Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  This is one of the most remarkable passages in the whole of the Ring, for what kind of “danger” can be involved in inviting the vassals to the wedding of Gunther and Brünnhilde and instructing them to offer up sacrifices to the gods? They are to bring down a wild boar for Froh, slay a goat for Donner, and slaughter sheep for Fricka “so that she gives a goodly marriage.” That Hagen adds an elaborate Baroque ornament to the word “gives” makes it clear beyond a doubt that he feels only mockery and contempt for the ceremonies that are about to take place. And this is no accident, for although Wagner’s stage directions indicate that altar stones to Wotan, Fricka, and Donner are located close to the Gibichung Hall, no one seriously believes in the power of the gods any longer, least of all Hagen himself. But how does he justify his dramatic shouts of “Woe” and “To arms”? And why does he want to make his vassals drunk? For Lawrence Kramer, this is “the one moment in the opera when Hagen ‘lets himself go’ expressively.”27 In order to assure himself of his men’s loyalty and provide them with a fix in the form of a mixture of power fantasies, grim joviality, and alcohol, he briefly adopts their own coarse lifestyle, with its close connection between alarmism and crude jokes.

  Wagner’s ability to use music, too, to create a sense of menace here is remarkable. Until now, Hagen has largely been a background figure and a loner, a gloomy, lowering figure on the edges of the action, but now, in the third scene of act 2, he and his vassals represent brute force as such. Symptomatic of this development is the writing for the steerhorns, which in Bayreuth were simple natural instruments until the 1940s. Rumor has it that American GIs then carried them off as trophies. Hagen plays the note C on his steerhorn, while those of his vassals reply to his right and left with a D and a D-flat, producing a sinister sound in keeping with the macabre and aggressive jollity of the chorus. No less eerie is this episode as a whole. It is dominated by the brass, whose harshness is broken from time to time by nervous strings resembling nothing so much as will-o’-the-wisps, while the harmonic writing—quite apart from the dissonance in the steerhorns—is so implacably brutal that the major-key consonance of the repellent boisterousness of the vassals’ response to Hagen’s “jokes” is bound to seem even more shocking.

  The same is true of the crass tribute paid shortly afterward by the chorus of vassals to the bridal couple Gunther and Brünnhilde. The couple, after all, is hardly in the best of spirits: Gunther is bringing home a bride whom he has won only through cunning on Siegfried’s part, while Brünnhilde’s spirit has been broken by suffering and humiliation. As a result, the vassals’ cry of “Hail to you, Gunther! Hail to you and your bride” sounds cynical in the extreme, and the leitmotifs in the orchestra point constantly to such discrepancies. At the same time Wagner operates on what might be called a meta-level by playing with the popular genre of the wedding chorus: as dusk falls on the gods, so the traditional forms of opera grow increasingly desperate and the listener’s expectations are thereby rendered futile.

  Instead of adopting the problematically extreme and extremely problematical view of Hagen as a protofascist, we might do better to admire Wagner’s ability to breathe life into the character, more especially within the context of the drama. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf has argued that the brutality of this scene is necessary “to prepare the ground musically for Brünnhilde’s subsequent anger, which is filled with hate and bent on thoughts of revenge” and “to desensitize the listener, making us deaf to psychological subtleties, so that the negative emotion of the doubly betrayed ex-Valkyrie acquires the musical force needed for the all-important peripeteia of Götterdämmerung.”28

  This peripeteia begins with Brünnhilde’s cry of “Deceit! Deceit! Most shameful deceit! Betrayal! Betrayal—as never before avenged!” Siegfried’s erstwhile lover is torn apart by grief and transformed into a vengeful fury. Taken together with the turbulent writing in the orchestra, this passage is one of the most shocking in any of Wagner’s music dramas, making it hard to believe that it was written by a composer who claimed to be weary of emotional outbursts. It reveals mature craftsmanship, but none of the routine occasionally found elsewhere in the score. In its piling up of negative emotions, it looks ahead to what half a century later would be called “new music,” so that it is easy to understand why Wagner’s contemporaries had such difficulties with this second act of Götterdämmerung and its “displays of brute force”29 and why Alban Berg—as we have already noted in our chapter on Tristan und Isolde—was able to say to a tyro critic: “Yes, you can talk like that—you’re not a musician.”

