How to handle the Wagner problem
There are deep ructions across Europe, as in Britain. All come down to the same thing. The societies in question have decided to take in more people than they could ever absorb or integrate, and have done so at a rate that will ruin these societies financially as well as socially. It’s a little late for the occasional minister to talk about the fabric of the country being under ‘strain’, or the need for greater ‘social cohesion’. These things have been shot for years.
The problem is that every counter to this problem has the same Charybdis. Oppose the migration extremism and even now you will be accused of Hitlerian tendencies. Before us stands the great disaster of the 21st century, but to oppose it is to be accused of repeating the great disaster of the 20th century.
So intent are some people on showing that they are not Hitler-ites that they have decided to push the current era’s problems even further. A decade ago, the Labour MP Rachael Maskell made a startling claim at a ‘refugees welcome’ rally. To an applauding crowd she said that we weren’t taking in enough refugees. ‘Twenty thousand is not enough, 30,000 is not enough,’ she said. ‘We must keep going until we really are at saturation point, because what does it matter if we have to wait another week for a hospital visit, or if our class sizes are slightly bigger, or if our city is slightly fuller? What does it matter if things are slightly more challenging? If we have to pay a little bit more into the system? Surely it is worth it.’
This point of view has been echoed in the sentiments of other MPs from our governing party. The Labour MP Michelle Scrogham (Barrow and Furness) recently branded some of her constituents racist for being opposed to the building of a multi-million-pound mosque in the Lake District. Scrogham seems to work under the delusion that a core British value is building mosques in the Lake District. I don’t remember that one myself.
Other pro-mosque demonstrators included one who said: ‘There are five British values, which include tolerance of other people’s faiths and beliefs. We’re standing up for proper British values.’ Like me, you might have missed the handout which informed us of the five values that we have in Britain. Perhaps the postal service was unusually overwhelmed that day. But this is the order of the moment. Build a mosque in Beatrix Potter country or you’re not British. Overwhelm the country to the point of saturation (and who will identify that point, I wonder?) and just accept ever worsening public services or you are a bigot.
Exactly why this country, which fought and helped defeat Hitlerian fascism, should now be lumped in as a co-conspirator in his crimes is a matter for another day. But certainly all this is leftover business from the 20th century. It deserves to be removed with a scalpel, yet everyone in control seems intent on trying to perform this surgery with boxing gloves.
As it happened, I was in Bayreuth last week for the opening night of this year’s festival. The opening opera was a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Aside from the spectacular singing and playing, it was fascinating to watch German society – including present and past chancellors Friedrich Merz and Angela Merkel – turning up. Nowadays the festival is subsidised by the government, though still controlled by the Wagner family. And what is interesting is not just what a mountain Wagner still is for modern Germany, but how they try to deal with it.
The exhibitions and displays at Wagner’s home, Wahnfried, all pay loving homage to the master. But they do not shy away from his gross anti-Semitism, which was obscene even for his day. They know that the master has to be approached in full, and that there is no point covering anything over.
The operas are a more complicated matter. You can no more ‘cancel’ Wagner from the repertoire of music than you can remove knowledge of how to split the atom from physics, or extract the theory of natural selection from biology. Like a mountain, Wagner just is. And as I have noted here before, the only dangerous moment in the work of a genius is where the person’s personal flaws seep into the work.
Meistersinger includes the one unarguable moment in Wagner’s work when his politics intrudes. It comes at the end of the last act, when at the conclusion of the singing competition Hans Sachs warns of the danger of German art being infected by foreign elements. All Wagnerians are aware of this moment, and most of us dread it. At Bayreuth last week the director and designers got over this mound by having a vast, upside-down inflatable cow (I will explain another day) start to deflate on stage. This made the audience chuckle and I suppose distracted some of them from the otherwise considerable problem Wagner has left us all with.
The sight brought back a memory of another performance – Welsh National Opera’s production that came to London ten years ago. This not only got around the problem, but confronted it head-on. The production had been in traditional dress, but when Sachs began his warning, members of the chorus slowly stood up and each turned around a photograph of a German artistic hero. Yes, there was Bach, Beethoven, Goethe and so on. But also Zweig and Weill and Lenya and others. In other words, they transformed what could be seen as a speech that limits German culture into one which post-facto embraced the richness of it. It was one of the most moving experiences I have had at a theatre and I can’t say my eyes were dry.
The point is that almost everyone agrees on where Wagner, the Nazis and others went wrong. The answer is not to distort our own history. And nor is it to commit suicide a century later in order to show that we are not them. Or at least that’s my view. Some Labour MPs will disagree.
