Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  For Ernst Bloch, classical music was above all an occasion to revel in its sounds, for it provided, in his eyes, a unique foretaste of the future, whereas Adorno placed his finger on what were above all its problematical elements, even though he shared Bloch’s love of music. He felt, for example, that Bach’s artistry “shows a moment of heteronomy, of something not entirely embraced by the subject which, despite his superior ‘accomplishment,’ places him, in historico-philosophical terms, below Beethoven.”4 Beethoven was the composer he revered above all others, a composer whose music, while not free from contradictions, expressed a greater truth than Wagner’s, whose much-lauded Gesamtkunstwerk was a late offshoot of the great metaphysical systems of the past: “The disintegration into fragments sheds light on the fragmentariness of the whole.”5

  We should, of course, be doing Adorno’s great Wagner essay an injustice by one-sidedly taking exception to such terms as “affirmation,” “regression,” “game of deception,” and “context of delusion,”6 for as a dialectician, Adorno knew very well what Wagner is all about—even in the case of Wagner the myth maker: “We can hear like an echo in the final lines of the Rhinegold what the Ring, as the luminous facsimile of the great systems, could ultimately see in them: the senseless, jejune, hopeless and solitary hope that nothingness offers to the man who is tragically ensnared.”7 And almost at the end of the same study Adorno praises the “feverish passages in Act III of Tristan,” referring to “that black, abrupt, jagged music which instead of underlining the vision unmasks it.”8

  But there is no doubt that the dominant tone is critical, and to the extent that it is directed at Wagner as a self-appointed prophet of art, it is easy for us to relate to it, especially when that critique is voiced by a writer who witnessed at first hand the National Socialists’ idolization of Wagner as a cult hero, a misappropriation that Adorno must have found particularly unbearable. It is surely no accident that the earliest draft of his Wagner essay dates from 1937–38, when Adorno was living in exile and making a determined effort to decode Wagner’s music socially. He interpreted its inflated, hypertrophic features as the symptom of a sick society holding all-night parties in an attempt to forget its own sickness.

  The Achilles’ heel of Adorno’s argument is that whereas it is easy to take offense at Wagner’s view of himself as a prophet of art and at his musical gift of gab, it is much harder to criticize him for any actual or alleged inadequacies in terms of his musical craftsmanship. For all its occasional perspicacity, Adorno’s polemic also contains a number of serious misunderstandings, and yet it would be wrong to dismiss his criticisms simply on the grounds that opera and music drama must be judged by other laws than those that govern the “autonomous” music of Beethoven and Schoenberg, for example. After all, Adorno was concerned with the truth and actuality of the whole idea of the total artwork, a concern that extended well beyond the confines of any questions about genre and aesthetics. But even here his sometimes unduly apodictic analyses of Wagner’s scores do not really get us any further. The actual or alleged illusory nature of the idioms that he criticizes is not an expression of any technical shortcomings on Wagner’s part, even in the most comprehensive sense of that term, but an inextricable part of his art in its totality. Here it is possible to criticize Wagner only on an ideological, not a technical, level—however much Adorno, as a connoisseur and composer in his own right, may have wished that the two were dialectically interrelated.

  Today’s listeners are in any case more tolerant, for every art provides us with its own “context of delusion.” And those of us who have a weakness for Wagner as a sorcerer and media virtuoso admire not some coherent concept but the perfection in imperfection. When seen from such a standpoint, Wagner’s musical drama resembles nothing so much as a magnificent mirror held up to our own society, with all its contradictions, hopes, and lies.

  Adorno’s study of Wagner is full of insights and has always fascinated its readers, while also creating the impression of excessive effort, an impression due to the fact that the young Adorno was emotionally drawn to Wagner—when he was sixteen, a performance of Tristan und Isolde under Furtwängler had left him “completely overwhelmed.”9 All the greater, then, was his sense of disenchantment on realizing that the genius that Wagner had for a time seemed to him to be had, in his eyes, so fundamentally betrayed the ethos of music. Much the same had already happened to Nietzsche, albeit for very different reasons.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “You will see—diminished sevenths were just not possible!”

