Wagner and Philosophy [Paperback]

The bulk of this splendid book deals with the relationship between Wagner and Schopenhauer; but that is preceded by a discussion of the influence of Feuerbach's philosophy on the composer; and it concludes with a fascinating chapter on Wagner's influence on Nietzsche.

In his youth Richard Wagner was a left wing radical and, at the age of 35, had played an active part in the Dresden uprising in 1849. The brand of left wing philosophy he espoused was Anarchism: the theory of Bakunin and of Proudhon was that all government, being based on force, is corrupt. For his part in the revolution, he had to flee to Switzerland, and while there, he read another left wing philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach also condemned relationships based on power: they should instead be based on Love. One of Wagner's earliest operas, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, 1836) had already extolled love which burst through the bounds of the conventional institutions that tried to trammel it: in his later operas, Wagner proclaims that love should recognize no barriers, not of adultery nor even of incest.

In Switzerland Wagner began work on The Ring cycle. Das Rheingold, the first of the four operas, had an almost overtly political message: the lust for power has destroyed the natural order of things and is destructive of love. This was the view of many anarchists whose objective was to liberate society by political means from all kinds of external control.

But by the time he had finished Rheingold, he had undergone a momentous conversion. To begin with, he had become disillusioned with politics. The 1848 revolutions had failed, and Louis Napoleon's authoritarian coup in 1851 made Wagner despair that the world could be improved by political action. It was while he was in the deepest depression that, in 1854, he discovered the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer had a bleak and pessimistic view of the world. We are dominated by an impersonal Will which relentlessly drives us to struggle against the sufferings of the world and which fills us with restless and unattainable longings. For Schopenhauer the Will was a terrible affliction. He thought that there were a few remedies: one of these was to lose oneself in art (and in music as the highest of the arts) and so escape from the sufferings in the phenomenal world (the world of appearances) into the ethereal realm of the noumenal world.

Wagner had already expressed this longing for nothingness in The Flying Dutchman (1841); and he had already preached the redemptive power of music. He had then come to the conclusion that society was actually irredeemable, and this had plunged him into his profound depression. Now Schopenhauer showed him that redemption was possible for individuals even if it was not possible for society. Wagner had intuitively used the motif of renunciation in The Flying Dutchman, in Tannhäuser (1845) and in Lohengrin (1848). He now found his intuition articulated in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. He even found that the shape of the entire libretto for the Ring (which had been conceived as early as 1850 although the music for the end of the cycle had yet to be composed) had intuitively moved from the quasi-political nature of Rheingold to the metaphysical message of the Götterdämmerung. From 1854 until his death Wagner steeped himself in Schopenhauer; and Magee traces the way in which the composer quite specifically and deliberately introduced one Schopenhauerian idea after another into his libretti and into the music which was conceived with more intensely philosophical meaning than any music had ever been before - a process culminating in Tristan and Isolde (1860).

Schopenhauer had seen Compassion as another way of escaping the fetters of the ruthless Will that operates in the noumenal world. It is this idea which is one theme in Wagner's last opera, Parsifal (1881). Because of the Christian symbols that figure in this work, it has often been taken to be a Christian work. Magee argues powerfully against this: Wagner was no more a committed Christian when he composed Parsifal than he had been a committed pagan when he put the Germanic gods on the stage in the Ring.

Nietzsche claimed that Wagner had "sold out" to Christianity in the libretto of Parsifal; and Magee's last chapter before the appendix deals with the influence that Wagner had on Nietzsche. Nietzsche had begun as a devotee of both Wagner and Schopenhauer. Later, pace Magee, he had an obsessive need to become independent and to escape from Wagner's influence. He broke violently with Wagner (and with Schopenhauer also), and launched a series of tirades against Wagner's outlook, each of which Magee parries with vigorous refutation. Magee accounts for the breach almost entirely in terms of Nietzsche's psychology, though he readily admits that Nietzsche's philosophy was itself of towering importance and influence. I think Magee's refutations of Nietzsche's charges are valid, although one is struck throughout the book by the superlatives which Magee constantly showers on Wagner's thought and work. And one of Nietzsche's specific charges against Wagner - that Wagner's antisemitism was vulgar and despicable - is not mentioned in this chapter at all.

However, that topic is dealt with in an Appendix, partly because Magee does not regard antisemitism as a philosophy and therefore not part of the subject of the book. Like any right-thinking person, he finds Wagner's antisemitism totally repellent. But even if it were a philosophy, however, Magee argues that there is no justification for seeing antisemitism playing any role in the operas, although many productions of the operas, during the Nazi period especially, portrayed them as such, and many post-war writers have insisted that Wagner as an antisemite did mean to endow figures like Mime and Beckmesser with the stereotyped hateful Jewish characteristics. In any case, Magee concludes, Wagner's genius as an artist is no more compromised by his antisemitism than is the genius of Dostoevsky by his. And to the genius of Wagner this book is splendid tribute.

