> On Thursday, September 25, 2003, at 10:59 AM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> > Although to be fair, unlike Nietzsche, Wagner really was repulsively
> > anti-semitic, and it was deeply connected to his choice of theme.
>
> Yes, he certainly was, but that was only part of his
> repulsive personal qualities.
>
> > And yet the Ring Cycle is still a piece of genius.
>
> I sometimes think it is the greatest work of art in
> Western history. (But then I quickly come to my
> senses. :-) ) Wagner is one of the clearest pieces of
> evidence for the theory that works of art, especially
> music, come from somewhere else into the human world
> through the artist, seemingly untouched by whatever
> faults she or he may have. It seems that he somehow had
> to be a complete rat as a private person in order to
> produce the work he accomplished.
>
> Beethoven was another example of a magnificent composer
> who was not that nice a person (though he was certainly
> superior to Wagner in his politics), as was Mozart --
> who would have gone completely nuts and bankrupt
> charging clothes if he had lived in the era of credit
> cards. OTOH, Bach, Haydn, Brahms, and Mahler were
> apparently pretty OK in their private lives.
>
> In any case, Plato was certainly onto something with his
> observation that artists can create great art with no
> relationship at all to morality.
It was not difficult to be an anti-semite in 1848. There was a tremendous economic crisis at the time that most obviously had no natural causes (no crop failures, no wars etc.) -- and the Rothschilds were cashing in like mad.
Such events need explanation, and the first-cut explanation is that perhaps it was them, or bankers in general, that had fucked everything up, perhaps even purposefully.
It should be noted that even now most people, educated ones included, could not come up with anything better.
Wagner could, elaborating a vision of how the world is saved from the power of gold by the power of love. Just that vision did not work out properly. Disaster would come.
It came.
cheers AN