Rating: 
Summary: Illuminating
Review: This book is an investigation of the relationship between Wagner's art and his intellect. Bryan Magee, who has been both an academic philosopher and a music critic, is uniquely qualified to describe this relationship. The book is based on Magee's careful analysis of both Wagner's music and Wagner's voluminous writings, including his autobiographical works, letters, and polemical writings on art theory. Magee is also an expert on 19th century German philosophy.Magee presents Wagner as both a great creative artist and a substantial self-conscious intellectual. Magee shows that Wagner made a conscious effort to shape his art to match philosophical/ideological concerns. Wagner's philosophical/idoelogical preoccupations did vary over the course of his life and this resulted in differences in content and forms of his operas. Magee is careful to demonstrate consistent themes (dare I say leitmotifs) throughout this artistic career. These include disgust with contemporary society, strong belief in the importance of love, and a conviction that Wagner's art could have a transforming effect on contemporary life. Magee shows well that Wagner was initially a political radical and German nationalist with strong anarchist leanings. Under the distant influence of Hegel and the more immediate influence of Feuerbach, Wagner rejected contemporary society, conventional religion and mores, and believed strongly in the redemptive power of love, particularly sexual passion. Along with the idea that he could create an integrated music drama with equal roles for poetry, dramatic expression, and music, these ideas strongly color his early successful operas and writings about artistic theory. Wagner began the Ring cycle with these ideas in mind and intended that the Ring cycle would be an essentially revolutionary document, an incitment to the destruction of contemporary society. Midway through the lengthy gestation of the Ring cycle, Wagner underwent a conversion experience after he encountered the work of Schopenhauer. Magee treats Wagner's experience with Schopenhauer sensitively. He shows that Wagner's embrace of Schopenhauer was based on very careful reading and analysis of Schopenhauer's work. Magee shows also that Wagner's enthusiasm for Schopenhauer resulted from the fact that Wagner's considerable intellect was already moving towards conclusions reached by Schopenhauer. Wagner's later work is shown to be a combination of Schopenhauerian ideas translated brilliantly into powerful music and opera. Magee is an excellent writer with a warm, conversational style. As intellectual history this book is first-rate and it is highly accessible. A bonus of this book is that it is an excellent introduction to 19th intellectuals like Schopenhauer and Feuerbach whose work is largely unknown here. As an aside, Magee makes it clear that important ideas usually associated with Freud originally derive from Schopenhauer and Feuerbach. Magee provides also a very good chapter on Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner and an appendix on Wagner's anti-semitism. The former contains what I think is Magee's only misstep. He attributes Nietzsche's descent into insanity as being partly due to Nietzsche's realization that he would never be the creative artist that Wagner became. This is unlikely. Better explanations are that Nietzsche suffered from dementia due to tertiary syphlis or simply developed severe and probably idiopathic depression. The section on Wagner's anti-semitism is clear, unsparing but also vigorously attacks those who judge Wagner solely on this basis. Magee puts Wagner's anti-semitism in context and rebuts claims that his operas exemplify anti-semitism.
Rating:
Summary: Wagner- One, Two, Three
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A real Wagner appreciation
Review: This is another wonder by the illuminated Brian Magee, just an intelligent most illustrated thinker. It's a lot saying. There are many people arround writing and writing unuseful complexities that do not mean anything. And other group that's builded by talkers of unsense long speeches. And a third who are the readers and listeners of those clowns, respectively. And still a fourth one who give ridiculous lectures trying to explain the mature Wagner works in three sentences in front of an inadequate public that's coming to listen Il Trovatore the day before. Any word and any sentence inside this sensational book is a deep teaching one, that contributes to understand not only Wagner's thoughts but the thoughts of those who influenced him. The first two readings of this book have convinced me, even more than before, that mature Wagner's works are not suposed to be performed and spoiled during regular "opera seasons", but in special sequences dedicated to Wagnerians. This last word is suposed to mean intelligent, learning and normal people that have already discovered that Wagner, the mature, is not just a composer or spectacular entertainer but a complete and complex artist. For enjoying the mature Wagner, it's absolutely mandatory to have a minimal understanding of a lot of matters that are confluent in the result of his mature works, not the less, philosophy. And the so called average "operatic" persons are not precisely this type of people, but epidermic sentimental ones who usually sleep during mature Wagner performances, waiting for the Hollywoody transformed and misunderstood long orchestral pieces -that isolated means nothing-. In summary, a book that cannot be avoided by anybody who pretends to be a Wagnerian in the whole extent of the word, and who is capable to be.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for Perfect Wagnerites
Review: Wagner's later works defy classification and are impossible to overestimate in greatness. The importance of this book is that it helps both to explain why and also to help those of us obsessed with Wagner's art to enjoy it without guilt. Most Wagner commentators point to a moment when his operas leave the world of the great and soar to unbelievable heights. Ernest Newmann says it is the third act of Siegfried. McGee, however, says it is the first act of Die Walküre (many Wagnerites favorite act famously commented on in Mann's short story Wälsungenblut) and explains why. In his view it is Wagner's discovery of Schopenhauer. This is the first time a philosopher has examined Schopenhauer's influence on Wagner in depth (they never met or corresponded) and the result is a fascinating insight into musical works of bottomless depth and beauty. The Gramophone, when it reviewed the first stereo recording of the Ring, declared that the Ring was the greatest achievement of a single human mind. Perhaps, what this book has done, is show that the achievement was one of, not one but, two human minds.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid
Review: Wow. I just finished this book. I had admired this author's brief study "Aspects of Wagner" for years. Now there's a full-length pendant to it. Magee is simply wonderful in his common-sense explanations of complex philosophical problems and their applications to Wagner's works. Likewise his no-nonsense approach to Wagner's anti-semitism and his later adoption by the Nazis. I recommend this book to anyone who takes Wagner's works seriously as among the greatest products of Western civilization.
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