Wagner

Die düstre Glut, die hier ich fühle brennen,

Sollt’ ich Unseliger die Liebe nennen?

Ach nein! Die Sehnsucht ist es nach dem Heil,

Würd’ es durch solchen Engel mir zuteil!

(The sombre glow that I feel burning here,

Should I, wretched one, call it love?

Ah no! It is the longing for salvation,

might it come to me through such an angel!)

In his justly famous essay ‘Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner’, Thomas Mann quotes these lines and rightly comments, ‘never before had such complex thoughts, such convoluted emotions been sung or put into singable form’. And he adds, ‘What a penetrating insight into the complex depths of an emotion!’ (Thomas Mann Pro and Contra Wagner, p. 97). But in his account of what it is that the Dutchman is discovering himself to be feeling, Mann seems to me to go astray. For he takes it that the Dutchman is in love with Senta, whereas it is a case of his mis-identifying, and then correctly re-identifying, a feeling. Just as Wagner is, according to Nietzsche’s sneer, always thinking about redemption, so he is always meditating on love. And since the soaring last melody to be heard in the Ring, often taken to be its final ‘message’, has routinely been miscalled ‘Redemption through Love’ by the commentators – an error which Wagner himself corrected, via Cosima – it is easy to conclude that his preoccupation is, if not always, then very often with how love might redeem.

But that is to assume that Wagner has a fixed idea of what love and redemption are, and is concerned with the mechanism by which the former effects the latter. Whereas his works constitute, along with a great deal else, a sustained investigation, often amounting to downright critique, of what love may be, and of what it is we seek when we seek redemption. He inherited an extremely well-worn vocabulary, which embodies the conflicting valuations of two millennia of Western civilisation; and thus he found himself in a profound predicament. Either, because his views were so radical and disruptive, he could coin a new vocabulary, but one which we wouldn’t understand, or would rapidly assimilate to the old one. Or he could use the familiar terms, with all their ambiguities and conflicting forces, and see how they could be put to new but indispensable work, thanks partly to the dramas in which they are saliently employed, and partly to the effects of the music, itself an integral part of the drama.

At no point in his life, so far as I am aware, did he put his problem and his mission in such bald terms, though he might (could) have done. For he was a slow developer, and what he achieved was an ever-increasing complexity of thought and feeling on these matters. That was something he was certainly aware of; and his endless retrospectives, autobiographical writings, reinterpretations of his life and art, are to be judged in large part not as being historically accurate – their failings in that respect have been at least sufficiently castigated – but as attempts to make sense of the process of making sense itself. His is a curious case, possibly a unique one, of an extraordinarily articulate artist who simultaneously mistrusted his own fluency. Hence his compulsive need to go on talking and writing. He viewed his works with a mixture of proud possessiveness and bemusement. And in some cases he not only gave conflicting accounts of what they meant, but remained dissatisfied with the works themselves. Tannhäuser, which he rightly felt to be unsatisfactory but too good to write off – it was also highly popular with his contemporaries – was something that, a few weeks before his death, he told Cosima ‘he still owed the world’.

But more often than revisions after the deed, he went in for, or found himself involved in, lengthy gestations. It has often been noted that halfway through his life Wagner had drawn up the agenda for his artistic productivity for the second half, as well as planning several major works which he never executed, and would not have done, though he sometimes wrote the complete text. Evidently he could not have considered someone else as a librettist. He sometimes said of his works that he had written the text and now all that remained to be done was to set it to music, and commentators with less perceptiveness than they need have taken it that the music was being composed in his head as he wrote the dramas. But that is absurd on many counts – not least because there was often a long interval between the writing of the text and the musical composition. And as a composer Wagner developed, between his first works and his last, at least as much as any composer ever has. In his writings he was as concerned to redeem his music-dramas as in his music-dramas he was concerned to redeem his characters (most of them, anyway). Because he was always occupied with certain very general issues, he was insistent on his works as constituting a genuine oeuvre. If it is not the case, as it is with Nietzsche, that each of his works left him with issues unresolved which demanded the composition of a further one, it is still true that their interrelationships are vital to understanding them, and that characters in one reappear, almost, with a different name, in another. Discretion has to be exercised in pursuing this line of thought – and, as we shall see, wasn’t always by Wagner himself.