  What is left at the end of the cycle—apart from Father Rhine and his daughters rejoicing in the ring that they have finally regained? From a material point of view, we are left with the ruins of the Gibichung Hall and, from a conceptual standpoint, there remains the so-called redemption motif (music example 28) that has been interpreted as a “symbol of birth and—here—the rebirth of a state of paradisal innocence.”30 But can these two elements be reconciled? In other words, can a shipwreck become a relaunch?

  28. Bars 1594–95 of act 3 of Götterdämmerung, with the motif generally described as the “redemption motif.”

  Let us first examine the shipwreck—viewed here not from a lofty philosophical vantage point but in entirely pragmatic terms. The final part of the Ring is called Götterdämmerung because it describes the downfall of the gods. In the last scene of all—according to the stage directions—“bright flames flare up in the hall of the gods, finally hiding them from sight completely.” None of the main actors in the drama—Siegfried, Brünnhilde, Gunther, Gutrune, or Hagen—survives this apocalypse. Only nature remains in the form of the Rhine and the Rhinedaughters, together with the men and women of the Gibichung court, and perhaps also Alberich, who does not, however, appear at the end.

  The conclusion is clear enough: the gods perish, as they had always been intended to do. In December 1870, when he was working on Götterdämmerung, Wagner told Cosima that Das Rheingold “has the one advantage—that as in a peasant’s trial it does clearly show us Wotan’s guilt and fatal error and the urgent need for his renunciation.”31 Peasant’s trials were legal proceedings instituted by farmers and other simple folk against the authorities when they felt that they had been unjustly treated. In the context of the Ring, the unjust gods bear responsibility for the state of the world, a point confirmed by Wagner’s comment in his letter to August Röckel in January 1854, when he wrote that “Alberich and his ring could not harm the gods if the latter had not already been susceptible to evil.”32 A comment that Wagner made to Cosima in May 1877 when seeing London’s docklands indicates what he thought the world would have looked like under Alberich’s rule. The weather in London that day was “mild and gray,” the impression left by the docks “tremendous”: “This is Alberich’s dream come true—Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.”33 Even more explicit is a comment from February 1881: “Recently R. expressed his pleasure at having provided in Der Ring des Nibelungen a complete picture of the curse of greed for money, and the disaster it brings about.”34 That same year, within the framework of his essay “Know Thyself,” Wagner noted that “‘Property’ has acquired an almost greater sanctity in our social conscience than religion.”35

  Although key words such as “property,” “power,” and “world dominion” are defined in different and even contradictory ways in the Ring and in Wagner’s own comments on the work, the cycle’s basic message remained unchanged over the decades: the gods may not have caused the human race to founder, but they did nothing to prevent it. Only through the downfall of the gods can something new arise in their place.

  We have already seen that in Wagner’s view Wotan represented “the sum total of the [failed] intelligence of the present day” and that he “resembles us to a tee.”36 His descendants—Siegmund, Sieglinde, Siegfried, and Brünnhilde—are ultimately doomed to perish. But what happens afterward—always assuming that everything do
es not start up all over again, with Alberich stealing the ring once more, a new Wotan wresting it from Alberich before having to cede it to the giants, and so on? Wagner has no answer to this question. As we know, he left four different endings to the Ring, each of which differs from the others in terms of its underlying tenor.

