I gave my talk via Zoom to the Wagner Society Manchester on Wagner and Revolution. It wasn’t an academic study, though it did make use of a number of different books by people who are academics which I alluded to at the end of the talk – rather it was a summary for the interested lay person of issues around this subject, from the reading I’d done over the past few months.. There were four parts to the talk: 1. Wagner’s thoughts about the concept of revolution, and the background to that; 2. Wagner’s actual engagement with revolutionary activity; 3. Wagner’s operas and revolution; 4. Wagner’s impact on other revolutionaries . It was my overall thesis that Wagner held utopian socialist views in the 1840’s and early 1850’s, and that, though they later became less all-determining in his thinking, they contribute important elements to the development of The Ring, and remained with him till the end of his life. How to regenerate the modern world was throughout his life an abiding concern – though his operas have very different answers to those questions both in relation to each other and even within the one work. The literature on this subject is vast, and people’s perception of the importance of utopian socialism in the development of Wagner’s art is partially tinged by their own overarching political perspectives. In the talk I tried to retain a balanced perspective. I found lots of good books on the subjects – Mark Berry was particularly impressive, and Bryan Magee. A wonderful essay in the Wagner Companion from the 1970’s by Michael Tanner too – I used to be one of the ‘select’ group of undergraduates at his Sunday afternoon events listening to Wagner, the room at ?Corpus Christi dominated by huge blow-up photo portraits of Furtwangler, Nijinsky and Wittgenstein.
The talk seemed to go quite well – though it over-ran time-wise – and people said nice things afterwards…………About 40 or so people came along online
John's musical journey 