What tends to arouse Wagner's hatred is not his music. Despite knowing that the poet died in 1883, many judge him because of his link to Wagner’s National Socialism. An example of this is the documentary Stephen Fry On Wagner that Patrick McGrady did in 2010 for the BBC 4. Fry asks permission from Jewish cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfish, who was at Auschwitz, to attend the Bayreuth festival and asks him: “Do I betray my Jewish being listening to Wagner?” Lasker-Wallfish smiles and tells him that in the concentration camp they did not touch Wagner: "I'm not going to ban anyone from listening to Wagner. In addition, if it were music without drama, I don’t think there are arguments against it.”

Theodor Adorno particularly insisted on the protophasist defense of Wagner’s work, written in 1937-38 and published in 1952 in Wagner in search (Versuch über Wagner). Why is Wagner worth saving? (Why is Wagner Worth Saving? As summarized in the 2005 preamble), for Adorno Wagner’s opera is a monument to the treacherous revolution, paradoxically linked to the conservative denial of capitalist modernity and the fight against the formal elements of fetish with goods. Ironically, Zizek points out that in the 1950s and 1960s Adorno gradually had the rest of Wagner’s most optimistic opinion and that, therefore, being faithful to Adorno’s succession and reabilizing Wagner would be the same. Another hypothesis is that the Frankfurt School was criticizing itself when it unveiled the resentment it felt for the leitmotivs, because they were the musical equivalent of those lexicalized formulas that it generated frequently.

In any case, it would be worth remembering some data to those who sow the flag of protophasism: In 1922, the PNF that led Mussolini to power was founded in 1921; and in 1933 Hitler was a candidate for NSDAP in 1920. Therefore, at best, the poet is credited with being an inspiration for the structures that emerged within the three decades of the author's death. According to Zizek at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair, statistics show that the Nazis were particularly fond of Verdi and Puccini: Ten years before 1933 and ten years later, measuring the number of representations, Wagner is the great loser. It is a good symptom to hear the melodies of the Nazi propaganda documentary Triumph des Willens, by Leni Riefenstahl, to realize that the musical drama has no place and that military bands, fanfarres and charanges predominate. The Nazi aesthetic and ideology corresponded to Carl Orff's stage cantatas.

The fallacy Reductio ad Hitlerum brings the debate to a clumsy border, for example, when it is known that the musician received a fierce contempt as he went through the feathers of Heidegger, the philosopher of the regime. As it reminds us, despite Nietzsche’s quarrel with Wagner, “both were symbols of the regime.” However, those who want to clarify that Wagner is anti-Semitic are looking for evidence, since in 1850 the author made clear his opinion of the Jewish world in his musical work. In the second death of the opera (La Seconde morte de l'opèra, 2006) Zizek clearly explains the personal connection of the composer with the often wandering character, Jew par excellence: Tannhäuser himself, Dutch or Wotan (which in the third chapter of the Tetralogy is called the Traveller).

et quandmême

Wagner used the myths. The Greeks mixed them with the pagans of Scandinavia to build the tetralogy of the Nibelungoes ring. According to Adorno, when the characters of the musical dramas express themselves, it is clear that some of the characters (Alberich, Hagen and Mime) represent the stereotype of the Jew. With Mendigo Wagner as a great success, he was the head of a Jew who used to beat Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer.

However, it is an idea that has emerged for decades, that the historicist decoders realized by Adorno are not as clear as they seem. The characters would be more complicated than at first glance. Furthermore, the prejudice with regard to the Jewish quarter at that time would not be reflected so clearly. Moreover, Tetralogy, in itself, would be a ferocious criticism of the fact that the gods, and especially the Wotan, do not behave as they should behave. Wotan, who has had all the pleasures of love, suddenly wants power. On the other hand, an ugly being that has nothing, bets on love. But the girls of the Rhine no longer listen to him in the world that sends the money. Aware of this, it has no choice but to steal the gold of the Rhine: gold is the road to love. It is quite clear, therefore, that the initial sin is not – as in the case of the racist thesis and classical anti-Semitism – the problem posed by some exogenous element: it is the gods who do not know how to behave well. In any case, foreign sin would be a small-scale response. The opposition (that of the gods and the Nibelungs) that is manifested is nothing more than the result of the internal contradiction of Wotan.

Love or power

Before tetralogy he had regularly represented the theme of love. This is not the place for his murmurs of affection, but it must be borne in mind that, although he was a small and big man, from the beginning the author was successful with the women. He combined with death the theme of love in Tristan and in Isolda. In the Tannhäuser opera they faced two ways of loving: the pagan love of antiquity – the meat – and medieval Christian love – the religious. In addition to the love and power faced in tetralogy, other topics are discussed: incestuous love for the mother, asexuality, homosexuality (Siegfried blindly adorns Brünhilde in a guerrilla dress and is surprised to learn that she is a woman), radical women without mercy (Fricka), repentance, redemption, adoptive paternity.

