# are Scholars alright with people listening to Richard Wagner music



## MusicFree (Jun 16, 2014)

because of his anti-semitism?


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## bz3 (Oct 15, 2015)

If they aren't alright with people listening to Wagner, for any reason under the sun, then they aren't serious scholars and I wouldn't spend a single moment concerned over their particular sensibilities with regard to art or anything else.


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## Klavierspieler (Jul 16, 2011)

No. His operas are racist and evil.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

MusicFree said:


> because of his anti-semitism?


This is going to open a can off worms beyond believe and most of all spoken off ten ( at least) times before.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

People who have been brainwashed by Plato probably aren't alright with it.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

We live in a culture where it is OK to write sympathetic biographies about Marquise de Sade, and make movies from his works and publish his "fiction". Our culture is OK with Marquise de Sade. If it's OK with de Sade, then it should be OK with literally anything, and Wagner doesn't even rate compared with Sade.

I would quote from "120 Days of Sodom" but I don't want to disturb you. Suffice it to say that it is, as Sade himself claimed, the craziest, most evil book ever written.

So, here are some quotations from reviews of a biography of Sade, to give you some perspective:

"In Gray's boldly imaginative retelling, Madame de Sade—the long suffering spouse of history's most infamous rake—becomes a praiseworthy enabler of greatness."

I assume what that means is that she tried to keep de Sade out of prison and make him focus on his literary hobbies, thus "enabling" the "greatness" of his literary output.

That was from New York Times Book Review. Here's from The Baltimore Sun:

"Gray's crisp and elegant prose makes for an extraordinary read."

I could go on and on, but like I said, this is a culture that is OK with people reading books about and by a man whose imagination would leave most serial killers blushing. Let's not pretend that this is a culture that might have any sort of moral high ground with respect to what music a person should or shouldn't listen to or praise or promote.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Who is a "scholar"? Who cares what they're "alright" with? Art speaks for itself. In the end we just shut up and listen.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

If we avoided composers whose views or habits we found distasteful, we'd live in a very quiet world. It always amazes me to see clueless people who want to impose their current, transient values on the whole of human past.


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## Guest (Aug 5, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> Who is a "scholar"?


I think you'll find s/he was referring to "*S*cholars" - perhaps a somewhat more elitist group of academics and intellecatuals?



Chordalrock said:


> We live in a culture where it is OK to write sympathetic biographies about Marquise de Sade, and make movies from his works and publish his "fiction". Our culture is OK with Marquise de Sade. If it's OK with de Sade, then it should be OK with literally anything, and Wagner doesn't even rate compared with Sade.


So we shouldn't be "alright with" de Sade?


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## Xenakiboy (May 8, 2016)

KenOC said:


> If we avoided composers whose views or habits we found distasteful, we'd live in a very quiet world. It always amazes me to see clueless people who want to impose their current, transient values on the whole of human past.


Or more so selectively impose those views...


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## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

I wonder if anyone can show me a section of Wagner's work that explicitly expresses his view of "anti-semitism"? Not some article like "Das Judenthum in der Musik" or something related to Nazi. Evidences based on music please.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> I think you'll find s/he was referring to "*S*cholars" - perhaps a somewhat more elitist group of academics and intellecatuals?


OK then, I'll rephrase. Who's in this "elitist group"? Why should we pay attention to them?



> So we shouldn't be "alright with" de Sade?


The point was, if our cultural mavens are so blithely accepting of de Sade, why question the acceptability of Wagner? Self-righteousness can be rather biased (PC, perhaps), wouldn't you say?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Bruckner Anton said:


> I wonder if anyone can show me a section of Wagner's work that explicitly expresses his view of "anti-semitism"? Not some article like "Das Judenthum in der Musik" or something related to Nazi. Evidences based on music please.


Interesting that Wagner's antisemitism is still such a topic, when Chopin's and Mussorgsky's is not. There was in fact a generally shared antisemitism among the 19th-century Russians. It was common in France as well (see the Dreyfus affair). Chopin and Mussorgsky were just lucky enough not to be favorites of Hitler.

Certain writers point to a few characters in Wagner's operas as embodying Jewish stereotypes, but the evidence is thin and quite subjective, convincing mainly to those already determined to find it. In the music itself there are no hints of anything Jewish. But there is more than a hint in Mussorgsky's _Pictures at an Exhibition_, where the movement titled "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" graphically depicts - I would even say caricatures - two Jews having an argument.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Every time after listening to a Wagner opera, we should pour ashes on our heads and weep about our sins


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## Hildadam Bingor (May 7, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> We live in a culture where it is OK to write sympathetic biographies about Marquise de Sade, and make movies from his works and publish his "fiction".


