being itself an activity which needs scrutinising. Wagner is, par excellence, an artist who has designs on us, and who therefore leads us to examine anew the Keatsian view, winning because of the very innocence of its dogmatism, that we should mistrust all such artists. The innocence – one which is shared by both Nietzsche and Adorno, but they go to inordinate lengths to establish their sophistication – is in imagining that there is any art which does not have designs on us, palpable or otherwise. No doubt we want, in the presence of art, to feel a peculiar freedom, and the more so the less we feel it elsewhere. That was Kant’s claim: that the autonomy of the aesthetic artefact has a close relationship to the autonomy of the spectator (auditor, etc.), indeed makes it possible as it is not anywhere else in our lives, where we are ruled either by the laws of Nature, nonprescriptive but nonetheless ineluctable; or the laws of Morality, easily violated but peremptory and absolute (to use George Eliot’s intimidating formulation). But whatever the content of ‘freedom’ in our responses to art, it seems that the more palpable the designs an artist has on us, the freer in one way we are, since there is then no question of our thinking that he is merely presenting us with ‘the facts’ if he is making it perfectly clear what attitude he wants us to adopt to them.
When we are dealing with a mixed art-form, such as opera, not to speak of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a kind of art which combines all the other forms, which is what Wagner wanted his mature works to be, the question evidently becomes more complex still. If we divide opera into action (or plot), text and music, then the crucial issue is the role that music plays. In his most famous dictum, Wagner claimed that in traditional opera music, which should be the means, had become the end, while drama, which should be the end, was merely the means. His revolution in opera, as opposed to all the other revolutions which he hoped to effect, was to be the placing of music and drama in the right order. To establish from first principles what that order was, Wagner was driven to his heroic amount of theorising, much of it unacceptable because it is so vague and groundlessly speculative. But what we can certainly agree with is that however much music is in the service of drama, it has, in the hands of all the operatic composers whose work survives, a capacity to direct our sympathies which none of them has failed to exploit. It may well be that opera is all the more effective when that is not what it appears to be doing, but that is chiefly to say that we admire the cunning of self-concealing enterprise.
It can seem that Wagner refuses to join in the time-honoured procedures of the artist, that he manifests in his dramas the lack of tact which was so striking a feature of his personality in general, and that his reverence for Beethoven is most apparent in his taking over the insistent nature of Beethoven’s music, a source of pain to his most fastidious listeners. We shall have to see about that. But it is an impression which many people have gained from listening, in the first place, to highlights from his works, the usual way, perhaps, of hearing things by him. Which brings me to the topic which someone who hasn’t yet seriously encountered Wagner’s art, but is thinking of doing so, is likely to be preoccupied by.
What I would like to do now is move immediately to a consideration of key aspects of Wagner’s work, by discussing some of his dramas and the themes with which they are concerned. But at some point I have to deal with an enormous amount of controversy that still rages about many aspects of his life and personality, and which, if one ignores it, is brought up as something which renders pointless any other discussion. Of course one can’t hope to transcend the controversy: Olympian postures in relation to it merely fuel it further. Nor, given the questions around which it revolves, can one hope to settle it. The only course is to wade in and make, as succinctly as possible, what one regards as the crucial points, emerging on the other side in as decorous a state as one can contrive.
It is presumably some evidence of what is taken to be a strikingly direct mode of statement in Wagner’s works which leads people to feel that the alleged facts of his life are relevant to understanding and judging them in a way that doesn’t occur elsewhere in music, music-drama, or literature – and this in the case of a dramatist whose sympathies might be expected to be distributed among his characters. There wouldn’t be a ‘case of Wagner’ if he had not been one of the most significant figures in the development of music and opera. But if he had led a life of sufficient ordinariness for his biography to be a bore, the case of Wagner would be much less insistent and incessant than it is.
A few recent examples, to show the level to which one has to descend if one is not to be felt to be just condescending. In his strikingly intelligent and serious A Guide to Opera Recordings (Oxford University Press, 1987), Ethan Mordden writes: ‘Parsifal is a lie, for Wagner was a sinner: hypocrite, bigot, opportunist, adulterer’ (p. 170). That telling ‘for’ could only have been used on the assumption that Parsifal is meant to be a proclamation of belief, and that if someone doesn’t behave in the way which he is taken to be recommending, he is a hypocrite. There are many disputable remarks in Mordden’s book, but this is the only one that seems to be evidently inane. Only about Wagner would anyone venture to make it.
In The Times of 15 February 1993, Rodney Milnes, one of the most earnest of opera reviewers, wrote apropos of Tristan und Isolde: ‘Nearly six hours spent in the theatre being buttonholed with long-winded and specious justification of the composer’s taste for other people’s wives in general and Mathilde Wesendonck in particular is wearing on one’s patience.’ So that’s what Tristan is! Probably Milnes would claim that he was only high-spiritedly letting off steam, taunting those members of the audience who might be taking the work too seriously: ‘Tristan und Isolde, an obsessively morbid and unhealthy work…’ the paragraph containing the previous quotation begins. But why the rage, why the dragging in of Wagner’s private life (actually a grotesque version of it)?
In The Times of 13 July 1993, another critic, Barry Millington, one of the leading ‘experts’ on Wagner of the present time, acclaimed a production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for revealing ‘the dark underside of the opera’. ‘In short,’ Millington writes, ‘the opera is the artistic counterpart of the ideological crusade launched by Wagner in the 1860s: a crusade to urge Germany to awaken, to expel alien elements and honour the “German spirit”. The characterisation of Beckmesser is demonstrably anti-Semitic.’ The ‘demonstration’ which is supposed to support that adverb is contained in an article by Barry Millington, published in the most self-consciously high-brow of contemporary opera journals, Cambridge Opera Journal. Clearly the tone is a more solemn one than Milnes’s, but that shouldn’t conceal the crass confidence with which Millington presents as fact his own preposterous opinions. To demonstrate their absurdity would be out of place here; I will merely point out that to the extent that the article in the learned journal claims to make its point, it is by the accumulation of a large number of clues which no one has ever picked up on before, and that by its very ingenuity it refutes itself: Wagner was often subtle, but he didn’t write in code. It might have occurred to Millington alias Holmes that Wagner, in the cause of his crusade, should have rendered his message to the German nation somewhat more accessible.
To grasp fully what leads people to write about Wagner in this way – and every reader will agree that there is no other major artist who elicits remarks of this kind, as methodologically absurd as they are deliberately provocative – we shall have to wait until examining some of Wagner’s art in some detail. But we don’t need to wait until then before acknowledging the strangeness of the hostility, its intensity and its reaching for any weapon that comes to hand (minds hardly seem to be involved) to clobber Wagner with. The most obvious feature of all the remarks quoted, and one that pervades anti-Wagnerian polemic, is the simplicity of the transition from features of Wagner’s extra-musical activities to animadversions on his art. One doesn’t need to have been involved in the intricacies of the dispute about the ‘Intentional Fallacy’, the tersest statement of which was ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’, to feel that the relationship between an artist’s life, including his intentions in producing his art, and his actual artistic productions, must be a matter of