May 30, 2010 The LaRouche movement confronts the culture vultures of Tinsel Town at a particularly bizarre production of Wagner's Ring Cycle with some real music and uncomfortable questions. The text of the leaflet gotten out at the protest: Wagner’s Ring(worm): Los Angeles’s Gotterdamerung? by Harley Schlanger It should come as no surprise, to those who know history, that the blaring and screeching of Richard Wagner’s operas were the last sounds heard by many Jews on their way to their mass deaths, by gassing, at Nazi concentration camps. Wagner’s “music drama,” the “Ring cycle,” was the preferred “heroic” art form of Hitler and his closest allies.
What is surprising is that this anti-Semitic filth should be revived by the Los Angeles Opera at precisely the moment when President Obama and the gutless, immoral Congress have passed health-care legislation which incorporates Hitler’s death policy for “useless eaters,” under the guise of “saving money,” and when brutal budget cuts by that son-of-a-Nazi, Governor Schwarzenegger, are hastening the deaths of many poor, elderly, and sick Californians. Has the L.A. Opera, which is careening toward bankruptcy, no shame? Does Los Angeles County have nothing better to do with $13 million, than bail out the L.A. Opera, so that it can celebrate the monstrous sexual fantasies, and the cult of violence, of that vile anti-Semite Wagner? And what of opera-lovers in L.A., who march into the opera hall, to be assaulted by a Disneyland-style multi-media extravaganza, of a story which fortified German anti-Semites in the justness of their cause, to eliminate the Jews of Germany?
You don’t think Wagner was anti-Semitic? Read his despicable tract, “Judaism in Music,” which he first published anonymously in 1850, then again, in his own name, in 1869. Read Wagner’s own words, in 1851, when he proclaimed, “My entire political creed consists of nothing but the bloodiest hatred for our whole civilization, and contempt for all things deriving from it. . . .” Read the true confession, “Twilight of the Wagners,” written by his great-grandson, Gottfried Wagner, who wrote, “Richard Wagner, through his inflammatory anti-Semitic writings, was co-responsible for the transition from Bayreuth to Auschwitz.” Wagner despised true Classical culture, which was the legacy of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. His “Judaism in Music” was aimed at Felix Mendelssohn, whose crime, in Wagner’s eyes, was the defense of that Bach tradition, against the assault of Wagner’s “new” German music.
We even got a little news coverage. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/las-ring-cycle-begins-with-protests-outside-mixed-reaction-inside.html