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2007-07-26 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-

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Posted by Anonymoose 2007-07-26 13:58|| || Front Page|| [1 views ] Top

#1 To paraphrase someone I heard the yesterday Wagner was the original moonbat. He may have loved this.

Posted by someone2 2007-07-26 14:17|| 2007-07-26 14:17|| Front Page Top

#2 Actually, Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds. [rimshot]

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2007-07-26 14:41|| 2007-07-26 14:41|| Front Page Top

#3 To put Wagner in his proper, if bizarre perspective, it would be hard to beat director Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975), which while it featured the equally bizarre life of Franz Liszt, played by Roger Daltrey, who hands down was the first rock star, it also features a justifiably surreal Richard Wagner.

And if you know the history of the two, from cigar smoking Russian countesses with mummified husbands in their closets, to Lola Montez' performing a strip tease on the table of a royal banquet and trashing a Parisian hotel room in a fit of lust, with visitations to the intensely insane Friedrich Nietzsche in the insane asylum, the movie may not be as wacky and surreal as it seems.

Though the infamous scene of the ribbon dance by nude women around the 15' tall penis of Liszt is obviously Wagnerian in character. Only in a Wagnerian opera will you see a 7' tall woman with 3' of hair, wearing little more than a fishnet body stocking, sing over a 3x normal size orchestra playing at full volume.

Posted by Anonymoose 2007-07-26 16:11|| 2007-07-26 16:11|| Front Page Top

#4 the intensely insane Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche couldn't have been too many tacos short of a fiesta. It takes a pretty agile mind to come up with one-liners like:

"Without music life would be a mistake."

Or, my favorite:

"The last true Christian died on the cross."

I'm glad to say that I have a friend or two who are living disproof of that last bit of cynicism.

Posted by Zenster">Zenster 2007-07-26 16:52|| 2007-07-26 16:52|| Front Page Top

#5 Yeah...them zany Germans.

Posted by tu3031 2007-07-26 18:57|| 2007-07-26 18:57|| Front Page Top

#6 Hell, a quick look through Groves encyclopedia's composer biographies will give an amazing number of examples of sexual scandals, wasted lifes, drunkeness, drug abuse, alternate lifestyles, and stormy scenes and illicit passions among composers through the ages.

About the only first-rate composer with a totally blameless and conventional personal and professional life was J.S. Bach. Most of the others were out there... and in some cases, wa-a-a-a-y out there. (And in the case of Tchaikovsky, way in there, closetwise.)

Posted by Sgt. Mom 2007-07-26 19:46|| www.celiahayes.com]">[www.celiahayes.com] 2007-07-26 19:46|| Front Page Top

#7 Instead, the audience was given a plot turned topsy turvy, a villain turned hero, a hero turned wimp -- and a few minutes of full frontal nudity.

Who was

Posted by Whusoper Mussolini8129 2007-07-26 20:18|| 2007-07-26 20:18|| Front Page Top

#8 Be vewwy quiet—I'm hunting wabbits.

Posted by Eric Jablow">Eric Jablow 2007-07-26 20:18|| 2007-07-26 20:18|| Front Page Top

#9 *&%$#@ links are bad.

#7 Instead, the audience was given a plot turned topsy turvy, a villain turned hero, a hero turned wimp -- and a few minutes of full frontal nudity.

Who was nekkid? They don't make opera singers like they used to.

http://auv.blogspot.com/2007/07/klaus-florian-vogt-watch.html

Posted by Whusoper Mussolini8129 2007-07-26 20:20|| 2007-07-26 20:20|| Front Page Top

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