Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  The “original epigone”6 later distanced himself from Wagnerism—which was by no means the same as denigrating his former idol. When Die literarische Welt asked Stravinsky, Egon Wellesz, and others for their views on Wagner fifty years after the latter’s death, Schoenberg, who was by then writing twelve-tone music, responded to the paper’s questionnaire:

  For me, Wagner is an ageless phenomenon, entirely independent of all fashionable trends. It is not even possible to describe his world of ideas as outdated or old-fashioned for no thought can grow old once it has been thought—it is a part of the structure of the world. The general public is evidently so corrupted by bad music that it no longer has ears for good music. On the other hand, Wagner’s art is not a part of our everyday lives.7

  Wagner was one of the great composers who guaranteed that German music enjoyed a privileged position in the world, its international standing one that Schoenberg himself was keen to maintain as a twelve-tone composer, even in adverse times. In terms of the philosophy of history, he regarded the line Bach-Beethoven-Brahms-Schoenberg as more important than the line Beethoven-Wagner-Schoenberg, although he would have been the first to agree that Wagner’s music, too, represented a milestone not just in the history of composition but also in the history of ideas. Naturally he drew attention first and foremost to the innovative features in Wagner’s music, features that served to authenticate his own creative output, which he strove to categorize not as part of some transitory avant-garde movement but as timelessly classical.

  With regard to the theory of music, the salient terms in this context are “expanded tonality,” “quartal harmony,” “wandering chords,” and “functionless harmonies.” And yet Schoenberg also found his own “musical prose” prefigured in Wagner’s music, and even his principle of “developing variation” has precedents in Wagner’s leitmotif technique. By clearly outlining the progressive features in Wagner’s music, Schoenberg was also able to clarify our own understanding of Wagner.

  In his freely tonal stage work Die glückliche Hand (The Fortunate Hand) Schoenberg continued to champion Wagner’s idea of a synthesis of the arts, not least by writing his own libretto and taking an active part in staging the piece. Conversely, his unfinished opera Moses und Aron may be regarded as a conscious attempt to create an alternative universe: Moses is the Jewish antithesis of Wagner’s Germanic heroes. And yet even here Joseph Kerman—one of the most original thinkers on music—advises us to study Wagner if we want to understand Schoenberg.8

  In 1933 Schoenberg typed out a memorandum headed “Program to Help and Build Up the [Jewish] Party.” It contains the following sentence: “I am sacrificing my art to the Jewish cause.”9 At that time, Wagner’s anti-Semitism played only a minor role in Schoenberg’s line of argument, and it was not until 1935, in a lecture delivered at the Ebell Club in Los Angeles and beginning with the words “When we young Austrian-Jewish artists grew up,” that he inveighed against Wagner’s “Jews in Music”—and yet even here his comments are astonishingly temperate.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Revolutionary Drafts

  ACHILLES, JESUS OF NAZARETH, SIEGFRIED’S DEATH, AND WIELAND THE SMITH

  Prerevolutionary activities—Draft for the Organization of a German National Theater under the patronage of the king—Radical political recommendations to Franz Wigard—Address to the left-wing Fatherland Association: can revolution produce a popular monarchy?—Viennese adventure—Friendship with Mikhail Bakunin—Wagner’s revolutionary dramas “in celebration of heroes”—Frederick Barbarossa—Achilles—Jesus of Nazareth—Activities during the May Uprising—Revolution and aesthetics—A dream of the end of the world as a source of fear and pleasure—Beethoven’s “Eroica” as the conceptual model for Wagner’s “celebration of heroes”—Siegfried’s Death—Comparison with Jesus of Nazareth—The optimistic ending of Siegfried’s Death—Wieland the Smith: an unique example of redemption without destruction—The artistic fruits of Wagner’s revolutionary period

  Wagner’s wanted notice, reproduced here from the supplement to Eberhardt’s Allgem. Polizei-Anzeiger of June 1853, more than four years after Wagner had fled Germany. The head is reproduced the wrong way around, as it is taken from a daguerreotype of Kietz’s 1842 original pencil drawing (Cf. p. 46 above). (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: N 3791.)

