Richard Wagner was not only a composer, but also a philosopher and revolutionary with deep thoughts on art, religion and culture. By combining music and mythology, his works became a symbol of artistic and intellectual awakening both in Germany and throughout Europe. Wagner’s multifaceted influence has been a source of inspiration, especially for the intellectuals of the Conservative Revolution and those seeking an aesthetic and philosophical challenge to modernity. We spoke to Giovanna Sessa about Wagner.

Could you introduce yourself to us?

I was born in Milan in 1957 and currently reside in Frascati (RM). I have taught philosophy in high schools and collaborated with Professor Gian Franco Lami at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, an unforgettable friend and mentor. I also served as a contract professor of “History of Ideas” at the University of Cassino. My writings have appeared in journals, newspapers, collective volumes, and conference proceedings. I have curated, translated, and prefaced dozens of books. Among my recent publications are Beyond Persuasion: Essay on Carlo Michelstaedter (Rome, 2008); The Wonder of Nothing: Life and Philosophy of Andrea Emo (Milan, 2014); Julius Evola and the Utopia of Tradition (Sesto S. Giovanni (MI), 2019); The Echo of Secret Germany: “Spring Comes Again” (Sesto S. Giovanni (MI), 2021); Azure Distances: Tradition on the Road (Sesto S. Giovanni (MI), 2022); Icons of the Possible: Garden, Forest, Mountain (Sesto S. Giovanni (MI), 2023). Regarding Wagner, I have curated R. Wagner, Religion and Art (Sesto S. Giovanni (MI), 2021); E. Schuré, Richard Wagner (Sesto S. Giovanni (MI), 2021); R. Wagner, The Ideal of Bayreuth (Sesto S. Giovanni (MI), 2024). I am the Secretary of the Julius Evola Foundation.

We understand the importance of Kant and Hegel in German thought, but what is Wagner’s significance for Germany? Can we speak of a “Wagnerian youth” akin to Goethe’s, and why didn’t Germany establish a Wagner Institute instead of the Goethe Institute?

Richard Wagner provided a theoretical and artistic contribution of inestimable value not only to Germany but to Europe as a whole. The ideological groundwork of his journey was deeply rooted in the German thought of his time. This creative and speculative trajectory was complex and multifaceted, undergoing various phases of development. Karl Löwith demonstrated convincingly in From Hegel to Nietzsche that the musical and theoretical experience of Wagnerism is linked to the ideological world of the Hegelian Left, a broad cultural movement that reached its zenith with Nietzsche, the philosopher who concluded the “dissolution of Hegelianism.”

During the second phase of Wagner’s production, matured during his stays in Zurich and Dresden, the great artist was captivated by the revolutionary spirit of Feuerbach. This period includes works like Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and the poetic drafting of The Ring Cycle. Through these works, Wagner sought to integrate art and life, striving to create a “revolutionary” art that could reunify what modern subjectivism had divided. His later production, centered on the Schopenhauerian German theme of Regenerationslehre (spiritual regeneration), called for the rebirth of the German and European peoples. This appeal to renewal involved young and old across all European nations.

The construction of the Bayreuth theater was completed with contributions (including financial) from passionate Wagnerians and associations bearing the composer’s name. These “young” Wagner devotees made explicit what was implicit in the etymology of Bayreuth: Reut refers to land reclaimed from the wild forest and made fertile, a symbol of a future rooted in an unfulfilled past—a concept Walter Benjamin might have termed “unexpressed.”

The Wagnerian legacy extended to authors of the Conservative Revolution, influencing both those who avoided Nazism and those who embraced it. Thus, a “Wagnerian youth” certainly existed alongside the “Goethean youth.” As for why Germany didn’t establish a Wagner Institute, it’s important to recall the aftermath of World War II. Germans were subjected to a thorough “brainwashing” aimed at erasing their historical memory. The American military occupied the Bayreuth theater and staged music-hall performances there. Earlier, General Patton had soldiers under his command urinate in the Rhine River, central to Wagnerian mythology—a desacralizing and provocative gesture against the composer and German-European Kultur.

Why was Wagner interested in the Middle Ages, while many intellectuals of his time turned to Ancient Greece and Rome?

