Wagnerism summary

In 1860, Wagner received a letter. “I owe to you the greatest musical pleasure I have ever experienced,” it read – continuing with a declaration of having been “penetrated and invaded, a truly sensual enjoyment.”

The letter’s author was the controversial poet Charles Baudelaire, who'd recently attended one of Wagner's concerts in Paris. Baudelaire was just one Wagnériste among many in France. So many of the country’s other leading artists found themselves captivated by Wagner. Among them were Emile Zola, Paul Cézanne, Stéphane Mallarmé – all struck by the composer’s bracing modernity and scandalous decadence, as epitomized by the erotic, mesmerizing Tristan und Isolde.

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a comedy, but right at the end it takes a famously dark turn. Hans Sachs, a beloved cobbler and singer, suddenly cautions the audience to “Beware!” The German people are under threat, he claims, and they must be alerted to the dangers of foreign influence.

In German-speaking lands in the late nineteenth century, artists and audiences heard a great many things in Wagner’s works. His influence on other art forms was huge and varied, just like it was abroad. But, as the end of Die Meistersinger shows, there was also a nationalistic element to Wagner that became increasingly hard to ignore.

It’s well known that Wagner was profoundly anti-Semitic. The aforementioned essay “Judaism in Music” vilifies Jewish composers like Meyerbeer and concludes that Jewish people should be redeemed through what Wagner ambiguously calls Untergang, a term that literally means a “going down” or “going under” but more commonly stands for “downfall.”

Did Wagner mean conversion and assimilation? Or something far more troubling? That is still open to interpretation.

So, what did Wagner truly believe? His incendiary texts are full of contradictions, and his music raises questions too. 

In “Religion and Art,” an essay he wrote in 1880, he voiced concern over the destructive potential of modern technologies like bombs and torpedoes. So was he a pacifist? Maybe – but then why does so much of his music sound strident and pugnacious?

On February 13, 1933 – exactly 50 years after Wagner’s death – the writer Thomas Mann stood at a podium in Amsterdam. He was about to deliver a speech that would question Wagner’s influence on the politics of the day. Its title? “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner.”

Boldly, Mann argued that Wagner’s views had little place in contemporary politics. He described the composer as a utopian socialist with anarchist leanings. The Nazis, Mann implied, were misreading Wagner; they were taking his name in vain.

One of modern cinema’s most iconic moments is underpinned by five minutes of Wagner. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a group of American helicopters launches an enormous, shocking, deadly attack on a peaceful Vietnamese village. The soundtrack is “Ride of the Valkyries” from the Ring cycle.

The sequence was meant to illustrate the horror and hubris of war. It’s certainly unforgettable – but some viewers misunderstood its critical tone. And that has led to the music being used in actual warfare. It rang across the deserts during the First Gulf War in 1991, and then again in Iraq, in 2004. Nowadays, you could even call the “Ride of the Valkyries” a symbol of American supremacy.

The Bayreuth Festival Theater itself, which Wagner set up in 1876, has had to change with the times. In 1976, the young French director Patrice Chéreau presented a new production of the Ring. It scandalized audiences at first, but it soon became a landmark.

Chéreau teases out the historical associations embedded within Wagner’s work. The early stages evoke the nineteenth century. Instead of gods, there are Victorian aristocrats confused by the dwarves’ industrial factories. As the cycle progresses, time creeps forward. In the final scene, as Valhalla is burning, a wordless chorus of people who seem to be from the future gaze straight out into the audience.