Class 2: Darwin's Tree of Life Part 2

Marx only has two beliefs in common with Darwin, but they are very crucial ones. Both Marx and Darwin believed the same lesson that all humans were connected by their common origin, and that they evolve in a steaming cauldron of war, murder and revolt. But this is only a third of Darwin’s true equation. Another third is occupied by Wagner, who believed that all things are divided, and the strong must therefore prove their strength by the defeat of the weak. Where this differs from Darwin is that Darwin sees no moral dimension in this whereas Wagner looks upon this development with approval.

Before we go any further, we have to be clear about a few things. The first is that it’s almost impossible to talk about the ideas present in music, or even opera, with any real precision. There’s a quote which over the years has been attributed to dozens of people: “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” While music can make you feel very many emotions, the whole point of expressing something in music is that you can express your feelings with such immediate urgency that no words could ever do the same. So to a certain extent, the music must do the talking for us.

And yet, with Wagner, no musician has ever demanded more discussion. And short of Shakespeare and the writers of The Bible, no artist has ever been more written about. Even now, Wagner may still be the most controversial, shocking of any genre in any part of the world.

Question: Who might you suggest as the most shocking, controversial artists in the world?

Wagner is the only composer, perhaps the only musician in any genre, whose music is almost guaranteed to cause a riot in one part of the world - even if it’s only Israel. When the Israel Philharmonic tried to perform a Wagner encore in 1981, a full-fledged riot broke out and the orchestra couldn’t finish the piece. A quarter-century later, an Israeli conductor named Daniel Barenboim announced that his German orchestra would play Wagner encore, and engaged the audience in twenty minutes of dialogue and debate in which anyone could speak up. Even in that situation, people started shouting and slammed the auditorium doors as they stormed out. Ever now that the taboo was successfully broken, nobody dared to break it again.

What is it about Wagner that’s so shocking? Let’s start with a purely musical example. This one is from 1861, when Wagner presented his opera Tannhauser in Paris and he wrote a ballet especially for the premiere that completely shocked the audience. The ballet is supposed to represent everything which goes on on the mountain of the goddess, Venus. To our ears, neither the music or the dancing would be all that shocking, though the harmonies were as avant-garde for its day as anything yet performed. But I need you all to imagine it from the standpoint of 1861 Europe, an era so repressed that they put dresses on the chair legs because they worried that the naked legs might sexually excite people.

(Play the first few minutes of the Tannhauser Venusberg Music - Munch - from 9:05)

This is extremely exciting music, but if If I told you that this music and the dancing that went with it caused full-scale physical fighting in the theater between partisans for and against it, you’d probably not believe me. But it’s still true. It was a very different era, and the goalpost for what’s shocking always changes. And yet, there are also elements of Wagner which are much, much more shocking today than they were when he wrote it - and Wagner wrote the texts to all his operas himself. Listen to this, the final few minutes of his only comedy, Die Meistersinger.

(play the monologue at the end of Die Meistersinger - Bohm - Verachtet mir die Meister nicht, from 2:10)

Habt Acht! Uns dräuen üble Streich': zerfällt erst deutsches Volk und Reich, in falscher wälscher Majestät kein Fürst bald mehr sein Volk versteht, und wälschen Dunst mit wälschem Tand sie pflanzen uns in deutsches Land; was deutsch und echt, wüsst' keiner mehr, lebt's nicht in deutscher Meister Ehr'. Drum sag' ich euch: ehrt eure deutschen Meister! Dann bannt ihr gute Geister; und gebt ihr ihrem Wirken Gunst, zerging' in Dunst das heil'ge röm'sche Reich, uns bliebe gleich die heil'ge deutsche Kunst!

Beware! Evil tricks threaten us: if the German people and kingdom should one day decay, under a false, foreign rule soon no prince would understand his people; and foreign mists with foreign vanities they would plant in our German land; what is German and true none would know, if it did not live in the honour of German Masters. Therefore I say to you: honour your German Masters, then you will conjure up good spirits! And if you favour their endeavours, even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German Art!

DIE VOLK Ehrt eure deutschen Meister, dann bannt ihr gute Geister; und gebt ihr ihrem Wirken Gunst, zerging' in Dunst das heil'ge röm'sche Reich, uns bliebe gleich die heil'ge deutsche Kunst! Heil! Sachs! Nürnbergs teurem Sachs!

