Wagner vs Austen

So as I brought up in class I think that part of why I think the Victorians were so confused by Wagner's music was the inaccessibility of the text. In Wagner all of the meaning of the music is carried in the music and explored through chromaticism, larger than life sound (via singer and orchestra), the color of the sound, and the use of leitmotif. In England though, we see a literary tradition that is reaching back hundreds of years and is carried through the Victorian era. There are so many literary icons that were British and wrote in amazing prose that is still worshiped today such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Austen. Therefore how could Wagner expect a society that is so sensitive to the word and the meaning of the text propelling the sound (i.e. the many, many famous chorals written by so many Englishmen) be super receptive to his incredibly new pallet of sound that considers music before the text, or at least music to inform the text.

Speaking of important British voices... I stumbled across the movie of the play The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. This play depicted many aspects of Victorian society that I thought were very interesting. I think its depiction of the workings of the upper class was also intriguing. Although I thought it slightly frustrating that it is a comedy in which we see a woman using her "power" to manipulate people only to attempt to get what she was looking for which was a marriage to the man of her choice. But I think that it is movies where I have taken most of my own prejudices of Victorian society from. I had always assumed that the level of "politeness" that we see meant that there was also an understood conservatism that follows suit. It is interesting to free these characters from my own prejudices. They seem to take on a whole different level of depth and "likability" to me. They seem not so different then from what we still see now... it isn't like we haven't heard a story of a manipulating woman before.