Richard Wagner

by Martin Geck

  Bloch is able to cite examples that can teach even experts a thing or two, Tristan und Isolde being a particularly fertile field of inquiry in this regard. Here, Bloch claims, it is easier to hear the unusual than the merely appropriate:

  Take Brangäne’s song from the tower, buoyantly extended over the rhythmic or even polyrhythmic unit as though separate, along with “that ascent of the violins that passeth all understanding” (T. Mann). In its musical ekstasis, this goes against the fear and warning it signifies within the framework of the opera. “Habet acht” is sung from up in the tower, and from this song, of Brangäne’s warning, “Lausch, Geliebter” is registered by Isolde in total contradiction to the song itself, though not to its slow, immeasurably long, arching lines, which do everything to suggest arrival.7

  And Bloch goes on:

  Brangäne perceives the horn fanfare from the nearby hunt merely at its face value as C major jostles with F major, but when Isolde is listening, the horns are replaced by violins, una corda. First there is the sound of rustling leaves and then of a stream trickling in the nocturnal hush: “What did I hear?” Isolde asks, “was that the horns again?”8

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Ernst Bloch, and Marcel Proust: these philosopher-writers and writer-philosophers were all enthusiastic about Wagner. And all of them knew his works—often far better than his detractors.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “A magnificent, overcharged, heavy, late art”

  DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG

  Between a “grand comic opera” and the theater of ideas—Marke as Sachs, Tristan as Walther, and Isolde as Eva—Lydia Goehr’s theory of “the opera’s secret”: Wagner denies his own idea of reconciliation—The opera in the context of contemporary events—Art and politics—The affinities between the opera and contemporary trends in realism—Hans Sachs: a contradictory figure—Old Nuremberg as a “life form” and “utopian setting”—Wagner’s wish to be hailed as a “German artist”—Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as “music about music”—Playing with irony—Deep structure and Bachian counterpoint—Nietzsche’s inspired characterization of the prelude—Stravinsky’s interest in the harmonic writing of the opera—Folk music in the opera as more than mere local color—The music as a historicophilosophical construct—Beckmesser as an anti-Semitic caricature?

  Wagner in 1868 at the time of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, seen here in a classic pose in an oil painting by the eminent portraitist Joseph Bernhardt. Wagner was initially reluctant to sit for Bernhardt, whom Ludwig II had commissioned to produce a portrait, preferring to be painted by Franz von Lenbach, but in the event he was pleased with the result. A pupil of Joseph Stieler, Bernhardt depicted Wagner not in some heroic attitude but as a thoughtful, visionary artist. (Photograph by the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: Bi 3255.)

  In Tristan und Isolde Wagner had championed uncontrolled desire in the face of the terror of rationality, and even when it was required to tell of the torments of passion, the work was still permeated by rhapsodically frenzied sounds. But after Wagner had “pushed himself to the limit,” there was now the need for self-restraint. Two months after the first performance of Tristan und Isolde, he noted in his Brown Book: “Strong is the magic of him who desires, but stronger is that of him who renounces.”1 These words are taken from his extended prose draft for Parsifal, which was set down in August 1865. Although Wagner was referring to his final Bühnenweihfestspiel—literally, a festival drama for consecrating a stage, the stage in this case being the Bayreuth Festspielhaus—his words can also be applied to the figure of Hans Sachs, the main character in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, on which he was likewise working at this time.

  Die Meistersinger differs from Parsifal, of course, in that in the earlier work there is still scope for a sense of fulfillment in the matter of profane love, although even here it is acceptable only because in the course of the action Walther and Eva learn to control the anarchical element of their passion in favor of the bourgeois ideal of marriage. This inevitably suggests a comedy with a happy ending and reflects the fact that back in Dresden Wagner originally planned to write a “grand comic opera.” According to A Communication to My Friends, it would have taken the form of a “comic satyr play as a pendant” to the tragedy of Tannhäuser,2 but in the end it turned into a work full of ideas and was labeled simply an “opera.” Listeners expecting only entertainment, however, will find themselves sold short, for while it contains moments of situation comedy and genuine wit in addition to what Carl Dahlhaus has termed “an untrustworthy sense of humour,”3 its principal characters exude not only wit and irony but also a great deal of earnestness.

