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Having in the first chapter floated a fair number of ideas, and in the second sunk, I hope, several of the most popular misconceptions about Wagner, I can now move on to a discussion of what is in the first place important about him: his musical works, which I shall designate as dramas, music-dramas or operas indifferently. His first artistic impulses were theatrical, music entering at a slightly later stage. Enormously excited as a boy by the sheer atmosphere of the theatre, and then finding the music of, above all, Beethoven deeply moving, it was clear that he would, if he was to be creative, combine thrills and emotions in the most popular contemporary form, that of opera. Contrary to the impression he sometimes gives in his many autobiographical retrospectives, Wagner received a thorough training in the elements of composition, through assiduous study of the masters of counterpoint. When he came, at the age of twenty, to compose his first opera Die Feen (‘The Fairies’), the chief constraints on what he wrote were those of having no very urgent need to communicate anything. It is very rare in Wagner that we feel a gap between his aspirations and his capacities – but all he aspired to at this stage was to be an opera-composer, with no particular subjects or themes in mind. As an ardent admirer of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and in love with the atmosphere of early German Romanticism, he sedulously devoted himself to producing a work which caught the spirit of Weber as fully as possible. The opening bars of the Overture to Die Feen, and much else besides in the work, might have come from Weber working at less than full pressure.

The result is a work of considerable charm, not much originality, and a pervasive uncertainty about how seriously it wants to be taken. One of Wagner’s most important statements of his development, A Communication to my Friends, written nineteen years later in 1851, makes a good deal of the fact that some of the central themes of his later works are adumbrated in Die Feen. Up to a point that is true, but as always the question is at what level they are dealt with, and the level of Die Feen is nothing to get worked up about; though it is certainly as enjoyable an opera as many that are revived these days to cries of the thrills of rediscovery. It is rather a long work for its slender substance, but it is at least as well worth hearing as most of Mozart’s or Verdi’s early operas, to take a couple of cases of severe contemporary overvaluation.

Despite its irrelevance for any serious consideration of Wagner, Die Feen is a plausible starting-point for a composer whose preoccupations were later to be with the supernatural, with the centrality of love as leading towards some mode of redemption, and with the expression of his dramatic themes in a German musical idiom. His next opera, Das Liebesverbot (‘The Ban on Love’), based loosely on Measure for Measure, can only be seen as an act of fairly gross infidelity to his muse. True, there are some passages that give a foretaste of Wagner’s later works more strongly than anything in Die Feen, and the tumescent motif which appears in the Overture, and in the scene between Friedrich (the Angelo figure) and Isabella, is strikingly characteristic. But the whole ambience of the work, its celebration of uninhibited hedonism, is utterly remote from anything that one thinks of as Wagnerian. In fact Wagner was going through a rebellious period, in which ‘German’ signified for him what it vulgarly does for many people – heaviness, soul-searching, and in musical terms a lack of interest in sustained singable melody. He was infatuated with the music of Bellini, the supreme bel canto composer, and a love-worthy object. But although Wagner never lost his affection for Bellini’s work. he soon came to realise that he was not destined for that path – or rather, that for all its appeal it wouldn’t serve his purposes. And in fact he was only able to use Bellini by misunderstanding him. He even went so far as to write an alternative aria for Oroveso, to be inserted in Norma, Bellini’s masterpiece. Listening to that aria one is amazed that Wagner thought he had captured the flavour of Bellini.

In Das Liebesverbot, which is once more an enjoyable opera, though again somewhat overlong, it is possible to feel that the young Wagner was putting up a misguided battle with his destiny. It manifests, if not with consummate skill, at least with gusto, many of the things which he was to spend the rest of his life fighting against with single-minded dedication. The theme of the ban on love itself he revisited in one work after another, but in his mature output the various ways in which the ban is brought into operation are seen as deep elements of human nature, as the concept of love itself becomes something of increasingly daunting complexity. But in Das Liebesverbot the figure of Friedrich, who imposes the ban, is a one-dimensional caricature, and a hypocrite to boot. He merely provides what suspense there is in the plot, while Wagner is mainly keen to express a mood of carnival and enthusiastic youthful rebelliousness. No comparison with the Shakespeare play would have any point: Shakespeare produced a deep, and in my view deeply flawed, work. Wagner produced something which doesn’t reach a level where serious criticism is appropriate. He was, as it were, shopping around. His first opera was an attempt in the German mode, reflecting what Wagner took to be his concerns; his second was one of those trips across the Alps which Goethe seems to have made obligatory for Germans at some stage of their career.

