Richard Wagner was born 200 years ago today in Leipzig in the kingdom of Saxony. He died on February 13, 1883 in Venice. As an artist, intellectual, author, and cultural force, Wagner has left an immense metapolitical legacy, which is being evaluated and appropriated in the North American New Right’s Wagner Bicentennial Symposium, which will continue through the end of May with articles by Collin Cleary, Christopher Pankhurst, and others. (more…)
Tag: Wagner Bicentennial Symposium
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It heaves and groans. It shimmies and clicks. One holds one’s 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.
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Not symphonic music, but rather the shattering roar of cannon announced the birth of Richard Wagner on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig. The German kingdom of Saxony had been overrun by the French troops of Napoleon Bonaparte as he made a last-ditch effort to reassert dominance over Europe.[1]
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Karl Marx reserved a special place of contempt for those he termed “reactionists.” These comprised the alliance that was forming around his time among all classes of people, high-born and low, who aimed to return to a pre-capitalist society. These were the remnants of artisans, aristocrats, landowners, and pastors, who had seen the ravages of industrialism and money-ethics then unfolding. (more…)
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“Your themes — they almost always consist of even values, of half, quarter, eighth notes; they are syncopated and tied, to be sure, but nonetheless persevere in what is often a machinelike, stamping, hammering inflexibility and inelegance. (more…)
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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] (more…)
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Wagner’s Music Dramas as Coded Anti-Semitism
T. W. Adorno and Wagner biographer Robert Gutman began a modern Jewish intellectual tradition (more…)
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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. (more…)
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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] (more…)
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April 12, 2013 Greg Johnson
Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord
Bryan Magee
The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000Bryan 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. (more…)
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Bryan Magee
Aspects of Wagner
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988In 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, (more…)
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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. (more…)