Wagner? A Materialist?

Continuing the line of thought I was following last Sunday, let us speak some more about Richard Wagner.

Some of my readers might have been surprised at Barzun's thesis, since it involves the inclusion of Richard Wagner, whose music dramas have a mystical, otherworldly cast to them, as part of a troika whose work led to the ubiquity of mechanistic materialism. How does Wagner belong on that short list?

As I understand Barzun's position here, there are three key points. The first involves the method of composition. The so-called "unending melody" of a Wagnerian opera is mechanically created, through an array of leitmotif, each expressing a definite character, idea, or object, so that when that character or object is on stage, or the libretto makes allusion to that idea, the musical development re-introduces the demanded motif, as an aural identification tag. It all strikes Barzun as materialistic, as if aural atoms are bumping into one another and randomly forming musical molecules.

The second key point involves the role of music itself within the larger theatrical context. His music, Barzun tells us, has no inherent appeal. Nobody would listen to the music itself for pleasure, in isolation from the story for which it provides accompaniment. The music is materialistic in that it does not stand on itself, as music of earlier eras had, but is a "program visibly objectified on the stage ... and the full dramatic program embodied in the philosophical commentary, and not simply in the libretto."

And, thirdly, that philosophical commentary to which would-be appreciators of Wagner's music are eventually directed is itself materialistic. Wagner resurrects the Norse gods in order to kill them all off, all in service of the Feuerbachian point that no God or gods created man -- men, as artists and as audiences, both create gods and dispose of them.

In his understanding of Wagner, Barzun has been seconded of late by Bryan Magee, author of The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (2000).