RICHARD WAGNER was a bounder, a cad who welshed on debts and grabbed other people's wives, was notoriously anti Semitic and the spiritual father of the nazi party. He was also a forceful critic, a fine conductor, a dramatic writer of skill, and a musical composer - and especially an orchestrator - of unequalled genius.
All the foregoing statements are claimed as true, and each one is material for a goodly slagging match. But for an elegant frisson of bitchery, like a well-chilled Sancerre, you must wheel on the academics.
Michael Tanner is Dean of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, a lecturer in philosophy and well known as a reviewer, especially for Classic CD magazine. He is also a Wagnerian, nearer high priest than acolyte.
This book isn't a biography; rather, it's a meditation on why people react so violently to Wagner; was he prophet or charlatan, and can one separate the art, the artist and the man?
The method for this adept is to take us on a guided tour, all the way from the early Die Feen (The Fairies, a homage to Weber) through to Parsifal, discoursing the white on philosophy, but not before he takes a few swipes at modern producers and critics, especially Barry Millington of the Cambridge Opera Journal. No target like home.
Tanner doesn't think much of Wagner's second opera, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on, Love), which is based on Shakespeare's Measure for pleasure. I had the happy privilege of seeing the Wexford production two years ago: it is a good if uneven opera, but it showed just how far the revolutionary of 1849, who fled Dresden with a price on his head, changed utterly in latter years. For which reason I suspect that True Wagnerites dislike this opera on more than artistic grounds. It is a passionate denunciation of autocracy and puritan gloom.
Wagner wasn't the only composer attracted to Shakespeare, or who insisted on writing his own words: Berlioz did all this and nearly better by, marrying an Irish Shakespearean actress. But when it came to writing a trilogy, Berlioz reached back to the great myth of the Trojan war, using a scale of production taken from the revolutionary spectacles of the painter Jean Louis David.
Wagner saw that new myths were needed, post industrial revolution. He could and did supply them. Following the showbiz example of his famed father in law, Liszt, he founded an alternative religion complete with Bayreuth temple where the wealthy widows (widows were big time, once Victoria set the fashion) of Ruhr industrialists could find insights contemplating stage miners. Cynics will say that a religion has unlimited added value potential. Tanner agrees with the new religion theorem: "Wagner judged to a T the degree to which in order to found a new religion, it was necessary to make it incomprehensible."
Here's a core question: can a deliberately written up storyline replace all the myths, legends and superstition that form the leaf mould bedding of a culture? Non devotees say nay, even if the story were better or more original. Incidentally, The Flying (or better, Fleeing) Dutchman is based on the same theme as Melmoth the Wanderer, written by Dublin clergyman Charles R. Maturin.
More than originality, what a new religion needs is ego, and Wagner had that in such plenty his followers worshipped him as a Master. For example (not in this book), Cosima, unauthorised daughter of Liszt, was married to Hans von Bulow, noted conductor and friend of Wagner. After she had left him for Wagner, he told her: "Cosima I forgive you." Came the reply: "It is not enough to forgive, one must also understand."
The book does give a sense of how enmeshed Wagner was in contemporary German philosophy, from Hegel who devised an all enfolding taxonomy of the thinkable, through to Schopenhauer, the crankiest curmudgeon of them all.
Aesthetically, the Romantic movement, which started with Moore's translation of Anacreon's lays, all wine, roses and delicacy of feeling, explored ever more exotic parts of the psyche, ending with Decadence, the Fleurs du mal with a corpse scent like that huge lily in Kew Gardens.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was developed into a credo that the best things in life are non rational, or irrational. Long hours on hard benches in Bayreuth are witness to this faith.
In musical terms, Beethoven was the apotheosis of the Hero; Wagner laid claim to Beethoven's mantle when at the age of 17 he arranged the Choral Symphony for solo piano. Keeping hold of the mantle, despite claims from Brahms, meant conceiving heroes of ever more irrational nobility, ending up with a god and a Wunderkind.
But what is The Ring? Is it an entertainment, which deters, most punters by its sheer size, its lack of serenity or laughs, and its strange power struggles? Or is it a series of philosophical dialogues, anti Plato with original sound effects, expressed in non rational form?
And how credible is it, especially after Tolkein's very successful raid in Lord of the Rings? By now, tales of characters who want to dominate the universe through magic rings are the stuff of the Children's Channel, off peak viewing (drop the bits about twins and incest).
Tanner is honest enough to lay out his own stall. Even for the "victims" of the Platonic Christian tradition, religion won't work, but art may make something of the leavings and symbols. A pop star called Madonna is on the same tack. Yet as a work of ecumenism, this is an intriguing witness, a phone line across the chasm between those who can't stand Wagner and those for whom, like a eucharist, he has within his art all sweetness.