Reviving Hitler's Favorite Music

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Reviving Hitler's Favorite Music Click here for Full Issue of EIR Volume 9, Number 35, September 14, 1982 Reviving Hitler's favorite music In Seattle, the Weyerhaeuserfamily is promoting Wagner's Ring cycle as a wedgefor the "new dark age" within the U.S. , writes Mark Calney If you want to see true Wagner you must go to Seattle. greeted not by the presence of our local Northwestpatricians -Winifred Wagner in black tie, which one would expect during the German cycle, but rather the flannel shirt and denim set. There were It was precisely 106 years ago in the ancient Bavarian forest cowboys from Colorado, gays from San Francisco, the on the outskirts of the German village of Bayreuth, that the neighborhood Anglican priest, and what appeared to be the first complete cycle of Richard Wagner's The Ring of the entire anthropology department from the local university, Nibelungs was performed. It was a most regal affair. This dispersed among the crowd. I overheard conversations in was to be the unveiling of mankind's greatest artistic achieve­ Japanese, German, Spanish, and Texan. A number of these ment, a four-day epic opera concerning the mythical birth pilgrims came from around the world-from Switzerland, and destiny of Man, depicting his various struggles amidst a South Africa, Tasmania, Chile, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia­ flotsamof dragons, dwarfs, and gods. Who was to attend this from 25 different countriesand from every state in the union. festival heralding the "New Age" in Wagner's "democratic For some it was their eighth sojournto this idyllically under­ theater?" populated part of America, to participate in the revelries of The premier day of Das Rheingold found the Bayreuth the only festival in the world which contiguously performs theater stuffed to the rafters with every imaginable repre­ the German and English cycles of the Ring (14 days), and sentative of the European oligarchy from Genoa to St. Pe­ has won renown for surpassing Bayreuth in presenting Wag­ tersburg. There was the manipUlative Malwida von Meysen­ ner's "true romantic" staging and costumes. burg, who had her own Bayreuth villa. Her friends included The English cycle, as planned, tended to draw the middle­ Giuseppe Mazzini (sponsor of the Mafiaand the proto-fascist class local yokels, those whom George BernardShaw would Young Europe Movement), radical Anglo-Swiss agent Alex­ certainly call the "imperfect" Wagnerites. They, however, ander Herzen, and French racist Count Joseph de Gobineau. were offered consolation at the Wagner Gift Shop in the loge, Limping slowly behind her, next to his sister and her fiance, where all the necessary instruments for pragmatic interpre­ we see the vile Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, looking sick tation could be found. Alongside the numerous Wagner re­ to his stomach, as usual. And over there in the grand entou­ cordings and books, including one on how young children rage beside Emperor Wilhelm I was that sly old Venetian, can perform their own Wagner plays, was a slew of such Prince Max von Thurn and Taxis, aide-de-camp to King "pop" items as. T-shirts of Wagner leaning on the Seattle Ludwig II of Bavaria from whose golden hoard the Bayreuth Space Needle, posters, gold jewelry, and the popular "Sieg­ complex had been built. fried for President" buttons. Was there not one republican to be found in the lot? The newcomers, of course, may have shared the fear that Where were Germany's great military generals, scientists, the translation of a great work of poetry from its original and statesmen who had built that nation? Where was Verdi? language into another required a poet of somewhat equal Where was Brahms? stature to do justice to the work. I am glad to report that The evening of Aug. 1, 1982 was the opening night for Andrew Porter's translation of the Ring did not suffer from the beginning of the English Ring cycle, The Rheingold, and this problem. That is primarily because in all of Richard as I entered the lobby of the Seattle Opera House, I was Wagner's works one cannot find a single shred of poetry. EIR September 14, 1982 National 59 © 1982 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. The curtain rose on the swimming Rhinemaidens. Though the ideology of racism. Wagner, of course, was a raving anti­ this is not the proper place for a much-needed detailed cri­ Semite, and Bayreuth served as a cesspool for the collection tique of Wagner's music, the great musicologist and student of Europe's leading Anglo-Saxon race theorists, such as de of Brahms, Heinrich Schenker, was certainly correct when Gobineau, and Bernard Forster, who married Nietzsche's he stated that "Richard Wagner was the single most impor­ sister Elisabeth. Cosima