Wagner and Hitler would have had a embolism over each other.  Both were
melodramatic to the point of infantile self-obsession.  Their "art,"
Wagner's "Numbing Lumbering Lied" and Hitler's Nuremberg Gigantism are
both ultimately boring, boring, BORING, especially to someone like me
who suffers from attention deficit disorder in its healthy form.

Right, I never interviewed Beethoven.  I don't travel by time machine.
That bus doesn't go by my office.  Besides, I can hear him in his music.
And there can't be less in the cause than in the effect.  Those who worship
Wagner's art but despise the man have their own enigma.  Even if Wagner
were a Quaker, I would find his music oppressive, airless, egomaniacal
and hysterical.  And Tchaikovsky is dismissed as suffering from hysteria.
He is a Haydn by comparison!

The only good music Wagner ever composed he filched from Mendelssohn's
overtures, particularly the Hebrides and Calm Sea and Properous Voyage.
Now isn't that ironic? By the way, when Wagner was only a neophyte (hard to
believe such a god was once only a neophyte or Hitler a bum), he made that
acknowledgment, only to conveniently forget it when music-lovers began to
feed his august impression of himself.  He deserves his legacy of making
second-rate soundtracks for movies possible.  Ironically, even they are
more bearable if only because they cannot continually occupy the center of
attention.  Healthy artists loose themselves in their art and not the other
way around.

Beethoven could only possibly have been anti-Semitic if the PBS version
of him were accurate.  It was so skewed in the direction of Beethoven's
melodramatic works that a newcomer would understandably think on hearing
the Pastoral or any of the even numbered symphonies that Haydn wrote them
posthumorously (sic).  Most of Beethoven's piano sonatas are not like the
Moonlight or the Appassionata.  Most bubble or glow like the op 14/2, op.
31/3, Les Adieux, the opp.  109, 110 and 111 and such quartets as "the
Harp," the opp.  127, 130, 132 and especially Beethoven's valedictory, the
op. 135.

So long as we are talking about politics and music, we can be sure of only
one thing.  Beethoven would have found our political parties as asinine as
Will Rogers did.

A. Carlan
Speaking Up For Nielsen