# Help finding work about Wagner



## dove (Sep 25, 2014)

Hello all,

I am searching for a criticism about the composer that I thought was written by Theodore Adorno, but I could not find it so maybe I was wrong. The criticism refers to Wagner's music (not the libretto), that it is the essence of fascism, because its so drunk with power and passion, that the listener has no choice but to be carried into it. Does anyone know what i'm talking about and can refer me?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Welcome to the forum, dove.

Try these:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3526414?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4489210?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/09/adorno-and-wagner.html

I can't find you the exact quote, but the idea of Wagner's _Gesamtkunstwerk_ (total art work) as "fascistic" because it seeks to overwhelm the audience is encountered frequently among those who want to tie him to Nazism. Adorno may be the original source of that notion. As you imply, Wagner's music itself makes some people uncomfortable with its direct aim at the solar plexus, its transgression of the "aesthetic distance" formerly provided by abstract formal structures. But his musical style has to be understood in the context of his larger concept of music drama as an all-embracing "alternate reality."


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

Nietzche wrote an interesting little tome on Wagner


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

dove said:


> Hello all,
> 
> I am searching for a criticism about the composer that I thought was written by Theodore Adorno, but I could not find it so maybe I was wrong. The criticism refers to Wagner's music (not the libretto), that it is the essence of fascism, because its so drunk with power and passion, that the listener has no choice but to be carried into it. Does anyone know what i'm talking about and can refer me?


Just read all the topics ( plenty of them) on this forum and you are a much wiser human man/ woman.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Triplets said:


> Nietzche wrote an interesting little tome on Wagner


You're probably referring to "Nietzsche Contra Wagner," but there's also "The Case of Wagner" and other assorted writings. Nietzsche remained all his life obsessed with exorcising Wagner from his psyche, both furious and grateful that he never could. It's a remarkable case of a man stuck in perpetual rebellion against a father figure, and the struggle resulted in some sharp insights and a fair amount of foolishness. I believe Adorno was influenced heavily by Nietzsche in his own thoughts on the composer.


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## dove (Sep 25, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Welcome to the forum, dove.
> 
> Try these:
> 
> ...


thank you, that was very helpful


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> It's a remarkable case of a man stuck in perpetual rebellion against a father figure, and the struggle resulted in some sharp insights and a fair amount of foolishness.


Hardly. He towered and still towers far above Wagner in terms of philosophical thought and psychological insight. It was Freud, who when he finally read Nietzsche, despaired that Nietzsche had already thought all of his thoughts and better.

Nietzsche probably never got over Wagner dismissing his attempts at composition. Wagner likely had a point, but he should have at least admitted that Nietzsche was a better pianist (which he most certainly was).


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

eugeneonagain said:


> Hardly. He towered and still towers far above Wagner in terms of philosophical thought and psychological insight. It was Freud, who when he finally read Nietzsche, despaired that Nietzsche had already thought all of his thoughts and better.
> 
> Nietzsche probably never got over Wagner dismissing his attempts at composition. Wagner likely had a point, but he should have at least admitted that Nietzsche was a better pianist (which he most certainly was).


It looks as if you haven't explored Nietzsche's close, complex and difficult relationship with Wagner, his youthful idol and mentor, which haunted him past their personal rift and Wagner's death to the very end of Nietzsche's life.

In the 1870s Nietzsche, in his late 20s and early 30s, spent a lot of time visiting Wagner's home, where he was welcomed into Wagner's inner circle, but where, after many exciting evenings of philosophical conversation, he grew increasingly uncomfortable with his host both philosophically and personally. Ultimately his differences with Wagner developed into a love-hate which, a few years after Wagner's death, exploded in such an outpouring of invective, some of it rational and some rationalized or simply fanciful, as could only be motivated by a need to get an obsession, and a sense of having been subordinate to a much older man he had idolized, out of his system.

Nietzsche's characterizations of Wagner's art are, like so much of his writing, self-indulgently messianic, theatrical and overwrought - some of the very qualities for which he criticized Wagner. It would be to misunderstand Nietzsche's personal psychology not to see his rhetorical shafts as directed at things in his own nature that his _Uebermensch,_ his grandiose fictional self, might have wished to disown. But he could never disown Wagner; in honest moments, in some of his last comments on Wagner's music, penned shortly before his mental collapse, Zarathustra paid tribute to the opera he supposedly loathed,_ Parsifal,_ in language both sincere and beautiful. If you know him only as an anti-Wagner crusader, you should read it:

http://www.monsalvat.no/nietzsch.htm

Nietzsche never could understand the meaning of Wagner's last opera as anything but a capitulation to ascetic Catholicism; he couldn't see it as the subversion of religion, the concentrated recasting and completion of the _Ring_, which it is. But his willingness to fully confess his own capitulation to its soul-rending beauty is deeply touching.

