Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

  As we have already observed, Wagner succeeds in this aim even in Das Rheingold, encouraging Christian Berger to note that a leitmotif “speaks” above all by dint of its function within a “complex network of melodic and harmonic relationships.”30 When such a leitmotif appears in a new context, it serves, therefore, not simply to “illustrate” situations already familiar to us. Rather, the leitmotif—to quote the literary scholar James Treadwell with reference to literary leitmotifs—understands “itself as text, story, myth. In scene after scene, it tells itself.”31

  Of course, Wagner must have been unusually clairvoyant to be able to create a set of leitmotifs in Das Rheingold that would not only serve him in the as yet unwritten parts of the Ring but allow themselves to be woven into an increasingly complex musical texture. Here the reader is inclined to believe Wagner’s own tendency to mystify the creative process and regard him less as capable of planning far in advance than of acting as a medium and as an intuitive artist, trusting in his own intrinsic genius.

  But it is not only in his handling of his leitmotifs that Wagner reveals his genius in Das Rheingold, for this facet also emerges from his ability to combine orchestral colors to produce the most subtly nuanced moods. Of course, there are already examples of this ability in the “tone paintings” in Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, but the prelude and the transformation music between the four scenes that make up Das Rheingold are veritable miracles of music, conjuring up oneiric visions in sound that give way to one another either abruptly or imperceptibly—and always in the sense of pure nature scenes involving no performers onstage.32 There is something altogether incredible about the orchestral writing while Wotan and Loge descend invisibly from the cloud-girt heights inhabited by the gods through sulfur-filled crevices to the underworld realm of Nibelheim, where they are confronted by the earsplitting din of hammers beating down on eighteen anvils: for what seems a tormenting eternity the music is almost literally choked by the noise of soulless labor; and when it finally catches its breath, it is merely to express the sense of horror-struck oppression that we feel at the sight of Alberich’s brutality toward his brother Mime. “Everything to be played with terrible energy of expression,” reads one of Wagner’s performance instructions from the time of the first Bayreuth Ring.33

  It is insufficient to speak only of illustrative music in a derogatory sense or simply to interpret the work’s “message,” for what we really need to do here is to provide a proper assessment of the compositional skill that underpins this music—and from this point of view it matters little whether we like the music or not. A book like this, which seeks to engage the general reader, is not a suitable place for a detailed technical analysis. Rather, it aims to adopt the position taken by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who wanted only experts to analyze his works in detail. Not even practicing musicians were to know his tricks—presumably he was afraid of plagiarism and rivalry. Interested music lovers, conversely, were to be shown the “beauty,” “risk-taking,” and “novelty” that they could admire in “true masterpieces” and the extent to which a composer might “depart from the ordinary and risk something special” in pursuit of originality in art.34

  These remarks are admirably well suited to Das Rheingold, for not even experts have succeeded in understanding this work in the sense of a self-contained, unified system, allowing them to draw conclusions about its individual parts on the basis of the whole, as is possible with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. Rather, we need to observe Wagner’s novel compositional procedures from the standpoint of the individual details that make up the work. And yet even if it is possible to discover coherent connections extending over longer sections of the work, they remain contingent. In other words: they may appear as a unity but do not necessarily have to do so. Wagner’s procedure may bewilder and annoy an analyst with a fetish for systematization, but it satisfies amateur music lovers, for whom the combination of a fragmentary experience of the present with the permanent search for wholeness and for a system reflects a common feeling in their lives. And since we know that Das Rheingold is merely the “preliminary evening” in advance of the actual events, we shall be encouraged by the incommensurable nature of the work, with its various settings in heaven, earth, and water, its fairy-tale cast of characters, and its wealth of memorable leitmotifs, making us keen to discover how the focus will narrow, how the strands in the plot will unravel, and whether Loge will be proved right when he mockingly prophesies, “They’re hurrying on toward their end, / though they think they will last forever.”

