WAGNERISM

ART AND POLITICS

IN THE

SHADOW OF MUSIC

Alex Ross

Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Alex Ross, 2020

Jacket design by Jo Thomson

Alex Ross asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:

Ingeborg Bachmann, excerpt from ‘Gently and Softly,’ translated by Peter Filkins, from Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. Copyright © 1978, 2000 by Piper Verlag GmbH, München. Translation copyright © 2006 by Peter Filkins. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Zephyr Press, zephyrpress.org.

Lines from ‘Música rocosa i roja o La força teatral,’ by Joan Brossa, from Carrer de Wagner. By kind permission of the Fundació Joan Brossa.

Lines from ‘The Ring Cycle,’ from Collected Poems, by James Merrill. Copyright © 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Lines from ‘Opera’, from Inventions of the March Hare, and The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Owing to limitations of space, illustration credits can be found here

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007319053

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780007518517

Version: 2020-08-27

Dedication

In memory of Andrew Patner

Epigraph

Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The best in this kind are but shadows;

and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

PRELUDE: Death in Venice

1. RHEINGOLD: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Ring

2. TRISTAN CHORD: Baudelaire and the Symbolists

3. SWAN KNIGHT: Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America

4. GRAIL TEMPLE: Esoteric, Decadent, and Satanic Wagner

5. HOLY GERMAN ART: The Kaiserreich and Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

6. NIBELHEIM: Jewish and Black Wagner

7. VENUSBERG: Feminist and Gay Wagner

8. BRÜNNHILDE’S ROCK: Willa Cather and the Singer-Novel

9. MAGIC FIRE: Modernism, 1900 to 1914

10. NOTHUNG: The First World War and Hitler’s Youth

11. RING OF POWER: Revolution and Russia

12. FLYING DUTCHMAN: Ulysses, The Waste Land, The Waves

13. SIEGFRIED’S DEATH: Nazi Germany and Thomas Mann

14. RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES: Film from The Birth of a Nation to Apocalypse Now

15. THE WOUND: Wagnerism After 1945

POSTLUDE

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS IN WAGNER’S LIFE

PICTURE SECTION

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY ALEX ROSS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PRELUDE

DEATH IN VENICE

Only down deep

is it trusty and true:

false and base

is the revelry above!

At the end of Das Rheingold, the first part of Richard Wagner’s operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, the gods are entering the newly built palace of Valhalla and the Rhinemaidens are singing in dismay. The river nymphs know that Valhalla rests on a corrupt foundation, its laborers paid in gold extracted from the water’s depths.

On the evening of February 12, 1883, some three decades after Rheingold was finished and seven years after the Ring was first performed complete, Wagner played the Rhinemaidens’ lament on the piano. As he got into bed, he remarked, “I am fond of them, these subordinate beings of the deep, with their yearning.”

Wagner was sixty-nine years old, and in poor health. Since September 1882, he had been living with his family in a side wing of the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, on the Grand Canal, in Venice. Sequestered in what he called his “blue grotto”—a chamber decorated in multicolored satin fabrics and white lace—he was writing an article titled “On the Womanly in the Human.” When it was done, he had said, he would begin composing symphonies.

The next day, clad in a pink dressing gown, Wagner continued to work on his essay. In a corner of a blank page, he wrote: “Nonetheless, the process of the emancipation of women goes ahead only amid ecstatic convulsions. Love—tragedy.” Elsewhere in the family suite, Cosima Wagner, the composer’s second wife, was playing Schubert’s song “Lob der Tränen” (“In Praise of Tears”) at the piano, in an arrangement by her father, Franz Liszt.

Sometime after two, Wagner cried out, asking for Cosima and his doctor, Friedrich Keppler. He was found writhing in pain, a hand clutched to his heart. A maid and a valet carried him to a settee, next to a window facing the Grand Canal. When the valet tried to remove the gown, something fell to the floor, and Wagner uttered his apparent last words: “My watch!” At around 3 p.m., Dr. Keppler entered, and established that the Meister, the Sorcerer of Bayreuth, the creator of the Ring, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal, the man whom Friedrich Nietzsche described as “a volcanic eruption of the total undivided artistic capacity of nature itself,” whom Thomas Mann called “probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art,” was dead.

By late afternoon, a crowd had gathered at the street entrance of the Palazzo Vendramin. Dr. Keppler came to the door and said, “Richard Wagner died an hour ago, following a heart attack.” Murmurs went up: “Richard Wagner dead, dead.” The news spread through a city drenched in rain: “Riccardo Wagner il famoso tedesco, Riccardo Wagner il gran Maëstro del Vendramin è morto!” John W. Barker’s book Wagner and Venice quotes the first obituary, which ran the next morning in La Venezia:

Deceased yesterday in our city was the musical genius of Germany.

The composer of Lohengrin was for some months among us with his wife and his delightful children, hoping that the mild air of our heaven might have served to restore him in health, delicate for some time …

Last evening we went to the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi to have news.

—Riccardo Wagner is dead—there it was told—and his widow, kneeling before his corpse, crazed with grief, hardly believing that her beloved companion sleeps the eternal repose!

How many memories crowd upon our mind—the bold struggles that he sustained, the sublime victories that he achieved—the art that he created—the bitter enemies he had—the fanatical partisans that idolized him as a God—the crowned kings who knelt down before him!

No more—a corpse!

But from him rises a voice that will not die—and perhaps will become in time more powerful, more hearkened to, more beloved.

Five thousand telegrams were reportedly dispatched from Venice in a twenty-four-hour period. The news traveled as far as Dunedin, New Zealand, where Fergus Hume composed a sonnet hailing Wagner’s “Æschylean music.”

Voluminous obituaries reviewed the composer’s epic life: his middle-class origins; his early struggles in provincial posts; his failed first stab at Parisian fame; his years as a progressive opera director in Dresden; his participation in the revolutions of 1848–49; his Swiss exile; his quarter-century of work, with long interruptions, on the Ring; his disorderly private life, including two marriages and interminable financial crises; his miraculous rescue by King Ludwig II of Bavaria; the building of a festival theater in Bayreuth, Germany; the premiere there of the Ring, in 1876, with two emperors and two kings in attendance; and the mystical farewell of Parsifal, in 1882. “The life of Richard Wagner affords a remarkable illustration of the results of persistent effort in carrying out to its conclusion the inspiration of genius,” the New York Times intoned. The more unsavory aspects of Wagner’s character were usually omitted. The New York Daily Tribune, in an obituary that consumed more than a page of fine newsprint, gave only one sentence to his vicious attacks on Jews.

Radical-minded Wagnerites thought that the mainstream tributes had got it all wrong. The American firebrand Benjamin Tucker wrote in his journal Liberty: “None of the newspapers, in their obituaries of Richard Wagner, the greatest musical composer the world has yet seen, mention the fact that he was an Anarchist. Such, however, is the truth. For a long time he was intimately associated with Michael Bakounine, and imbibed the Russian reformer’s enthusiasm for the destruction of the old order and the creation of the new.” Moncure Conway, a freethinker, abolitionist, and pacifist from the American South, made a similar argument in a memorial sermon in London. Through artists like Wagner, Conway said, “the old order has become unreal.”

Fellow composers, whatever their opinion of the man, were shocked by his departure. “Vagner è morto!!!” wrote Giuseppe Verdi, Wagner’s Italian antipode. “Reading the news yesterday, I was horror-struck, I can tell you! There is no question. It is a great personality that has disappeared! A name that leaves a most powerful imprint on the History of Art!!!” Johannes Brahms, seen as Wagner’s chief German adversary, sent a large laurel wreath to the funeral. Young zealots were in despair. Gustav Mahler ran through the streets in tears, crying, “The Master has died!” Pietro Mascagni secluded himself for several days, writing at high speed the Elegia per orchestra in morte di R. Wagner. Liszt memorialized his son-in-law in a strange piano sketch that wavered between emphatic assertions of major-key tonality and meanderings in harmonic limbo. It was titled R. W.—Venezia. A few months later, Liszt produced a still gloomier, eerier piece called At the Grave of Richard Wagner.

There was a flurry of memorial poems. “He hath ascended in the Magic Car,” wrote the American educator William Henry Venable, in “Wagner Dead.” Algernon Charles Swinburne rose above the rest with an elegy titled “The Death of Richard Wagner,” its alliterations echoing the composer’s bardic manner:

Mourning on earth, as when dark hours descend,

Wide-winged with plagues, from heaven; when hope and mirth

Wane, and no lips rebuke or reprehend

Mourning on earth.

The soul wherein her songs of death and birth,

Darkness and light, were wont to sound and blend,

Now silent, leaves the whole world less in worth.

The thirty-eight-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche was in Rapallo, completing the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which proclaims the death of all gods and the coming of the Übermensch. Nietzsche later noted that he had finished his task “in that sacred hour in which Richard Wagner died in Venice.” After seeing the newspapers the following day, he spent several days ill in bed, stupefied. Nietzsche’s brother-in-law, Bernhard Förster, heard the news in Asunción, Paraguay, where he was making plans to establish an Aryan colony. “What a thunderbolt it is to hear that Wagner has gone to Nirvana,” Förster wrote to a friend, unaware that the composer had cast doubt on the Paraguay scheme a few days before his death.

Commemorative concerts took place on both sides of the Atlantic. “All the world there,” said Mary Gladstone, William Gladstone’s daughter, of an all-Wagner event at the Crystal Palace, in London. Four days after the composer’s death, the Boston Symphony discarded its scheduled program in favor of a “Wagner Night.” Various institutions in New York City—the New York Academy of Music, the Philharmonic Society, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the New York Chorus Society—paid homage. In Paris, the Colonne and Lamoureux orchestras mounted impromptu festivals. The most extravagant tribute was held, fittingly, in Venice, on April 19. Outside the Palazzo Vendramin, the conductor Anton Seidl led an orchestra arrayed in bissone, Venice’s ornate ceremonial boats, with hundreds of people observing from gondolas. Siegfried’s Funeral Music, the orchestral epitaph from Götterdämmerung, resounded on the Grand Canal.

The American essayist Sarah Butler Wister attended one of the Paris memorials, her interest perhaps piqued by her musically inclined son Owen, who later wrote the classic Western novel The Virginian. The following year, in The Atlantic Monthly, Wister gave a vivid account of the occasion, recording not only the adoration of progressive factions but also the hatred of conservative patriots, who had not forgotten Wagner’s chauvinistic agitation during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71:

The music had swallowed us alive, like a gulf. The excitable audience was wrought into a frenzy, in which other passions than melomania had a share. There was in some hearers real antipathy to the composer, in others animosity to him as a German, and these prejudices struggled fiercely against the dominating power of the music and the rapturous enthusiasm of the majority. The grandeur of the Tannhaüser, the charm of the spinning chorus from the Flying Dutchman, the gravity and interest of the prelude to Parsifal, kept the dissidents in check until the wild gallop of the Valkyrie began. The stern daughters of Odin rode on the whirlwind above the din of the battle-field, sweeping mortals with them on their breathless course; and then the storm burst in hisses, hooting, stamping, shrill whistles, calls, cries, and counter-cries: “That’s not music!” “Bravo! bravo! bravissimo!” “If the Germans want to hear it, let them go hear it at home!” “Bis! bis!” (Again, again.) “You sha’n’t have it!” “Superb! Magnificent!” “Stop it!” “Turn out the blackbirds!” (the men with the whistles.) “Down with the circus-riders!”

Memorials in German-speaking lands were impassioned and frequently politicized. In Austria, an attachment to Wagner was common among youthful pan-Germanists—those who advocated the unification of Germanic peoples under one national banner. According to the author Hermann Bahr, young Viennese would declare themselves Wagnerites before they had heard a bar of the music. A friend of Bahr’s once camped out for three days at a train station in the mistaken belief that the Meister was due to arrive.

On March 5, Vienna’s German student association organized a tribute in the Sophiensaal, where the Strausses once held waltz evenings. Several thousand attended. Pan-German rhetoric mounted as the event went on, with antisemitic slurs becoming audible. Bahr, then a member of the Albia fraternity, delivered a fiery oration. At the climax, he employed a metaphor derived from Parsifal, comparing Germany to Wagner’s chaste hero and Austria to the outcast Kundry. The Reich was implored to “have mercy and no longer forget the sorely penitent Kundry, still waiting yearningly on the other side of the border for her Redeemer!” The phrase touched off a commotion, with the students singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” and the Deutschlandlied. The police intervened. Decades later, Bahr remembered Georg von Schönerer, the pro-German, anti-Jewish rabble-rouser, swinging a club and sputtering with anger.

The incident drove one Jewish alumnus of Albia to resign from the society in protest. Expressing his sorrow that a Wagner memorial had “developed into an antisemitic demonstration,” he wrote: “I would not think of polemicizing here against this retrograde fashion of the day; I will mention only in passing that even as a non-Jew I would have condemned, from the standpoint of the love of freedom, this movement to which my fraternity has to all appearances been connected. To all appearances; for if one does not audibly protest against actions of this kind, one is bound in solidarity to them. Qui tacet, consentire videtur! [Silence gives consent!]” This was Theodor Herzl, the future architect of the Zionist state. Herzl, too, felt drawn to Wagner, and the composer’s antisemitism did not discourage him. While he was writing The Jewish State, in Paris in 1895, he often attended performances of Tannhäuser, Wagner’s tale of a wanderer seeking redemption. “Only on the evenings when no opera was performed,” Herzl later recalled, “did I doubt the rightness of my ideas.”

Wagner’s coffin arriving in Munich

As news of Wagner’s death rippled outward, his remains journeyed back to Bayreuth, the Franconian town where he had established his festival and home. The casket was brought by water from the Palazzo Vendramin to the Venice railway station, whence it traveled in a mortuary car across Austria to Germany, arriving in Bayreuth on the evening of February 17. Three additional railway carriages were filled with wreaths. Twenty-seven firemen kept watch at the station overnight. The funeral began at four the following day, with a regimental band playing Siegfried’s Funeral Music. After speeches were delivered, a long procession moved slowly through the city, toward the villa that Wagner had christened Wahnfried—“peace from delusion.” The deceased was placed in a tomb that had been built in the yard behind Wahnfried, next to the grave of a favorite dog, a Newfoundland named Russ.

La Venezia did not exaggerate when it said that Cosima Wagner was “crazed with grief.” Once the guests had departed, the Meisterin, as she would now be known, climbed down into the grave and lay next to the casket. She had ordered her daughters to cut off all her hair, and a velvet cushion containing the shorn locks was placed on the dead man’s breast. She seemed to want to die with him. Eventually, Siegfried, her thirteen-year-old son, persuaded her to return to the house. She would live until 1930, having remade Bayreuth as a cultural monument.

Wagner’s resting place became a site of homage. One sonneteer took note of a “wondering band / Of loitering pilgrims who entrancèd stand.” John Philip Sousa, the American March King, went to some trouble to gain entrance, persuading the Wahnfried housekeeper to let him in when Cosima was away. Often, visitors left with a souvenir. The Boston arts patron Isabella Stewart Gardner took a leaf from the ivy that covered the grave and pressed it into her scrapbook. The composers Anton Bruckner and Emmanuel Chabrier also collected vegetation; Chabrier displayed his Wagner ivy in a box in his office. Rev. H. R. Haweis, the author of the bestselling tract Music and Morals, helped himself to a branch of a fir tree that was hanging overhead. A character in Upton Sinclair’s novel King Midas brings home a pebble.

Some pilgrimages were less sentimental. The African-American writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, when attending the festival in 1936, walked past the grave twice a day. Mindful of the composer’s racist legacy, Du Bois could still write, “The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it, and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he would know life.” When Leonard Bernstein stopped at the site, he joked that the slab was big enough that you could dance on it. Bernstein was undoubtedly thinking not only of Wagner but also of Adolf Hitler, who, on his first visit, in 1923, stood at the grave for a long time, alone.

Wahnfried is now the site of the Richard Wagner Museum. The sofa on which the Meister died—the Sterbesofa—can be seen in an upstairs room. The Palazzo Vendramin is occupied by the Casinò di Venezia, which offers poker, blackjack, and roulette under the slogan “An Infinite Emotion.” Facing the Grand Canal is a commemorative plaque, for which the poet-politician Gabriele d’Annunzio composed a suitably elusive text, in 1910:

In this palace

the souls hear

the final breath of Riccardo Wagner

perpetuated like the tide

which laps the marble stones.

The global ceremonies of mourning in 1883 showed how immense a shadow Wagner cast on the world in which he lived. The truly extraordinary thing is that after his death the shadow grew still larger. The chaotic posthumous cult that came to be known as Wagnerism was by no means a purely or even primarily musical event. It traversed the entire sphere of the arts—poetry, the novel, painting, theater, dance, architecture, film. It also breached the realm of politics: both the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany used Wagner’s music as a soundtrack for their attempted reengineerings of humanity. The composer came to represent the cultural-political unconscious of modernity—an aesthetic war zone in which the Western world struggled with its raging contradictions, its longings for creation and destruction, its inclinations toward beauty and violence. Wagner was arguably the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900 and then went to its doom.

Wagner’s grave at Wahnfried

He became the Leviathan of the fin de siècle in large part because he was never merely a composer. An idiosyncratic but potent dramatist, he wrote the texts for all of his operas, combining spectacular action sequences with intricate psychological studies. He was a prolific, all-too-prolific essayist and polemicist, whose menagerie of concepts—Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), leitmotif, “endless melody,” “artwork of the future”—overran intellectual discourse for several generations. He was a theater director and theorist who reshaped the modern stage. Productions at his Festspielhaus in Bayreuth anticipated the advent of the cinema, conjuring legends in the dark. Finally, and fatally, he dabbled in politics, helping to popularize a pseudoscientific form of antisemitism. The sum of all these energies cannot be fixed. “The essence of reality lies in its endless multiplicity,” Wagner wrote in 1854. “Only what changes is real.”

When the term “Wagnerian” first surfaced, it had an ironic ring. In 1847, a critic in the German city of Chemnitz wrote of the “triumph of the Wagnerians, of which we are lucky to have several fine specimens here.” Early on, the word denoted a follower or fan. Later, it marked an artistic quality, an aesthetic tendency, a cultural symptom. The social critic Max Nordau, in his 1892 polemic Degeneration, called Wagnerism “the most widespread, and therefore the most significant, of all present-day aberrations.” Eventually, it became a synonym for grandiose, bombastic, overbearing, or, simply, very long. Things that have been described as Wagnerian include the film Fight Club; the sound of ice breaking; the All-Ireland Gaelic football championship of 1956; the feud between Boeing and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company over a $35 billion tanker deal; servings of sausage and schnitzel in German-speaking Switzerland; the roar of a Lamborghini V10; and the monsoon in Mumbai. Similar lists could be made for “leitmotif” and “Gesamtkunstwerk.” The currency of such terms, however spurious their application, testifies to Wagner’s lasting grip.

Even when Wagnerism is defined more narrowly, its meanings multiply. In these pages, it may mean a modern art grounded in myth, after Wagner’s example. It may mean imitating aspects of his musical and poetic language. It may involve combining genres in pursuit of a total artwork. It may take the form of what I call “Wagner Scenes”—tableaux in novels, paintings, and films in which the music is played, discussed, or heard in the background of an interaction, often a seduction. Despite Wagner’s identification with German nationalism, he lived much of his life as a European nomad, and his impact was international in scope. Circa 1900, the composer was like a massive object in space, drawing some entities into its orbit, making others bend just a little as they moved along independent paths. Violent apostasy from Wagner can be Wagnerism inverted, as Nietzsche was the first to demonstrate. Among modernists of the early twentieth century, the agon with Wagner was so widespread as to be almost a distinguishing trait.

This is a book about a musician’s influence on non-musicians—resonances and reverberations of one art form into others. Wagner’s effect on music was enormous, but it did not exceed that of Monteverdi, Bach, or Beethoven. His effect on neighboring arts was, however, unprecedented, and it has not been equaled since, even in the popular arena. He cast his strongest spell on the artists of silence—novelists, poets, and painters who envied the collective storms of feeling that he could unleash in sound.

Dialogues between genres are not always persuasive or coherent. The theatrical visionary Adolphe Appia wrote, “Any attempt to transfer the Wagnerian idea into a work which is not based on music is a contradiction of that very idea.” In a way, this book is a story of failed analogies; the field of Wagnerism is rich in mistranslation, and those ubiquitous Gesamt- and leit- words long ago took on lives of their own. (Wagner used the term “Gesamtkunstwerk” a handful of times in 1849, then set it aside, exclaiming, “Enough of that!”) Yet misreadings can themselves be imaginative acts, as Harold Bloom showed in The Anxiety of Influence. To a surprising degree, an allegedly tyrannical artist becomes a blank screen on which spectators project themselves. Charles Baudelaire wrote to the composer: “You returned me to myself.” Nietzsche, reviewing his youthful effusions, said, “All the psychologically decisive passages speak only of me.”

The salient element of such experiences is that Wagner creates ambiguity and certitude in equal measure. Whatever is flitting through the subject’s mind is amplified and reinforced by a deep engagement with the music. The behemoth whispers a different secret in each listener’s ear. Although Wagner had strong ideas about what his work meant, those ideas were far from consistent, and, in any case, ambiguity was a necessary outcome of his dramatic method, which ultimately rested on the manipulation of myth. “The incomparable thing about myth,” he wrote, “is that it is always true, and its content, through utmost compression, is inexhaustible for all time.” His hoard of borrowed, modified, and reinvented archetypes—the wanderer on his ghost ship, the savior with no name, the cursed ring, the sword in the tree, the sword reforged, the novice with unsuspected powers, and so on—is his most durable legacy.

Early chapters of Wagnerism show a proliferation of mythologies, whether in Nietzsche’s fable of the Übermensch, the poetical arcana of Symbolist Paris, the neo-medieval conceits of the Pre-Raphaelites, or Thomas Mann’s tales of bourgeois decline. The mania gathers momentum not only in opera houses but also in occult shrines and anarchist cells. The middle third explores questions of race, gender, and sexuality. We roam the Wagnerian prairies of Willa Cather and gauge the equivocal responses of modernist writers like James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. The last section crosses the bloodlands of the twentieth century and enters the dreamscape of Hollywood, from The Birth of a Nation to Apocalypse Now. Some of these artists knew the work intimately; others had only glancing knowledge of it. The point is that for several consecutive generations it was omnipresent. The historian Nicholas Vazsonyi writes: “There is no path into the twentieth century—for good or evil—that bypasses Wagner.”

Of the Wagnerisms, the Nazi version is by far the best known. “The term ‘proto-fascist’ was virtually invented to describe Wagner,” the philosopher Alain Badiou has said. The association is not a random accident. Emphasis on “Hitler’s Wagner” in recent decades has been a necessary corrective to the silence that Wagnerites long maintained, whether because of lingering Nazi sympathies or because of a simple wish to avoid the subject. The composer’s worldview, despite its inner conflicts, contained seeds of Nazi ideology. At the same time, the Wagner-to-Hitler narrative has its shortcomings. It is prone to what the literary critic Michael André Bernstein called “backshadowing”—the habit of reading German history as an irreversible march into the abyss. Contemplating the literature of the Holocaust, Bernstein wrote: “We try to make sense of a historical disaster by interpreting it, according to the strictest teleological model, as the climax of a bitter trajectory whose inevitable outcome it must be.” One danger inherent in the incessant linking of Wagner to Hitler is that it hands the Führer a belated cultural victory—exclusive possession of the composer he loved. As early as 1943, the great leftist theater critic Eric Bentley was asking, “Is Hitler always right about Wagner?”

Whatever the merits of the “proto-Nazi” framing, Wagner’s afterlife assumes a tragic shape. An artist who had within his reach the kind of universality attained by Aeschylus and Shakespeare was effectively reduced to a cultural atrocity—the Muzak of genocide. Still, Wagnerism survived the ruination of the Nazi era. In the postwar era, radical directors reinvented the operas onstage. Fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones rejuvenated Wagner’s mythic devices, consciously or not. The mysticism of Parsifal wafted through the later novels of Philip K. Dick. Musicologists and historians have excavated half-forgotten understandings of the composer, and those alternative Wagnerisms are at the heart of my story: socialist Wagner, feminist Wagner, gay Wagner, black Wagner, Theosophical Wagner, satanic Wagner, Dadaist Wagner, sci-fi Wagner, Wagnerismus, Wagnerismo, Wagnérisme. I am conscious of my limits, in both expertise and language. Nietzsche accused Wagner of dilettantism: in fact, the composer’s legacy is so multifarious that anyone who studies it is a dilettante by default. Writing this book has been the great education of my life.

You need not love Wagner or his music to register the staggering dimensions of the phenomenon. Even lifelong admirers sometimes become exasperated or disgusted with him. As George Bernard Shaw said, in his classic study The Perfect Wagnerite: “To be devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is devoted to his master … is no true Wagnerism.” You can sympathize with Stéphane Mallarmé, who spoke of “le dieu Richard Wagner,” and also accept W. H. Auden’s description of the man as “an absolute shit.” Wagner’s divisiveness, his undiminished capacity to enrage and confuse, is part of his allure. He would have puzzled over the majority of artistic responses to his work, not to mention latter-day styles of opera production. Most of all, though, he would have marveled at the persistence of his music in a world grown alien. Cosima Wagner wrote in her diary: “He believes that after his death they will drop his works entirely, and he will live on in human memory only as a phantom.” In this respect, as in many others, he has been proved triumphantly wrong.

1

RHEINGOLD
Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Ring

In the beginning was the tone: octave E-flats in the double basses, sustained in a barely audible rumble. Five bars in, bassoons add a pair of B-flats, five steps higher. Together, these notes form the interval of the perfect fifth. Like the fifth that glimmers at the start of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, it is an emanation of primordial nature, the hum of the cosmos at rest. Then eight horns enter one after another, in upward-wheeling patterns, which resemble the natural harmonic series generated by a vibrating string. Other instruments add their voices, in gradually quickening pulses. As the mass of sound gathers and swirls and billows in the air, the underlying tonality of E-flat does not budge. Only after 136 bars—four to five minutes in performance—does the harmony change, tilting toward A-flat. The prolonged stasis engenders a new sense of time, although it is difficult to say what kind of time it is: perhaps an instant passing in slow motion, perhaps eons passing in a blur.

This is the prelude to Das Rheingold, which is itself the Vorabend, the preliminary evening, to the Ring. The orchestra represents the river Rhine, the repository of the magic gold from which a ring of unimaginable power can be forged. In his autobiography, My Life, Wagner relates how the opening came to him while he was staying in La Spezia, on the Ligurian Sea, in September 1853. Resting at his hotel, he fell into “a kind of somnambulistic state,” and the prelude began sounding in his head. Although biographers doubt that it happened exactly that way, we can surmise that the river is not purely German, that it flows from deeper, warmer waters.

“It is, so to speak, the world’s lullaby,” Wagner said. Out of the rocking cradle a universe emerges. The golden triads of Western harmony gestate from a fundamental tone; then language gestates from music. The Rhinemaidens swim up from the depths, singing a mixture of nonsense syllables and German words. Wagner told Nietzsche he had in mind the phrase “Eia popeia,” sung for centuries by mothers to lull their babies.

Weia! Waga! |
Woge, du Welle, | Welter, you wave,
walle zur Wiege! | surge around the cradle!
Wagalaweia! |
Wallala weiala weia! |

Wagner is employing a highly stylized version of the old Germanic verse scheme of Stabreim, which is structured around internal alliteration. The affect is epic, the language abstract. The modernists paid heed: T. S. Eliot quotes the Rhinemaidens in The Waste Land, and Joyce has them swim in the river of Finnegans Wake.

The prelapsarian bliss lasts for only twenty-one more bars before the harmony darkens to C minor and Flosshilde warns her fellow maidens that they are neglecting their guardian duties. The Rhine tries to resume its course in the key of B-flat, but it is again tugged into the relative minor. The double basses, having ceased their cosmic drone, play a loping pizzicato. Alberich, the Nibelung dwarf, has entered, his eyes fixed first on the maidens and then on the gold. Wagner sets up a clear duality between the beauty of nature and the malevolent energy of a subhuman outsider. Alberich is the chief antagonist of the Ring, although not necessarily its chief villain. Wotan, the chief of the gods, also lusts after the gold and falls prey to its illusions.

In 1876, in advance of the Ring premiere, Nietzsche, then a kind of intellectual publicist for the composer, issued a pamphlet titled “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.” Amid much flummery, Nietzsche devises as succinct a synopsis of the cycle as can be found: “The tragic hero is a god who thirsts for power and who, after pursuing all paths to gain it, binds himself through contracts, loses his freedom, and becomes entangled in the curse that is inseparable from power.” Needless to say, the topic is eternally relevant. The story of the fatal ring can always speak to the latest soul-stealing technological marvel, the latest swearing of vengeance, the latest rotting empire. The contradiction at the heart of the project is that the Ring is itself an assertion of power—huge in size, huge in volume, huge in ambition. Wagner criticized monumentality as an artistic value, calling for a vital folk art that spoke to its time instead of gesturing toward posterity. Nonetheless, the monumental and the Wagnerian were fated to become synonymous.

When, in the wake of the Ring, Nietzsche broke with Wagner, he thought of himself as a fugitive slave. Although he disavowed the man, he could not disavow the work. During the twelve years of philosophical activity left to him, he continued to wrestle with the composer’s shadow. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “I actually have it on my conscience that such a high estimation of the cultural value of this movement arose.” The movement is Wagnerei—Wagnerism. Nietzsche is referring to his early gushing on the Meister’s behalf, but it is the later, ostensibly anti-Wagnerian writing that shows the movement in full flower. The rejection of Wagner results only in a new interpretation of Wagner. Such is the infernal logic of his protean presence at the dawn of the twentieth century. As Nietzsche eventually admitted: “Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.”

THE RING AND REVOLUTION

The revolutionary year 1848, which gave rise to the Ring, shook the old European order but failed to bring it down. In Paris, three days of street protests in February brought about the abdication of King Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of the Second Republic. Similar revolts took place in German-speaking lands, and a national parliament attempted to form in Frankfurt. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in London in February; communist, socialist, and anarchist groups organized across the continent. Amid the tumult, counterrevolutionary forces regained the upper hand. The culminating moment—famously described by Marx as historical tragedy repeating itself as farce—was the dissolution of the Second Republic by Louis-Napoléon, Bonaparte’s nephew, at the end of 1851.

The Dresden uprising of 1849, with the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient exhorting the crowd from a window

Wagner, then in his mid-thirties, charged into the melee. Since 1843, he had been serving as the Royal Saxon Hofkapellmeister in Dresden, his reputation founded on his sprawling grand opera Rienzi, a dramatization of populist rebellion in fourteenth-century Rome. Over the course of his Dresden tenure, Wagner became increasingly attuned to leftist politics. By June 1848, he was writing poetry about cries of freedom resounding from France. In a fiery speech before the Vaterlandsverein, a democratic-nationalist association, he demanded the obliteration of the aristocracy, the imposition of universal suffrage, the elimination of usury, an enlightened German colonization of the world, and, somehow, the self-reform of the king of Saxony into the “first of the folk, the freest of the free.” Except for the German-nationalist element, these proposals resembled the philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who envisioned a society made up of communal units, free of state control but traditional in character.

In the same period, Wagner was delving into old Germanic tales of the hero Siegfried, who slays the dragon Fafnir, wins the dragon’s gold hoard, and dies with a spear in his back. Politics plainly motivated this turn: the gold represents the capitalist enemy, Siegfried a new German nation. More broadly, Wagner became engrossed by the evolution and function of myth. Sometime in 1848, he began writing “The Wibelungs,” an impressively convoluted essay in comparative mythology, which muses on the interrelationship of pagan legends, Christian lore, the Nibelung treasure, the Holy Grail, and historical personalities such as Charlemagne and Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. What fascinated the composer was how the same stories keep getting told in different guises: light against dark, warmth against cold, hero against dragon.

Wagner’s subsequent interweaving of mythic stories in operatic form caused him to be described—by none other than the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—as “the incontestable father of the structural analysis of myths.” The extension of ancient cycles into the present day brings with it an unsettling implication: the same dark, cold, dragon-like adversaries will be present in modern Germany. Ominously, Wagner compares the murder of Siegfried to the Crucifixion, remarking that “we still avenge Christ on the Jews today.”

In the fall of 1848, Wagner emerged with a prose sketch titled “The Nibelung Myth,” outlining a plot roughly equivalent to that of Götterdämmerung. It includes an elaborate backstory of gods, giants, dwarves, heroes, and Valkyries—essentially, the whole of the Ring in a few dense pages. The scenario combines material from various Nordic and Germanic sources—the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Vǫlsunga saga of Iceland; the Old Norwegian Þiðreks saga; the German Nibelungenlied; Jacob Grimm’s German Mythology—into an inspired mishmash that owes as much to the composer’s unruly imagination as to the extant sources.

The Ring itself is a new contraption. The old stories make mention of hoards and magic rings, but only in Wagner’s version does the gold yield a weapon of absolute omnipotence. The one vague antecedent is Plato’s Ring of Gyges, which makes the wearer invisible and thereby endows him with “the powers of a god.” Even a just man might misbehave with such a device at his command, Plato suggests. Likewise, Wagner’s Ring bends all to its will. Its companion gadget, the Tarnhelm, enables one to disappear, change shape, or travel far in an instant. It is surely no accident that such magic lore found new life in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass manipulation and mass destruction were coming into view.

“The Nibelung Myth” begins not with an image of natural splendor, as in the finished cycle, but with a sinister picture of an infested earth:

Out of the womb of night and death there germinated a people, which lives in Nibelheim (Mist-Home), that is, in gloomy underground chasms and caves: they are called Nibelungs; with shifty, restless activity they burrow (like worms in a dead body) in the bowels of the earth … Alberich seized the bright and noble Rhinegold, abducted it from the water’s depths, and with great and cunning art forged from it a ring, which gave him supreme power over his entire kin … Alberich strove for domination of the world and everything contained in it.

The good-versus-evil duality breaks down, though, when Wagner makes the noble gods complicit in the general corruption. “The peace by which they achieved domination is not grounded in reconciliation; it is accomplished through force and cunning. The intent of their higher world order is moral consciousness, but the wrong they are pursuing adheres to themselves.” In this early version, Wotan survives the upheaval, like the reformed monarch in Wagner’s Vaterlandsverein speech, and Alberich is set free with the rest of humanity.

Wagner fleshed out the story in a prose draft titled Siegfried’s Death. He then set the project aside and engaged in the most intense political activity of his life. In May 1849, Dresden revolutionaries rose up in protest of anti-constitutional actions by the Saxon king, and Wagner joined them, generating propaganda, helping to obtain arms, and sending signals from the tower of the Kreuzkirche. He was often at the side of the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had long-standing ties to German radical circles. According to one witness, Wagner fell into a paroxysm of rage, shouting, “War and always war.” The day after the Dresden opera house was set ablaze, a street fighter supposedly called out, “Herr Kapellmeister, the beautiful divine spark of joy has ignited.” This was an allusion to the “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth, which Wagner had conducted a few weeks earlier: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken.”

In the aftermath, both Bakunin and Wagner’s friend August Röckel were captured, convicted, and condemned to death, though the sentences were later commuted to prison terms. Wagner would probably have met the same fate if he had not eluded the authorities and made his way to Zurich, where he remained until 1858. For several years, he all but stopped composing and threw himself into the writing of essays, manifestos, and dramatic texts. In “Art and Revolution,” he assails commercial interests, saying, “Our god is money, our religion is making money.” Because of the false collectivity of capitalist society, artists must join the revolutionary opposition. In “The Artwork of the Future,” he upholds ancient Greek theater as a model for an amalgamation of the arts—the fabled Gesamtkunstwerk. And in the book-length treatise Opera and Drama he sets out the principles that underpin the Ring: a clear, uncluttered projection of the text; the use of recurring motifs to illustrate characters, concepts, and psychological states; the deployment of the orchestra as a medium of foreboding and remembrance.

Wagner’s antagonism toward the other, toward an elemental Alberich-like foe, comes to the fore in “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” or “Jewishness in Music,” published under a pseudonym in 1850. That essay contends that Jews have no culture of their own and that leading Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer are stale imitators of tradition and/or agents of capitalist greed. Chillingly, the analogy of a worm-ridden corpse recurs, purporting to evoke Jews’ presence in German society. Relatively few people read this odious document at the time: the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, where it appeared, had a circulation of about eight hundred. Almost two decades later, Wagner republished the essay under his own name, ensuring that it could never be forgotten or excused.

The violence of Wagner’s language in this period is still startling to behold. He writes to his supporter Theodor Uhlig: “Works of art cannot be created at present, they can only be prepared for by means of revolutionary activity, by destroying and crushing everything that is worth destroying and crushing.” He tells Liszt, his most steadfast musical ally, that he has an “enormous desire to commit acts of artistic terrorism.”

Having delivered a kind of polemical artillery barrage—a preview of the assaultive manifesto culture of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes—Wagner returned to his Nibelung material, greatly expanding its scope. First he drafted a prequel to Siegfried’s Death, titled The Young Siegfried. Then he went back further and wrote texts for what became Das Rheingold and Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). The two Siegfried librettos were revised as Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. In the final scenario, Wotan and the gods, representative of a failed monarchical order, are consumed in flames. Wagner told Uhlig that he could conceive of a performance of the entire work “only after the revolution; only the revolution can offer me the artists and listeners I need.” A “great dramatic festival,” in a theater erected on the banks of the Rhine, would “make clear to the people of the revolution the meaning of that revolution, in its noblest sense. This audience will understand me: present-day audiences cannot.” The revolution he has in mind is a future one—the “great revolution of humanity.”

The Ring is grounded not only in politics but also in philosophy. The young Nietzsche called the cycle “an immense system of thought without the conceptual form of thought.” The Rheingold prelude is itself a kind of cosmological proposition. The upwelling of E-flat major is not a creation myth that depends upon a godlike spark, a shout of “Let there be light.” Instead, a world materializes in evolutionary fashion, as in the transmuting organisms studied by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck or the nebularly cohering galactic systems theorized by Immanuel Kant. Early in his career, Kant speculated that the solar system had germinated from a mass of gas and dust. Friedrich Engels saw social implications in that hypothesis: humanity, too, should be seen no longer as a system of fixed relations but as an organism undergoing continual evolution.

The revolutionaries of 1848 leaned heavily on the German philosophical tradition, which, since Kant’s writings of the 1780s, had transformed how thinking beings viewed themselves and the world. As old certainties trembled—monarchic government, religious morality, hierarchies of class—German idealism put forward a new intellectual faith. Kant had enshrined the principle of autonomous reason, of “always thinking for oneself,” as the essence of the Enlightenment. G. W. F. Hegel, Kant’s commanding successor, unveiled a grandiose theory of progress, in which a World Spirit guides history toward a utopian future. To those disconcerted by the condition of evolution and flux, Hegel extended the promise that a perfected world was near.

In the 1830s and ’40s, another wave of thinkers, the Young Hegelians, appropriated the master’s schema, determined to accelerate the World Spirit’s progress. They took aim at religious pieties (David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity) and at social inequality (the early economic thought of Marx and Engels). Wagner especially prized Feuerbach’s notion of the “philosophy of the future,” which, the composer later said, promised a “ruthlessly radical liberation of the individual from the bondage of conceptions associated with the belief in traditional authority.” This fixation on futurity—Wagner spoke variously of the artwork of the future, the drama of the future, the theater of the future, the artist of the future, the actor of the future, the religion of the future, the woman of the future, the humanity of the future, and the life of the future—became a favorite target of satirists, but it was a calculated rhetorical device that moved art out of the domain of upper-class entertainment and into the main sociopolitical arena.

Wagner also absorbed the Romantic precept that art should fill the void left by the retreat of traditional religion. Friedrich Schiller, in his 1795 treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man, declared that humanity achieves freedom through the perception of beauty, that communities find unity through shared aesthetic experience. Schiller saw the advent of an “aesthetic state,” a “joyous realm of play and of appearance.” Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling all held that artistic mythologies could give new spiritual direction to what Max Weber would later call the disenchanted modern world. When Schlegel spoke of a reversion to the “primordial chaos of human nature, for which I know of no lovelier symbol than the motley throng of the ancient gods,” he might have been dreaming of the Ring, even if he had Greek gods in mind. The musicologist Richard Klein summarizes the Wagnerian synthesis: Romantic art-religion is bound to Hegel’s dialectic of progress, creating an aesthetic juggernaut.

Nationalism was a complicating factor. Hegel came to believe that the Spirit would find fulfillment in the modern state, and many shared his view. Johann Gottfried Herder, a member of the Weimar Classical circle that also included Schiller and Goethe, had codified modern nationalism with his thesis that humanity necessarily divides itself into distinct peoples, defined by language and folk traditions. One of philosophy’s great pluralists, Herder had no wish to aggrandize the German Volk at the expense of others. Wagner sounds like Herder when he says, in “Art and Revolution,” that the artist must transcend borders, exhibiting national features merely as a “charm of individual diversity.” More aggressive definitions of Germanness followed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807–1808), upheld the superiority of German culture, saying that it could bring about a worldwide renewal. The later Wagner fell in with the militant chauvinism that flourished in Fichte’s wake, although the imperial state ultimately disappointed him. Dieter Borchmeyer, in his book What Is German?, describes how nineteenth-century Germany wavered between cosmopolitan and nationalist answers to the titular question. Wagner raised the issue himself and never gave a clear answer.

The metaphysical bravado of German philosophy masked a host of insecurities and fears. Why had the “land of poets and thinkers” failed to form a nation in the political sense? Was Germany’s backwardness a condition to be overcome, or did it preserve premodern values amid dizzying change? Many Romantics, Wagner included, recoiled from nineteenth-century modernity—industrialization, urbanization, mass politics, mass media, the collective onslaught of the age of steam and speed. In the Ring, the Rhine is a resource in danger of exploitation and despoliation. The composer’s urge to heal the break with nature culminates in Parsifal, where the hero says, “Only the spear that inflicted the wound can close it.” In a way, that formula captures Wagner’s own method. His critique of industrial society employs advanced stagecraft and tools of promotion—a culture of spectacle that looks ahead to Hollywood as much as it looks back to ancient Greece. What is modern in his work is intended to heal modernity’s wounds.

Awesome as it is, the Rheingold prelude is something other than an idyll of natural innocence. As Mark Berry argues in Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire, a study of the Ring’s political philosophy, the cycle carries no naïve message about the loss of paradise. Wotan’s world is compromised from the start. The motif of the Rheingold—a C-major trumpet fanfare amid shimmering strings—may seem to possess the same triadic purity as the immemorial rushing of the river, but it gives off an illusory, deceitful sheen. And while the Rhinemaidens make a primeval first impression with their watery sound poetry, in Alberich’s vicinity they become sneering sophisticates, mocking the ugly interloper. In The Perfect Wagnerite, Shaw compares them to denizens of high society who disdain a “poor, rough, vulgar, coarse fellow.” Modern productions often depict them as aloof party girls. Their humiliation of the dwarf is cruel, and breeds a resentment that many in the audience may find sympathetic.

