Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  We would be doing Wagner an injustice if we were to accuse him of “Teutonicism” in this context. After all, he drew not only on Old Icelandic mythology, for all that this was to play a determinative role in Siegfried’s Death and the Ring, but also on the Greek and Judaic-Christian traditions. For a time, all three traditions held his interest, for in spite of what might be termed his Germanophilia, he was motivated first and foremost by the desire to exhaust the best possible sources for his new synthetic myth. Even after he had completed the poem of Siegfried’s Death, he continued to toy with the idea of writing works about Achilles (WWV 81) and Jesus of Nazareth (WWV 80).

  Wagner had already immersed himself in all three parts of the Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides) during the summer of 1847—in other words, even before the subject of the Nibelungs had become the focus of his interest. Twenty years later, he could still recall his enthusiasm for Aeschylus:

  There was nothing to equal the exalted emotion evoked in me by Agamemnon; and to the close of The Eumenides I remained in a state of transport from which I have never really returned to become fully reconciled with modern literature. My ideas about the significance of drama, and especially of the theater itself, were decisively moulded by these impressions.20

  A handful of notes discovered among Wagner’s unpublished papers may relate directly or indirectly to his plans for a three-act drama on the life of Achilles: “Achilles to Agamemnon: / If you seek joy in dominion, / May wisdom teach you to love.”21 Here the theme of love in conflict with power, which dominates the Ring, is already clearly adumbrated. And we may well believe that if Wagner had completed this drama, as he planned to do not only in Dresden in 1849 but later, too, in Paris, it would have constituted “a celebration of the hero,” with Achilles as the “desired and longed-for man of the future.” Like Siegfried, Achilles is not afraid of death since he has previously devoted the whole of his life to fullness and freedom. According to My Life, Wagner had already settled on the outlines of the action on May 5, 1849, during a “leisurely stroll” through the barricaded streets of Dresden—presumably the Prussian troops had yet to occupy the town.22

  The surviving evidence allows us to do little more than speculate about a possible drama on the life and death of Achilles, whereas Wagner’s interest in the Judaic-Christian tradition is well documented in the form of a complete prose draft for a five-act “tragedy” to be called Jesus of Nazareth and flanked by what one writer has termed a “theological impromptu”23 and by reflections on Christ’s role in Hebrew society. Under the heading “Christ in the nave,” Wagner even sketched eleven bars of music, while his correspondence indicates that as late as December 1849 he was still thinking of completing the opera for a performance in Paris.24 His preliminary work on the opera dates from the early months of 1849 and belongs, therefore, to the period immediately before the outbreak of the Dresden Uprising.

  The timing of these events lends weight to the idea proposed by Martin Gregor-Dellin and taken up by Alan David Aberbach that the hero of Jesus of Nazareth is portrayed “purely as a social revolutionary.”25 And yet such a suggestion misses the point. True, Wagner’s Jesus opposes the constraints of the law and champions the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” allying himself with the dispossessed and powerless at the expense of those in power. And, no less than Siegfried—the son of the Norse god Wotan—he embodies an idea that Wagner had expressed in his fragmentary, Feuerbach-inspired jottings on the subject of Achilles: “Man is god raised to his highest perfection. The eternal gods are the elements that beget man. In humankind Creation thus finds its ultimate expression.”26

  But Wagner’s Jesus is neither a politician nor a social revolutionary but a spiritual figure and, together with Apollo, one of the two “most sublime teachers of humankind.” As such, he shows us that “men are all the same and that they are brothers.” In keeping with Christ’s teachings in his Sermon on the Mount, human beings do not have to worry about what they will eat and drink as their “heavenly father will give them everything himself.” This heavenly father, Wagner explains in Art and Revolution, “will be none other than the social wisdom of mankind, which takes nature and its fullness for the welfare of us all.”27 Of course, Wagner believed that Jesus was able to become an outstanding teacher only because he sacrificed himself and suffered and died for humankind, for death is “the last ascension of the individual life into the life of the whole” and, hence, “the ultimate and most definite end of egoism.”28 In this sense Wagner regarded both Siegfried’s Death and Jesus of Nazareth as works that celebrated the life and death of their heroes, proclaiming the advent of the man of the future who was desired and longed for and doing so, moreover, in a drama based in no small way, he believed, on the cultic character of Attic tragedy.

