The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  These next years were revolutionary not only for European politics but for Wagner and the future of music. The “specter” that Marx and Engels saw “haunting Europe” in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 was also haunting Wagner. He published three revolutionary articles and distributed incendiary handbills during the Dresden uprising of May 1849. Luckily he was not shot by the Saxon soldiers and escaped arrest, but fled for his life. He had been impressed by the flowing hair and energy of Mikhail Bakunin, a most unlikely companion—for Bakunin envisioned a revolution that would destroy all cultural institutions, while Wagner foresaw a society newly shaped by artists. Ironically, it was the long-dead Beethoven who brought them together. After secretly attending Beethoven’s “Choral Symphony” conducted by Wagner on Palm Sunday, 1849, Bakunin exclaimed, “All, all will perish, not only music, the other arts too … only one thing will not perish but last forever: the Ninth Symphony.”

  Wagner’s flight from Dresden and his detachment from the German opera and concert halls opened an interlude when he did not compose. Arriving in Zurich in May 1849, he began a decade of Swiss exile. Removed from the familiar competitive musical scene, he was forced to seek expression in his other medium, and immediately began writing. These years of exile would produce some of his most interesting observations on life, art, and civilization. Wagner was as much intoxicated by his power with words as by the power of his music. Frantically he sought to unify the two worlds within him and make them collaborate. Wagner struggled, yearned, and wrote for a coherent world of the arts. The traditional opera would be no more than his point of departure. He now wrote a series of essays—Art and Revolution (1849), The Art Work of the Future (1850), Opera and Drama (1850–51)—a credo for his future composing. As a practicing composer of opera in the traditional mold he was painfully aware of the competition in the past between the two musics, the music of words and the music of instruments. He now used his talent with words to declare a truce and create a theory marrying them in a new art form. And he would then prove his theory by his own monumental creation in that mold. What Wagner would call the Art Work of the Future was foreshadowed in his own.

  The ideal of a single unified work that would consummate all the arts was far from new. Ancient Greek drama had been such a synthesis of ritual, poetry, music, and dance. It was an obvious model for the camerata, the groups of musicians and literary figures who met in Florence in the late sixteenth century, discussing the music of the ancient Greeks. Members of the group collaborated on Dafne, performed in 1598, which survives only in fragments but which some give the title of the “first opera.” Others in Germany, reacting against the Italian operas that had become mere showcases for singers’ arias, sought a better balance of the arts. Weber, the idol of Wagner’s youth, back in 1816 had envisioned “a self-sufficient work of art in which every feature and every contribution by the related arts are moulded together in a certain way and dissolve to form a new world.”

  The German language could provide a single word for this unifying concept, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Wagner described the ideal art work of the future (Gesamtwerk der Zukunft) (1849). His view is ambitious and universal. He wants to add to the “three purely human arts” (music, poetry, dance) “the ancillary aids of drama” (architecture, sculpture, painting). Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama) in 1851 elaborated his art ideal. “It is a very remarkable work,” he recalled to Cosima, “and I was very excited when I wrote it, for it is without a predecessor in the history of art, and I was really aiming at a target no one could see.” Fanatic in pursuit of his idea, he prescribed a “radical” water cure for himself and friends, and a “fire cure” for mankind, which started with setting fire to Paris to serve as a beacon. “How much better we shall be after this fire cure!”

  The dogma he now expounded was carefully developed, analytical, historical, and full of examples. Through it all runs his effort to reconcile word and music, in a new all-encompassing art form. In Part One, “Opera and the Essence of Music,” Wagner focused on the cardinal weakness of all opera before his time. “A means of expression (music) has been made the object; and … the object of expression (drama) has been made the means.” Gluck’s reform, “the revolt of the composer against the singer,” aimed to rescue opera from singers trying to show off. Mozart was indifferent to the words of the libretto and “all he did was to pour the fiery stream of his music into the operatic forms, developing their musical possibilities to the utmost.” But the drama was still only an excuse for the music. “Up to now this melody has been merely song-melody.” Then Beethoven discovered and developed a new more expressive kind of instrumental melody. “In his grandest work,” the Choral Symphony, finding the “absolute-musical,” the “instrumental language,” inadequate to his message he “at last felt the necessity of throwing himself into the arms of the poet” to clarify the meanings of his melody. Wagner went on with his customary extravagance, “The organism of music is capable of bearing living melody only when fructified by the poet’s thought. Music is the female, destined to bring forth—the poet being the real generator; and music reached the very peak of madness when it aspired not only to bear but also to beget.”

