Talk:Elsa Bernstein

Surname

Why would her birth name come after her married name in the hyphenate? I would assume that this is an error without an explanation--Scottandrewhutchins (talk) 00:06, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Fixed it, my friend — and you were right. Though there are many other inadequacies to her entry, I haven't the sword for that battle (particularly problems inherent to the German Wikipedia entry, our slightly tainted source). My brief comment about Elsa Porges-Bernstein's paternal grandfather at Talk:Heinrich Porges should be of general interest to you, I think, but is particularly relevant to those puzzling out that most devious of Ms. Porges-Bernstein's inventions, her "Ernst Rosmer" pseudonym (which she wrote under while making no effort to hide her true name and identity). Surely some brilliant academic has already noticed what's been "hidden in plain sight" now for more than a century, no? Or do people still listen to composers like . . . like Wagner, I was about to say . . . Elsa Porges at age ten "entering the books" as the youngest person to attend that glorious first complete Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, not because she was forced by her father's slightest vanity at his own "involvement" with it — no, quite the opposite, in fact — she attended by her own repeated, and emphatic, insistence that she be there to hear every note of it for herself . . . . Just imagine that beautiful blond ten-year-old prodigy, Liszt's granddaughter, drinking in every nuance of The Ring, that FIRST Ring, in the way that only a child's imagination could drink all that dewy manna in?

There are people today curious enough about "Ernst Rosmer" to seek out and write feminist interpretations of her plays, and who with every earnestness want to show that (albeit almost completely forgotten by the academic canon itself) she certainly was a formidable figure, a woman who stood straddling the expectations of her craft, a woman who, a woman . . . I agree with all that, albeit rather wanly. But who was she really? And with all her curious inventions, clearly not social commentaries in any easy received sense of that term, well, just what was she really trying to do? What mattered most to her, I'll suggest, was something akin to testing the value of music and myth and poetry together, with an eye toward the widest possible vistas . . .which is precisely why Wagner's vision remained so important to her that . . . that . . .

Hey, anyone still listen to Wagner? I mean, with an open mind? For the pleasure of discovery? Listen still? Still read? Read? Yes? No? Anyone? Sandover (talk) 17:06, 14 May 2013 (UTC)