A Note from the Guest Editor

Abstract

So many of my friends say Wagner is Leaves of Grass done into music that I begin to suspect that there must be something in it. […] I was never wholly convinced—there was always a remaining question. […] Do you figure out Wagner to be a force making for democracy or the opposite? [William Douglas] O'Connor swears to the democracy—swears to it with a big oath. Others have said to me that Wagner's art was distinctly the art of the caste—for the few. What am I to believe? I confess that I have heard bits here and there at concerts, from orchestras, bands, which have astonished, ravished me, like the discovery of a new world. What kind of barbaric yawp is Richard Wagner's “Hojotoho”? His music heralds some brave new world, we know this, know it just as Whitman did—but is it a world we still want to discover? The majority report since 1945 seems clear enough: yes, perhaps, in the opera house; no, absolutely, in the outside world. To hear Wagner's music, to witness his music dramas, has come to seem like peering through a glass window atop Pandora's box: observe, by all means, but keep the lid on tight.