What is the nature of artistic influence? And to what degree should we consider the artist's character apart from the quality of his creations? These are two of the underlying questions in Bryan Magee's The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy, a readable and often lucid, though at times problematic, introduction to a whole constellation of ideas revolving around Richard Wagner, one of the most talented, ambitious and complicated figures in 19th-century music.
Magee has made a career out of, among other things, the popularization of philosophy, most notably in the form of television programs on the BBC, and he is also an acknowledged authority on Wagner. The strengths of the Tristan Chord arise from a marriage of these previous experiences: Magee gives us crystal-clear explanations of the political and philosophical environment within which Wagner was active, ranging from the leftist anarchism of 1840s Germany to the thought of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Nietzsche and, most importantly, Schopenhauer. The philosophers in particular are covered with brief yet precise glosses, and the operas themselves — especially the mature ones, from The Ring cycle to Parsifal — are presented in well-conceived overviews that link each work to the events and evolution of Wagner's life and beliefs. The main arc Magee traces throughout the book is Wagner's conversion from a utopian, materialist world view to that of the world-weary Schopenhauer, with the resulting shift of philosophical focus from the rebirth of society (the initial concept behind The Ring) to the resigned casting away of the phenomenal world found in Tristan und Isolde.
Magee's aim is to rehabilitate Wagner's reputation by creating what he considers a truer portrait of the artist, his works and the thought behind them. In setting the record straight on issues such as Wagner's supposed proto-fascism and reactionary nationalism, the author hopes to enable listeners to appreciate the music based on their "spontaneous response to it in performance." The greatness of the composer's work will then be evident, Magee hopes, regardless of the composer's personal foibles, political and otherwise.
After an introductory chapter, "First the Music," The Tristan Chord launches into an examination of Wagner's formative years with an eye toward revealing the composer was anything but a reactionary. We find an "intellectually excitable" youth with a voracious appetite for the ideas of his age. Magee details associations with Heinrich Laube and the "Young Germany" movement, which espoused democracy and liberation from repressive social and sexual mores. The revolutionary Michael Bakunin also appears; Wagner, who became a close friend of the radical, was to eventually join him as a leader of the Dresden uprising of 1849. (Unlike Bakunin, Wagner escaped political imprisonment by fleeing to Switzerland.) Ludwig Feuerbach emerges as the first great philosophical influence for the composer. That God is mankind's creation; that love is central to human life; and that the world's corruption can be overcome through changing the reality which we ourselves create — Wagner culled all of these ideas from Feuerbach's writings; according to Magee, they are readily recognizable in The Ring cycle, a work originally meant to spark existential revelation in its audiences, resulting in dramatic societal change. Here, Magee clarifies Wagner's radical socialist views, pointing out that the sins of nationalism and anti-Semitism, of which Wagner is frequently accused, were often integrated into the fabric of leftist thinking in 19th-century Germany.
Magee's Nietzsche chapter is quite amusing and informative; the interaction between Wagner and the young philosopher appears to have been that of a megalomaniac and a failed megalomaniac, replete with hero-worship, intellectual patricide, crushed feelings and accusations of compulsive onanism (suspicions voiced by Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor in an inappropriately candid letter). Yet aside from all the drama, the two men quite clearly nourished each other intellectually and spiritually in a way that neither would ever experience again: Nietzsche maintained to the very end of his sane life that his years with Wagner were the most important of his life. As for Wagner, he confessed to Nietzsche's sister that he felt quite "alone" without the young philosopher. And their friendship resulted in at least one masterpiece for the philosopher: The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's brilliant debut work dedicated to ideas fomented, according to Magee, through his conversations with Wagner.
The appendix on anti-Semitism, however, stumbles in fundamentally difficult terrain. The discussions include, among other topics: Wagner's self-perceived humiliation at the hands of Meyerbeer (an influential Jewish opera composer); his compulsive borrowing from moneylenders (most of them Jewish, according to Magee); the composer's scathing written opinions regarding the alien presence of Jews in European culture; and the relation of Wagner's music to Hitler's Germany (apparently, Magee tells us, nobody but Hitler really liked the operas). The author doesn't deny the reprehensibility of Wagner's views, and yet it is clear that he thinks the subject should simply be set aside. Magee cites, for example, that some undeniably brilliant Jewish composers — Mahler and Schoenberg — thought very highly of Wagner's music. Yet this probably isn't going to convince anyone deeply offended by anti-Semitism (and particularly by Wagner's rabid form of it) that they should put their feelings aside and give Wagner's music a chance. Whether we can understand the causes or the effects of Wagner's overwhelming opinions on the subject are beside the point. Perhaps this is why the discussion of anti-Semitism is an appendix, segregated from the rest of the book: it is more than a small thorn in the side of Magee's pro-Wagner agenda, and he's unable to come up with a really convincing argument for why anyone should look past it.
