Pride of the Valkyrie

Commonweal, Oct 25, 2002 by Edward T. Oakes

The Tristan Chord Wagner and Philosophy Bryan Magee Henry Holt, $35, 399 pp.

Not to put too fine a point on it: artists can be real jerks. Leo Tolstoy abused his wife; Fyodor Dostoyevsky squandered all his royalties in gambling debts; Lord Byron had a daughter by his half-sister while another daughter by his mistress died in youth, perhaps at least partly because he refused to visit her; Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped with a sixteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a coffee-house proprietor, whom he divorced three years later, and who drowned herself two years after their traumatic divorce. The list could go on.

Generally speaking, the attitude of educators to these scandals is to distinguish the work from the man. But that assumes the nastiness of the man never worms its way into the work, an idea that unfortunately won't stand close scrutiny. As the noted literary critic Harold Bloom points out, art simply does not teach morality:

  The silliest way to defend the Western Canon is to insist that it incarnates
  all of the seven deadly moral virtues that make up our supposed range of
  normative values and democratic principles. This is palpably untrue. The
  Iliad teaches the surpassing glory of armed victory, while Dante rejoices in
  the eternal torments he visits upon his very personal enemies. Tolstoy's
  private version of Christianity throws aside nearly everything that anyone
  among us retains, and Dostoyevsky preaches anti-Semitism, obscurantism, and
  the necessity of human bondage. Shakespeare's politics, insofar as we can
  pin them down, do not appear to be very different from those of his
  Coriolanus. ... while the egomania of Wordsworth exalts his own poetic mind
  over any other source of splendor.

Leaving aside Mozart and Shakespeare and maybe a few others, the West has never seen a greater (and certainly no more ambitious) artist than Richard Wagner--or a bigger creep. Given his extraordinary talents, one can perhaps overlook his self-aggrandizing egomania (far worse than Wordsworth's!), his preternatural touchiness toward criticism, his pompous pop-philosophizing--but not his anti-Semitism, which was unrelievedly nasty. Talk about an ingrate. At the nadir of his poverty at the age of twenty-six, living in a Parisian garret with his wife, he appealed to a rather mediocre but moderately successful Jewish composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer, for help. Meyerbeer helped secure a Dresden premiere for Rienzi and a Berlin performance of The Flying Dutchman. No sooner was Wagner's own reputation established than he began to write anonymous critiques of Meyerbeer's work and finally penned the notorious anti-Semitic article "Jewishness in Music." Wagner, in other words, is the perfect example of the German philosopher Max Scheler's dictum that it is not love that makes the world go round, but resentment.

And yet there he is, with that extraordinary vision and even more extraordinary music, the most intoxicating (in both the good and bad sense) that human ear has ever heard.

So how do we react to this man, or to any artist's moral flaws for that matter? Again, I think Bloom gets the matter exactly right when he says that "the West's greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. ... If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation."

Anyone who disagrees with these peremptory assertions had best not read Bryan Magee's new book on Wagner's philosophy, The Tristan Chord; but for those readers who regard Bloom's insights as sublimely obvious, Magee's pleasantly written essay will prove immensely rewarding. In fact, probably no artist better reflects Bloom's thesis that art means a solitary confrontation with one's own mortality than does Wagner. To be sure, that was scarcely true of the young man, who was fired with revolutionary zeal to abolish poverty and establish socialism (Wagner's own poverty until middle age was extreme). The defeat of socialist forces in the revolutions of 1848, and above all in Louis Napoleon's takeover of the French government in 1851 (which put an end to the Second Republic and dashed all hopes of revolution), crushed Wagner's hopes.

Only a few years later, in 1854, he discovered the writings of the renowned pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose most famous work, The World as Will and Representation, had appeared in 1819 but had been almost entirely ignored until the total rout of revolutionary forces in the middle of the century. Then the book really took off, for it spoke to all the crushed idealists of bourgeois Europe. Schopenhauer was one of the first in the West to realize the significance of the self-abnegating metaphysics underlying the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, but his real genius was to fuse the Eastern call to renounce desire with Immanuel Kant's division of the world into appearance (the "phenomenal" realm) and a hidden, inaccessible reality (the famous "noumenal" realm). For Schopenhauer, the central, indeed only, feature of that hidden reality was will. But in the case of human will, our striving to accomplish goals would always meet with resistance from the world of appearances, crushing our hopes and leading to Schopenhauer's Buddhist-like call to renounce all desire as the source of suffering. Only art, he says, offers us surcease from this cycle of striving meeting disappointment.