Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  Nor was it any accident that he felt it was music that had led to the conciliatory ending of Die Feen.34 There is no doubt, then, that with this last-named work Wagner had taken a decisive step as far as his later output was concerned: the pessimistic idea that underpins his archetypal scene and that may be summed up as the belief that meaningful love is impossible in a meaningless world is now accompanied—contrapuntally, as it were—by the conviction that there is indeed something that extends beyond death: music. Although none of Wagner’s later works features an Arindal opening the gates to another world by singing and playing the harp, it is enough to recall the number of works that end with the sounds of one or more harps to see the importance of such transcendence: Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal.

  By writing music dramas, Wagner ensured that the corrupt and hostile world with which men and women have to deal in their everyday lives is transcended in the direction of redemption. In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche—approaching the subject from the standpoint of Schopenhauer’s pessimism—brought his own particular brand of personal enthusiasm to the idea, prompting a no less elated response in Wagner: “He is happy to have lived to read it,” his wife noted in her diary in January 1872.35 His reaction is hardly surprising, for his youthful admirer had provided welcome historical and philosophical backing for his own ideas about the classical synthesis of the arts from the spirit of music. Even more importantly, Nietzsche’s book offered its readers a description of the world uncannily close in character to Wagner’s archetypal scene and aptly summed up in Peter Sloterdijk’s words: “The usual individual life is a hell made up of suffering, brutality, baseness, and entanglement. [. . .] This life is made bearable only by intoxication and by dreams, by this twofold path to ecstasy that is open to individuals for self-redemption.”36

  It was in this sense that Nietzsche was later to describe Tristan und Isolde as “the actual opus metaphysicum of all art”37 and to suggest that love and the death of lovers can rise above the trivial world only by being borne aloft on a wave of music. Wagner’s claim in A Communication to My Friends that “I can conceive of the spirit of music only in love”38 can be effortlessly inverted: true love can be grasped only in the spirit of music. In turn this leads to an even more crucial point: since Wagner’s understanding of love shifts constantly between pure and impure, lustful and renunciatory, narcissistic and sociable, tyrannical and meek, animalistic and sublime, it is impossible to pin it down or define its meaning, with the result that music alone provides the only definition of love that the composer—or any other artist—can make us feel. Although this sounds vague to the point of unhelpfulness, it does in fact make sense, for Wagner spent his entire life believing only in his art—and this is true even when he was committed to the bourgeois revolutions of 1848–49. He was enough of a realist to see that there was literally nothing on earth that he could do to counter the world’s inherent baseness and evil. In this he followed Nietzsche’s dictum: “We have art so that we are not destroyed by the truth.”39 And yet he interpreted it in a very specific way: even within the world of art, it is music alone that is capable of offering the listener not fruitless intellectual or rational explanations, but meanings that our senses can grasp at once. And although Wagner invests this ability with a metaphysical dimension that is grounded in art, he still sets out from a physical and psychological reality: in every culture music embodies first and foremost the principle of universal reconciliation that Wagner himself termed “love.”

  It hardly needs adding that our experience of music has changed with the passage of time and that our need for harmony is tested to its limits by the art music of the modern world—not least by Wagner himself. And yet there is no other art form that can compare to music in its ability to express not only our desire for an ideal world but also the fulfillment of that desire through the actual performance of the music. This means that in Wagner’s stage works two realities converge: the action embodies the social reality of a world that is hopelessly evil, while the music encapsulates the psychological and anthropological reality of a “principle of hope” that can be grasped by our senses. This ambivalence may help to explain the fascination that Wagner continues to exert on us.

  Against this background, Wagner’s archetypal scenario may be seen to produce a leitmotif that permeates the whole of his output for the stage: “redemption through destruction.”40 Adriano and Irene, the Dutchman and Senta, Tannhäuser and Elisabeth, Lohengrin and Elsa, Tristan and Isolde, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and Parsifal and Kundry are all “couples” who find a quietus in death or at the very least are transported into an alternative existence. It is the task and function of the music to ensure that the “lifeless” sinking away that is often mentioned in the stage directions is transformed into the state of “gentle reconciliation” in which Isolde dies her Liebestod, or love-death.

  If I refer to “redemption through destruction” as a leitmotif, it is because it is not a fixed formula from which Wagner’s thinking can be seamlessly derived, but a leading idea that assumes different forms and that explains much, but not everything. There appears to be a variant of the motif even in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The mastersingers of Nuremberg), a work in which we might least expect it. When Hans Sachs proclaims at the end

  Zerging’ in Dunst

  das heil’ge röm’sche Reich,

  uns bliebe gleich

  die heil’ge deutsche Kunst!

  [Although the Holy Roman Empire may fade away, we shall still have holy German art!]

  Wagner is imagining the end of a particular social reality to which only “holy art” can reconcile us—and there seems little doubt that he was ultimately thinking of his own specific art here.

  Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg remains peripheral to this particular line of argument and that the motif acquires a note of deadly seriousness only in the other works, all of which end in death, ensuring that physical or figurative destruction is a central theme in all of them. Clearly all of their scenarios revolve around the notion of doom. The fact that doom also signifies redemption is a point that Nietzsche observed when he noted that “there is nothing about which Wagner has thought more deeply than redemption: his opera is the opera of redemption.”41 Only in Tannhäuser, of course, does such redemption rest on the intervention of a merciful God, whereas in every other case it is bought at the cost of “sweat, anguish, and want” and achieved only through “self-annihilation.”42

  These terms are taken from Wagner’s essay “Jews in Music.”43 Here we are interested in one particular aspect of this text, according to which Wagner holds out the promise of “redemption” through “self-annihilation” and “destruction,” offering it not only to Jews, as many writers have claimed on the strength of a—possibly consciously—cursory reading of the corpus delicti. True, the Jews are in particularly urgent need of “self-annihilation” because it is they who have “corroded” the “living organism” of modern society, but inasmuch as this organism can no longer be saved, all the members of this society are doomed to perish.

  The Ring clearly demonstrates that this also applies to the tragic figure of Wotan: “Wodan [sic] rises to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction,” Wagner informed August Röckel in January 1854:

  This is all that we need to learn from the history of humankind: to will what is necessary and to bring it about ourselves. [. . .] Observe him closely! he resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence, whereas Siegfried is the man of the future whom we desire and long for but who cannot be made by us, since he must create himself on the basis of our own annihilation.44

  Writing about himself in 1851 in the earliest—handwritten—version of A Communication to My Friends, Wagner insisted that “I am not a republican or a democrat or a soc
ialist or a communist but an artist, and as such I am a thoroughgoing revolutionary wherever my gaze, my wishes, and my will extends, destroying the old in creating the new!”45 Shortly beforehand, he had repeatedly spoken of the need to “destroy capital”46 and bring about the “destruction of the state,”47 demands that he had made in his role as a Dresden revolutionary.

  Here the motif of “redemption through destruction” dominates Wagner’s theoretical statements, too. And if they strike a more somber note than the message of his music dramas, it is because the musical dimension is missing: music alone has the power that allows us to feel the element of redemption, adding a note of joy to the pessimism of self-annihilation.

  Wagner’s ideas about “destruction” and “self-annihilation” in his stage works are every bit as real as every other aspect of his music theater: death occurs not just metaphorically but in the spirit of a higher reality. As for his own life on earth, Wagner no doubt shared Martin Luther’s conviction that the old Adam needed to be destroyed every day but that this did not mean laying violent hand to himself. In this sense it would be misguided to assume a straightforward link between life and works and to regard the two as congruent in every way. Even so, there can be little doubt that Wagner himself repeatedly equated the two. As Christian Kaden has emphasized, the myth that unfolds in the Ring, for example, is not concerned with unreal illusions but aims to “threaten the world of appearances and to question our illusions by destabilizing them.” From this point of view, it remains “true to real life” as experienced by Wagner himself.48

  Die Feen: a scene from act 3 of Emilio Sagi’s 2009 production at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet, which treated the opera as a fairy-tale revue. (Photograph courtesy of Ullstein Bild—Roger Viollet/Colette Masson.)

  It is in this sense that Wagner identifies with his own Flying Dutchman in A Communication to My Friends, claiming that the character “arose so often from the swamps and billows of my life, and drew me to him with such unresisting power.” And he writes rhapsodically about Senta as “the as yet non-existent, longed-for, dreamt-of, and infinitely womanly woman” who alone was able to redeem the Dutchman in him.49 Before we attempt to interpret this is a purely figurative sense, we would do well to recall a letter that Wagner wrote to Liszt at the time of Tristan und Isolde:

  Since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be properly sated from beginning to end: I have planned in my head a Tristan and Isolte [sic], the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception; with the “black flag” that flutters at the end, I shall then cover myself over in order to die.50

  That nothing changed even during Wagner’s years in Munich in the 1860s is clear from the many depressing and even desperate entries in his so-called Brown Book, a diary nominally concerned with the intensity of his feelings for Cosima. Even his comments during his final decade in Bayreuth are marked by a sense of decline and transience.

  But how is it possible to reconcile Wagner’s view of himself as the Dutchman and even as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew whose myth, in Dieter Borchmeyer’s view, is “a myth about Wagner’s life as an artist,”51 with a man whose increasing artistic successes turned him into one of the leading figures of his age, living in Wilhelminian affluence in his villa, Wahnfried, and looking back on two marriages and numerous affairs? The answer is simple: archetypal scenarios and leitmotifs are emblematic of an inner reality that invariably keeps one step ahead of its outer counterpart. Although it is possible to live in both worlds simultaneously, it is the inner experience that will always enjoy the higher degree of significance.

