I hesitate to post anything formally as I get nothing positive out of discussions with Christopher Webber at all, even if I generally welcome passionate disagreement. I appreciate Mat's teaching of tolerance for everyone and everything. Even for anti-Semitism or even for Hitler. Intolerance is what makes Hitlerism evil, and to be intolerant is too be like him. The flip side of this is that it is also a great thing to fight for one's ideals. Friendship and love means to tolerate and understand somebody, but to have a friend is to also have an enemy. Next I cannot accept a primarily Rassentheorie ['race-theory'] based interpretation of Wagner - especially not of the Ring. I will continue to argue that there is enough ambiguity in the figure of Alberich that he is capable of being an abstract myth-symbol. He is a symbol of someone driven by the Blind Will. A Blind Will which is also a Will to Power. He symbolises the evil of the Will to Power. Power is evil. Alberich can thus also as much be Stalin or Hitler, or anyone driven by a blind lust for power. In other words it is critical to appreciate the Schopenhauerian meaning of the Ring cycle to rescue it from the Nazi 'Rassentheorie' centred interpretation. Any insinuation that Wagner considered the Nibelungs to be in anyway Jewish must therefore be considered entirely subordinate to the Schopenhauerian meaning of the Ring. Thus for the Nibelungs to cease to be an abstract myth-symbol and instead be a concrete representation of a particular group of people AND NOTHING MORE one would have accept that Jewish people are all deaf and look like ugly dwarves etc. Once one rejects the 19th century caricature and stereotype, the Nibelungen again become abstract myth-symbols. I have emphasised that there are MANY aspects to the Ring and if pressed I will say that Rassentheorie may be just one aspect of this. I believe it to be a negligible one, and something that becomes less and less apparent after Das Rheingold. I believe the Hegelian, Marxist, and Schopenhauerian aspects to be vastly more important. To elevate Rassentheorie to the status of being the CENTRAL meaning of the Ring is Hilterism. Interpreted in this way it becomes true that 'to understand National Socialism one must first understand Wagner' (Adolf Hitler). I understand Wagner - that is why I do not understand National Socialism. That is why I do not understand repeated attempts to interpret everything in Wagner primarily and only from the perspective of Rassentheorie. And then to defend Wagner in Israel after proposing such an interpretation - what would motivate someone to want to interpret Wagner in this way? It makes me shudder with horror to imagine. Mats says I do not see the man Wagner in his works. I am afraid I do see more than fleeting glances. But I do not choose to dwell on this aspect of Wagner. Rather I choose to see the Hegelian/Schopenhauerian Idealist. Of course he failed miserably to live up to his own ideals as most of us do - but they are inspiring ideals nonetheless. To fail to see that is to be a blind cynic who can only dwell in the stench of Wagner's excrements. To see this and only this in another human being - that is truly evil. It is a degeneration to the level of that same excrement. That is why I find this discussion so distastful and can only see in it a smear campaign against Wagner. Lastly when I say that late Wagner is Absolute Music and orchestral I mean by that this is what makes the works poetic, dramatic, and philosophical. It is in the same way that late Beethoven is poetic,dramatic and philosophical. That is to say that the ESSENCE of the poetic, the dramatic and the philosophical is music! Of course this is just Schopenhauer all over again. That is also what Wagner is all about. Events on the stage become mere 'acts of music' to use Wagner's own expression. It was of course partly the centrality of music in Schopenhauer that influenced Wagner so heavily. Satoshi Akima Sydney, Australia [log in to unmask]