Richard Wagner
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Nietzsche could have appealed to Hoffmann the early romantic when he described a stage work, Tristan und Isolde, as the “actual opus metaphysicum of all art.”5 And Wagner himself was entirely right to claim that he was the true heir of “absolute” music, music which is “entirely itself” precisely because it really only begins to blossom in the soil that the total artwork offers it.6 Such considerations are by no means academic but lead to the first crux of “modern” responses to Wagner, for the religion of art of the modern age that emerged from the French Revolution in the form of a political program and that the romantics then espoused as an aesthetic and philosophical concern has always been an ambiguous concept, because on the one hand the message it proclaims is essential to it, otherwise we would not be able to speak of a religion of art, whereas on the other hand, it revolves around art, otherwise it would not be a religion of art.
It was, of course, Wagner’s keenest ambition to merge the two along the lines of an idealized classical Greek model, an ambition underscored by an entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary: “He should by rights have graced the world in Aeschylus’s age.”7 But in an age when music had acquired a new degree of complexity, Wagner’s music almost inevitably took on a life of its own and certainly gained in importance even in works involving both words and music. Wagner himself admitted as much when he stressed that his music was in the tradition of Beethoven, moving “amid its own most quintessential element”8 in the musical drama that he himself was propagating and being laid out along symphonic lines on an orchestral level.
The contradiction that is discernible here is even more clearly demonstrated, of course, by the reception of Wagner’s works. From the outset his stage works were perceived as operas—in other words, works that existed for the sake of their music and their stage magic. As a result, the question as to whether we are dealing with total artworks or even with a religion of art is of secondary importance and certainly does not enjoy the status traditionally accorded to it by secondary—verbal—discourse on Wagner. In the nineteenth century many members of what we might call the “sophisticated” public wanted stage works whose message reflected and respected the major ideas of the period, and there is no doubt that Wagner’s underlying idea of redemption made his works particularly attractive to audiences enamored of the notion of art as a religion, allowing them to see in him a figure “who brought joy to the world” in the same way that he himself regarded Beethoven as a figure who had gladdened the world.9
And yet a comparison between Wagner and Beethoven the writer of symphonies reveals that what matters are not the specific, concrete ideas contained within this word-tone-art but their powers of persuasion in terms of their function as purveyors of a modern religion. The disciple of a religion of art is no more required to decide in favor of certain ideas than someone who professes his or her faith in a higher being while refusing to acknowledge the concrete tenets of Christian belief is required to provide an account of the nature of that higher being. Indeed, we may even go a stage further and argue that as an enlightened contemporary, which is how any operagoer would at least like to see himself, such a disciple will have misgivings about choosing between possibly rival myths and their respective roads to salvation but will generally be content to cling to myth in general, thereby ensuring a refuge for himself in an age of transience. And yet this leads all too easily to our attaching more importance to the person than to the object, a point made by Peter Wapnewski, when he writes that “the artist as the creative human being, the artist as an autonomous authority is regarded by the modern age as the authentication of human existence in general after religious and metaphysical legitimacy has become dubious and invalid.”10
This leads me to the title of my final chapter. Although Wagner may not have seen himself as the “sleuth of modernism,” he certainly merits this description when judged by objective criteria inasmuch as he served the needs of nineteenth-century society by offering benefits whose drawbacks his audiences evidently preferred to ignore. In wanting to be gratified by Wagner’s gifts as a sorcerer, audiences prefer not to have their lives called into question by Wagner the moral preacher.
