Richard Wagner: Genius, Visionary, White Cultural Hero

This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of the greatest composers and poets in the history of Caucasian man: Richard Wagner. I do not throw the words ‘genius’ around like confetti, like many people do these days, but I would certainly use that epithet to describe this man. His genius is such that, in spite of being constantly castigated and deconstructed, his music has survived and been enjoyed by millions around the world. Certainly, Wagner had views on the subject of race and the racial spirit that are wholly incompatible with the left-liberal Weltanschauung that has been forced from above on mainstream culture. We will look at this in more detail later in the article.

Even on his bicentenary, the leftist grip on culture meant that a documentary last week that ought to have celebrated his life was turned into a lesson in character assassination and slander. Wagner’s alleged links with a German political party actually formed more than thirty years after his death has meant the extreme left has seen him as fair game and those in the political centre have not have the courage to defend him, lest they too are tarnished with the brush of perceived Nazism.

The documentary in question, called Wagnerwahn or La folie Wagner, was shown on Arte, the Franco-German allegedly cultural channel, although the channel these days seems bizarrely to find more interest in third-worlders making crude representations out of junk found on the refuse tip. I digress. During the programme, Wagner’s second wife Cosima was played by Asiatic actress Pegah Ferydoni who looked shocked and disapproving of his ideas on race.

In reality, Cosima shared his views and tirelessly promoted his work and philosophy after his death. The couple were shown as ruthless schemers who scammed money from Ludwig II, when, in fact, Ludwig II patronised Wagner, as part of the role of an aristocrat was to patronise genius when he saw it – and ought to be so today. Ludwig II and Wagner were very close, their ideals being almost identical, and the documentary makers wasted no time in insinuating a certain homoeroticism. Indeed, Jewish homosexual ‘scholar’ Laurence Dreyfus was given free reign to giddily cast aspersions about Wagner’s sexuality. His love letters between him and Cosima that used superlatives to describe each other were interpreted as cliché-ridden and insincere rather than as evidencing the love and mutual respect that lasted until Wagner’s death in Venice in 1883. As seen, for Cosima, that love never abated until her own death in 1930.

Who was the real Richard Wagner then? Wagner was born on 22nd May 1813 to lower middle-class parents in Leipzig in what was then the Kingdom of Saxony. Wagner’s father, Carl, died when Richard was but a few months old and his mother moved in with and then married the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer. This is an important fact, because one must never forget that Wagner was first and foremost a dramatist and poet. Most operatic composers had others write the texts to their compositions, whereas Wagner wrote his own.

Indeed, the music developed out of the poetry and drama; Wagner was always drawn to epic poetry and showed no real aptitude as a musician as a child. This is also important, because, as his son-in-law and philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain stated: ‘we have to deal with a seer, in other words, a poet, in contradistinction to the merely musically gifted individual whose world of conceptions may be, and even in the case of musicians of genius often is, an entirely nebulous one.’ In his mid-teens, the young Richard wrote a tragedy of monumental proportions, but was still not satisfied. The true artist that he was, he knew something was lacking. He decided to set it to music and a genius was born. In future endeavours, the poetry and music would be composed simultaneously. This emphasis on both drama and music prompted H S Chamberlain to use not the usual term ‘opera’ for his works, but a new term, the ‘Word-Tone-Drama’.

Wagner composed his early work in pairs, where one of the pair focused more on music, the other on the word, as he wrestled from the one to the other. He was never satisfied, yet several key motifs emerged in Wagner’s early work: the distinctly European – specifically Germanic feel to his art, the use of the extremes of the chromatic scale and the way sections of the orchestra play across each other; notice how the brass section and strings section create this effect in the overture to Tannhäuser:

In 1848, he resolved the conundrum: the question was not how to resolve it, but what to resolve it with. Gesamtkunstwerk was born. Most translators, academics and scholars of Wagner translate the term as a ‘total work of art’, which is fine when one is referring to artwork as and in an individual sense, but as a general term, I would much prefer the term ‘total art’ (Gesamtkunst – a term which Wagner used himself), and this is how I will refer to the concept throughout this article. Wagner did not invent the term; it first appeared in K F E Trahndorff’s Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst in 1827, but he certainly made it synonymous with his own music.

Wagner resolved the music/drama conundrum through the selection of stories that were naturally conducive to both, and this, for Wagner, meant the ancient folk myths, legends and history that had grown organically out of the European racial consciousness and were and are felt spiritually as appertaining collectively to us. This he expounded in a series of philosophical works written in exile between 1849 and 1851, most notably Die Kunst und die Revolution and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft. Works based on the total art theory include Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and culminated in his cycle of four operas Der Ring des Nibelungen.

The subject of his exile is interesting in itself, for Wagner was a left-wing revolutionary, supporting the 1848 revolution and participating in the Dresden May Uprising of 1849, in which the people of Saxony rose up against the king Friedrich August II, who had rejected proposals for and a draught of a constitutional monarchy. These revolutions throughout the various German states were based upon ideas of pan-German nationalism and the creation of a strong German state, which were rejected by most individual kings, as it would mean a diminution of their powers.

The idea that nationalism was left-wing would seem to most mainstream observers to be completely incongruous, considering how the left-right political dichotomy is portrayed now, and it is a reminder that what is considered centre-left now is the most extreme form of leftism imaginable. Wagner now would have been and often is cited as a right-wing extremist. The reasons for Wagner’s participation in the revolutions are perhaps best expressed in his aforementioned essay Art and Revolution:

‘The Romans had a god, Mercury, whom they likened to the Greek god Hermes. But with them his winged mission gained a more practical intent. For them it was the restless diligence of their chaffering and usurious merchants, who streamed from all the ends of the earth into the heart of the Roman world; to bring its luxurious masters, in barter for solid gain, all those delights of sense which their own immediately surrounding Nature could not afford them. To the Roman, surveying its essence and its methods, commerce seemed no more or less than trickery; and though, by reason of his ever-growing luxury, this world of trade appeared a necessary evil, he cherished a deep contempt for all its doings. Thus Mercury, the god of merchants, became for the Roman the god withal of cheats and sharpers.

