My pilgrimage: Chapter One
By Michael Moriarty
web posted February 20, 2017
I suppose it was the Rachmaninoff piano concertos that gave me my first glimpse of a pilgrimage. Not knowing one from the other I assumed, at the receptive ages of four and five years old, that these separate concertos were all one, big, long piece of music.
I’d sit there in front of the big RCA Victrola and, without having noticed how many records my father would have placed on its spindle, just listen and sometimes cry at the unrelenting beauty of it all.
It was a divine childhood.
Those piercingly beautiful sounds in the air had a godlike quality in them. It was music that I hoped and prayed would never stop! Or, at least, sounds that seemed like they never had to end.
I, of course, didn’t want them to end. I wanted them to go on and on and on forever!
Then school came and homework and everything began to be too long and too huge, with too many words and too many pages.
Simple songs and breathtaking melodies became my next obsession.
Cole Porter and album covers with the images of Manhattan on them! Then jazz and, it would seem, the more I learned about Miles Davis, the sheer naked loneliness and anger in the sound of his trumpet and his sometimes bitter attitude?
The more I listened, the more I somehow sympathized with Mr. Davis and his music. With divorcing parents, one tends to feel loneliness and anger quite quickly.
Of course, I had no idea where this was all leading.
Images of the days I live now and my blissful struggles with creating an entire “Ring” of operas… yes, like those of Richard Wagner and his Ring des Nibelungen?
That could not possibly have crossed my mind for at least two thirds of my life.
I was certainly writing plays and numerous songs by then, but operas?!
They were all too long and too easily made fun of for me to consider creating one of my own. Perhaps a musical comedy but… that was about it.
I had no idea of the pilgrimage I was on and not a notion of where it was going. I was simply grateful for a mildly famous life as an actor and entertainer.
Those portions of fame that embarrassed me and demanded pure, competitive selfishness? They just kept me, as I say, “mildly” famous.
Life has been exceptionally good to me. Retirement, however, has become the best part of it! Plenty of time to not only review one’s own, increasingly long life but the lives of others and the enormously dramatic history of the human race.
A still relatively modern but painfully major corner of that history for me has become Germany and its tragic destiny of provoking not one but two world wars.
I was born at the beginning of America’s initial involvement in the Second World War. I don’t remember much, if anything, about having lived through a war since the reality of that nightmare never really entered my early childhood.
We lived on a street near the big avenue of Grand River in Detroit, Michigan and life was pretty much kindergarten and listening to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter and the genius of Art Tatum’s piano.
Plus, the distinctive scents of cigarette smoke, high-balls, Martinis and cigars.
Musically, I was a fairly sophisticated kid at five years of age.
Emotionally? I wasn’t prepared for the hard knocks that we all face at some time in our lives. Music certainly helped get me through mine!
What has made me stand up boldly in my seventies and challenge not only the legacy of Richard Wagner but inevitably that of Bertolt Brecht as well?!
The answer to that question is the profoundest part of my entire pilgrimage through life. Wagner and Brecht, though they could not possibly have met one another, were born each other’s enemies.
The fruits of Wagner’s music?!
A raging anti-Semitism in Germany that, with the invaluable help of Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Winifred, elevated Adolf Hitler into the sheer personification of Wagner’s most shameless hero, Siegfried!
Meanwhile, Brecht, seeing what was inevitable from the likes of a Siegfried-like Fuhrer, created a satire of Hitler that lumped him into another corner of life that Brecht hated: America and American capitalism.
Capitalists, for Brecht, were no better than Chicago-style gangsters who used every means possible to achieve greater and greater power.
Yet I find them both, Wagner and Brecht, after spending a few unforgettable moments of my life as an actor and entertainer, performing the plays and music of Bertolt Brecht and his colleague, Kurt Weill, I consider both Wagner and Brecht enemies of everything that I hold dear.
Two of what I consider sacred virtues are simple decency and a fondness for measured amounts of pure sentimentality!
The genius of both Wagner and Brecht would dismiss my rules of behavior as not only bourgeois but utterly blind to the harshest realities of life!
For them, Americans are raised deluded by the fairy-tale and fictional precepts contained in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
Whereas I believe that those three documents that laid the very foundation for the United States of America are, after the Holy Bible, the greatest governing principles of the entire human race.
It is also an undeniable fact that without the Holy Bible?! The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution could not have been even conceived of!
The fact that, for over twenty years and the announcement by one of the most shamelessly treasonous Presidents of the United States, George H. W. Bush, that America must surrender to the inevitability of a New World Order run by the United Nations.
As it is described beneath this youtube.com entry: “The New World Order is an unofficial name for certain types of organizations, globalists, and people in and out of our government that want to destroy our US Sovereignty and get rid of our constitutional rights.”
Like both Wagner and Brecht!
The Bush family, the Clintons, the Obama Nation and its major contributor, George Soros, hold traditional America in absolute contempt!!
They are all profoundly certain that their concept of a New World Order, run by the United Nations, will happen!
What is left of an authentically American, Republican Party is now represented by President Donald Trump.
As you are well aware, they of The New World Order, both Republicans and Democrats, are doing their best to destroy the Presidency of Donald Trump.
Once they’ve succeeded in impeaching or, in some other way, eliminating President Donald Trump, they would most certainly destroy Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence.
Why is it so important for me to create at least four operas placing both Richard Wagner and Bertolt Brecht in their proper places historically?
The nightmare of The New World Order cannot possibly be understood or combatted unless you realize how close the human race has come to being destroyed under the tyrannies of Nazism, Fascism and the still, terrifyingly triumphant dictatorships of Communism.
Only America, restored to its Constitutional greatness, can possibly save and continue to protect the individual freedom of a healthy human race. 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty.