What Is Art? · Character

Richard Wagner

The composer whose music-dramas Tolstoy dissects as the era's most seductive counterfeit, a case study in how the upper classes mistake novelty for art.

supporting

Also known as Wagner

First appearance: i

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Criticized for praising Beethoven's last period and creating music based on erroneous theories.

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Wagner is the living test case for Tolstoy's charge that modern art has lost the capacity to transmit real feeling, substituting technical ambition and borrowed emotion. Tolstoy grants Wagner's fame and the devotion of his admirers, then argues that his attempt to fuse music and drama violates the separate realms of each art, producing effects that imitate sincerity without possessing it. Wagner's prestige makes him the pivot of the treatise's middle chapters, where Tolstoy turns from theory to the damning evidence of celebrated works.

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Character Web

13 connections

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Other

Character groups

True and counterfeit artists
Moral and national artists
Referenced thinkers and artists

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Narrative arc

Story tension across the book — this chapter sits in Exposition.

Setup
Escalation
Breaking point

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XII
Criticized for praising Beethoven's last period and creating music based on erroneous theories.
Chapter XIII: Wagner and the Counterfeit of Art
Composer whose works, especially 'The Nibelung's Ring', are used as the central example of counterfeit art.
XVII
Cited as a composer whose music is admired but contributes to the perversion of art.
Appendices
Excerpt from a letter by Wagner is included as an appendix.
III
Subject of the chapter; his opera cycle 'The Nibelung's Ring' is summarized and criticized.

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