WAGNER

do you like Shakespeare? the way most people feel about Shakespeare is the way I feel about Wagner. Wagner wrote 9 major operas (some other minor ones), but they are like the Himalayas. I think he's greater than Beethoven because he was a much more rounded person who actually only began composing music seriously in his 40s. Until then he was mainly a writer. The opera by him I love the most is 'Parsifal', a work suffused with beauty, suffering and tenderness so that it seems like the statement of a man who has passed through the veil between life and death and this is his swan song or whatever. It arouses the most mysterious feelings in me. Every Wagner opera is keyed into a different philosophical mood of the composer, The Ring has Schopenhauer and Buddhism, Parsifal the Grail legend and the composers Christian beliefs, after a lifetime of being perfectly immoral. Yet Wagner was in the utmost sense anti-intellectual, hence his anti-semitism. Yet paradoxically he's the most intellectualised composer of all. Wagner's music is pure emotion and that's what his statement is, emotions are what makes us human, his operas are about emotions, pure and simple. Of course this leads to his rejection of reason and thus his anti-semitism, which is perfectly irrational, but at the time seemed to fit into the age's romantic temperament. When such feelings were left to lesser men, they concocted a kind of dogs bollocks on the site of something which is really misunderstood today.

Of course Wagner was also a cross dresser and absolutely schizophrenic.