by Tim Blanning
The experiences of the abortive revolution in Dresden in May 1849 did, however, turn Wagner away from any thought of cooperation with the existing regime. In Lohengrin, completed in 1848, he had portrayed a benevolent but unexciting old regime headed by King Henry the Fowler (alias his employer King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony), galvanized by the arrival of the charismatic hero Lohengrin (alias Richard Wagner). In the first draft of The Ring of the Nibelung, also written in 1848, the chief god, Wotan, is allowed to survive, albeit suitably chastened and educated by the death of his grandson Siegfried and the suicide of his daughter Brünnhilde. After 1849, however, Wotan perishes along with all the other gods in a total bonfire of the old regime.
Wagner’s Ring presents the most radical and thoroughgoing critique of the modern world attempted by a romantic. It addresses all forms of abusive power, not just the naked despotism to which Alberich aspires, but also the less obviously toxic contractual authority exercised by Wotan. In both cases a rape of nature was involved—the former steals the Rhinegold, the latter wrenches a branch from the world-ash tree and fashions it into a spear inscribed with the treaties with which he rules the world. The first crime plunges the Rhine into darkness, the second begins the slow death of the natural world, as the leaves fell, the tree rotted, and the well ran dry.220 In both cases, power can be bought only at the cost of love. It is not only Alberich who renounces love. As Wotan explains to Brünnhilde in a crucial passage in act 2 of The Valkyrie:
When youthful love’s
delights had faded,
I longed in my heart for power:
impelled by rage
of impulsive desires,
I won for myself the world.221
It is love that thwarts Wotan’s plans to use a controlled revolution in the shape of his son Siegmund to get the ring back from Alberich. The adulterous and incestuous coupling of Siegmund and his long-lost sister, Sieglinde, allows Wotan’s formidable wife, Fricka, to intervene in the name of law to ensure that Siegmund is killed by Sieglinde’s cuckolded husband, Hunding. It is some measure of Wagner’s radicalism that he should have portrayed incestuous sex, if not actually onstage then clearly about to occur: The stage direction at the end of act 1 of The Valkyrie states: “He pulls her to him with furious passion, she sinks on his chest with a cry,” adding, “The curtain falls quickly.” (“And about time too!” scribbled an outraged Arthur Schopenhauer in the margin of the copy Wagner had sent him.)222 Perhaps even more arresting was Wagner’s indulgent attitude to homosexuality. When his second wife, Cosima, was rash enough to criticize the relationship between their friend Paul von Joukowsky and his Neapolitan manservant Pepino, she incurred the Master’s disapproval: “It is something for which I have understanding, but no inclination,” Wagner said. “In any case, with all relationships what matters most is what we ourselves put into them.”223
In the course of Wagner’s life (1813–83), the world changed more rapidly and radically than at any time in the previous history of the human race. The application of means–ends rationality had transformed the material world. Like most other romantics, Wagner believed that the scientific investigation and understanding of nature had led not to liberation but to conquest and exploitation. Referring to the French, he told Cosima in 1873: “If only we could reach the point of no longer looking to them for our ideas! … How low they have sunk one can see by the fact that they imagine they can get things done by maxims based on reason. As if anything ever comes of reason! … Only religion and art can educate a nation—what use is science, which analyses everything and explains nothing?”224 In this, as in so much else in Wagner—as in all the other romantics, indeed—the voice of Rousseau can be heard telling us that the advancing reign of reason was only throwing “garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh us down.”225 Were they able to return to the twenty-first century to witness the effects of the further advances of scientific rationalism, their worst fears would be confirmed.
CONCLUSION:
DEATH AND
TRANSFIGURATION
Death and Transfiguration is a tone poem composed by Richard Strauss in 1888. Sixty years later, in 1948, the year before he died at the age of eighty-five, he quoted the “transfiguration” theme in “At Sunset,” one of his “Four Last Songs.” Strauss’s long career illustrated as well as anything the longevity of romanticism in music. He was also a living as well as a sonic link with an earlier generation, for he attended the first performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882 at the age of eighteen.1 He—and all the other composers writing in a romantic idiom deep into the twentieth if not the twenty-first century—confirm E. T. A. Hoffmann’s dictum that “music is the most romantic of all the arts, one might almost say the only one that is genuinely romantic.”2
In the nonmusical genres, on the other hand, the romantic revolution had faded away by the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time the Prussian novelist Theodor Fontane could announce: “Romanticism is finished on this earth; the age of the railway has dawned.”3 In 1848, “the year of revolutions,” the radical poet Ferdinand Freiligrath took farewell of romanticism:
Your reign is over! Yes, I do not deny it,
A spirit different from yours now rules the world,
We all can sense how it blazes a new trail,
It throbs through life, it blazes before our eyes,
It strives and struggles—so let no one stand in its way!4
The Enlightenment, it seemed, had had the last laugh after all. Modernization could not be arrested. The spread of literacy, the improvement of physical communications, the accelerating pace of scientific innovation, the rapid increase in population, urbanization, the expansion of the public sphere—just to list a selection of the forces at work—combined to promote a sense of sustained secular progress. Moreover, technological change seemed to herald emancipation from more than reliance on the quadruped or Shank’s pony. As Friedrich Harkort, a German industrialist, put it in 1847: “The locomotive is the hearse that will carry absolutism and feudalism to the graveyard.”5
Optimism about the onward march of modernization was accompanied by pessimism about the short- and medium-term effects. The dislocation caused by industrialization and urbanization convinced many observers that the poor were becoming more wretched, more numerous, and more dangerous. This did not mean that all artists became socialists, but it did mean that a growing number of them chose the material conditions of the here and now as their central concern. It was no accident that the literary genre best suited to the new direction, first known as “realism” and later as “naturalism,” was the novel, for the world of the modern city was prosaic rather than poetic. In works such as Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–39), Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit (1855), Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), or the twenty volumes of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle (1870–93), the wonderful variety of commercialized urban society was usually less apparent than its attendant squalor and tension. This was the realm of anomie, the sense of moral rootlessness that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim identified as the essence of the human condition in the industrialized world.