THE PEOPLE Honour your German Masters, then you will conjure up good spirits! And if you favour their endeavours, even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German Art! Hail, Sachs! Nuremberg's dear Sachs!

“Beware! Evil tricks threaten us if the German people and kingdom should one day decay under a false, foreign rule, soon no prince would understand his people; and foreign mists with foreign vanities they would plant in our German land; what is German and true none would know, if it did not live in the honour of German Masters. Therefore I say to you: honour your German Masters.”

This opera goes on for more than five hours of music, and we’ll talk about the role of length in Wagner a bit later. But this is honestly one of the greatest operas ever written and the only opera Wagner wrote about non-mythological people with ordinary problems. Most of the music sounds like it could easily have been written by Schubert or Brahms. But at the very end of this huge marathon, Wagner inserts an unmistakable moral with the story’s hero exhorting an assemblage of all his townspeople to protect Germany from evil, to which the crowdspeople respond by repeating what he says word for word and then erupting in shouts of ‘Heil!’ for the man who commanded them. It should go without saying that for Hitler, the propaganda opportunities which this scene afforded was a godsend.

But let’s look a little closer at that text. “Evil tricks threaten us...under a false and foreign rule... “

Hmmm… well, most invaders patrol the streets with enormous military force, not evil tricks. Natives would only be afraid of evil tricks perpetrated by foreigners better known for their brains than their brawn. What could this possibly be code for when it’s written by a composer who once wrote a charming passage like this?

(call on reader)

“So long as the separate art of music had a real organic life-need in it […] there was nowhere to be found a Jewish composer.... Only when a body’s inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgement in it—yet merely to destroy it. Then, indeed, that body’s flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect life: but who in looking on that body’s self, would hold it still for living?”  

Richard Wagner - Judaism in Music

Many Wagnerians still deny that this finale of Die Meistersinger, and much else in Wagner’s operas, has any anti-semitic intent. And who knows? They might be right. Wagner was such a great artist that this speech is blended pretty much seamlessly into the fabric of the plot - there’s no way of accusing Wagner directly of putting proto-Nazi agitprop into his scores, but once you perceive it, the stench of some pretty offensive propaganda is rather overwhelming. There are all sorts of examples in art of places where the line blurs between art and political agitation. You can’t be sure whether the artwork is trying to exhort you to action, but it clearly seems that way.

So here’s a related question: What are some examples of artworks that might be trying to exhort us to some kind of action?

If there was action to which Wagner was trying to exhort people - and many people believe that he was trying very hard - what was it?

In order to talk about that, we need to talk as briefly as possible about the 1848 revolution and the effect it had on Wagner’s psyche. Wagner, in spite of impressing no one with his political knowledge, was very enthusiastic about the prospect of revolution - maybe even more enthusiastic than Marx. He believed in two very contradictory ideas: an absolute monarch whose authority could not be questioned, and an absolutely free people whose rights were never trod on. To put it succinctly, all he wanted a new conception of human beings in which they were all united in complete agreement all the time - such bourgeois concepts as disagreement, compromise, consensus, would  be obliterated. This would sound implausible to 99% of the world population, but perhaps Wagner thought it was possible because his own story was so implausible. A few years earlier, some music loving noblemen plucked Wagner from almost complete obscurity to be the director of the Dresden Court Opera House, one of the world’s pre-eminent musical jobs. But compromise, particularly when it came to things as banal as money, was not in his makeup, and Wagner quickly soured on his own success. Six years later, he rewarded his employers with a revolutionary plot to burn the opera house to the ground and spent the next 15 years on the run from the Saxon authorities, who wanted to jail him for life.

It was during the first four years of his exile that Wagner truly became Wagner. He stopped writing music and went back with a vengeance to his first love, the pen. During these four years, he wrote the entirety of the text to his sixteen-hour drama, The Ring Cycle, he wrote the essay, Judaism in Music, which we quoted, and many, many other essays. But the most important of them is probably ‘Art and Revolution.’

