Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

  As with the overture, so the earthiness of this scene can be seen as “applied Bach,” while we may also identify two examples of “applied Beethoven” as a lyrical counterpoint to it. The first such example is the prelude to act 3, the opening of which recalls Beethoven’s late style and, in particular, the imitative opening of the C-sharp Minor String Quartet, op. 131. Even so, this is a reminiscence that is “felt,” not one we can demonstrate by means of specific details. The second example is the quintet, beginning with Eva’s cantilena “Selig, wie die Sonne meines Glückes lacht” (Blissful as the sun of my happiness laughs). This is a number that Wagner would surely not have written if he had not been familiar with the quartet “Mir ist so wunderbar” from Fidelio, which served not just as a technical model but also as an inspiration for the idealistic and, hence, “German” attempt to bring together the disparate feelings of the individual characters and express the absolute nature of love beyond all individual feelings, thus coming closer to the oft-cited notion of “absolute” music. And, last but not least, we also find an instance of “applied Wagner” in the form of a striking quotation from Tristan und Isolde in Sachs’s scene with Eva in act 3, where the famous “Tristan” chord is contrapuntally structured.

  It can hardly be fortuitous that in Bach, Beethoven, and himself, Wagner was quoting three composers who according to his own historicophilosophical construct had brought to the history of music a dynamism found in the case of no other musician. Although he was no nationalist, Nietzsche hit the nail on the head when he observed that if music was ever again to be what it had been in the remote Dionysian past, then “it would have to rediscover itself through Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner and free itself from the service of civilization.”54 The opposite of a culture of “civilization” is music with a deep structure to it, a demand that the score of Die Meistersinger is able to meet with its contrapuntal interweaving of historical, social, compositional, and ideological contexts. As a work of music, Die Meistersinger amounts to far more than those of its elements that draw upon folk music and caricature—and certainly more than any straightforwardly ideological features. In order to judge the work properly, we need a certain appreciation of its unique multilayered qualities, which are apparent not only in its earthier moments but also in those passages which, with their filigree textures, are more easily overlooked.

  This brings us to the notion of a “satyr play” and, in particular, the idea of Beckmesser as a character designed to provoke us. For a time Wagner planned to call his town clerk Veit Hanslich and in that way to insult his bête noire, Eduard Hanslick, the music critic of the Neue Freie Presse. For Wagner, Hanslick was the prototypical critic, narrow-minded, limited in his outlook, capable of judging a work only from a purely formal standpoint, skeptical toward the new, and constitutionally incapable of demonstrating even the most basic creativity. As their marker, familiar with the rules of their guild, Beckmesser enjoys the respect of his fellow mastersingers, but he cuts a ridiculous figure with the townsfolk when competing with Walther in his attempt to win Eva’s hand in marriage. In the opera’s final scene he regales his listeners with a grotesquely garbled version of a song that he stole from Sachs’s workshop in the belief that it had been written by the shoemaker-poet himself.

  Beckmesser is also seen as a figure of fun in act 2, when the serenade that he sings at night in the hope of impressing Eva creates a pitiful impression as a result of its lack of orchestral support, its vocally uningratiating staccato passages, wayward coloratura writing, and incorrect textual emphases. According to Egon Voss, Wagner is not only poking fun at the critic’s artistic impotence but also caricaturing a traditional operatic aria.55 But is there also a third aspect here, namely, an anti-Jewish element? After all, Cosima Wagner’s diary contains the following entry for March 1870 in connection with the Viennese premiere of Die Meistersinger:

  Among other things the J[ews] are spreading a story that “Beckmesser’s Song” is an old Jewish song which R. was trying to ridicule. In consequence, some hissing in the second act and calls of “We don’t want to hear any more,” but complete victory for the Germans. R. says, “That is something none of our fine historians of culture notice: that things have reached the stage of Jews’ daring to say in the imperial theater, “We do not want this.”56

  Wagner’s comment could hardly be more anti-Semitic, and yet it ignores the reproach that he had been attempting to parody a Jewish song. Nor is there a single suggestion of anti-Semitism in any of his other remarks on the role of Beckmesser.

  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Wieland Wagner’s 1956 Bayreuth production. Wagner’s grandson was keen to avoid any reference to the historical city of Nuremberg in this final tableau, as he wanted to rid the work of its associations with the recent past, when the city had been the scene of National Socialist party rallies and Die Meistersinger had been performed in the local opera house as a part of those official celebrations. Intentionally or otherwise, Wieland’s production still features totalitarian images in the guise of the chorus treated as a well-regimented crowd. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: N 3605.)

  There are good reasons for this silence. It is conceivable that when Wagner wrote Beckmesser’s garbled serenade, he could hear in his mind’s ear the sort of synagogue chanting that he roundly dismisses in his essay “Jews in Music.” It is also conceivable that he wanted to expose Beckmesser’s handling of God’s gift of music as foreign and, hence, implicitly Jewish. And yet it would have made no sense in the context of the plot of the opera to have made Beckmesser—highly regarded in Nuremberg through his office as town clerk—a Jew.57 Still less would such an approach have validated Wagner’s claim that his message was universally valid. We would be guilty of limiting the role of Beckmesser by seeking to reduce it to anti-Semitic rancor. As a criticaster and confirmed bachelor, Beckmesser is part of a long tradition of comic characters who ultimately come a cropper and in the process forfeit our sympathy.