  Moving on to “The Drama and the Essence of Dramatic Poetry,” Wagner described the unified art work of the future. It will not be a mere mixture of the arts, not merely “reading a romance by Goethe in a picture gallery adorned with statues, during the performance of a Beethoven symphony,” but a merging of all arts into a new form. Drama, till now drawn from romance and Greek drama, has been “an appeal to understanding, not to feeling.” The future must “return from understanding to feeling.” The poet-dramatist must rise above the drab “commonplaces, intrigues, etc., things which modern comedy and drama without music are far more successful in presenting” to “the holy spirit of poetry as it comes down to us in the sagas and legends of past ages.” This required a new collaboration of word-language and tone-language. Poetry, which has mistakenly become only the medium for “understanding,” must be recalled to be the medium of feeling. “The inner man’s most primitive medium of utterance,” “the first emotional language of mankind,” was a language of melody consisting only of vowels. It acquired rhythm by adding gestures. By adding consonants this primitive tone-language became a full-fledged word-language. And when common consonants were grouped together in different words they helped produce a coherent mental picture by alliteration (Stabreim) and made poetry the vehicle of understanding. “Feeling sought refuge from an absolute speech of this intellectual kind and sought it in that absolute tone-language which constitutes our music of the present day.”

  The modern problem, according to Wagner, is how to bring together word-language and tone-language. But modern opera has made this effort only in a crude mechanical way. The poet writes his words and waits for the composer’s music to “transform the nakedness of articulate speech into the fullness of the tone-language.” The result is confusion. For a Gesamtkunstwerk the artist must from the outset create an organic work fusing words and music. Wagner himself would prove this possible by writing his own librettos.

  Looking ahead to “Poetry and Music in the Drama of the Future,” Wagner proposed a new kind of verse, better for “the purely emotional element,” going back to “the sensuous substance of the roots of speech.” Modern opera makes the mistake of treating the voice as only another musical instrument, but in the unified art work the voice part will become “the connecting link between articulate speech and tone speech.” Then the words will “float like a ship on the sea of orchestral harmony.” Modern instrumental music does “possess a capacity for speech,” for all that cannot be expressed in words. “The unifying bond of expression therefore proceeds from the orchestra.” “Translated” opera, he says, makes no sense and destroys its very essence. The German language is better than others for the art work of the future because it “still displays an immediate and recognizable connection with its own roots.” The art work needs a new public, not lik
e the present, which seeks only to be amused, but a public with a feeling for cosmic unity.

  Opera and Drama, which Wagner called his “testament,” was also his manifesto. He created a new concept of opera to which Verdi’s talents were not equal, and which Verdi in fact found menacing. Verdi would consider it an insult to be accused of “Wagnerism.” Wagner spent the next twenty years composing Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), which came close to fulfilling his grandiose hopes. The Ring, which Wagner himself described as “a stage festival play (Bühnenfestspiel) for three days and a preliminary evening,” provided twelve hours of opera: Das Rheingold (the Prologue), Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. His earlier operas had been adapted from folklore, history, or legend, but the myth to which he now turned did much more.

  Not mere entertainment, this Germanic mythology dramatized the eternal conflict between people and with their gods, giving opera the seriousness proper to a Gesamtkunstwerk. Some felt Wagner’s operas merely embodied the interminable. Combining two Germanic myth cycles, the stories of Siegfried and of the fall of the gods, the Ring dramatized the great issues of power, love, humanity, and divinity. In Das Rheingold Wagner revealed his unifying concept, for the music is continuous with the drama, without discrete melodies or set numbers. Leitmotivs now were not in vocal melody but in instrumental orchestral themes. After completing his prose sketches for Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in Zurich in late 1851, he declared, “With this conception of mine I totally abandon all connection with the theater and audiences of today.… I cannot think of a performance until after the revolution, only the revolution can give me the artists and the audiences.… Then I will summon what I need out of the ruins. I will find then what I must have.”

