Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  In other words, the redemption motif that Wagner weaves into the closing bars of the Ring does not have to be interpreted in a linear way as a vision of the future or even as a vague pointer to how events may yet unfold. Rather, it should be understood as a clarification of a permanent and at the same time metaphysical demand that Wagner does not abandon even in the face of the catastrophic events depicted in the Ring: no one can imagine power without thinking at the same time of its opposite, self-sacrificial love; and it makes no sense to speak of “damnation” unless we also have an inkling of “bliss.”50 If—to quote Kant’s categorical imperative—there is no “starry sky above us,” guaranteeing the world order, there is still “the moral law within us.” Without such a moral law, Wagner’s critique of prevailing conditions in the Ring would not only lack any yardstick by which we could measure it, it would also lack a corrective.

  Words, of course, are of no avail here. When Nietzsche turned up at Wahnfried in August 1874 flourishing a copy of the Triumphlied of Brahms—a composer whom Wagner held in low esteem—Wagner “laugh[ed] loudly at the idea of setting such a word as Gerechtigkeit [“justice”] to music.”51 No, music alone can help us here—as an “emanation” of religion. But Wagner would not be Wagner if he did not have a number of concrete hints up his sleeve. In this particular case he had the aforementioned redemption motif at the ready, a motif he had already described as “Sieglinde’s theme in praise of Brünnhilde” and which was now entrusted to the orchestra and treated as a “hymn to the heroine.” A letter that Cosima Wagner wrote to one of her husband’s admirers, the chemist Eduard von Lippmann, provides a further explanation: “Not being in a position to reply to you in person, my husband has asked me to tell you that the motif that Sieglinde sings to Brünnhilde is the glorification of Brünnhilde, which is taken up at the end of the work, as if by the entirety.”52

  Brünnhilde, who has endured so many highs and lows in the Ring, is left as Wagner’s only figure of hope. Cosima—no doubt echoing her husband—called her “compassionate and loving.”53 To love compassionately would be the categorical imperative to offset the striving for power on the part of the Ring’s other characters, most of them men. And that this imperative can be articulated only through music, not words, would reflect Wagner’s conviction that transcendence can be imagined only in the language of music. According to Carolyn Abbate, Brünnhilde lives on “in the form of her dematerialized voice, which at the end finds a home for itself in the violins and sings through them.”54 The media theorist Friedrich Kittler has spoken more drastically of the “liquidation of articulated speech”: for him, the end of the gods is “the beginning of all sound effects in Wagner. If no one commands it, music remains noise” and becomes the “technology” of pure “ecstasy.” We no longer listen attentively but listen, rather, to a “musical noise spectrum.”55

  Kittler, too, alludes to the redemption motif. But this is not the only motif that we hear at the end of Götterdämmerung. Others include the Siegfried motif and the Valhalla motif. And herein lies the problem of the ending of the Ring, not in the much-discussed function of the redemption motif, for the Siegfried and Valhalla motifs ring out with a splendor that has absolutely nothing to do with the preceding narrative. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to conceive of a more radical dismantling of musical motifs than we find with these two leitmotifs.

  What did Wagner once write about the prelude to Das Rheingold? It had been impossible, he explained, to “quit the home key” of E-flat, because the plot gave him no reason “to change it.”56 In the second act of Die Walküre, when he wanted to provide a “picture of the fearful gloom in the soul of the suffering god” at the words “So nimm meinen Segen, Niblungen-Sohn” (So take my blessing, Nibelung son), he had, conversely, harnessed together various leitmotifs “with the help of a digression in the harmony,” using enharmonic change to move from A-flat minor to E major within the shortest possible time. A composer of symphonies would have brought out the “acerbity of such musical combinations” as particularly “bold,” whereas he himself had sought to “tone down” the stridency of the writing and present the passage “in accordance with the laws of nature,” in other words, in a psychologically credible way.57

  Did such subtleties in terms of the interplay between plot and music no longer play a role when in the early part of 1872 Wagner jotted down a composition draft for the ending of Götterdämmerung that already gives a good idea of the definitive ending? It may be objected that Wagner seems unable to get by without affirmatively transfiguring finales and that these endings are due less to the plot than to the desire to paint as bright a picture as possible of the conciliatory power of music. But there is a difference between interpreting Isolde’s “Transfiguration” and the final unveiling of the Grail in this way and writing music for an apocalyptic scene like the end of Götterdämmerung that may not be triumphalist in a martial sense but which at least tends in the direction of triumph and frenzied ecstasy.

