Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  Thus speaks the political scientist, just as it is the philosopher who presents a philosophical reading of the Ring and the depth psychologist who proposes a psychoanalytical interpretation. Each commentator proclaims his or her own truth, and each is right—or wrong—in his or her own way. Regardless of the extent to which these readings find greater or lesser favor with individual audiences, these disparate forms of discourse are a necessary elixir for the survival of the Ring—assuming we want to see the work not in a mummified form but as the product of intelligent directors onstage. At the same time, however, all these interpretations run the risk of investing a single, partial reading with the status of an absolute, thereby oversimplifying Wagner’s message. The Ring is most at risk from those interpreters who home in on Wagner’s philosophy of history, which is its weakest element, for the cycle’s fascination rests in the fact that it unleashes a storm that ultimately leads to the destruction of all that exists, while including scenes of unalloyed happiness that occur, as it were, in the eye of the storm, where there is, as we know, only the most absolute calm. Such scenes include those between the lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde, and between Siegfried and Brünnhilde. The happiness that Siegfried feels with regard to his youthful strength is no less authentic than the violence that accompanies it, whether latently or openly. And—in spite of Loge’s mockery—does Wotan not feel genuine happiness in the sight of the mighty castle that the giants have built for him? In this regard, the Ring differs from Tristan und Isolde and especially from Parsifal. For here in the Ring, Wagner flies in the face of the ninth of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History: he is not one of the “angels of history” driven from paradise by the storm of progress who turns to face the past, which he sees as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”53

  The fairy-tale final scene in Achim Freyer’s 2010 production of Die Walküre for the Los Angeles Opera. Writing in the Wiener Zeitung on June 8, 2010, the Viennese critic Stephan Burianek noted that “although it proved controversial with local audiences, this was an interpretation that many Wagnerians in Europe would surely have been happy to have seen, namely, a production with a plot that remained close to the text and that was free from socio-political questions, intellectual reinterpretations, and psychological insights.” Freyer’s “fantastical play of light onstage” quotes from the worlds of pantomime, circus, puppet plays, and fairy tales, generally with a deeper meaning yet also with a tendency to engage in random imagery. (Photograph courtesy of Monika Rittershaus, Berlin.)

  Such moments are significant not just at the point in the narrative where they occur but as a fundamental “counterforce that resists the work’s temporal nihilism.”54 By constantly evading its own historical logic, the Ring continues to build a new world that can never actually exist. That the moments of happiness vanish, collapsing like a house of cards, serves merely to make them all the more immediate. Wagner’s Ring is not the “trial” of a Josef K., whom Kafka causes to be swept along by one misfortune after another. Nor does it include characters like Beckett’s Krapp rummaging around in the rubbish heap of their own lives, only to suffocate in it. Above all with its positive fairy-tale elements, the Ring works against the whole concept of a myth of overwhelming destructiveness, and Wagner reveals an advanced understanding of dialectics by both thinking in terms of the ending and enjoying each moment to the full. This is an aspect of the work that can be described by reference to philosophical categories, allowing us to speak of a multiperspective organization of time that distinguishes between a teleological experience of it and an obliviousness to its passage.55 And yet it seems more obvious to interpret the Ring on the basis on our own experience of life, for it is part of our whole approach to life not only to think in terms of the wider picture and to develop long-term goals but to give ourselves up to the moment and in that way forget the universal misery that exists all around us. In that sense, Wagnerians who, listening to and watching the Ring, abandon themselves to the happiness of the moment in spite of all that they know about the fate of the characters are undoubtedly closer to Wagner than those thinkers and directors who feel a constant need to prove to themselves and to others that they have not been taken in by the great sorcerer’s passing promises. Such writers and directors reveal scant understanding of the dialectics contained in the libretto and the music of the Ring. Of course, it can be argued that the reception of the Ring has privileged its affirmative and phantasmagorical elements to such an extent that there is now an altogether compelling need to deconstruct it—even the term “deconstruction” seems something of a cliché. But we should never lose sight of the subtle balance that Wagner himself maintains between affirmation and deconstruction. It is a subtlety that Wagner directors ignore at their peril. If they believe it imperative to worship at the shrine of today’s event culture, they should at least ensure that their ideas respect Wagner’s intentions and do not unfold in parallel universes. The colorful Ring that Achim Freyer directed in Los Angeles in 2009–10 is a good example of how to stage the cycle: his images may be surreal in an arbitrarily postmodern manner, but they do not disturb their audiences when assimilating the music.

  A Word about Angelo Neumann

  If we do not take the matter too seriously, it may offer scope for wry amusement: despite his lofty calling, Wagner was forever beset by Jews wanting to help him, causing him untold agonies of embarrassment. Such self-contradictions also marked his dealings with Angelo Neumann, the impresario of the “Traveling Wagner Theater.” In the run-up to the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 Wagner may well have toyed with the idea of limiting performances of the Ring to his own theater on the town’s Green Hill, but by the end of the festival it had become clear to him that however many rehearsals he may have held, the artistic results remained disappointing, especially with regard to the staging.