‘This slighted god, however, revenged himself upon the arrogant Romans, and usurped their mastery of the world. For, crown his head with the halo of Christian hypocrisy, decorate his breast with the soulless token of dead feudal orders, and ye have in him the god of the modern world, the holy-noble god of ‘five percent,’ the ruler and the master of ceremonies of our modern ‘art.’ Ye may see him embodied in the straight-laced English banker, whose daughter perchance has been given in marriage to a ruined peer. Ye may see him in this gentleman, when he engages the chief singers of the Italian opera to sing before him in his own drawing room rather than in the theatre, because he will have the glory of paying higher for them here than there; but on no account, even here, on the sacred Sunday. Behold Mercury and his docile handmaid, Modern Art!

‘This is art, as it now fills the entire civilized world! Its true essence is industry; its ethical aim, the gaining of gold; its aesthetic purpose, the entertainment of those whose time hangs heavily on their hands. From the heart of our modern society, from the golden calf of wholesale speculation, stalled at the meeting of its crossroads, our art sucks forth its life juice, borrows a hollow grace from the lifeless relics of the chivalric conventions of mediæval times, and, blushing not to fleece the poor, for all its professions of Christianity – descends to the depths of the proletariat, enervating, demoralising, and dehumanising everything on which it sheds its venom. […] Thus, as the broad-strewn art of drama, it denotes to all appearance, the flower of our culture; just as the Grecian tragedy denoted the culminating point of the Grecian spirit; but ours is the efflorescence of corruption, of a hollow, soulless and unnatural condition of human affairs and human relations.’

One notices that even here in his philosophy, one finds a blend of myth, history, politics and culture, for it is the vision of the Gesamtkunstler. Wagner’s critique, as total artist, of the development of European civilization lies in its corruption by money power, Mercury standing as the personification and deification of mercantilism. The aristocracy itself has adopted the mentality of base traders and speculators and married with the mercantile caste for additional riches. All art and culture has thus become enslaved by Mercury, by mercantile ideals of profit and loss. This is the principal reason for Wagner’s supposed anti-Semitism (although no one ever critiques Semitism these days), which he expresses in Das Judentum in der Musik:

‘From that turning point in our social evolution where money, with less and less disguise, was raised to the virtual patent of nobility, the Jews – to whom moneymaking without actual labour, that is, usury, had been left as their only trade – the Jews not merely could no longer be denied the diploma of a new society that needed naught but gold, but they brought it with them in their pockets. Wherefore our modern culture, accessible to no one but the well-to-do, remained the less a closed book to them, as it had sunk into a venal article of Luxury.’

Wagner believed that the spirit of profit and loss was at the very heart of the Jewish soul, and Jewish critics have written countless critiques of Wagner’s works, citing that many of them are inherently anti-Semitic; but then does not the Jewish critic see anti-Semitism in everything that promotes White racial integrity and White racial pride? Chief among those attacked are Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, the latter being first performed in the opera house that Wagner helped design: the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. It is no secret that Wagner objected to a Jew conducting Parsifal and stated that Hermann Levi ought to at least convert to Christianity before being allowed to conduct his opera. The opera has major Christian themes and symbolism within it and his objection is thus understandable. Equally, Wagner was against him conducting it on a racial basis, for, as many have seen, there are ideas within Parsifal that are taken from Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s racial theories. Wagner’s patron, Ludwig II, took the Jew’s part over Wagner’s, proving again Wagner’s critique of the degenerated and bourgeoisified aristocracy.

The antagonism to Wagner by Jewish lobby groups and contemporary leftists has created the unusual phenomenon of staging Wagnerian operas in industrial wastelands. I saw one performance of Tristan und Isolde many years ago in Dijon, where the stage director described himself as a ‘homosexual Catholic’ – they do like their oxymorons, don’t they? The scenery consisted of black corrugated iron and the characters were clothed in black and red. Why was this? It was done so that the visual imagery deconstructed the drama and music in order to alienate the audience from the allegedly ‘fascistic overtones’ of the piece.

This is the case now in almost all contemporary productions of Wagnerian operas. I have seen Der Ring as a laboratory filled with mad scientists and genetic experiments (this is to recall supposed Nazi experiments on Jews, for which Wagner himself is held partly responsible), again Tristan und Isolde staged with businessmen conducting transactions (as a critique against the ‘bourgeois institution of marriage’), and so on. This is all, of course, contrary to the spirit of Wagner’s total art, for it is inorganic and full of artistic contradictions and conflicts, which are inherent in the masturbatory petulance of contemporary leftist pseudo-philosophies.

These philosophies are destined to destroy those who adopt them, for, as the late Jonathan Bowden once said, artists who have adopted them and perform traditional canonical Eurocentric works while simultaneously deconstructing them are literally smashing themselves in the face while walking forwards in an act of masochism. One wonders why they even bother to put them on in the first place. Yet bother they do, and the reason is that they wish to alienate people from cultural ideas pertaining to the creation of an organic society. Therefore I say rejoice in the works of one of the great cultural visionaries of our race: Richard Wagner, genius. Wagner’s ideal was to base a society on the shared racial spirit instead of on wealth and materialism; let ours be also.

I will leave you now with an inspirational piece from his operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, Einzug der Götter in Walhall, conducted by one of the greatest conductors of Wagner, Wilhelm Furtwängler. When a nationalist government enters the Houses of Parliament, this is what ought to be played.