Book Review: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

Paperback: 432 pages

Publisher: Penguin Books (September 6, 2001)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0140295194

ISBN-13: 978-0140295191

Also released as The Tristan Cord: Wagner and Philosophy
Paperback: 424 pages
Publisher: Picador (October 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 080507189X
ISBN-13: 978-0805071894

All You Need is Love

There is much to praise in this book, which, despite some deep issues I have with it, remains essential reading in a field where much drivel is been written. It is also interesting that the Magee that we meet in this book comes across as much older and wiser than the author who penned Aspects of Wagner back in 1988. The personal influence that Magee infuses into the book is that of his own involvement in politics, as a member of parliament, where the common experience is to enter with rosy eyed optimism, only to end up rather disenchanted or even embittered. 

The greatest strength of the book is the absolutely tremendous grasp that Magee has of the history of philosophy in the nineteenth century, and the intellectual background that shaped Wagner. As I read through his summary of how the thought of Hegel had given birth to the Young Hegelian movement, to Feuerbach, Engels, Marx and then more latterly the Frankfurt School of Adorno et alia, I just nodded with approval. His summary of Feuerbach too, and its influence on Wagner for the rest of his life too was just spot on. Again the summary of the anarchists Proudhon and Bakunin were equally clear and informative. If you come from a musical background and want to understand the philosophical background to Wagner, look no further, as Magee is immensely readable. In fact, I must applaud Magee as I really couldn't have done a better job myself. These passages alone justify this book.

Magee's description of how Wagner got involved with liberal thinkers of the day is not quite at the same level — the basic information is there but it is not as succinctly presented. What really happened was that Paris, at the time that Wagner lived there, was a hot bed of liberal thought. There was a prominent community of German liberal dissidents, who had all escaped from ideological persecution in Germany during the post-Napoleonic conservative backlash, that lasted several decades. Amongst these dissidents included Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Heine. Wagner met Heine through a mutual friend, Heinrich Laube — a revolutionary, and key figure in the Young Germany movement, who had suffered imprisonment for expressing his liberal ideas. Heine came away with a quite positive impression of Wagner:

I cannot help feeling a lively interest in Wagner. He is endowed with an inexhaustible, productive mind, kept almost uninterruptedly in activity by a vivacious temperament. From an individuality so replete with modern culture, it is possible to expect the development of a solid and powerful modern music.

Apart from Wagner, other visitors to Heine during his Parisian exile included Karl Marx, who had also escaped to Paris from the backlash against his liberal ideas, and several of Heine's poems were published in Marx's journal Vorwärts. Wagner never did meet Marx, perhaps because of his premature deportation to Belgium after protest by the Prussian government at the growing flock of liberal dissidents in Paris, all busily writing critiques of German political life. Heine could not be deported because he had been born under French occupation. Eventually, Wagner was to base two of his operas on themes taken from Heine: The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser.

Likewise, Magee does a magnificent job of showing how Wagner's nationalist faith in the Young Germany was a product of his liberalism, and was not right-wing at all. At the same time Magee shows, as I have done in innumerable posts in this blog, that thoughts (such as that Jews needed to rise above the "degeneration" created by centuries of monstrous mistreatment) that we consider unacceptably anti-Semitic were endemic in Europe of the time, amongst both left and right wing thinkers, Jew and non-Jew alike, and that this in itself does not make Wagner a proto-Nazi any more than it makes either Marx or Herzl a proto-Nazi for their writings on the Judenfrage ("Jewish problem") based on similar ideas.