  Some of Beckmesser’s fellow mastersingers fare no better. Kothner the baker, for example, offers an extraordinarily silly critique of Walther’s Trial Song: “And he even leapt up from his chair!” And the Night Watchman, too, is subjected to Wagner’s ridicule, the final note of his song “Hört ihr Leut,” F, being followed by a dissonant G-flat on his horn, implying a particularly inept official. Of course, this foray into the world of atonality is not only intended to caricature the Night Watchman but also aims to render the elements of reality and ghostly apparition inextricably linked in a way entirely appropriate to an eventful Midsummer’s Eve in Nuremberg. This is merely one tiny example of Wagner’s use of multiple perspectives throughout the whole of the score, starting with the overture, which, as we have already indicated, offers no mixture of festive and comic elements free from any sense of conflict but uses eccentrically weighty counterpoint at times of particular parody,58 without itself descending into parody in the process.

  If we examine the remaining parts of the Ring and the whole of Parsifal from this point of view, we shall surely be obliged to concede that Die Meistersinger already contains signs of a “late” work. The idea of a lack of distance characteristic of long sections of Tristan und Isolde gives way to the impression of an artist standing over his subject and reflecting on it, while remaining entangled with it. It is the contradiction of old age to be always taking one’s leave while not wanting to do so at all.

  A Word about Berthold Auerbach

  By the time the writer Berthold Auerbach stopped off in Dresden in 1846 for a series of public readings from his works, his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Village Tales from the Black Forest) of three years earlier had already been translated into English, Italian, and Swedish. Auerbach was a relatively well-known figure at this time, and Wagner got on well with a man who was only a year older than he was: “Within the last few days I’ve become very friendly with Auerbach,” Wagner wrote to Alwine Frommann, reader to Princess Augusta of Prussia
and responsible for drawing the composer’s attention to the writer’s Village Tales. “He read us his latest short story & I regaled him with Tannhäuser, the first time he’d heard it. He’s an excellent poet, & what pleasure he takes in himself & his poetry!”1

  A member of a liberal student organization, Auerbach had been imprisoned for two months in the fortress of Hohenasperg, accused of activities hostile to the state, and must have seemed a sympathetic figure to Wagner, whose own outlook was becoming increasingly revolutionary at this time. “If it hadn’t been for my child, I would undoubtedly have fallen on the barricades in Vienna,” Auerbach wrote.2 It would be good to know if in 1846 the two men had discussed Auerbach’s 1837 progressive novel Spinoza, which turns on its head the motif of Kundry’s kiss that we later find in Parsifal: Ahasuerus is released from his curse by kissing the sleeping philosopher who, repudiated by Jews but revered by Christians, ushers in a new age marked by a new kind of truth.3 But we can be certain that in the light of the success of Auerbach’s Village Tales, Wagner will have been thinking about his own draft for Die Meistersinger from the previous year—perhaps he even declaimed the text to Auerbach. The two men, after all, were united by their interest in popular themes in the spirit of the “real idealism” of the period.

  They remained in contact for a number of years. When Auerbach visited Wagner in Zurich in August 1852, the composer read to him from the poem of the Ring, on which he was working at that time. Auerbach seems to have responded so positively that seven years later Wagner wrote to one of his friends in Dresden, Anton Pusinelli, asking him to lend Auerbach a copy of the limited private edition of the poem as a matter of some urgency. He had heard that Auerbach, now an even more successful writer and friendly with Gottfried Keller and Gustav Freytag, among others, was living just outside Dresden. Wagner hoped that Auerbach might prove a useful literary advocate.

  It remains unclear whether Auerbach ever received a copy of the poem, but his failure to follow up his initial interest rankled with Wagner to such an extent that in 1869, when publishing his open letter, “Some Explanations Concerning ‘Jews in Music,’” he described the unnamed but nonetheless readily identifiable Auerbach as “a very gifted, truly talented, and intellectual writer of Jewish origin who seems almost to have come to embody the most distinctive characteristics of the life of the German folk” but who continued to demonstrate typically Jewish character flaws. Privately he had spoken “with warm appreciation and clear understanding” about the poems of Tristan und Isolde and the Ring but had not dared to express his views in public.4 As a result the Wagners adopted a far cooler response to Auerbach’s work as a writer: in July 1869, for example, they described Keller’s short stories as “much more significant” than Auerbach’s.5 And only a few months later we find another entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary: “An article by Berthold Auerbach (no such genius he!) about woods is printed in the newspaper; R. says he found it unreadable on account of its affected closeness to Nature: ‘These fellows are a real nuisance’ (the Jews).”6

