Wagner: genius, proto-Nazi or both?; Should our knowledge of Wagner's

MOZART, famously, was a tiresome braggart. Picasso's monstrous ego destroyed those closest to him and led him into shallow and dishonest politics. Goya was, at best, an untrustworthy friend. Miles Davis's vanity was lethal within a radius of five miles. Creative minds can be host to odious opinions. Cecil B DeMille was a racist. Joseph Conrad an old reactionary. The blokey sexism of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin I could live without - their books and poems I'd prefer not to. For while few people would miss any of these personalities, millions would be impoverished by the absence of their work.

Should we expect more from our great artists than from anyone else? The philosopher Bryan Magee, author of Wagner And Philosophy, believes not. "It's childish romanticism to expect artists to be different or better than the average person." Magee, who is passionate when the conversation turns to Wagner, becomes quite distressed when the less pleasant aspects of the composer's personality get confused with his operas. "So much nonsense is talked about Wagner and his music by people who neither know about him nor understand his work."

Wagner, whose significance to our culture is on a level with Shakespeare or Da Vinci, was a composer whose opinions were neither modest nor moderate, especially when it came to Jews. "This unpleasant freak of nature," he called them. "We instinctively feel we have nothing in common with a man who looks like that." He wrote of "the shrill, sibiliant buzzing of (the Jew's) voice ... its offensive manner the cold indifference of its peculiar blabber". Wagner's writing - 16 volumes of musical and dramatic theory, plus letters - are littered with such notions and insults. Anti-semitism was not unusual in his era, but Wagner's bigotry was of a particularly virulent strain. He published, not once, but twice, his article Jewishness In Music which, if it weren't for its loathsome anti-semitism, might have been an interesting (if now defunct) argument about artistic alienation.

Magee had not intended to cover the issue directly in the book. "More than enough has been said about the issue," he tells me, "much of it ill-informed and motivated by concerns that would have had no meaning in Wagner's time. The book itself concentrates on quite different aspects of Wagner's intellectual life." But the subject is particularly topical at the moment. Controversially, for the first time in Israeli history, Wagner's music is to be performed in Jersualem. Not surprisingly, then, the publishers felt the issue would be of interest, and the book carries an appendix entitled Wagner's Anti-semitism. The question is, does Wagner's anti-semitism mar his music? Magee argues against the charge. He is repelled as much as anyone by Wagner's bigotry. "But the problem now is not so much about his views, but when and where he lived." Unfortunately, Wagner's opinions were not only repugnant, they were also catastrophically timed. Wagner died less than half a century before the rise of German Nazism. His anti-semitism was obviously appealing to the movement's Fuhrer, as were the mythical Germanic and Scandinavian themes of his operas. As a result, his music has become a kind of soundtrack to Hitler's career, and the composer himself deemed to be a great inspiration of Fascism itself.

Bryan Magee argues that Wagner's prejudice was of a very different variety from Hitler's; that the artist could have had no idea what anti-semitism would lead to in his country's future. Anyway, the rest of Hitler's boorish collegues disliked Wagner's music and ideas, and actively discouraged performances of his work. Had Wagner not been German, and not lived so soon before the darkest moment in recent human history, Magee's argument goes, the composer's pathetic prejudices would have been ignored and forgotten. Magee goes to great, and convincing, lengths to show that anti-semitism does not rear its ugly head in the composer's work. There are no Wagnerian Shylocks - and arguably, Shakespeare's work is thereby more contaminated than Wagner's, yet few, barring Americans, would discount the bard's plays on the basis of anti-semitic sentiments. Magee laments that some of the greatest music of all time has been unduly soiled by the guilt complexes of two generations of liberal German and European thinkers.

There can be no doubt that if we were to judge our artists' output by their personalities we would decimate the canon, worldwide. Artists are a mix of good and bad, like everyone else. That does not prevent them from producing great work, which anyway should take on an existence and meaning independent of its creator. The fact that so many Jews have themselves been the guardians and champions of Wagner's genius is testament to the necessity of separating author from output. Schoenberg claimed to have seen each of Wagner's operas 30 times by the age of 25. Half the outstanding conductors of Wagner, Magee points out, were Jews, including Klemperer, Levine and Barenboim. Georg Solti said: "I am not interested in Wagner's political or philosophical ideas to me, anybody who can create such beauty, whether he be anti-semite, liberal or royalist, is first and foremeost a musical genius and will remain so as long as our civilization lasts."

Still, it is puzzling why Bryan Magee - especially in a book investigating Wagner's philosophical learning - is surprised at the reaction to his hero's opinions. His argument would be far more persuasive if he weren't quite so dismissive of anyone with the slightest misgiving about the Wagnerian legacy.

The fact is that Wagner lived in, and helped shape, a nation that was about to launch two world wars and gave rise to the movement that would attempt destruction of an entire race. Unluckily for Wagner, Hitler did like and promote his music. In a book which reveals Wagner's interest in philosophy and ideas, the fact of his dull, unnecessary intolerance would seem of interest. Magee's dismissal of Wagner's prejudices is complete. But when I suggest that might infect the music for some, he will have none of it. "We must then agree to disagree."

Of course the work remains, and stands alone. In and of itself it cannot be belittled by the shortcomings of its paranoid and obsessive creator - a paranoia and obsessiveness that in other ways served his creativity so well. If there is a problem with Bryan Magee's afterthought essay, it is to sail too close to absolving the man, and not just the music. I have no doubt that Magee himself, as he clearly states in the piece, holds no truck with anti-semitism, and denounces it whenever he encounters it. "If I hear anyone making an anti- semitic remark, I cannot think of him any longer as a friend." Still, his aficionado's enthusiasm for Wagner's operas numbs him to the sensitivities and dilemmas of others.

Surely it is legitimate to concern ourselves with the background and events that led up to the Holocaust - to try and understand what went so horrifically wrong? Wagner's music, as Bryan Magee argues, is not anti-semitic. But whether fair or otherwise, it's a sad fact that, for at least a generation or two to come, what we know of Wagner the man will add a faint, bitter, discordant note to his magnificent music.

Wagner and Philosophy, by Bryan Magee, #20.00, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press

Copyright 2000
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