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No one nowadays is likely to be exiled for praise, lukewarm or otherwise, of Wagner, except possibly in Israel. But Wagner remains a figure of violent contention, just as much as he has ever been. And trying to get people to see him in a less contentious light is itself likely to lead to accusations of parti pris, ignorance of his use for political purposes, or simply of a failure to realise that, more than any other artist of comparable fame and stature, his work, and every other aspect of him, is inherently controversial.
What Mann tried to do in that doomed lecture, and others have tried to do with no more success, was to take Wagner out of his particular context, and to stress the universal, the trans-temporal, the mythic in his work. One difficulty with that approach is that the work does call forth responses of such intensity that it is always in danger of being hijacked in the service of one or another cause. Mann was aware of that, but his attempt to remove it from the cultural and political circumstances of Germany in 1933 was bound to be seen as something more than merely that — and rightly, since in such a situation everything is politicised.
Can we, 80 years later, move on? For though the political circumstances are utterly different now from then, in Germany and the rest of the West, the debate about Wagner seems stuck in much the same rut that it was in then, though with many more sophisticated appurtenances. It’s still routine for a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to be criticised for failing to confront the work’s nationalism, even though it is evident that Sachs’s words about ‘holy German art’ are concerned to stress what is permanently great about a nation’s achievements, in contrast to evanescent political debates. If anything, the alleged political subtexts of Wagner’s music-dramas are of more concern now to Wagner scholars than they were in the first half of the 20th century.
Yet, supposing it had been established that Wagner intended the Knights of the Grail in Parsifal to be concerned with purity of Aryan blood — something that no one studying the work itself, however intensively, could possibly surmise — where do you go from there? How much of your attention, while listening to or watching a performance of Parsifal, will be absorbed by that subject, and how will that relate to your total experience? A work’s subtexts are only interesting if they serve to illuminate the actual text, rather than making a bid to substitute for it. But the debate will go on.
I came to praise Wagner, but found myself, as I have for so long, trying to defend him instead. That was inevitable, since though his bicentenary has led to many new productions of his oeuvre, so many of them are of a reductive or distorting kind that one feels that his incomparable contribution to culture, which should be being celebrated, is instead being held up yet again for critical questioning. That is not happening with the other bicentenary, that of Verdi, and perhaps it can be seen as a tribute to Wagner that he generates, still, so much discussion, while it is hard to imagine Verdi leading to much discussion at all.
What Wagner should be celebrated for, it seems to me, is precisely what he would have wanted and what Mann in the passage I quoted put so eloquently: his music-dramas have the unique quality of drawing us into the particular situations which they explore, so that, for instance, we can experience times without number the slow growth of passion between Siegmund and Sieglinde in Act I of Die Walküre; while they incite us, from the depth and scope of the subjects they present, to ponder the most basic questions about the relationship between our needs and ambitions on the one hand, and all the compromises that civilisation imposes on us on the other. Wagner’s major characters make more exorbitant demands on life than any others; and usually they are more terribly thwarted than any others too. If Wagner failed, in his immense and penetrating works, to provide answers, how many other artists have ever presented the questions in such uncompromising yet alluring terms?
Also in Music and Opera
Also by Michael Tanner
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