Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans/Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss/Nietzsche and Music

Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans, by means of Joachim Kohler (trans. by Stewart Spencer) of recent origin Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Pres 2004 688 pp $4000 US (cloth)

Opera and fresh Culture: Wagner and Strauss, by means of Lawrence Kramer. Berkeley, University of California Pres 2004 258 pp $3995 US (cloth)

Nietzsche and Music, through Georges Li?©bert (trans. by David Pellauer and Graham Parkes). Chicago, University of Chicago Pres 2004 304 pp $3800 US (cloth)

I understand consummately when a musician says today: "I hate Wagner. on the contrary I can no longer bear any other music." But I'd also understand a philosopher who would dare: "Wagner the wholes up modernity. There is no way on the outside One must first become a Wagnerian."

Friedrich Nietzsche,

The Case of Wagner

"You are an ass."

Wagner to Nietzsche

The name "Richard Wagner" remains with equal reason inextricably bound to modernity, Nietzsche claims, that no philosopher has the luxuriousness to avoid him. Musicians too, perhaps against their better aesthetic taste feel compelled to listen. Whatever bystanders may think of the inventor of the Gesamtkunstwerk, "one must become a Wagernian first," in order to grasp all that is wrongful with modernity in general and Germany of the nineteenth hundred in particular. Becoming a Wagnerian first, allowing oneself to be completely seduc and inhabiting Wagner's dreams and mythos will, according to Nietzsche, inoculate single against the Wagnerian "illness" and reveal instead a positive "healthy" approach to the time to come But in the end, it is Wagner, who presages the subsequent time Having both embraced and cast asideed modernity, and become a tillage industry unto himself, Wagner embodies the ironies of modernity, its un freedom, its iron monetary rationality, and its institutions.

Nietzsche attacks one as well as the other the composer's aesthetics and his politics, allowing most debates have tended to separate these. certainly Wagner's aesthetics alone present abundant opportunity for debate. There are the nay-sayers, who shrink from the music's emotional shake the corny horn flourishes and crashing tympani, the promise of mythical transcendence. There are those who would diminish Wagner's contribution to music history, through claiming his gift consisted in synthesis rather than innovation. Against of the like kind views are still others who acknowledge the series of Wagnerian watersheds: fusing music and drama (opera was a word he eschewed) into a holistic spectacle, Wagner was the first to dim the auditorium lights, sink the orchestra below the view of the audience, and forbid late access into the hall. In in like manner doing he effected a of recent origin magical theater experience, conceived like moving pictures, which, as Adomo remarked, anticipated the cinema.

Yet genuinely aesthetic approaches fail to grasp Wagner's ideas, which are inseparable from his politics. Unlike the next to the first half of the nineteenth hundred where Wagner raised eyebrows for his singular ability to step quickly amok in personal scandal, unpaid bills and revolutionary ideas, Wagner remains controversial today because of his German nationalism, his anti-Semitism and the relation of these ideas to his music. Historically, in Wagner's life the anti-Semitism, came first. Doubts about his parentage, a step-father who may have been his biological father and Jewish, childhood attractions to Jewish women early obligations to Jewish creditors and mentors, all create tension above Jews. His anti-Semitic fixation preoccupies his writings as well. In his early "Art and Revolution" (1849) "The Art-Work of the Future" (1849) and especially "Jew in Music" (1850) which was first published beneath a pseudonym and later claimed by the agency of the author himself, Wagner marshals his previously revolutionary social criticism to the aid of his anti-Semitic diatribe. "Jew in Music" is directed in part at his former inspirations Felix Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine, whom he mentions by dint of name, as well as the unnamed onetime benefactor Giacomo Meyerbeer. In this essay, Wagner claims that Jewish music lacked emotion, was characterized by dint of coldness and indifference, triviality and nonsense. Wagner's German nationalism, meanwhile, was not always reactionary. In a certain quantity of respects it echoed the emancipatory ideals of Beethoven, the German Romantics, and later of Heinrich Heine. After the failed revolutions of 1848-49 however, Wagner became more pessimistic. His general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of German nationhood squared itself with the reichsdeutsch politics of the times, granting privately he voiced his disappointment with Bismarck after the unification of Germany in 1871 All along, from his early work flat to the later, when his vision of nationhood gained popularity in Germany, Wagner discarded the present in favor of a more finished lost cultural order. This real sentiment appealed to Hitler. Indeed, the young Adolf Hitler fatefully attended a performance of Wagner's 1837 opera Rienzi, and took inspiration for his hold "Thousand Year Reich" from the tragic Cola di Rienzi, the medieval Italian populist, who attempted to reestablish the Republic in the city of Rome Later, upon the verge of his rise to power, Hitler cultivated shut relations with the Wagner clan in Bayreuth and drew upon their support after 1933. It is this reichsdeutsch Wagner, along with his reductive national narrative, his pessimism, his decadence, his anti-Semitism, which will have the greatest in quantity influence in the twentieth hundred