On Jan 15, 2009, at 11:26 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Sure you can read Wagner's politics off the surface of the Ring
> cycle...It's especially notable in Siegfried and in the non-Ring
> work Parsifal (a truely [d]readful work). There's argument about
> whether it's obvious in the Meistersinger.
There has been so much ignorant talk on this list about "Wagner's politics," and everybody talks as if those politics were truly dreadful, yet nobody is willing to say what he thinks was so dreadful about "Wagner's politics," or even what those "politics" were . I suppose that is because they have been blinded by antisemitic passages in some of his prose**--even though antisemitism had no role in politics during his lifetime. Of course Wagner, though he placed art far above politics in his worldview, had political views. He was a revolutionary democrat who fought alongside Bakunin on the barricades at Dresden in 1848. He was a strong opponent of German political nationalism (and warned prophetically against its outcome in Sachs's final monologue). He was a founder of the German Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. What was so terrible about that?
And the "surface" of the Ring? To find politics in the Ring you have to go *below* the surface, the way GBS did in "The Perfect Wagnerite." And what did Shaw find there? Marxism, that's what: "Alberich's Tarnhelm is the Top Hat of a capitalist." "Siegfried is Bakoonin." [Shavian spelling]
And, by the way, just what does Andie find "truely [d]readful" in that supreme masterpiece Parsifal? That a couple of "Christian" sexual symbols (Chalice and Spear) are used to convey the work's *entirely Buddhist* spiritual message? That was enough for Nietzche to condemn the work in his degeneration into madness. What else does Andie have against it?
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos
**How many of you would think Marx's phrase "the Jewish N-word Lassalle" was relevant to an appraisal of "Marx's Politics?"