3/16/2023 0 Comments German opera music![]() ![]() The bitter moral of Du Bois’s tale is that for a Black American of his time, high culture is a trap. John Jones’s epiphany comes when he attends a performance of Lohengrin in New York and feels a new world opening up: “The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune.” In his ecstasy, he inadvertently touches the arm of the white woman next to him, whereupon her male companion complains and Jones is ejected from the hall. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which Du Bois turns to fiction to describe the intellectual awakening of a young Black man from a small town in Georgia. ![]() One of Ross’s most fascinating examples is “Of the Coming of John,” a chapter in W.E.B. In his book Wagnerism (2020), Alex Ross writes about what he calls “Wagner scenes” in literature-episodes in which a young concertgoer is spiritually transformed by an encounter with Richard Wagner’s music. ![]()
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