Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art: The 1998 Larkin-Stuart Lectures (The Larkin-Stuart Lectures)

How is it possible for a seriously flawed human being to produce art that is good, true, and beautiful. Why is the art of Richard Wagner, a very imperfect man, important and even indispensable to us? In this volume, Father Owen Lee ventures an answer to those questions by way of a figure in Sophocles - the hero Philoctetes. Gifted by his god with a bow that would always shoot true to the mark, and indispensable to his fellow Greeks, he was marked by the same god with an odious wound that made him hateful and hated. Sophocles's powerful insight is that those blessed by the gods and indispensable to men are visited as well with great vulnerability and suffering. Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art traces some of Wagner's extraordinary influence for good and ill on a century of art and politics - on Eliot and Proust as well as on Adolf Hitler - and discusses in detail Wagner's Tannhauser, the work in which the composer first dramatised the Faustian struggle of a creative artist in whom 'two souls dwell.' In the course of this penetrating study, Father Lee argues that Wagner's ambivalent art is indispensable to us, life-enhancing and ultimately healing.

How is it possible for a seriously flawed human being to produce art that is good, true, and beautiful? Why is the art of Richard Wagner, a very imperfect man, important and even indispensable to us?

In this volume, Father Owen Lee ventures an answer to those questions by way of a figure in Sophocles – the hero Philoctetes. Gifted by his god with a bow that would always shoot true to the mark and indispensable to his fellow Greeks, he was marked by the same god with an odious wound that made him hateful and hated. Sophocles' powerful insight is that those blessed by the gods and indispensable to men are visited as well with great vulnerability and suffering.

Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art traces some of Wagner's extraordinary influence for good and ill on a century of art and politics – on Eliot and Proust as well as on Adolf Hitler – and discusses in detail Wagner's Tannhouser, the work in which the composer first dramatised the Faustian struggle of a creative artist in whom 'two souls dwell.' In the course of this penetrating study, Father Lee argues that Wagner's ambivalent art is indispensable to us, life-enhancing and ultimately healing.

1. Wagner And The Wound That Would Not Heal -- 2. Wagner's Influence: The First Hundred Years -- 3. You Use Works Of Art To See Your Soul. M. Owen Lee. The 1998 Larkin-stuart Lectures. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [95]-98) And Index. These three Larkin-Stuart lectures, part of a series devoted to religious and ethical concerns, will examine some aspects of the life and work of Richard Wagner.