Longer Views

by Samuel R. Delany

  By October ’48, in addition to his political articles and speeches for the Voksblätter and the Vaterlands-Verein, Wagner had also completed his “Prose Sketch” for the Ring. Commentators have seen that practically everything we can find in the finished Ring is there in one form or another in the “Prose Sketch.” What they have not stressed quite as much is to what extent we can find the situation of Saxony in general and Dresden in particular in the same essay. The Nibelungs of the “Prose Sketch” are laborers and miners, as were many of the working class of Dresden and many of the other small towns in Saxony.

  The “Prose Sketch” begins:

  Out of the Womb of Night and Death there came into being a race dwelling in Nibelheim (Nebelheim) [Home—or Place—of Mist, Fog, or Obscurity], i.e., in gloomy subterranean clefts and caverns. They are known as the Nibelungs: feverishly, unrestingly, they burrow through the bowels of the earth like worms in a dead body: they anneal and smelt and smith hard metals . . .

  The last day of October brought news of the murder of the revolutionaries Blum, Becher, Jellinek, and Messenhauer in Vienna, and of the bombardment there. Robert Blum was a Saxon, and his body was returned to Dresden for a funeral where liberal cabinet members joined the funeral procession, fearful of both the people on the one side and the king on the other.

  There were more clashes in Berlin in November, and the Prussian National Assembly was finally dissolved. Now, just before beginning the libretto, Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death,” the first version of what was to become the last of the four operas in the Ring cycle), Wagner received the news that the promised Lohengrin premiere had been officially canceled at the Opera, even though the sets had been begun.

  No doubt the conservative theater management felt that the more and more radical Kapellmeister had to be disciplined; besides, there were not enough royal funds for producing new operas. Only four new operas were produced in all of Germany that year. Everyone involved had read the libretto and certainly no conservative official wanted to chance King Heinrich’s exhortation, from the opening minutes of the opera, “Let all who are German be prepared to fight / That none will ever again affront German soil,” going out to an audience that might take it as a rebel call to arms.

  Siegfrieds Tod was finished, and—along with fifty-odd pages of a sketch of another drama based on the life of Jesus, in which Jesus is presented as a property-despising revolutionary—was read to an otherwise sympathetic group of republicans, though it did not get much sympathy from Bakúnin, who was among the hearers.

  No doubt the Kapellmeister’s political interests were also causing rifts at home. It’s highly possible that at this time Wagner also wrote an article that may have been an early version of “Das Judentum in der Musik,” of which Minna was to write two years later, “you defame [d] an entire race.” Minna would not read it—or, at least, was highly unhappy with it. The article was not published—at least in that form. But from that time on, Minna later chided her husband, Wagner would neither show her nor play for her any more of his creative works. While our reconstruction of the reasons for his behavior towards her is largely supposition, we do know that at some point in the midst of all this, at least momentarily, Wagner decided to break with her: there is a journal entry to that effect from this date. But apparently he decided not to act on it.

  The general rehearsals for the annual Palm Sunday benefit concert were opened to those of the Dresden public who could not afford the expensive tickets to the actual performance.

  Wagner recounts:

  The general rehearsal had been attended, in secret and without the knowledge of the police, by Michael Bakúnin; after it was all over he came up to me unabashedly in the orchestra in order to call out to me that, if all music were lost in the coming world-conflagration, we should risk our own lives to preserve this symphony.

  If, of all people, Bakúnin could declare such a grand and noble musical work as the Ninth worth preserving, then it might also be worth writing such a work, especially if it dramatized the way in which world civilization, both the noble and the base in their intricate relation, came to destroy itself to make way for the new order. Some vision of that task was what I feel Wagner, in the year covering ’48 and ’49, was forming for the Ring. But the new order was, at least as far as we can tell from what Wagner had been proclaiming for most of a year now, basically the old order with free elections, trial by jury, and a much stronger parliament.

  Röckel had temporarily fled; so Wagner took over the Volksblätter editorship. On May 3, 1849, writes Wagner,

  . . .the appearance of the crowds streaming through our streets made clear enough that what everybody undoubtedly wanted was going to happen, for all petitions to obtain recognition of the German constitution, the main bone of contention, had been rejected by the government with a firmness it had heretofore failed to show.

  Wagner attended a particularly unruly Vaterlands-Verein meeting the next morning. The workers at the meeting were angry and talked of arms and preparation for invasion, while the more theoretically- inclined middle-class members seemed indecisive. When it was decided to end the meeting, Wagner’s impression was one of “utter chaos.”

  He goes on:

  I departed with the painter Kaufman, a young artist whose work I had observed in the Dresden art exhibition, where he had shown a series of drawings illustrating the “History of the Human Spirit.” I had seen the King of Saxony pause in front of those drawings, which represented the torture of a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition, and had noticed him turn away from this abstruse subject, shaking his head in disapproval. I was on my way home in conversation with this man, whose pale and troubled countenance reflected his realization of the coming events, when, just as we reached the Postplatz in the vicinity of the recently erected fountain designed by Semper, the bells in the nearby tower of St. Ann’s Church suddenly began to clash out the signal for revolt. “My God, it has begun!” my companion shouted, and vanished from my side forthwith. . . . I never saw him again. . . . It was a very sunny afternoon. . . . The whole square before me seemed bathed in a dark yellow, almost brown light, similar to a color I had once experienced at Magdeburg during a solar eclipse. My most pronounced sensation was one of great, almost extravagant well-being.

