Wagner and Philosophy

"This book is very dense, there’s a lot of stuff in it, a lot of philosophical thought. But it’s completely riveting. I found I read it like a novel. Wagner is very good to write about because he wrote a lot himself. He had a lot to say about current intellectual trends and was caught up in all sorts of philosophical movements, particularly Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. And he was tremendously verbose. He wrote letters and essays and also, of course, the long and complicated texts of all his operas. He had a very complicated mind, and he dealt with very dense subjects in his operas: the heavy Nordic myths, and all sorts of stories that are loaded with myth and message. So in Wagner you have an immensely complicated person, who produced an immensely complicated oeuvre. And as you get to know Wagner, you come to understand that this is a very dense experience, but it’s extremely difficult to unpick in your own head. You can’t handle it all. And what Bryan Magee has done in this book is unpick it, very, very brilliantly. In the cover of my copy I have written two quotations that must have come from either Wagner himself or from Magee’s commentary somewhere in the book. One is: “It is for art to salvage the essence of religion.” And the other is: “In Wagner, drama is music made visible.” That’s the sort of level this book is projected on: very, very thought-provoking. The two giants of the opera world are Verdi in Italian opera, and for German opera it’s Wagner. And you can put Mozart in there too, though his oeuvre wasn’t as big as the other two. Wagner and Verdi together are the absolute summit of singing. They’re tremendously demanding of singers, and if you manage to actually do it, you get a fantastic sense of achievement."