Mind's Eye Re: Is Wagner Bad For Us?

Was doing fine till the last paragraph. Will be busy with family until
the end of the week and about the last item I want whirling around in
my head is a discussion of Wagner! :-) It is a delicious topic as
there are so many possible avenues of response.

On Apr 3, 3:17 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Respecting boundaries was not Wagner's thing. Transgression he took in
> his stride – stealing other men's wives when he needed them, spending
> other people's money without worrying too much about paying it back –
> while artistically his ambitions knew no bounds. There is something
> awe-inspiring about his productivity under hostile conditions, the
> way, though living on the breadline, he turned out masterpieces when
> there was no reasonable prospect of any of them being performed:
> gigantic works, pushing singers and musicians to the limits of their
> technique, and taking music itself to the edges of its known universe.
> Theft; the breaking of vows, promises and contracts; seduction,
> adultery, incest, disobedience, defiance of the gods, daring to ask
> the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power,
> genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner's work is
> everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits
> reached and exceeded. 'Wagnerian' has passed into our language as a
> byword for the exorbitant, the over-scaled and the interminable.
>
> Wagner has kept me awake at night. Sleepless, I turn my thoughts to
> Tristan und Isolde, Wagner's most extreme work and the plus ultra of
> love stories, and I notice a kinship between aspects of Tristan and
> Isolde's passion and the experience of a certain kind of insomnia. The
> second act of Tristan und Isolde is Romanticism's greatest hymn to the
> night, not for the elfin charm and ethereal chiaroscuro of moonbeams
> and starlight, the territory of Chopin and Debussy, but night as a
> close bosom-friend of oblivion, a simulacrum of eternity and a place
> to play dead. Insomnia is a refusal to cross the boundary between
> waking and sleeping, a bid to outwit Terminus by hiding away in
> 'soundless dark', a zone beyond time. As garlic is to vampires, so
> clocks are to insomniacs, not because they tell of how much sleep has
> been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip
> Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big
> disadvantage that we wake up from it: 'In time the curtain edges will
> grow light,' he wrote in 'Aubade', bringing 'Unresting death, a whole
> day nearer now'. For Tristan and Isolde, too, night must not give way
> to day, not for the trivial reason that day will end their love-
> making, but because dawn brings death one day nearer. They must stay
> awake, for to sleep is to allow the night to pass, to awake from the
> night is to live and to live is to die. And when, inevitably, day
> dawns, they have only one recourse. To Tristan and Isolde, in their
> delirium, it seems that by dying they will preserve their love for
> ever: by dying, they will defy death.
>
> 'Utter rot' the scientist in me says, knowing science is a product of
> madness that can be demonstrated.  Wagner is bad for us.  And I think
> to science again - the science that dares to tell us the table is
> mostly nothing, with nothing curved space, unseen forces, the
> individual not Jack or Jill of thought in Idol boundaries.

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