  PARSIFAL

  Hermann Levi visits Wahnfried—Wagner’s belief in godliness, not in God—His study of the rituals of the Catholic Church—Parsifal as music with a philosophy—Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival—The enigmatic phrase “Redemption to the Redeemer”—Anti-Semitic interpretations of this phrase by Gutman and Zelinsky—Harry Kupfer’s 1977 Berlin production—Wagner’s contemporaries’ criticism of the work’s ideology—Structural affinities with Schubert’s short story My Dream—Parsifal as a dream machine for Wagner—Suffering in the work: Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nike Wagner—Alban Berg’s admiration for the music—Innovative elements in terms of the history of music—Parsifal as a pivotal piece—Compositional symbols for the mix of faith and the search for meaning—The “pure fool” motif—Symbolism and Jugendstil: a comparison with the work of Gustav Klimt—“Parsifal’s Wanderings”: a detailed analysis—Ambivalence of the music’s semantics—Kundry’s laughter and Kundry’s music—Sounds as “demons”—“Sorrow in bliss”

  Franz von Lenbach was known as the “prince of painters” on the strength of his portraits of eminent individuals invested with a sense of the self-assurance associated with the early years of Germany’s new Reich. Most of these portraits were prepared from photographs, and the same is true of this sketch of Wagner, made in red chalk and based on one of Franz Hanfstaengl’s photographs from 1871. It is arguably the most appealing of Lenbach’s numerous portraits of Wagner and probably dates from the winter of 1880–81, when Wagner was in Munich and may even have sat briefly for the artist, with whom he was on friendly terms. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: N 1227a.)

  Wagner completed the composition sketch of Parsifal on April 16, 1879, just after Easter. The orchestral sketch was finished ten days later. Shortly beforehand, he had received a visit from Hermann Levi, Munich’s court conductor, so that the two men could work through the finished sections of the score. One such passage was the Good Friday scene in act 3. The following day, Good Friday, Cosima attended Communion with her eldest children—for good Protestants this was an almost obligatory act.

  Wagner himself remained at home. Perhaps in an attempt to justify himself, he told his wife that “it was not Christ’s death but his resurrection which gave rise to the religion; the death all but destroyed the poor disciples, but the women’s not finding the body in the morning, and seeing Christ in their exaltation, created the community.”1 With this interpretation, Wagner was adopting the line taken by the so-called Tübingen school of theology, more especially a study familiar to Wagner and written by Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck: How Christian Is Our Present-Day Theology?

  By then, Levi had already returned to Munich. Wagner would undoubtedly have welcomed it if Levi, too, had attended Communion—having first been baptized, of course. For years he continued to nag his designated Parsifal conductor to convert to Christianity, for he—Wagner—was on the horns of a dilemma: it was only with the greatest reluctance that he had been persuaded to let Levi conduct Parsifal at all and to entrust his great confessional work to the son of a rabbi from Gießen. An entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary for April 28, 1880, reveals her husband’s attitude at its most cynical: “I cannot allow him to conduct Parsifal unbaptized, but I shall baptize them both, and we shall take Communion together.”2 And yet Wagner knew of no more suitable replacement to conduct the work: on the one hand, his patron, K
ing Ludwig II, saw no reason to distance himself from his Jewish kapellmeister; and on the other, Wagner could think of no more competent conductor and no more suitable team of singers than those of the Munich court opera. His annoyance at his predicament found expression in a particularly unpleasant episode that took place during rehearsals, when he confronted Levi with an anonymous anti-Semitic letter accusing the conductor of having an affair with Cosima.

