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The Wagner Question
Six works and the necessary confrontation with opera's most contested figure
6 selections · Stage Door Society Editorial
Why Wagner Cannot Be Avoided
Richard Wagner is the most contested figure in the performing arts. His antisemitism is not separable from his art — it inflects his theories, his plots, his characterizations. Every serious listener must decide what to do with that fact.
This collection does not pretend the question away. It offers instead what Wagner's music dramas demonstrably are: works of staggering ambition, orchestral complexity, and — in the best moments — genuine sublimity.
The Leitmotif System
Wagner's innovation was the leitmotif — short musical ideas associated with characters, objects, or concepts, transformed and combined as the drama develops. By Tristan und Isolde (1865), this system had become so complex that the orchestra carried more of the drama's meaning than
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