The Real Problem with “Kill the Wabbit”

“The attraction was essentially erotic. This music bespoke emotion liberated from reason. In the musical realm, the assault on tonality corresponded to an assault on sexual restraint in the moral realm and an attack on the social order in the political realm. Wagner could achieve all three, which would correspond to the deepest needs he felt as a failed revolutionary, simply by playing the half-diminished seventh chord that introduced the prelude to Tristan und Isolde. He had become a negative Orpheus, calling forth disorder out of order with his deranged and hyper-sensual music” [E. Michael Jones, Dionysos Rising (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 39]