Wagner’s interest in the Middle Ages has been well explained by Germanist Marino Freschi, who wrote: “Wagner returned to a lateral experience of Christianity: that of the Grail, the great Christic mystery that animated the entire Christian-Germanic Middle Ages […] Wagner retrieved the message of a savior who evades the depletion of materialistic critique, advancing toward a barely marked path that was being revisited at the time by Theosophy and, especially, by Rudolf Steiner (in Italy by Evola and Massimo Scaligero)” (Wagner and the Sublime Art that Saves Religion, in il Giornale, 04/02/2021).

However, it should be noted that Wagner initially looked to the pre-Christian world and Greece, as evidenced by the musical grammar of Tristan and Isolde. According to Giorgio Locchi, this composition reveals a vision of history centered on the three-dimensional, spherical conception of time, linked to the Dionysian potestas. Wagner’s music here conveys an anti-egalitarian worldview, challenging modernity and post-modernity not in reactionary nostalgia but actively, embracing the notion that origins are not definitively behind us but always possible, as Klossowski clarified.

Why was Wagner interested in the Middle Ages, while many intellectuals of his time turned to Ancient Greece and Rome?

The distinguished musicologist Paolo Isotta, in his splendid preface to Giorgio Locchi’s book, highlighted how the music that emerged in the Christian West was initially monodic in an absolute sense. Only in the late Middle Ages did polyphonic tendencies emerge, which, despite the historical-philological uncertainties, had been hinted at in antiquity in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. In this work, drawing from Platonic sources (Republic X, 616-617; Timaeus 34b-40d), Cicero refers to the simultaneous resonance of different sounds, harmonized by a divine mind.

In this sense, medieval polyphony was a rediscovery by the peoples of Northern Europe. It gave musical expression to the spiritual sediments lying dormant in their collective unconscious following the eruption of the Judeo-Christian vision of life. Isotta commented: “Modern Western European music, like Greek tragedy, originates from the people.” For Locchi, the harmonic, tonal, and polyphonic sentiment was innate to Nordic peoples and, after the Middle Ages, first exploded in the Flemish polyphonic school, flourishing in 16th-century Italy, and gaining further momentum in the music spanning from Bach to Wagner.

The most significant aspect of Locchi’s exegesis of tonal music lies in how it translated into scores the conception of time inherent to the classical age. Other types of music, including Gregorian chant, are centered on a linear, future-oriented temporality. In these: “Every note is an isolated point in the sonic space, preceded and followed by another point […] But in any tonal music composition, the note (the moment) does not signify by itself.”

Each note contains previous notes that determined it, while also encompassing those subsequent to it that it induces: “Each note (each moment), as the present, thus contains within itself the past and the future.”

Fugue and Sonata are stretched across three-dimensional time and are structured on it. Music, therefore, can become the paradigm of a non-deterministic conception of history, one alien to the secularization of the Christian vision of time and distinct from the various forms of historical philosophy that have emerged from the 19th century to the present.

If the post-modern world is the ultimate result of the Christian secularization of history’s purpose, it is necessary to return to the classical physis to escape the seductions of hope and despair. History, like tonal music, has neither a purpose nor an end; it is always “open,” suspended on the foundational-unfounded nature of freedom. With Wagner, the worldview implicit in tonal music became a mythical proclamation. For Locchi and Isotta: “The body of works ranging from Tristan to Parsifal constitutes the highest monument humanity has ever erected in its entire history.”

Yet, for those who truly listen and read, this monument is marked by unparalleled coherence. Myth, after all, is centered on the unity of opposites, but such understanding can only be grasped by a listener or reader who partakes in the mythic unveiling. As Wagner himself said: “For those left outside, myth always offers an ultimate ambiguity.”

While Wagner, especially in Tristan, embraced the three-dimensional view of time and its correlated superhumanist conception, it is thought that he later betrayed these foundational premises—both musically and philosophically. Nietzsche and Evola recognized this shift, as evidenced in Wagner’s Religion and Art. Nevertheless, following Wagner’s early works, European music continued its journey toward the New Essentiality and the creation of a genuinely Dionysian art, as seen in Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony.

What is the relationship between revolution and art in Wagner’s thought? Did he intend to replace religion with art?

