Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  No, for as Wagner observed in the very same breath, Lohengrin is his “most tragic” work. It also, if not exclusively, reflects his current feelings about life: as court kapellmeister and as an opera composer of some distinction in a relatively powerful position, he saw himself as a hero like Lohengrin, and yet ultimately he felt he was misunderstood in terms of his message to humanity. Wagner aka Lohengrin was not of this world.

  Would this situation ever change? During the years when he was working on Lohengrin, Wagner began to cherish the hope that political upheaval might create a social climate in which a renascent Lohengrin might have the chance to be unconditionally accepted and understood on the strength of feeling. This leads us on to the political dimension of the work, a dimension that ill consorts with its fairy-tale, legendary aspect and presents the modern opera director with serious difficulties. The situation is complicated above all by the fact that the political element failed to inspire Wagner as a composer but is nonetheless integral to the plot, which requires a historical framework or, to be more specific, the attempts by King Henry the Fowler to win over the “dear men of Brabant” for his campaign against the Hungarians. And so the listener is assailed in the very first scene by military fanfares on four army trumpets, a pep talk from the King, and valiant calls of welcome on the part of the Brabantine nobles as they clash their weapons together. In later scenes, too, we hear brass fanfares, shouts of “Hail” and vassals vowing to fight “for German lands with German swords! So may the empire’s might be preserved!” And when Lohengrin returns to the world of the Grail, the King and his nobles appeal to him with the words: “Oh, stay! Oh, do not leave! Your vassals await their leader [Führer].” Although Lohengrin refuses to be swayed by their entreaty, he offers them a prophetic vision of the future:

  Doch, großer König, laß mich dir weissagen:

  dir Reinem ist ein großer Sieg verlieh’n.

  Nach Deutschland sollen noch in fernsten Tagen

  des Ostens Horden siegreich niemals zieh’n!

  [But, great King, let me foretell: a great victory will be granted you in your purity. Not even in the remotest future will Eastern hordes overrun Germany.]

  We must resist the temptation to interpret these lines as the harbinger of a nationalistic or even a National Socialist desire for territorial expansion, for Wagner was operating within the political climate of his time. In terms of domestic politics Lohengrin’s victory over the intrigue fomented by Ortrud and Telramund may be seen to reflect the imaginary triumph of a new and highly desirable form of bourgeois rule over the corrupt system then in existence. From the standpoint of foreign policy, Wagner had been a champion of Polish independence since the 1830s and, like many other artists and intellectuals, he was sympathetic to the manifold aspirations of the Polish people in their wish to throw off the yoke of czarist Russia. Although the Holy Alliance between Russia, Austria, and Prussia still existed at this period, at least as a formal arrangement, czarist Russia was currently exerting considerable pressure on Western Europe in general and on Prussia in particular, so that Wagner’s reference to “Eastern hordes” could well have been interpreted as an allusion to the threat that was posed by Russia at this time.

  No matter whether it was Hungary or Russia that was being pilloried here, the warning about these “Eastern hordes” was still sufficiently explosive even as late as 1876 for Wagner to have to omit the relevant passage in a performance that he himself conducted in Vienna in March of that year. Undertaken at the request of the director of the Vienna court opera, the cut was intended to spare the sensitivities of the Hungarian half of the imperial and royal dual monarchy.7

  Regardless, however, of such details, it is only the libretto of Lohengrin that has any political connotations, for in Wagner’s eyes there could be no such thing as political music: “that which is to be expressed in the language of music is limited to emotions and feelings,” with the result that the task facing the “word-tone poet” was to express “the purely human as freed from all convention.”8 And above and beyond such theoretical considerations, it is surely not the “political” parts of Lohengrin that make it the musical event that it is, but the “poetical” sections: the “white” romanticism embodied by the lovers Lohengrin and Elsa and the “black” romanticism of the two conspirators, Friedrich and Ortrud, who inspired Wagner to write music so advanced that the world of Henry the Fowler pales into insignificance in comparison. (It is also worth adding parenthetically that many a Bayreuth conductor has cursed Wagner for the military music played by the onstage band in Lohengrin, the particular acoustics of the Festspielhaus making it well-nigh impossible to position the players correctly and even more difficult to coordinate them with the orchestra in the pit.)

  Musically speaking, then, the piece would not suffer if the work’s “politics” were disregarded, and yet—as we have already noted—these “politics” remain an indispensable part of the action. Wagner consciously constructed his plot around the idea of an encounter between reality and a fairy-tale realm that he himself preferred to describe as the world of “legend.” The date at which the action takes place can be determined with some precision: it is the reign of Henry the Fowler (ca. 912–36), who was the Duke of Saxony and king of East Franconia. He defeated the Hungarians—previously believed to be invincible—in 933. Wagner was merely repeating received opinion when he made Henry the “German” king of a “German empire” that was still in its infancy. But this does not alter the fact that in his own eyes he was setting out from a historically authenticated position to which his response was to introduce a miracle. Of course, this use of miracles has precedents in early romantic literature, which often featured the irruption of the miraculous into the everyday secular world, but at the same time there is no doubt about Wagner’s own inspired coup: by locating his fairy tale within a concrete historical context, he is able to present us with an apparently optimistic political utopia, while his utopian vision of successful human relationships is postponed sine die.