In revenge, Alberich takes the gold and fashions the Ring. Significantly, he does not win the prize by force. Wagner has given the Rheingold a peculiar feature, which is not to be found in the medieval sources:

Only he who renounces love’s power,

only he who spurns love’s pleasure,

only he can attain the magic

to wrest the ring from the gold.

In short, power and love are incompatible. If you have one, you cannot have the other. Alberich is willing to make the trade: “Thus I curse love!”

When the gods enter, in the second scene of Rheingold, they present a handsomer picture of the same ugly contradiction. Wotan is locked in a loveless marriage, with Fricka. Inscribed on his spear are the treaties that keep warring factions at bay and preserve his own preeminence. As we later learn, he cut this spear from the World Ash Tree, which withered as a result. Here is more evidence that shadows fell on the Ring universe long before Alberich shuffled in. Wotan has undertaken a massive construction project, Valhalla, which he can ill afford. The giants Fasolt and Fafner have yet to be paid for their work in building it, and they want compensation in the form of Freia, keeper of the apples of eternal youth. When Wotan hears of the Ring, he realizes he can use it to pay off the giants. With Loge, the demigod of fire, Wotan descends to Nibelheim, Alberich’s world, intending to trick the dwarf into giving up the hoard.

During the transition to Nibelheim, Wagner unleashes a gigantic percussion section that includes eighteen anvils—a frightening, futuristic sonority, far removed from the idyll of the Rhine. Shaw seizes on the industrial modernity of the Nibelung domain: “This gloomy place need not be a mine; it might just as well be a match-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders.” Alberich has multiplied the gold into vast wealth; like Marx’s potentates, he is captive to his capital and takes no pleasure in it. Yet—to adapt an American politician’s quip about the Panama Canal—he stole the gold fair and square, by renouncing love. Wotan makes no such sacrifice, at least consciously, and is therefore a thief of a higher order. As Wagner makes clear in his initial sketch of the Nibelung story, Alberich is “right in his complaints against the gods.” In the final scene of Rheingold, the dwarf delivers his terrible curse upon the Ring, which is also a curse upon Wotan:

Am I free now?

laughing angrily

Truly free?

Then receive my freedom’s

first greeting!

As it came to me through a curse,

so shall this ring be cursed in turn! …

Let all covet

its acquisition,

let none enjoy

its benefit! …

Forfeit to death,

let the coward be fettered by fear:

as long as he lives,

let him die away craving,

the lord of the ring

as the slave of the ring:

till I hold the spoils

in my hand again!

Wotan and Loge try to laugh away this diatribe—“Did you hear his love greeting?”—but the curse kicks in when Fafner kills his brother, Fasolt, in a dispute over possession of the Ring. Wotan begins to realize that his dealings rest on an “evil wage.”

The terms of the political analogy are clear. Wotan is a ruler in the modern mode, willing to allow limited freedoms but prepared to resort to violence. In his mania for treaties, he resembles Klemens von Metternich, the master of the old order. The lesser gods are the aristocracy; the giants are the restless proletariat; Alberich is a self-made capitalist. Loge is like a renegade philosopher-politician who has joined Wotan’s coalition for pragmatic reasons. Many commentators have likened Loge to Bakunin, who, according to Wagner, imagined a world conflagration arising from peasant rebellion. At the end of Rheingold, Loge is tempted to torch Valhalla earlier than scheduled: “They’re hurrying on towards their end, though they think they will last forever … I feel a seductive desire to turn myself into guttering flame.” The fall of the gods is the necessary prelude to a true uprising. “Alles, was besteht, muß untergehen,” Wagner wrote in his 1849 essay “Revolution”—“All that exists must go under.” The words parallel the prophecy of the earth goddess Erda, who warns Wotan, “All that is, ends.”

Rheingold closes with the degraded majesty of the gods’ entrance into Valhalla. Just as Wotan and his clan set foot on the rainbow bridge that leads to their new home, the Rhinemaidens are heard pleading for the return of the gold (“Only down deep is it trusty and true”). Wotan scowls to Loge: “Put an end to their teasing.” Fergus Hume, in his memorial sonnet of 1883, was right to call Wagner “Æschylean”: the scene resembles the ending of Agamemnon. As Clytemnestra and Aegisthus enter the palace of the murdered king, the chorus chants, “Have your way, gorge and grow fat, soil justice, while the power is yours,” to which Clytemnestra replies, “Do not heed their empty yappings.” Both processions are hollow triumphs. False and base is the revelry above. The challenge is to hear the irony in Wagner’s wall of sound: the thrill of the sonority, with its seventeen blaring brass, can trick us into taking the bombast at face value.

DIE WALKÜRE AND METAPHYSICS

In the summer of 1854, Wagner arrived at Walküre, the first full-length opera of the Ring. Settled in Zurich, he composed at a manic pace. By September, he had churned his way through the first act, in which Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wotan’s twin offspring, fall in love without knowing each other’s identity. Despite the scandalousness of the situation, or perhaps because of it, nineteenth-century audiences found these scenes as rousing as any popular romance of the day. The climactic cascade of sensations—Siegmund’s ardent song of love and spring (“Winter’s storms have waned”); Sieglinde’s equally ardent answer (“You are the spring for which I longed”); Siegmund’s drawing of the sword from the tree (“Nothung! Nothung!”); the final orgasmic embrace—is a tour de force of hot-blooded Romantic entertainment.

Wagner in Zurich, from Thomas Mann’s picture collection

In the second act, the emotional temperature plummets. Wotan enters in a buoyant mood, convinced that he has found a way to regain the Ring. Having surrendered the gold to Fafner, Wotan cannot revoke the deal, on account of the contracts etched into his spear. Yet the wild human Siegmund would appear to be free of his father’s will and of godly commitments. Surely he can win the Ring from Fafner, who has taken the precaution of turning himself into a dragon. Fricka, Wotan’s disgruntled spouse, proceeds to pick the plan apart. Incestuous love is an outrage, she says, and Siegmund’s independence is a sham: the free man is transparently a pawn. Fricka demands that Wotan stand aside when Sieglinde’s husband, Hunding, comes seeking satisfaction. Wotan descends into a twenty-minute monologue of anguish. The chief of the gods comes to understand his own powerlessness and, beyond that, the inevitability of his end.

Wagner wrote of this scene: “If it is presented as I require—and if all my intentions are fully understood—it is bound to produce a sense of shock beyond anything previously experienced.” First, downward-crawling bassoons, cellos, and a bass clarinet suggest Wotan’s dejection. When his Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde asks what is wrong, he howls:

O heilige Schmach! | O righteous shame!
O schmählicher Harm! | O shameful sorrow!
Götternoth! | Gods’ distress!
Götternoth! | Gods’ distress!
Endloser Grimm! | Infinite rage!
Ewiger Gram! | Eternal grief!
Der Traurigste bin ich von Allen! | I am the saddest of all living things!

The alliterations of Stabreim here follow a subtler function, of a kind that Wagner discusses in Opera and Drama. When our ears detect consonant patterns—say, “heilig” (“holy/righteous”) and “Harm” (“sorrow”)—we recognize a bond between seemingly opposed emotions.

The music is titanic. The vocal line dives down jagged intervals—octave, major seventh, minor seventh. The orchestra piles on monolithic dissonances over a cavernous C. The bass note keeps moving down, one false bottom giving way to another, until we reach the basement of the world. Wotan now retells the story of the Ring with a clear view of his own guilt: “I longed in my heart for power … I acted unfairly … I did not return the ring to the Rhine … The curse that I fled will not flee from me now … Let all that I raised now fall in ruins!” Finally, he emits two cries of “Das Ende!”—the first stentorian, the second a whispered gasp. In a bitter epilogue, Wotan bequeaths to Alberich the “worthless splendor of the gods.”

Just before Wagner wrote this music, he made a discovery that reshaped his intellectual landscape. A fellow exile in Zurich was the revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh, who, in 1848, had led an expeditionary force into the Grand Duchy of Baden in support of attempts to found a republic there. Herwegh recommended that Wagner read Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. First published in 1818, this lyrical masterpiece of philosophical pessimism initially attracted little attention. In the years when Hegel’s vision of historical progress held sway, Schopenhauer offered a far darker picture of a pain-filled world spinning toward no definite goal. By the early fifties, the pessimist had come into fashion, his world-weariness matching the depleted mood of the postrevolutionary era. At first, Schopenhauer’s imperative of self-abnegation alarmed Wagner, but Herwegh made him realize that all tragedy rests on an awareness of the “nothingness of the world of appearances.”

The World as Will appealed to Wagner not least because it elevated music to a place of preeminence among the arts. In Schopenhauer’s thought, the Will is not simply the striving of the individual but a drive inherent in the universe—an endless need that never finds satisfaction. Music, Schopenhauer says, is the one art form that, rather than copying the outer shell of representation, mimics the operation of the Will itself. The composer reveals the “innermost nature of the world,” and his work “gives the innermost kernel preceding all form, or the heart of things.” The great boon of aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer elsewhere says, is that in replicating the activity of the Will it grants the spectator relief from the Will’s insatiable pressure, by letting him imagine that he has stepped outside of it. “We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.”

Nietzsche later smirked that Wagner’s embrace of Schopenhauer was no surprise, given the superpowers that this philosophy bestows on the musician: “Henceforth he became an oracle, a priest, indeed more than a priest, a sort of mouthpiece of the ‘in itself’ of things, a telephone of the beyond.” But the appeal was not simply narcissistic. Wagner saw striking resemblances between Schopenhauer’s work and the Ring in progress. One passage in The World as Will reads like a précis of the opening of Rheingold: “I recognize in the deepest tones of harmony, in the ground-bass, the lowest grades of the will’s objectification, inorganic nature, the mass of the planet.” The ethic of self-abnegation matches Wotan’s acceptance of his powerlessness. Schopenhauer says that only a denial of worldly appearances, a denial of the will to live, can bring peace to the suffering individual. He who overcomes the self will “change his whole nature, rise above himself and above all suffering … and gladly welcome death.” The Wotan of Walküre begins to attain such wisdom, although his behavior lags behind his understanding: “What I love, I must relinquish.”

These ideas had sources older than Schopenhauer. To expose the unreality of the outer world, the philosopher drew not only on the Western intellectual tradition—Plato’s shadows in the cave, Kant’s world of phenomena—but also on Christian asceticism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The Hindu concept of māyā, the veil of illusion, was paramount. Feuerbach, in his Thoughts on Death and Immortality, had taught that the lust for life is also the lust for death, that “only nothingness can cure being.” True heaven is the “better I of another humanity” that comes into being when the ego withers. The Romantics had long sung in praise of death, dissolution, self-annihilation. Wagner seemed especially open to such thinking after 1848, when his alienation from both political and artistic life became profound. The world is “evil, evil, fundamentally evil,” he wrote to Liszt. “It belongs to Alberich.” Bryan Magee, in his philosophical study The Tristan Chord, proposes that Wagner’s apparent conservative turn resulted from this deeper philosophical transformation: “His significant movement was not from left to right but from politics to metaphysics.” Music itself becomes the metaphysical agent, the way to a “trusty and true” world beyond the veil.

In December 1854, Wagner sent Schopenhauer the text of the Ring, no doubt hoping that the philosopher would recognize it as the work of a kindred spirit. Schopenhauer, who preferred Mozart and Rossini to more modern music, made biting notes in the margins. “Wodan under the slipper!” he wrote next to Fricka’s critique of her husband in Act II of Walküre. The goings-on between the twins caused him obvious distress. Next to the stage instruction that ends the love scene in Act I—“The curtain falls quickly”—Schopenhauer added, “And it’s high time.”

SIEGFRIED DIONYSUS

Siegfried’s theme, from Wolzogen’s guide to Ring leitmotifs

At first, Siegfried, the blond hero born of Siegmund and Sieglinde, loomed almost erotically large in Wagner’s imagination. In 1851, he spoke of “the beautiful young man in the shapeliest freshness of his power … the real, naked man, in whom I was able to discern every throbbing of his pulse, every twitch of his powerful muscles.” The strapping youth also has the appearance of a revolutionary, free of sentimental attachments to the extant world. Nietzsche wrote: “His origin already amounts to a declaration of war on morality—he comes into the world through adultery, through incest … He overthrew all tradition, all respect, all fear. He strikes down whatever he does not like.” Shaw called Siegfried “a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist … an anticipation of the ‘overman’ of Nietzsche.”

Siegfried receded in importance as the Ring grew in scope and Wotan moved into the foreground. The god “resembles us to a tee,” Wagner wrote in 1854. Siegfried is more abstract—“the man of the future whom we desire and long for but who cannot be made by us since he must create himself on the basis of our own annihilation.” At times, the composer sounded almost disillusioned with Siegfried, even though his only son bore the hero’s name. “The best part of him is the stupid boy,” Wagner said in 1870. “The man is awful.” Indeed, Siegfried is the most problematic character in the cycle. By design, he lacks complexity: he can seem like an action-movie figure barging into a psychological novel. Stupidity is his tragic flaw. Nonetheless, the entire drama hinges on him.

In 1856, Wagner set about composing Siegfried—the “stupid boy” part of the cycle. It is the archetypal tale of a budding superhero discovering powers he does not yet understand. Siegfried is in the care of Mime, Alberich’s brother, who intends to use the boy to slay the dragon and take the Ring. Siegfried reforges Nothung, Siegmund’s shattered sword, and does the deed. When he tastes the dragon’s blood, he can suddenly understand the discourse of a magical Woodbird, who tells him of Mime’s treacherous nature. Siegfried kills the dwarf and moves on to his next mission: winning a Valkyrie maiden who sleeps within a ring of fire. In the final act, he finds his way blocked by Wotan, who is now disguised as the shadowy Wanderer, his one-eyed face concealed beneath a broad-brimmed hat. The hero breaks the Wanderer’s staff, prances through the magic fire, and meets his destined mate, Brünnhilde.

In the summer of 1857, with two acts of Siegfried drafted, Wagner set the Ring aside in favor of a new project: the romantic tragedy Tristan und Isolde. He was in the throes of an infatuation with the author Mathilde Wesendonck, who was married to his Zurich patron Otto Wesendonck. The love triangle of Tristan mirrored his personal situation. Relations with the Wesendoncks and with his first wife, the actor Minna Planer, reached a point of crisis, and in 1858 he decamped to Venice, rented rooms in a canal-side palace, and buried himself in Tristan. His intention was to produce a more manageable score, one that could earn him the money he needed to finish the Ring. The opera that emerged was so radical in its musical language that it was at first deemed unperformable. After Tristan came Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, a comedy of colossal dimensions. In 1864, work resumed on the first two acts of Siegfried, but not until 1869 did Wagner take up Act III. In the interim, his style had been transformed. At any performance, you feel a jolt when the curtain rises on Act III and the enriched technique of Tristan and Meistersinger comes flooding in, with nine distinct Ring leitmotifs superimposed.

The word “leitmotif” has sown much confusion over the years. Hans von Wolzogen, one of Wagner’s most militant young followers, popularized the term, against the composer’s own wishes. Although Wagner referred to “melodic moments” and “basic motifs” in his work, he criticized Wolzogen for treating such motifs purely as dramatic devices, overlooking their musical logic. In the simplest definition, leitmotifs are identifying sonic tags: when someone talks about the sword, you hear the sword’s theme. Leitmotifs certainly function this way in the Ring, but they are less finished melodies than charged fragments, which transcend their context and gesture forward or backward in time. They not only illustrate the action but indicate what characters are thinking or sensing—or even what they are unable to perceive.

As the Ring proceeds, Wagner handles his leitmotifs in increasingly cavalier, even subversive ways. The motif commonly called “Renunciation of Love” first sounds in Rheingold, as the Rhinemaiden Woglinde explains how the gold can be won. It is heard again in Walküre, when Siegmund is preparing to pull the sword Nothung from the tree. There its purpose is more obscure, and has stirred much speculation. It implies some concealed identity between the lusty hero and the loveless dwarf—and the identity of opposites is a favorite Wagner theme. Even more tellingly, the motif sounds in Götterdämmerung when Brünnhilde tells her sister Waltraute that she will not give up the Ring, because it symbolizes her bond with Siegfried. The Ring’s power has advanced to the stage that love and lovelessness serve its purposes equally.

A psychological study has concluded that neither general musical training nor command of German is necessary for subjects to be able to recognize and recall the leitmotifs. They are superbly designed to lodge in the memory of a broad public, orienting listeners in large-scale compositional structures. Eric Prieto, in his book Listening In, writes that the leitmotif is “not a musical technique at all” but instead a device “borrowed from drama, and dependent on that eminently linguistic procedure, the attribution of a referent to a sound symbol.” Because of its literary nature, the leitmotif has affected literature in turn. Wagnerian authors create networks of phrases that recur across a wide span. Visual artists and filmmakers, likewise, introduce motifs of pattern and color. Although the analogy can become vague to the point of vanishing, artists in many disciplines have respected Wagner’s way of giving continuity to extended forms.

What no artist can imitate with complete success—though Thomas Mann and Proust come close—is the uncanny way leitmotifs operate in later stages of the Ring, bridging expanses of time. The music of previous days resurfaces, as if from another life. From Act III of Siegfried forward, the old motifs are, indeed, the voice of Wagner’s younger self intruding on his mature style. When Siegfried breaks the Wanderer’s staff, the mighty descending figure of Wotan’s spear undergoes a harmonic fracture, breaking into whole-tone intervals. The Spear motif will recur in Götterdämmerung; there it falls into the hands of Alberich’s demonic son Hagen, who dispatches Siegfried with a stab in the back. Having helped to establish identity and personality, leitmotifs also suggest the loss of identity, death itself.

By the time he returned to Siegfried, Wagner had settled in a lakeside house in Tribschen, outside Lucerne. Living with him was Cosima von Bülow, his lover since 1863. The couple remained unmarried until 1870, when Hans von Bülow, Cosima’s first husband, agreed to a divorce. (Minna Wagner had died in 1866.) In the meantime, Cosima had given birth to two illegitimate children, Isolde and Eva. Although she performed the role of helpmate, Cosima was a woman of high intelligence and broad culture, anything but meek in her opinions. That the Bayreuth Festival survived Wagner’s death and became a permanent institution owed everything to Cosima’s skill as a theatrical director, her flair for administration, and her half-ethereal, half-steely charisma. Few women of the period achieved comparable authority. She was also politically reactionary, and, if anything, even more antisemitic than her husband. In 1869, she began keeping a diary, in which she recorded Wagner’s daily utterances and depicted him as a German sage. That formidable document—twenty-one volumes, nearly a million words—is both a rich fund of biographical data and a masterly exercise in image control.

Wagner in Lucerne

“At lunch a philologist, Professor Nietzsche,” Cosima wrote on May 17, 1869. Nietzsche had first met Wagner the previous November, in Leipzig, and succumbed at once to the composer’s personality. “Wagner played all the important parts of Meistersinger, imitating all the voices in very boisterous fashion,” Nietzsche reported. “He is indeed a fabulously lively and fiery man, who speaks very rapidly, is very funny, and makes an intimate party of this sort a total joy.” In private, the glowering Meister of official portraits was antic, ebullient, even clownish. He liked nothing more than to cavort with his dogs, who ruled the household.

In the spring of 1869, the twenty-four-year-old Nietzsche had been appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, which was several hours from Lucerne by train. He came to Tribschen in the hope of renewing his acquaintance with the Meister. It was the eve of Pentecost, Nietzsche recalled—the day the Holy Spirit visits the Apostles. He lingered outside the villa, listening as Wagner tried out chords at the piano. Later, he determined that he had heard the passage of Siegfried in which Brünnhilde sings, “He who woke me has wounded me!” It is a telling moment. Brünnhilde has been confined to the ring of fire for disobeying Wotan’s commands. When Siegfried enters her domain, she initially resists his advances and laments the loss of her Valkyrie powers. She is no helpless maiden awaiting rescue; her pride and intellect remain. When she yields, she does so in the knowledge that this relationship is not a personal matter but a means of world transformation. “Twilight of the gods, darken above,” she sings—the one time that the word “Götterdämmerung” is uttered in the Ring.

When Nietzsche mustered the courage to announce himself, Wagner sent word that he did not wish to be disturbed. The young man was, however, invited for lunch the following Monday. “A quiet and pleasant visit,” Cosima wrote. In early June, Nietzsche returned and spent the night—not any night, but the night that Cosima gave birth to Siegfried Wagner. During Wagner’s remaining years in Tribschen—he moved to Bayreuth in 1872—Nietzsche visited so often that he was given his own room in the house. The friendship deepened into something like a father-son connection. “Strictly speaking, you are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in life,” Wagner wrote to his disciple in 1872. Later, in a draft of the preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche described the relationship as “my only love-affair,” before striking the phrase from his proofs.

Nietzsche grew up in a Lutheran household that cherished the German musical tradition. His father, the pastor of Röcken, a village not far from Leipzig, played the piano and organ in a style that his son characterized as “free variation.” Nietzsche took up piano at an early age, studying repertory from Bach to Schumann. He also composed, in an indistinct Classical-Romantic idiom, and later made the mistake of showing his efforts to the Wagners and their circle. In 1872, Hans von Bülow passed lacerating judgment on Nietzsche’s talent: “From the musical standpoint, your ‘Meditation’ is tantamount to a crime in the moral world. I could discover no trace of Apollonian elements, and as for the Dionysian, I was frankly reminded more of the morning after a bacchanal than of a bacchanal per se.”

At first, Nietzsche regarded the “music of the future” with suspicion. When, in 1866, he studied the score of Walküre, he found “great deformities and defects” alongside “great beauties.” By 1868, though, his interest had intensified into an obsession, as he praised Wagner for possessing qualities that he also attributed to Schopenhauer: “the ethical air, the Faustian scent, cross, death, and grave, etc.” The material of the Ring, and especially the figure of Siegfried, transfixed him. On hearing the preludes to Tristan and Meistersinger, he wrote, “Every fiber, every nerve in me is quivering.” Later, he would compare the experience to taking hashish. Many Wagnerites felt the music to be intoxicating or narcotic in effect. Baudelaire likened it to opium, others to alcohol, morphine, and absinthe.

Nietzsche promptly took on a role that others filled before and after him: that of companion, propagandist, factotum. He stayed at Tribschen during the holidays and carried out duties elsewhere. On one occasion, he was sent to procure caramels and other desserts in Strasbourg; on another, he fetched silk underwear in Basel. There was an element of calculation on both sides. Nietzsche seized the chance to align himself with a star of European culture. Wagner, who lacked strong support in the academic world, knew the value of having a gifted and impassioned young scholar as an ally.

Fulfilling Wagner’s request for a “longer and more comprehensive work,” Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in 1872. Its central idea, the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, is one that he had been pondering for a while, but he surely discussed it with the composer, who had his own notions about the Greek gods. In “Art and Revolution,” Wagner associates Apollo with the perfection of the male form, the ordered harmony of Greek architecture, and the swinging rhythm of music. In passing, Wagner comments that Dionysus inspires the tragic poet as he brings forth drama under Apollo’s gaze. A synergy of the two is implied. Hanging in Tribschen was a watercolor of Bonaventura Genelli’s neoclassical painting Bacchus Among the Muses; Nietzsche thought of the picture as he worked on his book. In 1871, Wagner told Nietzsche that the painting, The Birth of Tragedy, and his own work came together in a “remarkable, even miraculous connection.”

Nietzsche also echoes his mentor when he proposes that Greek tragedy gestated in the musical utterance of the chorus. In Opera and Drama, Wagner compares the modern orchestra to the Greek chorus, using the metaphor of the Mutterschooß, the mother’s womb, to describe the function of orchestra and chorus alike. In his 1870 essay on Beethoven, he writes that “out of choral song the drama projected itself onto the stage”—that “out of the spirit of music” the entire Greek order arose. The last phrase passed into the title of The Birth of Tragedy, and the womb image is replicated in the text: “The choral passages that are woven into the tragedy are, in a certain sense, the womb of all of the so-called dialogue, i.e., of the total stage world, the actual drama.”

At almost every turn, however, Nietzsche pushes Wagnerian thought to new rhetorical extremes. His emphasis on Dionysian revelry outpaces the composer’s warier engagement with orgiastic states. His claims on behalf of art are fanatical: “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” Master and follower diverge most conspicuously on the question of slavery. For Wagner, slavery was a flagrant flaw of Hellenic culture; a Greek revival would require a different social structure, one that would make beauty available to all. Nietzsche repeats certain of these sentiments but never strongly affirms them. In the grip of the Dionysian rite, the slave can achieve freedom, anyone can feel like a god; yet his permanent liberation seems neither possible nor desirable. In an essay on the Greek state, which was dropped from The Birth of Tragedy in its final form, Nietzsche declares that “slavery belongs to the essence of a culture,” its logic binding the masses to the service of a superior, art-creating minority. The intellectual historian Martin Ruehl speculates that Wagner persuaded Nietzsche to omit this material when they discussed the manuscript.

In the last part of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes that German music will incarnate “the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit.” Amid the degeneracy of contemporary life, one can take comfort in the fact that

the German spirit rests and dreams in an inaccessible abyss, like a knight sunk in slumber, its splendid health, profundity, and Dionysian strength intact; and from that abyss the Dionysian song is wafting up our way, to let us know that this German knight still dreams even now his age-old Dionysian myth in blissfully serious visions. Let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical homeland, if it can still understand so clearly the bird voices which tell that homeland’s tale. One day it will find itself awake, in the morning freshness of a tremendous sleep; then it will slay dragons, destroy the spiteful dwarfs, and awaken Brünnhilde—and Wotan’s spear itself shall be unable to block its way!

It is a polemical account of the Ring. Not only Brünnhilde but also Siegfried are cast as sleepers waiting to be awoken. The hero becomes like Friedrich Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was said to lie beneath the Kyffhäuser hills in Thuringia, waiting to rise again. As Benedict Anderson shows in his classic study Imagined Communities, the metaphor of awakening is a commonplace in nationalist discourse, recasting a newly invented entity as a resurrected one. German readers would have related such imagery to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the crowning of Wilhelm I as Kaiser of a unified Reich. In fact, Nietzsche, who witnessed the war’s carnage as a medical orderly, felt that militarism was eroding the German soul, and argued the point with Wagner, who was in a jingoistic phase. Nietzsche aired those reservations in his 1873 essay on David Strauss, but not in The Birth of Tragedy.

Wagner pronounced himself pleased. “This is the book I have been longing for,” he told Cosima. But it may have impressed him more as a feat of publicity than as a faithful picture of his ideas. Nietzsche thought that Wagner “did not recognize himself in the text.” What is missing is an awareness of Siegfried’s flaws—his gullibility, his rashness, his obliviousness—and a sense of Brünnhilde’s redeeming wisdom. Nietzsche effectively jettisons the Ring’s critique of power. He would later say that Wagner went astray when he lost touch with Siegfried’s vitality and gave in to Wotan’s pessimism: “Everything goes wrong, everything is a disaster, the new world is just as bad as the old one:—Nothingness, the Indian Circe beckons.” The disjunction between Nietzsche and Wagner is visible from the start.

BAYREUTH 1876

“The chief feature of the Wagner district is a great lunatic asylum,” George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1889. “It is a desperately stupid little town.” To call it stupid is unjust, but Bayreuth is certainly a quiet place—a typical provincial German city, with a quaint old center and a fine Baroque opera house. There are no fast trains from metropolitan centers; most travelers must change to a local in Nuremberg, about fifty miles to the southwest. For Wagner, the relative dullness of Bayreuth was a boon. He wanted to locate his festival in a city large enough to accommodate an influx of visitors but not so large as to possess a well-heeled, prejudiced art public of its own. The site had to exist outside of extant cultural networks; it had to be a blank slate.

Wagner had long wished for a new kind of festival experience, through which his audience could escape urban distractions and enter a more receptive frame of mind. There were precedents for such a ritual, such as the Passion Play at Oberammergau, which has been reenacting Jesus Christ’s trial and death at ten-year intervals since 1634. The ultimate model was the Great Dionysia, the civic festival of ancient Athens, which revolved around dramatic performances in the form of tetralogies—three tragedies followed by a satyr play. Wagner set forth his plan in an 1850 letter to Uhlig:

I would erect, in a beautiful meadow near the town, a crude theater of boards and beams, built to my specifications and equipped only with such decor and machinery as is necessary for the performance of Siegfried … At the new year, announcements and invitations to all friends of the musical drama would go out to all the German newspapers, with the offer of a visit to the proposed dramatic musical festival: anyone who responds and travels for this purpose to Zurich would be assured an entrée—naturally, like all the entrées, gratis! In addition, I would invite the young people here, university, choral societies, etc. When everything was in order, I would arrange, under these conditions, three performances of Siegfried in one week. After the third, the theater would be torn down and my score burnt. To those who had enjoyed the thing I would then say: “Now go do the same!”

It would cost ten thousand thalers, Wagner added. Although he soon set aside the immolation of the score, he stuck to this initial scheme for a long time. He often spoke of his theater as a temporary structure, made of light materials. Even at a late stage, he hoped to offer free tickets, so that the experience would be open to all. To be sure, the expense of traveling to Bayreuth would still have been more than most people could bear.

By the later sixties, Wagner was a figure of international renown, his insurgent aura fast dissipating. In 1864, Ludwig II, the teenaged monarch of Bavaria, had come to the composer’s rescue. The king adored Wagner’s music but had his own ideas about architecture, and was not inclined to underwrite a temporary theater in a meadow. When the Romantic-Classical master Gottfried Semper drew up plans for a massive theater in Munich, Wagner called it “nonsensical,” although he approved of Semper’s design for the auditorium itself. The projected cost of the building provoked criticism, adding to the cloud of controversy that surrounded Wagner in Bavaria. Court intrigues and press campaigns forced a retreat to Switzerland. Still, Ludwig sought to make Munich the Wagner capital. Between 1865 and 1870, Tristan, Meistersinger, Rheingold, and Walküre all had their premieres there. Wagner disliked the manner of presentation, and expressed relief when the Munich project came to naught.

Finally, in 1870, Wagner’s eye landed on Bayreuth. The Festspielhaus that rose there, on a hill above the town, was a compromise between the austere 1850 plan and Ludwig’s penchant for luxury. It was a real theater, not a provisional one, yet it was an unostentatious building in an out-of-the-way place. Reviewing the blueprints, Wagner asked for more simplicity, more functionality. “Away with the ornaments!” he wrote on one design. The structure, he said, should be “no more solid than is necessary to prevent it from collapsing.” Seen from the train station, the Festspielhaus looks like a graceful industrial facility rather than a temple of culture. A “rambling, no-style building,” one critic said. The novelist Colette compared it to a gasometer. But it has aged well—a stately pile of brick and wood, framed by stands of trees. Veteran Bayreuthians call the festival complex the Green Hill, as if it were an outgrowth of the park that surrounds it.

The interior was even more jarring to nineteenth-century sensibilities. Traditional opera houses conform to a horseshoe shape, with many of the boxes facing one another—an arrangement conducive to social display. Bayreuth has a fan-shaped array of steeply raked rows, like a section lifted from a Greek amphitheater, so that every seat is angled toward the stage. Two proscenia are nested inside each other, drawing all eyes forward. The pit is set unusually deep, removing the musicians and the conductor from the field of vision. In an acoustical miracle that has never been fully explained, the orchestral sound diffuses richly through the auditorium, even though it must pass through an aperture in front of the stage. Modestly adorned columns line the sides of the auditorium. Hard-backed seats keep the listener awake and alert. In an 1873 essay, Wagner headily summarized the intended effect on the spectator:

Once he has taken his seat, he finds himself in a veritable “Theatron”—that is, a space designed for nothing other than looking, and looking where his position points him. Nothing distinctly perceptible comes between him and the image to be looked at—instead only a sense of hovering distance, which results from the architectural arrangement of the two proscenia; in this way, the abstracted image assumes the unapproachability of a dream vision, while the music, sounding spectrally from the “mystic abyss,” like vapors arising from the sacred Ur-womb of Gaia beneath the seat of Pythia, carries him into that inspired state of clairvoyance in which the scenic picture becomes for him the truest reflection of life itself.

This essay bears the imprint of Schopenhauer’s analysis of occult phenomena—clairvoyance, prophetic dreams, encounters with ghosts. The philosopher says that the dreaming or mesmerized mind can find a shortcut to the sphere of the will, where artificial constructs of space and time melt away and glimpses of the future intrude upon the present. Wagner is likewise suggesting that his theater will send its audience into a state of Hellsehen, or clairvoyance. The Pythia was the oracle at Delphi; Bayreuth has a similar function.

In all, Bayreuth was intended to foster a new level of seriousness in the theater public. Spectators should feel themselves disappearing into the work at hand. To assist in that illusion, Wagner planned to have the lights in the auditorium dimmed—again defying an operagoing culture that saw its own finery as part of the spectacle. At the first Ring, adjustable gas lamps failed to operate as planned, resulting in near-total darkness. Although the system was fixed, the idea of Wagnerian gloom took hold. The darkening of theaters actually dates back centuries, but Bayreuth popularized the practice in opera.

Wagner was also keen to discourage the bursts of applause that interrupted standard opera presentations. He did not, however, mandate worshipful silence, as is often claimed. In 1882, at the premiere of Parsifal, he requested that there be no curtain calls after Act II, so as not to “impinge on the impression,” as Cosima wrote. The crowd took this to mean that there should be no applause at all, and total silence greeted the final curtain. Wagner plaintively asked, “Did the audience like it or not?” At a later performance, someone shouted, “Bravo!” during the chorus of the Flower Maidens, and was hissed. That someone turned out to be the composer. Here was an early sign that Wagnerism was taking on a life independent of its creator.

The view from the “mystic abyss”

Nietzsche hoped that Bayreuth would be the fulfillment of his Greco-German dreams—a modern festival along Hellenic lines, fusing Apollonian and Dionysian elements, presented before an audience of elite aesthetes. Wagner, for his part, clung to his fantasy of a great popular festival, open to people of all backgrounds. Supporters were building up an international network of Wagner Societies, whose members made advance contributions in exchange for tickets. Through their patronage, Wagner hoped to keep admission free. By 1873, fund-raising was lagging, especially among German notables. Two of the biggest donors were, reputedly, Abdülaziz, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Isma’il Pasha, the khedive of Egypt.

To Nietzsche fell the task of writing an “Exhortation to the Germans,” urging native support. As promotional literature, it left much to be desired, its arguments bending toward the tortured and the delusional: “The German will appear honorable and beneficial to other nations only when he has shown that he is terrifying, and yet through the exertion of his highest and noblest artistic and cultural powers he will make one want to forget that he was terrifying.” Delegates from the Wagner Societies rejected Nietzsche’s work on account of its “bold language,” according to Cosima, though she considered it “very fine.”

Nietzsche’s culminating publicity effort, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” was published in July 1876, just before the festival opened. The tone is portentous, at times preposterous: “When on that day in May 1872, in pouring rain and under dark skies, the cornerstone was laid on that hill in Bayreuth, Wagner rode back to the city with some of us; he was silent and for a long time turned his gaze inward with a look that would be impossible to describe in words.” We are told that Wagner breathes in the “sublime and the ultra-sublime,” that he provides “the supreme model for all art in the grand manner,” that Tristan is “the true opus metaphysicum of all art.” Bayreuth was to be a gathering of chosen apostles, as on that rainy day in 1872, which, Nietzsche solemnly recorded in his notebooks, also fell in the period of Pentecost. At the same time, somehow, the festival would welcome the masses, since Wagner’s art “no longer even recognizes the distinction between cultivated or uncultivated.”

Even as he was manufacturing hype, Nietzsche was inwardly pulling away. The Wagners’ move to Bayreuth led to emotional as well as physical distance. The bustle of the nascent festival made for a dispiriting contrast to the otherworldly idyll on Lake Lucerne. Initial notes for the Bayreuth essay, from 1874, show smoldering skepticism:

If Goethe is a displaced painter and Schiller a displaced orator, then Wagner is a displaced actor.

W.’s youth is that of a many-sided dilettante who seems destined to come to nothing. In an absurd way, I often have doubted whether W. has musical talent.

W. has a domineering character, only then is he in his element … the inhibition of this drive makes him immoderate, eccentric, obstreperous.

W. gets rid of all his weaknesses by imputing them to his age and his adversaries.

Nietzsche remains admiring of the musical achievement, its “unity in diversity,” but he is hostile to the public, theatrical nature of Wagner’s enterprise.

The 1876 festival drew many glittering names. Kaiser Wilhelm I greeted Wagner by saying, “I never thought you’d pull it off.” Dom Pedro II of Brazil, who once expressed interest in becoming Wagner’s patron, made the long journey from Rio de Janeiro. Various dukes, princes, and counts attended—more than two hundred members of the German and Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. Such leading composers as Liszt, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Saint-Saëns were present, though Brahms and Verdi stayed away. The crowd included some eminent painters and writers: Hans Makart, Franz von Lenbach, Henri Fantin-Latour, Catulle Mendès.

For the most part, though, well-to-do curiosity-seekers set the tone. Joseph Bennett, one of a hundred or more journalists present, spotted American women “in a chronic state of ecstasy about ‘darling Liszt’” and Frenchmen “meditating epigrams of a withering character.” Tchaikovsky noted that the visitors looked preoccupied, “as if in search of something.” That something turned out to be food, which was in short supply: “Cutlets, baked potatoes, omelettes—all are discussed much more eagerly than Wagner’s music.” Shops were full of tacky merchandise, with Wagner’s face emblazoned on beer mugs, pipe bowls, cigar boxes, and sundry toiletries.

In the end, a festival that professed to shun consumerism all but wallowed in commercial values. As Nicholas Vazsonyi demonstrates in Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand, the composer helped to pioneer modern techniques of mass dissemination and publicity. Wolzogen’s leitmotif guide appeared ahead of the festival. Press releases provided behind-the-scenes anecdotes. The fund-raising system resembled a stock company, a network of investors; the Wagner Societies operated like fan clubs. The buzz of scandal that followed Wagner kept his name in the news—a crucial component of the machinery of celebrity. Somehow, the Ring itself, that radical monument, rose above the noise. Vazsonyi writes: “Wagner’s special skill was the ability to preserve the artistic integrity of his towering works amidst the blaze of commodification to which he in the first place had subjected them.”

Wagner knick knacks at the Reuter Wagner Museum in Eisenach

Nietzsche was appalled. “I no longer recognized anything, I scarcely recognized Wagner,” he wrote in Ecce Homo, remembering the “profound alienation” he felt when he arrived for the final rehearsals of the Ring. “What had happened?—Wagner had been translated into German! The Wagnerian had become the master of Wagner!—German art! The German master! German beer! … Enough; in the middle of it all I left for a couple of weeks.”

The biographical reality is somewhat different. Nietzsche indeed fled to the mountain forest resort of Klingenbrunn, but he was there for only about a week. He went mainly because of his chronic ill health, which included eye problems, piercing headaches, and attacks of vomiting. Sitting for extended periods in a theater was all but unbearable for him. Most likely, he was suffering from a hereditary neurological or vascular disorder; his father, who died at the age of thirty-six, showed similar symptoms. Nonetheless, Nietzsche could not stay away from what he called the “liquid gold” of Wagner’s orchestra, and he returned to Bayreuth in time for the first public performances, August 13–17.

If Nietzsche exaggerated his flight from Bayreuth, there is no doubt that he felt estranged from the festivities. Throughout his life, he believed that a philosopher must wage war on existing forms and conventions—“overcome his time in himself.” Bayreuth made it plain that the former pariah Wagner was now an adornment of the age. A crowd of “bored, unmusical” patrons and “idle European riff-raff” traipsed about, using the place for sport. On a personal level, Nietzsche’s intimacy with the composer was slipping away. The French author Édouard Schuré recalled that Wagner displayed “fantastic gaiety” and “exuberant humor” in gatherings at Haus Wahnfried, putting on his customary one-man performances. Nietzsche, in contrast, seemed deflated—“timid, embarrassed, almost always silent,” Schuré wrote.

Once the festival was over, Wagner, too, lapsed into a state of dejection. Despite all of his ingenious promotional tactics, he had lost a great deal of money, and in many ways the productions failed to satisfy him. Cosima wrote: “R. is very sad, says he wishes he could die!” The next time, he told her, everything would be done differently. In blacker moods, he thought to himself, “Never again, never again!” There was even talk of “giving up the festival entirely and disappearing.” Did Wagner sense that he had fallen far short of his old dream of a free festival in a meadow? In any event, he fled south, as if to recapture the Mediterranean glow in which he had first glimpsed his treacherous gold.

NIETZSCHE’S BREAK

The last meeting between Nietzsche and Wagner took place in the fall of 1876, in Sorrento, on the Amalfi Coast. The Wagners were ensconced at the Grand Hotel Vittoria, which looks out at the sea. Nietzsche was staying in humbler quarters a few minutes away, in the company of his former pupil Albert Brenner and the writers Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. Relations with Richard and Cosima remained outwardly cordial, but the mood was strained. For one thing, the Wagners were suspicious of Rée, because of his Jewish heritage. They also took an intrusive interest in their friend’s medical issues. To Otto Eiser, Nietzsche’s doctor, Wagner later offered the observation that he had seen other “young men of great intellectual ability” cut down by similar problems, and that these were often the result of masturbation. Eiser replied with polite skepticism, saying that his patient displayed no such abnormalities. At some subsequent date, word of Wagner’s amateur diagnosis got back to Nietzsche, who was left with the impression that his idol suspected him of “unnatural excesses, with hints of pederasty.”

The immediate cause of the break, however, was a brazen display of independence on Nietzsche’s part. During his stay in Klingenbrunn, in the summer of 1876, he had begun making notes for the book that became Human, All Too Human. The style departs markedly from his earlier published writing. In place of spacious paragraphs and ornate sentences, it proceeds by way of aphorisms and polemics, pithy strikes and sudden swerves.

Sleep of virtue.—When virtue has slept, it will arise refreshed.

Luke 18:14 improved.—He who humbles himself wants to be exalted.

Against originals.—When art clothes itself in the most worn-out materials, we most readily recognize it as art.

This change of voice, inspired in part by Rée’s brisk positivist philosophy, goes hand in hand with an attack on metaphysics. Wagner, after the Ring, turned toward the mystical ritual of Parsifal—a staging of the Schopenhauerian ethic of self-abnegation, with elements culled from the great world religions. Nietzsche veered in more or less the opposite direction.

Human, All Too Human begins with a sweeping refutation of the Romantic sublime. All attempts to grasp some fundamental truth behind the veneer of existence—the Ding an sich, the “thing in itself”—result from a false duality; reality consists of a tangled but ultimately graspable web of historically fluctuating relationships. Later sections pick at the moral pieties that underpin so much of Wagner’s work. Parsifal, following Schopenhauer’s philosophy of compassion, sets forth an ethic of “knowing through compassion”—“durch Mitleid wissend.” Nietzsche, who had read Wagner’s prose draft for the opera as early as 1869, hammers away at that word Mitleid, considering it a badge of weakness. Instead he praises animal urges, the flexing of strength, the exercise of force, even to the point of cruelty. “Culture simply cannot do without passions, vices, and acts of malice.” He goes so far as to say that “temporary relapses into barbarism” can rejuvenate an aging civilization. Wagner and Schopenhauer exude sickness and decadence; Nietzsche stands for power and health.

