Lorin Maazel leads the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall
(Melanie Burford/NPR)
The Vienna Philharmonic is internationally recognized as a top-tier orchestra – but it’s not known as a particularly progressive organization. Women were only permitted to join the group as full-fledged members in 1997 – today, they make up less than 5% of the ensemble. Minorities have also traditionally been kept out. But now, as the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss approaches -- the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938 -- the group has pledged to come clean about its past ties with the Nazi party in Austria, which appear to have lasted long after World War II ended in 1945. New York Times freelance writer and consultant James R. Oestreich joins us with the story.
Comments [1]
HATE is the latest prominent ingredient in theatrical productions on stage and in film and in political campaigns and muck-raking publications and Tv and radio programming. HATE and VIOLENCE appeal to those seeking excitement from sensationalism and catastrophic explosive forms in nature as tsunamis. volcanic action, floods, snowstorms, dust storms and the like and bloody battles and car wrecks and contact sports such as wrestling which usually APPEARS, but ISN'T for real, yet satisfies the venal mindsets. Too many stage directors seeking self aggrandizement by doing the outrageous populate even our most respected opera houses and live theater establishments Although Wagner was an extreme radical antisemite, TANNHAUSER nowhere expresses anything but a Roman Catholic concern for redemption which the Pope refused TANNHAUSER, but his virtuous lover Elizabeth by her sacrifice in her own death achieved for him. The composer Wagner had a Protestant mother and a Jewish father, LUDWIG GEYER, whom the child WAGNER adored. Nonetheless, his competitiveness and professional protocol approach ruled against his own reason and intellect and produced a contemptible blind scorn, a major blemish that thwarted a true view of others. The Germany of today views its ancestral NAZI predecessors as the villains they were. . I am a Wagnerian heldentenor, an opera composer, "Shakespeare" and "The Political Shakespeare" and director of the Richard Wagner Music Drama Institute. Here are my websites where one may download, free, my singing of 37 out of the 100 selections that I have sung in four solo concerts at the Isaac Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall by going to Recorded Selections: www.WagnerOpera.com, kennethbennettlane.com, kennethlane.org, www.ShakespeareOpera.com and www.RichardWagnerMusicDramaInstitute.com. Roles that are represented in my singing to be heard on my websites are: Tristan, Siegfried, Goetterdaemmerung Siegfried, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Siegmund, Walther von
Stolzing, Rienzi, Federico, Florestan and, in oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus.
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