  Levi was so unnerved by this accusation that he left Bayreuth forthwith and demanded to be relieved of his duties, prompting Wagner to write what Cosima—in an appalling lapse of good taste—called a “splendid reply,”3 in which he in turn accused the deserter of being oversensitive and ended by adding the distinctly ambiguous sentence: “Perhaps this will be a great turning point in your life—but at all events, you are my Parsifal conductor.”4 Once again Levi was evidently being invited to consider baptism, only this time the invitation was implied. Such tactlessness toward Levi is in striking contrast to Wagner’s open-minded attitude to August Friedrich Gfrörer’s Critical History of Early Christianity, which had held his attention since 1874, not least on account of a number of striking parallels between Jewish theosophy and the message of his own Parsifal.5

  Wagner himself was neither loyal to the Protestant Church nor a believer in the traditional sense of the term: “I do not believe in God, but in godliness, which is revealed in a Jesus without sin.”6 Dated September 20, 1879, this entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary is by no means untypical of Wagner’s attitude in general. Only the previous day, for example, he had exclaimed: “If Protestantism had remained on a popular level, completely untheological, it would have been capable of survival; theology was its downfall.”7

  There were times, however, when Wagner adopted a far more critical attitude to the rituals of the Catholic Church: an entry in his Brown Book—effectively a diary that he kept for Cosima—includes a passage that dates from September 1, 1865, three days after he had completed the prose draft of Parsifal. It was intended first and foremost as a dig at Liszt and was therefore pasted over by Wagner’s daughter, Eva Chamberlain, decades later in an attempt to render it unreadable: “To me all this Catholic rubbish is repugnant to the very depths of my soul: anyone who takes refuge in that must have a great deal to atone for. Once you revealed it to me, speaking in a dream: it was dreadful. Your father is repugnant to me.—and when I was able to bear him, there was more Christianity in my blind indulgence than in all his piety.”8

  The very next day—again in the pages of his Brown Book—Wagner returned to the subject of his Parsifal draft: “What to do about the bloodstained lance?—The poem says the lance is supposed to have been produced at the same time as the Grail, and clinging to the tip was a drop of blood.—Anyway, this is the one which has caused Anfortas’ [sic] wound: but how does this hang together? Great confusion here. As a relic, the lance goes with the cup; in this is preserved the blood that the lance made to flow from the Saviour’s thigh. The two are complementary.—So either this: [. . .] Or this: [. . .] Which is better, Cos?”9

  For all his criticism of the Catholic Church, Wagner was also at this time visiting the Munich Benedictine priest Petrus Hamp in order to “exchange ideas on the representational aspects of the Catholic Mass.” As Hamp recalled in his reminiscences, “a copy of the Missal lay open between us throughout these discussions. Wagner asked probing questions about the tiniest details, including the sense and significance of the ceremonies, especially their origins and age, and the theatrical design of the Mass. Time and again he asked me to sing the praefationes, or prefaces.” Wagner also expressed an interest in the moment when the act of transubstantiation took place and asked “whether the faithful did not feel a frisson.”10 Twenty-six years later Paul Valéry observed in a letter to André Gide that “we are all little boys when set beside liturgists and theologians since the most brilliant among us, Wagner and Mallarmé, bow before them and imitate them.”11

  Some of the “great confusion” that Wagner felt on reading Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval romance may seem to have left its mark on the opening pages of the present chapter, but the heteroclite character of this section is in fact intentional, for it is meant to indicate that we would be guilty of fundamentally misjudging the composer’s creative and conceptual work on Parsifal if we were to compare it to the careful planning of a professional librettist. Rather, Wagner kept leaping back and forth between different levels right up to the time of the work’s first performance in 1882.

  Ever since he had first become acquainted with the subject of Lohengrin in 1845, Wagner had been engaged in mythological speculations and studies of the circle of legends surrounding the Grail and Parzival. With the passage of time, theological and philosophical questions became increasingly central to his thinking. At the same time, he was exercised by the concrete question of how he could present what Hermann Danuser has called his “world-view music”12 in the form of a Bühnenweihfestspiel that would be his most important contribution to the religion of art that he was propagating. This required him not only to work on Parsifal as a librettist and composer but also to demonstrate uniquely compelling powers of persuasion such that it is almost impossible for us to draw a distinction between Wagner as the “founder of a new religion” and Wagner as a private individual.