To return to the Dutchman and the passage that I consider so crucial: the duet in which it occurs is hardly a ‘love-duet’. Actually Wagner didn’t compose nearly as many of those as he is often taken to have done. Certainly the movement is one of powerfully operating mutual magnetism, but the magnetism is not of an erotic kind – not quite. Erik, Senta’s unlucky suitor, and Daland, her father, naturally take it to be. But they show, by doing so, how much they belong to the world of marriages and children, both of which are, in nearly all cases, comically irrelevant to Wagner’s predestined pairs. One of the things that annoys people about Wagner is that his ‘lovers’ seem to be more interested in verbal, albeit sung, communication than in getting on with consummating their relationship. Very often, though not, as I said, in Holländer, there is a strong erotic charge in Wagner’s music that would seem to indicate that a sexual act is imminent, or is even being performed, but in musical code. He is, in fact, the composer who can write the sexiest music of anyone, though he is rarely capable of the come-hither, seductive (in the strictest sense) kind that comes so easily to Mozart, in Susanna’s ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ or Don Giovanni’s duet with Zerlina ‘La ci darem la mano’. His most famous ‘seduction scene’ is in Parsifal, indeed constitutes most of the Second Act, and Kundry still fails. The only one that succeeds is Gutrune’s of Siegfried in Act I of Götterdämmerung, and that is affected by an aphrodisiac with amnesiac properties. Wagner is not interested in the mechanics of seduction as such; he is concerned with the forces which bring people together, and which are out of the control of either of them.

That is clearly the case in the Duet in Holländer. Senta has long been familiar with the portrait of the Dutchman which hangs in the spinning-room. It represents for her an idea which becomes her ideal: self-sacrifice for an endlessly tormented man, something she gives alarming voice to in her breakaway in the middle of the third stanza of her Ballad. Like Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, she had her imagination ignited by a likeness. Wagner is already intimating that what comes first is the need, focused on a representation which reality obliges by copying. The relationship Senta wants has already been worked out before she sets eyes on the person who incarnates it. It is a theme which will recur in Lohengrin, in the Ring, in Tristan and in Die Meistersinger. Love in Wagner so often occurs at first sight because it has already begun in, as it were, second sight.

That leads to a further crux in reactions towards Wagner. His characters often lead listeners to feel ill at ease because they appear to embrace impossibly elevated notions of self-sacrifice, while at the same time the same characters seem to be abnormally, even abhorrently, self-obsessed – a reflection, the conclusion is often drawn, of their composer’s highly ambiguous state of mind. How is it possible to give, Derrida has been asking recently, in the context of a circle of exchange which turns the gift into a debt to be returned? But that is only putting into a specific context a question which is raised whenever the subject of selfishness and selflessness is considered. Wagner’s ‘givers’, redeemers, are, as I have remarked, no less desperate for someone to redeem than the converse. And this appears to have the consequence that his characters don’t relate to one another so much as relating to an idea of one another, which reality more or less obliges with. Thus both Senta and the Dutchman begin their Duet in reverie, Senta just as self-absorbed as he is. Whereas he misidentifies his yearning for redemption as love, for a moment, she wonders what she should call ‘the pains within my breast’, which are, she concludes, a longing to save him. Like Beethoven’s Leonore, with whom Senta shares several salient features, she is less interested in the identity of the man whom she sees before her than in what she can do for him. ‘Wer du auch seist’ (‘Whoever you are’) she sings, using precisely the words that Leonore uses in the dungeon-duet in Fidelio, at which point Beethoven’s music undergoes a marked intensification. Senta pretends that she will marry him because she will always obey her father – the Dutchman has asked her, after their rapt individual musings, whether she approves her father’s choice – and the music comes down with a rude thump, momentarily, to Daland’s level, before the Dutchman makes her an offer, or rather asks her a question, to which she can hardly say no. And then he, like Florestan in his prison cell, having a vision of Leonore as an angel leading him to salvation, tells her that she is an angel.