Because no disciple of Sade ever become a person of political consequence. (Though we may belatedly be getting there: https://t.co/eD1qoqEJpH)

More to the point is that we live in a culture where it's still very much OK to make sympathetic depictions of capitalist colonialism, as long as the perpetrators are nice liberals and you keep the victims off stage, e.g.:


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Even Beethoven spoke of one of his publishers (Schlesinger I think) as playing "Jewish tricks" in paying for one of his works. But he stayed on good terms with his publishers. Casual anti-Semitism was common enough in those days.

Wagner was rare in going an extra step in publishing an anti-Jewish pamphlet, even though his friends tried to dissuade him, both in the initial version and a later version as well. Wagner seemed particularly angry at Meyerbeer, who had given him financial assistance early on, but later refused more. He seemed to resent that some Jewish composers, wealthy to begin with, had an easier economic road than he had. My impressions only, of course.

https://sites.google.com/site/kenocstuff/wagner-on-judaism-in-music


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## Guest (Aug 5, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> The point was, if our cultural mavens are so blithely accepting of de Sade, why question the acceptability of Wagner? Self-righteousness can be rather biased (PC, perhaps), wouldn't you say?


I got the point. But Wagner is not absolved of his errors because others do worse.

(And 'PC' - no, I wouldn't say.)


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## Guest (Aug 5, 2016)

SiegendesLicht said:


> Every time after listening to a Wagner opera, we should pour ashes on our heads and weep about our sins


That's another good reason not to listen to a Wagner opera!


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> That's another good reason not to listen to a Wagner opera!


I assume you say that because you have never tried


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> I got the point. But Wagner is not absolved of his errors because others do worse.
> 
> (And 'PC' - no, I wouldn't say.)


If you got the point you wouldn't have written your next sentence, which is beside the point. Who's absolving anyone of anything? Why the hostility toward an attempt to put things in perspective?

Wagner's, or any artist's, personal prejudices, if they aren't embodied in his art, simply have nothing to do with his value as an artist, and may have nothing to do with it even if they are. If they're a stumbling block for some people, the misfortune is theirs. The rest of us don't need to care, except to the extent that self-righteous, intellectually fashionable Nazi hunters constantly annoy us with their third- and fourth-hand regurgitations of ignorant - but not always innocent - misconceptions.

Those of us who object to the continued attempts to portray Wagner in terms of events which transpired nearly half a century after his death and ideologies to which he didn't subscribe aren't trying to excuse his faults. We would simply like to see the real man, with his virtues and flaws, replace the demonic caricature. If that should ever happen, we might no longer have to watch films about Nazi concentration camps accompanied by music from _Parsifal._


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## Guest (Aug 5, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> If you got the point you wouldn't have written your next sentence, which is beside the point. Who's absolving anyone of anything? Why the hostility toward an attempt to put things in perspective?


I did get the point. I just disagree with it, though not because I have a problem with Wagner. I was making a generic point that if, as you say, Composer, the man, matters when considering Composer, his music, this should apply across the board, not on some sliding scale according to someone's personal moral standards. A

And it's not hostility, but it might be impatience I suppose, though no worse than the impatience I felt from Chordalrock towards those with hypocritical attitudes...and from you towards those bent on vilifying Wagner.


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## Guest (Aug 5, 2016)

SiegendesLicht said:


> I assume you say that because you have never tried


I say that because the prospect of putting ashes on our heads and weeping about 'our sins' is distinctly unappealing: why would I listen to anything if I felt compelled to do as you're suggesting afterwards?


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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)




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## EarthBoundRules (Sep 25, 2011)

I don't let affect real world problems affect my appreciation of art. For me, the composer and their art are disconnected so I can enjoy one and despise the other.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> I say that because the prospect of putting ashes on our heads and weeping about 'our sins' is distinctly unappealing: why would I listen to anything if I felt compelled to do as you're suggesting afterwards?


Because I was being ironic?


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Hildadam Bingor said:


> Because no disciple of Sade ever become a person of political consequence.


