... Wagner was after something more radical: He proposed to do away with the covenantal order of traditional society. Nietzsche had him pegged. At first intoxicated with Wagner, he awoke with a hangover and wrote: “Whence arises all evil in the world, Wagner asked himself? … From customs, laws, morals, institutions, from all those things on which the ancient world and ancient society rests.”He went on: “Wagner’s heroines, once they have been divested of their heroic husks, are indistinguishable from Madame Bovary.”
Well, here's one case where Nietzsche was spot on. I'm not much of a Wagner fan. An awful lot of his music strikes me as banal. As for whether his music should be performed in Israel, I suppose I'd be inclined to leave it up to Israeli audiences. If they programmed and no one one attended, it would demonstrate that Wagner was not a valued commodity in that venue. Hence, no reason to program his music, since no one would want to hear it.
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