Wagner and Hegel

(Article, 'Hegel,' first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Jakob Schlesinger: Portrait of G.W.F. Hegel, 1831

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (b. Stuttgart, 27 Aug. 1770; d. Berlin, 14 Nov. 1831, Berlin) Philosopher, studied alongside Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling at Tübingen, taught at Jena, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg. In 1818, he succeeded Fichte as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, his lectures attracting students from across Europe. Schopenhauer scheduled clashing Berlin lectures, an empty hall awaiting. A conflict embodied in Wagner’s oeuvre had already been dramatized.

As Aristotle stands to Plato, Hegel does to Kant. Hegel’s philosophy restored dynamism to neo-Aristotelian ontology (philosophy of being), long encumbered by scholastic encrustation. At the heart of Hegel’s system lies the dialectical method, owing something to Fichte and instantiated in Phenomenology of Spirit. As Hegel worked on it in Jena in 1806, Napoleon entered the city, the Consul-Emperor a model for Hegel’s “world-historical” individual, unconscious vehicle of Spirit itself. Whereas mathematics depend upon the principle of non-contradiction, Hegel’s ontology proclaims that contradiction exists, thereby going beyond Kant. Hegel’s dialectic places conflict between subject and object at the heart of being, expressed in history – revelation in time of God/Spirit – through alienation of mind. The vulgar Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis has nothing to do with Hegel’s philosophy, which posits objects growing through necessary self-negation into their full potentiality. Contradiction lies within; it is not applied from without. That radical dialectical method, rather than his accommodationist “positive philosophy” – though one should distinguish Hegel’s ideal, rational state from its empirical counterpart – proved Hegel’s greatest legacy to radical successors: first “Young” or “Left” Hegelians such as David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and Max Stirner; thereafter, figures such as Wagner, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, and beyond. Others, for instance, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, revolted, yet always consciously.

Wagner’s acquaintance with Hegel(-ianism) may be categorized as follows: (i) what we know he read; (ii) what he may have read; (iii) what he learned second-hand: from Bakunin, Georg Herwegh, et al., general intellectual milieu; (iv) internal evidence from dramas and writings such as Oper und Drama, themselves a significant contribution to Hegelian aesthetics. From the mid-1850s, following Schopenhauer, Wagner tended to disparage Hegel, minimizing his influence. Yet Wagner’s works, Parsifal and the late “regeneration writings” included, speak differently: Hegel, Schopenhauer, and other intellectual currents coexist, modify, transform, even do battle, no one “side” claiming victory.

Hegel’s Philosophy of History was the sole work of modern philosophy in Wagner’s Dresden library – though we know that he read others, including Hegel’s Phenomenology. The latter’s identification of transformations in consciousness with historical eras is replicated in Wagner’s prose writings, especially those written in Zurich exile, for instance in Wagner’s typology of Greek state and tragedy, Christian negation and subjectivity (cloister replacing amphitheatre), and modern imperative to reconciliation (the artwork of the future). Hegelian contradiction forms the material of Wotan’s Walküre monologue – better, dialectical self-dialogue. Negation of Wotan’s original political intent, a monarchical state under rule of law, is revealed as implicit in that state’s founding, yet revelation may only, in Hegelian spirit, come historically, contradictions having became apparent. “The owl of Minerva only takes flight at the onset of dusk,” that Dämmerung prophetic of Götterdämmerung itself (“die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug,” Hegel, 7:28). Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is proclaimed with thoroughgoing anarchism: “Lord through contracts, now am I enslaved to those contracts” (Walküre Act II, scene 2).

Hegel was unwilling to negate the principle incarnate in the Rechtstaat (legal state); Leftist successors, Wagner and Bakunin amongst them, prepared to forge and to wield swords of anarchism. Wagner’s world-historical individual, Siegfried, re-forger of Notung and rebel without a consciousness, serves both as celebration and critique not only of the revolutions of 1848-9, but of the Hegelianism in which Wagner conceived his chronicle. Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene interpretative wisdom, voiced as ravens take flight, dawns only at twilight: hers, the Ring’s, societal. We cannot predict what that final scene’s “watchers” will (re-)build, yet one day, it will be understood in light of what they saw on the Rhine, Minerva’s owl once again spreading its wings.

