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How is it possible for a seriously flawed human being to produce art that is good, true, and beautiful? Why is the art of Richard Wagner, a very imperfect man, important and even indispensable to us? In this volume, Father Owen Lee ventures an answer to those questions by way of a figure in Sophocles ? the hero Philoctetes. Gifted by his god with a bow that would always shoot true to the mark and indispensable to his fellow Greeks, he was marked by the same god with an odious wound that made him hateful and hated. Sophocles' powerful insight is that those blessed by the gods and indispensable to men are visited as well with great vulnerability and suffering. Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art traces some of Wagner's extraordinary influence for good and ill on a century of art and politics ? on Eliot and Proust as well as on Adolf Hitler ? and discusses in detail Wagner's Tannhouser, the work in which the composer first dramatised the Faustian struggle of a creative artist in whom 'two souls dwell.' In the course of this penetrating study, Father Lee argues that Wagner's ambivalent art is indispensable to us, life-enhancing and ultimately healing.… (more)
User reviews
One of the main points of M. Owen Lee's lectures is that this is a common misconception. Wagner's opera's deserve as much to be read as listened to. Wagner was serious about everything: the music, the text of his operas and the stage performance, as well known, and pointed out once more much of our concert hall experience is owed to the practice first insisted on by Wagner.
Apparently, Brian Magee's Aspects of Wagner (OUP), a very slim biography is indispensible reading when it comes to Wagner. (I read that slim volume in 2019). By contrast, Wagner. The terrible man and his truthful art, also a slim volume, of just three lectures, is a mere epiphany, a light afterthought. It is more about what other people thought of Wagner (yes, including the Nazis) and how he influenced others, including many writers, than about the music. It ponders more on the smaller operas, like Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, and Tannhauser than on the Ring.