Music
The St. Petersburg of the East.
An inventive reading of Chronicles.
Wandering Stars.
“I’ve little doubt about the Boss’s power as a galvanizing spiritual personality.”
Amernet at the Kennedy Center.
An operatic experience like no other.
Ernest Drucker was forced to halt a Brahms concerto. His son picked it back up.
Most orchestral music composed since 1950, writes Oliver Rudland, pales in comparison with that of the previous 100 years. Even popular music, after its mid-century. . .
More insidious than Wagner’s hateful ideas are his passions, which reside in his music and stir answering passions in others.
Hating Wagner is a debilitating Jewish habit. So is loving him.
Wagner’s totalizing anti-Judaism is still alive. It just has a new face, fully revealed in this month’s attacks in Paris.
As Wagner illustrates, anti-Semitism is more than a mere dislike of Jews—it’s a metaphysical condition that shapes the very way the world is perceived.
Two centuries after the great composer’s birth, his anti-Semitism remains a bitterly contested issue. Perhaps that’s because no one has yet come to grips with its, or his, true nature.