The conflict between individual and totality inherent in Hegel’s system – or, as Marx argued, inherent in its engendering bourgeois capitalism – is, consciously or otherwise, dramatized in verbal and musical terms in Wagner’s dramas. Dynamic material resists and yet is molded by demands of the whole: a prelude to subsequent analytical controversies, which might fruitfully be probed for socio-political and philosophical meaning – and vice versa.

Mark Berry, “Is it here that Time becomes Space? Hegel, Schopenhauer, History, and Grace in Parsifal,” The Wagner Journal 3.3 (2009): 29-59.

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Grundlinen der Philosophie des Rechts, in: Werke, 20 vols, eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969-72).

Bayreuth, Parsifal, and the Artwork of the Future

(I was delighted to be invited to speak in late November at the Internationaal Wagner Congres Amsterdam 2013. Below is the text of my paper. A considerably longer, fully-referenced version will be published as an essay in a 2014 issue of the German journal, wagnerspectrum. However, it will not have the pretty pictures...)

 

In the beginning was Bayreuth. Except, of course, for Wagner, it was not the beginning: it was the end, at least an end, and in many respects a misleading one. Bayreuth, or perhaps better, the idea and ideal which have come down to us, mostly from the period following Wagner’s death, presents a gathered congregation as opposed to the freer assembly apparently envisaged by the younger Wagner. That leads us to ask: can one, should one, do more than smile at the utopian idea of a wooden theatre to be torn down at the same time as the score of Siegfried went up in flames, after but three performances – ‘Entrée: gratis!’ – given within the course of a week? Was the ‘artwork of the future’, outward looking, ‘universal’ as opposed to merely ‘national’, just as much a progressive pipe-dream, then, as the ‘springtime of peoples’ of the 1848-9 revolutions? As AJP Taylor’s ‘turning point’ whose ‘fateful essence’ was that Germany ‘failed to turn,’ or, still worse, Sir Lewis Namier’s sneering epitaph, the ‘revolution of the intellectuals’? Wagner’s part in the Dresden uprising is well known. It is nevertheless worth reiterating that, whatever the disillusionment of the 1850s and beyond, revolutionary hopes found themselves instantiated both in the subsequent course of much of European politics – liberals and sometimes even socialists found that they could accomplish a great deal by cooperation with a reinstated old order, whose reaction was in any case more military than aristocratic – and in Wagner’s later musico-dramatic deeds. The ‘artwork of the future’ remained, endured, even strengthened itself, for all the transformations, both pragmatic and principled, required by what we might call, in dubious homage to the former people’s democracies, the ‘actually existing Bayreuth Festival’.

 

Anniversary years naturally prompt us to look back, to take stock, yet also to look to the present and indeed to the future. After all, we find ourselves celebrating and considering ‘Wagner in 2013’ as much as we do ‘Wagner in 1813’. I shall consider Wagner principally through the lens of performance, through a lens focused upon a Bayreuth that looks forward and back. It is to one particular production that I shall specifically turn, to Stefan Herheim’s well-nigh ‘classic’ 2008-12 staging of the Bayreuth work par excellence, Parsifal, a production that explicitly engages with the work’s reception history, in order to turn in informed fashion to the twenty-first-century present and future of Wagner’s artwork. But before that, and with Herheim’s staging in mind, a broader consideration of the relationship between staging of a work from the operatic or at least musico-dramatic ‘museum’, and the historical process, may be in order.

