Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  We may remind ourselves at this point that in August 1850 Wagner broke off Siegfried’s Death after only two pages in order to write Opera and Drama and sort out in his own mind his future concept of the drama. Theory and the tools of his trade were now ready “for new feats”—to quote from the prologue to Siegfried’s Death. It would be a modern myth; its theme was to be love and power; the poem would be in alliterative verse; poetic-musical periods would create the musical drama, guaranteeing unity in multiplicity; motifs of “presentiment” and “reminiscence” would ensure that the action was presented to the audience’s feelings at every moment of the work; and the musical “fabric” produced by all the work’s different interwoven elements would be presented by the orchestra commenting on the stage action in the manner of an omniscient Greek chorus.

  But Wagner had still not worked out how to give practical expression to his newly developed concept. While waiting impatiently for Opera and Drama to appear in print and managing to persuade his publisher to increase his fee for five hundred copies from 100 to some 260 thalers, he wrote the poem for Young Siegfried between June 3 and 24, 1851, since it now struck him that two evenings were necessary to realize his Siegfried project: Young Siegfried and Siegfried’s Death.

  Only then did he take the decisive step that was to lead to the four-part Ring. During July and August 1850 he wrote A Communication to My Friends, an autobiographical text extremely important for what it has to say about Wagner’s political, philosophical, and artistic position. It ends with the announcement that “I plan to perform those three dramas, together with the prologue, within the course of three days and a preliminary evening at a festival specially designed for that purpose.”24 The first two parts of the tetralogy that Wagner was announcing in such vague terms were still untitled. Later he vacillated between “The Rhinegold” and “The Rape of the Rhinegold” for the “preliminary evening” and between “Siegmund and Sieglind [sic]: The Valkyrie’s Punishment” and “The Valkyrie” for the “first evening.” Only when the poems of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were more or less finished in November 1852 did Wagner’s friends discover the cycle’s definitive title: The Nibelung’s Ring. A privately printed edition of the poem, limited to fifty copies, was intended for those members of his circle who were unable to attend the series of readings over four consecutive evenings at the Hôtel Baur au Lac in Zurich.

  True, the score still had to be written, a task that was to occupy Wagner for another twenty-two years, and yet what he had produced so far and what he still envisaged was impressive enough: an exile driven from his native Saxony, where he literally had a price on his head, and now living in Zurich under the vigilant eye of the secret police, Wagner was visited by visions that could hardly have been more grandiose. The ancient Greeks remained his model, their tragedies the subject of the following rhapsodic comments in Art and Revolution:

  To the Greeks the performance of a tragedy was a religious festival at which the very gods appeared onstage and bestowed their wisdom on humankind. [. . .] The nation, streaming in their thousands from the state assembly, from the agora, from the country, from ships, from camps, from the remotest regions, filled the amphitheater with thirty thousand spectators in order to see the most profound of all tragedies, Prometheus, to gather their thoughts in the presence of this mightiest of works, to understand themselves, to rede the riddle of their own activities, and to merge as one with their own nature, with their community, and with their god to create the most intimate unity and in the noblest, profoundest peace to live once again the life that only a few hours earlier they had lived in the most restless excitement and most isolated individuality.25

  But quite apart from the fact that it was impossible to relate this idealized picture of a Greek polis to Wagner’s own age, which he regarded as hopelessly decadent, even the practical realization of his plans presupposed a degree of optimism that was nothing if not hubristic. After all, the Greek tetralogies that undoubtedly lay behind his own concept of the four-part Ring had taken place on a single day, whereas Wagner was planning on four whole days. And just as he had allegedly reacted to warnings about the bullets whizzing around him during the Dresden Uprising by claiming “I am immortal,”26 he was now planning an artistic undertaking that can likewise be described only as foolhardy. A man who, according to Cosima, “should by rights have graced the world in Aeschylus’s age,” now felt that he had to deal with a theatrical world that resembled nothing so much as a “fairground stall”: “He speaks the language of the priest, and shopkeepers are supposed to understand him!”27