With almost too handy comprehensiveness, Wagner’s next effort, Rienzi, the last of what have been widely and rightly agreed to be his juvenilia, was an emulation of grand French opera. Though it is artistically the least satisfactory of these three works, it provides more interesting food for thought than do the first two. Wagner tried to produce a grand historical tragedy, basing it on the novel by Bulwer Lytton. On its own terms – or rather those of Meyerbeer, who had set the fashion for this kind of oversized period drama, with its compulsory ballets, spectacular scenery and vast cataclysms – it is successful to a degree that makes one fear for Wagner’s integrity at this stage. Perhaps it is fairer to say that since he still lacked an artistic identity, there was nothing to be single-minded about. And yet the beginning of the Overture, the first piece of Wagner’s music to have retained its place in the repertoire, is original, moving and unmistakable. It starts with a long-held trumpet note, evocative both of majesty and suspense, and then moves into the first great arch-Wagnerian melody, richly scored for strings. That melody, which provides Rienzi with the material for his Prayer at the beginning of Act V, has a nobility which almost everything else in the work betrays, including most of the rest of the Overture, a blowsy piece which, once it moves into its allegro stride, skirts vulgarity with a Verdian brio, though it is much more heavily scored than anything by the Italian master.

This theme, which can’t be called a motif, since it is too fully-formed and monolithic to be plastic enough for that purpose, clearly indicates the hero’s greatness of soul. But in the work itself Rienzi has to become a figure who has been forced to sink to the level of the intriguers around him, so that there is a disjunction between his portrayal in the opening section of the Overture and everything that comes later, apart from the recapitulatory prayer. The only way that Wagner can resolve the action is through a suitably apocalyptic conflagration, as the Capitol is ignited by the angry crowd and Rienzi is immolated along with his visions. Once more, if one were so inclined – many commentators are – one could trace connections between elements in Rienzi and the later works, including, very obviously, the conflagration at the end of the Ring. But such comparisons are more likely to subtract from the sublimity of Götterdämmerung than to add to the stature of Rienzi. That Wagner was fascinated by certain types, and by what might happen to them, is clear enough. But it is merely confused to think that later versions are nothing more than the earlier ones with sophisticated and far greater music to lend them glamour and plausibility. In the case of many of the greatest artists who can, in a sensible way, be said to have subjects, they show what those subjects are going to be from their earliest works. But what makes them great is their capacity for working with certain terms and endlessly exploring and deepening them, until the connections with what they started out from are better disregarded. Otherwise we get nothing more than an example of the ‘fallacy of origins’, by which the developed form of something is alleged to be no more than its elementary form cosmeticised.

Unfortunately this tendency is especially pronounced with Wagner’s critics, and all the more so since it was attending a performance of Rienzi in Linz which set Hitler, so he often claimed, his goal of absolute power. It may have done, though if he fancied himself as a reincarnation of Rienzi he must have paid scant attention to the action. Perhaps this is one thing for which Hitler can be forgiven, since Rienzi is written in an idiom which discourages concentration. With its spectacle and its elaborate diversions, it was the ideal work for those who went to the opera for ‘effects without causes’ – Wagner’s cruel and famous characterisation of Meyerbeer’s operas, which also applies in large part to Rienzi. In fact one wishes that the opening weren’t so arresting; it raises expectations and suggests a degree of seriousness which are willingly granted. But when they aren’t fulfilled, what may happen is that instead of spending five hours being disappointed, one takes the actuality of the work at a higher value than it deserves, lapsing again into the mistake of thinking there are such things as serious subjects, as opposed to serious treatments of them.