 

Herheim opens with Parsifal at the time of its first, Bayreuth staging, in 1882. He proceeds to tell a history that leads to somewhere approaching the present day, even turning a mirror upon the audience at one point, a moment with considerably greater theatrical power than a mere retelling might suggest. The audience is not simply accused, deservedly or otherwise; it is also reminded that it belongs to a drama that remains unfinished, whatever Wagner’s Hegelian aspirations towards totality, and that it, the audience, interprets, shapes, even writes the history suggested. Far from having reached a Fukuyama-like ‘end of history’, we might all have become historians: a challenge already to the ‘gathered congregation’ of Bayreuth orthodoxy, whether that be Wagner’s own or not. Wagner, though he might sometimes come close to positing a false immediacy of audience response, was no proponent of art as non-reflective, non-reflexive entertainment – purveyor of the diversions opponents of interpretative stage direction more often than not wish to see enacted. ‘Our theatrical public,’ he complained in Oper und Drama, ‘has no need for the artwork; it desires diversion from the stage, … well-crafted details, rather than the necessity of artistic unity.’

 

Herheim, it should be added, began his career as a cellist, and is a more unusual example than one might expect, or at least desire, of a director who reads the score. (We should be surprised if a director of Æschylus in the original did not read Greek, yet treat non-musical directors of Wagner with equanimity.) The issue of staging the Prelude to the first act was resolved more amicably, more fruitfully, than it would be with Barenboim in Lohengrin. Initially, the conductor, Daniele Gatti was sceptical, concerned that the audience might be distracted from the music. But Herheim made the excellent point in an interview that would suggest that, once, the curtain rose, the audience need no longer concern itself with the music, continuing, ‘I'm not saying that in principle the Prelude should always be staged. But if you have good reasons to portray the music in the prelude, it's just the way that it’s done that you can argue against. Gatti acknowledged this and was excited about the symbiosis the staging entered into with the music.’ That, in a sense, is a perfect restatement of the echt-Wagnerian dialectic of music drama; the various elements – if indeed they may be considered separate elements at all, Wagner having taken great pains to stress, in Hegelian fashion, their initial unity in the ancient world – gain in intensity by mutual interaction. Greater emphasis upon the staging heightens rather than lessens the effect of the orchestra, and so forth.

 

Crucially, that symbiosis enabled, even provoked, the emergence of an idea of the score as redeemer. It was subtle rather than thrust in one’s face, unlike the provocative second-act Nazi imagery, which I shall address later. Yet, for that reason, and it might well take more than one encounter fully to appreciate this, Herheim’s candidate for an answer to Wagner’s riddle of ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser’ emerged all the more convincingly. Again, that was a possibility rather than a definitive ‘solution’, but successful dramas, like successful performances, do not trade in the latter. The tale of German history, of Parsifal as a work developing through that history, could thereby be seen and heard as requiring and receiving some form of transcendental, or at least beneficial, intervention, not so much ‘grace’, but something more immanent, arising from within, the attempted negation of the litany of negative dialectics to which history and work have been subjected. There was no false mediated unity in which to rejoice or rather to wallow.

For the conservative caricature of modern Regietheater, which in certain cases has an element of truth to it, a caricature in which, for the sake of argument, Monsalvat is arbitrarily relocated to a multi-storey car-park in Essen, and references to the automobile industry become determining features, bears no relation to the exploration of music, words, reception, and so much more offered by Herheim and other probing directors. Still less does it respond to Wagner’s strenuous challenge. Interestingly, Peter Konwitschny has, for very similar reasons, avowedly dissociated himself from the Regietheater label, it perhaps being no coincidence that Konwitschny, the son of a celebrated conductor, Felix, is himself a musician: 

I do not consider myself a representative of the Regietheater. Often, these directors present one single idea, such as for example staging Rigoletto in an empty swimming pool or in a slaughterhouse. These ideas are not consequentially followed through and explored, and in most cases, the singers stand next to each other on stage just as unconnected as in conventional productions.

My stagings, on the other hand, aim to return to the roots: to get to the core of the pieces, through the jungle of interpretative traditions, which, in most cases, have distorted the pieces. The accusation that this is ‘too intellectual for the average viewer’ is absurd and exposes the enemies of such theatre as opposing new insights.

