In a world where everything is for sale, where value is price and price is
value, where feelings are bartered, and the sentimental fake no longer
distinguished from the genuine article, the artist becomes a modernist,
and culture escapes to a garrett, high above the market place. For a century
or more modern culture has been a modernist culture, and even if we are
now entering a ‘post-modern’, or ‘post-modernist’, or maybe ‘post-postmodernist’
phase, there is no chance of understanding where we are
without considering the modernist enterprise.
ree great artists prepared the way for modernism – Baudelaire,
Manet and Wagner. And all three haunt the work of T.S. Eliot, the greatest
modernist writer in English, and the one who has inspired the thoughts
contained in this book. To begin with Wagner is not to begin the story of
modernism at the beginning. But it is to gain insight into the mission
bequeathed by the Enlightenment to art. e operas of Wagner attempt to
dignify the human being in something like the way that he might be
digniëed by an uncorrupted common culture. Acutely conscious of the
death of God, Wagner proposed man as his own redeemer and art as the
transëguring rite of passage to a higher world. e suggestion was
visionary, and its impact on modern culture so great that the shock waves
are still overtaking us. Modern high culture is as much a set of footnotes to
Wagner as Western philosophy is, in Whitehead’s judgement, footnotes
to Plato.
In the mature operas of Wagner our civilisation gave voice for the last
time to its idea of the heroic, through music which strives to endorse that
idea to the full extent of its power. And because Wagner was a composer of
supreme genius, perhaps the only one to have taken forward the intense
inner language forged by Beethoven and to have used it to conquer the
psychic spaces that Beethoven shunned, everything he wrote in his mature
idiom has the ring of truth, and every note is both absolutely right and
profoundly surprising.
Wagner was in conscious reaction against the sentimentality and
lassitude of official art. Like Baudelaire (whose admiring letter to the
composer after the Parisian performance of Tannhauser displays a self-
conscious affinity) he saw that the ideal had ìed from the world into the
citadel of the imagination. Unlike Baudelaire, however, he believed that the
ideal could be tempted back, so as to dwell among us (though at
considerable public expense). He therefore tried to create a new musical
public, one that would not merely see the point of the heroic ideal, but
also adopt it. is attempt was already doomed when Wagner ërst
conceived it, and his sacerdotal presumptions have never ceased to alienate
those who feel threatened by his message. Hence modern producers,
embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, decide in
their turn to make a mockery of the dramas. Of course, even today,
musicians and singers, responding as they must to the urgency and
sincerity of the music, do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner
intended. But the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted
commas, and reduced to the dimensions of a television sitcom. Sarcasm
and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or
say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility
has become intolerable. e producer strives to distract the audience from
Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the
drama should ënally come home. As Michael Tanner has argued, in his
succinct and penetrating defence of the composer, modern productions
attempt to ‘domesticate’ Wagner, to bring his dramas down from the
exalted sphere in which the music places them, to the world of human
trivia, usually in order to make a ‘political statement’ which, being both
blatant and banal, succeeds only in cancelling the rich ambiguities of the
drama. In contemporary Wagner productions we see exactly what the
transition from modernism to the ‘post-modern’ world involves, namely,
the ënal rejection of high culture as a redemptive force and the ruination
of the sacred in its last imagined form