  How could he find a suitable group of performers, raise the necessary money, and conjure the requisite “infrastructure” out of thin air? Not least, how could he find an audience of believers like those who had attended performances of Greek tragedy in their tens of thousands? Even in this apparently hopeless situation, Wagner had specific ideas for his utopian vision, and in the preface to the first official edition of his libretto for the Ring, he famously evoked the image of a “prince” who would help to cultivate “a genuine national spirit lacking in all conceit” and set up a foundation designed to mount festival performances of the cycle.28 And behold! Only a short time afterward a young prince would read this preface and feel that the appeal was addressed to him in person. His name was King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

  This was the outward aspect of the miracle. Rather more fascinating, by contrast, is its inner aspect, for Wagner was by no means willing to limit himself to philosophical and theoretical deliberations on the subject of the Ring. Still less was he content to study dozens of modern editions and scholarly commentaries on Old Icelandic literature or take a closer interest in the Nibelungenlied, the Eddas, and the Saga of the Volsungs.29 Even the attempt by the respected medievalist Karl Simrock to produce “a single great poem”—the Lay of the Amelungs—from the mass of disparate sources that had survived from the Middle Ages30 was insignificant when set beside Wagner’s desire to create a universal myth. Above all, Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology had made it clear to him that the surviving myths could provide only the building blocks, not the ground plan, that he needed for his task and that he himself would have to become a “creator of myths” in his own right.31 As a result, any attempt to identify the Attic elements in the Ring is little more than an academic exercise, for although there are remarkable parallels, not least with regard to the Oedipus myth to which Wagner gave central importance in Opera and Drama,32 it matters little which motifs he took over consciously or unconsciously and which were already available to him from other contexts as part of the deep structure of myth. Such sources could be of little use to him in developing the large-scale structure of his own particular myth.

  Moreover, such a large-scale structure would have been of little avail if he had not been able to write a successful libretto suitable for his musical drama. It is not just the composition of the Ring that I find miraculous, but Wagner’s ability to thrust aside all theory and literary sources and in under two years to produce a poem that can effortlessly stand comparison with part 2 of Faust in terms of its philosophical significance, even if Goethe had no need to take account of his poem’s suitability as the libretto for a music drama. In November 1852 Wagner wrote to Liszt, enthusiastically acclaiming his libretto as “the poem of my life and of all that I am and feel.”33

  Anyone comparing the monumental nature of the whole undertaking with the chances of its realization is bound to be reminded of a remark by the American dramatist Eugene O’Neill: “The man who pursues the mere attainable should be sentenced to get it—and keep it. [. . .] Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope worth living and dying for—and so attain himself. He with the spiritual guerdon of a hope in hopelessness is nearest to the stars and the rainbow’s foot.”34

  Readers who find this too emotionally overwrought may prefer Nietzsche’s more sober claim that “Wagner is never more Wagner than when difficulties multiply tenfold”35 or else they may cite T
homas Mann’s remark that “the Ring remains to me the epitome of the work per se. In contrast to Goethe, Wagner was a man wholly concerned with the work in hand, a man devoted absolutely to power, the world and success.”36 This is an approach that views the Ring from the standpoint of the artist and does not exclude the possibility that in spite of all its magnificence the Ring may be full of inconsistencies and, its affinities with Greek tragedy notwithstanding, may have little to do with the “classical” theory of drama associated with the name of Aristotle, for, as Walter Benjamin has argued, the “nihilism lodged in the depths of the artistic philosophy of Bayreuth nullified—it could do no other—the concept of the hard, historical actuality of Greek tragedy.” Benjamin observed such nihilism in both Wagner and Nietzsche and believed that it could never be reconciled with the essence of Attic tragedy and with its “central doctrine of tragic guilt and tragic atonement.”37

  By comparing the ethos of Greek tragedy with Wagner’s aestheticization of myth, Benjamin was conscious of the vast gulf that had opened up between them, although it has to be said that not even the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles were performed within a cultic context. Yet even the two Aristotelian unities of action and time are invalidated in the Ring, for none of the dramatis personae appears in all four parts of the drama. Instead, the times and the places where the action unfolds keep changing between Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung.

