Controversies and Viewpoints

by Alain de Benoist

  In 1933, Hans Tietjen is entrusted with the festival’s artistic direction. Spurred on by Pretorius, the stage design reaches unequalled heights. Ten years later, the scenery of the Master-Singers would be created by Wieland Wagner, Richard’s great grandson.

  In the aftermath of the war, the festival met with a peculiar fate. The performances were initially prohibited. And yet, while the ‘Wahnfried’ villa had been partially destroyed by a bomb, the Festspielhaus remained intact. The occupation authorities, however, perceived it as a ‘temple’ of German nationalism and, in order to desacralise it, entrusted it to the American army, which then had various jazz bands settle in so as to distract the GIs. A series of musicals and cabaret spectacles was performed there over the course of several years.

  Convinced that the ‘mythical’ ideology with which Wagnerian Musikdramen are imbued was in some way responsible for the aberrations committed by National Socialism, certain milieus declared themselves hostile towards the resumption of the performances. Some even went as far as to claim that the theatre should be destroyed.

  During that same period, several of Wagner’s adversaries found themselves unable to dismiss their unbounded admiration for that ‘infinite melody’ which, having been silenced, was all the more present around them. A recent film by Ken Russel739 described the ambiguous fascination exerted by Wagner upon Mahler.740 The very same ambiguity was encountered in the sentiments that people expressed towards Bayreuth. ‘Since I am so fond of Wagner, I shall deny him’: was it not Debussy741 who once stated this?

  Thomas Mann, who, at the start of his political evolution, had praised Wagner to the heavens (The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner. Fayard, 1933) went as far as to write (in Reflections of an Apolitical Man, Grasset, 1975):

  Rarely has Wagner’s influence been, in my view, greater and more decisive upon a non-musician than it was on me. All that I know is owed to his art.

  In 1945, he makes the following declaration:

  The Germans have granted the West its most profound and meaningful music. The Occident, however, has been overcome by an enduring feeling that is now felt more intensely than ever, the feeling that such musicality of the soul is paid for all too direly in another domain, namely the political domain of the common life of the world’s peoples.

  There were others who thought, in a simpler manner, that the time had come for them to ‘deify’ Wagner by pitting themselves against this troublesome dead man. In the end, one thus decided to restore the festival in its rights. Winifred, who was accused of having served the Third Reich, was, however, banned from taking charge of it again, and the production duties thus fell to his two sons, Wieland and Wolfgang.

  A Vaudeville742 for the Centenary

  The ‘new Bayreuth’ was born, and what began to take shape was the ceaselessly expressed desire — particularly on the part of Wieland Wagner in his book entitled Richard Wagner und das neue Bayreuth743  — to reach a ‘new public’ that would have been led to forget the nature of the dramas performed at the Festspielhaus, thus coming to Bayreuth to listen to music ‘like any other’.

  One first proceeded to ‘de-Germanise’ a work that had been constructed using exclusively Germanic materials, while simultaneously stressing its ‘universal’ significance.

  From there, Wieland Wagner went on to introduce an entire sequence of innovations, one that strived to strip the performance of all its ‘visual’ aspects or those that were too blatantly symbolic.

  Under the pretext of eliminating superfluous elements, one soon reached a stage744 where the entire essence had been modified. Thanks to an appropriate choice of theatrics (lights, costumes, etc.), one erased the plot’s very tragic character. Several textual fragments found themselves amputated and removed from the Tetralogy. One exerted themselves to minimise the importance of the opening scene of Lohengrin, as well as that of the closing part of the Master-Singers. One gave the audience permission to applaud at the end of Parsifal, although Wagner himself had prohibited any and all applause so as to highlight the performance’s sacred character. Soloists were discretely encouraged to come up with personal innovations. Furthermore, an effort was made to render Tristan more ‘erotic’, while in Tannhäuser, the role of Venus was given to an African singer. And in 1956, one simply removed Nuremberg from the staging of the Master-Singers.

