Perfection in Imperfection? Arnold Whittall appraises a major new study of Wagner and his works

Review of Martin Geck, Richard Wagner: A Life in Music, tr. Stewart Spencer (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

March 2014, Volume 8, Number 1, 76–8.

As Martin Geck might put it, using (via Stewart Spencer) one of his text’s recurring formulas, ‘it is no accident’ that the word ‘music’ is given such prominence in his title. Music, as Geck sees and hears it, is not obliged to behave as if it were the exact equivalent of verbal, conceptual language. ‘It is above all non-musicians among Wagnerians who are keen to reduce Wagner’s thinking to a coherent system. In the process they rarely acknowledge that Wagner’s thinking is thinking about music’ (p. 137). Geck is therefore in the grand tradition of those German writers – Adorno, Dahlhaus – who home in on Wagner’s paradoxical ways, and also, to some extent at least, of those (mainly) American scholars who have sought to give discontinuity (not to be confused with incoherence) a distinctive role in Wagnerian musical dramaturgy.