You seem to have taken my remarks as criticisms of Nietzsche's achievements (or perhaps you merely saw another opportunity to put down Wagner). That Nietzsche was a greater philosopher, and an incomparably greater writer, than Wagner is disputed by no one. That's irrelevant to my statement that "Nietzsche remained all his life obsessed with exorcising Wagner from his psyche, both furious and grateful that he never could. It's a remarkable case of a man stuck in perpetual rebellion against a father figure, and the struggle resulted in some sharp insights and a fair amount of foolishness." I believe that to be true.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> It looks as if you haven't explored Nietzsche's close, complex and difficult relationship with Wagner, his youthful idol and mentor, which haunted him past their personal rift and Wagner's death to the very end of Nietzsche's life.


On the contrary, I have fully explored it. I am fully conversant with Nietzsche's writing.



Woodduck said:


> In the 1870s Nietzsche, in his late 20s and early 30s, spent a lot of time visiting Wagner's home, where he was welcomed into Wagner's inner circle, but where, after many exciting evenings of philosophical conversation, he grew increasingly uncomfortable with his host both philosophically and personally. Ultimately his differences with Wagner developed into a love-hate which, a few years after Wagner's death, exploded in such an outpouring of invective, some of it rational and some rationalized or simply fanciful, as could only be motivated by a need to get an obsession, and a sense of having been subordinate to a much older man he had idolized, out of his system.


This is a personal characterisation, not a reflection of facts. The difference of views and the break are real, but you are implying that it is somehow a story of the lesser figure becoming disgruntled and this developing into an _irrational_ obsession. That is completely false. His style in the last writings is without doubt histrionic, but the line of thought he developed is sound and also devastating for Wagner's self-image.



Woodduck said:


> Nietzsche's characterizations of Wagner's art are, like so much of his writing, self-indulgently messianic, theatrical and overwrought - some of the very qualities for which he criticized Wagner. It would be to misunderstand Nietzsche's personal psychology not to see his rhetorical shafts as directed at things in his own nature that his _Uebermensch,_ his grandiose fictional self, might have wished to disown. But he could never disown Wagner; in honest moments, in some of his last comments on Wagner's music, penned shortly before his mental collapse, Zarathustra paid tribute to the opera he supposedly loathed,_ Parsifal,_ in language both sincere and beautiful. If you know him only as an anti-Wagner crusader, you should read it.


I really don't need to read it, I am very familiar with Nietzsche writing. It's very easy to go on about his collapse, but all the ideas that turned up in _Nietzsche contra Wagner/The Case of Wagner_ were already formed and partially written in other preceding books, particularly _The Gay Science_ and even _Richard Wagner in Bayreuth_ before the break. The writing there is not histrionic; it demonstrates an insight into Wagner criticism that so many other 19th century thinkers would not have even perceived, let alone pursued so taken were they on the music and semi-philosophy.

In a way his attitude towards Wagner is always one where he acknowledges what he found great in Wagner, but after seeing how the magician does his tricks the magic is not quite so compelling as before.



Woodduck said:


> Nietzsche never could understand the meaning of Wagner's last opera as anything but a capitulation to ascetic Catholicism; he couldn't see it as the subversion of religion, the concentrated recasting and completion of the _Ring_, which it is. But his willingness to fully confess his own capitulation to its soul-rending beauty is deeply touching.


That's because it isn't a 'subversion of religion'; it is religion by any other name. No playing with words and names can alter this. I don't think it's at all correct to suggest that Nietzsche, this great scholar who was appointed the youngest professor of philology at Basel, _couldn't understand_ the themes of Wagner when he was fully conversant with every influence sustaining them. I would say that, on the contrary, Wagner had by that time an inability to see that his last opera is little more than a collapse into modified religion. 
In itself this is no great crime. Nietzsche himself thought that what appears profound and uniquely human in religion are all the ordinary modes of human life assumed and absorbed into religion and sanctified. I suppose his criticism is in wondering why Wagner was assuming a veil of religious sanctity - which he was.



Woodduck said:


> You seem to have taken my remarks as criticisms of Nietzsche's achievements (or perhaps you merely saw another opportunity to put down Wagner). That Nietzsche was a greater philosopher, and an incomparably greater writer, than Wagner is disputed by no one. That's irrelevant to my statement that "Nietzsche remained all his life obsessed with exorcising Wagner from his psyche, both furious and grateful that he never could. It's a remarkable case of a man stuck in perpetual rebellion against a father figure, and the struggle resulted in some sharp insights and a fair amount of foolishness." I believe that to be true.


