Posted on 08/12/2015 7:40:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Great article. Pay no attention to the boobs who can’t process it.
People in our culture today have no time to think deep thoughts. Any “free” time they have is spent being entertained by shallow movies and television and music. Sure, there are gems here and there, but most of it negates rather than encourages thinking.
I have known Mozart’s Don Giovanni for many years.
I never made any connection with it and Catholicism.
The libretto (the story and words) was written by Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who worked with Mozart on several operas.
Da Ponte later moved to NY City in the US and luckily (for me—not for the clueless) left valuable information about what it was like to work together with Mozart while Mozart was directly in the middle of his creative process.
His comments on Mozart are dead wrong.
He doesn’t have a clue what he is writing about.
Very interesting article from the gloomy Spengler.
Garbage.
Western culture has become inaccessible to the general public because of a concentrated plan to destroy Western culture.
Shakespeare is placed by Maya Angelou and West Indian lesbian 'authors.'
Beethoven is replaced by "Kill the police"---- where rap "artists" speak in a monotone
(One of the three basic elements of music is melody--which is change of pitches. It is false to call the current rap crap 'music' for that reason--among others).
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Rembrandt are replaced by Andy Warhol's Campbells soup cans.
Only a few years ago symphony orchestras and opera companies were thriving.
Layman in the US argued about who was better--Artur Rubinstein or Vladimir Horowitz----Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz---Arturo Toscanini or Fritz Reiner.
Today classical music is going extinct.
This did not happen by accident.
Academia and the media and the public school system are tools of this carefully planned destruction of Western culture.
As pawn of this operation Jesse "Hynietown" Jackson chants, "Yo Ho Ho--Western Culture No."
Well said.
I disagree that people can’t contemplate “Great Questions” unless they are free from daily care. That certainly wasn’t the condition of the original audiences of most great works of literature, including the sacred scriptures of every religion that has any.
What are great works of literature about, after all? Life and death, eternal damnation, war, family, lust, status conflict, futility ...
This is what rock music is about, too, and popular television series, and Western movies. I’m not saying these are works of comparable quality and depth to the “Iliad.” However, I am saying that people are always the same. They are socialized in different ways, but they all fear death. They all experience anger, lust, greed, love, ambition, and they can participate in the exploration of these experiences in literature.
There is no great ability or life of leisure needed to appreciate the Volsungasaga or the Odyssey or the Trojan Women or the Book of Kings.
Take that, all you engineering degree drones!
Da Ponte was an absolute revolutionary. Anyone who sees The Marriage of Figaro must see that. We have the Enzio Pinza version here - the voice of God speaking through Mozart and Pinza, of course.
And that is the core of the problem. Not all have succumbed, but too many of the faculty have apostatized, and when the instructors go over to the enemy, the students are lost.
The humanities used to be understood as the study of the good, the true, and the beautiful, acknowledged as universals and regarded as mutually reinforcing, given the ultimate unity of the good. This tended inherently to draw students out of themselves and to search for common ground with others, anchored in the best the culture has produced over time.
It is difficult to imagine anything more antithetical to the liberal arts than the modern preoccupation with particularistic, self-indulgent identity and grievance studies, or the rejection of the canon because contemporary hackwork seems more "relevant" to whatever itch is rotting the current crop of professors.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.