Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  The air of a socialist critique hovers about the Ring for the same reason that the air of a socialist revolution hovers about the incidents at Dresden—which is to say, because it was a revolution, complete with guns (and grenades), we associate it with the twentieth-century revolutions that we are more familiar with. Because the Ring grew out of a real revolutionary critique of society, we associate that critique with the most radical critiques of today, starting from them as we begin to unwind its allegorical threads. But though what the Dresdeners rebelled against was real enough, what it was a rebellion for simply could not be called in any way, by today’s standards, radical.

  In reviewing the words of Wagner’s fiery prose poem “Revolution”—the Goddess of Revolution will come and destroy “the order of things that divorces enjoyment from labor, makes labor a burden and enjoyment a vice . . .”—one of Wagner’s recent biographers, Gregor-Dellin, asks, in the midst of quoting one of Wagner’s more Utopian flights from another unpublished fragment of this period where Wagner is waxing euphoric over a “communism” that will bring “the full emancipation of the human race and the fulfillment of pure Christian ideals”:

  “Who was going to do the actual work?”

  But the answer is the people who did it ordinarily; only now they would have wonderful music, composed by Wagner, to make them happy while they did it. Again, we must stress that even if it meant throwing a grenade, the conflict at Dresden was between Monarchy and Republic, not Monarchy and some form of socialism. And Wagner’s rare use of the word “communism” in a positive context has to be taken as the most idealistic of metaphors, rather than any sort of materialist program. When he does use “communism” in any material sense, as we saw in the January 12th speech to the Vaterlands-Verein, it is only to execrate it as “. . . that most fatuous and senseless doctrine . . .”

  Those battles were to come—and, when they came, they would obscure much of the conservative theory behind the actions of men like Wagner with a radical aura.

  Wagner saw the ills of society. He had real sympathy for the oppressed. He even had some understanding of the machinery through which society replicated its oppressions. But while his answers for those ills included the range of republican rights and liberties, they involved no fundamental reorganization of the social structure.

  Higher wages, better working conditions, more leisure for the working classes?

  He was certainly for them all. But what they were supposed to do with that leisure was to listen to more music; and that would make them fundamentally content with their lot. His analysis in the end was far closer to Dickens’s than it was to Marx’s. What would end the evils of humanity was less greed, greater spirituality, stronger love. God was dead. (Wagner was an atheist.) But art in general and music-dramas in particular could disseminate these feelings of love and great-heartedness throughout the people.

  Art can, of course (and especially theatrical art), move an audience to great emotion. But the nineteenth century saw this as a material force that could work throughout society for the greater social good.

  We have talked about the received idea, current in the nineteenth century, of the destruction of civilization as a prerequisite for the “new order.” But there was another received idea that runs through the whole of Wagner’s thought and writing. That is the idea we discussed in terms of Matthew Arnold and English literature in our fourth chapter: i.e., all that reformers in England, from Arnold to Professor Gordon, believed literature would do, Wagner, among many others, believed music could do.

  What probably strikes modern readers of Mein Leben as most odd is the tone in which Wagner, again and again, justified his activities by claiming that his only interest in the republican revolution was because of the possibility of theater reforms that it held out, the possibility of higher performance standards that could benefit, and even calm, a revolutionary populace. Wagner was certainly serious about the reality of musical performance. And it was precisely these emotions that, again and again, he wanted to appeal to—with his own work, and in his performances of the works of others.

