Wagner

Michael Tanner's 'Wagner' is a polemic and it is of its time (1996). The scene has to be set of a period when Wagner 'mattered' but had become embroiled (Heidegger has a similar issue) in the cultural politics of a rising left-liberalism. He was seen to be out-of-time as a villain of history.

The reason was that his own passionate politics had been set in another Germany in which the nationalist revolt in 1848 had been a central event (critical equally to what made Marx) and before the measured German nationalism of Bismarck became the imperial idiocy of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Appropriated by the Nazis and presumed to be a harbinger of a later racial antisemitism, the more 'socialist' aspects of at least the early Wagner were forgotten in what show more amounted to a sneering hate-fest about the man and his music from people most likely not to have the patience for it.

It is this remarkable ability of the late liberal mind to be unable to think themselves empathetically into past historical 'being' and to judge all pasts from a position of rather ridiculous moral absolutism that did for Wagner as it did for many great artefacts of the world of 'old white males'.

Tanner is thus hitting back and hitting back hard in a rearguard action against the middle brow. He writes as someone who understands music (which I do not) and the German philosophical tradition which is relevant here as Idealism, Schopenhauer and the squabble with Nietzsche.

He sweeps away (quite rightly) the fact that Wagner was a tremendous ego who would put Trump to shame. Many (though only a minority of all) geniuses are such but the egoism is not so much irrelevant as part of what enabled the man to produce remarkable feats of artistic creation.

Although not an easy read (too bound up with the polemic and rather donnish at times), if there is one thing Tanner manages to do it is to establish that this is a genius of great worth whose music was culturally transformative and a 'maker of the modern world' despite the latter's ignorance of that fact.

For example, the cinematic blockbuster and its music have become the total work of art in middle brow form. Few of its audience understand that Wagner's conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk is now central to their own cultural assumptions and reception of creativity.

And this is the problem of the book in 2025. The controversy has disappeared because the people who condemned Wagner and did not understand his work may have been intellectual lightweights in the 1990s but at least this was a bad God to be rejected. A God believed in still exists.

Today the problem is that Wagner only exists as a God of belief amongst the very knowledgeable of which an even smaller group has much knowledge of that mid-nineteenth century ferment of ideas in Germany before the Nazis even existed.

The History Channel view of the world - sharks, Nazis and aliens - distorts but the barrier it sets up is in popular understanding of the continuities in our culture and of the importance even of polemic itself. Instead, we have a bland and pasty-faced wimpish desire that all should have popular cake.

As to Tanner's book, it is an important corrective in this context. It is not strictly speaking a biography but rather an exercise in criticism that takes us through the major operatic works (notably the Ring cycle) in order to help us understand what is going on with Wagner's creative process.

If only there was more time (which I do not have) because Tanner encourages us to take each opera and live it as Wagner lived it as a creative process. He is excellent at giving us access to that liminal world between creator and creation where the work is not the man or vice versa.

There is Wagner creating himself, there is each work which can stand on its own musically and dramatically and then there is the 'process' in which the total work unfolds, sometimes haltingly and with major gaps, in order to express a particular but fluid philosophy of life.

Wagner's work unfolds here with (for me) less interest in the intellectual tour de force that is 'The Ring Cycle' than in the emotional expression of absolute desire in 'Tristan and Isolde' and the heroic Christian symbolism with hidden pagan aspects in 'Parsifal' (at the end of his life).

The irony of the book is that it is using a lot of words to try to describe what is ineffable - some people reach the ineffable through philosophy, the spiritual, poetry and the plastic arts or nature but music too, if it can be the very effable Offenbach, can also be the inexpressible 'being' of Wagner.

The phenomenology of Wagner is what Tanner appears to be striving at without creating a philosophical treatise. If he does not achieve this as often as we might like, he does open the door to our achieving it if we want to put the effort in on our own account.

