Barbarians who seem to lack any access to Beauty’s divine joy, and therefore hate it, and thus try to destroy what they can’t have.
MC The Fifth Column
Let’s assume, just for the fun of it, that they blindfold you, help you up the wide stairs of the San Francisco Opera and lower you carefully into a velvet fauteuil. You hear the murmur of many voices, a squeaking and scraping of instruments being tuned, and a few harsh coughs as mucous residues are brought under control. Then, on a more mechanical note, a different squeaking and scraping as the curtain opens. Silence! Suddenly the tentative moan of wind-instruments, perhaps oboes and bass clarinets. Horns, or possibly tubas, trumpets, bassoons, bass trumpets, trombones, contrabass trombones and contrabass tubas join the gradually accelerating symphony until a ringing crash shatters the ominous tonal procession. As an old Wagner aficionado you have already twigged the conundrum: this is Mime wielding his hammer while forging anew the sword Nothung that was broken. A sword intended for his mighty foster-son Siegfried who must kill Fafner the Dragon and divest him of his most precious treasure, the one Ring of Power. Which, as the nasty dwarf hopes, will thus end up in his own claws and so make him Master of the World! With a deep sigh you lean back, and while the powerful music overwhelms your heart and mind, its visual setting unfolds before your inner eye.
The foreground is part of a cave that occupies nearly three quarters of the stage. Two naturally formed entrances open out into the dark and ominous forest. At the rear wall stands a large hearth fashioned from real rock. Only the huge bellow is artificial. The vent — real as well — disappears in the roof from rock. A huge anvil can be seen, also other tools of a smithy. Original Libretto
When Mime laments the Forced Drudgery! with a voluminous tenor while doggedly banging his hammer, you can’t take it anymore. You jump to your feet and rip the blindfold from your eyes. And, from your Grand Tier Premium seat, what do you see? The above! A hideously illuminated scrap-yard with a smashed-up trailer and a stunted street-bum banging his Made in China Wal-Mart mallet onto a piece of rusty iron.
Stunned, you sit down again. And while you do so, the terrible truth dawns on you. Namely that you have been tricked into attending the modern production of a great classical opera.
Now let’s assume you weren’t in such a great mood anyway, because some run in with your Japanese SUV or Siamese tomcat or crooked solicitor had darkened the day already, and all it needed to blow your top was a piece of theatrical hogwash like this. Thus you jump to your feet again and, with all the power your lungs can muster, begin to curse the heathen hogs to kingdom come.
Which, for a while at least, has the desired effects. The orchestra stops playing. Harp, trombone and first violin allow for a sip from the pocket flask while the conductor opts for a line. Mime drops his hammer and pops another upper. The audience is in turmoil. Some people stand and stare. Others use the opportunity and rip off programs when nobody looks. Old Rebecca Greenberg-Traurig, granny to some of the House’s foremost sponsors, goes down with the vapours. David Dunn Bauer, a celebrated art critic and rabbi, recognizes you as sincerely heterosexual and therefore, amongst other deviations, terroristically inclined. The House’s General Director, David Gockley, widely derided in certain circles as one of the major innovators in American opera, appears on stage while frantically hissing into his diamond-studded I-pod. Francesca Zambello, the production’s legendary artistic director, rolls into the main isle and yells insults at you that would make a harbour trollop blush. From your elevated position you glare down at her heavily powdered pizza-face and hurl your French fauteuil at it. But the damn thing misses by half a yard and only flattens her recently wed wife, Faith Gay (sic).
Finally the door is kicked down and all the world’s cops jump on you, and you are blissfully saved from watching the rest of the outrage.
Well, too bad really! Because by refusing so callously to consider the SFO’s magnificent production of Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelung, you’ve missed one the season’s cultural highlights. Just read what the assorted press had to say of the old semitophobe’s most acclaimed oeuvre.
Wagner’s SIEGFRIED a Stunning Smasher, informs Opera Warhorses, which is most likely the most consummate praise ever.
Zambello’s “decaying American landscape” and “world ravaged by greed and neglect” — on Michael Yeargan’s sets with piles of garbage, polluted water and smoke-belching chimneys” — is OK, we are categorically assured by Janos Gereben in The Examiner.
Francesca Zambello, the first American woman to direct Wagner’s macho four-opera epic, was loudly cheered (if also booed by a handful), writes Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times.
A Siegfried of unparalleled physicality and imagination. Director Francesca Zambello and her forces have created a five-hour opera that plays like a two-hour action flick, enthuses Michael J. Vaughan in The Opera Critic.
And more of the same. But to get a real in-depth impression of the grandiose event, let us look at what one of the more subtle and thoughtful art critics has to say in his international journal for the arts where we are treated prominently to his curriculum vitae.
David Dunn Bauer is a rabbi, stage director, critic, and educator. He is an alumnus of Yale University, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Pacific School of Religion, in addition to having studied with Nadia Boulanger in 1976 and at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 2010 and 2011. Based in San Francisco, he coordinates the Jewish Queer Sexual Ethics Project at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry and is the Bay Area Director of Programming for Nehirim, the leading national provider of community programming for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Jews, partners, and allies. He writes regularly on issues of Torah, sexuality, Queer culture and community, and the arts.
Truly impressive credentials, you will agree, and particularly appropriate to give the stunning, smashing SFO production its proper due. In addition, Mr. Bauer’s journal styles itself The Berkshire Review, a somewhat misleading label since it clearly tries to give the impression that its editor is in some way akin to bygone critical genii like George Bernard Shaw who commanded the ethical and aesthetic clout to understand what the whole incredible Ring was really all about.
Here follows a brief compression of Rabbi Dunn Bauer’s critical acclaim.
Francesca Zambello forged something new and wondrous from Wagner’s tremendous and often toxic masterwork. I want to proclaim the true innovative triumph of the whole endeavour, the way in which Zambello told a worthy and contemporary feminist story through Wagner’s Romantic score, his heroes and heroines. While the sung (German) text remained unaltered, SFO’s (American) supertitles never referred to “the Rhine” (do you remember the Rhine?), only a nameless “river” and, as has become more and more the custom, often provided a slang and ironic commentary that bent the meaning of the original words.