  There were times when he was overcome by “a mood of great bitterness” and grew depressed at the failure of his plans for Bayreuth. Since “fragments” from the Ring were in any case “being played all over the place,” he was inclined to sell the work and “never give any more thought to a theater,” especially since the 1876 festival had ended with an enormous deficit that required him to think of ways of generating further income. It was no accident that in April 1877, after casting an eye at her housekeeping books, Cosima noted with some concern “that we spent 14,999 marks in the last quarter”—nearly fifty thousand dollars at today’s prices.1

  By this date no German theater director was willing to risk a production of the whole Ring. As Cosima noted in her diary, salvation came “from Leipzig and from Israel” in the guise of Angelo Neumann: “He has come for the Ring but would also like to have Parsifal! Coaxes R. out of half the royalties for the subscription quota—in short, is just what such gentlemen always are. R. says he has nothing against his coming, insofar as it shows they still need him—and we need money, so agreement is reached!”2

  A production of all four parts of the Ring spread over two seasons in Leipzig in 1878 remained largely unnoticed, which was emphatically not the case with the four cycles that Neumann mounted at Berlin’s Victoria Theater in May 1881: they proved a resounding success and at the same time signaled Wagner’s breakthrough in the German capital. When he traveled to the city for the opening nights, the hotel porter greeted him as “Your Excellency,”3 and he was also well received by large sections of the imperial court and upper echelons of bourgeois society. The audience’s reaction, too, was positive. All in all, the press concluded, the success and impact of the Berlin performances were far greater than they had been in Bayreuth five years earlier.

  Wagner had no choice but to express his gratitude to Neumann, not least because the latter had been sufficiently astute to involve him in the rehearsals. Wagner responded by praising Neumann’s commitment, while at the same time criticizing his work in all manner of petty ways, to say nothing of the fiasco at the end of the last perform
ance. In his speech after the final Götterdämmerung, Neumann began by thanking not Wagner but the members of the imperial household who had attended the performances, causing the composer to storm offstage in high dudgeon and to forget in turn to thank the performers. That Neumann, too, felt slighted is less surprising than that it was Wagner who made the first move in the direction of a reconciliation, so keen was he not to lose his excellent impresario. But before new negotiations could begin, Wagner and his family had returned by train to Bayreuth, occupying a private carriage. Waiting for them at Wahnfried was Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, the author of the four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races whom Wagner had first met in Rome in October 1876. Gobineau had in fact been present in spirit in Berlin, for his theories had been the subject of a lively discussion over a meal at the home of Count Alexander von Schleinitz, the Prussian minister of the royal household in the city.

  By 1882 Neumann had set off with his Traveling Wagner Theater, performing the more or less complete Ring in twenty-three different cities between September 1882 and July 1883. It was an undertaking that placed tremendous logistical demands on all concerned: the company numbered 130 singers and instrumentalists, while their sets and costumes filled twelve separate wagons of a special train that visited not only German cities, but also Amsterdam, Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, Basel, Venice, Bologna, Rome, Turin, Trieste, Budapest, and Graz. Wagner had sold his original sets to Neumann, as there could no longer be any question of a revival of the cycle in Bayreuth, although he retained the lighting equipment, which was worth 30,000 marks. Among the props that Neumann acquired was an “armory” filling forty crates, including the Valkyries’ armor and weapons, which weighed forty-five pounds per singer.4

  The reduction of the orchestra from 114 to 60 players represented an unfortunate makeshift, but the cast—with the usual exceptions—was altogether outstanding. The conductor, too, was distinguished: Anton Seidl was later to take charge of the German repertory at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “My music making is in fact magic making, for I just cannot produce music coolly and mechanically”

  THE ART OF THE RING—SEEN FROM THE BEGINNING

  The Ring: more art as religion than religion as art—Nietzsche’s and Thomas Mann’s accusations of dilettantism—Wagner’s statement of intent “I shall write no more operas” in the light of Das Rheingold—The Rheingold prelude: art used to create nature—The Rhinedaughters, Erda, and Alberich as seen by present-day directors—Alberich as a “subhuman Jew”—From the wide-angle shot to the narrowest focus—The art of “improvisation”—“Local criteria” in the compositional process and vocal forms that reflect the situation onstage—The perfect arch—Hanslick’s narrow critique of Das Rheingold—The character of the leitmotifs—From the Rhinegold motif to the Ring and Valhalla motifs—Transfer effects in the listener—The music’s “autonomous activity”—The ingenious combination of leitmotifs—“A varied network of melodic and harmonic relationships”—Mixing orchestral colors to produce specific “tone paintings”—The transformation music between scenes 1 and 2 as an example of such “tone painting”—Music as mediator between the fragmentary experience of the moment and the permanent desire for wholeness

  Photograph of Wagner taken by the Munich court photographer Josef Albert in November 1864. The version reproduced here is a hand-colored copy dedicated to Ludwig II and includes Wagner’s autograph signature together with the last two lines of a poem that Wagner wrote for the king in the summer of 1864: “So but from thee my strength to thank is taken, / Through thine own kingly Faith of strength unshaken” (trans. William Ashton Ellis). (Photograph courtesy of the Bayerische Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen, Munich.)