  Tristan und Isolde has not been forgotten but continues to leave its mark on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, with Sachs as a second Marke. According to the German writer on music Gerd Rienäcker, Walther von Stolzing could also have been called Tristan, while Eva could have been named Isolde: “Both are attempting to escape from a bourgeois existence.” But, Rienäcker argues, Walther does not achieve Tristan’s greatness, and in the tailor-made Prize Song that leads to his being elected a middle-class mastersinger, he is no more than a “domesticated Tristan.”4 The American philosopher and musicologist Lydia Goehr goes a step further and points out that before he finally agrees to wear the mastersingers’ chain of honor, Walther initially rejects the guild’s insignia: “No Master! No! I mean to be happy without being a Master!” The “opera’s secret,” Goehr claims, lies in Walther’s final words, for they indicate the way in which Wagner, after superficially promoting the idea of reconciliation in the work, denies that message on a deeper level, the idea of a reconciliation between genius and convention containing “a promise it deliberately does not keep so that it could tell us that the promise was being kept elsewhere.”5

  For Goehr, “elsewhere” is Tristan und Isolde. It is not the relatively conventional Die Meistersinger that deserves to be hailed as a song in praise of German art but the exceptional Tristan und Isolde. This, at least, is how Goehr interprets Wagner’s secret message. Wagner disavows the role of Hans Sachs, who is ultimately concerned only with compromise, but identifies, rather, with the iconoclast Walther von Stolzing and his Trial Song (“Fanget an”), which Walther sings in the presence of the mastersingers’ guild. For although his singing encounters incomprehension, it reveals more “emancipatory potential” and more “Tristanesque chromaticism” than the more conventional Prize Song to which Sachs later gives his explicit approval.6

  We do not have to subscribe wholeheartedly to this view to see that it contains much of interest and value by offering an original counterweight to the thoughtlessly two-dimensional interpretations of Die Meistersinger that include crude attempts to dismiss the work as nationalistic or even proto-National Socialist. True, Sachs invites his audience to honor “German art” and “German masters” in his final address, and it is no accident that in his very next breath he inveighs against “Romance dross.”7 But his words reflect the spirit of the age: for all their fundamental differences, composers such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Bruckner were all convinced at this time that the Germans had a historic mission. And although the idea of a German national state no longer had the same appeal between the failed revolutions of 1848–49 and the foundation of the Reich in 1871 as it had done before 1848, it had not yet acquired the craving for status typical of the Wilhelminian age, the dawn of which Wagner viewed with mistrust and even hostility.

  Ultimately we must be able to differentiate between Wagner’s actual political activities and an operatic project stretching back to his years in Dresden and, therefore, to a time when the question of German national identity bore entirely progressive features. At that date no one would have thought of dismissing the Deutschlandlied by the freedom fighter Hoffmann von Fallersleben, with its lines “From the Maas to the Memel and from the Etsch to the Belt,” as an example of blatant chauvinism: in 1841 these words reflected a desire on the part of p
rogressive Germans to establish a nation united in its freedom from the self-interested ambitions of the country’s particularist rulers.

