Pro and Contra Wagner

"His ambivalence towards Wagner, as towards everything actually, is fascinating. With Wagner, he said his relationship was one of “love without belief”. He didn’t accept a lot of Wagner. Wagner’s worldliness and appetite for worldly success, combined with his ascetic dedication to his art—Wagner said a day without work is a nightmare for me —Mann found that to be the paradigm of the artistic constitution. It’s an illuminating book. He wrote it at the end of 1932 and the start of 1933. He was very politically aware by then, he lived in Munich. He constantly saw street battles and his children were involved in scuffles with Nazis, so he knew what the score was. He very much addresses Wagner the internationalist, the supra-national, the person who wasn’t concerned with pushing German art as such. That lecture was the main reason why there were these warriors of the spirit—unfortunately orchestrated by the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch, who had been a friend of Thomas Mann’s and lived close to him in Munich—that grouped together against him. There has been a great deal of discussion on the whole subject. It seems to have been a joke at Thomas Mann’s expense to get a protest signed by the Richard Wagner society of Munich, with Knappertsbusch, Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner—the composer of the great opera Palestrina —and various other great conductors and distinguished cultured politicians. There were about fifteen to twenty people protesting on behalf of the city of Munich against Mann. Thomas Mann says in his usual warm but ironic spirit that Wagner was a “dilettante on the grand scale”. It’s absurd to call him a “dilettante” as Wagner was so passionate and professional. Stravinsky, for most of his life, was a strong anti-Wagnerian. When someone thought they’d get into his good books by saying how much they hated Wagner, Stravinsky said ‘ yes, but he was a professional’ . He really knew his stuff. Nothing was done amateurishly. No. Hitler had always passionately admired Wagner, partly on musical grounds. He went to Bayreuth in 1923 to an early rally, when the Nazi party was still quite a small one and met with Siegfried Wagner – Wagner’s son – and his wife Winifred Wagner. Winifred became a fanatical Nazi very early, despite being English. She went to Hitler’s rally and invited him to Wahnfried—Wagner’s villa in Bayreuth. Hitler, of course, was incredibly excited and spent a long time at Wagner’s grave. From then on, animated correspondence took place between Winifred and Hitler. Bayreuth virtually became a Nazi centre, thanks to the Wagners who were a nationalist, reactionary lot. “The relationship between Wagner’s art and the Nazi ideology is much more tenuous than people think.” When Hitler was sentenced after the failed putsch in Munich – which Winifred had been at – she sent him writing paper with Bayreuth heading for him to write Mein Kampf on. And then, when he came to power in 1933—shortly after her husband Siegfried had died aged 61—Hitler subsidised the Bayreuth festival and turned it into a great Nazi rallying point. He insisted on the top Nazis going. And he was in ecstasy; he used to sit in the box with Winifred, kissing her hand, while the other Nazis sneaked away to town brothels if they could, because they were so bored by Wagner. All of this Wagner thing was actually Hitler—Hitler and Goebbels. The rest of the Nazis were bored stiff. The relationship between Wagner’s art and the Nazi ideology is much more tenuous than people think. It doesn’t seem to be particularly helpful. You could do the same with Luther, Marx, and Kant. Admittedly, Wagner’s anti-Semitism was very extreme, though it was peculiar. He also said things to Cosima which are recorded in her diaries about how ‘We haven’t got far enough yet to incorporate the Jews into our society, they are ahead of us.’ There are a lot of remarks like that, at the same time as the hatred. The first conductor of Parsifal , Herman Levi, was Jewish. Wagner didn’t want him to be the first conductor because he hated to have an orchestra conducted by a Jew. It was Ludwig II, Wagner’s patron, who was anti-anti-Semitic who insisted that if Herman Levi was not to conduct Parsifal then it wouldn’t be done. But there is also this bizarre phenomenon that many of his best friends were Jews. Wagner became very friendly with Levi and stayed with him the day before he died. Levi wrote letters to his parents saying, ‘Wagner is the kindest and noblest and finest of human beings, don’t believe what you read about him.’ So Levi was a passionate devotee of Wagner. Heinrich von Stein, who was Siegfried Wagner’s tutor, was also Jewish. Wagner also had a great Jewish following, and there have been lots of famous Wagnerian Jews who have just swallowed the gnat as far as Wagner’s views are concerned. They were both extremely peculiar and completely inconsistent in many ways. No, I don’t think there is. It’s quite hard to resist, but I don’t think there’s more necessity with Wagner than with anybody else. It’s important to know which order the works were created in. Shakespeare was fortunate enough for us not to know anything about him. “If by pressing a button”—as Elizabeth Anscombe said about Wittgenstein’s personal life—and there be no knowledge of Wagner, then I would rather it was that way. Unfortunately, I’m of the ‘intentional fallacy’ school. I can’t resist reading about the artist that I most admire. But I wish I could."