This is a fascinating 1993 article from the London Review of Books, in which some genius thought to bring together a Jew (Paul Lawrence Rose), a Palestinian (Edward Said), and a Wagner apologist (Michael Tanner) to discuss Wagner:
Edward Said · The Importance of Being Unfaithful to Wagner
I don't know much about Said, apart from the torrent of stupidity he is about to unleash concerning his approach to Wagner, but Rose and Tanner will be familiar to some as perhaps Wagner's most formidable prosecutor and defender, respectively, on the question of antisemitism in late 20th-century Wagner scholarship.
It's a bit of a read, so I'll break down the most important points and offer my thoughts on each.
1. Wagner cannot be reduced to a single interpretation
Said points to the vast and divergent scholarship on Wagner's operas and the multitude of interpretations his works have inspired. So far, so good. These are extraordinarily rich works, and Wagner's own theory of artistic creation allows for precisely this multiplicity of interpretation.
Wagner describes artistic inspiration as originating in the deepest recesses of the unconscious, beyond the reach of rational understanding (Verstand). Drawing on Schopenhauer's theory of dreams, he likens the creative process to the translation of a profound inner dream into a second, more intelligible dream immediately preceding awakening. The artist thus gives outward expression, through the conscious shaping of his material, to an inner revelation whose ultimate significance cannot be fully captured by concepts.
It follows that the full meaning of the unconscious Dichterische Absicht of a Wagnerian drama may remain on some level as fundamentally mysterious to its creator as to its audience, including the few sympathetic Mitwisser who understand Wagner's motivations and the noble insights his works attempt to awaken in the otherwise dimwitted and unreceptive opera-going public. Wagner may consciously articulate what has been revealed to him through music and poetry without exhausting its full potential of intellectually available meaning. Others may therefore discover elements within his works, particular to their own consciousness, of which Wagner himself was never consciously aware.
2. Adorno: Wagner must be "liberated" from Wagnerian orthodoxy
Said approvingly quotes Theodor Adorno's argument that Wagner's works contain "irreconcilable contradictions". Now, this is true, although what Adorno calls "contradictions" I would call "paradoxes". Indeed, such paradoxes are central to Wagner's dramas. In his efforts to secure power and maintain order, Wotan ensures the loss of his power and the destruction of that very order. Tristan and Isolde drink a love potion, only to discover that they can never truly be united so long as they remain separate beings capable of being united. Kundry kisses Parsifal, awakening not the delights of passion but the torments of compassion. Hans Sachs seeks refuge from the world's Wahn, yet his own intervention inadvertently unleashes it upon Nuremberg in a riot.
These are not failures of dramatic unity. They are the very paradoxes through which Wagner's dramas achieve their unity.
According to Adorno, however, traditional stagings "conceal" these "contradictions" beneath an appearance of "dramatic unity" (which, as we know, is central to Wagner's entire theoretical conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk). The "solution" to this supposed problem is to "expose" the contradictions. This is to be accomplished by rejecting Wagner's original staging instructions and deliberately introducing contradictions between what is staged and what is sung.
The astonishing conclusion of Adorno's line of reasoning is that only productions that challenge Wagnerian orthodoxy can genuinely reveal "the truth" of Wagner's works. In other words, Wagner's own dramatic conception conceals the truth of his works, and burden of the audience's enlightenment and understanding of the Drama is passed from its creator to the staging director, the gentleman formerly hired to arrange the furniture on the stage, who performs his new duties to contradict and confound as best as possible what the creator set out to achieve.
3. To be faithful to Wagner, one must betray him
Said agrees with Adorno that an ironic, Brechtian-style rational dissection of Wagner's works is the true path to a deeper understanding of them. Productions should not be treated as historical reconstructions of Wagner's intentions. Rather, each director and conductor should present a possible Wagner, shaped by the concerns and intellectual preoccupations of their own historical moment. Thus, fidelity to Wagner is achieved not by respecting his dramatic conception, but by challenging, subverting, and even betraying it.
4. Wagner's music is not antisemitism
Said points out that perpetuating antisemitism is not the primary purpose of Wagner's operas. This predictably infuriates Rose, who seems to have made it his life's work to establish precisely the opposite. Rather predictably, the exchange then degenerates into a dispute over Israel and Palestine, with Said questioning whether Germans seeking to expel Jews and Jews seeking to expel Palestinians are fundamentally different in principle. I'll spare you most of this diversion.
5. Michael Tanner's response: A defense of Wagner's intentions
Tanner draws an important distinction between the postwar Bayreuth productions of Wieland Wagner and those of Chéreau and subsequent Regietheater directors. Wieland stripped the stage of its elaborate scenery and presented the dramas through simple, abstract staging, seeking to reveal their universal human significance. Chéreau and his successors, by contrast, deliberately deconstruct Wagner's works, relocate them within particular historical and political contexts, and impose new interpretations upon them.
Tanner criticizes the latter approach, observing that deconstructive Regietheater productions have themselves become the new Wagnerian orthodoxy (and keep in mind, he was writing this in 1993), while traditional stagings have become the genuinely unorthodox alternative.
Said and Rose respond with predictable hostility, seemingly unable to decide whether to attack Tanner or resume their quarrel over Israel and Palestine.
My views on this debate
Said begins in (1) by arguing that Wagner cannot be reduced to a single interpretation, only to conclude in (3) that Wagner must be reduced to an interpretation, provided it is the stage director's rather than Wagner's own. Apparently, all interpretations are welcome except the composer's.
Adorno and Said stand before one of Wagner's works as Parsifal stands before the Grail, and, unable to comprehend its significance, conclude that the Grail's essence must be contradiction, rather than considering the possibility that the contradiction lies in their own failure of understanding. They are fools, yes, but hardly pure ones, if purity requires the ability to set aside one's egotistical Verstand long enough for something to make contact with one's Gefühl, perhaps too much to ask of an academic.
According to Adorno and Said, Wagnerian orthodoxy fails to reveal the "core truth" of Wagner's works, despite Said having declared in (1) that these works cannot be reduced to any single interpretation. Moreover, the very contradictions they claim to have discovered were revealed to them through the supposedly orthodox presentations they now insist must be rejected. Thus, having established that Wagner's works are open to a multitude of interpretations, they conclude that their true meaning can only be revealed by restricting that openness through the intervention of a stage director imposing his interpretation. The interpretive freedom they celebrate in theory is precisely what they seek to abolish in practice.
Let it be said plainly: "the truth" of Wagner's works becomes whatever the stage director has imposed upon them. The further we depart from Wagner's intentions, the closer we supposedly approach the truth. And they suggest Wagner is the authoritarian?