Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  The detailed prose draft of Wieland combines elements from the traditional legends associated with both Wieland (also known in English as Wayland) and Siegfried. One aspect that bears heavily on the plot is the motif of the skillful smith whose tendons have been severed to prevent him from fleeing but who still manages to escape from his servitude at King Neiding’s court by flying away on a pair of wings that he has crafted for himself. Wagner had already anticipated this scene at the end of his earlier essay The Artwork of the Future:

  He did it: he fulfilled the task that the greatest need had inspired in him. Borne aloft on the object created by his own art, he flew up on high and from there fired his deadly dart into Neiding’s heart, before soaring away through the air on his blissfully bold flight to where he found the loved one of his youth.——O unique and glorious folk! This is the song that you have fashioned, and you yourself are this Wieland! Forge your wings and soar aloft!40

  Here Wagner was attempting to come to terms with his disappointed revolutionary hopes in keeping with a motto later formulated by Nietzsche: “We have art so as not to be destroyed by the truth.”41 On this occasion, then, the celebration of a hero is not the result of a sacrificial death that is needed to bring about a new order. Instead, it is the apotheosis itself that is staged here. An individual hero is no longer required when the folk itself steps into the breach. As Wagner makes clear in his multistrophic poem Die Noth (Need), which he wrote in 1848, the folk has already suffered so much that this in itself amounts to a sacrifice. Did Wagner, writing in the wake of the failed revolution, really believe in the mission of this folk—possibly the German folk, as implied by his letter to Uhlig? Or is the whole exercise no more than a defiantly credulous about-face? Whatever the answer, it is surely significant that this draft was to be followed within a matter of months by an outburst of hatred in the form of the article “Jews in Music” that appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in September 1850. By now there was no longer any mention of the “glorious folk” but only of the nefarious Jews causing the body of the people to decompose, a body, let it be said, that was already doomed to destruction.

  Wieland the Smith is unique in Wagner’s output, the only example of a work that not only hints at a positive utopian vision—at least to the extent that such a vision can be detected in his works at all—but ends, according to the stage directions, in the “brilliant radiance of the sun.”42 This was the only time, then, that Wagner contradicted his own artistic leitmotif of “redemption through destruction.” Of course, his volte-face did not find expression in one of his musical dramas, for he turned his attention instead to the Ring and—to Nietzsche’s lasting annoyance—revoked the promise of a better future that provides Siegfried’s Death with its rhapsodic, hymnlike ending.

  In a book concerned above all with Wagner’s music theater, a chapter like this would not be worthwhile if it were not ultimately validated by the Ring. Of course, even the Ring can be interpreted without a knowledge of the conditions that led up to it; and yet such a reading would be one-dimensional without the context and intertext, a black-and-white picture compared to one in full color. The Ring remains a contentious work of such unparalleled richness and intensity that we need to know the contemporary background and the conditions in Wagner’s life at the time he was working on it. Only then will we be able to scale its peaks and plumb its depths and relate it to our own lives.

  From the standpoint of this central work, Wagner needed this revolutionary period, with its flights of fancy and subsequent disappointments, in order to clarify his own position and in that way free himself up for the works that he wanted and was able to compose in the future. As Paul Bekker noted in the 1920s, striking a note of almost foolhardy boldness, Wagner had to “become a politician, a revolutionary, a socialist, an atheist—not because these questions as such interested him personally but because his art depended on the answers to them.”43 Without this dry run, there would be no Ring—and certainly not this particular Ring. Wagner would simply not have succeeded in forging this particular variant of his artistic leitmotif of “redemption through destruction” if he had not passed through the purgatory of politics and tried his hand at “heroic operas” in the spirit of the revolution, experiments that opened his eyes to what was possible and impossible in his art, and doing so, moreover, in a way that commands our respect for its sheer magnificence.

  A Word about Paul Bekker

  Art and Revolution is the title of a lecture that Paul Bekker published in 1919 on paper that wartime exigencies meant was of inferior quality. It appeared as part of a longer series of monographs under the imprint of the well-respected Frankfurter Zeitung, for which Bekker edited the music pages. He was a well-read writer and five years later was to publish a study of Wagner that went through several editions and was also translated into English. In short, it was almost certainly no accident that he chose the title Art and Revolution in conscious emulation of Wagner’s identically titled pamphlet, even though Wagner’s name is not in fact mentioned in it. This is unimportant, however, for what concerns us here is that Bekker developed his theories about the link between art and revolution before applying them to Wagner only a short time afterward.

