A good biographer's way of writing is necessarily not a pile of information, he must have a problematic consciousness, dissect his master like a doctor, form a dialogue with him as much as possible, and even where his master is hesitant to hide, he must be able to say it for him, he must be honest enough, not just to please his master and his descendants. Such was the case with the Biography of Wagner by Ulrich De Luna.
Richard Wagner was a German composer and playwright who wrote many great operas during his lifetime, including The Ring of the Nibelungen and Tristan and Isolde. Why is his work great? Druna's attempt to connect the work and the people by dissecting Wagner's motivations may not be as shocking as on stage, nor is it described in Wagner's autobiography. Druna wrote this biography based on a neutral stance, neither denigrating and deconstructing Wagner nor deliberately concealing the mythical Wagner.
Anti-Semitism permeated Wagner's life, and just one year after Wagner's birth, his father died and his mother hurriedly remarried. There is an uncertain theory that Wagner may have been the child of his stepfather, although his stepfather also died when he was seven years old. Because of his stepfather's Aryan ancestry, Wagner was also uncertain about his identity.
German composers, without exception, were poorer, earning less than singers and performers. From this, Wagner decided to go to Paris to develop. Wagner's social reach expanded when he came to Paris, and he once again revalued Beethoven's value. Meyerbel, a Jew who could be said to be the savior of Wagner, became a sinner in Wagner's mythology later on. Wagner's autobiography was very unfriendly to those who had helped him, including Schlesinger and Heine, the former who provided him with the necessary money, and the latter who gave him a lot of creative material and inspiration, Wagner said nothing about it.
Later in his musical career, Wagner went into exile for his involvement in the Dresden Uprising, still facing unpopularity in Paris, and he still believed that Meyerbel was behind it, not knowing whether he was deliberately trying to stigmatize Meyerbel or whether he was really caught up in conspiracy theories. Probably also out of jealousy of the Jewish composer, when his Prophet premiered in Paris, the ideas in it were completely different from those of the characters in Wagner's play.
Meyer Bell
Wagner's work places a great emphasis on German culture, while at the same time presenting an extremely anti-Semitic ideology. Of course, this enthusiasm for the German nation did not originate with Wagner, when musicians in Dresden turned to german works. Wagner's new play, First Staged in 1845, Donald's, deals with the theme of opposition, the same theme as Heine's work, but in a different way, and Heine hopes to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. And this also shows their different pursuits politically. Wagner was influenced by Hegelian ideas and developed a keen interest in the philosophy of Feuerbach and Hegel. The idea of German hegemony has always flowed among German literati and philosophers, and it is normal for Wagner to be affected, and the play "Ron Green" is "the most dramatic expression of the conception of the savior hero". Heine, whom Wagner despised, was a sober enough man to sniff out the dangers of German philosophy, even in the presence of a multitude of philosophers. I cannot understand why all philosophers and musicians regarded The German consciousness as so important, as the secularization of the Christian messiah, and the Germans were boiling with blood for their own people, believing themselves to be the representatives of God.
Lohengrin
Wagner was not a socialist revolutionary, but rather an anarchist, and this is not intended to reduce Wagner to a radical revolutionary, but to a political revolution based on socio-cultural change, but to adopt a top-down approach, hoping that by reforming the opera house, the individual's cause and his personal artistic utopia would be put into order. There is no doubt that such a revolution has failed. It was because of his failure that Wagner threw himself into a real cultural and political revolution, and he wanted to succeed in a roundabout way to achieve an artistic revolution. During this period, he became acquainted with Bakunin and Proudhon, who had an indelible influence on his thinking, Wagner had the concept of love and freedom, making man his own god, and in a series of ideas and the creation of the Ring of the Nibelons, Wagner's anti-Semitic tendencies became more and more pronounced, because the relationship between Jews and money was pointed to the opposition to freedom, that is, the use of Jews as the beneficiaries of capital grabs.
Wagner's biography, My Life, is exaggerated in many places. It seems that Druna not only had to write a biography of Wagner, but also needed to examine the deceptive elements of Wagner's autobiography.
Wagner's deception was not only directed against the Jews, but also the account of his first wife, Minna Plana, which is entirely denigrated, all of which is recorded in his biography, but if you look at other sources, such as the letters between Wagner and his wife Minna, Minna's diary, you will find that Wagner and his later biographers are stigmatizing Minna. Minna's birth and experience are lamentable, and at the age of 15, she was seduced and conceived a child, but the man ran away. Minna's stepmother pretends to be pregnant, minna sneaks into hiding, and the child is born, claiming to be Minna's sister, the father knows nothing about it, and the so-called sister does not learn the truth until her deathbed. Wagner fell in love with Minna unknowingly, writing many warm letters to Minna, but in Wagner's later autobiography, minna was so denigrated that it influenced the evaluation of later biographers who wrote biographies of Wagner, and they all invariably belittled Minna, thinking that she was vulgar and hysterical, and interestingly, these people were all men.
Perhaps this is the significance of the existence of this version of Wagner, re-examining the myths that Wagner created for himself, and justifying some of the stigmatized.