For this Jewish Wagnerian who feels profound discomfort with Wagnerian anti-Semitism, I was deeply relieved at how thoroughly Zambello’s production eschewed the racist stereotypes implicit in the text and score. The prime Nibelungs, Alberich and Mime, were not by nature ugly or evil, more troubled and embittered. The Valhallan Gods were not lofty in manner or motivation. Neither the Volsung Twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, nor their love-child Siegfried shone with gilded character against the dark horde of their moral inferiors. The ethical playing field was rendered strikingly even for a game played among deities and dwarves, goddesses of wisdom, demigod heroes, and scheming murderers.
As if to mete out a further measure of Borscht-Belt retribution for repugnant Aryan sins past, Zambello introduced an unprecedented amount of shtick into this portentous musical mythology. There were enough precisely timed elements of low comedy and enough laugh-provoking prop gags (beer bottles, butt kicks to God, telephones, televisions, remote controls, croquet mallets, and lap dances) to fill a revival of Gianni Schicci. In a rough tally, we find that Zambello transported the Ring out of the Rhine to the American River; brought the gods down (and the gnomes up) to a very humane plane; spiked Teutonic mead with vaudeville borscht; enriched the quality of women’s experience and agency beyond the stale limits of conventional heroine-ism; and erased the ethnic caricatures of the most offensively anti-Semitic work of dramatic art to hold an enduring place on the world stage.
And here a few visual highlights of the incredible extravaganza. The comments are lifted from Mr. Dunn Bauer’s unabridged critical piece.
Alberich steals the Gold from the Rhinemaidens: “pretty, blonde and sassy saloon girls”
Alberich:“never registered as mean or perverted, just downtrodden”
Hagen and Alberich: “Crush a baby Nibelung for sport, sexually abuse your adult son for control, and then you’re a force to be reckoned with”
Götterdämmerung with Brunhilde, Hagen, Siegfried and a few SS veterans: “At the end of the most comedic Götterdämmerung ever… Zambello crafted a truly redemptive conclusion (the shtick, Boss, the stick!)”
Which seems to be a persiflage of Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” and is therefore a perfect epitome of the entire hideous and miserable travesty.
Mr. Dunn Bauer, himself in danger to be labelled an ethnic caricature, and a damn queer one at that, has correctly identified Alberich as one of his own tribe. Though imperatives of loyalty forbid him to enlarge on the matter, he surely understands that the nasty dwarf is alive and well and wields the one Ring of Power to his heart’s content. What better therefore to divert attention to Siegfried’s heirs and crush a baby Nibelung for sport, an elegant simile clearly inspired by Elie Wiesel’s masterwork Night wherein the famed Nobelist and crackpot saw with his very own eyes how lorry-loads of small babies were hurled into a gigantic furnace?
Seen in this context, it is of course small wonder that a vengeful schmuck like Mr. Dunn Bauer rejoices about the mountains of shtick that disfigure Wagner’s incomparable magnum opus like plague spots a beautiful Rhinemaiden. Yet what seems odd is that he never mentions the generous sponsors who made this Twenty Five Million Dollar Enterprise possible. Because they are easy to make out. Just look at SFO’s official website and you will find, among small fry like La Boulange who occasionally doles out a free espresso, the usual suspects, namely a few international investment corporations who obviously laid out most of the aforementioned millions.
Just as in other great houses where there are frantic and vain attempts to destroy Wagner’s glorious legacy by presenting it as a theatrical garbage heap. Which gives us once again a clear idea about this particular type of barbarian who seem to lack any access to Beauty’s divine joy, and therefore hate it, and thus try to destroy what they can’t have.
Here three more examples.
The Rhinemaidens taunting Alberich Dresden Semper Oper
Götterdämmerung London Royal Opera
The Rhinemaidens Bayreuth Festspielhaus
As for those who are firmly grounded in Christian-humanist ethics and aesthetics, the smutty antics of the San Francisco Opera can’t be anything but the convulsions of an utterly diseased counter-culture that will slide back into the gutter once its sponsors have been divested of the one Ring of Power.
Which, according to the developments in Greece and elsewhere, will happen rather sooner than later.
Michael Colhaze’s website is www.michael-colhaze.biz. Email him.
The Rhinemaidens Arthur Rackham
The Joys of Jihad: Islamentable, Isatrocious, Isbetrayal
Nordics versus Implicit Jews in "The Switch"
When Heidi went to Heaven 
Readers may judge whether the set is more or less hideous than the 2004 Toronto cycle, although the costumes there, at least, were more tasteful.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/features/opera/ring.html
It’s always tragic when leftists and jews attempt art.
What this shows is envy and hatred.
Clear as day. This is the ugliness of Jewish motivations, and the real animus behind multiculturalism, equality, and diversity.
This article brilliantly illustrates how Christianity differs from Judaism. Throughout its history in Europe the church has always sought the good, the beautiful and the true in every people they encountered and have found ways to incorporate those elements into our culture. Often seen as a great weakness, in fact it has been a great strength which has enriched our people. Look at Christmas. Clearly entwined with the Solstice – neither was destroyed – rather the beauty of the returning sun after the dark time and the return of hope are perfect symbols for Christmas. Look what the Jews did to Christmas – pervert it from a celebration of love and hope into a crass commercial orgy of excess.
Un idea perplexi na,
This brings to mind a band named TYR. Most of you will recognize the name. They bring Nordic history and traditional music to Heavy Metal. If nothing else, look up “Sinklar’s Visa” on YouTube and listen to it. It’s about a bunch of farmers righteously defending their people.
What is interesting is that the trend in Wagner-interpretations is exactly the opposite of what it is elsewhere: historically informed performances are the rage of the day, played with period instruments, of course, just how they played when the composer was alive, or how he must have intended it. But with Wagner, it’s somehow exactly the opposite, not only do not they strictly adhere to the composer’s instructions, they actually willfully change the message and the story to the diametric opposite of his intentions…
OFF TOPIC…..Tuned into NPR, they are celebrating the dreaded Norman Leers 90th birthday and noting his ‘activism’.
He of the ‘gotta get back at Fr Coglin [NPR calling Coglin 'infamous'] I heard him on the radio when I was very young, he who disliked FDR and Joos’.
But I remember a Catholic Newspaper way back [1972] noting there was nothing funny in his show “MAUD’, in one episode the joke was 40 ish Maud found herself pregnant and went to get an abortion.
