Wagner : Wilhelm Richard (1813-83), German dramatist whose operatic creations represented a new art form on dramatic, musical, & verbal levels. His work marked a Romantic culmination. Much of the later history of Western classical music stems from him, either by extension of his discoveries or in reaction against them.
... Ernst Hanfstängl: op. cit., p. 98. 215 Ralph Reuth, op. cit., p. 152. 216 Joachim Fest, op. cit., p. 179. 217 David Clay Large: Hitlers München, p. 236. 218 Brigitte Hamann: Winifred Wagner, oder Hitlers Bayreuth, p. 84. 219 John Toland: Hitler, pp. 229, 230. 220 Margarete Plewnia: Auf dem Weg zu Hitler, p. 101. 221 Robert Gellately: Backing Hitler, p. 11. 222 Ernst... pp. 88-89. 401 Konrad Heiden: The Fuehrer, p. 194. 402 Fritz Fischer: Krieg der Illusionen, p. 66. 403 Klaus von See: Barbar, Germane, Arier, p. 292. 404 Brigitte Hamann: Winifred Wagner, oder Hitlers Bayreuth, p. 84. 405 Quoted in William Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 109. 406 Brigitte Hamann, op. cit.,, p. 85. 407 Joachim Fest, op. cit.,, p. 616. ... op. cit., p. 210. 775 Joachim Köhler, op. cit., p. 355. 776 Peter Orzechowski, op. cit., p. 179. 777 Albert Speer: Inside the Third Reich, pp. 604, 607. 778 Brigitte Hamann: Winifred Wagner, oder Hitlers Bayreuth, p. 258. 779 Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, pp. 379, 380. 780 Id., pp. 290, 294, 293. 781 In Christian Zentner: Adolf Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf’, p. 46. 782 Id., p. 22 ...
... related to identical views in other religions, and even had space for the theories and discoveries of science. “Theosophy swept Europe with an impetus and energy comparable to that of Wagner or Nietzsche. Wagner may have created a religion of his own, but few people at the time would explicitly have acknowledged it to be such. Theosophy, on the other hand, did announce itself as a full-fledged organized ...
... mystical love of nature and a Social Darwinism which was so typical of much radical thought. This transformation from scientist to radical racist was catalyzed by his encounter with the work of Richard Wagner … He provided the New Romanticism [völkisch and therefore racist] with a scientific base and thus lent the tone and the goals of science to his racial theories.” 439 This is a risky undertaking in... was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie.” 444 This irrefutable argument was duly repeated after Chamberlain by countless German Christians, while he himself was only repeating what Richard Wagner had said on the subject, who in his turn may have referred to Schopenhauer and Fichte. The Germans were not only the purest Aryans, they were the foremost in every field, also the religious, and “much ...
... important public or political manifestation. Hitler had made Wagner into the official composer of the Third Reich; living composers, like Richard Strauss, only moved in Wagner’s shadow. The reason was that Wagner and his music had played such an important role in Hitler’s own life. From his years in Linz onwards, he had eaten and drunk Wagner, seen his operas an astonishing number of times and read every... . A few measures of Wagner sufficed to calm him down in any circumstances and made him behave as if entranced. “This music affected him physically”, wrote Ernst Hanfstängl, “it had become part of Hitler’s being.” 580 And Hitler himself said one day: “When I hear Wagner, it is as if I hear the rhythms of the world in its beginnings.” 581 Hitler never hid what he owned to Wagner and he thanked him by... their role as carriers of the destiny of mankind. Parsifal, “the sacred masterpiece of Bayreuth”, upon which Wagner meditated for a quarter of a century and which would become his apotheosis, was generally recognized as a symbolic play of the purity of the blood, Germany’s Holy Grail. Wagner too turned Christ into a German superhero, and Bayreuth into “the national sanctuary of the völkisch revival ...
... detail … I was also present when Adolf Hitler narrated to Mrs [Winifred] Wagner, whose guests we were, the occurrence which had taken place after the performance of Rienzi at Linz. Thus I found my own memory confirmed twice. And I have never been able to forget the words with which Hitler concluded his narration to Mrs Wagner. He said gravely: ‘That was when it began’.” 912 The very reliable Brigitte... his followers what he would tell later to Winifred Wagner. The Party Rally in Nuremberg will each year open with the Rienzi overture, which Köhler calls “the quasi official Reich overture” and “a musical summary of Hitler’s ideological programme”, while Serpico calls it “the unofficial hymn of the Third Reich”. “In the Third Reich the music of Wagner occupied a dominating position, because it was so... higher speculations, beyond the improvement of their daily life, the popular classes abandoned him. Ultimately they revolted against him, at the instigation of the nobles, and killed the tribune, whom Wagner lets die in a vast conflagration. Young Adolf seems to have felt, unexpectedly and forcefully, that his own destiny was prefigured in the events on the stage, carried by Wagner’s intensely evocative ...