  The process peaked in 1976, when, on the occasion of the festival’s centenary, Mr Pierre Boulez745 was entrusted with directing the Tetralogy (Mr Boulez had previously only been in charge of Parsifal), with the production duties resting in the hands of Mr Patrice Chéreau.746

  Modifying all the musical tempi in a most insensitive fashion, Pierre Boulez set the example of an analytical sort of direction: he granted each instrument a large amount of autonomy, separated the orchestral tones from the singers’ vocals and strived, above all, to allow the sounds to settle throughout, thus going against the formal notice left by Wagner, who never ceased to insist on the necessary fusion of all the elements of the musical discourse within the ‘mystic abyss’ of the orchestral pit.

  As for Mr Chéreau’s staging, which lies halfway between Offenbach’s747 Olympia and Brechtian748 patronage, the only thing it led to was the simple fact of turning Wagnerian drama into a sort of ‘committed’ vaudeville. The kingdom of Alberich was a mine into which Wotan descended using a ladder. In The Valkyrie, the wooden hut leaning against the world’s ash tree, so perfectly described by Wagner, suddenly became a factory, and Wotan was depicted wearing a frock coat with a dressing gown on top. In short, everything was ‘deformed, not to say caricaturised’, Mr Jean Mistler749 writes (L’Aurore,750 14th-15th August, 1976).

  In the bulletin published by the Richard Wagner National Circle, one could read the following statement:

  It does seem to be the case that the less familiar with Wagner’s work each audience member was, the more the 1976 production of the Ring managed to appeal to them. (October–December 1976)

  In Bayreuth, tickets were returned for the very first time, and owing to their rage and indignation, some people even found themselves in tears.

  Mr Georges Liébert, the former head of Contrepoint magazine, passed the following judgement upon the performance:

  The very same French mindset reigned, in fact, over both the stage and the pit, a mindset which Stendhal would have immediately recognised based on its most irritating trait: a fear of duped, one which turns the sublime into a game and targets all grandeur with resentment. From Voltaire to Canard enchaîné, it is understood that the French are not to be taken for fools; Patrice Chéreau’s winking is proof of this, as is the jeering smile with which he welcomed the great honour of being booed. For more than two centuries, Shakespeare has been suffering from this national shortcoming of ours in France, and it is now Wagner’s turn to fall victim to it, despite having previously encountered, from Baudelaire to Lévi-Strauss, through Proust, Claudel and Julien Gracq, the most poetic and most convincing comprehension he could ever have hoped for. (Le Quotidien de Paris, 26th August, 1976)

  There were also other performances, of an even more political nature, that had already experienced a certain success, particularly in East Germany, where it is customary for one to contrast the ‘young Wagner’, who authored and composed both Rienzi and Art and Revolution, with the mature Wagner.

  ‘Critical’ Psychoanalysis

  In 1938, in his Perfect Wagnerite, George Bernard Shaw751 had already indulged in a socialist and humanitarian ‘reading’ of the Ring. At a later stage, one reminded the world that in 1848, Wagner had sided with the revolutionaries of Dresden, while also pretending to believe that the revolution he had wished for had actually not been very different from Marx’s. The Tetralogy was then depicted as a ‘striking’ tableau of the birth and fall of capitalism, which, in Twilight of the Gods, succumbed to its own internal contradictions.

  On its part, a ‘new critique’ inspired by Freud and Marx displayed its intention to ‘restore’ Wagner�
�s thought in all its truth by venturing ‘beyond’ the interpretations of Wagner’s entourage and of those faithful to him, interpretations which all were deemed ‘abusive’. Whenever such interpretations had been expressed by Wagner himself, one specified that ‘in fact’, what the Master had wanted to say was the opposite of what he had expressed and that the very fact of having been so ‘eager’ to make a certain declaration betrayed his ‘unconscious desire’ to be understood differently (such second-rate psychoanalysis had already been conducted on Nietzsche’s work).

  Mr Hans-Jürgen Nigra writes:

  With Wieland interpreting Richard in contrast with Richard, this criticism undertook to “demonstrate” that Richard had been wrong about himself and that it was, in fact, Wieland who, at long last, put things back in their proper place. (As stated in the previously mentioned text.)

  One of the most significant and, simultaneously, most intelligent attempts to neutralise the very sense of Wagnerian drama was the work of Theodor W. Adorno.

