Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music

Occasionally in life one encounters a biography so insightful, so rich in detail and so beautifully written that it nearly transcends its subject and stands as a work of art unto itself. It is in this category that Gutman's masterpiece belongs. There is so much to learn from this historiographical account of the great composer's life that one scarecely knows where to begin praising it. Best of all, in the Ernest Newman tradition, Gutman shows us the real Wagner, warts and all, and traces the all-too-tangible line leading from the composer's pen to the Nazi nightmare. At times shocking, Gutman's work "opens the kimono" on the breeding ground of hatred and racism that Bayreuth became, and the composer's steadily increasing obsession with the Jews. He offers incontrovertible proof, now widely accepted and expounded on in the indispensable works of Rose and Weiner and Zelinsky, of how Wagner incorporated these racist ideal into his operas. At the same time, Gutman recognizes the incredible genius of his subject, and praises the works mightily. His account is always balanced, fair and backed by evidence. It is no wonder the Wagner apologists have criticized this book heavily, while the leading musical journals and book reviewers have blessed it with near-unanimous acclaim: Many simply cannot bear the fact that their favorite composer directly influenced Hitler and had a streak of true evil in him. Gutman bravely shatters myths and shows us Wagner for what he truly was: a composer of incomparable gifts and a human being of precious few qualities. If you haven't read this book yet, I strongly recommend you explore it now.

This is an extraordinary book -- on a par with Maynard Solomon's Mozart -- but don't just take my word for it. The New York Times Book Review called it the "richest and best-accomplished single volume on Wagner in English." The late Paul Hume, himself no slouch as a musician, musicologist, and critic, called it "superb."In 455 dense pages, Gutman, retired as a university professor and lecturer at Bayreuth, chronicles the comings and goings of Richard Wagner's life, probes the recesses of his often messy mind and his frequently strained relationships with other artists, lovers, thinkers, political figures, and hangers on, examines the development of his ever-changing esthetic, and analyzes the novelty of his music and, more importantly, the sometimes bourgeois, sometimes frightening sentiments of his words. As a reader, it helps to have some prior familiarity with the plots of Wagner's operas and with nineteenth-century European intellectual history.Gutman's central thesis is that, as a composer of music, Wagner was a genius; as a poet, he was barely literate; and as a human being, he was egomaniacal, boorish, uneducated, greedy, opinionated in the extreme, and racist. In 1968, when Gutman first advanced this thesis, Wagner was enjoying a resurgence of critical acclaim as a poet. Otherwise there is nothing to be surprised by here. The composer's problems with patrons and creditors, his voracious sexual appetites, his meretricious relationship with King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the appeal of the composer's operas to Hitler and hence to the Third Reich, his involvement in the events of 1848, and his anti-semitism have long been well known.In developing his thesis, Gutman displays an encyclopedic understanding, not only of letters, libretti, Wagner's own vague scribblings (whether in support of revolution or a diet of vegetables), and other primary sources for a biography, but also of the political and intellectual context in which Wagner's life was played out. Nietzsche, Lizst, Kaiser Wilhelm, Metternich, the mistresses of the Jockey Club, Goethe, and Ulysses S. Grant march, leap, and slide effortlessly through these pages. Gutman's writing is lucid, rich, and spiced with urbane humor.Thus, for example, Gutman writes that the failure of the first Bayreuth festival of 1876 apparently turned Wagner -- previously a romantic rebel and always a staunch atheist -- away from a belief in inevitable advance toward higher forms just as he was composing what he knew would be his final opera, Parsifal. The result was profoundly unchristian. "Monsalvat was Wagner's paranoiac concept of a small self-contained elite group, uniquely possessed of the truth, obsessed with its 'purity,' and struggling with an outside world it held worthless. Redemption was promised the hard-pressed knights, but, obviously, the Wagnerian redeemer was not to be found among Jewish craftsmen or lepers. Not by accident did Guernemanz almost immediately remark upon Parsifal's noble, highborn a

This is probably the best single-volume biography of Richard Biographies of Richard Wagner, the most controversial of all composers, abound, and selecting the single "best" one is no easy task. After reading perhaps 20 such biographies, I would have to name Gutman's the most informative, the most thorough and, with no competition to speak of, the most beautifully written. (I recommend it especially for readers who already have a basic knowledge of Wagner's life and works.) Readers who want a highly detailed account of Wagner's every move would be best served by Ernest Newman's multi-volume biography, which will probably always stand as the definitive English-language account of the composer's life. Those with less time and patience, however, will find Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music an incomparable resource. Far more than a detailed biography, the book offers the reader a total "sociographic" picture of Wagner's time, including the artistic and political mentality that helped shape Wagner's thinking. Gutman is scathing in his examination of Wagner's anti-Semitism, which he sees as a direct influence on the policies of that most famous of Wagnerians, Adolf Hitler. Gutman's knowledge of the 19th century is astounding. My sole "complaint" with the book is its relatively sketchy treatment of Wagner's music and compositional techniques. The discussion of Wagner's hamonies and use of leitmotives is good but cursory, and leaves the reader thirsting more. Nevertheless, Gutman's work stands above most other Wagner biographies I have read, and is certainly a "must-read" for all hard-core Wagnerians such as myself