  Wagner’s first act was to run to the nearby house of the tenor Tichatschek and requisition the singer’s sporting guns from his wife. (Tichatschek was out.) Leaving her a receipt for them, he went to park them at the Vaterlands-Verein headquarters. He claimed he was afraid that the general rabble in the street might rush in and seize them—or that the excitable tenor might do something silly with them. At any rate, this is another claim often taken by his later biographers to be disingenuous. And when the warrant was issued for him later, it was listed as among his crimes.

  Then Wagner went out to explore what was happening in the city—and at some point wrote out an order for the powder to be packed into those grenades.

  About fifty years after the fact, that indefatigable English collector of Wagneriana, Mrs. Burrell, transcribed an eyewitness report from a daughter of one of Wagner’s Dresden friends, who recalled the first day of violence in the city, when, as a young girl, she sat watching and listening from her third story window, as first a young miner, then an older one, harangued the crowd, which later marched off looking for arms. After the first shots, a bit later she saw the corpse of the older of the two miners wheeled by her house in an open van, surrounded by the people, the body half naked now and lying on its belly, displaying a bloody back wound—the first casualty, or one of the first, in a list that was to swell, over the next days, to thousands. Wagner’s favorite soprano at the Dresden opera, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, saw them pass from her second floor window in the same block of flats and shrieked out, “Rächt Euch an der Reaction!” (“Revenge yourselves upon the reactionaries!”) which, misinterpreted by the people, started a round of merchandise looting from the ground floor apothecary, which was used as a barrica
de in a nearby street.

  Wagner also encountered the soprano. Either it was earlier that day, or possibly the account above comes from a day later. At any rate, Wagner writes:

  I now descended again into the streets to see what was going on in the city, apart from the clangor of the tocsin and the yellowish solar eclipse. I first reached the old market square and noticed a group there in the midst of which someone was making an animated speech. To my almost delighted astonishment, I beheld Frau Schröder-Devrient, who had just come back from Berlin, and was standing in front of a hotel evincing tremendous excitement at the news immediately communicated to her that the populace had already been fired upon. She had just seen an attempted revolt crushed by force of arms in Berlin, and she now was highly indignant to see the same thing happening in what she regarded as her peaceful Dresden. . . . I met her again the following day at the home of my old friend, Heine [the recently dismissed set-designer for Lohengrin], where she had taken refuge; there she once again implored me, inasmuch as she attributed to me the requisite sang-froid, to make every effort to stop the senseless and murderous struggle.

  Shots had been fired; men had been killed; there were barricades in the streets; and Wagner was at the city hall in the thick of meetings and conversations and arguments. The King by now had quit Dresden proper, for Konigstein on the Elbe. Saxon royalist troops were in the city; but Prussians had been called in.

  The next day, Wagner, who had been editing the Volksblätter himself for the past few weeks, had the paper’s printer run off handbills to win over the royalist soldiers. The boys who put up the bills (“Are You With Us Against Foreign Troops?”) inadvertently pasted them up on the rebels’ side of the barricades where the Saxon soldiers couldn’t see them. So Wagner had another 200 printed up, carried them through the barricades, and handed them out among the King’s soldiers himself.

  Mein Leben tells the story of the handbills; but it does not go into the details of their incorrect placement or what Wagner did about it.

  On the following night, with a Döbeln schoolmaster and a Reichenbach professor, Wagner stood watch atop the 300-foot Kreuzkirche Tower, where, under fire from the royalist soldiers, bullets splattered against the back wall now and again through the night. Between discussions of the Christian philosophy of life, the men observed and wrote down the movements of the royalist troops, tying the messages to rocks and tossing them over into the square below to be run to General Heubner and Bakúnin at the city hall, who were trying to maintain some organizational efficiency among the volunteer rebels.

  On the floor of the tower, Wagner finally slept. Just before daylight, he records:

  I was awakened by the song of the nightingale wafting up from the Shutze garden close beneath us; a sacred calm and tranquility lay over the city and the broad expanse of its surroundings I could see from my vantage point: toward dawn a light fog settled on the outskirts: penetrating through it we suddenly heard, from the area of the Tharandt road, the music of the Marseillaise clearly and distinctly; as the source of the sound came closer, the mists dispersed and the blood-red rising sun glittered upon the guns of a long column marching into the city. It was impossible to resist the impression of this unfolding sight; suddenly that element I had long missed in the German people, the absence of any evidence of which had contributed in no small part to the mood which had dominated me until then, now pressed in upon me in the freshest and most palpable colors; these were no fewer than several thousand well-armed and organized men from the Erzgebirge, mostly miners, who had arrived to help in the defence of Dresden. Soon we saw them march into the old market square, outside the city hall and, after a jubilant greeting by the people, encamp there to rest after their march. Similar contingents kept arriving throughout the day.