  At the end of Siegfried’s Death there is no cosmic conflagration, no destruction of Valhalla, but, rather, the optimistic prospect of an end to humankind’s slavery. And yet it remains unclear how this act of liberation will come about. In the light of all that has previously happened at the Gibichung court, Brünnhilde’s final assertion that “the bravest of men’s most mighty deed must now be blessed by my knowledge” seems unduly starry-eyed, and Wagner, too, came to see this for himself in the wake of the failed bourgeois revolutions of 1848–49. When he revised the work, he allowed the world to be destroyed, a decision which, as far as visions of the future are concerned, could hardly be less equivocal. And yet he still felt the urge to equivocate, for the world was not to be destroyed in its entirety: something had to remain. Of course, Wagner found it hard to say exactly what this “something” was. Was it “love” that could be the start of something new? In her 1852 peroration, Brünnhilde had insisted that “blessed in joy and sorrow love alone can be,” but by August 1856 Wagner’s exposure to Schopenhauer had convinced him that “in the course of the myth this love had emerged as fundamentally annihilating.”37

  Or is this really the end of everything, as the so-called Schopenhauer version of 1856 implies? “Grieving love’s profoundest suffering opened my eyes for me: I saw the world end.” Or should we trust in the vague sense of hope that we find in the definitive version of the work, where the gods do indeed perish, but, as we have already noted, “men and women” watch these events unfold “in speechless dismay.” In the full score, Wagner changed this yet again: here the men and women are “moved to the very depths of their being,” suggesting that a dream on the part of the human race has here come true. We could also adopt a similar interpretation of the ending of Patrice Chéreau’s Bayreuth production of the Ring between 1976 and 1980, the final tableau of which was vaguely reminiscent of Delacroix’s canvas Liberty Leading the People.

  In the sixth volume of his collected writings, which appeared in print in 1872, before the first Bayreuth Ring, Wagner included all three versions of the end of Götterdämmerung, merely adding a note to the effect that the lines that had not been set to music were either superfluous or unhelpful, because they struck a “tendentious” note and “tried in advance to replace” what should be “left to the musical impact of the drama” to express.38 But can we really reconcile the different endings of the Ring in the way that Wagner implies here?

  We must in any case wonder at Wagner’s decision to publish all these variants in the form of a series of notes in the collected edition of his writings as if they were part of some critical apparatus, but not part of a myth that cannot be rewritten at will. It can hardly be chance that as far as the poem of the Ring is concerned, Wagner played only with the ending but otherwise changed practically nothing else in the rest of the libretto, which remained the same over a period of more than two decades.

  Although Wagnerians of the old school continue to imply that with his definitive ending to Götterdämmerung Wagner found a coherent solution, however we may choose to interpret this, attempts to deconstruct the work had already begun during the composer’s own lifetime. In his later, anti-Wagnerian phase, Nietzsche would accept only the life-affirming end of Siegfried’s Death and dismissed all three endings to Götterdämmerung as the product of an unseemly decline into pessimism. In “The Wagner Case,” he fulminated against the composer: “What had he transposed into music [in Siegfried’s Death]? Optimism. Wagner was ashamed.” Then, referring to the lines “blessed in joy and sorrow love alone can be,” he mocks the new peroration: “Brunhilde [sic] was initially supposed to take her farewell with a song in honor of free love, putting off the world with the hope for a socialist utopia in which ‘all turns out well’—but now gets something else to do. She has to study Schopenhauer first; she has to transpose the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation into verse.”39

  Hans Mayer was merely echoing Nietzsche when he described the Ring as a work whose “ultimate meaning evolves before us in three different variants,” Wagner “shamefully” traducing his original concept, as found in Siegfried’s Death.40 Theodor W. Adorno, conversely, wasted little time examining the different versions of the ending of Siegfried’s Death and the Ring and instead launched into a generalized critique of Wagner’s utopias. In his major essay on Wagner, he wrote simply: “In Wagner, the bourgeoisie dreams of its own destruction, conceiving it as its only road to salvation even though all it ever sees of the salvation is the destruction.”41 In 1964 the weekly Die Zeit published a piece under the heading “Postscript to a Discussion on Wagner,” in which Adorno stated that “it was with Wagner that the destruction of the world first became an unprecedented spectacle.” In the final pages of Götterdämmerung, in particular, “aesthetic form and social untruth” were intimately connected.42

  This brings us to the age of Chéreau and Boulez, which in many respects is also our own. Certainly it now almost goes without saying that we will treat the end of Götterdämmerung as “one big question mark,” as Chéreau put it. Explaining his production concept, he had the following to say about the ending: “I simply wanted everyone present, the whole of present humanity, to listen to the music as if to an oracle that can reach every individual or not, as the case may be, and whose meaning we can understand [or not, as the case may be].”43