  In 1846 he had submitted a hundred-page proposal for the reorganization of the Dresden orchestra to the royal cabinet by way of the Theater Intendant, Baron August von Lüttichau, in which for all practical purposes he invented the modern orchestra as we know it. His proposal covered everything from the musicians’ salaries to the placement of the players. This last is worth looking at, because, twenty years later at Bayreuth, Wagner was actually able to institute these changes; and from there they became standard orchestral practices all over the world. Till then, in most European opera houses the players sat with their backs more or less to the audience in a long line, two deep, across the theater. The conductor stood behind the orchestra, facing the stage, his back to the players and the audience, directly conducting the singers, for whom he also acted as prompter. Watching him from behind, the musicians did the best they could. Wagner suggested that the players be pulled together (much along the lines of his Ninth Symphony arrangement) so that they could see (and hear!) each other, and that the conductor stand in front of the orchestra and guide the players—and that the singers (first) learn their parts better and (second) take a cut in salary, which should be distributed among the orchestral players who more deserved it. He also suggested that the stolid wooden music stands be replaced with lightweight metal ones, which he’d designed. It is a commonsensical document with higher standards of performance as its goal, and must make anyone who has ever played in an orchestra, no matter how small, love Wagner—at least momentarily. We should remember, of course, that all through the nineteenth century such proposals for musical reform were being made by serious musicians all over Europe. Berlioz’s biography abounds in such intelligent suggestions—and indeed such defeats:

  Shortly after the Palm Sunday concert of 1847, right after Wagner moved into the Marcolini, his proposal had been rejected.

  But it is only this belief in the possibility that art can be as great a force as religion once was that creates the grandiose potential in the artist’s social position, as reflected in artists such as Hugo, Rossini, Sand, Byron, and—later, once Ludwig interfered—Wagner. And it is only this nineteeth-century belief that allows Wagner’s explanation of his motivations to make sense at all and not seem a ratiocination too preposterous for any intelligent man to expect anyone to believe! It also explains why men like Röckel, Bakúnin, and Heubner would put such trust in an artist like Wagner in the first place or would consider having a conductor and opera composer, even if he was a Second Royal Kapellmeister, among their advisers and intimates.

  Today, we might understand (though we would probably smile at, even so) an artist who threw herself or himself so actively into such a revolution to “get material” for a work. (And that smile and those quotation marks sign an even further historical displacement of the artist’s social position.) But that is not Wagner. Although the republican revolution gave him a view of the world that, indeed, marked all his subsequent work almost as strongly as it did Victor Hugo’s, Wagner threw himself into that revolution in order to make manifest the real possibility of using what he saw—a possibility and a use that can only be understood in nineteenth-century historical terms.

  In its final tableau, the allegory or the Ring leaves us with a silent, awed populace, void of articulation but full of expectation, standing among the ruins of history, metaphysically freed of the chains of religion and physically released from monarchy (a monarchy that they have not overthrown but that has simply destroyed itself through its own inner corruption and collapsed), ready now not for socialism but for elected leaders, trial by a jury of one’s peers, education, science, public programs for the dissemination of the arts (art that would, indeed, perform the same tasks as religion once had in strictly monarchical times), and the universal (male) vote.

  VII

  There are many aspects to Wagner that, if not discussed, leave our considerations radically incompl
ete. Yet this exploration can only be but so long. I should like here, for example, to explore Wagner’s anti-Semitism.

  Apologists for it, such as Bryan Magee and Martin Gregor-Dellin, to me seem to hover somewhere between troubling disingenuousness and true naïveté. Both appear wholly oblivious to the reality (and demonstrable social effects) of an active, incontrovertible, and energetically functioning social prejudice against the Jews in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, however subtle that prejudice could be or however often it was overtly denied. Even so meticulously researched a study as Jacob Katz’s The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism, strikes me as somehow misguided. Professor Katz argues that before 1850, in the considerable documentation that exists on Wagner, there is no anti-Jewish statement from the man. During this time Wagner even championed Jewish writers, such as Heinrich Heine—and set two of Heine’s poems to music. The notion that Wagner’s later statements in Mein Leben—that, whether he said so or not, he felt repulsion against the Jews—are therefore suspect, seems to me to ignore the fact that the age under study was one in which, socially, conventions of hyperbole and hypocrisy were rampant—so much so that we can hardly give them those names today without distorting them.