French railway in the mid-nineteenth century. As a middle-class family relaxes, on the other side of the tracks the three props of the old regime, marginalized by the coming of the railway, await their doom: the noble and his chateau, the priest and his church, the peasant and his donkey.
Also naturally suited for capturing contemporary reality was painting, which found an articulate spokesman for the new approach in Gustave Courbet, as well as a wonderfully gifted practitioner. Among his trenchant observations on the nature of his art were: “Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the presentation of real and existing things” and the quintessentially antiromantic gibe: “Show me an angel and I’ll paint it!”6 Although never a propagandist, Courbet was very much a man of the left, a republican and supporter of the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871, who paid for his beliefs by
spending two years in prison and the rest of his life in exile. Together with Jean-François Millet, he represented, as it were, the “heroic” phase of realism, all funerals, firing squads, hunched peasant women, and horny-handed sons of toil.
This realist trend was underpinned by a positivist belief in the natural sciences. As Zola wrote of the Salon of 1866: “The wind blows in the direction of science. Despite ourselves, we are pushed towards the exact study of facts and things.”7 As technological advance was piled on technological advance, especially in the field of communications, and as the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 seemed to deliver the coup de grâce to revealed religion, the disenchantment of the world seemed complete. Moreover, it was accompanied by the allied triumph of liberalism. This was the period when Italy and Germany were unified and when liberals took control in one state after another, even in the multinational Habsburg Empire, where the great Ringstrasse project in Vienna exemplified a new alliance between dynasty, liberal bourgeoisie, and material progress.8
But no sooner had this new triumph of the culture of reason and progress been proclaimed than the dialectic began its corrosive—and creative—work. In his novel The Stomach of Paris, published in 1873, Zola put the following words into the mouth of Claude Lantier, who points first at the iron-and-glass structure of the recently erected central market—Les Halles—and then at the neighboring medieval Church of Saint-Eustache, predicting: “This one will kill that one, for iron will kill stone.” He was not the first materialist to be deluded by the shadows on the wall of the cave: Les Halles were demolished in the 1970s, but Saint-Eustache still stands. In the same year that Zola’s Lantier made his hubristic prophecy, a long economic recession began, usually (if misleadingly) called “the Great Depression.” Together with the eruption of new mass political forces, with socialism, clericalism, and anti-Semitism in the van, it ensured that the high noon of bourgeois liberalism was of short duration.
It was now that it turned out that romanticism had been resting, not dying, as the maxims of an earlier generation were rediscovered. In 1888 the twenty-year-old French painter Émile Bernard virtually repeated the words of Caspar David Friedrich quoted earlier when he wrote that the artist should paint not what he sees in front of him, but the idea of the thing he sees in his imagination.9 Similarly, the central tenet of what became known as “symbolism,” as expressed by its main organ, Symbolist—“Objectivity is nothing but vain appearance, that I may vary or transform as I wish”—could have been said by any romantic two or three generations earlier. The old romantic obsessions with death, the night, and sex were all back in favor again, nowhere more powerfully than in Gustav Klimt’s notorious ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna. What the academics had wanted and expected was a portrayal of the victory of reason, knowledge, and enlightenment. What they got was a world turned upside down, in which Philosophy is subconscious instinct, justice in Jurisprudence is a cowed and helpless victim of the Law, and in Medicine behind Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health, lurk more interesting phenomena than personal hygiene and physical fitness, notably sex and death.10
This phantasmagoria has much in common with the nightmarish visions of Goya, but this is not a simple case of repetition. European culture has not repeated itself cyclically but has developed dialectically. High Victorian positivism was not a rerun of the Enlightenment, nor was fin de siècle a repetition of romanticism. No romantic would have adopted the radical “perspectivism” of, for example, Nietzsche, who did not just privilege subjectivism but denied the very possibility of objectivity: “So what is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms—in short an aggregate of human relationships which, poetically and rhetorically heightened, became transposed and elaborated, and which, after protracted popular usage, poses as fixed, canonical, obligatory. Truths are illusions whose illusoriness is overlooked.”11
Around the turn of the twentieth century, a reaction to the neoromantic excesses of fin de siècle set in and there emerged a general trend toward aesthetic purification. In music, it can be heard in Arnold Schoenberg’s move from the lush post-Wagnerian orchestration of Gurre-Lieder (begun in 1900) to the atonal austerity of Five Orchestral Pieces (1909). In architecture it can be seen in the contrast between Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà (1906–10) and Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus (1925–26). In sculpture it can be seen in the contrast between the neobaroque swirls of Auguste Rodin’s Balzac (1897–98) and the spare simplicity of Constantin Brâncuşi’s Sleeping Muse (1910). In painting it can be seen in the contrast between the voluptuous eroticism of Lovis Corinth’s Salome (1899) and the chaste linearity of Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Gray and Light Brown (1918). T. S. Eliot spoke for all modernist artists, and not just for writers, when he claimed: “The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. Poetry is not the turning loose of emotions but an escape from emotion, not the expression of personality but the escape from personality.”12 It is difficult to imagine a more antiromantic utterance, or one that was so comprehensively contradicted by everything that Eliot created, which is as original as it is expressive.