But what exactly is the secret of Wagner’s artistry as a magician? Striking a sympathetically modest note, Lawrence Kramer suggests that it involves no coherent mythology or ideology but impressive “premodern narrative images” combined with the “hypnotic effect” of the music.11 Thomas Mann was only one of many earlier writers to regard Wagner’s music as an opiate: an intoxicating consciousness-expanding drug that was used by almost every fin-de-siècle artist. Mann identified with an art that was subtle and dangerous and no less attractive in consequence. When Gerda Buddenbrook announces her intention of working through the score of Tristan und Isolde with Edmund Pfühl, an organist brought up with the music of Bach, the latter groans: “That is not music—believe me! [. . .] This is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed fog, shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in art.”12
This passage also reflects the situation of “modern man” encouraged by countless world fairs and exhibitions to believe that his scientific and technological potential is boundless even while repeatedly striking against his own personal boundaries. Wagner’s art tricks us into thinking that individual experience can be delimited and infinitely expanded. It is clear from French responses to Wagner that his mythological message was scarcely affected by all this, for here the boundaries that were crossed remained an essential part of the world of art, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry all drinking at the well of art for art’s sake and deriving this element from Wagner’s music without engaging with the action of his works, fascinated, as they were, by the idea that their German model was able to extend the conventional system of music, expanding its boundaries almost to infinity, while never actually violating them. Even more clearly than with the early romantics, the “what” of art was now eclipsed by the “how.” Valéry in particular valued Wagner’s music for its “pure sounds”:13 unlike literature, it did not have to wrestle constantly with meanings.
Robert Musil summed up this quality of music in a passage in The Man without Qualities in which Diotima, exercised by problems of the heart, reflects in the third person: “Should a woman in Diotima’s difficult position make a gesture of renunciation, or let herself be swept into adultery, or take a third, mixed course [. . .]. For this third solution there was as yet no libretto, as it were, only some great harmonic chords.”14
Diotima would prefer it if the ethical decisions that she feels incapable of taking were raised to a higher aesthetic level that allowed her to feel good about herself. Something similar is felt by Wagnerian audiences: they refuse to engage with the ethical conflicts that these works explore but enjoy the aesthetic solution that is suggested by the music. Although this flies in the face of Wagner’s original intentions, it ultimately reflects the composer’s own approach to his works—at least to the extent that we see that approach against the background of Nietzsche’s aforementioned motto: “We have art so as not to be destroyed by the truth.”15 The myth that is music reveals no truths but aestheticizes them.
This is particularly problematical when it is brute force and violence that are aestheticized, a topic that played a role in the reception of Wagner’s works from a relatively early date—and not just in the German-speaking world. In À la recherche du temps perdu, for example, Proust describes the Wagnerian Robert, Marquis de Saint-Loup—an officer in the First World War—standing on the balcony of a building in Paris and admiring the “great aesthetic beauty” of an air raid by German zeppelins picked out in the night sky by the circles of light of the French anti-aircraft searchlights: in this apocalyptic vision the zeppelins become Valkyries, the noise of the air-raid sirens another Ride of the Valkyries.16
It is no accident that this same scene was quoted by Ernst Jünger in his ideologically dubious wartime diary, Strahlungen, while the Ride of the Valkyries acquired a very specifi
c popularity thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s anti–Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now, one of the US Airborne Cavalry’s helicopters having mounted in it a tape recorder blaring out Wagner’s music: “We’ll come in low out of the rising sun,” announces the commanding officer, “and about a mile out, we’ll put on the music. Yeah, I use Wagner—scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys love it.”17
Can Wagner’s music really be used to justify this cinematic demonstration of violence? In a wider sense, yes, but in this specific case, no. Wagner’s high art involves the ability to offer us tone paintings of the greatest vividness and succinctness. It is an art that benefits the specific atmosphere of the start of Der fliegende Holländer as well as the Lohengrin prelude. It also affects the “traurige Weise” at the start of act 3 of Tristan und Isolde and the whole of the Parsifal prelude. And it additionally leaves its mark on the Ride of the Valkyries at the start of act 3 of Die Walküre. For his well-developed ability to write music according to “local criteria”18 and for his decision to bank more on sonority than on an integral compositional structure, Wagner inevitably has to pay a high price—this is the nub of Adorno’s critique of Wagner’s use of phantasmagoria: music that moves from situation to situation without being integrated into a higher, overriding concept runs the risk of being exploited for other ends.