@Alice Teller
You said:
“This article brilliantly illustrates how Christianity differs from Judaism. Throughout its history in Europe the church has always sought the good, the beautiful and the true in every people they encountered and have found ways to incorporate those elements into our culture.”
Answer:
Agreed. Not only have they destroyed Christmas, look what they have done to the Church throughout America. Fooled them into 501c3 status which exchanged their Sovereign status under biblical law to a slave status under UCC Judaic economic fictitious codes, statutes etc.
Made many Churches (mega churches) into a nothing more than money making operations to support the anti Christ (“Jews”/”Israel”).
Turned much of Christianity into a laughing stock by twisting basic Christian doctrine into Talmudic material Zionist claptrap.
Exchanged the truth of Christ for uber lies; and this while converting whole sections of our European populations into little wussies; afraid to “offend” anyone much less even think of giving the ultimate sacrifice for Christ or their follow kinsman.
This is not true of all Christian Churches but it sure is of the TV evangelist- mega churches and most large Protestant and/or Catholic Churches. Who in the heck are the Protestants even protesting these days? And people wonder why whites are running from the church in record numbers these days. It makes me want to vomit!
The Jewish Communist goals in America were of course, basically the same for Europe proper.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”
They seemed to have done a damn good job of accomplishing what they set out to do.
Reference
The Communist Manifesto
Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963
@Alice Teller:
The church was filled with Europeans not middle easterners, so it inherited the natural sense of beauty which the Greeks had.
The Greeks sought and made everything beautiful.
Perhaps that is the goal of Jews. To make America and Europe ugly and vulgar with all the art and immigration.
@TyronRobertParsons: Wish I wrote that!
@Sandy:
He is partly idiot, partly smart. This is from his smart part.
“The shtick, Boss, the stick!” Not a persiflage of Conrad’s. An allusion to, “Zee plane, Boss, zee plane!” from the opening scene of Fantasy Island, a TV series from the late 70s in which a brown dwarf (Herve Villechaize) announced each week’s airborne arrival of B-list guest stars. A more fitting cultural icon for the Rabbi, don’t you think?
There was an excellent article – and I think it was on TOO – on a German classical composer of the Third Reich, However, I cannot find this by using the arts and culture index (there is no entry for music) on TOO, only Mahler and Wagner. I got as far as listening to an excerpt from the music, but have now forgotten the name and strangely web searches don’t seem to work. Can anyone help trace this article?
Julian Lee’s anthem for men of the West
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7oY89OelA4&list=PLA3598F052B3BA832&index=1&feature=plcp
For a Shakespeare class I had in college, I was forced to attend a local theatre company’s production of King Lear, which involved, amongst other perversions, modern construction scaffolding as the set, and a fully nude black man as Edgar. I managed to stay until the intermission (long enough to have experienced enough of the sickening thing to write the required review) and then promptly left.
PS: David Dunn Bauer’s credentials/bio here reads like a mocking joke, but I’m sure he will stay safely ensconced in academia for life considering how often the words “queer” and “Jewish” appear in his cv.
Ugh! I am literally sick to my stomach after reading about this trashing of a Cultural Treasure by dirty Jews!
I hope more African refugees stream into Israel now!!!
In fact the news just said that an ‘Islamist’ just won the Egyptian election, maybe we will get lucky and he will void the Camp David Accords, furthering isolating evil Israel.
Also there are still places that have good classical music. They show old performances of classic pieces from like the 1950s to the 1960s all the time on a program called ‘Classic Arts Showcase’ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Arts_Showcase )
It is one of the Whitest channels on television! About the only non-White I ever see on there is Yo-Yo Ma, and hey, at least he has a cool name.
It is not just Wagner. A few years back, I went to a “modern” version of Carmen. The scenery was so off-putting, that I just couldn’t enjoy the music.
To return to the vernacular of my youth: everything the Jews touch turns to shit.
Jews and leftists, essentially being slave moralists, take pleasure in degeneration, decay, and ugliness. The Ancients- the Spartans, Athenians, and Romans- knew that truth and beauty were synonymous, and so the highest ideal was always reflected in their sculpture, painting and architecture. The beautiful woman and the beautiful man were the truest, most honorable humans, the ones whose forms were to be reflected in art, so that the people could have an ideal to aspire to. From Jewish hatred and envy the religion of Christianity was born, and Christianity evolved in modern liberalism, the slave morality par excellence. The ideology of the sick, wretched, and ignorant masses. It’s they, essentially being judaized Whites, who take pleasure in the destruction of truth and beauty.
@Lancashire lad:
Paul Hindemith? However, he got in a kettle of hot soup with the Nazis over the supposedly populist character of his opera, Mathis der Maler, about Mathis Grunewald.
@Lancashire lad: I couldn’t find anything myself, you might want to try at Counter Currents Publishing…
I have only heard works from two composers who worked under the Third Reich era in Germany, Carl Orff and Wilhelm Furtwängler. The latter is mostly known as a conductor, but I heard his Symphony No. 2 (performed by Eugen Jochum and the Bavarian Radio Orchestra) and I was surprised. (This might have something to do with my low expectations: he is totally forgotten as a composer, and I listened to his symphony more out of curiosity than anything else, after listening to a number of his interpretations of others’ works.) Anyone liking late Romantic music (like Bruckner) might give it a chance. I will definitely check out his other works.
Two other composers from the Third Reich era whom I never heard (but will check them out later) are Richard Strauss (the best known of all German composers at the time) and Franz Schmidt.
All four of these gentlemen were German nationalists (and with the exception of Schmidt who died in early 1939 probably desired a German victory in the war), but none were National Socialists.
@lancashire lad
It might be Norbert Schultze. He was, if I remember well, Hitler’s favourite contemporary composer, wrote a few romantic operas and is best known for “Lili Marleen”.
And this is surprising to whom exactly?
When you have understood that Jews see themselves as at war with the whole of humanity and that they use all their power and influence in this war, whether it is in finance, politics, media, “science” or “art”, then the behaviour of these Jews in this case comes as no surprise. Degrading existing gentile art or introducing monstrosities of their own is simply part of their ethnic “mission”, which is exploiting the Goyim on the one hand and weakening them on the other hand so that they never can pose a danger to their Jewish masters. There is no better way to weaken a population than by moral degradation. Moral degradation comes in many forms but artistic degradation is surely highly effective as it corrodes the esthetic ideals of the target group. Jews have the advantage that they are themselves already morally and esthetically thoroughly degraded, so they only have to express themselves as they are. Let a Jew touch your art and he surely will corrupt it.
