An Essay by Humphrey McQueen  

 

One image of Richard Wagner is of a Nazi who composed bombast to accompany helicopters straffing Vietnamese villagers. The only valid element in that take-out from Apocalypse Now is that Wagner can become our contemporary. No other composer provokes so much disagreement among both lovers of Classical music and those with no acquaintance beyond soundtracks. A fondness for Puccini might be frowned on as middle-brow. A passion for Wagner, by contrast, can lose you a friendship.

Even devotees are divided between those who are seduced by the music – the Tristanites – against those who are fixated on the ideas – the Wagnerites. Most are drawn back because of the music. Nonetheless, Wagner’s polemics hold more than a scholarly interest. We all remain caught in the problems with which he grappled in his music-dramas.

Aspects of Wagner’s personality, like the themes in his poems, hold their attractions because they traverse the contraries within the mix of individualism, society and nature that capitalism brought to a fever pitch. The best and the worst in Wagner and his works retain their fascination because they engage with so many of the dynamics that still puzzle us about our place in the world. 

Wagner’s concerns were at the heart of the conflicts that made the nineteenth-century into a business civilisation. As heirs to that legacy, we can clarify our current dilemmas a little by unravelling the impulses and insights of those who were present at the creation of modernity. We cannot return to the innocence, the prejudices, or the ferment of 1848. The excitement in tracing Wagner’s contrary inspirations comes from immersing ourselves in how one genius tossed and turned through the maelstrom of revolutions in every aspect of society and science.

Four often intersecting points of contention in and about Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen are being still being played out: anti-Semitism; destruction of the environment; feminism; and anarchism-cum-socialism. This quartet of controversies keeps Wagner as our contemporary.

 

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