Another part of Wagner's life, of which we receive a less than perfectly lucid description of is, again, his participation in the Dresden uprisings. This is the first indication of something going seriously awry in the picture of Wagner that Magee paints. Once again, I refer the reader first and foremost to Ferdinand Praeger for a first hand account. This is the picture of Wagner that Praeger paints:

It was in the morning about eight o'clock, the barricade at which Wagner and Hainberger were stationed was about to receive such morning meal as had been prepared, the outposts being kept by a few men and women. Amongst the latter was a young girl of eighteen, the daughter of a baker belonging to this particular barricade. She stood in sight of all, when to their amazement a shot was suddenly heard, a piercing shriek, followed by the fall of the girlish patriot. The miscreant Prussian soldier, one of a detachment in the neighbourhood, was caught redhanded and hurried to the barricade. Wagner seized a musket and mounting a cart called out aloud to all: “Men, will you see your wives and daughters fall in the cause of our beloved country, and not avenge their cowardly murder? All who have hearts, all who have the blood and spirit of their forefathers, and love their country follow me, and death to the tyrant.” So saying he seized a musket, and heading the barricade they came quickly upon the few Prussians who had strayed too far into the town, and who, perceiving they were outnumbered, gave themselves up as prisoners. This is but one of those many examples of what a timid man will do under excitement, for I give it as my decided opinion, and I have no fear of lack of corroboration, that Richard Wagner was not personally brave.

However hard though some may try to disparage Wagner any chance they get, you cannot take this sort of deed away from him. Actions speak louder than words. Of course, some do try, right down to siding with the reactionaries, who criticised Wagner for ingratitude to his king, and by suggesting that Wagner's participation in the Dresden uprising was little more than his reaction to the refusal to have Lohengrin performed in Dresden. Considering that Wagner's advocacy of vegetarianism is used as incontrovertible evidence proving that he caused WWII and the Holocaust, I am not surprised.

Overall, George Bernard Shaw summed things up perfectly in The Perfect Wagnerite:

And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The Rhine Gold is what they call “a work of art” pure and simple, and that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with the facts of Wagner’s life. In 1843 he obtained the position of conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of £225 a year, with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional position and livelihood with it, In 1848, the year of revolutions, the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion, which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical epicure and political mugwump that the term “artist” seems to suggest to so many critics and amateurs — that is, a creature in their own lazy likeness — he need have taken no more part in the political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or Free Trade movements. What he did do was first to make a desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the poor monarch’s feelings), and then, when the crash came, to take his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old friend of Wagner's to whom he wrote a well-known series of letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself Wagner escaped to Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and his exile lasted twelve years.

Obviously, the German uprisings around 1848-49 were never merely caused by the refusal of the Saxon king to stage Lohengrin! The background to Wagner's participation in the intellectual life of liberal German politics goes back long before, and in taking part in the Dresden uprising, he not only risked his own life by taking up a musket in his hands, but sacrificed a very comfortable lifestyle. As Shaw says: he was ruined. He had sacrificed everything in the name of a cause he believed and was left an exile with a death sentence hanging over his head. I wonder if any of these people who denigrate Wagner for his role in the Dresden uprisings have themselves ever taken up arms, risking death, torture, or imprisonment in the name of democracy? While in prison, Wagner's anarchist friend Bakunin suffered scurvy due to malnourishment and all of his teeth fell out. Talk is cheap, but actions speak louder than words. 

I don't know about you, but if I were left jobless, homeless, the police in pursuit with a death warrant over my head, and my friends in prison suffering endlessly repeated "interrogations", and  condemned to death, I would feel utterly shattered. To go from wielding a gun in name of freedom to that, would have had an enormous impact on everything that I was. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Wagner felt any different. There is every reason to think that the enormity of the impact of this seminal experience produced an equally enormous work of art, Wagner's opus magnus — The Ring. Even as late in his life as the second of May, 1874, Wagner spoke to Cosima of the profound impact that his experience of the Dresden uprising of 1849 in the name of democracy and freedom had upon him: 

I think that I would have never conceived The Ring if it weren't for this movement. 

Ich selbst, ich hätte glaube ich, den Ring nicht konzipiert ohne diese Bewegung. 

It just makes attempts to interpret The Ring as an expression of a Nazi ideology truly appalling and tasteless to the extreme.  

The most interesting aspect of the book is the way Magee uses his own experiences of life in politics to illuminate the life experiences of Wagner. Magee reminds us of how idealistic Utopian socialists go into politics with rosy eyed optimism to emerge rather grey haired, embittered and disappointed. Magee tells us:

Readers belonging to the same generation as myself will see many parallels between all this and events in their own lifetime. For most of the twentieth century large numbers of socialists, possibly millions internationally, have regarded the coming of socialism as inevitable, and have thus taken it for granted that they knew what lay in the future . . . To nearly everybody now, including most former socialists, it seems obvious not only that socialism is not inevitable but that it is never going to come at all - indeed, large numbers of those who once thought it desirable no longer do even that. 