  After all, Wagner’s interest in the debate in conservative circles who had diagnosed a crisis in civilization and were examining the chances of finding a cure was not confined to the public sphere but also found expression within his own private circle. Among the leading figures of this movement, in which a critique of civilization went hand in fist with anti-Semitism, were Paul de Lagarde, Constantin Frantz, and the self-styled Count Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, all of whom were known to Wagner not just through their writings but also through personal and epistolary contact. Theological and philosophical debates were such a regular feature of daily life at Wahnfried that we may surely claim that Wagner lived every single minute of the creative process surrounding his last great confessional work, suffering and reacting to it with every fiber of his being.

  And, miracle of miracles, Wagner managed to ensure that the world premiere of Parsifal in 1882 was a cultural event never previously seen in Germany, at least in the field of music. Even more incredible is that the event was a financial success, the quarter of a million marks that the enterprise cost being met by box-office receipts, while donations from the Patrons’ Societies worth 140,000 marks additionally helped to support the cause. For the full score and vocal score Wagner’s publisher paid 150,000 marks, a sum that no previous German composer had commanded, although, as Wagner was aggrieved to discover, Gounod received a similar sum for his oratorio La rédemption.

  The press reacted far more positively than had been the case in 1876, when the response had been relatively muted and had revolved in the main around the question of whether or not Wagner had achieved his record-breaking aim. By 1882 a different climate prevailed: now there was applause and publicity wherever one turned. Even Bayreuth’s numerous enemies avoided their earlier note of malice, since the subject matter of Parsifal was undoubtedly calculated to inspire a mood of national solemnity. Wagner’s new work was not as long and complicated as the Ring; it lacked its gloomy ending; and it was a drama about redemption, allowing audiences to leave the theater after only a few hours in a suitably elevated mood.

  “Whereas it was blood and fire that flowed freely in the Ring,” we read in a review in the Nationalzeitung almost defensive in its critique of the work, “it is now consecrated oil.”13 The age could make use of consecrated oil in the guise of a work imbued with religious and nationalist ideas, whether we view those ideas as Catholic, Protestant, Celtic, Germanic, or Buddhist or attribute them to the tradition of Jewish mysticism or the spirit of animal rights, or see them as an expression of décadence—or even if we have no clear idea what the work is ultimately about.

  And this brings us to a central point—the lack of any clear message in t
erms of Wagner’s “theology.” Hundreds of books and articles have sought to explain whether the “love-feast” should be interpreted as a celebration of the Eucharist and whether the bread, wine, Last Supper, lance, and dove should be seen as Christian symbols and, if so, how. And then there is the role of the Grail, which has inspired esoteric writers of all shades of opinion to indulge in the most lurid speculations.

  I have nothing but respect for all interpretations that show commitment and conviction: even a person not inclined to esoteric speculations can sympathize with the view that the Grail satisfies a primal need in us for protection and sustenance. And there is no doubt that Parsifal’s journey to greater maturity—“Made wise by pity, the blameless fool”—invites us to identify with the hero in a positive way, while exactly the same is true of the motif of compassion, whether we see it in Buddhist or Christian terms. After all, no less an authority than Claude Lévi-Strauss has described Wagner’s libretto as an important “contribution to mythology” and hailed Gurnemanz’s lines “You see, my son, here time becomes space” as arguably “the most profound definition of myth in general.”14

  Other writers have sought, rather, to demythologize Parsifal in their attempts to salvage the work. Hans Mayer, for example, sees in Parsifal a second Siegfried—“once again a young man who is meant to embody the fate of human freedom but who on this occasion is not destroyed by the curse of some Alberich or other.”15 Udo Bermbach even speaks of an “aestheticization” of religion that began with the Ring and is continued in Parsifal.16