And yet this is no green light for interpretations that equate the Ride of the Valkyries with fascism or dismiss Wagner’s music in general as protofascist, for not only is the theme of violence merely one among many in Wagner’s work and by no means determinative, but the Ride of the Valkyries is not about violence as such but—conceptually and musically—concerned with what Richard Klein has termed “the synchronization of extremes”: “Delimiting lightness clashes with rigidly fixed structures.” “Wagner’s orchestra anticipates the air-borne steeds of the twentieth century, dreaming them up in advance of their actual appearance.”19
In his Library of Congress lecture “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,” Thomas Mann advanced the view that “with his philosopheme of power,” Nietzsche “presaged the dawning imperialism and as a quivering floatstick indicated the fascist era of the West.” Mann was in fact inclined “to reverse cause and effect and not to believe that Nietzsche created fascism, but rather that fascism created him.”20 What was true of Nietzsche could also be true of Wagner, especially if we replace the “fascist era” by the “modern age” in keeping with Nietzsche’s own dictum that “Wagner sums up modernity.”21
It is, of course, a varied and ambiguous modernity with which Wagner engages, being the product of a civilization that seeks to control itself in every last detail and yet does not know why, refusing to acknowledge its demonic basis, while permanently confronting it. Here is a society that would like to be enlightened but which is exposed to such existential concerns as nature, love, sexuality, guilt, death, and destruction in the same way that every previous society has been. Wagner’s works are contradictory, especially in terms of their “great narratives”: as Gerd Rienäcker has observed in the context of the Ring, “The work is not about people mastering their fate but about the circumstances that turn each and every one of us into the victims of that fate.”22 In this respect Wagner’s mythological characters are barely any different from Strindberg’s “modern characters.” Whether seen from the standpoint of the characters themselves or from that of their audiences, a yawning gulf opens up between ambition and reality, between the subjective desire for emancipation and the objective state of the world, a gulf that no myth, however beautiful, can fill—not even Wagner’s myth of redemption through destruction.
And yet Wagner has a specific trump card up his sleeve—his music. Although this cannot fill the gulf, it can shrink it by offering meanings merely by dint of the sounds that it makes, which it is able to do in keeping with what is arguably its most important anthropological function. It is this that renders it the one truly redemptive factor in Wagner’s total artwork. In his late essay “Religion and Art,” Wagner tells a story to clarify this point:
The children of a parish priest in Sweden once heard a nixie singing, while accompanying herself on her harp. “Sing as much as you like,” they called out to her, “you’ll never get to heaven.” The nixie sadly lowered her harp and head: the children heard her weeping and ran to tell their father. He counseled them and sent them back to the nixie with glad tidings. “Come, nixie, don’t be sad,” they called out to her. “Father says that you may get to heaven after all.” Then all night long they heard the river echoing with songs so sweet than never man heard sweeter.23
In other words: true redemption may be tied to destruction, but the music ensures that we have no need to feel stoic or to be overcome by despair in the face of such destruction. Rather, there is reason to feel “longing, faith, and hope.”24
Here Wagner reveals himself as a true romantic—just as he does in those passages in his stage works in which music was “never sweeter” and sings as beautifully as the nixie. At the same time, however, he is the sleuth of a fractured modernism, for in its details his music is by no means as affirmative or calming as its reputation. Rather, it displays some of the qualities of Strindberg’s psychological realism. It was Nietzsche who first highlighted these contradictions, praising his idol for extending music’s potential for language in immeasurable ways,25 while at the same time mocking the composer for loosening music’s tongue only to break its limbs.26 In both cases we can see Wagner’s presumptuous keenness to ensure that his music is psychologically true in every detail and is able “to advance into hitherto inaccessible areas at the very limits of expression and dig deep into the buried depths of our consciousness.”27
This “attention to detail” goes hand in hand with the “fragmentation of the bigger picture,”28 prompting Nietzsche to describe Wagner as “the greatest miniaturist of music.”29 And there is no doubt that Wagner’s art of the theater lacks the authority that would mediate between the lofty super-structure of his music theater and its “naïve” type of localized narrative. As a result—and in spite of his self-proclaimed “art of transition”—constructive and destructive elements clash violently with each other in his scores. And yet which court should we appeal to when complaining that Wagner fails to bring off the contortionist feat of embracing the myth of music while at the same time savoring every last detail of his own compositional dexterity? Building on his theory that music is both autonomous and a “fait social,” Adorno was able to claim that Wagner’s music is not only phantasmagorically untrue but also and at the same time an expression of social truth: the whole of modernism seeks the big picture while finding only riveting sequences of separate images.