There are one or two awkwardnesses in this prototypically Wagnerian duet: the cadenza which the soloists indulge in is a non-contributory throwback; and the drop into mundanity, though it makes a point, makes it a bit too baldly. But the overall structure is maintained with moving mastery, and Wagner already shows how he can take us through a huge process of feeling in a comparatively short time without giving any sense of a hectic comic strip, as Verdi so often embarrassingly does. And the Duet does comprehend all the relevant aspects of the work: the Dutchman’s tiny burgeoning hope, Senta’s lonely need, the distance – this is a particularly impressive stroke – between the pair at the beginning, even though they are dwelling on the same theme. Then, to electrifying effect, the entry, for the first time in the Duet, of the Dutchman’s motif of ceaseless wandering, a compressed account for Senta’s benefit of what he has to endure and what she will have to share if she doesn’t have ‘ew’ge Treu’ (eternal fidelity). Once that has been made clear, Senta is free to express with full, explicit conviction that she knows her ‘sacred duty’, and they surge together to the close, when Daland re-enters bumptiously.

No one, in music-drama or elsewhere, had achieved an effect like this before. It is not, perhaps, surprising that it still remains unclear to many listeners what the effect is, apart from the overpowering sense of two figures being drawn together by a force which lies deeper than any kind of attraction that they feel for one another. The cunning proportions of music, and sentiment, which differentiate them and those which they share give us an uneasy feeling that there is a degree of manipulation which Wagner contrives to present as inevitability. And the manipulation is one which – if it exists – is exercised on the listener as well as on Senta and the Dutchman. It is the more disturbing because it brings into question the nature of quasi-erotic feelings. Already, at this almost alarmingly early stage in his career, Wagner shows himself to be a master of a certain kind of effect, which will grow immeasurably in intensity and profundity in his later works, but which is already sufficiently complex for us to sense a dominating presence demanding submission. For people who find it understandably questionable, as Nietzsche came to do to a degree which necessitated the pretence of wholesale rejection, it is (this is only a first, tentative formulation) as if the drama which Wagner created is one in which the dramatist’s will is imposed on the characters, and in turn their ecstasies are transmitted to us, so that the circle is closed and we are, as it might be felt, engulfed in Wagner’s feelings. He seems to deprive us of the possibility of achieving a perspective on the drama, which means that in a sense it is not a drama. For the genuine dramatic experience, as we have come to understand it, is one in which, however intense the actions on the stage, however sympathetic some of the characters may be and however revolted we are by others, we are still witnesses to a whole process which leaves us with the freedom to judge and assess. What Wagner seems to do – not always, but often enough for it to be fairly called characteristic of him – is to present us with a set of data which are, as it might be put, the premisses of the drama, and which often involve, it is soon made clear, portentous issues on which we are to ponder as well as about which we are to have feelings. But as he proceeds, the movement of the drama leads us to make exclusions which egg us on to identification with the figure, or often the pair of figures, whose supreme intensities of feeling over everything else that is happening lead us to respond so intensely ourselves that any question of checks or balances is eliminated. It is like, or it is, brilliant hypnotic rhetoric in action which disguises, by a remarkable combination of blatancy and subtlety, its ineluctable movement towards a clinching climax which – and it is no good postponing the word indefinitely when discussing Wagner – intoxicates us. The immediate effect is of an undreamt-of expansion of consciousness, giving us an intimation of a level of living which perhaps only Wagner can communicate to us, but does communicate so forcefully that we are led to think we can make it our own. The longer-term effect is of a closing down of alternatives, so that we seem to be left with the brutal imperative: Either live like this or you aren’t living at all. But we can’t by ourselves live on such exalted terms; we don’t have, in Erich Heller’s phrase, such ‘resources of ecstasy’. So the upshot is that we become addicted to the only art which does that for us: we become Wagnerians, dependent on the magic brew of an astonishingly persuasive mixture of something like sex and religion, a transcendence of the ordinary conditions of life which is, as many have remarked, the prolonged artistic equivalent of an orgasm.