Not at all. I'm not a blind follower of Nietzsche, I reject a fair chunk of his ideas, but I think he offers insightful criticism of art and in general art as Wagner practised it as a form of social-psychological-cultural project. I freely accept that part of what drove Nietzsche's critique was a desire to knock down Wagner's former position over his life, but this doesn't alter the substance of his critique.
You're right that I am a critic of Wagner, but not that I am on some mindless path to 'put down' Wagner at every opportunity, for no reason. I put it to you that the opposite is true: that you are so much an admirer of Wagner, and have been for so long from an early age, that you refuse to see anything other than an unassailable genius. It's not a particularly balanced view.


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## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

Having read Nietzche's fascinating treatises on Wagner, there's no doubt that he provides many thoughtful insights and criticisms about the works that are worthy of consideration for anyone interested in the subject. Yet it would be an overstatement to say these criticisms invalidate the operas. As Bryan Magee has noted, "Thus great figures like Thomas Mann and Bernard Shaw, or, within music, Richard Strauss and Mahler, found no difficulty in being ardent enthusiasts of both Wagner and Nietzsche". It is possible to both understand Nietzche's points and still consider Wagner's music dramas to be penetrating and enriching works of art.

I think it is worth going over in detail what some of these criticisms were, and the charges that Nietzsche levels at Wagner. Essentially, Nietzsche dismisses the Wagnerian magic as a kind of manipulation. Wagner's great conceptions, he argues, do not tell the truth about our condition: they falsify it. And the music, with its urgent accents, is part of the deception, injecting unjustified emotion into situations that, judged in themselves, are too thin and schematic to merit our concern. He even argues that the whole idea of redemption, conceived in Wagner's way, is a denial of life and an invocation to decadence. In the third essay of _The Genealogy of Morals_, devoted to the demolition of asceticism, he ridicules _Parsifal_, wondering whether the composer had not intended the work as a kind of satyr play, a grotesque sequel to _The Ring_. And in _The Case of Wagner _ he sets out to demonstrate the diseased quality of the Wagnerian hero, who is not a hero at all buy a decadent human being. The goal of Nietzsche is to reject Wagner's moral vision, and also to suggest that the attempt to build that vision into a sustained work of art leads to music that is fundamentally sick. In other words, the moral faults of the vision translate directly into aesthetic faults in the music, and at the same time an immersion in the music involves a corruption in the soul of the listener, whose psyche is jeopardized by this surrender to a polluted ideal.

In opposition to Wagner's claims for his art, Nietzsche argues that the heroic in Wagner is a sham. His characters need to be unmasked, to be deprived of their mythic costumes and returned to the bourgeois context from which they have been lifted into legend. Wagner's portentous music does not offer his characters redemption, since it merely disguises the fact that they are the ordinary sick refuse of nineteenth century society: as far from tagic grandeur as Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The Wagnerian drama is a species of counterfeiting, in which the heroic passions and vast deads reveal themselves, when held up to the critical light, as thin whips of sickly passion puffed up by musical bombast. The promises of redemption and transcendence depend on the forgery conducted by the music, and the fact that these promises are taken so seriously by so many is indicative of the equally decadent and counterfeit nature of the surrounding culture.

Yet, as the now well-known letter to Peter Gast of January 1887 illustrates, _Parsifal_ was, for Nietzsche, a shattering experience, an entirely _genuine_ expression of "sympathy with what is seen and shown forth that cuts through the soul as with a knife...Has any painter, ever depicted so sorrowful a look of love as Wagner does in the final accents of his Prelude?" Clearly then, his attacks on Wagner did not cure him of the enchantment, and we are left wondering how sincerely he meant them.

There is truth in Nietzche's claim that the Wagnerian characters do not always live up to the metaphysical and moral burdens that the composer places on them. For example, only every now and then, as when alone in the forest, or confronting the Rhine-daughters, or dying in a long delayed access of consciousness does Siegfried represent the tragic truth of human freedom. Nevertheless, the real test of Wagner's achievement lies with the music, as this is music drama, and this is where Nietzche's come up short. The Wagnerian ideal of the hero would only be demonstrated to be a sham, as Nietzsche thought it to be, only if we could demonstrate that the music fails to raise the hero to the level that the drama requires. This elevation of the passions is what the music attempts to achieve, and for those of us respond to the operas so enthusiastically, Wagner succeeds. He portrays the intricate emotional connections that enable us to make sense of the heroic soul. And he gives them without asking us to deny our skeptical modern outlook. The stories of his operas are a presentation of one of the few human ideals that remain available: the ideal of heroic love. This ideal cannot be assessed merely from an acquaintance with the text, any more than the ideal of moral integrity thst Shakespeare sets before us in the character of Cordelia could be assessed from a prose translation of the play. Just as the great poet forges through words and imagery the moral links that sustain his ideal, so does the great composer forge those links through music.

As Bernard Williams argues in his great essay on _The Ring_, _Wagner and the Transcendence of Politics_, there is no transportable conclusion that are contained Wagner's works that be argued against in the way Nietzsche does, as if he were attacking concrete ideas. These works do not argue for a thesis: they show us what we are, and help us to understand through sympathy what is at stake in our moral choices.

