Richard Wagner and Wagnerism
Richard Wagner was the living embodiment of the term "protean genius." He was a composer, conductor, playwright, poet, polemicist, anarchist, Teutonic nationalist, anti-Semite, feminist, pacifist, vegetarian, and animal rights campaigner. His legacy and life were and still are a continuum where fascination, even ravishment, coexists with outrage and controversies, affection and contempt. When thinking about Wagner and trying to distill what his art means, one is reminded of the parable of the blind men and the elephant from ancient Hindu mythology: The object itself is so enormous and strange that each person groping to understand it comes to a completely different understanding of what it is. Like his American contemporaries Walt Whitman, Wagner was a multifaceted writer. He also had inconsistencies, which contributed to his fame and impact decades after his death in a way that no other creative person—possibly with the exception of Shakespeare—has ever done.
"Wagnerism" eventually came to be used to describe the diverse qualities of Wagner's art, philosophy, and politics, all of which dominated — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "penetrated" — European and American cultural life for a period roughly spanning from 1880 to the end of World War II and that even today, albeit with less vigor, can still affect our society as a whole. His use of the words Valhalla, Liebestod, Valkyrie, Gesamtkunstwerk, Flying Dutchman, Nibelung, Brünnhilde, Götterdämmerung, Siegfried, Leitmotiv, and infinite song has made them popular signifiers in modern discourse.
Wagner's music was played more than 17,000 times in Germany alone during the years of 1901 and 1910. It is reasonable to assume that no real artist, least of all a classical music composer, could even begin to reach that degree of notoriety in today's society.
Wagner frequently used the word "revolution" in his early years, both in its political and artistic senses. He was nearly executed for his role in the 1849 revolt in Dresden, which drove him into exile. The youthful King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a morbidly artistic man-boy who was enthralled by Wagner's art for the remainder of his brief life, finally became his loving patron. And "revolution" is an even better word to use to express the profound transformation Wagner brought about in music. His use of a radical harmonic language in "Tristan and Isolde" and "Götterdämmerung" forever altered the direction of European music. Without him, neither Mahler nor Debussy, nor even Gershwin or Richard Rodgers, would have been possible.
Wagnerism evolves into a more evil persona as the 20th century goes on. The mythology and music are both used by the Nazis. Wagner is frequently heard on propaganda newsreels and is performed at official Nazi events. The descendants of Wagner enthusiastically embrace Hitler's regular trips to Bayreuth. "Siegfried's Funeral Music" is the preferred piece of music for national grief while a war is in progress. The repulsive Goebbels-directed propaganda film "The Eternal Jew," whose narrator attributes the anti-Semitic epithet "The Jew is the plastic devil of the degeneration of mankind" to Wagner, is the most devastating. The taint of the Holocaust on Wagner is not wholly undeserved, and one cannot help but sense that his claims that Jews were subhuman had come home to roost.
Why is "Beethovenism" or "Bachism" taboo while Wagnerism is? The reason is because Wagner's constellation of concepts, symbols, and themes informs his art in a way that goes well beyond musicals and is always used to further myth.
