It would be different if Wagner were only an artist, whatever exactly that means; or if he had been clearly in the first place something else – a philosopher of culture, or some kind of prophetic figure. But he was, and remains, a musical dramatist trailing clouds of doctrine, and thus a ‘phenomenon’. In the former case, he could be just ignored as not to the taste of many ardent lovers of music and drama; in the latter, attacked or ridiculed for the falsity or absurdity of his views. It is the cunning interpenetration of his art and his prosily expressed Weltanschauung which makes him unavoidable, together with his immense influence in so many disparate spheres. No wonder that those who resist take refuge in unrestrained polemic – they want to obliterate him, so that he can simply cease to exist as the object of endless discussion. But their polemics only fuel counterblasts, and achieve just the opposite effect from the ‘marginalising’ which they had hoped for. In his own last, splenetic writings on Wagner, Nietzsche acknowledged that too. There is, and will remain, a ‘case of Wagner’ so long as we are stuck in the cultural crisis which Nietzsche diagnosed, because Wagner embodies it to an extent which no other artist approaches.
The issue is complicated by a further one which makes Wagner’s music-dramas very different from almost everything else in the operatic tradition, Schoenberg being the only notable exception. Wagner was intensely concerned that we should feel rather than think in the presence of his works. Here at least his hope has been fulfilled. But for many people, whom for convenience’s sake we may call Brechtians, that in itself renders him suspect. However, it is worth noticing that they attack Wagner not so much for saying that he wanted emotional rather than cognitive responses to his art, but for the works themselves, which seem to demand an incessantly high-level emotional response more insistently than any others. But the Brechtians don’t attack Verdi, for instance, in the same way, or so far as I know at all, despite the fact that his operas provide stimulus for feeling rather than thought – indeed the idea of thinking in relation to Verdi is odd. Who could reflect for long, and relevantly, on Il Trovatore, a masterpiece of its kind, but one which can only excite and move us in presenting with such vigour a succession of situations each of which is stirring? Wagner is the most intellectual of musical dramatists (Schoenberg again excepted, and up to a point Pfitzner in his explicitly Wagnerian masterpiece Palestrina); not by dint of the prodigious theoretical writings and continuous musings, in correspondence and conversation, about everything under the sun, if not indeed the sun itself; but by virtue of the subject-matter of his works and the kinds of issue which his characters are involved in and are articulate about. Sometimes in Wagner’s works it seems as if he were setting philosophical dialogues to music, the victory being awarded not to the character who argues most convincingly, but to the one who, to put it not quite accurately, has the best tunes.
In fact one can say that Wagner would not have been so insistent that we should respond by feeling rather than by thinking if he hadn’t realised the extraordinarily dense quality of the thinking which is going on in both the words and the actions of his dramas. The relationship between thought, or ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’ (the German word is ‘Verstand’) as Wagner more often puts it, and feeling, was something which he wasn’t so inclined to be simple-minded about as what I have thus far said suggests. He devotes a long section of his major theoretical work, Opera and Drama, to the subject, and produces many penetrating and novel formulations, of which perhaps the most subtle can be illustrated by this quotation:
Nothing should remain for the synthesising intellect to do in the face of a performance of a dramatic work of art; everything presented in it must be so conclusive that our feeling about it is brought to rest; for in the bringing to rest of this feeling, after its highest arousal in sympathy with it, lies that very peace which leads us to the instinctive understanding of life. In drama we must become knowers through feeling.
As so often with Wagner’s formulation, one could wish that he had expressed himself a little more clearly, at the same time as one sees what he means, and is impressed. He felt the truth of what he wrote here so powerfully that he made it, in slightly adapted form, part of the actual subject-matter of his last drama, Parsifal. And in fact the feeling which the sympathetic spectator or listener has, in the face of Wagner’s works, is remarkably accurately caught by it. They do typically work at an extremely high emotional pitch, which is resolved in the final minutes of the dramas. Therein lies much of their enormous appeal, expressed as succinctly as possible in Wagner’s statement of his purpose just quoted. But the progression of feeling which they induce is also precisely what makes them suspect for many people. For it involves a huge measure of trust in the artist, the more so when he pitches things at so intense a level. As we are swept through his works, mesmerised through the means which Wagner to a unique extent commands, critical distance is made impossible (so the argument goes), and we could be persuaded by him of anything.
It is interesting that this passage from Opera and Drama is quoted by Deryck Cooke, one of Wagner’s most ardent intelligent admirers, at the beginning of his vast, regrettably unfinished study of the Ring, entitled I Saw the World End (the rather strange title is taken from some discarded lines which were at one stage part of Brünnhilde’s peroration in Götterdämmerung). Anyone who writes at length expounding the significance of Wagner’s works has, it would seem, to ignore this claim. Cooke’s position is that it holds good for the dramas apart from the Ring: ‘with the others, we do find that our feeling is set at rest, that nothing remains for the intellect to search for, that our instinctive knowledge of life is enriched, and that we become “knowers through feeling”’, he writes. But he thinks that things are different with the Ring, and that therefore a commentary of great thoroughness is required in order to make its meaning clear. But that suggests, surely, that the Ring is some kind of failure.
It seems strange of Cooke to make this distinction between the other dramas and the Ring. All of Wagner’s works require exegesis, not because they are flawed or opaque, but because even if they do in some way enable or help us to become ‘knowers through feeling’, the ‘synthesising intellect’ still has an enormous amount of work to do, and of a highly profitable and strenuous kind. The question is what it has to get to work on; and the answer is the feelings which the dramas have aroused in us, even if they have, in the closing sequences, been in some sense set to rest. For clearly it is possible for music, with its phenomenal resources of creating harmony and order out of their opposites, to persuade us that a dramatic resolution has been achieved. One of the reasons why there are so few operatic tragedies is that composers have been tempted, and have nearly always succumbed to the temptation, to show that however desperate things get dramatically, it is never beyond the powers of music to rescue them. That makes operatic criticism a very tricky business, since the critic can’t ignore the music, obviously, but has to decide on the exact role which it has been called upon to play.
The easy way out, where Wagner is concerned, is the one which Nietzsche finally took, and Adorno after him, in his polemic In Search of Wagner. Both writers point to the pervasive idiom of Wagner’s music, and ask, rhetorically, whether you think that you can trust a man who employs those means in order to get his message across; as one might point to a politician and ask why someone who meant what he said and had something worth saying should indulge in that particular mode of speech. They have