To answer this question, we must reference Wagner’s Religion and Art. This is a collection of essays written during the same period as the composition of Parsifal. Specifically, the collection consists of seven essays, followed by concluding Annotations where the composer presents and comments on passages from Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he regarded as “our great philosopher.” These writings represent Wagner’s effort, in the final phase of his earthly life, to leave the world a positive message regarding the possibility of a Regenerationslehre—spiritual and social regeneration centered on Schopenhauerian Mitleid .

This theme would become central to 20th-century philosophy and art, influencing figures such as Stefan George, Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, and Moeller van den Bruck, as well as Walter Benjamin, who, echoing Karl Kraus, envisioned the origin as a destination in his Theses on the Philosophy of History.

In Religion and Art, regeneration was to take place in Germany and Europe by critiquing the utilitarian and economic conception of life, which was gaining dominance through the political triumph of liberalism. Wagner shared these ideas only with a select circle of disciples loyal to his vision of life, who were to act as the vanguard of a radical periagoghé—a turning of the heart leading to a different worldview, heralded by art and especially music. The book was intended to serve as the programmatic manifesto of this New Beginning.

The titular essay begins with a synthesis of Wagner’s positions, containing in embryonic form the answer to your question:  “One might say that where religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for art to save its substantial core.” Authentic art, through the ideal representation of symbolic images, has always contributed: “to the understanding of [religion’s] innermost essence, that is, inexpressible divine truth.” Wagner saw the greatness of Christianity in its foundational truth, destined for the “poor in spirit,” unlike other religions, such as Brahmanism, which addressed only the “rich in spirit.” Yet Christianity soon transformed into: “a state religion for Roman emperors and persecutors of heretics.” For Wagner, the Schopenhauerian Christian doctrine inverted the will to live, considering this world of “I want” as fallacious and only postponing humans to the true Kingdom—the Kingdom of God.

Ultimately, for Wagner, modern art had to take on a “religious” character and become a “Total and Definitive Work.” This perspective marked a shift from the pre-Christian, tragic vision animating Tristan.

What is the relationship between revolution and art in Wagner’s thought? Did he intend to replace religion with art?

The corruption of the original Christian message occurred through: “the forced and tyrannical connection of this crucified deity with the Jewish Creator of heaven and earth […] who seemed more fortunate than the merciful Savior of the poor.” Only artists rejected this dominion, and the denial of the world was witnessed in the representation of the miracle of motherhood. Consider Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, where the Virgin, lifting her child in her arms, reveals the fulfillment of divine love. Wagner remarked that the Virgin Mary is no longer untouchable, as seen in the sculptural depictions of Artemis with her severe chastity, but instead expresses the miracle born from divine love.

The Greek representation of nature, as Schopenhauer described it, pointed to an ideal that physis itself had not achieved—it was the idealization of the natural. Meanwhile, Christian art unveiled the “secret” of religious dogma. This same tension toward unveiling the truth, present in Raphael, can also be found in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, which: “represents […] God fulfilling His terrible task.” Unlike painting, poetry remained tied to canonically fixed concepts: “Only in music did Christian lyricism rise to true art […] dissolving and diluting words, along with their concepts, to the point of erasing their intelligibility.”

Once conceptual words are dissolved, music reveals the nullity of the phenomenal world, as every sonic image belongs to a reality beyond appearances. For Wagner, music suffered devastatingly from the Church’s increasing worldliness. Only its separation from ecclesiastical decadence preserved sound as a pure ancestral legacy. The original core of Christianity, according to Wagner, was contaminated by dogmatic Judaism, which rendered formal the Christic command: “Eat of this henceforth, in memory of Me.”

This was meant to encourage the consumption of bread and wine—the spontaneous gifts of the earth. Such an indication aligned with the Brahmanic and Pythagorean intuition that everything in the cosmos is one: “When the Brahmin, in the face of the vast multiplicity of living forms in the world, exclaimed, ‘This is you!’ he immediately awakened in the listener the awareness of truth.”

For Wagner, Jesus was essentially the hero of the Last Supper, urging his disciples to feel fraternity not only with their peers but with all living beings. This understanding informed Wagner’s staunch defense of vegetarianism, a practice the Church ignored as it drew from Judaism to shape its dogmas: “However, it was from this that the Church derived its power and dominion.”

This demonstrates Wagner’s belief that art in the modern age must adopt a “religious” character and become a “total and definitive” work. In this perspective, Wagner moved away from the tragic, pre-Christian vision that had animated Tristan. Thus, a return to “Greek thought,” in the author’s view, remains only partially realized in Wagner’s later works.