Wagner goes unnamed in Human, All Too Human, but a number of passages take clear shots at him. “Any degree of levity or melancholy is better than a romantic turn to the past and desertion, an accommodation with any form of Christianity whatsoever”: this is a preemptive critique of Parsifal. “It is in any case a dangerous sign when an awe of oneself comes over any human being”: this is a slap at the Wagner cult. There is even a swipe at Cosima, under the heading “Voluntary sacrifice”: “Nothing that women of significance do for their husbands, if they are men of renown and greatness, does more to make their lives easier than becoming the receptacle, as it were, for the general disfavor and occasional ill humor of other people.” That Nietzsche felt a strong attraction to Cosima had long been a complicating factor.

Nietzsche hoped that Wagner would take the book’s challenge in stride, as part of a back-and-forth between equals. Two copies of Human, All Too Human were sent to Bayreuth in April 1878, with a playful dedicatory poem from “Friedrich the Free-minded of Basel” to “the Meister and the Meisterin.” Cosima wrote: “At noon arrival of a new book by friend Nietzsche—feelings of apprehension after a short glance through it.” On subsequent days she described it as “strangely perverse,” “sad,” and “pitiful,” insisting all the while that she was not reading it. “Evil has triumphed here,” she wrote to a friend.

Wagner was no less dismayed, but he kept on reading, and even gave a lyrical recitation of the book’s ending—the ode to the wanderer, who sees “swarms of muses dancing past him in the mist of the mountains.” Did he feel a lingering fondness for Nietzsche’s thought, foreign as it now seemed? One day Wagner thought of sending Nietzsche a congratulatory telegram on the birthday of Voltaire, who is lionized in Human, All Too Human. This might have been the kind of large-spirited gesture that Nietzsche sought. Cosima talked her husband out of it. Bayreuth maintained a cold façade, and Nietzsche felt a “great excommunication.”

That summer, Wagner published the third part of an essay titled “Public and Popularity.” This work and other writings of his last years appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter, the newly founded magazine of the Bayreuth circle. (Wagner had originally wanted Nietzsche to edit the publication; Wolzogen, the labeler of leitmotifs, took the post instead.) Amid a typically rambling disquisition, Wagner refers to certain philologists and philosophers who have achieved “unbounded progress in the field of criticism of all things human and inhuman.” These individuals enact “pitiless” sacrifices of noble victims; they renounce the worship of genius; they are “astonished that Sunday-morning bells still ring today for a Jew crucified two thousand years ago.” (This answers one of Nietzsche’s jabs at Christianity.) Cosima wrote that her husband had taken on Nietzsche “in such a way that a reader who is not fully in the know will not notice.” The ploy was hardly as subtle as that. The excommunication was now official.

Wagner took special umbrage at Nietzsche’s critique of compassion, which directly contradicted his own philosophy. In the course of stewing over Human, All Too Human, he remarked that the chief characteristic of the Devil was “malice, pleasure in the misfortune of others.” Nietzsche appeared to be extolling such pleasure; Wagner thought himself to be taking the side of the weak, in a Christian spirit. If Nietzsche had been able to debate the question face to face, he might have responded that he was concerned chiefly with the hypocrisy of the compassionate; the ones taking pity find selfish delight in a display of emotion and a sense of power. He might also have noted the limits of Wagner’s love of humanity, particularly with regard to Jews.

In the end, both men harbored impulses that look ominous from the vantage point of the post-Holocaust era. What Wagner disliked in Nietzsche—the pitilessness, the exaltation of power—and what Nietzsche disliked in Wagner—the Teutonic chauvinism, the antisemitism—added up to an approximation of the fascist mentality. Once the better angels of their natures are set aside, Wagner and Nietzsche darkly complete each other in the Nazi mind. Of the two, only Nietzsche had an inkling of what the future held. “I know my lot,” he wrote in Ecce Homo. “One day my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous—to a crisis like none there has been on earth …”

SIEGFRIED ZARATHUSTRA

Wagner had no direct contact with his former acolyte in his final years. The last chance for a reunion would have been at the premiere of Parsifal, in 1882. Nietzsche told friends that he would go to the festival if he received a personal invitation, but none came. It is likely that Wagner regretted the demise of the friendship. Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, who was at Bayreuth that summer, claimed that the composer said to her, “Tell your brother that since he left me I am alone.” But public concessions were not in Wagner’s nature. Nietzsche was reduced to monitoring events through intermediaries. “The old sorcerer [Zauberer] has had another tremendous success, with old men sobbing, etc.,” he wrote to his amanuensis Heinrich Köselitz. Nietzsche is presumably the source of the epithet “Sorcerer of Bayreuth.”

Any attempted reconciliation would have been spoiled by the publication that summer of The Joyful Science, which sets aside indirect sniping in favor of frontal assault. Nietzsche accuses Wagner of having misunderstood the philosophy implicit in his own art. Schopenhauer has beguiled him into anti-Jewish blather, into a dubious conflation of Christianity and Buddhism, into an overweening concern for the well-being of animals. (The last shot was carefully aimed, given Wagner’s adoration of his pets.) What is the true philosophy? “The innocence of the highest selfishness; belief in the great passion as a good in itself; in one word, what is Siegfried-like in the countenance of his heroes.” In the next part of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche announces the death of God. Wagner is a fallen Wotan, his staff broken by his substitute son.

The stage is set for the most troublesome of Nietzschean beings, the Übermensch. The word had surfaced in the philosopher’s earlier writings, but usually in a negative sense. The critique of the “cult of the genius” in Human, All Too Human—unmistakably directed at Wagner—isolates the crisis moment when the genius begins to “take himself for something superhuman.” Then, in The Joyful Science, the term acquires a positive connotation. In the section headed “The greatest advantage of polytheism,” Nietzsche advocates a “plurality of norms,” and in so doing mentions “gods, heroes, and superhumans of all kinds, as well as near-humans and subhumans, dwarves, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils.” It sounds like the dramatis personae of the Ring, augmented by Greek and Christian guests. The translation of “Übermensch” as “superman,” popularized by Shaw in his 1903 play Man and Superman, is problematic not only because “Mensch” is gender-neutral but because the word now makes readers think of the brawny comic-book character. Nietzsche’s overman is no caped hero, although he is clearly a superior sort of being, almost a new species.

The Übermensch makes a formal entrance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was writing at the time of Wagner’s death. Zarathustra, the Übermensch’s prophet, appears toward the end of The Joyful Science, preparing to descend from his mountain and undertake his Untergang, his “going under.” The word “Untergang,” which can mean descent, decline, downfall, dissolution, or destruction, is one that Wagner uses repeatedly and indiscriminately. He speaks of the downfall variously of the state, of the gods, of history, of the world, of himself, and, notoriously, of Jews. He wrote to Liszt in 1853: “Mark well my new poem—it contains the world’s beginning and its downfall!” Untergang also has a philosophical history; Hegel’s Logic states that the highest stage of human understanding is that in which its Untergang begins. So Zarathustra’s going under is also a going over (Übergang) to new life, to the world of the Übermensch. The words are paired in one of the book’s most celebrated passages:

Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and Übermensch—a rope over an abyss … What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are an Übergang and an Untergang.

Roger Hollinrake, in Nietzsche, Wagner, and the Philosophy of Pessimism, argues that both Zarathustra and the Übermensch stem from Wagner. In one passage, Zarathustra sounds very much like the Wanderer of Siegfried—Wotan in disguise—in dialogue with the earth goddess:

WANDERER: Awake! Vala! Vala, awake! From your long sleep I awaken you, slumberer. I summon you forth: Up! Up! Up from the misty chasm, from the depth of night! Erda! Erda! Eternal woman!

ZARATHUSTRA: Up, abysmal thought, out of my depths! I am your rooster and dawn, you sleepy worm: Up! Up! … And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. It is not my manner to wake great-grandmothers from their sleep only to tell them—go back to sleep! … My abyss speaks, I have unfolded my ultimate depth to the light!

Yet the Übermensch is something other than a fearless, boyish hero. (Nietzsche’s misogyny makes a female Übermensch unlikely.) In fact, he eludes any kind of brief description. His mastery is rooted in tremendous struggle, not only with the outer world but with himself. Nietzsche melts down the materials of the Ring as he forges his own creation.

In the last book of Zarathustra, the protagonist meets the Zauberer, the Sorcerer, one of several tempters who try to lure him from his path. Even if we hadn’t read Nietzsche’s prior references to the “old sorcerer,” we would recognize Wagner’s personality in this restless, twitching, frantically gesturing figure, who babbles self-pitying monologues and dubs himself “the greatest person living today.” Zarathustra exposes him as an actor, a counterfeiter. After spluttering in protest, the Sorcerer gives in: “I am weary of and nauseated by my arts, I am not great, why do I pretend!” A conciliatory dialogue follows, and the Sorcerer hails Zarathustra as “a vessel of wisdom, a saint of knowledge, a great human being.” This seems pure fantasy on Nietzsche’s part, an imaginary victory over his mentor turned oppressor—although he claims in his notebooks that when he confronted Wagner in private the composer accepted the criticism. “I wish that he would also do it publicly. For what constitutes the greatness of a character other than that he is capable, for the sake of truth, of also taking sides against himself?”

The Sorcerer later stages a momentary comeback. In a pseudo-Christian supper scene, he strums his harp and sings mumbo-jumbo redolent of the Tristan libretto. The assembled company is hypnotized. Before long, all turn religious, kneeling before an ass and chanting Parsifalian pieties. Zarathustra responds with a string of contemptuous rebuttals, leading to another make-believe dialogue with Wagner’s ghost:

“And you,” said Zarathustra, “you wicked old sorcerer, what have you done! Who in these liberated times is supposed to believe in you anymore, if you believe in such asinine divinities?

“What you did was a stupidity; how could you, you clever one, commit such a stupidity!”

“Oh Zarathustra,” replied the clever Sorcerer, “you’re right, it was a stupidity—and it’s been hard enough for me.”

The pious mood gives way to roguish laughter, and it is in this spirit that the book ends: learning to laugh, to love the earth, to love what is fated, to be willing, under the doctrine of eternal recurrence, to relive the same life in every excruciating detail.

BECOMING WAGNER

Nietzsche writes to Cosima Wagner, January 1889

On February 3, 1883, Wagner glanced at an article about The Joyful Science, and, according to Cosima, responded with “utter disgust.” He died ten days later. It was not the ending that Nietzsche had pictured for a friendship that remained active in his mind. He was distraught but also relieved. The tension with Wagner had become unbearable. He wrote to Köselitz: “In the end, it was the aged Wagner against whom I had to defend myself; as far as the real Wagner is concerned, I intend in good measure to become his heir.”

In the major works of his last years of sanity, from 1885 to the end of 1888, Nietzsche brings his diatribe against conventional morality to its highest pitch. Beyond Good and Evil provisionally endorses “harshness, violence, slavery, danger in the streets and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the art of seduction, and devilry of every kind … everything evil, horrible, tyrannical, predatory, and snakelike in humanity.” All this “serves to elevate the species ‘humanity’ as well as its opposite.” On the Genealogy of Morality relates the good and noble to the innocent conscience of the predator, the “magnificent blond beast roaming about lustily after prey and victory.” Modern European civilization, meek and effeminate, has lost touch with the voluptuous cruelty once exhibited by Germanic tribes. The Antichrist continues the theme: “What is good? Everything that heightens in man the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself.” What is bad? Weakness, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion—Mitleid again.

Nietzsche is still looking for a savior figure, an unfettered Siegfried. In the Genealogy, he dreams of a future hero of “sublime malice,” a “redeeming man of great love and contempt.” Insinuating italics differentiate this redeemer from the ascetic hero of Parsifal. Redemption will entail not a flight from reality but a close embrace of the true nature of humanity. Nietzsche’s latter-day defenders posit that he is not actively praising war, aggression, and the rest. Rather, he is acknowledging that human beings will invariably be vicious to one another and to the world around them. Nietzsche’s critique of morality posits that moral language is not the same as moral action, and, indeed, that moral language can serve as a cover for actions that are immoral in the extreme. We must accept the reality of human nature and the vicissitudes of fate. The Dionysian urge is a “triumphal yes to life over and above all death and change.”

The Case of Wagner, written in the spring of 1888, promises to be the ultimate act of apostasy. In a style of high intellectual comedy, Nietzsche pillories German gigantism (“the lie of the grand style”); diagnoses the composer as a pan-European neurosis (“Wagner est une névrose”); coins deft one-sentence summaries of the operas (“You should never be too sure who you are really married to” is Lohengrin); praises Bizet’s Carmen at Wagner’s expense (“Music must be mediterraneanized”); and inserts a cackling footnote to the effect that the author of “Jewishness in Music” might himself have been Jewish. Yet the entire exercise is undercut by a preface that places Wagner at the very heart of modern life. The “case” is especially indispensable to the philosopher, for

where would he find a more knowledgeable guide to the labyrinth of the modern soul, a more articulate connoisseur of souls, than Wagner? Modernity speaks its most intimate language in Wagner: it hides neither its good nor its evil, it has forgotten any sense of shame. And conversely: when one is clear about the good and evil in Wagner, one is close to a reckoning of the value of the modern.—I understand perfectly when a musician says today: “I hate Wagner, but I cannot stand any other music.” But I would also understand if a philosopher were to declare: “Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian …”

What does Nietzsche mean by “modernity”? Competing definitions of the word exist in different intellectual spheres. In philosophy, it is often associated with the formation of a free, self-determined consciousness in the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. In sociology, it applies more often to nineteenth-century modernization—the economic and social upheaval analyzed by Marx, Weber, and Émile Durkheim. In cultural criticism, the “modern” denotes a radicalization of the arts, culminating in the modernist movements of the early twentieth century. Nietzsche defines modernity more narrowly, as the culture of decadence—overripe, indecisive, weak, detached from primal instincts, premised on false ideas of freedom. He must have known, however, that such an untethered abstraction would strike his readers in various ways. Broader understandings of modernity crowd into our minds. The Case of Wagner is more the opening of a case than the settling of one: it provokes a debate about what it means to be “modern” just as the word is coming into vogue.

Toward the end of his career, Nietzsche drops the pretense of being anti-Wagnerian and confesses his vestigial adoration. In Ecce Homo, a paragraph on Tristan lapses back into the rhapsodic mode of The Birth of Tragedy and “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”:

To this day I am still searching for a work of such dangerous fascination, of such shuddering sweet infinity, as Tristan—I am searching all the arts in vain … I think that I know better than anyone what tremendous things Wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of foreign ecstasies that only he had wings to reach; and being what I am, strong enough to turn what is most questionable and dangerous to my advantage and thus become even stronger, I name Wagner the greatest benefactor of my life. That which relates us—the fact that we have suffered more deeply, also from each other, than people of this century are capable of suffering—will reunite our names eternally …

Such passages support Thomas Mann’s belief that Nietzsche’s polemic against Wagner is really a “panegyric with the sign reversed, another form of glorification,” serving more to “goad one’s enthusiasm than to cripple it.”

Most of Nietzsche’s public commentary on Wagner takes the form of propaganda, positive or negative. In the more considered passages of his writings and notebooks, he finds his way to a clear-eyed, nuanced understanding. The Joyful Science dismantles clichés about Wagnerian hugeness and loudness, even before such clichés had fully taken hold. The composer may think of himself as a maker of “great walls and brazen murals,” but he is really a master of psychological moments, an “Orpheus of all secret misery.” The Case of Wagner scorns the cycle’s popular showpieces as so much “noise about nothing.” Instead, we should marvel at the “wealth of colors, of half shadows, of the secrets of dying light … glances, tendernesses, and comforting words.” Wagner is “our greatest miniaturist in music, who can urge an infinity of meaning and sweetness into the smallest spaces.”

Nietzsche also works to rescue Wagner from the triumphalism of the new Reich. In his 1878 notebooks, he sees the Bayreuth ritual as both a self-aggrandizement and a self-enslavement on the part of the German public. The resulting psychological contradiction could lead, he speculates, to a scapegoating of outsiders, such as Jews. One project of the later writings is to separate Wagner from bad national mythologies and guide him toward the Nietzschean ideal of the “good European,” who has no fatherland or motherland. The Teutonic culture-hero venerated in imperial Germany is a “phantom,” unrelated to the immoralist-atheist whom Nietzsche knew in private. The true Wagner is a “foreign country,” a “living protest against all ‘German virtues.’” Nietzsche’s joke about Wagner being translated into German makes the same point. The composer’s unforgivable mistake was that he “condescended to the Germans—that he became reichsdeutsch.”

Most impressively, Nietzsche exposes the neurosis that his own excessive fandom has generated—a dynamic that is by no means unique to Wagnerism. “Wholesale love for Wagner’s art is precisely as unjust as wholesale rejection,” he writes in 1878. “I revenged myself on Wagner for my deceived expectations,” he says. Tellingly, in the midst of such musings, he quotes the passage from Siegfried that Wagner was composing when the two men met in Tribschen: “He who woke me has wounded me!” Nietzsche would appear to be Brünnhilde, sleeping within the ring of fire until the arrogant, flawed hero makes his entrance.

This furiously conflicted relationship is best understood in terms of the Greek agon—the contest between worthy adversaries, in athletics or the arts. Nietzsche wrote about the agon in his 1872 essay “Homer’s Contest,” saying that the Greeks abhorred the predominance of a single figure and desired, “as a means of protection against genius—a second genius.” It is not far-fetched to guess that Nietzsche was thinking of himself and Wagner. As the philosopher Christa Davis Acampora emphasizes, the aim of the agon is not the destruction of the other but the elevation of the self, through a sublimation of the ineradicable human instinct toward aggression and violence. “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” shows that the composer’s battles with contemporaries were the crucible in which he “became what he is”—an early version of a favorite formula. Likewise, Nietzsche’s agon with Wagner is part of a process of self-formation. In fact, this contest benefits both participants, defining the one and redefining the other. The ritual of going up against Wagner, the dialectic of love and hate, often recurs in the annals of Wagnerism.

Around Christmastime 1888, while staying in Turin, Nietzsche sent a copy of Ecce Homo to Cosima. A draft for the accompanying letter is addressed to “the only woman I have ever revered,” and is signed “The Antichrist.” In the first days of the new year, Nietzsche broke down in the streets of Turin, allegedly after seeing a horse beaten by a coachman. For a few days, he continued to send incoherently stylish correspondence, calling himself “the Crucified” and “Dionysus.” Cosima received several more letters; one of them, addressed to “Princess Ariadne,” announced that the writer’s previous incarnations were Buddha, Dionysus, Alexander, Caesar, Voltaire, Napoleon, and “perhaps also Richard Wagner.” Once he was institutionalized, Nietzsche was heard to say, “My wife, Cosima Wagner, brought me here.”

Having become himself in the course of his agon with Wagner, Nietzsche fell back under the sorcerer’s spell in the end. He lived eleven more years, increasingly blank-eyed, gentle during the day, given to animal groans at night. In fulfillment of his prior prophecies, his work enjoyed an ever-growing vogue, soon to rival Wagnerism in breadth and intensity. But the news of his victory passed him by. In 1900, he was buried by the side of his father’s church.

GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

On November 21, 1874, Wagner finished the orchestration of Götterdämmerung, ending a project that he had begun twenty-six years earlier. “Thrice sacred, memorable day!” Cosima wrote in her diary. At lunchtime, though, she inadvertently enraged her husband by showing him a letter from her father. Why the letter caused offense is not clear—it seems that Wagner simply found it distracting—but Cosima spiraled into self-castigating despair. “The fact that I dedicated my life in suffering to this work has not earned me the right to celebrate its completion in joy,” she wrote. The two were later reconciled, but the dispute was a strange way to mark the realization of a work that affirms the triumph of world-changing love.

George Bernard Shaw accuses Wagner of a sort of backsliding in Götterdämmerung—of reverting to such grand-opera clichés as “a magnificent love duet … the opera chorus in full parade on the stage … theatrical grandiosities that recall Meyerbeer and Verdi … romantic death song for the tenor.” Shaw neglects the dramatic purpose of such well-worn devices: we have left the realm of the gods and are down on the human plain. Hagen, son of Alberich, is hatching a scheme to defeat Siegfried and win back the Ring. His unwitting ally is his half brother Gunther, the status-seeking chief of the Gibichungs. When Siegfried arrives at the Gibichung court, he is served a memory-erasing potion, so that he forgets Brünnhilde and falls in love with Gunther’s sister, Gutrune. It is decided that Gunther should marry the Valkyrie and that Siegfried should disguise himself as Gunther in order to win her hand. This fully operatic web of deceit stirs resentment and vengefulness on all sides. An infuriated Brünnhilde tells Hagen of Siegfried’s vulnerability—his unprotected back—and Hagen makes fatal use of the information by the waters of the Rhine. Before Siegfried meets his fate, the Rhinemaidens plead one last time for the Ring, their cry of “Weialala leia” grown forlorn.

Siegfried dies, the Funeral Music thunders, and Brünnhilde arrives to deliver her final monologue. “All things, all things, all things I know,” she sings, without entirely disclosing what she has learned. Deciding on the right ending gave Wagner considerable trouble. The essential action was fixed early on: Siegfried’s funeral pyre blazes; Brünnhilde rides her horse, Grane, into the flames; the Ring falls back into the Rhine. But what conclusion should Brünnhilde draw? In the initial 1848 sketch, with its happy message of liberation for all, she exudes revolutionary fervor: “Rejoice, Grane: soon we will be free!” Soon, though, Wagner’s vision darkened. The flames of the pyre consume Valhalla, and the end becomes a Todeserlösung, a redemption through death. In the version that was printed in 1853, he added a passage influenced by Feuerbach, in which material society is overcome by the power of love:

Though the race of gods

passed away like a breath,

though I leave behind me

a world without rulers,

I now bequeath to that world

the hoard of my most sacred wisdom.—

Not goods, not gold,

nor godly glory;

not house, not court,

nor lordly pomp;

not the treacherous bonds

of murky treaties

not the harsh decree

of dissembling convention:

blessed in joy and sorrow—

love alone can be.

The “Feuerbach ending,” as it is known, gave way to a “Schopenhauer ending,” in which Brünnhilde takes cover in visionary solitude:

I draw away from desire’s realm,

I flee forever the realm of delusion;

the open gates

of eternal becoming

I shut behind me …

Deepest suffering

of sorrowing love

opened my eyes:

I saw the world end.

This, too, was excised, to the regret of the young Nietzsche. Ultimately, Wagner chose not to delay the denouement with philosophical musings. Brünnhilde proceeds directly to her final lines, in which she urges Grane toward the flames—“Does the laughing fire lure you to him?”—and jubilantly salutes her beloved: “Siegfried! Siegfried! See! In bliss your wife bids you welcome!”

In the orchestra, we hear a reprise of the galloping motif of “The Ride of the Valkyries”—one of the first inspirations that Wagner had for the Ring, in the summer of 1850. It is joined to a regal theme that has been heard only once before in the cycle. In Act III of Walküre, after Brünnhilde saves Sieglinde and the unborn Siegfried from Wotan’s wrath, Sieglinde responds with a hymn of praise, addressing the Valkyrie as “O hehrstes Wunder! Herrliche Maid!” (“O noblest wonder! Glorious woman!”). The melody for these words turns floridly around the tonic note, as in a bel canto aria, and then dips down a seventh before climbing back up to the tonic. Wagner called it the “glorification of Brünnhilde,” although it seems more a glorification of Sieglinde’s selfless love. Once Valhalla falls, this theme becomes sovereign, with a stepwise bass line supplying hymnal gravity. The harmonization is almost sentimental: two-chord sequences like Amens, a wistful turn to the subdominant minor. The cycle ends in an incandescence of D-flat major.

Later it became fashionable to regard the ending of Götterdämmerung as a disappointment. Shaw said it was “trumpery.” Nietzsche thought that Wagner should have stuck with his original ending, in which Brünnhilde “was to say goodbye with a song in honor of free love, leaving the world to the hope of a socialist utopia where ‘all will be well.’” Theodor W. Adorno, one of the leading Wagner skeptics of the twentieth century, compared the closing theme to the finale of Gounod’s Faust, “in which Gretchen hovers as a Christ-angel above the rooftops of a medium-sized German town.”

Many modern Wagnerites are inclined to read the ending not as a turnabout but as a continuation of the composer’s long struggle with political and personal power. In Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire—a title derived from the various versions of Brünnhilde’s monologue—Mark Berry asserts that the closing theme is no cliché of Love Triumphing over All but a “shift, albeit partial, from erotic to charitable love,” positing the basis for a humane political state. Slavoj Žižek, similarly, understands it as “a gesture of supreme freedom and autonomy,” the “transformation from eros to agape.” Alain Badiou sees not merely the death of the gods but “the destruction of all mythologies.”

The final tableau of Götterdämmerung includes a silent human chorus, which gathers as the fires consume Valhalla. “Men and women watch with the greatest emotion,” Wagner writes in the full score. In Patrice Chéreau’s epochal 1976–80 production of the Ring at Bayreuth, these citizens of an unknown future turn around as Brünnhilde’s melody is unfurled and move to the front of the stage, looking out at the auditorium. They seem to say, in the words of the musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “It is up to you!” Their implicit message recalls Wagner’s early prospectus for a festival at which the theater was to have been torn down and the score burnt: “To those who had enjoyed the thing I would then say: ‘Now go do the same!’” The most monumental artwork of the nineteenth century is merely a prelude to future creation. The audience must write the rest.

2

TRISTAN CHORD
Baudelaire and the Symbolists

The Lohengrin riot of 1887

In January and February of 1860, Wagner conducted three concerts of his music in Paris, hoping to conquer a city that had largely shunned him in his youth. He had set his sights on a staging of Tristan und Isolde, his latest and boldest creation. To that end, he included the prelude to Tristan on his programs, alongside selections from The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin. Concert performances of the prelude had already taken place in Prague and Leipzig, but the Paris of the Second Empire, crowded as it was with republicans, anarchists, bohemians, and the literary vanguard, promised the ideal audience. In the throng at the Théâtre-Italien was Charles Baudelaire, the dark prince of French poetry, who had won infamy three years earlier with the publication of Les Fleurs du mal. “The Death of Lovers,” from that collection, already has the air of Tristan: “Vying to spend their last heat, / Our two hearts will be two vast torches, / Reflecting their double light / In the twin mirrors of our souls.”

To prepare his listeners, Wagner wrote a program note in which he laid out the rudiments of the story. Tristan, the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, is sailing from Ireland with Princess Isolde, who has been betrothed to Mark as part of a political bargain. Isolde is enraged, because this same Tristan killed her fiancé in battle. During the voyage, she asks Brangäne, her attendant, to prepare a death potion, which she and Tristan will drink together. Brangäne, unwilling to part with her mistress, serves a love potion instead. The prelude gives a preview of the music that accompanies the drinking of the philter, but it stands as an independent orchestral statement, in which we hear

insatiable longing well up from the shyest confession of the tenderest attraction, through anxious sighs, hopes and hesitations, laments and wishes, raptures and torments, to the mightiest onrush, the most violent effort, to find the breach that shows the infinitely yearning heart the way into the sea of endless loving rapture. In vain! Powerless, the heart sinks back to languish in longing, in longing without attainment, since each attainment leads only to renewed desire, until in final exhaustion the breaking glance catches a glimpse of the attainment of the highest rapture: it is the rapture of dying, of ceasing to be, of the final deliverance into that wondrous realm from which we stray farthest when we try to penetrate it with the stormiest force. Do we call it death? Or is it the nocturnal wonder-world, out of which, the legend tells us, an ivy and a vine once grew in intimate embrace over the grave of Tristan and Isolde?

Wagner chose not to issue this program, apparently because Mathilde Wesendonck, the object of his own Tristan-like affections, deemed it too personal in tone. In a letter to her, he parsed his music in terms of what he described as the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world: “A breath clouds the clear expanse of heaven.” As in the Ring, Wagner must relive the moment of creation before he can begin his story.

More words may have been spilled about the first three bars of Tristan—a rising minor sixth in the cellos, a semitone descent, a pungent chord of cellos and winds—than about any short passage in music, with the possible exception of the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. That first chord, named the “Tristan chord,” is a nebulous, ambiguous half-diminished seventh. In a well-defined harmonic context, it would be unremarkable, but in the hazy space delineated by the cellos it assumes an identity at once sensuous and unstable. The sequence seems to repeat, departing at a higher pitch, yet the music is not quite the same. The initial leap in the cellos is wider than before, a major sixth rather than a minor sixth. We drift deeper into the mist. The third iteration introduces further irregularities: an extra downward step in the cellos, an extra upward step in the winds. With such minute variations, Wagner captures the texture of unconscious, dreaming states. David Michael Hertz, in his book The Tuning of the Word, relates the passage to the literary technique known as parataxis: phrases appearing one after another, without a clear sense of connective tissue. Hertz’s description of the opening of Tristan—“A chain of fragments, each one freely bonded to the next”—pertains just as well to Baudelaire or Mallarmé.

All of Tristan is a hymn to oblivion. The political realities surrounding the Irish princess and the Breton-Cornish knight dissipate like a mirage. When, in Act I, Brangäne announces that their ship is approaching land, Isolde asks, “Which land?” And when Tristan is told that King Mark is approaching, he asks, “Which king?” The obliteration of reality is most pronounced in Act II, much of which is given over to the Liebesnacht, or Night of Love. After King Mark and his party go out on a hunt, Tristan and Isolde sing a forty-minute duet that oscillates between extreme sexual agitation and blissful lassitude. Serene ecstasy settles over the music as the two foresee their death together:

So starben wir, | Thus we died,
um ungetrennt, | so that, undivided,
ewig einig, | forever one,
ohne End’, | without end,
ohn’ Erwachen, | without waking,
ohn’ Erbangen, | without fearing,
namenlos | namelessly
in Lieb’ umfangen, | enveloped in love,
ganz uns selbst gegeben, | given entirely to each other,
der Liebe nur zu leben! | we might live for love alone!

The Gestalt philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels claimed to have found not one but two places in Act II where “orgasmic ejaculations” occur.

With a crashing orchestral chord, erotic stasis gives way to savage action. The lovers are caught; Tristan is fatally wounded; King Mark launches into an agonized lament. Act III, set at Kareol, Tristan’s ancestral castle on the Brittany coast, tracks the encroachment of death: prolonged, fitful, and feverish, in the case of Tristan (“Where—was I? Where—am I?”); becalmed and beatific, for Isolde (“Do I alone hear this melody?”). Isolde has crossed the Channel to heal his wound, but as she approaches Tristan tears off his bandages and lets his life bleed away. He dies in her arms, with a musical phrase that evaporates into silence. Taking charge of the “So starben wir” melody, Isolde sings a colossal monologue of farewell—“Mild und leise wie er lächelt,” or “How softly and gently he smiles”—and dies by Tristan’s side.

How that overwhelming music came to be known as the “Liebestod” (“Love-Death”) is another curiosity of Wagnerian apocrypha. The composer applied the word “Liebestod” not to the ending but to the opening passage of the prelude, which evokes the switching of the potions. His preferred title for the final monologue was “Isolde’s Transfiguration.” Then, in 1868, Liszt published a piano paraphrase of the ending, calling it Isolden’s Liebes-Tod. Because of the popularity of piano transcriptions, Liszt’s title supplanted Wagner’s own. Originally, the Liebestod was a seeming death that turns into love. It became almost the opposite—love that turns into death.

In fact, the word “death” is missing from Isolde’s valediction. Rather, this is a hallucination of life: Tristan’s lips forming a smile, his eyes shining, his heart beating, his breath rising, mysterious music emanating from him, sound merging with sight, taste, and smell. And Isolde is desperate to share the mirage with others: “Friends! See! Do you not feel and see it?” A mystical synthesis transpires:

In dem wogenden Schwall, | In the surging swell,
in dem tönenden Schall, | in the ringing sound,
in des Welt-Atems | in the world-breath’s
wehendem All,— | wafting vastness—
ertrinken, | to drown,
versinken,— | to sink—
unbewußt,— | unconscious—
höchste Lust! | highest bliss!

Her death is spelled out in the stage directions: “Isolde sinks, as if transfigured, in Brangäne’s arms, gently onto Tristan’s body.” But, as the musicologist Karol Berger writes, it is a mistake to think of the ending as a “glorification of the nihilistic death wish,” as he characterizes the common view. The monologue is ultimately concerned with the metamorphosis of the lovers’ story into myth, into art. Tellingly, even as the language dissolves into fragments, the music achieves a radiant simplicity, the vocal line becoming fixed almost exclusively on the notes of the B-major scale, with the elemental interval of the octave rising at the end. You have the sense that Isolde is not so much dying as disappearing back into the music that set the tale in motion.

In Paris, it took time for Tristan’s potion to kick in. When Wagner conducted the prelude at the Théâtre-Italien, it met with a tepid response. “A sort of chromatic moaning,” said the composer-critic Hector Berlioz, a sometime supporter. Baudelaire was bewitched by most of what he heard but had nothing to say about Tristan. Wagner had a more difficult time in France than he had hoped; it was not Tristan but the more conventional Tannhäuser that reached the stage of the Opéra in 1861, and even then a storm of opposition arose. Tristan did not arrive at the Palais Garnier until 1904. By century’s end, though, Wagner had become a godfather of modern art, his name invoked variously by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. The short-lived journal Revue wagnérienne facilitated the emergence of the Symbolist movement in literature. Tristan set the course for an avant-garde art of dream logic, mental intoxication, formless form, limitless desire.

Wagnérisme, the French cult of Wagner, was an astonishing development, as those who lived through it knew. “You cannot imagine the impression that this music made on those of my age,” the novelist Alphonse Daudet said, according to his son Léon. “It truly transformed us. It renewed the atmosphere of art.” Camille Mauclair, a devotee of Mallarmé and the Symbolists, remarked that Wagnérisme had the rhythms of a great love affair—“the first stammerings of the Wagnerian revelation; the arguments, the disavowals, and the enthusiasms, all equally furious; the blazing apotheoses and then the restless unease, the god debated …” Mauclair’s generation felt not only an intemperate love for the god himself but also a “terrible disgust” for everything else. The fervor was all the more notable given the mutual distrust that festered between France and Germany in the decades after the Franco-Prussian War. That so many Parisian intellectuals welcomed the cultural figurehead of a nation that had humbled France on the battlefield never ceased to baffle the patriotic bloc.

Nietzsche monitored the early stages of this national obsession. In The Case of Wagner, he links the composer to contemporary France (“Very modern, right? very Parisian! very décadent!”). In Ecce Homo, he names Baudelaire “the first intelligent follower of Wagner.” The philosopher cherished French culture, but his ascribing of Parisian manners to the master of Bayreuth had a cutting edge; his goal, surely, was to embarrass those who considered Wagner the most German of artists. The Wagnéristes, though, sincerely believed that their idol belonged in France—that Paris was his “proper soil,” as Nietzsche said. The early twentieth-century author André Suarès openly declared that France was the place where Wagner had been understood best; the operas had transcended their German milieu and become essential to French intellectual life. Indeed, in a 1916 essay, Suarès wrote, “Wagner at the end of his life is freer of Germany than is Nietzsche, who prides himself on having escaped from it.” This proposition would have annoyed Nietzsche no end.

For the French, Wagner was, first and foremost, modern. A notion of modernité had become integral to the self-image of the Parisian vanguard. Baudelaire began campaigning for unflinching representations of la vie moderne in the 1840s, and he fashioned an axiomatic definition in the 1860 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” The modern artist can find the eternal within the ephemeral, “poetry within history.” At first glance, Wagner seems distant from modernity thus defined: the ephemeral is not his subject. But Baudelaire will recognize in the composer another kind of adversarial potential. Wagner’s “passionate energy of expression,” his “strange superhuman quality,” makes him, in fact, the “truest representative of modernity.” The last phrase probably inspired Nietzsche’s aphorism about Wagner summing up the modern condition. The two comments are, however, very different in spirit. For Nietzsche, Wagner epitomizes a decadent culture that must be overcome. For Baudelaire, decadence is a site of resistance, a source of secret power.

Decadence long had a purely negative connotation: it was the overripe expression of an exhausted civilization. The conservative critic Paul Scudo found in Wagner’s music “the qualities and the defects of an epoch of decadence.” Baudelaire took possession of the word in his 1857 essay on Edgar Allan Poe, saying that any literature labeled “decadent” was almost certain to be superior to the alternative. In 1881, the novelist and critic Paul Bourget defined decadent style as “one in which the unity of the book breaks down and gives way to the independence of the page, in which the page breaks down and gives way to the independence of the sentence, and in which the sentence breaks down and gives way to the independence of the word.” For some, this atomization of discourse was a misfortune; for others, it advanced the cause of art. Although Bourget does not mention Wagner, Nietzsche makes the connection, using the Frenchman’s analysis to lament that life no longer resides in the whole, that discourse is devolving into an individualist free-for-all. Tristan, with its disconnected, groping phrases, is a case in point—even if Nietzsche cannot stop listening to it.

Wagner was modern; he was decadent; and he was dangerous. Riots and brawls accompanied French performances of his works until the end of the century, when the torch of scandal passed to the modernists. Opposition arose not only because of his German nationality but also because of the perceived difficulty of his music and the undoubted pugnacity of his prose. His rhetoric of perpetual revolution delighted the nonconformist artists and writers of Paris. That the conservative wing denounced Wagner and his followers as “terrorists of music” spoke in their favor. For the Wagnéristes, the composer had little to do with Germany; rather, he represented an international revolt against the artistic status quo.

Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” describes the ambivalence that the likes of Baudelaire felt in the face of an expanding popular marketplace. Recoiling from commerce, they put a premium on absolute novelty, which was a kind of market value in itself. In Benjamin’s estimation, Wagner’s total artwork became the ultimate expression of the art-for-art’s-sake mentality. For that reason, “Baudelaire succumbs to the Wagner infatuation.” Yet Wagnéristes were by no means blind idolaters, nor did they necessarily retreat from social questions, as Benjamin’s analysis implies. Their relationship with Wagner was a double-edged exchange, a contest of wills, an agon. Mallarmé directed writers to “take back what is ours” from the rival domain of music drama. “What a singular challenge Richard Wagner imposes on poets, whose duty he usurps with the most candid and splendid bravura!”

EARLY WAGNÉRISTES

Wagner’s first Parisian foray, from 1839 to 1842, was a humiliating defeat, at least in his own mind. Fleeing creditors in the Baltic city of Riga, where he conducted for two seasons, he and Minna Wagner arrived in the bourgeois metropolis of Louis-Philippe with few friends and no money. For two and a half years, Wagner found work as an arranger and a journalist, but his music received scant notice, and his profligacy nearly landed him in debtor’s prison. Ever after, he viewed this experience as the crucible in which his mature self was forged.

Although Paris generally ignored him, Wagner did attract a glimmer of attention when, in advance of a staging of Carl Maria von Weber’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz, he contributed a two-part article to the Revue et gazette musicale, explaining the work’s roots in folk legend and identifying supposed differences between German and French taste. Wagner predicted that the supernatural dimension of Freischütz—its magic bullets, its enchanted forest, its Wolf’s Glen—would mystify Parisian audiences who were accustomed to promenading in the Bois de Boulogne. Only the melancholy, questing German spirit, steeped in the lore of the Black Forest and the Teutoburger Wald, could feel at home in Weber’s opera. George Sand, near the height of her fame, read that article and paraphrased it in the introduction to her own diabolically tinged story “Mouny-Robin.” The woods of France have their own devilish secrets, Sand retorted.

Interest in Wagner quickened after 1848. The failure of revolutionary hopes impelled a turn away from politics and toward the otherworldly, the bizarre, the visceral, the voluptuous—a distinctively French counterpart to Wagner’s turn to metaphysics. The cult got off to a somewhat shaky start when the author and critic Gérard de Nerval, a flickering fixture of Paris bohemia, reviewed the premiere of Lohengrin without having attended it. The performance took place in 1850, in Weimar, under Liszt’s direction. Nerval fell sick en route but assembled a plausible account using materials that Liszt sent his way. “Lohengrin is one of the knights who go in search of the Holy Grail,” Nerval wrote. “Such was the goal of all adventurous expeditions of the Middle Ages, as with the Golden Fleece in ancient times and, today, California … This is an original and bold talent which has revealed itself in Germany, one that has as yet said only its first words.” Wagner approved of the article, despite its erratic summary of the plot.

Nerval continued to follow the German singularity from afar, writing in 1854 that his own theories were “quite related to those of Richard Wagner”—although he still had not heard any of the operas. He was by then immersed in his unfinished final work, Aurélia, which begins with the sentence “Dream is a second life.” Nerval’s sustained examination of the “overflow of dream into real life” intersects at many points with the Wagner of Tristan and the Ring. Confined to a clinic, the protagonist imagines being attended by Valkyries and has premonitions of world destruction. In one sequence, he meditates on the origins of the white and black races, the Nibelung hoard, Brünnhilde, Siegfried, Charlemagne, and the Holy Grail—a swirl of topics that overlaps with Wagner’s 1848 essay “The Wibelungs.” Nerval committed suicide in 1855, but his preoccupations became central to French literature.

The poet, novelist, and critic Théophile Gautier, a comrade of Nerval’s from schooldays onward, understood Wagner in terms of the art-for-art’s-sake stance that Gautier popularized in his poetry and prose. One of his most famous poems, “Symphonie en blanc majeur” (“Symphony in White Major,” 1852), set off a fad for musical titles in poetry and painting. Gautier, who shared Nerval’s taste for dream states and the supernatural, first encountered Wagner when the Tannhäuser overture was played in Paris in 1850. He judged it “a work full of knowledge, of original instrumental effects,” surpassing “those facile banalities that the French public is always ready to applaud.” When Gautier saw the complete opera, in Wiesbaden, in 1857, his reaction was more measured, not to say confused. Expecting the music of a “paroxyste,” he instead professed to hear a formally conservative work “full of fugues”—an analysis that few musicologists have seconded.

The majority of Francophone critics were unremittingly negative. In 1852, the eminent Belgian theorist and critic François-Joseph Fétis wrote a seven-part series of articles disparaging Wagner’s music and ideas, yoking the composer to such “aberrations of the spirit” as the realism of Courbet and the radicalism of Proudhon. French listeners could not easily judge for themselves, since almost no one was playing the music. Between 1842 and 1860, Paris heard nothing by Wagner except two isolated renditions of the Tannhäuser overture. Then began the “second assault on Paris,” in the words of the Wagner biographer Ernest Newman. First came the concert series at the Théâtre-Italien, then the Tannhäuser fiasco at the Opéra, which launched Wagnerism as an international event.

