‘Kavalier & Clay’ could be a Jewish-American ‘Ring Cycle’ — what would Richard Wagner think of it?
The adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel traces a uniquely American mythology
Richard Wagner
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Culture Jewish Director Puts Richard Wagner On Trial — At His Own Festival
Scholars have long argued whether Richard Wagner left traces of his anti-Semitic convictions in his opera, for example, by encoding characters with stereotypically Jewish traits. When Barrie Kosky directed a “Ring Cycle” in Hannover between 2009 and 2011, the Australian director didn’t have a shred of doubt. For him, the duplicitous dwarf Mime (the cycle’s…
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Culture How Klezmer Music Refutes Richard Wagner’s Myth of Racial Purity
The art world has always been a bastion of globalism, with artists constantly borrowing from one another to create new, previously inconceivable works. In our increasingly anti-globalist, anti-immigrant time, it is important to remember that many of the artistic works that we hold dear would not have been possible without centuries of cultural exchange. Few…
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Fast Forward Wagner Museum Takes Hard Look at Composer’s Nazi Ties
A renovated Richard Wagner Museum opening in Bayreuth this weekend to coincide with the Bavarian city’s annual Wagner opera festival puts the composer’s anti-Semitism and his family’s later ties to Adolf Hitler center stage for the first time. Revamped and doubled in size at a cost of 20 million euros ($21.92 million), the museum for…
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The Schmooze The Jew Who Fell in Love With Wagner
(Haaretz) — The music of German composer Richard Wagner was never played in his parents’ home: Too many bad associations with Hitler and the Nazis, explains filmmaker Hilan Warshaw. So it wasn’t until he began playing violin in a New York City youth orchestra that Warshaw was first introduced to the work of the notoriously…
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Culture Why Jews Stood Up for Richard Wagner
There’s an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Larry David is caught whistling Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” to his wife in front of a movie theater. A hysterical and unhinged nudnik accosts him, spouting the common litany of charges against Wagner (“history’s biggest anti-Semite,” “millions of Jews marched to the gas chambers with Wagner’s music…
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Fast Forward Richard Wagner Protestor Clashes With Organizer of Jerusalem Symposium
A man stormed the stage at a Jerusalem symposium on composer Richard Wagner and hurled insults at the audience in a protest over the German maestro’s associations with the Nazis. Ushers at Tuesday’s event struggled to restrain the strongly built protester, a man in his late 30s who gave his name as Ran Carmi. Ignoring…
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Culture My Dinner With Leonard Bernstein
Although marred by unexplained omissions and bowdlerizations, the publication of “The Leonard Bernstein Letters” brought to mind a dinner I attended at Bernstein’s Fairfield, Conn., home around 30 years ago. Unlike the interviewer, Jonathan Cott, author of “Dinner With Lenny: The Last Long Interview With Leonard Bernstein,” I did not ask the maestro any portentous…
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