Dr. Satoshi Akima quotes:

>Hitler ranting "to understand Wagner one must first understand
>Wagner" ...

I'd no idea Hitler had such a metaphysical wit.  If Dr Akima is quoting
him correctly, the Fuhrer's epigram is worthy to stand beside Bob Hope's
classic dictum that "Wagner is the Puccini of music".

Dr Akima writes fairly of Thomas Mann's ambivalence towards Wagner, an
ambivalence which is most tellingly expressed in "Doktor Faustus", a novel
which anybody interested in the philosophy of music and politics will find
rich fare.

On one point, though, our Doctor seriously over-eggs his pudding.  Mann
did not "damn Wagner" for failing to provide "a solution to all immediate
political woes of the world." On the contrary, he could not find in Wagner
the Olympian detachment which Mann valued above all artistic qualities (see
"Joseph and his Brothers" passim.) He further quotes Mann:

>"The German Spirit is essentially socially and politically
>disinterested and profoundly alien to these spheres". It is
>the sort of argument that would lead one to the conclusion that
>Schumann's 'Kreisleriana', or Mahler's Wunderhorn works were
>National Socialist through and through.

Why on earth should anyone think that? Dr Akima perhaps confuses
"disinterested" with "uninterested".  Mann did not feel that art without
politics was possible - read "Doktor Faustus" again, with its subtle
analysis of that glorious spirit of Teutonic Barbarism of which the author
takes Wagner's operas as the prime example.  Mann recognised with regret
that impartiality towards politics - the cold weather-eye, not to be
confused with indifference, of a Shakespeare - was about the best we
mortals could manage.

Wagner has many virtues, but political indifference is not one of them, as
so many contributions to this thread have ably demonstrated.  Dr Akima's
feverish picture of the "Desert Island Disks" session in Hitler's bunker
demonstrates precisely why politics lies at the very heart of the Wagner
Problem.  Hitler's understanding of his Musical God was horribly partial,
as Dr Akima has so often admonished us; but the Fuhrer was surely not far
out in discerning the fundamental political thrust of the Master's work.

That thrust - German Nationalism and its ramifications - is the specific
problem we have with Wagner's politics today.  There is a deeper one, which
is his dark negativity about human existence - that same Schopenhauerian
dimension so lyrically adopted by Dr Akima.  Many of us find this negation,
Wagner's vote for death over life, easily the most problematic thing about
him.

It is also, I might delicately suggest, why the life-worshipping Verdi,
the optimistic Italian nationalist rather than the fatalistic German, is
finally the more liberating, the more satisfying artist ...  but I don't
wish to offer this particular red rag to Dr Akima's bull!

Christopher Webber,
Blackheath, London, UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm "ZARZUELA!"