Setting the Record Straight - What Are We To Do With This Embarrassing Beauty?

How can today’s sensible secular intellectuals account for the unmatchable beauty, the order, and technical genius of the music of the Catholic “West”? “Parsifal” is Richard Wagner’s greatest opera. Unfortunately for some it is unashamedly Catholic and luminescent with sacred beauty. What had happened to the younger Wagner who, in Tristan and Isolde, had abandoned the order of logos and unleashed the relativistic chaos that eventually produced a school of modern classical music so ugly that no one now wants to hear it? Perhaps in “Parsifal” he had found the true sensuousness within the logos.

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