  A Word about George Steiner

  In December 1818 the sixty-nine-year-old Goethe was taking the waters at Berka when—as he later recalled—his “mind was in a state of perfect composure and free from external distraction.” Listening in this frame of mind to Bach’s Preludes and Fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier, he said to himself: “It is as if the eternal harmony were conversing within itself, as it may have done in the bosom of God just before the Creation of the world. So likewise did it move in my inmost soul, and it seemed as if I neither possessed nor needed ears, nor any other sense—least of all, the eyes.”1

  Taking his cue from Goethe, the present-day philosopher George Steiner has defined music as “the soliloquy of being, of the original fiat echoing itself.”2 In his later book, Grammars of Creation, he discusses Wagner at greater length, describing the “initial chord” of the prelude to Das Rheingold as a “rising out of chaos.” The “resonance” of this chord, “simultaneously radiant and ominous, poses the question: as we comb the depths, what monsters are we trawling?”3

  This is a good description of the narrative that constitutes the Ring, for there is much—including elements that are far from edifying—that prefigures the rising of the curtain on Das Rheingold. Steiner will not have objected, therefore, to Chéreau’s idea of damming the Rhine with a hydroelectric dam in his Bayreuth Festival production in 1976, an unmistakable sign that for the children of the modern world there can be no return to nature. Steiner’s concern in his Grammars of Creation is above all with art and, more especially, music, for although he has a number of objections to Wagner’s verbal message, such messages are of little interest to him. Rather, his focus is the music. As he explained in conversation, “There are moments in which one is tempted to say that the human mind has created very little that can compete with Wagner. But a word of caution: all that he did was to express the unfathomable strangeness of music.”4

  Time and again Steiner has referred to the “intimate strangeness” of music,5 by which he means the “untranslatability of the musical experience”: “Even at their most intimate, the relations between music and language bristle with intractabilities.”6 Again: “Organically, human song sets us closer to animality than any other manifestation. [. . .] Song leads us home to where we have not yet been.” Steiner calls it “daimonia in music.”7 In short, it cannot be explained even by reference to the spiritual experiences that Wagner claimed to have known in La Spezia before he conceived the prelude to Das Rheingold: “This is the puzzle: where does the new melody, the novel key-relation [. . .] originate? What, if you will, was there before? Silence, perhaps, but a silence which, in a linguistically inexpressible way, was not mute.”8

  A person who has “no more beginnings” can no longer puzzle over them.9 And the person who can no longer puzzle over the act of artistic creation abandons all that is best about him to civilization, science, and technology. As a result, Steiner warns us not to try to approach Wagner’s music with an ideological scalpel, for although art in general cannot be separated from barbarism, it may arise “for reasons of this barbarism and with this barbarism.”10 At the same time, we would do well to recall another remark by Steiner:

  When the young Hitler heard Wagner’s Rienzi for the first time, he told one of his young friends that he had a vision of the National Socialist international state. Years earlier, the successful journalist Theodor
Herzl had heard the same opera and afterward noted in his diary: “This evening I saw that we shall win back Jerusalem.” There is neither good nor evil in music.11

  And yet we may well be inclined to add that there is militant and less militant music.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “He resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence”

  THE ART OF THE RING—WOTAN’S MUSIC

  Act 1 of Die Walküre: a bourgeois eternal triangle?—Wagner identifies with Siegmund—Mathilde Wesendonck—Act 2 as the peripeteia of the whole Ring—Wagner’s Wotan as the ne plus ultra of his dialectic characterization—Wotan’s questionable career—His great monologue—Wagner’s sympathy for Wotan—Wotan’s downfall hastened by the orchestral melody—Wagner’s own analysis of a detail of the score—The ingeniously contradictory connection between plot, vocal line, and orchestral melody—Carolyn Abbate’s narratological comment on Wotan’s monologue: “That voice may ring false”—The dialectics of musical logic and intended meaning—Wotan’s Farewell and the Magic Fire Music—Thomas Mann’s admiration of this scene—The sleep motif in Bruckner’s Third Symphony—The sleep motif in terms of music theory—Wagner as a “thinking” composer—His sympathy for Wotan and Alberich—Siegfried: a new fairy-tale beginning for the action of the Ring? Walter Benjamin’s comparison between fairy tale and myth—Fairy-tale music or deceptive idyll?—Wotan, as the Wanderer, meeting Mime and Siegfried—Breaking off composition of Siegfried in favor of Tristan und Isolde

  This photograph of Wagner was taken in Franz Hanfstaengl’s Munich studio in December 1871 and is inscribed “To his Brünnhilde”—the soprano Amalie Materna—by “Wagner-Wotan!” The portrait is now in the Wagner Museum in Bayreuth. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: Bi 3660).