... on earth. Another important tie of Nietzsche with the period in which he lived was his relationship with Richard Wagner. “His identity was so bound up with Wagner that it might collapse if they separated”, writes Carl Pletsch. 692 When Wagner died, Nietzsche wrote in a letter: “Wagner was by far the fullest man I have ever known.” His music “seeped into the being of its listeners and transformed them... the power and nature of the human Machtgefühl [feeling of power]. Wagner’s music was an extraordinary elemental embodiment of will.” (Lesley Chamberlain 693) All the same, Nietzsche broke with Wagner when the latter became too reichsdeutsch , too much accepted, and enjoying the acceptance, by the German nationalist and conservative elite, which was riding on its wave of pride and superiority after ...
... kind of circles in Berlin and to the Wagner clan in Bayreuth, whom he knew well, for he had been a newspaper critic at the Festspiele for several years. Hamann, in her recent book Winifred Wagner, or Hitler’s Bayreuth , calls Eckart “a Wagnerian”, which reveals another interest he shared with Hitler. Winifred Wagner, the Englishwoman married to Siegfried Wagner, had spent several years of her youth ...
... sketched here by Mosse has to be somewhat adjusted. According to Cosima Wagner, Gobineau, a very cultured and widely-travelled man, had obtained access into the circle around her husband, Richard Wagner, and had found compensation in the composer’s “enthusiastic response” for the general neglect of his racial theory. “It was thanks to Wagner that the Frenchman became the inspirational source of the future... Germany and France. The French branch received little support and never really flourished. It was not really popular in Germany either, but there it received the wholehearted support of the Richard Wagner circle, of which Schemann was a member. In addition, Schemann, active on the board of the Pan-Germans, was able to obtain the support of this significant conservative group for the cause of racial ...
... Chamberlain; he was educated in France, became a qualified biologist, and chose Germany as his second fatherland. He wrote (sometimes in trance) in German, and married Eva, the daughter of Richard Wagner, thereby becoming the master of Haus Wahnfried in Bayreuth, where the composer had spent the last years of his life and were he lay buried. Georges Mosse calls Chamberlain “the most influential... air of a sort of consecration. As religious believers go on a pilgrimage before making an important decision, so Hitler went to obtain the blessings of Chamberlain and of the deceased master, Richard Wagner.” 404 By then Chamberlain was a bedridden man who could only hold Hitler’s hand and mumble some hardly understandable words. But afterwards he still managed to write a letter to Hitler in which... having been able to meet, at the end of his life, the redeemer of Germany. “That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality … May God protect you!” 405 Siegfried Wagner was equally impressed by Hitler’s first visit: “Hitler is a wonderful man, the real soul of the German people. He must succeed.” 406 “Hitler appears as the specifically radical representative of ...
... improvised occurrence. Brigitte Hamann in her book on Hitler and Winifred Wagner, however, makes us think otherwise. Hitler visited Haus Wahnfried in Bayreuth for the first time on 1 October 1922, a month before the putsch. All present were touched by his solemn first contact with the place where the revered Richard Wagner had lived, worked, and lay buried. “It is certain that Hitler told the Wagners... like a consecration. As religious people go on a pilgrimage before making an important decision, thus Hitler went to obtain the blessings of [Houston] Chamberlain and of the departed Master, Richard Wagner.” 218 Rumours were abroad, plans were made, the tail coat was rented, and the whole affair turned into a resounding fiasco – which made Hitler a figure of national importance. ...
... first a very Page 628 great but too dryly intellectual statement of truths that get their living meaning only in the intuitive experience, but afterwards in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as in Wagner it developed the intuitive vision and led to a deep change in European thinking. But the life of Germany remained still unaffected by her higher mind, well-organised, systematic but vitally and ae ...
... soldiers—for the most part poor enough types of men—but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great thinker and poet Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music, is clearly predestined ...