@The Admiral On Horseback: Robert, Michael
Thanks, I’ll check these out. It might have been Furtwangler. The general idea of the article I remember was that the music continued the tonal tradition, rather than the atonality that music critic Theodor Adorno said was inevitable for some reason, expressing great contempt for Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis on supposedly technical rather than religious grounds. The grandiose orchestras of Bruckner weren’t needed for this music – to which there was a link to an excerpt. There was no romantic agenda as such, more a continuation of the classical tradition but with popular elements through the use of melody, retention of some traditional structures, resolution, etc. There was some remark, possibly attributed to KMac, along the lines that music had to appeal to some aspect of our aural psychology such as the search for order to retain its audience.
@Bobby:
I must admit that I was, again, taken aback by the sheer malice. I understand it all intellectually but each new example of the energy spent destroying beauty and the zest and joy they express in the process comes as a bit of a shock. We cannot highlight these examples often enough.
I find it perplexing about complaints about Wagner and anti-sem. These folks really (perhaps intentionally) distort Wagner’s documented feelings about jews. And their beef about the Ring cycle is simply wrong, unless the reviewers feel guilty about something.
That should be “Gianni Schicchi”, not “Gianni Schicci.” Pronounced skee-kee, not skee-chee.
@Alice Teller: Alice, your’e a mind reader. It’s exactly the thought of the amount of “energy spent” on ugliness, frivality, and pure hatred, that crossed my mind reading and looking at this article.
How sad. I have seen several operas staged by Francesca z and she is usually really good. Too bad. Only in the land of fruits and nuts I guess.
Of course, not all modern revisionings are Judaic or anti-White.
Here, for example, is Rob Zombie’s re-staging of of the Gotterdamerung:
http://youtu.be/MZarAaCCv_Y
For more, see my essay “More Aryan than Human:
The Return of Repressed White Wisdom in Rob Zombie’s Firefly Family Films” at
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/01/rob-zombie/
Is Francesca Zambello Jewish? Or only her handlers? It seems to me that what is overlooked in the discussion, here, is the director’s “open lesbianism” (per the free encyclopedia). Generally, it has been my experience that lesbians are anti-white male, probably because they wish they were. Homosexuality, in its modern manifestation, perverts all it touches. Only when held in check by society can civilization survive.
@Alice Teller:
I agree with your post. Its so refreshing to read the clarity of those who follow the truth via the person of Jesus. Christianity is unique in that it is not found by way of Epistemology, the existential, or the pragmatic. Christianity is ontological and rooted in the personhood of Jesus Christ. Morality is only sustained through a belief in God. Europeans, at the height of our strength, were Christians. Once the majority of Europeans gave up their Christian identity, their European white identity as a whole became subverted to Alien interests. A divided house cannot stand.
-Therefore one can easily argue that the lack of European opposition to third world immigration stems from their refusal to abide in the Christian identity. Bill Maher states, “Look at Europe, their sophisticated and don’t believe in Jesus anymore.” Yes, lets look at Europe! No identity, the UN now demanding that they forever rid themselves of their homogeneity, and financial ruin. Yes, let Europe be the cautionary tale for all Nations who wish to become strong and stave off ruination-stick with the protestant work-ethic and the only path to truth and satisfaction in this life.
@49er:
Thank you. As a Christian, I do, of course, agree with you. However, after recent comments here the term Christian identity makes me very nervous. My primary point was that despite Christianity’s Middle Eastern roots, it is a very, very different religion from Judaism.
@Alice Teller:
Judaism was founded as a Near Eastern tribal religion. Although Christianity sprang from Judaism, and did so originally in Palestine, it was founded and then developed under Greco-Roman culture and Roman political administration. It is a Western religion, whereas neither Judaism nor Islam is. Theologically, it is a universal faith that has next-to-nothing in common with Judaism. Christianity is to Judaism about as “Lou Grant” (the hour-long CBS drama) was to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (the half-hour CBS situation comedy, from which the ‘Lou Grant’ character, played by Ed Asner, was spun off into an eponymous show)!
@D. K.:
You’re confusing what Christianity was vs. what Christianity is today. Christianity used to be a semi-organic belief system that united Europe. Today Christianity is a Jewish-run business that is explicitly anti-White and serves Jewish interests and coddles third world muds. The Christian WN’s on here need to realize that the vast majority of their fellow Christians are their opponents and enemies.
@Alice Teller:
My apologies, I’ve yet to experience the comments you mentioned. But what other identity is there for Europeans-secular humanists?lol And yes, I agree with you that Judaism is not Christianity. My only argument, at this point, would be that the best way to get out of the matrix like vice that tv re-education camps have over our children-is through a Christian worldview.
@49er:
Look for comments by Tyron Parsons and Arlene Johnson on most of the other current threads. You’ll soon see why Alice Teller (and not that lady only) gets nervous when “Christian identity” and similar terms are used, no matter how innocently.
@Lancashire lad: As do others who have responded to your query, I am virtually certain that the article you are thinking of did not appear at this site, but I wouldn’t count TOQ out. Perhaps you should do an archival search there.
I am also pretty certain that the only composer who fits almost every dimension of the measure you have given us is Paul Hindemith (what doesn’t fit is the fact that Hindemith left Germany for Switzerland in 1938; he feared for his wife, whose ancestry was part Jewish; Hindemith himself was completely German/Christian, going as far back as anyone could determine, and had had both ups and down in terms of government approval). It would certainly not have been Furtwängler, whose music was Postromantic in means and manner and goals—that is to say, practically speaking, his principal works were extremely long and used a gigantic orchestra. The great singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (RIP), who as a young man was a self-described protégé of the conductor and remained a profound admirer of the man and his work right up to his own death last month, said a few years ago that he thought that one of the reasons WF was chilly towards Mahler’s music was that the former recognized in the latter someone who did musically much of what he (WF) had wanted to do but did it better.
The article would obviously not have been recommending the music of the Commie Jew Kurt Weill, which, while it was frequently tuneful in a deliberately banal way (probably the only way he was capable of composing, actually) and generally used small ensembles, was motivated by his root-and-branch detestation of Germany’s Christian culture. Adorno, need I add, was a big fan of Weill.
