Tag Archives: opera

Wagner Bicentennial Symposium
Rage Against the Machine:
A Very American Ring Cycle

Jef Costello

The great Wagner Machine--Siegfried and Brunnhilde in Goetterdaemmerung

The great Wagner Machine–Siegfried and Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung

2,427 words

It heaves and groans. It shimmies and clicks. One holds one breath during the best parts, hoping it will not malfunction and ruin the whole evening. One fears for the performers, halfway expecting it to devour them.

Published: May 21, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged articles, bad taste, classical music, Jef Costello, Metropolitan Opera, North American New Right, originals, Peter Gelb, Richard Wagner, Robert Lepage, The Ring Cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | 3 Responses

Wagner Bicentennial Symposium
The Monster

Deems Taylor

1,717 words

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body — a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur. Read more …

Published: May 16, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged articles, classical music, Deems Taylor, North American New Right, reprints, Richard Wagner, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Wagner Bicentennial Symposium
Evil Genius:
Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 4

A night at the opera: Adolf Hitler with Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner

4,022 words

Part 4 of 4

Wagner and National Socialist Germany

Richard Wagner has long been reviled by Jews as the intellectual and spiritual precursor to Adolf Hitler who, according to William Shirer, once declared: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”[1] Read more …

Published: May 16, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged Adolf Hitler, articles, Brenton Sanderson, classical music, commemorations, North American New Right, originals, Richard Wagner, the Jewish question, the Third Reich, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Wagner Bicentennial Symposium
Evil Genius:
Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 3

Arno Breker, Bust of Richard Wagner

2,360 words

Part 3 of 4

Wagner’s Music Dramas as Coded Anti-Semitism

T. W. Adorno and Wagner biographer Robert Gutman began a modern Jewish intellectual tradition Read more …

Published: May 15, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged articles, Brenton Sanderson, classical music, commemorations, North American New Right, originals, Richard Wagner, the Jewish question, Theodor Adorno, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Wagner Bicentennial Symposium
Evil Genius:
Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 2

3,016 words

Part 2 of 4

Wagner’s Racial Thinking

In addition to his concern about the baleful Jewish influence on German culture, Wagner, under the influence of Darwinism and the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, became increasingly concerned about the fate of the White race generally. Read more …

Published: May 14, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged Arthur de Gobineau, articles, biological race differences, Brenton Sanderson, Christianity, classical music, commemorations, North American New Right, originals, Richard Wagner, the Jewish question, Theodor Adorno, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Wagner Bicentennial Symposium
Evil Genius:
Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah, Part 1

Richard Wagner, 1813–1883

4,763 words

Part 1 of 4

Richard Wagner was a one man artistic and intellectual movement whose shadow fell across all of his contemporaries and most of his successors. Other composers had influence; Wagner had a way of thinking named after him. It has been claimed that “never since Orpheus has there been a musician whose music affected so vitally the life and art of generations.”[1] Read more …

Published: May 13, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged articles, Brenton Sanderson, classical music, commemorations, North American New Right, originals, Richard Wagner, the Jewish question, Theodor Adorno, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord

4,085 words

Bryan Magee
The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000

Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (just Wagner and Philosophy in the UK) combines two of my favorite subjects into an informative, stimulating, and highly readable book. Creativity and critical reflection are two very different activities, and excellence in one is seldom accompanied by excellence in the other. Read more …

Published: April 12, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged anarchism, Arthur Schopenhauer, book reviews, Bryan Magee, classical music, Friedrich Nietzsche, Greg Johnson, Ludwig Feuerbach, North American New Right, originals, Parsifal, philosophy, Richard Wagner, socialism, the Jewish question, The Ring of the Nibelung, The Tristan Chord, Tristan and Isolde, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Riccardo Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini

Ary Scheffer, “Francesca da Rimini,” 1854

454 words

In 1902, Gabriele D’Annunzio published Francesca da Rimini, a tragedy based on Boccaccio’s elaboration of an episode in Dante’s Inferno.

Francesca was the Daughter of Guido I da Polenta, lord of Ravenna. Read more …

Published: March 29, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged articles, classical music, Dante, Francesca da Rimini, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Giovanni Boccaccio, Greg Johnson, North American New Right, originals, Riccardo Zandonai | Comments closed

Bryan Magee’s Aspects of Wagner

2,373 words

Bryan Magee
Aspects of Wagner
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988

In preparation for the Wagner bicentennial on May 22, I have been listening to, watching, and reading about Wagner non-stop. But one’s enjoyment of art and ideas is magnified by sharing them with others. So I am going to get you in the Wagner spirit, or drive you crazy trying, Read more …

Published: March 5, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged book reviews, Bryan Magee, classical music, drama, Greg Johnson, North American New Right, originals, Richard Wagner, the Jewish question, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Call for Papers
Our Wagner

185 words

Today is the 130th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s death in Venice. May 22, 2013 is the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth. To mark this occasion, Counter-Currents/North American New Right will run a symposium on “Our Wagner.” The symposium will consist of essays, reviews, poems, podcasts, and videos on Wagner’s life, work, and ongoing significance for the metapolitical project of the North American New Right and the New Right in general. Read more …

Published: February 13, 2013 | Posted in news item | Also tagged classical music, Greg Johnson, news item, Richard Wagner, Wagner Bicentennial Symposium | Comments closed

Jonathan Bowden’s Last Interview, Part 1: Transcript

Jonathan Bowden

5,888 words

Podcast here

Welcome to Counter Currents Radio. I’m your host Greg Johnson. With us today is Jonathan Bowden. First of all, I need to ask you is it “Boden” or Bowden?

JB: Depends where you are in England basically, if you are in the North of England you say “Boden,” but if you are from the South of England, and I’m from the South of England, you say Bowden. Read more …

Published: January 25, 2013 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged architecture, Arno Breker, Ayn Rand, classical music, Counter-Currents Radio, David Lynch, Dimitri Shostakovich, film, Flannery O'Connor, Francis Bacon, Gertrude Stein, Greg Johnson, interviews, J. G. Ballard, Jonathan Bowden, Leni Riefenstahl, modernism, originals, Pablo Picasso, painting, podcasts, poetry, Robinson Jeffers, Salvador Dalí, Socialist Realism, William Blake | Comments closed

Jonathan Bowden’s Last Interview, Part 1

Jonathan Bowden

387 words / 47:46

Part 1 of 2

Transcript here

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Yukio Mishima & Richard Wagner:
Art & Politics, or Love & Death

Emi Mann Kawaguchi

The platform of this year’s “Yukoku-Ki,” November 25th, 2012, Tokyo

3,668 words

The Keynote Speech at the 42nd Yukoku-Ki in Tokyo, November 25, 2012

Translated by Riki Rei

Published: December 17, 2012 | Posted in North American New Right | Also tagged classical music, death, Emi Mann Kawaguchi, Friedrich Nietzsche, Japan, literature, North American New Right, originals, Patriotism, Richard Wagner, sexuality, suicide, translations, Tristan und Isolde, Yukio Mishima | Comments closed