... elusive meaning as in musical compositions. As to the stress on sheer sound in poetry, he was quick to observe: "The richest and most resonant harmonies of Hugo fall as music far short of Berlioz or Wagner." This inferiority to real music is, of course, no argument against the value of harmonious utterance in the poetic art, provided there is no neglect of substance or matter. Verlaine, as we once ...
... spacious patterns of music, and we can set you amidst movements of gods and goddesses, a heavenly traffic heard for us and echoed to us by Chopin and Mozart and Cesar Franck, Bach and Beethoven and Wagner. Live, child, in these palaces, and find yourself, when you are no longer a child, one in spirit with those divinities. I can never wish you anything better on your first birthday. Page 85 ...
... points should be borne in mind. Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G. Wells. It was the great composer and director Gustave Mahler who wrote: ‘We all return; it is this certainty ...
... that even the proud propaganda-tsar of the Reich was informed about some important events only post factum. “Hitler has never revealed the secret of his mission”, writes Joachim Köhler in Hitlers Wagner, p. 21. “The core of his message was not decoded” (p. 22) … The struggle against the Jews was indeed Hitler’s totally personal and therefore not further explainable or discussable basic conviction ...
... Jekyll & Hyde – 1939, Deutschland von innen betrachtet Haffner, Sebastian: Von Bismarck zu Hitler Hamann, Brigitte: Hitlers Wien – Lehrjahre eines Diktators Hamann, Brigitte: Winifred Wagner, oder Hitlers Bayreuth Hanfstängl, Ernst: Hitler – The Missing Years Hartog, Rudolf: The Sign of the Tiger Hastings, Max: Das Reich Heehs, Peter: Sri Aurobindo – A Brief Biography ...
... overthrow the throne of the pharaoh. There is the assertion that it was the Christians, followers of Paul, the Jew of Tarsus, who undermined the Roman Empire and caused its downfall. (To Hitler – as to Wagner, Chamberlain, Rosenberg and most of the Nazis – Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan and an anti-Semite.) There is the fundamental Jewishness of the Catholic Church, for is their holy book not Jewish ...
... stands in this matter. These things are mysterious in their origin and so it is said, "De gustibus non est disputandum”— "There can be no disputing about tastes". Some connoisseurs of music exalt Wagner 107 as a god or a Titan, others speak of him with depreciation and celebrate the godhead of Verdi 108 who is Page 287 disdained by their opponents. Yet I suppose the genius of ...
... while she was still a young girl, we recognize that while our race continues she will be also the Riddle of the Ages. When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent ...
... temperament and character and outlook. The Western Germany is the true Germany, the Germany of light and culture, the Germany that produced the great musicians, poets and idealists, Goethe and Heine and Wagner and Beethoven. The other Germany represents the dark shadow. It is Prussia and Prussianised Germany. This Germany originally belonged to the bleak, wild, savage, barbarous East Europe and was never ...
... points out that it was not her soldiers and empire-builders like Bismark and Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm II but her thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche and her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, who represented Germany's great subjective force that has ushered in the modem renaissance. And yet it is the soldier and the racist who have repeatedly seized power and tried to give a wrong turn ...
... Kapp’s bid for power was no more than a flash in the pan and they arrived too late. It is a simple fact that the Reichswehr, the Pan-Germans and the Germanenorden, supported by the influential Wagner circle in Bayreuth, were conspiring all along to overthrow the social-democratic government. They will try again in November 1923, when Hitler hijacked the coup planned by the rather indecisive “three... acquaintances may have been the result of his fame as a writer, but also of his standing in the spiritist network. The way he had access to circles like the Bruckmanns, Bechsteins, Lehmanns and the Wagner family, as well as to the officer corps of the Reichswehr, tells of the emanation of an undeniable authority or “charisma” from his person in spite of a delicate constitution. Eckart was the only one ...
... Hitler failed his entrance examination to the Academy of Fine Arts for the second time and disappeared into the anonymity of the metropolis. Hitler read about the subjects that interested him: Richard Wagner, the theatre, the technical aspects of stagecraft, architecture, military equipment and war, German history, and the political background of the events he witnessed in Vienna. But another and no less... Hitler biographers tended to confine their surveys of Hitler’s supposed sources of inspiration to intellectually respectable writers on racial superiority and anti-Semitism such as Gobineau, Nietzsche, Wagner and Chamberlain. But there is no evidence that Hitler read their scholarly works. It is altogether more likely that he would have picked up ideas to rationalize his own dualist outlook and fixation ...
