Has there ever been a grander portrayal of human nature than in Wagner?

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Has there ever been a grander portrayal of human nature than in Wagner? Anonymous Wed Sep 16 07:57:36 2020 No.16374742 [Reply] [Original]

I remember Bryan Magee saying:

>Each of Shakespeare's characters is a unique being in a way that is ultimate to his or her existence. [...] but what comes across in his plays is a view of character as if he were an immortal soul, that is to say as if his existence were ultimately independent of the existence of this world: other people, society, the universe itself - all these could vanish and yet what is essential to the being of that character would remain. Furthermore, Shakespeare had a genius that no one else has equalled for understanding and being able to put into words how everything looks, and is understood and felt, from that one, incomparable standpoint. In his presentation of the human individual there are no generlizations: everything about everyone is specific and unique. This being so, in his creations of his characters he comes as close to being effaced as it is possible for such a great author to be. The ultiateness of each and every one of them in the fullness of his or her irreplaceable being leaves no room for an authorial presence, no space for it to occupy. The character appears not as a dummy sitting on the knee of a ventriloquist who is the real character, the one doing all the talking, but a fully created and achieved human being who needs no one else to give him a mind and a soul. One could say that Wagner's view of character is the polar opposite of this. He sees what is ultimate in character as being something universal. For this reason he chose to base most of his mature works on myths or legends, because they possessed this quality of universality. In Greek mythology, for instance, although the gofd are not only people with individual personalities but have all sorts of quirks, and many such quirks, they have always been (correctly) understood as embodying the universal truths about human beings. Wagner's characters are of this kind, although he takes them mostly from the medieval myths and legends of Northern Europe, or creates them to inhabit such a world. They are universally recognisable as individuals in the same sort of way as the well known inhabitants of Olympus are - or the much loved knights of Arthurian legend.

Though I disagree with much of the exactness of what he says, the point stays. From it we can see the tapestry of leitmotifs of the world, the myth, interacting. And kindled together toward a definitive story and end of the drama, this in itself, the whole story intersects the standing themes themselves. It is a whole combustion of a madman! Someone who set impossible standards upon himself and somehow achieved them. It makes no sense except in theory. Why didn't /lit/ tell me about Wagner sooner?

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/lit/ - Literature