apparently performed free of charge), and his art is supposed to make
similar demands upon its audience. Either give it all or not at all.
Hence Nietzsche’s characterisation of Wagner’s art as decadent, and
Wagner himself as the supreme decadent. Wagnerian opera he treated as a
ruiner of spiritual health; for those to whom life is not enough it
fills the void and makes up for whatever is lacking. It latches onto a
certain neurosis, feeds on it and keeps it going, and therefore Wagner’s
works and the man himself can be a literal health hazard. As Wagner
himself wrote to a friend once, “if we had life, we should have no need
of art. Art begins where life breaks off: where nothing more is present,
we call out in art, ‘I wish’? is our ‘art’ therefore not simply a
confession of our impotence?” Tanner says all this theorising about
decadence is speculative but even so, “it would be less than honest for
people on either side to deny that something, maybe a large element, in
their responses to Wagner is touched by it”. Maybe it is in my case.
Maybe I try to resist being sucked in by Wagner and his works so as to
affirm my own strength. But I doubt it.
There’s another possible reason why people perhaps resist the pull of
Wagner which is rather less speculative: the taint of National
Socialism. That Wagner’s name and reputation have become tarnished by
his having been co-opted by Hitler is not worth the effort of denying.
It was Wagner’s early opera Rienzi, with its tale (told by Edward Gibbon
near the end of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) of the
medieval Roman tribune who went about trying to restore the glories of
ancient Rome and lift it out of the decadence into which it had fallen
by the fourteenth century, that converted the 17 year old Adolf to
Wagnerism and supposedly inspired him to purify the still fairly
recently formed Germany and cleanse it of the taint of Judaism.
(Parenthetically, Rienzi was Wagner’s longest work, the premiere of it
in 1842 lasting as it did some six hours. Hitler certainly had more
staying power than me.)
Of course, we shouldn’t blame Wagner for this. In the same way that we
shouldn’t blame Jesus for the many idiots who followed him, we can’t
really hold Wagner responsible for things that happened decades after
his death. William Shirer claims any influence Wagner had on the nascent
Dritte Reich was based upon a misinterpretation of his works. (Wagner is
referred to on just six of the approximately 1300 pages of Shirer’s
history of the Third Reich.) This is also the claim made by advocates of
Nietzsche, who is also viewed as an influence on Nazi Germany, that his
words and ideas were taken and twisted by Nazi theorists and by Hitler;
therefore in the interests of fairness at the very least we have to
allow Wagner’s advocates to state their case.
But if Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite, and his writings provide
abundant evidence that he was not, Wagner certainly was an anti-Semite,
and his writings provide abundant evidence that he was. It’s this part
of his character which probably does the most to set people against him
these days, given how unfashionable anti-Semitism has become since World
War 2. Michael Tanner is clearly fascinated by the way in Wagner’s
character is used as an excuse to question the value of his work,
whereas someone like Beethoven also acted like a monstrous *censored* but no
one questions his work. This is a fair call to a degree. I think the
personality of a creative artist must in some way find expression in the
art they make and that this is unavoidable. By the same token, however,
I think that the evaluation of the artwork has to be made by removing
the creator from the creation. A person may be a complete arsehole but
that shouldn’t influence how we perceive their art. In Wagner’s case
(and perhaps in Hanif Kureishi’s case as well!), however, people seem to
find this separation too difficult to perform. And although Nietzsche
has probably been rescued from Nazi distortion and so rendered as fit
for consumption as he’ll ever be, there is still that anti-Semitic
streak in Wagner’s work which means the association with Nazi Germany
will never quite go away. Not until 1993 was Wagner’s music first
performed in Israel, whereupon questions were asked in the Israeli
parliament.
Perhaps the term I’ve used a couple of times, “unfashionable”, might be
viewed as somewhat inappropriate and/or flippant given the conclusion
that anti-Semitism was pushed to in the middle parts of this tiresome
century, but I’ll stand by it. After all, I think political views and
opinions are in many ways subject to certain fashions, especially with
what we now call “political correctness”? and just as a show of one’s
political correctness has been a fashion in itself for better and for
worse, so too has political incorrectness been prized by some. It all
depends where you stand.
The dominant direction of political correctness in trendy European
intellectual circles, at least for the past couple of centuries, has
been leftwards, towards more liberal ideas. Germany by the early 20th
century was a different matter; William Shirer claims that the
nationalistic thinking of early 19th century German philosophers like
Fichte and Hegel worked eventually to set German political fashion in a
rightwards direction, thereby isolating it somewhat from the rest of
Europe. Ironically, of course, Hegel’s dialectical methods also inspired
that ?ber-Leftie Karl Marx, who was also German by birth?and also
something of an anti-Semite. At least that sort of thinking wasn’t
necessarily unique to Right-thinkers. (The greatest irony of all was
that the virulently anti-socialist Nazi Party was in fact named the
National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany? though few people, least
of all the Nazis, seem to have noticed this.)
Because right-wing ideologies seem to have been traditionally less hip
in the rest of Europe than left-wing ones (and also perhaps because the
?ber-Right policies of Nazi Germany led to such horrific
conclusions?which is not to deny similarly dreadful events in Communist
Russia and China, although I’d argue those states were hardly leftist
any more), we’ve had more trouble admitting that Nazi Germany could
possibly have created any great art. When we do find something
worthwhile, we hum and haw over whether or not we should admit to liking
it. We seem to have little trouble admiring Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet
films but Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia are somehow
more problematic. “Great films, yes, but?” seems to be the way of it. We
feel we have to qualify our admiration for some reason. I have a set of
Bruckner symphonies which were recorded in the 1930s and therefore are
technically products of Nazi Germany (even if it is EMI who distributes
them). Shouldn’t I feel extremely wrong for harbouring these things?