That is the case for the prosecution, put as cogently as I, not believing in it, can manage. I shall not try to refute it directly, but rather take aspects of Wagner’s works, the ones which I think are most relevant, and see how far they are adequately accounted for by such an accusing account. If the account – the accusation – itself is something of a hotchpotch, that is not only fair to the level of critique to which Wagner is subjected (when it is trying its best not to be merely abusive), but also a faithful report of the confusion which Wagner generates in the minds of his audiences.

4 Domesticating Wagner

Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Der fliegende Holländer might feel that I have been making heavy weather of it, or around it, though heavy weather is a large part of its subject. Surely, it will be argued, it is at most a fine example of early German Romantic opera, a stirring story set to frequently exciting music, but not to be singled out from other more or less equally successful examples of the genre, such as Weber’s Der Freischütz, another story of a demonically driven man and a loving, self-sacrificing maiden. But admirable as Der Freischütz is, it belongs firmly in the realm of the folk opera, and its atmosphere is that of the Grimms. Probably it is impossible to carry out the thought-experiment of viewing Holländer without taking into account Wagner’s subsequent spectacular development. But to the extent that I am able to, I still find the stupendous surge and toss of the Overture evokes metaphysical as well as physical vistas. Though he is an incomparable nature-painter in music, Wagner’s interest in it is always sentimental in Schiller’s sense: there is no nature-evocation in his works which does not affect, and reflect, moods of the human beings who exist in it. Even his most famous portrayal of a natural process, that of the Rhine flowing at the beginning of the Ring, is potent with hyper-natural associations. For before the Rhine gets properly under way, there are those famous bars scored for the lowest strings and wind at the bottom of their registers, more sound than music, which are wholly static, and suggest that we are being taken back to the beginning of all things. As Wagner told Liszt in a famous letter, the Ring depicts the beginning and end of a world, including the beginning from which the world in which it takes place evolves. Once more one thinks, as Wagner surely did, of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Wagner loves and is awed by Nature, its wildness and majesty, but he invariably anthropomorphises it at the same time.

However, the Wagner of Holländer, enormously in Beethoven’s and Weber’s debt, was still, many people feel, obviously an apprentice. Up to a point they are right. I am not claiming that Wagner, in one mighty bound, arrived at a maturity of method and message. Nonetheless, although Holländer may be fairly taken as an exciting evening in the theatre (or, more likely nowadays, at home), it does announce the terms which Wagner throughout his life would imbue with richer and deeper meaning; and it shows, at the least, his potentiality for depth. It is not surprising that in later life he regarded it as the first of his authentic works. Of course, if you find Wagner’s obsessions tiresome because irrelevant, you will appreciate Holländer more for its crude freshness, its lack of the extreme emotional temperatures which pervade some of the later works, and are often thought to be omnipresent in them, though that is false.

When an artist returns, in work after work, to the same preoccupations, it is easy for criticism to weigh in and celebrate his progress to maturity, finding his early efforts touching in their simple-minded adumbrations, attentively reading more into them than they can seriously bear. It is also easy to schematise the oeuvre, overlooking the variety of new concerns. What it seems almost impossible not to do, perhaps in Wagner’s case more than anyone else’s, is to postulate a presence which is given the artist’s name, and then to indulge in the construction of an artistic biography which runs in parallel with the life the artist actually had. And despite the most solemn methodological pronouncements about the illicitness of inferences from the art-life to the lived one, or vice-versa, it proves, over and over again, irresistible. All the more so when the art is of so compelling a kind, and the life so spectacular. In Wagner’s case, once more, the originator of this romantic connecting was Wagner himself. He constructed a life, in his unreliable autobiographical writings and oral reminiscences, which imparts an even more ferocious teleology to the series of works than they manifestly possess. And conversely he justified his existence by the somnambulistic assurance, made all the more glamorous and stupefying through its zigzagging course, with which he brought the works into being. The categories by which the art demands to be judged are taken over from the terms in which Wagner made sense of his wildly implausible existence, one which was an outrage to everyone who, persuaded by this devastating force of will, still failed to succumb to his tirelessly self-justifying rhetoric. His occasional insistences that he viewed his creations with the baffled but tremendously impressed gaze of the outsider, striking as they are, and no doubt sincere, failed to counter the drive towards the celebration of a unique degree of integration, forged from the most disparate and recalcitrant materials.

