W

Wagner’s work has often been described in

terms of its paradoxes. Yet the fact that these

paradoxes reveal so much about the nine-

teenth century is due to Wagner’s having

been a dramatist as much as a composer. He

championed a socialist Utopia free from

financial cares where the pursuit of art could

be held as the highest ideal: yet subtly he

reinforced the Christian-bourgeois morality

of his day. He was an idealist and, for the

most part, an optimist, yet death cast the

longest shadow over his work. He unleashed

in his music a liberating new sensuality and

energy, while arguing dramatically that

redemption could be achieved only through

sublimation, renunciation and self-sacrifice.

He worked on a massive scale, but was

celebrated for his unprecedented sensitivity to

detail. As an artist, he was particular to the

point of pedantry, but used his art to preach

anti-intellectualism and a recognition of

nature as the teacher of spontaneity. And

while his operatic reforms and innovations

were radical and international in their influ-

ence, they were, at the same time, rooted in a

vast cultural and philosophical learning, and

in mythic sources that were conspicuously

German. Nowadays these opposites may

readily be understood as interdependent. But

earlier judgements of Wagner have, not sur-

prisingly, been characterized by significant

contradictions: he has been seen both as the