Psychological Archetype and Motif

I'm not a psychologist, I just play one in cyberlife (laughing). This page is more about my personal experience and studies. As my studies progress, I'll be expanding this page accordingly.

As I began getting deeply interested in Wagner's music, I began to feel it progressively more each time I listened to it. This was something I'd experienced before, with select Rock/Metal music, as well as Beethoven's late string quartets. Some people refer to this effect as a mystical experience. I became determined to read up more about the philosophical and psychological ramifications of Wagner's work.

There were two books, Robert Donington's "Wagner's Ring and Its Symbols" , and Brian Magee's "Aspects of Wagner" , that got me thinking more about why Wagner's (music and Wagnerian music in general) effected me so much.

Wagner could be seen as the progenitor of modern psychoanalysis. He understood the power of repressed psychical energies, and translated them into music. Many of the ideas "introduced" by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the early part of the 20th century were already manifest and worked out in the operas of Wagner. Friedrich Nietzsche himself never made bones over how much of an impact that Wagner's music ideas had on him . In fact, one of the last things Nietzsche wrote as a sane man proclaimed that Wagner was the greatest benefactor of his whole life!

Professor Magee hypothesised that Wagner's music was the externalisation of what each character in his operas was feeling. In other words, the orchestra was the inside of the character, but out (get confused yet? laughing). It's really fascinating to compare what any of the characters in Wagner's last six operas says/sings with his or her mouth, as opposed or simpatico to what the orchestra is "saying".

It's even more interesting to ponder whether Wagner, through his Art, was enacting a transference of his own neuroses into his operas (most scholars would reply in the affirmative).

To Be Continued