Wagner, Richard's wife, was instru­ tant reason for the degeneration of music after Brahms." mental in ensuring the publication of de Gobineau's works, Throughout the entire opera cycle, Wagner proceeded to drag and Wagner himself published excerpts of de Gobineau's the audience through one mere feeling-state after another; Theory of Inequality of the Races. there was never a quality evoked in the human mind which One of Wagner's main projects was an attempt to "Ar­ reflected an uplifting of the soul such as one would witness yanize" Christianity. He writes in a letter from Venice in in a performance of Beethoven's Fidelio or Mozart's The 1883, not long after the first production of his last opera, Magic Flute. Furthermore, if one were to begin a search for Parsifal, which deals with the pagan Teutonic version of the the origins of that insipid "background music" played be­ myth of the Holy Grail: "By tracing the roots of the German hind every motion picture and television production that ever tribes it can be demonstrated that they have talents and traits came out of Hollywood, the gtanuscripts of Richard Wagner which have been lost by the entire Semiticized so-called would be worthy of primary inspection. (Just listen, if you world." can stay awake, to Act I, Scene II of The Valkyrie!) From Valhalla to the bunker There are some who say that Wagner's music is evil because people such as Hitler listened to his operas. This is Scratch an ardent Wagner not true.Wagner's music is evil because it created, in large enthusiast, and you will find an part, the counterculture which produced Hitler directly. Hit­ ler once said that to understand the Nazi party you must first enemy of civilization. The Ford understand Wagner. To understand Wagner is to know that Foundation launched Seattle's Wagner is the music of oligarchs. Ring cult, and Trilateralist George Wagner, who was bought and paid for by the homosexual "Mad King" Ludwig II, of the Wittelsbach family of the Weyerhaeuser maintains it. Until Kingdom of Bavaria, played a leading role as a battering ram now it has remained a mere against the influence of classical European neo-Platonic cul­ beachhead in the assault on ture. It was against this culture-which was committed, as Bee�oven was, to creating a Europe of constitutional repub­ culture in America, but afull­ lics of scientific and industrial progress on the American scale invasion is planned over the model-that a still-powerful feudal oligarchy deployed Wag­ next year. ner, Nietzsche, and a host of other anti-human degenerates. The Ring is, in fact, an epic of the creation of the oligar­ chy. It is based upon a series of myths handed down fromthe ancient Northern European tribes of certain pagan tree­ worshipping cults. These myths had been popularized in the One month after this letter was written, Wagner died in 18th century through the publiction of The Poems of Ossian, that citadel of oligarchs, Venice, at the Palazzo Vendramin­ a hoax directredby British intelligence operativeDavid Hume, Kalergi. It was the Venetian circles of Count Coudenhove­ who admitted to the fraud on his deathbed. Unfortunately, Kalergi, including the Thurn and Taxis family, who later the Ossian hoax hoodwinked a number of people including created the fascist Pan-European Union and its inner elite, Herder, who disseminated it throughout Germany·. the Thule Society. One of the leaders of this cult was the The story of the Ring re�olves around the task of Wotan, well-known race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (a king of the gods, to seek the salvation of his dying order of relative of the Nazi-appeaser Neville Chamberlain), who tragically flawedgods through the creation of a mortal hero, marriedWagner's daughter Eva at Wahnfried, Wagner's vil­ who will champion a chosen race of mankind. This hero, la in Bayreuth in 1908. Chamberlain was personally involved Siegfried, is begotten through the typical aristocratic mech­ in recruiting Adolf Hitler, a German military intelligence anisms of infidelity and incest. Siegfried is ultimately con­ stringer at the time, into the swastika-ridden Thule Society. sumed in an orgy of death, climaxed by the fieryim molation He invited Hitler to the first of many visits to Wahnfried on of Valhalla, the kingdom of the gods. Oct. 7, 1923. On Nov. 9, 1923 Hitler led the famous Beerhall Aside from the more obvious pompous nature of these Putsch, and Wagner's son Siegfried was found footing the operas, the key oligarchical trait woven throughout them is bill for the escape of putsch member Hermann Goering to 60 National EIR September 14, 1982 Venice. " The personality is the goal of neo-aristocratic politics. Many pages could be filledaccounting the close relation­ The quality of human beings is the goal, not the quantity.
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