Sade was a narcissist and a sadist. He once lured a woman into a hotel room and tortured her until she managed to escape. His last and most gruesome book is a catalogue of some of the sickest sexual fantasies man has imagined, intended to titillate like-minded readers. His cultural and political ambitions - at least the overt ones - are obsolete, since our culture is now the kind of culture he was overtly seeking: atheistic, sexually liberated, and so on. Our elites don't object to Sade, because they agree with his politics.

You're also missing the most important bit: narcissism and sadism. The people who have power in the West are usually narcissists or sadists or both. So I'm afraid you have it backwards. It's because people much like Sade are ruling the West these days that the immensely grave and serious issue of sadism, particularly sadism as an evolutionary adaptation and typical feature of those who seek power, is never talked about in our culture and barely researched, while silently injected into our culture and silently promoted. The same is true of the topic of narcissism. No one with political power is brainless enough to admit to being Sade's "disciple" in public. These are things you have to read between the lines when you consume news stories about British police protecting and covering up for VIP child murderers, or women and children being gratuitously bombed as part of some war operation, and so on.

An elite that isn't interested in researching sadism and pathological narcissism, and ridding the world of the genes that are responsible for sadism and pathological narcissism, is an elite that is either fatefully incompetent or incomparably evil. It's an elite that has no business telling anyone much of anything. It wouldn't just be hypocritical, it would be grotesque.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Chordalrock said:


> Sade was a narcissist and a sadist. He once lured a woman into a hotel room and tortured her until she managed to escape. His last and most gruesome book is a catalogue of some of the sickest sexual fantasies man has imagined, intended to titillate like-minded readers. His cultural and political ambitions - at least the overt ones - are obsolete, since *our culture is now the kind of culture he was overtly seeking: atheistic, sexually liberated,* and so on. Our elites don't object to Sade, because they agree with his politics.
> 
> You're also missing the most important bit: narcissism and sadism. *The people who have power in the West are usually narcissists or sadists or both.* So I'm afraid you have it backwards. It's because people much like Sade are ruling *the West these days* that the immensely grave and serious issue of sadism, particularly *sadism as an evolutionary adaptation and typical feature of those who seek power, *is never talked about in our culture and barely researched, while silently injected into our culture and silently promoted. The same is true of the topic of narcissism. No one with political power is brainless enough to admit to being Sade's "disciple" in public. These are things you have to read between the lines when you consume news stories about British police protecting and covering up for VIP child murderers, or women and children being gratuitously bombed as part of some war operation, and so on.
> 
> An elite that isn't interested in researching sadism and pathological narcissism, and ridding the world of the genes that are responsible for sadism and pathological narcissism, is an elite that is either fatefully incompetent or incomparably evil. It's an elite that has no business telling anyone much of anything. It wouldn't just be hypocritical, it would be grotesque.


Why do you characterize sadism and narcissicism as modern Western disorders? Aren't they perennial disorders of the psyche which always thrive when some humans have power over others, and which different cultures merely rationalize differently? I think I'd rather deal with the sadists and narcissists in a present-day constitutional democracy than in Imperial Russia or Elizabethan England.

And why do you identify de Sade with atheism and sexual liberation? As a sexually liberated atheist, I suspect that I - and similarly-minded friends of mine - find de Sade's practices no more attractive than you do.


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## bz3 (Oct 15, 2015)

Chordalrock said:


> Sade was a narcissist and a sadist. He once lured a woman into a hotel room and tortured her until she managed to escape. His last and most gruesome book is a catalogue of some of the sickest sexual fantasies man has imagined, intended to titillate like-minded readers. His cultural and political ambitions - at least the overt ones - are obsolete, since our culture is now the kind of culture he was overtly seeking: atheistic, sexually liberated, and so on. Our elites don't object to Sade, because they agree with his politics.
> 
> You're also missing the most important bit: narcissism and sadism. The people who have power in the West are usually narcissists or sadists or both. So I'm afraid you have it backwards. It's because people much like Sade are ruling the West these days that the immensely grave and serious issue of sadism, particularly sadism as an evolutionary adaptation and typical feature of those who seek power, is never talked about in our culture and barely researched, while silently injected into our culture and silently promoted. The same is true of the topic of narcissism. No one with political power is brainless enough to admit to being Sade's "disciple" in public. These are things you have to read between the lines when you consume news stories about British police protecting and covering up for VIP child murderers, or women and children being gratuitously bombed as part of some war operation, and so on.
> 
> An elite that isn't interested in researching sadism and pathological narcissism, and ridding the world of the genes that are responsible for sadism and pathological narcissism, is an elite that is either fatefully incompetent or incomparably evil. It's an elite that has no business telling anyone much of anything. It wouldn't just be hypocritical, it would be grotesque.


