A Note from the Guest Editor

So many of my friends say Wagner is Leaves of Grass done into music that I begin to suspect that there must be something in it. [. . .] I was never wholly convinced—there was always a remaining question. [. . .] Do you figure out Wagner to be a force making for democracy or the opposite? [William Douglas] O’Connor swears to the democracy—swears to it with a big oath. Others have said to me that Wagner’s art was distinctly the art of the caste—for the few. What am I to believe? I confess that I have heard bits here and there at concerts, from orchestras, bands, which have astonished, ravished me, like the discovery of a new world.

—Walt Whitman, 1888¹

What kind of barbaric yawp is Richard Wagner’s “Hojotoho”? His music heralds some brave new world, we know this, know it just as Whitman did—but is it a world we still want to discover? The majority report since 1945 seems clear enough: yes, perhaps, in the opera house; no, absolutely, in the outside world. To hear Wagner’s music, to witness his music dramas, has come to seem like peering through a glass window atop Pandora’s box: observe, by all means, but keep the lid on tight.

The point is not to turn back the clock. There should be no patience for such pseudodialectical maneuvers as simply gainsaying what has been said and denying insights gained. That misty-eyed old sandman—the one who tells us that Wagner’s beautiful scores have nothing whatsoever to do with politics and also, gleichzeitig, that Wagner wasn’t really such an anti-Semite after all—he’s not going to put us back to sleep. No: we have read our Marc Weiner, our Paul Lawrence Rose, our David Levin—and cannot listen to Wagner in the same way again.

But are we wholly convinced? Is there a remaining question?

It is so easy to forget. Wagner shoulder to shoulder with Mikhail Bakunin at the Dresden barricades. Wagner as political exile in Zurich, writing that “the Art-work of the Future must embrace the spirit of a free mankind, delivered from every shackle of hampering nationality; its racial imprint must be no more than an embellishment, the individual charm of manifold diversity, and not a cramping barrier.”² Wagner as inspiration for Bernard Shaw and Ralph Ellison, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein, Ernst Bloch and Hans Mayer, Christoph Schlingensief and Ruth Berghaus, Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez, Edward Said and Fredric Jameson, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.

It is not simply that there is another Wagner, let us call it a Left Wagner, who runs like a strong countercurrent through the long history of production and reception. This is important to recall, and we will recall it many times in this issue, but it is not simply this. It is also that a better understanding of this Left Wagner may compel us to grapple with questions we prefer to leave alone. Questions such as: In believing ourselves to have “overcome” Wagner’s seriousness, have we simply succumbed to a lightness that is just as ideologically troubling for us today as Wagner’s worst bombast was in his? Is it possible that this weightlessness of ours is not the weightlessness of dancers’ feet but of mere light-headedness? What have we lost when we lose Wagner’s urgent sense of loss and his need to create anew? And in this loss, our loss, have we lost also the possibility of—even the possibility to imagine—eventful change? For Wagner was right, surely, at least in this: that any useful sword must be forged from Not and not from mere whim. In a world that cries out for action, even (dare we say it?) for heroic action, where is our Nothung?

Wagner’s reception has gone through five familiar stages. (In truth they are not only serial but also intertwine.) The first, of course, is Denial: the mummified Wagner reigning over his living tomb at Bayreuth, the Wagner of horned helmets and The Operagoer’s Guide to...