A piece in Prospect tries to untangle the lessons of the story:
So Wagner has a reply to Feuerbach, and to Feuerbach’s other great disciple, Karl Marx, namely: stop looking to politics for your salvation. But stop expecting from love anything more than it demands: which is sacrifice. It is a harsh moral, but a true one.The piece is worth reading.
Wagner has a bad rep being associated with the Nazis. The German Nationalists would have wanted his norse sagas on their side for propaganda reasons, even after he was dead.
ReplyDeleteBut the music is its own language, and one can infer and deduce what he was feeling from his music. Depending on how it is executed.
The Japanese, have also been quite taken with Wagner's operas or the norse sagas. Probably some appeals to them in comparison to Shintoism and the worship of the various kami or divine spirits of the land.