Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  37. Kundry’s motif from bars 216–20 of act 1 of Parsifal.

  In the middle of the motif the harmonic fabric suddenly falls apart. What remains is a powerfully expressive gesture, but it is not one that seeks to “evaluate” either Kundry as a person or the situation in which she finds herself. Rather, the motif should be understood in the sense of a genotext that reaches back into deeper layers of experience and is unconditionally no more than what it is. Although he may have used a different technique, it is passages such as these that Alban Berg picks up and elaborates, notably in Lulu. It is above all her music that ensures that Kundry—like all the other characters in the work—is not a monster but a genuinely human figure. Although the opposites that she combines within her may be extreme, they nonetheless make clear what each of us carries around with us as baggage.

  A quotation from Cosima Wagner’s diary may serve to illustrate this point: “R. fetches me for lunch and says, ‘Do you know how Kundry calls to Parsifal?’ He sings me the phrase, so piercingly tender, with which she names him: ‘It is the first time his name is spoken, and thus his mother had called to him! Only music can do that.’”97 One of the first interpreters of the role of Kundry was Marianne Brandt, who was initially considered unsuited to the character as she appears in act 2, but, as, Hans Bartolo Brand reports: “A sustained note, as if from a little silver bell, a note pure and clear, gradually dying away to the most delicate pianissimo. And then the call of ‘Parsifal! Tarry!’ wafting over the flowery hedge. This wonderful, beguilingly beautiful voice cast its spell on listeners and fellow performers alike, drawing them into its sway.”98 This, too, is a part of Kundry’s character. However necessary the debates about Wagner’s ideology and current productions of his works, the most precious part of his legacy—his music within the context of the theater—should never be lost from sight.

  The French philosopher André Glucksmann, who was the son of Jewish parents, used his ironically titled book The Master Thinkers to attack those major figures who in his view had been responsible for leading the West into the byways of ideological totalitarianism. For him, Wagner was the “master thinker” among artists. In mocking its own premises, Glucksmann argues that Wagner’s work—and he was thinking specifically of the Ring in Patrice Chéreau’s Bayreuth production—defies the constraints of the system: “A man sets out upon a stage the grand machinery of modern power: he launches the speeches, prepares the imbroglios, puts the fantasms into action. It works. In his miracle of Bayreuth he realizes the philosophy of Hegel and of Marx, that of the Kremlin, the Pentagon and the Forbidden City. He guffaws in our faces.”99

  It is the laughter of the music, as provocative as Kundry’s laughter, provoking all know-it-alls and fanatics addicted to a particular system. As Wagner observed on February 25, 1870: “Concepts are the gods living within a convention, but tones are the daemons.”100 The music of Parsifal is likewise demonic, counteracting the theory expressed in this chapter that erotic love was on the point of vanishing. But this disappearance can relate only to Wagner’s vision of the perfect Parsifal society, not to the experiences of its characters as revealed above all in the music. That, as Wagner explained, a “certain sentimentality” was no longer “possible” does not mean that he was retracting what he had written at the time of Tristan und Isolde: “Just consider my music, with its delicate, oh so delicate, mysteriously flowing humors penetrating the most subtle pores of feeling to reach the very marrow of life, where it overwhelms everything that looks like sagacity and the self-interested powers of self-preservation, sweeping away all that belongs to the delusive madness of personality.”101

  The music of Parsifal resembles the paintings of Klimt in that both have the same tendency to explore an “exquisitely refined sensuality”102 that Wagner too recalled while orchestrating Parsifal: “‘Oh, music!’ he exclaims. ‘Here one will be able to see for the first time what potentialities it contains for conveying sorrow in bliss!’”103 True, Wagner rarely allows “bliss” to express itself freely, for even in the music for the Flowermaidens, there are echoes of the Grail motif, and the music of the “Good Friday Spell” likewise reflects the ambivalence of Parsifal’s words: “Du weinest—sieh! es lacht die Aue” (You are weeping—behold! The meadow is smiling). Conversely, Parsifal’s despairing cry in act 3, “in Irrniß wild verloren der Rettung letzter Pfad mir schwindet” (lost in the wilderness, deliverance’s final path disappears from sight), is followed by a clarinet motif that recalls Venus’s words in Tannhäuser, “Geliebter, komm’! Sieh’ dort die Grotte” (Beloved, come! Behold the grotto). Immediately afterward, the “Tristan” chord is heard repeatedly. Presumably it is only the connoisseur who notices these echoes, whereas every lover of Wagner’s music will be aware of the sensuality that keeps that music alive: without it, the static action of Parsifal would be barely tolerable.

