Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "19th-century"

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Wagner, in Magee’s words, was ‘the only major composer who seriously engaged with philosophy’, so any book looking at the philosophers he read is bound to be interesting.

And so it is - where Magee follows Wagner’s early interest in Feuerbach, his earth-shattering discovery of Schopenhauer, as well as the real reasons for Nietzsche’s break with the master (namely the fapping advice incident).

However, the book has a major glaring omission - Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau’s influence may have arrived too late to affect Wagner’s music and libretti, but Wagner’s fascination with his ideas was by all accounts a very strong one (although he rejected Gobineau’s pessimism, believing as he did in regeneration).

So, it would have been interesting to read about Gobineau’s ideas and how they affected the great man, but Magee dismisses Gobineau in a sentence or two as ‘unimportant’, when by all accounts he was W’s greatest philosophical discovery after Schopenhauer himself.

Magee seems to have written this book as a justification to his liberal friends as to why he likes Wagner so much, trying to make the latter seem philosophically ‘respectable’, but at the expense of truth. (To be fair, Magee lives in the UK, where it would be illegal to objectively discuss Gobineau’s ideas). So, while this book sheds valuable light on Wagner’s work, I can’t award it very high marks.



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