What is your opinion on Wagner (You look like you have one). Is he good or bad? Any fun facts?
horrifyingly, i do.
perhaps my best take on wagner is that he’s full of contradictions to the point that it’s very hard to get to the bottom of anything he’s trying to say. i’ll never understand how he could have such an objectively bizarre and oftentimes straight-up bad personality and still write characters that imply great wisdom and knowledge about human nature. very little in wagner’s persona screams high emotional maturity/intelligence, often rather the opposite, and still he wrote characters that are so real and true you could hold their hand, and the music to tell you all about them. i’ll never get to the resolution of this contradiction, and so i’ve stopped trying to decipher him. it’s a better idea, i think, to know what sort of person he was, and what his faults were, and to let his work take flight and to find what it means to you personally.
musically, you like him or you don’t, both is fine – i think his works are musically fantastic. they’re extremely expressive, and to me at least, there’s an element of true-ness to it, when i think yes, this is really what something feels like, physically, even for feelings his compositions aren’t often traditionally associated with, ig, like grief.
fun facts:
- he was a short little btch of ca 165cm
- he was also a fan of colourful clothes and ordered trousers, shoes and pyjamas in really weird colours (pale yellow, pink, green…)
- he was allergic to wool
- most facts about him aren’t fun because they’re about his bad personality
