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.

But the one work of his which refuses to be more complicated than it originally appears to be is Tannhäuser, where the initial opposition between sensual and spiritual love remains just that, and the eponymous hero, or anti-hero, spends the opera torn between the two. Yet, of course, Wagner knew that life and love are not as simple as that, and indeed many of his other operas are at least partly devoted to showing how shallow the contrast between the flesh and the spirit, as made in much traditional religion and philosophy, is.

What is more bewildering, and makes Tannhäuser more interesting than it might appear, is that one character in it, Elisabeth, realises, not wholly to her delight, that love isn’t a straightforward matter, and finds herself, movingly, struggling with thoughts and feelings which she didn’t realise she could have — thoughts and feelings which are the effect on her of meeting Tannhäuser and hearing him sing, for the opera is partly about the effect that singing can have on people, and what impels them to song.