Meister or Monster?

Whether he's an obsession or an object of revulsion, nobody is neutral about Richard Wagner. As the National Youth Orchestra prepare for Wagner's complete Ring cycle in Limerick next week - the first Irish performance in 90 years - Michael Dervan looks at one of the most influential composers of the 20th century

Wagner is one of those figures who simply can't be kept out of the international headlines. The members of the Wagner family feud viciously and publicly over control of the Bayreuth Festival, a focus of pilgrimage so successful there are 10 times as many applications as there are tickets available.

The festival's current director, Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of the composer, was granted life tenure in his post, and has been resisting attempts to replace him. He has successfully faced down the festival's board of trustees and Bavaria's minister of culture. The struggle that's still ongoing is not so much a soap opera as a real-life drama exemplifying the corrupting influence of power - one of the central themes of the composer's great operatic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs).

Wagner, an anti-Semite, was the favourite composer of Adolf Hitler, whose world view was influenced by the mythology of the operas. The Wagners were unhealthily close to the German dictator; and Winifred Wagner, an Englishwoman who married into the family (she was the wife of the composer's only son, Siegfried), remained unrepentant and spoke warmly of Hitler until her death in 1980. The anti-Semitism has brought about an unofficial ban on Wagner's music in concert halls in Israel.

Zubin Mehta was thwarted 20 years ago when he attempted to conduct Wagner there. But Daniel Barenboim succeeded last summer in Jerusalem, playing the prelude to Tristan und Isolde as an encore, after allowing time for any objectors to leave the hall. The censure for such a high-profile transgression was swift, widespread and severe, with a parliamentary committee calling for Barenboim to be boycotted by cultural institutions in Israel until he had apologised.

Barenboim's attackers accused him of "cultural rape" and behaviour that was "brazen, arrogant, uncivilised and insensitive".

The music of Wagner, dubbed "The Music of the Future" in the composer's lifetime, has always tended to excite extremes of polarised response. One individual, who caught the Wagner bug when young, was the director of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Francis Humphrys.

"He became an obession," he recalls. "Either you can't stand him and can't stand everything that he stands for, or the music catches you somewhere very deep and you get hooked. It's like a drug, isn't it? That's my memory of it. You did everything, queuing for Covent Garden, going to Bayreuth on the off-chance, waiting outside the box office for returns, sometimes even getting a good seat for free, sometimes just landing a spot behind a pillar where you can't see anything. But even with all the reservations about the Nazi past and everything, the experience was overwhelming." He now seems genuinely reluctant to attend the Ring performance in Limerick, for fear of fully re-activating the craving.

It seems appropriate that the work of a composer who propounded the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, should arouse such all-consuming passion. And the trait of taking things to their limit seems to have been with Wagner from his earliest days.

At the age of 11, he planned a gigantic drama in the spirit of Shakespeare. "The design," he said, "was grand in the extreme. Forty-two people died in the course of the piece, and I was obliged to let most of them reappear as ghosts in the last acts, for want of living characters."

In terms of extremism, Wagner is the personification of the Romantic artist. He endured both poverty and failure early in his career. He went on to secure the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the freedom to work without compromise, lead a life of luxury and see the building of a theatre to his own specifications. In between he had designed his own musical instruments (the Wagner tubas which were also so beloved of Bruckner), been a revolutionary political refugee and become the composer about whom no one was shy of an opinion.

HIS private life was colourful, too. He stole the wife of a close colleague, Hans von Bülow, and Cosima (who was the daughter of Liszt) lived on after him to supervise the perpetuation of his work and ideals.

In musical terms, Wagner's work furthered changes that were at the heart of musical development in the 19th century, the expansion of the orchestra, the liberation of instruments that had hitherto been granted only supporting roles, the increasing chromaticism of harmonic usage. The protracted avoidance of resolution in Tristan und Isolde not only created the work's unique sense of yearning, but also served to inspire composers who took the matter a stage further and began to jettison the system of tonality, of key-centredness, which had governed music for hundreds of years.

It's been one of the sad facts of musical life in Ireland that the major works of such a seminal figure go largely unheard.

To put it in context, it's almost as if some of the major plays of Shakespeare were never to be seen in our theatres. The National Youth Orchestra's complete performance of the Ring may only be a concert performance, but it will actually be the first complete performance of the work in Ireland since the foundation of the State. And it would be a rare optimist who would predict a date for the four operas of the Ring to be performed here on stage.

And what of the 14-and-a-half hour Ring cycle itself, that tale of power achieved by the forswearing of love, and the cursed fate of the magic ring and those who crave the power it grants?

It is unquestionably one of the peaks of Western musical art, rich enough that it excites both adulation and revulsion, and universal in its fundamental message so that it can successfully absorb and reflect the conflicting concerns of successive generations.

And, as the familial in-fighting over Bayreuth continually reminds us, that message is no less relevant today than it was when the work was first performed in Bayreuth in 1876.

The National Youth Orchestra's performance of the complete Ring is at the University Concert Hall in Limerick next Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.The university hosts an international Wagner conference on August 9th and 10th, and among the speakers is Nike Wagner, a family member who was in contention for the directorship of the Bayreuth Festival.

Booking and information from 061-331549 (Ring performances) and 061-202354 (conference)