Wagner was an ass. This is news?

If, on one hand, you ever wanted to know what a swine Richard Wagner was, this is the book to tell you. It does so at length, in reliable detail, calmly, without prurience, perfectly backed with documentation, and in a translation whose only fault is in giving no Translator’s Notes for in-house German references. Joachim Köhler sustains his story with new ideas, revises other interpretations and modestly deconstructs Cosima née Liszt’s creation of “Richard Wagner Enterprises Inc”. (This she developed so far as to keep Parsifal exclusive to Bayreuth, prompting George Bernard Shaw to remark in 1889 that it “would almost reconcile me to the custom of suttee”!) Her tirelessly engineered public image of Wagner as a Titan – a Prometheus? an Atlas? – is countered by Köhler’s picture of him as his own successive operatic heroes: Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, the Dutchman, Tristan, Walther, Wotan, even Parsifal’s Saviour.

If, on the other hand, you ever wanted to know how it was that the same Richard Wagner created some of the most ravishing and marvellous music ever composed, how he achieved in his gigantic compositions, note by note, bar by bar, some of the biggest single projects of the imagination ever achieved by any human being in any field of endeavour, then you will not quite find the answer here. The book’s limitations in this respect are not exceptional, being second nature to most studies of composers, particularly now that music study is to music as Classical Studies are to Latin. I had three particular doubts as I read Köhler’s interpretation of the life and works, and the first has to do with the swinishness.

I have Joachim Köhler's Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation. The gentleman (Köhler, since neither of the men in the title of the work may accurately be so identified) has great sympathy for the young Nietzsche (who, incidentally, bears an eerie resemblance to someone I know ( I make no claims as to the content of the "eerie resemblance" site, by the way. Just a Google image search)). As well one might: Wagner's overbearing insistence on hero-worship from all around him, along with his rather underhanded dealings with the fairer sex, are presented in all their squalor.

There is, however, something unconvincing in the portrayal of Friedrich Nietzsche as the innocent youth betrayed. Perhaps because my only real encounter with him is through his writings, I cannot myself imagine him over-awed or blinded by admiration for long. And so when Köhler insists that Nietzsche's remarks about the spirit "suddenly lost to us Germans through the arrogant behavior of the Jews" is merely the neophyte aping the master, I doubt. That Nietzsche's anti-Semitism was exaggerated by the Nazis I am sure. But that it existed, there seems to me no reason to doubt. If it is less spoken of in his later works, that is perhaps because he found more people to hate.