Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  Though nothing

  Will drive them away

  We can be heroes

  Just for one day.1

  The lovers in David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ — kissing by the Berlin Wall as the bullets fly over their heads — are doomed; and they know it. The song, as Bowie admitted after it was released in 1977, is about ‘facing reality and standing up to it.’2 But the lyric is full of wrenching sadness, because the singer knows that in this contest between two people and reality itself, they don’t stand a chance. Bowie’s extraordinary vocal grows by stages from a croon to a scream as the song moves towards its end — bearing witness to his character’s slow realisation that, pure though the lovers’ love may be, a stone wall is a stone wall. And yet, paradoxically, even as he faces the fact that he and his beloved can’t win, he insists that they can. ‘We can beat them,’ he sings, ‘for ever and ever!’3The lovers are heroes — but not the kind to save somebody from a burning building or lead a nation to victory. They’re martyrs to love; two people who have chosen to preserve their perfect feeling by, as Werther would say, quitting their prison. Their love is too big, and too bold for the world, they must perish.

  As with ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’, the sentiment of Heroes — the very idea that passion cannot and should not be contained by the limits of life — would have been baffling to an eighteenth century audience. But a concert-goer of 1865, hearing ‘Heroes’, would understand instantly why the lovers in the song are heroic — and might not even be too bothered by the screaming guitars. Thanks to composer Richard Wagner, the nineteenth century music lover had already become quite well acquainted with romantic passion and terrifyingly loud noise.

  Wagner was born in the last days of the Napoleonic wars, and grew up admiring the great culture heroes of German romanticism — Goethe, Hoffmann, and above all, Beethoven, whose Symphony No. 9 he arranged for piano at the age of seventeen. Twelve years later his opera Rienzi became a huge hit. More successes — artistic if not always commercial — followed, with The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser. Then, in 1848, Wagner embarked on the greatest project of his life — the three-part saga, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

  In the summer of 1857 Wagner, short of funds and mentally exhausted by his monumental and as-yet incomplete trilogy, decided to try something different. This new opera would be simpler to stage, cheaper to produce, and much shorter. Compared to the mind-boggling scale of Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde would eventually satisfy all these criteria. But if Wagner ever thought it was going to be easy to write, he was in for a shock.

  Tristan was to be an adaptation of the ancient folk tale of the same name — a Celtic love story with a tragic end, kept alive as a metrical romance in medieval Europe. Versions of the Tristan story turned up in France, Italy, England and Germany. And it was a German version by Gottfried von Strassburg written in 1200 that Wagner used for his libretto. Like all medieval ballads, Tristan had acquired a lot of embellishments over the centuries — things that would have been entertaining to an audience of the thirteenth century, but which didn’t translate so well in the nineteenth. In adapting Tristan for the stage, Wagner set about stripping away a lot of this incidental action, to reveal the story’s core. As he did so, his Tristan and Isolde began to take on a life of its own. ‘Child!’ he wrote to the poet Mathilde Wesendonk. ‘This Tristan is turning into something terrible! This final Act!!!! — I fear the opera will be banned.’4

  The first act of Tristan is musically revolutionary, but dramatically nothing too out of the ordinary. The action begins on a ship. Tristan, a Cornish knight, is ferrying Isolde to Cornwall and his King Mark, whom Isolde has promised to marry. Isolde is secretly in love with Tristan. She would, she says, rather die than marry ‘Cornwall’s weary King’ — but tragic heroines say things like that.5 Later in the first act, Tristan snubs her, and the furious Isolde decides that he must die, and that she will die with him. They both drink what they think is poison — but is in fact a love potion. This love potion, as the British academic Michael Tanner points out in his study of Wagner, is not so important as people imagine. ‘So far as its long term effects are concerned, they might as well have been drinking water — the potion enables them to release their previously hidden feelings for one another instantly, but they do that only because they believe death is imminent.’6 The lovers embrace, and become completely absorbed in their love for one another. By this point, the ship is landing, and King Mark’s royal train is in sight. But Tristan and Isolde are oblivious.

