Losing one’s Head: Roger Allen is stimulated and provoked by a magisterial new study of Wagner

The most immediate and pressing challenge John Deathridge sets both himself and the readership of Wagner Beyond Good and Evil is how to respond to the Nietzschean agenda set by the title. Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886), Nietzsche’s celebrated account (partly fuelled by Wagnerian polemics) of how cultures lose their creative drive, still has the power to unsettle. What exactly are the Wagnerian ‘forces and juices, seasons and zones’ that Nietzsche regards as so potent (paradoxically referring in Beyond Good and Evil to the Meistersinger Prelude, one of the two works in the Wagner canon not subjected in the present study to Deathridge’s critical scrutiny)? In Wagner Beyond Good and Evil John Deathridge courageously takes up the Nietzschean gauntlet by addressing one broad underlying question from a variety of critical angles: why do Wagner’s works continue to exercise a fascination and provoke extremes of reaction in a cultural context very different from that in which they were created?