  It would not be wrong to conclude from this that Wagner believed that political upheaval must precede any changes to the human heart, an attitude reflected in, and confirmed by, his own situation at this time. He wrote Lohengrin during the years leading up to the bourgeois revolution of March 1848, a decisive period in German history generally known as the Vormärz. Nor was he indifferent to the political developments that were taking place at this period. He numbered himself among the progressives whose agenda included the idea of a German nation, while stressing its roots in the Middle Ages. On long walks in Dresden and the surrounding area, he would discuss the current political situation with his music director August Röckel, who understood more about politics than music and who helped to organize the Dresden Uprising in May 1849, an act of insurrection for which he was sentenced to death, although the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in Waldheim. That Wagner was fired by Röckel’s optimism is clear from the memoirs of the professional revolutionary Alfred Meißner, who was introduced to the composer during an outing to the Dresden Waldschlößchen arranged by local artists and literary figures in September 1846: “I remember his words exactly: a revolution had already taken place in people’s heads, the new Germany was ready and waiting, like a bronze cast that needed only a hammer blow on its clay shell in order for it to emerge.”9

  Writers on Wagner have spilled much ink over the question of whether he was really a political animal or, rather, an artist who wanted to further his own particular cause with the aid of politics. But this is splitting hairs. Wagner was interested only in his own individual mission. In November 1847 he complained in no uncertain terms to the Berlin critic Ernst Kossak about the “poor impression of Berlin” that he had formed during a series of performances of Rienzi in the city: “There is a dam that must be broken down here, and the means we must use is Revolution! [. . .] A single sensible decision by the King of Prussia with regard to his opera house, and all will be well again!”10

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p; But Wagner’s peculiar blend of egocentricity and naïveté did not prevent him from becoming a revolutionary overnight. Whatever misgivings one may harbor about this label, it is one that Wagner emphatically deserves, whereas he does not deserve to be described as a democrat in the spirit of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848–49. Even if he advocated the violent overthrow of the existing order in the anonymous articles that he is believed to have contributed to Röckel’s Volksblätter, he continued to uphold the romantic tradition of dreaming of a king who was directly legitimized by his people. He wanted a popular monarchy that could bestow its blessings without regard for a “state” that was represented by the nobility and military on the one hand and by “capital” on the other. Under these “ideal” conditions, Wagner could propagate his notion of art as the new religion without having to take account of a hierarchy of sclerotic civil servants or having to compete with a music industry geared merely to making a profit. He would receive his commissions from the king and execute them in the name of the people. If they had still been living in ancient Greece, then Attic tragedy from the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles—an age in which Wagner likewise took an intense interest—would have served as his standard of comparison. In the nineteenth century the idea of a German popular monarchy was the most obvious alternative.

  We may legitimately mock Wagner for proposing a utopian vision that may sometimes enjoy the sympathetic, if ironic, support of today’s men and women of the theater, motivated, as they are, by anger at the lack of understanding of their own cultural institutions. But equally clearly we should admire Wagner for the creative way in which he sought to integrate his master plan into a stage work, namely, Lohengrin. For here, too, we find a popular monarchy and a hero whom Wagner explicitly hailed as an “artist” and who comports himself in the work as a kind of state-appointed artist. In the course of the opera he unites the people of Brabant, who are “without a prince” and living “in discord.” And he gives them a ruler in the person of the young Duke Gottfried, who in future will reign with the Grail’s blessing, Lohengrin having turned him back into human form after the wicked witch Ortrud cast a spell on him and transformed him into the swan that had brought our hero from the kingdom of the Grail to the banks of the Schelde in Antwerp.

  It is said that this aspect of the work reflects Wagner’s own “political” view of the situation: if artists like him had any influence over the state, they would be able to hold a protecting hand over young heirs to the throne, with the result that revolutions would no longer be necessary. Lohengrin is supposed to demonstrate that although such a notion is utopian, it still remains desirable. Such writers also argue that Wagner did not feel uncomfortable in the role of a political redeemer and that he later attempted to play the part of an intuitive political adviser to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who bears a number of similarities with the young Duke Gottfried, for all that he himself would have preferred to be an otherworldly Lohengrin than a temporal ruler.

  On the other hand, it has also been claimed on a similar basis that Wagner himself felt that on a personal level he had to live without the hope of ever finding fulfillment in love, at least under the social conditions existing at that time. Lohengrin/Wagner remains a stranger in the world and seems to anticipate the maxim of Theodor Adorno—a later critic of Wagner—in his Minima moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”11

  It is with a certain fascination that the reader notes the skill with which Wagner has introduced into Lohengrin his own situation as man and artist as well as his engagement with the politics of his day. No less impressive is his skill in integrating a fairy-tale motif into a historical framework that has much in common with real life, for all that it has been adapted to suit his own view of the world. Indeed, so successful has he been in this regard that an important political message emerges: we need artists of genius as pure in spirit as Lohengrin to provide our country, torn apart as it is by political intrigue, with the prospect of a better future.