  Wagner’s reason for designating Das Rheingold a “preliminary evening” will be clear to operagoers by the opening of act of Die Walküre, if not before, for the quantitative leap between the two works is enormous. Das Rheingold manifestly plays out in an archaic world with a cast of gods, nixies, giants, and dwarfs, and although they evince a number of human qualities, these figures communicate with one another in awkward ways. Some of them demonstrably dwell “on cloud-girt heights,” others “on the bed of the Rhine,” and others again “on the earth’s broad back” and “in the depths of the earth.” The scenes in which the action unfolds span the entire natural world, and it is no accident that the basic elements of fire, water, air, and earth play a crucial role in the plot. And whereas the music of the rest of Das Rheingold is not as elemental as it is in the work’s opening prelude, it is nonetheless entirely untypical of the nineteenth century.

  This all changes with Die Walküre, and it changes even before the curtain goes up on its opening act, when the verve of the orchestral prelude, which according to the performance marking is to be played “tempestuously,” indicates that we are back in the world of grand opera, a point that applies to the whole of this opening act. While lacking in vocal numbers of a traditional kind, it contains bel canto scenes in which listeners can revel to their heart’s content, most notably Siegmund’s “Winterstürme,” which comes suspiciously close to an aria—in this regard, it is surely significant that Wagner wrote down the earliest melodic sketch while he was still working on the libretto.

  But the dynamic markings that Wagner uses with his orchestral melody likewise give the impression that the actions that unfold in this opening act, while impassioned, are human in scale, starting out, as they do, from an “elemental and reduced” range of sonorities gradually invested with more differentiated harmonies before finally “culminating in the sound world of the spring night and the tempestuously erotic final pages with their candid depiction of the twin’s act of incest.”1

  The new sense of direction in the musical dramaturgy reflects the drama’s concentration on the relationship between Siegmund, Sieglinde, and Hunding. Entering the trammeling confines of Hunding’s hut from the vast space of prehistoric time as depicted in Das Rheingold, Siegmund has scarcely closed the door behind him when we find ourselves at the heart of a marital drama that clearly relocates Wagner’s universal theme of love versus power within the bourgeois present, its mythological garb notwithstanding, as a doughty outsider successfully shakes the very foundations of the institution of forced marriage. The events that unfold in this act could easily be found in a nineteenth-century play or novel on the theme of social justice—German readers will be reminded of Theodor Fontane’s novel L’adultera, in which the bewitching impact of Wagner’s music acts as a catalyst in a way that can hardly be fortuitous. After reading the poems of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in 1881, Fontane summed up his opinion of the composer in a letter to his wife, Emilie: “He is entirely Wotan, wanting both money and power but refusing to renounce ‘love,’ to which end he constantly cheats.—Here, too, the poet lives in his characters.”2

  As a member of the realist school of writers, Fontane avoided taking sides, whereas Wagner clearly identified with Siegmund while working on act 1 of Die Walküre. This was a period when the forty-one-year-old composer was passionately in love with the wife of his patron Otto Wesendonck, with the result that the autograph draft of act 1 contains cryptic contractions such as “I. l. d. gr.!!,” “L. d. m. M.??,” “W. d. n. w., G!!!,” “D. l. m. a!!,” and “G. w. h. d. m. verl??” generally believed to mean “Ich liebe dich grenzenlos!!” (I love you boundlessly!!), “Liebst du mich Mathilde??” (Do you love me, Mathilde??), “Wenn du nicht wärst, Geliebte!!!” (If it weren’t for you, beloved!!!), “Du liebst mich auch!!” (You love me too!!), and “Geliebte, warum hast du mich verlassen??” (Beloved, why have you forsaken me??).3

  It is one of the piquant imponderables of Wagner’s art that although his life is not reflected in his works, the two frequently brush against one another. Specifically, this means that it is likely that Wagner would have written the opening act of Die Walküre and been equally successful in investing it with such passion even if he had not been in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, and yet there is something mysterious about the way in which he was able to write scenes whose optimism and passion are not even matched by the final scene of Siegfried—and this at a time when his sexual desires appear to have been frustrated.

