To what degree will you support musicians who (openly, possibly or jokingly) include racist, sexist, homophobic, or bigoted messages in their music, or who privately hold such beliefs?

what does Ray Nitschke have to do with this

Ha, I was gonna say, I always liked Nitzche's keyboard playing with Neil Young.

Neil why did you love a Nazi so much you wrote this beautiful song about him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6OaS3WvABs

hahah

I believe nobody has ever blamed Jack Nitzche of being a nazi... :)
Friedrich though....

goddamnit! thread went way downhill again after shakey scared off aero

i leave work with an interesting discussion going on, log on 3 hours later and find out it's all gone to hell :/

it went all geir hongro

"(I continue to be amazed, btw, by the fact that Geir has never been sb'd)"

Pretty sure he has been actually.

only once. Some were sb'd 3 or 4 times i think

I guess on the upside we got some pretty good intelligent debate...and the other stuff...so, yknow...it at least delivered on both fronts.

I actually just had somewhere to get to

But as soon as you start saying WAGNER'S MUSIC IS ANTISEMITIC AND SHOULD NOT BE PERFORMED you are on the way to sharing some very unsavory company, far worse than the kind you find in open societies.

no, I disagree strongly with this. if saying something "should not" be performed were actually the same as saying "there should be a law against it," your point might stand. there are all sorts of things I think people shouldn't do which they have a perfect right to do. if we were discussing somebody's right to play or hear something, that would be an entirely different discussion.

As to yr other point I don't think there are many day jobs that aren't less important than furthering the cause of human good, not that there's usually much of a choice. But I think forcing benign readings onto Wagner is like...really? anybody can read the libretto to Siegfried & see what's going on. no shortage of art that isn't by a guy who wrote "Jewishness In Music," so fuck him.

counterpoint: opera is, if not an out-and-out 'dead' artform, then certainly one whose best days are behind it and whose appeal is in some irreducible sense 'historical'; therefore, one should take that history at face value and listen to the 'great artists' who were significant in the genre's development, even if they were hateful or bad people by our standards, because anything else is a falsification.

(less a 'benign reading' of Wagner than a decadent reading of European opera, I guess)

Opera is as alive as ever, man, and probably more accessible too imo

I was gonna say

completely ignores the emotional charge of Wagner - art stays alive. We can historicise away - it's easy - but it's dodging the energy and effects on many listeners of eg the Prelude and Liebestod. The wouldn't be quite so much fire in the discussion if this were just about someone 'important' but not so connected to the emotional sound-world of now (Wagner influence in film soundtracks?).

But really... There is absolutely nothing wrong about Wagner at all. Except Hitler loved him 50 years later. Which he couldn't really help.

"As a virulent anti-semitic nationalist, I am shocked and appalled that this virulent anti-semitic nationalist loves my music." - Wagner's ghost, 1933

It's okay to love the "Liebestod" when Buñuel used it cos he was taking the piss.

Also want to add that ppl shouldn't be treating 19th-century anti-semitism like it's one thing, or universal, or static: judging by what I read in essay linked above, W is far beyond the polite shitness that seems pretty commonplace.

Exactly! As has been noted, Nietzsche broke with Wagner over the latter's anti-Semitism, George Eliot wrote a major novel about it, it was by no means a default 19th Century fact of life. The fact that there were more racists and the upper levels of society were freer to express their racism doesn't mean that it was some banal unchallenged non-belief. It was the preserve of scumbags.

Why are these always the most popular threads?

Dunno, start a thread about it.

POLL: why are these always the most popular threads?

1. It's an interesting, complicated topic.
2. Clusterfuck!

ow man, wagner was an anti-semite? why does ilx want to spoil everything for me?

:(

POLL: why are these always the most popular threads?

1. It's an interesting, complicated topic. there's only one way to find out..
2. Clusterfuck!

xps

Right - in Victorian Britain, there's Eliot & Browning as positively philo-semitic, Disraeli of course, & Dickens going out of his way to sort things out after falling that way himself with Fagin.

But maybe there's some special reason it's more ok in Germany.

POLL: why are these always the most popular threads?

Because fans of disco and other corporate manufactured music love using racism and homophobia to defend their corporate taste.

completely ignores the emotional charge of Wagner - art stays alive. We can historicise away - it's easy - but it's dodging the energy and effects on many listeners of eg the Prelude and Liebestod. The wouldn't be quite so much fire in the discussion if this were just about someone 'important' but not so connected to the emotional sound-world of now (Wagner influence in film soundtracks?).

― portrait of velleity (woof), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 12:06 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark

(overuse of word "particular" there meant, again, not as handwaving moral relativism, but because of my sorta-hegelian views on great art as a collective achievement that draws on the resources of an entire culture — in this case, one thoroughly pervaded with ugliness and racism and sexism and imperialism and other things that all of us in the 21st century are still dealing with the repercussions of)

lol I was posting "Why?" and you xposted me with the answer

spooky

I very much acknowledge both the influence and the "emotional charge of Wagner", and I think it is important to listen to his music and to feel that rush and then to step back and say "okay, this amazing and influential and still very-much-alive thing was the product of a raging anti-semite working in a particular cultural milieu for a particular audience" — rather than e.g. "let's find someone else who sounds kinda like Wagner but was a better person, that way we can listen to them with a clean conscience"

Very much agree with that. I'll take Wagner as he is, knowing that he was not a Nazi, and that listening to him is 'complicated'; just like I'll listen to Bach canatatas and oratorios while finding much of the theology expressed in them distasteful to some extent (and there's anti-semitism in those too).