Yet among the many aspects of Wagner's life taken into consideration by The Tristan Chord , the discussions of Schopenhauer, Wagner's conversion to his worldview and the progressive degree to which Wagner's operas embody the German philosopher's ideas emerge as Magee's most important themes. With Schopenhauer came the concepts of phenomena — the outer world of appearance — and neumenon — the unknowable, inner world underlying everything. The ideas of compassion, the transcendence of sexual union and the transformative properties of art (with music as the highest art form) — all central to Wagner's mature operas — also come directly from Schopenhauer.
Magee divines myriad connections between Schopenhauer and the operas' storylines, libretti, music (such as the Tristan chord itself — the first chord in the opera, bursting with harmonic, "longing" tension, yet completely unanalyzable by traditional music theory) and the relationship of the orchestral music to the sung texts. For example, the composer's introduction to Schopenhauer meant a radical re-interpretation of the already existing Ring cycle libretto; what had been a call to utopian revolution ends in final release from the evils of the phenomenal world through ecstatic immolation. In Tristan und Isolde, Magee details the role of Schopenhauer's "will" in the form of longing. (Tristan: "Longing, longing/ even in death still longing/not to die of longing./ That which never dies,/ longing, now calls out/ for the peace of death.") Magee shows that the noumenon and phenomena concepts are also woven throughout the work; in the libretto, they appear as "night" and "day" respectively (Isolde: "From the light of day/I wanted to flee/ and draw you with me/ into the night"). Likewise, Magee suggests that the relationship between the music — "that other invisible world of feeling, and above all of the will" — and the staged drama marks another parallel to the relation between noumenon and phenomena.
The author goes on to zealously illustrate the degree to which all of Wagner's operas from The Ring on are suffused with Schopenhauer. And on this point, he succeeds: it's clear that Schopenhauer was among the most important intellectual touchstones for Wagner during the period of his mature creative output. However, in arguing for such a strong link between Wagner and Schopenhauer, Magee chooses to evade some complex questions about the nature of influence, the workings of the unconscious and the meaning of a work of art. Though Magee does attempt to bracket them aside, these questions are always lurking behind his arguments and produce some important tensions that are never fully addressed.
For example, throughout The Tristan Chord, the author returns repeatedly to the idea that there could be no Wagner — from The Ring on — if the composer had not read and absorbed, to a profound extent, the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The implication is that Schopenhauer's ideas somehow infused Wagner's creative process, and that the resulting operas were an embodiment of those ideas. At the same time, Magee, being a die-hard Wagnerian, insists on the composer's originality as a creative genius. So how do we reconcile Wagner's creative autonomy with Magee's implication that Wagner's artistic intuitions themselves were somehow recast by his exposure to Schopenhauer, resulting in works that are essentially saturated with the philosopher's ideas?
Magee often skates around this murky conceptual space between influence and creative autonomy. In order to build his case for the far-reaching connection to Schopenhauer, he must solidify that connection at every level while simultaneously maintaining Wagner as a wholly independent creative genius. Thus, in a certain way, Magee's project contains the seeds of its own undoing: by potentially over-stating the connection with Schopenhauer, he risks dethroning the originality of the icon whose image he set out to polish.
In fact, within the writings extensively quoted by Magee, there is evidence that Wagner himself saw Schopenhauer as providing a language through which the composer could articulate his own pre-existing intuitions. Perhaps, then, Schopenhauer's ideas were a kind of intellectual scaffolding, used by Wagner to consciously structure his unconscious, intuitive process; they also undeniably served as an effective means for Wagner to metaphorically articulate the meaning of his creations through an overarching philosophical system. This option would allow for both influence and intuitive originality. Yet Magee overlooks it, probably because it weakens the necessity for a specifically Shopenhauerian understanding of Wagner's music: scaffolding is meant to be removed once the work is done.
Beyond this, more questions follow: Is an understanding of Schopenhauer essential to the understanding of Wagner? More precisely, does a Wagner opera give the listener everything he or she needs in order to receive the meaning — or the multiplicity of meanings — that it has to offer? Or is philosophy homework required first? Magee himself seems unclear on the answers.
The point of raising such difficult questions is not so much to reveal contradictions in The Tristan Chord, though they do exist. On the contrary, to acknowledge them while reading Magee's book is, in a sense, to become aware of how well the author manages to navigate around fundamentally complex points for the sake of being "clear" about Wagner. Nevertheless, his evasion comes at a price: after all, it is behind these very questions that the mystery and power of the music resides, just beyond the reach of language. By veering around these points so adroitly, Magee obscures issues like meaning, influence and intuition that are integral to the very nature of music. These questions don't have to be answered — and perhaps they can't be answered — but they should be asked, especially when the goal is clarification, once and for all, of something as multifaceted as the music and thought of Richard Wagner.
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