The Influence Of Richard Wagner
...at the turning of one of the bars.” Klingsor was the name of an evil magician in “Parsifal” and was also used as a nickname for Wagner. Schoenberg had seen all of Wagner’s operas twenty to thirty times by the time he was twenty five. Of course, Wagner’s students Berg and Webern were also greatly influenced by Wagner. The only major composer that was not influenced by Wagner was Stravinsky, and he once said that his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, who he greatly admired, “kept a portrait of Wagner over his desk” (Magee 77-83). Wagner was a huge influence in music, but that’s not the only area he was influential in. “The most influential poem of our century in any language, ‘The Waste Land’, contains four quotations from Wagner’s Operas (two from ‘Tristan and Isolde’ and two from ‘Gotterdammerung’) and a line from Verlaine’s sonnet on Wagner’s ‘Parsifal.’” That’s just one of Wagner’s influences on literature. The German author Nietzsche was one of the first people to come under Wagner’s influence. Nietzsche’s English biographer and translator once said about Nietzsche that Wagner was “the most powerful and enduring influence upon him – an influence which, despite all his efforts, Nietzsche could not shake off until his dying day…. Nietzsche regarded his association with Wagner as the greatest event of his life.” Wagner had a major influence an every book Nietzsche wrote, and since he had a huge influence on poets such as Rilke and George, Thomas Mann, and Bernard Shaw, and on philosophers such as Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre, it is wondered if this might be called “secondary Wagner infection” (Magee 71-79). Wagner also had a big influence on politics, especially in Germany. Hitler used to say “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.” Wagner may have been an influence on the Nazis, but the Nazi view of Wagner was a distortion (Magee 83-84). When World War I began, the performance of Wagner’s music declined in Britain and completely stopped in the U.S., but people protested these reactions to the war. In the article “Richard Wagner contra Militarism” by William Ashton Ellis, he quoted comments Wagner made “criticizing Prussia and argued that it should be clear as day that modern Germany was ‘flying dead in the face of every principle of life and genuine culture that Wagner held dear.’” Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham continued to perform Wagner’s pieces “Tannhauser” and “Die Walkure” despite critic...