  In this context, a comment made by Wagner in November 1880 is worth noting. This was a time when he resumed work on Parsifal after a lengthy interruption and, possibly in this very context, looked at the end of Götterdämmerung, prompting him to tell Cosima that “never again will [I] write anything as complicated as that.”58 There is no doubt that Wagner had in fact written even more complicated passages elsewhere in the Ring. Indeed, John Deathridge has claimed that the initial sketch for the ending is “perhaps one of the most disconcerting documents in the Bayreuth archives. If one takes an uncharitable view of musical composition, it could have been written by a roughly trained university student doing a paper in tonal composition.”59

  Of course, the corpus of Beethoven’s sketches teaches us that early versions of a passage do not always allow us to draw conclusions about its intended final form. Rather, they must be seen as a composer’s vague attempts to invest a nebulous idea with a preliminary shape. Is it conceivable that it was not the technical element in his compositional approach that Wagner found complicated and which Deathridge describes as “the usurping of quasi-symphonic development by motivic allegory,”60 but something completely different? Might he not have asked himself the question whether the frenzy and pomp of the music describing the end of the world might not in fact be appropriate from an ideological standpoint?

  As the starting point for our assumption we could take the somewhat cynical motto that “inferior reality remains with us while utopias keep on changing.” Wagner had already had problems with the ending of the libretto, making it likely that he also found himself in a predicament as a composer having to explain to himself and to others whether he still saw himself as a revolutionary who had once wanted to burn down Paris or as a state composer who had gained respectability during the early years of the new Reich and was satisfied with the symbolism of a fire that burned down Valhalla and that was staged as a frenzy of sounds? When he noted down this particular sketch, the foundation-stone ceremony for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus lay only weeks away, a building which, for all its relative modesty, was far from being the provisional theater of planks and beams that had fired his imagination twenty-two years earlier. Bayreuth was now a project of national importance for which the Wagners were drumming up trade with all the means at their disposal.

  The united German Reich had come into being in 1871, a development that Wagner had initially followed with ardent patriotism, even if he was later unable to disguise his disappointment at the way in which the national idea took concrete shape. Like Brahms and Nietzsche and other patriots he avidly supported the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. When he was asked for an autograph for an organization set up to help the war-wounded, he added a line of verse inspired by his libretto to Lohengrin: “Nie soll der Feind aus seinem öden Osten” (Ne’er shall our foe come from his barren east) but changed the “barren east” to the “windy west.” This line of doggerel verse was not meant to be sung to the music of Lohengrin but, according to Wagner, was intended “as an a
lternative”—exactly how is not clear—to the patriotic The Watch on the Rhine, which famously starts with the bellicose lines: “Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall, / Wie Schwertgeklirr und Wogenprall” (The cry resounds like thunder’s peal, / Like crashing waves and clang of steel).61

  In his poem “To the German Army outside Paris,” which he wrote in January 1871, Wagner paid tribute to the King of Prussia, who had been named German kaiser in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and whom Wagner renames “Siege-Fried” (A Truce to Victories).62 Shortly afterward he laid at the kaiser’s feet a further act of homage in the form of his Kaisermarsch (WWV 104) that culminates in an extended quotation from Luther’s Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A mighty stronghold is our God) and a “folk poem” beginning with the words “Hail! Hail to the kaiser! King Wilhelm!” that was to be sung by the entire army. This was also the work that Wagner chose to launch the official celebrations marking the laying of the foundation stone in Bayreuth on May 22, 1872:

  Heil! Heil dem Kaiser!