  No previous Wagner director had regarded himself in quite the same way as Christoph Schlingensief, who saw himself not just as lord and master of his own productions but who even cast himself in the role of a performance artist making an active contribution to those productions—in this case his 2004 Bayreuth Festival staging of Parsifal. On the one hand, his reading offered a sympathetic exploration of the Grail community as envisaged by Wagner, but at the same time flooded the stage with so many symbols, images, and visual stimuli that they got in the way of the detailed direction of the singers that Wagner had always placed at the center of his own productions. Seen here is an example from act 2: Schlingensief presented both Kundry and Parsifal simultaneously in several different guises and different media with the result that the two were never able to communicate properly. Still less was Schlingensief able to ensure that their interaction—fraught, as it should be, with tremendous tension—was credible, while the various stages in their evolving relationship were no longer adequately explored in words and music. Three different Kundrys are discernible here: significantly, none is seen interacting with Parsifal. To be fair, it has to be admitted that even in Wagner’s original stage work the two characters engage with each other only on a symbolic level, regardless of the psychological sensitivity with which Wagner has invested their scenes together. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung Bayreuth: parsifal2-e.)

  That this sensuality may be found in manifold guises is a subject that Wagner repeatedly raised in the pages of Cosima’s diary. On May 30, 1878, for example, she refers to the “heavenly Flower Maidens’ scene, in which R. has conjured up for all time spring and its longing, its sweet complaint. And in the middle of it Kundry’s cry, like a mortal soul suddenly giving voice to its suffering and its loving amid the innocence of Nature.”104 In the course of another conversation, Wagner and his wife discussed the scene between Parsifal and Kundry “up to the cry of the former: ‘Amfortas!’ Indescribably moving! ‘A moment of daemonic absorption,’ R. calls the bars which accompany Kundry’s kiss and in which the fatal motive of love’s longing, creeping like poison through the blood, makes a shattering effect [. . .]—all these things, so richly and variously laid out, so ravishing and so painful, form a whole of unfathomable beauty and nobility.”105

  We do not need to set excessive store by such comments, but they may serve to counter the impression that has sometimes been given that Parsifal is dominated by some kind of sultry eroticism. But nor shall we do justice to the score by concentrating unduly on its more somber aspects as found, for example, in the entry of the Parsifal motif in act 3, where it appears pianissimo in a relatively dark mixture produced by the E-flat trumpet, four horns, and three trombones. (“Horns alone would have been too soft, not ceremonious enough, the trumpet alone too clattery, brassy.”106) When Pierre Boulez conducted Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1966, he was instantly able to demonstrate that Wagner’s dark orchestral colors do not have to be ideologically based but can also be lit from the vantage point of French impressionism. And already a light began to gleam in the darkness.

  A Word about Gusta
v Mahler

  Mahler was twenty-three when, in 1883, he saw Parsifal for the first time in Bayreuth. By then he was already infected by those of Wagner’s later writings that were critical of contemporary society and had even become a vegetarian. But these impressions were as nothing when compared to the impact left by the Festival: “It would be hard to describe what is going on in me,” he told one of his friends, Fritz Löhr. “When I emerged from the Festspielhaus, incapable of uttering a word, I knew that all that is greatest and most painful had been vouchsafed to me, and that I would carry it around within me, inviolate, for the rest of my life.”1 Mahler returned to Bayreuth on several subsequent occasions, and in 1894 he was even privileged to attend the performances from the Wagner family’s private box: Cosima was particularly interested in the talented and successful conductor, although she was never able to bring herself to invite him to conduct at the Festival.