Magee argues that this is the sort of movement from Utopian idealism to disillusionment that Wagner himself went through due to the failure of the Dresden uprisings. Magee argues that Wagner went through a midlife crisis, after which the revolutionary turned into an embittered and burnt out ex-revolutionary, verging on becoming a reactionary. It is at this point that I part company from Magee, who is partly reading his own life story into that of Wagner's. Magee writes:

In his later years Wagner the man came a little closer to resembling the view of him that his detractors have, but the truth is he never resembled it at all closely. For instance he never espoused right-wing politics, but merely lost faith in left-wing politics. After the failure of the revolutions of 1848-9 his revolutionary fervour became if anything stronger at first, for a while, if only out of an angry reaction; but then gradually he lost his trust in the efficacy of political solutions for mankind's problems. According to his own account, the crucial turning point was the anti-parliamentary coup in Paris in December 1851 in which Louis Napoleon seized power. This, he says in his autobiography, seemed to him ‘absolutely incredible’. 

Of course there is some degree of truth in that Wagner lost faith in the musket as a means of effecting social change. Magee goes on:

From then on he ‘turned away from the investigation of this enigmatic world, as one turns from a mystery the fathoming of which no longer seems to be worthwhile’. . . Significantly, his very next paragraph begins with the words: ‘Before long I was overtaken by exceptional depression, in which disappointment at external events in the world was admixed...’ . . . The decisive change from optimism to pessimism had come about. 

The fundamental assumption here is that Schopenhauerian "pessimism" (if we can even call any philosophy that teaches redemption from the tragedy of the human condition that) can only possibly be a symptom of a mental illness such as depression. Of course, this is just the standard Nietzschean polemic against Schopenhauer, accepted too uncritically.  It is more likely that the sort of pathologically manic joyfulness that Nietzsche emphasises represent his attempt to overcome his own decent into depression and mental decay. Later he even quotes Nietzsche's rather satirical summary of Wagner as once political optimist abruptly turned philosophical pessimist — indeed Magee seems to base his whole book on this awfully witty, but ultimately silly caricature. He gives us the source in Nietzsche for this idea in The Case of Wagner*:

Wagner had believed in the Revolution all his life, as only a Frenchman could ever have believed in it. So he searched through all the mythic runes, and believed that in Siegfried he had found his perfect revolutionary.

‘Whence comes all evils in the world?’ Wagner asked himself. From ‘ancient oaths,’ he answered, like all ideologues of Revolution. Put plainly: from conventions, laws, moralities, institutions — everything that the old world, the old society is supported by. ‘How can one rid the world of its evils? How can one do away with the old society?’ Only by declaring war against ‘oaths’ (traditions, morales).   

This is just what Siegfried does. He starts on that precociously, very preciously: even his origin is already a declaration of war on morality — he is brought into the world by adultery, through incest. That's not how the saga actually goes, Wagner is the real inventor of this radical offshoot, at which point he fixes up the saga. Siegfried continues as he has begun: he merely follows his first impulse, he throws everything traditional, all respect, all fear overboard. Whatever displeases him he stabs down. He irreverently runs down ancient deities. But his principle undertaking is to emancipate woman - ‘to redeem Brünnhilde - Siegfried and Brünnhilde; the sacrament of free love; the rise of the golden age; the Götterdämmerung for the old morality - all evil has been disposed of.  

For a long time Wagner's ship sailed merrily along this course. There is no doubt that this was where Wagner sought his highest goal. - What happened? A calamity. The ship struck a reef; Wagner was stranded. The reef was Schopenhauer's philosophy; Wagner's ship was stranded on a contrary world-view. 

