Steve Schwartz wrote:

>Of course, at this point it doesn't matter how big an SOB Wagner was.
>He and everybody who knew him are dead.  We will never find ourselves at
>a party in which he is a fellow guest.  All we have is his work - in short,
>the best of him.  However, while we can admire the work, I don't see why we
>must admire the man as well.

I don't think we can draw that clear a distinction in W.'s case.
The works are so personal and deal so directly with Wagner's political
and philosophical ideas that you can't divorce them from the man - and
for that reason, I don't think I, for one, will ever be able to admire
his works unresearvedly.  Just to take the hackneyed example of the
Mastersingers (I'm not talking about the supposed anti-semitic references
some researchers claim to have found in the opera).  Despite all Nazi
co-option, you can't honestly deny that it's in many ways hard to find a
more warm-spirited and humane work.  But how much more meanspirited does
that make the ending look, with Beckmesser's unredeemed disgrace and the
undignified warnings against the danger of Frenchified culture from
across the border? (a question here to people who know the score of the
Mastersingers intimately:  is it at all musically feasible to cut out the
bit about 'welscher Tand' etc, leaving the 'good' parts about honouring
the German masters and German Art surviving the German State?)

The fact is, Wagner's operas reflect the man, and both are richly and
often uncomfortably paradoxical and inconsistent.  But for this very reason
Thomas Mann rightly considered W.  one of the most interesting and fully
representative of 19th century figures.

Felix Delbruck
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