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God I love Wagner. Why do people hate Wagner? Because of the Nazi thing? I mean okay fine, but I mean have these people listened to Wagner? It's like when in that Motte podcast and @KulakRevolt kept hating on The Great Gatsby. I mean I feel like at some point people aren't paying attention to the things they should be paying attention to.
Exhibit A: This is Siegfried's Funeral March. Yeah, from a film, but hey, I have never had the good fortune to watch the 17 hours which is Der Ring des Nibelungs though I would do it in a heartbeat.
Many years ago I watched a pretty uneven film called Aria and was introduced to Wagner apart from the usual Apocalypse Now sequence. The film had only one Wagner piece, a haunting section from the longer opera Tristan Und Isolde called Liebestod. You can find this in both instrumental and vocal versions. My favorite is the one done by Leontyne Price, and was the one used in in the film. You can watch that here.
So why the Wagner hate? Too rhapsodic? Too emotional? Neither of these critiques holds water with me. I mean listening to Wagner 24/7 is probably not advisable, but sometimes a little Wagner is just what the musical doctor ordered.
Fight me!
There are critics of every great musician in every genre, especially as they come in and out of fashion. But Wagner, broadly speaking, has a good reputation as a composer. He is generally considered one of the greatest operatic composers ever. His works appear on almost every list of “the greatest operas of all time”. His politics (and Hitler’s love of him, and upholding of him as central to German nationalist art) mean that an association with the radical right is probably always inevitable, but his operas are staged regularly and his pieces are performed even more regularly in the US and Western Europe and draw a large audience. I looked on the website of the New York philharmonic and they’re playing pieces from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in early January next year, they had several Wagner-focused concerts late last year (and probably some more earlier this year).
So I’d say he has probably broadly the appreciation he should. People who don’t like opera or classical music may have their prejudices, but they wouldn’t listen to him anyway.
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