A piece of piano music that is 3 hours and 30 minutes long, divided into 3 acts and subtitled “an opera without words as a piano reduction”, evokes the outer limits of the late adherents to Romanticism, especially Sorabji. Indeed, “Anti Wagner” is a deconstruction of Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre” but shares with it only the time durations of acts 1 - 3, whereby the last act is about 10 minutes shorter than Wagner’s. This suggests that “Anti Wagner” remains unfinished, which is another romantic idea or that Wagner had a larger penis. Alfred Adler would tell us that, but he’s dead.
Out the formal constraints of Classicism the practice of Romanticism was born in the early 19th century, a romantic idea that became accepted as historical truth. But as the romantic Adorno would tell us, if he were to be resurrected from the dead, the most romantic idea of the year 2018 is the negative dialectic of the variations that ignore a theme. Indifference to the wound that stabs you is the best defence against suffering from its deadly consequences, as Schopenhauer would tell us, if he were resurrected today, because the Will is a blind force. But all this resurrection business places an undue burden upon the living and is mistaken as “Culture” in Germany today. Germany’s lead “culture” is nothing but the 19th century practice of resurrection in the flesh, the ghastly Frankensteinian actual reanimation of dead body parts. The reenactment of a few canonized ideas of the dead consumes the cultural machinery today, with deadly consequences for the souls of the living. Repeating falsehoods does not make them true, an idea that science promotes, but in 2018, this is reality, proving science wrong. Wagner’s “Ring” is the ring of emotional falsehoods which is complete and renews itself with every Euro spent to subsidize “Culture”. The "Anti Wagner" here are anti-Authoritarian. They open the German soul in the spirit of Dutschke, who reminds us of his legacy: “Without provocation nobody would take us for real”. If only he were resurrected today of course, and if only this “Opened Ring” were to be performed/installed today in the institutions of German “Culture” it will undoubtedly break its cyclic chains, derail its wheel, free the souls of the living from the yoke of history and return “Culture” to its truthful contemporary state, naked as the Emperor without clothes, as “Nature”. This is the romantic idea. It is also the tip of an iceberg. In front of us we have 3 and 1/2 hours of piano music and this opera is only the second of four. So let’s start at the beginning. G C Bb Ab C Bb A D Bb G. Do these 10 pythagorean notes contain the viral DNA of the universe? Are they the eternal recurrence of the same, the cyclic master template of all spiritual beings? No, these 10 notes are just a provocation, they simply announce the tip of the iceberg, the improvised Anti Wagner that is the opera without words as a piano reduction. |
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Catalog No: | FLX142 (LN504) |
Title: | Anti Wagner |
Sound Artist: | Frank Rothkamm |
Visual Artist: | Holger Rothkamm |
Label: | rothkamm.com |
Length: | 3:34:50 (12890s) |
Composed: | 2018 |
Location: | Cologne |
Instruments: | Yamaha C5 (Salamander Grand Piano) |
Release Date: | 05/24/2018 |
Format: | Digital |
Tags: | Solo Piano classical |