Freud's or Lacan's friends can find never-ending material, but not just them. This was demonstrated by Marxian George Bernard Shaw in 1898, The Perfect Wagnerite, to change the view of those who “believe that tetralogy is a battle for a ring between half a dozen characters.” A Commentary on Niblung's Ring in the text. For Shaw, what is said is “the trap in the face of the horror that shakes the world.” In Boulez's representations since the 1980s, the new form of slavery of industrial capitalism in the working class is highlighted more. It seems that Wagner got the inspiration by reading in England the conditions of the working class of Engels.

Transition message

In this sense, he proposes “to analyze the relationship with Wagner Adorno”. Because Wagner creates the form as “transformation of form,” and like any other can’t build “unformed music.” Each of his works has “a different color, identifiable from the first bars”.

Wagner’s formal features “are characterised rather ambiguously.” To revolutionize the genre of opera, Christoph Willibald von continued Gluck's works in the 18th century, according to which music was at the service of poetry. And that was one of Wagner's goals, a kind of return to the Greek tragedy. His works are called musical drama, and in his essays The Work of the Future (1849) and Opera and Drama (1850) exposes his theories. From the beginning he had his music in Grundthem or his main themes. The need to control every artistic process was developed under the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) from Tetralogy. In addition to narrative and musical elements, he also dealt with pictorial and scenic issues. The Wagnerian drama that sought to break the vain fun of the Italian and French opera of the time and the sensationalist prominence of the singers also put the hidden orchestra under the drama.Aunque for
Nietzsche is nothing more than a transition in the music of Wagner, the director Pierre Boulez stresses that the potential of the Wagnerians lies in transformation, in the metamorphic.

Special accusations of complaint and defence lawyers

He says that behind Nietzsche's insults and contempt is the most ardent passion of his life. His main reproach to Wagner was to bet on great art, rather than great politics. Nietzsche wanted to judge Wagner by the Parsifal opera, using the lexicon of law to stage the duel. But it does carry out a form of false and inconstant analysis, it does not address a single concrete content, in addition to the narrative emotion, there is no exegesis. Insults focus on the neurotic, the modern artist par excellence, the author of sick art, the author of bad music, the actor, the tyrant, the musician. There is nothing better than an example of this round phrase: “Richard Wagner, seemingly victorious in the victors, corrupted by himself, desperate December adent, suddenly sinned, helpless and destroyed, fell down to the Christian cross.” He complained that he gave in to Christianity and the wishes of the masses, equating himself to Victor Hugo. But in Parsifal there is a radical critique of Christianity: it is explained that obsolete Christianity, which only deals with survival, is absurd. Rather than criticizing Christianity, he chooses to make a radical re-reading, in the eyes of Mario Parsifal “it is essentially an attempt at desertion from Christianity.” Wagner’s sin, unlike what happened to the myths of Rome, Greece or Scandinavia, was to begin to interpret the narratives that were still “alive”.

Comrade of Bakunin and patrons Ludwig II

Another front chosen by those who wanted to offend Wagner was the connection he had with economic powers. In any case, and according to biographies, the impression is that Wagner continued to do his own works, although in most of his life they were not staged. Not even when the author's commitment to his work led him to the limit of famine changed the direction of his works.

Wagner began to have libertarian views at the age of seventeen, stating that he would “end the yoke of tyrants.” One of the most memorable passages of his life was the Dresden Uprising in 1849. Wagner, along with his colleagues Bakunin and Röckl, actively participated in the revolutionary uprising. After six days, the revolution had been defeated: 231 deaths, 1,200 imprisoned and exiled Wagner from most of the German countries, who were accused with his two colleagues of being dangerous anarchists. Vuillermoz said that his friend Liszt negotiated with the police and crossed the border with France with a fake passport.

After the events, he was in Paris moving to cheaper and cheaper homes for rentals that were unbeatable to him. He survived misery thanks to the help of his friends. Although he worked as a director here and there, he did not have financial stability until he was 51 years old. The Savior of Wagner's economy was Ludwig II of Bavaria, newly arrived on the throne. Besides helping the young monarch and musician, who was eighteen years old, he received his advice in building the Neuschwanstein castle of his dreams. Lucien Rebatet picks up with astonishment in his History of Music (Une histoire de la musique, des origines à nos jours, 1969) Wagner “was tried with completely bourgeois critics”. The historian points out that defamation campaigns are born “of books based on anecdotes,” everything is based “on more than a hundred years of malicious accounts and topics” or “on Adorno’s unworthy attempt.” With another way of narrating, but Rebatet coincides with what Zize and others say about Adorno: “In the attempt to demonstrate socio-philosophically the bourgeois character of Wagner demonstrates his pedantry; the result is incomprehensible and unintelligible.”