All of Wagner’s three early operas are on a virtually unprecedented scale, at any rate in the history of German opera. He indulged himself in them, letting an impressively far-ranging imagination have its head, at the same time that he was developing his capacity for thinking in long time-scales. Their organisation is rudimentary, but they must have given him confidence in his ability not to let things simply get out of hand. Prentice-work though they are, and worth only occasional airings, they would have established him as a composer of unusual ambitions. But the work which, even if Wagner had never written another, would have remained permanently among the great operas, was his next and most evidently concise drama, and the one in which, at one bound, he found himself – by no means all of himself, but what he did find was wholly genuine and strikingly deep. There may be no other example of a composer so suddenly moving from competence in various idioms of his day to commanding mastery which was partly rooted in tradition, but equally impressive for its necessary departures from it.

The famous opening of Der fliegende Holländer has the hallmarks of all Wagner’s openings from now on: it compels attention, and lets one know instantly what the matter in hand is. Viewed with hindsight, it achieves other ends too. It sounds not only as if Wagner is making a declaration of having found his real self as a composer, but is also showing how he relates to the most admired figures and works in the tradition from which he emerges. For the raging first pages are in D minor, the demonic key of Mozart and Beethoven. Don Giovanni opens in it, and equally cataclysmically. No other operatic overture before Holländer begins so arrestingly, and with music that is part of the fabric of the main action. And Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a talismanic work for Wagner, and one which he had made a piano arrangement of when he was seventeen, has given nineteenth-century music its definitive D minor statement. Though Beethoven begins almost inaudibly, while Wagner’s Overture rages, they are both elemental, and both use the same material and some of the same devices. Wagner, as always, has his roots in the physical, even though his ultimate intentions are metaphysical; Beethoven evokes a primeval chaos which has no truck with physicality. It would be pointless to press the similarities, but if they were not conscious, that is all the more striking. At any rate, the demands Wagner is going to make on us are clear, and they are immense.

But it is not the Overture that I want to dwell on, rather the drama it portends: for, quite apart from the elemental sweep of Holländer, it is a simple, but certainly a serious treatment of a subject which is at the top of Wagner’s agenda throughout the whole oeuvre, and so, besides its intrinsic compellingness, it is a valuable way into his world, as the three works which precede it are not.

The story is familiar. The Flying Dutchman, whose story Wagner took from Heine, but without the irony – Wagner is the least ironic of artists, at least within his individual works: the ironies exist in their relationship to one another – is, in crude outline, the prototype of the Wagnerian protagonist: someone who has done something so terrible that he has to spend the rest of his existence looking for salvation, or redemption, which comes only through the agency of another human being, even when, as in Wagner’s first three and last dramas, there is a certain amount of theological background (usually vague and non-specific). Though it is characteristic of Wagner’s central figures that they have committed a crime – in the Dutchman’s case, an oath that he would round the Cape at any cost, for which Satan doomed him to eternal voyaging; in Tannhäuser’s that of sojourning with Venus; in Wotan’s that of making a bargain which he has no intention of keeping – it seems that really Wagner was a Schopenhauerian from the start. He only read Schopenhauer in 1854, instantly becoming a disciple.

Schopenhauer claims that living itself is the original sin. That Wagner always held a position which amounts to that comes out in the fact that the ‘redeemers’ in his works long to redeem just as much as the sinners long to be redeemed. Hence it is entirely appropriate, and could well have been a planned effect, unquestionably casting light back over a lifetime’s work, that the final words of Parsifal, intoned by the chorus, are ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser’ (‘Redemption to the redeemer’). Taken by themselves, or just in the context of Parsifal, they are a riddle. But it may not be too difficult to solve it if one surveys the series of characters, often though not always female, who do the redeeming. In Der fliegende Holländer Senta needs the Dutchman quite as badly as he needs her. Her life is without a genuine purpose, it only has a visionary one until he appears on the scene. The various ways in which the sinner/redeemer relationship is worked through is among the great fascinating topics for meditating on Wagner’s works – and one that, in the notoriously vast ‘literature’ on them, is weirdly neglected.

So the Dutchman himself, given a teasing chance every seven years of setting foot on land to find a woman who will sacrifice herself for him, begins the Duet with Senta, which is the heart of the work, with an unaccompanied solo which is more groan than song, and more interiorised recitative than melody. But it does move, gradually, into song, quietly punctuated by the orchestra, as he feels the faintest stirrings of hope, exhaustion hardly daring to give place to a new attempt at salvation. Then, to tense tremolandi from the strings, he moves into a statement of what he feels, which is expressed by a slowly rising melodic line and then a declamatory mode which hovers between song and enhanced speech. The words:

Die düstre Glut, die hier ich fühle brennen,

Sollt’ ich Unseliger die Liebe nennen?