What had he been setting to music? Optimism. Wagner was ashamed. What is more, an optimism for which Schopenhauer had coined a hideous epithet - heinous optimism. Once more he was ashamed. He reflected for a long while, his situation seemed desperate. - Finally, a way out dawned on him: the reef on which he was shipwrecked - what if he interpreted it as the goal, as the hidden intent, as the true significance of his voyage? To be shipwrecked here - that too was a goal. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci (When I cause a shipwreck, I have navigated well).  

So he translated The Ring into Schopenhauer's terms. Everything goes wrong, everything perishes, the new world is as bad as the old: the Nothing, the Indian Circe, beckons.  

Brünnhilde was initially supposed to take her farewell with a song in honour of free love, entrusting the world to a socialist utopia with an ‘all will come good’ — she now she gets something else to do. She has to study Schopenhauer first; she has to transpose the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation into verse. Wagner was redeemed. In all seriousness this was a redemption. The blessing that Schopenhauer owes Wagner is immeasurable.

From der Fall Wagner — my own translation and not the unsatisfactory one quoted in Magee's book (by a reasonable translator, but one unfamiliar with Wagner).

Note that the misogynist Nietzsche "accuses" Wagner's Brünnhilde of being the ultimate Ur-feminist, and Siegfried of being the ultimate feminist sympathiser. Also note that he totally confirms the correctness of what George Bernard Shaw says in The Perfect Wagner about Siegfried Bakunin. Finally, note that Nietzsche probably got it straight from the horse's mouth that The Ring was originally meant to be about "free love": including free sex, released from the bondage of the institution of marriage. Ha! — absolutely spot on, on all counts, Freddy.

Magee summarises this even better for us, in terms we moderns can instantly related to. Wagner started out believing in the Utopian Flower Power revolution, for which Wagner had been busily writing the cheerfully optimistic soundtrack, that went "All You Need is Love":

Before there was Woodstock, there was Bayreuth!

The flower of revolution wilted, free sex left him with a hangover (the gossip columns to this day remain abuzz with speculation over his libertine sex life), and Wagner was forced to find a Buddhist peace within himself, while also fighting for more realistically attainable social goals such as animals rights — rather than pursue his former grandly Utopian, flowery and ultimately naive view of destiny.

A tirade against vivisection from the February 1881 edition of Bayreuther Blätter

 Magee goes on:

He went through a mid-life crisis of the sort that so many men go through. His loss of belief in radical activity made him accepting not of the world as it is ... but of the unchangeability of the human condition in its most fundamental aspects. He developed a kind of philosophical acceptance of this which, though not religious in itself, had much in common - as he came to realize - with something central to the world-view of Eastern religions. His whole attitude to life took a metaphysical turn and became more inward than outward looking. The process was nourished by immersion in the pessimistic, world-rejecting philosophy of Schopenhauer, which became the single most important intellectual influence on him that there had ever been. By the time his reputation made the decisive breakthrough to international fame, which happened when he was in his fifties, he had ceased to hold the radical left-wing views of his younger self. 

That is, that his Schopenhauerianism was a sign of him rejecting liberal-socialist ideology. I am going to strongly take issue with this. For a start, what would you think today if you were to meet a man who after a lively interest in radical socialism — even anarchism — in his youth, had later in his life become interested in Buddhism as well as vegetarianism, and animal rights? Would you angrily accuse him of turning his back on the liberal ideology of his youth and of becoming a right wing reactionary, or even a Nazi? Or would you think these new interests were perfectly complementary?

In the preface, Magee summarises it like this:

... to the end of his days he remained radically critical of the society he knew, and never from a right-wing point of view. But he became disillusioned, and bitterly so, with the possibilities of idealistic change. The unforgiving bitterness of the disappointed left-winger is a quite different phenomenon psychologically from the curmudgeonliness of the reactionary . . . Wagner certainly ceased to be a revolutionary, or a socialist, or anything other than a spasmodic and atavistic devotee of the residual values of failed leftism in the later part of his life, without becoming conservative or right-wing or reactionary. . . His significant movement was not from left to right but from politics to metaphysics.

All this is very well, but conspicuously missing in all of this lengthy narrative about Wagner is even the tiniest shred of supportive evidence from Wagner's own writings to substantiate it. The only thing that is offered as evidence is the author's own life experience, which raises suspicions that Magee is narrating his own biography rather that of Wagner's.

