jools at the opera

[binkie]

I think the reference is, as much as anything, an early indication of the tricky balancing act Harry performs between being entirely Them, or entirely Us. There are all sorts of complexities of class, education, association, networking and politics involved in the relationship between Harry and Jools, between Harry and the Service, and between Harry and his very particular perception of (the value of) patriotism. The Wagner comment highlights several of these, all of which are underpinned by centuries of development and counter-development in terms of the making and un-making of cultural constructs and intellectual consensus.

Wagner is an extremely contentious, even toxic, figure in the history of the creative arts. His anti-semitism, racism and proto-eugenic politics bled into his work. Furthermore, because of his extraordinary contemporary popularity, and the extent to which he was happy to play the part of a sort of 19th-century sleb, the communication of his opinions and attitudes accompanied his work in the wider world. He does, though, suffer somewhat by association in retrospect: Friederich Nietzsche was an admirer of his, and was a member of his intellectual retinue. The appropriation by the National Socialist movement of elements of Wagner's and Nietzsche's vision of Man-in-the-World (and the constitution of what it meant to be German in that world - even at a time when Germany did not really even exist) continues to exert negative influence over any rehabilitation of the work of either man.

Harry, it appears, is less willing than Jools to be charitable about concepts of art existing in a vacuum. For Harry, if Wagner was a proponent of a compromised intellectual expression - and, worse than this - was an object of hero worship for a man whose intellectual and political compromise was so utterly and devastatingly horrendous to behold, this is all there is worth knowing of Wagner. Jools, it is implied, has no interest in the man, or the historical backdrop or development of application of his works or his philosophies. He just likes the rousing tunes: the actual Sturm und Drang. Jools has had a better, more expensive, education than Harry. But Harry is the man with the brains - the man who sees the bigger picture.


There is, of course, every chance I'm just spectacularly over-thinking this