Like a lot of Westerners discovering Eastern religious thought, Wagner was an enthusiast, not an adept. He didn't, to my knowledge, practice any of the disciplines typical of Eastern religious practice. He worked on the story of an opera on a Buddhist subject (Die Sieger - "The Victors"), but realized, with sure artistic instinct, that it wasn't something he could carry through, musically and dramatically. His Western (Christian) acculturation was too strong, and in Parsifal we get an idiosyncratic blend of Eastern and Western religious ideas which, according to one's perspective, falls short of both, or transcends both. It's pretty clear that Wagner hoped for the latter. People have always disagreed about how successful he was.
I think the disagreement is perfectly understandable. I don't think it's simple to say what Wagner's operas are "about," and I don't think this is any sort of problem that needs to be solved. Maybe the last thing it needs is a reductionist or essentialist view that derides and discards the analyses of people deeply engaged with the operas simply because their preferred intellectual context differs from our own.
The problem with a primarily "metaphysical" view of Wagner's dramatic works is that once we think we've grasped what we believe to be the "something genuinely metaphysical" for which he was reaching, we are still left with plots, characters, symbols and, above all, music that are so complex and interesting that we need to bring in all sorts of disciplines and intellectual contexts to make sense of them. Yes, Tristan and Isolde spend a celebrated half-hour lounging in a flowerbed, trying to be oblivious of the unpleasant world that wants to claim them, speculating about the disappearance of a conjunction from the language and what it would be like not to have separate selves. But such "metaphysical" talk isn't as esoteric as it appears. Lovers from time immemorial have felt the desire to "make the world go away," they have felt a merging with one another and a loss of everyday inhibitions and barriers, and if sex is good enough they might actually have experienced that longed-for losing of the self in an all-embracing ecstasy. What makes Tristan und Isolde unique, and peculiarly Wagnerian, is that it tries to translate eros into metaphysics, or metaphysics into eros.
That's certainly a striking idea for a music drama, and it gave rise to a unique work of art. But I think we make a mistake in trying to privilege, one over the other, either the work's quasi-Eastern metaphysics or its psychologically powerful depiction of unfulfillable erotic longing. The music of Tristan, which is the essential medium of communication and the ultimate raison d'etre for this rather static four hours in the theater, gives us an amalgam of the emotional, the erotic and the spiritual that positively forbids dissection, but irresistibly invites analysis from all directions. Nobody with more than a casual interest in Wagner could fail to notice that erotic heterosexual relationships are not merely primary elements in most of his plots, but function, in their treatment, as keys to the operas' meaning. This use of human sexuality as a sort of conduit to metaphysical speculation and spiritual experience is essentially Wagnerian. We find it in The Flying Dutchman (the need for the complete devotion of a woman to rescue a man from the curse of masculine loneliness); in Tannhauser (the tragedy of the Christian dichotomization of sexual and spiritual love); in Lohengrin (the need of a spiritual being to find fulfilment in earthly marriage to a woman); in the Ring (where a seemingly destined and perfect love promises, and fails, to save the world); and in Parsifal (an astonishing interplay of symbols expressing the ambiguous significance of sex and sexual archetypes). One need not be a "Freudian" (or a Jungian, or a proponent of any school of psychology) to notice all this, or to want to explore in depth this key aspect of Wagner's work. To do so is not to reduce the operas to the theme of sex, and it is not to deny or diminish any other aspect of these products of a complex human being and a profound artist.
Ultimately, I want my Wagner whole, not dissected into the "psychological," the "political", or the "metaphysical." I don't carve up my own life or the lives of others in that way, at least not if I want to know and understand them. I have no use for a clearly biased reductionism here, and I find the subject of this thread as originally framed to be of value only as something to push against.