  In the second act, the lovers meet in secret while King Mark is out hunting. They begin a duet with the words ‘O sink hernieder, nacht der lieber’ (‘O sink upon us, night of love’).7 Now, the only thing real in the world of Tristan and Isolde is the dream of Tristan and Isolde — everything else, including King Mark who we know must come back from his hunt at any moment — is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. When Mark returns and confronts Tristan over his betrayal, Tristan dismisses the king and his claims as nothing more than ‘Phantoms of the day! Morning dreams!’ He has determined to leave this sham world, and asks Isolde to accompany him to the ‘wonder-realm of night’.8 To the king, this is all complete nonsense, but the lovers have long ago replaced sense with sensibility. Feeling, to Tristan and Isolde, is sacred — it’s the only law they will accept. And since no-one else can understand their feeling, they retreat more and more from the world and go deeper into their love for one another. People say they’re crazy, what do they know? Here, the loneliness that comes of solipsism is in theory redeemed by romantic love. But in a sense, Tristan and Isolde are lonelier than ever.

  The climax of Tristan and Isolde’s love-duet finds them singing, ‘So might we die together, eternally one without end, without awakening, without fearing, nameless in love’s embrace, giving ourselves wholly, to live only for love!’9 And this is what they set out to do. Tristan fights a battle with Sir Melot, who had betrayed the lovers to King Mark. He allows himself to be beaten, is fatally wounded, and is carried off to Brittany where we find him, slowly expiring, as the curtain goes up on the third act — the one Wagner worried would be banned, or would drive people insane.

  Tristan’s faithful servant Kurwenal has sent for Isolde to heal his master’s wound. The dying Tristan hallucinates Isolde’s arrival, and this, as Tanner writes, is his happiest moment — ‘essentially, he has found the world he wants to be in’.10 Tristan dies as Isolde arrives. She, devastated, expires over his body, singing her famous ‘Liebestod’. The terms of the agreement they reached in the second act are fulfilled — the world could offer the lovers nothing, they will be united in death. Isolde leaves the world of day behind for ever, and joins Tristan as she sinks into ‘unconscious, highest bliss!’11

  Throughout Tristan und Isolde, Wagner uses the other characters in his drama to critique the lovers’ behaviour. Mark and Kurwenal’s dialogue gives voice to the incomprehension ‘normal’ people must feel in the face of Tristan and Isolde’s monumental self-absorption. While Tristan lies unconscious in the third act, Kurwenal sings, ‘Oh deception of love! Oh passion’s force! The most beautiful of the world’s illusions!’12 Kurwenal’s world, the world most of us live in, is the opposite of Tristan’s — here romantic love is an illusion, a phantom which is bound to evaporate. As Tanner points out, many critics have taken Kurwenal’s stance to be the true voice of Tristan und Isolde. They see the opera, in other words, as a critique of romanticism — as though Wagner knows better than his doomed lovers, and is subtly exposing their self-deception. In his book, Wagner, Tanner insists that nothing could be further from the truth. ‘The trouble with accounts of Tristan which view it as in any way a critique or expose of romantic love is that that is not in the least how it feels.’13

  The promise Bowie’s King makes to his Queen is the same impossible vow Wagner’s lovers make in the second act of Tristan. Their struggle against the world will end in their deaths, but in death their love will live ‘forever and ever’. As Tanner has said of
Tristan, it’s tempting to interpret this as ironic, because if it’s not, then the song is a sincere denial of civilisation itself. ‘Heroes’ indicts the whole world for letting its lovers down, and then dismisses that world as a sham, insisting that the lovers’ dream world — Tristan’s ‘wonder-realm of night’ — is their true home, where they can reign as King and Queen forever. It’s still possible that all this is meant to be ironic, but as Tanner says of Tristan, that’s not how it feels — the quotation marks around the title appear nowhere in the song. Bowie sings it as though his heart is about to burst.

  Wagnerian

  OF ALL THE romantic composers, Wagner is the one most deserving of a place in the history of rock and roll. Others have had their moment in the sun — Beethoven was briefly in vogue in the late ’60s thanks to Wendy Carlos’s A Clockwork Orange soundtrack, Strauss had one of his tone poems pressed into service as Elvis’s walk-on music in the ’70s, and Rivers Cuomo, as we’ll see later, has always had a soft spot for Puccini. But Schumann? Mahler? Berlioz? None are likely to find a place in the index of even the most exhaustive rock history, let alone have an entire genre of rock music named after them.

