Being Wagner by Simon Callow (2017)

 Before Freud and Jung, Wagner made the old myths mean something again; like them, he looked beyond the rational brain.  He saw man as a turbulent, troubled, writhing, longing, betraying, creating, destroying, loving, loathing mess of instincts and impulses so deeply buried within us that we scarcely dare look at them.  He forced us to do so.  He was all of these things himself.  Had he been anything other than a musical genius, he would have been locked up.                                                                                                 -- Simon Callow, Being Wagner (Vintage, 2017)

It took me a while to appreciate opera.  Susan and I love the ballet but after hearing and seeing the brilliant use of Wagner's Tannhauser overture by Preston Sturges in Unfaithfully Yours (1948), among other reasons, we decided to learn about and experience opera. In the 90's we went fairly indiscriminately to The Metropolitan Opera and The New York City Opera and, though we liked well enough some of Puccini and Verdi we found we particularly responded to Mozart and Wagner, the highlight of our experience being The Ring Cycle of Wagner at The Metropolitan Opera in 1999, a total immersion in the gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner, following which we saw and heard the rest of the Wagner repertory, the highlight of which was Robert Wilson's beautiful styilized production of Lohengrin.

Since our  children were born we have not been to the opera as often -- our children enjoy the ballet immensely -- but Simon Callow's book reminds me of how much I love Wagner and how beautiful his music is.  It is a detailed description of Wagner's passion to create in spite of the tremendous difficulties in his way, many of which he put there himself, with others caused by the political turmoil of the time and his constant erysipelas (an infection of the upper layer of the skin).  But Wagner persisted, with many of his operas unperformed until fate intervened with the sudden emergence of King Ludwig II of Bavaria as a patron and, as Callow says, "Wagner knew better than most how to recognize the intervention of fate." Though to some exten Wagner remained his own worst enemy he finally achieved recognition and his operas gradually began to become regularly performed, "for Wagner, it was if his lifelong dream of the artist's place in the scheme of things had at last become a reality."