The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  His personal situation was rather more dramatic than this sounds. When he composed Rheingold, Valkyrie, and Tristan, Wagner was already in his fifties, but he had little prospect of the works ever being performed. Moreover, he was in debt in Vienna and, to avoid imprisonment, he was forced to flee and so was “on the run” for the second time.6 At this point, the Wagner story, if it doesn’t have a fairy-tale ending, has at least a fairy-tale middle. Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, was an eighteen-year-old passionate soul who felt as strongly about Wagner’s music as Wagner did himself. Out of the blue he offered the composer funds to stage his operas and, using the same funds, Wagner built his own opera house and launched the Bayreuth Festivals, which continue to this day.

  Before Schopenhauer, the thinker who had the greatest influence on Wagner was Ludwig Feuerbach (see Chapter 11). In his autobiography, Wagner says he “discovered” Feuerbach while living in Dresden and that he was “the sole adequate philosopher of the modern age.” In particular, and as the poet Georg Herwegh was the first to note, he was influenced by Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), which, it will be remembered, argued that nothing exists except man and nature, that therefore “higher beings” are merely a reflection of our own anxieties and ambitions (Wagner dedicated one of his own books, The Work of Art of the Future, to Feuerbach).7 The aspect of Feuerbach’s argument that appealed to Wagner was his idea that the reason religious belief has been almost universal is that it “meets basic human needs” and is not really interested in, say, biology or physics.8 Religion has to be looked at not for what it reveals about heaven or fundamental aspects of reality, but for what it reveals about ourselves.9 These ideas were incorporated into the libretto of The Ring, where many of the characters are “gods at an early stage of the world’s development.”10 They are, in a Feuerbachian sense, projections of universal human characteristics and desires and not to be understood as inhabiting a transcendental world.

  Though this is fine as far as it goes, it omits several other elements in Wagner’s idea of musical drama that add levels of complexity. The first of these was nationalism, which we need to remind ourselves was then a left-of-center cause, drawing its power as a reaction to those political conservatives who wished to preserve the separateness of the smaller ancien régimes, each with its own ruling elite and, more often than not, archaic feudal institutions. In line with this, music had its own nationalist elements. Wagner, in particular, thought that, after Mozart and Beethoven, it was absurd that Germans should still place such a high premium on French opera. After Bach and Haydn, the German tradition was now the greater one. Die Meistersinger was his answer.11

  Another complicating factor was what has been called Wagner’s “metaphysical turn.” According to his autobiography, the turning point was the right-wing antiparliamentary coup in Paris in 1851 when Louis Napoleon seized power. Wagner concluded from this that the world he wished to see exist would never come about by political action and that the human condition is essentially unchangeable. He turned away from politics, and became more inward-than outward-looking.12 One final factor in Wagner’s psychological makeup was his view of ancient Greece. When ancient Greek civilization disintegrated, he said, the essentially humanistic Greek gods, and the most important subject matter of all—myth—was no longer available to art.13

  THE “GREAT EVENT”

  In many aspects of his thought, Schopenhauer had grasped most of the insights Wagner had arrived at, albeit by a different route. The minute he encountered Schopenhauer, Wagner realized not only how far ahead the other man was, but also that the philosopher’s German prose was itself “a work of art.” In the last half of 1854, Wagner was at work on the music for the beginning of The Valkyrie when he chanced upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Wagner, who was not in the best of health when he encountered Schopenhauer (he had a boil on his leg), never let go of this book and dipped into it often.14

  The World as Will and Representation had been published as long ago as 1818 but had hardly set the Rhine on fire. In April 1853, however, in the radical Westminster Review, the assistant editor of which was the Germanophile George Eliot, an article titled “Iconoclasm in German Philosophy” appeared over the name of John Oxenford. Oxenford gave a commendably clear summary of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, so much so that the article was swiftly translated and published in the Vossische Zeitung, meaning the translation was seen by a far wider public than the original. Schopenhauer caught on and suddenly, in his midsixties, he became famous after a lifetime of being sidelined.15

  It was this sudden burst of interest in Schopenhauer that brought him to Wagner’s attention, with the result that, at Christmas 1854, Wagner sent the philosopher a copy of the libretto of The Ring, inscribed “With reverence and gratitude.” Unfortunately, Schopenhauer took offense because Wagner did not enclose a letter with the libretto, and neither then nor subsequently did he have any dealings with Wagner. Bryan Magee again: “There is something almost unbearably poignant about the fact that Schopenhauer went to his grave not knowing that one of the greatest works of art of all time had already come into being under the influence of his philosophy.”16

  MUSIC AS METAPHYSICS

  Schopenhauer believed Kant was the most consequential philosopher of all time, certainly since the Greeks, and saw himself as carrying on the Kantian tradition. The single idea he found most seductive was Kant’s notion that “total reality is comprised of a part which can be experienced by us and a part which can not,” the division of “the phenomenal” from “the noumenal” (see Chapter 5). Building on this, Schopenhauer’s philosophy consisted of four intertwined entities. He thought, first, that Kant had it wrong when he said that, outside the empirical world, there are things in the plural. For one thing to be different from another, he said, they had to occupy space and time; but space and time are aspects of experience and must exist only in the empirical world. Even something like numbers, abstractions that “seem to exist” beyond space and time, can only be entertained in our minds because of our understanding of succession, which is itself unintelligible without the notions of space and time.17 Schopenhauer concluded from this that, outside space and time, “everything must be one and undifferentiated.” In other words, total reality consists of two aspects—phenomena, a world of many material objects, located specifically in space and time, and the “noumenal realm,” which is a “single, undifferentiated something—spaceless, timeless, non-material, beyond all reach of causality.” This realm is inaccessible to experience or knowledge.

