The best analysis of Wagner's music in the last century

books:

	• The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy Bryan Magee Holt Paperbacks, 2002 - 424 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wagner helped by writing to produce creative tension

People who have learned how to write properly organized essays in school might find the kind of writing that Wagner did rather loose, to say the least. I'm far more interested in rock 'n' roll as an artform that appeals to the contemporaries of those who are moderately talented than in the fine art of Mozart, but favorite songs can be done well no matter where they came from. Not half bad is more likely to be my judgment on anything I would like to hear. I have enough CDs to remind myself of music in many forms, but the creative tension involved in trying to write a review of a book like THE TRISTAN CHORD also reminds me of many things that are not in this book.

THE TRISTAN CHORD ~ WAGNER AND PHILOSOPHY by Bryan Magee starts out strongly with the idea that Wagner's work is based on an understanding of life that exceeds anything within the confines of philosophy or knowledge as it is contained in universities. Clearly Nietzsche acquired so many of his ideas from Wagner because Wagner had realized that ancient Athens was the kind of society he wished to inhabit, and the festivals at which tragedies were performed were so different from the commercial nature of entertainment values in modern global intellectual property that the context has to be explained to modern readers as follows:

... Third, human participation was also maximized, in that the whole community was involved. Dramatic performances were accorded the highest possible importance, a significance that was tantamount to religious - nothing that the community did was seen as mattering more, unless it was fighting a war. This attitude could scarcely be further from that of a bourgeois society towards its commercialized art. When Athens put on a play the entire life of the society revolved around it: the day was a public holiday, all other activities came to a halt so that everyone could go to the play, no one talked of anything else, attendance was free, the actors were maintained by the State; what we would call commercial considerations were totally absent. As Wagner summed it up in his essay `Art and Revolution,' published in 1849: `With the Greeks the perfect work of art, the drama, was the sum and substance of all that could be expressed in the Greek nature; it was - in intimate connection with its history - the nation itself that stood facing itself in the work of art, becoming conscious of itself, and, in the space of a few hours, rapturously devouring, as it were, its own essence.' (pp. 86-87).

Few adults in American society were able to offer young people anything as compelling in the 1960s, when Walter Kaufmann was writing and translating, but rock 'n' roll was having more impact. The Beatles are not listed in the index of THE TRISTAN CHORD, but one of their songs, `All You Need Is Love,' is mentioned on page 60, long after comments about the early Wagner opera `Das Liebesverbot' (p. 24) being in response to the intellectual discontent of the Young Germans:

In the arts they saw the classic figures of their immediate past, people such as Goethe and Mozart, as pre-revolutionary, and therefore antediluvian, no longer speaking to the condition of the young. ... They glorified love as it really was, the sexual intoxication of the young, and they saw it as socially subversive. To express it they wanted an art that was freely and frankly erotic. In opera this caused them to look away from Weber to the unabashed sensationalism of the French, and also, much more seriously, to the sensual, hedonistic lyricism of the Italians. Perhaps most important of all to the Young Germans as individuals, they wanted to live out these principles in their own lives, loving and expressing themselves as liberated beings, innovating boldly in politics and the arts, deriding authority, and free for ever from the stultifying conservatism and conventionality of their elders. (pp. 24-25).

The philosophy of Feuerbach is considered a major source for the setting of Wagner's `Ring' cycle of operas. I tend to associate this kind of catastrophe with the Vietnam syndrome of my generation, but THE TRISTAN CHORD links Feuerbachian philosophy of religion to picturing the gods as a gang of crooks. Just imagine, "Isaiah Berlin used to exclaim complainingly, `But they're just a lot of gangsters!'" (p. 54).

The interesting theme for me is the idea that Wagner did a lot of writing to generate the creative tension which he would like to turn into a form of art critical of his own society by composing music that would maintain a stream of consciousness worthy of the kind of life currently possible or imagined as a future ideal. "Because Wagner believed that we live in `a whole world of injustice' which was about to be swept away and replaced by `a righteous world' there is a sense in which he was living for the future." (p. 59). "Because the drama of ancient Greece is the art he is bent on re-establishing, and the opera of his contemporaries is the obstacle he is determined to sweep away, he is liable in a discussion of almost anything to dive off into the question of how whatever it is he is talking about relates to either or both of those things." (p. 91).

... The musical motives need not simply be repeated, they possessed infinite possibilities of musical transformation - the light hearted could be made tragic, the triumphant hollow, the confident full of foreboding, the loving grief-stricken. The potential for musical metamorphosis was protean, and also endlessly subtle. (p. 91).