Indeed, the pernicious anti-intellectualism of such attacks as such, as opposed to perfectly justified criticisms of particular productions, reveals itself to be a strange sort of intellectual condescension. No one reading Hegel or listening to Wagner for the first time expects to ‘understand’ everything; nor does he mind when he ‘fails’ to do so. Were there a final, achievable, destination, we should then give up, having ‘mastered’ Parsifal or the Phänomenologie des Geistes, and then move on to something else. Re-enactment of the sort envisaged by the decriers of interpretation makes no more sense here than it does in performance. Ritual is in Parsifal and through Parsifal dynamically, dialectically challenged from within as well as from without; that indeed is the very stuff of Wagner’s drama.

 

For Parsifal was intended to be and remains different. Wagner’s various attempts to avoid the pejorative – to him – ‘opera’ as a description of his later works may nowadays elicit as much scepticism as blind adoration, though in simply calling Tristan und Isolde ‘drama’ (Handlung), he certainly captured a quality of that singular work. However, it would take a Wagnerian of extreme, unhealthy devotion not to raise at least a hint of a smile at the cumbersome Bühnenweihfestspiel, or ‘stage-festival-consecration-play’, employed for Parsifal. And what that term might mean has brought all manner of consequences for the work’s reception, even indeed, given the determination of Cosima and other Bayreuth loyalists that it should remain confined to the stage it allegedly consecrated, for the possibility of staging it at all. The surrounding aura of sanctity may seem to many repellent (‘an unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as religion and the theatre as a temple’ – Stravinsky), ridiculous (Debussy, albeit continuing to honour the score alone as ‘one of the loveliest monuments ever raised to the serene glory of music’), or both, as in Nietzsche’s case. Moreover, the claim that Parsifal is in any straightforward sense a ‘Christian work’, as opposed to a work that treats with, amongst other things, Christianity, would find few takers today. Even if the end of the first act were an invitation to receive Holy Communion, the Grail Knights’ words – ‘Partake of the bread, valiantly transform it into corporeal strength and power’ – suggest a church or theology whose heterodoxy extended beyond the merely gnostic.

 

That said, this tale of a ‘pure fool’, so ignorant that he knows neither whence he has come, nor even his name, who, through the offices of divine grace rather than by his own deeds, enlightened through compassion (Schopenhauer’s Mitleid, ‘suffering with’), rejuvenates a dying community, remains quite different from the operatic essays of any of Wagner’s contemporaries and many of his successors. Parsifal resists assimilation to the opera house; it is out of place amongst champagne, canapés, and diva-worshippers. Wagner wrote to Ludwig II that he wished to protect it from ‘a common operatic career’. Pierre Boulez, a highly distinguished interpreter and critic as well as compositional successor, understood this very well when he approvingly wrote of Wagner loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are … like cafés where … you can hear waiters calling out their orders: ‘One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!’ Wagner’s works declare their incompatibility with existing theatrical conventions and norms – even today, arguably still more so. And of those works, Parsifal remains the ne plus ultra.

 

The signal strength of Herheim’s production is that it engages with these problems: with the fraught associations, both with Bayreuth – which, for better and for worse, is also quite different from anywhere else – and with broader historical themes, associations the work has gathered from at least the time of its premiere in 1882. So intensely dialectical and multi-layered is Herheim’s direction that we tread successfully a tightrope between presentation of his guiding Konzept – the history of Parsifal as a work and the world in which it has developed from the time of its first performance to that of its most recent – and recounting of the immanent story of Parsifal. Two stories run not so much in parallel as with mutual influence, yet without inflicting harm upon each other and with no sense of contrivance.

