Wreckage in Valhalla
AGNER'’S Ring on the air is the ghost of a piece of giant-art. Certain things are still there in the music-the complex language of the leitmotifs, the orchestral resource, the singular beauty or dramatic intensity of individual scenes and passages. But it also has patches of interminable dullness, phoney rhetoric and _ sheer bathos. Whichever way you look at it, it is the kind of enormity which only genius can create. At this moment it is hard to see just what it is, so much does the grandiose drearn merge into the reality of Hitler’s Reich. I suppose it’s unfair to blame Wagner for. that; the man who strangles his wife can’t shift the blame to Shakespeare for writing Othello. All the same, it is difficult in this case to see art objectively when’ life has imitated and perverted it on the most grotesque scale. For us at least, Brunnhilde bounces . around like one of the Hitlermadchen, Wotan sounds like Goering in a_ rage, the Valkyrie seem to ride in on Heinkels with the cymbals bursting like bombs, and the wreckage of Valhalla suspiciously resembles the ruins of the Berlin Chancellery.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 734, 7 August 1953, Page 10
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193Wreckage in Valhalla New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 734, 7 August 1953, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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