Wagner was influenced in this matter by his conception of Greek tragedy. Like many readers of the Greeks, Nietzsche included, he was struck by the extraordinary sense of reconciliation that radiates from the Greek tragic stage. The audience lives through the destruction and death of noble and commanding characters, observes the most dreadful reversals of fortune, and all of this is presented as a kind of necessity, a destiny that cannot be averted. And yet somehow the result is not only beautiful but serene. The audience is raised by the dreadful events, in which the fear of death has been transcended and human life reaffirmed in the knowledge of its fleeting nature. Explanations of this experience have been forthcoming since Aristotle, but Roger Scruton, in his book _Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde _ argues that Wagner was the first thinker to fully grasp that the tragic experience is akin to, and derived from, the ritual heart of religion. Suffering, as portrayed in tragedy, is both ritualized and sanctified. The tragedy shows human beings on the edge, on the verge of nothingness, who can nevertheless snatch greatness from the jaws of destruction. They do this by displaying what is worthy about what is being taken away: the absolute value of life and love, revealed in the moment of their annihilation.

Nietzche's complaint, that Wagner's characters, returned to the modern context where they belong, are no more capable of tragic grandeur than Emma Bovary shows a disregard for what art can do (not to mention an underestimation of Flaubert's novel). In his essay, _Parsifal: The Refusal to Transcend_ Michael Tanner responds to Nietzche's criticism:

"Thomas Mann, always thrilled by the equivocal, the suspect and so forth, remarks:

Take the list of characters in _Parsifal_: what a set! One offensive and advanced degenerate after another! A self-castrated magician; a desperate double personality, composed of Circe and a repentant Magdalene, with cataleptic transitions stages; a lovesick high-priest, awaiting the redemption that is to come to him in the person of a chaste youth; the youth himself 'pure fool' and redeemer, in his way also an extremely rare specimen.

That is a reasonably accurate account of the leading characters, so far as it goes, but the intention behind it is clear: it is to get us to share Mann's view of the work as 'languorously sclerotic', gorgeously over-ripe, fascinating by virtue of its unhealthiness. He is merely reacting positively to what he sees as the same phenomenon as Nietzsche, where in _Der Fall Wagner_ he exclaims: 'Indeed, transposed into hugeness, Wagner does not seem to have been interested in any problems except those which now preoccupy the little decadents of Paris. Always five steps from the hospital.' One resists yet again a _tu quoque_, just as one fleetingly recalls, reading the Mann passage, that he chose as the location for his diagnosis of modern life a sanatorium. Of course, one finds such people in a hospital: and Wagner, Nietzsche and Mann all agreed in thinking the modern world a sick place. The whole question is about the attitude which is taken up towards the sickness, or many sicknesses, that the artist discerns. And there can be no doubt that Wagner's urgent desire in _Parsifal_ is to find a treatment of the most efficacious kind; there is even less ground for attributing to him than to Nietzsche a fascination with sickness, decadence and depravity for their own sakes, and very much less than in the case of Mann, who would have suffocated in clear air. Nietzsche's charge is all the more strange since he spent all his adult sane life preoccupied with the 'patient', i.e. modern civilization in its decline. But by the time he wrote _Der Fall Wagner_ he was so exhausted with his own non-artistic attempts at diagnosis and prescription that he looked to art as a relaxation, a refreshment--and found _Carmen_. Not that any music person has anything but admiration for that work, but it's odd that Nietzsche should not have felt that Don José has _his_ problems, and so does even Carmen herself. But we don't feel that they matter so much as the problems of Amfortas and Kundry; and that was, for Nietzsche, a relief. Even so the grounds for accusation of Wagner remain strange--at least, _these_ grounds. What is true, and may account for Nietzsche's frantic search for plausible criticisms, is that _Parsifal_ is an extraordinarily taxing and shattering experience, not to be undertaken lightly. Those who, having heard it or some of it once or twice, withdraw from it on grounds of its 'religiosity' or morbidity, might ask themselves whether what they really object to is not simply the extreme demands it makes on them--demands, they may feel, which are in excess of any that art should ever make. Hence the tendency to recategorize it as 'ritual', and then conclude that it is bogus."

I agree with Tanner here; suppose we were to return Oedipus and his children to their context, to see them merely as the most famous dysfunctional family in fiction, and to place their well-known moments of distinction as when Oedipus stabs out his eyes, in the context of the ordinary and no doubt sordid machinations of day to day life in Thebes. Would they not appear then, as Nietzsche says of Wagner's characters, as "five steps from the hospital"?

