Wagner's scandals
From a human point of view,
his life was only scandals.
As a politic activist,
he just about made enemies with everyone.
His marriage was a failure,
so the only thing he did in it
was to deceive her,
looking constantly for other women,
choosing only married ones,
as if they were the only proper challenge.
Thus he tried assiduously and desperately
with Mathilde Wesendonck
and wrote the whole of "Tristan" in the process,
but she was a wise and virtuous lady
who preferred her husband.
Wagner took instead the wife
of his best friend and favourite conductor,
Hans von Bülow, Cosima, the daughter of Franz Liszt,
his only child, and twenty-four years younger
than her second husband, already a mother of two children,
but she managed well, surviving Wagner 47 years.
Of course, von Bülow was enraged
and never could forgive him
but committed the mistake of venting all his ire
not on Wagner but on his protector,
that fantastic King Louis II of Bavaria,
yet another victim of the opera composer's human ruthlessness,
who never quite got over Wagner's base misconduct
and betrayal of his friends,
his favourite conductor, and his sponsor,
who lost all the trust of his Bavarian people
and became an isolated victim of delusion.
Wagner didn't care. He just went on
his ruthless ways, abusing Jews in music,
sacrificing anyone who came into his path
and used them all or just abused them.
After him came Nazism
making him a god and idol of their madness.
Nietzsche was another of his victims.
What about his music, then?
Extremely pompous and bombastic,
presumptuos and pretentious,
and his opera librettos are distortions
of what could have been good stories,
but occasionally now and then
there are some things that you could listen to.
Poetry by Christian Lanciai
Read 452 times
Written on 2008-04-16 at 10:30
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