As devastating rebuttal of Magee's completely subjective and unsubstantiated caricature of Wagner, I offer the following quotations from Wagner himself.

The first of these quotations come from Erkenne dich selbst first published in the February-March 1881 issue of the Bayreuther Blätter.  Here is my translation:

"Property" is practically held to be more sacred than religion in our state-run society. . . . Since property is deemed the foundation of our entire existence as a society, it seems all the more destructive that we do not all own property, and that the greatest part of society even comes disinherited into the world. Society is thus manifestly reduced by its own principle to such a state of dangerous discontent, that it is forced to estimate all its laws to the impossibly of settling this antagonism. Protection of property, in its widest universal legal sense — what armed force is selectively maintained for — can truly mean nothing else than a defence of the Haves [Besitzenden] against the Have-Nots [Nichtbesitzenden]. As many serious and keen calculating minds have applied themselves to the study of the problem before us, a solution to this — the final one perhaps being an equal distribution of all property — is something nobody has wished to bring to fruition; and it seems as if, through state exploitation of an apparently so simple a concept as property, a stake had been driven into the body of mankind that makes it waste away from the misery of a painful illness.

This was published two years before Wagner's death, and was written years after he had completed the text to Parsifal, and was in the midst of completing the orchestration to the final two acts. Yet the ideology he is expressing is unmistakably socialist, in identifying a status quo between the Haves and Have-Nots, kept in place by brute force. This is still the Wagner of old, and his thinking has not changed one iota from that of the Fatherland Union Paper (see post with that title — arguably the most important discussion in this blog) from the time of the Dresden Uprisings.

As further evidence I tender the next passage from the same essay published in 1881:

If gold appears to be the daemon that chokes the innocence of mankind, then our great poets are letting the invention of paper money pass them by like a devilish spook. The ominous Ring of the Nibelung as a share market portfolio completes the gruesome picture of the ghostly masters of the world. 

From Erkenne dich selbst

Compare these words to those in the Fatherland Union Paper from the time of the Dresden uprisings:

. . . it be our duty to investigate boldly ... the cause of misery of our present social status, and determine whether man ... can have been destined by God to be the servile slave of inert base metal. We must decide whether money shall exert such degrading power over the image of God — man — as to render him the despicable slave of the passions of usury and avarice. The war against this existing evil will cause neither tears nor blood.  

. . . we shall destroy the nebulous notion that money possesses any inherent power . . .[and] dispel the false halo with which the unthinking mind invests this demon money. Then shall we root out the miseries engendered and nourished by public and secret usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations. This will tend to promote the emancipation of the human race (whilst fulfilling the teachings of Christ ...) 

These make it clear that Wagner never ceased to be a socialist at heart, and that his later interest in the Buddhist influenced idealist philosophy of Schopenhauer, as well as in animal rights and vegetarianism, are all perfectly complementary to the musket wielding socialism of his younger days. It is totally and utterly absurd to suggest that there is anything remotely contradictory about them at all.

Schopenhauer: That great fundamental truth contained in Christianity as well as in Brahmanism and Buddhism, the need for salvation from an existence given up to suffering and death, and its attainability through the denial of the will, hence by a decided opposition to nature, is beyond all comparison the most important truth there can be’ (The World as Will and Representation, vol. ii, p. 628).

This is what Wagner was to write in the introduction to Know Thyself:

The great Kant taught us the longing for the knowledge of the world of through the critique of our own cognitive faculties. Through this we ended up at the complete uncertainly about the reality of the world. Schopenhauer taught us an even more far-reaching critique to grasp the unmistakable key to the In-Itself of the world through our own pre-existing Will, rather than through our cognitive faculties. "Know thyself and thou shalt know the world" — thus taught Pythia. "Behold thyself — all this art thou" — thus taught the Brahmins.

Know Thyself (Erkenne dich selbst ) by Richard Wagner. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March 1881. My translation.

