Valhalla?

I sat obediently through the first fourth of Der Ring Des Nibelungen last evening, and less obediently listening to Die Walkure now. My thirst for cultural refinement does not extend to all forms, and the Metropolitan need for sustenance is one of those. Maestro Levine would scoff, point to my lack of education in the synthesis of the trained baritone and the orchestra's ability to magnify melodrama, and far be it for me to argue with such gods who walk the earth, but whatever function opera served in Wagner's day, and in the Victorian era as a whole, where dying aristocrats and the rising bourgeois went to gossip, end and start new sex lives, in the modern era, the spectacle simply doesn't work for me, and I can understand why poor Nietzsche, in the eclipse of his sanity, thought Wagner's scores were dangerous. Why not just break all this up into managable segments more tolerable to the modern ear?

What interests me more is the complicity sometimes laid at Wagner's doorstep, Nietzsche's too, for the rise of National Socialism, as David Bamber cryptically murmurs, made up as Adolf, "One cannot understand National Socialism without understanding Wagner."

Are leitmotifs really as powerful as all that? We still suffer today from such cheap reactions, but to me it is only evidence that the human animal is stalled, losing its evolutionary advantage. As my mortality circles itself, my embrace of darker hedonist sentiments includes the elimination of the powerful who do harm (my nemesis is the one on the titanium sticks with cuffs), but not at the expense of willful destruction of civic struggle.