  If Wagner’s myth is not a myth in the classical tradition, is it at least timeless as demanded by the philosopher Kurt Hübner in response to Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making Bayreuth Ring in 1976?38 I would find it impossible to write about the Ring as a “timeless” myth. Even Wagner himself was clear on this point when planning the work, as he explained to his friends: “The absolute work of art—that is, the work of art that is not bound by time and place nor portrayed by particular people in particular circumstances for a particular audience for the understanding of that audience—is a complete nonsense, a figment of the aesthetic imagination.”39

  Wagner’s principal aim is well illustrated by the title of the tetralogy, for it is not a hero called Siegfried who gives his name to the cycle but a curse-laden ring, a state of affairs undoubtedly due to Wagner’s revolutionary experiences, which were anything but timeless. And the idea of starting the work with the theft of the gold from the Rhine and the forging of the ring, with its built-in curse, goes back—according to the German medievalist Volker Mertens—not to the Old Icelandic Völuspá but to Wagner’s own imagination and to the Communist Manifesto, which Wagner may have known through Georg Herwegh.40

  Bernard Shaw, who first saw the Ring in Bayreuth in 1889 (lack of funds apparently prevented him from attending the cycles staged by Angelo Neumann in London in 1882), was one of the first writers to interpret the work against the background of the nineteenth century. This was a view that inspired Chéreau in his centennial production in Bayreuth. The work, the director insisted, was self-evidently based on a “nineteenth-century myth”: “It is the past history of our industrial society, the infancy of our world as it takes its first steps.” And he went on: “To want a timeless myth strikes me as a frame without the picture.”41 In advancing this view, he had the support of Michel Foucault:

  On the stage at Bayreuth, where Wagner wanted to create a myth for the nineteenth century, Chéreau and his designer Richard Peduzzi brought back to life the images of this very same century—images that Wagner may have shared not only with Bakunin, Marx, Dickens, Jules Verne, and Böcklin, but also with the architects of the factories and municipal residences, with the illustrators of children’s books, and with the agents of anti-Semitism. They showed this mythology, which still rules our world today.42

  The philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach has summed up this approach in similar terms:

  The Ring is the most significant myth of the nineteenth century. What it depicts is not the universally human in general but what nineteenth-century man—that is, Richard Wagner—was bound to regard as the universally human in the wake of idealism and revolution in an age of capitalist modernization, in short, the contemporary truth about the links between love, power, guilt, and redemption.43

  But how does labeling the Ring a “modern” myth help us to understand it? Classical antiquity regarded myth as a narrative invested with a collective, binding authority and, hence, with a religious potential: by partaking of the myth, the individual could be assured that the world and society constituted a meaningful whole. “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” (The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism) is the modern title given to a text dating from 1796–97 and believed to be the work of either Friedrich Schelling, Hölderlin, or Hegel. It translates this classical view of myth into the here and now, arguing that once the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had swept aside the old state order but offered nothing in its place that might provide social order with a religious legitimacy, a “new myth” was required to provide a post-Enlightenment blasé society with a new sense of direction, which it would do through the medium of an art that could be physically experienced with the senses.

