(Article, ‘Politics,’ first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))
Aristotle’s contention that man is by nature a political animal (ζῷον πολιτικόν) might have been formulated with Wagner in mind (Aristotle I.1253a2). Whatever he claimed on occasion, for instance when seeking amnesty for his revolutionary deeds, or writing Mein Leben for Ludwig II, Wagner’s life and oeuvre were intimately and often explicitly concerned with political questions. “Questions” is the moot word, for, whilst Wagner rarely hesitated to proffer answers, he ultimately found them wanting. Political involvement arose from artistic need and vice versa, art and politics being inextricably related in Wagner’s conception. Inspired by Attic tragedy, Wagnerian musical drama was necessary political: communal celebration and perhaps incitement. Wagner also treated with political ideas in essays, correspondence, and the dramas themselves.
1.
Karl Marx, German idealism, and
French socialism
2.
The Ring
3.
The Ring: Political order
4.
The Ring: Heroic challenges
5.
After
Wagner
1.
Karl
Marx, German idealism, and French socialism
 |
| Marx, 1839 |
Wagner was a contemporary of
Marx (b. 1818) in more than a chronological sense. They shared influences, not
least the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller,
G.F.W. Hegel, and Young Hegelians
such as Ludwig Feuerbach; they
shared friends and acquaintances, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Georg Herwegh;
they denounced many of the same social ills, not least nineteenth-century
bourgeois capitalism. Both, moreover, were master dramatists; even Capital is as much psychopathological
history as work of economic analysis. The
differences between Marx and Wagner are, however, equally telling. That Marx
would have dismissed Wagner’s work largely as “ideology” does not mean that we
should do so, yet there lies therein much of that “true socialism” Marx and
Engels excoriated in favor of their “scientific” variety. Wagner’s politics
concern themselves with some issues of lesser importance to Marx, for instance
despoliation of the natural world (“green politics,” one might say) and a
pre-Nietzschean conception of the will to power (Liebesgelüste, see letter from Wagner to Uhlig, 11/12 Nov. 1851).
For Wagner, standing firmly in
the tradition of German idealism, the Athenian polis had embodied harmony between individual and society, private
and public. Tragic enactment represented the supreme manifestation of harmony –
in every sense. The problem of modern political life, both for Wagner and idealism,
was how to reconcile the apparently idyllic communal integration of Hellenic life
with post-Classical, Christian subjectivity (individual souls: the Lutheran
priesthood of all believers). Art, as life in general, fragmented following the
political decline of Athens. A higher unity – Wagner aimed not at a restoration of tragedy but at its renewal – entailed wholesale transformation
of the public realm: individuality would flourish, but not empty, mercenary
individualism as abetted by modern civilization. Socialization of art and
aestheticization of society would be one and the same. As for Schiller and the German
Romantics, art was the paradigm of free, productive activity – or would be when
liberated from forcible division of labor. For the divorce of “opera” from “drama”
was as much a dehumanized and dehumanizing consequence as factory wage-slavery:
revolution would overcome both.
French socialism – “utopian”
according to the typology inherited from Marx and Engels – played an important role
here too, not least via August Röckel,
though Wagner also read much for himself, returning to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
after the Dresden uprising. In Mein Leben, Wagner recalls having
questioned Röckel in Dresden about his “new moral order of things,” founded
upon “the annihilation of the power of capital by direct productive labor.”
Where, asked Wagner, would the “free spirits, let alone artists,” be found, “if
everyone were to be swallowed up into the one working class”? Röckel replied, “that
if everybody participated in the work at hand according to his powers and
capacities, work would cease to be a burden, and would become an occupation
which would eventually assume an entirely artistic character, just as it had
already been proven that a field worked laboriously by a single peasant with
the plough was infinitely less productive than when cultivated by several
persons according to a horticultural system.” This utopian socialism stood
closer to Marx than one might think, for division of labor is to be transformed
into something voluntarist rather than merely abandoned in Romantic reaction.
Wagner thus “took pleasure in developing conceptions of a possible form of
human society which would correspond wholly, and indeed solely, to my highest
artistic ideals” (My Life, English
translation, 373-4). The “Zurich
reform writings” – Die Kunst und die Revolution, Das
Kunstwerk der Zukunft, and Oper und Drama – do just that.
2.
The
Ring
One might say that Wagner’s
politics are expressed most clearly, or rather most probingly, in Der
Ring des Nibelungen. This is true and misleading: there is no single
doctrine to be expressed, but a continual, questioning process of development.