According to Wagner, drama is the highest of all the arts because it synthesizes all the others into a new whole, but true drama is wasted on the public of his own day. The society of Wagner’s day, completely unlike our own…, was tired and decadent, a compromised, bourgeois, semi-democracy, completely debased by financial concerns and valued money over people. Its citizens’ lives were so dreary that they wanted only to watch frivolous stage entertainments to forget their hopelessness rather than stage work which might enoble them. What the citizens need is an Athenian democracy, unspoiled by financial compromises, in which all people are valued, and which views art and religion as the exact same thing. In such a democracy, the premiere of a new drama is nothing less than a religious event deserving of its own festival. Such a democracy can only be attained through revolution, and when we have brought forth a true resurrection of Athenian democracy, an enthusiastic audience will embrace the writing and producing of new dramas like the Athenian tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that seamlessly blend drama, art, dance, music, and poetry. Such a democracy, purged of its dirty financial elements, would return us to the lofty, pristine glory of the Classical Athens.

Here is how Wagner put it:

(call on reader)

“To the Greeks, the production of a tragedy was a religious festival, where the gods bestirred themselves upon the stage and bestowed on men their wisdom...

As the spirit of community split itself along a thousand lines of egoistic cleavage, so was the great united work of Tragedy disintegrated into its individual factors...

Each one of these dissevered arts, nursed and luxuriously tended for the entertainment of the rich, has filled the world to overflowing with its products; in each, great minds have brought forth marvels; but the one true Art has not been born again, either in or since the so-called Renaissance. The perfect Art-work, the great united utterance of a free and lovely public life, the Drama, Tragedy, - howsoever great the poets who have here and there indited tragedies - is not yet born again: for the reason that it cannot be reborn, but must be born anew.

Only the great Revolution of Mankind, whose beginnings erstwhile shattered Grecian Tragedy, can win for us this Art-work. For only this Revolution can bring forth from its hidden depths, in the new beauty of a nobler Universalism, that which it once tore from the conservative spirit of a time of beautiful but narrow-meted culture - and stirring it, engulfed."

So let’s pause for a question: Since we never stop hearing that our American society is tired, bourgeois, decadent and frivolous, and has become so because of money. Is there any society today which might fancy itself worthy of a new kind of Greek Tragedy that marries religious belief to art?

It’s common to call Wagner a ‘romantic’ composer, not romantic in the erotic sense but in the historical sense. But there’s something missing from this definition, let’s look at how Isaiah Berlin defines Romanticism.

"a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.”

And now let’s listen to this duet from Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde:

(Furtwangler/Berlin/Suthaus/Schluter '47 O sink hernieder)

BEIDE O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe, gib Vergessen, dass ich lebe; nimm mich auf in deinen Schoss, löse von der Welt mich los!	Music	TOGETHER Descend, O Night of love, grant oblivion that I may live; take me up into your bosom, release me from the world!
	TRISTAN Verloschen nun die letzte Leuchte;		TRISTAN Extinguished now the last glimmers;
	ISOLDE was wir dachten, was uns deuchte;		ISOLDE what we thought, what we imagined;
	TRISTAN all Gedenken -		TRISTAN all thought
	ISOLDE all Gemahnen -		ISOLDE all remembering,
	BEIDE heil'ger Dämm'rung hehres Ahnen löscht des Wähnens Graus welterlösend aus.		TOGETHER the glorious presentiment of sacred twilight extinguishes imagined terrors, world-redeeming.
	ISOLDE Barg im Busen uns sich die Sonne, leuchten lachend Sterne der Wonne.		ISOLDE The sun concealed itself in our bosom, the stars of bliss gleam, laughing,
	TRISTAN Von deinem Zauber sanft umsponnen, vor deinen Augen süss zerronnen;		TRISTAN softly entwined in your magic, sweetly dissolved before your eyes;
	ISOLDE Herz an Herz dir, Mund an Mund;	Music	ISOLDE heart on your heart, mouth on mouth;
	TRISTAN eines Atems ein'ger Bund; -		TRISTAN the single bond of a single breath;
	BEIDE bricht mein Blick sich wonn'-erblindet, erbleicht die Welt mit ihrem Blenden:		TOGETHER my glance is deflected, dazzled with bliss, the world palses with its blinding radiance:
	ISOLDE die uns der Tag trügend erhellt,		ISOLDE lit by Day's guileful deception,
	TRISTAN zu täuschendem Wahn entgegengestellt,		TRISTAN standing firm against deceitful delusion,
	BEIDE selbst dann bin ich die Welt: Wonne-hehrstes Weben, Liebe-heiligstes Leben, Niewiedererwachens wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch.	Music	TOGETHER then am I myself the world; floating in sublime bliss, life of love most sacred, the sweetly conscious undeluded wish never again to waken.