Rock 'n' roll has filled many pockets with big bucks, but it is also carrying remnants of more than philosophy could say. The vocabulary was entirely different, but the simplicity of a chorus that kept repeating after verses that can go from bad to worse in so many ways, certain songs could be described as blues. Just one example is a song, `(Down to) SEEDS & STEMS (Again)' recorded in Austin, Texas, November, 1973, written Billy Farlow and George Frayne, who do vocals and piano for a group called Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, which was included on a collection of their songs `Too Much Fun' released on CD in 1990. A looser version on `Marijuana's Greatest Hits Revisited' has someone singing, "I have a few decent memories of what I was going to say. I'm down to seeds and stems again, hurray!" At times, it is nice to discover that the fun is going to stop and life can go back to being about something else. But for us, what else could there possibly be?

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The Schopenhauer Chord

Bryan Magee writes with enthusiasm and clarity. He's particularly good at explaining philosophy in layman's terms. According to Magee, Wagner was the most erudite of all the great composers, and his philosophical beliefs profoundly effected his compositions. His intellectual life can be broken into two main periods: the early, one of political radicalism and activism, and the late, one of resignation and mysticism.

As a young man Wagner believed that a revolution - a total annihilation of the existing order - must take place in order for people to start anew to build a free and equal society. This was the intellectual zeitgeist throughout Europe in reaction to the sweeping changes brought about by capitalist industrialization in the early 19th Century. It was, in part, a romantic longing for a simpler past.

In Wagner's first period two figures were his main influences, Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist, and Ludwig Feuerbach, who taught that mankind created the Gods, or God, in its own image. This was not to dismiss religion but to appraise it seriously as something illuminating about human beings.

After numerous inconsequential attempts at revolution took place throughout Germany in the mid-1800's Wagner became disenchanted with politics. He immersed himself in the philosophy of his contemporary, Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer wrote a great deal about music and it occupied a large part of his philosophical outlook. Both he and Wagner shared an interest in Buddhist thought.

Schopenhauer maintained that human beings are the embodiment of a metaphysical "will", so that willing, wanting, longing, craving and yearning are not just things we do, they are what we are. And he believed that music was a manifestation of this metaphysical "will." Thus, music directly corresponds to what we ourselves are in our innermost being. Wagner's "late" period dates from his extensive study of Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer wrote that music proceeds by creating certain wants which it then spins out before satisfying. Even the simplest melody makes us want to close eventually on the "tonic" and provokes dissatisfaction if it ends on any other note than that.

Schopenhauer gave special attention to a technical device in harmony known as "suspension," and this instantly appealed to Wagner's musical sensibility. The suspension in music is the penultimate chord, when what we had just heard was what we thought was the penultimate chord. This causes a sense of discord in the listener. Schopenhauer said "this is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the will which is enhanced through delay."

This inspired in Wagner the idea of composing an entire piece of music moving from discord to discord in such a manner that the listener was always in a state of tension waiting for a resolution that did not come. This would be the musical equivalent of the dissatisfied longing , craving, yearning that our being is. There could only be one resolution to it, the final chord that was the end of the musical score (and in an opera, the end of the protagonist's life). This would be a musical expression of the essence of humanity in the universe.

The first chord of Tristan is the most famous chord in the history of music: F, B, D sharp and G sharp or any chord of the same intervals. It contains not one, but two dissonances. It then moves to resolve one of the dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution, yet not resolution. Thus as the music proceeds, in every chord shift something is resolved but not everything. This "partial satisfaction" yet continued "frustration" carries on through the entire work. The only point where all discord is resolved is in the final chord, which is the musical analogue of freedom from striving, freedom from the tension that is existence. It is like a mystical state of nirvana.

What made this double-dissonance chord so famous was that it, in effect, closed the door on the age of classicism. And it opened the door to impressionism, atonalism, and modern classical music in general.

It was under the influence of the Schopenhauer-Buddhist belief system that Wagner's late works, Tristan, The Mastersingers, and Parsifal were written. Actually, since most of his operas were written piecemeal with many interruptions (sometimes years in length), there are traces of the early and late philosophical influences in almost every opera. Tristan is the only opera that Wagner wrote uninterrupted from start to finish.

There are many more aspects of Wagner's life and work contained in this book. New insights are provided into the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship and the vexed anti-semitism of Wagner. It should be noted that although Magee believes the above conjunction of philosophy and music in Wagner, he is not dogmatic. He says late in the book that "one does not have to be familiar with Schopenhauer's ideas, let alone accept them" to appreciate the greatness of Wagner's music.

This book has added a new dimension to my understanding and appreciation of Wagner. I heartily recommend it.