Tragedy does not deny the ordinary and the sordid. Again, Roger Scruton argues that Wagner's operas do is take the turning points of human life and frames them as religious sacrifices, or a making sacred of those moments when we must pay the full cost of being what we are. It is not absurd to to give these moments that Wagner did when attempting to summarize their power: redemption. He did not mean that word in a Christian sense, as invoking the promise and purchase of a better life to come. He meant it as a description of the rite itself, and hence the moment when life is shown to be intrinsically worthwhile, exactly when it engulfed in nothingness.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

SilenceIsGolden said:


> The Wagnerian ideal of the hero would only be demonstrated to be a sham, as Nietzsche thought it to be, only if we could demonstrate that the music fails to raise the hero to the level that the drama requires. This elevation of the passions is what the music attempts to achieve, and for those of us respond to the operas so enthusiastically, Wagner succeeds. He portrays the intricate emotional connections that enable us to make sense of the heroic soul.


What a bizarre claim. The music - as Nietzsche and everyone familiar with Wagner at the time heard it - was already linked to his concept of drama and the common thread of ideas running through it. What would Nietzsche's opinion have been had he heard this music 'cold', with no back story, without the years of association with Wagner and the shared cultural ideas? I really don't buy the personal interpretations of music, laden with baggage, that masquerade as spiritual revelation.

Even if the music arouses a sense of the great and heroic (as it does) this still doesn't render the dramatic treatments either meaningful or profound, or even as representing what Wagner thinks they represent.

That letter to Peter Gast is not a contradiction of Nietzsche's views. About a year or so later, around the time of his first explicit "anti-Wagner" writings, he is still saying roughly the same things in his letters, but with a sense of being able to see things from a position of not being a Wagner subordinate - his own fault if anything.

I do not rely on Nietzsche's criticisms of Wagner as some sort of basis because he actually does have the sense of bitterness which Woodduck alluded to. In that sense he is like a reformed alcoholic who turns into the harshest critic attacking his own former 'foolishness'. There's also a sense of not having a position he thought he deserved in relation to Wagner. All of this is true, but his criticisms are justified as far as they go. In some sense, even as he puts himself _contra_ Wagner, he's still concerned with many of the same problems and ideas in the same way: what is German culture? Why it isn't great. How it can be great. Some of it complete drivel.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

eugeneonagain said:


> The difference of views and the break are real, but you are implying that it is somehow a story of the lesser figure becoming disgruntled and this developing into an _irrational_ obsession. That is completely false. His style in the last writings is without doubt histrionic, but the line of thought he developed is sound and also devastating for Wagner's self-image.
> 
> It's very easy to go on about his collapse, but all the ideas that turned up in _Nietzsche contra Wagner/The Case of Wagner_ were already formed and partially written in other preceding books, particularly _The Gay Science_ and even _Richard Wagner in Bayreuth_ before the break. The writing there is not histrionic; it demonstrates an insight into Wagner criticism that so many other 19th century thinkers would not have even perceived, let alone pursued so taken were they on the music and semi-philosophy.
> 
> ...


Be careful about characterizing me and my views on Wagner. You came onto this forum accusing people who love Wagner's operas of being "cultists," and your subsequent insistence that the depth that others have found and continue to find in his work is bunk has forced me into a defensive position. You then point to my defense as evidence that I "refuse to see anything other than an unassailable genius," thus confirming your initial accusation. You are continuing to play this circular game. I call foul.

My comments on Nietzsche's complicated and painful psychological relationship to Wagner are hardly an occasion for a wholesale defense of Nietzsche, whose brilliance is not in question. I'm sure you know his writings better than I do, as I know Wagner's operas better than you do. The difference between us is that I don't set out to characterize Nietzsche's admirers in belittling terms. Both men were exceedingly complex people whose work has strong admirers and strong detractors. I take no sides on Nietzsche's virtues as a philosopher (though I may like or dislike this or that idea), but I can see clearly that his rejection of Wagner's philosophical views and his criticisms of his place in culture, though insightful in some respects, are underlain by a deep personal ambivalence, and can't be entirely accounted for without understanding his continuing attachment to and identification with the very art he criticizes. This is so obvious and widely understood that I really don't understand your reaction to seeing it mentioned.

If you want to discuss particular aspects of Nietzsche's views on Wagner (which I perceive as having been a primary influence on your own, insofar as you've stated them), I'm game. But in any such discussion I think it's important to keep our contexts and categories straight. I mean by this to point out that your criticisms of Wagner, like Nietzsche's, are heavily weighted toward cultural criticism, while my response to his work is based mainly on encounters with the works themselves. Wagner is at bottom an artist and not a philosopher, no matter how much extracurricular talk he engaged in, or how much talk has buzzed around his work in its day and since. His operas are art, not philosophical tracts, and they are meaningful to people now as living works of art, not merely as expressions of a cultural milieu now defunct. I will weigh what anyone has to say about what they're "about" against what they say to me as I listen to them - and they say a lot. If they don't say much to you, fine, but that's unlikely to impress people who find them more meaningful.