  And while the fate of Die Meistersinger is closely bound up with the patronage of the King of Bavaria, its libretto and whole sections of its score were written before Wagner met Ludwig. And yet it is impossible to overlook that throughout the time he was working on the piece, Wagner was keen to forge a link between politics and art. It was as a political adviser that he offered his services to his young admirer, not least in his series of articles German Art and German Politics. He also suggested that the king should consider moving his seat of government from Munich to Nuremberg, an idea that Ludwig was far from dismissing out of hand. It was in Nuremberg, Wagner argued, that “my ‘Walther’ knows he is at home.”8

  “Walther” was the name that Ludwig had chosen for himself at a politically difficult time when he would far rather have been an artistic genius than king and supreme commander of his country’s armed forces. But it was as the latter that he was needed most of all by Wagner, a fatherly friend who cast himself in the role of Sachs and who required the backing of a politically and militarily powerful king, a goal he pursued so single-mindedly that in early 1867 he replaced a “pacifist” passage in the libretto of Die Meistersinger with some far more bellicose lines. In 1862 Sachs’s final address had included the words:

  Welkt manche Sitt’ und mancher Brauch,

  zerfällt in Schutt, vergeht in Rauch,—

  Lasst ab vom Kampf!

  nicht Donnerbüchs’ noch Pulverdampf

  macht wieder dicht, was nur noch Hauch!

  Ehrt eure deutschen Meister:

  dann bannt ihr gute Geister!9

  [Though many a habit and custom may wither, crumbling into dust and going up in smoke, you should stop fighting! It is not the blunderbuss or gunpowder smoke that will restore substance to what is now a mere breath! Honor your German masters and you will then conjure up kindly spirits.]

  In the full score, these lines were redrafted in order to ensure that the dilatory Ludwig would not have an excuse for any defeatist capitulation before the Prussians in the politically confused situation that then existed:

  Habt Acht! Uns dräuen üble Streich’:—

  zerfällt erst deutsches Volk und Reich,

  in falscher wälscher Majestät

  kein Fürst bald mehr sein Volk versteht;

  und wälschen Dunst mit wälschem Tand

  sie pflanzen uns in deutsches Land.

  Was deutsch und ächt wüßt’ Keiner mehr,

  lebt’s nicht in deutscher Meister Ehr’.

  Drum sag’ ich euch:

  ehrt eure deutschen Meister,

  dann bannt ihr gute Geister!

  [Beware! Evil tricks threaten us: if the German people and empire should one day fall apart under false Romance rule, soon no prince will understand his people any longer; and they will plant empty Romance ideas and Romance dross in our German land. No one would know any more what is German and genuine if the country did not honor its German masters. And so I say to you: honor your German masters and you will then conjure up kindly spirits!]

  A comment by Hans von Bülow, who conducted the work’s first performance in Munich in 1868, indicates that its “political” dimension is more far-reaching than this opportunistic attack on non-German elements in art and politics: in a letter that he wrote in 1862 to Ferdinand Lassalle, the leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party, he described the libretto as an example of “thoroughly healthy realism in a poetically transfigured light.”10

  The term “realism” was used between 1849 and 1871 to refer to a pioneering trend in politics, literature, and art whose principal newspaper in Germany was Die Grenzboten, which boasted contributors of the eminence of Gottfried Keller, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, and Berthold Auerbach. The central aim of these German-speaking realists was a critique of romanticism as an expression of the German mind and of German art whose flower had faded, its critics stigmatizing it as lachrymose, otherworldly, and stylistically overwrought. In general, the shift from romanticism to realism marks a significant change in the history of ideas, for whereas romantic writers had restricted their discourse to poetry, lyricism, religion, and the individual, the realists took as their starting point philosophy, epic, drama, and the concept of the folk, or nation. And politics, too, was an inevitable part of this debate, the failure of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848–49 having necessitated a radical shift in emphasis and, with it, a repositioning involving new goals for the whole of society.

