Except The Things That Make Life Worth Living

Martin Kettle writes:

Listening on the radio to the stormy grandeur of Beethoven's Appassionata piano sonata the other day, I thought, as some of us still do occasionally, about Lenin. Lenin had strong views about the Appassionata. He loved Beethoven's great sonata – but he also hated it. Or rather he hated the fact that he loved it.

According to Maxim Gorky, Lenin once said this about the sonata. "I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naivety, to think that people can work such miracles. But I can't listen to music very often. It affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty."

Not for the first time, Lenin was seriously wrong. He was wrong because he thought that politics was always more important than everything else in life. But that just isn't so. It's one of the reasons why Lenin's revolution failed.

Politics is certainly important, and everything in life, even today, may to some degree be described as political. But politics is not everything, as Lenin claimed that it was. Politics has to take its place among other things that matter just as much, and perhaps even more.

The summer is a particularly appropriate time to consider where politics fits among the other great appetites of humankind. Politics may seem to rule the public roost much of the rest of the year – but it is a striking fact that politics has no power against the summer.

This is something with which the political class has managed to come to terms only by insisting that these few weeks are merely a break from reality. Politics reassures itself that September is not far distant and the natural order will then be restored.

But perhaps this is the wrong way of thinking about the place of politics in life. It might be more useful to think about the summer break in a more positive way.

This, after all, is the time of year when politics can no longer keep up the pretence that it is all-encompassing. So it is therefore also an opportunity not for suspending all thought about politics but for trying to put politics into a more life-enhancing balanced context.

Over recent months I have written large numbers of articles about the big political issues of 2013. I have written often about the financial crisis, the future of the UK's union and its governing coalition, the prospects for Labour, and the politics of the United States. All of these subjects genuinely interest me. All of them still seem to me immensely important.

But I would be lying if I said they were the events that have dominated my waking hours or fired my imagination the most. For that, I would have to turn to seeing Gareth Bale score so many improbable goals this spring; to the scent of the Albertine rose in my garden this summer; to watching Ricky Ponting's final century and the flowering of Joe Root; to listening to Peter Brook talking about Shakespeare at the National Theatre or John le Carré about the cold war at the Hay festival; to hearing The Sixteen in St Albans Cathedral, and Jonas Kaufmann at the Met; to meeting Joyce DiDonato at Covent Garden; to watching Phil Mickelson at Muirfield; and to walking the Brecon Beacons with old friends on the May Day bank holiday.

Most of all, though, I would turn to the operas of Wagner. Throughout my life, these extraordinary works have been the gift that keeps on giving, almost more than anything else. This year, which is Wagner's bicentenary, they have given even more than usual.

The passion is greater than ever. Indeed this column is being written from Wagner's home town of Bayreuth in northern Bavaria, where a new production of Wagner's Ring cycle came to a close on Wednesday night. I'm afraid it was not Bayreuth's finest hour.

This column is not about to segue into a review of the new Bayreuth Ring cycle. There was a time when newspaper columnists could get away with that sort of thing.

HL Mencken certainly did it, and more recently Bernard Levin would annually regale readers of the Times with descriptions of the hotel plumbing in Wagner's town and with accounts of the operas he had seen as he trekked up the hill in the heavy August heat to the Wagner theatre that overlooks Bayreuth. Matthew Parris could pull it off too, in our own era, if only he were wise enough to like Wagner.

I lack the gifts of a Mencken, a Levin or a Parris. But I know this from watching and listening to Wagner, and I know it with absolute certainty too: I know that political engagement and a sustained cultural life are twin necessities of the civilised condition, twin embodiments of the belief that the world can be a better place than it is, not the foes that Lenin wrongly believed them to be. And not just Lenin, either.

Last week I watched as Angela Merkel and a host of German politicians and other public figures arrived at Wagner's theatre for the Bayreuth festival opening. Their presence was a political affirmation that in Germany the arts matter. It was, in its way, a sign of a healthy civic society.

But its equivalent simply would not happen in Britain. In Britain too many politicians are philistines. Some of them glory in it. A lot of them barely notice it. They may not be Leninists in any other respect, but they share with the Bolshevik leader the belief that politics is all, and that politics excludes a rich cultural life.

There are, of course, exceptions – honourable mention to Labour's Nick Brown, a devoted Bayreuth pilgrim. In general, though, it is a sign of a failed society and a failed culture.

There was a time when radical politicians could quote Shakespeare, Milton and Byron and not be thought odd or pretentious for doing so. There was a time when radical journalists could do likewise. Those times are disappearing. Politicians, it is often said, live in a political bubble.

That criticism is right – and the two things are umbilically connected. It means, to quote Robert Kennedy, that far too many of them know about everything in the world except the things that make life worth living.