Why did the Conservative Revolutionaries show such interest in Wagner? How did Wagner influence them?

The Conservative Revolutionaries, who sought to transcend the modernity born from the wreckage of World War I and move beyond purely reactionary or nostalgic approaches, could not help but look to Wagner as a prophet of a New Beginning for Europe.

Stefan George’s poetic vision, for instance, finds an exceptional precedent in Wagner and his theory of art. George, the leader of the Kreis, was surrounded by disciples enchanted by his attempts at poetic re-sacralization of life. The question posed by the intellectuals of the Conservative Revolutionary milieu concerning Wagner’s work was: “Which Wagner should we look to for inspiration and vitality in the revolutionary and conservative existential-political project?” George, Klages, Schuler, and, to some extent, the Jünger brothers, focused on the early Wagner, whose tonal music embodied an “open” view of history. Initially, they were dazzled by the idols of Nazism but later distanced themselves, living on the regime’s margins. Others, drawn to Wagner’s teleology and messianism, embraced the ethnocentrism of National Socialist ideology. For the author, echoing Alain de Benoist, this ideology was far from “pagan” but rather monocratic and closed: “One leader, one empire, one people.”

Was the divergence between Nietzsche and Wagner a personal conflict or a reflection of the divide between two Germanies (Weimar and the Third Reich)?

The divergence between Nietzsche and Wagner was driven by ideological rather than historical or political factors related to the values embodied by the Second and Third Reichs. It concerned their respective visions of life and art.

Nietzsche remained faithful to the tragic, while Wagner, embracing a salvific conception of music and history, adopted a reassuring teleological position, becoming yet another “philosopher and musician of history.” By contrast, tragic art is hyperbolic, never concluded, and always in motion, like the animating principle of life itself, which resides solely in physis. The tragic approach remains perpetually open, opposing the philistine spirit that Wagner ostensibly sought to combat but unwittingly embodied.

It was this “unconfessed philistinism” in Wagner that drove Nietzsche away. Regarding the first performances at Bayreuth, Nietzsche wrote to Mathilde Maier on July 15, 1878: “During the Bayreuth summer, I became fully aware of all this; I fled, after the first performances I attended, far into the mountains.”

As Nietzsche remarked elsewhere: “Step by step, Wagner descended into everything I despise […] Even into anti-Semitism […] Wagner […] suddenly and desperately collapsed at the foot of the Christian cross.” Yet Nietzsche also acknowledged Wagner’s genius, writing in an April 7, 1884, letter to Franz Overbeck: “In many respects, I shall be Wagner’s heir.”

This recognition reflects both Wagner’s greatness and the philosopher’s divergence from him, rooted in Nietzsche’s genuine fidelity to “Greek thought.”

What was Wagner’s position regarding Italian opera? What role did this relationship play in shaping musical drama and glorifying the Central European musical tradition?

Wagner had a great love for Italy, finding inspiration and peace in several Italian cities. In Venice (where he would die), he composed part of Tristan. In La Spezia, he dreamed of the prelude to The Ring Cycle. In Ravello and the Siena Cathedral, he imagined scenes for Parsifal, which he completed in Palermo.

In 1859, Wagner sympathized with Piedmont against Austria during the Second War of Independence. On November 1, 1871, Lohengrin premiered at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, marking the first-ever performance of a Wagner opera in Italy. Giuseppe Verdi attended a subsequent performance, and after Aida, critics unfairly accused Verdi of being “Wagnerian,” betraying the compositional and orchestral canons of Italian opera.

This highlights the complex, love-hate relationship between Wagner and Italian opera, marked by attraction and repulsion. In his essays in The Ideal of Bayreuth, Wagner credits Italians with rediscovering the value of classical theater, leading Italian culture to move away from spoken drama and attempt to recreate ancient drama in musical opera. However, Wagner’s true model for the “Total Artwork” is not simply Italian opera but Shakespearean theater, with its emphasis on mime.

Wagner’s vision of a total artwork required a setting vastly different from the Italian-French theater halls. While Wagner drew inspiration from Italian opera, it was not his privileged reference point. His engagement with prior musical and theatrical traditions—and with those of his time—enabled him to revitalize the European musical tradition.