Dramatic form, radicalizing rather than resolving – there are harmonic
implications here too – arguably proved better suited than essay-writing to
such development, at least for Wagner, though we should never reduce the dramas
to tracts.
There nevertheless remains much
political truth in Wagner’s encouragement to Liszt,
“Mark well my new poem – it contains the beginning of the world and its
destruction!” (Wagner to Liszt, 11 Feb. 1853). At the heart of the Ring’s action lie the foundation of
modern state and society, and their dissolution, the latter seeming
increasingly uncertain following the apparent failure of revolution in 1848-9,
yet never abandoned. Even in the 1880s, Wagner would record, recalling his
earlier, highly political Jesus von
Nazareth: “Jesus could foresee
nothing but the end; we no less. Materially and empirically composed, we await
the destructive forces which, even, for the Roman world, did not fail to appear”
(Brown Book, English translation,
201). Annihilation remains political as well as metaphysical, the Christian
dialectic between cyclical (Greek) and linear (Jewish), at least as understood
by Wagner, Schopenhauer, and many
other German idealists, re-imagined, just as in Parsifal.
3.
The
Ring: Political order
 |
| Bakunin, 1843 |
Wotan, however, is no mere
gangster. We sense the religious aura and majesty of Valhalla: the ideological defenses
of the gods’ stronghold should not be underestimated, especially as it emerges
in Wotan’s musical dream. Wotan’s vision is not, moreover, of “might is right.”
He restrains Donner from resolving the problem of the giants as in the Prose Edda:
“Stop, you savage! Nothing through force! My spear protects contracts: spare
your hammer’s power” (Rheingold,
Scene 2). Such is a remnant of the originally creative urge that led him to
inscribe contracts upon his spear; the problem with laws is that as soon as
they are rendered unalterable, human creativity is stifled. They are
transformed into their opposite; they entrap, as Wotan laments in his Walküre
monologue. Conflict between love and the Law is a constant refrain in Wagner’s
plans for Jesus von Nazareth. Indeed,
Wagner portrays Jesus, who proclaims that his death will also bring about that
of the Law, as an heir to Proudhon and Bakunin (Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen 11:290). Law has, in a classical
case of Feuerbachian inversion, acquired divine power over the men whose
original creation it was, as Valhalla (or Heaven) has in religious terms. The
temporary and imaginary have become feared and obeyed as eternal and
super-real. And yet, as we read in the 1848 prose sketch (“Die
Nibelungen-Mythus. Als Entwurf zu einen Drama”), though the purpose of the gods’
“higher world order is moral consciousness … they are tainted by the very
injustice they hunt down.” From the oppressed “depths of Nibelheim consciousness
of their guilt echoes threateningly” (SSD 2:157). Wagner originally intended
that the oppressed Nibelungs be liberated by revolution; experience taught him
the struggle would be harder.
 |
| Arthur Rackham: Alberich and the subjugated Nibelungs |
In Nibelheim lies a more modern
– at least to Wagner – instantiation of domination, and a threat to the gods’
relatively enlightened variety. For, as Marx observed, though Wagner might
readily have done, “the relationship of industry and, in particular, the world
of wealth to the political world is a principal problem of modern times” (Marx,
“Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie”). Both extended Feuerbach’s
critique of religious alienation, this time into the realm of capital. Alberich’s parallel rape of Nature –
there are two creation myths in the Ring
cosmos – is theft of the Rhine gold. Value-free in its natural state, Alberich
transforms it into capital in the Nibelung hoard, and would-be totalitarian
power in the ring, with which he enslaves his kinsmen and would vanquish ancien régime Valhalla. He may not
accomplish that himself, yet his bourgeois challenge, born of his lowly place
endured in its feudal order, hastens its destruction.
4.
The
Ring: Heroic challenges
Subsequent challenges issue
from Siegmund and Siegfried, both standing in Wagner’s
line of charismatic revolutionary heroes from Rienzi
(indeed from the hero of the Faust
Overture) to Parsifal.