  The liberal Bekker had no sympathy for the kind of political revolution that had just taken place in Russia but hoped for a revolution in the service of “human values” through “a thoroughgoing organic reorganization of our artistic lives.”1 In order to create an “artistic community unified by its feelings for human values,” artists themselves and their audiences needed to be “revolutionized,” an aim that could be achieved, for example, by abolishing subscription performances and the star system.2

  This program is by no means as innocent as it may appear at first sight, not least because it remains an unrealized goal even today. Essentially it reflects the ideas on reform that Wagner had never tired of promoting throughout his entire life. Even so, one wonders if Wagner the Dresden revolutionary would have been satisfied with the realization of this particular program. Rather, it seems to have been Bekker’s own ideal, for in his subsequent book on Wagner he declared the composer a political “visionary” whose program of reform contained only a single “positive” element—namely, the “reformation of the theatre.”3 And Wagner’s flight from Dresden in the wake of the failed uprising in the city receives only the most laconic of comments: “His future was even more insecure than when he embarked at Pillau for London, but he was content with the knowledge that he had finally escaped from forces which had sought to enslave him.”4

  Bekker’s standpoint represents a “radical aestheticization of the artist in all his manifestations.”5 “Wagner’s nature,” he wrote, was “governed by emotion. He was primarily neither musician nor poet, but like Berlioz, Liszt, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, he was primarily an expressionist.”6 His art was thus the expression of an emotional experience, with the result that his life “cannot rightly be described as ‘tragic’ or ‘fatal’ in the primary sense of those terms, for it was passed in the use of tragedy and fatality for the purposes of creative art.”7 For Bekker, Wagner’s life and thinking, with all their highs and lows, their insights and their aberrations, were ultimately an organic process, serving as the platform for an artistic oeuvre whose standing is never in doubt.

  Against this background even Wagner’s anti-Semitism “was as far removed from practical politics as the ‘communism’ of his Dresden days.” Wagner needed this “idea of Judaism, adopted simply for its practical artistic use,” as a background for characters such as Alberich, Loge, Hunding, Mime, and Hagen, all of whom express “the dark side of the world of Wagner’s imagination.” “He was pleased to call this dark phase of his nature ‘Jew,’ just as he called the bright phase ‘Hero.’”8

  Such comments on the part of a writer and thinker who was responsive to currents in contemporary music and by no means unworldly create a distinctly sinister impression when we recall how Bekker was rewarded for them:
he was dismissed from his post as general administrator of the Wiesbaden State Theater in 1933 and forced to emigrate to the United States, where he died only four years later at the age of forty-four. Every fate suffered by an émigré is tragic, but in this case it struck down a generous, noble-minded individual who tried to adopt a humane approach to works that his destroyers would soon appropriate for their own inhuman ends.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “We have art so as not to be destroyed by the truth”

  THE RING AS A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYTH

  The scenario of the failed revolutionary: “destruction” and “self-annihilation”—“Jews in Music”—Wagner’s abandonment of work on the score of Siegfried’s Death—His vision of a theater “of wooden boards”—Opera and Drama as a provisional stocktaking—Traditional operas as a “wanton,” a “coquette,” and a “prude”—Attic tragedy and the Oedipus myth—The Artwork of the Future—The Greek chorus and the modern orchestra—The semantics of the leitmotifs—The philosophy and philology of alliterative verse—The “poetic-musical period” as a formal constituent of the Ring cycle—A Communication to My Friends as a statement of Wagner’s current thinking as a composer—Reading the poem of the Ring—The Ring as an artistic miracle—Wagner’s unwavering faith in his own work—A comparison with Faust, part 2—The Ring as a nineteenth-century myth—Martin Luther and Walter Benjamin as the chief witnesses for Wagner’s pessimism—The Ring as the expression of a coherent view of the world?—Various attempts to interpret the Ring—Moments of happiness in the work in spite of its mood of universal doom

  Clementine Stockar-Escher’s watercolor dates from the spring of 1853 and was the result of several sittings. The amateur portraitist, who was a sister of Alfred Escher, the president of the Swiss National Council, painted Wagner against the backdrop of Lake Zurich, his delicate facial features somewhat belied by a pose more normally associated with figures of authority. Wagner commissioned the portrait in order to have it lithographed and distributed in Germany as a way of keeping himself in the public eye during his years of exile in Switzerland. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: Bi 3229.)

  Even after Wagner had landed unceremoniously in Zurich in late May 1849 with a price on his head following the failure of the Dresden Uprising, he continued to fire off barbs in the direction of the well-armored establishment, an exercise conducted with considerable passion but ultimately futile. In his quiver were belligerently aesthetic and political tracts such as Art and Revolution and The Artwork of the Future, a sketch for an opera on the life of Wieland the Smith, and a maliciously polemical article published under the title “Jews in Music.” With the exception of the unpublished Wieland, these writings caused a great stir in Germany. But soon Wagner’s arsenal was empty, and the situation remained unchanged—how could it be otherwise in view of the prevailing conditions? Wagner’s greatness emerges from the fact that, far from lapsing into self-pity, he continued along his chosen course. Much, however, had changed.

