Wagner's intellectual development involved him in a mass of contradictions that can never be fully resolved. Under the influence of Feuerbach and Proudhon, he first sketched the text of his Ring drama in the revolutionary year of 1848 as an allegory of the rise and fall of capitalism. The failure of the 1849 Dresden uprising, in which he played a leading role alongside his friend Bakunin, led to a disillusion with political solutions and this coincided with a change in the ending of The Ring: the optimistic account of the salvation of the gods through the restoration of the ring now gave way to a nihilistic vision of the end of the world.
Wagner's discovery of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea, with its highly personal fusion of Kant, Plato and Buddhism, gave voice, therefore, to a disillusion that was already well under way. It confirmed his move from a belief that the world could be improved, to a metaphysics of resignation which left it pretty well to its own devices. However, the element of struggle did not entirely disappear from his work; instead it took the recurrent form of the confrontation of a rebellious and uninstructed young man with a contemplative older one, well versed in Schopenhauerean asceticism.
Schopenhauer also gave a uniquely privileged role to music as the direct expression of the invisible reality behind the illusory world. Rather awkwardly, at that time Wagner had just finished writing one of his most ambitious theoretical works, the book-length Opera and Drama, in which the function of music in opera was stated to be that of faithful servant to the text and action: the vocal line was to follow natural speech rhythms and the orchestra was to act as a sort of Greek chorus, using leitmotifs as reminiscences and presentiments. Furthermore, he had by now set almost half of his Ring text - The Rhinegold and two thirds of The Valkyrie - as a demonstration of these principles. Now he found himself faced with a complete reversal of his previous position.
Perhaps here, too, Schopenhauer merely confirmed the direction in which his ever more complex technical development was leading him, but his 12-year abandonment of The Ring for Tristan and The Mastersingers was almost certainly the result of the dilemma posed by his new philosophy. Now traditional musical devices, such as counterpoint, which his earlier theorising self had dismissed as "mathematical", are given a new expressive role. The orchestral writing becomes so rich that it is constantly threatening to overwhelm the action.
Magee's Wagner and Philosophy offers a useful summary of what has been written on all of these shifts in Wagner's work. His account is eminently reasonable and straightforward, sometimes to the point of prosiness. His appreciation of Nietzsche as a philosopher is greater than that of Wagner's great biographer Newman, who tended to dismiss him as a somewhat tiresome young man, but his treatment of the Nietzsche-Wagner rift is no less partisan. The fact that Nietzsche was profoundly moved by Parsifal hardly invalidates his witty attack on the values it represented for him. For any polemic against Wagner to rise above philistinism, being moved has to be part of the problem.
The book closes with an appendix on Wagner's anti-semitism, its possible causes and relation to his operas. In dealing with something so irrational, calm and reasoned argument can appear woefully beside the point. Magee cites a passage from Wagner rejecting the representation of Jews as unsuitable for dramatic treatment to prove that he did not conceive any of his characters as Jewish caricatures, but this might be a great deal more convincing if Wagner had ever shown himself capable of such consistency. But this is equally a problem for his detractors.
Vincent Deane writes and broadcasts on 20th century literature and opera