TheGaggle
Politics • Culture • News
Our community is made up of those who value the freedom of speech, the right to debate and the promise of open, honest conversations.

We don't agree on everything but we never silence our followers and value every opinion on our channel.
Interested? Want to learn more about the community?
The Gaggle Music Club: Prelude To Die Meistersinger Von Nürnberg By Richard Wagner

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is the Prelude (Vorspiel) to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner. Die Meistersinger is among Wagner's most complex and ambivalent works. It is also his most accessible and delightful of his mature works.

Die Meistersinger is unique in that it is his only opera that gets described as a comedy. It is of course a very serious work of art, and one of the few operas that Wagner composed that is not based on myth or legend, but rather on historical and cultural life in Renaissance Germany.

Wagner began sketching ideas for Die Meistersinger as early as 1845, while working on Tannhäuser. At the time, he became interested in the historical guild of master singers (Meistersinger)—artisan musicians who adhered to strict compositional rules in the free imperial city of Nuremberg during the 16th century. Wagner drew heavily on Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s 1697 historical treatise on the Meistersinger tradition.

After setting it aside for more than a decade while he worked on the Ring cycle, Wagner resumed the project in earnest in the early 1860s and completed it in 1867. It premiered in Munich in 1868 under the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who had become Wagner's champion and benefactor.

Wagner's Die Meistersinger is a celebration of German civic tradition as well as a triumphant affirmation of a national art that is rooted in the traditions of a people. However, at the heart of the opera is a conflict between rigid tradition (represented by the guild rules) and creative genius. Wagner thus presents his own complex picture of the artist: one who innovates, but whose originality nonetheless serves ultimately to renew and elevate the traditions of a people who will live on long after him.

While Die Meistersinger is rich in humor, satire and romantic entanglements, its overall tone is deeply serious and philosophical. It meditates on the relationship between art and community, memory and change and identity and history.

The opera is in three acts, and is scored for large orchestra. It incorporates folkish melodies; lively choruses; counterpoint and canon, evoking Renaissance musical traditions; and leitmotifs, though they are used much more sparingly than in The Ring.

The Prelude, which is after all The Gaggle Music Club's selection, is one of Wagner’s most popular orchestral works and serves as a musical microcosm of the opera’s major themes: the conflict between tradition and innovation, civic pride, the triumph of artistic genius and the celebration of the Meistersinger as the custodians of German art. It is symphonic in scope, rich in counterpoint and character and establishes the key motifs and ideas that reappear throughout the opera.

The prelude introduces major leitmotifs and sets the tone of jubilant civic grandeur. Most of the preludes to Wagner's operas convey mystery, menace or brooding introspection. The prelude to Die Meistersinger, on the other hand, begins with brilliance and formal clarity. It has clear tonal structure (firmly in C major), symphonic development worthy of Beethoven or Brahms and controlled orchestral color and balanced form.

The Prelude is a non-verbal condensation of the opera’s central tension: Rigid tradition vs. Inspired innovation. It previews, musically, the journey from conflict to synthesis that will unfold over the three acts. The Prelude is far more than a rousing concert opener. It is a musical argument--an exploration of how tradition can enrich genius. Through its interplay of themes, Wagner encapsulates the opera’s core message—that true artistic greatness reconciles innovation with cultural roots, and that national identity must be renewed, not merely preserved.

It remains one of the most complex and triumphant overtures in the operatic canon.

In this performance from 1988, Klaus Tennstedt conducts the London Philharmonic.

00:10:26
Interested? Want to learn more about the community?
What else you may like…
Videos
Posts
Articles
The Gaggle Music Club: Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Composed between 1914 and 1917, the piece is one of Ravel's most poignant works. It is both a personal elegy and a musical homage. Ravel wrote it originally for the piano, but he later orchestrated four of its six movements.

Ravel began composing the piece before the First World War, but its final shape was affected by the war. The word tombeau in French Baroque music denotes a musical memorial. The piece however is not solely a tribute to François Couperin, the great French Baroque composer. It’s a broader homage to the French clavecinist tradition of the 18th century — including Jean-Henri D’Anglebert and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

More personally, each movement is dedicated to a friend of Ravel's who had died in the war. Ravel served in the war as a truck driver and lost many friends. He said of the suite: “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.”

The work is neo-classical, ...

00:18:41
TG 1928: Tulsi Gabbard Discloses RussiaGate Receipts: Will It Make A Difference?

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's presentation of the case that the RussiaGate hoax was from the start a treasonous plot masterminded by President Barack Obama himself. Will the disclosure however make a difference?

00:43:35
TG 1927: Is Mike Huckabee Having An Epiphany?

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss the surprising series of angry confrontations U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee is having with Israeli leaders, almost as if he is unaware of Israel's long record of brutal indifference toward the fate of anyone who is not a Jewish Israeli.

01:18:10
Monday Night At The Movies: "Les diaboliques" (1955)

Dear Gagglers:

Monday is, and has always been, a profoundly depressing day. That's why we have decided to add a little bit of fun to it.

On Monday, July 21, we are holding another film screening. Gagglers can watch a movie and, as they do so, offer comments, random thoughts, aesthetic observations and critical insights in the Live Chat.

We will be screening the joint-winner of The Gaggle's "films with a surprise twist" poll: Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Les diaboliques," starring Véra Clouzot and Simone Signoret.

I am delighted to announce that, after a too-long absence, The Gaggle's resident film expert, Cynthia Holt, is returning to the screenings proffer her extraordinary knowledge and insightful observations.

The film will starts at 3 p.m. ET sharp.

See you at the movies.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046911/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_les%2520diaboliques

The Gaggle Book Club: "The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics And Terror, 1940–1949" By Joseph L. Heller

Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is Joseph L. Heller’s "The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940–1949." Published in 1995, the book is considered to be the definitive intellectual history of the Stern Gang in English, and is an important contribution to the deconstruction of the Zionist myth and of extreme nationalist ideology underlying it.

Lehi (originally called “Irgun Zvai Leumi in Israel”) was a radical breakaway from the Irgun, which was itself an integral part of Revisionist Zionism led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Heller traces how Avraham “Yair” Stern, influenced by mystical nationalism and the Maccabean...

Joseph_Heller_-_The_Stern_Gang__Ideology,_Politics_and_Terror,_1940-1949-Routledge_(1995).pdf
12 hours ago

AOC’s career was launched by two Israeli venture capitalists, Joe Raby and Cheni Yerushalmi of Gage Strategies

The origin story is left out of her bio, but suggests an Obama-esque trajectory toward national power

As with Obama, the signs of sellout were always there
https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1946628558908002748

January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals