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What is it about Richard Wagner that makes him, 112 years after his death, still so violently controversial? The easy answer would be ‘Everything’, but it would not be quite right. For no one – no serious musician – any longer doubts that his place among the most significant composers is now secure. That, at least, is a comparatively recent development. Until after the Second World War, which certainly did his reputation no good, and for which, to read some contemporary commentators, one might think he was in large measure responsible, there were still important figures on the musical scene who were prepared confidently to dismiss him out of hand.

But one would be hard put to it now to find that attitude. It becomes increasingly difficult to write off someone whose works remain enormously popular all over the world, whole cycles of the Ring, however outlandish the production and mediocre the musical execution, being invariably sold out in advance; and much more so now than half a century ago. Among the musical avant-garde his fate has been more complex: after a period in which many of them, Stravinsky being their leading spokesman (but even he finally recanted), regarded him as a tiresome perversion in the history of music, they have increasingly tended to find him a cause of extreme fascination, and even of inspiration. That has been especially true of the aggressive modernists of the post-World War II era, Boulez and Stockhausen. The latter is still in the process of writing a vast cycle of operas which he knows will routinely be dubbed Wagnerian, on account of their scope, ambition and pretensions. Boulez has devoted lengthy periods of an exceptionally varied and trend-setting career to conducting Wagner, and to writing about him in favourable terms, though his writings seem to urge on us the strange request that we, at long last, come to view Wagner ‘objectively’. But how can we, and how can anyone, imagine that we ever will?

We have the phrase ‘to put someone in perspective’, and we use it in an odd way. For since it has become fashionable, at any rate in philosophical circles, to use the term ‘perspectivism’, and rather less fashionable to have much of an idea of what that term might mean, people have begun to deny, on what sound like fresh grounds, the possibility of objective truth. And yet when they talk of putting Wagner, or for that matter anyone else, in perspective, they seem to mean getting an accurate idea of him as opposed to being infatuated with or violently contemptuous of him. But there is, if one understands what a perspective is, no such thing as getting someone, and a fortiori not Wagner, into it. There is only the possibility of taking various perspectives, and seeing how he looks from them. What, I think, is meant is achieving a desirable distance from Wagner, being locked in neither embrace nor combat. But what is that distance, and how would we know that we had achieved it? We are back already, too soon, at objectivity, with its connotations of lack of involvement, a capacity for seeing something – Wagner’s works, or the whole gigantic phenomenon of works together with life together with influence of many kinds – without taking sides, though we may pass judgement, of a desirably impersonal kind.

A short book which began with a long consideration of methodology might be tiresome, so I shall take as a kind of motto some sentences from Hans Keller’s book Criticism:

But ever since the age of objectivity started, primarily in reaction to so-called romantic hero-worship, this new danger has, as a temptation, presented itself to the evaluating, the critical historian – to canalise his own destructiveness into a professional virtue and, inspired by the spirit of detachment, find fault especially where impeccability used to reign.

In the entire history of the Western mind, one chief villain has emerged in the age of objectivity, for a variety of reasons, all of them easy to uncover – RICHARD WAGNER.

(Criticism, p. 95)

That does seem undeniable, though I’m not sure about the ease with which all the reasons for Wagner’s status can be uncovered. As Keller goes on to say, even lovers of Wagner’s music are often haters of Wagner the man, some of them plainly finding something exciting about the contrast in their feelings. And haters of the music often claim that it was written by the kind of person you would expect, granted what it is they hate about it. Music critics, and perhaps opera critics in particular, as we shall see, tend to be naive about the relationship between composers and their art. And even if they aren’t in general, when it comes to Wagner the tendency to infer objectionable features in the work from (alleged) detestable personal characteristics proves too strong to withstand, for anyone who dislikes the works in the first place.

Hans Keller goes on to offer his own diagnosis of anti-Wagnerism. But while he makes many shrewd points, it seems to me that he doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. His chief claim is that we have a dread of greatness, that the ‘age of objectivity’, about which he is efficiently scathing, has supervened on an age of hero-worship, which we now view with embarrassment and distaste. While it is not uncommon to find a need to cut geniuses, especially self-conscious ones, down to size, that doesn’t provide a sufficient explanation of anti-Wagnerism, since there are other geniuses whom almost everyone rejoices in celebrating. Mozart is an obvious case, even now that the myth of his childlike unawareness of his gifts has been pretty comprehensively blown. And though Beethoven is a more controversial figure, I think that that is not on account of his insistence on the respect due to his genius.

The fact is that people would forgive Wagner his alleged megalomania, his genuine anti-Semitism, his (ludicrously exaggerated) womanising, his conversion from left revolutionary to right nationalist, and anything else known or suspected about him, if they didn’t find something in his music-dramas, perhaps more specifically in his music, which led them to reinforce their hostility by grasping at anything about him that might justify their Miss Prism-style moralising. And though the hostility, or the expression of it, often takes forms so shockingly crude that one is tempted to ignore it, it is important to recognise that its roots are deep. Too deep, it seems, for exploration by those who indulge – still – in hysterical denunciation.

Hans Keller has an explanation, one which has been adumbrated by other favourably disposed writers, for this too:

Wagner’s music [Keller was only interested in the dramas to the extent that they enabled Wagner to express his supreme musical gifts], like none other before or after him, let what Freud called the dynamic unconscious, normally inaccessible, erupt with a clarity and indeed seductiveness which will always be likely to arouse as much resistance (to the listener’s own unconscious) as its sheer power creates enthusiasm.

The trouble with that highly plausible-sounding suggestion is that no one has succeeded in developing it any further, no doubt because to do so would involve independent research of a kind that musicologists are unwilling or unable to undertake; and because, as usual with explanations which derive from Freud, it is hard to know how to set about verifying or falsifying them, even in rough outline. Is the suggestion that those of us who respond passionately to Wagner in a favourable way are unusually well-balanced, or exceptionally neurotic? And that those who find his music repulsive are repressed or threatened by what it audaciously succeeds in exposing?

It seems that the argument could go either way. It is satisfying to Wagnerians to feel that they can cope with uniquely explicit revelations of the contents of their unconscious, and it is satisfying to anti-Wagnerians to feel that they are rejecting the glorification of barbaric forces. This argument, like all serious argument about Wagner, had already been launched by Nietzsche, who, I think it is interesting and relevant to note in this crucial matter, is not illuminating, at any rate in any direct way, in his early pro-Wagnerian writings, but who becomes hugely instructive in his late expressions of fear and loathing. Without having available the resources of Freudian terminology and what it denotes, he had made a claim which can very easily be translated into psychoanalytic terms. It was a general claim about art, which received, he thought, spectacular justification from studying the rampant Wagnerism by which he felt himself to be surrounded, and which not long before he had fervently endorsed.

The claim is that, for the healthy person, art serves to express his sense of over-abundance, extreme vitality, everything to which Nietzsche opposed ‘decadence’. By contrast, for the decadent himself – Wagner being the arch-example – art expresses need, lack, an urgent demand and supply in one, making up in fantasy for what is missing in reality. The claim applies equally to the artist and to his audience. It is, quite evidently, questionable in the most straightforward sense, and all the more so because it is so central a claim about civilisation, society, and the various forms which they take. So the Kellerclaim that Wagner has a uniquely direct line to the ‘dynamic unconscious’, and is therefore, though a deeply disturbing artist, also a very great one, had been pre-stated by Nietzsche to Wagner’s disadvantage. Wagner gets to the places which no other artist does, but for the Wagnerian that is felt as a liberating, exhilarating experience: Where id was, ego is, when one is listening to Tristan und Isolde, say, and it is Tristan which is always the touchstone for Nietzsche. But the anti-Wagnerian of Nietzsche’s outlook can only lament the neurotic state which Tristan appears to cure, and the embracing of the art which deals with it successfully, or seems to. For the Nietzsche of the late phase art which treats illness is itself sick, and there is no hope for those who need it. Art is, Nietzsche had come to think, either celebration of health or comfort for the ailing. It no longer possesses the truth-value which it had done for him in his heady days as a Wagnerian: that he should ever have thought such a thing shows what a plight he had been in. Art is no vehicle of truth, though it may be highly symptomatic, and so inadvertently give away a lot. Whatever one can deduce from art, it is not a revelation of a reality apart from the artist and his audience, as it had been in The Birth of Tragedy. Because it is now, for Nietzsche, nothing but an experience sui generis, it is impossible to live by it. That is the hideous mistake the Wagnerian makes, and can hardly fail to in succumbing to those hypnotic, narcotic works. As for living, Wagner does that for the Wagnerian; but the anti-Wagnerian does it for himself, or at any rate makes a spirited attempt.

This is still speculative, nebulously so. Yet it would be less than honest for people on either side to deny that something, maybe a large element, in their responses to Wagner is touched by it; at least on repeatedly interrogating my own feelings about him I conclude that it is a line worth pressing on with. The difficulty is that, as in any matter which goes so deep, it ramifies so extensively that it is hard to deal with without also articulating one’s reactions to a large number of the most basic issues. All to the good, in one way. But the problem now becomes that while for the Wagnerian it is an excellent and enjoyable thing to be able to focus his attitudes towards many of his central preoccupations by further experiences of Wagner’s art, and reflection on them, for the anti-Wagnerian it is painful, or worse still, merely boring, not stimulating, to be led to define his positions by reference to a phenomenon which he finds so cosmically nasty and tiresome. So confrontation at this profound level, which could be most worthwhile, because most searching, tends not to occur. Instead there is endless bickering about aspects of Wagner and his art which is interesting, possibly, but serves to disguise the real conflicts which should be explored, and so the whole discussion is superficial, if impassioned.

It would be different if Wagner were only an artist, whatever exactly that means; or if he had been clearly in the first place something else – a philosopher of culture, or some kind of prophetic figure. But he was, and remains, a musical dramatist trailing clouds of doctrine, and thus a ‘phenomenon’. In the former case, he could be just ignored as not to the taste of many ardent lovers of music and drama; in the latter, attacked or ridiculed for the falsity or absurdity of his views. It is the cunning interpenetration of his art and his prosily expressed Weltanschauung which makes him unavoidable, together with his immense influence in so many disparate spheres. No wonder that those who resist take refuge in unrestrained polemic – they want to obliterate him, so that he can simply cease to exist as the object of endless discussion. But their polemics only fuel counterblasts, and achieve just the opposite effect from the ‘marginalising’ which they had hoped for. In his own last, splenetic writings on Wagner, Nietzsche acknowledged that too. There is, and will remain, a ‘case of Wagner’ so long as we are stuck in the cultural crisis which Nietzsche diagnosed, because Wagner embodies it to an extent which no other artist approaches.

The issue is complicated by a further one which makes Wagner’s music-dramas very different from almost everything else in the operatic tradition, Schoenberg being the only notable exception. Wagner was intensely concerned that we should feel rather than think in the presence of his works. Here at least his hope has been fulfilled. But for many people, whom for convenience’s sake we may call Brechtians, that in itself renders him suspect. However, it is worth noticing that they attack Wagner not so much for saying that he wanted emotional rather than cognitive responses to his art, but for the works themselves, which seem to demand an incessantly high-level emotional response more insistently than any others. But the Brechtians don’t attack Verdi, for instance, in the same way, or so far as I know at all, despite the fact that his operas provide stimulus for feeling rather than thought – indeed the idea of thinking in relation to Verdi is odd. Who could reflect for long, and relevantly, on Il Trovatore, a masterpiece of its kind, but one which can only excite and move us in presenting with such vigour a succession of situations each of which is stirring? Wagner is the most intellectual of musical dramatists (Schoenberg again excepted, and up to a point Pfitzner in his explicitly Wagnerian masterpiece Palestrina); not by dint of the prodigious theoretical writings and continuous musings, in correspondence and conversation, about everything under the sun, if not indeed the sun itself; but by virtue of the subject-matter of his works and the kinds of issue which his characters are involved in and are articulate about. Sometimes in Wagner’s works it seems as if he were setting philosophical dialogues to music, the victory being awarded not to the character who argues most convincingly, but to the one who, to put it not quite accurately, has the best tunes.

In fact one can say that Wagner would not have been so insistent that we should respond by feeling rather than by thinking if he hadn’t realised the extraordinarily dense quality of the thinking which is going on in both the words and the actions of his dramas. The relationship between thought, or ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’ (the German word is ‘Verstand’) as Wagner more often puts it, and feeling, was something which he wasn’t so inclined to be simple-minded about as what I have thus far said suggests. He devotes a long section of his major theoretical work, Opera and Drama, to the subject, and produces many penetrating and novel formulations, of which perhaps the most subtle can be illustrated by this quotation:

Nothing should remain for the synthesising intellect to do in the face of a performance of a dramatic work of art; everything presented in it must be so conclusive that our feeling about it is brought to rest; for in the bringing to rest of this feeling, after its highest arousal in sympathy with it, lies that very peace which leads us to the instinctive understanding of life. In drama we must become knowers through feeling.

As so often with Wagner’s formulation, one could wish that he had expressed himself a little more clearly, at the same time as one sees what he means, and is impressed. He felt the truth of what he wrote here so powerfully that he made it, in slightly adapted form, part of the actual subject-matter of his last drama, Parsifal. And in fact the feeling which the sympathetic spectator or listener has, in the face of Wagner’s works, is remarkably accurately caught by it. They do typically work at an extremely high emotional pitch, which is resolved in the final minutes of the dramas. Therein lies much of their enormous appeal, expressed as succinctly as possible in Wagner’s statement of his purpose just quoted. But the progression of feeling which they induce is also precisely what makes them suspect for many people. For it involves a huge measure of trust in the artist, the more so when he pitches things at so intense a level. As we are swept through his works, mesmerised through the means which Wagner to a unique extent commands, critical distance is made impossible (so the argument goes), and we could be persuaded by him of anything.

