The impossibility of the project proves the point: a world without Wagner is almost unimaginable. Almost.
The clear historical winner in anti-Wagner world is Brahms.
His vision of a past and future coalescing in the emotionally ambiguous and complex present, his personal and political convictions against the rising tide of antisemitism that he witnessed in Vienna in the 1880s and 90s: those are the clarion-calls of a radically different sensibility and creative consciousness to Wagner's.
Brahms's music – his late piano pieces, songs, and orchestral pieces particularly – is an acknowledgment of the limits of what music can do.
Its power to mirror the tensions of a historic moment and to transmute them into a discourse that can't pretend to change the world, but instead can speak from one heart to another.
Brahms's vision is anti-utopian and empathetic, the opposite of Wagner's. Those are qualities that culture then, and the world now, needs more than ever.
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Imagine a world without Wagner …
