so did you like wagner ?
personally my favourite classical composer
always felt if he was composing in this era the result would be something of the heavy metal genre

well...
as a human being, he was a loathesome, elitist, rascist, sexist, homophobic anti-semite. His music is brilliant, but he probably didn't have a talent for writing anything under 3 hours in length. (And almost all of his operas, especially the Ring cycle which features the Nibelung dwarves, have strong anti-semitic references. And Siegfried is filled to bloating with Oedipal ideas...uggh)

The first scene with Mime, and every scene with Wotan and Alberich were good--well sung, beautiful music. Just every time Seigfried or Brynhilde opened their mouths, they wouldn't shut for a good half hour more (which is probably why my head feels like a biker gang has taken up residence inside it...)

Edited by - Wilde on 2/9/2005 11:08:14 AM

And would you believe there's an annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth in Germany for which a ticket is harder to get and more expensive than for the superbowl?

True Wagner enthusiasts are.. well.. something like a very special human subspecies.

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well...
as a human being, he was a loathesome, elitist, rascist, sexist, homophobic anti-semite. His music is brilliant, but he probably didn't have a talent for writing anything under 3 hours in length. (And almost all of his operas, especially the Ring cycle which features the Nibelung dwarves, have strong anti-semitic references. And Siegfried is filled to bloating with Oedipal ideas...uggh)

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Is it really fair to denigrate someone who was no different to all of his peers and his society? Wagner may appear to be a nasty piece of work by modern values, but during his time it was normal and acceptable to be racist, sexist, homophobic etc. Don't forget religion plays a heavier part in people's lives at this time than it does now and the bible was taken much more literally. For example there were those that believed they were ordained by God to rule over the blacks , some considered the Jews to be "Christ-killers" etc, it all depends on their interpretations. Anyway, before I go off on a tangent, what I'm trying to say is that Wagner's ideas and points of view will have been moulded by his upbringing in a society that had yet to learn much about equality, so it's not really fair to judge him by today's standards.

That still doesn't excuse him. Society and religion doesn't excuse white supremacist thinking in South Africa during the Apartheid, despite the fact people rushed to defend it on those very terms. It doesn't excuse black slavery in the 1800s--simply because it was a societal custom to hold slaves didn't make it right by any rational standards. Despite the fact that societal customs dictated (in some parts of North America) strong homophobia, it wasn't right for Matthew Sheppard to have been brutally slautered.

What I could see being possibly offensive (had not the entire crew and cast not been anti-semitic) was the portrayal of the dwarves. The Nibelung dwarves as portrayed in Wagner are supposed to be hairy and ugly, stooped, crafty and wily, and obsessed with nothing but money and power despite the fact they claim to show human emotion. This was the common view of what the Jews are like among anti-semites, and probably in Wagner's time would have been an emphasized caricature.

Also, besides his feculant view on Jews, he was apparently a very ego-centric person--he constantly needed a group of people to stand around him and tell him he was fabulous. And if you didn't, you're nobody, in his mind. (I had this all from an historian)

Being prejudiced can't be compared to killing someone. Those that killed Matthew Sheppard knew that killing was wrong and did so anyway regardless of whether they knew homophobia was right or wrong.
There's a fair bit more to Apartheid in South Africa than what you wrote, you really can't compare them. There was international outcry against S.Africa. It became a pariah nation and suffered all sorts of embargoes. The people advocating apartheid were well aware of the arguments against it.
If you're kept in an environment where you're told that this group of people are bad and inherently evil and then hear the same thing from everyone you speak to. When your source of spiritual guidance also tell you this, you're going to reckon that God agrees too. You aren't going to associate yourself with them and hear their side of the story. You are isolated from knowing or understanding anything different. I didn't say that Wagner was right about anything, merely that he may not have been aware that he was in the wrong. There's a difference between being mistaken and being intently malicious.
Finally, my point was more that, it's difficult to look at someone who lived so long ago that their environment was effectively totally alien to your own and declare that they are bad people based on modern morals. Otherwise perhaps we should go round demonising nearly every famous man in history for being sexist.

You have a good point that the murderers of Matthew Sheppard probably were more culturally exposed than those in South Africa or Germany; however, I would disagree with you on your point that we cannot point out moral flaws in any person's behaviour simply because they lived in a different time and culture from us.

Of course there are variations in the purity code from culture to culture; one will have very strict laws concerning consumption of alcohol, another will have no laws against it at all, and a third will use alcohol in ceremonial practice. The greeks celebrated the practice of homosexuality and the Victorians despised it. These are all variations cross-culture in the purity code. The moral code, however, remains universally the same across time and space within human boundaries, having such principals as no murder, no torture, compassion, etc. Of course we must understand each person within their societal and cultural context, and thus a rascist in the early 1800s and a rascist today must be viewed differently, but that still does not excuse what the process of Platonian dialectic can prove easily to be immoral and hypocritical. Wagner surely is still a demon of a human being, regardless of his societal context.

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Also, besides his feculant view on Jews, he was apparently a very ego-centric person...

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What is wrong with egocentrism?

um...what isn't wrong with ego-centricism?

There are two fundamental laws of reality: Impermanence and interconectedness. Nothing lasts forever, and everything is connected. Pure empirical evidence dictates this--

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Nothing else remains. Around the base of that statue, the lone and level sands stretch far away...

And one can clearly see that everything is in some way connected. Stars, for example, had to explode in order for the materials to exist to create the computer I'm sitting at. Every thing is connected to everything else...therefore to deny this law is to wrap oneself in illusion, rotting the essence of your emotional self as you sink into obsession with yourself and forget the world around you. Essentially, to think you're the most important person in the world, to think only of personal gain, makes you a really crappy person to be around.

If I am not for myself, who is for me?

How do you know egoism leads to a "rotting the essence of your emotional self"? Have you tried? Egocentrism is centered around maximizing one's own happiness. It seems perfectly rational to me. It isn't isolationsim or spitefulness. If making other people happy and working with them is required for your greatest happiness then a egoist would encourage you to do so.

Exactly. And an egoist thinks only of her/himself in an age where there are 6 billion other people on earth. How is this rational at all ?

Egocentricism=being centered around your own ego. Everything revolves around you. Everything must go your way. So yes, it is about maximizing your own happiness, but at the expense of the happiness of others. And if you do this for your entire life, do you know where you almost without fail end up? At a therapist, because you are deathly unhappy. No happiness can come from denying a fundamental law of reality.