Word: wagnerism
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...anniversary of his birth, East Germany celebrated Martin Luther. Today, in their tercentenary year, it praises George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, the two greatest composers of the Baroque. Here, where the lives and paths of such men as Luther, Handel, Bach, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Richard Wagner intersect, the glory, unity and tragedy of German history are a living memory...
...benevolent bewigged stone figure beams down from a pedestal, quill in hand and manuscript paper at the ready; beyond it, high on a hill in the distance, sits the Wartburg Castle, where Luther, in disguise, completed his translation of the New Testament while hiding out from Catholic wrath and Wagner set his opera Tannhauser. In Leipzig, a sterner Bach is memorialized outside the Thomaskirche by both a full-length statue and, not far from the church, a bust dedicated by Felix Mendelssohn. Genius pays homage to even greater genius: it was the romantic Mendelssohn, a Christianized...
...German contradiction is also embodied by Wagner, who wrote the noxious anti-Semitic essay Jewry in Music, yet who also allowed Hermann Levi to conduct the premiere of the Christian epic Parsifal at Bayreuth. Faust, the national symbol, might be speaking for both Luther and Wagner when he says at the beginning of Goethe's play, "With keen endeavor I have studied philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, and even, alas, theology. And yet here I stand, a poor fool no wiser than I was before...
...world, he has overshadowed his countryman Handel, who had the effrontery to defect to the West before it was politically necessary. And there Bach is praised for giving "artistic expression to the people's aspirations and endeavors for peace." But he is impervious to political manipulation, as Luther and Wagner are not. He was not seduced by the devil, who tempted so many others to forswear a basic tenet of humanity long before the Wall made the spiritual division of the German soul visible...
...Their mother is shocked at the notion: "Divorce! You are too young to utter the word, and there is no reason why you should, for you know nothing about it. You have never known anybody who was divorced. I don't think I ever have, except of course Cosima Wagner." The scene shifts, in a downwardly mobile fashion, to a Thamesside public house and inn, run by friends of the Aubreys'. Rose stumbles into a Saturday-night ruckus in the bar: "All the customers were standing quite still and nobody was saying anything. Their faces were clay-colored and featureless...