Mark the Music

“For the next one hundred fifty years, the West would post the Liebestod question again and again in various ways, from Nazism to Woodstock, and never be able to come up with an answer. In the process, enormous amounts of cultural patrimony were thrown overboard. Classical music, freed from patriarchal melody by Wagner’s chromatic modulations, would go into a state of terminal decline. Sexual morals would follow suit. It was an expensive way to find out that Shakespeare had been right all along and that this sort of man should not be trusted [a reference to The Merchant of Venice (V, I, 82-88) ‘Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music’” [E. Michael Jones, Dionysos Rising (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994), p. 50]