by Martin Geck
As far as Wagner is concerned, it is clear that he was a revolutionary all his life, both as artist and as thinker. But it is equally certain that this champion of national cultural revolution did not intend political revolution, and never felt at all at home in the climate of 1848–9. [. . .] Lohengrin and 1848—two worlds apart, with at most only one thing in common: their national pathos. And the liberal critic [i.e., Heinrich Mann] is guided by a sure instinct when he makes fun of Lohengrin in satirical social novels by translating them into the political sphere. Wagner could probably hear the fine bass of his own King Henry in his mind when he made that thoroughly bizarre speech before the Dresden Fatherland Association, in which he proclaimed himself an ardent royalist and a despiser of constitutionalism in all its forms, and called upon Germany to cast out “alien, un-German notions”—by which he meant Western democracy—and to re-establish the one true saving and Old-Germanic relationship between the absolute monarch and the free people.18
Here Mann could clearly be accused of pussyfooting around the topic of Wagner and politics, because from Wagner’s point of view there was a close connection between Lohengrin and the revolutions that swept across Germany in 1848, and if he admitted his support of a popular monarchy, this was no bizarre whim on the part of an unpolitical artist but an expression of the “conservative revolution” with which Mann, too, sympathized at this time. It is with some astonishment, moreover, that we read that Wagner’s rejection of “Western democracy” was a passing eccentricity, not least because Mann himself largely shared that view, and it was not until some years later that in the wake of a positively Pauline conversion Mann began to champion the ideas of Western democracy.
We may well interpret Mann’s reaction as an expression of his mortification—in his diary he complains in no uncertain terms about the “hateful cultural ridicule” heaped on Lohengrin by his brother and about the latter’s generally “dissolute political tittle-tattle directed at Wagner.”19 But perhaps, too, his complaints are a reflection of his own attempt to suppress his doubts about his own position. After all, is it really possible to draw such a clear distinction between the political and aesthetic messages in Lohengrin as Mann would like to have done? And was he not obliged to concede that his brother was right at least to the extent that most audiences see Lohengrin through the eyes of that nationalist philistine, Diederich Heßling?
The story of Lohengrin does not end with Heinrich and Thomas Mann. Adolf Hitler was twelve when he stood through a performance of the opera in Linz. Recalling the occasion in Mein Kampf, he wrote that he was “captivated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds.”20 Later, Hitler prepared set designs for an opera that he must have known almost by heart,21 with the result that he reacted with surprise when, attending a performance of the work in Bayreuth on July 19, 1936, under Wilhelm Furtwängler, he heard the second half of Lohengrin’s Grail Narration, a passage that Wagner himself had cut even before the work’s first performance in Weimar in 1850. Mann listened to this same performance on the radio from his home in Küsnacht near Zurich—it was broadcast as part of the celebrations marking the one-thousandth anniversary of the founding of the German Reich—and evinced a knowledge of the score in no way inferior to that of the Führer who had forced him into exile. He, too, was surprised to hear the extended version of the Grail Narration.
Hitler was presumably not the only self-appointed leader to identify with Lohengrin, but he was undoubtedly the only one to be hailed by his people—excluding, of course, the émigré Mann—as a reincarnation of Lohengrin and King Henry.22 The idea that Hitler was a Lohengrin-like leader who, with the blessing of the mysterious Grail, was sent to Germany directly by Heaven to restore his people to their former glory as long as they believed in him implicitly was not imposed on the Germans against their will but had for generations been an ingrained belief in many of them as the result of a process of socialization.
For me, Lohengrin is incapable of concealing its affinities with nationalism and National Socialism, for its ideological aspects not only affect its “political” dimension in the person of King Henry but are inextricably bound up with the action that is centered around Lohengrin. It is Lohengrin, after all, who installs the young Duke Gottfried as “Führer.” It was Lohengrin, too, who provided Kaiser Wilhelm II with his motto “I know no more parties” and who was able to serve as a model for the National Socialists’ attitude of “You are nothing, your people is everything.” However much we may care to stress that it is in Lohengrin’s “nature” to fail in his relationship with Elsa and that this has nothing to do with “politics,” it remains the case that politically speaking he appears as a God-sent savior who—in the name of the “Providence” that Hitler never tired of invoking—unmasks and destroys the “false” leader of the people in order to install the “right” one.