It is interesting that this passage from Opera and Drama is quoted by Deryck Cooke, one of Wagner’s most ardent intelligent admirers, at the beginning of his vast, regrettably unfinished study of the Ring, entitled I Saw the World End (the rather strange title is taken from some discarded lines which were at one stage part of Brünnhilde’s peroration in Götterdämmerung). Anyone who writes at length expounding the significance of Wagner’s works has, it would seem, to ignore this claim. Cooke’s position is that it holds good for the dramas apart from the Ring: ‘with the others, we do find that our feeling is set at rest, that nothing remains for the intellect to search for, that our instinctive knowledge of life is enriched, and that we become “knowers through feeling”’, he writes. But he thinks that things are different with the Ring, and that therefore a commentary of great thoroughness is required in order to make its meaning clear. But that suggests, surely, that the Ring is some kind of failure.

It seems strange of Cooke to make this distinction between the other dramas and the Ring. All of Wagner’s works require exegesis, not because they are flawed or opaque, but because even if they do in some way enable or help us to become ‘knowers through feeling’, the ‘synthesising intellect’ still has an enormous amount of work to do, and of a highly profitable and strenuous kind. The question is what it has to get to work on; and the answer is the feelings which the dramas have aroused in us, even if they have, in the closing sequences, been in some sense set to rest. For clearly it is possible for music, with its phenomenal resources of creating harmony and order out of their opposites, to persuade us that a dramatic resolution has been achieved. One of the reasons why there are so few operatic tragedies is that composers have been tempted, and have nearly always succumbed to the temptation, to show that however desperate things get dramatically, it is never beyond the powers of music to rescue them. That makes operatic criticism a very tricky business, since the critic can’t ignore the music, obviously, but has to decide on the exact role which it has been called upon to play.

The easy way out, where Wagner is concerned, is the one which Nietzsche finally took, and Adorno after him, in his polemic In Search of Wagner. Both writers point to the pervasive idiom of Wagner’s music, and ask, rhetorically, whether you think that you can trust a man who employs those means in order to get his message across; as one might point to a politician and ask why someone who meant what he said and had something worth saying should indulge in that particular mode of speech. They have every right, indeed duty, to ask the question, but not to make it into a rhetorical one – the asking of rhetorical questions being itself an activity which needs scrutinising. Wagner is, par excellence, an artist who has designs on us, and who therefore leads us to examine anew the Keatsian view, winning because of the very innocence of its dogmatism, that we should mistrust all such artists. The innocence – one which is shared by both Nietzsche and Adorno, but they go to inordinate lengths to establish their sophistication – is in imagining that there is any art which does not have designs on us, palpable or otherwise. No doubt we want, in the presence of art, to feel a peculiar freedom, and the more so the less we feel it elsewhere. That was Kant’s claim: that the autonomy of the aesthetic artefact has a close relationship to the autonomy of the spectator (auditor, etc.), indeed makes it possible as it is not anywhere else in our lives, where we are ruled either by the laws of Nature, nonprescriptive but nonetheless ineluctable; or the laws of Morality, easily violated but peremptory and absolute (to use George Eliot’s intimidating formulation). But whatever the content of ‘freedom’ in our responses to art, it seems that the more palpable the designs an artist has on us, the freer in one way we are, since there is then no question of our thinking that he is merely presenting us with ‘the facts’ if he is making it perfectly clear what attitude he wants us to adopt to them.

When we are dealing with a mixed art-form, such as opera, not to speak of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a kind of art which combines all the other forms, which is what Wagner wanted his mature works to be, the question evidently becomes more complex still. If we divide opera into action (or plot), text and music, then the crucial issue is the role that music plays. In his most famous dictum, Wagner claimed that in traditional opera music, which should be the means, had become the end, while drama, which should be the end, was merely the means. His revolution in opera, as opposed to all the other revolutions which he hoped to effect, was to be the placing of music and drama in the right order. To establish from first principles what that order was, Wagner was driven to his heroic amount of theorising, much of it unacceptable because it is so vague and groundlessly speculative. But what we can certainly agree with is that however much music is in the service of drama, it has, in the hands of all the operatic composers whose work survives, a capacity to direct our sympathies which none of them has failed to exploit. It may well be that opera is all the more effective when that is not what it appears to be doing, but that is chiefly to say that we admire the cunning of self-concealing enterprise.

It can seem that Wagner refuses to join in the time-honoured procedures of the artist, that he manifests in his dramas the lack of tact which was so striking a feature of his personality in general, and that his reverence for Beethoven is most apparent in his taking over the insistent nature of Beethoven’s music, a source of pain to his most fastidious listeners. We shall have to see about that. But it is an impression which many people have gained from listening, in the first place, to highlights from his works, the usual way, perhaps, of hearing things by him. Which brings me to the topic which someone who hasn’t yet seriously encountered Wagner’s art, but is thinking of doing so, is likely to be preoccupied by.