  A disciple of Alban Berg, the former musical advisor of Thomas Mann for Doctor Faustus, Adorno is, along with Ernst Bloch and Max Horkheimer, the principal representative of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. His Essay on Wagner, written in 1937–38 in London and New York, came out after the war. In it, he presents an analysis of the Tetralogy conceived from the angle of the ‘ruse of reason’.

  Attacking the very conception of Wort-Ton-Drama head-on, Adorno perceives it as a ‘phantasmagoria’ and, in the final analysis, a mystification. By illustrating the ‘spherical’ conception of history using a music of Eternal Becoming, Wagner is alleged to have strived to ‘delay’ the triumphant march of ‘progress’ and the advent of the proletariat. ‘Suspended’ between the past and the future, Adorno writes, ‘Wagner does not dare to wage the revolution’. Furthermore, while being conscious of his ‘lie’, Wagner is said to have attempted, by means of a contempt-worthy subterfuge (the Wort-Ton-Drama), to make people forget that any work of art is but a ‘fabricated product’ (one that is due to the division of work, to the separation of intellectual work from the manual kind). His intentions are thus purported to be ‘morally reprehensible’.

  On the basis of such claims, Adorno proposes a novel interpretation of the Ring, one in which Siegfried becomes an allegorical representative of the ‘proletariat’ who, as the story goes on, ‘transforms into a fantasy of an immediate humanity that has not been corrupted by history’. Initially a socialist (just like Wagner himself), Wotan ‘betrays the rebellion’ by compromising with the world instead of transforming it. As for the dwarves Alberich and Mime, as well as the despicable Beckmesser of the Master-Singers, Adorno declares that he perceives them as ‘caricatures of the Judaic kind’, the incarnations of a rational world from which any and all non-quantitative values are excluded (Adorno justifies this point of view by referring himself to the famous essay entitled Judaism in Music, published by Wagner in 1850).

  It is this interpretation that probably prevailed in Israel, where, ever since 1948, people have been banned from listening to the works of Wagner and Richard Strauss (on 22nd June, 1974, the Municipal Council of Tel Aviv asked the Israeli philharmonic orchestra and its conductor, Zubin Mehta, to renounce its intention to play a few segments of Wagner’s music during a certain concert. The press had revealed that most of the tickets had been purchased by people whose purpose was the prevent the orchestra from playing this music. What is more, the ushers had decided to go on strike).

  Today still, the theories of Theodor W. Adorno exert a strong influence on an ill-informed public, in addition to voicing a complicit sort of criticism.

  In 1974, during the staging of the Master-Singers, the audience watched clerk Beckmesser return to the stage after his setback in the third act. In the original text, however, Wagner made him melt into the crowd and disappear. This seemingly insignificant detail reflects a specific intention.

  In the programme booklet published by the festival that same year, author Walter Jens specifically quotes Adorno and, indeed, explains that tolerating any sort of ‘discrimination’ against the unfortunate Beckmesser would contradict the spirit of the times. He writes:

  Every conceivable reproach has been used to afflict this mangy sheep, this lacklustre voice amidst the singers, this Black man lost among the Whites, this Jew that has strayed among the Christians.

  The Eternal Melody

  It is then explained that, in the end, Beckmesser is but an ‘unconscious’ projection of Wagner himself and that the defects that characterise him actually reveal, through their very excess, Wagner’s ‘fear’ of being ‘identified’; in short, that in contrast with Hans Sachs, ‘a bourgeois fraught with good intentions’ but dreaming of an impossible ‘social reconciliation’, his dissenting mindset is absolutely necessary. Hence this conclusion:

  It is impossible to accept Beckmesser’s complete disappearance at the end of the play. He must remain on stage, for he is still needed.

  Not all post-war Wagnerians have been stricken with the ‘Beckmesser complex’, however.

  Towards the end of the 1950s, two publics existed side by side in Bayreuth: on the one hand, a festival-going and mundane public and, on the other, a ‘celebrative audience’ whose members went to the Festspielhaus in silence, like pilgrims reaching for a source of hope within secret catacombs.

  Back then, whenever Hans Sachs asked the residents of mediaeval Nuremberg to put their trust in the ‘holy German art’ (heil’ge deutsche Kunst) in times of great tribulation, it was the latter public that shared in the master-singer’s famous apostrophe. All that its members needed was to close their eyes to once again experience the eternal melody.