This interpretation is not intended as an indictment of Wagner. After all, his political ideas had a different significance in the years before 1848 than they did after 1871 or at the time of National Socialism. Nor was it possible to have predicted the disastrous turn that they would take. If it had been possible to do so, then we should also have to condemn the hundreds of thousands and even millions of Germans who, attending performances of Lohengrin in the spirit of Diederich Heßling, made Wagner’s ideological construct their own and treated it as a mainstream idea. After all, it needs only to be remembered that if the work’s reception had developed along different lines, then it would have been possible to stress those alternative elements in the work that filled Thomas Mann with such great enthusiasm.
Wagner will not have thought along the lines of physical annihilation. He wanted his son Siegfried to be spared military service and toward the end of his life wrote a sentence that could be interpreted as a rejection of the killing machine set in motion by the National Socialists: “Heroism has bequeathed to us nothing but blood-letting and butchery—without all heroism—but everything with discipline.”23 At the same time, it seems to me impossible to rid Lohengrin of its ideological taint without emasculating the work completely. Rather, this is an example of the more general point made by Walter Benjamin to which I referred in my introduction: when surveying cultural treasures, the objective observer will “without exception” note that they “have an origin that he cannot contemplate without horror.”
Is this a case of the curtain falling and leaving all questions open? Presentday opera directors can try, of course, to play down the political element in the work or—adopting the opposite extreme—emphasize it unduly. In his 2010 Bayreuth Festival production, for example, Hans Neuenfels was making a valid point when he dressed the Brabantine chorus as laboratory rats, implying that they can be manipulated. And at the end of the opera, when Lohengrin introduces the young Duke Gottfried to the Brabantines as their future leader in their war on Hungary, it may also be legitimate to present him as a boy soldier wearing a steel helmet and toting a machine gun, as Peter Konwitschny did in his Hamburg State Opera production in 1998. Any director wanting to instill a sense of productive unease in his audience could do worse than replicate the production that was seen for the first time in Bayreuth on July 19, 1936, in the sets and costumes of the time, and with Hitler exchanging knowing remarks with Siegfried Wagner’s widow, Winifred, about the extended Grail Narration. Clips of Thomas Mann listening to the broadcast from his exile in Switzerland might also be intercut with the action. The conductor might wear a Furtwängler mask, and several members of the orchestra would be sporting swastika armbands. Or the action might be frozen at the relevant moments in order to present tableaux vivants by a group of dancers, thereby allowing us to appreciate the distance that exists between us and the nationalist tendencies that are inherent in the plot. Audience members could then judge for themselves whether these tendencies also affect the music. (The choreographer Sasha Waltz adopted this principle when she staged Pascal Dusapin’s opera Medea at the Berlin State Opera in 2007.)24
/> Whereas other works by Wagner are able to resist this kind of one-sided ideological appropriation, Lohengrin remains permanently overshadowed by these unfortunate aspects of its reception. And yet even objects that are damaged beyond repair may still retain their charm as audiences can appreciate them in spite of everything. And this means a great deal in the case of Lohengrin: for here is a gripping fairy-tale narrative in which modern man’s basic sensitivities can be effortlessly incorporated.