THE TANNHÄUSER SCANDAL

“The author of the Tannhäuser overture! Open all the doors,” the poet and critic Auguste de Gasperini wrote to his friend Léon Leroy in September 1859, announcing Wagner’s return to Paris. Two years earlier, Gasperini, a former naval surgeon who read German philosophy and espoused radical politics, had heard the Lohengrin wedding march in the spa town of Baden-Baden, and found himself “subjugated” by it—a strong reaction to a somewhat innocuous piece. Since then, Gasperini had been proselytizing on Wagner’s behalf. Leroy, a musically trained journalist and editor, spread the word in liberal circles.

Wagner in Paris, 1861, from Thomas Mann’s collection

The political backdrop helps to explain the ensuing battle over Wagner in Paris. Louis-Napoléon was crowned Napoleon III in 1852, and in the early years of his regime he exercised an authoritarian grip, effectively suppressing opposition at both ends of the political spectrum—the republican left, adhering to the ideals of the Revolution; and the legitimist right, dedicated to restoring the Bourbon monarchy. By the end of the fifties, though, the left was gathering strength, and the emperor responded with a strategy of partial liberalization. The system of censorship that forced Baudelaire to remove six poems from Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 eased modestly in the following decade, giving encouragement to new artistic voices.

Even if Wagner had retreated from politics, his reputation rested in large measure on his revolutionary pamphlets, and he had many fans on the left. The ranks of the Wagnéristes grew to include the politicians Jules Ferry and Émile Ollivier (the latter married to Liszt’s daughter Blandine); the philosopher and future Third Republic statesman Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour; the poet and dramatist Théodore de Banville, who greeted Wagner as “a democrat, a new man, wanting to write for everyone and for the people”; the pianist Maria Kalergis, who, by Eugène Delacroix’s report, adored the composer “like a fool, as she adores the Republic”; and the author Marie d’Agoult, mother of Blandine Ollivier and Cosima von Bülow, later Cosima Wagner.

When Wagner presented his concerts at the Théâtre-Italien, musical conservatives ratcheted up their opposition to the alleged Marat of composers. Critics mocked the audience as a parade of poseurs: “Dresses of yellow satin with crimson bodices; bouffant skirts held up with belts of gold braid; small amaranth hats with turned-up brims; bundles of cherry pink ribbon intertwined with beads and shells; white plumes perched on the ear; in sum, the hairstyles and toilettes of the future.” Paul Scudo scowled at the “mediocre writers, painters, sculptors without talent, quasi-poets, lawyers, democrats, suspect republicans, deceivers, women without taste, day-dreamers of nothing.” According to Baudelaire, Scudo stood at the exit after one rehearsal and laughed maniacally, “like one of those unfortunates in mental institutions who are called agités.” It was a prophetic aside: the critic died insane four years later.

Wagner was finally famous in Paris, but at a price. Just after his concert series ended, Jacques Offenbach’s musical satire Le Carnaval des revues opened at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, almost next door to the Théâtre-Italien. This entertainment included a scene set in the Elysian Fields, where Gluck, Grétry, Mozart, and Weber pass judgment on a certain “composer of the future” who blends jarring discords with vulgar tunes. When the departed greats hear a pop hit of the Second Empire in the mix, they dismiss the newcomer as a beggar and a brigand. If parody had the power to kill, Le Figaro said, “Richard Wagner would be a dead man at this moment.”

Being branded a revolutionary was of no help in winning a performance at the Opéra, as Wagner knew. He began hosting a salon on Wednesdays, inviting not only republicans but also legitimists and members of the emperor’s circle. His latest commentaries prioritized psychology over politics. For a French translation of his librettos, he wrote an introductory “Lettre sur la musique,” which dwelled on myth, dreams, and the unconscious. The mark of a great poet, Wagner says, is his ability to let his public grasp in silence what is left unsaid. In the case of the musician, “the infallible form of his resounding silence is endless melody.” Music and literature can meet in an ideal space that exists at the outer limits of each discipline. Canny as ever, Wagner sets the stage for a radical literary reception of his work.

“Endless melody” proved to be another inescapable Wagner formula. It stands in seeming contrast—almost in contradiction—to the leitmotif, which entered common parlance after the premiere of the Ring. Leitmotifs are crisply defined melodic fragments that play a signifying role; endless melody suggests a continuous, formless flow of consciousness. As the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus once showed, the two concepts are really complementary. Endless melody consists, in essence, of leitmotivic materials seamlessly interlocking.

In March 1860, Napoleon III commanded a performance of Tannhäuser at the Opéra. The historian Gerald Turbow diagrams the politics behind the move: the emperor wished to improve relations with Austria, and Princess Pauline von Metternich, the wife of the Austrian ambassador, was a Wagner champion. At the same time, the gesture seemed intended to win allies among domestic progressives. In a similar liberalizing spirit, Napoleon III would sponsor the 1863 Salon des Refusés, giving his imprimatur to Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and other painters rejected by the Académie. In the end, the entire scheme backfired. Some leftists who had seen Wagner as a revolutionary stalwart now looked at him askance. The legitimists had even less reason to approve of him. When Tannhäuser finally opened, on March 13, 1861, much of the audience was predisposed to dislike it.

The opera was already more than fifteen years old—a landmark of Wagner’s early development rather than a harbinger of his mature style. In his first four operas, he had tried his hand at various genres. Die Feen is a Romantic fantasy; Das Liebesverbot is an Italianate treatment of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure; Rienzi is a grand opera in French style; The Flying Dutchman returns to the Romantic supernatural. Tannhäuser, based on a medieval legend that Wagner probably first encountered by way of a retelling by Heinrich Heine, attempts a synthesis, incorporating grand-opera and bel canto features in a German Romantic frame. Wagner was never altogether satisfied with the result, and for the Paris production he extensively reworked the score.

Baudelaire summarized the story thus: “Tannhäuser represents the struggle between two principles that have chosen the human heart for their chief battlefield: that is to say, flesh and spirit, hell and heaven, Satan and God.” The title character is torn between the debauchery of the goddess Venus, who tempts him into the mountain grotto of the Venusberg, and the more wholesome adoration of Elisabeth, the niece of the Landgrave of Thuringia. The eventual self-sacrificial death of Elisabeth brings about Tannhäuser’s redemption, as the hero escapes Venus’s clutches. Many of the opera’s principal motifs are given a lavish presentation in the overture. The “furious song of the flesh,” as Baudelaire heard it, fails to vanquish the stately Pilgrims’ Chorus: the two elements are intertwined and reconciled.

When Wagner revised Tannhäuser for the Opéra, he gave special attention to the opening scene, in which nymphs, bacchantes, and other revelers enact the Venusberg. With an injection of the advanced harmonic language of Tristan, the sequence turns into a matchless orgiastic frenzy. Wagner hoped that the new material would solve an imminent crowd-control problem. Paris audiences were accustomed to seeing a ballet scene not at the beginning of an opera but in the second act. The noblemen of the Jockey Club, who occupied many of the most prominent boxes, were in the habit of skipping the first act, arriving in time to see their favorite ballerinas. Although Wagner refused to supply a ballet in the expected place, he thought that his supercharged Venusberg music and the accompanying dancing would astound everyone into surrender.

He miscalculated, to say the least. The Jockeys, who had ties to the legitimist camp and no great love for Napoleon III, had already decided to ruin the show. They came equipped with hunting whistles and made a mighty noise. The entrance onstage of ten hunting dogs, loaned by the emperor, caused merriment, eliciting cries of “Bravo les chiens! Bis les chiens!” The Wagnerites fought back, shouting, “À bas les Jockeys!” Fistfights broke out; Princess Metternich attempted to confiscate the Jockeys’ noisemakers. At the second performance, the din grew so loud that Nina de Callias, the model for Manet’s Lady with Fans, compared it to the sound of a dozen locomotives. In the end, Tannhäuser seemed to have won over most of the public. But Wagner had had enough. After one more tempestuous performance, he withdrew the work in a fit of pique. The Opéra did not touch his music for another thirty years.

Paris had witnessed such scenes before, and more were to follow. In 1830, at the premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, the eighteen-year-old Gautier had shouted on behalf of the new Romanticism. The most crucial phase of such aesthetic battles took place not during the performance but afterward in the press. In the case of Tannhäuser, the conservatives almost immediately lost the argument. As the musicologist Annegret Fauser notes, Wagner and his allies successfully characterized the opposition as a convocation of imbeciles who were blocking progress. The most effective broadside appeared on April 1, 1861, in the Revue européenne: an eleven-thousand-word article titled “Richard Wagner,” by Charles Baudelaire.

BAUDELAIRE

Baudelaire, 1863

Eight years younger than Wagner, Baudelaire could hardly have been more different in personality. While the composer came from relatively humble origins, the poet grew up in comfortable bourgeois circumstances, and assumed, with a certain pride, a downward trajectory. Where Wagner refrained from most bohemian habits, Baudelaire indulged in absinthe, opium, hashish, and large quantities of wine. Wagner’s love affairs often stopped short of sexual congress; Baudelaire’s early and frequent encounters with prostitutes probably gave him the venereal disease that has been linked to his early death. Wagner never lost faith in an ever-evolving conception of God; Baudelaire hailed Satan. Wagner gazed backward to mythic origins; Baudelaire opened his poetry to the seamiest tendencies of contemporary life. Even so, the poet’s identification with the composer was profound. Having endured his own scandal on account of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire saw the same forces of philistinism conspiring against Tannhäuser.

Listening to Wagner’s music and reading his texts, Baudelaire felt repeated shocks of familiarity. Both men relied on the rhetoric of the new. “Children! make something new!” was one of Wagner’s slogans; for Baudelaire, it was “To the bottom of the Unknown to find the new!” Both sympathized with wanderers and outcasts. Venus flits through Fleurs, which critics have divided into cycles of the “black Venus,” the “white Venus,” and the “green-eyed Venus.” The poet who contrasted muses and Madonnas with temptresses and whores was well prepared for the Elisabeth-Venus duality of Tannhäuser. On the purely musical level, Wagner’s investigation of unusual harmonies and timbres accorded with Baudelaire’s ideas about the beauty of the ugly and the bizarre. Berlioz had accused Wagner of making the horrible beautiful and the beautiful horrible. Baudelaire might have loved the music for exactly this reason.

Although Baudelaire had warmed to Wagner as early as 1849, he was unprepared for the impact of the Théâtre-Italien concerts. His mania on the subject amused his friends, as he told his publisher: “I dare not speak more about Wagner; I’m getting mocked too much. That music has been one of the great pleasures of my life; it has been easily fifteen years since I have felt such ravishment.” The following day, Baudelaire sent a letter to the composer, characterizing his experience as one of addiction, infatuation, subjugation. Indeed, he metaphorically placed himself in a passive sexual role:

Before everything, I wish to tell you that I owe to you the greatest musical pleasure I have ever experienced … It seemed to me that this music was mine, and I recognized it as every man recognizes the things he is destined to love … I often experienced a sensation of a rather bizarre nature, and this was the pride and pleasure of comprehending, of letting myself be penetrated and invaded, a truly sensual enjoyment, which resembles that of rising in the air or tossing on the sea.

Some artists might have been alarmed to receive such a piece of correspondence, but Wagner was delighted. In his autobiography, he reports the satisfaction of encountering this “extraordinary mind,” which expressed itself “with conscious boldness in the most bizarre flights of fantasy.” Despite the lack of a return address—Baudelaire had not given one, to avoid the impression he was asking for a favor—Wagner tracked down the poet and invited him to his salon. Baudelaire set to work on his essay, steadily expanding its scope over many months. “I dream continuously of WAGNER and POE,” he wrote to his publisher. Only in the wake of the Tannhäuser debacle did the article finally appear in print. It was subsequently republished under the title “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris.”

Baudelaire begins in medias res, in the manner of Poe: “I propose, with the reader’s permission, to go back some thirteen months, to the beginning of the affair.” There follows a withering précis of the Parisian battle over Wagner, which erupted before anyone had had a chance to hear the music. The poet then tells of his own conversion experience. The prelude to Lohengrin struck him most strongly. Reproducing passages from Wagner’s program note, which describes the apparition of the Holy Grail to a “pious wanderer,” Baudelaire italicizes particular phrases: “plunges into an infinity of space,” “he yields to a growing feeling of bliss,” “radiant vision,” “he is swallowed up in an ecstasy of adoration, as if the whole world has suddenly disappeared,” “burning flames gradually mitigate their brilliance,” “into whose hearts the divine essence has flowed,” “into the infinities of space.” He then summarizes his own impressions, stressing the overlap with Wagner’s text:

I remember that from the very first bars I suffered one of those happy impressions that almost all imaginative men have known, through dreams, in sleep. I felt myself released from the bonds of gravity, and I rediscovered in memory that extraordinary thrill of pleasure which dwells in high places … Next I found myself imagining the delicious state of a man in the grip of a profound reverie, in an absolute solitude, a solitude with an immense horizon and a wide diffusion of light; an immensity with no other decor but itself. Soon I experienced the sensation of a brightness more vivid, an intensity of light growing so swiftly that not all the nuances provided by the dictionary would be sufficient to express this ever-renewing increase of incandescence and heat. Then I came to the full conception of the idea of a soul moving about in a luminous medium, of an ecstasy composed of knowledge and joy, hovering high above the natural world.

The convergence of these associations, which also resemble phrases from Liszt’s essay on Lohengrin, proves to Baudelaire that “true music evokes analogous ideas in different brains,” that verbal images and musical ones are intimately interrelated. They reflect the “complex and indivisible totality” of God’s creation. To illustrate the point, Baudelaire inserts, without naming the source, eight lines from his own poem “Correspondances,” published in the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal:

Nature is a temple where living pillars

Let fall at times a confusion of words;

There man passes through forests of symbols

Which look at him with knowing eyes.

Like long echoes that distantly lose themselves

In a shadowy and profound oneness,

As vast as night, as vast as light,

Scents, colors, and sounds answer each other.

Baudelaire thus delineates a correspondence between Wagner’s goal of reunifying the arts and the poet’s own synesthetic command of smell, sight, and sound. The forest imagery deepens the identification: George Sand had questioned Wagner’s assumption that only Germans could understand the enchanted woods of Der Freischütz, and now Baudelaire places himself in similar terrain, the mystery only heightened by the incomparably spooky vision of symbols with eyes.

As he confesses in his introductory letter—“From the day I heard your music, I have said to myself constantly, especially at bad hours: If only I could hear a little Wagner tonight!”—Baudelaire is responding with the ardor of an addict, an opium dreamer. Wagner’s revolutionary politics leave him cold; the adventures of 1848 and 1849 are an “error excusable in a sensitive and excessively nervous mind.” What matters is the composer’s “absolute, despotic taste for a dramatic ideal.” Baudelaire proceeds to quote Wagner’s “Lettre sur la musique,” which describes myth’s capacity to activate powers beneath conscious reason: “The character of the scene and the tone of the legend work together to throw the mind into that dream-state where it is soon brought to the point of full clairvoyance, and it discovers a new interrelationship of the phenomena of the world, which the eyes could not perceive in the ordinary waking state.”

Delving into the Tannhäuser overture, Baudelaire predictably favors the profane over the sacred. The world of Venus exudes “languors, fevered and agonized delights, ceaseless returns towards an ecstasy of pleasure which promises to quench, but never does quench, thirst … the whole onomatopoeic dictionary of Love.” Indeed, Baudelaire upends the moral scheme of the opera by claiming that the Venusberg music represents “the overflowing of a vigorous nature, pouring into Evil all the energies which should rightly go to the cultivation of Good; it is love unbridled, immense, chaotic, raised to the level of a counter-religion, a satanic religion.”

The extravagant vocabulary of the essay’s concluding section foreshadows Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetics. Indeed, Baudelaire comes close to preempting the Übermensch when he says that Wagner’s passion “adds to everything a je ne sais quoi of the superhuman.” One should exult in “these excesses of vigor, these overflowings of the will, which write themselves on works of art like flaming lava on the slopes of a volcano, and which in ordinary life often mark that delicious phase that follows upon a great moral or physical crisis.” This superman is not, however, a specifically German quantity. Indeed, Baudelaire ignores Wagner’s Germanness and instead criticizes the chauvinistic small-mindedness that has led French crowds to thwart a work of high importance. In an epilogue that he added for the book version of the essay, he asked, “What is Europe going to think of us, and what will they say about Paris in Germany?”

In the end, this apparent submission to Wagner is a wholesale reinvention of him. As the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it in his study Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), Baudelaire wards off music’s threatened dominance by way of “subjective reappropriation.” Music remains stubbornly inarticulate, even in Wagner’s word-heavy, emotionally charged incarnation. Baudelaire’s declaration that the music “returned me to myself” stealthily reclaims territory that he had seemingly given up in his state of abject wonder. “I myself am the world,” the lovers sing in Tristan, the opera that Baudelaire never heard. By saying, in effect, “I myself am Wagner,” Baudelaire makes the music his own, and forever changes how the world perceives it. In this agon, the one who surrenders is the victor.

Wagner’s initial reply to the Tannhäuser essay alludes offhandedly to Baudelaire’s “very beautiful” words before retailing the usual stories of his woes. Perhaps he only skimmed it, for in a second letter he suddenly sounds almost desperate with gratitude. He has tried several times to call on Baudelaire in order to convey his appreciation for the article, “which honors and encourages me more than anything that has ever been said about my poor talent.” Wagner goes on, in passable French: “Would it not be possible to tell you soon, out loud, how intoxicated I felt upon reading these beautiful pages, which related to me—as does the best poem—the impressions I must boast of having produced on a sensibility as superior as yours? A thousand thanks for this blessing you have given me, and believe me proud to call you a friend.” Baudelaire reported that Wagner later hugged him, saying, “I would never have believed that a French writer could so easily understand so many things.” Did Wagner like the essay that much? Or did he realize that its unorthodox speculations granted him a kind of exegetic immortality?

When “Richard Wagner” was published, Baudelaire had only six years to live. Symptoms of physical and mental decline soon became evident. In 1866, the poet suffered a massive stroke, and spent his final year in a nursing home, incapacitated and effectively unable to speak. Among his regular visitors were Suzanne Manet, the wife of the painter, and the pianist Eléonore-Palmyre Meurice. Both women played Wagner for the invalid. Another friend recalled: “When I spoke of Wagner and Manet, he smiled with happiness.”

In 1888, Nietzsche came across Baudelaire’s Œuvres posthumes, which recounted the poet’s last days and quoted Wagner’s appreciative letter of 1861. The only other time the composer ever waxed so effusive, Nietzsche claimed, was when he read The Birth of Tragedy. Baudelaire’s writings show Wagner to be a cosmopolitan, supra-German artist; at the same time, they point up his decadence, his appeal to sick souls. Nietzsche observes that when Baudelaire was “half mad and slowly going under, they applied Wagner’s music to him as medicine.” Within a year, Nietzsche had himself passed into the beyond, playing his Wagnerian fantasies at the piano.

AXEL’S CASTLE

The Wagner wars raged on. In October 1861, a few months after the Tannhäuser scandal, the conductor Jules Pasdeloup instituted a series of low-priced Concerts Populaires in the Cirque Napoléon, now the Cirque d’Hiver, a circular arena that at the time could seat around five thousand people. The following year, Pasdeloup programmed an excerpt from Tannhäuser, and added more Wagner as the decade went on. The conductor also led an extended run of performances of Rienzi in 1869 and 1870. A decade later, John Singer Sargent painted Pasdeloup’s orchestra in rehearsal—a moody tableau of blurry black-clad figures set against white score pages and golden brass.

Paul Verlaine was a regular at the Cirque, arriving early to be assured of a good seat. In his Épigrammes, the poet remembers that he had “thrown a punch / For Wagner” in the skirmishes that regularly took place between fans and detractors. Isidore Ducasse, the short-lived proto-Surrealist author who wrote as the Comte de Lautréamont, also had Wagnerite leanings. In the second canto of Les Chants de Maldoror, the testament of an apostle of evil, the figure of Lohengrin is seen hurrying down a city street in an anonymous modern guise. Maldoror is tempted to stab him to death, so that the beautiful youth will not “become like other men,” but he restrains himself. “I am yours,” he says. “I belong to you, I no longer live for myself.”

Émile Zola and Paul Cézanne, schoolboy friends from Aix-en-Provence, belonged to the local Wagner Society and joined the ranks of the Wagnerians at the Cirque on moving to Paris. Zola boasted that he had been among the first to shout “Bis!” (“Encore!”). Later, having renounced Impressionism in favor of naturalism, he looked back on those adventurous years with a less sentimental eye. Claude Lantier, the failed, doomed painter at the heart of Zola’s 1886 novel L’Œuvre, is modeled on Cézanne. Among the cast of supporting characters is a painter named Gustave Gagnière, whose soliloquies preserve some of the more unhinged Wagnerite rhetoric of the period:

Oh! Wagner, the god, in whom centuries of music are incarnated! His work is the mighty ark, all the arts in one, the true humanity of the characters finally achieving expression, the orchestra separately experiencing the life of the drama; and what a massacre of conventions, of inept formulas! what a revolutionary emancipation into the infinite! … The overture to Tannhäuser, ah! it is the sublime hallelujah of the new epoch …

Gagnière defies the hissing ignoramuses at the Cirque and exits one concert with a black eye.

Baudelaire was not the only French author to develop a distinctive vocabulary for Wagner. Another influential advocate was the arch-bohemian writer and critic Champfleury, the nom de plume of Jules Fleury-Husson—a “juggler, a thermometer of enthusiasms,” according to the art historian T. J. Clark. While Baudelaire mulled over his Wagner essay for more than a year, the prolific Champfleury dashed off an aphoristic, free-associating pamphlet a few days after the first Théâtre-Italien concert. Seeking “analogies of sensations” to capture the experience, Champfleury first evokes the infinite expanse of the ocean, then looks toward the forest, which had already made a memorable appearance in Baudelaire’s “Correspondances.” He writes: “There is a religious aspect in the work of Wagner, the religious feeling that you experience in a thick forest, when you traverse it in silence. Then the passions of civilization fall away one by one: the spirit leaves the little cardboard box where it is habitually locked away whenever one ventures out to a soirée, to the theater, in society; it purifies itself, it visibly grows, it breathes contentedly and seems to climb to the tops of tall trees.”

Champfleury’s essay was published in March 1860. Wagner, buffeted by attacks in the French press, gratefully seized on it and folded some of its images into his “Lettre sur la musique.” According to Champfleury, the music is in no way bereft of melody, as conservative critics complain; rather, it is “only one vast melody,” indivisible like the sea. Wagner’s “Lettre,” in turn, takes up the formula of the “endless melody” and spins its own extended forest metaphor, asking the reader to imagine a lonely traveler who, on a summer evening, leaves behind the noise of the city and goes walking in a beautiful forest. There, he listens to the “endless diversity of voices awakening in the wood” and has the “perception of a silence becoming ever more eloquent.” These sounds cannot be separated from one another; they are “but one great forest-melody,” religious in character.Wagner is thinking, no doubt, of the shimmering Forest Murmurs music in Act II of Siegfried. The influence is circular: forest imagery first appears in Baudelaire and then reappears in Champfleury’s ode to Wagner, which Wagner absorbs in turn. No wonder Baudelaire felt a sense of self-recognition on reading the “Lettre.”

Wagner, in his youth, had perplexed George Sand with his assertion that French listeners would never be able to penetrate the forests of German folklore. The rising generation of French writers might have led him to rethink his position, if anyone had thought to challenge it. Deep in the Black Forest, a symbol-encrusted magic castle was about to rise, the creation of a stupendous character who could make even Wagner wish for a little peace: Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

He always brought in a festival,” Mallarmé said. “Time annulled itself those nights.” The Goncourt brothers recalled the “feverish eyes of a victim of hallucinations, the face of an opium addict or a masturbator, and a crazy, mechanical laugh which came and went in his throat.” This absinthe-breathed bohemian was, in fact, the scion of an ancient family, as his page-wide name testifies. Born on the Brittany coast, Villiers could claim proximity to the romance of Tristan: the hero comes from a Breton line, and, in Wagner’s version, dies in the family castle. One of Villiers’s distant ancestors had been the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and family lore held that he left a great treasure buried somewhere. Villiers’s father, Joseph, engaged in ill-advised real-estate ventures in order to carry out excavations in Brittany. According to Villiers’s biographer, Alan Raitt, the only thing Joseph ever found was a dinner service. His son inherited the fixation on lost glory, transmuting it into literary fantasy. Auguste gained early notoriety for having declared his candidature—seriously or not, no one could be sure—for the throne of Greece.

Villiers’s poems, plays, novels, and tales elude the usual literary categories. How to classify The Future Eve, a kind of baroque science-fiction novel in which Thomas Alva Edison invents a female android? This author is most approachable, though not necessarily most likable, when he is engaging in vicious satire: his collections Cruel Tales and Tribulat Bonhomet rail against bourgeois fatuity and callousness. In one story, the insufferable Dr. Bonhomet breaks the necks of swans, because he has heard that the birds sing most beautifully when they die. Villiers suffered from the usual failings of male European writers of the period: antisemitism, misogyny, elitism. William Butler Yeats liked to quote a characteristic line from Villiers’s mystical drama Axël: “As for living, our servants will do that for us.”

Music-mad from youth onward, Villiers was an energetic if eccentric pianist who, like Nietzsche, specialized in improvisations. He met Baudelaire a year or two before the Tannhäuser scandal, and a shared regard for Wagner cemented their friendship. “I will play Tannhäuser for you once I am settled in your neighborhood,” Villiers wrote. He also fell in with Catulle Mendès, a handsome poet and novelist who floated through Paris society beneath waves of Lisztian hair. The son of a Sephardic Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Mendès won early fame—and a brief prison term—by publishing mildly erotic poetry in his Revue fantaisiste. That short-lived journal, founded in 1861, was an early organ of the Parnassian movement, which valued formal poise and exquisite precision in the Gautier manner. In 1866, Mendès married Judith Gautier, Théophile’s daughter, who was on the verge of her own significant literary and artistic career; the two had met at one of Pasdeloup’s concerts.

In 1869, the Mendès couple, having proved their worth as combative Wagnéristes, received an invitation to visit the composer in Tribschen. Villiers joined them on the pilgrimage. The itinerary also included Munich, where rehearsals for the premiere of Rheingold were under way. Beforehand, Villiers had written a story titled “Azraël,” which he dedicated to Wagner, “prince of profound music.” Oddly, it was on an Old Testament Jewish theme, depicting King Solomon in conversation with the Angel of Death. As the party approached Tribschen, Villiers displayed mounting elation. He gave Wagner the obscure nickname “palmiped of Lucerne,” and exclaimed, “He is cubic!”

The palmiped met them on the railway platform, wearing a large straw hat, which made him look like Wotan. Gautier remembered being fixed for a full, silent minute by the soul-scoping intensity of his gaze. In letters home, Villiers described the “fabulous being” in terms suitable for the cruel angels and crazed scientists of his stories: “Something like immortality made visible, the other world rendered transparent, creative power pushed to a fantastic point, and, with that, the sweat and the shining of genius, the impression of the infinite around his head and in the naïve profundity of his eyes. He is terrifying.” He is “the very man of whom we have dreamed; he is a genius such as appears upon the earth once every thousand years.”

Cosmic ramifications notwithstanding, Wagner acted much of the time like a hyperactive child. Mendès has him throwing his hat in the air, dancing about, gesturing with nervous excitement, and talking without pause. One day, he made a catlike jump from an upper story of the house into the garden. When Villiers was later asked whether the composer was a pleasant conversationalist, he replied, “Do you imagine, sir, that the conversation of Mount Etna is pleasant?” Like Nietzsche and Baudelaire, Villiers experienced Wagner as a human volcano.

The next year, Villiers, Mendès, and Gautier set out on a second Wagner vacation, witnessing the premiere of Walküre in Munich and paying another visit to Tribschen. This time, the Franco-Prussian War intervened. Otto von Bismarck had manipulated a diplomatic dispute into a major crisis, and Napoleon III declared war on July 19, just as the French party—now including the composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Henri Duparc—alighted in Lucerne. Despite the news, the company sat enthralled as Wagner and Hans Richter performed excerpts from the Ring. “It is the Nibelungen, all the night of time,” Villiers wrote. The Nietzsche siblings, Friedrich and Elisabeth, also dropped by, making for a singular constellation of personalities. The French had hoped to stay for Richard and Cosima’s wedding, but this was delayed for legal reasons, and tensions were simmering. “R. demands of our friends that they understand how much we hate the French character,” Cosima noted. The Wagners became exasperated by Villiers’s “bombastic style and theatrical presentation”—a severe reprimand in this household. Russ, the chief family dog, bit Villiers’s hand. On July 30, the French departed, announcing their intention to visit a “friend in Avignon,” who turned out to be Stéphane Mallarmé.

Villiers never made it to Bayreuth for the Ring. Reportedly, he broke down in tears when he realized that he couldn’t afford to go. His Wagnermania persisted, reaching its apex in Axël, which once loomed over fin-de-siècle literature as a successor to Faust. In 1931, the American critic Edmund Wilson honored Villiers’s fading fame by giving the title Axel’s Castle to his history of Symbolist and modernist literature. The play first took shape at the time of Villiers’s visits to the Wagners, for whom he may have read aloud an early draft. The euphoric demise of its self-annihilating lovers, Axel d’Auersperg and Sara de Maupers, smacks of Tristan und Isolde; its story of fatally alluring gold, meanwhile, recalls the monetary curse of the Ring, not to mention the treasure-hunting escapades of Villiers’s father. Villiers was still revising and expanding the play when he died, in 1889. It reached the stage only in 1894, in a performance that lasted nearly five hours, about as long as Tristan itself. “Seldom has utmost pessimism found a more magnificent expression,” said Yeats, who was present for the occasion.

The climax of the play is like Tristan and Götterdämmerung superimposed. Sara, having fled a convent, arrives in Axel’s castle in the Black Forest, led there by a mysterious book. Axel briefly engages her in combat, gazes upon her, and falls in love. He comes to resemble not only Tristan and Siegfried but also Wotan with Brünnhilde (“I will close your eyes of paradise”) and Siegmund with Sieglinde (“Sara, my virginal mistress, my eternal sister”). What to do with the sudden onset of passion? Sara wants to flee to a remote locale and “listen to the hummingbirds in some hut in the Floridas.” Axel is unconvinced: “Oh! the external world! Let us not be dupes of that old slave.” To break the veil of illusion, he says, they should kill themselves at once. After a certain amount of hesitation, Sara agrees. As the humble songs of a village marriage are heard from outside, she draws poison from the ring on her finger. Axel expresses the hope that the rest of the human race will follow suit. After the lovers die, though, the stage directions dictate a different outcome: “Disturbing the silence of the terrible place where two human beings have just dedicated their souls to the exile of Heaven—we hear from outside the distant murmurs of the wind in the vastness of the forests, the vibrations of awakening space, the swell of the plains, the hum of life.” The forest murmurs on; the world has not committed suicide at Axel’s behest. The ironist in Villiers shows the limits of his characters’ transcendent longing.

Lost to history are Villiers’s fabled one-man Wagner entertainments. Joris-Karl Huysmans left a memorable description: “After the meal, he sat down at the piano and, lost, out of this world, sang, in his feeble, cracked voice, several pieces by Wagner, among which he interpolated barracks choruses, joining it all together with strident laughter, crazed nonsense, and strange verses. No one possessed in the same degree the power to heighten farce and make it shoot bewildered into the beyond; he always had a punch-bowl flaming in his brain.”

MODERN PAINTERS

Cézanne, Pastorale

More than a hundred thousand soldiers were killed during the Franco-Prussian War. One of them was the brilliant young Impressionist painter Frédéric Bazille, who had been a regular at Pasdeloup’s concerts and had fantasized about meeting Wagner. After the conflict, the composer’s reputation in France slumped again, thanks in part to his genius for insult. In 1873, he dismayed even his most die-hard French fans by publishing a would-be Aristophanic farce titled A Capitulation, which made light of the siege of Paris in the fall and winter of 1870. In the hardest days, Parisians resorted to eating rats and other animals. Wagner’s play, for which he thankfully wrote no music, calls for a ballet corps of human-sized rats. Catulle Mendès was particularly incensed, though he could not bring himself to cut all ties. A Hungarian Jewish friend of the author’s kept a bust of Wagner with a laurel wreath on its head and a cord around its neck. Mendès adopted the same attitude, admiring and despising his old idol in equal measure.

Between 1870 and 1887 there was only one full staging of Wagner in France—a Lohengrin in Nice, in 1881. Orchestral concerts and private events became the main conduit for his music. Pasdeloup soon resumed programming the composer in his Concerts Populaires, causing a predictable ruckus. Boos, whistles, and shouts of “À la porte Wagner!” mingled with loud cheers. Saint-Saëns, his attitude altered since he visited Tribschen with Villiers and company, accused Pasdeloup of being a German agent. In the eighties, the younger conductors Édouard Colonne and Charles Lamoureux joined the crusade, including heavy doses of Wagner on their series. Lamoureux, the most musically ambitious of the three, began presenting entire acts of the operas. In 1884, he led Act I of Tristan, with the audience listening in rapt silence. In the same period, a society called Le Petit Bayreuth, which had been operating partly in secret to avoid hostile demonstrations, offered excerpts from the Ring and Parsifal.

Supreme among the Wagnéristes was Judith Gautier, who, after separating from Mendès, had developed an intimacy with the composer that probably remained platonic. The author of several finely drawn novels on East Asian themes, Gautier advised Wagner on Eastern thought and culture, contributing to the ambience of Parsifal, which she translated into French. In 1880, Gautier organized a series of Wagner lecture-concerts at the Nadar photography studio, and in 1898 she presented a puppet-theater adaptation of Parsifal, for which she crafted dozens of figurines. The latter project led to a break with Cosima, who had tolerated Gautier’s ambiguous relations with her husband but could not condone a possible breach of copyright. That contretemps did not diminish Gautier’s enthusiasm. In later years, she would show visitors her collection of Wagner relics, including a piece of bread into which the Meister had bitten on the day of the first Parsifal. Her menagerie of pets featured a raven named Wotan.

If the war had dampened French Wagnerism, the composer’s death seemed to ignite it again. “Curious people!” Tchaikovsky wrote from Paris. “It is necessary to die in order to attract their attention.” At the Bayreuth Festival of 1886, the number of French visitors exploded, from a few dozen to well over a hundred. Back home, the Wagner contingent could turn rowdy. One evening, the critic Albert Aurier, an early promoter of van Gogh and Gauguin, got into a fracas with the police after marching through the streets with a crowd of friends, singing the melody of “The Ride of the Valkyries” at full volume. “Sir, I was singing Wagner,” Aurier told an officer. “And I know of no law that prevents it.”

In 1887, Lohengrin finally received a full staging in Paris, amid an uproar that almost outdid the Tannhäuser affair of 1861. The Opéra-Comique had planned to produce the opera the previous year, but retreated in the face of a patriotic press campaign that cast Wagner as a warmonger rather than an artist. An academic painter threatened to incite a riot by packing the theater with two hundred toga-wearing art students. Lamoureux then entered the fray, giving notice that he would present Lohengrin at the Éden-Théâtre. A Franco-German dispute known as the Schnaebelé Affair intensified the inevitable bout of negative publicity, which included a broadsheet called L’Anti-Wagner, subtitled Wagner pédéraste.

On opening night at the Éden, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the theater to taunt the audience as it arrived. “La Marseillaise” was sung; whistles were blown; a brick crashed through a window; cries of “À bas Wagner,” “À bas la Prusse,” and “Vive la France” went up. A young blond man who dared to shout “À bas la France” was pursued by an angry crowd, though the police prevented outright violence. Further performances were canceled. Politics was invading everything, Mallarmé wrote—“so much so that even I am talking about it.”

Shortly after the Lohengrin riot, three leading French artists—Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin—attended a banquet in honor of the indomitable Lamoureux. “Your name cannot be missing from this celebration of independent art,” Octave Mirbeau wrote to Rodin in advance. The artists, like the writers, shared an enemy with Wagner: conservative, patriotic, “official” France. Anti-Wagnerism was the sign of a backward mind. Gustave Flaubert indicated as much in his sardonic Dictionary of Received Ideas, which illustrated the philistine mentality: “Snicker when you hear his name and make jokes about the music of the future.” The people who whistled at Tannhäuser in 1861 probably also snickered at Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia. When, four years later, Champfleury came upon a group of irate bourgeois at the Olympia exhibition, he pranked them by exclaiming, “It’s Wagner’s nephew!” And when Manet complained about the abuse he was receiving, Baudelaire reminded him that Wagner had endured the same.

Wagner by Renoir, 1882

Therese Dolan’s book Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of Their Time explores the possible subtext of Manet’s 1862 painting Music in the Tuileries, which shows a distinguished crowd in the Tuileries Garden, listening to music of unseen origin. On the left-hand side are Baudelaire, Champfleury, Théophile Gautier, and Fantin-Latour, all vocal Wagnéristes. Offenbach, satirist of the “music of the future,” is on the right. Faces are occluded in shadow, becoming like masks, and human figures toward the back are almost indistinguishable from trees and vegetation. Dolan surmises that Manet’s turn toward abstraction in this canvas was partly a response to the radical sensibility that Baudelaire detected in Wagner and displayed in his own work. Unsurprisingly, Music in the Tuileries stirred up the same kind of vituperation that had greeted Tannhäuser the previous year. Wagner’s music is unlikely to be playing in this placid outdoor setting, yet a certain edginess in the composition makes one wonder. The Wagnéristes, somber and watchful, look ready for a fight.

Partisans of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting often used Wagner as a reference point. The poet Jules Laforgue likened the “thousand little dancing strokes” of Monet and Pissarro to “a symphony which is living and changing like the ‘forest-voices’ of Wagner’s theories, competing vitally for the great voice of the forest.” The composer himself had conservative taste in the visual arts, and late in life he scoffed at Impressionists who “paint nocturne-symphonies in ten minutes.” Nonetheless, in 1882 he consented to sit for a portrait by Renoir—a pallid, ghostlike image, very unlike the stern patriarch seen in German painting. The session took place in Palermo, immediately after the completion of the score of Parsifal.

The first avowed Wagnerian among French painters was Henri Fantin-Latour, who won fame for his lustrous still lifes but harbored higher ambitions. Having fallen for the composer even before the Théâtre-Italien concerts of 1860, Fantin spent decades trying to capture the music dramas on canvas and paper. His first efforts depicted the Venusberg: a nude goddess drapes herself over a dour, black-clad Tannhäuser while nymphs gyrate in an almost Monet-like blaze of sunlight. After a visit to Bayreuth in 1876, Fantin set about evoking the Ring in various media—at least forty works in all. In the pastel Les Filles du Rhin, later redone in oils, the Rhinemaidens are at play in the primeval waters, sunlight filtering down and irradiating their bodies. In Scène finale de la Walkyrie, an indistinct, shrouded Wotan towers over a ridge of fire. The art historian Corrinne Chong relates Fantin’s “aesthetic of vagueness” to the phantasmagoria of diffused sound and onstage steam that the painter witnessed at Bayreuth.

Cézanne’s Wagnerism crested during his “Romantic period” of the sixties, when themes of murder, rape, and decadent coupling preoccupied him. The German musician Heinrich Morstatt, a friend in Marseille, stoked the painter’s interest. “You will make our acoustic nerve vibrate with the noble tones of Richard Wagner,” Cézanne wrote to Morstatt in 1865. Cézanne’s 1868–69 painting Young Girl at the Piano, which now hangs in the Hermitage, was originally known as Overture to “Tannhäuser.” It shows a young woman playing a parlor instrument while an older woman, perhaps her mother, sews reflectively. The picture is outwardly composed and restrained, seemingly at odds with its Wagnerian source. A previous version, now lost, was evidently wilder in style. A friend of Cézanne’s spoke of the painting’s “overwhelming power” and said that it was “as much about the future as Wagner’s music.” Scholars and critics have debated this apparent retreat on Cézanne’s part. André Dombrowski argues that the painter was commenting on the domestication of music, its reduction to a leisurely pastime on the level of embroidery. Mary Tompkins Lewis sees a residual theatrical heat in the twisting patterns of the wallpaper. Indeed, tonal lurches in the composition give a sense of strong emotions beneath the surface.

If Lewis is right, the Venusberg informs two other Cézanne works from around 1870: Baigneuses, an early try at a favorite scene of women bathing; and Pastorale (Idylle), another tableau of nude female figures by the water. Both paintings are gloomy, obscure, drenched in nocturnal blue. In the first, Lewis sees a near-abstract impression of the Venus grotto, modeled on Fantin-Latour: vertical shapes on the left-hand side could be stalactites. In Pastorale, Lewis discerns Tannhäuser dressed in black, reclining in “melancholic reverie.” What is arresting about Pastorale is that Cézanne introduces two other males, both facing away from the viewer. All three men are fully clothed, as in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. They seem almost indifferent to the female nudity around them. It’s as if spectators at a Tannhäuser performance have wandered into the mythological orgy, in a posture of jaded arousal.

Where Cézanne reacted to Wagner in muted hues, Vincent van Gogh, a Dutchman who reached his vertiginous zenith in France, associated the composer with explosions of color. In Arles, van Gogh spoke about the resonance he felt between “our color” and Wagner’s ripe chords: “By intensifying all the colors one again achieves calm and harmony. And something happens as with the Wagner music which, performed by a large orchestra, is no less intimate for that.” Van Gogh had heard Wagner performed in Paris and had studied a compilation of his writings. These encounters left the painter with the sense that music had pulled ahead of the other arts. To Gauguin he wrote: “Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us … an art of consolation for broken hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!!” And to his brother Theo: “What an artist—one like that in painting, now that would be chic. This will come.” The brazen yellows of Sunflowers and the inundating blues of Starry Night proclaim the arrival of just such an art.

For Gauguin, finally, Wagner stood as a paragon of artistic conviction—an empowering example for the artist’s quest for pure worlds beyond the reach of civilization and commerce. In 1889–90, Gauguin spent time in the Breton village of Le Pouldu, in the company of Paul Sérusier and Jacob Meyer de Haan. The group decorated their inn with pictures and slogans, ranging in theme from the earthy-folkish to the philosophical-mystical. On one wall, beneath de Haan and Gauguin’s frescoes of Breton women scutching flax, Sérusier inscribed a quotation from Wagner, in emerald-green paint: “I believe in a last judgment where all who have dared to profit in this world from sublime and chaste art, all who have soiled and degraded it with the baseness of their sentiments, with their vile greed for material pleasures, will be condemned to terrible suffering.” The same passage, an inexact citation of Wagner’s 1841 story “An End in Paris,” appears in a document known as “le texte Wagner de Gauguin.” As for Wagnerian motifs in Gauguin’s work, hard evidence is lacking, but art historians have compared his ondines to the Rhinemaidens, the female nude of The Loss of Virginity to Brünnhilde on her rock, and the Flageolet Player on the Cliff to the shepherd’s song in Tristan.

