Pro and Contra Wagner

This volume brings together Thomas Mann's reflections of a lifetime on the composer to whom he felt closest. The novelist's admiration for Wagner was, however, by no means uncritical. Following Nietzsche, Mann knew that one had a duty to be both 'pro and contra Wagner'–hence the title of this collection.

Its centerpiece, 'The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner', is one of the most revealing essays on the composer ever written. Delivered as a lecture in Munich within two weeks of Hitler having become Chancellor. Mann's blasphemous view of Wagner's art as 'dilettantism raised to the level of genius', was the immediate cause of his long exile from German soil.

This and the other major essay in this book (on the Ring) have long been out of print. They are presented here in wholly new translations which capture more faithfully than previous renderings the tone and literary distinction of the original texts. The forty-four other items, written between 1902 and 1951, include many which have never before been available in English.

As Erich Heller says in his introduction, these incomparable writings are 'an essential fragment of the novelist's intellectual autobiography'.

Substantially based on Wagner und unsere Zeit (Wagner and Our Time, which was edited by the author's daughter, Erika, Blunden's new translation and the inclusion of items not found in the earlier collection cast different light on Mann's image of Wagner, making it possible, as Patrick Carnegy notes in the preface, "to follow the continuities and discontinuities in Mann's lifelong preoccupation with the composer." For example, in a 1933 lecture, appearing here as the essay "The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner," Mann stated: "A passion for Wagner's enchanted oeuvre has been a part of my life ever since I first became aware of it and set out to make it my own, to invest it with understanding." In the same piece he describes Wagner's work as "a case of dilettantism that has been monumentalized by a supreme effort of the will" and calls it "the music of an oppressed soul, lacking the elan of dance." Compelling.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.