This might seem like a trivial point, but it isn’t. There is no ‘Redemption through Love’ at the close of the Ring. Brünnhilde retrieves the accursed ring from the finger of the slain Siegfried, climbs onto her horse and the two of them, woman and beast, take a flying leap onto Siegfried’s blazing funeral pyre. Everything goes up in flames. And then comes a flood. The ending is cataclysmic.

‘Redemption through Destruction’ is one of the themes that pops up from time to time in Richard Wagner: A Life in Music by German musicology professor Martin Geck. This is Wagner’s ‘archetypal scenario’, according to Professor Geck. The destruction doesn’t need to be on the apocalyptic scale of the final moments of the Ring. In fact, it is almost always played out between the two central characters in any one opera: the Dutchman and Senta; Lohengrin and Elsa; Tristan and Isolde, and so on. ‘Redemption through Destruction’ is also a motif in Wagner’s notorious essay ‘Judaism in Music’ (1850, revised 1869), where Wagner argues that Jews are offered ‘redemption’ through ‘self-annihilation’, a price which strikes me as rather too high.

As for love, it is by and large a negative force in Wagner’s operas. It is a source of anguish. Isolde’s blissed-out aria over the dead body of Tristan at the conclusion of Tristan and Isolde is generally known as her ‘Love-Death’, but Wagner’s preferred name for it was ‘Isolde’s Transfiguration’. At the conclusion of the aria, according to the stage directions, ‘Isolde sinks gently, as if transfigured, in Brangäne’s arms, on to Tristan’s body.’ She finally overcomes the torments of love by transcending her corporeal existence. That is to say, she dies.

But, of course, music complicates everything. We are ravished by the sounds of Isolde’s death. And the final notes of the Ring, a D-flat major melody of utmost beauty played by unison violins, are so incredibly lovely we really want to believe that we are hearing ‘Redemption through Love’. Never has annihilation sounded so exquisite. Wagner, in private, claimed that the melody signified the ‘glorification of Brünnhilde’. But Brünnhilde, to put it bluntly, has committed suicide. So whichever way you look at it, death is given a sublime soundtrack.

Wagner photographed by Elliott & Fry in London, 1877, reproduced in Barry Millington’s Richard Wagner: The Sorcerer of Bayreuth (Thames & Hudson, 2012, $49.95 hb)

Is anything salvaged at the end of the Ring? Or, as put by Geck, ‘can a shipwreck become a relaunch?’ The gods, ensconced in their fortress Valhalla, perish in the inferno. But the three Rhine daughters, representing nature, return to claim the gold (or, at least, the ring forged from the gold) that was stolen from them in the Ring’s opening scene. And Wagner’s stage directions indicate that there are spectators to the conflagration and flood who presumably survive the catastrophe. Having posed the shipwreck/relaunch question, Geck argues against such a reductionist model – Wagner’s operas are full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and lacunae; factors which go some way towards making them so endlessly fascinating – but proposes a relaunch of sorts when he suggests that Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, with its theme of renunciation, presents the possibility of a world beyond Götterdämmerung. But Parsifal, with its aura of Aryan Christianity and racial regeneration, throws up its own set of problems.

Wagner’s so-called ‘regeneration’ essays, the centrepiece of which is ‘Religion and Art’ (1880), date from his last years, around the time he composed Parsifal. For nearly half a century, Wagner wrote treatises and pamphlets on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the history of opera to ancient Greek theatre to German destiny, Jews, Beethoven, vivisection, and much else besides. But were Wagner not a musical dramatist, he would be little remembered today.

‘Don’t be fooled by the subtitle – A Life in Music – for this is not a biography in any strict sense but rather a penetrating and occasionally provocative study of the works of Wagner as musical entities, theatrical productions, and cultural, historical, and philosophical artefacts.’

Wagner was born into a family with theatrical inclinations. His stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, was an actor, and four of Wagner’s five older siblings pursued careers in the theatre, either as actors or singers. One of the pleasures of Richard Wagner: A Life in Music is the discussion, brief though it is, of Leubald, a five-act tragedy – spoken, not sung – written by Wagner between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, that is to say, between 1826 and 1828. Were it to be performed, it would last for approximately six hours. (What is the Jesuit expression about give me the boy and I’ll show you the man?) The operas Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot followed in 1834 and 1836, and the five-act ‘grand tragic opera’ Rienzi in 1840. According to Wagner’s autobiography, Mein Leben (1870–75, 1880), the première of Rienzi commenced at six in the evening and the curtain had still not come down when the clock struck midnight. None of these works is in the Bayreuth performing canon, which commences with The Flying Dutchman, written in 1841 (and later revised, several times).

Geck’s focus, like the Bayreuth canon, is principally on the operas from The Flying Dutchman on, with each receiving its own chapter (indeed, several chapters in the case of the Ring). Don’t be fooled by the subtitle – A Life in Music – for this is not a biography in any strict sense but rather a penetrating and occasionally provocative study of the works of Wagner as musical entities, theatrical productions, and cultural, historical, and philosophical artefacts. I was taken aback at about the midway point to come across the following: ‘A book like this, which seeks to engage the general reader, is not a suitable place for a detailed technical analysis.’ Granted, ‘detailed technical analysis’ of musical examples (of which there are not many) is kept to a minimum, but ‘general readers’ might want to be clued up on enharmonic modulations, diminished seventh chords, and the like. Also, there are no plot summaries or blow-by-blow descriptions of the operas, so familiarity with the works under discussion is taken as given. In other words, if you’re new to Wagner this book is probably not for you, but if you want to sink your teeth into a work of intense musicological scholarship which also draws widely from thinkers in other disciplines (the roll-call of names includes Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Marshall McLuhan, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Slavoj Žižek), you will find much to savour.

Finally, a word about an unsung hero: the translator of the volume, Stewart Spencer. Here we have not only a translator of the very highest order, but a Wagner scholar of distinction. The attention to detail is stunning: in the approximately forty pages of endnotes, we not only are given precise citations for works in German, but, where applicable, corresponding page references for those works which are available in English translation. Meticulousness of this kind is indicative of the attention to detail throughout. Bouquets all round.