  Wieland Wagner died in 1966; and since 1967, the management of the Bayreuth festival has been in his brother Wolfgang’s hands. The Wagner family has, incidentally, never stopped growing. Instead of Wieland, we now have his widow, Gertrud, and his four children Wolfgang Siegfried (‘Wumi’), Iris, Daphne and Nike, as well as Wieland’s and Wolfgang’s sisters, Friedelind and Verena.

  In order to avoid excessive complications, the Wagner legacy has been turned into a foundation. A contract signed in 1973 between the public authorities and the Wagner family guarantees the Festival’s material continuity.

  The Society of Friends of Bayreuth (Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth e.V.), whose president is Doctor Ewald Hilger and secretary Mr Adolf Hopf, is the partner of the organisation of representatives. Its 2,600 supporters participate in its funding (sometimes considerably) and include the Aga Khan, the BASF corporations, Bahlsen, Thyssen, Mannesmann, the Krupp factories, the Munich House of Culture, and others.

  Now eighty-one years old, Winifred Wagner has kept her proud bearing and glittering eyes. As a sign of protest against the spirit of the ‘new Bayreuth’, she had previously renounced her place in the Festspielhaus’s theatre box before returning to it after Wieland’s death. She did not, however, attend the Centenary Festival and now resides in the proximity of ‘Wahnfried’, in the ‘Siegfried-Haus’.

  In 1941, Paul Viereck752 wrote:

  Wagner’s originality consists in the adaptation of Romantic values to a different era; not to the past, nor to his own time, but to the age of complete spiritual and material mechanisation which his sensibility allowed him to predict.

  It is this very age that we have now entered.

  *

  L’enchanteur et le roi des ombres,753 a collection of selected letters by Richard Wagner and Ludwig II of Bavaria presented by Blandine Ollivier. Libr. Académique Perrin, 379 pages.

  Wagner l’enchanteur,754 an essay by Jean Matter. La Baconnière, Neuchâtel, 281 pages.

  A Bayreuth avec Richard Wagner,755 an essay by Jean Mistler. Hachette, 324 pages.

  Der Bayreuther Kreis, Wagnerkult und Kulturreform im Geiste völkischer Weltanschauung, an essay by Winifred Schüler. Aschendorff, Münster, 293 pages.

  Cosima Wagner, an essay by Alice Sokoloff. List, München, 341 pages.

 
La famille Wagner et Bayreuth, 1876–1976,756 photos presented by Wolf Siegfried Wagner. Ed. du Chêne, 160 pages.

  Wagner au jour le jour,757 a chronology established by Martin Gregor-Dellin. Gallimard, 315 pages.

  Wagner et l’esprit romantique,758 an essay by André Coeuroy. Gallimard, 380 pages.

  Essay on Wagner, written by Theodor W. Adorno. Gallimard, 214 pages.

  Richard Wagner, an essay by Michel R. Hofmann. Pierre Waleffe, 216 pages.

  ***

  Numerous works on Wagner were published in 1976, on the occasion of the centenary of the Festival of Bayreuth. Éditions d’aujourd’hui (14, rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris, France) have notably reedited Wagner’s complete prose works in a total of thirteen volumes published in 1928 through Delagrave. The Nouvelle école magazine has also released a special issue (number 30, winter 1976–77).

  Cercle national Richard Wagner759 (6, Square de l’Aveyron, 75017 Paris, France); Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth e.V. (Festspielhügel 6, 8580 Bayreuth, Germany).

  *

  Von Salomon’s Germany

  There is a very beautiful house located in Elbdeich (Stöckte), between Schleswig and Hamburg — it includes a wooden barrier, two large buildings with a thatched roof, and a garden with trees. A white, brown and green vision. This is where writer Ernst von Salomon passed away on 9th August, 1972. On the previous evening, he had voiced his concern over a storm whose end he would never see.

  ‘It is never the fact of taking action that dishonours, but the fact of suffering the actions of others’, Walther Rathenau760 wrote in his Reflections. Ernst von Salomon and his friends did not wish to suffer; they thus killed Walther Rathenau.

  The work of von Salomon is the story of his life; and, simultaneously, the (hi)story of Germany itself. The two overlap, and neither could ever be mentioned separately, for they both began in the aftermath of the Great War.