  He began work on the score of Siegfried’s Death but broke off after only a scene. By now he had lost his faith in a “heroic opera” in which the sacrificial death of an outstanding individual would free humankind from its shackles under the supreme command of Wotan, who continued to be worshipped as the “most glorious” of gods. As Wagner could now see, not only had humankind failed in its revolutionary mission, but the gods were not on their side. And so Wotan had to abdicate and by self-destructing prepare the way for something new, something that was no longer a concrete utopia but at best a vague hope, and even this hope would for a time be abandoned under the influence of Wagner’s reading of Schopenhauer and of the latter’s Buddhist beliefs. Now he was convinced that we must all abdicate, for all that remains to us humans is redemption through destruction. Wagner’s old artistic leitmotif returns here with a new and unsuspected power. That it could also assume a threatening aspect is clear from “Jews in Music.”

  However maliciously mean-spirited Wagner’s tirade may be, it would be wrong to see in him an advocate of the physical annihilation of the Jews. True, the Jews were in particular need of “redemption through destruction,” as they had proved to be the essential cause of the ruin of humankind, which Wagner believed was damaged beyond repair. But it was humankind in general that was doomed to perish.1 In this context the words “destruction” and “annihilation” are to be understood as metaphors—in Opera and Drama Wagner uses the latter to attack the genre of opera, which, he claims, had proved to be a historical “aberration.” Only once it had been destroyed and swept away would the way be open for something new to replace it.

  In both cases, the undeniably well-read Wagner may have been thinking subliminally of the philosophical categories of his age: in Faith and Knowledge, for example, Hegel speaks of a “subjectivity” that has “sought refuge in destruction” in the guise of faith—the notion is typical of Hegel’s dialectic thinking and may well have appealed to Wagner.2 In his conception of the musical drama, the category of destruction was to become even more significant, for the subject matter of such dramas, like that of Greek tragedy, can only be described as negative: in his social isolation, the present-day artist is incapable of creating an artwork of the future, since this presupposes the restoration of a sense of social and communal cohesion that modern society has forfeited. As an alternative he could chose as his subject matter only the “self-annulment of the egoistical individual” as the necessary precondition for a future sense of community.3 Wagner had already proposed this idea in Jesus of Nazareth and Siegfried’s Death, although in those two cases he had still been fired by the revolutionary hope that the utopian age that each foretold in its different way would shortly dawn. By the end of 1849, however, he was striking a substantially more pessimistic and disillusioned note in a letter to Theodor Uhlig:

  Works of art cannot be created at present, they can only be prepared for by means of revolutionary activity, by destroying and crushing everything that is worth destroying and crushing. That is our task, and only people totally different from us will be the true creative artists.4

  In spite of its radical language, this, too, is meant to be read metaphorically. In the course of a conversation held twenty years later with Cosima, Wagner expressly regretted that Schopenhauer’s philosophy might exert “a bad influence on young people” like Nietzsche because “they apply his pessimism, which is a form of thinking, contemplation, to life itself, and derive from it an active form of hopelessness.”5

  But let us return to Siegfried’s Death. In theory Wagner could have incorporated his new nihilistic scenario, dramatically intensified in the wake of his disenchantment with the whole idea of revolution, into the existing libretto without the need for any far-reaching changes. Simply by removing the optimistic ending, he could almost certainly have achieved that aim. He would not even have needed to rewrite the earlier scenes, which had come to seem increasingly indispensable for a proper understanding of his Siegfried tragedy as this prehistory is already mentioned in the Norns’ scene that introduces Siegfried’s Death. Of course, there is space in this scene for only a condensed account of these earlier events, with the result that it immediately became clear to Wagner when he started work on the score that he would have to begin the opera with a lengthy, recitative-like exchange between the Norns expatiating on Siegfried’s past. Not only did this fly in the face of Wagner’s own maxims about not beginning a new stage work with a mass of undiluted information, but he would be unable to launch the piece with a musical opening that would carry the audience forward with an irresistible sense of momentum. In short, it would impair his aim of conveying his myth to his audience’s emotions by means of music capable of speaking for itself within the context of this opening scene.

  A glance at the Norns’ scene that Wagner set to music twenty years later at the start of Götterdämmerung helps to throw light not only on the problem itself but also on its subsequent resolution. By then
Wagner had already completed the first three parts of the Ring, resulting in a whole series of leitmotifs that could now form the basis of the Norns’ scene. As a result he was no longer obliged to think in terms of a dry recitative but could create a musical scenario teeming with richly allusive motifs that would impinge directly on listeners already in the know.

  When Wagner set about writing the music for Siegfried’s Death in August 1850, these motifs did not yet exist. But even if they had existed, their use would have been unmotivated and premature. As a result, Wagner—no doubt with his own highly artificial music to Lohengrin still ringing in his ears—was stymied, while continuing to cling to the project, which he now planned to write for an “audience of the future” that would be convened at short notice for a performance, directed by himself, in a theater made from “wooden planks”: “I would then send out invitations far and wide to all who were interested in my works, ensure that the auditorium was decently filled, and give three performances—free, of course—one after the other in the space of a week, after which the theater would be demolished and the whole affair would be over and done with.”6 This is the first time in his correspondence that Wagner mentions the idea of a festival, although for the present it lacked all material basis, as Wagner had yet to complete the work and did not have the sum of ten thousand thalers that he believed was necessary to fund the project.