The Wagner Experience And Its Meaning To Us

The distillation a lifetime’s work which has clearly been a labour of love, this book is organised as two beautifully illustrated volumes. The first deals with Wagner’s output as a whole and attempts (very successfully, in my view) to explain what the author terms “the miracle of the music”. Those of us who struggle for coherence when asked what the secret is of Wagner’s hold over the imagination and the intellect will find such chapters as the boldly-titled “Towards a definition of Wagner’s fascination” to provide much assistance. One may have reacted sceptically to the pre-publication blurb which claimed that this is a book like no other on the subject, but the fact that it is written with the benefit of a lifetime’s experience as a medical practitioner alone brings an abundance of justification for such a claim. The biographical chapters in particular provide a doctor’s insight into Wagner’s psychological development and the influences upon his work which can be traced back to his earliest childhood and beyond.

The work and life of “the supreme artist of dramatic psychology” are illuminated for the author by the psychologist Carl Jung. We are told that Wagner never escaped a compulsive tendency to be self-centred to its pathological point of narcissism. “Narcissists are often aware of exactly how different people work and how they are likely to respond, but exploit this awareness overwhelmingly for their own interests.” So Wagner came to have an insight and a feeling for character that was extraordinary, “as outsiders often do”.

Throughout the book original angles of approach provide freshness, but one chapter in particular may come to be seen as revolutionary. Would you have expected “Femme inspiratrice, femme fatale” to be about Minna Wagner? With this chapter the author has to justify its opening sentence: “Of all the experiences which went into the making of Wagner, Minna Planer was the most far-reaching.” He adds: “The importance of her role is impossible to exaggerate, and yet it goes unrecognised.” The 39 meticulously researched pages which follow cover the ground of comparing her influence with that of Cosima Wagner. Although he concedes; “It was Cosima that made possible what is for me the most extraordinary achievement of Wagner’s life, the fulfilment of Parsifal down to its staging within a year of his death.” He continues: “It was Minna who became the source of all the heroines in Wagner’s dramas. Cosima, and briefly Mathilde, would re-invigorate the paradigm of woman as life’s ultimate fulfilment which Minna had instilled in Wagner. But it was Minna who had forged it in the first place.”

The chapter: “Puzzles, Obstructions and Objections” addresses the matter of the hostility which the music itself can call up. “When Wagner stirs the depths what comes welling up can be ecstatic and liberating, but it can also take the disturbing form of dark phantoms that come screaming out of the blackness. Not many people are happy to recognise any shadow or disunities in themselves.” He explains that this is not the only inner problem which some people foist outwards onto Wagner. Another objection to Wagner apparently represents another pathology: “it is bound up with the lure that Wagner holds for anyone who is looking for shortcomings in greatness and feels satisfaction from finding them. To do this is the mark of a neurosis, a compensation mechanism for people who cannot accept that others exist who are more significant than they are themselves. Wagner’s towering greatness and his great faults provide these people with a ready target.” 

Two important refutations are adroitly provided in this chapter, namely that Wagner’s political views (“he always remained far away to the left”) were in some way compatible with Hitler’s and that the composer’s anti-Semitism is present in his musical output. We are provided with a useful tool to test the work to determine whether or not it qualifies as “anti-Semitic art”.

Volume 2 is a guide to each of the ten “great dramas”. The author throws medically-informed illumination upon many of Wagner’s characterisations in a 21st Century handbook which is likely to become as indispensible as that of Ernest Newman. The author avoids dry presentations of the stories by integrating narrations with the points of discussion which they generate at the very places in the plots where they come up as he does with the music examples. Those who are unable to read musical notation are catered for with the verbal descriptions of motives, etc which are also provided.

Space allows the picking of no more than a couple of exemplar cherries. Remember that each of the following claims have closely-argued support. We are told that, thanks to its music, “Tristan und Isolde describes romantic love and erotic passion more vividly than any other story or description in existence. Because of the music Tristan und Isolde is more than a description; it creates the actual feeling within us. Through the music it creates the very experience in the imagination. It conjures up all that love might be, even for people who have never known it, switching on the mind to ecstatic possibilities that may previously be unimagined but are innate, and to the hope that they may be realised.” 

Of the author’s favourite work, Parsifal, he writes: “Our encounter with Montsalvat comes with a demand that we accept its standards for actual life. The experience of Parsifal enjoins kindness, compassion, loyalty, generosity, integrity, responsibility, a willingness to get involved and act, and a willingness to leave well alone.”

