Richard Wagner, Father of Modern Music.

Over the years like many artists, I like to paint accompanied by classic music. My favourite composer has been J S Bach, mainly because I find his mathematical structure and discipline soothing, helping me decide what to do next. Anyone who has followed this blog over the years will know my artistic vision moves between different extremes. At one moment controlled and planed, at others free to run where the moment take me in an expressionist manner. Music among all the art forms has a presence that you can not ignore, unlike a painting you do not wish to engage with you may shut you eyes or turn away. This of course is not possible with Wagner, whether you like it or not his music fills the entire space wanted or not.

Years ago in my youth, I became addicted to Japanese Koto and Shakuhachi music, a sound that seems to grow on me. I would start my day with a little meditation, lying on the floor and let the sound of the koto drift over me and carry me away on a spiraling snake of smoke that wove its way ever upwards through forest and mountain imagery. This was very influential at the time as I began to hear music in visual terms, a taint that has remained over the years. Which bring me to Wagner who celebrated his 200th birthday the other day, if it is possible for him to celebrate such an event. Poor Wagner has had a lot to put up with over the years, his association with German National Socialism has not helped. Considering he died in 1883 nearly 35 years before Hitler's rise to power, it has always seemed absurd to me that in some quarters he is tared with such a  brush.  In Australia all German music was banned from being put to air on the radio during World War II, and only a few years ago the Israeli public went into melt down at the mere suggestion that a Wagner composition should be included in a concert, such it would seem is the power of music.

Wagner was interested in the grand picture and set a new course for musical composition. He liked to lead his listeners slowly into the folds and half hidden melodies of his works. A rich tapestry that at times overwhelms our senses as his music takes control of self. There seems to be no boundaries between the music and the world around us. This very quality of course is what was so attractive to later political figures, for it allowed them to move the masses on an unprecedented scale, to meld them to their will. Wagner leads us with large letters into his world that becomes our world as well, melding into one. This is what I like so much about Wagner, the sense of the grand picture the expansive vision.

This afternoon as I listened to The Flying Dutchman, Overture, a work based on his own experience in a stormy voyage on the Baltic in 1839. An experience that he felt would see the end in both his and his wife's death. Anyone who has ever experience a serious storm at sea, and I mean serious will relate to this work, the shrill of the wind in the rigging, the crushing raging strength of the waves against the ship's sides, often followed by a dreaded still moment of silence.

Music is capable of influencing our physical, mental, and emotional state in a direct way, we can not look away. Wagner has this capacity to suggest through musical forms, ideas and characteristic special to him. It has a completeness and purpose all of it's own. His music has not however always been popular, Berlioz, once suggested that Tristen und Isolde was a degenerate work, yet today it stands of one of Wagner's master composition.