By century’s end, genuflections toward Wagner were routine among French painters. Georges Seurat is said to have chosen wider, darker frames for his canvases in imitation of the dramatic blackouts at Bayreuth. The teenaged Paul Signac painted the names “Manet—Zola—Wagner” on the prow of a canoe that he paddled in the Seine. Maurice Denis compared the color contrasts of the Mona Lisa to the instrumental effects of the Tannhäuser overture. Circa 1900, the scandal around Wagner in France had subsided, but the composer’s triumph over opposition did not diminish his legend. Instead, his unstoppable march from the fringe to the center served as the greatest extant demonstration of a successful avant-garde—the victory for which even the most anticommercial artists yearned.

REVUE WAGNÉRIENNE

By 1885, a new phalanx of writers occupied the front lines of French literature. Verlaine and Mallarmé were its leaders, and at least a dozen young poets filled out its ranks. Paris had seen successive waves of romanticism, Parnassianism, and naturalism; this latest vanguard, which had allies in the visual arts and the theater, touched upon uncanny images, spectral apparitions, the world of dreams, clusters of words so dense that they resisted understanding. The poets of the eighties reacted against the naturalist claim to be showing the world as it is, and, more widely, to materialist and evolutionary understandings of the human condition. Here, behind the veil of reality, was the hidden truth of existence, at the edge of the sayable. The unavoidable question arose of what the new movement should be called. One possible term was “decadence,” which Bourget codified in 1881, with his theory of the disintegration of language. Two years later, Verlaine published his poem “Langueur,” which begins with the line “I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.” This usage reached unashamedly for decadence in the old, disreputable sense—excess amid collapse.

For that very reason, though, many young poets rejected the label. In 1885, Jean Moréas replied to an unflattering essay on “decadent poets” by repudiating bohemianism in the Baudelaire-Verlaine vein, preaching instead a devotion to “the pure Concept and the eternal Symbol.” In passing, Moréas proposed the word “symbolist.” In a subsequent manifesto, he expanded on the term, explaining that the new poetry obeyed an evolutionary logic while revealing “esoteric affinities with primordial Ideas.”

That same year, patrons of the Concerts Lamoureux were offered copies of a new magazine called the Revue wagnérienne. It was the brainchild of Édouard Dujardin, the twenty-three-year-old son of a sea captain who supported his literary endeavors with a stipend from his parents. Dujardin also worked out a system for winning at the racetrack, which boosted his coffers until he tried to break the bank at Monte Carlo. Dandyish and bemonocled, Dujardin wore a red vest embroidered with tiny swans, in honor of Lohengrin. He caught the Wagner virus in May 1882, when he heard the Ring in London. That summer, he went to Bayreuth for the premiere of Parsifal, and at the following year’s festival he greeted French arrivals at the railway station by blowing discordantly on a horn in what he believed to be a Siegfried manner.

In Wagnerian circles in Paris, Dujardin fell in with two other young men who shared his musical and literary passions. One was Téodor de Wyzewa, a Polish émigré critic with a yen for Villiers, Mallarmé, and Jules Laforgue. The other was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an expatriate Englishman who would eventually marry into the Wagner family and become Bayreuth’s resident racist philosopher. In the early eighties, Chamberlain was more liberal in his opinions, and avidly read the latest French literature. A Wagnerite from the late seventies onward, he, too, had attended the first performances of Parsifal. Several times he hovered in the Meister’s vicinity, too overawed to speak to him. Together, Dujardin, Wyzewa, and Chamberlain decided to found a Wagnerian journal, dedicated not only to the music itself but to the increasingly large number of artists who took it as a model.

At first, the Revue looked to be an offshoot of the Bayreuther Blätter, the house periodical at Bayreuth. It offered translations of Wagner’s writings, analyses of the operas, schedules of performances, and other tidbits. Then, in the third issue, the Revue took an unusual turn, with the publication of a prose poem about the Tannhäuser overture. This was the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, who had already written provocatively about Wagner in his popular and scandalous novel À rebours (Against the Grain). Des Esseintes, that book’s protagonist, bemoans the vulgarity of concerts like the Pasdeloup series, where a “man with the aspect of a carpenter beats a sauce in the air and massacres disconnected episodes of Wagner, to the immense delight of an ignorant crowd!” The music is better enjoyed at home, where the mind can roam free. In his Tannhäuser piece for the Revue, Huysmans focuses on the Venusberg music and its “screams of uncontained desires, cries of strident lecheries, impulses from the carnal beyond.” Venus is “the incarnation of the Spirit of Evil, the effigy of omnipotent Lust, the image of the irresistible and magnificent Sataness.”

Dujardin’s essay “The Theoretical Works of Richard Wagner,” which also appeared in the Revue’s third issue, ponders the composer’s capacity to disclose deep, hidden truths through the medium of art. Renouncing false realism, the poet-artist will “transport men into the ideal and real realm of the Unity.” Here was the transubstantiation that so many Symbolists sought. The difference was that, unlike Wagner, they felt little need to reach a wide audience or to speak in a readily accessible way. In the words of Edmund Wilson: “The symbols of the Symbolist school are usually chosen arbitrarily by the poet to stand for special ideas of his own.”

Wyzewa contributed a series of visionary essays that tracked Wagnerism in different artistic fields. In an article on literature, the critic writes that “art re-creates life by way of Signs,” although one must detach these signs from conventional referents in order to grasp the perpetual flux of emotion. This agenda sounds Nietzschean, and, indeed, Wyzewa helped to introduce French readers to the philosopher. Wagner and his fellow composers have captured that flux in sound; other arts are striving for the same effect. Wyzewa imagines a new kind of novel that would dive into a single consciousness, duplicating the ebb and flow of thought and feeling. In the visual arts, Wagnerism figures not only among the realists but also among adherents of the “Poetry of painting,” who combine “contours and nuances in pure fantasy.” Recent works by Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Edgar Degas qualify as “Wagnerian deeds.” In the post-Wagnerian music of the future, scores would be read rather than played.

The final issue of the Revue’s first year featured a sequence of eight sonnets, under the heading “Hommage à Wagner.” The poets were Verlaine, Mallarmé, Wyzewa, Dujardin, René Ghil, Stuart Merrill, Charles Morice, and Charles Vignier. Except for the first two, they were in their early or mid-twenties—foot soldiers of Symbolism. The work is mostly of the second rank, but it colorfully exhibits the symptoms of Wagnérisme as it spread through the Third Republic. Merrill pictures a cavalcade of heroes—Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and Parsifal the Chaste—in gold armor under purple banners. (Merrill, an American based in Paris, planned a cycle of twenty-two Wagner sonnets, of which he completed only four.) Ghil renders music as a tender virgin set upon by a virile composer. Morice associates Wagner with fiery hordes and bloody tumult. Wyzewa dips into the domain of sleep and waking dreams. Dujardin bows before a Magus, a “Blasphemer of the Ordinary,” who unveils the “other universe” beyond the quotidian.

The Symbolists gave much thought to the innate musicality of the raw materials of language. In 1886, Ghil, who was once so thunderstruck by a Lamoureux Wagner concert that he aimlessly wandered the streets of Paris after midnight, produced Treatise of the Word, which, to quote Joseph Acquisto, attempts to establish “scientific correspondences among vowels, consonants, colors, orchestral instruments, and emotions.” Undoubtedly inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s 1883 poem “Vowels,” Ghil devises the following arrangement:

A, black; E, white; I, blue; O, red; U, yellow

A, organs; E, harps; I, violins; O, brass; U, flutes

In a section on Wagner, Ghil pledges that the new musical poet can meet the Meister’s challenge: “In the Brass, the Woodwinds, the Strings that ravish him, through the close and subtle relationships of Colors, Timbres, and Vowels, he will seek the least poorly concordant Speech, in words sounding as notes.” (Wagnéristes had a tendency toward Germanic capitalization.) According to Francis Vielé-Griffin, another American-born poet who joined this circle, one group of Symbolists was known as the “Symbolistes-Instrumentistes.” Seeking to become more musical, they got hold of a harmonium and hoisted it up to the apartment where they gathered. Unfortunately, it turned out that no one knew how to play the instrument, and so “the organ remained perpetually mute, reinforcing by the solitary solemnity of its presence an atmosphere already rather thick with verbal lyricism.”

Dujardin, in a poetic cycle titled Litanies, went as far as to supply a notated musical realization. Stilted in compositional terms, Litanies is of greater significance in French literary history. The stately metrical structures of classical poetry are giving way to vers libre, or free verse. Dujardin later testified that Wagner impelled his first thoughts in this direction: “Because the musical phrase had won freedom of rhythm, it was necessary to win an analogous rhythmic freedom for verse.” The composer’s librettos are already a kind of free verse, liberated from the tight rhyme schemes that had governed most opera before him. In collaboration with Chamberlain, Dujardin concocted a “literal” translation of the opening scene of Rheingold. It begins: “Weia! Waga! vogue, ô la vague, vibre en la vive!” The language of Litanies is nearly the same: “Les voiles voguent sur les vagues” (“Sails waft over the waves”). As Vielé-Griffin concluded, “music made symbolist expression possible.”

Even bolder is Dujardin’s 1887 novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (The Laurels Are Cut Down), which answered Wyzewa’s call for a new kind of Wagnerian fiction, one that would record a single character’s ideas, perceptions, and emotions over a short period. Les Lauriers—the title comes from an old French children’s song, “Nous n’irons plus au bois”—describes the inner life of a dandy wandering about Paris one evening. Passages of insistent repetition bring to mind the heaving texture of the Tristan prelude:

The candles on the mantelpiece are lit; here’s the white bed, soft, the carpets; I lean against the open window; outside, behind me, I feel the night; black, cold, sad, sinister night; the dark where appearances change; the silence where sands murmur; the tall trees packed black together; the bare walls; and the windows dim with the unknown, and the windows lighted, unknown; in the pallor of the sky, this vibration of the weeping eyes of the stars; the secret of opaque, mysterious shadows, mixed into something fearsome; there, some unknown, fearsome thing … I shudder; quickly, I turn round, grip the window, I push it to, I close it, quickly … Nothing … The window’s closed … And the curtains? I draw them to, like this … Night is abolished.

Dujardin explained his method in a later essay titled “The Interior Monologue.” Just as Wagner’s music consists of a succession of motifs that suggest psychological states, the interior monologue is a “succession of short sentences, each of which also expresses a movement of the soul, the similarity being that they are related to each other not according to a rational order but according to a purely emotional order, outside of any intellectualized arrangement.” At the time, this idea had few imitators, but its moment would arrive in the next century: James Joyce cited Les Lauriers as a precedent for Ulysses.

VERLAINE AND MALLARMÉ

Mallarmé by Manet

Experiments in endless melody and vers libre aside, the most striking tributes in the Revue wagnérienne were in sonnet form. Verlaine’s “Parsifal” and Mallarmé’s “Hommage” both appeared in the “Hommage à Wagner” issue of January 1886. Each poem heralded a distinct new strain of Wagnerism. Verlaine hosted a Wagnerism of the Decadence, spiked with illicit sexuality. Mallarmé augured a modernist Wagner, esoteric and abstract. Such work disconcerted the more conventional-minded supporters of the Revue wagnérienne. The magazine’s split identity—part fan publication, part avant-garde periodical—proved untenable, and Dujardin shut it down after the third year.

Dujardin had difficulty extracting a sonnet from Verlaine, who was living in squalid conditions in a small room behind a wine shop. The poet had recently served his second prison term, after threatening to strangle his mother; the first was for shooting Rimbaud. (Almost alone among French writers of the period, Rimbaud was indifferent to Wagner. An obscene drawing in one of his letters, showing a man labeled “Wagner” with a bottle of Riesling inserted into his rectum, has been identified as a reference not to the composer but to an unpopular landlord.) The Irish novelist George Moore, who accompanied Dujardin when the editor went to collect Verlaine’s poem, recalled that a young man “with a face so rosy that he reminded me of a butcher-boy” opened the door. The sonnet was handed over, but Moore doubted whether it could be published, because of its eyebrow-raising variation on the theme of Parsifal’s threatened chastity. Although the syntax is equivocal, the boy savior seems tempted not only by Kundry and the Flower Maidens but also by a fellow young male.

Parsifal has conquered the Maidens, their pretty

Babble and amusing lust, and his inclination

Toward the Flesh of virgin boy who is enticed

To love light breasts and pretty babble;

He has conquered the beautiful Woman of subtle heart,

Spreading fresh arms and arousing throat;

Having conquered Hell, he returns to his tent

With a heavy trophy on his boyish arm—

The lance that pierced the Flank supreme!

He has healed the king, is king himself,

Priest of the most holy essential treasure.

In robes of gold, he worships, as glory and symbol,

The pure vessel where the True Blood shines.

—And, O those children’s voices singing in the dome!

The sonnet wavers between sincere religiosity—Verlaine gestured toward Catholicism in his last years—and unrepentant sensualism. The final line, with its slightly too excited intake of breath, has a campy ring. The poem looks ahead to a turn-of-the-century homoerotic culture in which the composer’s works become an emblem of outlaw desire.

Mallarmé, whom Verlaine generously celebrated in his 1884 anthology Les Poètes maudits, remade Wagner in his own image: opulent, intricate, ambiguous. This most recondite of nineteenth-century poets took pride in the drabness of his lineage, describing himself as the scion of an “uninterrupted series of functionaries in the Administration and the Registry.” Born in Paris in 1842, Mallarmé lost his mother and sister early. He had the feeling of being an orphan, of having come from nowhere. By the time he was twenty, he had decided upon a literary career. He took jobs teaching English in the provinces, and in his spare time worked on his early masterpieces, “Hérodiade” and “The Afternoon of a Faun.” Having dabbled in Romantic and Parnassian moods, he found his own strict and strange style. “I am inventing a language,” he wrote in 1864, “which must necessarily spring from an entirely new poetics, which I could define in these few words: Paint not the thing but the effect it produces … All words must efface themselves before the sensation.”

Like van Gogh, Mallarmé felt that music had moved ahead of other art forms. Poets, like painters, must catch up. In an 1862 essay insincerely titled “Art for All,” Mallarmé begins with a famous proposition—“Everything that is sacred and wishes to remain sacred envelops itself in mystery”—and praises the art of music for holding fast to its secrets. “If we casually open up Mozart, Beethoven, or Wagner and throw an indifferent eye on the first page of their work, we are gripped with a religious astonishment at the sight of these macabre processions of severe, chaste, and unknown signs.” Poetry is lacking in such mystery; Mallarmé will restore it. All this harks back to Wagner’s theorizing on the untapped potential of musical drama.

The young Mallarmé had few opportunities to hear Wagner’s music live, but he surely encountered it in the salons. Heath Lees, in his book Mallarmé and Wagner, has found traces of the composer in early poems like “Sainte” and “Hérodiade.” Villiers, whom Mallarmé revered, stimulated a deeper interest. When Villiers and Mendès came to stay with the poet in 1870, after their visit to Tribschen, they were undoubtedly full of talk of the “palmiped of Lucerne.” Still, Wagnerism remained dormant in Mallarmé’s work for some time. Indeed, Mallarmé was somewhat dormant himself; for fifteen years, he published almost nothing. The explosion of so-called decadent or Symbolist art in the mid-eighties revived him. After Verlaine and Huysmans paid tribute, Mallarmé found himself with a bevy of young acolytes. Among them were Dujardin and Wyzewa, of the Revue wagnérienne.

In April 1885, Dujardin took Mallarmé to an all-Wagner event at the Concerts Lamoureux, which included the Tannhäuser overture, Siegfried’s Funeral Music, and the preludes to Tristan and Parsifal. Mallarmé was riveted by music and audience alike. The word “foule,” “crowd,” occurs often in his writing on Wagner, and it is never entirely free of the shudder of horror that Huysmans’s Des Esseintes feels when he visits the Concerts Populaires. From then on, though, Mallarmé seldom missed a Lamoureux event. Even in high summer he would greet his younger followers at the gate in formal attire, an impeccable top hat on his head. He would take notes as he listened, perhaps with ideas for poems hatching in his mind. Paul Valéry, one of the adepts, said that Mallarmé “left the concerts full of sublime jealousy.”

Dujardin asked Mallarmé to write for the Revue. The result was “Richard Wagner, Reverie of a French Poet,” which appeared in August 1885. “Nothing has ever seemed so difficult to me,” Mallarmé wrote to Dujardin, very much in the style of a harried working writer. “Just think, I am sick, I am more than ever a slave. I have never seen anything of Wagner’s, and I want to create something original and precise, something which is not beside the point. I need more time. I will work on nothing else, you have my word, until this is done.”

Mallarmé begins with praise for Wagner’s renovation of decrepit theatrical traditions. Music “penetrates and envelops the Drama through its dazzling will.” Characters become manifest in the medium of sound: we encounter “a god dressed in the invisible folds of a fabric of chords,” we experience the “wave of Passion” that comes pouring through a single hero, so that “Legend is enthroned in the footlights.” But Wagner stops short of the true origin of poetic mystery: “Everything refreshes itself in the primitive stream: not to the source.” The inhibiting factor is myth, which supposedly speaks to people of many traditions but in fact falls prey to parochialism. The exacting French mind cannot accept it. We need a new universal fable, “virgin of everything, place, time and known characters,” starring a hero with no name. “Everything moves toward some supreme bolt of light, from which awakens the Figure that None is, whose rhythm, taken from the symphony, comes from the mimicking of each musical attitude, and liberates it!” Mallarmé envisions a poetry that imitates music, surpasses it, and stages in the theater of the mind the higher drama that Wagner sought in vain.

The “Reverie” ends with a semi-ironic fanfare to the “Genius” and a jibe at the Wagnerites who crowd the pages of the journal in which Mallarmé is writing. “O Wagner,” Mallarmé writes, “I suffer and reproach myself, in minutes marked by lassitude, for not numbering myself among those who, bored with everything in order to find definitive salvation, go straight to the edifice of your Art, for them the end of the road.” In fact, this crowded temple is only halfway up the slope of a holy mountain, at the top of which is the “menacing summit of the absolute.” Mallarmé pictures himself pausing at the Meister’s shrine, “drinking from your convivial fountain,” and gazing up at that cold peak, which no one seems prepared to scale. “No one!” Mallarmé says again. The reader is left to imagine that a solitary climber, having stocked up at the Wagnerian base camp, is set to perform the impossible feat.

The following January, Mallarmé’s “Hommage,” also known as “Hommage à Wagner,” appeared next to Verlaine’s sonnet in the Revue. Needless to say, the poem is free of misty word-pictures of swan knights and Valkyries. Mallarmé claimed that it was an admission of defeat—“the melancholy of a poet who sees the old poetic front collapse, and the luxury of words grow pale, before the rising of the sun of contemporary Music of which Wagner is the latest god.” This faux-pessimism masks an exercise of poetic might. Ensconced in sonnet form, poetic language wraps itself in a new kind of sacred mystery.

Le silence déjà funèbre d’une moire

Dispose plus qu’un pli seul sur le mobilier

Que doit un tassement du principal pilier

Précipiter avec le manque de mémoire.

Notre si vieil ébat triomphal du grimoire,

Hiéroglyphes dont s’exalte le millier

À propager de l’aile un frisson familier!

Enfouissez-le moi plutôt dans une armoire.

Du souriant fracas originel haï

Entre elles de clartés maîtresses a jailli

Jusque vers un parvis né pour leur simulacre,

Trompettes tout haut d’or pâmé sur les vélins,

Le dieu Richard Wagner irradiant un sacre

Mal tû par l’encre même en sanglots sibyllins.

The already funereal silence of a cloth

Places more than a single fold on the furniture,

Which the settling of the central pillar

Must drag down with default of memory.

Our old triumphal revels of the spellbook,

Hieroglyphs exalted by the millions

To spread a familiar shiver of the wing!

Bury it for me in a cupboard.

Out of the original smiling fracas hated

Among the master clarities there has sprung

Up to the square born for their simulation

Gold trumpets swooning aloud on vellum,

The god Richard Wagner, irradiating a rite

Scarcely silenced by the ink itself in sibylline sobs.

The poem defies explication, never mind translation. Some readers, like Wyzewa, took it as a eulogy, seeing the funereal furniture of the first quatrain as a metaphor for a spent literary art and Wagner as a “sovereign of the Scene” who brings renewal. Since the composer had died not long before, he may also be present in the opening lines: he, too, could be a dusty book of spells. Louis Marvick sees the entire sonnet as a critique, those golden trumpets representing the “stridency of Wagner’s music.”

The meaning of almost every line or phrase is up for grabs. Consider “Du souriant fracas originel haï.” What is this fracas? Who hates it? Robert Greer Cohn identifies it as the ancient art of “pure Beauty,” abhorred by the false artists of the marketplace. Heath Lees relates it to the Wagner scandals of 1860 and 1861. For Gardner Davies, the fracas is the squiggle of musical notation; for Bertrand Marchal, it is the original force of primitive art. Several commentators believe that the final lines suggest some festive Bayreuth scene. Mallarmé never visited the Festspielhaus, but he probably knew of the ritual that summons the audience back to their seats toward the end of each Bayreuth intermission: brass players assemble on the front balcony and intone motifs from the opera of the day. Interpreters more or less agree that the last line pivots toward the musical literature or literary music of Mallarmé’s dreams. That art exists in the form of ink, but it is not truly silent (mal tû); its music speaks in “sibylline sobs.”

To seek a conclusive meaning, though, is to miss the point. Joseph Acquisto remarks that Mallarmé’s work “marks the rebirth of poetic language in a performative mode … The poem is re-created each time it is read aloud.” At the end of his life, Mallarmé took this indeterminate aesthetic even further in his free-form graphic poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (“A roll of the dice will never eliminate chance”). A text of some seven hundred words is scattered across eleven double pages, in staggered lines and in fonts of varying sizes, often with independent sentences juxtaposed. The layout has the look of musical notation, with voices rising and falling amid expectant silences. Mallarmé invokes Wagner in his introductory note: “A sort of general leitmotiv that unfolds itself constitutes the unity of the poem: accessory motifs have gathered around it.” But the performance is a private one, taking place on the inner stage of the reader’s mind. The Cirque d’Hiver is obsolete.

For all their inscrutability, Mallarmé’s writings on Wagner are clear-eyed and judicious. In many ways, the poet is dealing with the same ambivalence that tormented Nietzsche, but he spares himself the oscillations between adulation and disgust. As Lacoue-Labarthe writes, he is “critical, in some sense, but in no way hostile.” The tone is “reserved. Measured, even. And thus, again, admiring.” When Mallarmé died, a book about Beethoven and Wagner was found on his bedside table.

3

SWAN KNIGHT
Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America

The wedding of Princess Victoria and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, 1858

In the past century and a half, countless millions of women have walked down the wedding aisle to the accompaniment of the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, also known as “Here Comes the Bride.” The custom is a little strange, because in its original context the music is a prelude to catastrophe. Marriages in Wagner’s world tend to go badly, and the one in Lohengrin is no exception. Elsa of Brabant is engaged to a knight from a faraway land, but the groom has imposed a stifling condition: “You must not ever ask me / Nor should you care to know / Whence I made my way / Nor my name and kind.” The wedding, with its indelible lilting tune, takes place at the beginning of Act III. Afterward, Elsa cannot refrain from posing the forbidden question. Lohengrin reveals himself to be a Knight of the Holy Grail—the son of Parsifal, no less. Because his secret is out, he must return to the Grail Temple. Before departing, he undoes the evil magic performed by the pagan witch Ortrud, who has trapped Elsa’s young brother in the body of a swan. Despite that happy event, Elsa is too bereft to live, and expires.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Bridal Chorus had become a fixture of the marital ritual around the world. In 1894, the Nebraska State Journal carried this account of the wedding of Miss Nell Cochrane and Mr. Frank Woods, in the city of Lincoln:

At half past six there was a little pause, and then came the first stirring notes of that perfect wedding march of Lohengrin. Twenty girls of the Delta Gamma fraternity entered, marching down the left aisle, carrying ropes of smilax and bunches of loose roses, singing the words of the wedding march. Dr. Lasby took his place under the palms before the chancel. The twenty girls came slowly forward and ranged themselves on either side of him. Next came Miss Daisy Cochrane, the maid of honor, dressed in white silk and carrying a bouquet of pink roses. Last came the bride herself, in white ottoman silk, her veil drawn back from her face, carrying bride roses. She came slowly down the aisle, with perfect repose, seeming scarcely to move, but rather to be borne onward by the triumphant tenderness of Wagner that surged from the organ.

The author of this item, a precocious University of Nebraska student named Willa Cather, added a more idiosyncratic perspective in her column the following day: “If people are going to be foolish enough to be married they might as well do it with a glare of torches and a blaze of trumpets, and have a church wedding and give the community the benefit of it. Then they can have Wagner’s wedding march on the organ, and it’s worth getting married to have that.”

The British royal family, arbiters of wedding fashion across the ages, promoted the Bridal Chorus as a marriage anthem. In 1840, Queen Victoria, of the House of Hanover, wed Prince Albert, of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The prince loved German music and showed skill as an organist and a composer. The young queen assimilated Albert’s taste, and in June 1855 the couple attended one in a series of concerts that Wagner conducted in London, at the invitation of the Philharmonic Society. The program included, by royal request, the Tannhäuser overture. “A wonderful composition, quite overpowering, so grand, & in parts wild, striking and descriptive,” Victoria wrote in her diary. She received Wagner and found him “very quiet”—possibly the only time he ever made that impression. They spoke about the composer’s dog and parrot. In letters home, Wagner reported that the queen was “very small and not at all pretty, with, I am sorry to say, a rather red nose, but there is something uncommonly friendly and confiding about her.” Victoria’s willingness to associate with a “politically disreputable person wanted for high treason”—Wagner’s self-characterization—flattered him deeply.

Three years later, Princess Victoria, the queen’s eldest child, wed Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, who, in 1888, would briefly reign as Friedrich III, emperor of Germany. A festive concert after the ceremony featured the wedding scene from Lohengrin, with a new text for the blessing of the couple: “O ne’er may England’s Princess / One hour of sorrow know; / For her may life’s rude billows / With gentle current flow.” (The lyricist was Thomas Oliphant, best known for the Christmas carol “Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly.”) Music by Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn followed. It is a historical curiosity that the British royals chose to pair Wagner with the two Jewish composers whom he insults in “Jewishness in Music.”

Der Meister and Her Majesty met one other time. In 1877, Wagner returned to London for an extended festival of his music, by which time he had become a regal figure in his own right. At the concerts, he sometimes sat in an armchair, facing the audience, while Hans Richter conducted. Victoria wrote in her journal: “After luncheon the great composer Wagner, about whom the people in Germany are really a little mad, was brought into the corridor by Mr. Cusins. I had seen him with dearest Albert in ’55, when he directed at the Philharmonic Concert. He has grown old and stout, and has a clever, but not pleasing countenance. He was profuse in expressions of gratitude, and I expressed my regret at having been unable to be present at one of his concerts.” If Victoria now looked askance at Wagner, missives from her daughter in Germany may have influenced her. An 1869 letter from the princess reads: “If you want to read anything perfectly cracked you should see Richard Wagner’s new pamphlet called ‘Jewish Influence in Music.’ I never read anything so violent, conceited or unfair.”

By the end of the century, memories of Victoria’s interest in the composer had faded. An 1897 book titled The Private Life of the Queen asserted that “Wagner has found little or no favour in her eyes.” But anonymous attendants were not privy to all areas of her spirit. When, in 1889, the singers Jean de Reszke and Emma Albani privately performed an excerpt from Lohengrin for the queen, she wrote in her diary: “Beyond anything beautiful, so dramatic … The music lasted till four, and I could have listened to it much longer. It was indeed a treat.”

The incorporation of Lohengrin into the royal wedding protocol exposes a gap between French- and English-speaking responses to Wagner. In France, he was a scandal, an incitement, a field of battle. In Britain and the United States, he was a somewhat tamer product—a “treat,” in Victoria’s graciously belittling formulation. From Buckingham Palace to the Nebraska plains, the former fugitive could serve as an adornment of Victorian and Gilded Age society. His operas became mainstays of the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera; touring productions drew a diverse public. Popular accounts, including a series of Wagner books for young people, portrayed a noble-minded idealist, one whose industriousness exemplified the Gospel of Work. Cultured clergymen like Alfred Gurney wrote of the “salutary, soothing, and elevating influence” of Parsifal.

Historians have long insisted that the decorous surfaces of Victorian life masked a more complex social reality. Wagner’s mythology appealed to the burgeoning imperialist mind-set on both sides of the Atlantic, where presumptions of cultural superiority—the White Man’s Burden, Manifest Destiny—rested on theories of racial supremacy that Wagner helped to promote. The fetishizing of Anglo-Saxon origins overlapped with the veneration of the Germanic. The British Isles had been ruled by monarchs of German descent since the early eighteenth century, and the Hanoverian dynasty fostered a respect for German music, literature, and philosophy. Thomas Carlyle, the advocate of Hero-Worship, touted Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte; Walter Pater read Hegel; Schopenhauer’s rise to international prominence began in Britain. In the United States, an influx of German immigrants meant that musical culture acquired a Teutonic profile. At the end of the nineteenth century, American orchestras were largely German-speaking ensembles.

Most of all, Wagner captured the Victorian imagination because of his proximity to the Matter of Britain—the tales of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. In 1816 and 1817, new editions of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur were published, helping to spark an Arthurian revival. Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood occupied themselves with Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, and the lovers Tristram and Iseult, whose story occupies the middle part of Malory’s book. The Ring shares with Arthurian legend the motif of the embedded sword: as the young king draws a blade from the stone, Siegmund draws Nothung from the tree. The tale of Venus and Tannhäuser especially mesmerized the Pre-Raphaelites, who, like the agonized knight, were forever torn between the sacred and the profane.

Even as evocations of a mythic past served an imperial agenda, the anticapitalist allegory of the Ring warned against the industrial modernization that fueled the mid-century might of the British Empire and the gathering strength of the United States. Wagner’s own vision of London was nightmarish: “This is Alberich’s dream come true—Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.” The Pre-Raphaelites spoke of the contemporary cityscape in similar terms, lamenting the demise of older, more spiritually grounded ways of life. The novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy registered the transformation of the social fabric wrought by steamships, railways, and the telegraph. For many Victorian listeners, Wagner provided a kind of secular cathedral space in which they could contemplate tensions between an idyllic past and an industrial present.

Far-seeing Victorian thinkers devised new paradigms through which to comprehend large-scale social change. In 1859 and 1860, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s partner, published his two-volume Physiology of Common Life, which posits a “vast and powerful stream of sensation” as the sum total of our sensibility—a “stream of Consciousness.” Lewes’s work appeared at the same time as two other epochal books written in the area of London: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which shows the determining power of evolutionary processes; and Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which demonstrates how economic conditions control all human affairs. The reasoning intellect is dethroned from its sovereign position. Jacques Barzun, in his 1941 book Darwin, Marx, Wagner, noted that Tristan, too, was completed in 1859, and that it posed an equally jarring challenge to the sensibilities of the day: romantic love dissolves into a quasi-biological music of sexual desire. Wagner’s courtly tragedy thus becomes another treatise of and against the Victorian Age.

GEORGE ELIOT

Circa 1855, when Wagner crashed into the Victorian world, music had pride of place as the supreme medium of moral uplift among the arts. This was a different primacy from the one described by Schopenhauer, who considered music the embodiment of the restlessly striving Will. For the Victorians, music, especially instrumental music and choral singing, soared above the vulgar sphere of popular entertainment, opera included. It was an art “exempt from the trail of the serpent,” wrote the art critic Elizabeth Eastlake. Musical events in spaces like the Crystal Palace and the Royal Albert Hall offered a fantasy of a harmonious, spiritually elevated public, free of class strife and political division.

Some effort was required to make Wagner conform to Victorian ideals. The creator of Tristan had meager credentials as a teacher of virtue. Early on, his music met intense resistance in Britain. During the 1855 visit, the Sunday Times had trouble deciding whether he was a “desperate charlatan” or a “self-deceived enthusiast.” J. W. Davison, the lead critic of the Times and of the Musical World, derided Wagner as the “Mahomed of modern music,” as a “priest of Dagon,” and, most obscurely, as a “veritable man-mermaid.” Lohengrin was “poison—rank poison.”

Wagner’s British reception was further complicated by awareness of his anti-Jewish feelings. Thanks to a maladroit article by a supporter, Ferdinand Praeger, the English-speaking music world had recently learned of Wagner’s authorship of “Jewishness in Music,” which otherwise received almost no international notice. The pamphlet’s critique of Mendelssohn as a somehow stunted talent was a particular affront to British music-lovers, who revered that composer almost as an honorary Englishman. When Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides appeared on one of Wagner’s London programs, Davison pointedly called it a “magnificently Jewish inspiration.”

Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, was one of the first major English-speaking figures to take Wagner seriously. Born in 1819, she had immersed herself in music from an early age, playing the piano and attending concerts. A close student of German literature and philosophy, she published translations of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity—Young Hegelian treatises that left a mark on Wagner.

In the summer of 1854, Eliot left England for an eight-month stay in Germany. With her was George Henry Lewes, with whom she had begun a nonmarital relationship, shocking friends back in London. The arrangement raised fewer eyebrows in the circle around Liszt in Weimar, where they spent three months. With Liszt installed as the Kapellmeister for the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Weimar had become the de facto center of Wagnerian activity—part of an attempt to restore the exalted status that the city had enjoyed in the age of Goethe and Schiller. Eliot saw performances of Tannhäuser, The Flying Dutchman, and Lohengrin, and heard Liszt expound on Wagner’s theories. She summarized her experiences in an unsigned 1855 article titled “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar,” in which she makes reference to the “propaganda of Wagnerism”—one of the first appearances of that word in English.

Music is evolving: this is the main insight that Eliot gains from Wagner. Opera should become an “organic whole, which grows up like a palm, its earliest portion containing the germ and prevision of all the rest.” Pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought affected Eliot’s aesthetics, as Delia da Sousa Correa observes in George Eliot, Music, and Victorian Culture. Lewes and his colleague Herbert Spencer were examining the interaction of evolution, physiology, psychology, and the arts; Spencer held that music, the language of emotion, had grown out of a more objective spoken language. Eliot, who often attended opera performances with Spencer, sees a similar logic at work in Wagner: “It is just possible that melody, as we conceive it, is only a transitory phase of music … We are but in ‘the morning of the times,’ and must learn to think of ourselves as tadpoles unprescient of the future frog.”

Eliot endorses Wagner’s progressive ideas, but the music itself gives her trouble. Accustomed to clean-cut classical forms, she finds the endlessness of Wagnerian discourse bewildering. The biological metaphor is given a humorous twist: “The tadpole is limited to tadpole pleasures; and so, in our state of development, we are swayed by melody.” Lohengrin reminds Eliot of “the whistling of the wind through the keyholes of a cathedral, which has a dreamy charm for a little while, but by and bye you long for the sound even of a street organ to rush in and break the monotony.”

These reservations aside, Eliot supplies some of the most positive and perceptive commentary that Wagner had yet received in Britain. She rejects any “cheap ridicule” of the composer, respecting his skill in dramatic construction. Of Tannhäuser, she writes: “I never saw an opera which had a more interesting succession of well-contrasted effects.” The title character, she writes, “has become weary of hectic sensualism,” and “longs once more for the free air of the field and forest under the blue arch of heaven.” Tannhäuser sounds a bit like Will Ladislaw, the hotheaded young artist of Middlemarch, who quits Rome for the Midlands.

Eliot’s visit to Weimar left subtle traces on the succession of novels that culminated in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Monumental in scale, these books discard the episodic, panoramic structure that defined many prior efforts in the form. In the “Prelude” to Middlemarch—Wagner preferred that term from Lohengrin onward, in place of “overture”—Eliot vows to honor women who have “found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action.” She later speaks of the “roar which lies on the other side of silence”—the storm of feeling behind the façades of ordinary lives, especially those of women. Such a project may seem far removed from Wagner, even opposed to him, yet several contemporaries made the connection. In 1876, Charles Halford Hawkins, a master at Winchester College, argued that Wagner’s “minute development of tone and character painting” and his extraordinary demands on the audience made him the “George Eliot of music.”

In that same year, Eliot published Daniel Deronda, her most deliberate bid for the kind of “organic unity” that she valued in Wagner. She later said that she “meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there.” As serial installments were published, readers struggled with the sheer scope of the narrative. Henry James captured the debate around the novel—and his own ambivalence—by publishing a review in which three imaginary readers express a range of opinions. For one, the book is “so vast, so much-embracing”; for another, it is “protracted, pretentious, pedantic.” This sounds like a group of operagoers quarreling over Wagner—particularly when the skeptic says, “The tone is not English, it is German.”

Eliot all but invites Wagner comparisons by including a character named Julius Klesmer, a beret-wearing composer-teacher who preaches the music of the future. When Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine, sings a bel canto aria by Bellini, Klesmer reproves her:

You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair organ. But you produce your notes badly; and that music which you sing is beneath you. It is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture—a dandling, canting, seesaw kind of stuff—the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody; no cries of deep, mysterious passion—no conflict—no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it. Sing now something larger.

Klesmer’s rhetoric fairly reeks of Wagner, although his cosmopolitan ideas about the “fusion of races” depart from the party line. As one member of James’s critical roundtable says: “And you must not forget that you think Herr Klesmer ‘Shakespearian.’ Wouldn’t ‘Wagnerian’ be high enough praise?” The character paraphrases Eliot’s own 1855 exposition of Wagner’s theories, with “puerile state of culture” supplanting “tadpole pleasures.” And when Klesmer performs a composition of his own, one listener compares it to a “jar of leeches, where you can never tell either beginnings or endings”—exactly the sort of insult that critics routinely lobbed at Wagner. Klesmer may be a satire on German seriousness, but his exhortation to “sing now something larger” reverberates beyond the situation described on the page. It can almost be heard as a challenge from the author’s Wagnerian character to the author herself.

Sing something larger she does. Daniel Deronda breaks the frame of the domestic novel. Gwendolen’s marriage to the icy, controlling Henleigh Grandcourt at first seems to follow the pattern of Middlemarch, where Dorothea Brooke is trapped in an unrewarding union and then finds her way to a happier outcome. Then the tone darkens: Grandcourt is a monster from whom Gwendolen sees no escape. “I think we shall go on always, like the Flying Dutchman,” she says. During a dismal Italian holiday, Grandcourt drowns, and Gwendolen accuses herself of having deliberately failed to save him. It is like an ironic inversion of the ending of the Dutchman, where Senta leaps to her death to save the cursed mariner. Meanwhile, Deronda discovers that he is Jewish, triggering meditations on race, religion, and identity. Eliot had no patience for antisemitism, and denounced it in an 1878 essay titled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” To what extent she knew of Wagner’s anti-Jewish writings is unknown, but when she wrote of the muddled thinking of “the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant,” she might have had the author of “Jewishness in Music” in mind.

Nicholas Dames, in his study The Physiology of the Novel, conjectures that Eliot bound together her “much-embracing” novel with a version of the leitmotif—a technique that she had perceptively described in “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar.” The motifs include phrases from an accusing letter, objects such as a ring and a necklace, and physical tics and gestures. Such recurrences jog the memory of a reader who may be overwhelmed by the novel’s extended span. They organize a flow of material that begins to resemble Lewes’s “vast and powerful stream of sensation.” In the end, Dames says, the reader of Daniel Deronda is not so much searching out significant events as “enduring temporality itself.” We read the book as we live a life. In this sense, the arch-Victorian Eliot begins to look ahead to literary modernism, which has its own tangled Wagnerian roots.

WAGNER AMONG THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

The London Wagner Festival of 1877 was a grand affair, consisting of eight concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. The plan was to recoup the deficit created by the first Bayreuth Festival. Although receipts fell short of expectations, the visit was otherwise triumphant. According to the young George Bernard Shaw, Wagner met with “tempestuous applause” at each concert, and at one he received a laurel wreath. The Prince of Wales, more Wagnerian than his mother, attended. Young dandies sought to show that they were “well up in Wagnerism.” Young women felt the slightly illicit thrill of “The Ride of the Valkyries”—or the “Walkers’ Ride,” as Mary Gladstone, the prime minister’s daughter, called it. The press amused itself. Punch declared that after each concert “special trains will run from the Kensington High Street station to Colney Hatch, Hanwell and Earlswood”—lunatic asylums on the outskirts of London.

It helped that Londoners were finally seeing Wagner’s operas complete: The Flying Dutchman in 1870, Lohengrin in 1875, Tannhäuser in 1876. (All were sung in Italian, the standard operatic language of the day.) The Carl Rosa Opera Company, founded by a widely traveled German-Jewish conductor and impresario, had great success with an English-language Dutchman. The public was learning to listen in a new way, as The Musical Times advised: “The Teutonic element in the house had a marvellous effect in teaching the audience that ‘Lohengrin’ was not to be judged by the ordinary standard; so when the usual round of applause was given for the favourite singers on their entrance … a very decided ‘hush’ convinced the astonished Opera habitués that the vocalists must be considered as secondary to the work they were interpreting.” Even J. W. Davison cut back on his vitriol. In a report from Bayreuth, he admitted that the Ring was an “incontestable success.”

Two German immigrants had painstakingly prepared for this breakthrough. One was the pianist and teacher Edward Dannreuther, a native of Strasbourg who spent much of his boyhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father ran a short-lived piano business. He came to London in 1863 and began publishing articles in which he criticized the “phantasmagoria” of French and Italian opera and lauded Wagner’s Beethovenian breadth. By invoking Beethoven, the composer’s supporters catered to the Victorian regard for the improving properties of instrumental music. Wagner, too, occupied an “ideal sphere,” following the “loftiest aspirations.”

Dannreuther’s co-conspirator was Francis Hueffer, born Franz Hüffer, who had arrived in England in 1869, at the age of twenty-four. A classmate of Nietzsche’s in Leipzig, Hueffer had spoken for Wagner’s merits at a time when Nietzsche still had doubts. In London, Hueffer established himself as a Wagnerite music critic, and within a decade he had replaced Davison at the Times. Like Dannreuther, Hueffer had a knack for uncovering Victorian virtues in his subject. His 1874 book Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future praises the composer for his “unequalled firmness and presence of mind” and for the “middle-class freedom and intelligence” of the character of Hans Sachs. Where Baudelaire, listening to Lohengrin, is swept away in abstract ecstasy, Hueffer thinks of angels in white clouds. Sealing Hueffer’s naturalization of Wagner is the dedication of his book Half a Century of Music: “TO HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, THE FRIEND OF MENDELSSOHN, AND THE FIRST ENGLISHWOMAN TO RECOGNISE THE GENIUS OF WAGNER.”

