Re: Re: why play wagner?


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Posted by Ola on July 04, 2002 at 20:31:24:

In Reply to: Re: why play wagner? posted by gc on July 04, 2002 at 13:29:15:

There has been numerous attempts by leading church officials in Norway to ban the performances of Mendelssohn's famous wedding march on the grounds that in the play it accompanies (in the original setting) the wedding is between a princess and a goat - obviously not the ideal christian marriage.... To me that sounds just silly, purely because it is wonderful music. One could ban much music because of the context in which it was written, or what it signified for the composer, or if the composer was not the most wonderful person (which composers {the good ones anyway} tend not to be). Please - lets ban Britten because he was gay! That was indeed illegal in Britain in his lifetime! It just seems silly to ban music because of such petty things. Would you listen to 'The Death of Klinghoffer' with that kind of thoughts going through your head as well?

And stop the 'Austrian race'-talk. There has never been such a thing. The race you are thinking of is generally known as the Germanic race, although some call it the Nordic race. The name Aryan was made up by Hitler's nazis, they had a liking for putting good-sounding names, often with a mythological twang to them, to everything. Austria at the time of Wagner contained PART of what is now Austria, plus all of todays Hungary plus some smallish other areas, like part of Prussia. Thus, the larger part of the population would be hungarian, which is a race not closely related to the germanic one, neither in genes or in language (in fact, hungarian and german are further separated as languages than english and chinese). And Austria has had very liquid borders through the past couple of centuries, making the talk of even an Austrian people a rather touchy subject, though nowadays its population is mainly germanic.


fwiw


O


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