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Ist Richard Wagner für den Zweite Weltkrieg und Holocaust Verantwortlich?
Nun bestand Hitlers »Aufgabe« gewiß nicht darin, Politik zu machen, sich also mit der Wirklichkeit im Interesse der Nation, deren Kanzler er war, zu arrangieren. Seine Wirklichkeit bestand in der...
View ArticleIn Praise of Hans Werner Henze
These days I utterly despair of the standard repertoire. It seems that in the last three or four decades taste has almost stood still, or gone backwards. I recently read that the last opera to enter in...
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Spare No Pity for Bayreuth in Deconstructing the Wagner Myth
With Nietzsche and Wagner we have the stories of two one-time close friends whose fates posthumously become closely associated with the Dritte Reich. In the post-war era, apologists found it far easier...
View ArticlePierre Boulez: the Greatest Musical Mind of our Age
I am rather devastated to hear of the death of Pierre Boulez.He has, for me, been the guiding inspiration and light of our age.He is without all doubt the greatest French composer since Josquin de...
View ArticleHitler Myths Refuse to Die
It seems that to mythologise is human nature. Even ancient Greek and Roman myths often do have a historical basis to them.One modern myth that refuses to die is that Hitler went berserk after one of...
View ArticleNew Posts Coming
It's hard to believe I haven't posted since the end of February.For interested readers, please watch out for a major new post on Richard Wagner's Parsifal. I have been working on it for a long time. It...
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Does Opera Cause the Rise of Fascist Movements?
The Washington Post has an interesting article on the resurgence of new extreme far right movements throughout the world.Far right movements were common throughout the world during the Great...
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Parsifal: A Theology After the Death of God
Wagner's Parsifal stands in a centuries long tradition of religious musical works. As with all liturgical works, the chosen text for the work, here written by Wagner himself, is of tantamount...
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Richard Wagner and the European Union
In the hysteria that the mere mention of his name causes, people have largely forgotten that Richard Wagner in his later years became an ardent supporter of a theoretical forerunner of the European...
View ArticleAnother Major Post Coming!
I have currently started work on another major post. The one on Parsifal took me months of writing and revision. This one will be just as epic.Yes, it will also be about Richard Wagner and his...
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Wagner's Willing Executioner: Joachim Fest Reviews Köhler's "Hitler's Wagner"
I thought it is about time that the English language speaking world have full access to the Joachim Fest's 1997 review of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple, published in...
View ArticleWhat is the Academic Consensus on Nazi Opera Conspiracy Theories?
Today, I thought I would go through and highlight a bitesize portion of the information crammed into the main essay on this blog, which is now a bit overfull.Many Nazi opera conspiracies theories that...
View ArticleWhat Would Richard Wagner Say About Boris Johnson?
I encountered this quote from Boris Johnson;Johnson claimed that the past 2,000 years had seen failed attempts to recreate the "golden age" of the Roman Empire: "Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried...
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The Collapse of Weimar Democracy: Not a Uniquely German Event
There are those who think that the collapse of a fully functioning democratic system in the form of Weimar German democracy is a uniquely German event. We are told it was caused by the "German Mind"....
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Wonderful Unintentional Comedy
Thank you for the reader who shared this delightful piece of unintentional comedy with me over Twitter:HITLER AND WAGNERISMJanet Gregory To the average person the name Wagner means nothing more than...
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Why Donald Trump is Not Hitler
This post is less related to musicology than usual, but not entirely far off the sociopolitical discussion on history found in the Wagner discussions.Hitler comparisons have become something of a tired...
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Review of “The Effect of Richard Wagner's Music and Beliefs on Hitler's...
The source of this publication is Musical Offerings, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 55–66. ISSN 2330-8206 (print); ISSN 2167-3799 (online). The full text can be found at the following...
View ArticleRichard Wagner: A “Communist” After All?
I have been spending days revising my review of Joachim Köhler’s book:http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.htmlThe main insight is that despite the fact that...
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Amerika über alles: American Exceptionalism Follows the Path of German...
It you read the longest post on the blog, a systematic critique of Joachim Köhler's book Wagner's Hitler, one of the key themes is the rejection of German exceptionalism. In the early post-war decades,...
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Is Racism Just an Instrument of Capitalist Imperialism?
If we look at nineteenth century discourse on ethnicity, of the sort we stumble across in studying the writings of Richard Wagner, we find that it is quite different from what we are used to in late...
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