Both expatriates formed alliances to the artists and writers of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In 1871, Dannreuther married Chariclea Ionides, daughter of the Greek merchant Alexander Ionides, who hosted salons in his homes and hired the likes of William Morris to decorate them. During his 1877 visit, Wagner was a contented guest at the Dannreuther-Ionides house. Hueffer married Catherine Madox Brown, younger daughter of the Germanically inclined painter Ford Madox Brown. Their son would find literary fame under the name Ford Madox Ford. Dannreuther and Hueffer also knew Swinburne, and composed songs on his poems.

Part of the émigrés’ plan for the 1877 festival was to facilitate meetings between the Wagners and Britain’s leading artists and writers. To that end, the painter John Everett Millais and his wife, Effie Gray, organized a dinner in the Meister’s honor. They were crestfallen when he failed to appear. Cosima, who spoke fluent English, was more sociable. She sat for a portrait by Edward Burne-Jones and asked to meet Morris, because he “treated the same subjects that her husband had treated in his music.”

Cosima also attended a reception for the Grosvenor Gallery, a showplace for Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, which opened the day the Wagners arrived. The young Oscar Wilde remarked on the conjunction in the Dublin University Magazine: “That ‘Art is long and life is short’ is a truth which everyone feels, or ought to feel; yet surely those who were in London last May, and had in one week the opportunities of hearing Rubinstein play the Sonata Impassionata, of seeing Wagner conduct the Spinning Wheel Chorus from the Flying Dutchman, and of studying art at the Grosvenor Gallery, have very little to complain of as regards human existence and art-pleasures.” Wagner did not, in fact, conduct the Spinning Chorus, but the point generally holds.

Eliot, who frequented Pre-Raphaelite circles, was a constant presence at the Wagner Festival. The music continued to fascinate her, nagging hesitations notwithstanding. She reportedly wept over the scene between Siegmund and Brünnhilde in Walküre. She and Lewes were in attendance when Wagner read aloud his recently completed Parsifal libretto at Dannreuther’s—a riveting two-hour performance, according to several witnesses. The man himself left Eliot cold. He had the personality of an “épicier,” a grocer, she said. Cosima, on the other hand, was a “rare person,” even a “genius.” Cosima returned the admiration, recording in her diary that Eliot had made “a noble and pleasant impression.” The two women sat together at rehearsals while Wagner yelled at the orchestra. Lewes later encouraged Cosima to read a pamphlet titled George Eliot und das Judenthum, the work of a Jewish theologian.

The hoped-for meeting of minds never quite came about. Wagner’s politics and personality may have been stumbling blocks, but the deeper problem was one of cultural ownership. The Pre-Raphaelites saw the stories of Tristan and the Knights of the Grail as their own possession, and tended to look on Wagner as an interloper. Even when they acceded to his power, they did so with a slight grimace. Hence Burne-Jones, in 1884: “I heard Wagner’s Parsifal the other day—I nearly forgave him—he knew how to win me. He made sounds that are really and truly (I assure you, and I ought to know) the very sounds that were to be heard in the Sangraal Chapel.”

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which sought to revive the handcrafted aesthetic of the Middle Ages in anticipation of a better world, formed in 1848, in the midst of the pan-European wave of revolutionary agitation that also spawned the Ring. The young men at the core of the group—Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt—held back from direct political action, but they sympathized with the working-class Chartist demonstration of April 1848. The first Holman Hunt painting to carry the designation “P.R.B.” was Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice, a brightly austere canvas in which the Roman populist Cola di Rienzo is seen raising a defiant fist over his brother’s body. For Holman Hunt, as for Wagner and many other leftists, Rienzi symbolized the long struggle for political liberation. The painter intended an “appeal to Heaven against the tyranny exercised over the poor and helpless … ‘How long, O Lord!’”

Morris and Burne-Jones gravitated toward the Pre-Raphaelites while studying at Oxford in the mid-fifties. They were disciples of John Ruskin, who prized the craftsmanship of Gothic architecture and decried the “degradation of the operative into a machine.” The Pre-Raphaelites, too, believed in the Gospel of Work, but only when workers could take pleasure in their tasks. Morris soon emerged as the most audacious thinker in the Brotherhood, applying himself in a variety of media—painting, poetry, fiction, essays, decorative arts, textiles—in pursuit of social reform. He was the principal force behind the Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to restore wholeness and richness to the drab decor of daily life. “The leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation,” Morris later said. Swinburne, a slightly younger Oxfordian, entered the circle around 1857, his tastes more Continental in orientation.

This brand of progressive nostalgia is not unlike Wagner’s own blend of revolution and reaction. The composer felt that the lusty expressivity of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods had given way to artifice and mannerism, and that the artwork of the future should bring back lost unities. For the Pre-Raphaelites, too, the revivification of an idealized past implied a direct attack on an ugly, iniquitous present. The vivid color schemes and quasi-photographic perspectives of Pre-Raphaelite painting—the aroused crouch of Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, the blissed-out gaze of Millais’s The Bridesmaid, the flatly sexual stares of Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia and Astarte Syriaca—bring to mind the hedonistic harmonies of Wagner’s Venusberg and his Tristan love scene. And the luminous Holy Grail sonorities of Lohengrin and Parsifal are akin to Burne-Jones’s pale knights and prayerful maidens.

The narrative of Tannhäuser and the Venusberg was known to English-readers through Carlyle’s translation of the Ludwig Tieck poem “The Trusty Eckart,” which Wagner also read. But the Pre-Raphaelites happened to take a sudden interest in the material around 1861, the year of Tannhäuser in Paris. First, Burne-Jones made a watercolor titled Laus Veneris (The Praise of Venus). Not long after, Swinburne set to work on a poem with the same title. Morris began a poem called “The Hill of Venus,” which eventually appeared in his 1870 cycle The Earthly Paradise. Burne-Jones prepared illustrations for Morris’s poem and then revisited the subject in darkly glowing oils. The Tannhäuser scandal, together with Baudelaire’s impassioned response, probably helped to drive interest across the Channel.

Swinburne may well have learned of Wagner through Baudelaire. He was the first British writer to take serious notice of Les Fleurs du mal, reviewing it in 1862. The following year, he traveled to Paris in the hope of meeting his idol. He failed to do so, but happened to see Fantin-Latour’s rendering of the Venusberg in Manet’s studio. Baudelaire later sent Swinburne a letter of gratitude, in which he repeated what Wagner had said to him about the Tannhäuser essay: “I would never have believed that a French writer could so easily understand so many things.” In the same spirit, Baudelaire was amazed that an Englishman had comprehended him. By a quirk of fate, this letter never reached its destination; the photographer Nadar neglected to deliver it, and it surfaced only after Swinburne’s death. Baudelaire also mailed a copy of his Wagner essay, and this did show up at Swinburne’s door—a cryptic message from one poet to another.

Swinburne was already at work on Laus Veneris. From the start, his personal obsessions colored his approach to the legend—the pleasure of pain, the pain of pleasure, a queasy eroticism that borders on sadomasochism:

Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,

Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck

Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;

Soft, and stung softly—fairer for a fleck …

Inside the Horsel here the air is hot;

Right little peace one hath for it, God wot;

The scented dusty daylight burns the air,

And my heart chokes me till I hear it not.

The last lines recall Baudelaire’s picture of the Venusberg, “breathing a perfumed but stifling atmosphere, lit by a rosy light which came not from the sun.” They also echo Swinburne’s own description of Les Fleurs du mal: “It has the languid lurid beauty of close and threatening weather—a heavy heated temperature, with dangerous hothouse scents in it.” Swinburne later recommended that anyone wishing to understand his conception of Venus should read the passage of Baudelaire’s Tannhäuser pamphlet that depicts the “fallen goddess, grown diabolic among ages that would not accept her as divine.” This unapologetically erotic, paganistic poem caused a scandal of its own when it appeared in Swinburne’s 1866 collection Poems and Ballads. Accused of “Greek depravity” and “schoolboy lustfulness,” Swinburne cited Baudelaire and Wagner in his defense.

Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris, the final version of which showed at the Grosvenor in 1878, is a sumptuous snapshot of Venus in repose. She reclines in a full scarlet gown, her right arm dangled behind her head, her eyes disaffectedly drifting down. Four female attendants prepare to sing for her, music being the preferred mode of seduction in Venusberg tales. On the music stand is an illuminated score titled “Laus Veneris.” At the top of the canvas, a window opens to a cool, blue world outside, where five young knights are riding by. The middle one stares in with particular intensity; he might be Tannhäuser. The scene has a hothouse stillness. As often in Pre-Raphaelite work, a present-tense immediacy burns through the veneer of the faux-ancient, setting up unstable resonances between past and present, the imaginary and the real.

Among Pre-Raphaelite visions of the Venusberg, Morris’s “The Hill of Venus” is closest to Wagner in mood. At the outset, the knight wanders the world in cynical despair. Hope flickers in him when he sees Venus’s grotto, and narcissistic rapture overtakes him: “For this, for this / God made the world, that I might feel thy kiss!” After a time, though, he wearies of that ever-burning love, and begins to fear the fires of hell. He makes his pilgrimage to Rome, seeking absolution. Before the Pope, he again grows defiant, and mercy is denied. At the end comes a finely calibrated moral twist: after the knight slinks back to the hill, the Pope loses confidence in his judgment and asks whether he has done wrong. Suddenly, his staff blooms, signaling a miraculous forgiveness that stems from older powers within the earth. There is a taste of the atmosphere of Parsifal: Christianity and paganism reconciled in a Good Friday Spell.

No wonder Cosima Wagner expressed a desire to meet Morris: his universe overlapped with her husband’s to a remarkable degree. He wrote of Venus and Tannhäuser; he painted Iseult; he treated the world of the Grail; he pored over the Icelandic sources that furnished much of the material of the Ring. In the sixties and seventies, Morris studied Old Norse with the Cambridge-based scholar Eiríkr Magnússon, who collaborated with him on an English translation of the Vǫlsunga saga. Morris saw this as “the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks.”

Yet Morris loathed the very idea of Wagner. On receiving an English version of Walküre, in 1873, he said that it was “nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera.” He apparently never heard Wagner’s music in person. If he had, he might have felt the same as Ruskin, who described Meistersinger as “clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded … sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless.” In the same year that the Ring premiered, Morris composed a four-book epic titled The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs. Jane Susanna Ennis, in a comparative study of Morris’s and Wagner’s texts, speculates that Sigurd “would have been very different—indeed, may not even have been written at all—had it not been for Wagner’s Ring.”

William Morris, La Belle Iseult

Every telling of the Siegfried story hinges on the scene in which the young hero discovers Brünnhilde—or Brynhild, in Morris’s spelling—within her aerie of fire. Morris and Magnússon, in their version of the Vǫlsunga saga, interpolate a passage from the Poetic Edda and translate it fairly faithfully:

Long have I slept

And slumbered long,

Many and long are the woes of mankind …

Hail to the day come back!

Hail, sons of the daylight!

Hail to thee, dark night, and thy daughter!

Wagner, too, stays close to the Edda text. It falls to the orchestra to conjure the majesty of the scene—the first harsh glint of the sun (E minor) followed by the warming spread of its rays (harp-caressed C major).

Hail to you, sun!

Hail to you, light!

Hail to you, light-bringing day!

Long was my sleep;

awakened am I;

who is the hero

who woke me?

Morris, in Sigurd, casts Brynhild’s hymn to the sun in more flowery terms, as if trying to compensate for the orchestral resources of the German rival:

But therewith the sun rose upward and lightened all the earth,

And the light flashed up to the heavens from the rims of the glorious girth;

But they twain arose together, and with both her palms outspread,

And bathed in the light returning, she cried aloud and said:

“All hail, O Day and thy Sons, and thy kin of the coloured things!

Hail, following Night, and thy Daughter that leadeth thy wavering wings!

Look down with unangry eyes on us today alive,

And give us the hearts victorious, and the gain for which we strive! …”

Hueffer and Shaw considered Sigurd a worthy counterpart to the Ring. But the plainer, more pungent language of Morris’s earlier translation has aged better.

Wagner and Morris differ most in their valuation of past and present. Morris often frames his legendary world as a lost paradise. Sigurd begins: “There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old.” The same elegiac voices speak at the end of the Brynhild chapter: “They are gone—the lovely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient Earth.” In The Earthly Paradise, Morris bids the reader to “Forget six counties overhung with smoke, / Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, / Forget the spreading of the hideous town.” Wagner avoids that tone of “Once upon a time.” In the preludes to Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and the Ring, a distant world is materializing out of the mist, yet it is soon overcome by the illusion, exciting and dangerous, of the past bleeding into the present. Wagner removes the gilt border around the stuff of myth.

The tale of Tristram and Iseult is indisputably a property of the British Isles, even if the earliest surviving versions come from twelfth-century France. Iseult the Fair is an Irish princess, her castle thought to lie on the outskirts of Dublin. King Mark, to whom she is betrothed, has a castle in Cornwall, often identified with Tintagel, where King Arthur is said to have been conceived. Tristram, the Breton orphan, is effectively Cornish, because King Mark has adopted him. By the time Wagner took up Tristan, in the late fifties, he was a latecomer; Morris was painting a fresco of the lovers on the walls of the Oxford Union, and Matthew Arnold had published a three-part poem called Tristram and Iseult. When, many years later, Arnold heard Tristan in Munich, he placidly commented, “I have managed the story better than Wagner.”

Burne-Jones, Tristram and Iseult stained-glass panel

Arnold confines himself to three fragments of the romance. First we see Tristram awaiting his beloved; then the lovers in their last embrace; and, finally, a scene from the lonely life of Iseult of the White Hands, Tristram’s wife in the original legend. (That character is absent from Wagner’s opera.) Despite Romantic touches, Arnold takes a dim view of “this fool passion … an unnatural overheat at best.” Tennyson’s treatment in “The Last Tournament” (1870–71), the gloomiest chapter of his Idylls of the King cycle, is even harsher. Tristram is arrogant and hard-hearted, a player of “broken music,” and Isolt is motivated as much by hatred of her husband as by desire for her lover. The tale ends with jarring abruptness, as Liebestod is reduced to death pure and simple:

He rose, he turn’d, and flinging round her neck,

Claspt it; but while he bow’d himself to lay

Warm kisses in the hollow of her throat,

Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch’d,

Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek—

“Mark’s way,” said Mark, and clove him thro’ the brain.

The Pre-Raphaelites could never be so unsentimental. In Morris’s Oxford Union fresco, Tristram and Iseult clutch each other amid lush vegetation, their love implicitly organic and natural. In the same period, Morris painted La Belle Iseult, with Jane Burden, his future wife, appearing as a pensive queen, her gaze fixed on a book. In 1862, the arts-and-crafts firm of Morris and Co. produced a series of Tristram-and-Iseult stained-glass panels, with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Ford Madox Brown making contributions; a tone of noble suffering prevailed.

Swinburne, who felt that Tennyson had “degraded and debased” the romance, sought to put matters right in his long poem Tristram of Lyonesse, begun around 1870 and completed in 1882. Just before embarking on the project, Swinburne studied a collection of Auguste de Gasperini’s writing on Wagner, with its extensive treatment of Tristan. He also conferred regularly with the wealthy Welsh connoisseur George Powell, a vehement Wagnerite who went to Bayreuth in 1876. (During his visit, Powell had tea with Cosima and attempted to interest her in Swinburne’s poetry, apparently without success.) Wagner’s connection to Schopenhauer especially interested the poet as he prepared to leap into the ravishing abyss of the Tristan story.

Morris launches his Sigurd with an image of time revolving backward. Swinburne, in a more Wagnerian maneuver, begins with an incantatory, forty-four-line sentence in praise of love:

Love, that is first and last of all things made,

The light that has the living world for shade,

The spirit that for temporal veil has on

The souls of all men woven in unison,

One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought …

Swinburne admits that love has wrecked those in its path, as “soul smote soul and left it ruinous”; but, unlike Arnold and Tennyson, he still insists on love’s painful joys. Indeed, repeating a motif from Laus Veneris, he proposes that love entails “a better heaven than heaven is.” As in Tristan, the heat of Tristram and Iseult’s ecstasy causes the outer world to dissolve. Binaries break down: day becomes night, night becomes day. When the lovers first kiss, “four lips became one burning mouth.” The carnal oblivion extends to the dimension of sound, as the lovers hear an inner music that drowns out the roar of the sea and, later, festive shouts from the nearing shore. It is hard not to hear this self-deifying music as Wagner’s Tristan score, now swallowed up in poetry’s realm:

Yet fairer now than song may show them stand

Tristram and Iseult, hand in amorous hand,

Soul-satisfied, their eyes made great and bright

With all the love of all the livelong night;

With all its hours yet singing in their ears

No mortal music made of thoughts and tears,

But such a song, past conscience of man’s thought,

As hearing he grows god and knows it not.

At the very end, Swinburne tells of how King Mark, having forgiven the lovers, builds a tomb for them—“a chapel bright like spring / With flower-soft wealth of branching tracery made.” (Burne-Jones pictured such a tomb in his contribution to the Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass project, with sculpted lovers lying side by side and two hounds keeping watch.) Swinburne then recalls that according to legend the Kingdom of Lyonesse sank into the sea. So, above the lovers’ submerged shrine, the tide “gleams and moves and moans,” and they find permanent peace in the “light and sound and darkness of the sea.” The obliterating action of the ocean plays much the same role as Tristan’s “Transfiguration,” where Isolde sinks and drowns in highest bliss.

Swinburne endured two shocks after publishing the poem he considered his best. In October 1882, Powell died suddenly at the age of forty. In February 1883, Wagner expired in Venice. In a poem titled “Autumn and Winter,” Swinburne called Powell a “herald soul,” flying up in advance of his musical god. There followed “The Death of Richard Wagner,” the noblest of the dozens of poems written in commemoration of Wagner’s death. It ends with an image of “the rising of doom divine as a sundawn risen to sight / From the depths of the sea.” These poems appeared alongside “Two Preludes: Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde” in the 1883 volume A Century of Roundels. The British literary world had resisted Wagner, but it gave way in the end. Tristram became Tristan, Iseult Isolde.

YOUNG ADULT WAGNER

The Wagner-cultus has grown and spread of late amongst British musical amateurs to an extent that is little short of the phenomenal,” a critic said in 1881. The following year brought a Wagner wave to London, encompassing most of his mature output. A touring production of the Ring, based on the 1876 Bayreuth staging, presented three complete cycles in London; the Prince of Wales attended most of the performances, having rearranged his schedule to accommodate them. William Gladstone, the giant of British liberalism, also showed approval of Wagner. Parsifal, which was still confined to Bayreuth, acquired an especially lofty reputation in the Victorian era. Anne Dzamba Sessa, in Richard Wagner and the English, writes that the opera “bathed the listener in a soothing wash of inchoate and luxurious pious emotion.”

Later in the decade, the physician and Theosophist William Ashton Ellis launched a journal called The Meister, dedicated to the “regenerative life-force of the Spring of Richard Wagner’s genius.” Ellis also began publishing translations of Wagner’s prose writings, making the doubtful claim that even if the Meister had “never composed one bar of music, and never conceived one scene of drama, his prose works alone would have ranked him amongst the foremost thinkers of the day.” Regrettably, Ellis’s clumsy, literal, borderline-unreadable renderings of Wagner’s already intractable prose remain the standard English versions. The Meister aimed to be the counterpart to the Revue wagnérienne, but it fell on an altogether lower literary level. A few commemorative poems give sufficient flavor of the whole:

Immortal Master! earthward wing thy flight …

(Henry Knight, “In Memoriam: R. Wagner”)

I will not call thee dead, for such as thee

Death is but Life …

(Clara Grant Duff, “At Richard Wagner’s Grave”)

Thou, O Belovëd, O Master,

Magical child of the spring …

(Evelyn Pyne, “Anniversary Ode”)

Farewell, Great Spirit! Thou by whom alone,

Of all the Wonder-doers sent to be

My signs and sureties Time-ward, unto me

My inmost self has ceased to be unknown!

(Alfred Forman, “The World’s Farewell to Richard Wagner”)

Forman, a minor poet and scholar who made a living as a paper merchant, prepared the first English translations of the Ring and Tristan, which rival Ellis’s work in their alliterative opacity (“Fitly thy ravens / take to their feathers”). Isolde’s Transfiguration lapses into the lilt of a Victorian parlor song: “To drown—/ go down—/ to nameless night—/ last delight!”

Publishers in both Britain and the United States saw a market for explications of Wagner, especially ones oriented toward younger readers. These books naturally highlight the heroes-and-dragons dimension of the music dramas. In keeping with popular sensibilities, they maximize the nobility of Wagner’s characters and minimize their sins. Wonder Tales from Wagner, by the American author Anna Alice Chapin, begins its account of Tristan with the words “Once upon a time.” Isolde is “tall and very fair, with hair of a deep, brilliant gold, and clear, shining blues.” Tristan is a “deeply tanned” lad with “short, curling brown hair.” With the onset of the Night of Love, the two show apparent restraint, seating themselves upon a bank of flowers and “satisfying themselves and each other with assurances and proofs of their love and fidelity.”

Reticence was obligatory in the genre of Wagner for the Young. The composer’s less wholesome goings-on, especially the incest in the Ring, necessitated a fair amount of bowdlerization, not to mention outright falsification. The New York Times, reviewing William Henry Frost’s The Wagner Story Book: Firelight Tales of the Great Music Dramas, dryly concluded that “the emotional contents of the Wagner dramas are altogether too stupendous to lend themselves readily to reduction to child literature.” The critic noted Frost’s “masterly inactivity” on the subject of the brother-sister love in Act I of Walküre. Grace Edson Barber, in Wagner Opera Stories, omits the entire first act of that opera, saying only that Brünnhilde had defended an unnamed “brave friend” who had “not been true to all the laws.” Chapin mentions the twins in The Story of the Rhinegold, but slyly disguises their relationship, saying, “They loved each other as much as though they had been really brother and sister.”

Götterdämmerung posed another challenge: how could young people be expected to cope with the self-immolation of Brünnhilde and the incineration of Valhalla? In Barber’s telling, Brünnhilde manages to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens without having to ride into the pyre. She exclaims, “The transformation is coming!,” whereupon, after a few days of darkness, “the birds awoke and caroled glad songs of love.” Florence Akin, a former schoolteacher from Pasadena, California, performs even more drastic surgery in her Opera Stories from Wagner: A Reader for Primary Grades, allowing the survival not only of Brünnhilde but also of Siegfried. The lovers deposit the Ring in the Rhine, whereupon “hurry, worry, falsehood, greed, and envy vanished from the earth.”

A few contributors to the Wagner youth market delved deeper. Dolores Bacon, in Operas Every Child Should Know, briskly confronts the racist question: “Probably no stupider thing was ever said or done than that by Wagner when he wrote a diatribe on the Jew in Art.” Constance Maud, the author of Wagner’s Heroes and Wagner’s Heroines, hints at Wagnerian feminism, of which more will be said in Chapter 7. The daughter of a British clergyman, Maud was involved in the suffrage movement and, in 1911, published a fiery feminist novel titled No Surrender. She makes sure that her young readers register Brünnhilde’s “commanding tones,” her “tone of queenly authority.” Furthermore, she gives glimpses of Wagner’s revolutionary agenda. When Valhalla burns, Maud perceives that Wotan has fallen victim to “the love of power and the love of gold.” There are few blunter summations of the Ring, for adults or children.

WAGNER IN AMERICA

Herman Matzen’s statue of Wagner in Edgewater Park, Cleveland, erected in 1911

In his final years, Wagner flirted with the notion of immigrating to the United States, a place he never saw. Reeling from the financial disaster of the first Bayreuth Festival, he spoke of selling Wahnfried and moving with his family to the New World. Cosima wrote in her diary: “America?? Then never again a return to Germany!” In 1879, the North American Review published an essay attributed to Wagner, positing the New World as an idyll where the “unconquerable vigor and strength” of the German spirit would find new life. Although the essay was ghostwritten by Hans von Wolzogen, the Bayreuther Blätter editor, it reflected Wagner’s outlook: his disappointment in the new Reich; his belief in the indestructibility of “holy German art”; his concerns about racial intermixing; and his fantasies of cultural rebirth. In the same period, he described his Bayreuth idea as “a kind of Washington for art”—comparing the festival to the American capital that rose on swampy land by the Potomac River.

By 1880, the American plan had become an idée fixe. Cosima wrote: “Again and again he keeps coming back to America, says it is the only place on the whole map which he can gaze upon with any pleasure.” He went so far as to draft a financial prospectus, in consultation with Newell Sill Jenkins, his American-born, German-based dentist. The idea was that American supporters would raise a million dollars—around twenty-five million in today’s currency—to resettle Wagner and his family in “some State of the Union with favourable climate.” In return, the United States would receive earnings from Parsifal and all other future work. “Thus would America have bought me from Europe for all time.” The pleasant climate he had in mind was, curiously, Minnesota.

The conceit was not as absurd as it seems. Around a million Germans had immigrated to the United States between 1846 and 1855. They were often called Forty-Eighters, because many had fled after the failed 1848 revolutions, and they played a pivotal role in American politics before the Civil War. Predominantly liberal in their thinking, they tended to support Lincoln and the Union cause. The most illustrious of them was Carl Schurz, who fought as a Union general, became a senator from Missouri, and served as the secretary of the interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes. (Wagner approved of Schurz, saying that he showed “what a proper German can do.”) Another significant Forty-Eighter was Hugo Wesendonck, who left Germany under the threat of a death sentence and proceeded to make a fortune in the life-insurance business. His company, Germania, thrives today, under the name Guardian. Wesendonck’s brother Otto, who funded Wagner during his Zurich years, was a partner in a textile-import firm that had its headquarters in lower Manhattan. The money that kept Wagner afloat for a time was American in origin.

The image of Wagner in America is amusing to contemplate—it might make for a lively historical novel—but it never came close to reality. The talk of exile may have been a ploy intended to whip up support from sources closer to home. Ludwig II, among others, took fright when he learned of the scheme, and wrote to the composer: “Your roses cannot thrive in America’s stony soil, where self-seeking, callousness, and Mammon reign.” With a certain amount of adaptation, Wagner indeed took hold across the Atlantic. In time, a full-blown cultus arose, to the point that streets were named after his characters—at least four American towns have a Parsifal Place—and statues of him were erected in parks in Cleveland and Baltimore. The monuments still stand, despite occasional calls for them to be removed.

Each country saw Wagner through a self-fashioned prism. For the French, he was a torchbearer of the modern; for the British, a messenger of Arthuriana. In the United States, Wagner harmonized with a national love of wilderness sagas, frontier lore, Native American tales, stories of desperadoes searching for gold. Joseph Horowitz, the leading historian of American Wagnerism, cites Frederick Jackson Turner’s conception of the frontier, according to which “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness” define the nation’s self-image. In much the same vein, the New York critic Henry Krehbiel contended that American operagoers saw themselves reflected in the “rude forcefulness” of Wagner’s heroes. Siegfried, especially, stirred sympathy with his “unspoiled nature,” his freedom from “false and meretricious” habits. Wagnéristes said that France was the composer’s true homeland; Yankee Wagnerites made the same claim. The historian and memoirist Henry Adams wrote that the “paroxysms of nervous excitement” surrounding the Ring at the Met showed that “New York knew better than Baireuth [sic] what Wagner meant.”

At the same time, Wagner allowed the young nation to prove itself as a maturing global power. Great American cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago, aspiring to rival European capitals in cultural richesse, nurtured symphony orchestras and opera houses alongside museums and architectural monuments. Wagner productions, notably the Metropolitan Opera’s 1903 staging of Parsifal, were among the most opulent entertainments of the American fin de siècle. That program of self-improvement conformed to what the philosopher George Santayana called the “genteel tradition”—the American counterpart to Victorian propriety.

With his usual double-sidedness, Wagner spoke both to the crude vigor of American enterprise and to the yearning for refinement and uplift. The spiritual dimension of his work received special emphasis, joining a national mania for alternative religions and therapies: Theosophy, New Thought, Christian Science, the Chautauqua movement. The agnostic orator Robert Ingersoll loved Wagner, too: “I would rather listen to Tristan and Isolde—that Mississippi of melody—where the great notes, winged like eagles, lift the soul above the cares and griefs of this weary world—than to all the orthodox sermons ever preached.”

The American quest for heroic self-definition was caught up in questions of gender and race. Theodore Roosevelt, with his “Rough Rider” persona, epitomized an American masculinity that resisted a supposed European tendency toward effeminacy and degeneracy. Furthermore, the country’s striving for global influence and its pursuit of Manifest Destiny coincided all too often with ideologies of Aryan and Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. Herbert Spencer, the theorist of social evolution, visited the United States in 1882 and predicted that its Aryan stock would “produce a finer type of man than has hitherto existed.” Roosevelt was vulnerable to this kind of thinking; in 1911, he bemoaned “loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races.” Wagner’s work and ideas provided fodder for both sides of a battle over American identity that is ongoing.

STAR-SPANGLED WAGNER

Wagner’s music arrived in the United States in the luggage of the Germania Musical Society—two dozen radical-minded musicians who formed a collective in Berlin in early 1848 and then emigrated en masse. As Nancy Newman relates in her history of the group, the Germania aimed to create a musical-social utopia, a band of free individuals tied together by fellow feeling. Believing that “communism was the most perfect principle of society,” they adopted the ideals of “one for all and all for one,” of “equal rights, equal duties, and equal rewards.” They contrasted this picture of musical leveling with what they saw as the egotistical mannerisms of solo virtuosos in the employ of the upper classes. The Germanians hoped that their performances of composers from Bach to Wagner would “enflame and stimulate in the hearts of these politically free people … love for the fine art of music.”

In 1852, the Germanians played an excerpt from Tannhäuser in Boston. The following year, in the same city, they organized a Grand Wagner Night, augmenting selections from Rienzi, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin with Rossini and Bellini arias. The New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, soon to write his Native American epic The Song of Hiawatha, was there, and wrote in his diary: “Strange, original, and somewhat barbaric.” The Germanians toured widely with this repertory, and news of their activities reached the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, one of whose contributors, Richard Pohl, made this prediction: “Wagner, the man of the liberal arts and the man of the future, will rise anew in the land of freedom and the future, and find a permanent home.” The essay ends with the sentence “Westwards moves the history of art!” The composer proudly noted, “In Boston they are now even presenting Wagnernights, evening concerts at which only my own compositions are performed.” He did not know about the Rossini and Bellini.

The Germania disbanded in 1854, but its influence lingered, especially in New York City. Carl Bergmann, one of its leaders, began conducting the Philharmonic Society of New York in 1855, causing excitement there with performances of Wagner. Four years later, Bergmann led a full staging of Tannhäuser at the Stadttheater, on the Bowery, which catered to German immigrants. Despite less than ideal conditions—the theater was small and grubby, one critic said, with boys selling glasses of beer and chunks of cheese—the opera gained respectful reviews.

Wagner did not lack for critics in the American press, although they were milder than their European counterparts. John Sullivan Dwight, the publisher of Dwight’s Journal of Music, frequently objected to the composer’s ideas, but he did a fair job of explaining them. An idealist with ties to Transcendentalism, Fourierism, and the utopian Brook Farm community, Dwight saw music as a means of moral improvement and social reform. At first, the new import piqued his interest. “Verily here is a deliberate attempt to Wagnerize us,” he wrote in advance of the Germania’s Wagner Night. “But why shall we not test the new sometimes, by the old?” In the event, Dwight found the music too taxing, and as he got to know Wagner’s writings his doubts increased. In 1869, when “Jewishness in Music” was republished, he spent several pages denouncing its “ignoble and small-minded statements” against Jews.

Wagner’s most decisive advocate in the post–Civil War years was the German-born conductor Theodore Thomas, who came to the United States with his family in 1845, when he was ten. Thomas was one of the first modern conductors—a strong-willed podium technician in the lineage of Berlioz, Wagner, and Hans von Bülow. Thomas’s first orchestral concert, in New York in 1862, began with the Flying Dutchman overture. In subsequent years, he led the Philharmonic Society of New York and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and in 1891 he helped found the Chicago Symphony. Thomas often included Wagner excerpts on the summertime concerts that he led in the Central Park Garden, starting in the late sixties. In 1872, he presented “The Ride of the Valkyries,” using a copy of the manuscript. “The people jumped on the chairs and shouted,” he wrote in his memoirs. The “Ride” was already a hit in Europe, despite Wagner’s intermittent disapproval of the practice of playing excerpts.

In 1876, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of American independence, Thomas succeeded in commissioning an American Centennial March from Wagner himself. The fee was five thousand dollars—equivalent to more than one hundred thousand dollars today. After haggling over rights, Wagner produced a work of thoroughgoing mediocrity, its most promising musical idea set aside for the Flower Maidens scene in Parsifal. The premiere took place at the opening of the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia. Despite the dreariness of the music, the response was generally warm. According to one press report, Wagner had honored the “feminine loveliness, noble natures, and pure mental activity of American women”—the march was dedicated to the Women’s Centennial Committee—and evoked “a world of souls communing together in universal concord.”

The rising young composer and bandmaster John Philip Sousa added a Wagner twist to his own centennial composition, a medley of national airs titled International Congress Fantasy. The piece culminates in a festive orchestration of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the style of the Tannhäuser overture, with stuttering motifs accompanying the principal theme. In a band arrangement, the anthem is marked “à la Wagner.” Sousa once told an interviewer, “My two most popular pieces are the ‘Tannhaeuser Overture’ and the ‘Stars and Stripes.’” He added: “Wagner was a brass band man, anyway.” When he took charge of the U.S. Marine Band, in 1880, the March King regularly programmed Wagner on official occasions, including that of the inauguration of President Grover Cleveland, in 1885.

Wagner had impinged on the American presidency before. Ulysses S. Grant was present for the premiere of the American Centennial March, though he famously had no ear for music. (“I only know two tunes: one is ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the other isn’t,” he supposedly once said.) Rutherford B. Hayes, Grant’s successor, hosted musicales at the White House, including piano performances by his secretary of the interior, Carl Schurz. On at least one occasion, the First U.S. Cavalry Band serenaded Hayes with a Wagner selection. Cleveland, who served two discontinuous terms as president, apparently liked Wagner, and his young wife, Frances Folsom, was a conspicuous enthusiast. Sousa’s Marine Band played the Bridal Chorus at the Clevelands’ wedding, in 1886, and later performed selections from Lohengrin on the White House lawn, with the First Lady sitting enthralled at a window.

American Wagnerism entered its peak phase in 1884, when Theodore Thomas marshaled a grand tour of seventy-four Wagner concerts in twenty North American cities, employing monster choruses and drawing audiences as large as eight thousand people. The success of that endeavor caught the attention of a fledgling New York company, the Metropolitan Opera, which had opened the previous year and immediately run into financial trouble. For the second season, the Met board, led by James A. Roosevelt, Theodore’s uncle, decided to switch from Italian opera to German fare. The émigré conductor Leopold Damrosch, well acquainted with Wagner, was engaged as music director. Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Walküre formed the core of the repertory, the last causing a sensation that probably ensured the survival of the house.

When Damrosch died suddenly of pneumonia toward the end of his first season, the Met brought in Anton Seidl, a greatly gifted young conductor who had assisted Wagner in Bayreuth. The company kept to an all-German format until 1891: out of nearly six hundred performances in that period, more than half were of Wagner. In the 1888–89 season, Seidl led the first American Ring, and subsequently took the cycle on tour, as he had done with the Bayreuth Ring in Europe. In St. Louis, the Ring was advertised, in the P. T. Barnum manner, as “THE GREATEST OPERATIC ATTRACTION IN THE WORLD.” The Wagner mania reached across the continent to San Francisco, and even penetrated the Francophone bastion of New Orleans, where Rex, the King of Carnival, brought his masked retinue to a gala performance of Lohengrin.

Amid growing reverence for Wagner, Seidl became a cult figure, as Joseph Horowitz recounts in Wagner Nights: An American History. In 1891, Seidl replaced Thomas at the Philharmonic Society, maintaining a Wagner focus. He also led summertime programs at Brighton Beach, where Wagner was by far the most frequently performed composer. In 1890, in Brooklyn Heights, Seidl presided over a singular event known as the “Parsifal Entertainment”—an abridged concert rendition with religious accoutrements, falling on Palm Sunday. The Clevelands attended, libretto in hand. Laura Holloway-Langford, the spiritually inclined head of an organization called the Seidl Society, hoped to launch a summer Wagner festival, a kind of Brooklyn Bayreuth. There were proposals for building exact replicas of the Festspielhaus in the United States—one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, another on the Hudson River. These went unrealized, despite rumors of support from Cosima.

In 1903, Heinrich Conried, the Met’s new general manager, mounted a full production of Parsifal, in defiance of Bayreuth’s claim of exclusivity. Cosima tried to stop the staging with a lawsuit—Wagner et al. v. Conried et al.—but the U.S. Circuit Court ruled against her. Because the United States was not a signatory to the Berne Convention, Parsifal fell outside of German copyright. A secondary controversy involved protests from religious quarters, on the grounds that Parsifal made inappropriate use of Christian symbolism. Reverend C. H. Parkhurst, of New York, called it “stupid sacrilege.” Several American clergymen came to the opera’s defense: Washington Gladden, a leader of the liberal-minded Social Gospel movement, crowned Wagner one of the “witnesses of the light,” alongside Dante and Michelangelo. Amid the furor, the first run of eleven performances was a major success, generating $186,000 in receipts.

Opening night was Christmas Eve 1903. The Times lavished coverage on the fashions of the Golden Horseshoe, as the elite boxes at the Met were known: “Mrs. Vanderbilt was in black velvet and wore a black silk beaver hat. Mrs. Baylies was in black lace pailleted in gold. Her small black hat had a long white plume, and a black and white lace wrap. Mrs. Barney was in her box, and with her was her daughter, Miss Katharine, in pale blue satin. None of the party wore hats.” Up in the galleries, the crowd was more diverse: “A colored man wearing a jewel in his necktie which if real was worth nearly $30,000, discussed motifs and movements with a man and his wife from beyond the Bronx who were in evening attire.” As in London, the crowd assimilated the Bayreuth ban on intermittent applause: “Even when the wild heroine Kundry, in the person of Mme. Ternina, clad in skins and with dishevelled hair, came galloping madly through the air the silence was as of the grave.”

The man then occupying the White House took notice. “Mother came back yesterday, having thoroughly enjoyed Parsifal,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit. The president might be classified as a casual Wagnerian: mentions of the composer dot his correspondence, though he had no time for in-depth exploration. When his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge went to the Wagner shrine, Roosevelt wrote, “I envy you Bayreuth. In a perfectly dumb way I have always admired Wagner’s operas and I should like greatly to see them in their own place.” In 1904, the president spent nearly an hour inspecting a series of Parsifal Tone Pictures by a favorite artist, the expatriate Symbolist painter Pinckney Marcius-Simons, who lived in Bayreuth. In 1906, Alice Roosevelt, the president’s oldest child, wed Nicholas Longworth III, and Wagner again resounded at the White House—Tannhäuser, not Lohengrin—while the president led his daughter down the aisle.

AMERICAN SIEGFRIEDS

sidney lanier

One night in 1888, the artist Albert Pinkham Ryder attended a performance of Götterdämmerung at the Met. On returning home, he set about painting what he had seen. “I worked for forty-eight hours without sleep or food,” Ryder recalled. The resulting picture, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, is a vision of spirit-shrouded nature, with a gnarled, windswept tree dominating the composition and yellowish moonlight bathing the scene. Siegfried is riding by on a horse; his steed has one leg in the air, as if frightened. The Rhinemaidens wave from the water, their bodies twisted like the branches of the tree. Sometime before 1887, Ryder produced an even wilder, more abstract impression of The Flying Dutchman, with paint thickly layered in impasto style. These paintings later made an impression on Jackson Pollock, who, in the words of the art historian Robert Rosenblum, took them as an image of the “overwhelming energies and velocities of nature.”

Ryder’s Siegfried marks a merger of American and Wagnerian mythologies. It departs from the libretto in setting the scene at night and placing Siegfried on a horse; the background looks more like a Western mountain lake than the Rhine. It’s almost the reverse of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: here a lone Wagnerian hero goes riding in the American outback. Similar transpositions appear in Wagner-inspired paintings by Louis Eilshemius and Arthur Bowen Davies, whose dreamlike tableaux represented an American strain of Symbolism. In general, though, Nibelung and Arthurian motifs crop up less often in Gilded Age art than they do among the Pre-Raphaelites. Instead, the Siegfried-like figures who populate the vistas of the American spirit—the frontiersman, the cowboy, the homesteader, the outlaw—are homegrown heroes, denizens of the great wide open.

The “imagined communities” of nineteenth-century nationalism required the invention or elaboration of a deep mythic past. The case of the United States was especially complex because its ruling population had come from Europe. What stories were purely American? Indisputably, the deep past of the North American continent belonged to its native peoples. Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was one hugely successful attempt at constructing an American epic, even if its metrical pattern imitated the Finnish Kalevala. Anton Seidl, at his death, was planning an operatic trilogy on the Hiawatha story, in the hope of creating an “American Nibelungenlied.” In the same period, Antonín Dvořák was predicting that African-American spirituals would supply raw material for future compositions. The idea of a national mythology based on the legacies of conquered, murdered, and enslaved peoples was not one for which Wagner provided a precedent.

The American Siegfried strides through the work of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier, who achieved national renown in the late nineteenth century before fading into the literary background. At his best, Lanier created a dense verbal music that has drawn comparisons with the august Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Born in Macon, Georgia, in 1842, Lanier fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Disregarding his father’s desire that he pursue a career in law, he dedicated himself to poetry and music. In 1873, he took a position as principal flute of the Peabody Orchestra, the resident orchestra of the Peabody Institute, in Baltimore. He also composed several charming pieces for his instrument. In poetry, his chief models were Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. He was fixated on the idea of freeing the English language from classical influences and reestablishing its Saxon roots. In a treatise titled The Science of English Verse, he declared that the metrical scheme of an Old English work such as The Battle of Maldon was “well-nigh universal in our race.”

In 1870, on a visit to New York, Lanier heard a Theodore Thomas performance of the Tannhäuser overture. An “unbroken march of beautiful-bodied Triumphs,” the poet called it. He obtained a copy of the Ring libretto, and, in 1874, began work on a translation. A few effective renderings of passages from Rheingold appear in the endpapers of Lanier’s German-English dictionary—“Of the Rhine-stream’s Gold / Heard I rumors; / Treasure-Runes it / Hides in its crimson gleam”—but the project trailed off. In the end, Lanier came to think that instrumental music was superior to the dramatic kind, that the Gesamtkunstwerk was a retrogression to primitive ritual. Wagner was probably on his mind when he praised the “immeasurable profounds of music” over the “quite measurable shallows of this old Scandinavian godhood.”

