Barry Emslie, Wagner: Race, Nation, Culture

I want to proceed, even in an article as brief as this, from the initial assumption of the complete man, taking the highly integrated homogeneous Gesamtkunstwerk as a model and suggesting that our customary attempts to deal with those aspects that are in themselves repugnant are misguided. That is, they are not discrete factors in the equation that can be cancelled out, nor are they ingredients in the mix that can be extracted and put to one side. Nor, even, are they simply lapses, mere quirks, with which we just have to live, either ignoring them when possible or responding to them in whatever rationalised fashion best suits our Wagnerian sensibilities.