  Before Wagner could complete his own Gesamtkunstwerk and see it performed, a friend introduced him to the stirring World as Will and Idea (1819) of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). As he worked on the sketch for Die Walküre, Schopenhauer’s work had an effect like that of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And he read the whole book four times over in 1854. For him it expressed the powers of intuition and the irrational that would be explored by Bergson, Freud, and others in the next century. Schopenhauer was saying something Wagner wanted to hear. Apart from philosophy, it seemed to justify Wagner’s pessimism for never having had a fulfilled love in his life. About this time, too, he had conceived a hopeless love for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the Swiss benefactor who had recently saved him from catastrophe by paying all his debts. Was he inspired to compose Tristan by his love for Mathilde? Or, as others suggest, was writing Tristan what inspired his love for Mathilde? The liaison made it uncomfortable for Wagner to stay on in Zurich. He went to Venice and then to Lucerne to complete Tristan in 1859. After seventy rehearsals in Vienna in 1862–63 it was given up as unperformable, but was finally performed in Munich in 1865.

  That performance was directed by Hans von Bülow, a friend whom Wagner had encouraged to become a conductor in defiance of his family. Von Bülow had married Franz Liszt’s daughter, Cosima. Wagner had met her years before, but now their relationship developed. They traveled together and she bore Wagner three children before her divorce in 1870. The self-sacrificing von Bülow observed, “If Wagner writes but one note more, then it will be due to Cosima alone.” Wagner and Cosima were married in a Protestant church in Lucerne in 1870. This was another chapter in Wagner’s happy relationship with Liszt (1811–1886), who had produced his Lohengrin and constantly cheered him on to compose the Ring and to build Bayreuth. Von Bülow’s prediction was not far wrong, for Cosima was Wagner’s companion and inspiration till his death.

  Wagner had been unduly pessimistic in predicting that his Ring could not be properly performed until “after the revolution.” Das Rheingold (1869) and Die Walküre (1870) were produced separately in Munich. But the first performance of Siegfried and of Götterdämmerung was reserved for the festival of the whole Ring at Bayreuth in August 1876. More than a bouquet of new operas, this was a Gesamtkunstwerk. When before had a composer written the words for his own music, to be performed in an opera house of his own conceiving? At Bayreuth Wagner came close to being the total creative artist. For more than ten years Wagner had been thinking of the proper architectural setting for his Ring. With aid from his sponsor, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he would build his own auditorium. In the shape of an amphitheater with two prosceniums, one behind the other, the theater would create “a complete dislocation of scale,” enlarge the appearance of everything on the stage and separate “the ideal world on the stage from the real world on the far side of the … orchestra pit.”

  He searched the countryside to find the ideal site for his ideal theater. “Oh, I feel as though I was trying to build a house on a catalpa flower. I should have to fill the world with airy vapours first, to separate me and my art from the human race.” Nietzsche reported Wagner’s emotions in May 1872 as the foundation stone was laid on a hill in Bayreuth in the pouring rain. “Wagner drove back to town with some of us; he did not speak and communed long with himself with an expression on his face that words cannot describe. He began the sixtieth year of his life on that day: everything that had gone before had been preparation for that moment.… What may Alexander the Great have seen at that moment when he caused Asia and Europe to be drunk from the same cup?”