It is in this sense that Gerd Rienäcker has declared Wagner’s “strange linguistic construct” a “magnificent failure”: “States of narcotic intoxication yield to oddly gleaming brightness and to painful clarity of detail and overall context; the sounds are wan and broken when Hagen lashes out, they break open in the Grail ceremony, and they are dissonant in the face of Valhalla, robbed for long stretches of any unambiguous tonal context.”30
Wagner’s music draws its strength and life force from these contradictions, insisting on the harmony of the world while at the same time bidding it a resolute farewell. It is planned by the composer right down to the very last detail and simultaneously represents a rhizomatic fabric that seems able to survive without the guiding hand of an author. Its leitmotif technique is both hierarchical and anarchic. And although the leitmotifs exist for the sake of their significance within the drama, they also provide the material for an autonomous musical syntax. Wagner’s compositional thinking follows traditional Aristotelian logic whereby something can be either A or not A—first subject or second subject, theme or accompaniment, theme or interlude, structure or instrumentation—and yet it constantly ignores this logic, for A can also be not A, the theme can also be the accompaniment, and the structure can vanish behind the instrumentation
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As a result, anyone who for reasons of ideology or simply to make a rhetorical point insists on the idea of a total artwork will find that his or her access to Wagner’s works is barred. The sinister attempts of fascism and Stalinism to inflict the mask of the total artwork on a society aligned with a set of state-imposed norms make it almost impossible to salvage this category for the narrower world of aesthetics, for even here authoritarian structures may still be found in discussions of this theme. On the other hand, it is all too typical of the German tendency to overestimate the importance of the mind and of mental effort to posit artistic heroes such as Wagner as influential figures in the ebb and flow of social processes. His “total art” is nothing more than an enzyme of such a process. And at least it is true of the present day that a free society will listen to its artists but will not allow them to dictate their behavior. Nor does such a society need to keep importuning Wagner with the ultimately unanswerable question as to the extent to which his understanding of art may itself be questionable. Rather, it should be possible for us simply to enjoy the intellectual and sensual stimuli that his art continues to promise us.
Wrestling with such questions is more than postmodernism has to offer in the case of Wagner, for postmodernism no longer checks out Wagner’s total artwork for sense and meaning, being or appearance, morality or immortality, coherence or contingency, but examines it for its media competence. According to Jean Baudrillard, “We no longer experience the drama of alienation but the ecstasy of communication,” a diagnosis taken over by Sven Friedrich, the director of the Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, in a fashionably titled article “tannhaeuser@venusberg.de: On Wagner’s media technology.”31 In keeping with the motto that “the medium is the message,” communication can mean anything and everything in this context. The only thing it cannot mean is rational discourse on art. As we have already noted, Friedrich Kittler prefers the term “noise”: “With Wagner, music becomes a matter of pure dynamics and pure acoustics.”32 We could choose other images and examine Wagner’s music in terms of its different thermal states or drives. And we may even concentrate on the “erotic impulse” of these works33 or, with reference to Tannhäuser, aim our rifle sights at the “virtual hyper-reality of the Venusberg.”34