... makes little categories (this is more convenient for it), but that does not resemble the truth very much. Page 312 You have said that Wagner had an intuition of the occult and that to have spiritual power one must conquer sexuality. In fact, Wagner had the intuition of this victory to be achieved, for in "The Ring of the Niebelungen" there is a treasure hidden at the bottom of a river. Three ...
... inspiration. Her admiration for Bach and Beethoven is well known, but perhaps it is not so commonly understood ¹ Centenary Edition Vol. 3, p. 106. Page 144 that Wagner also was to her one of the greatest musical phenomena, though not always of such unmixed quality as those two. I recall a special reference by her to one of his operas. I recall it all the more ...
... treated, a subject which should have given rise to a piercing and mighty yet unpretentious splendour. Surely, episodes occur where the language and attitude escape being hectic. Whenever Richard Wagner is introduced, we at once catch something genuine. The picture of him alive or in a faint or in the sleep of death is always impressive: somehow he seems to be the undeclared hero of Page 28 ...
... highly diverse community”, were closely involved in the German life. The degree to which they were “assimilated” or “integrated” is corroborated by the difficulty of trying to extricate them again. Wagner, Hitler, Rosenberg and Heydrich were themselves suspected of having Jewish blood in their veins (Hitler’s case remains pending, probably forever); Emil Maurice, Albrecht Haushofer, Erhard Milch and ...
... such a moment after he and his friend Adi had seen a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi for the first time . Not less important as a confirmation of that moment is Hitler’s narrating it to Winifred Wagner – “That was when it began!” – as deemed worth mentioning by Brigitte Hamann (2002), Anna Maria Sigmund (2000) and Ralph Reuth (2003). Indeed, many historians of the younger generation are much more ...
... convinced that “the old Aryan culture, under the leadership of Nordic man, would experience a rebirth”. Moreover, Spengler made himself unpopular in Bayreuth because of his critical remarks about Richard Wagner, and was there henceforth referred to only as “the Decline”. 778 Hitler thought of himself as the prophet of “an entirely new Weltanschauung ”, a word which may be translated as “world vision” ...
... performances at the Comédie française. There were her meetings with famous people like the novelists Anatole France and Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis. There was the music of Richard Wagner, Camille Saint-Saëns, César Franck and Ambroise Thomas, the composer of Mignon and twenty-one other operas, and the concerts of Eugène Ysaye, the great Belgian violinist. It is probable that Mirra ...
... was not in Germany’s statesman and soldiers … but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great poet and thinker Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music is clearly predestined ...
... like an unhealthy vein ran through the compositions of Frédéric Chopin. And she would talk about Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and about the occult inspiration in many parts of the operas of Richard Wagner, whose fame was around the turn of the century at its peak, in France as well as elsewhere. And then there was Eugene Ysaÿe, the Belgian violinist, ‘truly the most wonderful violinist of his age ...
... Luchi: a kind of small and thin saucer-shaped bread fried in ghee. Hasi or Uma Bose (22.1.1921-22.1.1942): A 'lovely singer', sang like a nightingale. Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-83). Celebrated German composer of operas: "The Ring of the Nibelungen', Tristan and Isolde7, 'Parsifal', etc. Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco (1813-1901), Italian composer of operas ...
... idealistic, aspiring for the light, selfless world-negators, worthy of ruling the world. This kind of thinking was common among the German nationalists and volkists, whose sources were Luther, Wagner, Houston Chamberlain and Theodor Fritsch, to name only four of the most influential. Less common was Eckart’s “dualism”, his conviction that idealism and materialism, light and darkness, the Aryan ...
... man”, he said to his entourage after having met privately with his old teacher at Klagenfurt in 1938. 144 One of the effects of Pötsch’s influence upon Hitler, together with that of his veneration for Wagner, was his love of the German myths and legends, often held to be historical fact. “The volumes of the Sagas of the German Heroes were his favourite reading which he never lent to anyone else”, remembers ...
... Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , which had made its author the revered guru of the German nationalists, the favoured thinker of Emperor Wilhelm II and, as the husband of Eva Wagner, resident master at House Wahnfried in Bayreuth. But a still stronger influence on Rosenberg was exerted by The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion. The Protocols pretended to provide a report ...
... Germany also led to utopian visions of a Hellenic Germany, based on the best, most rational and most aesthetically superior Apollonian aspects of ancient Greek culture. In the 1870’s, Nietzsche and Wagner unleashed a stream of utopian fantasies that reversed these notions with their appeal to a return of an irrational, organic, Dionysian community of oneness of will and expression.” 505 Apollo and sun ...