Romanticism redivivus: Gustav Klimt, Medicine (1907).
Fresco for the University of Vienna, destroyed by fire in 1945.
The Allied victory of 1945 was acclaimed in both West and East as a cultural as well as a military triumph. The discovery of the full horrors of National Socialism engendered a belief in the absolute values of liberalism or communism every bit as self-confident as that entertained by the French revolutionaries of 1789 or the liberals of the mid–nineteenth century. As Martin Jay has written, “Aesthetic modernism at mid-century, precisely because of its detachment from concrete social and political practice, came to be taken by many as the appropriate cultural expression of a much larger project of human emancipation.”13 The collapse of the wartime alliance and prolonged struggle between the two victors in an intense ideological cold war helped to maintain the triumphalist impetus, as each side noisily proclaimed its own special virtues and the opposition’s defects. Of the visual evidence that confirmed the victory of modernism, perhaps the most obtrusive was the rash of skyscrapers, all in the spare, linear, rational “international style,” that mushroomed across the globe. It was also the clearest indication that modernism at last had found a style in which it felt at home.
By the middle of the twentieth century, modernism knew what it wanted. One of its most eloquent spokesmen, Nikolaus Pevsner, regarded this development as “full of promise,” posing the rhetorical question “Can we not take it then that the recovery of a true style in the visual arts, one in which once again building rules, and painting and sculpture serve, and one which is obviously representative of character, indicates the return of unity in society too?”14 A comparison between Charles Garnier’s wonderfully eclectic Paris Opéra and the bleak Deutsche Oper (German Opera) in West Berlin, designed by Fritz Bornemann and opened in 1961, makes the point well.
The Deutsche Oper opened on September 24, 1961, just six weeks after the erection of the Berlin Wall had begun. The latter was supposed to make the Eastern bloc safe for socialism. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that the system was doomed. Many were the corrosive forces that brought the wall tumbling down just twenty-eight years later, among them economic failure, the arms race, and the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan; but perhaps the most powerful was advancing communications technology. The evil empires of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin had benefited from a perfect match between their despotic objectives and the instruments of control available. Without electronic amplification, the radio, or the cinema, they could not have cowed so many for so long. By the 1960s, television was eclipsing all other forms of mass media and was proving increasingly difficult to control. The Berlin Wall could keep a people in prison, but it could not keep out the images and sounds of Western liberty and Western consumerism. The two seemed to go together. So when the Soviet Empire
collapsed after 1989, media moguls were quick to claim the credit. Looking back from 1997, Ted Turner, then still in charge of CNN, boasted: “We have played a positive role. Since the creation of CNN, the Cold War has ended, the conflicts in Central America have come to a halt, and peace has come to South Africa.”15
But, like other revolutions in communications, television proved to be a double-edged sword. It exposed the inability of the Soviets to control Afghanistan, but it also exposed the inability of the Americans to control Vietnam. It advertised the attractions of consumerism, but it also laid bare its excesses. If it inspired the serfs of socialist command economies to rattle their chains, it also inspired the children of its beneficiaries to bite the hands that fed them. For the post-1945 generation that grew to maturity in the 1960s, modernism had become complacent, middle-aged, and—fatal adjective—boring. The eruption of youth culture thrust reason to one side. If it acquired a brief political tinge in 1968 and if its exponents have always been prone to striking moralizing postures of a vaguely leftist kind, at the heart of youth culture is anarchic hedonism. Significantly, its preferred medium has been music. Also revealing is the strong emphasis on narcotics, to facilitate escape from mundane reality and its illusory values to the “wonder world of the night.” So massive is the purchasing power of young people (those aged fourteen to twenty-five account for over 70 percent of record sales, for example)16 that what was still a marginal group as recently as the 1950s is now the driving force in consumerist culture.
