Is Wagner divine?

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2002 by Disch, Thomas M

With the operas of other composers I am seldom in such a confusion. Verdi is great and Mozart greater, but theirs are a daylit greatness. One would never be at a loss, as with the Dutchman, to offer a theory as to what aspect of the essential human condition Rigoletto, or Figaro, or the Countess represents. As archetypes they are as apprehensible as Greek statuary.

Wagner, like hell, is murky. His greatest scenes happen at night, or in caverns, or illumined by fire, and the characters in these tenebrous situations are seen, like specters, darkly, emerging from shadows, shadows themselves. I remember how Miss Allard kept dwelling on how, in the second act of the Tristan she had seen in Amsterdam, the whole thing happened in darkness and the two blissed-out lovers were almost invisible on the stage. Brunnehilde, when she informs Siegmund of his imminent death, is another such darkling, numinous presence. She is, literally, the voice of God, telling us a truth that is at the very edge of the possibility of human comprehension.

The notion of a noumenal world, as against the phenomenal world of logical-positivist, daylight reality, is where Kant comes in, and Magee cannot very well be paraphrased on this subject, for he himself is paraphrasing the spin that Schopenhauer put on Kant. Kant held that never the twain shall meet, that the phenomenal world of cause-and effect, of Newton's planets and Darwin's apes, coexists with a noumenal world of the soul and truth and beauty, but they don't interact. In that world, all things are simply one immense noumenal Something. And that Something is the inapprehensible, shimmering Nacht that Tristan and Isolde are singing about in the dark opera house of their "Liebestod." Compressed into such a single molecule of meaning such an "explanation" may seem just silliness, or word-spinning, but at the more stately pace of Magee's exposition it is at least as persuasive as good poetry.

And there were interesting and direct consequences for Wagner, who encountered Schopenhauer just as he had begun to write the music for the first act of The Valkyrie. These are the facts, as Magee reports them:

Wagner composed the music of Act I of The Valkyrie, between 28 June and I September 1854, at the age of forty-one. The music for Act II was written between 4 September and 18 November, and that for Act III between 20 November and 27 December... Obviously he must have been working at ... white heat. This makes it all the more difficult to grasp... that it was during the autumn of 1854 he read for the first time Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, one of the longest masterpieces in the history of philosophy... well over a thousand pages. And not only did he read it, he was bowled over by it: it was to have more influence on him than anything else he read in his life. Thomas Mann puts this baldly: "His acquaintance with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer was the great event in Wagner's life."

Does this mean that one cannot scale Mount Wagner without trekking through the same thousand pages of The World as Will and Representation? I think not even Bryan Magee would be such a cruel schoolmaster. Indeed, he has written his book precisely to let confirmed