Pynchon & Wagner

[Gary Webb]

Every time Wagner comes up lately I’m reminded of Allen Bloom’s comparison of the frenzy induced in the youth due to Rock/Pop music( ...this was in the 80s) to the frenzy Wagner’s music induced in Germany almost a century later... 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/06/07/is-rock-music-rotting-our-kids-minds/a9f3e90a-f31f-41b3-921e-0041e40fa9f2/

I don’t agree with Bloom, and I wonder what he would think of the things currently occupying our obsessive youth... probably that the souls he was intent on saving from the dread Walkman, have long since been lost, and mysteriously converted to 1s & 0s...

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 17, 2020, at 12:07 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> of course, Wagner's family had much to do with the reactionary beliefs even
> before Adolf came around--Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner
> (both British-born), eg. Syberberg's long interview/documentary about
> Winifred gives some insight into the family dynamics following Wagner's
> death and legacy.
> 
> rich
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 6:26 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Alex Ross:
>> 
>> + ... In recent decades, scholars have reconstructed a school of
>> Wagnerian leftism, which gained purchase in Europe and America at the
>> end of the 19th century. Socialists, communists, social democrats, and
>> anarchists all found sustenance in Wagner’s work. After the Bolshevik
>> revolution, Wagner had a brief vogue as a figurehead of proletarian
>> culture. / The starting point for the Wagner left was the composer’s own
>> revolutionary activity in 1848 and 1849, which forced him into exile for
>> many years. His writingsArt and Revolution
>> <http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/11/97.pdf>andThe Art
>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>-Work of the Future
>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>were classic, if
>> eccentric, articulations of the idea that art could play a leading role
>> in the struggle for social equality. His own work became a kind of dream
>> theatre for the imagination of a future state. Of course, other
>> ideologies exploited the composer in the same way. It would be a mistake
>> to say that Shaw and his fellow leftists found the “true” Wagner. But it
>> would also be a mistake to say they misunderstood him... Wagner’s tale
>> of the corrupting power of the golden Ring matches Marx’s musings on the
>> “perverting power” of money. When, in Das Kapital, Marx speaks of the
>> hoarding of commodities, he notes that the hoarder “sacrifices the lusts
>> of the flesh to his gold fetish” and adopts “the gospel of
>> renunciation”. The word Marx uses here, “/Entsagung/”, is the same that
>> Wagner applies to the dwarf Alberich’s renunciation of love – the
>> gesture that wins him access to the Rhinegold. For Marx and Wagner
>> alike, love and power are irreconcilable ... Peter Kropotkin was an
>> admirer ...Patrice Chéreau
>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>’s epochal Bayreuth
>> production of the Ring
>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>(1976-80), took
>> inspiration from The Perfect Wagnerite, realising Shaw’s vision of “tall
>> hats for Tarnhelms, factories for Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas”. /
>> In 1943, the great theatre criticEric Bentley
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/theater/eric-bentley-dead.html>– who
>> recently died at the age of 103 – asked a charged question: “Is Hitler
>> always right about Wagner?” The question hangs in the air as the
>> controversy rolls ever on ...+
>> 
>> 
>> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/17/why-did-lefties-love-wagner-alex-ross-wagnerism-revolution-hitler
>> 
>> In "Versuch über Wagner", Adorno writes:
>> 
>> "In der Liebe sterben: das heißt auch, der Grenze gewahr werden, die der
>> Eigentumsordnung am Menschen selbst gesetzt ist: erfahren, daß der
>> Anspruch der Lust, wäre er jemals zu Ende gedacht, eben jene autonome,
>> sich zugehörende und ihr eigenes Leben zum Ding erniedrigende Person
>> sprengen würde, die verblendet glaubt, im Besitz ihrer selbst Lust zu
>> finden, und der dieser Besitz Lust gerade entzieht. Wohl verweigert
>> Siegfried geizig den Rheintöchtern den Ring; aber indem er den Kreis der
>> Verblendung schließt, findet er die Geste, die Erdscholle hinter sich zu
>> werfen als das individuelle Leben, das der nicht mehr halten muß, dem es
>> einmal hielt, was es versprach. Daher ist Wagners Werk nicht nur der
>> willige Prophet und beflissene Büttel von Imperialismus und
>> spätbürgerlichem Terror: es verfügt zugleich über die Kraft der Neurose,
>> dem eigenen Verfall ins Auge zu sehen und ihn zu transzendieren im
>> Bilde, das dem saugenden Blick standhält."
>> 
>> 
>>> Am 28.08.20 um 12:41 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>>> 
>>> Did you know (cf. Christian Hänggi: Pynchon's Sound of Music, Zürich
>>> 2020: Diaphanes, p. 215) that Richard Wagner is the most frequently
>>> referenced composer & musician in Pynchon's books?
>>> 
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVprS--bLks
>>> 
>>> Jessye Norman - Liebestod (Tristan und Isolde)
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>> .
>> 
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>> 
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l