Twisting Free With/Of Wagner

Abstract

In spite of the manifold divergence between Adorno and Heidegger, each converged upon the figure of Richard Wagner in the second half of the 1930s. Adorno’s book-length essay In Search of Wagner comprises an explicit treatment of the composer. But Wagner is no less fundamental to Heidegger’s lecture course on Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power as Art’ (1936). This coincidence might initially be explained away as a continuation of the divergence, between the one who fled Nazism and the one who supported it. In Search of Wagner comprises, Adorno will later state, a search for the ‘source of Hitler’s ideology’. Heidegger’s assessment of Wagner is mediated through his reading of Nietzsche. As the English-language editor of these lectures puts matters, ‘Take the thinker of the “blond beast”. Add another who is a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. The result bodes ill for the matter of thinking that is Heidegger’s Nietzsche.’3 Add an anti-Semitic composer, and the matter does not seem to bode any better.