Prolix Theorist

...From Nietzsche to Hitler and Thomas Mann, he has served as a touchstone of all that is ailing and alive in European culture...

...as a writer he lacks the lucidity and wit of Berlioz...

...He reduces the Romantic ethos through inadvertent parody and exaggeration to a mechanical operation of the spirit...

...Reviewed by HERBERT LEIBOWITZ Contributor, "New Republic" Wagner's music, tracts and personality have always roused partisanship or antipathy...

...The editors' comparison of The Ring with Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is somewhat misleading...

...The trouble is that while musically Wagner exploits the mythopoeic content in Beethoven, spiritually and formally he inverts it...

...the "theater of narcosis" is merely naturalism in a new guise...

...But Wagner was an intellectual opportunist, and when in 1854 he fell under the spell of Schopenauer, he changed philosophical sides with his usual aplomb and public fanfare...

...The bulk of Wagner's writings were produced during the years 1848-54, when he composed no music...

...He defines, perhaps, the limits of evocativeness...

...The artwork of the future, that ideal fusion of all the arts into a perfect whole, never came into being...

...Though his operas are sparsely set compared with the mise-en-scène of a Meyerbeer opera, they are full of material effects...

...This spate of pamphleteering was necessary to induce that state of auto-intoxication, the only state in which Wagner could compose...

...The myth of The Ring is spurious and rests on an ethical confusion, and so, by Wagner's own standards, the music can only intermittently rescue the drama from its poetic banalities...

...Wagner was insensitive to the visual arts, and in his operas, properly enough since he was preeminently a musical genius, everything was subordinated to the music...

...The erotic myth of Tristan expresses a strain of irrationalism latent in Romanticism, but its love of death and night, its "lofty hysteria," its dismissal of the self, is inimical to the Romantic spirit...

...they were suspiciously like Meyerbeer's devotees...

...This explains why, for all his elaborate systematizing, he consistently contradicts himself in theory and practice...

...Forced into exile by his political activities during the Revolution of 1848, he wrote rapidly Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future, and Opera and Drama, and sketched out Siegfried's Death, and the groundplan of The Ring...

...In his vices and strengths, in his genius and charlatanry, and most important, in his equivocal relationship to Romanticism, Wagner rehearses the Realpolitik of the art and history of the last 150 years...

...in Tristan it is given a classical symmetrical form...

...The editors have pruned the repetitions and digressions of Wagner's thought and expression to manageable size, culling their selections from his essays, letters, and magazine articles, and arranging them in an order that is dialectical not chronological...

...This meant toppling Meyerbeer's spectacular Philistine operas from their eminence— no easy task...

...The performance, mercurial and dull, inflated and humorless, ends up just a bit commonplace...

...As in The Ring, where the words without the music are second-rate, so in his writings...

...Wagner, unlike the Romantics, mistrusted the Imagination, which led to the petrifying realism of much of his work...

...Still, it is a welcome guide to the student who wants to learn about this infuriating, enthralling and formative force in our culture...

...But the throngs at Bayreuth, picnicking on beer and sausages, were not the folk...

...But in his later political screeds the state was to guarantee the sensibility of the artist...

...despite the encyclopedic reach, the mind is derivative and the style prolix...

...Professors Goldman and Sprinchorn remark that the artwork of the future is the logical synthesis of Romanticism...

...Wagner was genuinely interested in theatrical reform (theater to him meant opera) and, as Professors Goldman and Sprinchorn point out in their informative introduction, consciously set out to revive the spirit of tragedy...

...But if Wagner, in essay and music, set out to challenge the hegemony and vulgarity of the official bourgeois culture and address himself to a classless folk world, he ended by propping up that decadent German society...

...It might also, Wagner hoped, educate a listless public to accept a more demanding and mystical dramatic experience: Wagner's "myth-music theater...

...Tragedy, Wagner loved to say, must return to the Greek ideal of total theater, the ritual expression of the folk...

...Whether as poet, composer, prophet or theorist, he is the tireless performer bent on overwhelming the listener with the sheer size and force of his personality...

...The book is, unfortunately, sparsely annotated, and the uninitiated reader will have to take Wagner's historical errors along with his insights...

...Nor was Wagner's music, with its sophisticated notation of motifs, folklike...

...Reading through this useful compendium of Wagner's writings on music and drama—alternately astonishing, boring and appalling— one is reminded of Nietzsche's characterization of Wagner as a "transposed actor...

...At first Wagner believed that the state tends to make everything uniform and to suppress the might of the free personality...

...Thus the artist ought to lead in the overthrow of the established order, and build the new drama on the ruins of the old...

...It is tempting to view The Ring as the Romantic epic and Tristan as the Romantic tragedy constructed out of myth and the psychological depths of the soul...

...Even his much vaunted reversal of the relations between poetry and music turns out to be rhetoric...

...Not surprisingly, Wagner is at his best when he discusses musical matters—interpreting his own works or Beethoven's, exposing the claptrap of Meyerbeer's operas, or giving his version of the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris—or attends to the minutiae of craft and performance...

...His texts are better than Scribe's, more concentratedly motivated, but they are barely adequate...

...It is not easy to make one's way through Wagner's turgid prose...

...His polemics, like his conversation and his music, are grandiloquent self-dramatizations...

...Hence in their works subjectivity is given an open and improvised form...

...For the Romantics envisioned love invading the realm of death and conquering it for life, extinguishing not personality, but the will to death...

...as poetry they are often dismal...

...The symphonic texture woven by the orchestra remains the dominant and most impressive element in The Ring and in Tristan, Wagner's masterpiece...

...They are most persuasive in showing how Wagner's chromaticism and harmonic innovations—as well as his theory of tragic drama—developed out of the late works of Beethoven (and issued in the serialism of Schoenberg...

...Yet to understand the cultural history of the 19th century, and its legacy to our confused age, we must understand Wagner...

...The Ring becomes, under the influence of Schopenauer's pessimism, a declamation preaching the power of surrendering the will to death...

...Shelley's poem is a rhapsody celebrating the redemption of the universe from tyranny through love...