Wagner’s Lohengrin

The last three days I watched Lohengrin on YouTube, one act each night, corroborating what I think of opera.

If a good film loses ten or twenty per cent of its art when seen on the small screen, opera easily loses ninety-nine per cent. It is art made to be seen live, with the flesh and blood characters in front of our seats, and with all the ritual of spending our meagre savings, as the adolescent Hitler did when he discovered Wagner; dressing up in our best clothes, and going to a palace (like this one in Mexico City: the only one where I have enjoyed an opera, inviting a lady of course, to accompany me).

Opera really misses almost one hundred per cent of its magic. It seems an outrage that in the next few days I will continue to use this medium to see other Wagnerian operas. But in the palace of the town where I live, operas by the Führer’s favourite composer are very rarely performed. And even in the single opera I have seen there, the subtitles in my native language were essential to understanding the songs and the plot.

It is impossible to understand National Socialism without enjoying the art of its background. And it is impossible to grasp Wagner’s art in all its glory without having the funds to go to Vienna or Bayreuth in Germany, where some of his operas are performed every year. But even if you have the money, say, to go to the opera theatre in the Judaized US, in recent times modern choreography has bastardised the German composer’s original vision, courtesy of the Jews (see for example these quotations of an article that was later deleted in The Occidental Observer).

In the performance I saw yesterday, embedded below, Lohengrin is not the blond Aryan that Europeans used to see in more accurate performances. While the singer I heard yesterday has a magnificent voice, we will have to wait for the Fourth Reich before we can, once again, enjoy Wagner’s works as they were seen by those born in much less obscure times than ours…