  Appointed principal conductor of the Hamburg Opera in 1891, Mahler had already made his mark as a Wagner conductor, and almost every season in Hamburg ended with a cycle of Wagner’s works made up of Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and all four parts of the Ring. (Parsifal was still restricted to Bayreuth.) Following his move to Vienna in 1897, his enthusiasm for Wagner’s works remained undiminished, and in 1904, for example, we find him writing to his wife, Alma: “Having worked through all of Brahms [in the form of printed scores], I returned to Bruckner. Curiously mediocre figures.—The one spent too long ‘in the ladle’ [presumably the ladle used with a crucible], the other was in need of that very treatment. Now I’ve come to rest with Beethoven. Only he and Richard [Wagner] are beyond reproach—and nobody else!!”2

  As an artist who was the victim of aggressive anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Mahler was, of course, aware of Wagner’s feelings on this point. But such was his admiration for Wagner as an artist that he tended in fact to ignore them. In 1898, working on the Ring in Vienna, he commented on the figure of Mime: “Although I am convinced that this character is the living parody of a Jew as envisaged by Wagner (in all the features with which he invested him: his petty cleverness, his acquisitive greed, and his whole jargon, which is musically and textually admirable), it really mustn’t appear exaggerated here and laid on with a trowel. [. . .] I know only one Mime [. . .] and that’s me! You’d be amazed at what’s in this role and how I would bring it all out!”3

  With his 1903 Vienna production of Tristan und Isolde, Mahler began his exemplary partnership with the painter and stage designer Alfred Roller, who was the president of the Vienna Secession and a friend of Klimt. One has an inkling of some of the intensity with which Mahler now pursued the idea of the total artwork. In our chapter on Parsifal we noted the way in which, as a mystic and pansophist, he was inspired by the idea of redemption that permeates Wagner’s works, but it is worth recalling that in the context of Parsifal, Wagner brooded on the ideal of an “invisible theater” and—almost certainly not merely in jest—spoke of his resolve to write only symphonies in future. Mahler may have regarded this as a link with his own creative output, which he saw as a total artwork within the medium of the symphony. It was against this background that his contemporary Thomas Mann admired not only Parsifal but also the Symphony of a Thousand: both were examples of art as a form of religion.

  It would be wrong, however, to see Mahler’s indebtedness to Wagner only on the lofty level of philosophy and world theater, for a more important aspect of Mahler’s debt was that of his “musical prose,”4 even if this term is confined to the level of compositional technique. Where could Mahler find a more compelling legitimization of the disjointed, volatile character of his own symphonic diction than in Wagner’s music? After all, there was no precedent for it in the German symphonic tradition and only to a limited extent in that of program music. Instead, he was thrown back on Wagner’s “musical prose.” In the case of the older composer, this aspect was covered by the context onstage, but as a symphonist Mahler developed his “epic and novel-like”5 style of writing using semantically charged “vocables.”6

  Mahler must have been particularly fascinated by Wagner’s fearless ability to let beauty and ugliness, the sublime and the trivial clash with uncompromising directness, for it lent support to his own aesthetic conviction that contrasts, no matter how abrupt, were legitimate, for all that this was an aesthetic that repeatedly caused him problems.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Wagner as the Sleuth of Modernism

  On seeing this portrait of himself by Auguste Renoir, Wagner complained that it made him look like “the embryo of an angel, an oyster swallowed by an epicure” (CT 2:873; Engl. trans. 2:791; entry of Jan. 15, 1882). Now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, it was produced during a thirty-five-minute session in Palermo that Wagner granted the painter on January 15, 1882, when he was completely exhausted from his work on the final pages of the full score of Parsifal. Renoir wrote to a friend in Paris to report on his conversation with Wagner prior to the sitting: “We spoke about the impressionists, about music. What nonsense I must have spoken! I ended up shouting, getting completely drunk and turning as red as a rooster. In a word, I was just like any shy person letting himself go and overstepping the mark. But I know I made him happy, though I’m not sure why. He hates the German Jews, including Wolff [Albert Wolff, the critic at Le Figaro]. He asked me if we still like [Auber’s] Les diamants de la couronne in France.” See Willi Schuh, Renoir und Wagner (Erlenbach: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1959), 21–22; and Martin Geck, Die Bildnisse Richard Wagners (Munich: Prestel, 1970), 55–56. (Photograph courtesy of Ullstein Bild—Roger Viollet.)

