The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner

"I have a huge preoccupation with Wagner right now. My third book, a very big, long-term project, is going to be called Wagnerism . It will not be a book about Wagner per se, but an account of his vast cultural impact from the latter part of his life to today in all the arts. I’m not actually going to talk about his impact on music, which is a book or many books in itself. Nietzsche as a young man was completely besotted with Wagner, and had to fight his way out of this obsession – not only with the music but the man, because they had quite an intense personal relationship. In the latter part of the 19th century, this reaction of Nietzsche against Wagner points to a new strand of thinking, which became modernism in a lot of ways. It’s the case with many other major figures of the later 19th and early 20th century. Very often, you see an early infatuation with Wagner, followed by a reaction against him or a modification of the passion. You see it in Thomas Mann, James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , TS Eliot and many others. People have forgotten just how overpowering a figure Wagner was in the late 19th century. If you were an intellectually or artistically leaning young person in any field, you more or less had to come to terms with Wagner, or at least expose yourself to him. He influenced every imaginable form. He had an impact on socialists, communists, feminists, early gay-rights people, as well as the right wing of course, which is all that people remember in a way. “People have forgotten just how overpowering a figure Wagner was in the late 19th century. He influenced every imaginable form.” One very significant problem that classical music has faced in the 20th century has been an association with fascism, and in particular Hitler’s notorious love for Wagner. There was a sense that something had gone spiritually awry in classical music itself, or that Hitler’s love for Wagner had somehow tainted the music or revealed something evil inherent to it. This is something of a misunderstanding, or a far from complete picture of Wagner – but it needs to be confronted and talked about. The other thing about Nietzsche’s writing about Wagner is that it’s wonderfully brilliant, unpredictable vivid and perceptive, even when he’s deliberately distorting the material for a certain effect or working out his own profound ambivalence about Wagner. It’s fantastic music criticism exactly because it’s so wild and eccentric and unreliable – he’s the last person you should turn to for an exact account of what’s going on in Wagner’s librettos, but it’s insidiously quotable and fantastically expressive. It’s a dangerous model to use for music writing, but an inspiring one nonetheless. People are still debating this. One school of thought is that the break is not as severe as it appears to be. The Birth of Tragedy appears to be the work of a man who worships Wagner and places him on the same level as the great Greek tragedians. The Case of Wagner appears to be the work of someone mocking his subject ruthlessly and rejecting the entire apparatus of romanticism. But the obsession and the love of Wagner lingers. Nietzsche admitted all the while that he was still under Wagner’s spell. The two books together are a record of a man struggling in different ways to come to terms with the power this music has over him. He never broke free of it, he never entirely rejected Wagner – in that way it’s a revealing case study in musical obsession. Very often when people talk about their musical tastes, they have gone through an infatuation with a certain artist and suddenly it turns into revulsion or some sense of a total break. Musical taste gets very deep inside of us. In a sense it’s like a relationship in real life – a tempestuous love affair that can go up and down. It’s especially fascinating in the case of Nietzsche because there was also a direct personal dimension to this. At the heart of the story may be the tensions of Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner – Nietzsche’s inability to sustain a certain kind of sycophancy which Wagner seemed to require of those in his circle, and Nietzsche’s feeling that his own abilities were not being recognised. But it’s perfectly obvious to me – and it’s quite touching reading The Case of Wagner – that he never did fall out of love with the music. This sustained tradition of philosophical commentary on Wagner is in a way a chapter in the history of philosophy. It really begins with Nietzsche and the questions that Nietzsche poses – almost ethical questions about what role culture has to play in our society. There is something very elusive about Wagner on that ethical level, something very slippery. Even as he denounced extant systems of morality, Nietzsche remained a rather moralistic figure to the end, but Wagner was the opposite in many ways. Wagner was the sybarite, the sensualist and the one who seemed to release sexual energies in his music. It’s interesting to recall that the danger that Wagner seemed to pose in the later 19th century was often identified as a sexual danger. In terms of the philosophers who followed Nietzsche, because it became such a preoccupation with him others had to try to come to terms with Wagner as well. And by Adorno’s lifetime, the question had appeared of Wagner and politics – that’s very much the subtext to Adorno’s writings about Wagner. But it was that dangerous confluence of the personal and sexual with the historical and political that made Wagner an explosive quantity whom everyone had to come to terms with."