In the Fatherland Union Paper quotation you further see a reference to the degradation of humanity:

We must decide whether money shall exert such degrading power over the image of God — man — as to render him the despicable slave of the passions of usury and avarice. 

This theme of the degeneration of humanity is a theme also explored in Judaism in Music. There, Wagner argued that the tragic history of the mistreatment of Jews had caused the dehumanising degeneration of Christian-German to the status of "predatory bestiality" whereas, the Jews degenerated into "usury and avarice" (to use the words of the Paper). This concept of Jewish degeneration due to mistreatment was widely accepted, including by Theodor Herzl, who argued that formation of a Zionist state would cure the Jews of this degradation and restore their lost nobility. It was not considered anti-Semitic at all. Wagner argued that assimilation into a common humanity would restore this lost humanity to both gentile and Jew alike. That is to say, that the solution to the ethnic tensions around the Jews would involve a regeneration of humanity lost to both gentile and Jew alike.

Later in life, in the essays published around 1881, Wagner was to return with a gusto to the theme of regeneration. These late publications are known in German as the Regenerationsschriften: the Regeneration Papers. This regeneration that seeks to rediscover the lost pure humanity common to all peoples is the theme of Parsifal and of these late writings. By comparison, the Ring is also about the regeneration of humanity out of the ashes of l'ancien regime that has gone up in flames — a humanity degraded to "despicable slavery" by the "avarice" of capitalism . So we really are talking about the same composer. [The reader is also referred to the thread on The Fatherland Union Paper]

Wagner ends the 1881 series of regeneration papers with Heroism and Christianity. The conclusion of this is that:

We have to keep a hold of the fact that the efficiency of the noblest races' domination and exploitation of the lower races, justified thoroughly in naturalistic terms, has established a completely immoral world order — a possible sameness of all people made equal to each other through the intermixing of races can only lead to an aesthetically ordered world if this sameness were conceivable when grounded on a universal moral consensus such as the true Christianity . . .

[This is my own translation. For a damning critique of the William Ashton Ellis "translation" (more like a perversion) please see previous posts.]

It just goes to show that Wagner remained true to his liberal faith in the oneness of humanity (alle Menschen werden Brüder) to the very end of his days. 

As to the reasons for Magee's ultimate shortcomings, he admits openly documents them himself. I previous mentioned that even a famous linguist such as Noam Chomsky said that he felt like he had gene missing, because he finds the writings style of European thinkers who follow in Hegel's footsteps to be totally incomprehensible. Here is what Magee has to say:

Writing that is incomprehensible or near-incomprehensible and yet impresses readers has spread like a toxic fungus across Western culture since Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were the first philosophers of note to make cynical use of it.

In recent times this tradition has become even more widespread due to the influence of Derrida, particularly in the field of literary studies. Here is what Magee has to say:

In our own time the exploitation of this kind of charlatanry has become a stock in trade of whole departments of academia. It is a deep and bitter irony that some of the worst hit departments of all are departments of literary studies. There are some in which no one writes directly and openly: they are all hiding behind approved jargons, hoping to conceal the unremarkableness of what they have to say by clothing it in either inflationary rhetoric or a professional idiom that only the initiated can penetrate. Wagner came to realize the inauthenticity and worthlessness of this kind of thing, and to laugh at himself for having been impressed by it not only as a student but as a mature man who ought to have known better. Even so, its residual influences were evident in his own writing for the rest of his life.

Actually, as I have already said, Wagner makes Hegel seems like a walk in the park to read — in German that is. I have read many books by Heidegger and Derrida too without any difficulties, though mostly in English translation, as I read French rather poorly. However, Wagner is harder than any of them to read. I swear I would have an easier time reading Derrida in French (provided I had read the English translation of the book first). Magee ultimately confesses:

Even so, it remains a minor tragedy that Wagner is so turgid a writer, because it means that one of the supremely great minds of all time is not satisfactorily accessible through his writings, and that these writings are scarcely read any more (except in certain academic circles in the German-speaking world, where there is now a thriving industry devoted to them). Even for someone as interested in Wagner as I am, reading him is not a pleasure - except for the autobiography, which was dictated to his second wife and is in a personal, direct and conversational style quite different from the rest of his writings.