Ach nein! Die Sehnsucht ist es nach dem Heil,

Würd’ es durch solchen Engel mir zuteil!

(The sombre glow that I feel burning here,

Should I, wretched one, call it love?

Ah no! It is the longing for salvation,

might it come to me through such an angel!)

In his justly famous essay ‘Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner’, Thomas Mann quotes these lines and rightly comments, ‘never before had such complex thoughts, such convoluted emotions been sung or put into singable form’. And he adds, ‘What a penetrating insight into the complex depths of an emotion!’ (Thomas Mann Pro and Contra Wagner, p. 97). But in his account of what it is that the Dutchman is discovering himself to be feeling, Mann seems to me to go astray. For he takes it that the Dutchman is in love with Senta, whereas it is a case of his mis-identifying, and then correctly re-identifying, a feeling. Just as Wagner is, according to Nietzsche’s sneer, always thinking about redemption, so he is always meditating on love. And since the soaring last melody to be heard in the Ring, often taken to be its final ‘message’, has routinely been miscalled ‘Redemption through Love’ by the commentators – an error which Wagner himself corrected, via Cosima – it is easy to conclude that his preoccupation is, if not always, then very often with how love might redeem.

But that is to assume that Wagner has a fixed idea of what love and redemption are, and is concerned with the mechanism by which the former effects the latter. Whereas his works constitute, along with a great deal else, a sustained investigation, often amounting to downright critique, of what love may be, and of what it is we seek when we seek redemption. He inherited an extremely well-worn vocabulary, which embodies the conflicting valuations of two millennia of Western civilisation; and thus he found himself in a profound predicament. Either, because his views were so radical and disruptive, he could coin a new vocabulary, but one which we wouldn’t understand, or would rapidly assimilate to the old one. Or he could use the familiar terms, with all their ambiguities and conflicting forces, and see how they could be put to new but indispensable work, thanks partly to the dramas in which they are saliently employed, and partly to the effects of the music, itself an integral part of the drama.

At no point in his life, so far as I am aware, did he put his problem and his mission in such bald terms, though he might (could) have done. For he was a slow developer, and what he achieved was an ever-increasing complexity of thought and feeling on these matters. That was something he was certainly aware of; and his endless retrospectives, autobiographical writings, reinterpretations of his life and art, are to be judged in large part not as being historically accurate – their failings in that respect have been at least sufficiently castigated – but as attempts to make sense of the process of making sense itself. His is a curious case, possibly a unique one, of an extraordinarily articulate artist who simultaneously mistrusted his own fluency. Hence his compulsive need to go on talking and writing. He viewed his works with a mixture of proud possessiveness and bemusement. And in some cases he not only gave conflicting accounts of what they meant, but remained dissatisfied with the works themselves. Tannhäuser, which he rightly felt to be unsatisfactory but too good to write off – it was also highly popular with his contemporaries – was something that, a few weeks before his death, he told Cosima ‘he still owed the world’.

But more often than revisions after the deed, he went in for, or found himself involved in, lengthy gestations. It has often been noted that halfway through his life Wagner had drawn up the agenda for his artistic productivity for the second half, as well as planning several major works which he never executed, and would not have done, though he sometimes wrote the complete text. Evidently he could not have considered someone else as a librettist. He sometimes said of his works that he had written the text and now all that remained to be done was to set it to music, and commentators with less perceptiveness than they need have taken it that the music was being composed in his head as he wrote the dramas. But that is absurd on many counts – not least because there was often a long interval between the writing of the text and the musical composition. And as a composer Wagner developed, between his first works and his last, at least as much as any composer ever has. In his writings he was as concerned to redeem his music-dramas as in his music-dramas he was concerned to redeem his characters (most of them, anyway). Because he was always occupied with certain very general issues, he was insistent on his works as constituting a genuine oeuvre. If it is not the case, as it is with Nietzsche, that each of his works left him with issues unresolved which demanded the composition of a further one, it is still true that their interrelationships are vital to understanding them, and that characters in one reappear, almost, with a different name, in another. Discretion has to be exercised in pursuing this line of thought – and, as we shall see, wasn’t always by Wagner himself.