I don't agree with every single word but I do agree with the essence of this post. In the absence of the harshness and cruelty of the natural world in our everyday lives, human nature seems to have become more harsh and cruel in the modern corporate-capitalist era. Maybe it was always so at the top rungs of power but it wasn't always the case that the people bowed at the altar of an ends-oriented moral spectrum that says you're either something or you're nothing.

The US Presidential election is the obvious topical example today, pitting a reality TV real estate mogul and self-described "winner" against a morally bankrupt international money hustler. The only thing anyone could say either of these two individuals want is "more" and that's what they'll both likely get, win or lose.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

bz3 said:


> In the absence of the harshness and cruelty of the natural world in our everyday lives, *human nature seems to have become more harsh and cruel in the modern corporate-capitalist era. *


Read more history, look at what people are doing to each other elsewhere even in our time, and be grateful for the horrible corporate-capitalist culture you were lucky enough to be born into.

No. I'm not apologizing for our hideous corporate culture. Just recommending some perspective.


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## Guest (Aug 5, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> His last and most gruesome book is a catalogue of some of the sickest sexual fantasies man has imagined, intended to titillate like-minded readers.


If you read it...er...?
And if you didn't...er?


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Why do you characterize sadism and narcissicism as modern Western disorders? Aren't they perennial disorders of the psyche which always thrive when some humans have power over others, and which different cultures merely rationalize differently? I think I'd rather deal with the sadists and narcissists in a present-day constitutional democracy than in Imperial Russia or Elizabethan England.
> 
> And why do you identify de Sade with atheism and sexual liberation? As a sexually liberated atheist, I suspect that I - and similarly-minded friends of mine - find de Sade's practices no more attractive than you do.


I did write it somewhat carelessly.

1) I don't have anything against atheism or sexual liberation, although I could have added nihilism, which I think is misguided.

2) I think narcissism has been the defining trait of people who seek power, for as long as there has been recorded history. For normal people, power is a source of stress and anxiety due to the responsibility involved. For narcissists though, it is a drug. I haven't checked the original source, but apparently Gibbon wrote that almost all the Roman emperors were practising pederasts, which to me suggests narcissism, as does the institution of slavery itself. Gladiator shows suggest sadism, or at the least indifference to other people's suffering and humiliation (which would again relate to narcissism in the absence of ideological motives).

3) I'm not sure about the historical presence of sadism among the elite, but I'd guess that it was kept in check during the Medieval times and until recently by the way that power and wealth moved from father to son, instead of being there for anyone to grab. When power, wealth, social status are mostly hereditary, you don't have every sadist seeking them and achieving them, because they simply aren't available to them for the most part. In the modern world though, they are available to anyone who is cunning and ruthless enough, and in addition there are popular secret societies that exist so that successful people can do and receive favors, including cover ups and anything you might imagine. It's really a rather different world than it used to be.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> If you read it...er...?
> And if you didn't...er?


There's also a third possibility: I skimmed it.

I'm sorry, this world is to me like a traffic accident. I don't want to watch, but I also can't look away.

I don't spend a lot of time researching political or cultural topics, but at the same time I want to understand and to be well-informed. I'd recommend the same to everyone except I suspect it wouldn't make any difference, since people are mostly powerless regardless of what they know.


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## bz3 (Oct 15, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> Read more history, look at what people are doing to each other elsewhere even in our time, and be grateful for the horrible corporate-capitalist culture you were lucky enough to be born into.
> 
> No. I'm not apologizing for our hideous corporate culture. Just recommending some perspective.


I think you misread me, I wasn't saying it's horrible. Most of us here likely live fairly comfortable lives, historically speaking, and due to technology are able to tune out whatever it is that we dislike about our culture. I think western democratic capitalism is the best thing that's happened for human civilization in recorded history.

BUT, what I was saying is that I think Chordal was onto something about the values that corporate-capitalism produces for a society. And I do think corporate/globalized capitalism of today is markedly different from western democratic nation-state capitalism of the pre-War era (perhaps different than those of even 2 generations ago) - I just think we're living in the kind of era that the Enlightenment was when civilizations began to change drastically. I think that the values and social impetuses of today are different, and I think the ironic indifference towards the old values we see all around us today is similar to what Europe fell towards as monarchies waned and aristocratic republicanism rose.


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