In 1875, Lanier found fame with “The Symphony”—an anticapitalist poem in which instruments of the orchestra speak out loud and condemn industrial society. That success led to a commission for the American centennial festivities: Lanier collaborated with the New England composer Dudley Buck on a choral cantata titled Centennial Meditation of Columbia. Lanier’s text takes the form of a monologue by the New World goddess Columbia. The language is knotty and dense, as in the poet’s attempted translation of Rheingold: “… old voices rise and call / Yonder where the to-and-fro / Weltering of my Long-Ago / Moves about the moveless base / Far below my resting-place.” The final line is a pseudo-Wagnerian mouthful: “Wave the world’s best lover’s welcome to the world.” The cantata had its premiere on the same program that disgorged Wagner’s American Centennial March. The music went over well, but the poem caused bafflement and merriment. When Lanier shot back at his critics, Buck said that the ruckus brought to mind “the early Wagner pamphlets in defense of his own ideas.”

A year after the centennial, Lanier penned a poem in honor of the composer who filled and troubled his vision. “To Richard Wagner,” initially subtitled “A Dream of the Age,” recapitulates the antimodern rhetoric of “The Symphony” through an array of Wagnerian motifs. The opening lines paint an American Nibelheim, with the night sky wiped out by the pollution of Trade: “I saw a sky of stars that rolled in grime. / All glory twinkled through some sweat of fight.” In a chaotic contemporary landscape, nature is molded anew, creeds collide, art struggles to invent fresh forms. But then a transforming sound is heard, a blast of “old Romance,” which rises over the “murk-mad factories” of the present:

Bright ladies and brave knights of Fatherland;

Sad mariners, no harbor e’er may hold,

A Swan soft floating tow’rds a tragic strand;

Dim ghosts of earth, air, water, fire, steel, gold,

Wind, care, love, lust; a lewd and lurking band

Of Powers—dark Conspiracy, Cunning cold,

Gray Sorcery; magic cloaks and rings and rods;

Valkyries, heroes, Rhinemaids, giants, gods!

Lanier deserved some sort of prize for summarizing the majority of Wagner’s work in a handful of lines. (Anna Alice Chapin quotes them in Wonder Tales from Wagner.) In the subsequent stanzas, which were cut from the final version of the poem, Lanier pursues an intricate conceit in which Wagner’s myths are woven into contemporary lives—the “modern Last / Explains the antique First.” We read of smiths and clerks whose “dull hearts” make manifest the yearning hymns of knights and ladies; of “pale girls by spinning spools in factories” who sing of “Elsa’s woes and Brünhild’s passionate pleas.” Then comes the peroration, which contains a presumably accidental echo of Richard Pohl’s 1854 comment about art moving westward:

O Wagner, westward bring thy heavenly art!

No trifler thou: Siegfried and Wotan be

Names for big ballads of the modern heart.

Thine ears hear deeper than thine eyes can see.

Voice of the monstrous mill, the shouting mart,

Not less of airy cloud and wave and tree,

Thou, thou, if even to thyself unknown,

Hast power to say the Time in terms of tone!

Lanier seems on the verge of a politicized reading of the Ring story, such as Shaw would present in The Perfect Wagnerite. At the very least, he is grasping what the Pre-Raphaelites resisted: Wagner wishes to transcend the idyll of the past, not to restore it.

O Wagner, westward bring thy heavenly art!” Owen Wister, another would-be composer who turned to literature, seemed to take the instruction literally, whether or not he ever read Lanier’s poem. His 1902 novel The Virginian, which established the principal tropes of cowboy literature, was the work of a young man who glorified Wagner and saw the West in explicitly Wagnerian terms. That Wister’s writing is shot through with white-supremacist rhetoric brings up the all-too-familiar convergence of Wagnerism and racism, although the likes of Wister had no need to look as far as Bayreuth for inspiration. Scientific theories of racial difference became prevalent in the United States in the years before the Civil War, in the writings of Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, and others.

Wister came from an artistic lineage. His grandmother was the Shakespearean actor Fanny Kemble; his mother was the essayist Sarah Wister, who memorably described a Wagner tribute in Paris in 1883. Henry James was a family friend. Young Owen studied music at Harvard with the composer John Knowles Paine, who disapproved of his student’s “indecorous and scandalous explosions of Wagnerian harmony.” Wister’s obsession had an irreverent strain; parodies of Rienzi and other Wagner works figured in the comic operas he helped to concoct at the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Harvard’s long-running revue. Theodore Roosevelt was Wister’s classmate. Later, Roosevelt would receive the dedication of The Virginian.

In 1882, Wister traveled to Europe to further his studies, and visited Bayreuth. Although he failed to meet Wagner—perhaps fortunately, since Evert Wendell, the Harvard chum with whom he was traveling, reported that the Meister was “looking rather cross”—Wister had a happy encounter at Wahnfried with Liszt, for whom his grandmother had written him a letter of introduction. When Wister played his piece Merlin and Vivien, Liszt called him “un talent prononcé.” As in the case of Lanier, Wister’s artistic longings ran up against family pressure, as his father pushed him toward a career in banking. In 1885, his health broke down, and he took a restorative trip out west, spending much of the summer at a ranch in Wyoming. (Roosevelt was already a believer in the rugged life.) The West had a galvanizing effect on Wister, and Wagnerian metaphors helped him translate his feelings into words:

The remains of the moon is giving just enough light to show the waving line of the prairie. Every now and then sheet lightning plays from some new quarter like a surprise. The train steamed away into the night + here we are. We passed this evening the most ominous and forbidding chasm of rocks I ever saw in any country. Deep down below a camp fire was burning. It all looked like Die Walküre.

In the same period, Wister asked his mother to send him his four-hand piano score of Meistersinger and also the music for “Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire,” which, he said, should be lying around the drawing room. Some years later, describing Yellowstone National Park, Wister said that the landscape reminded him of those moments in Wagner “when the whole orchestra seems to break into silver fragments of magic—sounds of harps and the violins all away up somewhere sustaining some theme you have heard before, but which now returns twice as magnificent.”

In 1891, just after the American frontier had been declared closed, Wister made a first attempt at writing a Western novel—an unfinished story of two Easterners on a hunting trip, titled The Romance of Chalkeye. One of the two sounds much like the author on his first trip west: “This extraordinary crystal silence! … It’s like the opening bars of Lohengrin.” His earthier companion dismisses Wagner as “a lot of damned noise.” The last line suggests that the experience of the West is leading Wister to become ashamed of his inner Harvard aesthete. Instead, he identifies with the rough male specimens he encounters on his journeys. Most of all, he is enamored of the cowboys—cow-punchers, in the lingo of the day. In his 1895 essay “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” which appeared with illustrations by the celebrated Western artist Frederic Remington, Wister compares cowboys to the knights of old: “In personal daring and in skill as to the horse, the knight and the cowboy are nothing but the same Saxon of different environments.” Native Americans, he writes elsewhere, are unfortunate members of an “inferior race” who fall before the conquering whites.

The narrator of The Virginian is, like the author, a fellow from the East. When the title character is introduced, Wister invents the iconography of the Western loner in a single stroke: “Lounging there at ease against the wall was a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips.” This figure exerts an almost erotic appeal, as the narrator admits—“a something potent to be felt, I should think, by man or woman.” We are in an American Eden, all history stripped away. As at the beginning of the Ring, we relive “creation’s first morning.”

The Virginian’s name is never disclosed. By withholding it and substituting monikers like “trustworthy man,” Wister gives his hero a legendary aura. Wagner’s nameless knight from a far-off land springs to mind. Like Lohengrin, The Virginian concerns a relationship between a reticent man and an inquisitive woman, but in this case the alliance has a happy ending: the Virginian gives up his free-roaming ways to marry Molly, a schoolteacher from Vermont. Because he remains unnamed to the end, Molly has avoided Elsa’s mistake of asking too many questions about her betrothed. The soul of the Anglo-Saxon male remains pure. The convention of the nameless Western hero would later find its apotheosis in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of spaghetti Westerns, in which Clint Eastwood plays the Man with No Name.

Amid the skillful tale-spinning, a more menacing agenda emerges. Wister not only cherishes the West as a land of unlimited possibility but upholds the Virginian as a superior exemplar of a superior race. Wister’s narrator lapses into strident editorials: “It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man … We decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, ‘Let the best man win, whoever he is.’” Embedded in this founding text of the Western genre is an unusually ugly articulation of the racist social-Darwinist philosophy that underlay so much of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. Although there is no evidence that Wagner incited such rants, the music supplied a mental soundtrack for Wister as he spun his cowboy fantasies.

WAGNERIAN SKYSCRAPERS

Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium in Chicago

The American city, too, became Wagnerian. In 1920, the critic Paul Rosenfeld suggested that the nation’s urban life might have been molded in the composer’s image:

The very masonry a river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody … American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being.

In London, Wagner saw “Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work.” He would have thought the same of New York and Chicago, with their crowded streets and jutting skylines. Yet his music spoke loudly to several presiding architects of the American metropolis—particularly to the Chicago School of John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, and Louis Sullivan. The city of the future, as these architects imagined it, would be a place not of soulless functionality but of ever-changing form and color. In Sullivan’s view, ancient values, “rhythmical, deep, and eternal,” would interpenetrate the modern. Structures such as the Wainwright Building, in St. Louis, and the Bayard Building, in New York, should have the noble mass of Gothic cathedrals, or give the impression of trees in a dense forest. The steel-frame building was “a thing rising from the earth as a unitary utterance, Dionysian in beauty.”

Root led the Chicago architects in embracing Wagner. A sometime church organist, he thrilled friends with his lively rendition of “The Ride of the Valkyries.” What roused him was not the might of the sound but its internal variety. In an 1883 essay, he called for a future “symphony of color” comparable to the nuances of musical language, in pursuit of the “complete unification of the arts for which Wagner labored.” Burnham, too, had musical leanings, and designed a home for Theodore Thomas’s Chicago Symphony. When Burnham died, in 1912, the Chicago orchestra responded to the news by playing Siegfried’s Funeral Music, as New York had done for Seidl. The Monadnock Building, Root and Burnham’s magnum opus, was originally to have been built of many-colored bricks, embodying the visual symphony; in the end, it became a uniform, unadorned purple-brown, heralding twentieth-century modernism. The construction methods underpinning early skyscrapers proved more influential than the semi-Wagnerian aesthetic that the pioneers wished to wrap around their steel skeletons.

Sullivan took nourishment from German philosophy, Transcendentalism, and the Pre-Raphaelites. In his youth, he saw Thomas conduct the Act III prelude of Lohengrin, and heard many more Wagner excerpts on arriving in Chicago. To quote his third-person memoir, Autobiography of an Idea: “He saw arise a Mighty Personality—a great Free Spirit, a Poet, a Master Craftsman, striding in power through a vast domain that was his own, that imagination and will had bodied forth out of himself. Suffice it—as useless to say—Louis became an ardent Wagnerite … his courage was ten-folded in this raw city by the Great Lake in the West.” In the late eighties and early nineties, strains of Wagner filled Sullivan’s studio, as the young Frank Lloyd Wright, one of Sullivan’s apprentices, attested: “He would often try to sing the leitmotifs for me and describe the scenes to which they belonged, as he sat at my drawing board.” Wright addressed Sullivan with the Bayreuthian epithet “Lieber Meister.”

In 1884 and 1885, the Met brought its Wagner to Chicago, setting off the usual hysteria. It was decided that Chicago should have its own major opera house. Sullivan and his partner, the German-Jewish émigré Dankmar Adler, received the commission to design it. The result was the Auditorium, the first major building in which Sullivan had a hand. The driving force behind the project was the progressive-leaning real-estate mogul Ferdinand Peck, who imagined a public space where people of all classes could congregate and imbibe the unifying tonic of great art. (Peck had been horrified by the Haymarket riot of 1886 and other signs of labor unrest.) As Joseph Siry has argued, Peck envisioned the Auditorium as a riposte to the Met, with its horseshoe of elite boxes. After a tour of European theaters, Peck and Adler settled on a more egalitarian fan-shaped seating plan, after the Festspielhaus model. Sullivan handled the ornamentation of the interior, using arching forms, gold-relief patterns, delicate mosaic work, and incandescent lighting to generate an atmosphere of enveloping warmth. Wagner is one of four figures portrayed in medallions to either side of the proscenium; the others are Haydn, Demosthenes, and Shakespeare.

In 1893, Adler and Sullivan unveiled an even more arresting color-symphony at the World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. Their Transportation Building, nearly a thousand feet long, was a prominent feature of the White City, the makeshift metropolis that arose on the Exposition grounds. The sea of white was broken by a polychromatic Golden Doorway, its predominantly crimson hues including some forty different tints. As the art historian Lauren Weingarden points out, the color scheme acted to diminish mass, to “dissolve enveloping surfaces,” to make the structure seem to hover. A guidebook to the Exposition stated: “The architects of the building have called its vari-colored effects ‘Wagnerian,’ and we may accept their ideas so far as to name this entrance the wedding-march of a ‘Lohengrin’—in other words, an unquestionably beautiful feature in an ensemble that is purposely devoid of entertainment and delight.”

The Golden Doorway has vanished, along with the rest of the White City, but Sullivan’s vari-colored aesthetic persists in the “jewel box” banks that he designed in his later years, when his reputation was in decline and commissions for large-scale projects eluded him. In towns across the Midwest, Sullivan pursued his dream of making buildings that vibrate with color over the course of the day. Echoing Root, he spoke of a “color symphony” or “color tone poem,” with “many shades of the strings and the wood winds and the brass.”

The exterior of the National Farmers’ Bank, in Owatonna, Minnesota, is an imposing red-brick box, its grand arched windows facing the town center. Orange and green hues give the interior an ethereal air, with stained glass filtering light from the sides and above. The Farmers & Merchants Union Bank, in Columbus, Wisconsin, is heavily ornamented on the outside, with eagles and lions standing guard; the interior is again much warmer, its stained-glass windows centered on abstract, swirling discs of many hues. Bank business is still conducted in both buildings; townspeople depositing checks must walk around tourists gazing upward in awe. Wagner’s Bayreuth was designed as a respite from capitalist clamor; Sullivan hoped to cast a wholesome light on the daily life of American commerce, as if the unsullied Rheingold were gleaming from the vaults.

DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

By the turn of the century, Wagner loomed large in American life, his operas laden with the neo-Gothic trappings that informed so much American architecture of the period. The master of the Gothic Revival, the Boston-based architect Ralph Adams Cram, identified himself as a “besotted Wagnerite,” seeing the composer as a foe of materialist decadence. He and his partner, Bertram Goodhue, built churches that dissented from the teeming sidewalks and streets around them, their interiors giving an exaggerated, almost cinematic sense of space. Goodhue remarked that St. Bartholomew’s, a neo-Byzantine church in New York, would “look more like Arabian Nights or the last act of Parsifal than any Christian church.” One could even hear Wagnerian strains ringing from bell towers. The carillon of Riverside Church, in New York, still marks the passing quarter-hours with a sequence based on the bell motif in Parsifal. It was donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., son of the Standard Oil tycoon.

Yet the “Wagner fever,” as a character in William Dean Howells’s 1889 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes calls it, spread only so far. The nation’s aspiration toward European grandeur, Parsifal Entertainments included, clashed with a contrary impulse to shrug off an effete, unmanly European inheritance. American popular culture was in ascendance, seeking its roots in homegrown folk traditions, and Wagner presented himself as an obvious target for insolent jibes. In Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith’s 1905 musical Miss Dolly Dollars, a millionaire heiress flouts the Parsifal fad at the Met:

Oh, I love those songs where “honey”

Is the only rhyme for “money”

They are better than old Parsifal to me.

Tin Pan Alley lyrics for Scott Joplin’s “Pine Apple Rag” follow a similar line:

Some people rave about Wagnerian airs,

Some say the Spring Song is divine,

Talk like that is out of season,

What I like is something pleasin’,

Pine Apple rag for mine …

In pop culture, Wagner was both a phenomenon to be emulated—he was, after all, a master of spectacle—and a rival to be defeated. This American Wagner complex will play out most obviously in Hollywood movies, but it is already evident in Owen Wister’s attempt to reconcile his love of Wagner and his adulation of cowboys. It also surfaces in the alert ambivalence of two earthy-minded American authors who repudiated Gilded Age pretension: Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.

Twain is often credited with a world-class barb: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” In fact, the humorist Bill Nye said it; Twain merely quoted it. An eager operagoer, Twain had his ups and downs with Wagner, emphasizing the downs for his readers. A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, relates one encounter: “We went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree,—otherwise an opera,—the one called Lohengrin. The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.”

In 1891, Twain trained his gaze on the juiciest high-culture target of all, undertaking a ten-day visit to Bayreuth. He reported on the experience in a rippingly funny newspaper article that first appeared under the title “Mark Twain at Bayreuth” and was later republished as “At the Shrine of St. Wagner.” Selective quotations of its sharpest jabs have made it seem a merciless takedown. It is, in fact, an oblique expression of embarrassed fandom, nearly as conflicted as Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner.

The essay begins with a respectful description of the Festspielhaus, “the model theater of the world.” Twain’s response to the Parsifal prelude is rhapsodic, almost delirious: “Out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments.” The visitor has the impression that Wagner was “conscious in his grave of what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain.” The music is “exquisite,” “delicious.” The problems start with the singing. Twain wishes that he could listen to Wagner with the vocal parts omitted, so that he could bask in the orchestration. Despite the absence of “anything that might with confidence be called rhythm, or tune, or melody,” Twain enjoys the first act all the same. Later, he falters. “Seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.”

The next day brings Tannhäuser, which, Twain says, “has always driven me mad with ignorant delight.” The Pilgrims’ Chorus sends him into rhapsodic mode again: “music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.” Tristan is more of a struggle. Twain becomes preoccupied with the almost inhuman attentiveness of the audience around him. The most famous passage ensues:

This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some and have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

Less widely quoted are the sentences that follow: “But by no means do I ever overlook or minimize the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.”

When Twain hears Parsifal again, he resists no longer. Instead, his disdain falls on those who tell him afterward that second-rate artists had substituted for the first cast. In an abrupt reversal, he announces, “I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money back on those two operas.” In all, the essay is the record of a reluctant conversion—another inverted panegyric, like Nietzsche’s. That it has so often been mistaken for a frontal attack indicates the degree to which Twain was hedging his bets on the question of America’s relationship with European culture. Even though Bayreuth won him over, he knew which way the native wind was blowing. Some years later, he reverted to an anti-Wagner line, comparing the composer unfavorably to the blackface minstrel shows he saw in his youth. In his autobiography, he wrote: “If I could have the nigger show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera.” Twain appears unaware of the irony of posing a choice between Wagner’s operas and homegrown racist entertainment.

Whitman felt no embarrassment over his love for the European musical tradition, which he considered essential to his American art. “But for the opera I could never have written Leaves of Grass,” he once said. He was speaking not of Wagner but of Italian bel canto, which was the mainstay of his younger years. By the time the cultus took hold, Whitman was no longer attending opera regularly. He said to Horace Traubel in 1888: “I have got rather off the field—the Wagner opera has had its vogue only in these later years since I got out of the way of going to the theater.” But he mentioned hearing “bits here and there at concerts, from orchestras, bands, which have astonished, ravished me, like the discovery of a new world.”

Poet and composer had much in common. Whitman’s irregular, ever-rolling rhythms seem the American equivalent of “endless melody”; his incantations of signature phrases ring out like leitmotifs; his creed of all-embracingness—“I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds”—resembles Tristan and Isolde’s cry of “I myself am the world.” For all his rude robustness, Whitman was not immune to Liebestod sentiments. “I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most,” he wrote in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass. “What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?”

The elderly Whitman could not help noticing how often his name was paired with Wagner’s. He told Traubel: “So many of my friends say Wagner is Leaves of Grass done into music that I begin to suspect there must be something in it.” As early as 1860, the freethinker Moncure Conway—who, after the composer’s death, would eulogize him as the prophet of a new social order—connected Whitman’s line “There was a child went forth every day” with the opening chords of the Tannhäuser overture. In Britain, Edward Dannreuther inserted several Whitman references into his 1873 book Richard Wagner: His Tendencies and Theories. And William Sloane Kennedy named Whitman the “Wagner of poets”: “As Wagner abandoned the cadences of the old sonatas and symphonies,—occurring at the end of every four, eight, or sixteen bars,—so Whitman has abandoned the measured beat of the old rhymed see-saw poetry.”

Although Whitman never saw a full Wagner production, he accepted the idea that the operas were “constructed on my lines”—that they “attach themselves to the same theories of art that have been responsible for Leaves of Grass.” In 1881, he wrote an essay with the Wagnerian title “The Poetry of the Future,” in which he bids his colleagues to “arouse and initiate more than to define or finish.” Whitman declares, as van Gogh would do later in the same decade, that music has taken the lead: “The music of the present, Wagner’s, Gounod’s, even the later Verdi’s, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion.” Poetry, by contrast, is stuck in outdated values of “verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure.”

All the same, Whitman hesitated. “Do you figure out Wagner to be a force making for democracy or the opposite?” he asked. His longtime friend William Douglas O’Connor argued for the former. “O’Connor swears to the democracy—swears to it with a big oath. Others have said to me that Wagner’s art was distinctly the art of a caste—for the few. What am I to believe?”

4

GRAIL TEMPLE
Esoteric, Decadent, and Satanic Wagner

Reginald Machell, Parsifal

Here time becomes space,” the sage old Gurnemanz says in Act I of Parsifal. A foolish, lawless lad has blundered into the secret realm of the Holy Grail. Even though he has introduced himself by senselessly killing a noble swan, his arrival appears to be no accident, and Gurnemanz offers to lead him to the Grail Temple, where the Liebesmahl, the communal love feast of the Grail Knights, is about to be held. No path will show the way to the sacred place. Only one whom the Grail has chosen can find the route. Parsifal takes a few steps, and says, “I am hardly moving, yet I already seem to have come far.”

There follows an orchestral passage that the libretto designates as Verwandlungsmusik, or Transformation Music. As Gurnemanz and Parsifal tread the hidden path to the temple, bells sound repeatedly from the pit—the notes C, G, A, E, as in John D. Rockefeller’s Riverside Church carillon. The inaugural Parsifal production of 1882 used a memorable device: as the singers walked in place, a panorama unscrolled behind them, giving the illusion of great distances traversed. The illusion is also musical: the hypnotic repetition of the bell figure, through shimmering orchestration, conjures an “immense horizon,” as Baudelaire said of the Grail music in Lohengrin. The march of industry in the nineteenth century had led to a pervasive feeling of an accelerating, shrinking world. When, in 1838, the steamer Sirius crossed the Atlantic in a mere seventeen days, the New York Morning Herald famously spoke of the “annihilation of time and space.” A similar phrase entered the lexicon of Marx, describing the global grasp of capitalism. Parsifal supplied the opposite sensation: time slowing, space expanding, the fleeting moment stretched into eternity.

Victorian odes to Parsifal tended to glance over the sheer strangeness of what happens once Gurnemanz and Parsifal reach the temple. First the Knights of the Grail enter, taking their places for the feast. The boys’ voices admired by Verlaine float down from the temple dome, delivering unchildlike sentiments: “With joyful heart let my blood now be shed for the redeeming hero.” The Grail is brought forth, covered in its shrine. Squires also carry King Amfortas, the suffering ruler wounded by sin. He is a variant on the figure of the Fisher King, whose fertile realm becomes a Waste Land when he falls sick. Wagner’s Amfortas awaits the “pure fool” who will cure him—Parsifal, as yet unready for the task.

There is a long, lugubrious silence. Amfortas is weary of the ritual he must perform again and again. Each time he uncovers the Grail, the miracle of the Savior’s blood gives sustenance to all, but his own wound bleeds anew. “Let me die,” he cries. A sepulchral voice within the temple, sounding “as if from a tomb,” commands Amfortas to do his duty. This is Titurel, Amfortas’s father and the founder of the order. Hundreds of years old, too feeble to rise from his bed, he relies on his son to lead the ceremony, which prolongs his life. Amfortas sings a monologue of dire lamentation—“Take my inheritance from me, / close the wound”—and then performs his office. Darkness descends. The chalice glows red. Amfortas’s blood flows. Titurel cries, “O heavenly rapture!” This grisly sacrament raises the question of what kind of sect the Grail Knights really are. Titurel could be mistaken for a vampire.

In Act II, the evil sorcerer Klingsor, who engineered Amfortas’s fall from grace, attempts to ensnare Parsifal as well. When the troupe of Flower Maidens fails to seduce the newcomer, Klingsor presses into service the enigmatic Kundry, who has been wandering the earth for centuries after having laughed at Christ. Kundry, too, falls short, whereupon Parsifal vanquishes Klingsor and reclaims the Holy Spear—“the lance that pierced the Flank supreme,” as Verlaine calls it. In Act III, Parsifal reappears in the province of the Grail, clad in black, and finds that the situation has deteriorated further. Amfortas can no longer bear to repeat the Grail rite; Titurel is dead. Nevertheless, Gurnemanz discloses to Parsifal the miraculous vision of the Good Friday Spell, in which “all creation gives thanks, all that blooms and soon fades away.” A sinuous melody of grace courses through the strings, then drifts into a harmonic haze.

Suddenly, “as if from far away,” the bells of Monsalvat begin to ring. Their fixed tones clash against the diminished chord on which the strings have landed. The bells are thus turned against their nature and made to sound baleful. The Knights stage a second procession, one group bearing Amfortas and the other bearing Titurel’s corpse. When the bells ring again, gnashing dissonances in the orchestra crash against them. The Grail music has become funereal, catastrophic, demonic.

Once Parsifal has touched the Spear to Amfortas’s wound, a rite of healing unfolds. The opera ends with glowing affirmations of the key of A-flat major, the same in which it began. Yet the shadows of the journey linger in the mind. Wagner’s own comments make clear that Parsifal is no bland exercise in moral uplift. “The Savior on the Cross, blood everywhere” was his concise summary. The night before the first performance, he is said to have issued this exhortation: “Children, tomorrow it can finally start! Tomorrow the devil is let loose! Therefore, all of you who are taking part, seek that the devil enters into you, and you who are in the audience, seek that you receive him properly.” While Wagner was no doubt speaking metaphorically, such tremors of diabolism led the American critic James Huneker, a renegade Nietzschean, to write a story in which a character asks, “What is Parsifal but a version of the Black Mass?”

Parsifal is certainly a Mass of a different color. It is a religious work—Wagner called it his “stage consecration festival play”—yet it belongs to no one religion. Indeed, despite the claims of the Anglo-American genteel tradition, it has an adversarial relationship with organized faith, at least in its modern form. Back in 1849, Wagner had dreamed of a “new religion,” one that would smash the materialist values that imprisoned art, politics, and spirituality alike. By the time he began composing Parsifal, he was no longer remotely a revolutionary, but his antimaterialist slant remained. His 1880 essay “Religion and Art” raises the hope that art can renew worn-out faiths: “One could say that when religion becomes artificial, it falls to art to save the core of religion, by grasping the figurative value of those mythic symbols that religion wants us to believe as literally true, and revealing through an ideal presentation the deep truth hidden in them.” Christianity and Buddhism are the greatest of religions, preaching “renunciation of the world and its passions,” yet secular society holds them captive. They can regain their original strength only if they recognize the unity of living things under the sign of compassion.

Although the later Nietzsche considered Parsifal a capitulation to Christianity, he better explained the composer’s stance in an 1875 note: “If Wagner takes up Germanic-Christian myth one moment, seafaring legends another, then Buddhistic myths, then pagan-German ones, then the Protestant bourgeoisie, it is clear that he stands free of the religious meaning of these myths, and requires the same of his listeners.” The Christianity in Parsifal is obvious. The ceremony of the Grail in Act I is a Eucharist, and when a penitent Kundry washes Parsifal’s feet in Act III she is channeling Mary of Bethany in the New Testament. But elements of other traditions crowd in. “Redemption to the Redeemer,” the gnomic motto of the work, recalls the formula “Salvator salvandus,” or the Savior saved, in Gnostic teachings. The Good Friday Spell intimates a pagan celebration of nature; the Resurrection carries on age-old cycles of death and rebirth. The no less primordial Kundry earns the nicknames Urteufelin (“Arch-she-devil”) and Höllenrose (“Rose of hell”). “Unfortunately, all of our Christian legends have an external, pagan origin,” Wagner wrote in 1859.

Eastern traditions had nearly equal weight in Wagner’s thinking. He probably first learned of them through his brother-in-law, the philologist Hermann Brockhaus, who translated Sanskrit and Persian. Schopenhauer’s meditations on Eastern concepts pulled Wagner in deeper. In 1856, he began planning a Buddhist drama called Die Sieger, or The Victors, which would have told of the maiden Prakriti’s love for the monk Ananda and her overcoming of desire under the Buddha’s guidance—a story mentioned in the essay Wagner was writing the day he died. The theme of lust turned to love, of self-seeking becoming compassion, passed into Parsifal. Traces of Hinduism and Islam also surface. Ronald Perlwitz proposes that Parsifal’s misdeed in Act I, his killing of the swan, is modeled on a passage in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, which condemns the murder of a crane. Islamic influences reside in the medieval Parzival romance of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the opera’s primary source. The Grail there takes the form of a precious stone; Wagner plausibly compared it to the veneration of the Kaaba at Mecca. He erred, though, in thinking that the name Parsifal was derived from the Persian for “pure fool.”

The philosopher Ernst Bloch handily summarizes Parsifal as “Christian-Buddhist-Rosicrucian art-religion or religious art.” Poised between blinding light and devouring night, it rose as a supreme, enigmatic symbol over the epoch of the fin de siècle, when artists everywhere felt that some revelation was at hand. For some, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth—until 1903, the one place where the sacred play of Parsifal could be seen—was less about worshipping Wagner than about undertaking a private quest toward hidden worlds. These journeys had many different destinations—Catholic mystery, Gnostic riddle, Buddhist enlightenment, Black Mass—but they began with a departure from the world as it was, an escape from Nibelheim.

It was the age of esotericism, occultism, Satanism, Spiritism, Theosophy, Swedenborgism, Mesmerism, Martinism, and Kabbalism. Reinventions or fabrications of medieval sects multiplied: the Knights Templar, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and various Rosicrucian orders, which sought to revive Renaissance alchemical and necromantic lore of obscure origin. Not only fringe gurus but also denizens of high society were dabbling in séances, tarot cards, astrology, and homeopathy. A large number of writers, artists, and musicians took an interest in one or another of these movements; the Symbolists, including the Mallarmé circle, were especially prone. They might have agreed with William Butler Yeats, who saw occult happenings as “metaphors for poetry”—so spirits from the other side told him.

Holbrook Jackson, writing in 1913, associated the mystical revival with a “revolt against rationalism” and a “salvation by sin”—ideas implicit in Parsifal. The spiritualist movements were one more face of the resistance to industrial capitalism that manifested itself in the underworld tableaux of Baudelaire, the neo-primitivism of Gauguin, and the archaism of the Pre-Raphaelites. The advent of positivism, social Darwinism, and other mechanistic explanations for human behavior brought a countervailing urge to restore the dimension of the miraculous. The occultists also rejected dualities of good and evil, seeking a more complex balance of darkness and light. Nietzsche’s jeremiads against conventional morality were widely read, as was Mikhail Bakunin’s posthumous book God and the State, which portrays Satan as “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds.”

Wagner blended readily with the mystical milieu. Édouard Schuré, a leading French explicator of arcane practices and non-Western religions, acclaimed him as “a fallen Lucifer” and “the greatest unconscious occultist who ever lived.” Gérard Encausse, who took the pseudonym Papus and co-founded the modern Martinist order, said that “the world of enchantments has confided all of its secrets” to Wagner. Rudolf Steiner, the leader of Anthroposophy, declared: “That there is in Wagner and in his works a very large measure of occult power, is something that mankind is gradually learning to realize.” In 1901, Aleister Crowley, the British magus, addressed the composer thus:

O MASTER of the ring of love, O lord

Of all desires, and king of all the stars,

O strong magician …

Crowley asserted that Parsifal had been created at the bidding of the German occultist Theodor Reuss, the Outer Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, or Order of Oriental Templars. Wagner’s name appears on a fantastical list of members of the order, alongside Siddartha, Osiris, Orpheus, Mohammed, Merlin, Dante, Goethe, and Nietzsche.

The quest for mystical truth produced reams of nonsense, but it also inspired thrilling imaginative leaps—indeed, some of the earliest feats of artistic modernism. Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick, in The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art, describe how the Symbolists undermined conventional modes of representation in an effort to “access the divine directly.” John Bramble, in Modernism and the Occult, notes that artistic avant-gardes often patterned themselves on the esoteric orders of the day, sometimes becoming indistinguishable from them. Art in the cultic mode, which would persist deep into the twentieth century, had no greater exemplar than the Sorcerer of Bayreuth.

ROSE + CROIX

Joséphin Péladan

After Wagner’s death, Bayreuth faced an uncertain future. Parsifal drew less than full houses in 1883 and 1884—a sign the festival could not subsist on one work alone. When Cosima Wagner assumed control, she expanded the repertory, adding Tristan in 1886 and Meistersinger in 1888. By the end of the decade, the festival had found a steady footing. Cosima, an Italian-born French-Hungarian who spoke fluent German and English, knew that Bayreuth’s future depended on an international audience, and she proved adept at obtaining one. The guest lists for 1888 included the composers Giacomo Puccini, Ferruccio Busoni, Max Reger, and Johann Strauss, Jr.; the rising musical revolutionary Claude Debussy, who occasionally visited occult circles; a raft of eminent Bostonians, including Isabella Stewart Gardner and Bernard Berenson; Édouard Dujardin and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, of the Revue wagnérienne; the photographer Alfred Stieglitz; the architect and stage designer Adolphe Appia; and the Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff.

Conspicuous in the crowd that summer was Joséphin Péladan—novelist, playwright, art critic, and performance artist avant la lettre. Péladan habitually went about in a flowing white robe, an azure or black velvet jacket, a lace ruff, and an Astrakhan hat, which, in conjunction with his bushy head of hair and double-pointed beard, gave him the look of a Middle Eastern potentate. Perhaps on account of that costume, he failed to gain admittance to Wahnfried, but he became a fervent Wagnerite all the same. Three hearings of Parsifal, he later said, led him to his calling as a Rosicrucian mage: “The renovation of the Rose + Croix was born at Bayreuth, was born of Bayreuth!” Although he had doubts about the festival, he cherished it as a place free of cynicism, where “one goes in search of emotions and not epigrams.” If not for the German language, he said, it would be the loveliest place on earth.

Péladan was born in Lyon, in 1858, into a family steeped in esoterica. His father, Louis-Adrien, was a conservative Catholic who tried to establish a Cult of the Wound of the Left Shoulder of Our Savior Jesus Christ. Péladan’s older brother, Adrien, wrote a medical text describing how the brain subsists on unused sperm that takes the form of vital fluid. When Adrien died prematurely, of accidental strychnine poisoning, his brother propagated his ideas, arguing that the intellect can thrive only when the sexual impulse is suppressed. The Péladans were reactionary in their politics, detesting democracy and demanding the restoration of the monarchy. Péladan differed from many other occultists in couching his Rosicrucian rhetoric as an extension of authentic Catholic doctrine.

He made his name first as an art critic, inveighing against naturalism and Impressionism, both of which he considered banal. “I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy,” he said. His model painter was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who, in a manner akin to Pre-Raphaelitism, rendered neoclassical subjects in archaic style, flattening perspectives and whitening colors. “What he paints has neither place nor date,” Péladan wrote of Puvis. “It is from everywhere and always.” At the same time, he had a taste for the lurid, enjoying the nastily glittering Salomé pictures of Gustave Moreau and the gruesome caricatures of Félicien Rops. Péladan singled out for praise Rops’s Les Sataniques, etchings of visibly aroused demons penetrating and killing women. Such pendulum swings between piety and depravity were typical of the fin-de-siècle milieu.

In 1884, Péladan published his first novel, Supreme Vice—the initial installment in what turned out to be a twenty-one-volume cycle titled La Décadence latine. A magician named Magus Mérodack is pitted against embodiments of decadent society, notably the domineering, sphinxlike Princess Leonora d’Este. A flagrant misogynist, Péladan often saw women as vessels of satanic energy. He attributed to Rops the saying “Man puppet of woman, woman puppet of the devil.” Supreme Vice had a considerable success, despite its obscure and inconclusive narrative. Crucially, it caught the eye of the poet Stanislas de Guaita, who began exchanging ideas with Péladan about the restorative capacity of magic. By the time Péladan arrived in Bayreuth, in 1888, he had joined forces with Guaita to form a Rosicrucian society called the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose + Cross.

Mystical circles were prone to constant internecine warfare, and even the smallest sects found ways to subdivide into still tinier ones. By 1890, Péladan and Guaita were parting ways, mainly over Catholic doctrine: the one adhered to strict beliefs, the other inclined more toward Kabbalism, Buddhism, and paganism. (Guaita’s thinking was actually closer to the syncretism of Parsifal, though he showed little interest in Wagner.) Péladan proceeded to found the Order of the Catholic Rose + Croix of the Temple and the Grail, dubbing himself Le Sâr Péladan, after the Akkadian word for “king.” He published a book titled How One Becomes a Mage, and let it be known that he had completed the syllabus. He informed Félix Faure, the president of the Republic, that he had the gift of “seeing and hearing at the greatest distance, applicable to enemy councils and suppressing espionage.” To the Minister of Public Instruction and Beaux Arts, he wrote that he had “reforged Nothung.” He began one lecture by saying, “People of Nîmes, I have only to pronounce a certain formula for the earth to open and swallow you.”

Péladan’s trip to Bayreuth yielded a novel titled The Victory of the Husband, the sixth book in the Décadence cycle. The preface offers “greetings and glory to you, Richard Wagner, thaumaturge and discoverer of the third mode, conqueror and emperor of the Western Theater!” The plot concerns the love of Izel and Adar: she, the adopted daughter of a wealthy Avignon priest; he, a young genius aghast at the stupidity of his time. They speak “in Wagner,” styling themselves Siegmund and Sieglinde. When they honeymoon at Bayreuth, one of the more stupefying Wagner Scenes in literature ensues. During a performance of Tristan, the newlyweds cannot restrain themselves and begin making love. “Tristan! Isolde!” the lovers cry onstage. “Adar! Izel!” the lovers murmur in the audience, possibly to the irritation of their neighbors. As their lips lock together, there is a salty taste of blood.

On the question of Parsifal, however, the lovers diverge. For Izel, the opera is too “chaste, sweet, and calm.” For Adar, it opens the door to a new mystic consciousness. He goes to study with a sinister Nuremberg sorcerer named Doctor Sexthental and drifts away from his bride. Sexthental, sensing an opportunity, projects himself astrally into Izel’s chambers, in the form of an incubus. The initiate defeats this incursion, but marital strife persists. Adar must renounce his magic—“I resign the august pentacle of the Macrocosm”—to regain Izel’s love.

Wagner figures in various other Péladan novels. In Le Panthée, a starving composer stoops to playing piano at a resort; when he is told that his choice of Tristan is agitating the clientele, he defiantly launches into Siegfried’s Funeral Music. In The Androgyne, an angelically feminine thirteen-year-old boy improvises on Beethoven and Wagner, “sounding the bells of the Grail after a phrase from the Pathétique Sonata.” And in The Gynander, another androgyne, Tammuz, makes it his mission to convert “gynanders”—Péladan’s term for lesbians—to heterosexuality. His final triumph comes when he performs the feat of generating replicas of himself, each of whom seduces and marries a wayward lesbian. As an orchestra plays the wedding march from Lohengrin and music from Walküre, the brides fall to worshipping a giant phallus. Thus summarized, Péladan’s writing sounds daft. But it is impressively daft, and had many admirers in its day. Anatole France, Paul Valéry, André Gide, and André Breton read him with pleasure. Verlaine called him “bizarre but of great distinction.”

In 1892, Péladan found a new identity as an artistic impresario, inaugurating the Salons de la Rose + Croix. The intermingling of the arts at these annual affairs—painting, sculpture, theater, music—anticipated the mixed-media happenings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. John Bramble goes so far as to say that the Salon pioneered the “religion of modern art.” What Péladan took from the “superhuman Wagner” was, above all, the idea that the artist should be “a priest, a king, a magus.” At the Salon, Péladan wrote, “there will unfold intellectual rites as noble as the celebrated ones at Bayreuth … The Ideal will have its temple and its knights.” The opening ceremony was to have taken the form of a Solemn Mass of the Holy Spirit at St.-Germain l’Auxerrois, with excerpts from Parsifal sounding on the organ. Wary clerics withheld permission, on the grounds that Wagner was Protestant. So Péladan and his cohort repaired to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, where they held aloft a rose crossed with a dagger, to the bafflement of ordinary parishioners. At the exhibition itself, which occupied the Galerie Durand-Ruel, brass players intoned the Parsifal prelude.

The Salons continued annually until 1897, attracting large crowds and voluminous commentary. Such luminaries as Mallarmé and Verlaine paid their respects. Yet Péladan never won the confidence of the artistic community at large. He alienated several leading figures, including Puvis, by prematurely advertising their participation. The end result was a somewhat indiscriminate mix of stylistic schools and levels of accomplishment. Péladan complicated his task by issuing strenuous restrictions and regulations. He forbade history paintings, still lifes, seascapes, “everything humorous,” and “all representations of contemporary life, whether private or public.” (Lest anyone miss the anti-naturalist agenda, a poster for a later Salon showed a Perseus-like hero holding up the severed head of Émile Zola.) Architectural entries were discouraged, “that art having died in 1789.” Female artists were ostensibly excluded, “following Magical law,” although at least five women exhibited under pseudonyms—including the arch-Wagnériste Judith Gautier, who contributed a relief sculpture titled “Kundry, Rose of Hell.”

In the midst of the first Salon, Péladan feuded with his chief financial supporter, Antoine de La Rochefoucauld, who held the title of Archonte des Beaux-Arts. The point of contention was Péladan’s play The Son of the Stars, which told of a shepherd-poet being initiated as a magus. The Montmartre composer Erik Satie wrote astonishing, borderline-atonal music for the premiere—another instance of mystical impulses leading into uncharted regions. When La Rochefoucauld decided to cut back on Salon events, including two performances of The Son of the Stars, Péladan proclaimed a schism and arranged a disruption of a concert that remained on the schedule—a Wagner program conducted by Charles Lamoureux. During the Siegfried Idyll, an ally of Péladan’s, ineffectively disguised by a thick beard, began shouting imprecations, calling the Archonte “a felon, a coward, a thief.” The heckler was ejected, causing a glass door to shatter and the musicians to fall silent. Cries of “Vive Péladan!” were drowned out by “Vive La Rochefoucauld!” Somehow, the concert proceeded to its close—the final scene of Parsifal.

Péladan’s notoriety dwindled as the nineties went on. Satirists reduced him to caricature: Jean de Tinan’s 1897 novel Mistress of Aesthetes features a Grand Master Sotaukrack, author of The Sphinx with Mauve Eyes. By the time of his death, in 1918, Péladan seemed a perfumed relic. Still, he was never forgotten, his influence surfacing in unexpected places. Ezra Pound consulted Péladan’s The Secret of the Troubadours; Wassily Kandinsky cited Le Sâr’s dictum that “the artist is a ‘king’ … not only because he has great power, but also because his responsibility is great.” Later in the century, Joseph Beuys read Péladan with interest. What caught these artists’ attention was Péladan’s faith in the alchemy of the creative act. In 2017, the much-mocked magus received belated vindication in New York, as the Guggenheim Museum, housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s upward-spiraling modernist temple, presented a re-creation of the Salons de la Rose + Croix. Fittingly, Parsifal emanated from the loudspeakers.