This is, believe it or not, just a small part in the first half of a 40-minute love duet. There are days when this duet seems like the dumbest thing on earth, and there are other days when this incredibly long duet seems to me like may be the greatest thing Wagner ever wrote. There are even moments, very rare ones, when it seems to me that perhaps Tristan und Isolde is not ridiculous, and really is the greatest work of art ever conceived by the human mind, and that Wagner is the one artist of the last four-hundred years that can bare comparison with Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. But yes, those moments are rare.

So Question - without taking a lot of time on it: What dramatic works do you think might compare to Shakespeare and Sophocles?

But for the moment, this would seem to fit Berlin’s definition of Romanticism in every particular. It is both Romantic with a capital and a lower case-R. What Wagner is describing is a concept of sexual love which involves so much ecstasy that you literally forget you’re a separate being from the other person. And yet, like sex itself, the very concept is more than a bit ridiculous.

Wagner was a passionate follower of an eminent philosopher of the generation before Marx named Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s most important theory, and again, this is an extremely simple explanation, is that there are two sides to the Self. One self is the self which we perceive as our selves. This self is not the person within you who does the thinking, but the person within you to whom it occurs that you’re thinking. The other self, the more naive, inborn, self, is the thinking self, but is more basic than thinking. This self is the ‘Will’, or the ‘will-to-life.’ The Will is what causes us to think, to feel, to be conscious, to have instincts. The Will is also a prison from which we can’t escape, and all of the unsatisfied longings of the will can only lead to anguish. What we call pleasure, is merely the reilef we feel when we don’t feel the Will’s pain. Therefore, we have to find ways of extinguishing the pain which the Will so consistently gives us. And we’re most likely to transcend the pain of the Will through either music, philosophy, art, or the wholesale renunciation of desire.

So question: What older concepts does this philosophy sound like? (wait for someone to say Buddhism)

To anyone who’s ever read about Buddhism, this is all very familiar - particularly that last part about renunciation. Both Schopenhauer and Wagner were interested in Buddhism, and Wagner planned before he died on writing an opera about The Buddha. But at the end of this same duet, Wagner provided a rejoinder to Schopenhauer which, in his mind at least, showed another way around the power of the Will.

(play Kleiber/Dresden - So Starben Wir)

