Why I don’t love Wagner anymore

It has been four years since I gave up opera criticism. The pandemic had struck, I had celebrated a significant birthday and had three decades at the grassroots level behind me – a quarter of a century at the telegraphand a previous post at this address. There were other things I wanted to do and after reviewing about 2,500 performances, I had said everything I wanted to say several times and knew it was time for other voices to be heard.

To be honest, I was becoming a little jaded. My blind spots – opera seria, the last eight mediocrities of Richard Strauss, Rossini’s annoying comedies – became a cancer, and even masterpieces like Tosca And The Magic Flute: no reflection on it, just the effect of overfamiliarity. “Don’t you miss it?” friends still ask. Absolutely not. I like to buy tickets now and then for “quality assured” performances with fabulous singers and let everything else take its course. To satisfy any pangs of nostalgia, I also have recordings and memories.

But something very strange has happened to my taste, something I had not expected and cannot explain: I have developed a violent and instinctive allergy to Wagner’s music. I cannot listen to it at all, and although it is quite easy to avoid it on stage or in the concert hall, when it happens to reach me on the radio, it provokes an almost nauseating disgust and something like embarrassment. It is simply too much.

This disillusionment should not happen. Once you see the light of Wagner, it only becomes more fascinating and seductive – or so we are told by clever minds like Michael Tanner and Roger Scruton (note their gender, by the way: women don’t play much of a role in this field). It is a life sentence that causes a physical addiction that enters your bloodstream and changes (perhaps poisons?) your view of the world. It is as much religion as art, something you believe in inexhaustibly and indelibly.

I was one of these paid Wagnerians. When I heard Reginald Goodall conduct in the 1970s, that was the first infection. Since then, I have made several pilgrimages to Bayreuth, at least ten ring cycles and scoured the archives to admire the legendary interpretations of Frida Leider and Hans Knappertsbusch. I was delighted by Nina Stemme’s Isolde, Waltraud Meier’s Kundry, Bryn Terfel’s Holländer. I admired Bernard Haitink’s Lohengrin and Christian Thielemann’s TannhäuserI have heard of Richard Jones’ production of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Stefan Herheims ParsifalAnd above all, there was a Parsifal in Munich in 2018, when a cast including Stemme, Jonas Kaufmann, Christian Gerhaher and Rene Pape under the direction of Kirill Petrenko rose together into a transcendentally sublime zone and left me speechless. Perhaps this was the point at which the tide turned: I had reached a climax and the level could not rise any higher.

Nietzsche presents the classic example of a Wagnerian apostate: after a long period of infatuation, he decided Parsifal was “all nerves, no muscles” and turned to the Mediterranean delights of Bizet’s Carmen instead. But complex personal and ideological considerations influenced his argument, and my case has a longer historical perspective and other symptoms. Wagner’s everyday viciousness does not particularly bother me. Even his notorious anti-Semitism – which must be considered alongside his caustic contempt for the British and French – seems to me so blatantly stupid that I can only ignore it, and, apart from commentators like Barry Millington, I do not think it has much influence on the operas. The real problem is that I am simply not convinced that Wagner’s librettos deserve the heavy intellectual attention they have enjoyed. They work within mainstream German Romanticism and are governed by Wagner’s innate sense of drama rather than metaphysics. In other words, I have the audacity to believe that they are not the philosophically sophisticated tracts that Scruton in particular would like to make them out to be.

For me, the ring is a thrilling story, an outstanding narrative achievement that works best as a cinema blockbuster (George Bernard Shaw noted how Twilight of the Gods followed all the conventions of Meyerbeer’s grand opera, which Wagner supposedly despised) and not a critique of capitalism or a gloss on Schopenhauer. The second act of the Tristan and Isolde offers a remarkably frank depiction of the rhythms of intense sexual intercourse, but does not convey anything profound about the reality of human love. Through the allegorical mists of ParsifalSpenglerian parables of European decadence and foreshadowings of Nazi racism have been discovered, but would an innocent eye on a clear day see anything solid except pseudo-Artusian nonsense in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites?

Wagner is the most demanding and imperious composer: he is not good at being quiet or – despite all the pious talk about “Pity‘ In Parsifal – sympathetic. He is not interested in nuance or irony. His music is, to use a fashionable term, immersive, and the problem with immersion is that you run the risk of being smothered or drowned out. There is no room for modesty in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (as there is in Mahler’s huge symphonies), and although Mastersingers contains a kind of flat comedy, but it lacks wit. Perhaps I have been corrupted by the restless anxieties of the TikTok era, but I resented the majestic tempo of the Wagnerian chronometer – how I have never missed the slow and somber first act of LohengrinI ask myself now – and my impatience has made me even more amazed at the mercurial lightness with which Debussy, deeply rooted in the model of Parsifal although he is, he turns ordinary language into melody Pelléas at Mélisande.

In my current state of mind, it seems to me that the best of Wagner’s music lies in his depictions of the natural world – the sunny forest interludes of Siegfriedfor example – where he seems to relax and become more human. Doctrinal old men with beards bring out the worst in him: two of his most blatant failures of artistic tact are the finger-wagging mark in Tristan and the preaching Gurnemanz in Parsifal. Let’s face it, they are so boring it makes your butt go numb and I sat there listening to their boring babble thinking it was my fault and if I just waited their wisdom would reveal itself. Eventually I got fed up and left.

I suspect this is just a phase and my former awe will return: I have had ups and downs with other composers, as we all have. Wagner will not go out of fashion, of course, and his influence has been so pervasive that it has become impossible to imagine what Western culture would be like without him. But that is part of the problem – he blocks the way, although many Wagner opponents have tried to force their way through the barriers.

I am not anti-Wagner – he is undeniably a great genius, even if he does not captivate me at the moment – but I realise that over the years I have been led to accept the view that Wagner’s operas represent the pinnacle of the art form, rather than just an episode in its ongoing history, embodying a limited range of aesthetic possibilities.

Well, that’s all over. After long being impressed by the greatness of what Wagner achieved, I’ve now realised what he didn’t achieve and I’m having so much fun with Haydn, Wolf, Poulenc and Ligeti, nice guys with no ambition to blow you away or change the world.