  Toward the end of his life Wagner expressed his thoughts on this theme in his essay “The Stage Consecration Festival Drama in Bayreuth”:

  Which of us can spend his whole life gazing freely and openly at a world of murder and robbery that is organized and legitimized by lying, deceit, and hypocrisy without occasionally having to turn away with a feeling of shuddering disgust? Where then is our gaze directed? Often, no doubt, into the depths of death. But to those of us who are cut off from all this by their destiny and who have a different calling, the truest reflection of the world may indeed seem to be a message from its innermost soul, a message that prophesies redemption. To be able to forget the actual world of deception in this prophetic reflection must surely be the reward for the painful truth of our recognition of all its wretchedness.52

  It is very much in the tradition of Greek antiquity that Wagner invested the musical drama with a cathartic, purifying force: by seeing through the world’s iniquities and by reflecting them in his art in the form of a “prophetic reflection,” the artist enables his community of listeners to forget the world’s wickedness. In doing so, he speaks for the “innermost soul” of the world, a soul that reminds us about “redemption” and prophesies its advent.

  A Word about Felix Mendelssohn

  When Wagner looked at Felix Mendelssohn, he saw himself—incredibly—as the underdog. To his inner eye, Mendelssohn seemed a Jewish child of fortune, a banker’s son hailing from a good home, with exquisitely educated private tutors, and enjoying the blessing of the elderly Goethe, to say nothing of his distinguished artistic career: when he was eleven, his parents arranged a performance of his singspiel Soldatenliebschaft (Soldiers’ Love) with members of the Royal Orchestra; by the time he was seventeen his inspired overture to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was on everyone’s lips; and he had only just turned twenty when half of Berlin paid tribute to him for his epoch-making revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

  And so it remained for many years. After a few terms at university, Mendelssohn was permitted to embark on a Grand Tour lasting almost three years, his journey taking him to England, Italy, and France and not only bringing him into contact with many well-known figures from the world of art and politics but allowing him to perform his works and get to know the music of other composers. In Paris, for example, he stumbled upon Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, only for him to dismiss it as “cold and heartless.” Its music, in particular, was said to lack “warmth and truth.”1

  Wagner, who spent the greater part of his life complaining about the “poverty” of his parental home,2 found himself in Paris a few years after Mendelssohn, but his journey there was no primrose path, for he was fleeing from his Baltic creditors. And even after he had been appointed kapellmeister to the royal court of Saxony in 1843, he continued to lag far behind his rival in terms of his fame and achievements. His elder by only four years, Mendelssohn was not only principal conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig but—from June 1841—conductor to the Dresden court, a post that involved no full-time commitments. But what would have become of Wagner if Mendelssohn had decided at that time to take on a permanent position in Dresden?

  During their lifetime, the two men managed to avoid getting in each other’s way. Rather the opposite, in fact: Wagner was full of praise for St. Paul when it was performed in Dresden in 1843, while Mendelssohn commented appreciatively on Der fliegende Holländer at the time of its first performance in Berlin in 1844. Two years later he conducted the Tannhäuser overture at one of his Gewandhaus concerts. Moreover, the two composers shared common ground in respect of their views on art and politics: both of them longed for a new type of German opera that would be taken seriously. They also promoted serious concert programs. Nor were they afraid of Beethoven’s Ninth. And they did everything in their power to encourage competent professional musicians who were passionate about their work. In turn this led them to introduce a number of reforms designed to improve the standing of professional musicians.

  It was only when Mendelssohn died in 1847 that this situation changed in unedifying ways. In 1850, in his essay “Jews in Music,” Wagner held up his colleague as a classic example of the way in which “a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may claim as his own the finest and most varied cu
lture and the highest and most delicate sense of honor, and yet never be able—even with the help of all these advantages—to call forth in us that deep and affecting effect that we surely expect from art.”3 During his Bayreuth years, when he was never at a loss for a crude and coarse expression, Wagner compared Mendelssohn to “certain apes who, so gifted when young, become stupid as their strength increases.”4 Even so, he continued to praise his rival’s concert overtures as finely wrought genre scenes. A particular passage in the Fingal’s Cave overture, for example, he found “tremendously beautiful, ghostly.”5 And there was a certain irony to his comment in 1871, when he was working on a “big aria for Hagen, but only for the orchestra”: “It is incredible what a bungler I am—I can’t transcribe at all. [. . .] Mendelssohn would raise his hands in horror if he ever saw me composing.”6

  Two years earlier, in 1869, Wagner had expressed the view that Mendelssohn’s complicated position in the musical life of his age entitled him to a certain sympathy, which was not the case with “today’s musical bankers who are sprung from the school of Mendelssohn or who are commended to the world by dint of his personal patronage.” Despite—or because of—their “elegant polish,”7 these were conductors who banked on the music’s outer brilliance and ultimately, therefore, on their own success. Like real-life bankers, they produced nothing of value but merely kept music in circulation as if it were some commodity. As a result, music was of value only as a form of exchange—above and beyond the disagreeable anti-Semitic context, this remains a sore point in terms of every kind of commercial concert-giving today.