can anyone, imagine that we ever will?
We have the phrase ‘to put someone in perspective’, and we use it in an odd way. For since it has become fashionable, at any rate in philosophical circles, to use the term ‘perspectivism’, and rather less fashionable to have much of an idea of what that term might mean, people have begun to deny, on what sound like fresh grounds, the possibility of objective truth. And yet when they talk of putting Wagner, or for that matter anyone else, in perspective, they seem to mean getting an accurate idea of him as opposed to being infatuated with or violently contemptuous of him. But there is, if one understands what a perspective is, no such thing as getting someone, and a fortiori not Wagner, into it. There is only the possibility of taking various perspectives, and seeing how he looks from them. What, I think, is meant is achieving a desirable distance from Wagner, being locked in neither embrace nor combat. But what is that distance, and how would we know that we had achieved it? We are back already, too soon, at objectivity, with its connotations of lack of involvement, a capacity for seeing something – Wagner’s works, or the whole gigantic phenomenon of works together with life together with influence of many kinds – without taking sides, though we may pass judgement, of a desirably impersonal kind.
A short book which began with a long consideration of methodology might be tiresome, so I shall take as a kind of motto some sentences from Hans Keller’s book Criticism:
But ever since the age of objectivity started, primarily in reaction to so-called romantic hero-worship, this new danger has, as a temptation, presented itself to the evaluating, the critical historian – to canalise his own destructiveness into a professional virtue and, inspired by the spirit of detachment, find fault especially where impeccability used to reign.
In the entire history of the Western mind, one chief villain has emerged in the age of objectivity, for a variety of reasons, all of them easy to uncover – RICHARD WAGNER.
(Criticism, p. 95)
That does seem undeniable, though I’m not sure about the ease with which all the reasons for Wagner’s status can be uncovered. As Keller goes on to say, even lovers of Wagner’s music are often haters of Wagner the man, some of them plainly finding something exciting about the contrast in their feelings. And haters of the music often claim that it was written by the kind of person you would expect, granted what it is they hate about it. Music critics, and perhaps opera critics in particular, as we shall see, tend to be naive about the relationship between composers and their art. And even if they aren’t in general, when it comes to Wagner the tendency to infer objectionable features in the work from (alleged) detestable personal characteristics proves too strong to withstand, for anyone who dislikes the works in the first place.
Hans Keller goes on to offer his own diagnosis of anti-Wagnerism. But while he makes many shrewd points, it seems to me that he doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. His chief claim is that we have a dread of greatness, that the ‘age of objectivity’, about which he is efficiently scathing, has supervened on an age of hero-worship, which we now view with embarrassment and distaste. While it is not uncommon to find a need to cut geniuses, especially self-conscious ones, down to size, that doesn’t provide a sufficient explanation of anti-Wagnerism, since there are other geniuses whom almost everyone rejoices in celebrating. Mozart is an obvious case, even now that the myth of his childlike unawareness of his gifts has been pretty comprehensively blown. And though Beethoven is a more controversial figure, I think that that is not on account of his insistence on the respect due to his genius.
The fact is that people would forgive Wagner his alleged megalomania, his genuine anti-Semitism, his (ludicrously exaggerated) womanising, his conversion from left revolutionary to right nationalist, and anything else known or suspected about him, if they didn’t find something in his music-dramas, perhaps more specifically in his music, which led them to reinforce their hostility by grasping at anything about him that might justify their Miss Prism-style moralising. And though the hostility, or the expression of it, often takes forms so shockingly crude that one is tempted to ignore it, it is important to recognise that its roots are deep. Too deep, it seems, for exploration by those who indulge – still – in hysterical denunciation.
Hans Keller has an explanation, one which has been adumbrated by other favourably disposed writers, for this too:
Wagner’s music [Keller was only interested in the dramas to the extent that they enabled Wagner to express his supreme musical gifts], like none other before or after him, let what Freud called the dynamic unconscious, normally inaccessible, erupt with a clarity and indeed seductiveness which will always be likely to arouse as much resistance (to the listener’s own unconscious) as its sheer power creates enthusiasm.
The trouble with that highly plausible-sounding suggestion is that no one has succeeded in developing it any further, no doubt because to do so would involve independent research of a kind that musicologists are unwilling or unable to undertake; and because, as usual with explanations which derive from Freud, it is hard to know how to set about verifying or falsifying them, even in rough outline. Is the suggestion that those of us who respond passionately to Wagner in a favourable way are unusually well-balanced, or exceptionally neurotic? And that those who find his music repulsive are repressed or threatened by what it audaciously succeeds in exposing?
It seems that the argument could go either way. It is satisfying to Wagnerians to feel that they can cope with uniquely explicit revelations of the contents of their unconscious, and it is satisfying to anti-Wagnerians to feel that they are rejecting the glorification of barbaric forces. This argument, like all serious argument about Wagner, had already been launched by Nietzsche, who, I think it is interesting and relevant to note in this crucial matter, is not illuminating, at any rate in any direct way, in his early pro-Wagnerian writings, but who becomes hugely instructive in his late expressions of fear and loathing. Without having available the resources of Freudian terminology and what it denotes, he had made a claim which can very easily be translated into psychoanalytic terms. It was a general claim about art, which received, he thought, spectacular justification from studying the rampant Wagnerism by which he felt himself to be surrounded, and which not long before he had fervently endorsed.
The claim is that, for the healthy person, art serves to express his sense of over-abundance, extreme vitality, everything to which Nietzsche opposed ‘decadence’. By contrast, for the decadent himself – Wagner being the arch-example – art expresses need, lack, an urgent demand and supply in one, making up in fantasy for what is missing in reality. The claim applies equally to the artist and to his audience. It is, quite evidently, questionable in the most straightforward sense, and all the more so because it is so central a claim about civilisation, society, and the various forms which they take. So the Kellerclaim that Wagner has a uniquely direct line to the ‘dynamic unconscious’, and is therefore, though a deeply disturbing artist, also a very great one, had been pre-stated by Nietzsche to Wagner’s disadvantage. Wagner gets to the places which no other artist does, but for the Wagnerian that is felt as a liberating, exhilarating experience: Where id was, ego is, when one is listening to Tristan und Isolde, say, and it is Tristan which is always the touchstone for Nietzsche. But the anti-Wagnerian of Nietzsche’s outlook can only lament the neurotic state which Tristan appears to cure, and the embracing of the art which deals with it successfully, or seems to. For the Nietzsche of the late phase art which treats illness is itself sick, and there is no hope for those who need it. Art is, Nietzsche had come to think, either celebration of health or comfort for the ailing. It no longer possesses the truth-value which it had done for him in his heady days as a Wagnerian: that he should ever have thought such a thing shows what a plight he had been in. Art is no vehicle of truth, though it may be highly symptomatic, and so inadvertently give away a lot. Whatever one can deduce from art, it is not a revelation of a reality apart from the artist and his audience, as it had been in The Birth of Tragedy. Because it is now, for Nietzsche, nothing but an experience sui generis, it is impossible to live by it. That is the hideous mistake the Wagnerian makes, and can hardly fail to in succumbing to those hypnotic, narcotic works. As for living, Wagner does that for the Wagnerian; but the anti-Wagnerian does it for himself, or at any rate makes a spirited attempt.
This is still speculative, nebulously so. Yet it would be