... she stands in this matter. These things are mysterious in their origin and so it is said " De gustibus non est disputandum "—"There can be no disputing about tastes." Some connoisseurs of music exalt Wagner as a god or a Titan, others speak of him with depreciation and celebrate the godhead of Verdi who is disclaimed by their opponents. Yet I suppose the genius of neither can be disputed. So far as I ...
... it and to a great extent expressed it. Beethoven, when he composed the Ninth Symphony, had the vision of an opening into a higher world and of the descent of a higher world into this earthly plane. Wagner had strong and powerful intimations of the occult world; he had the instinct of occultism and the sense of the occult and through it he received his greatest inspirations. But he worked mainly on the ...
... expresed it. Beethoven, when he composed the Ninth Symphony, had Page 125 the vision of an opening into a higher world and of the descent of a higher world into this earthly plane. Wagner had strong and powerful intimations of the occult world; he had the instinct of occultism and sense of the occult and through it he received his greatest inspirations. But he worked mainly on the vital ...
... 390 Virgil, 197,211,375 -Ae1Ulid, 375n Virochana, 288, 376 Vishnu, 133, 277 Vwekananda, 56, 59, 154, 161, 165,396 Voltaire, 16, 50, 212 . WAGNER, sa Watson-Watt, Sir Robert, 251-2 Wave mechanics, 316 Wells, H. G., 140 Whitehead, A. N., 345-6 Wordsworth, 183, 194 World Review, the, 353 ...
... former, music of the later. We find a considerable influence of inspiration in poetry where music looms large; e.g. in lyrics. Likewise a poetic form can often be found to a large extent in music – Wagner is an immortal instance. Inspiration is the fount of the lyric, intuition of the epic. Forms of beauty and truth come into existence through the creator's intuition, and the rhythm, the gesture ...
... out of proportion. Then a time comes when people begin to see and discover Page 260 new proportions and a new harmony. Even in music the same thing happens. For instance, when Wagner gave his music it sounded very unusual and, to some discordant. But at last they found harmony and rhythm and everything else. Similarly poetry is not some arrangement of words or ideas, it is ...
... which to others appears perhaps out of proportion. Then a time comes when people begin to see and discover new proportions and a new harmony. Even in music the same thing happens. For instance, when Wagner gave his music it sounded very unusual and, to some discordant. But at last they found harmony and rhythm and everything else. Similarly poetry is not some arrangement of words or ideas, it ...
... of the lodge stood before him in a semi-circle, while in the background music was played on a harmonium or piano, accompanying a choir of forest elves. The brothers sang the “Pilgrim’s Choir” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser . The ritual had to take place by candle light. And so on. This goes to show that the Germanenorden was still deeply stuck in the naïve imaginings of a romantic past. It is not that simple ...
... the socialist agitators”. 522 It were of course the cities and towns who formed the basis of his movement – Munich, the “capital of the movement”, Dinter’s Weimar, Streicher’s Nuremberg, Winifred Wagner’s Bayreuth, Goebbels’ Berlin – and on the streets of which the Nazis did battle with the Reds, those “decent, misguided working people”. Klaus von See relates the saying of a classical Roman author ...
... g ecstasy of human love in which the heart of insatiable desire loses its identity in a super-sleep, as it were, of a nameless night. I am thinking of both the prelude and the grand finale of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, exquisite with now poignant now defunctive music. To avoid yielding to such grandeurs and sonorities of artistic creation simply on the doctrinaire grounds that Sri Aurobindo ...
... ear to those footsteps I forget my own halting movement and even in the midst of it I feel tranquillity and freedom and my walk is as if a Maestro were executing perfectly some difficult passage in Wagner's music. Certain things which we have to do pall on us, but that is Page 277 because we have not inwardly offered them to the Mother. If some work we have to do is not enjoyed ...
... just as the evening of the great apes was followed by the dawn of Homo Sapiens. In his prescience Sri Aurobindo also knew that we already live in the fast-fading 1. "I believe it was Wagner's parsifal”, informs Amal (Editors). Page 166 evening twilight of our own species. Which was certainly why he had placed that premonitory text from the Rig Veda ...
... famous Opera House. (Years later Hitler was still able to whistle faultlessly all of the Meistersinger , and at one time he even had started writing an opera himself.) It was after a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi that something happened which Kubizek never forgot: ‘I was struck by something strange, which I had never noticed before, even when he had talked to me in moments of the greatest excitement ...
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