  In the preface to his 1888 “naturalistic tragedy,” Miss Julie, Strindberg observed that “since they are modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have drawn my people as split and vacillating, a mixture of the old and the new. [. . .] My souls (or characters) are agglomerations of past and present cultures, scraps from books and newspapers, fragments of humanity, torn shreds of once-fine clothing that has become rags, in just the way that a human soul is patched together.”1

  Impressed by Théodule Ribot’s Les maladies de la personnalité and its theory concerning the “multiplicité du moi,”2 Strindberg—who was familiar with Wagner’s output but whose musical icons were Bach and Beethoven—deliberately located his own art in fin-de-siècle, décadent Europe. A glance at the interpretations of Wagner’s works proposed by modern theater directors suggests that these works are seen as a part of this same environment. And, as our chapter on Parsifal will have shown, there is much to be said for this view. Even so, I do not intend to start my final summing up at the end but prefer to return to the roots of Wagner’s creativity and begin with Beethoven: after all, Wagner regarded himself as Beethoven’s heir in an almost mystical manner.

  In his essay The Artwork of the Future, which he completed in November 1849 and published the following spring, Wagner referred to Beethoven as a bold seafarer who set out on his “stoutly built and giant-bolted ship” to cross “the endless sea” of absolute music, music said to speak the language of “insatiable, heart-felt longing.” On seeing a new continent before him, he had had to decide “whether to turn round and face the bottomless ocean once again or cast anchor on the newfound shore.” “Staunchly he threw out his anchor: and this anchor was the word”—not just any random word but the one “that the redeemed world-man cries out from the fullness of the world-heart,” namely, “joy.” The “universal drama” that will in future spring from this merger of words and music is one that Wagner describes as the “human gospel of the art of the future.”3 It goes without saying that this gospel will be proclaimed primarily by Wagner’s own Gesamtkunstwerk.

  Readers may smile at the lofty tone that Wagner adopts here, and some may even be inclined to ridicule such flights of fancy, but we shall nonetheless have to concede that it chimes with the ninet
eenth century as a whole: Wagner’s century sought a prophet of art; and in the course of his threescore years and ten he succeeded in donning this mantle—he may not have been uncontroversial, but there is no doubt that he was unrivalled.

  From a political point of view, Wagner’s century began with the French Revolution of 1789, while in terms of cultural history it started with romanticism. And there was a close link between the two. The “Culte de l’être suprême” created by the painter Jacques-Louis David in response to a Jacobin commission and organized by the leaders of the French Revolution in 1794 was intended to lay the foundations of a national religion of art. It may also be seen as a total artwork: the houses of Paris were festooned with flags, the streets were strewn with flowers, men and women garlanded with roses carried sheaves of wheat and baskets of flowers, and Robespierre invoked the “supreme being.” And while the musicians from the Institut National de Musique struck up François-Joseph Gossec’s anthem Père de l’univers, suprême intelligence, Robespierre lit a funeral pyre on which atheism, discord, and ambition were metaphorically consumed as the allegory of Wisdom rose from the ashes.

  As we have already noted, Beethoven took over and developed the tone of French revolutionary music in his symphonies. And in using Schiller’s Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony, he offered his own explicit contribution to a religion of art, even though the leading romantics regarded such a religion of art as predominantly apolitical. (Schiller’s ode dates from 1785 and is an expression of his enthusiasm for the whole idea of art as a religion in the run-up to the French Revolution, which he initially welcomed.) But the romantics’ view of “absolute music” was by no means the one that Carl Dahlhaus claimed, namely, the metaphysical idea of “non-representational and non-conceptual instrumental music”: “Music expresses what words are not even capable of stammering.”4 Rather, such “absolute” music was now revealed in the context of poetry, no matter how imperfect that manifestation may be. This had two implications: first, it is invariably accompanied by pictorial ideas and feelings, and, second, it includes the medium of opera—readers will recall E. T. A. Hoffmann’s admiration for Mozart’s operas.