  Wagner was a spur-of-the-moment kind of person who nevertheless entertained long-term goals. Few would argue with the claim that he gave thought to the future—one thinks, for example, of his ability to pursue over the course of half a century his plans for a religion of art through the medium of the musical drama. His spontaneity, conversely, emerges with particular force from the revolutionary period of 1848–49. He spent the first four months of 1848 devoting all his energies to completing the full score of Lohengrin, while the wider world was exercised by the February revolution in Paris and the March revolution in Germany. No wonder, then, that after putting the finishing touches to the full score on April 28, 1848, he threw himself heart and soul into the world of political agitation.

  His initial plans were entirely pragmatic and aimed at least in the shorter term at ensuring his own artistic survival: in view of the uncertainty of the age, he was understandably afraid that any prospect of a production of Lohengrin was quickly disappearing “into the remote and mystic distance.”1 The court opera’s board of directors will hardly have been keen to stage a lavish new opera by a member of its music staff who was becoming ever more politically compromised in the eyes of the Saxon court. At the same time, however, the revolutionary forces that might come to power in Saxony might well regard the subsidized court theater as a feudal relic that should be closed down without further ado. Wagner evidently felt that the best way to counter this twin danger was to put forward a series of reform proposals of his own, proposals that were both concerned with the existing court theater and also designed to suggest a change of direction in the future: the revolutionaries would find an institution adept at cultivating the arts to which they could not possibly take exception. But if Wagner was to square this particular circle, he needed to find a solution that would leave the king in full possession of his existing powers, while also making it clear that the spoken theater and the opera belonged to the “people” and to the artists who worked there.

  Wagner felt that his time had come when the king of Saxony, unsettled by the March revolution, offered some early concessions to the rebellious estates and reshuffled his cabinet by introducing a number of more liberal ministers. On May 11, 1848, barely two weeks after completing the score of Lohengrin, Wagner duly submitted an extensive “Draft for the Organization of a German National Theater for the Kingdom of Saxony,” a text that fills forty-one pages in the second volume of his collected writings, where it is wrongly dated to the period immediately before the outbreak of the Dresden Uprising of May 1849. Wagner was astute enough to say little about his own position, but pleaded, rather, for improvements to be made to the lot of the company as a whole, the general tenor of his remarks being aimed—sensibly and thoughtfully—at “ennobling taste and improving morals” by means of art.2

  At the same time, however, he put forward suggestions that were not only financially unrealistic but also politically foolhardy. The conductor, for example, was to be elected by the musicians and by members of an “association of patriotic composers” and would be responsible not to the general administrator but to the minister in charge of the theater. Looking down on it all, the king must deem it an honor to approve “the success of the nation’s free agency.”3 In this way, the administration at the court opera whose officials had made life so difficult for Wagner was effectively sidelined, for now it was the artists themselves who decided who would represent them and influence the way in which the repertory was planned.

  Wagner’s decision to leave the theater under the patronage of the king was in part a reaction to the actual balance of power in May 1848, but there is no d
oubt that he was also attached to the idea of a popular monarchy. And conceivably he was keen to show his superiors that his ideas could be put into practice without delay—and without the violent overthrow of the existing order. Although this may sound naïve, we should not forget that Wagner did indeed succeed in achieving a similar aim sixteen years later in the Munich of Ludwig II, when his plans for reform came true, at least for a time. On that occasion, it was not only his own works that benefited from this development, for his efforts to raise the level of musical culture also came to fruition.

  Back in 1848, it was not long before Wagner sought to add his voice to the more general political debate on the questions of the day. By May 19 he was writing to the left-wing Catholic physician Franz Jacob Wigard, one of the Saxon deputies in the recently convened parliament in Frankfurt. His letter constitutes a truly revolutionary program involving the “introduction of a people’s militia,” a “defensive and offensive alliance” with republican France, and a restructuring of the German states so that in future there would be “no states with fewer than three million inhabitants and none with more than six.”4 Behind such precise proposals we may well suspect the influence of August Röckel. It was Röckel who ensured that a piece Wagner contributed anonymously to the Dresdner Anzeiger on June 15, 1848, was also declaimed by him in person at a gathering of some three thousand members of the left-wing Fatherland Association.