To return to the Dutchman and the passage that I consider so crucial: the duet in which it occurs is hardly a ‘love-duet’. Actually Wagner didn’t compose nearly as many of those as he is often taken to have done. Certainly the movement is one of powerfully operating mutual magnetism, but the magnetism is not of an erotic kind – not quite. Erik, Senta’s unlucky suitor, and Daland, her father, naturally take it to be. But they show, by doing so, how much they belong to the world of marriages and children, both of which are, in nearly all cases, comically irrelevant to Wagner’s predestined pairs. One of the things that annoys people about Wagner is that his ‘lovers’ seem to be more interested in verbal, albeit sung, communication than in getting on with consummating their relationship. Very often, though not, as I said, in Holländer, there is a strong erotic charge in Wagner’s music that would seem to indicate that a sexual act is imminent, or is even being performed, but in musical code. He is, in fact, the composer who can write the sexiest music of anyone, though he is rarely capable of the come-hither, seductive (in the strictest sense) kind that comes so easily to Mozart, in Susanna’s ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ or Don Giovanni’s duet with Zerlina ‘La ci darem la mano’. His most famous ‘seduction scene’ is in Parsifal, indeed constitutes most of the Second Act, and Kundry still fails. The only one that succeeds is Gutrune’s of Siegfried in Act I of Götterdämmerung, and that is affected by an aphrodisiac with amnesiac properties. Wagner is not interested in the mechanics of seduction as such; he is concerned with the forces which bring people together, and which are out of the control of either of them.

That is clearly the case in the Duet in Holländer. Senta has long been familiar with the portrait of the Dutchman which hangs in the spinning-room. It represents for her an idea which becomes her ideal: self-sacrifice for an endlessly tormented man, something she gives alarming voice to in her breakaway in the middle of the third stanza of her Ballad. Like Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, she had her imagination ignited by a likeness. Wagner is already intimating that what comes first is the need, focused on a representation which reality obliges by copying. The relationship Senta wants has already been worked out before she sets eyes on the person who incarnates it. It is a theme which will recur in Lohengrin, in the Ring, in Tristan and in Die Meistersinger. Love in Wagner so often occurs at first sight because it has already begun in, as it were, second sight.

That leads to a further crux in reactions towards Wagner. His characters often lead listeners to feel ill at ease because they appear to embrace impossibly elevated notions of self-sacrifice, while at the same time the same characters seem to be abnormally, even abhorrently, self-obsessed – a reflection, the conclusion is often drawn, of their composer’s highly ambiguous state of mind. How is it possible to give, Derrida has been asking recently, in the context of a circle of exchange which turns the gift into a debt to be returned? But that is only putting into a specific context a question which is raised whenever the subject of selfishness and selflessness is considered. Wagner’s ‘givers’, redeemers, are, as I have remarked, no less desperate for someone to redeem than the converse. And this appears to have the consequence that his characters don’t relate to one another so much as relating to an idea of one another, which reality more or less obliges with. Thus both Senta and the Dutchman begin their Duet in reverie, Senta just as self-absorbed as he is. Whereas he misidentifies his yearning for redemption as love, for a moment, she wonders what she should call ‘the pains within my breast’, which are, she concludes, a longing to save him. Like Beethoven’s Leonore, with whom Senta shares several salient features, she is less interested in the identity of the man whom she sees before her than in what she can do for him. ‘Wer du auch seist’ (‘Whoever you are’) she sings, using precisely the words that Leonore uses in the dungeon-duet in Fidelio, at which point Beethoven’s music undergoes a marked intensification. Senta pretends that she will marry him because she will always obey her father – the Dutchman has asked her, after their rapt individual musings, whether she approves her father’s choice – and the music comes down with a rude thump, momentarily, to Daland’s level, before the Dutchman makes her an offer, or rather asks her a question, to which she can hardly say no. And then he, like Florestan in his prison cell, having a vision of Leonore as an angel leading him to salvation, tells her that she is an angel.