  This widely publicized architectural gesture brought attacks on Wagner even from former students. A Munich doctor published A Psychiatric Study (Berlin, 1870) proving that Wagner suffered manic delusions. But with encouragement from Cosima and his father-in-law, Liszt, and financial aid from King Ludwig, construction proceeded as Wagner kept in constant touch with the work. Meanwhile Wagner toured Germany in search of the ideal performers. Till the last moment Wagner oversaw every detail, and he hastened to complete the music. The first performance of the Ring, August 13, 14, 16, and 17, 1876, was a resounding success. At the end of Götterdämmerung, King Ludwig led the applause of celebrities who had come from all over Europe. Wagner said the applause itself justified his calling this a “festival drama.” In retrospect, within a month Wagner was depressed by the inept performers, and he wrote, “There is no footing for me and my work in this day and age.”

  Ideally the four parts of the Ring should have been performed consecutively and without intermissions. Orchestral interludes would provide the continuity from one scene to the next. Bayreuth had come close to providing Wagner with the kind of audience a Gesamtkunstwerk required. Wagner had done much to change the opera atmosphere from the vaudeville informality of the opera buffa to a quasi-religious solemnity. But the first Bayreuth festival incurred such a heavy deficit that twenty years passed before it was repeated there.

  Even after conceiving the Ring, Wagner had composed more conventional works. An amnesty had allowed him to return to Germany in 1861. After Tannhäuser even when revised was a failure in Paris, and the Vienna production of his Tristan was put off because of its unfamiliar style, he turned to comedy-opera. The tuneful Die Meistersinger, which he had been working on for a decade, was performed in Munich in 1860 and would never cease to be popular. It has been laboriously interpreted, either as an allegory of two sides of his own character or of the conflict between tradition and creation which was reconciled in Hans Sachs. To escape his creditors, as he had fled Riga before, in 1864 again Wagner had to flee Vienna. Then by good luck the eighteen-year-old Ludwig II, a music lover, came to the throne of Bavaria. He had read the poem of the Ring, which had been published to raise money for the festival production. He invited Wagner to Munich to complete the Ring, and he remained the essential prop for Wagner and his Bayreuth theater. In 1874 he also provided the house at Bayreuth that Wagner called Wahnfried (peace from illusion) where he completed preparations for the Ring.

  After the triumphant festival of the Ring, Wagner stayed on at Wahnfried. His last opera, Parsifal, the product of five years, pursued again the theme of redemption in the quest for the Holy Grail. Even before its firs
t performance at Bayreuth in 1882, Wagner had written to Ludwig that this Bühnenfestspiel should never be performed anywhere except there. Opera, he insisted, was not mere entertainment but a religious ritual that required the proper setting. At Wagner’s death in 1882 as the most famous composer in Europe, he was buried in a tomb he had prepared in the garden of Wahnfried.

  Though Wagner was not satisfied to be known as a musician, he has survived as a musician. His Utopian vision of the unity of the arts drew him on. With twin talents in word and in music he united the arts in himself and proved it could be done. In an age of many other unifying concepts—evolution and progress, socialism and nationalism—Wagner pursued his own quest for unity. He proved that a Gesamtkunstwerk was possible, but failed to establish the tradition of Total Art Work for which he had hoped.

  Later he was to become a patron saint of Nazism, Hitler’s favorite composer. The annual party rallies of the Nazi Party opened with a performance of Die Meistersinger. So Wagner tests our ability to separate our aesthetic from our moral judgment. He exalted music as the universal language and said a Gesamtkunstwerk would unify all humanity in the arts. But he was himself a narrow, envious man, consumed by chauvinism and bigotry. He curiously insisted that German was the only proper language for opera. And his venom against Jews, which his defenders would justify as an expression of self-hate in reaction to his “isolation,” may really have expressed a resentment of his personal debts to Jews. The young Jew Samuel Lehrs, a companion of Wagner’s unhappy years in Paris, had introduced him to the legends of the Wartburg War, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin. Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) had strongly influenced his early operas, had lent him money, and had given him enthusiastic critical support when he most needed it. But Wagner made Meyerbeer the target of his vicious anti-Semitism, which he shamelessly dared defend as “necessary for the complete birth of my mature being.” Wagner’s Jewry in Music was plainly in the Nazi tradition. His enthusiasm for das Volk and his contempt for das Publikum were ominous. And his Germanic themes resound with the belligerent spirit of “Deutschland über Alles.”