  Instead of whining about the failure to achieve political progress through revolution and instead of pursuing unattainable ideals, the realists who wrote for Die Grenzboten argued in favor of a positive approach to the challenges of the day and a determination to place their bourgeois lives in the service of universal social progress. In the field of literature and art, realism aspired to what it termed “real idealism”—Fontane defined this as a “reflection of all real life [. . .] in the element of art.”11 This aim was not to be achieved, however, through any naturalistic imitation of life but should take the form of the “prospective possibility of a harmonious order that could be recognized in real life.”12 Such prospects did not preclude backward glances at moments of happiness in Germany’s past, for these examples of the transfiguring standpoint of “real idealism” demonstrated the feats of which the Volksgeist—the “spirit of the nation,” a vague category much valued by the nineteenth century—was capable. It was no accident that Wagner himself described his figure of Hans Sachs as “the last manifestation of the artistically creative spirit of the nation.”13 Within the context of a role laid out along “real idealistic” lines, Sachs is admirably successful in resolving the contradictions that arise and in presenting the communal lives of his beloved Nurembergers as altogether exemplary on no fewer than three different levels: on those of love, art, and politics.

  Thanks to Sachs’s wisdom, fateful passion, whose claims to be treated as an absolute have no place in this society, can be channeled in a “healthier” direction. An emotion that initially smacked of dangerous passion and irrational instinct and that Eva had summed up in the words “It was obligation, compulsion” is transformed into the ideal of marital love as the shoemaker-poet prevents the hotheaded Walther from eloping with Eva and thereby losing his chance as an “impoverished”14 knight of marrying into the house of the well-to-do patrician Veit Pogner and laying the foundations for a middle-class career. In his future role, we may take Wagner’s premise a stage further and imagine Walther encouraging art and artists in the same way that his father-in-law once did. After all, Pogner—with Eva’s approval—gives his daughter’s hand in marriage not to the richest man in Nuremberg but to the one with the greatest appreciation of art. As a widower, Sachs has enough common sense to know not to throw his hat into the ring. We shall not go far wrong in assuming that in future he will content himself with the role of godfather to the children of Walther and Eva, while finding satisfaction in his art above all else.

  Within the work itself, Sachs’s actions are designed to promote a “German art” of a kind very dear to Wagner. This involves, first and foremost, the reconciliation of art and life and, second, the reconciliation of old and new. It is not only with ideas such as these that Wagner aligned himself with current thinking in “real idealism” but also with his whole decision to tackle the subject of Die Meistersinger at all. In a study that he published in 1849 on the “socialist elements” in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Ferdinand Gregorovius—later to make a name for himself as a historian—examined the art of the mastersingers and saw in it a historical model for a “sense of a social community” needed in the present day to mitigate class divisions.15

  Wagner does not ridicule mastersong as such but only its “narrow-minded, petty bourgeois” aspects. Above all, the “marker” Sixtus Beckmesser has negative connotations thanks to his “absurd pedantry, with its insistence on prosody and the r
ules of the Tabulatur.”16 Hans Sachs, who was ultimately reconciled with Beckmesser in Joachim Herz’s 1960 production of the work in Leipzig,17 is not only a mastersinger himself, but also does everything in his power to persuade a reluctant Walther von Stolzing to accept the title of mastersinger, a title that Walther had aspired to acquiring only in order to win the hand of Eva, not because of its artistic implications. It is no accident that Wagner summed up his intentions in a program note on the overture to the opera: “The love song is heard at the same time as the mastersongs: pedantry and poetry are reconciled.”18

  By the end of the opera, both pedantry and poetry have been forced to compromise. On the one hand, the mastersingers have been obliged to see that the townspeople no longer accept Beckmesser, who is a pedant of the worst possible kind. Instead, they welcome Walther into their ranks, even though his grasp of the rules cannot keep pace with his poetry. And on the other hand, Walther has demonstrated with his Prize Song that he can control his artistic temperament in the service of the tradition that the mastersingers have long been cultivating. After his initial, distinctly rash attempt to become a mastersinger without any knowledge of the guild’s rules, his second attempt—made with the help of his generous mentor Hans Sachs—produces a song that with some effort on our part may be said to satisfy the prescribed rules. In Sachs’s view Walther’s concession to tradition is not only artistically meaningful but also socially responsible: the “bar form” that he has taught Walther is presented as a symbol of bourgeois family life, the poetic and musical model of two Stollens followed by an Abgesang mirroring the three-member family of two parents and a child.