  Manfred Frank has demonstrated the extent to which the revolutionary Wagner was able to learn from early romantic ideas such as these. At the same time, he cites Carl Dahlhaus’s insistence on the distance between the ideas of the early Schelling and those underpinning Wagner’s conception of the Ring, for, as Dahlhaus has written, myth “is not so much restored by Wagner as destroyed, or, rather, it is restored in order to be destroyed.”44 Frank finds an even clearer way of expressing his conviction that Wagner was “revoking” the “new mythology”: “Profoundly compromised, irretrievably lost, robbed of all their credibility, certainly not sentimentally glorified, the gods—who justify the status quo on the basis of the highest certainties of faith—abdicate in the most shameful manner. Myth becomes negative.”45 This can be allowed to stand as long as it is seen as an analysis of Wagner’s great historicophilosophical narrative and if the composer is not reproached for not offering a solution. For what would such a solution have looked like in the modern world? In a society that has lost its sense of community and its authentic metaphysical values?

  This brings us back to Walter Benjamin. In his eyes the modern world is characterized by two factors in particular: a “traumatic shock” and the staging of that shock.46 This shock stems from the attempts undertaken by Luther and his reformation to replace good works by faith. Since the soul was now dependent exclusively on God’s grace, human actions lost their value. “Those who looked deeper saw the scene of their existence as a rubbish heap of partial, inauthentic actions,” with the result that “gloominess” filled an “empty world.” German tragedy, Benjamin believed, still offered the chance of “enigmatic satisfaction” at the contemplation of that world.47 And at least its “constant creation of meaning affords the vaguest of hopes that it may be possible to slow down the fate of the empty world, even if that fate cannot be averted altogether.”48

  Inherently critical of the whole concept of progress, Benjamin’s ideas may be directly applied to the Ring. At the same time they reveal a powerful motif behind Wagner’s philosophy of history, which is not just Christian in a general kind of way but also specifically Lutheran. His artistic leitmotif of “redemption through destruction” clearly recalls Luther’s Small Catechism, which Wagner was undoubtedly required to recite from memory and which refers to the “Old Adam” who has to be “drowned” every day in order for a “new man” to arise. Luther’s Great Catechism refers explicitly to the gradual “destruction” of the old in favor of the new. In much the same way, the question as to the origins and existence of evil—questions of great significance for the relationship between Wotan and Alberich—has roots that are ultimately Lutheran. Although Luther leaves the origins of evil shrouded in darkness, he is in no doubt that by nature mankind tends toward evil.49

  A second historicophilosophical trace on the road to the Ring leads us to Nietzsche, for he too d
efined the “modern” world in the same sense as that found in the Ring—namely, as “‘chaos,’ a complex fabric of existential and experiential perspectives for which there is no longer an overriding viewpoint, no unifying standpoint afforded by religion.”50 This would be unbearable if it were not that above and beyond all perspectivist variety, there was not a single unifying experience of the Ring, which Nietzsche found, quite rightly, in Wagner’s music, even if he later came increasingly to criticize that music for becoming bogged down on the level of the suggestive and mimetic instead of soaring aloft to the peaks of “absolute” music whose “existence in sound” would provide a counterweight to the “senseless” aberrations and confusions of the plot.51

  Anyone wanting to see the Ring as a work underpinned by a coherent philosophy will have realized by now that this is impossible, for although Wagner himself clearly laid down the foundations for a reading that involves the depiction of a world rent from first to last by power struggles that leave “purely human” love no chance to develop, thereby leading inevitably to its own downfall, it is clear that as soon as we examine the details of this “philosophy,” we are bound to be both fascinated by the unfathomable complexity of its artistic realization and at the same time confronted by the numerous inconsistencies and contradictions that the work contains. Not that there is any lack of attempts to propose an interpretation of the Ring. Udo Bermbach has drawn a distinction between “socio-utopian and socialist, mythological and archetypal, philosophical, psychoanalytic, feminist, nationalist and racist interpretations,” while adding his own view of the cycle: “The Ring is a political parable, telling the story of a world ruined by politics, the story of politicians obsessed with power and with the acquisition of that power, their thinking fired by fantasies about dominion and order, and accepting whatever risks may be involved in the pursuit of their obsessions, even if those risks include their own destruction.”52