  Schopenhauer said further that he thought the two realms were different aspects of the same reality understood in different ways. For him, the noumenon is the inner significance of what we apprehend in the phenomenal world. Although Schopenhauer wasn’t at all religious (he was a declared atheist, one of the first people to publicly admit this), he said he was making the kind of distinction a Christian makes in his understanding of the soul, as something significant hidden inside us. Down deep, said Schopenhauer, we are, all of us, the same something, but a something we can never fully apprehend. For Schopenhauer, there is an ultimate oneness of humanity, a realm we all share. Most important, we are compassionate because we realize that if one person injures another, that person in some way injures himself or herself. For modern tastes this is more than a little mystical. It also belies Kant’s argument that ethics are rational.18

  The second aspect of Schopenhauer’s basic system—much easier to understand—is that he thought human life was bound to be tragic. Life, he said, is made up of endless “hoping,” “striving,” “yearning”—we are always, from our earliest days, reaching out for something. This endless yearning is inherently unfulfillable, for as soon as we get what we want, we want something else. This is our predicament.19

  It is a predicament that is made all the worse by the third element in his thought, that we are, most of the time, selfish, cruel, aggressive, and heartless in our deali
ngs with each other. If he was right, he said, if the noumenal and phenomenal worlds are the same reality but apprehended in different ways, this must mean that the noumenal realm itself is amoral and terrible. This was his famous—notorious—pessimism. Schopenhauer had a problem with what to call this terrible, blind, purposeless noumenal world and though he eventually came up with the word “will,” he was never entirely happy with it. He chose that word, and the phrase “the will to live” because it seemed to him to be the “ultimate impulse” within us.20 For Schopenhauer, we have to recognize the various manifestations of this will to exist, and to overcome them if we are to achieve contentment away from the world.

  He thought that one of the reasons religions take the form they do is that most people cannot stomach profound metaphysical and moral truths when stated baldly—they have to be sugarcoated in parables, myths, and legends. Schopenhauer thought that religions embody the profoundest truths there are, and he also thought they had a great deal in common with creative art.21 This led him to his fourth main argument, that the most accessible way for us to see into the heart of things—if only momentarily—is through sex and art, particularly the art of music.

  Art apart, Schopenhauer’s focus on sex was surprising, but to him it obviously had a wide-ranging effect on human behavior. He said: “If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to live, is to be found…I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation…That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence.” (He also added, “What is all the fuss about?”)22

  Art was similar: whatever a work of art is, once we are absorbed in it, we forget ourselves. At the same time, for Schopenhauer, each of the arts is representational—except music. Therefore, music is the expression of “something that cannot be represented at all, namely the noumenon.” It is a metaphysical voice: “The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom, in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand.” It takes us away from the struggle for life.23

  THE STARTING POINT OF MODERN MUSIC

  The seriousness with which Wagner treated Schopenhauer and Kant helps inform us about his music. Disillusioned about politics—about the political process rather than any particular set of political views—Wagner was drawn to Schopenhauer’s argument that art could be a refuge from the world, as the only way to encounter, however briefly or unsatisfactorily, the noumenal world. He was intent on creating—or uncovering—something that existed outside space and time, and the redemption of mankind, bringing it back into the fold, removing alienation, was for him the culmination of experience.24

  Wagner was at work on the music for The Valkyrie when he encountered Schopenhauer; he had completed the libretti but not the music for Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. It follows that only Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers, and Parsifal were created after he had imbibed the philosopher.25 In these three above all, we see how Schopenhauer influenced the musician. Wagner himself said that Parsifal was his “crowning achievement,” after which he intended to cease writing opera and turn to symphonies, but in fact Wagner’s sound-world began to change with Siegfried. Composed two years after he first encountered Schopenhauer, the music of Siegfried is already very different from what went before, The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie. The main difference, as again Bryan Magee has noted, is the relationship of the orchestra to the characters. In the earlier operas the music rises and falls—always accompanies—the words; in Siegfried, for the first time, the spectator cannot always hear the words, the sheer weight of orchestral sound, the massive wall of music, compels attention.