  It is instructive to see how Wagner, at this particular juncture in his life, took such an intense interest in the entirely unpolitical figures of Siegfried and Jesus of Nazareth, both of them exemplary characters with neither the ability nor the will to engage in day-to-day politics, but condemned, rather, to founder on the perversity of a society dominated by the quest for power and by misguided laws. Only through their self-sacrificial deaths can they prepare the way for the longed-for new. This, after all, was the very time that Wagner saw himself as an active revolutionary. It is no wonder, then, that Bakunin felt only well-meaning contempt for Jesus of Nazareth and advised the composer to abandon his existing text and replace it with something rather more direct: “The tenor was to sing: ‘Off with his head!,’ the soprano ‘To the gallows,’ and the basso continuo ‘Fire, fire!’”29

  In later life Wagner sought to dismiss his contribution to the Dresden Uprising as the apolitical and unreflecting action of a man fired by drunken high spirits. Appealing to Goethe’s famously aestheticizing account of the cannon attack on Valmy, he invests his description of the uprising in the Postplatz near to Semper’s fountain with all the trappings of an operatic spectacle:

  The whole scene before me seemed bathed in a dark yellow, almost brown light, similar to a color I had once experienced at Magdeburg during a solar eclipse. My most pronounced sensation was one of great, almost extravagant well-being; I suddenly felt the desire to play with something I had hitherto regarded as useless; I thus hit upon the idea, no doubt because it was near the square, to go to Tichatschek’s residence and inquire after the guns kept there by this ardent weekend hunter.30

  We do not need to see this as a belated attempt to gloss over the true facts of the matter for the benefit of King Ludwig II, for whom these reminiscences were for the most part intended, for Wagner—who during his years in exile still hoped that the whole of Paris would be “burned to the ground”31—was inclined to play with fire, a game that was both fantastical and at the same time utterly serious. This may well be typical of every genius with a borderline personality. But this game is not only a reflection of Wagner’s anarchic ideas, it also mirrors his perpetual dream of world destruction, which was a source of both fear and pleasure. And it also expresses the quintessentially Christian motif of the “eschatological annihilation of the world” that must necessarily precede the advent of a state of eternal bliss.32 Hans Magnus Enzensberger described this as follows in The Sinking of the Titanic:

  Damals glaubten wir noch daran (wer: “wir”?)—

  als gäbe es etwas, das ganz und gar unterginge,

  spurlos verschwände, schattenlos,

  abschaffbar wäre ein für allemal,

  ohne, wie üblich, Reste zu hinterlassen.

  [There was a time when we still believed in it / (What do you mean by “we”?), as if anything / were ever to founder for good, to vanish / without a shadow, / to be abolished once and for all, / without leaving the usual traces.]33

  The complex social and personal situation in which Wagner found himself during the late 1840s in Dresden makes it difficult to draw any binding conclusions about what he “believed” at that time. Like many revolu
tionaries, he had a clear idea of what he disliked, while being unable to offer a straightforward answer to Lenin’s well-known question “What’s to be done?” It is not even possible to distinguish between what he felt was achievable in real political terms and what he fantasized about as desirable—presumably he never sought to give an account of himself. Theoretically and practically he was an eclectic in the political sciences, convinced only that his own answer to the problems of the day lay in the field of art. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has speculated on what it was that linked “the powerful personalities of the Romantic era,” among whom he lists Wagner, Bakunin, Marx, Berlioz, and Hugo: it was, he argues, their protest at “the emptiness, lack of beauty, division from self and nature, atomism, and injustice of the contemporary world.”34 From this point of view it would be wrong to underestimate the strength of the impulses which, critical of the age, emanated from as powerful a personality as Bakunin: Wagner did not have to “understand” the Russian anarchist’s political theory to value him as a fellow sufferer and fellow revolutionary.

