1/3/2023 0 Comments Wagner composer![]() The point is that Wagner was pointing in the right direction in the final years of his life, and moving in the right direction, flirting with Catholicism itself. As the German Wagnerian scholar Ulrike Kienzle has commented quite correctly, “Wagner’s turn to Christian mythology, upon which the imagery and spiritual contents of Parsifal rest, is idiosyncratic and contradicts Christian dogma in many ways.” And yet, even conceding that this is the case, Wagner’s final work still represents a crucial and significant turn in the direction of the Christian faith, a fact that anti-Christians, such as Nietzsche, could not help but condemn. And yet anyone who has seen the opera will know that it’s hardly a work that is unproblematic from the perspective of orthodox theology. Far from disagreeing with Nietzsche’s accusation that Parsifal was a Christian work, Wagner described the opera himself, in a letter to his patron, King Ludwig II, as “this most Christian of works.”ĭescribing Parsifal to his wife Cosima as his “last card,” Wagner’s final great work can be seen as something of a Christian swan song, a bowing out on a Christian note. He saved particular scorn for what he condemned as Wagner’s affirmation of Christian concepts of chastity in Parsifal, the great composer’s final opera. It is true that Nietzsche had originally championed the work of Wagner and had befriended him but it is also true, and hugely significant, that he broke off his friendship and spent the final years of his life ranting against Wagner’s selling out to Christianity. With such “friends,” Wagner might indeed complain that he doesn’t need any enemies! But what of his association with Nietzsche? Isn’t this more problematic? My friend might concede that Wagner should not be condemned as a precursor of Nazism merely because the Nazis embraced him, tainting his reputation by tarring him with their own blood-stained brush. “Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.” Should Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings be condemned merely because he took his inspiration from the same “noble northern spirit” which had inspired Wagner’s own Ring cycle? Tolkien wrote to his son Michael in 1943. #Wagner composer fullBut why should Wagner be held accountable for the manner in which maniacs perverted the purpose and meaning of his work a full fifty years after his death? Why should all that is good and noble in Norse and German mythology be forever cursed because of its being abused by Hitler and the Nazis? “I have in this war a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler,” J.R.R. There’s no doubt that the Nazis coopted Wagner’s genius to give credence to their “volkish” desire to make Germanic myth and art the quasi-religion of the Reich, thereby supplanting “semitic” Christianity with something more worthy of the Herrenvolk. Why is it that the genius of Richard Wagner continues to be so controversial? Perhaps his legacy has been overshadowed and some would say permanently marred by the manner in which he became the poster child of Hitler’s grotesque Third Reich. My crime, in the eyes of my friend, was my description of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture as “probably the one work of music that I admire above all others, and is by the one composer that I admire above all others,” to which I added that “this soaringly impassioned tour de force transports me out of myself into somewhere better.” All was fine, so it seemed, until I revealed, or perhaps confessed, that my favourite composer, whose work I admired above all others, was none other than Richard Wagner, the mercurial and some would say mad genius who seems to be the bête noire of many Christian music lovers. My friend had no problem with my waxing enthusiastic about Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A Major or Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony nor, for that matter, did he question my praise of Vaughan Williams, or my admiration for the romantic patriotism of Sibelius or Smetana, or the minimalism of Arvo Pärt. The essay praised the music of Tallis, Byrd, Verdi, Fauré, Allegri, Schubert, and Bach, and ranged in scope from anonymous songs from fourteenth-century Catalonia to modern film scores by Richard Einhorn and Howard Shore. The above-quoted words were written to me by a friend after he had read an essay of mine in the Imaginative Conservative in which I listed some of my favourite works of classical music. But Wagner, your favorite composer! Say it ain’t so, Joe! Yet should we condemn his music for this reason? ![]() Richard Wagner’s legacy has been overshadowed, and some would say permanently marred, by the manner in which he became the poster child of Hitler’s grotesque Third Reich. ![]()
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