It is not good enough for anyone who is writing a serious book on Wagner not to study Wagner prose works in the original German. The failure to have done so is the source of all of this book's severe shortcomings. To which I can say that I sympathise, if Magee is unable to read densely written academic German, and has been reduced to trying to comprehend the perverse "translations" (if you can even call them that) of Wagner's prose works by William Ashton Ellis. New, better quality translations of Wagner's prose works are overdue by about a hundred years. If you have read some of the posts in this blog, you will have seen some fascinating glimpses of the sort of wonderful treasures that await those sad lot of you who read only English.

Now that I have finished taking Magee to task for his one truly serious shortcoming, I will readily admit that there are truly immense virtues in this book that do more than compensate. His analysis of the use of rape in the Ring as a symbol of the degradation of love into a capitalist commodity is excellent — the use of the German word Gewalt (violence) to mean power comes to mind. His insight into the relationship between Licht-Alberich (Wotan) and Schwarz-Alberich, as representing the Janus face of the same essence is excellent, and that he manages to couple this with the common structural origin in their respective leitmotifs, shows he is able to combine philosophical insight with musicological insight — something that evaded even Theodor Adorno when it came to Wagner. 

Above all — at last — here is someone who is not busying himself trying to belittle Schopenhauer's impact on Wagner. There are no attempts to explain him away and quickly sweeping him under the rug. Even more important is that here is a writer who actually listens to what Wagner says. Instead of trying to convince us with all sorts of sophistry that Wagner is actually all about Feuerbach, Hegel, Marx, Proudhon, Fichte or Schelling, he really believes Wagner. Amazing! He simply takes Wagner at his word, who said that discovering Schopenhauer was the greatest revelation of his life and reiterated at the end of his life: "How can I thank him enough?" 

Magee gives a superb account of the emergence of Schopenhauerian thought out of Kant, and then proceeds to give us an equally lucid explanation of how Schopenhauer discovered its relationship to the Indian philosophies of Brahmanism and Buddhism. Anyone with even an remote interest in Wagner, but who feels it too daunting a task to read The World as Will and Representation should read Magee instead. He does a magnificent task of explaining it in easily comprehensible terms. That he manages to grasp the close link between Feuerbach and Schopenhauer in their respective views of religion, all in one breath, makes it all the better. 

It gets even better still when Magee correctly identifies Schopenhauer as a thinker who more than anticipated Freud in his philosophical meditations around sexuality and the human mind. Then with the ultimate coup he pushes on to a revelation of the relationship between religious, sexual and musical ecstasy in Schopenhauer's system. More than anyone else, Magee helps the reader to understand — nay, experience — the sheer ecstasy of the revelation Wagner went through when he discovered Schopenhauer. It is very much an reenactment in our own mind of that the moment of enlightenment that Parsifal goes through in the Good Friday scene.

Once you understand Schopenhauer, then you will find that everything that Wagner says about his own compositions suddenly make sense. I can assure you, that you will never look at Wagner. or even at music or art in general, in the same way. I will not even try to summarise what is to come in the book — you just have to read it. Even musicians and musicologist will find the analysis of the Tristan cord in Schopenhauerian philosophical terms to be revelatory. I just nodded all the way, as I had come to much the same conclusions years ago. 

The only thing that is missing now is the insight that I have expressed on this blog, that Wagner saw in Schopenhauer a philosophical and psychological explanation, not only of the essence of sexuality, but of the insatiable libido for money and power that drove capitalism itself. It helped Wagner to understand the essence of capitalism — the blind lust for gold, the daemon of humanity, which is the central theme of the Ring. It also helped to illuminate the true thing from which humanity most needed redemption from: ourselves. Hence know thyself. And, that, provides the ultimate link which connects the periods before and after Wagner's discovery of Schopenhauer. 

Lastly, there are two more chapters that are read like appendages. One is on Nietzsche and his personal relationship with Wagner, and how their personal falling out was enacted. I have already pretty much called Nietzsche a bit of a vindictive ex-wife who wants to air as much dirty laundry on her celebrity ex-husband as she can. In short, Nietzsche is to Wagner what Heather Mills is to Paul McCartney. Read with a pinch of salt. Oddly enough most philosophers take Nietzsche's tabloid philosophy deadly seriously!  Magee does not. 