Why is Wagner so interested in people who have committed a terrible deed, and why should we share his interest? How much moral cum metaphysical baggage does one have to take on board in order to regard his works as more than bizarre actions set to frequently wonderful music, granted that one isn’t going to be so lazy as to feel that something important is going on, but that it is better not to try to find out what it is in strenuous detail? It is in a praiseworthy attempt to answer that question that many recent opera producers, or directors as they are increasingly often called, have gone in for highly specific interpretations of his dramas, and though I believe that their efforts are fundamentally misconceived, I find their rationale sufficiently convincing (to other people) for them to merit some consideration. I have in mind primarily the school of directors who emanate from what until six years ago was East Germany, and their epigones.

They operate on the following premisses: first, every work of art is anchored in the time and place of its composition, and can only be understood on that basis. Any attempt to render the timeless significance of a work in a production is hopeless, since there is no such thing. Second, Wagner’s works in particular need drastic re-presentation, in the first place because they are even now tainted with the Nazi ideology by which the very vagueness of their import rendered them exploitable. Third, because in the first post-war productions of them which had great impact, those of Wieland Wagner, they were freed from their past only to be presented again in terms of their ‘purely human’ significance, a basic error which Wieland shared with his grandfather. Fourth, since the conditions, economic and therefore political, under which Wagner conceived and wrote his works were sufficiently similar to our own to mean that they can cast light on our situation, so long as they are treated with the proper kind of disrespect which great creations deserve and require, one would only be doing him a favour by eliminating a spurious universality and replacing it with an involving topicality.

Besides these broadly Marxist productions, which are now less likely to be well received than they were a few years ago, there is a wide range of styles which sometimes employ the catch-all title ‘post-modern’ to cover their nakedness, and which involve a mixture of times, places, and costumes; Wagner’s works are not, according to them, to be understood in mythological terms, as he naively thought, since the time for mythologies is past. We should draw on psychoanalysis, surrealism, and other twentieth-century movements in the humanities, so that once again we can make of these works what we will, but only within limits. This kind of production – and there are correlative written interpretations – has in common with Marxist ones the premiss that there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature to appeal to, though it isn’t clear how that is compatible with using psychoanalytic insights, which were thought, at least by their founder, to have universal application.

What all these contemporary ways of viewing Wagner have in common is a desire to make him smaller, in one obvious way, in order that he will be seen to be relevant, which will in turn render him a service, even if it takes some of us time to realise that. The effort to make him smaller is not, then, necessarily a manifestation of hostility to him and his works; rather hostility to Wagnerism. Up to a point it parallels something which we are becoming very familiar with in ‘Shakespeare studies’, and also in many productions of Shakespeare, though he doesn’t have the accumulated bad reputation of Wagner to be cleared of. The idea of ‘alternative’, ‘political’, etc. Shakespeares is to question his time-transcending genius, in the interests of genuinely responding to him. It is no paradox, we may warmly agree, to say that we might learn much more from Shakespeare if we ceased to deify him, as both directors and critics have pointed out, while they engaged in their apparently ungrateful task, in both senses of that word. We – those of us unfortunate enough to have received a traditional humane education – have been brought up to revere Shakespeare (while admitting that like everyone else he occasionally potboiled) in a way that removes the possibility of entertaining questions about the success of some of his masterworks. What often happens – and it is an increasingly fashionable critical move – is that the unease we may feel about Hamlet, say, is relocated as an unease the play allegedly feels about itself. Or its subject-matter is changed, in line with feelings about its central characters. Hamlet becomes a study of a pathological case, Oedipally-fixated or not, and ceases to be the portrayal of ‘the most adorable of heroes’, and a great deal more to that effect that was prevalent in the nineteenth-century heyday of Hamlet hero-worship. Or if, as is more plausibly argued, the play exhibits (or attempts to conceal) deep fissures, the plot having been taken over from a traditional revenge-play, while Christian elements are brought into the foreground, then that provides us with a fascinating study of a playwright giving voice to sharply conflicting values within his own culture. Whether the play is a success or not hardly matters: there is, it is implied, something childish about such a preoccupation.