  Wagner’s theme—“How do republican aspirations stand in relation to the monarchy?”—produced a line of argument that was necessarily riven by self-contradiction, for on the one hand he professed to sharing the demands of the radicals for abolishing the aristocracy and court and for introducing universal suffrage, the replacement of the standing army by a people’s militia, and, last but not least, the overthrow of the rule of money:

  God will give us the light to find the rightful law to put this principle into practice; and like a hideous nightmare this demonic idea of money will vanish, taking with it its whole loathsome retinue of open and secret usury, paper-juggling, percentage interest, and bankers’ speculations.

  This, Wagner insisted, had nothing to do with “Communism,” which he defined as “the most tasteless and meaningless doctrine” for the “mathematical division of property and earnings.” No, what he meant was the “fulfillment of Christ’s pure teaching, which is jealously hidden away from us behind dazzling dogmas invented long ago to bind the uncouth world of simple barbarians.”5

  We need only turn to the diaries of Karl August Varnhagen von Ense—an astute observer of the age who held relatively moderate views—to see how ideas not dissimilar to Wagner’s had gained ground among wide sections of the population at this time. Shortly before the Dresden Uprising broke out, Varnhagen reported with horror on the “trembling rage” of the king of Prussia in the face of the “Frankfurt rabble” that had had the “temerity” to offer him the imperial crown.6

  On the other hand—and regardless that similar ideas may be found in the writings of Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, and Julius Fröbel—Wagner’s profession of faith in the Saxon monarchy can be regarded only as culpably naïve: was it really conceivable, after all, that reform or even revolution should come to pass under the patronage of a king who, as “the man of Providence,” would proclaim a republic for his adoring people? “I declare Saxony a free state,” he was to say. As Wagner went on to explain to his listeners, the majority of whom must have been astonished at what they heard: “Let the first law of this free state provide the finest guarantee that it will survive: the highest executive power rests in the Royal House of Wettin and passes from generation to generation by right of primogeniture.”7

  Wagner’s protestations of his loyalty to the crown did nothing to prevent his position at court from growing increasingly precarious, and in July 1848 he sought leave of absence in order to take soundings in Vienna and try to find a new field of endeavor—no doubt, too, he was motivated by the vague hope of shifting his oppressive burden of debt. And he was positively elated by the mood of political ferment in Vienna and by the offers that he received as a composer, offers that were naturally noncommittal. On his return to Dresden, he found that his position was even less secure than before, and although the general administrator, August von Lüttichau, felt too inhibited by the explosive political situation to dismiss him out of hand, he ensured that during the early months of 1849 Wagner’s duties at the court opera were for the most part limited to conducting performances of Friedrich von Flotow’s comic opera Martha.

  It was during this time that Wagner became friendly with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who was living in Dresden under the assumed name of “Dr. Schwarz” and whom Wagner could still recall three decades later as a “wild, noble fellow.”8 It was no doubt under Bakunin’s influence that Wagner contributed an article to Röckel’s Volksblätter in February 1849 calling not only for the overthrow of the regime but for “man’s struggle against existing society.”9 In a second article he predictably hymned “the sublime goddess Revolution.”10 His decision to elevate “Revolution” to the status of a goddess is significant, for however clearly he drew a distinction between the common “mob,” bourgeois “philistines,” and cultured “epicures,”11 the object of the longed-for revolution continued to appear to him in only the vaguest outlines, persuading him to believe that it would be simplest if he were to deify her.