TRISTAN So starben wir, um ungetrennt, ewig einig ohne End', ohn' Erwachen, ohn' Erbangen, namenlos in Lieb' umfangen, ganz uns selbst gegeben, der Liebe nur zu leben!		TRISTAN Thus might we die, that together, ever one, without end, never waking, never fearing, namelessly enveloped in love, given up to each other, to live only for love!
	ISOLDE (wie in sinnender Entrücktheit zu ihm aufblickend) So stürben wir, um ungetrennt, -	Music	ISOLDE (as if in reflective rapture, looking up at him) Thus would we die, that together -
	TRISTAN ewig einig ohne End', -		TRISTAN ever one, without end -
	ISOLDE ohn' Erwachen, -		ISOLDE never waking -
	TRISTAN ohn' Erbangen, -		TRISTAN never fearing -
	BEIDE namenlos in Lieb' umfangen, ganz uns selbst gegeben, der Liebe nur zu leben!		TOGETHER namelessly enveloped in love, given up to ourselves to live only for love!
	(Isolde neigt wie überwältigt das Haupt an seine Brust)
	BRANGÄNES STIMME (wie vorher) Habet acht! Habet acht! Schon weicht dem Tag die Nacht.		THE VOICE OF BRANGAENE (as before) Beware! Beware! Night soon gives way to Day.
	TRISTAN (lächelnd zu Isolde geneigt) Soll ich lauschen?		TRISTAN (smiling down at Isolde) Shall I listen?
	ISOLDE (schwärmerisch zu Tristan aufblickend) Lass mich sterben!		ISOLDE (dreamily looking up at Tristan) Let me die!
	TRISTAN Muss ich wachen?		TRISTAN Must I waken?
	ISOLDE Nie erwachen!		ISOLDE Never waken!
	TRISTAN Soll der Tag noch Tristan wecken?		TRISTAN Shall Day still waken Tristan?
	ISOLDE Lass den Tag dem Tode weichen!		ISOLDE Let Day give way to Death!
	TRISTAN Des Tages Dräuen nun trotzten wir so?		TRISTAN Have we Day's menaces thus defied?
	ISOLDE (mit wachsender Begeisterung) Seinem Trug ewig zu fliehn!		ISOLDE (in growing rapture) Ever to flee its guile.
	TRISTAN Sein dämmernder Schein verscheuchte uns nie?		TRISTAN Did its dawning never affright us?
	ISOLDE (mit grosser Gebärde ganz sich erhebend) Ewig währ uns die Nacht!		ISOLDE (raising herself up with a grand gesture) May our Night endure for ever!
	(Tristan folgt ihr, sie umfangen sich in schwärmerischer Begeisterung)
	BEIDE O ew'ge Nacht, süsse Nacht! Hehr erhabne Liebesnacht! Wen du umfangen, wem du gelacht, wie wär' ohne Bangen aus dir er je erwacht? Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod, sehnend verlangter Liebestod! In deinen Armen, dir geweiht, urheilig Erwarmen, von Erwachens Not befreit! Wie sie fassen, wie sie lassen, diese Wonne, Fern der Sonne, fern der Tage Trennungsklage! Ohne Wähnen sanftes Sehnen; ohne Bangen süss Verlangen; ohne Wehen hehr Vergehen; ohne Schmachten hold Umnachten; ohne Meiden, ohne Scheiden, traut allein, ewig heim, in ungemessnen Räumen übersel'ges Träumen.	Music Music	TOGETHER O eternal Night, sweet Night! Gloriously sublime Night of love! Those whom you have embraced, upon whom you have smiled, how could they ever waken without fear? Now banish dread, sweet death, yearned for, longed for death-in-love! In your arms, consecrated to you, sacred elemental quickening force, free from the peril of waking! How to grasp it, how to leave it, this bliss far from the sun's, far from Day's parting sorrows! Free from delusion gentle yearning, free from fearing sweet longing. Free from sighing sublime expiring. Free from languishing enclosed in sweet darkness. No evasion no parting, just we alone, ever home, in unmeasured realms of ecstatic dreams.
	TRISTAN Tristan du, ich Isolde, nicht mehr Tristan!		TRISTAN Tristan you, I Isolde, no longer Tristan.
	ISOLDE Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Isolde!		ISOLDE You Isolde, Tristan I, no longer Isolde!
	BEIDE Ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen, neu Erkennen, neu Entbrennen; endlos ewig, ein-bewusst: heiss erglühter Brust höchste Liebeslust! (Sie bleiben in verzückter Stellung)		TOGETHER Un-named, free from parting, new perception, new enkindling; ever endless self-knowing; warmly glowing heart, love's utmost joy! (They remain in a rapturous embrace)

Notice that very last moment, you hear a dissonant chord, which thwarts the resolution of a very coital sounding climax. The illicit affair of Tristan and Isolde has just been found out, and the pain of living has just become that much more painful.

Before we get to the finish: another question: Can you name any other work of art that imply the internal experience of sex so graphically? (so I can watch it...)

Wagner’s way around the all-conquering Will is death and a mystical hope that by choosing your means of death, your death will be to a purpose. If Tristan and Isolde can’t possess each other in life, perhaps they’ll be allowed to be together in the next world. At the end of the final act, Isolde sings the music we just heard again over Tristan’s dead body, but this time, the climax isn’t thwarted by a dissonant chord, and she sort of orgasms herself to death.

Technically this story is tragedy - it ends in the death of flawed heroes. But the music is the opposite of tragedy. It meets its end ecstatically, as though death is not something to be avoided but to be celebrated. Wagner’s great operatic rival, Verdi, also specialized in tragedies, but Verdi’s tragedies sound tragic. His music sounds more interested in consoling the people left behind than it does in telling us about death’s glories.