  König Wilhelm!

  aller Deutschen Hort und Freiheitswehr!

  Höchste der Kronen,

  wie ziert Dein Haupt sie hehr!

  Ruhmreich gewonnen,

  soll Frieden Dir lohnen!

  Der neu ergrünten Eiche gleich

  erstand durch Dich das deutsche Reich:

  Heil seinen Ahnen,

  seinen Fahnen,

  die Dich führten, die wir trugen,

  als mit Dir wir Frankreich schlugen!

  Feind zum Trutz,

  Freund zum Schutz,

  allem Volk das deutsche Reich zu Heil und Nutz!

  [Hail! Hail to the kaiser! King Wilhelm, the hoard and defender of liberty of all Germans! Highest of crowns, how gloriously it adorns your head! Praiseworthily won, peace shall reward you! Like the oak with its fresh green leaves, the German Reich arose through you: hail to its forebears and flags, which guided you and which we bore when we vanquished France with you! Defying our foe and protecting our friend, the German Reich exists for the salvation and benefit of all people!]

  Is it possible that the music at the end of Götterdämmerung contains an echo of the mood of euphoria that accompanied the establishment of the new German Reich? Was no further utopia needed now that the present age had showed such a friendly face? Was Wagner’s dream world now directed less at the future than at what was attainable in the here and now? By now there was not only Wilhelm I—“Siege-Fried”—to ensure good times for all but also Parsifal, who was on hand to demonstrate that things could take a positive turn after Götterdämmerung. The question as to whether the Ring must inevitably end in destruction or whether it can strike a utopian note now becomes unimportant. If we go back to the cycle’s beginnings, we could of course argue that the affirmative ending of the music takes up the heroic gesture of the final tableau of Siegfried’s Death, which survives the saga of the Ring at least in terms of the music.

  The idea that the Ring may extend into Parsifal is not new, of course. As early as 1848, even before he had conceived the notion of an opera on Siegfried’s Death, Wagner had already written a substantial study to which he gave the title The Wibelungs: World History from Legend, the penultimate section of which was headed “Ascent of the ideal content of the hoard into the ‘Holy Grail.’” (The “hoard” is, of course, the Nibelung treasure.) In short, Wagner’s reconstruction of the Nibelung myth encompassed the Grail from the outset. And even when he started work on the Ring, Wagner never lost sight of Parsifal. It is significant, for example, that the earliest prose sketch for Parsifal dates from 1857, the very time that Wagner broke off work on the Ring for a period of almost twelve years. Is it possible that—already anticipating the failure of his hero Siegfried—he saw Parsifal as a second Siegfried even at this early date? We have already quoted from Cosima Wagner’s diary entry for April 29, 1879: “Siegfried ought to have turned into Parsifal and redeemed Wotan, he should have come upon Wotan (instead of Amfortas) in the course of his wanderings—but there was no antecedent for it, and so it would have to remain as it was.”63

  Act 1 of Götterdämmerung in Peter Konwitschny’s 2000 Stuttgart production. Seen here are Siegfried, Hagen, and Gutrune’s legs. The production explored different layers in the work, layers that the conductor Lothar Zagrosek also heard in the score—notably “in the scene for Hagen, Gunther, Gutrune, and, later, Siegfried: if you take out specific layers of the winds—even just held notes—the result would almost be a comic minuet. Of course, it is already poisoned, but there is also something comic about it as it strikes you as so stilted, with a positively ‘courtly’ character. As Adorno says, there are various levels or layers, and you suddenly sense that behind it all there is something else, something that from the outset tells you that things are going unstoppably wrong. I find this great about Wagner—it is this that is so wonderful and enigmatic about his music”: see Eckehard Kiem, “‘. . .verschiedene Schichten von Präsenz’: Wagnerorchester und Wagnerregie; Gespräch mit Lothar Zagrosek,” in Richard Klein, ed., Narben des Gesamtkunstwerks: Wagners “Ring des Nibelungen” (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001), 300. (Photograph courtesy of A. T. Schaefer, Stuttgart.)

