Club Troppo

We never quite got to any ‘official’ best blog comments in our recent Best Blogs exercise.  And it wouldn’t qualify because it wasn’t Australian.  But (and apologies to regular readers who saw it when first posted) I’ve just come across this marvellous intervention by commenter Laon on the marvellous group blog Crooked Timber.

Chris Bertram reported on a ghastly production of Wagner’s Twilight of the Idols and got a couple of fascinating comments on Hitler’s views on Wagner and whether Wagner was a proto-Nazi.  I found it fascinating anyway.  So there you go - that’s blogging for you.  Post something on Wagner and get someone who’s doing his PhD on it dropping by for a bit of a screen dump.

And here’s a quote from Ruskin on Wagner.

Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, … and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound – not excepting railway whistles – as I was by the cessation of the cobbler’s bellowing.

To which we would add these days ‘and those were the good points’.