Wagner helped by writing to produce creative tension | The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy

Easy read with deep insight | The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy | Bryan Magee

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	• The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy Bryan Magee Holt Paperbacks, 2002 - 424 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It Helps To Be Wagner Fanatic

This is a terrific, surprisingly easy to read book. It offers invaluable, concise insights not only into the mindset and operas of Richard Wagner, but the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as well. In fact, this book served as my introduction to Schopenhauer's philosophy, and I am deeply grateful for that. The parts concerning Wagner's compositional habits, motivations, and struggles are not only some of the most inspirational, but LUCIDLY WRITTEN, ever. Bryan Magee is spectacular on these points.

I did, however, find Magee's longwinded anti-Christian rants to be both unconvincing (when applied to Wagner), and too axe-to-grind in general. That is, we get very early on that Magee is anti-Christian, but like many vehement atheists, he decides that gives him the right to blow his propaganda onto everything (to be fair, Chrsitians are guitly of somethimes doing the same thing, in the other direction).

When he singles out Wagner as having been anti-Christian, he is only part right. Wagner was, like many "Romantic" writers of the time, quite anti-Christian/agnostic in his youth. But anyone who takes the time to read Wagner's writing in his later years, including his own Brown Book, can see that the Lutheranism he knew as a child became more and more a variable in his life. He was never much of a church goer, but to be point blank, Wagner believed in Jesus as redeeming savior of the world.

Other than that particular argument, there's only one other problem with this book: it's best to be a HUGE enthusiast of Richard Wagner to like it. Magee often seems to be the "Wagnerolators" that he wrote about in his earlier book, "Aspects of Wagner". This is fine, for me, as I am quite the enthusiast of Wagner's music myself. But, for someone wanting a book that's a bit more cool headed...

But those really are quibbles in the face of this phenomenally informative, educating, yes even ENTERTAINING(!) book on the greatest composer who ever lived.

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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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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!

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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 for any of our various ideologizing modes of regard. Neither does he indulge in any of the the widespread but ultimately superficial KULTURGESCHICHTLICH approaches in which Wagner is but one more symbol-player to be pigeon-holed and arranged in a trajectory tour of the modern imagination (much like the props in Hans-Juergen Syberberg's "Parsifal" film), nor does he dish up Wagner with a sideorder of Marxist criticism. Instead what you get is Wagner considered as a living, breathing, thinking, AND creating human being, a real man (no mere puppet of impersonal cultural forces here!) who when he encountered ideas and people reacted to them in the completely unique way that his personality (like it or not!) demanded.

In a way one can only appreciate this book if he has already spent some 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 possessed a most 'commanding' personality and what that simple fact might mean in real terms, and why that in itself might be a petty thing to hold against him in our age of pathologically inflated egos and equally calculating self-interest). And Mr. Magee does this by making distinctions 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 simply despised so many other individuals and/or groups, and that he did so in accordance with his own unrepentant sense of artistic/intellectual principle. 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 from 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 another author who actually knows what he is talking about and who has bothered to spend a lifetime actually thinking about it instead of parroting the easy cultural prejudices so fully and freely available in sources like the "The New York Times Review of Books".

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WARNING - this is UK Wagner and Philosophy

Great book - but I already had it; it's nowhere apparent that it's the UK/Penguin Wagner and Philosophy by the same author. The rating is for amazon, not for Magee.

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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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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