That is quite possible, but I wouldn’t write down Furtwängler’s music, at least the first (and so far only) time I listened to his 2nd symphony I liked it.
@The Admiral On Horseback: Nor would I write it down either, my friend! I simply meant that Furtwängler’s music didn’t fit the description given by Lancashire lad.
Indeed, if you’d like to hear it again, there is an excellent recording of a live performance WF gave in 1953 with the Vienna Philharmonic available on the Orfeo label for about 13 euros (search for ASIN number B0000044WN on any of the Amazon sites; I found the best price on German Amazon). WF was unhappy with the studio recording he made with the Berlin Philharmonic two years earlier (still available on DGG), and most fans of the symphony agree with his preference for the Vienna performance. As you may know, a great many concerts were broadcast live by the ORF (Austrian Radio), which made and preserved absolutely top-quality tapes of those concerts it broadcast. This particular performance being one such and Orfeo’s release being sourced from and licensed by the ORF, the sound is just as good as DGG’s studio sound.
@49er:
No apologies necessary, simply a question of bad timing and perhaps undue timidity on my part. A Christian worldview would indeed feel like a heavenly breathe of fresh air.
@Alice Teller:
@Pierre de Craon:
I hesitate to continue this digression, since I’m hoping that after plumbing the depths of off-topic bickering in the last few threads we can all make an effort to keep our comments pertinent to the topic, but I did want to say, since it has come up, that I really appreciate both of you (and others I’m missing) continuing to show it is possible simultaneously to remain pro-white, Christian, and level-headed, in spite of trials from multiple sides.
@D. K.:
Now you tell me! I’ll count on you to come out again when the big, bad, Christophobes come back!
@Sean:
How kind of you! . It does help to keep a sense of humor. I admit to wandering far off topic but the unrelenting repetition of woe- is- me needs lightening from time to time. Kind words like yours help, too. Thanks.
@Alice Teller:
Well, so long as they do not dawdle much, Alice; I am just shooting, now, to survive through my next birthday, this October!?! “Che sara, sara!” ;-)
@D. K.:
Excusez-mois, Monsieur, mais “che sara, sara” devrait être : “que sera, sera”.
@Franklin Ryckaert:
No, actually, as I was quoting the family motto from “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), not the award-winning song from Hitchcock’s remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956)– which was actually taken from that earlier film, by the latter’s songwriters, but translated from Italian into Spanish. As someone who had studied both, inter alia, in my ill-spent youth, I have retained a fondness for the former, and developed a genuine loathing of the latter. But, then, that is just me….
@Franklin Ryckaert: Actually, the expression is quite as common in Italian as in Spanish—indeed, as far as Merriam-Webster is concerned, the standard loan form in English is the Italian version. It is, as everyone knows, properly spelt with a grave accent over each of the final a’s (sarà), but I think, given the present rough-hewn and nonscholastic context, that D. K.’s diacritic deficiencies—as much of a blow to his final grade in Italian Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics 102 as they would undoubtedly be—may be passed over in silence without causing a stir among the pigeons nesting within the silvae academi.
Incidentally, though the title of the song, originally from a Hitchcock film, that Doris Day made famous more than half a century ago employed the Spanish form, she sure as shootin’ didn’t pronounce que in the Spanish way, and her voicing of the first syllable of each verb couldn’t be taken as any sort of reliable guide either.
P.S. My use of the nominative rather than Horace’s accusative is deliberate, this being an isolated quotation in an English-language context of a common foreign expression.
@Sean: Thanks from me, too. Very kind of you, Sean.
From apostolic times to the day before yesterday, saints and Christian scholars have never, of course, been shy about reminding all and sundry of the risible limits of human reason. They clearly did so, however, not because of any sensu stricto contempt for reason as such, but because of the seemingly ineradicable temptation to treat human reason as if it were godlike. Yet when the matter is rightly understood, no other religion has ever held reason, properly formed and used, in anywhere near such high esteem. It requires little time and less research to ascertain that the “credo quia absurdum” current, long maliciously and in cartoonish form attributed to Tertullian, has never been a particularly well-paddled one in Christian thought. It is, for that matter, hardly a coincidence that, until the Tribe remade every philosophy department they touched into a
swampprotected wetland for the likes of Freud, Foucault, and Derrida, such giants as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas loomed larger in every institution’s curriculum of philosophy than theology.Though I expect little but derision for offering this view, I would not hesitate to say, using Thomistic language, that Christianity’s understanding and acknowledgment of reason’s significance is one of the marks of the True Faith.
It is precisely in the light of the foregoing that I see the great danger of Parsons-Johnson disease, which is, whatever one might say or think about American Evangelicalism per se, a very, very diseased offshoot of that stem. Yet despite the fact that virtually everyone who has engaged Parsons and Johnson in [sigh] debate (it pains me to use the word in such a context) knows full well (or ought to) that they are as representative of genuine Christianity as Gilad Atzmon is of a typical Jew, their painfully antirational fulminations, riddled with a level of detail more often found in the 600-page bodice-ripper novels once beloved of secretaries and steno pools everywhere, are triumphantly denounced as proof positive of the harm that “Christian thinking,” usually characterized as “jew-shaped” or some such equally tasteless modifier (yes, fender, I’m addressing you now), has done to “whites” or “white nationalism” or … well, you’ve read the crap yourself, Sean, and so can fill in the missing tags.
Put otherwise, is it really such a stretch to doubt that it’s coincidental that, yet again, folks claiming to defend the Cross and the Faith turn out to do them more harm than good? And can their doing so really be no more than an accident?
@Lancashire lad: It has belatedly occurred to me that Franz Schmidt, mentioned earlier by the Admiral, might indeed be another strong candidate (i.e., perhaps as good as or better even than Hindemith). I am abashed to admit that my much less extensive knowledge of his music—I know well only the big oratorio The Book with Seven Seals and the orchestral Variations on a Hussar Song, which was a classical radio staple when I was younger—may have caused me to dismiss him as a candidate earlier. I thank the Admiral for calling out his name.
Schmidt’s negatives include his death in 1939 and his Austrian, not German, birth. Postwar, he was once in the Tribe’s sights as a putative Nazi, but his inconvenient and tiresome failure to have party membership, his lack of international fame and his patent disinterest in and ignorance of politics persuaded them to move onto easier targets. (Of performing rather than composing musicians I deeply revere, one such target was the titanically great pianist Walter Gieseking, whose outspoken scorn at the very idea of death camps or the Holohoax got him locked out of the States till 1952.)