  Certainly anti-Semitism is there in Mein Leben—right before the events of the revolutionary Dresden year—in Wagner’s discussion of his friendship with the Jewish writer Berthold Auerbach, whose stories he had read and been impressed by. What remains seductive about it, even today, is that Wagner can listen to the stories of the childhood oppressions of his Jewish friends, can hear of the taunts they endured from others, can learn of the ostracism they suffered, all with true sympathy; “[But] . . . one day,” he tells us of Auerbach, “I turned to him in an amiable intimate way and advised him simply to let the Jewish question go hang; there were, after all, a number of other standpoints from which to judge the world. Curiously enough, he lost all his ingenuousness at that point, adopted what struck me as a not entirely authentic tone of whimpering emotion, and assured me he could never do that, as Judaism still contained too much that demanded his complete sympathy . . . When I saw him again in Dresden, I found his countenance changed in a disarming manner: he looked extraordinarily common and dirty; his former refreshing liveliness had turned into the usual Jewish fidgetiness, and every word he spoke came out in such a way that one could see he regretted not having saved it for the newspaper.” (In his study, Professor Katz refers to this account as having “an undertone” of anti-Semitism about it; I can only throw up my hands.) What Wagner is totally blind to is precisely what such blindness as his will lead to historically.

  The anti-Semitism is there right after the Dresden account in the odious essay he composed within a year of fleeing the devastated city, “Jewry in Music”: Jews cannot write great music because their relation to culture is foreign, secondary; and because they have no usable musical culture of their own they are in an inauthentic relation to the mainstream of music tradition . . .

  Anti-Semitism, indeed, so pervades Mein Leben, in everything from Wagner’s digs at the Jewish composer Mendelssohn (whose rediscovery of Bach’s music Wagner championed and at whose house Wagner was sometimes a guest) to his final repudiation of Meyerbeer, a Jew and the most popular opera composer of the day (as well as, for a period, a supporter of the young Wagner), that one only wonders how, for the length of the Dresden uprising, Wagner manages to put it aside. But what truly disarms about Wagner’s anti-Semitism is just how modern—and how familiar—it sounds.

  If Wagner represents the creation and the subsequent dissemination of the modern in artistic attitudes, we must remember that on several national fronts, the modern experience is that of the concentration camp and genocide. Wagner, his four-part Festival Play, and his philosophy are so intimately connected with one of those fronts that the question of the relationship between a national concept of art and a nation’s political practice must be raised, however we decide to answer it.

  I should like to take on, both for agreement and disagreement’s sake, the criticisms of Wagner made by Theodor Adorno in In Search of Wagner; written between autumn of 1937 and spring of 1938, in London and New York. Adorno claims Wagner is an anti-intellectual composer; he is gestural, rather than developmental. Wagner intentionally abandoned the entire classical range of developmental techniques to make his music more democratic, more accessible. In place of development, Wagner substituted the insistent hearable and comparatively simple repetition of the leitmotif. This decision for simplification and democratization was made before the coming of music’s mechanical reproduction would educate hundreds of thousands to a familiarity with just that classical range—the same educative process that would reduce Wagner’s music to kitsch.

  Adorno was not the first to voice this criticism. And Debussy had defended Wagner against it well before Adorno’s book, with his observation that, indeed, Tristan und Isolde was nothing but development from one end to the other! But Wagner would probably not have said so. (“Unending melody”—the term Wagner wanted—is not continuous development.) While clever, Debussy’s remark is finally disingenuous.

  Adorno’s comments mirror Nietzsche’s late and somewhat disturbed quip over the already-mentioned swelling Wagnerian literature (which Nietzsche himself twice contributed books to, as well as several essays). In The Case of Wagner; published five years after Wagner’s death, Nietzsche wrote:

  Not every music so far has required a literature: one ought to look for a sufficient reason here. Is it that Wagner’s music is too difficult to understand? Or is he afraid of the opposite, that it might be understood too easily—that one will not find it difficult enough to understand?

