I got an A+

For the first time in a very long time, I got an A+ on a paper. My professor even said it was one of the best papers he has ever gotten in his class. So, that put me in a cheery mood. In case you were wondering, I'm in Music History III: Romantic to Modern Era and I just did a paper on the banning of Richard Wagner in Israel (because of his Nazi ties, among other things). I don't think I want to put the whole thing on here because you don't really need to be interested, but here's the opening paragraph nevertheless:

The very existence of great art, however one chooses to define it, almost always necessitates a need to erect a political barrier between the work of art and the views of its artist. To take film as an example, one can be impressed and enthralled by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation while recognizing that it is a blatantly racist and inaccurate account of the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan—similarly, that same person can agree with what Michael Moore is trying to say in Farenheit 9/11 while noting that a lot of it is misleading and propagandistic. The barrier seems reasonable enough, but as with almost all theories, problems can arise. What if this artist may have been indirectly responsible for the death of a friend or loved one? Such is the strange case of Richard Wagner’s legacy. Everybody who has studied Wagner at one point or another can probably agree on two central points: one, that he was one of the key composers in world history with a body of work that is almost unparalleled in terms of ambitiousness; and two, that many of his personal views, especially regarding Jews, were abhorrent and unforgivable, especially in light of how his views were co-opted and used by Hitler as a justification for the extermination of the Jewish race. In 1948, more than sixty years after Wagner’s death, the state of Israel was formed, partially as a response to the need of so many Holocaust survivors (many of whom were forced to listen to Wagner in concentration camps) to establish a Jewish state. Since that time, there has been an unofficial ban on playing the music of Wagner in the state of Israel, and the few attempts individuals have made to perform Wagner (notably by the Israeli conductor and composer Daniel Barenboim) have been met with a significant amount of conflict, both from Israeli citizens and public officials. The reasons Israelis offer for eliminating Wagner from the Israeli repertoire are understandable, but they reflect a certain amount of hypocrisy: Why ban Wagner and not other confirmed anti-Semites, as the majority of individuals in Europe during the late 19^th century at least harbored some sort of anti-Semitic belief? The answer lies not in the works of Wagner but in the image and symbol of Wagner, as used by Hitler. The unofficial ban on playing Wagner's music in Israel is more a result of Hitler's co-opting Wagner's views and music as part of his own agenda, as opposed to Wagner's views themselves, which often contradicted many aspects of Hitler's philosophy.


Kind of long-winded, but essentially correct, right? If my prof asks, I might make this into a syposium project. I'll talk about that later.