  Equally curious is that neither the second nor the third acts of the complete draft contain any further abbreviations relating to Mathilde Wesendonck. It is possible, of course, that the new set of circumstances in which Wagner found himself had persuaded him to identify with the resigned figure of Wotan rather than the impetuous lover Siegmund. At the same time, however, we may see in this a minor biographical miracle in that this decision—if such it was—was taken at the very moment that Wagner had reached the peripeteia of the Ring. And our sense of wonderment will be increased when we recall Wagner’s own comment in a letter to Liszt:

  I am worried that the second act is weighed down by its contents—it contains two such important and powerful disasters that they would be enough for two acts, and yet they are so dependent on one another and the second follows on so ineluctably from the first that it was impossible for me to keep them apart.4

  Nor can we overlook that it was while he was working on act 2 of Die Walküre that Wagner became familiar with Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), which examines the subject of resignation from every possible angle.

  Whether or not we choose to speak of chance or providence in this context, there is no doubt that the relationship between the first two acts of Die Walküre reveals the same inspired dialectic that informs the Ring in general, for on the one hand we have the sibling love that evinces an élan vital unchecked by thoughts of adultery and incest inasmuch as the couple “loves unconsciously,” to quote from a passage in the libretto that Wagner did not set to music,5 while on the other hand we have the disasters invoked by Wagner in his letter to Liszt, namely, Wotan’s abdication and Sie
gmund’s execution. Thanks to the music and to Wagner’s skill as a composer, these are no thesis and antithesis that would have been followed by a synthesis, but a single entity in which the two are merged imperceptibly.

  The scene in which Siegmund and Sieglinde are united in act 1 includes motifs associated with the sword, Valhalla, the contracts carved into Wotan’s spear, renunciation, and grief, forcing us to suspect that this euphoric union is no unhistorical, natural coupling between two individuals but part of a doom-laden scenario involving entanglements of every kind. While the intimate drama of the opening act is still unfolding, the actors of the second act’s universal drama are already waiting in the wings. At the same time, motifs that in the opening act had had positive, utopian connotations and that include those associated with love, spring, the sword, sibling love, and rapture return in this somber second act, bringing the briefest of rays of light to the action.

  In 1876, it is true, some members of the audience complained about the “monotony of expression” caused by the extended passages of dialogue in act 2,6 and yet it is very much these passages that reveal Wagner at the peak of his powers in terms of his ability to depict characters of astonishing subtlety. This is especially true of Wotan, whom Wagner described in his oft-cited letter to August Röckel as “the sum total of present-day intelligence,” adding that the figure “resembles us to a tee.”7 For Udo Bermbach, the Ring is “Wotan’s tragedy,” Wotan being “undoubtedly the main character in the tetralogy.”8 And the word “us” in Wagner’s letter to Röckel is a clear pointer to the fact that the composer identified with Wotan more than with any other character. It is no wonder, then, that directors have repeatedly staged the Ring with Wotan wearing a Wagner mask, notably in Christine Mielitz’s 2001 production in Meiningen, a production designed by Alfred Hrdlicka. But when Bermbach describes Wotan as a politician obsessed with power “who rejects all sense of morality” and places his trust entirely in “deception, betrayal, and trickery,”9 while at the same time arguing that the character—defined exclusively as a political figure—reflects Wagner’s own loathing of politics, then the contradiction between the two interpretations—Wotan as a corrupt politician and Wagner as a latter-day Wotan—stretches our credulity to breaking point, for it is scarcely credible that Wagner himself would have recognized himself even at a distance in Bermbach’s characterization, to say nothing of the way in which the character is refracted in the mirror of myth.