history breaths heavily and now is home to one of the finest museums worldwide.

maverick muse| 5.30.11 @ 10:38AM

The Ring of Truth in Myth

Joseph Campbell, yes. Very enjoyable article.

As has been said, a prophet is without honor in his own country. My dad's a WWII Vet (thanks and memory to all our service men and women today). While studying music my lifetime, Wagner was not eschewed at school. We were allowed to enjoy the heroic nature of his masterpieces without being biased with lessons linking Wagner to Hitler. It wasn't until the liberal-Marxists overwhelmed the US educational system that the only thing said of Wagner was that he may as well have been a Nazi. Leave it to propagandists to revise meanings not only of words and phrases, but of Truth. Just as when "meaning" does not reflect the reception of experience, "Art for art's sake" as first tagged doesn't fly beyond a brief period of in-your-face popularity. Historically, muse that Wagner's Achilles heel was in merging the late 18th Century metaphysical supremacy of the "wordless" instrumental symphonic apex (first Haydn and then universally recognized through Beethoven), and despite precedence from Beethoven's Ninth (Ode to Joy) and then through Berlioz Symphony Fantastique complete with written Programme provided to audiences at performances, Wagner's sin was re-corrupt "perfection" with words again. Just as Berlioz had detractors, so did those who followed that inspiration. Also, Wagner's stylized unending melody had its contemporary critical detractors. It isn't as if Hanslick, for instance, was either pro-Semitic or pro-Republic. Focusing on the personal frailties of an artistic human being in order to "judge" the meaning of his artistic creation is itself a corruption of judgement on two counts. One, as if the judge is himself without personal frailties; and two, as if by knowing the artist, a biased onlooker provides the ultimate/only meaning and significance of the art.

Btw, although they were Young Romantics growing up together, it certainly was NOT Mendelssohn to whom Wagner was strongly influenced, unless making distinction as to which compositional direction to NOT take. Mendelssohn was the early Romantic extension of Mozart's lighter style. Whereas those of the New German School (namely Liszt and Wagner) were the early Romantic extension of Beethoven's later evolutionary direction. And it would be the subsequent generation (Joachim/Brahms/Hanslick), not the early Romantics born around 1810, who aligned socially to annihilate and decontaminate the intolerable qualities of the New German School's evolutionary organic processing of "The Beautiful" ideal, adventure and imagination (emphasizing the inner struggles over the external actions in life) in order to retain the "purity" of neo-Classicism. Hence, the 19th Century's divisive musical "War of the Romantics" waged after the revolutionary defeats of 1848, also marked by Schumann's personal tribulations. The politically correct characters banned and prohibited performances of music reflecting the New German School "Philistines", attempting to extinguish metaphysics with scientifically replicated monuments to "purity" musically expressed through theme and variation.

Indeed, Wagner was completely self centered to the point of thieving all public honor for inventions he stole from others, and to the point of stabbing his best friends in the back. Wagner was not the Romantic Hero, but a villain. Nonetheless, as Liszt said, Wagner's musical dramas were the original genius masterworks of their century.

One can note the ultimate distinction from which primal basis Liszt and Wagner worked cultivating the Idea that Determines Form. Wagner wanted to cure God, man's creation. Whereas through Caritas, Liszt wanted to elevate man, God's creation, to be receptive to Spirit.

Finally, recall that Cosima divorced herself from her father in order to usurp the position of Wagner's wife, and that it was Wagner's intention in taking Cosima to effectively consume Liszt. Cosima did not learn bigotry from her father; and that she would choose selfishness and spite over loyalty and compassion illustrates that she was her mother's daughter.

dee see| 5.30.11 @ 10:48PM

----And now onto the engineered culture of dope
and degradation brought into being by recorded
and electrified music relentlessly and ubiquitously
repeated-----across the world.

"It's called 'Pop' or 'rap' because it's to be the
final round---wrapped up and popped like a
bubble."
-ALAN WATT

"Remember, real culture celebrates creation.
False culture celebrates production (culture of
'Pop hits') ---and creates a living human hell."
-JEAN PAUL SATRE

------What are we STILL not seeing?

ティファニー 通販 | 6.1.11 @ 3:29AM

open the door

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http://spectator.org/archives/2011/05/27/the-ring-of-truth

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