num_pages: 96
description: 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. 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.
language: English
title: Wagner: The Terrible Man and His Truthful Art
publisher: University of Toronto Press