  As a passionate and in many ways courageous pioneer of Jewish emancipation, Auerbach was shocked by the republication of “Jews in Music” in 1869. Even though his name does not appear in it, he seriously toyed with the idea of penning a public riposte, as he did in Die Gegenwart in 1876 in response to an anti-Semitic article by Brahms’s friend Theodor Billroth. Although he decided in the end to refrain from making any public statement on the matter, he followed Wagner’s rising star in international circles with undiluted displeasure. Months before his death he thought of calling on the Jews in Berlin, where he was then living, and asking them to boycott the Ring that Angelo Neumann staged in the city’s Victoria Theater in May 1881. Among the unpublished manuscripts found among his papers at the time of his death was one headed “Richard Wagner and the Self-Respect of the Jews.”7

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “They’re hurrying on toward their end, though they think they will last for ever”

  THE ART OF THE RING—SEEN FROM THE END

  Resumption of work on the Ring and the resultant stylistic break—Taking over musical idioms from Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg—A compositional comparison of the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde with that between Siegfried and Brünnhilde—The new Ring tutti and the increasing complexity of the writing—The omnipresence of the leitmotifs ensuring that the plot of Götterdämmerung also has a mythological dimension—Compositional scope for greater liberties in spite of all the constraints—Hagen as villain and victim—On the genealogy of the topos of “Nibelung loyalty”—The scene between Hagen and Alberich: “Wagner at his best”?—Hagen’s cynicism—On the musical design of a background of menace—A shattering moment: Brünnhilde’s cry of “Deceit”—The end of Götterdämmerung: shipwreck as a launch?—Wagner’s claim that Wotan’s guilt is treated as in a “peasant’s trial”—The different endings of the Ring—The interpretations of Nietzsche, Hans Mayer, Adorno, and Udo Bermbach—The role of the redemption motif at the end of the Ring—The redemption motif intertwined with the Siegfried and Valhalla motifs—The end of Götterdämmerung as a reflection of Wagner’s espousal of nationalism and the new Reich?—The real utopia of the Ring heralding Parsifal, the misgivings of Nietzsche and others notwithstanding

  In August 1875 Adolph von Menzel attended the rehearsals for Siegfried in Bayreuth and produced a number of pencil sketches depicting Wagner sitting at a production desk next to the prompt box. On his desk is a copy of the score lit by a paraffin lamp with a green shade. Reproduced here is a replica of one of these drawings with an original vignette that Menzel presumably gave as a present to Wagner, dating it “Berlin, May 5, 1876.” (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: RP 612.)

  Twelve years were to pass before Wagner returned to the Ring on a permanent, rather than a sporadic, basis, following the interruption caused by his decision to write Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Few writers on Wagner have foregone the opportunity to comment on the stylistic break between those sections of the Ring that predate the break and those that were written later. Indeed, even the most innocent listener registers the greater “weight” of the second half of Siegfried and the whole of Götterdämmerung when compared with the freshness of Das Rheingold, the verve of Die Walküre, and the color of the early scenes of Siegfried. Wagner had no choice but to take over into his compositional arsenal certain subtleties of the harmonic writing in Tristan und Isolde and the sumptuous instrumentation of Die Meistersinger. And we also encounter regular assonances.1 To take an example: when Siegfried reaches the summit of Brünnhilde’s rock and sings the words “Wie mild erzitternd mich zagen er reizt” (Gently trembling it lures me on, fainthearted that I am) we hear the chord of the diminished seventh with a suspended major seventh over a pedal point on F. Exactly the same device, this time starting out from E, is found in the third act of Tristan und Isolde in the context of Tristan’s delirious fantasy at the words “Ach Isolde! Wie schön bist du!” (Ah, Isolde, how beautiful you are). The same gesture ensures that on both occasions both listener and character are painfully drawn into this sound world only to withdraw again afterward.

  Wagner’s recourse to the full-bodied, full-blooded sounds of Tristan und Isolde reflects the increasing pressure now placed on the plot. Although Siegfried and Brünnhilde may be united in jubilant love at the end of the music drama that bears his name, this can hardly blind us to the events that are to follow, for, as Loge says of the gods at the end of Das Rheingold, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, too, are hurrying on toward their end.

  A comparison between the music that Wagner wrote for the love scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde and that which he composed for Siegfried and Brünnhilde helps to shed light on the difference between them: the earlier scene exudes the feeling of an outpouring of sensuality and private happiness, whereas the later scene suggests a public display of almost religious ecstasy lacking in any real warmt
h. As the German writer on music Gregor Herzfeld has noted, “The sensual eroticism inherent in music is here transformed into a sensual sublimity that seeks to overwhelm us.”2 In the opening act of Die Walküre the music reflects a passion opposed to all social constraints, whereas its function in the final act of Siegfried is to depict a love already doomed to be destroyed by those very same social forces. Both Sieglinde and Brünnhilde express an all-or-nothing mentality, but the union of Siegmund and Sieglinde is followed by new life, whereas the “hour” in which Brünnhilde’s world is lit by “Siegfried’s star” gives way to a “night of annihilation.”