  Does this still have to be so? Or can a modern director take Wagner’s statement in The Wibelungs at face value and end the Ring not with the redemption motif but with the faith motif from Parsifal? In his Bayreuth production of the Ring in 2000, Jürgen Flimm placed the young Parsifal onstage at the end, though the idea was abandoned at subsequent revivals. I myself would like to go a stage further and propose a solution that is not afraid of encroaching on the music: at a Wagner conference organized by the Hamburg State Opera in October 2009 I even presented a collage in which the ending of the Ring passed seamlessly into the heroic faith motif from Parsifal.64

  In my own view, this would be the only honest answer that Wagner can give: there is no escaping from the world of the Ring—neither into the utopia of a free society nor into the realm of free love nor into a state of nirvana. Although we may be able to choose whether we are buried in the earth, at sea, or on a funeral pyre (Wagner’s preference was for cremation and burial at sea), we cannot transcend ourselves. The only alternatives are cultic ritual, the liturgy, and the “incense-perfumed sensual preaching” against which Nietzsche—understandably indignant—fulminated in Beyond Good and Evil.65 I imagine the final scene of the Ring transmuting into the Temple of the Grail, with Siegfried as Parsifal and Wotan as Titurel. At the side of the stage, Brünnhilde vegetates as Kundry. And the sounds we hear are those of Parsifal. For me, this would be no deconstruction of the “grand narrative” of the Ring but would mean getting to the heart of this “grand narrative” in the spirit of Wagner himself.

  Eliding the Ring and Parsifal in this way inevitably has consequences for Parsifal, for it will now be difficult to hail this as a Bühnenweihfestspiel. Instead, we shall be forced to concede that the hopelessness that marks the events of the Ring continues to resonate in Parsifal, albeit with the decisive difference that the structural injustice found in the Ring becomes the personal guilt of the characters in Parsifal. And religion is a panacea for personal guilt, a point illustrated by the Grail bells with a clarity that leaves nothing to the imagination. And so Götterdämmerung could end not with the prelude to Parsifal but with the inviting peal of the bells. Then the men and women who, “in speechless dismay,” watch as events unfold at the end of the Ring would know which community they will belong to in the future.

  But perhaps we should not insist unduly on the ideological dilemma raised by the end of Götterdämmerung and leave the floor instead to Friedrich Kittler with an offer that may well warm the hearts of many Wagnerians inasmuch as it encourages them to “plunge into the ocean of the music” in an altogether elemental way: “In the final moments of the Ring, fire, water, and wind—that is, air—contend with each other. [. . .] Wotan represents the storm with the Valhalla motif, the Rhinedaughters are aquatic creatures, and fire is present in the conflagr
ation that destroys Valhalla and also in the person of Loge. These three layers run counter to each other as music.” In other words, the end of Götterdämmerung does not proclaim a message. Rather, the message is the “world breath”—the Weltatem—that lends its powerful voice to the orchestra. Whether listeners are convinced by this multimedia answer to the “question as to how the world can be destroyed or vanish into thin air”66 or whether they regard it as an example of a postmodern lack of commitment will depend on which generation they belong to.

  A Word about Theodor W. Adorno

  There is no doubt that when Theodor W. Adorno spoke of the “phantasmagoria” of the ending of the Ring,1 he hit the nail on the head, for it is here that the bourgeoisie celebrates its own demise. Thus a critical observer may judge the situation. But what are we to make of the ideological criticism to which that same observer subjects the whole of Wagner’s output? As a philosopher, Adorno championed the idea of “inexorable music” that defiantly represented the “truth of society in opposition to society.”2 At its simplest, the opposite of “inexorable music” is music as a commodity—a type of music that throws itself at the spirit of the age, at audiences, and at the culture industry. Adorno was always in two minds about Wagner, whose music he regarded as “true” at the same time that it was a “commodity,” no clear dividing line being discernible between them.3