I suspect that we do not live in a culture of effort, partly because of lack of time, partly because of an overwhelming access to information, partly from imposed ideology and partly from simple lack of basic cultural education. This is just how it is. We live in a different culture from Wagner's. show less

A chronological review of all of Wagner's operas, including Die Feen, although I would have thought everything that could profitably have been said about Wagner's first opera had been said long, long ago. Tanner is particularly eager to defend Wagner from illegitimate criticism that conflates biographical (Wagner was often a bad boy) and ideological (Wagner was a racist) prejudice with judgment on aesthetic value. I, for one, certainly take his point and need no further special pleading. Tanner's at his best with his extended discussion of the Ring. I'm taken with his view that there is no ultimate meaning to this almost infinitely complex mega-drama -- or that if there is, the meaning has to do with the transcendent power of delusion. show more Ultimately, though, all considerations of Wagner (or any serious composer) without detailed musical analyses are self-limiting and can provide only superficial insight. show less

The author is a Dean of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he lectures on philosophy, writes about Nietzsche, and reviews for Classic CD and the Times Literary Supplement. As such, and as he admits, his views of Wagner are admiring but iconoclastic, and frankly amusing.
Supplies a thorough understanding of Wagner's life and work, with somewhat unorthodox analyses of his music and dramatic purposes.
Even with only a rudimentary acquaintance with Wagner's operas, I found the book highly informative and enjoyable.
My own interpretation of Tanner's analysis (and he never says this in so many words, but I think the implications are there) is that Wagner was looking for the meaning of Gospel Love and Sanctified Marriage, but found the show more connection to Christianity completely unacceptable, and so turned to pagan mythology for his inspiration, resulting in the psychological and spiritual muddle that Tanner documents. The Tristan / Isolde and Siegmund / Sieglinde couplings of illicit passion are counter-posed to the banality of the Meistersinger's more prosaic but licit romance, while the renunciations of Parsifal and Lohengrin are somewhat in the middle.
Tanner thinks that Wagner's heroes are looking for redemption (usually from their own immoral acts), and his heroines looking for someone to redeem (in the worst tradition of abused women everywhere), -- but no one is looking for redemption through the atonement of Christ. show less

British academic philosopher Tanner has written on music for the Times Literary Supplement and is author of Nietzsche, a volume in the "Past Masters" series from Oxford University Press (1994). Nietzsche wrote a lot about Wagner, joining a flow of opinions that became a river long ago. Tanner quotes him here, mainly in order to argue with him and many others who find fault with the complicated, controversial German music dramatist. Opening by harshly explicating some Wagner criticism as "inane," "outrageously unfair," and "priggish," Tanner then spiritedly discusses all the operas in chronological order, focusing upon effects he feels their characters, stories, and music are meant to have on thoughtful members of the audience. When show more these effects are contradictory, Tanner self-consciously argues with himself. A short bibliographic essay provides leads to still more views. A warm-hearted, occasionally hot-headed defense of Wagner; recommended for balance.

From Kirkus Reviews
Tanner, a Cambridge philosopher and opera critic for the Spectator, offers analyses of the plots of Wagner's operas, the intellectual themes projected by them, and an evaluation of the music that is (for most of us) their justification. Tanner's discussion of The Ring is superb and makes an otherwise very uneven book required reading. He often overstates (arguing, for instance, that Tristan is one of the two great religious works in Western music, along with the St. Matthew Passion), and he

While no one would dispute Wagner's ranking among the most significant composers in the history of Western music, his works have been more fiercely attacked than those of any other composer. Alleged to be an unscrupulous womanizer and megalomaniac, undeniably a racist, Wagner's personal qualities and attitudes have often provoked, and continue to provoke, intense hostility that has translated into a mistrust and abhorrence of his music. In this emphatic, lucid book, Michael Tanner discusses why people feel so passionately about Wagner, for or against, in a way that they do not about other artists who had personal traits no less lamentable than those he is thought to have possessed. Tanner lays out the various arguments made by Wagner's detractors and admirers, and challenges most of them. The author's fascination for the relationships among music, text, and plot generates an illuminating discussion of the operas, in which he persuades us to see many of Wagner's best-known works anew--The Ring Cycle, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal. He refrains from lengthy and detailed musical examination, giving instead passionate and unconventional analyses that are accessible to all lovers of music, be they listeners or performers. In this fiery reassessment of one of the greatest composers in the history of opera, Tanner presents one of the most intelligent and controversial portraits of Wagner to emerge for many years. show less

A good short biography of the great Romantic composer, this is useful as a short introduction.