Fair enough. If you'd like to elaborate on that I'd be fascinated to hear what you have to say.
Well, briefly, Wagner was, in the context of mid-19th century music, an arch-modernist and even a radical. Contrast with, say, Brahms, who was his great rival and a much more conservative voice. His harmonic language was far more complex and difficult than many of his contemporaries- the most famous example of this being
Tristan and Isolde, which starts with a really hard-to-place harmony and doesn't get a proper cadence until the very end
four hours later. These harmonies don't seem so radical now, given all his imitators, but they were at the time. Also, a a
lot of the weirder 20th century stuff that makes it seem more normal was, in fact, a direct reaction against Wagner (say, the Impressionists or Stravinsky), or the logical next step (Schoenberg- who started out in much the same complex post-Romantic vein and evolved to the 12-tone system after a longer time period than you might think).
In terms of staging and lyrics and such, he took an unprecedented level of control over all of it in much the same way that modernist-inclined filmmakers would later brand themselves "auteurs". (Example: writing his own libretti.) The idea was given the name
Gesamtkunstwerk and it is a deeply modernist way of creating and thinking about art. He tried, and largely succeeded in, turning opera from high-class entertainment into High Art- the whole "dim the lights and complete silence from the audience" schtick was basically
invented by Wagner in his attempt to make the stage a temple for his new and radical art, sweeping away the follies of the past.
And, to further elaborate, the choice to put all this Great German* Profundity into
opera- sorry, oops, "music drama"- was itself another decision that, for its time, was a marker of the radicals. The thinking was that Beethoven's 9th, which added chorus, had exhausted the "pure symphony" and a New Art that built on that would have to fuse music and drama- that is, opera. Contrast again with Brahms, who wrote symphonies but nary a single opera.
Oh, and also, there are his writings, which make it even more clear:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_and_Revolutionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artwork_of_the_Futureand... um...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Judenthum_in_der_MusikObviously it's hard to see all of that behind the Viking helmets and the anti-Semitism. And, sure, he didn't have the same love of the machine that the Italian Futurists did. But, adjusting for his different time and place, he was very into forging that New Art of the Future, in a way that indeed was similarly
simpatico with the more revolutionary aspects of Fascism.
...
For what it's worth I can't stand Wagner's actual music, even
without taking into account his horrid politics. But even I can't deny his incalculable influence on the entire classical world, and a lot of stuff I
do like does owe him a debt one way or another.
...
* And yes, obviously, the fact that this Profundity was German matters a great deal.
Poll
