another point of agreement with Zizek

Another point where I agree with Zizek: the music of Wagner is really good. I have no theories to justify that sentiment, I just think it’s really good.

The first teacher I ever had who had authored a book (and I was really excited about that fact) was my Sophomore music tutor at St. John’s, Mr. Elliott Zuckerman. His book, The First Hundred Years of Wagner’s Tristan, was published before I was even born, and has possibly even been out of print since before I was born.

I enjoyed reading it. But one point I disagreed with, though perhaps he made it in class rather than in the book, was that Wagner’s style was such that he never wrote any great songs in the normal sense– great arias, etc. As Nietzsche put it, Wagnerian music is like a polyp, never broken into song-like chunks, or however he said it.

But I can think of one extremely powerful counterexample: the so-called “Spring Song” in Act I of Die Walküre, beginning with the word “Winterstürme”… It’s beautiful music, and also a great love song despite the brother-sister incest situation in which it is ensconced.

I became a Ring fan on the PIERRE BOULEZ recordings from Bayreuth, and so Boulez’s version will always seem like the “real” Wagner to me, but at one point I picked up the recording of LAURITZ MELCHIOR and KIRSTEN FLAGSTAD doing the Spring Song, and I’m not sure what happened to it during my move to Egypt, but it was one of the most magnificent things I’ve ever heard.

And incidentally, I am by no means a classical music junkie. (Electronic dance music is what I listen to about 70% of the time, especially while working.) It’s true, if embarrassing to admit, that Mozart leaves me cold, to give just one example.