Wagner and Philosophy
Bryan Magee
Language: English
Pages: 405
ISBN: 0140295194
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Title note: Alternative title, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
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Wagner was one of the few major composers who studied philosophy seriously. Bryan Magee places the composer's artistic development in the context of the philosophy of his age, and gives us the first detailed and comprehensive study of the close links between Wagner and the philosophers - from the pre-Marxist socialists to Feuerbach and Schopenhauer.
Magee explores the relationship between words and music, between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between art and philosophy. It tackles soberly and judiciously the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity and anti-semitism are repugnant, as well as the Wagner of artistic genius.
The resulting text illuminates Wagner and the music-dramas in altogether new ways.
to feel that what the wisest men down the ages have always said is true, namely that worldly values are empty. In men, at least, the turnaround is often associated with a mid-life crisis. Quite a few of them try to throw off their life as a whole and start a new one – they change wives, homes, jobs. With a new awareness of the inevitability of death they try to find a life that contains something more than short-term meanings, a life that no longer takes its values or interests or satisfactions
thirty-seven, he published an article in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (whose editor after all these years was no longer Schumann) which amounted to a declaration of war against the influence of Jews in music. Actually, as we shall see later, much of it was more tightly focussed than that and was a declaration of war against Meyerbeer; and what this war was to be was Wagner's war of independence. ‘If emancipation from Judaism seems to us a prime necessity, we must test our strength for this war
tall – but in art, not across the frontiers of Europe. The Mastersingers was not a glorification of German political or military prowess, although Bayreuth pro-ducers in the following century sometimes staged it as if it were: it was a glorification of German art, above all of German music. The foreign domination which it saw as a mortal threat, and hated for that reason, was not political or military but – specifically – cultural. All this has important things in common with Wagner's attitude
their idea of his abilities on such judgements, are making a mistake. It is rather as if they were to rate Shakespeare low because of the many historical inaccuracies in his plays. Shakespeare's plays are to be judged as plays, not as history: as history they are second-rate, but as plays they are uniquely marvellous. Geniuses of such magnitude take as much of whatever they need from wherever they can get it. I have heard professors of mathematics pooh-pooh Einstein's abilities as a
goes up in flames, and the world embarks on a new beginning without them. So their triumphalism is self-deluding and hollow; and this is marvellously expressed in the music. Now, at the end of The Valkyrie, the orchestra makes the rafters ring once more, but this time (by deliberate contrast, I believe) the emotion is not in the least superficial but authentic and profound, and almost intolerably moving. It will prove to have significant implications for the remainder of the cycle that the three