First and foremost there is the battle between the forces of good and evil. On the one hand we have those two beacons of light, Lohengrin and Elsa, while on the other there are the conspirators Ortrud and Friedrich. And yet the relationship between these four figures is far from being crassly black and white, for in spite of their nobility of outlook, Lohengrin and Elsa are not without fundamental weaknesses, while Ortrud, however evil, is a fascinatingly powerful woman. It was in this sense that Wagner wrote to Liszt in 1852:
A male politician disgusts us, a female politician appalls us: it was this appallingness that I had to portray. [. . .] Her whole passion reveals itself in the scene in act 2 when—following Elsa’s disappearance from the balcony—she leaps up from the minster steps and calls out to her old, long-vanished gods. She is a reactionary, a woman concerned only for what is outdated and for that reason is hostile to all that is new—and hostile, moreover, in the most rabid sense of the word: she would like to eradicate the world and nature, simply in order to breathe new life into her decaying gods. But this is no idiosyncratic, sickly whim on Ortrud’s part, rather does this passion consume her with the whole weight of a woman’s longing for love—a longing that is stunted, undeveloped, and deprived of an object: and that is why she is so fearfully impressive.25
The reader senses Wagner working himself up into a rage at the very idea that his characters might be dismissed as operatic stereotypes remote from real life rather than being valued for what they are: reflections of actual social trends clothed in myth and fairy tale. This is also true of the figure of Lohengrin. Time and time again Wagner stressed that he had written not only Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser but also Lohengrin to hold up a mirror to the triviality of his age. In view of the “unnatural state” of the world, the “absolute artist” was unable to assert his desire to be “understood through love” and express his need for “the utmost physical reality”: “Lohengrin was looking for the woman who would believe in him and who would not ask who he was nor whence he came but who would love him as he was and because he was whatever she deemed him to be.”26
Herman van Campenhout has objected that the Middle Ages were innocent of the whole concept of the “absolute artist,” so that Wagner’s interpretation of his own opera is like a “romantic picture invented by the bourgeoisie,” a picture for which there is not even any evidence within the work itself.27 But it is very much this that adds a certain spice to the piece in that Wagner presents us with a fairy tale that does not have to be given a present-day gloss but which certainly allows for one. Nor is he so naïve as to identify completely with a narcissistically world-weary Lohengrin: in referring to his hero’s “egoism,” he touches on the failings of an individual who is destroyed by his own demands. Conversely, Elsa is not a failure simply because she worships Lohengrin, rather than understanding him, for “there clings to him the tell-tale halo of his ‘higher’ nature,”28 and this positively invites her to worship him. At the same time, however, she can become what Wagner calls “a woman of the future” only by dint of her insistent questioning. In this way she becomes a Brünnhilde figure who “knows everything” and to whom “everything is revealed” in turn.29 But even an Elsa who wants to know everything cannot really be free as long as she tries to possess Lohengrin, for, as Wagner told Cosima, “the Knight of the Grail is sublime and free became he acts, not in his own behalf, but for others.”30 Here we encounter contradictions that for the most part rest not on moral failings, as they still do in Tannhäuser, but which are an integral aspect of human existence in general, at least in modern society.
“Nie sollst du mich befragen”: “Never shall you question me.” Readers are simply being taken in by Wagner if they try to throw light on every aspect of the characters in Lohengrin. We then become caught up in contradictions similar to those that beset Wagner himself in his pronouncements on the piece. There was “no escape from the longings of individuality except in death,” he summed up his feelings in 1873.31 It is impossible to imagine a remark as straightforward and yet as ambiguous. In a letter to August Röckel, he had earlier claimed that the “high tragedy of renunciation” was the “underlying poetic feature” of all three of his romantic operas.32 Although the differences between the Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin are plain to see, they are only inadequately explained by reference to philosophy, the history of the mind, and even depth psychology.
Rather, they become apparent above all when we examine the roles and their representatives, representatives whose actions are ultimately unfathomable, and one can understand why Wagner, as a man of the theater, was furious whenever he saw his “message” threatened by performances characterized by routine or slovenliness. Whenever he could, he tried to show his singing actors how to perform their roles by identifying completely with them. In Lohengrin, the impresario Angelo Neumann recalled that when he was rehearsing the work in Vienna in 1875, Wagner
demonstrated every move and gesture to Lohengrin, Telramund, and the King. Even his rapt expression when he delivered the line “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan” [Accept my thanks, beloved swan] remains deeply etched in my memory. But it is altogether impossible to describe the inwardness with which he sang the part of Lohengrin. As for Elsa, he showed her every expression, every arm movement from her very first entry right through her whole long scene with the King. [. . .] But it was the third act that was the most extraordinary of all, for here Wagner acted and sang almost the entire scene in the bridal chamber. I shall never forget the expression of increasingly profound sadness that suffuses Lohengrin’s features as he realizes that Elsa is coming ever closer to breaking her vow, and there was something almost otherworldly about his features when, with matchless grace and transfigured expression, he drew Elsa over to the casement and, gently opening it with his left hand, sang the words “Atmest du nicht mit mir die süßen Düfte” [Can you, too, not smell the sweet perfumes?] while supporting Elsa in his right arm.33
By wanting to ban performances that were unauthorized or, he believed, inadequate, Wagner was behaving very much like Lohengrin and treating his audience as his hero treats Elsa: audiences should not use their critical intellect to ask what the emissary Lohengrin was nor whence he came but should love him just as he was and just as they deemed him to be. But this would work only in the case of performances in which the performers, having first made the roles their own, were able to identify with those roles to the maximum possible extent.