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Worth the wait

This is THE book on Wagner that I hoped would one day be written and which I knew could be written. The author has no use for post-Holocaust axe-grinding or ideological regard, and neither does he indulge in any of the by now ubiquitous but ultimately superficial KULTURGESCHICHTLICH approaches in which Wagner is one more symbol-player to be pigeon-holed and arranged (much like the props in Hans-Juergen Syberberg's "Parsifal" film), nor does he dish up Wagner with a sideorder of Marxist criticism. Instead you get Wagner as a living, breathing, thinking, AND creating human being, a real man (no impersonal cultural forces here!) who encountered ideas and reacted to them in the completely unique way that his personality demanded.

In a way one can only appreciate this book if he has already spent time ploughing through even a fraction of the tendentious trash in print that attempts to deal with this man (e.g. Gutman, Millington, even M. Owen Lee at times). If you have done that, then you will really be in a position to enjoy what Bryan Magee has done, how he has done it, and what a tremendous debt we owe to him for presenting to us Wagner the man in all of his outrageous but fascinating complexity. This is a book for people who are interested in learning more closely what kind of man Wagner actually was (that, for example, he was a 'commanding' personality and what that might mean in real terms, and that, in itself, should not be held against him) and who are equally interested in distinctions being made along the way that really do amount to something and are not just so much critical hot air.

For example, people need to know about Wagner's anti-Semitism, but that fact alone must be seen in relation to the greater fact that he despised so many other groups and that he did so in accordance with his own artistic/intellectual principles. And besides, whence this smarmy assumption that any artist or intellectual must already be some fully formed politically correct forerunner of our own pseudo-enlightened age? It is a woefully dishonest attitude to adopt since it serves to divert us in the end to the demons lurking in our contemporary secular righteousness as it is manufactured and propagated by the literary Left.

After you read this book--and if you have not already done it--read Michael Tanner's "Wagner" and enjoy hearing from someone who actually knows what he is talking about and who has bothered to spend some time thinking about it instead of listening to the clowns who parrot the easy cultural prejudices culled from "The New York Times Review of Books".

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Easy read with deep insight

Popular scholarship at its best: engaging, entertaining, and very informative. Magee systematically illuminates some of the most elusive and misunderstood aspects of Wagner's life, work and influences, with graceful clarity. He summarizes and recapitulates just enough so as to ensure that each idea is remembered and understood in light of what proceeded. A broad scope of complex topics are made remarkably easy to digest. A tribute to Wagner both unapologetically celebratory and intellectually rigorous!

The best analysis of Wagner's music in the last century

I'm a careful fellow yet I make quite a claim in the title of this review; and I confidently stand by it. Wagner has stimulated an enormous bibliography, but most of it is biography and/or polemics regarding the man himself or else "way out" (e.g. Jungian) interpretations of his art. Surprisingly little criticism of real seriousness pertains to the actual music. Bryan McGee's book magnificently fills that gap.

It is not a musical analysis per se, but a study of Wagner's changing philosophical values and how they influenced his music...and there is no composer in history who was a more acute intellectual than Wagner and more influenced in his art by ideas. You cannot fully understand his art without this book...it is that seminal. And it does not pertain only to "Tristan und Isolde," despite the title. It covers the entire sweep of Wagner's output.

Mr. McGee brings to his text the virtues which previously made him an outstanding author in "popularizing" philosophy: clarity, honesty, common sense, and even-handed weighing of the evidence. I hesitate to say he "popularized" philosophy. That could suggest a "dumbing down." And that is definitely not this book. It is crystal clear for a layman yet it is a scholar's dream in substance...a rare combination.

The book is an absolute must for anyone who has ever been moved by Richard Wagner's music...and perhaps even for those who have wondered why the rest of us are so moved by it. I cannot recommend it enough. There are only two other texts in the last century which compare, in my opinion: 1) Ernest Neumann's multi-volumn biography of Wagner; and 2) Deryk Cooke's "I Saw the World End," (first published 1979), which is the definitive (if incomplete) analysis of Wagner's "Ring."

If you love Wagner's music, or want to investigate it, this book is both a delight and a "must."

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Richard Wagner's devotees have ranged from the subtlest minds (Proust) to the most brutal (Hitler). The enduring fascination with his works arises not only from his singular fusion of musical innovation and theatrical daring, but also from his largely overlooked engagement with the boldest investigations of modern philosophy. In this radically clarifying book, Bryan Magee traces Wagner's intellectual quests, from his youthful embrace of revolutionary socialism to the near-Buddhist resignation of his final years. Magee shows how abstract thought can permeate music and stimulate creations of great power and beauty. And he unflinchingly confronts the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity, and anti-Semitism are as repugnant as his achievements are glorious.At once a biography of the composer, an overview of his times, and an exploration of the intellectual and technical aspects of music, Magee's lucid study offers the best explanation of W. H. Auden's judgment that Wagner, for all his notoriety, was "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived."

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