WAGNERISM

Richard Wagner was arguably the most important figure in nineteenth- century opera. He was certainly the most controversial, especially when it came to his theoretical and polemical prose, to the ambitious stage-pieces that occupied the last thirty-five years of his life (Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers, the four-opera Ring cycle and Parsifal) and to his establishment in 1876 of the Festival Theatre at Bayreuth in Bavaria for the performance of his works. Factions pro and con formed and skirmished, with the composer's admirers coming to be known as ‘Wagnerites’, ‘wagnéristes’ and so on. Their Wagnerism – a term already current in English in the 1860s – was of several often-overlapping stripes. For many of the music-lovers among them, the appeal lay simply in Wagner's music as such: the ‘unending melody’, the new harmonic richness, the ‘Leitmotifs’, the apocalyptic climaxes. Some of its admirers (to the annoyance of Wagner himself) called it ‘the music of the future’, and its influence on other composers could be heard in a host of scores for opera house and concert hall from roughly the 1870s to the 1910s. For other Wagnerites the appeal lay in the achievement of their composer-librettist hero in annexing the resources of the ‘grand opera’ and nascent national opera of previous decades, transforming them through an intense, quasi-‘Greek’ focus on the action, characters and momentous issues of the plot, and so creating engrossing ‘music dramas’ somewhat akin in performance to religious RITUAL and hence magically appropriate to ‘temple’ ambiences like that of Bayreuth. (Wagner's wizardry in this had an especial appeal for French and Russian SYMBOLISTS.) A third Wagnerism gave priority to one issue that was to be found in differing forms throughout the later operas: the overthrow or purification of an inadequate old order, impelled by hopes for some kind of regeneration-renewal-redemption. This was read in various ways. Some admirers, such as Bernard Shaw in his account of the first three Ring operas (The Perfect Wagnerite, 1898), saw it as an image of social/socialist REVOLUTION reflecting Wagner's own leftist revolutionary activities of half a century before. The Russian poet Alexander Blok similarly felt in 1918 that ‘when revolution begins to sound in the air, Wagner's art resounds in response’.