Wagner, Me and Sex with Brunnhilde

My discovery of the work of Richard Wagner when I was a teenager was a revelation that was as momentous as losing my virginity. My first sexual encounter was with a girl who I will call Brünnhilde, and after that event my view of the female sex was transformed for good. In a similar way, after hearing Wagner for the first time my whole outlook on music changed just as dramatically.

My music lessons at school were fairly traditional. This, I hasten to add, was thirty years ago and pretty much all of my study was comprised of lessons in harmony, counterpoint, practical performance and analyses of a composer’s works. There were no diversions to look at popular genres or projects to be completed on Elvis Presley or The Beatles. But like the diligent student I was, I happily worked my way through some of Debussy’s pieces – (the string quartet, Fêtes and Prélude à l’aprés midi d’un Faune) and chamber works by Brahms (the op.115 clarinet quintet, a piano trio and one of the string sextets). When I heard, by chance, some of Wagner’s music on the radio it was like being hit by a juggernaut.

Until then I knew nothing by Wagner except the Ride of the Valkyries of course like almost everybody, but the first significant piece I heard was the prelude from Parsifal and at the time I thought it was the most sublimely beautiful thing I had ever heard. Brünnhilde and I played it often during our sessions of horizontal pleasure, savouring its delicious intensity until we collapsed exhausted amid the record covers and vinyl discs. My sexual peregrinations with Brünnhilde mirrored my discovery of Richard Wagner’s oeuvre and during the subsequent months I blithely investigated the world of the music-drama: Lohengrin, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhauser, Tristan und Isolde and the Ring cycle. I became as obsessed with these operas as I was with the gorgeous Brünnhilde. Wagner’s music was deeper and more magnificent than anything I had heard before; its subject matter was exciting and fascinating and seemed to say more about human nature than any other art form. It was both visceral and intellectual, sybaritic and ethereal all at the same time; there was always the feeling that whenever you listened to it there were glimpses of some emotion that was just beyond reach, a spiritual plane that we humans were not quite able to attain and I couldn’t understand why some people were so ambivalent about my musical ‘thunderbolt’.

Whilst raiding the cultural larder for Wagner goodies I had been blissfully unaware of the thing that so many people find objectionable about Wagner and his music. Perhaps it was because I was more interested in music than history; I knew about the half-diminished ‘Tristan’ chord, about leitmotivs, about orchestration, about chromatic harmony, but knew nothing of the anti-Semitic-Nazi-Hitler thing. And when I did find out I didn’t think it mattered. I still don’t; the music is more important than mere worldly concerns, but I realise, of course, that people will point the finger and say ‘ah, yes, but you’re not Jewish’. That’s true, I’m not, but does all music have to be tainted by the baggage we humans ascribe to it? Do we shun the music of Pfitzner or Chopin who were also anti-Semitic? Do we ignore Schumann and Hugo Wolf and Berlioz because they were a bit nuts? Do we spurn the works of Tchaikovsky and Samuel Barber and Benjamin Britten because they were gay? (Camille Saint-Saens made regular trips to North Africa to pick up rent-boys; how many people consider that when they listen to Carnival of the Animals?) Surely, no music deserves to be tainted by our own neuroses and prejudices.

I did watch the recent documentary by Stephen Fry as he travelled to Bayreuth (lucky bugger!) detailing his love of Wagner. It was interesting and personal in the same way that many people’s discoveries of the composer are, but one thing Mr Fry said stuck in my mind: ‘Wagner’s music is bigger and better than Hitler ever imagined it to be’. That is true indeed. It’s certainly bigger than my infatuation for Brünnhilde ever was. Is it better than sex? Now, there’s a question!