Bach did not compose any opera at a time when the genre was very much in vogue. In this, he cannot contrast more with Wagner, mainly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works later became known, ‘musical dramas’). Unlike Bach who used the Gospel text in his most ambitious works, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his works. My father, a composer of classical music, used to say that Wagner’s art predicted cinema.
However, the narrator tells us in the aforementioned documentary that St Matthew Passion has operatic elements. It was music that inspired ‘contrition and remorse’, and it is striking how the pundits of white nationalism don’t want to see the elephant in the room when they agonize to explain how the guilt that currently kills the white man originated. St Matthew Passion lasts an hour and a half, and has twice the choir and orchestra than St John Passion.
Who has hit you
my Savior, and with torments
so harshly abused you?
The narrator tells us: ‘And it’s in that moment that I feel Bach is saying, This suffering is unbearable. We have to stop it. We have to show our sense of moral outrage’.
You know nothing of our sins…
Have mercy my God
for the sake of my tears.
After explaining St Matthew Passion the narrator made the mistake of passing the microphone to a psychologist to ‘psychoanalyse’ Bach. Readers of this site know that I think clinical psychology is pseudoscientific, and it’s not worth adding much here except to say that Freud and his disciples loved to ‘psychoanalyse’ geniuses to feel superior to them (see what I say about the Vienna quack: here).
After the shrink mistake, the narrator tells us that Bach’s obsession with composing religious music was such that, despite his Lutheran background, he composed a large-scale Latin mass for a Catholic court. As the lyrics of one of his last compositions say shortly before Bach died:
Before (((your))) throne now I appear…
5 replies on “Wagner vs. Bach, 4”
Another composer that should be analyzed as a case study on service to (((god))) in music is Joseph Haydn. Despite being a skilled musician and the “Father of Symphony” while living a hard life, he dedicated all his work to the Big Yahudi in the sky and never once realized that maybe his talent lay in his blood rather than his delusions.
Here is a good example of how much of an intellectual coward he was. Bearing in mind that an adult of all people wrote such nonsense:
“Whenever I think of God I can only conceive of Him as a Being infinitely great and infinitely good. This last quality of the divine nature inspires me with such confidence and joy that I could have written even a miserere in tempo allegro.”
“When I think upon my God, my heart is full of joy that the notes dance and leap from my pen.”
“Never was I so devout as when I composed The Creation. I knelt down each day to pray to God to give me strength for my work….When I was working on The Creation I felt so impregnated with Divine certainty, that before sitting down to the piano, I would quietly and confidently pray to God to grant me the talent that was needed to praise Him worthily.”
Its amazing how such a fool would be so talented and praised. Perhaps his work should also be forgotten to the sands of time just like the (((Holy Bible))) that he feverishly read like the sad manchild he was.
Do you know that at six Haydn almost went under the knife to ‘save’ his voice and join the castrati club?
He was a child whose parents sent him to live with others when he was six years old, and he never saw them again! No wonder his religious piety.
To paraphrase what I said in Day of Wrath, a child whose childhood was lived in an atmosphere of genuine love is capable of developing his self without needing the idea of a personal God preferring, instead, human models.
The child destined to be the great Hayden could not develop his psyche with worldly models. He had to project a parental luminous side onto the deity of the same religion that his now gone parents taught him.
“Perhaps his work should also be forgotten to the sands of time …”
Antifa destroys Confederate monuments. Loss of Christian artifacts is similar, and Culture Destroyers will ‘fill-in all the blanks’ with their script.
Learn from history, first, by keeping it.
“Culture-Destroyers”? I’m sorry, but last time I checked the Neo-xtian hordes of apes tearing down statues are simply repeating what (((Xtians))) did in antiquity: Literally everything happening today is a simple rebirth of the old mania centered on pseudo-sacred reversals of Natural Order.
As for keeping history, we can just write our own script. Its not like much of anything the schizophrenic ghouls in the cathedrals and monasteries was actually true or worthwhile to preserve. Simple archaeology and cultural analysis in a Spenglerian sense is superior to any text written by the shepherds of human beings.
Krist Krusher: Why are you sorry? No need to be.
I used a piece of Francis Parker Yockey’s definition to make a point. As for “…we can just write our own script.” – Why not: “Greed is Good.”