To come up to date, but leaving Germany (and also classical music) for a
moment, let’s consider the black metal music scene in Norway. Alongside
the Satanic imagery metal music has often decked itself out in to
equally often silly effect, quite a few black metal bands have also
adopted Nazi leanings as well. Norway, of course, was a notorious Nazi
puppet state, and after the war right-wing ideologies fell distinctly
from grace, hence the adoption of them by many black metal bands. My
favourite example is probably an album by Darkthrone with the words
“Norsk Arisk Black Metal” emblazoned on the back cover where you
couldn’t miss them, which forced the band’s distributor Peaceville
Records to issue a statement distancing themselves from the band’s
politics. I bet they wouldn’t have bothered doing that had the band
explicitly aligned itself with communism rather than Nazism. In the case
of Varg Vikernes, the one-man band behind Burzum, politics are the least
of the problems he poses. The lovely Varg is a convicted arsonist and
murderer, after all?two things we can’t pin on Wagner, though some might
like to try?and I have a couple of Burzum albums. By purchasing these,
am I perhaps showing some form of private support for a criminal?
Admittedly, as with the Bruckner symphonies mentioned above, these are
things I’ve thought about, but they don’t really bother me much. I think
that if you stop for too long to question all your motives and whether
or not you should do a thing, then you will soon wind up doing nothing.
(And Peaceville Records evidently didn’t feel strongly enough about
Darkthrone’s dubious politics to refuse to make money from them.) But a
vague feeling of what might be called guilt by association does kind of
linger in the background. By venturing into the muddy waters of black
metal I may have wandered a bit from Wagner?and in musical terms I
certainly have, though many of the bands may be accused of having
similar pretensions to pomp and grandeur if on a cheaper scale?but even
so, I think all of that ties in with things I’ve said earlier about how
there are things you’re supposedly not allowed to like and also Wagner’s
posthumous association with Nazi Germany. My own political leanings do
not incline towards Nazism, but I don’t think that means I can’t find
Burzum interesting. And yet, perhaps that’s why some people are wary of
Wagner. Whether or not the Third Reich was his fault, the association’s
still there? and perhaps people are afraid to commit firmly to Wagner
because of it. Maybe they think that if they side with Wagner, in some
way they’re also siding with the Reich. Guilt by association, as I said.
Can you let yourself like Wagner? Can you allow yourself?
Maybe, maybe not. This is all speculative, of course, just as Michael
Tanner rightly notes Nietzsche’s theory of Wagner as artist of decadence
is also speculative. But I think the possible ethical reason I consider
for why people have problems with Wagner are a bit less tenuous than the
psychoanalytic fields Nietzsche and Tanner ponder.
Anyway, I don’t think my own reservations are rooted in any ethical
issues? probably because I haven’t really done a vast amount of study
into Wagner’s works. There are times when I’m faced with a supposed
masterpiece of art, be it pictorial musical cinematic or literary, and
I’ll automatically respond to it, and there are times when someone has
to explain to me why it is a masterpiece before I’ll necessarily agree.
Wagner fits the latter case. I feel instinctively that yes, something
great is indeed going on here, but until I know what it is I don’t think
I fully appreciate it. Obviously I understand Wagner’s historical
importance, and I do appreciate the skill needed to write a piece of
music lasting 15 hours yet remaining coherent all the way through. But I
think I’d appreciate it more if I knew more about all what’s going on
for those 15 hours.
Still, I don’t know if I’d actually enjoy Wagner then or not. In smaller
doses he doesn’t pose a vast problem. I’ve enjoyed a record of piano
transcriptions made by Glenn Gould which also features his orchestral
Siegfried-Idyll, and have given serious consideration to buying a
collection of historic performances of “bleeding chunks”. Smaller doses
are fine (remember Nietzsche’s characterisation of him as a
miniaturist). It’s just the big slabs of raw meat from which the
bleeding chunks are ripped that pose problems for me. Thus far of all
the operas I’ve heard Siegfried is probably the only one I could say I
somewhat enjoyed. This is interesting, given that Michael Tanner says
that’s probably the least popular member of the Ring family. Die Walk?re
usually comes out on top in popularity terms, yet listening to it this
time round I don’t recall feeling especially moved by it. Then again,
maybe it’s a matter of what version you get. I seem to remember liking
Bruno Walter’s 1935 Walk?re Act I when I heard it.
At present, therefore, I don’t dislike Wagner but I’m not exactly a fan
either. There’s still obstacles in the way of my greater enjoyment of
Wagner’s work. Still, despite the difficulty, I’m willing to make an
effort to understand him better. Having finished with the Ring, I’ll now
give Tristan and Parsifal another go, and make an attempt on Die
Meistersinger. And perhaps one day I will indeed learn to love the
Tristan prelude, as Matthew has ordered me to do. Meanwhile, Karlheinz
Stockhausen is pressing ahead with his Licht series of seven operas, due
for completion in 2002, whereupon even the Ring will be dwarfed in time
scale?the four parts currently available already fill more CDs than any
Ring cycle I know, and there are still three more parts to be written
and/or recorded. Wonder if anyone will ever hold Stockhausen responsible
for a war? I’m sure Wagner would never have expected that honour either?