@D. K.:
Aren’t we all? There is no danger at all that you will have to wait long. In fact, a review of this thread will provide ample targets. Despite the fact that all institutions in our society have been tarred with the brush of Jewish influence, some take delight in singling out Christianity as irremediably tainted by its origins.
You have done yeoman’s work against the Christian identity duo, I look forward to your efforts against the Christophobes.
@D. K.:
I knew this expression from a song by Doris Day which I heard in my youth and liked very much. I always asumed it was French and badly pronounced by Doris Day because of her English language background. Now that you say it is actually Italian that has cleared things up. Next time I will no more react like priggish schoolmaster. That is a promise.
@Pierre de Craon:
For the record, I was fully aware of those missing accents– which I always supplied, in both my long-ago Italian assignments and in my countless handwritten letters to my (now) dearly departed mother, inter alia, over the following thirty-some years– but I do not consider Internet posts to be worth the bother of putting them in, with my computer keyboards. I am, admittedly, a very lazy character. “Che sara, sara!” (I do, however, add the comma, which, I believe, was not part of the family motto, in Italian, but was used in the Spanish movie-song title, two years later!?!) Not only did I earn straight As, in my enjoyable two years of Italian, but, thirty-five years ago, during my final semester as an undergraduate, I also earned a “Fantastico!” in red ink, from my estimable Italian professor, on an Italian sonnet that I wrote for class– which is the single item that I saved from my surfeit of formal education!
@ Piere de Craon
I profoundly enjoy, as certainly many readers here do, your comments. Since you have written one article for TOO already, could we not prevail upon you to regale us occasionally with more of the same?
@D. K.: I never doubted your sprezzatura. My verb tenses in the comment defending you, after all, were all conditionals.
@michael: Thank you for saying what you do. For better or worse, I have never been the recipient of so much praise that I am grown indifferent to hearing it!
I honestly do not know whether I shall be able to accommodate your request. Even were my health to grow rather better than it now is (not something a prudent man would bet on), I am not sure whether the sort of piece I am temperamentally inclined to write—something cut from the same mold as recent articles by Brenton Sanderson, Sir Tristram, Trudie Pert, Lasha Darkmoon, and KM in his feature article vein—would or could be on a topic relevant to the site’s needs and purposes. Should things take a positive turn, however, I shan’t forget that you (and other generous people) are rooting for me.
@michael: Let me second this.
@Pierre de Craon:
I am myself one quarter Austrian (and another quarter Donauschwäbisch), but I tend to agree with the old definition that Austrians are the people who convinced the world that Beethoven was an Austrian, but Hitler was a German. At the time Austrian was considered to be a special kind of German, just like Bavarians are to this day, and the difference between Austrians and neighboring Germans is rather small, even the neighboring dialects are very similar. So I don’t think this is a big negative. (I doubt this is news to you, just wanted to make the remark for other readers.)
@michael: I neglected to say earlier what I should have said in my very first comment on this thread. This is yet another terrific article, not least of all in your understanding of what is at stake and what is being placed in serious jeopardy, perhaps for several generations to come. It is so perfectly clear that for Zambello, Bauer, Yeargan, and many, many more like them, the “deconstruction” of Wagner in particular and the high art of the West in general is actually a stage in the complete disemboweling of that art. This year the Ring is reinterpreted for the hip and the trendy, people for whom Wagner’s characters, whether thought of as genuine individuals or archetypes, are simply too naff for words (to use that delightful bit of Britslang). In five or ten years’ time, today’s hip and trendy now people will be so then that their willingness to endure the whole cycle, even deconstructed, will itself have become too naff for words. In thirty years’ time, at least if their timetable plays out, no one will be doing the Ring at all, ever again. Who needs that scheissvolle anti-Semitic amalgamation of Christianized Germanic myth anyway? We’ve got Transgendered Talmudic Rap to lift our minds and hearts!
I had forgotten that Zambello was the talentless cow who did a Lucia at the Met in 1992, the last full year I had anything to do with the house. Everyone I knew there, even all the fairies, thought it was a career ender for her. How naive we all were! Even then the Met was still a place to which European opera lovers flocked because, no matter how mediocre the singing and conducting, the Met was one of the last opera houses on earth that still mounted “traditional” productions—i.e., productions which the operas’ composers and librettists might have recognized as truthfully re-creations of their works. With the accession of the incompetent Jew Peter Gelb (succeeding the criminal, albeit Gentile, thug Joe Volpe), however, the Met’s management embarked on a decadelong campaign to out-Kupfer Harry Kupfer and out-Friedrich Götz Friedrich.
About ten years ago, a British author and music critic named Tully Potter (a very learned man incidentally), wrote an editorial in the quarterly he then edited about productions of Wagner at Covent Garden and all over Europe. Potter, then already in his sixties, noted that ever since he had been a boy, he had heard and read self-serving commentary from opera producers and designers about the need to break away from tired old “realistic” production styles where Valkyries wore helmets and the Wälsungs wore bearskins. He wrote, in effect, that he longed to see, just once before he died, a Ring production where Brünnhilde indeed wore such a helmet, just as Wagner described her wearing. What, he wrote, would now be more revolutionary than a production that hewed to the composer’s wishes?
Perhaps that’s the way out of the sewer—to convince the trendy and the cool and the with-it beautiful people that defying the Tribe’s wishes and demands will make them, well, even trendier and cooler.
I can dream, can’t I?
@The Admiral On Horseback: Just so, my friend. For everyone there is a first time to hear these home truths from the region once graced by the noblest dynastic house that ever existed.
In my most humble opinion, far and away the best essay on the total corruption of Western Art by our Jewish friends ever written was by Dr Lasha Darkmoon, a while ago here on TOO.
I paste a small sample below:
“In 2001, ARTnews listed the world’s Top Ten Art Collectors. Eight of them were Jews. Ponder these staggering statistics: A people who constitute 0.2% of the world’s population make up 80% of the world’s richest art collectors. Out of every thousand people in the world, roughly two are Jews. To be precise, one in every 457 people are Jews. Yet go to a conference at which 1000 of the world’s wealthiest art collectors have gathered and you will find, to your amazement, that 800 of them are Jewish! Phenomenal, isn’t it?”