On _Parsifal_: Nietzsche's view that Wagner "prostrated himself at the foot of the cross" misses the mark, and it does so because he sees the work in terms of - in this case contrary to - his own philosophical positions, and thus sees it superficially and incompletely. In fact, _Parsifal_ is no more religious _in essence_ than is the _Ring_ or _Tristan_, and its symbolism, drawn from Christianized pagan myth and romance, expresses themes which had been developing over the whole course of Wagner's works (remember that its gestation began a quarter of a century before a note of it was written). Nietzsche saw only a spiritual decline between _Parsifal_'s "life-denying" morality of compassion and the exuberant, anarchic heroism of the _Ring._ But his perception was distorted by his understandable distaste for the air of sanctity which hovered over the work and was unquestionably perpetrated, in part, by Wagner himself. What Nietzsche missed was that the plots of the works were at base telling the same story, a story which is also told in various ways in _Tannhauser,_ _Tristan,_ and _Die Meistersinger._ All these operas relate the human struggle for an inner freedom of the spirit and for a morality rooted in it, a struggle waged against false and oppressive mores embodied in laws, customs, rituals and institutions which are really vehicles of power and ego, and which the operas show quite vividly for the evils they are. The difference in _Parsifal_ is that those evils are magically and cannily veiled in the self-congratulatory righteousness of the guardians of the Grail: what Wagner has done by presenting the realm of Titurel as holy, and then showing how horribly corrupting the consequences of holiness can be, is to turn religion inside out and point beyond its codes and rituals to essentially human aspirations which religion's trappings conceal, distort, and corrupt. And Wagner stated this to be his intention.

Not to get too deep into analysis here, I'll nevertheless point out the unmistakable parallels between the personages in _Parsifal _ and those in the _Ring _: Titurel/Wotan (powerful rulers and guardians of the established moral order), Klingsor/Alberich (the "shadows," in the Jungian sense, of Titurel and Wotan, embodying the unvarnished dark side of their apparently high-minded ambitions), and Parsifal/Siegfried (the wild child, the "natural man," who must acquire a conscious self and learn how to live as a moral agent.) Parsifal is essentially a Siegfried who grows up: through the experience of empathy, he realizes that salvation can't be found through yielding to seductive illusions of egoistic pleasure (Kundry) on the one hand or through the wielding of power (the Spear) on the other, and thus, by understanding and assuming his responsibility for the world (Amfortas and the Grail knights), he can succeed in rediscovering and redeeming the source of life (the Grail). This of course is only a sketch; filling it out in terms of the opera's canny dramaturgy and uncanny music can occupy books, and has done so.

To anyone who wants to get at _Parsifal_'s meaning, I can only recommend what Wagner recommended as the key to his works: listen to the music. The chromatic subtlety and ambiguity of this score, its unprecedented and unsettling mix of agony and ecstasy, the sublime and the horrible, forbid simplistic assumptions based on the work's religious appearances. _Parsifal_ is admittedly a difficult nut to crack, and I can't blame anyone for not seeing beneath its mystic magic show. But the simple fact is that Nietzsche did not, and that anyone who trusts his guidance on the matter will not. That's what's relevant here.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

"Be careful"? What the dickens is this supposed to mean? 

I'm not a committed 'Nietzschean' so I'm easily able to see the man's weaknesses. Is it really out-of-line for me to say that you seem unable to recognise any critique of Wagner that isn't superficial and obvious? That is a sort of devotion. You may indeed take this personally, but I am not trying to needle you personally, as Woodduck the person.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

eugeneonagain said:


> "Be careful"? What the dickens is this supposed to mean?
> 
> I'm not a committed 'Nietzschean' so I'm easily able to see the man's weaknesses. Is it really out-of-line for me to say that you seem unable to recognise any critique of Wagner that isn't superficial and obvious? That is a sort of devotion. You may indeed take this personally, but I am not trying to needle you personally, as Woodduck the person.


Yes, it certainly is out of line - i.e. presumptuous and insulting - to say that I "seem" unable to recognize any critique of Wagner that isn't superficial and obvious. How do you know what critiques of Wagner I am able to recognize? The fact that I find _your_ remarks about his work and the people who love it off the mark, prejudiced, and demeaning offers not a clue to what I'd think of someone else's critiques. Do you think your critiques represent the only ones possible, or the last word on the subject? If so, the arrogance is mind-boggling.