  I should like to essay my own analysis of the social allegory presented in the Ring. Writing The Perfect Wagnerite during the height of the explosive anti-Semitic feelings ignited by the Dreyfus Affair, Shaw (it would seem) felt that the anti-Semitic elements could be politely skipped over and the work could still make its point. I believe that unless we trace clearly its massively anti-Semitic strands, the work is historically unreadable. Whatever one thinks of it, or however unacceptable one finds it today, clearly the major outline of the social allegory presented in the Ring’s prologue, Das Rheingold, is that it was the Jews (Alberich) who gave up human love for wealth and power, by the initial seizure of the Rhinegold. And in Siegfried, the Ring’s third opera, clearly the allegory runs along the following lines: the heroic spirit of the West (Siegfried) grows up through being nurtured by a tradition of Jewish skepticism and social cynicism (Mime); but that heroic spirit will only come into its own when it learns to repudiate and finally throw off that tradition (Siegfried kills his foster father, Mime), because that tradition is ultimately greedy, petty, destructive and is bent on enslaving the spirit for its own ends. The point of course is that the Nibelungen are—in terms of Wagner’s allegory—not just Jews; they are workers, they are bohemians, they are all that was considered socially marginal by the nineteenth-century Christian German middle classes. But Wagner certainly meant them to be read largely as Jews. And in his allegory it is, of course, the Jewish infiltration of the ruling classes (the Gibichungs) in the person of the halfling Hagen that brings about their downfall.

  Indeed, the allegory may be more specific than this.

  I find it incomprehensible that no one, for instance, among the biographers of Wagner I have read (and they approach a dozen) has even asked the question, if only to answer it yes or no, if any of the mine owners in the Dresden area were Jewish; or, indeed, if there were any mines owned specifically by a pair of Jewish brothers.

  However unpalatable a confirmation might be, to me the four operas clamor, one way or another, for an answer.

  When Wagner had completed Parsifal, he was set on having the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi conduct its premiere at Bayreuth. Levi was understandably dubious; Wagner’s anti-Semitism was, by this time, blatant and notorious. Wagner invited Levi to Wahnfried, Wagner’s home at
Bayreuth, and prepared a banquet for him at which Jewish wines were served and traditional Jewish foods were prepared. Wagner’s argument was great-hearted—and, ultimately, convinced the not-insensitive Levi. Given the fact that Levi was, in Wagner’s estimation, the finest conductor in Europe, it was particularly important, Wagner argued, for Parsifal, the work of a famous and committed atheist, but nevertheless based on a Christian myth, to have a Jewish conductor. This would be a way of stressing that it was the mythic and universal significance of the story that Wagner intended to signify—and not any narrow, sectarian interpretation. It would be a gesture, declared Wagner, toward brotherhood among all peoples.

  Nietzsche had already broken with Wagner. At least part of the reason was that he felt the great atheist artist, by choosing a Christian religious story, was pandering to the bourgeoisie, which Nietzsche—and, until then, Wagner—claimed to hold in contempt. Another reason for the break was that Wagner had taken an untoward—and unwanted—interest in the younger man’s masturbation and campaigned to have it ended medically! Which was paramount, however, at this date it is hard to say.

  Levi consented to Wagner’s request. He conducted Wagner’s last opera; on Wagner’s death, he was one of Wagner’s pallbearers—and, till his own death, one of Wagner’s staunchest defenders.

  Levi’s defense of Wagner is precisely what one would expect of a nineteenth-century intellectual at home with the philosophy and cultural presuppositions of his time: Wagner’s anti-Semitism does not represent the authentic Wagner. Anti-Semitism was not central to Wagner’s being. Rather, for Levi, Wagner was still the great republican revolutionary who wished to promote universal brotherhood. Like the young Hegel, like the young Nietzsche, Levi wished to cut off all that was idiosyncratic, anomalous, and marginal about Wagner, as he saw it—unaware that such margins and such centers are wholly a product of personal perspective—which is the same as personal blindness. Indeed, it is not till Theodor Adorno’s 1964 (!) study, The Jargon of Authenticity, that we commence a critique firmly identifying the problem to be the concept of the authentic/inauthentic as valid for the subject in the first place. It is the notion that such personal centers (one) exist and (two) are constitutive of the subject that creates the problem. This and similar critiques are what have slowly opened us up to the postmodern notion that the subject is constituted across a split (rather than around a center), a notion that begins, of course, with Freud’s idea of the conscious/unconscious dichotomy in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), but which has been further radicalized by thinkers such as Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida in the 1950s and ’60s.