Do you prefer Richard Wagner music or Igor Stravinsky?

There are entire stretches where I want to shout at his characters, “Shut up already and get on with the story!” But his music, when he hits his stride, sends me soaring. You have to sit with Wagner's ego for a long time while he preaches at you, before you get to the good parts. But the good parts are glorious. read more

Perhaps Wagner would have been more sympathetic to these modernists in a detached musical sense, if he were really capable of such thought; but we must remember that Wagner’s ideals were as much philosophical and political as musical: if he could construe the work of Schoenberg and Stravinsky as somehow bolstering his own world-redeeming, almost cosmic vision for music (doubtful), or as combating “Jewry in music,” (even more doubtful), then he might have gotten on board. read more

Stravinsky's asserted mainstream was a fiction, constructed by historians (Schoenberg and Webern moonlighting among them) who replayed in forward motion a lineage that had been traced backward to justify atonal and 12-tone music as the inevitable outcome of the ''crisis of tonality'' Wagner had supposedly set in motion. read more