And the work’s creator had already made this clear to his singers not just as its director but also as its composer. In his letter to Liszt he offers a detailed characterization of the wayward figure of Ortrud, revealing in the process a secret love of the character. Later, too, he spoke of the way in which the “wretchedness of two outcasts”—Ortrud and Telramund—had motivated him to produce such a “moving” account.34 Clearly Ortrud had fascinated him as a musician and inspired him to write some of his finest music. This brings us—and how could it be otherwise?—to the heart of the matter, namely, the essential role of the music. Wagner could show his singers how to play their parts as often as he liked, but it would all be to no avail if they were not guided by the music, for it is the music that presents the action to our feelings. And it does so in a double sense. First, it “supports” the singers’ actions onstage, actions that would have no authority without such a “net” but would seem arbitrary and, from today’s standpoint, even absurd. And, second, it opens up a deeper dimension by clarifying things that words and gestures are incapable of exp
ressing or which they are prevented from expressing at this particular point in the action.
It is above all this new depth that reveals just how much progress Wagner has made in Lohengrin when compared with Tannhäuser. In terms of his compositional technique, this advance may be summed up in two words: leitmotif and fabric. Although it was not until many years later that Wagner himself used the term leitmotif—and then only with great misgivings—and although it was not until the time of Opera and Drama that he referred to motifs of “presentiment” and “recollection,” the facts of the matter already entitle us to use the word leitmotif in the context of Lohengrin. Even the prelude, which is intended to provide a musical description of the “wonder-working descent of the Grail in the company of a host of angels” and its “transfer to the most blessed of all mortals,”35 is concentrated on a single central motif—this, too, is a novel feature of the work (music example 11). But because Wagner composed the prelude last of all, “elements of the later development of the motif also find their way into it. Once Wagner had become conscious of this process, he made the links more precise, allowing the initial motif to continue to resonate just as it echoes in the main characters. In this way the prelude already tells us obscurely about Lohengrin and Elsa.”36
11. Bars 5–12 of the prelude to Lohengrin.
Another of the leitmotifs to command our attention is Ortrud’s inasmuch as it looks forward structurally to the Ring, its metrical freedom and “lack of any tonal relationship” allowing Wagner to use it in varying forms and different compositional contexts.37 At the same time, its individual sections are also sufficiently eloquent to have an associative effect when used as brief quotations. Here is the Ortrud motif at its most discursive (music example 12). In more general terms, the role of Ortrud is associated with the notion of a particularly modern compositional style. In the opening scene of act 2, in which Ortrud and Friedrich conspire to bring about Lohengrin’s downfall, the American musicologist Graham G. Hunt has rightly noted a “complexity never before encountered in an operatic role.”38 Among the novel features is not only the motivic writing, which serves to characterize Ortrud’s darkly demonic nature, but also the tendency for the whole of the compositional fabric to become much denser. Within only thirty-four bars at the start of act 2, we hear not only the Ortrud motif but also two other important motifs, namely, those associated with the forbidden question and with the idea of revenge. In this way Wagner invests the orchestral writing—which serves, as it were, as the background for Ortrud’s and Telramund’s subsequent exchange—with a specific dramaturgical function clearly anticipating procedures that were later used in the Ring. Wagner wants not only to introduce Ortrud in general terms but also to shed light on her insidious plans: she is plotting revenge and by persuading Elsa to ask the forbidden question, she hopes to cause the downfall of her rival, who is currently reveling in her feelings of newfound bliss. The orchestra already allows us to suspect what Ortrud is planning even before she has sung a single note.39