Toru
Takenaka: Wagner-Boom in Meiji-Japan
At the
turn of the last century a feverish enthusiasm for Richard Wagner flourished
among Japanese intellectuals. Not only were musicians affected, but novelists,
poets, and scholars were equally swept up in an impassioned fervor for
Wagner’s operas. One contrast to European Wagnerianism was the fact that
in Japan there had as yet been no stage performances of the music dramas
themselves. How then were Japanese intellectuals able to become so absorbed in
a particular music they had not personally experienced? Theories pertinent to
this question from a leading Wagnerian, Anesaki Chofu, assert that the Japanese
possessed a mere abstract, textual knowledge of Wagner and that they primarily
concerned themselves with his ideology and his contemporary criticism of
Imperial German society—a critique colored by art-religion based on a
nationalistic and life-reforming Weltanschaung. Suffering from the social
and cultural stagnation at the end of the Meiji era (1867-1912) and deploring
the state of their own hopelessness, they seemed to see in them solutions they
so urgently longed for.