Musings on Music

How Wagner fooled the music world and got Hitler on his side

Whenever I find a Wagner aficionado, they tend to be of the slightly decadent, hedonistic, type who are obsessed with him. I used to wonder about this, until I started discovering some fundamental things about him.

Take his famous Tristan Chord, which he supposedly invented. Many have written words of praise for this musical invention, but note how even his admirers phrase some of their thoughts:

• Wagner actually provoked the sound or structure of musical harmony to become more predominant than its function [1]

This indicates that Wagner, for all his apparent harmonies, was actually anti-harmony. He was more into sound, rather than music. Many critics also talk about Wagner "hammering out" his music.

• As regards the symbolic meaning of the chord, one might prefer the term "confusion"[2]

Wagner was really after getting the listener under his thrall. His over-repeated, intricately woven leitmotifs, his unresolvable Tristan Chords, his hammerings and crescendos, are all about forcing, confusing and seducing the listener into his orbit.

• Arnold Schoenberg referred to Wagner’s chordal progressions in Tristan as: “phenomena of incredible adaptability and non-independence roaming, homeless, among the spheres of keys; spies reconnoitering weaknesses, to exploit them in order to create confusion, deserters for whom surrender of their own personality is an end in itself.”[3]

"homeless; reconnoitering weaknesses; create confusion; surrender their own personality." These are the words used by Schoenberg to describe Wagner's music.

• It has even been suggested that Hitler used Wagner’s treatment of the leitmotif as a springboard to write his speeches.

Form always follows function. The way your house is built - a condo, a modernist style, a southern mansion, etc... will determine how you behave (move, rest, even your manners). The same with music.

Wagner's form influenced Hitler's speeches. It wasn't just that Wagner was an anti-semite, but his very musical form, with it's homeless, reconnoitering weaknesses, creating confusion and causing surrender of one's own personality was what Hitler was after.

Evil always finds its soulmate.

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