Spot the odd one out in this list: Richard Strauss, Orff, Canteloube, Respighi, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Wagner.

I mean, I feel like there is a temptation to make this into some sort of hypothetical "given the choice between a world without Wagner and a world without anti-semitism, which would you pick?" — and of course, anyone with a conscience is gonna take the latter eight days a week. but that's not that choice we're given. because both Wagner and the historical moment of his anti-semitism belong to the past (this is what I meant by calling opera a dead/historical artform, as opposed to very-much-alive-and-kicking homophobic rap or w/e) — you can't undo any of it, you can't sacrifice art to change history, all you can try to do is understand it.

ok, I took your earlier post as saying that opera (hence Wagner) exists mostly in/as history, so we can treat operas as historical cultural productions, turn them into study-objects - contextualise, analyse etc. I'm closer to agreeing with that 'feeling the rush' stage built in (and I think ppl are doing this to an extent on the thread), but in Wagner's case the historical questions won't sit in quarantine - the aesthetics of Romantic nationalism, the varieties of anti-semitism etc etc. They seem like live arguments to me, and you can't museum-case them.

definitely agree that they should not be museum-cased, but I don't know that I would go so far as to call them "live arguments" either — like, sometimes when you look at history, you see that a debate has already run its course, one side won and the other lost — you can't put the genie of nationalism/Romanticism/fascism/etc. back in the bottle, y'know? it's sad and painful and frustrating (at least it is for me) to see injustices and suffering that you are powerless to remedy; but again, it's just the nature of the beast.

but I think we are basically on the same page (study the past, criticize it, learn from it, don't allow its mistakes to be repeated) and just quibbling over terms.

Because fans of disco and other corporate manufactured music love using racism and homophobia to defend their corporate taste.

i feel like geir's been halfway reasonable itt until now-- not even gonna touch this one, tho

i elected to pass it over in silence

Just wanted to chime in and say I don't think this thread is a cluster fuck at all, it's been ready interesting and esp would like to thank the ppl that really know classical and wagner on the thread, it's been real educational. I feel like any thread that gets long is called a cluster fuck by default sometimes

I know I shou;dn't, but fuck it.

Because fans of disco and other corporate manufactured music love using racism and homophobia to defend their corporate taste.

How is disco anymore corporate than smooth melodic FM pop you enormous Shrek-alike moron?

Could we keep personal insults like "you enormous Shrek-alike moron" out of this interesting thread please?

Could we keep Geir out of this interesting thread please?

^^^

I apologise. I should know better. I do know better.

There there, Nick. It's hard on all of us...

Forget it, Nick. It's Hongrotown.

definitely agree that they should not be museum-cased, but I don't know that I would go so far as to call them "live arguments" either — like, sometimes when you look at history, you see that a debate has already run its course, one side won and the other lost.

Agree that we're broadly on the same side here; suspect that some of our differences might come from national perspective (you're US right?); I feel like Romantic Nationalism, fragments of a totalitarian past & far-right action keep bursting up in Europe, and none of it is a done deal, so there's a certain amount of suspicion one should maintain: picking at the rush that can come from Wagner's sound wall, asking oneself what one is swooning for, wondering if there won't always be something dark built into these energies, wondering how this relates to kitsch etc etc.

BUT must clarify: I'm not a classical music person. I've listened to Wagner a little, sometimes found it intoxicating (liebestod), sometimes dull. I don't know much.

(& I assume the classical music ppl itt would argue all that questioning is built into Wagner when listened to properly?)

Just wanted to chime in and say I don't think this thread is a cluster fuck at all, it's been ready interesting and esp would like to thank the ppl that really know classical and wagner on the thread, it's been real educational. I feel like any thread that gets long is called a cluster fuck by default sometimes

― Bleeqwot the Chef (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, March 23, 2011 9:59 AM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark

Seconded. As someone whose knowledge of Wagner is limited to "Kill da Wabbit" and Hitler-as-fanboy, I'm learning a lot here.

xp at the same time tho, it's very dramatic music that kind of requires you to let go/get into it — I mean the dude built a fuckin' crazy-opera house just so he could A. have his works performed in an acoustically-ideal space (the total work of art, y'all!) B. hide the musicians and force the audience to focus on the onstage action. like, on some level, he is trying to force people to "find it intoxicating", right? which is maybe a little harder for all of us, who aren't really able to 'let our guard down' around Wagner, and perhaps shouldn't.

so maybe the argument is that we can never listen to Wagner 'properly' anymore, but his operas should still be staged as a sort of grotesque spectacle that makes us reflect on ~the past~ — also it beats what's on TV

But performance can give a chance to reclaim, redeem, reimagine works, so it's not like we have to stare sceptically at protofascist myth spectacle - good staging can do a lot with the musical, psychological, intellectual force of W? Again, out of depth here, but thinking that objectionable Shakespeare (Shrew) & Marlowe (Jew) can be remade into something worthwhile live (because they come from unusual talents looking at earlier versions of our own fault lines?)

^^^ point about staging is a really good one