Enthusiasm for the figure of Siegfried was widespread amongst Vormärz radicals, including the young
Engels, for whom nineteenth-century “heroic deeds” (Heldentaten) might be endeavored by “sons of Siegfried” (see his
essay, “Siegfrieds Heimat”). Brünnhilde, we might note, sends Siegfried out
into the world: “to new deeds, dear hero” (Götterdämmerung,
Prelude)
If our opening quotation might have been made for Wagner, so, in the Volsung context, might Aristotle’s subsequent words: “And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homer [Iliad, Book IX] denounces – the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts” (Aristotle I.1253a2-6). Siegmund and Siegfried both appear out of nowhere, or rather out of the Teutonic forest, suggesting a world in which Franco-Roman rules (laws) do not apply – that is, a stateless place of anarchy. Wagner does not consider them “bad men”; foes such as Hunding and Fricka do. In Wagner’s attempt, confounded by state power, to have them transcend or at least transform existing society, they echo Aristotle’s “above humanity” – and prefigure Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Both heroes stand opposed to “tribe” and “law,” and are, in the face of society and its institutions, “lovers of war.” Such was Wotan’s intention, having turned against his own laws and attempted to free himself from the merciless dialectic of power-politics. “Hearthless” the Volsung heroes are too, whereas Hunding – his second line, “Holy is my hearth” – prides himself upon his outwardly respectable, internally repressive (bourgeois-equivalent) household (Walküre, Act I).
Siegmund’s rescue of Sieglinde from Hunding’s domination
therefore represents dramatic progress; it is blessed with heroic progeny. By
contrast, Brünnhilde’s wish that
Siegfried settle down attempts (again) to render permanent what should be
temporary. Marriage, symbolized with cruelest irony by possession of Alberich’s
ring of power, would pervert and destroy their love through intervention of law
and property. Her need to constrain Siegfried thus helps initiate, in alliance
with Gibichung state corruption, the tragedy of Götterdämmerung, the undoing of all concerned. Nothing could be
further from the truth than George Bernard Shaw’s
claim that in Götterdämmerung, Wagner
relinquished his political vision; his politics, however, stood far from Shaw’s
Fabian variety.
Instead, there persisted a
vision of free love inspired by
Young German and Young Hegelian “sensualism,” and by French socialists such as
Charles Fourier and the Saint-Simonians – despite Wagner’s Schopenhauerian
recognition of love itself as a form of power. Fourier lamented: “Our
legislators want to subordinate the social system to … the Family,” which he
contrasted with “groups” of honor, friendship, and love, and “which God has almost entirely excluded from influence in
Social Harmony, because it is a group of forced or material bonds, not a free,
passionate gathering, dissoluble at will…. Since all constraint engenders
falsehood … both civilized and patriarchal society, where this group is the
dominant one, are the most duplicitous” (Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements). It is no coincidence that conventional marriages in Wagner are
duplicitous – and barren. Siegfried, if unconsciously, destroys the bonds of
law and state as much through his betrayal of Brünnhilde as his defiance of
Wotan.
5.
After Wagner
Wagner was not the first to treat with political ideas in his musical dramas, yet those coming after tended to take their leave from him. That might lie in rejection, for example, Igor Stravinsky and even Richard Strauss, in his marriage of Wagnerian musico-dramatic construction to decidedly Nietzschean aestheticism, or in continuation. Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu dealt explicitly with socio-political concerns, likewise Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, an exemplar regarding difficulties and opportunities provided by the Wagnerian-modernist tradition. Schoenberg contrasts Moses, at loss for words, and therefore lacking power, with Aron, whose dangerous political power lies in bel canto ease of communication and its catastrophic consequences. If Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill reckoned themselves resolutely anti-Wagnerian, they could hardly have done so without him; there remained, in any case, more than a little residue. Post-war “engaged” composers such as Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono were compelled to confront Wagner’s legacy: in Henze’s case almost equally through inescapable homage and angry confrontation.
Wagner’s dramas have also stood
at the forefront of political Regietheater.
There are specific historical reasons for this, not least a post-war Adornian
desire to “salvage” them from their fraught relationship to German history, but content and
political purpose have proved equally important. If Wieland Wagner’s “New Bayreuth” understandably downplayed
the taint of politics – itself a political act – then directors such as Joachim
Herz, Ruth Berghaus, Patrice Chéreau,
and Stefan Herheim have continued, in Wagnerian tradition, to question the
dramas, to venture out to “new deeds.” Man remains a ζῷον πολιτικόν.
Aristotle, The Politics, tr. Jonathan Barnes, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1988).
Mikhail Bakunin, “State and Society,”
Selected writings, tr. Steven Cox (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1973).
Udo
Bermbach, Der Wahn des Gesamtkunstwerks:
Richard Wagners politisch-ästhetisch Utopie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004).
Mark Berry, “Is it here that
Time becomes Space? Hegel, Schopenhauer, History, and Grace in Parsifal,” The Wagner Journal 3.3 (2009): 29-59.
Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire (Aldershot
and Rochester, NY: Ashgate, 2006).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The German Ideology, including Theses on
Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus, 1998).