  The phrase ‘Wagnerian rock’ is generally credited to songwriter Jim Steinman. Steinman adapted Wagner’s Das Rheingold into a stage musical in 1974.1 Three years later, he had teamed up with ex-Rocky Horror Picture Show star Meat Loaf to record Bat Out Of Hell, a hysterically over-the-top ode to American romance that turned Meat Loaf into an unlikely star, and paved the way for future Steinman mini-operas like Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. But by the time Bat Out of Hell appeared, the term ‘Wagnerian’ already had some currency in the world of heavy metal. When The Stalk Forest Group changed their name to Blue Oyster Cult in 1971, rock critic Richard Meltzer suggested a way to lend their new name a bit of typographical panache. ‘I said, “How about an umlaut?”’ Meltzer later recalled, ‘Metal had a Wagnerian aspect anyway’.2 The heavy metal umlaut — or ‘rock dots’ as they came to be called — went on to have a life of their own, subsequently adopted by scores of bands from Motörhead to Mötley Crüe for their vague associations of tragedy, paganism, and above all, loudness.

  By ‘Wagnerian’ Meltzer most likely meant ‘loud and intense’ — which is absolutely fair. ‘I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s,’ says Lady Henry in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. ‘It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.’3 Wagner’s music was frequently dismissed as ‘noise’ by nineteenth-century critics. A cartoon published in 1869 showing the composer hammering a crotchet into a concertgoer’s ear with a mallet sums up a fairly widespread feeling about him at the time. But Wagner intentionally strove for intensity in his music, and just like the metal bands he unknowingly inspired, if the technology of the day wasn’t up to producing what he heard in his head, Wagner simply went ‘one louder’. He had a specially designed Festival Theatre built in Bayreuth to accommodate his musical vision — the first stone was laid in 1872, and it would be another four years before the theatre saw its first performance. Meanwhile, The New York Times reported excitedly on Bayreuth’s radical new design. Wagner had the orchestra sunk below the floor so that the music would rise up before the audience as if from nowhere. The paper informed its readers that future theatregoers would watch Wagner’s dramas ‘through an invisible wall of sound’.4

  Almost a century later, pop’s most famous Wagnerian, Phil Spector, revived The Times’ phrase to describe his new hit making formula, first heard on The Crystals’ ‘He’s a Rebel’ in 1962. Spector’s Wall of Sound was created by a unique combination of multiple instruments, strings, kettledrums and big reverb-soaked spaces — all squeezed into a mono mix. The result was the most overwhelming noise that had ever been heard on the radio, a deep cataclysmic rumble topped with a sweet sprinkling of bells and shakers and a gut-busting vocal. Spector produced hits for The Crystals, Darlene Love and Bob B Sox, before reaching an extraordinary peak with The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ in 1963.

  Spector called these songs ‘little symphonies for kids’,5 and spoke elsewhere of taking a ‘Wagnerian approach’ to rock and roll.6 While the sound was radically new, Spector’s fusion of teen-pop and romantic agony was by no means just a gimmick.

  The eccentric producer had hit on a fundamental connection between the high school kids who bought his records and the operas of Richard Wagner. Spector had realised that in high school, every time a boy looks at you, let alone asks you on a date or dumps you just before the dance, it feels like Tristan und Isolde. So Spector decided to treat these teen tragedies with the dignity their protagonists instinctively felt they deserved. He would tell the teens of America that their emotions were every bit as important as they imagined. The Wall of Sound is not just a sound — it’s a sound married to an idea.

  Spector quit the business (temporarily, it later turned out) after DJs refused to play his masterpiece, ‘River Deep–Mountain High’, in 1966. He would have taken his Wall of Sound with him if he could, but by the end of the ’60s it was no longer exclusively his. A new generation of artists and producers who’d grown up with Spector’s songs ringing in their ears was taking his sound in new directions, and using it to tell new stories. By the mid ’70s the kids who’d bought ‘Be My Baby’ were in their twenties. Their lives had become more complicated, their responsibilities were greater, but they all still retained, somewhere in their hearts, the vision of ideal romantic love presented in that song and the sound that carried it — a vision that came to seem all the more tragic as reality closed them in its net.

