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I'm with Rossini on this: Wagner has beautiful moments but terrible quarter-hours.
There are beautiful lyrical moments, but that's mostly the music. Singing in German is a tough row to hoe (can you tell the sound of it is not one of my favourite languages?) and it's only at times that he makes it work.
The politics, unfortunately, is entangled with the work, but trying to leave that aside - I think Wagner's view of Love (as in the Tristan and Isolde sense) has been a terrible one. Love cannot last on earth and leads inexorably to Death. You can't live like that. Grand tragic passion that wrecks the lives of all around you as the only true love? Go away.
EDIT: I note you mention the Wagner pieces as, in essence, having heard "His Greatest Hits". You haven't sat through the seventeen hours, you've had the best bits plucked out for you 😁 The Liebestod is beautiful, and the Love Duet which precedes it has been used to great effect in BBC Radio 4 versions of the Holmes story The Adventure of the Devil's Foot but the underlying philosophy is essentially nihilistic; this is a barren emotion that can only be realised by the death of the lovers and sinking into some kind of cosmic, impersonal, energy. From Act II Love Duet when they realise and consummate their love:
Tristan's idea is that only in the endless night of death can they truly have their love. Even the night of physical love they are sharing is not sufficient. And in the end of the opera, in the end of the Liebestod (Love-Death, literally translated) Isolde agrees: to melt back into the energy of Nature, to be engulfed by the World-Spirit, is their only culmination:
But if they are reduced to non-consciousness, submerged once again in the Universal, will they even know each other? can they even experience this love, this bliss, if they are no longer the unique personalities of Tristan and Isolde, if they don't know themselves or each other? They don't even have the fruits of this tragic love-in-death after all!
That's the emotions-over-reason spirit of the romantic movement though isn't it. It's not supposed to make sense, making sense is for squares. Think about it logically - the less sense it makes the more potent and authentic the emotions must be!
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Well Tristan and Isolde obviously weren't imagined by Wagner, though of course he may have chosen that story to illustrate some grander theory of his own about love. I don't particularly feel the kind of doom-filled approach to love that you describe as Wagnerian, but then again I don't analyze it, I just listen. I don't understand German, nor do I read through translations as I listen. I just listen. And I've, as I say, never had the opportunity to watch. Or, never made the opportunity or taken it.
The pieces I linked aren't the only Wagner I've ever listened to, though you're probably correct that I have been exposed to a lot of his greatest hits, as you say. I don't think this is a particularly bad thing. My first exposure to Rachmaninoff was in this same way but I've since listened to quite a few of his full concertos and symphonies. As well as of course his Vocalise which, I'm sure you're happy to know, isn't in German but consists of just one vowel.
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