Corey Robin

Tag: Richard Wagner

Wagner, Tolkien, and the Tech Bros

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A few days ago, Michiko Kakutani (I didn’t even know she was still around) had a long piece in the Times on the Silicon Valley power elite’s embrace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Kakutani expresses repeated puzzlement over Silicon Valley’s besottedness with these texts. Tolkien had a horror of technology and power politics, after all, which is clearly expressed in the trilogy, and his world seems as far away from Silicon Valley as his was from the Norse sagas he drew upon. I find myself puzzled by Kakutani’s puzzlement. It can hardly be a secret that The Lord of the Rings mirrors in many ways Wagner’s Ring Cycle and that Wagner also expressed horror for technology and power politics, […]

Monday Morning at the Wagners

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From Cosima Wagner’s Diaries 1878-1883: Coming from his bath, R.[ichard] says to me: “You are quite right—we should have slaves”… [January 7, 1878] One more potential bit of evidence, incidentally, for my claim that Nietzsche’s arguments in early essays like “The Greek State” and in Birth of Tragedy may have been about real, not metaphorical, slavery. In her diary, Cosima Wagner makes clear that she and Richard had been discussing the benefits of slavery over wage labor (“I declared recently that slaves had been happier than the present-day proletariat”), which was one of the main defenses of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War in the South. Though the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche was, in 1878, on the brink of a permanent […]