We often like to call Wagner bombastic, and he absolutely is. But he’s bombastic in a completely different way than people think he is. Wagner’s operas are not all fat women with helmets shouting over loud orchestras. His operas contain just as much music that’s deafeningly quiet accompanying dull, high-fallutin, pseudo-philosophical conversations for the better part of an hour. But in such moments, or hours..., the music seems almost deliberately dull. Wagner never bored his listeners without knowing that that was exactly what he was doing. He was a master hypnotist. He wanted to create a sense of claustrophobia over the listeners. He doesn’t adapt to you, you can only adapt to him. You can be completely bored for a half-hour and then realize that you have another seven half-hours to go, so you might as well surrender to the experience. He’s trapped us in the opera house for the better part of a day, and uses that span to completely change our perceptions of time. At the beginnings of his operas, he releases us with only enough loud music to make us think that we might get some more on the horizon. What he demands we demands we surrender is our Will. And once we’ve surrendered our Wills to him, these loud, bombastic moments become much more frequent, more frenzied, more violent. The musical violence becomes like a narcotic which we crave.  

Question: Can you think of any filmmaker who uses the same technique? (Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola, Hitchcock) Any TV show? (Breaking Bad)

The truth is that, relatively speaking, Tristan und Isolde is not that violent a piece of music. It certainly has many violent moments, almost none of which we’ve listened to today. But it’s the embryo that prepares us for the 15-hour, four day, Ring Cycle, which is where the real Wagnerian bloodbath happens, both musically and dramaturgically. Hopefully this class will go on long enough that we get to the Ring Cycle and talk about it in relation to Bismarck.

Beethoven celebrated the Self. His music demanded our attention as no musician before him ever did, but his music gives back to us a celebration of our dignity, our individuality, our generosity. But Wagner extolled self-renunciation, what he gives back to us is a sense that individuality is a curse from which our living selves can’t escape. But since we live in a godless world, we may be able to escape our individuality through death. Here is another great quote from Art and Revolution:

(call on reader)

“only Love can fathom Beauty; only Beauty can fashion Art. The love of weaklings for each other can only manifest itself as the goad of lust; the love of the weak for the strong is abasement and fear; the love of the strong for the weak is pity and forbearance; but the love of the strong for the strong is Love, for it is the free surrender to one who cannot compel us. Under every fold of heaven’s canopy, in every race, shall men by real freedom grow up to equal strength; by strength to truest love; and by true love to beauty. But Art is Beauty energized and turned to Knowledge.

And as the Knowledge of all men will find at last its religious utterance in the one effective Knwoledge of free united manhood: so will all these rich developments of Art find their profoundest focus in the Drama, in the glorious Tragedy of Man. The Tragedy will be the feast of all mankind; in it, - set free from each conventional etiquette, - free, strong, and beautious man will celebrate the dolour and elight of all his love, and consecreate in lofty worth the great Love-offering of his Death.”

This is why Wagner is still the most controversial artist who ever lived or who still lives. There is no appeal in Wagner to basic decency. In Wagner, there is only strength and weakness, and we have to prove our strength either by dying or causing death. Like all functional sociopaths, he understands us better than we do ourselves. The reason Wagner appeals to us is because we fear that he might be right.  So even if we fear and hate him, he’s far too useful for us to divorce him. He is, perhaps, the greatest creative genius who ever lived. And even if his characters are ridiculously unhuman, his music makes us feel as though we understand every thought that goes through their heads.

Like Marx, Wagner inaugurated a new, atheistic, kind of religion. But whereas Marx believed that we’re nothing more than tools formed by other tools, Wagner believes that no tool can touch us in any meaningful sense. All that matters about us is our blood, and Wagner worshipped blood both senses of the word - he worshipped bloodlines - as we’ll hopefully see in The Ring Cycle, and also worshipped the spilling of blood. Clearly the bloodlines Wagner worshipped were German, but nationalism centered around bloodline can be applied to any nationality, and has. In the 20th century, both Marx and Wagner led their followers down the same bloody path and used Darwin as an accomplice. Together, they’ve created the two main branch-divisions in Darwin’s tree. The world is now divided into those who believe that man is at the center of the world, and those who believe that machines are. Perhaps the next period of history is slated to be the one which determines that conclusion.