  One can only remember here the miners in the opening paragraph of the “Prose Sketch.”

  Sometime before noon, someone spotted flames springing up from the old Dresden Opera House.

  Always a firetrap, it had been torched by the insurgents while the fire could be controlled, to prevent its going up accidentally in the bombardment, where it might destroy the whole neighborhood. Wagner had come to loathe his Kapellmeister job. The Ninth Symphony aside, his attempts at theater reform had been stymied at every turn. And there was the canceled Lohengrin premiere . . .

  Wagner sent down from the tower for wine and snuff in honor of the theater’s destruction; they arrived with a message from Minna to please return home. And the lookout tower was now filling up with armed men, sent there to fire upon the approach to the old market square as soon as the expected attack on it from the Kreuzgasse began. At last Wagner descended from his outpost and philosophical eyrie.

  At the Marcolini, he found his apartment full of his wife’s excited friends, including Röckel’s wife, who was particularly upset. Two of his young nieces had arrived. Their exuberant mood over the shooting and excitement even infected Minna, who was much relieved to see her husband back safe. Downstairs, the sculptor Hänel had wanted to shut up the whole palace “so that no revolutionaries might get in,” which had angered the women. Now everyone enjoyed making fun of his terror.

  The next day, when Wagner was passing St. Ann’s church, a member of the Communal Guard called out to him, “Herr Kapellmeister, the spark of divine joy—” quoting from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”—“has certainly ignited everything; the rotten building has burned to the ground.”

  “Obviously this enthusiast had attended the last performance of the Ninth” Wagner comments wryly in his journal. (The “Ode” is, of course, the choral text for the Ninth’s final movement.) Later, when he had a moment to note the conflagration, Wagner (again in his journal) wrote: “Opera house now burned down; strangely contented.”

  After meeting with Bakúnin, Wagner got Minna and Natalie (and the parrot and the dog) off to Chemnitz, after taking a last walk along where he had done much of his thinking, talking with friends, and composing, while the sounds of gunfire rattled through the melancholy spring morning. Leaving Minna and her little “sister” with his own married sister, Klara, he returned to Dresden on May 8th (Wagner writes May gth):

  . . . the only safe way to advance was through shattered buildings, making my way toward the city hall on the old market place. It was already evening; what I saw offered a truly horrible picture, for I was passing through those parts of the city where everyone was prepared for house-to-house fighting. The unceasing roar of big and small arms fire made the other sounds of the armed men calling to one another from barricade to barricade, or from one shattered house to another, seem merely an uncanny murmur. Torches burned here and there, and pale exhausted figures lay about close to the guardposts, while stern challenges met the unarmed intruder.

  At the city hall, everyone was exhausted. People’s voices croaked or were hoarse. The old city council clerks stood around, cutting up sausages and spreading butter on slices of bread, while others distributed provisions to the hungry.

  Heubner alone seemed to have retained his energy, though his eyes flickered with an “unearthly fire”; he had not really slept for seven nights. He was glad to see Wagner, and the two men conversed.

  Bakúnin . . . received me on one of the mattresses which had been spread out in the city hall council chamber, a cigar in his mouth and at his side a very young Galician Pole, by the name of Haimberger, a young violinist whom he had referred to me recently for recommendation to Lipinsky for further training on his instrument . . . Bakúnin had made a place for him on the mattress, and gave him a vigorous slap on the back whenever he twitched at the sound of a heavy cannonfire. “You’re a long way from your violin here,” he called out to him. “You should have stayed with it, musician.”

  Bakúnin brought Wagner up to date. No one had seen the recently returned Röckel since the previous evening. He had probably been caught. Wagner told of the troops he’d seen between Chemnitz and Dresden, including several thousand reinforcements. Bakúnin and Heubner sent Wagner of
f to drum up more vehicles for the rebels, along with Wagner’s old friend Marschall von Bieberstein, which the two men did, going to Freiberg and, after various adventures and some success, returning.

  The retreat from Dresden had already begun before Wagner quite reached the city. Someone pointed out the coach carrying “the provisional government,” and Wagner flagged it down to join Heubner, Bakúnin, and the Rochlitz editor (remember Wagner’s arguments for war) in the overloaded carriage on the trip to Erzgebirge—which is where we started our story in the previous section.

  All that lay ahead was the dismounting, the trap, the missed coach, the arrest of Heubner and Bakúnin—and Wagner’s flight.

  * * *

  Again, we must ask: Is there anything in all this Sturm und Drang that is in any way radical as we understand the word in its political sense today?

  Certainly Wagner was aware of oppression. Shortly he was to write in his book, Art and Revolution: “Our modern factories present a wretched picture of utter human degradation: ceaseless exertion, destructive of mind and body, devoid of love and enjoyment—often, too, almost devoid of purpose.”

  His answer to these ills, however, was neither a major redistribution of wealth nor any basic reorganization of society: what he proposed was to reinsert some enjoyment into the worker’s lives, and that via music—Wagner’s music.