  We shall find ourselves on firmer ground when we turn to the question of the sources on which the revolutionary Wagner drew his literary ideas. In preparing the way for Jesus of Nazareth he took an astonishingly detailed interest in the whole of the New Testament and was evidently also familiar with the writings of religious socialists such as Wilhelm Weitling, whose Poor Sinner’s Gospel was published in 1845, and Pierre Leroux, who is credited with inventing the word “socialism.” Nor should we overlook Wagner’s private conversations with Bakunin.35 A recent study by Rüdiger Jacobs explores Wagner’s “metapolitical thinking” from so many different angles that the reader’s head starts to spin.36 And yet, however much one may respect such scholarly exercises, a certain degree of skepticism is surely in order in the face of such oversubtle analyses of Wagner’s theoretical views.

  Although Wagner’s “revolutionary” writings contain much that is intelligent, creative, and thoughtful, it is also clear that the more critical one’s reading of them, the more it becomes apparent that his “grand narrative” lies not in the commentaries that prefaced his music dramas or that provided them with a post hoc rationalization but only in those works themselves. This is particularly striking in the case of The Wibelungs (1848), an essay that Wagner intended as a conceptual precursor of the Ring and that he regarded as sufficiently important not only to publish in booklet form in 1850 but to include in his collected writings more than two decades later, long after the libretto of the Ring had been completed.

  Our admiration of the intensity and imagination that Wagner brought to the field of Norse mythology in the run-up to the Ring should not be allowed to discourage us from concluding that this essay tends more in the direction of brain-spun whimsy than of a convincing exercise in the history of philosophy. How would it help us if—as is the case with Jesus of Nazareth—we had only Wagner’s essay on the Ring, rather than the Ring itself, and if this were the only object of our analysis? The fascination exerted by the cycle lies in the fact that Wagner leaves far behind him the swagger and bombast that make The Wibelungs such effortful reading for the nonspecialist and finds a form of expression that is compelling and inexhaustibly rich, combining, as it does, modern myth and contemporary social criticism.

  It is above all nonmusicians among Wagnerians who are keen to reduce Wagner’s thinking to a coherent system. In the process they rarely acknowledge that Wagner’s thinking is thinking about music. And this also affected his aim of staging the exemplary death of a “man of the future whom we desire and long for” as the “celebration of a hero.” This aim inevitably recalls the “Eroica” Symphony, a work that Wagner held in high regard from an early age and later conducted on frequent occasions, including one of his subscription concerts in Dresden on January 22, 1848. When he performed the symphony in Zurich in 1851 he explained what and who it was that he believed Beethoven wanted to characterize as “heroic” in the opening movement of the work: it was no “military hero” but “the whole, complete man in whom are present all the purely human feelings of love, grief, and strength in their greatest fullness and force.”

  We are inevitably reminded of Wagner’s own Siegfried, a figure who had by this date been conceived but not yet born—if we wish to adopt Wagner’s own image of myth as the progenitor and music as the childbearing mother of the music drama. And this figure is accorded a funeral in the second movement of the “Eroica” that could not be more “exalting.” At the same time our grief gives rise to a “new strength” that in the final movement is “finally” able to present us with “the whole man in harmony with himself [. . .] in all his divinity” and in that way “reveal the overwhelming force of love.”37 Here we have Wagner’s revolutionary dramas and drafts in a nutshell, albeit with the important difference that this “celebration of the hero” presents his utopian vision at best as an imaginary ideal, whereas Beethoven’s idealism savors that utopia in every possible variant.