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/09/the-plot-against-art-part-2/
@Pierre de Craon: Thanks for the suggestion! I will search for it.
@Pierre de Craon:
It is all the more interesting since in Beethoven-interpretation the trend has been more and more historically informed performances, often with period instruments. I am not against this trend, at least I don’t think these performances are worse than the traditional-Romantic interpretations, just different. (Although I disagree with those who think that this strict interpretation is the only way to go.)
How could that be that while with Beethoven or Bach or Mozart closely following the composers wishes is the most important thing, whereas with Wagner his wishes are completely disregarded? I sometimes feel like being the only sane person (or rather one of the very few) in a mad planet – or else how could it be that nobody notices this difference?
@Pierre de Craon
I’ll include you in my prayers, if you don’t mind. Won’t do much, but still…
@michael: No prayers are lost or wasted! God bless you for the remembrance; you will be in mine, too.
@The Admiral On Horseback: The difference lies in the storytelling dimension, which strictly instrumental music lacks—how very fortunately for it.
Present-day operatic producers and designers, in common with nearly everyone else in what remains of our corrupted cultural establishment, have lost the sense of intellectual and artistic modesty that goes hand in hand with the traditional understanding that virtually all human activities and institutions involve some form of hierarchy. Until the day before yesterday, the notion of a musical or theatrical re-creator substituting his own “ideas” for those of the composer or playwright invariably prompted derision. Nowadays, with self-esteem (i.e., self-worship) enthroned as the governing human impulse, it is virtually taken for granted that each and every homosexual and/or Jewish third-rater will suck out the innards of whatever he lays his hands on and refill the empty shell, to the applause of all his relatives in the press and the media, with the filling of his choice (generally a hypersexualized one).
At bottom, the impulse to do something like this is derivative and juvenile; put otherwise, it is a product of arrested development. Caricature, as Oscar Wilde saw, is nothing but mediocrity paying tribute to genius. With mediocrity being the Jew’s via normativa and with his arrested wants, needs, and goals having replaced normal, healthy adult ones in the controlled marketplace of ideas, the perversion of the theater (which more than one wag has called the second-oldest profession) through caricature has become emblematic of a Western world ruled by KM’s aptly named hostile elite.
Once again, I have overresponded to a simple comment; sorry. Let me point out in closing, however, that if you know anything of a famed international poseur called Peter Sellars, you will find in some of his productions the virtually Hegelian synthesis of the thesis (the HIP [historically informed performance] impulse in strictly musical performance] and the antithesis (the thumb-sucking indulgence of the reconceived theatrical masterwork). His longtime musical collaborator, the conductor Craig Smith, used period instruments in Sellars’s productions of the Mozart operas as long ago as the early nineties. The combination was in fact one of the hippest things about those productions, which—not forgetting Sellars’s in-your-face homosexuality and his long history of Jewish support, of course—made him a giant on the American cutting-edge scene. And when America swallows, the rest of the Tribe’s world promptly and obediently belches.
Francesca is obviously Italian. There is no reason to believe she is Jewish. It is no cecret she is a lesbian.
She made an infamously bizarre proaction of Lucia once that was a scandal; but I have seen her productions many times and they are
generally quite good.
I don’t approve of homosexuality but I don’t know why it should have been the distorting factor. There have been more than a few fans of Wagner through the decades who were gay yet orthodox in taste. How about king Ludwig for starters? Gosh. Lol. Maybe Fred N too. Lol. One famous German author wrote a book about that. Wang we would not likely have accomplished quite what he did without gay Ludwig’s support.
So probably homosexual stuff Is totally besides the point here.
@Pierre de Craon: I agree that the storytelling dimension is a difference, but I have never read an introduction into Wagner’s music which didn’t start with the statement that his music cannot be understood without the drama. If the drama is so important to the music, it can only be obvious that changing important aspects of the composers instructions will also alter the musical message.
I recently read a particularly silly interview where the director was arguing that Tannhäuser is already meaningless for the people of today, because now everyone has sex before marriage, so he has to change the message into a banal love triangle.
@Anty ep: Homosexuals in historical ages were different than homosexuals in the present age, because homosexual identity politics did not yet exist before the second half of the 20th century.
@The Admiral On Horseback:
Just curious, on the issue of storytelling, would it be fair to say that Aryans, Whites, Indo-Europeans – you know us – are better storytelllers than any other group? I’m not an expert in art and literature, but it seems that no other group has created quite the rich set of stories we have. Not denying others have them, but we seem far better at it.
And other races seem to prefer our stories much of them time. And when I say Aryans or Whites, I mean non-Jewish Whites.
@The Admiral On Horseback: Well, you make a fair point, but the vocabulary of music criticism, especially operatic music criticism, is seldom truly analytically rigorous, even in professional journals. Thus, when people say or write that Wagner’s music cannot be understood without knowledge of the drama of which it is a part—as they have been doing for about 130 years now—they really mean that, in their view, the music makes little or no strictly musical sense divorced from the storytelling dimension, in which it may play the leading part but by no means the sole one or one divorceable from the constituent elements. (This being something Wagner himself said time and again, I shan’t try attacking it here and now!) It is not inconsequential, either, that the music of Wagner most at home in the world’s concert halls is made up of the operas’ various overtures, preludes, and occasional set pieces.
To get somewhat more rigorous for a moment, however, what we’re approaching here is discussion of an aesthetic thesis or conceit, one that has virtually retired from the lists on account of its having largely bested all comers over the course of the last seven hundred years or so, at least here in the West. That conceit, oversimply put, is that music—even when its composer’s intentions or beliefs run clear contrary—does not communicate meaning in the same way that the arts of the word do or even the graphic arts do. The most ground that the champions of this thesis are willing to yield is that, in a sense, Pythagoras was right—right, that is, in the consequences flowing from his fundamental but profound observation that the tones within the musical octave have a precise mathematical relationship one to another. In that the octave derives from nature, as do we, it is far from unreasonable to posit that individuals’ response to this or that piece of music may well not have merely local or intracultural significance. Yet what that larger, all-encompassing significance (or “meaning”) is has been the subject of contentious disagreement from Pythagoras’s time to ours. Hence, the wisdom of adopting the fallback position, which for me was best enunciated by Stravinsky: “Music expresses only itself.” The less one budges from this position, the quieter his life will be.