Paul Dawson-Bowling has written powerfully succinct conclusions to the Volume 2 chapters, each covering one of the great music dramas. If I may be permitted an editorly quibble it is that, with one exception, (Parsifal) the effect is spoiled by the fact that before the reader can sit back and contemplate the chapter now completed it starts up again with a list of performers of the work’s first performance at Bayreuth! Let me challenge the wisdom of this editorial decision with the example of Götterdämmerung. Who would want to move on to the 1876 cast list immediately upon reading the following? “The Ring as a whole is a compelling validation of human existence, a secular redemption. Simply to have lived life in all its richness and variety is an experience of such value that is not negated by the fact that it must end. The prospect of it ending does create a degree of regret; yes, that is there in The Ring’s final eight bars; but it still establishes the conviction that to have lived life is an experience so worthwhile that not even the prospect of total, eternal oblivion can detract from that worthwhileness.”

I have greatly enjoyed reading The Wagner Experience. It is in every way remarkable, and I am convinced that it communicates essential truths and modes of understanding Wagner and his creative achievements much more effectively and much more perceptively than many recent publications. Paul strikes an admirable balance between what needs to be set out about Wagner the man and the relationship between the man and his compositions. He conveys the dazzling scale of Wagner’s intellect, the astonishing intensity of his insights, and his unique capacity to integrate the dramatic and the philosophical aspects of his genius in a comprehensive art work which enfolds and inspires the listener in a breathtaking experience of unequalled intensity.

Impressive though Paul’s enthusiasm is, it never betrays him into excess or a lack of aesthetic balance, and I especially appreciate his discussion of Parsifal in which he does full justice to the Christian elements in the work while recognising the presence of other influences, all of which make a coherent whole, give the astonishing control exercised by Wagner’s powerful intellect. Like Paul, I cannot understand how anyone could deny that Parsifal is a religious work and I fear that many commentators, like too many modern producers, impose their own often obtuse interpretation on Wagner’s text. Paul’s discussion of the influence of Schopenhauer on Tristan and Meistersinger is a model of balance and perception, and he has led me to see Tannhäuser in a new light: his criticism of the premiere contrasts between sacred and profane love is beautifully expressed and the claim that Wagner was arguing for balance and responsibility in human relationships, with due recognition for the ‘erotic’ and the ‘altruistic’ is thoroughly convincing. I am in absolute agreement with the forceful and well argued rejection of the current tendency to see “ anti-Semitism” as the central theme in Wagner’s creations and with the dismissal of the notion that Beckmesser is meant to be a Jewish caricature. I particularly savoured Paul’s comment that the portrayal of the town clerk is really a satire on certain German characteristics.

I also appreciated the quotation from Tolkien about the ‘ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler’ which was new to me. Like many Wagnerites, I am thoroughly weary of the popular association of Wagner with Hitler: the question is not whether Hitler enthused over Wagner’s operas but whether or not he properly understood his message. The late Deryck Cooke was right to summarise The Ring as the struggle between the love of power and the power of love, and Paul’s reference to Hitler telling Goebbels that religion should be banished from Parsifal reveals how far he was from truly understanding Wagner: compassion seems to me a recurrent theme in Wagner’s output even though it is given its most intense expression in Parsifal. I had even read that Hitler intended to have a new libretto written for Parsifal to bring the work into line with Nazi ideology. The great Congregationalist theologian, P.T. Forsyth, whose theology anticipates that of Karl Barth in some ways, was present (through the generosity of affluent friend) at one of the performances of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882, and rather like Newman in 1951, regarded as one of the greatest spiritual experiences of his life; his daughter claimed that he thought there was something ‘sacramental’ about the work. Forsyth wrote two interesting essays relating to Wagner; one was about the philosophy of pessimism which he regarded as one of the most impressive attempts to understand life from a non-Christian perspective; the other was on Parsifal, in which he discussed the Christian elements in the work. I very much appreciated Paul’s reference to the young Felix Weingärtner at Bayreuth in 1882, I have a copy of his memoirs which includes a reference to his meeting with Wagner, who jokingly said to Weingärtner, “Young man, at your age, you will be chiefly interested in the flower maidens!” Like Queen Victoria, Weingärtner noted that the idea had a strong Saxon accent, and how important it is to remember that Wagner was a Saxon and not a Prussian or a Bavarian.

I also very much appreciate the selection of illustrations in this book: the box cover and the dust jacket displays what has long been my favourite portrait of Wagner (it graced the cover of the festival booklet when I first visited Bayreuth in 1962), and I have always liked Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for The Ring. The scenes from the Karajan Salzburg productions of Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde are breathtakingly beautiful as are those I have seen from his Salzburg Meistersinger. One or two of the Leeke illustrations were familiar to me from the old publications but I have never seen the ‘Liebig’s Fleisch Extract’ illustrations before. In their way I find them charming as well as being a reminder that in earlier eras an awareness of high culture was much more widespread throughout society than it is today.

The Wagner Experience and Its Meaning to Us is a wonderful culmination to a lifetime of devotion, and it deserves to be widely read and bought, I hope, in large numbers. Any one reading the book will have a well-informed, sympathetic, perceptive understanding of Wagner without any neglect of the more difficult aspects of his personality – the egocentricity, the mood swings, the anti-Semitic prejudice.