  The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel always thought on the grandest scale and had little time for the individual arts: his interest in the development of the absolute mind or spirit and, hence, in the “whole” that was uniquely “true,” meant that the arts—in his view—had outlived their usefulness. It was time for them to be replaced by philosophy, which according to Hegel could provide the key to absolute knowledge, a claim for which Hegel was willing to vouch in person. The “ruse of reason” that he often invoked ensured, of course, that Wagner adopted a highly selective approach to his system and singled out only the one element that he found most appealing—his critique of the individual arts. Wagner had no desire to entrust the concern for the whole to philosophy but, evincing an arrogance no less egregious than Hegel’s, regarded his own total artwork as the platform on which to present world-embracing ideas: it was, he believed, not pure thinking or absolute knowledge that could depict the whole in all its greatness but only a new mythology using the medium of art: it was, in short, a religion of art.

  Regressive though this may have been from Hegel’s perspective, it was an integral part of romantic thinking, with its concern for “ways of depicting the ‘absolute’ as the ultimate basis on which to anchor our fragile existence and invest it with a sense of assurance.” And art was uniquely placed to answer this need since it alone was in a position “to depict something inherently undepictable in a form whose meaning could never be fully understood.” Since the artist could not avoid “depicting something specific” but must inevitably fail in revealing “the inexhaustible contents of the absolute,” he or she must avoid all “specificity of expression.” As Manfred Frank has put it, “They said the finite and meant the infinite. They said something specific and caused it to hang in the balance by means of something else which, equally specific, was not compatible with it. No art can do this better than music, an art revered by the romantics above all others.”1

  This brings us to the Ring as a work of art. In other words, the aim of the present chapter is not to discuss whether the cycle offers a coherent view of the world and should be seen as a modern myth or whether it should be rejected as such. Our concern, rather, is Wagner’s potential ability to give aesthetic expression to his view of the world in the form of a work of music theater that continues to fascinate us today. Das Rheingold will serve to illustrate this point. The intellectual rigor that the composer brought to bear on providing the Ring with a solid conceptual foundation may earn our admiration or elicit our contempt, but what matters—in Hegel’s terms—is the “material appearance” of these ideas, and this is even more true in a skeptical postmodern age that has made it almost impossible to regard the Ring as an example of a religion in art. Instead, we are necessarily obliged to see it as an aesthetic object, with the emphasis no longer on religion but on art. Moreover, the question as to the artistic quality of the total artwork that the Ring is or claims to be is not external to the cycle but is the most important issue that singers, instrumentalists, conductors, directors, and designers on the one hand and audiences and critics on the other have to confront. Answers to this question are not to be found in books on Wagner’s worldview but time and time again have to be rediscovered in our concrete confrontation with the phenomenon of the Ring in performance.

  It is, of course, no easy matter to set oneself up as judge of Wagner’s art and, more especially, of Das Rheingold, for on the one hand the “preliminary evening” of the Ring, for which Wagner effectively had to relearn the whole technique of composition, offers many points of access of a formal and aesthetic nature, while on the other hand there is much truth to Nietzsche’s remark that “it is all too easy to be proved right with Wagner.”2 And Nietzsche must have known what he was talking about, for he was uniquely placed to understand a man whom he loved and hated, admired and criticized in equal measure. One of his criticisms was directed at the composer’s alleged dilettantism, and in his essay “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”—a text whose perspicacity is in no way compromised by its overemotive language—he invokes

  a spirit of restlessness, of irritability, a nervous hastiness in seizing hold upon a hundred different things, a passionate delight in experiencing moods of almost path
ological intensity, an abrupt transition from the most soulful quietude to noise and violence. He was held in check by no traditional family involvement in any particular art: he might as easily have adopted painting, poetry, acting, music as academic scholarship or an academic future; and a superficial view of him might suggest that he was a born dilettante.3

  Writers on Wagner are inordinately fond of quoting these last five words, while generally overlooking that Nietzsche was essentially describing the intellectual climate of décadence within which he was inclined to locate Wagner’s art and stressing that only a “superficial” observer would reproach that art for dilettantism. Even so, it will repay our attention to examine the matter more closely. First and foremost, there is the naïve assumption that the age of décadence, being restlessly nervous and irritable, was incapable of producing solid, craftsmanlike art. In this context the reader may be reminded of Thomas Mann, who in turn spoke admiringly of Wagner’s “infamously inspired dilettantism” in a short story, Der Bajazzo (The Clown), that he wrote almost immediately before Buddenbrooks. In this last-named work, little Hanno represents the fourth generation of the Buddenbrook family, a youth unsuited to the world of business but also incapable of practicing music professionally, for he could “improvise only a little.”