Alas, almost nothing of this blather deals with your comment! OK, I’ll get practical, before my rapidly dwindling energy dies out completely. (1) If your comment was, among other things, meant to suggest that falsifying Wagner’s dramatic means and ends also ipso facto falsifies his music, you’ll get no argument from me. I would contend, however, that the Zambello cow and a fortiori Friedrich and Kupfer have never cared a whit if, or to what extent, they betray, falsify, or simply make nonsense of Wagner’s music or anyone else’s. They, as homosexuals, communists, Jews, or some combination of the preceding, proudly carry the banner of Self above All, and the devil take the hindmost. (2) In terms of so-called period authenticity, it is simply impossible to pretend that the music of Wagner and his contemporaries is as “old” (i.e., different from “our” music, whatever that is) as Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, Schumann’s, or even (in one or two respects) Brahms’s (despite the fact that Brahms was fifteen years Wagner’s junior!) and hence performable in a fashion that would seem “unmodern” to a layman’s ear. (E.g., the contention of Roger Norrington and several others that use of string vibrato in Wagner’s music is largely anachronistic has failed to muster widespread agreement, and even most of those that do agree have little or no interest in dutifully following Norrington in performing Wagner’s music in a vibrato-lite way.) Another way of saying the foregoing is that the present-day style of the strictly musical part of Wagner performance and a period-authentic style are … [here it comes] … one and the same! Even the matter of tempo differences, a topic generating much musicological fuss in my youth, is now essentially a thing of the past, since all of Wagner’s works can now be found in performances ranging from slow through moderate through fast through just plain lickety-split.
Whether this is progress is a question for another day. (Be it noted that I am by no means a reflexive enemy of the “authenticity” movement.) Forgive me for giving up and retiring from the field at this point. Fatigue and illness are overcoming me. I hope I’ve given you at least a somewhat useful response.
@Lancashire lad:
I believe Counter-Currents ran an article on Bruckner, who may be the one you are trying to recall. Good luck.
@Pierre de Craon: Sorry that I didn’t answer your comment earlier.
Yes, I meant that falsifying the drama also falsifies the music, and we seem to be in agreement.
The authentic music movement (of which my views see below) has of course nothing to do with Wagner musically – but since Wagner’s music is special, because of the centrality of the drama, somebody might notice that playing Wagner’s music dramas the way he himself intended might do just as much good to his music as playing Beethoven’s symphonies with an orchestra of only 22 musicians, and on period instruments, does to Beethoven’s music. Yes, Wagner’s music as such is still played in an authentic way, but his music dramas are not performed authentically – he never wrote anything about bicycle-riding Valkyries or SS-officers etc.
Regarding the authentic music movement, I have some reservations, which mostly stem from a theoretical viewpoint. Let me start it with the case of Arabic, a language which spread from the Arabian Peninsula all the way up to Syria and Iraq, and to the West all the way to Morocco (and for a while even to present-day Spain). There was country where that language could never spread into, in spite of the country being conquered and subsequently dutifully converting to Islam. That country was Iran. Of course, people of letters started to learn Arabic in Iran as well, and they seemed to have learnt it well: outside the Arabian Peninsula, all Arabic texts contain large numbers of grammatical and syntactical errors. The strange thing is that there was an exception to that rule, apparently – unlike the others – Iranian scribes learnt their Arabic well: they also made minor mistakes, but many less than elsewhere. However, apparently Arabic to them was a stylized language, not living, but dead text, of which they learnt the rules but never even tried to use it as a vernacular in their everyday lives.
How that connects to music? Well, of course, Furtwängler plays a distorted Beethoven, compared to – say – Jos van Immerseel. But Immerseel’s Beethoven is stylized: once we’ve learnt how it ‘should’ be played, that’s how we play it, and thereby we’ve reduced variation. Of course Immerseel’s Beethoven is beautiful (I might even go as far as saying it might even be the best Beethoven ever recorded), but it’s never going to change. It’s not really part of today’s musical world, it has nothing to do with today’s music, it’s just a kind of substitute which we can use in the absence of Beethoven’s original CD recordings from 1824.
Strictly musically speaking, I find the authentic recordings mostly very nice and I really like them. But philosophically, this is a sign of the death of classical music, it is too perfect to be a lively tradition, much as Arabic language in its perfect form couldn’t become a vernacular, and its perfect use by Iranian scribes was a sign that it wasn’t used as vernacular, only as a highly stylized official language. If we don’t distort it, we don’t live it!
I hope this comment made some sense, I now find it a bit too long and complicated, but I cannot bring myself to rewrite it.
Last but not least: I wish you got better. Really.
Admiral yes that is circumlocutive, yet it was interesting, and I agree w your point.
@Anty ep: Thanks.
Just to clarify my point regarding “distortion”, this doesn’t mean that anything goes. Just as the scribes in Egypt tried to use a good Arabic (but weren’t very successful), we should try to create a music that the composer would have approved. However, traditional/Romantic performers insisted that the composer really wanted to use a larger orchestra, slower tempi, etc., and only wrote the score the way he did because of limitations of his age. In other words, when Furtwängler played the Allegretto in Beethoven’s Seventh for over 9 minutes (sometimes over 10 minutes), he really believed that Beethoven would have approved. Having listened to a few of his recordings, I think we can agree that at least there is a chance.
We also have some recordings by 20th century composers. E.g. Béla Bartók (a fellow Hungarian, although unfortunately I don’t know yet too much of his work) played many of his works, and even though he had clear metronome markings, he disregarded them and played faster than the score… We also know that Baroque composers usually expected some minor improvisations on the parts of musicians.
Altogether, I don’t think most early composers would be horrified by listening to Romantic performances of their works, at worst they might have a slight preference for an authentic performance, at best they might even prefer the Romantic style. In the absence of time machines, the question cannot be satisfactorily answered, so we should just assume that the composer might approve both of them and may prefer the authentic version, but no more. I think the test should be correspondingly lax: we shouldn’t perform music in a way which would surely make the composer spin in his grave, but anything that has a reasonable chance of being approved by him should be acceptable.
On the other hand, a totally different kind of distortion is present in Wagner’s works: we can be essentially sure that Wagner would be totally horrified after viewing a Eurotrash performance of his works. This is the kind of distortion which should not be permitted.