  Be that as it may, I am convinced that Wagner, who saw himself as the living embodiment of Beethoven in an almost mystic sense, was far more profoundly inspired by the “Eroica” Symphony and by Beethoven’s music in general than by any “philosophical” writings and the like. And this is all the more true in that the tradition in question goes back far beyond Beethoven: the funeral march as an expression of heroic adulation was an integral part of the religious festivals associated with the French Revolution. Beethoven, who toyed with the idea of moving to Napoleon’s Paris, not only followed with close interest these early stages in the emergence of a modern religion of art but consciously alluded to the music of the French Revolution in the funeral march in his “Eroica” Symphony. And just as it was entirely typical of Beethoven to incorporate these semantically unequivocal elements into the vast structure of his “absolute” symphonic style, so it was typical of Wagner to develop Beethoven’s idea in his own music dramas.

  As yet, however, this development still lay in the future, for the first draft of the libretto for Siegfried’s Death that Wagner completed on November 28, 1848, and that was to be the basis of the later Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) is still explicitly described as a “grand heroic opera in three acts.” At this date Wagner evidently still thought that it was possible to stage his great theme on a single evening in the opera house. And unlike Achilles and Jesus of Nazareth, he did more than simply draft the libretto; in August 1850 he even made a start on a musical sketch of the prologue.

  We shall take a closer look at Siegfried’s Death in our chapters on the Ring. What concerns us here is an aspect of the work that is of particular interest within the context of Wagner’s other drafts from his revolutionary period: Siegfried is an idiosyncratic version of Jesus of Nazareth. Although Wagner describes Jesus first and foremost as a man, he is of divine descent, his death allowing him to redeem humankind. Exactly the opposite is the case with Siegfried’s self-sacrificial death, for Siegfried not only frees the Nibelungs from their servitude, he also lifts the curse on the gods in favor of “boundless might,” allowing Brünnhilde to proclaim at the end of Siegfried’s Death:

  Nur Einer herrsche:

  Allvater! Herrlicher du!

  Freue dich des freiesten Helden!

  Siegfried führ’ ich dir zu:

  biet’ ihm minnlichen Gruß,

  dem Bürgen ewiger Macht!

  [One alone shall rule: All-Father! Glorious god! Rejoice in the freest of heroes! Siegfried I bring to you now: grant him a loving greeting, the bondsman of boundless might!]

  There is, however, one final “heroic opera in three acts” from this revolutionary period that demands no sacrifice of its hero: Wieland the Smith (WWV 82). Wagner prepared two prose drafts on the subject in the early months of 1850, by which date he was already living in exile in Switzerland. On March 13, 1850, he wrote to Theodor Uhlig: “Now all that I still have to do is write the verse for my Wiland [sic], otherwise the whole poem is finished—German! G
erman!”38 But what exactly is so “German” about this unfinished project? Above all, Wagner wanted to make it clear that he no longer intended his work to be presented to a French audience, since he had by this date abandoned his “rummagings in French art”—the brouhaha surrounding Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, while undeniably impressive, had put him off France for good: there was no room in such a work for the “pure, noble, most holy Truth” and “the divinely human” that he demanded of his own works and which, writing to Uhlig with bitter irony, he imputed to Le prophète.39

  The final scene of Joachim Herz’s production of Das Rheingold originally staged in 1973 and seen here in its 1976 revival as part of Leipzig’s centennial Ring. It represents the director’s answer to Brecht’s “question of a literate worker”: “Who built seven-gated Thebes?” Paid for with stolen gold, Valhalla is an architectural collage quoting elements of the Palais de Justice in Brussels, the Niederwald Memorial with its statue of Germania, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, and the imperial stairway at Vienna’s Burgtheater. Among those who witness this magnificent spectacle are all who toiled to build it—not just the site foremen, but an entire team of masons, whose costumes are modeled on those of English dockworkers of the period. Other powerless onlookers include the Nibelungs, who are held in check by Alberich and by his chief engineer Mime and seen here as the unemployed subproletariat. On either side are ordinary people who may be acclaiming the gods or simply looking on in silence. Downstage center are the Rhinedaughters lamenting the loss of their gold and, center stage, Loge, an intellectual who wisely keeps himself apart. (Photograph courtesy of the Leipzig Opera. Photograph by Helga Wallmüller.)