This is a remarkable book. Bryan Magee is a philosophy professor who has a gift for explaining philosophy to the lay reader. He is also immensely knowledgeable of music, opera, drama, and in particular the works of Richard Wagner.

Magee explains the life and works of Wagner in terms of Wagner's political, philosophical and artistic beliefs, and provides an introduction to the key German philosophers who would play a role in Wagner's life: Feuerbach, Kant, Nietzsche and above all Schopenhauer. As Magee explains, Wagner's depth of interest in philosophy is unique amongst all the great composers. It would not be possible to write a similar book about Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Bach or any the other musical greats.

First he takes us through Wagner's earlier years, essentially up to the point where Wagner broke off from composition of the Ring cycle. Magee relates his interests in politics, socialism, anarchism, greek drama, opera, and his attempts to build a comprehensive theory of art that famously led to the concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk - a "complete art work" that would unify music and drama into a single art-form in which music, words and drama are equal.

Magee then relates Wagner's mid-life crisis and discovery of Schopenhauer. The biggest surprise for me was that I expected to read about the philosophy of Schopenhauer and its influence on Wagner with a purely academic interest. Instead I found myself strongly attracted to the ideas of Schopenhauer and started to share something of Wagner's seduction by the power of those ideas. For Schopenhauer art like religion strives to understand something of the reality beyond the physical world that we see and feel. Schopenhauer regards art as above religion because it is not inhibited by the stories and beliefs that religion uses to express these deeper truths. Furthermore, Schopenhauer regards music as the greatest of the arts, because it is the most abstract art form and therefore it is the one best adapted to expressing and experiencing the spiritual dimension of life.

Schopenhauer leads Wagner to reevaluate his work and allows him to resolve the bitterness of the loss in faith in his earlier political ideals. Wagner moves beyond the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and instead elevates the role of music in his remaining works - Tristan, Meistersinger, Parsifal and the remaining parts of the Ring cycle. Magee shows how the 3 great operas Tristan, Meistersinger, and Parsifal are all deeply tied into the ideas of Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer and Wagner's political disillusionment posted a dilemma for the Ring cycle. The Ring cycle was originally meant to be the embodiment of the Gesamtkunstwerk and was also meant as socio-political allegory that would promote Wagner's socialist ideals. However, Magee shows that although on the surface the philosophy of Schopenhauer appeared to contradict Wagner's earlier beliefs, in actual fact many of these beliefs had been in Wagner's sub-conscious since a young man. Wagner was therefore able to eventually complete the Ring cycle without the need to change the earlier operas and with the ability to maintain a convincing musical and dramatic whole, nevertheless transforming the fundamental message of the work in the process:

"He may, years before, have written the libretto believing it to be an optimistic work in which a world-order based on lovelessness, power, money and chicanery was seen to be overthrown and replaced by a new order based on love, but he was now quite sure that what his artistic intuitions had rightly done instead was to produce a pessimistic work in which one loveless order was replaced by another, thus showing violence and betrayal to be perennial in the world, and any abiding rule of love unattainable; a work in which all world-orders are seen to go down to irretrievable ruin. The optimist who was the younger Wagner had composed the work up to the point where a new era of hope is expected to dawn. Now the mature Wagner, a pessimist, would compose the rest, showing how this hope is betrayed and the new era goes down in the same destruction as the old."

The final two chapters of the book are devoted to Nietzsche and anti-semitism. Of the great philosophers covered in the book, Nietzsche is unique, because he was a philosopher who greatly influenced Wagner, but instead he was himself hugely influenced by his relationship with Wagner.

Magee does not regard anti-semitism as a valid school of philosophy, but he addresses it in the final chapter, because Magee feels that Wagner's anti-semitic reputation is so damaging that it over shadows the greatness of Wagner's work.

This book was given to me by a friend which surprised me a little given that I have never really been into opera. However philosophy is a keen interest of mine and this book is one of those rarities that successfully manages to intertwine elements from philosophy with another subject - in this case the operatic artistry of Richard Wagner. Magee obviously knows and passionately loves his Wagnerian operas, and uses his other passion, philosophy, as a means of accessing Wagner, the radical youth, the mature cynic, at all times the philosopher, and an intellectual artist of incomparable standing. Although some parts of the book repeat themes touched on earlier, just like a musical piece itself each iteration builds on the previous dicussion leading to a greater intensity in the overall understanding. I thoroughly enjoyed the way Magee dissected his subject to focus on different aspects of Wagner's life and influences of the times. The end result is an uncompromising view of a man flawed in many ways, but blessed as a staggering genius musically. This is a book that you will never forget for its critical analysis and clever writing.