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English original here

Translated by Lawrence

Ele era um homenzinho pequenino, com uma cabeça grande demais para seu corpo — um homenzinho adoentado. Ele sofria dos nervos. Ele tinha problemas de pele. Para ele, era uma agonia ter que usar qualquer coisa próximo à pele que fosse mais áspera do que a seda. E ele tinha ilusões de grandeza.  (more…)

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Part 8 of 8

Gelassenheit

We can say that the plot of the Ring is simply this: Western man, in the person of Wotan, finally awakens to the destructiveness of his thumotic nature, and wills his own end. (See my review of Duchesne’s Uniqueness of Western Civilization for a discussion of how Western man is preeminently thumotic man.) (more…)

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Part 7 of 8

Siegfried

If Wotan is the main character of the Ring, Siegfried is its hero. However, in dealing with the character of Siegfried we do not depart from our discussion of Wotan at all. This is because Siegfried, like many of the other characters in the Ring, is a kind of hypostatization of an aspect of Wotan himself.  (more…)

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Part 6 of 8

Das Rheingold

When the events of Das Rheingold begin, the Wotan-Loge relationship is already well-established, and the primeval crimes described earlier are long past. However, the opera begins with yet another crime against nature: Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold. (more…)

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Part 5 of 8

The story of the Ring involves four ages, similar to those taught in Tradition.

The Age of Titans is the period represented by figures somehow more primordial than the gods: Erda, the Norns, and possibly the Rhine daughters. Events in this age are not depicted in the Ring; they are merely referred to (primarily in Götterdämmerung).

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Part 4 of 8

Wotan and the Faustian West

As noted in the Introduction to this essay, at the time of the Ring’s conception Wagner was an anarchist revolutionary. Major influences on his thinking included Bakunin, Feuerbach, Hegel, and possibly Marx (though of these only Bakunin was an anarchist). (more…)

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Part 3 of 8

Wagner’s Use of Sources for the Ring

As a brief summary of how Wagner makes use of the major sources discussed in section three above, I don’t think one could do any better than this paragraph from an article by Elizabeth Magee:

Looking back, we can see how the Eddas supplied most of Das Rheingold, (more…)

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Part 2 of 8

The Story of Der Ring des Nibelungen

For the uninitiated, I will now tell the story of the Ring, confining myself to essentials. Even the initiated would do well to read this summary, just to re-familiarize themselves with the story, as the account of Wagner’s use of the source material to follow will presuppose that one is well-acquainted with the events of all four operas. (more…)

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Part 1 of 8

1. Introduction

Richard Wagner is the man principally responsible for keeping the Germanic mythological tradition alive in the modern world. Countless individuals have been exposed to that tradition through Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and it is safe to say that at any given moment somewhere in the world some portion of the Ring is being played or performed. (more…)

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In 1878 Nietzsche sent a copy of his book Human, All Too Human to Richard Wagner. At the same time Wagner sent Nietzsche a copy of the verse for his opera Parsifal. Nietzsche was later to write that when received this text, “I felt as if I heard an ominous sound – as if two swords had crossed.”[1] (more…)

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Part 3 of 3

IV.

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Part 2 of 3

III.

Given the concept of “tendency,” it is easy to see an intimate relation between the work of Wagner and of Nietzsche. (more…)

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Part 1 of 3

“I simply said to you that Wagner was the greatest man who ever lived. I didn’t say that he was God himself, but I was tempted . . .”

— Pierre Louÿs (letter to Debussy)

“‘Let us look one century ahead, and let us suppose my attack against two thousand years of unnaturalness and the desecration of man should succeed. (more…)

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Richard Wagner was born 200 years ago today in Leipzig in the kingdom of Saxony. He died on February 13, 1883 in Venice. As an artist, intellectual, author, and cultural force, Wagner has left an immense metapolitical legacy, which is being evaluated and appropriated in the North American New Right’s Wagner Bicentennial Symposium, which will continue through the end of May with articles by Collin Cleary, Christopher Pankhurst, and others. (more…)

The great Wagner Machine–Siegfried and Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung

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It heaves and groans. It shimmies and clicks. One holds one’s breath during the best parts, hoping it will not malfunction and ruin the whole evening. One fears for the performers, halfway expecting it to devour them.

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Richard Wagner by Arno Breker, Bayreuth

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Not symphonic music, but rather the shattering roar of cannon announced the birth of Richard Wagner on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig. The German kingdom of Saxony had been overrun by the French troops of Napoleon Bonaparte as he made a last-ditch effort to reassert dominance over Europe.[1]

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Karl Marx reserved a special place of contempt for those he termed “reactionists.” These comprised the alliance that was forming around his time among all classes of people, high-born and low, who aimed to return to a pre-capitalist society. These were the remnants of artisans, aristocrats, landowners, and pastors, who had seen the ravages of industrialism and money-ethics then unfolding. (more…)

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“Your themes — they almost always consist of even values, of half, quarter, eighth notes; they are syncopated and tied, to be sure, but nonetheless persevere in what is often a machinelike, stamping, hammering inflexibility and inelegance. (more…)

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Portuguese translation here

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body — a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.  (more…)

A night at the opera: Adolf Hitler with Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner

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Part 4 of 4

Wagner and National Socialist Germany

Richard Wagner has long been reviled by Jews as the intellectual and spiritual precursor to Adolf Hitler who, according to William Shirer, once declared: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”[1] (more…)

Arno Breker, Bust of Richard Wagner

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Part 3 of 4

Wagner’s Music Dramas as Coded Anti-Semitism

T. W. Adorno and Wagner biographer Robert Gutman began a modern Jewish intellectual tradition (more…)

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Part 2 of 4

Wagner’s Racial Thinking

In addition to his concern about the baleful Jewish influence on German culture, Wagner, under the influence of Darwinism and the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, became increasingly concerned about the fate of the White race generally. (more…)

Richard Wagner, 1813–1883

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Part 1 of 4

Richard Wagner was a one man artistic and intellectual movement whose shadow fell across all of his contemporaries and most of his successors. Other composers had influence; Wagner had a way of thinking named after him. It has been claimed that “never since Orpheus has there been a musician whose music affected so vitally the life and art of generations.”[1]  (more…)

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Bryan Magee
The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000

Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (just Wagner and Philosophy in the UK) combines two of my favorite subjects into an informative, stimulating, and highly readable book. Creativity and critical reflection are two very different activities, and excellence in one is seldom accompanied by excellence in the other. (more…)

2,373 words

Bryan Magee
Aspects of Wagner
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988

In preparation for the Wagner bicentennial on May 22, I have been listening to, watching, and reading about Wagner non-stop. But one’s enjoyment of art and ideas is magnified by sharing them with others. So I am going to get you in the Wagner spirit, or drive you crazy trying, (more…)

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Today is the 130th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s death in Venice. May 22, 2013 is the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth. To mark this occasion, Counter-Currents/North American New Right will run a symposium on “Our Wagner.” The symposium will consist of essays, reviews, poems, podcasts, and videos on Wagner’s life, work, and ongoing significance for the metapolitical project of the North American New Right and the New Right in general. (more…)