  Wagner’s interest in Lohengrin went hand in hand with a detailed study of the Middle Ages. In the case of Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser he had been able to seek inspiration in the writings of romantic poets such as Tieck and Heine, but he was unable to do so with Lohengrin, which had not been reworked by these writers. Instead, he had recourse to the late thirteenth-century Lohengrin epic, a poem for a long time attributed—erroneously—to Wolfram von Eschenbach and one which the books on the Middle Ages that he consulted retold in various ways. Here he found most of his Lohengrin motifs as well as the characteristic combination of history and fairy tale. The version of the Lohengrin narrative that dates from around 1280 tells how Henry the Fowler won his battle against a hundred thousand Hungarians with the help of only four thousand Christian knights thanks to the supernatural strength of his vassal Lohengrin.12 However mysterious this emissary of the Grail may be, he marries Elsa in the medieval sources and they have children together before she finally asks him the fatal question about his origins. This episode is described as follows by San-Marte in his translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival:

  Nachts ward das Beilager gefeiert,

  Und er am Morgen ausgesteuert

  Mit der Krone von Brabant,

  Die Hochzeit wird mit Pracht begangen,

  Und die Fürsten und Baron’ empfangen

  Ihre Lehen von seiner Hand. [. . .]

  Aus ihrer hochbeglückten Ehe

  Wurden schöne Kinder geboren;

  Jedoch der Freude folgte Wehe.

  Wie sie gewonnen, ward sie verloren.13

  [At night their nuptials were celebrated, and in the morning he was invested with the crown of Brabant. The wedding was marked with pomp, and the princes and barons received their fiefs from his hand. [. . .] From their most happy marriage beautiful children were born; but joy was followed by pain. As it was won, so it was lost.]

  Nietzsche was one of the first writers to mock Wagner for cleaning up the narrative, arguing that the “Master” had taught us “that it may have the direst consequences if one doesn’t go to bed at the right time.”14 But Lohengrin’s refusal to sleep with Elsa underscores a message that was bound to be alien to the Middle Ages: although there may be hope for the German nation, this is not the case for the heroic individual who can fulfill his mission only by renouncing personal happiness. For Wagner himself this topos may well have seemed convincing, but in the light of subsequent German history it is bound to strike today’s observers as troubling. A century ago it had positively explosive force when the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann found themselves at loggerheads over the opera, a disagreement that even found expression in their respective writings, albeit in encoded form.

  The younger of the brothers, Thomas, had been an ardent admirer of Lohengrin since his youth, and according to his “Essay on the Theater” of 1908 he had attended performances of all Wagner’s works at the Stadttheater in Lübeck, where he had been entranced by “this vast and questionable oeuvre, [. . .] this clever and ingenious wizardry, full or yearning and cunning, this fixed theatrical improvisation.”15 He could hardly remain indifferent, then, when his elder brother attacked one of his favorite works in his novel Der Untertan (variously translated as The Patrioteer and Man of Straw), which he completed in 1914. Its hero, Diederich Heßling, attends a performance of Lohengrin and exults in the nationalist fervor of the work. Unlike his fiancée Guste, he

  sided more with the King beneath the oak tree, since this was clearly the most prominent person. His entrance was not particularly dashing, [. . .] but what he said was to be welcomed from a national standpoint. “Protect the honor of the Reich in East and West.” Bravo! Each time he sang the word “German,” he stretched out his hand, and the music emphasized it accordingly. Elsewhere, too, the music powerfully underlined those lines that one should listen to. Powerful, yes, that was the word.

  Diederich is particularly struck by the woman playing Elsa, an “emphatically German type, with billowing blonde hair
and a lively temperament,” only to be told by Guste that the soprano is in fact an “emaciated Jewess.” For Diederich, Lohengrin himself embodies “supreme power, flashing in a magical way. [. . .] It was no accident that there were higher powers.” As he later informed Guste, the moral of the story was that “next to God, the supreme master is answerable only to his conscience.”16

  It was not only brain-dead members of the petty bourgeoisie like Diederich Heßling who harbored such thoughts under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Max Koch, for example, was not only a self-confessed Wagnerian, he also taught the history of modern German literature in Breslau. In his reminiscences he recalls that “when war broke out, King Henry’s promise that the country’s enemies ‘should never again dare to draw near from the desolate East’ seemed like a comforting prophecy that was to come true at Tannenberg, causing us to echo his cries of ‘For German lands the German sword! So may the empire’s might be preserved!’”17

  For Thomas Mann’s repudiation of a nationalist interpretation of Lohengrin, whether such a view was meant to be taken seriously, as with Max Koch, or clothed in satire, as in the case of Mann’s brother Heinrich, we must turn to his Reflections of a Non-Political Man, which he conceived during the First World War and published in 1918. Here Mann drew a distinction between an aesthetic and a political view of the world and reckoned it to the credit of the older type of Germans that they insisted on the former and refused to be dragged into politics. Although there were political artists, they represented a type of artistry that was “half-hearted, intellectual, willful and artificial,” because the politician demanded political consequences from all forms of art. Turning to Lohengrin, Mann noted that