BRUGES-LA-MORTE

In his headiest moments, Le Sâr imagined that he could make the world of the Grail real. He spoke of a “Monsalvat restored”—some solitary, ruined abbey that would be consecrated for his order, its walls ringing with strains of Aeschylus, the Ninth Symphony, and Titurel’s funeral music. During a visit to Belgium, where his ideas intrigued local artists and writers, Péladan was told that a wealthy American had offered to donate an old church as the site for a new Grail Temple. If his account is to be believed, and most likely it is not, Péladan was returning from Brussels to Paris to meet with the supporter, Parsifal resounding in his head, when customs inspectors confronted him at the border. They sized up his exotic dress—the hat, the boots, the cloak—and deemed him unhygienic. When an undeclared package of Egyptian cigarettes was found in his luggage, Péladan was detained for some hours, missing the assignation with the mysterious American. “Wagner alone suffered such hatred,” he wrote.

Fernand Khnopff, Isolde, 1905

Belgium would have been a logical place for a new Monsalvat, since the nation was to some extent an operatic creation. In the summer of 1830, the revolutionary overtones of Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici, a work that Wagner appreciated, incited riots during and after a performance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, the venerable opera house of Brussels; those riots are credited with setting off the Belgian Revolution, which led to independence from Dutch rule. La Monnaie was later the site of one of Europe’s staunchest Wagner cults. Performances of Lohengrin held particular attraction, since that opera is set in the vicinity of Antwerp. It received its Belgian premiere in 1870, long before it arrived in Paris. In the years when Wagner was still scarce in France—only in the nineties did his operas begin to enter the repertory—intellectuals often traveled to Brussels to hear what they were missing.

As the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau mingled with centuries-old Gothic and Baroque architecture, Belgian cities took on a dreamlike air. By night, they could be mistaken for opera sets. Such is the mood of Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-morte, or Bruges the Dead, in which the paralyzed sorrow of the widowed protagonist is of a piece with the town’s ascetic, brooding atmosphere. The Belgian architects and designers who helped to invent Art Nouveau often mined Wagner for ideas. Henry van de Velde, a harbinger of modernist design, set himself the goal of making a Gesamtkunstwerk out of the domestic sphere. The art historian Katherine Kuenzli writes that van de Velde’s fastidiously harmonized Bloemenwerf villa, on the outskirts of Brussels, “shifted the setting for aesthetic experience from the mythical stage of Wagner’s festival theater at Bayreuth to the realm of everyday life.”

An atmosphere of withered medieval romance pervades the work of Maurice Maeterlinck, the most renowned Belgian writer of the period. Although Maeterlinck was confessedly ignorant of music, he knew Wagner’s librettos and took Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël as a model. Maeterlinck’s 1892 play Pelléas et Mélisande, immortalized in operatic form by Debussy, shares traits with Tristan and Parsifal. It is a tale of forbidden love set in a decaying kingdom, with the enigmatic, Kundry-like Mélisande emerging from a Symbolist forest. Maeterlinck’s people, in contrast to Wagner’s, are aggressively depersonalized, at the mercy of nameless fates. Maeterlinck once wrote: “It may be necessary to remove the living being entirely from the scene.”

The leading Belgian art journals, like their French counterparts, named Wagner as a fellow combatant in the war against bourgeois taste. The progressive periodical L’Art moderne wrote of a “valiant Wagnerian army” doing battle with ignorance, indifference, and routine. In 1883, the critic Octave Maus, co-founder of L’Art moderne, took the lead in organizing Les XX, or the Twenty, an artistic alliance whose original roster included Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor. They were later joined by Rops, van de Velde, and two sympathetic Frenchmen, Paul Signac and Odilon Redon. With the exception of Rops, all were Wagnerites, and Khnopff was the most avid of the lot.

A child of the haute bourgeoisie, Khnopff spent part of his youth in Bruges, absorbing the city’s timeless atmosphere. He later provided the frontispiece for Bruges-la-morte—an Ophelia-like figure floating amid weeds on a canal. Having made his name as a society portraitist, Khnopff ventured into the Péladan circle in the mid-eighties. Supreme Vice enjoyed a Belgian vogue, and Khnopff was one of several XX painters who responded to it. An 1885 drawing based on the novel showed a female nude, representing Leonora d’Este, in the company of a sphinx. This caused a commotion, because Khnopff transposed the face of the soprano Rose Caron—then preparing to sing in Meistersinger at La Monnaie—onto the naked figure. When Caron protested, Khnopff destroyed the work, although he later made another on the same theme. The artist went on to illustrate several of Péladan’s novels; in the frontispiece of Istar, vegetation is entwined around the crotch of a Venus whose hands appear to be bound above her head.

Khnopff first visited Bayreuth in 1888, the same season that gave Péladan his Eureka moment. He later assisted in the design of opera productions at La Monnaie, including its 1914 production of Parsifal. The young Austrian composer and pianist Alma Schindler, later to find fame as Alma Mahler-Werfel, met Khnopff in Vienna in 1900 and wrote in her diary that the painter “knows and loves every note of Tristan.” After Schindler played the “Prelude and Liebestod” at the piano, Khnopff picked up the vocal score of the opera and pointed to his favorite passages. “He dug his fingernails forcefully into the vocal score and shouted like a man possessed,” Schindler wrote. “Suddenly he said: ‘I must stop, otherwise I’ll get depressed.’”

The chief Wagnerian work in Khnopff’s catalogue is a 1905 drawing titled Isolde, in which the Irish princess tilts her head back and looks out with vacant, lustrous eyes. Alma Schindler’s diary affords a clue to its meaning. The passage in Tristan that Khnopff raved about occurs just after the lovers have drunk the potion. As it takes hold, in a recapitulation of the prelude, Isolde utters the word “Tristan,” over a descending minor-seventh interval. “Khnopff wants to make a free translation of these two notes into color,” Schindler writes. “Of Tristan only an arm—of her perhaps just the face—but all expression concentrated in that face—all the torment, pride, love, hate, every nerve-fibre a-tremble.” Isolde might realize that idea, except that the torment and fury are absent. The heroine is oddly serene, her arched eyebrows and faint smile conveying the hauteur of a woman who knows how men will act. There is something startlingly modern about her: Isolde surveying an urban salon.

If Khnopff partook of Wagnerian esoterica with aristocratic detachment, his younger contemporary Jean Delville, a brash spirit from a poor background, plunged into the thick of the occult, executing hallucinatory visions with almost neoclassical clarity. In 1896, Delville inaugurated the Salons d’Art idéaliste, which he modeled on Péladan’s Rosicrucian salons and on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The first exhibition featured his own Treasures of Satan, in which a muscular Lucifer equipped with a massive head of red hair and elongated tentacles hovers over a writhing mass of nude male and female bodies, their faces more ecstatic than agonized. While Delville, like Péladan, warned of the dangers of uninhibited lust, his version of Hell hints at the Venusian pleasures savored by Baudelaire.

Delville not only idolized the Meister but enlisted him in the battle against naturalism. “The destiny of the Wagnerian work,” he wrote, “will be to annihilate once and for all the naturalist muck where Zola has sat for nearly a half-century.” Like Péladan, Delville felt that realist art foreclosed the possibility of spiritual growth and locked the viewer in the industrial present. Delville’s 1887 drawing Tristan et Yseult is more mystical than erotic—an “animastic union of male and female,” according to the art historian Brendan Cole. Tristan lies on his back, his body in shadow. Isolde is draped over him, one hand holding aloft an empty cup. The bodies together form an upward-arching, triangular mass. Light streams from behind the chalice. This tableau captures the drinking of the potion in Act I, though it also prefigures the opera’s ending: Tristan has a lifeless look, Isolde seems transported. The luminous cup could be mistaken for the Grail.

Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde, 1885

It fell to Odilon Redon to summon on canvas the sublime menace of Parsifal—Delville having fallen short with a kitschy picture of a fleshy youth in curly blond locks. Redon belonged to the Paris vanguard, but he found early recognition among les XX in Brussels. Confronted with the serene severed heads of Redon’s lithographic series In the Dream, the Belgian critic Jules Destrée, later a leading socialist politician, made reference to certain phrases in Wagner that “leave you shivering and troubled for a long time.” In a similar vein, Redon’s bouquets, with their seductive explosions of color against vacant backgrounds, reminded the French decadent author Jean Lorrain of the Flower Maidens in Parsifal, blooming in oblivion.

Redon once criticized Henri Fantin-Latour for producing “pale and soft sketches on the poems of the musician Wagner.” His own Wagner pictures are cryptic, unearthly, and—as Téodor de Wyzewa said in the Revue wagnérienne—“terrifying.” There are three of Brünnhilde. The first, which appeared in an 1885 issue of the Revue, is a lithograph of a boyish Valkyrie amid the fire of battle, her shield raised, her eyes wide with fierce concentration. The second, from 1894, shows a subdued warrior, her hair streaming in more feminine style, her face drawn into a mask of sadness. (Mallarmé owned a copy of this work.) Around 1905, Redon created a turbulent pastel in which Brünnhilde rides a dark purple horse that is rearing up into a sapphire sky. A mass of gold-brown brushwork could be either earth or fire. If this is the climax of Götterdämmerung, it is a coolly rapt vision of the world to come.

Redon’s two renderings of Parsifal are two decades apart and seem to span a lifetime. In a lithograph from 1891, the hero has large, dark eyes, a long, straight nose, and thin, determined lips, his left hand clutching a spear that looks more like a long arrow. The critic Ernest Verlant elaborated on the image: “His head is anointed, his feet sprayed with perfume; he has been crowned King of the Grail, master of august rites, initiate of Christ. Mystical promise is fulfilled in him; he is ‘the pure one, the holy soul rendered voyant through pity,’ and that is why his eyes widen in a supernatural fever and magnetize towards eternity.” A 1912 pastel of Parsifal provides a jolting contrast. This seems to be the transformed hero of Act III—the black-clad victor over Klingsor’s magic. His face is wrapped in a mass of flattened, brownish hair, with a stringy beard hanging down. There is something misshapen about the visage: the mouth is a sliver across the middle. No spear is visible. The figure seems hunched and tired, as if he is pausing in the middle of an interminable trek. The sky is a skirmish of light above a rocky outcrop. What unites this haunted sage with his younger counterpart is the wide-open sadness of the eyes, staring blankly into the future.

The Symbolists ran up against a quandary that was not unfamiliar to the man who founded the Bayreuth Festival: their excoriation of bourgeois mediocrity did not prevent the bourgeoisie from consuming their art. A vestige of Romantic mystery clung to the work of Khnopff, Delville, and Redon, making it suitable decor for wealthy salons. James Ensor, the chief rebel of Les XX, banished Symbolist aesthetics in favor of a brusque, bristling style that prophesied twentieth-century trends of Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and even Pop Art. Ensor made scathing caricatures of Catholic clergy, military brass, and financiers—the alliance that underpinned the ruthlessly exploitative regime of King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch. As the scholarship of Debora Silverman has made clear, the Art Nouveau splendor of Brussels depended on riches gained from the brutal colonial operation of the Congo Free State.

His habitual nonconformism notwithstanding, Ensor joined in the general veneration of Wagner. “This extraordinary genius influenced and sustained me,” he wrote. “I glimpsed a huge and beautiful world.” La Monnaie’s production of Walküre in 1887 apparently led him to paint a Ride of the Valkyries, in which the maidens ride over a tumultuously abstract landscape. An 1890 work is titled Indignant Bourgeois Whistling at Wagner in 1880 in Brussels. In the 1902 painting At the Conservatory, Ensor trains his ire at the bourgeois culture that consumes Wagner without comprehending his deeper meanings. An elegantly attired singer performs from a score whose cover is imprinted with a garbled version of Brünnhilde’s cry: “HO.Y.HOTOYO / HO Y HO HO / HAUT Y HAUT / TROP HAUT / TROP PEAU …” (“too high, too skin”). She is being pelted with flowers, a cat, a duck, and a pickled herring. In the midst of this fiasco, Wagner himself is seen holding his fingers to his ears.

Ensor’s most celebrated work is the enormous—almost Wagnerian—Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. It is a phantasmagoric vision of the Savior riding a donkey through a carnivalesque throng, with a wooden-soldier brass band at the center and a bloated bishop at the front. In Patricia Berman’s reading, the painting condemns Leopold’s Belgium for its abuse of Christian iconography in the service of state violence. Originally, Ensor intended to include Wagner in the nightmare procession: a preparatory drawing from 1885 has at its center a banner reading “PHALANGE WAGNER FRACASSANT,” or “Wagner Army Raising a Din.” The same legend appears in a later copper etching. Is this a band of anti-Wagnerians, denigrating the Bayreuth master as a purveyor of mere noise? Or are Belgian Wagnéristes themselves the butt of the satire—revering the composer of Parsifal while travestying the Redeemer’s message? Ensor gave no evidence of his thinking, and in the final painting he omitted the “PHALANGE” banner, probably by painting over it. Wagner is drowned out by the urban din, the savage parade.

SATANIC WAGNER

Péladan spoke of “sathanisme de l’amour.” Baudelaire invoked a “satanic religion.” Huneker beheld a Black Mass in Parsifal. The idea that Wagner’s music tapped into devilish forces had wide purchase, both among the composer’s detractors and among his wilder-eyed disciples. Fin-de-siècle culture granted mighty powers to artists, and by some accounts Wagner was capable of administering a sort of aural potion of death or derangement.

The supernaturally inclined could point to a string of mishaps that befell people close to Wagner. The tenor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld dropped dead shortly after creating the title role of Tristan, in 1865. His widow, the soprano Malvina Garrigues, who was the first Isolde, received mediumistic messages from Schnorr and accused Cosima of being an “infernal spirit.” Alois Ander, who had earlier rehearsed Tristan in Vienna, died insane in 1864. Felix Mottl suffered a fatal heart attack while conducting Tristan in 1911. Ludwig II died a watery death in 1886. The Russian-Jewish pianist Joseph Rubinstein, a fanatical follower, killed himself in 1884, supposedly in despair over the Meister’s passing. The Polish pianist and composer Carl Tausig, also Jewish, died of typhoid at twenty-nine; some blamed the strain of serving Wagner. Nietzsche crossed the border into madness while raving about Richard and Cosima. On the other hand, Cosima herself lived to the age of ninety-two.

Félicien Rops, frontispiece for Péladan’s Le Vice suprême

Wagner saw himself as an affirmative artist, preparing humanity for a better world. Yet he, too, sensed danger in his music. While composing Tristan, he worried that it would drive people insane. After Schnorr’s death, he wrote in his diary: “My Tristan! My beloved! I pushed you to the abyss!” (The salutation quotes Kurwenal, Tristan’s friend and servant.) Undeniably, there is a romance of evil in Wagner. Venus, in Tannhäuser, bewitches the ears, especially in the Paris version of 1861. Telramund and Ortrud, the malefactors of Lohengrin, hatch their plots over jagged, corkscrewing figures that announce Wagner’s mature style. Alberich and Hagen, in the Ring, stride grandly in the bass regions. Conversely, paeans to goodness in the operas are not always convincing. Siegfried’s Funeral Music is more impressive than the man himself. Parsifal’s wound-closing monologue often sounds a touch hollow. Suffice to say that evil is necessary in Wagner’s world, and the division between evil and good is fluid.

Fin-de-siècle fiction feasted on Wagner’s macabre side. An early instance is Élémir Bourges’s 1884 novel Le Crépuscule des dieux, whose title is the French name for Götterdämmerung. Bourges, a member of Péladan’s Rose + Croix order, tells of a great old family in decline—a popular story arc of the period. A German notable named Charles d’Este, Duke of Blankenbourg, is introduced as the “son of a race of gods.” He is marking his birthday by hosting Wagner in a command performance. During Act I of Walküre, the duke learns that Prussian troops have entered his territory, and he is forced to flee. As he departs, the composer solemnly informs him that the Ring will end with a Twilight of the Gods. Decadence infects the family, sowing death and madness. A scheming Wagner soprano named Giulia Belcredi, having become the duke’s mistress, plots to destroy two of the duke’s children, the half-siblings Hans Ulric and Christiane. Belcredi convinces the duke to host a domestic performance of Walküre, with Hans Ulric and Christiane cast as Siegmund and Sieglinde. She knows, somehow, that Wagner’s drama will trigger incestuous love in the real-life pair. When it does, Hans Ulric kills himself and Christiane enters a convent. At the end, the duke falls ill, attends Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth, and dies.

As the eighties gave way to the nineties, vampiric, necromantic, and satanic themes proliferated in post-Wagnerian, post-Symbolist literature. Joris-Karl Huysmans set the tone with a series of novels that began with À rebours, in 1884, and continued with En Rade (1887) and Là-bas (1891). Against a backdrop of hyper-refined aestheticism, Huysmans exposed his readers to homosexuality, incubi and succubi, sadism, the child murders of Gilles de Rais, the Black Mass, and, most exotically, a Mass of Sperm. Huysmans adroitly placed this ghastly subject matter in the context of a wide-ranging spiritual search; in the end, he and his protagonists return to traditional Catholicism. “From exalted mysticism to raging Satanism is but a step,” a character says in Là-bas. “In the beyond, all extremes meet.”

“The Succubus,” an 1898 story by the Belgian writer Camille Lemonnier, is in the Huysmans mold, and also harks back to Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann. It opens at a performance of Tristan somewhere in Bohemia. The narrator cannot take his eyes off a deathly pale woman in a neighboring box, who, he senses, has some connection to his past life. The sight of this “satanic perversity” harmonizes with Wagner’s “torrent of love and sadness,” his “symphony of afflictions.” During Act III, the narrator remembers what happened. In his youth, when he was bedridden with a near-fatal illness, a woman had visited him, clad only in red and black ribbons.

This devouring virgin penetrated under my sheets and bit my lips with so fearful a kiss that my blood immediately gushed a large jet. Our bodies immediately convulsed; mine, in my effort to escape her, writhed like a wounded slow-worm; and at the end I stopped repulsing her deadly thirsty lips. While in small strokes she continued to lick my red substance, I myself drank life at her neck, under the black ribbon, as from a fountain … My mother, entering my room in the morning, found me half expired and bathed in my own blood.

When the lights go up, the narrator rushes to the exits, but “the Lady with red headbands, like a lithe phantom, like the vampire that she was, seemed to have dissolved in the air of the street.”

In Latin America, the Modernismo movement, led by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, mixed Symbolist, Decadent, and Wagnerian strains, to sometimes creepy effect. Horacio Quiroga, a Uruguayan epigone of Poe, wrote two stories on Wagner subjects: “The Death of Isolde” and “The Flame,” also called “Berenice.” The second is set largely in Paris in 1842, and features Wagner and Baudelaire as characters. Baudelaire introduces the composer to a wealthy patron and her ten-year-old daughter, Berenice, who shows signs of being enraptured by Wagner’s music. The score of Tristan is tried out with orchestra. Wagner feels the child throbbing beside him, and is surprised to discover that she has suddenly grown older: “Those twenty minutes of hurricane-force passion had just converted a child into a woman radiant with youth, eyes darkened in mad fatigue.” As the opera progresses, the aging process advances at terrifying speed, until Berenice has become a decrepit, cataleptic old woman. She remains in that condition until her death, forty years later. In the face of such poetic license, it seems pointless to add that Wagner did not know Baudelaire in 1842, nor did Tristan exist.

The apogee of satanic Wagnerism is, arguably, Marcel Batilliat’s 1897 novel Chair Mystique, or Mystic Flesh. Schooled in Zola and Huysmans, Batilliat adopted a style at once precise and precious. Mystic Flesh, which has a notation from Tristan as its epigraph, tells of a young woman named Marie-Alice, who, trapped in a provincial life, is drawn to the literature and music of high passion. She dreams of “reviving the divine loves of the Wagnerian heroes,” of becoming the “modern Isolde” to a “modern Tristan.” Her mother died of tuberculosis, and she is fated to perish of the same disease. Her knight in black armor is an alienated aesthete named Yves. They form a bond as Marie-Alice plays Tristan at the piano, the odor of death rising around her. Moving to an isolated forest house, they lose themselves in an oblivion of love. Marie-Alice falls sick, and a doctor friend warns Yves of infection. Instead, Yves hurls himself into prolonged bouts of lovemaking, in the hope that he will contract the disease. On breaks, the lovers read the Symbolists and “adore above all the sublime pages of Tristan und Isolde.” A stray cat joins the ménage and acquires the name Klingsor. Eventually, poetry bores them; only music matches their delirium. Marie-Alice dies in Yves’s arms, her last throes resembling orgasm. They remain entangled as rigor mortis sets in.

But this is not all. Marie-Alice is buried, and Yves, now falling ill himself, has a dream in which he sees his lover’s corpse approaching him. Batilliat abruptly switches stylistic gears, using the kind of hyper-clinical language favored by naturalist writers:

She was naked as on their nights of love, and all green amid a swarming of parasitic worms! Everywhere, ocher, amber, and slate-gray emphysemes stretched the integuments; a purulent, brownish fluid exuded through the pores, flowed from natural openings which were full of larvae and worms. On the depressed thorax, whose ribs were bursting the skin, serous vesicles contrasted in their paleness with red plaques that marked the place of the intestines, and the ruptured abdominal walls, scarred by a huge wound, gave out their putrid contents, all twitching with the activity of roundworms. The eyes were black holes, where oozing brain matter turned into pus; bared teeth, stained with purulence, laughed a horrible laugh, between saponified muscles and blueish aponeurosis. Alone among all these horrors, the golden hair, flowing like a scarf as on the day of farewell, had remained resplendent, like a streaming of light.

Even in the wake of this magisterially revolting hallucination, the Tristan fantasy lingers. At the very end, Yves again salutes the operatic pair, “who loved each other as one must love: to the utmost!” Indeed, with his scene of eroticized decomposition, Yves has set a new outer limit of Wagnerian passion—one that will have no serious rival until the 1960s, when Yukio Mishima filmed an act of seppuku to the tune of Tristan.

THEOSOPHY

The Goetheanum, Dornach

Helena Blavatsky, the chief figure in Theosophy, did not care at first for Wagner. In 1883, she had this to say about Parsifal: “Such a handling of the ‘most sacred truths’—for those for whom those things and names are truth—is a sheer debasement, a sacrilege, and a blasphemy.” Four years later, Madame Blavatsky, as she was widely known, suffered a near-fatal medical crisis, and formed a good opinion of the doctor who treated her—William Ashton Ellis, the indefatigable and fatiguing English translator of Wagner’s prose. Ellis had embraced Theosophy in the mid-eighties, around the time he began writing about the composer. Almost at once, Theosophical opinion turned around. In 1888, Blavatsky’s magazine Lucifer—the title denotes the bringing of light, not Satan—warmly greeted Ellis’s Wagner journal, The Meister, saying that Wagner was a “mystic as well as a musician” who “penetrated deeply into the inner realms of life.”

Ellis was right to see common ground between Wagner and Theosophy. Blavatsky’s synthesis of West and East resembles the religious fusion of Parsifal, although she gives stronger emphasis to Eastern thought, especially Buddhism. The daughter of a Russian military officer, Blavatsky traveled widely in her youth, gaining a reputation as a psychic. She claimed to have received telepathic communications from a group calling themselves the Mahatmas, or super-evolved Masters. In 1873, she showed up in New York, where she began to elaborate her Secret Doctrine. Disavowing spiritualism, she defined Theosophy not as a religion but as a rational inquiry into religion, a “purely divine ethics.” She was not above using cheap tricks to soup up her legend. An 1885 investigation by the Society for Psychical Research concluded that Blavatsky was “one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters of history.” She plowed ahead regardless, and by the time of her death, in 1891, Theosophy had become international in scope, its headquarters based in Adyar, India.

In 1888, Lucifer published Ellis’s essay “A Glance at Parsifal?,” which interprets Wagner’s Grail as “the Divine Wisdom of the ages, the Theosophia which has been ever jealously guarded by bands of brothers.” It abides in a place “whence Time and Space have fled away.” The titular hero “unites in his nature the characteristics of Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha.” Brotherhood heals the world’s discords. The message of the opera, Ellis says, is acutely relevant “in these days when each man’s hand is turned against his brother, when materialism is rife … and each state in Europe, laughing at [religion’s] shrill, unmeaning bleat, adds another fifty thousand paid butchers to its bloated armaments!”

Although Ellis soon withdrew from active involvement in Theosophy, other Wagnerites took his place. In 1896, Basil Crump, a barrister who specialized in maritime law, began publishing pamphlets analyzing the Wagner operas as composites of religious traditions. He was soon joined by Alice Leighton Cleather, a clergyman’s daughter who belonged to Blavatsky’s circle. Together, Crump and Cleather published four studies of the Wagner operas. In Parsifal, they write, “the essential elements of the great religions of the Eastern and Western worlds—Christianity and Buddhism—are blended in a form especially adapted to the Western world of to-day.” Tristan, too, acquires an Eastern tinge. Crump and Cleather label a phrase from the prelude the “Nirvâna motive” and link it to the “redeeming power which shall bring peace and rest in the bosom of the Oversoul.” When Cleather visited Bayreuth, she was pleased to see many Eastern texts in the Wahnfried library.

In the mid-nineties, a group of American Theosophists split from Blavatsky’s heir apparent, the British socialist and anti-imperialist Annie Besant, to form the Theosophical Society in America. They were under the sway of Katherine Tingley, a social worker from an obscure background, possibly theatrical. Grandiose in manner, habitually wrapped in robes and scarves, Tingley announced a World Crusade, in the hope of gaining a global presence for the American wing. In an essay on Theosophical Wagnerism, Christopher Scheer notes that excerpts from the music dramas were often heard at Tingley’s events. In 1897, the Third Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society in America, at the Madison Square Garden concert hall, opened, Péladan-style, with Parsifal on the organ.

For a few years, Crump and Cleather participated in Tingley’s movement, perhaps lured by its Wagnerian trappings. In 1897, they traveled to North America and lectured on Wagner and Theosophy, drawing crowds of up to a thousand people in halls bedecked with the flags of Tingley’s Crusade. Musical examples were played, though in modestly scaled arrangements. In keeping with the Bayreuth idea of the invisible orchestra, the musicians remained hidden behind a screen. Journalists made much of the duo’s penchant for high-tech illustrations: magic-lantern images of Lohengrin, the Flying Dutchman, Parsifal, and other Wagner heroes flickered before audiences’ eyes. Crump happily concluded: “The new aspect of Theosophy presented in these musical lectures has proved very attractive and has interested a new section of the public who are ready for the message but needed touching in a different way.”

The World Crusade had a destination in view: Point Loma, California, a Theosophical utopia outside San Diego, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The complex included a Temple of Peace, the Raja Yoga Academy, and an open-air Greek theater. On seeing it, the actor Helena Modjeska exclaimed, “A second Bayreuth!” Nellie Melba said that the scene reminded her of her first experience of Parsifal. A group of Parsifal paintings by the Theosophical artist Reginald Machell, an Englishman who had settled in Point Loma, exemplified the Tingley vision; in two of them a guru-like figure holds the Grail over his head, his arms forming a sacred geometry with the cup. “Every conqueror of himself conquers also for others,” Machell explained.

Reginald Machell, The Holy Grail

Like the Rosicrucian sects of Paris, branches of Theosophy kept feuding with one another and engaging in doctrinal warfare. When Annie Besant anointed an Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti as a Messiah figure, the German Theosophist leader Rudolf Steiner left the society, taking much of German Theosophy with him. In 1912, he formed his own discipline, Anthroposophy, which has endured longer than most fin-de-siècle spiritual movements. Hundreds of Waldorf schools around the world follow Steiner’s philosophy of holistic education, fostering creativity and independence in children. More intellectually rigorous than many in the Theosophical world, Steiner was well grounded in philosophy, science, and socialism. Intolerant of Theosophy’s Eastern slant, Steiner focused on the Western mystical heritage, with particular attention to tales of the Grail. He directed Munich productions of Édouard Schuré’s spiritual dramas, The Sacred Drama of Eleusis and The Children of Lucifer, and wrote his own mystery plays, which, in the words of one acolyte, represented “the psychic development of man up to the moment when he is able to pierce the veil and see into the beyond.”

Steiner joined Schuré, Ellis, and others in sensing a “strange and deep connection” between Wagner and the new spiritual trends. In the eighties, in Vienna, he encountered rabid young Wagnerites, whom he characterized as “homeless souls,” hungry for an alternative to materialist modernity. In 1905, he gave four lectures on the topic “Richard Wagner in Light of Spiritual Science,” and two years later, having seen Parsifal in Bayreuth, he spoke about Wagner and mysticism. Following Schuré, Steiner framed the operas not as psychological dramas but as treatises on initiation, on the overcoming of mundane reality. Thus, Isolde’s Transfiguration evokes the union of souls in an astral world—a “surging ocean of bliss” removed from ordinary sexual desire, indeed from the division of gender itself. Dwelling on Parsifal, which he sometimes used as entrance music for his lectures, Steiner predicts that the human reproductive organs of the future “will not be infused with desire, but will be pure and chaste, like the plant-calyx that turns itself toward the love-lance, the ray of sunshine.”

In 1912, Steiner said, “We have been thinking about a kind of Bayreuth.” A year later, in the Swiss town of Dornach, outside Basel, he laid the foundation stone for a hilltop complex that he called the Goetheanum—a structure defined by two intersecting domes. Some interior features, particularly the stage space underneath the smaller dome, resembled the Grail Temple set in Parsifal. After the building burned, in 1922, the Goetheanum was rebuilt in even more inventive style, its undulating forms prophetic of late twentieth-century architectural trends. Many “new Bayreuths” were imagined in the fin-de-siècle years, but few led to tangible results. Not only did Steiner see his vision through, but his temple still stands, serving as the world headquarters of Anthroposophy. To see it rising above Dornach is like glimpsing the Festspielhaus from the Bayreuth train station: the impossible has become real.

YEATS AND THE CELTIC TWILIGHT

“Westward roams the glance / Eastward strikes the ship,” sings a young seaman at the outset of Tristan. The vessel is bound for King Mark’s castle in Cornwall; Isolde is gazing back toward her native Ireland. An injured Celtic pride is implicit in the heroine’s rage at the outset of the opera (“Who dares to mock me?”). Such touches undoubtedly boosted Wagner’s popularity in Ireland, although he had a following there even before Tristan was widely known. Around the turn of the century, Carl Rosa’s company performed most of Wagner’s operas in Dublin, attracting flocks of writers and artists, including the young James Joyce.

The period of Wagner’s ascendancy coincided with the cresting of ​Irish nationalism. More than a few artists and impresarios looked to the composer as they pondered how to forge their own political identity. The new Irish state, whatever form it took, would need its native myths, legends, heroes, and leitmotifs. Cultural pride mingled easily with an influx of mystical and esoteric movements. The Celtic Revival concerned itself with old Gaelic literature and age-old Irish folktales, resulting in a heightened awareness of faeries, elves, ghosts, and other supernatural entities. Insofar as Wagner functioned as a conduit for such half-forgotten spirit forces, he became an honorary member of the movement that W. B. Yeats called the Celtic Twilight.

Wagnerism wafted around the Irish Literary Theatre, which Yeats co-founded in 1899. The project received backing from Annie Horniman, an English theater maven who went to Bayreuth almost every year and wished to create an equivalent institution in Ireland. As the literary scholar and biographer Adrian Frazier writes, Yeats was Horniman’s Wagner, and “the theater was to be his Bayreuth.” Horniman also designed costumes for several of the theater’s productions; those for Yeats’s The King’s Threshold are said to have looked like the costumes in Bayreuth’s Tristan.

Edward Martyn and George Moore, two other founders of the theater, were keen Wagnerites who sometimes greeted each other by whistling Siegfried’s motif. Martyn, a wealthy landowner who was active as a musician and a dramatist, valued the composer’s “cult of liturgical aestheticism.” In his 1899 play The Heather Field, a deranged landlord has visions of nymphs and faeries, of stories of the Rhine, of a rainbow, of “strange solemn harmonies” of singing boys. Unexpectedly, this Gaelic-Gothic spirit later became the first president of Sinn Féin, which led the drive toward Irish independence in 1921.

Moore, a cousin of Martyn’s, spent much of his youth in Paris, where he consorted with Dujardin and Mallarmé. Accompanying Martyn on expeditions to Bayreuth, the musically untrained Moore felt that there was “something in [Wagner’s] art for everybody, something in his music for me.” Moore’s 1898 novel Evelyn Innes is an early entry in the small but lively genre of Wagner-soprano fiction, which Willa Cather brought to its zenith. Under the influence of a Wagnerite named Owen Asher, Evelyn pursues an operatic career and achieves great success, winning the approval even of Cosima Wagner—though the Meisterin deems her Brünnhilde too womanly and insufficiently godlike. Evelyn also meets an austere young composer named Ulick Dean, who resists the Wagner craze but is gripped with desire for Evelyn on hearing her sing Isolde. Afterward, “she threw herself upon him, and kissed him as if she would annihilate destiny on his lips.” As in Péladan, Tristan acts as an aphrodisiac.

Evelyn Innes has potboiler elements, but it also experiments with interior monologue in the Dujardin mode. Evelyn’s love life and stage career come into conflict with longings for a pious existence. She mulls over her predicament in bed, ellipses indicating pauses in her thoughts. “It was unendurable to have to tell lies all day long—yes, all day long—of one sort or another. She ought to send them both away … But could she remain on the stage without a lover? Could she go to Bayreuth by herself? Could she give up the stage? And then?” She indeed walks away, forgoing the chance to sing Kundry in Bayreuth, and enters a convent, where she carries on singing Wagner all the same. Unusually, the sensual-spiritual division of Tannhäuser becomes the concern of a female rather than a male protagonist. For Evelyn, singing Wagner is merely a stage of a larger quest, one that dominates the novel’s sequel, Sister Teresa.

Ulick Dean’s physical appearance is modeled on that of Yeats. Moore writes: “He had one of those long Irish faces, all in a straight line, with flat, slightly hollow cheeks, and a long chin. It was clean shaven, and a heavy lock of black hair was always falling over his eyes. It was his eyes that gave its sombre ecstatic character to his face. They were large, dark, deeply set, singularly shaped, and they seemed to smoulder like fires in caves, leaping and sinking out of the darkness.” Certain of Ulick’s views sound like Yeats’s, as when he says that the Celtic gods are alive for him, or when he extols William Blake. Ulick’s operas adapt Irish tales, like Connla and the Fairy Maiden, and Diarmuid and Gráinne. His style is full of “strange, old-world rhythms, recalling in a way the Gregorian she used to read in childhood in the missals, yet modulated as unintermittently as Wagner.” And Ulick surely speaks for Yeats when he says, in parting from Evelyn, “God is our quest—you seek him in dogma, I in art.”

Yeats’s language sings across the page, but his knowledge of music was limited. Moore bluntly called him “unmusical.” That lack did not prevent him from citing Wagner and imitating his methods. The cultures in which Yeats moved—the Celtic Revival, London Aestheticism, Parisian Symbolism, Theosophy and its variants—were all sufficiently soaked in Wagner that he could absorb the influence without having tasted it firsthand. After 1902, Yeats also delved into Nietzsche, whose posthumous vogue was well under way. The dispute between the Germanic titans concerned the poet little: both were models of aesthetic imperiousness and heroic force.

For Yeats, as for many others, Wagner showed how folk sources could shape a national consciousness. In his 1898 essay “The Celtic Element in Literature,” he wrote of Ireland’s connection to the “ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of Nature.” The Celts, he said, were “nearer to ancient chaos.” The Scandinavian tradition drew from similar sources. Through the medium of Wagner, the Nordic sagas had become “the most passionate element in the arts of the modern world.” Yeats also considered the composer an agent of Symbolism, “the only movement that is saying new things.” Like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mallarmé, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Maeterlinck, Wagner had found spiritual intensity in the practice of his art, fighting against materialism and rationalism. In another article, Yeats placed the “ecstasy of Parsifal” alongside William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End and Villiers’s Axël in the category of art that seeks to “bring again the golden age.”

Yeats’s occult adventures led him first to Theosophy’s Esoteric Section and then to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which had been co-founded in 1888 by MacGregor Mathers, a charismatic English guru of invented Scots heritage. More insular than Theosophy, the Golden Dawn burrowed into Rosicrucian, Masonic, and Egyptian ritual. In the usual fashion, it underwent schisms and quarrels. Mathers placed his hopes in Aleister Crowley, who progressed from the Golden Dawn to Thelema, a discipline of his own invention. Crowley’s Holy Books make heavy use of Wagner: the Book of Thoth includes a phallic interpretation of Parsifal, saying that the hero “attains to puberty” when he grasps the Holy Spear. Crowley also wrote a Tannhäuser play in which Venus is revealed as Lilith—“The soul of the Obscene / Incarnate in the spirit.”

Although Yeats never ventured quite so far afield, his occult activities were a heady brew of poetic ambition, political fantasy, and sexual desire. For many years, the chief object of his romantic longing was the Irish nationalist activist Maud Gonne, another member of the Golden Dawn. A devout Wagnerian, Gonne probably did more than anyone to stir Yeats’s interest in the composer, having once told him that Parsifal is “worth travelling round the whole world to hear.” She was often likened to a Valkyrie, and invited the comparison by wearing a hat adorned with black wings. Her first trip to Bayreuth was in 1886, when she was nineteen. Soon after, she fell in love with Lucien Millevoye, a right-wing French politician who shared her Wagnermania. Gonne bore a child out of wedlock, who died young. In a turn of events that could have been scripted by Péladan, she came to believe that the boy could be reincarnated if another child were conceived in the vicinity of the corpse. Supposedly, she and Millevoye proceeded to make love at the tomb. Their second child was named, of course, Iseult.

Thanks to informants like Gonne, Moore, and Horniman, Yeats could speak confidently about Bayreuth’s sightlines and unified stage picture. He also expertly deployed Wagnerite rhetoric. In 1898, he got into a public debate with the critic John Eglinton on the question of the Irish literary revival. Eglinton rejected the idea of an Irish national literature founded on ancient legend, contending that the latter had no relevance for the modern age. In response, Yeats brought up Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Wagner dramas, which “are becoming to Germany what the Greek Tragedies were to Greece.” Eglinton replied, in turn, that Bayreuth did not strike him as a plausible rebirth of Athenian democracy. Yeats shot back that Wagner’s impact was hardly limited to the tony crowd at Bayreuth: it stretched across Europe and fired the imaginations of contemporary writers such as Villiers.

The Irish Literary Theatre opened in 1899 with Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen—a tale of a munificent aristocrat who sacrifices her soul to save her land from famine and demons. The lead character, intended for Gonne, resembles nobly self-obliterating Wagnerian heroines like Senta in The Flying Dutchman, Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, and Brünnhilde. The premiere production, static and hieratic in style, apparently took inspiration from Bayreuth. The stage directions suggest some mixture of the Ring and Parsifal: “The darkness is broken by a visionary light. The Peasants seem to be kneeling upon the rocky slope of a mountain, and vapour full of storm and ever-changing light is sweeping above them and behind them … A sound of far-off horns seems to come from the heart of the light.” Tristan lurks behind Yeats’s Diarmuid and Grania, co-written with Moore between 1899 and 1901, and his Deirdre, from 1907. Both plays involve a triangle of two younger lovers and an older man of authority.

Yeats’s most consciously Wagnerian work is The Shadowy Waters, a short play first conceived when he was a teenager, written and rewritten between 1894 and 1900, and then revised again at intervals in the following decade. In the tradition of Tristan and Axël, it tells of a pair of doomed lovers, named Forgael and Dectora. The setting is vague, but Yeats specified in one draft that the actors should be “dressed like Wagner’s personages, except that the men do not wear winged helmets.” The action begins, as in Tristan, on the deck of a ship, with the voice of a sailor. Forgael, the sailors’ leader, is a mariner-musician on an obscure quest—a cross between Tristan and the Flying Dutchman, the wanderer in search of redemptive love. Dectora enters as a captured queen, very Isolde-like, but Forgael’s magic harp makes her lose interest in the world.

During an American trip in 1903 and 1904, Yeats saw the Met’s staging of Parsifal, and, as he later recounted, objected to its literalism. “Parsifal symbolises an action that takes place in the mind alone,” he remembers telling the Met director. He wanted a more suggestive, dimly lit production for The Shadowy Waters, in Parisian Symbolist style. The 1904 premiere in Dublin went badly, but the play found a more receptive public when the Theosophical Society hosted a performance at its congress in London in 1905. Such eminences as Maeterlinck, Annie Besant, and Rudolf Steiner attended the meeting, and all may have seen The Shadowy Waters. Even in that rarefied milieu, though, Yeats was criticized for his lack of dramatic action. He subjected the play to a heavy revision, shedding “needless symbols.” After reading Arthur Symons’s essay “The Ideas of Richard Wagner,” Yeats wrote to the author: “The Wagnerian essay touches my own theories at several points, and enlarges them at one or two.” While struggling with one passage, Yeats came upon “that paragraph where Wagner insists that a play must not appeal to the intelligence, but … directly to the emotions.”

As Yeats entered his maturity, the play took on a harder edge, losing its Celtic Twilight glow. Even so, the debt to Wagner becomes, if anything, more pronounced. In the revised text published in 1906, the sailor’s first line is “Has he not led us into these waste seas / For long enough?” This echoes a phrase in Tristan that will also be quoted in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Waste and empty the sea.” When the lovers meet, they preach to each other a world-liquidating love, looking toward a “country at the end of the world” that seems coterminous with Tristan’s “Wunderreich der Nacht,” the wonder-realm of night:

I would that there was nothing in the world

But my beloved—that night and day had perished,

And all that is and all that is to be,

All that is not the meeting of our lips.

It is also a mystical transport to a place beyond the material world, a plane of initiation where eternal knowledge is attained:

Where the world ends

The mind is made unchanging, for it finds

Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,

The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,

The roots of the world.

This imagery recurs in Yeats’s 1930 poem “Byzantium”: “At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit / Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, / Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame …”

In the mid-twenties, on a visit to Palermo, Yeats stayed at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes, where, four decades earlier, Wagner had finished Parsifal and sat for a portrait by Renoir. One could see the room in which he stayed and, purportedly, a pen with which he wrote. Visiting Palermo’s Cappella Palatina, with its Byzantine mosaics, Yeats heard a local story to the effect that the chapel had given rise to the Grail Temple in Parsifal. That claim is biographically doubtful—Wagner mentioned Siena Cathedral as his principal scenic source—yet Yeats seized on it. The path that leads to Monsalvat points onward to the dream city of Byzantium, where broken lives are gathered into the artifice of eternity.

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