  And such a goddess was best served by means of active involvement in the Dresden Uprising that broke out on May 5, 1849, and although Wagner did not man the barricades or join the ranks of the communal guard, he nonetheless played his part, printing posters with the words “Are you with us against foreign troops?” and in all likelihood helping the brass founder Carl Wilhelm Oehme to prepare hand grenades.12 Above all, however, he was keen to discuss his ideas about the goddess whenever the opportunity presented itself—at least until such time as the real-life rebellion was bloodily suppressed by Prussian auxiliaries after only a few days and Dresden’s court kapellmeister was obliged to flee the city with a substantial price on his head.

  There are good reasons why the present chapter begins with such a detailed account of the biographical background to this period in Wagner’s life, for his later works, with their rejection of romantic opera in favor of the musical drama, can be understood only if we are aware of the seriousness with which he explored the political situation before tackling the artistic project of the Ring.

  Not only are Wagner’s life and times—in other words, the revolutionary years in Dresden—part of the prehistory of the Ring, so too are the theatrical projects that paved the way for the cycle: Siegfried’s Death, Achilles, and Jesus of Nazareth. All three projects are linked by the same idea, that of seeing the future cycle as the “celebration of a death” that would allow the tragic hero to rid himself of his “personal egoism” and merge “with the generality.” In that way his exemplary life would become a model for others.13 Although it was not until October 1849 that Wagner was to express himself in such terms in The Artwork of the Future, these sentences throw the clearest possible light on his preoccupations between Lohengrin and the Ring, when he was both waiting for the coming revolution and at the same time forging ahead in terms of his whole thinking about art: both of these levels are dialectically interlinked.

  Wagner was no longer satisfied with the eponymous heroes of his three romantic operas, all of whom were too self-centered and interested only in their own redemption. Thus they were not “purely human” characters striving “with tremendous force to come to grips with the wider picture, only to be overwhelmed by the circumstances in which they find themselves.”14 Wagner was looking for something that Elsa had failed to find in Lohengrin—namely, “a human being in the most natural and blissful fullness of his physical life,” a man whose movements were restricted by neither his “historical garb” nor by any other political or cultural constraints.15 Instead, he radiated life and love and did not even have to fear death since he had already give
n the world everything he could. This “man of the future whom we desire and long for”16 and whom Wagner had learned to understand above all through his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach was bound to fail in real life, and yet he left behind him a seed that would flourish in the future, bringing forth a new and better race of human beings.

  In spite of his commitment to the politics of the day, it was inconceivable that Wagner would seek his new hero in politics, history, or society. But not even fairy tales and legends could satisfy his demands any longer—at least to the extent that they failed to penetrate to the very foundations of myth, where the most basic questions concerning humankind lay deep in a well, hidden there not by any individual poet but by the folk. At the end of 1848 he briefly dusted down an earlier project about the life of Frederick Barbarossa (WWV 76) that he had discarded in favor of Lohengrin. The legend of the ancient emperor asleep in the Kyffhäuser Mountains until the day he wakes and restores the empire to its former glory would have been timely. Eduard Devrient, the stage director at the Dresden court theater, whom Wagner regularly regaled with readings from his works, thought that Barbarossa—as featured in Wagner’s essay The Wibelungs: World History from Legend—was “the mightiest vehicle for this whole idea, an idea of tremendous, wondrous beauty.”17

  Ultimately, however, Wagner was discouraged by the “vast mass of historical events and relationships,” a detailed account of which would obscure the “wider picture.” Instead, he was carried back “through the poems of the Middle Ages” to the deeper layers of myth.18 In this renewed quest of his, Wagner adopted a thoroughness that not only went beyond all his previous studies but which is almost certainly without equal in the whole history of libretto writing. After all, more was at stake than finding a suitable subject for the ordinary music theater: in keeping with his solemn pronouncement “I shall write no more operas,”19 which Wagner announced to his friends in 1851, he was now eager to explore themes that satisfied the demands of art as a new religion. And the artist may have recourse to such themes only if he sees himself as the plenipotentiary of the folk in whose midst these myths arose. In short: the more deeply and broadly a myth was rooted in the people, the better it was for Wagner.