Your "critiques" smell very much like recycled Nietzsche, and, as I've said, come at Wagner from a cultural and philosophical perspective which shows a failure to respond to his operas as integrated, musical-dramatic works of art which have survived a turbulent and sometimes horrifying century-and-a-half to speak to people today. They _do_ continue to speak to people, and people continue to talk and write and argue about what they say as the times and our perspectives change. Can you name another composer of operas who generates this kind of intellectual and artistic ferment? Wagner is still big business in the world's opera houses and the world's bookstores. But "Wagnerism" as a cultural phenomenon is dead, and good riddance to it: it did the reputation of his works no favors, and the fault is partly his own. Looking at those works through the eyes of people caught up in the cultural concerns of Wagner's and Nietzsche's time is a fascinating puzzle for historians, but it doesn't define the experience of those works now, or what is enduring in them.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> Yes, it certainly is out of line - i.e. presumptuous and insulting - to say that I "seem" unable to recognize any critique of Wagner that isn't superficial and obvious. How do you know what critiques of Wagner I am able to recognize? _The fact that I find your remarks about his work and the people who love it off the mark, prejudiced, and demeaning offers not a clue to what I'd think of someone else's critiques._ Do you think your critiques represent the only ones possible, or the last word on the subject? If so, the arrogance is mind-boggling.


Hmmm, don't you think this is rather ironic after many posts telling me how wrong I am; how I've completely misinterpreted or failed to grasp Wagner; how I perhaps ought to go and read links giving me a broader outlook? Isn't that also demeaning? Why is it different?
The bit I italicised above strikes me as a safety-net sentence. I realise how much you happen to 'love' Wagner's work, but it's not a compelling argument for it. I'm sorry if the critiques reach your eyes and immediately appear insulting, but it's not unique to appreciating Wagner. You and other's didn't seem to feel the need to respect e.g. Millionrainbows's obvious devotion to his sort of listening. Trashing things one doesn't love seems to be much easier.

I've lost count of the number of people who tell me that Satie (a composer for whom I have great appreciation) was a useless orchestrator (partly true) or that he was a fraud hiding behind a mask of 'humour' and part of the idiotic fake and destructive art movements of dada/cubism/surrealism etc. Is it me they're insulting? Not really. I don't have to defend it all that strenuously because I feel it is secure enough despite the criticisms. I don't sense that among Wagner's fans at all, but rather an hyper-defensiveness. Perhaps somewhat justifiably considering the barrage of crazy claims from those linking him to Hitler, but it seems to go hand-in-hand with an attitude that Wagner was simply the greatest and most profound opera composer (or just composer) in the history of the world: well that's just an opinion.



Woodduck said:


> Your "critiques" smell very much like recycled Nietzsche, and, as I've said, come at Wagner from a cultural and philosophical perspective which shows a failure to respond to his operas as integrated, musical-dramatic works of art which have survived a turbulent and sometimes horrifying century-and-a-half to speak to people today. They _do_ continue to speak to people, and people continue to talk and write and argue about what they say as the times and our perspectives change. Can you name another composer of operas who generates this kind of intellectual and artistic ferment? Wagner is still big business in the world's opera houses and the world's bookstores. But "Wagnerism" as a cultural phenomenon is dead, and good riddance to it: it did the reputation of his works no favors, and the fault is partly his own. Looking at those works through the eyes of people caught up in the cultural concerns of Wagner's and Nietzsche's time is a fascinating puzzle for historians, but it doesn't define the experience of those works now, or what is enduring in them.


You see again, in like measure I could do that: just dismiss your Wagner-praise as recycled, tired 19th century aesthetics mixed with proto-religion, but then it will be marked out as atrocious derision. 
Can I name another artist who generates this kind of ferment? Well, that ferment is not all to do with the profundity of Wagner's work is it? A great deal of the ferment is merely the mistaken idea of his link to the Nazis and that "Wagnerism" you mentioned. The more substantial critiques are among a much smaller group, even from people who actually like Wagner's music.

I feel like I've been here before though. Philosophical objections are countered by claiming Wagner wasn't being philosophical (though this clearly contradicts what he and all the people around him thought he was doing). Cultural objections are sidestepped in the same way. If Wagner's philosophical and cultural concerns, which he poured into his dramas and are expressed through the medium of folklore and mythical drama, are easily dismissed, what exactly is left? The music can stand on its own; I don't accept that it has to be permanently intertwined with the drama.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Hmmm, don't you think this is rather ironic after many posts telling me how wrong I am; how I've completely misinterpreted or failed to grasp Wagner; how I perhaps ought to go and read links giving me a broader outlook? Isn't that also demeaning? Why is it different?

Well, there's the fact that you began your criticisms of Wagner by criticizing his fans, and that you continue to use that ad hominem tactic. It annoys people. Then, when they get defensive and tell you you don't know what you're talking about, you use their counterattack to validate your disparagement of them. I did point out before that this is a circular game and foul play, but you ignored me.

I realise how much you happen to 'love' Wagner's work, but it's not a compelling argument for it.

I haven't used it as any sort of argument, except perhaps to point out that the rather obvious, widespread and enduring love of Wagner's work is not "love" and is not a cult, but is actually based on something. What that something is is the great question, and I've pointed out a number of things that help to answer it.

