dimanche 30 mai 2010

"Push over and share the popcorn"

Zeus Is Watching nous a régalés, sur son blog, d'une pièce de Vivaldi;  Man of Roma, en commentaire, a souligné l'importance de Bach.  J'y ai mis mon grain de sel en affirmant que Bach, pour moi, était relié au spirituel et Vivaldi, à la détente.  J'ajoutai que Wagner cependant me soulevait vraiment en les suppliant de ne pas me fusiller pour autant.
SledPress, une haltérophile intellectuelle et mélomane (l'ordre est arbitraire)  inscrivit le commentaire suivant: "Shoot you, heck, push over and share the popcorn."  J'avoue n'avoir jamais associé Wagner ou son oeuvre au popcorn...mais après tout, pourquoi pas?  Pourtant il me semble qu'écouter Siegfried ou Lohengrin en mangeant du popcorn serait presqu'une profanation sauf, peut-être, pour la marche nuptiale tellement galvaudée.
Lors de notre mariage, Thérèse et moi avions laissé le choix de la musique à l'organiste...après avoir spécifiquement exclu la marche nuptiale.
Maintenant, si elle me lit, c'est peut être SledPress qui va me fusiller.  Ce doit être ça vivre dangereusement.

20 commentaires:

  1. Well, I think she loves watching Wagner's works on DVD in the privacy of home. Popcorn or any other snack will do.

    The two of you are welcome to Wagner. Sledpress has expanded my appreciation of music to include a serious love of Baroque Opera, but she has no chance, nor do you, when it comes to getting me to even like Wagner. I won't shoot either of you, but I might take pot shots at the DVD player if I sense the appearance of Wagner.

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  2. Peace my friend, peace and have pity of the DVD player, just an innocent instrument in our hands.
    I can understand your abhorence of Wagner probably linked to his highjacking by Herr Schickelgruber. Then again he was not consulted about it.
    I must say I hate what the modern Bayreuth Festival has done to his works.

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  3. Nah don't worry Paul. Nobody, not even Mrs Haltérophile (loved the word, had to look it up) is going to shoot you for Wagner. I instead risk vraiment d'être fusillé for my posts on Gramsci and his cultural hegemony, seen by ALL as concerted, totalitarian, premeditated cultural domination. It's like Pericles invited Socrates, Herodotus, Alcybiades, Sophocles, Tucidides and Euripides to sit at a table over a beer and said to them: "Ok, let's construct Athens' cultural hegemony for the next centuries: you write this, you think that, and people will 1) obey us and 2) chant Athens' praise until 2010 AD!"

    I asked for it, I'll admit ;-)

    Ah, I forgot. My tobacconist man, just across the road, is a Wagner fiend - you can hear W's music each time you enter his shop - but he's the most innocuous 35-year-old guy in the world.

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  4. I found your take on Gramsci very interesting although he was totally unknown to me and most likely to most Canadians and North Americans.
    As for your Wagnerian tobacconist he most sell very good tobacco.

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  5. I had to look up halterophile et aussi melomane, so we know what I got from my four years of Francais-au-lycee!

    (I usually call myself a "gym rat.")

    Wagner is a spectacle that to my mind has rarely been done right. But in an evening of music lasting four or five hours a bit of popcorn might be called for (not messy if you leave off the butter.) Actually, after Gotterdammerung in the opera house, I would probably need a chiropractor. (Amusing side note: the last time I saw any Wagner performed live, Brunnhilde had on a surgical boot from accidentally plunging through the stage where it had been cut out to indicate the descent from Valhalla to the mortal world. That requires popcorn, or something like it.)

    The only Wagner opera for which I think I would utterly prohibit popcorn, or anything except sparkling mead, is Meistersinger. After the overture and "Wach auf!" chorus that opens the third act I am a little, sobbing puddle on the floor, and that is before we even get to the Prize Song.

    (So sue me about Parsifal -- I have the same beef with Wagner over that that Nietszche did. Crunch.)

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  6. PS. Holy Crap, Paul, your favorite books include "Le matin des magiciens"? As in Pauwels et Bergier?

    Mon semblable, mon frere! (Apologies a Baudelaire...)

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  7. Indeed Sledpress, it is as in Pauwels and Bergier. It is sad that these two ended up in acrimony. Pauwels evolved into a right wing man and a libertarian while Bergier remained staunchly socialist.
    When the two split it meant the end of the Planet magazine movement...and I lost 6 months worth of my subscription money.
    I have, on DVD, The Bayreuth production of Siegfried under Barenboim and Kupler, love the music and the singing, hate the staging.
    On CDs I have the Meistersinger and on vinyl, by Phillips, the complete Ring.
    Bonne fin de semaine.

