Robert Greenberg - The Ring - Part One - The Great Courses 

I'll give it one if you like.

Wagner was not a saint; rather he was a well-known scoundrel. And Professor Greenberg's sassy comments are quite appropriate. No idea where you think he sniped you.

@@angryjalapeno I think Greenberg is totally irresponsible. In spite of the hackneyed assertion that Wagner was a monster, he most definitely was not. His friends loved him. He was great with his children. He was playful, but he was a man filled with pain and compassion Fought for animal rights passionately.But the cheap,tabloid way to deal with him is to sensationalize his bad traits, further spurious information about him and blame him for Hitler. I ordered Greenberg's course on Wagner, but promptly packed it up and returned it. Debussey had a mistress who committed suicide because of his behavior,but it is never held against Debussy. It's become a popular sport to pile onto Wagner rather than to sort through what Thomas Mann called " the sufferings and greatness of Richard Wagner."

Very well said. I could not agree more. Oaf is the rigjt eord for the way he approaches this genius of first order.

I agree wholeheartedly. I have watched the whole thing, only continuing to see how much more awful it could get. The penny finally dropped that Greenberg is Jewish, and absolutely conflicted between his appreciation of the utter beauty of the music and his horror at all the antisemitism he sees in not just the composer but his works. In the end I asked a fellow Wagner enthusiast who is also Jewish what the hell was going on here and he explained quite a lot to me, while refuting much of it at the same time. So that explains his attitude. It doesn't explain why he of all people was commissioned to produce these lectures, full of such negativity and dislike. It also doesn't explain the poor quality of his scholarship. He devotes almost no time to the discussion of the motivic structure of the Ring score for example, rather falling back on the old "they're just calling cards" trope. One motif he does quote, universally known as Wotan's frustration, he calls "anger" or something like that. He sneers at Siegmund's name as meaning "orifice (presumably mouth) of victory". (I'm sure everyone on the planet who is called Sigmund or Siegmund will appreciate that one!) It takes only the most cursory reading to discover that the name means "protector of victory". (Presumably Edmund is "protector of Eds"?) "How does Brünnhilde know that Sieglinde is knocked up?" he asks, answering himself with "I dunno." Well, maybe because she is a demi-goddess, the daughter of the earth mother, and has intuitive insight into such things? At a wild guess. That's just the howlers that immediately come to mind. There were a lot more. One thing that did strike me was his assertion that Wagner originally stipulated that Parsifal was only 12 years old. He then, of course, went off on one about Kundry seducing a 12-year-old and how disgusting this was. But the idea intrigued me. Parsifal as a 12-year-old in act 1 would work brilliantly - if you transposed it up an octave and cast a treble! Then, you only have to factor in a gap of six or eight years between act 1 and act 2 to have Kundry seducing the boy as he is on the cusp of manhood. I have no idea where he got this from though. If anyone knows, could they tell me?

I learned a lot from «How to Listen to and Understand Great Music», but Greenberg's sense of humor does get tiresome, and when he talks about Richard Wagner, the snarky sarcasm is relentless; so I knew I should steer clear of this course.