  Born to Run

  IN 1974 ‘BE My Baby’ still sounded like the future to Bruce Springsteen. The singer was looking for a way to refine the structure of his music while increasing its emotional impact, and Spector’s ‘little symphonies for kids’ seemed to point the way. Not that Springsteen’s new songs were ‘for kids’ exactly. Music writer Greil Marcus once wrote that Springsteen in the ’70s took the carefree, drag-racing, soda-jerking teens of the ’50s and early ’60s and ‘dumped fifteen years on them’.1 Those kids who busted out of their parents’ house and hit the road in search of fun and love; what did they find? And where are they now? This was the territory explored by a new song Springsteen had written early in 1974. He asked producer John Landau if he thought a Wall of Sound-style arrangement would work for ‘Born to Run’.

  ‘Born to Run’ was one of the shortest songs Springsteen had written up to that point, but recording it took almost six months in the studio — twice as long as it had taken to record his last album.2 The time spent paid off — ‘Born to Run’, then as now, explodes out of the radio. As with Spector’s ’60s’ productions, the song’s deep spaces and tiny details add up to create the effect of a gigantic symphony compressed into the grooves of a rock and roll 45. But the song doesn’t just sound like ‘Be My Baby’, it works like ‘Be My Baby’. The music is impossibly grand, but the song is not about great men doing great deeds, it’s about young Americans whose emotions will not be contained by the limits of their small-town lives. It’s ‘Summertime Blues’ meets Tristan und Isolde. It’s a tragic romance — and something more.

  Romanticism replaced the Enlightenment’s insistence on knowledge with a philosophy based on action. Goethe said, ‘I am not here to know, but to do.’3 In ‘Born to Run’, Springsteen’s lonely rider agrees. Sensible, rational people tell him to knuckle down and get a good job — but this is secondhand philosophy, which is of no use to a young romantic:

  … I gotta know how it feels

  I wanna know if your love is wild

  Girl I wanna know if love is real.4

  These lines are followed by a terrifying hallucination of America by night, lost souls drift through the mist, cars scream down the highway, the amusement park looms over the lovers like a mechanical monster. The singer and his girlfriend have to get out of this hostile world — he serenades her with the surprising lyric:
r />   I wanna die with you out on the street tonight

  In an everlasting kiss.5

  This world of illusion is not for the singer and his Wendy; he proposes Isolde’s ‘unconscious, highest bliss’ as an escape route. But he also suggests, just before the song’s last chorus, that death is not the end, or that they might be headed somewhere after all:

  Someday girl I don’t know when

  We’re gonna get to the place where we really wanted to go

  And we’ll walk in the sun.6

  ‘Born to Run’ comes on as a tragedy — only to later reveal itself as something else — a religious drama based on a faith that doesn’t exist yet. This, as Michael Tanner insists, is what Tristan und Isolde is really about. Wagner’s lovers are determined to live with the consequences of their love, to see it to its conclusion. Their death is not a defeat, because they believe in something beyond the physical world. This is clearly a religious idea — but whereas Bach’s St Matthew Passion deals with a religion everybody knows, Wagner was creating a brand-new one — a religion of romantic love.7 ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Heroes’ both preach this religion. The singer and his soul mate place their faith in each other, knowing that this will offer them salvation in death. This is how Springsteen and Wendy can die in each others arms and ‘get to the place’; Johnny and Tina can ‘make it’ whether they make it or not; and Bowie and his queen can be beaten and still ‘beat them forever’.

  This ‘Passion of Passion’ as Tanner calls it shares a few things in common with Christianity: the players in the Passion are forced to make enormous sacrifices and have their faith tested every step of the way. The key difference, according to Tanner, is that the Christian God makes you wait, whereas romanticism demands immediate action, with paradise as the direct result. In ‘Thunder Road’, the first song on the Born To Run album, Springsteen is standing outside his girl’s house, holding out his hand and offering her a ride. She’s been praying for a saviour, he tells her to get up off her knees and get in the car.