I've lost count of the number of people who tell me that Satie (a composer for whom I have great appreciation) was a useless orchestrator (partly true) or that he was a fraud hiding behind a mask of 'humour' and part of the idiotic fake and destructive art movements of dada/cubism/surrealism etc. 

I wish I knew enough classical music fans to lose count of the ones who disparage Satie (not that I'd agree with them). Lucky you.

I don't have to defend it all that strenuously because I feel it is secure enough despite the criticisms. I don't sense that among Wagner's fans at all, but rather an hyper-defensiveness. Perhaps somewhat justifiably considering the barrage of crazy claims from those linking him to Hitler, but it seems to go hand-in-hand with an attitude that Wagner was simply the greatest and most profound opera composer (or just composer) in the history of the world: well that's just an opinion.

It's as good an opinion as any - but I personally don't advance these "greatest and most profound" opinions. I don't need to make such comparisons. Wagner is certainly unique among opera composers, and setting the _Ring_ alongside _Figaro_ or even _Falstaff_ is pretty pointless except to prove that we're in a different artistic universe. Only Wagner did what Wagner did.

You see again, in like measure I could do that: just dismiss your Wagner-praise as recycled, tired 19th century aesthetics mixed with proto-religion... 

You could say that, but you'd be hard put to prove it (and what _is_ "tired 19th-century aesthetics" anyway?). Wagner analysis has been very busy since the 19th century, and I'm not a 19th-century person. I arrived here well after Freudian and Jungian psycholgy, comparative mythology, literary mythopoeia and stream-of-consciousness (all indebted to, or prefigured by, Wagner). As for the "religious" dimension of Wagner's works, it's a matter of psychic transformation and evolution, expressed through a musical language characterized by exactly those things.

Can I name another artist who generates this kind of ferment? Well, that ferment is not all to do with the profundity of Wagner's work is it? A great deal of the ferment is merely the mistaken idea of his link to the Nazis and that "Wagnerism" you mentioned. The more substantial critiques are among a much smaller group, even from people who actually like Wagner's music.

Of course I wasn't referring to the Nazi stuff, which isn't a ferment but a tiresome yet perennially fashionable and self-congratulatory rehashing by academic mediocrities, journalistic hacks, opera reviewers under deadline, guilt-ridden Wagner descendants, and Jewish intellectuals still traumatized by the Holocaust, or obligated to pretend to be. None of that is essentially about the works, despite the strained and convoluted efforts to find coded antisemitic messages in them (or even, weirdly, in the music itself). No, the ferment is in the persistent stream of studies of the operas themselves, which shows no sign of slacking off. One assumes that there's a market for it, as there is for new productions and recordings of the operas themselves.

Philosophical objections are countered by claiming Wagner wasn't being philosophical (though this clearly contradicts what he and all the people around him thought he was doing).

I would never say that Wagner wasn't philosophical, only that his works are not didactic, i.e. not fundamentally vehicles for conveying ideas, despite making some pretty strong points through dramatic representation. Trying to view them as basically ideological, with reference to what Wagner presumably was thinking and talking about at the time, gets us into all sorts of trouble. Nietzsche and others started doing that during Wagner's lifetime - understandably, as they were faced with a powerful sort of art they had never seen before, produced by an extremely opinionated and voluble genius.

Cultural objections are sidestepped in the same way. If Wagner's philosophical and cultural concerns, which he poured into his dramas and are expressed through the medium of folklore and mythical drama, are easily dismissed, what exactly is left?

Again, its valid to look at all the influences on the works, and all the ways in which they influenced the culture in turn. What's not valid is to think that we can understand the works in depth by doing that. These are works of art we're talking about, and works of art have to speak compellingly and communicate something significant to people regardless of their historical and cultural context. If they're great works, they will be capable of renewing their appeal era after era and be understood freshly by people in terms of their own lives, not in terms of a culture now receded into the mists of time. Wagner's works have shown themselves capable of this self-renewal, and Nietzsche's righteous fretting over Wagner's bourgeois sensibilities and histrionic personality appears increasingly quaint, more culture-bound than the works he presumes to criticize.

The music can stand on its own; I don't accept that it has to be permanently intertwined with the drama.[/QUOTE]

Some of the overtures and preludes can stand alone, but the operas are highly integral musical/verbal/dramatic/theatrical entities for which Wagner created a kind of stream-of-consciousness music that wasn't intended to be self-sufficient, although we may like it enough to listen to it as if it were. I do sometimes listen to it that way, but then I know its context; some people, some of them fine musicians, can't listen to it at all, apparently because it operates according to principles alien to those governing the exposition of absolute music. Regardless, the relationship of music and drama in Wagner's mature works, in which music fills out for us the complex meaning of what are generally very spare symbolic representations, is essential to understanding his art and to fully understanding the music itself.


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