use it as well. He demanded an almost unreasonable degree of loyalty from his supporters and followers, many of whom gave him it (even Has von Blow, when he found Wagner shacking up with little Cosima, stuck by himand all the performers at the first Bayreuth apparently performed free of charge), and his art is supposed to make similar demands upon its audience. Either give it all or not at all. Hence Nietzsche's characterisation of Wagner's art as decadent, and Wagner himself as the supreme decadent. Wagnerian opera he treated as a ruiner of spiritual health; for those to whom life is not enough it fills the void and makes up for whatever is lacking. It latches onto a certain neurosis, feeds on it and keeps it going, and therefore Wagner's works and the man himself can be a literal health hazard. As Wagner himself wrote to a friend once, "if we had life, we should have no need of art. Art begins where life breaks off: where nothing more is present, we call out in art, 'I wish' is our 'art' therefore not simply a confession of our impotence?" Tanner says all this theorising about decadence is speculative but even so, "it would be less than honest for people on either side to deny that something, maybe a large element, in their responses to Wagner is touched by it". Maybe it is in my case. Maybe I try to resist being sucked in by Wagner and his works so as to affirm my own strength. But I doubt it. There's another possible reason why people perhaps resist the pull of Wagner which is rather less speculative: the taint of National Socialism. That Wagner's name and reputation have become tarnished by his having been co-opted by Hitler is not worth the effort of denying. It was Wagner's early opera Rienzi, with its tale (told by Edward Gibbon near the end of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) of the medieval Roman tribune who went about trying to restore the glories of ancient Rome and lift it out of the decadence into which it had fa...