  For Udo Bermbach, such relativism or deconstructionism likewise goes without saying, with the result that he makes no attempt to salvage the ending of the Ring in the sense of a “new blueprint for the world” but speaks of “the lack of any future prospect, no matter whether in the sense of ‘redemption,’ ‘self-annihilation,’ or even ‘resignation.’”44 Anglo-Saxon readers, at least, have been aware of this debate for over a century, Shaw’s covert encomium of the Ring in his Perfect Wagnerite of 1898 eliciting a response the following year from the music critic and Wagnerian cynic Ernest Newman, who insisted that in writing the Ring the composer “was not contributing one iota to the knowledge or the wisdom of mankind.”45

  But is this not just as true of Wagner’s description of the status quo as it is of any vague future prospects? After all, he hardly offers a coherent analysis of capitalism, at least of the kind that a socialist like Shaw would like to have seen. In my own view, Wagner does paint an impressive picture of the corrupting influence of power, which is fascinating more especially because he describes not only the structures of power but also the agents of that power and does so in a way that makes his diagnosis seem as topical today as it was in the nineteenth century.

  That Wagner becomes entangled in all manner of contradictions is not something we need to hold against the artist that he was. Such condescension on our part is unnecessary, not least because economists and sociologists of the nineteenth or even the twentieth century could scarcely have argued more compellingly. Some decades ago Claude Lévi-Strauss—a self-declared admirer of Wagner—referred to the hubristic view of intellectuals from the years between 1700 and the early nineteenth century that “the social world” was “conceptually intelligible,” adding: “I no longer believe that the world is conceptually intelligible, for societies have now become too complicated, too comprehensive, the number of variables has become too great. That is why political actions can take place only as a move and countermove, blow by blow, day by day.”46

  Wagner offers a magisterial description of this particular kind of political action in the figure of Wotan. After all, the Wotan of the Ring is a politician who has “recognized the guilt of existence” and who “atones for the error of creation,” as Wagner explained to Cosima.47 His music theater has neither the need nor the ability to offer us anything more than this by way
of argumentation, especially when we place the emphasis on the music. “Just wait,” Wagner told Cosima on November 14, 1869: “when I write my treatise on the philosophy of music, church and state will be abolished. Religion has assumed flesh and blood in a way quite different from these dogmatic forms—music, that is the direct product of Christianity, as is the saint, like Saint Francis of Assisi, who compensates for the whole church as well as for the whole world.”48 The end of the Ring—godless in the truest sense of the term—was already predictable in the Middle Ages: the gods of the old Germanic tribes were dead, and music drew its life force from Christianity only as the latter’s “indirect emanation.” The young Nietzsche, who visited the Wagners frequently at this period, will have heard such comments and rejoiced at them: for him, too, God was dead, while Wagner’s metaphysical art was very much alive. This brings us to the relaunch into which we may—or may not—care to transform the shipwreck of the end of the Ring.

  Particularly compelling in this context is a comment made by Wagner on July 23, 1872. The previous day he had completed the orchestral sketch for Götterdämmerung, adding a final note, “End! All to please Cosel.” On the 23rd he informed his wife that “Music has no ending. It is like the genesis of things, it can always start again from the beginning, go over to the opposite, but it is never really complete. [. . .] I am glad that I kept back Sieglinde’s theme of praise for Brünnhilde, to become as it were a hymn to the heroine.”49 The theme in question is the one first heard in act 3 of Die Walküre at Sieglinde’s words “O hehrstes Wunder” (Sublimest wonder) and refers to Brünnhilde. When it returns at the end of Götterdämmerung, it indicates the importance that music has for Wagner’s musical drama: to the extent that this task has not already been taken over by the plot, it reveals in an immediate and physical way that the myth of the Ring does not depict a linear series of events taking place at a particular point in history and moving inexorably toward a unique ending but describes a circular action that reflects the state and structure of the world in which we live. That which ends at one particular point is still in full swing at another, while at a third point it is still in the process of coming into being.