Wagner and philosophy - you must be in heaven...

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270501 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 424 pages

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Customer Reviews

Cannot do without it!
For anyone wanting to understand the many and various influences on Wagner's work, this book will explain clearly those influences, including political, philosophical, dramatic. It doesn't pretend to bring consistency to the works of this great composer, but it does successfully bring understanding to the influences involved.

Twilight of the idol
I went into this book knowing the Wagner, Schopenhauer/Buddhist and Nietzche connection. This book was a major explicator of all these themes.
The book's greatest highlight for me was a precis on Kant's philosophy and how it linked with Schopenhauer's eventual world view. The concepts of phenomena and noumena are well explained, and there is a brilliant vision of the occidental philosophical grasp of reality in the romantic era. Certainly, these German philosphers were brilliant and sufficiently detached to transcend their cultural outlook and fly over it.

To me the book did not wade deeply enough into Nietzche and Schopenhauer but this was obviously not the author's objective and his treatments though non voluminous are comprehensive. On the other hand the book is also a eulogy of Wagner and was certainly a bit subjective as the author pours over some of the operas and gives a great deal of over zealous details, which a reader unfamiliar with the stuff may want to pass over in preference to actually getting the CD (telling us what to buy would have spared most of the description).

The author uses the book as a stage from which to demolish Wagner's neo-Nazi credentials and he gives the low down as to why Nietzche abandoned Wagner, using the composer to enhance Nietzche's reputation at the same time as ridiculing the composer later on.

Whether Wagner was really that philosophical compared to any other great composer (the philosophical interests of which are less known) as the author contends is debatable. That the composer drew on the finest German philosophy and myth available to him is not in doubt. My own impression is that Wagner was a sort of Walt Disney (leaving aside the former's compositional genius which Walt probably needed more of) who cherry picked using his tremendous intelligence all the finest resonances of German culture, poetry and the new religions emerging and transformed them to music that all people would be moved by. Wagner appears to have been deeply religious though how sincere this was is another matter. He did worship Schopenhauer and appears to have been eternally grateful to his Eastern world renouncing ideas. Wagner succeeded better than any other composer in fulfilling his wildest dreams amd ambitions and being able to awe the public in his very lifetime. The secret of some of this success is revealed in this great book.