There are one or two awkwardnesses in this prototypically Wagnerian duet: the cadenza which the soloists indulge in is a non-contributory throwback; and the drop into mundanity, though it makes a point, makes it a bit too baldly. But the overall structure is maintained with moving mastery, and Wagner already shows how he can take us through a huge process of feeling in a comparatively short time without giving any sense of a hectic comic strip, as Verdi so often embarrassingly does. And the Duet does comprehend all the relevant aspects of the work: the Dutchman’s tiny burgeoning hope, Senta’s lonely need, the distance – this is a particularly impressive stroke – between the pair at the beginning, even though they are dwelling on the same theme. Then, to electrifying effect, the entry, for the first time in the Duet, of the Dutchman’s motif of ceaseless wandering, a compressed account for Senta’s benefit of what he has to endure and what she will have to share if she doesn’t have ‘ew’ge Treu’ (eternal fidelity). Once that has been made clear, Senta is free to express with full, explicit conviction that she knows her ‘sacred duty’, and they surge together to the close, when Daland re-enters bumptiously.

No one, in music-drama or elsewhere, had achieved an effect like this before. It is not, perhaps, surprising that it still remains unclear to many listeners what the effect is, apart from the overpowering sense of two figures being drawn together by a force which lies deeper than any kind of attraction that they feel for one another. The cunning proportions of music, and sentiment, which differentiate them and those which they share give us an uneasy feeling that there is a degree of manipulation which Wagner contrives to present as inevitability. And the manipulation is one which – if it exists – is exercised on the listener as well as on Senta and the Dutchman. It is the more disturbing because it brings into question the nature of quasi-erotic feelings. Already, at this almost alarmingly early stage in his career, Wagner shows himself to be a master of a certain kind of effect, which will grow immeasurably in intensity and profundity in his later works, but which is already sufficiently complex for us to sense a dominating presence demanding submission. For people who find it understandably questionable, as Nietzsche came to do to a degree which necessitated the pretence of wholesale rejection, it is (this is only a first, tentative formulation) as if the drama which Wagner created is one in which the dramatist’s will is imposed on the characters, and in turn their ecstasies are transmitted to us, so that the circle is closed and we are, as it might be felt, engulfed in Wagner’s feelings. He seems to deprive us of the possibility of achieving a perspective on the drama, which means that in a sense it is not a drama. For the genuine dramatic experience, as we have come to understand it, is one in which, however intense the actions on the stage, however sympathetic some of the characters may be and however revolted we are by others, we are still witnesses to a whole process which leaves us with the freedom to judge and assess. What Wagner seems to do – not always, but often enough for it to be fairly called characteristic of him – is to present us with a set of data which are, as it might be put, the premisses of the drama, and which often involve, it is soon made clear, portentous issues on which we are to ponder as well as about which we are to have feelings. But as he proceeds, the movement of the drama leads us to make exclusions which egg us on to identification with the figure, or often the pair of figures, whose supreme intensities of feeling over everything else that is happening lead us to respond so intensely ourselves that any question of checks or balances is eliminated. It is like, or it is, brilliant hypnotic rhetoric in action which disguises, by a remarkable combination of blatancy and subtlety, its ineluctable movement towards a clinching climax which – and it is no good postponing the word indefinitely when discussing Wagner – intoxicates us. The immediate effect is of an undreamt-of expansion of consciousness, giving us an intimation of a level of living which perhaps only Wagner can communicate to us, but does communicate so forcefully that we are led to think we can make it our own. The longer-term effect is of a closing down of alternatives, so that we seem to be left with the brutal imperative: Either live like this or you aren’t living at all. But we can’t by ourselves live on such exalted terms; we don’t have, in Erich Heller’s phrase, such ‘resources of ecstasy’. So the upshot is that we become addicted to the only art which does that for us: we become Wagnerians, dependent on the magic brew of an astonishingly persuasive mixture of something like sex and religion, a transcendence of the ordinary conditions of life which is, as many have remarked, the prolonged artistic equivalent of an orgasm.

That is the case for the prosecution, put as cogently as I, not believing in it, can manage. I shall not try to refute it directly, but rather take aspects of Wagner’s works, the ones which I think are most relevant, and see how far they are adequately accounted for by such an accusing account. If the account – the accusation – itself is something of a hotchpotch, that is not only fair to the level of critique to which Wagner is subjected (when it is trying its best not to be merely abusive), but also a faithful report of the confusion which Wagner generates in the minds of his audiences.