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  8. I went to the tobacconist yesterday - I don't smoke, he sells all sorts of stuff - but he said he is 45. I was amazed. He really looks 35. Wagner, again, was thumping, but I didn't recognize the piece. Il était trop méthodique pour avoir 35 ans.

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  9. Dear Giovanni, Wagner is not all thumping. The Meistersingers are very melodic and his preludes are pure romanticism. My wife hates Wagner and when I put on the preludes she asked who wrote that lovely music and she checked the jacket because she did not believe me.

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  10. Oh my. Now I must break out my copy of Morning that I have owned since I was 13, and perhaps read it while listening to my old Solti Rheingold.

    Are you a reader of Robert Anton Wilson? Quite the Fortean as well (died only a couple years ago), and equally fond of throwing ideas at the wall to see what would stick.

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  11. Never heard of R. A. Wilson. When I read Le Matin, I was in my early 30s. It was a revelation and most liberating for a guy brought up in ultra catholic and conservative Québec.
    Will check on Wilson.

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  12. If your upbringing was ultra-catholic and conservative you will especially appreciate Wilson (his autobiography, peppered with thoughts on everything from semiotics to psychedelics, is titled "Cosmic Trigger.")
    http://www.rawilson.com/home.html

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  13. It would be nice to interact but I have no idea of what you're talking about. But I like to listen. For a change.

    And Paul, I love Wagner. You don't need to convince me. I just liked to use the word 'thump'. Trying to make this - foreign to me language - a bit alive. Sledpress helps me. She can switch to all registers of the language.

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  14. MoR, "le matin des magiciens" is a book about esoterism and related doctrines. I loved it and so did Sledpress although weread it a vastly different age, she at 13, as she states, I at around 30. Our experiences are bound to have been different but enriching according to our ages and maturity.

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  15. The book was one of several that warped me for life. It was the first place I ever learned of the Nazi Welteislehre, parlayed from Norse mythology and nineteenth-century theosophy-type lore, claiming a cosmic struggle through time between the forces of Ice and Fire, and that we live INSIDE a hollow earth. I already knew about the outlines of WWII, but when I read this, I sat up and realized that at least some people who are driven to power complement their zeal with completely mythic beliefs -- that politics and religion are forever blurring.

    This led straight to my 1980's trunk novel featuring Otto Rahn, Carl Jung, Rudolf Hess and Esclarmonde de Foix, a subject matter so unwieldy I could never hammer it all together into a real narrative. It had Cathars, reincarnation, seances, German choral singing and bad beer. One day I'll do something about it.

    Later stops were Colin Wilson and the above mentioned R.A., no relation to one another...

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  16. You illustrate perfectly my preceding comment about our age when we read the book. To me it was a revelation in the sense that other poeple were asking themselves the questions I was asking myself and gave answers I was giving myself and dared write about it. It was a liberating experience:one could think outside the box and not feel guilty, an unheard thing in my neck of the woods. That has changed a lot, thank god.
    My children were raised in a much freer atmosphere.

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  17. And I was somewhere in between. Believe me, I have clear memories of family members registering horror when I began to talk about things in this and similar books, like the possibility of reincarnation, and accusing me of "thinking like some ignorant person in a diaper." But I had already been teaching myself Yoga from books and had a good deal of respect for the thinking of people in diapers, so I didn't let it fluster me and, as you say, times marched on and people weren't being thrown out of schools or clubs over their ideas. Mostly.

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  18. Indeed we have come a long way in Canada and the USA. But I'm worried about our Harper and your Tea Partyers.

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  19. Je suis arrivé tard dans la conversation. Mais, pour revenir un instant à Bach, Vivaldi et Wagner. La musique de chacun, est adapté à une humeur particulière.

    Pour moi, Bach est froidement mathématique; Vivaldi est chaud (warm) et ensoleillé; Wagner nous émeut au plus profond de nos âmes, et il est si ............. allemande!!

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  20. Oui Phil, nous choisissons nos musiques selon notre humeur du moment. Voilà pourquoi nos compositeurs préférés peuvent signifier des choses différentes pour chacun.
    Pour vous, Bach est "froidement mathématique" alors que pour moi il est spirituel. Nous partageons le même sentiment pour Vivaldi et Wagner.

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