ABSTRACT
There is hardly a great artist round whom so much controversy has settled, and who has aroused - still arouses - such extremes of adulation and revulsion as Richard Wagner (1813-83). To seek the reasons for this is to uncover some of the fundamental truths of the German Romantic tradition and to understand the absoluteness of the claims it made. For Wagner makes unconditional demands upon his public, demands which some defiantly resist, to which some joyfully surrender, and to which others exhaustedly capitulate. ‘Daß das Romantische auf deutsch und in der Maske treuen Meistertums auf seinen Gipfel kam und seinen Welterfolg beging, war ihm seinem Wesen nach vorbestimmt,’ wrote Thomas Mann (Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners; Adel des Geistes, 1945, 470). That this Romantic climax should come in music, and that the ‘master’ should be Wagner, are but different ways of stating an equivalence which lies at the heart of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