  Schopenhauer’s belief that music held a special place in the arts led him to make a number of specific comments about music, about acoustics as the ground for metaphysics, and to include a technical device in harmonics known as “suspension.”26 This reference seems to have found immediate resonance with Wagner, so much so that he decided to compose a whole opera based on the way suspension operates.* The idea was that “the music would move all the way through from discord to discord in such a manner that the ear was on tenterhooks throughout for a resolution that did not come.” This was, in effect, pure musical Schopenhauer in that “the unassuaged longing, craving, yearning, that is our life, that is indeed us,” would only be resolved in the final chord, which, in dramatic terms, would also be the end of the protagonist’s life. In Bayreuth he even lowered the orchestra pit to help this effect.27

  This is what makes Tristan a revolutionary composition. Consisting of almost nothing but discords, it sounds different from most of what has gone before and has, since its first night, been regarded as the starting point of “modern music,” breaking all the rules. Tonality was the supreme aim—and achievement—of traditional music, and as a consequence it was composed in keys. Tristan was so different that the opera was not performed for five years after the score was published (for one thing, the bizarre succession of notes was impossible for the singers to sing or even remember).28

  Exhilarating as this was, Wagner now argued plainly what was beginning to be obvious in his operas, that there is no equality between music and words. In opera, the experience is primarily a musical one, music is “the invisible world of feeling…As we construct the phenomenal world by application of the laws of time and space which exist a priori in our brain, so this conscious presentation of the Idea of the world in the drama would be conditioned by the inner laws of music, which assert themselves in the dramatist unconsciously, much as we draw on the laws of causality in our perceptions of the phenomenal world.”29 Music, as Bryan Magee has observed, is thus elevated here to a level of philosophical importance it never had before or since.30

  NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER

  Just as Wagner looked up to Schopenhauer, so Friedrich Nietzsche looked up to Wagner. Nietzsche was twenty-four and still a student when the two men met in November 1868. Wagner was at the height of his fame. The Mastersingers had been premiered that year and received with greater enthusiasm than any of his previous works.

  Nietzsche, like Wagner, came from Saxony in east Germany, and belonged to a family of Lutheran pastors.31 Scholarships sent him to the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where his subject was classics, not philosophy. He was such a brilliant student that, at the age of twenty-four, when still an undergraduate, he was offered an associate professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel, becoming a full professor a year later. So advanced was he that the University of Leipzig awarded him his degree without his having to submit a thesis or wait for the examination. He moved to Basel immediately.

  These highly unusual accolades had made his reputation at the time he met Wagner. The two men remained good friends from 1868 until 1876, after which the younger man relinquished his academic post in Basel to devote himself full time to philosophy (he had tried to switch within the university but had been turned down). Following the break from Wagner, which we shall come to, Nietzsche developed his idiosyncratically itinerant lifestyle and, over a period of about twelve years, when he was between thirty-two and forty-four, he “poured out” the writings for which he is now famous.32 His friendship was formed too late to have any influence on Wagner but he did influence other composers—Gustav Mahler, Frederick Delius, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss, whose tone-poem Also Sprach Zarathustra is based on Nietzsche’s best-known book. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had a great interest in music—his great pleasures centering on Schumann, Schopenhauer, and solitary walks. He paralleled Wagner in that it was his discovery of Schopenhauer that proved the intellectual turning point in his life.

  After they met, the friendship ripened, and Nietzsche became a frequent visitor to Tribschen, Wagner’s house. Nietzsche spent Christmas there, helped with the printing of Wagner’s autobiography, read the proofs, and was the copyist on the urtext of Siegfried. When Wagner went for walks, Nietzsche was allowed to pl
ay his piano.33 Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus der Geist der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music; 1872), is dedicated to Wagner, and Nietzsche goes so far as to say that his book is a “crystallisation” of his conversations with the composer.34

  Nietzsche’s argument is that we have—or had then—essentially misunderstood the ancient Greeks. A close reading of Greek tragedy, in particular the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, shows that their concern is the “oceanic and irrational” feelings that swirl through human affairs—passion, eroticism, aggression, and intoxication, experiences he called “Dionysian.” But this passion was rendered through mythic stories that channeled the imagination in a particular way, the “Apollonian,” suitable to the linear—and therefore essentially rational—form of plays in the theater. While the plays themselves are one thing, the Dionysian side to life was destroyed by the development among the Greeks of “critical and self-critical intelligence,” a relentless drive that culminated in Socrates, the “supreme critical intellect.” Intellectual understanding, critical self-consciousness, became the prevailing methodology, arousing, as Nietzsche said, “terror and misconceptions.”35 Even morality, according to Nietzsche, was, in Socrates’ world, a function of knowledge, the whole of human existence accessible to the “conceptualising intelligence.”36 This approach to experience culminated in Euripedes’ tragedies, which made a mockery of what had been the essence of Aeschylus and Sophocles, namely their exploration of the irrational, of what, in Nietzsche’s day, was already being called the unconscious. Nietzsche felt that Euripides was shallow, that his works forfeited the ability to move people and that this was how Greek art had declined and decayed. In Nietzsche’s view, Wagner’s music—with its emphasis on compassion as the basis for morality, and on the irrational—marked a return to Aeschylus and Sophocles, restoring drama to its former completeness as an art form.37 Wagner loved the book and said Nietzsche was in a closer relationship with him than anyone except his wife.