Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy
Although the nature of Ezra Pound’s Fascism has generated substantial critical study, the mechanics of his actual engagement in the cultural projects of the Mussolini regime has received less attention. Using as its starting point lines from Pound’s controversial “Italian Canto” 72—explicit in its praise of the Fascist regime— the essay examines Pound’s correspondence with Italian cultural figures in the 1930s. Focusing on his relationship with the academic librarian Manlio Torquato Dazzi and the celebrated Futurist F.T. Marinetti, the essay demonstrates the blurred distinctions between aesthetic and political spheres in Pound’s engagements with Italian culture in the 1930s. The essay further argues that Pound’s avant-garde aesthetics and neo-platonic philosophy colored the way he engaged with the cultural projects of the regime, making his Fascism a mixture of spirituality, modernism and totalitarianism.
Ezra Pound's Lost Book: Orientamenti
Little has been written about Ezra Pound's extensive contributions to the Rome-based paper Meridiano di Roma between 1938 and 1943, though they provide important insight into the poet's thinking and state of mind during the last years of the Italian regime. I discussed these pieces in a preliminary way back in 1984 (in my Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing) but there has been surprisingly little interest in them since (even Robert Casillo's authoritative The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound [1988] largely ignores them). The present essay explores the context and content of these pieces, looking especially at the selection Pound published under the title Orientamenti, a volume quickly destroyed when the Allies occupied Italy. Key issues are Pound's equivocal relation to the Italian regime, the obsessive, ideological cast of his thinking at this time, and his peculiarly restricted sense of what was happening at this climatic moment in modern history.
Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival
The operatic festival Richard Wagner founded in 1876 is the oldest and most famous in the world. It is also the most controversial, for it became the cultural showcase of the Third Reich. In this prize-winning and generously-illustrated book - the first to provide a frank and fully rounded history of Bayreuth - Frederic Spotts describes the festival's performances and productions, the Wagner family who have run it, its debasement into 'Hitler's court theatre', and its postwar liberation from its chauvinistic, anti-Semitic past. Provocative and compelling, the book will fascinate all Wagner enthusiasts as well as those interested in European cultural and intellectual history since 1876. 'A vast body of historic data - musical, personal, political, and generally artistic - presented in smooth, witty prose ... Spotts tells in absorbing detail the complex story of the relationship between the Third Reich and Bayreuth ... As reliable a guide to Bayreuth as we shall ever have.' Michael Tanner, 'The New York Times Book Review' 'Bayreuth is not just a spiritual and political history of the Festival but a sustained attempt to explain the place, uniquely emblematic, that it holds, and has always held, in German cultural life.' Richard Law, 'Opera' 'A readable, authoritative account of the Wagner festival that is compelling and chilling, sketching the cult's evolution and surveying its achievements ... Definitive.' Edward Rothstein, 'The New York Times' 'Spotts knows his Wagner as well as any professional musician ... he writes illuminatingly about the political as well as the musical context of the Bayreuth phenomenon.' David Mellor, 'The Daily Telegraph' 'Music history, cultural comment, and such issues as the family's embrace of Nazism are all deftly combined.' 'Time' Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for the best music book of 1994. Frederic Spotts is an Associate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a former member of the American Foreign Service.