Vapid Wagner

It is characteristic of Wagner’s operas, in their remarkable urgency and depth, that initially one thinks they are dealing with one or another opposition, for instance, Power versus Love in the Ring, only to find, as one gets further into them, that they are very much more complicated than that, and often that what seems to be their subject matter is not what actually is.

It is characteristic of Wagner’s operas, in their remarkable urgency and depth, that initially one thinks they are dealing with one or another opposition, for instance, Power versus Love in the Ring, only to find, as one gets further into them, that they are very much more complicated than that, and often that what seems to be their subject matter is not what actually is. Probably Wagner was as surprised as we are by what he found himself to be fundamentally concerned with – plenty of passages in his letters and in Cosima’s diaries suggest that he was.