The final appendage of a chapter deals with the issue of allegations of anti-Semitism. He asks a question as to whether Jewish Wagner lovers find it offensive that some will say that a character has to be Jewish because he is ugly. The answer is that: yes, they do find it offensive. It is worth a quick read but there is nothing revelatory there. 

All in all, this is a much better book than Magee's Aspects of Wagner: far more insightful and profound. The years of extra experience and wisdom shine through. Still, I have some residual reservations, but the positives far outweigh these. So in conclusion I will say that this book is essential reading and highly illuminating. 

[*Urtext from der Fall Wagner:

Wagner hat, sein halbes Leben lang, an die Revolution geglaubt, wie nur irgend ein Franzose an sie geglaubt hat. Er suchte nach ihr in der Runenschrift des Mythus, er glaubte in Siegfried den typischen Revolutionär zu finden. – "Woher stammt alles Unheil in der Welt?" fragte sich Wagner. Von "alten Verträgen": antwortete er, gleich allen Revolutions-Ideologen. Auf deutsch: von Sitten, Gesetzen, Moralen, Institutionen, von Alledem, worauf die alte Welt, die alte Gesellschaft ruht. "Wie schafft man das Unheil aus der Welt? Wie schafft man die alte Gesellschaft ab?" Nur dadurch, dass man den "Verträgen" (dem Herkommen, der Moral) den Krieg erklärt. Das thut Siegfried. Er beginnt früh damit, sehr früh: seine Entstehung ist bereits eine Kriegserklärung an die Moral – er kommt aus Ehebruch, aus Blutschande zur Welt ... Nicht die Sage, sondern Wagner ist der Erfinder dieses radikalen Zugs; an diesem Punkte hat er die Sage corrigirt ... Siegfried fährt fort, wie er begonnen hat: er folgt nur dem ersten Impulse, er wirft alles Ueberlieferte, alle Ehrfurcht, alle Furcht über den Haufen. Was ihm missfällt, sticht er nieder. Er rennt alten Gottheiten unehrerbietig wider den Leib. Seine Hauptunternehmung aber geht dahin, das Weib zu emancipiren – "Brünnhilde zu erlösen" ... Siegfried und Brünnhilde; das Sakrament der freien Liebe; der Aufgang des goldnen Zeitalters; die Götterdämmerung der alten Moral – das Uebel ist abgeschafft ... Wagner's Schiff lief lange Zeit lustig auf dieser Bahn. Kein Zweifel, Wagner suchte auf ihr sein höchstes Ziel. – Was geschah? Ein Unglück. Das Schiff fuhr auf ein Riff;Wagner sass fest. Das Riff war die Schopenhauerische Philosophie; Wagner sass auf einer conträren Weltansicht fest. Was hatte er in Musik gesetzt? Den Optimismus. Wagner schämte sich. Noch dazu einen Optimismus, für den Schopenhauer ein böses Beiwort geschaffen hatte – den ruchlosen Optimismus. Er schämte sich noch einmal. Er besann sich lange, seine Lage schien verzweifelt ... Endlich dämmerte ihm ein Ausweg: das Riff, an dem er scheiterte, wie? wenn er es als Ziel, als Hinterabsicht, als eigentlichen Sinn seiner Reise interpretirte? Hier zu scheitern – das war auch ein Ziel. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci ... Und er übersetzte den "Ring" in's Schopenhauerische. Alles läuft schief, Alles geht zu Grunde, die neue Welt ist so schlimm, wie die alte: – das Nichts, die indische Circe winkt ... Brünnhilde, die nach derältern Absicht sich mit einem Liede zu Ehren der freien Liebe zu verabschieden hatte, die Welt auf eine socialistische Utopie vertröstend, mit der "Alles gut wird", bekommt jetzt etwas Anderes zu thun. Sie muss erst Schopenhauer studiren; sie muss das vierte Buch der "Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" in Verse bringen. ]