Tristan Chord

I'm a careful fellow yet I make quite a claim in the title of this review; and I confidently stand by it. Wagner has stimulated an enormous bibliography, but most of it is biography and/or polemics regarding the man himself or else "way out" (e.g. Jungian) interpretations of his art. Surprisingly little criticism of real seriousness pertains to the actual music. Bryan McGee's book magnificently fills that gap. It is not a musical analysis per se, but a study of Wagner's changing philosophical values and how they influenced his music...and there is no composer in history who was a more acute intellectual than Wagner and more influenced in his art by ideas. You cannot fully understand his art without this book...it is that seminal. And it does not pertain only to "Tristan und Isolde," despite the title. It covers the entire sweep of Wagner's output. Mr. McGee brings to his text the virtues which previously made him an outstanding author in "popularizing" philosophy: clarity, honesty, common sense, and even-handed weighing of the evidence. I hesitate to say he "popularized" philosophy. That could suggest a "dumbing down." And that is definitely not this book. It is crystal clear for a layman yet it is a scholar's dream in substance...a rare combination. The book is an absolute must for anyone who has ever been moved by Richard Wagner's music...and perhaps even for those who have wondered why the rest of us are so moved by it. I cannot recommend it enough. There are only two other texts in the last century which compare, in my opinion: 1) Ernest Neumann's multi-volumn biography of Wagner; and 2) Deryk Cooke's "I Saw the World End," (first published 1979), which is the definitive (if incomplete) analysis of Wagner's "Ring." If you love Wagner's music, or want to investigate it, this book is both a delight and a "must."

This book, 380 pages in length, is a perfect book for those people who love Wagnerian operas and want to learn more without having to plough through a heavy tome which 9 out of 10 readers never finish. The author, Bryan Magee, intelligently wites to the lay reader. His explanation of philosophers such as Nietzche, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer and others who helped form Wagner's thinking, is easy to follow and brilliantly shows how Wagner developed and merged philosophy and music. Wagner changed music. One cannot recommend this book more highly to those interested in learning what made one of the great composers tick and how he is often misunderstood. It is a treasure trove of information and is well laid out. A great read. Bravo, Mr. Magee.

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.

There aren't many composers whose philosophical views are of such crucial, and controversial, importance as Wagner's. But this is not because Wagner was an important philosopher. As Magee shows, Wagner's thinking should not be too readily dismissed. Wagner was no philosophical dilletante. He was awesomely well-read in the philosophy, philology and linguistics of his day, in addition to his vast reading in literature ancient and "modern", in history, myth, and the history of myth, and much more. And he was an intelligent and sometimes extraordinarily perceptive man, whose erudition was not just for showing off with but of vital importance to his thought and work. However Wagner believed, wrongly, that his intuition was as sure a guide in the world of ideas as it was in music and drama. So his philosophical writings follow his intuitions, not his reasoning - indeed he seems to avoid reasoning, except in small bursts, out of principle. His writing is therefore irrational and self-contradictory, obscure in the worst German manner: neither original (except accidentally, where he achieves originality by misunderstanding a source, particularly Schopenhauer), nor lucid, nor "true". "True", that is, in the sense of being based on "matters of fact or reason". So his philosophy is not, despite what Wagner probably thought, of much importance in its own right. It is mainly important because it permeates and influences his major works, which are among the few most endlessly fascinating human creations of any kind. The increasingly Buddhist resignation, withdrawal from the world, of his later works are steeped in Schopenhauerian doctrine, just as the leftist radicalism of the earlier works are steeped in the work of the libertarian democratic-socialist Feuerbach. Magee's book is invaluable in tracing the effect of these and other philosophers on Wagner's work. _Tristan und Isolde_, for example, was indeed written in the white heat of a love affair, but that love was Wagner's love of Schopenhauer, not of Matthilde Wesendonck. Wagner's philosophical ideas are important to his work in a way that seems true of no other composer. Mozart's use of Masonic symbols in _Zauberflöte_ and elsewhere (eg his "three" chords, three maidens, three boys, etc) has never seemed more than skindeep, almost flippant, references, while in Wagner the philosophical ideas cut deep both with the drama and the characters. Magee shows how the many complex layers and depths of works like the _Ring_, Tristan_, _Parsifal_, and even the earlier Romantic operas like _Lohengrin_ and _Tannhäuser_, can never be fully explored without an understanding of Wagner's key ideas: the futility and evil of power-seeking and conquest, the struggle of the artist to escape from, and yet redeem, the constricting culture in which they operate, the desirability of losing the world by annihilating one's one ego-consciousness, the value of the irrational and of dream, and much else. There is another, hopefully tem

The author, Bryan Magee, modestly states in his preface that: "There is never any suggestion that I am giving a full explanation of [Wagner's] works by what I say in these pages: I am merely drawing attention to some of the ideas that went into them." While it is true that is book is focused on Wagner's philosophy (both in the broad and narrower senses of the word) and how this philosophy influenced and affected his works, he also succinctly and brilliantly covers Wagner's biography and personality. If you have never read a book on Wagner, this would be a marvelous place to start. Magee's basic argument is that to really understand and appreciate Wagner's mature operas you need to understand Schopenhauerian philosophy and Wagner's metaphysical beliefs. He then proceeds to explain Wagner's ideas in a prose style that is straight-forward, extraordinarily lucid and brimming with profound insights. But while the heart of the book is the exposition of Wagner's philosophical beliefs and the affect on his music, there is so much more. As the book jacket blurb says accurately, the book is "at once a biography of the composer, an exploration of the creative process, an account of 19th century opera and an investigation of the intellectual and technical aspects of music". It is really a wonderful addition to Wagner literature. Magee, it should be noted, is also the author of "Aspects of Wagner", which is a marvelous collection of five short pieces examining, yes, different aspects of Wagner. One of the pieces in that book is about Wagner's anti-Semitism, primarily placing Wagner's views in historical context. In Tristan's Chord, he compliments that earlier essay with an appendix which explores Wagner's anti-Semitism and its ramifications more fully than his earlier piece. It is a balanced and well-supported argument on this most controversial and inflammatory topic.