 

In the first act, we therefore witness the early days of post-Wagner Wahnfried, the sickly, incestuous goings-on of an impeccably haut bourgeois family and its nursery (Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks comes to mind), in the era of an oft-present Imperial Eagle. As Christianity enters an especially peculiar phase, dreams and childhood come to the fore, likewise the psychopathology of religious experience (which both Nietzsche and Mann saw as fundamental to the work). A priest, incense – Nietzsche’s accusation of Wagner sinking to his knees before the Cross re-examined – and, most shockingly, circumcision of the infant who may or may not ‘be’ a young Parsifal, offer almost as much food for thought as Wagner’s own inversion, echoing the philosophy of Feuerbach, of the elements. The violence of the deed could hardly have been more topical during the 2012 legal controversy over infant genital mutilation in Germany; and yet, it also points to something older, deep-seated, and of course very much part of the work’s reception history: the question of whether anti-Semitism might be expressed in Wagner’s drama. (It notably does not propose answers.) Amfortas now seems far more central to the drama. His cry of pain jolts us from complacent ‘knowledge’ of the work, and also points forward – or backward! – to Kundry’s scream of laughter at Christ, who, whatever Wagner may have hoped, must also have undergone the procedure, on the road to Calvary.

 

The second act opens in a field hospital. For once, and this is typical of Herheim’s attention to Wagner’s detail, we actually see the renegade Knights, Sir Ferris and all. Klingsor is Cabaret Master of Ceremonies; for now, we behold Weimar Germany, our Moorish castle’s owner suggestive in white tie and fishnets. The delicious representation of the Flowermaidens as orderlies and flappers – is that not just what they are? – gains dramatic attention, as well as firmly placing us in the inter-war period. (I say, ‘firmly’, but historical time passes as its performative cousin does.) And yet, a reminder that various levels of interpretation are anything but distinct is offered by a greater keenness of manipulation when it comes to Kundry’s acts: above all, what she tells Parsifal. She is in turn being manipulated by Klingsor; yet perhaps so many of us are understandably now influenced by feminist readings that we feel uncomplicatedly sympathetic. It is salutary to be reminded that this Rose of Hell – the rose very much part of Herheim’s imagery, ‘new’ video technology included – has, despite her plight, agency of her own. That is more properly feminist than to consider her purely as victim. And the similarity of costume between her and Klingsor, both in Weimar cross-dressing travesty, reinforces the need both have for each other, an Hegelian master-slave dialectic re-imagined. Wagner’s artwork is permitting of answers, or better, further questions, which he may or may not have been able to conceive himself. Historical understanding enables it to become of the present, even of the future.

 

The final scene of the second act is electric, the coming of Bayreuth’s and Germany’s darkest years truly shocking. Indeed, the phrase coup de théâtre might have been invented for this advent of the Third Reich, signalled by the ‘Weimar’ castle’s destruction, the arrival of stormtroopers and a brown-shirted, tomorrow-belonging-to-him, little boy, and the unfurling of swastikas. Overdue yet nevertheless courageous, the Festival seemed at last ready to begin to come to terms with its history. Judging by the disgruntled noises from some members of the audience – it should hardly surprise that ‘conservative’ critics of searching productions would feel discomfited by a reminder of their ideological kinship – it remains an absolute necessity too.

 

Then, the final act opens in the garden of a bombed Wahnfried. Parsifal’s coming and Good Friday offer the possibility – illusory? – of rejuvenation. In a tribute to the Bayreuth Tannhäuser of Götz Friedrich, with whom Herheim studied, a procession of the starved post-war population crosses the stage, victims of what has gone before and, prospectively at least, of the mendacious ideology of the Wirtschaftswunder and its culture industry. The point of ultimate hope comes when a star briefly appears in the sky: wonderfully touching, yet what does it signify? A (false) messiah’s advent? A simple, childlike pleasure? It certainly rings truer than the gaudy coloured lights signalling Parsifal’s descent into the realm of the (lifestyle?) guru. Another brave coup de théâtre – Herheim never forgets that Parsifal, amongst other things, is theatre; nor should we – comes with a projection during the Verwandlungsmusik. A request is displayed from the young Wagner brothers, Wieland and Wolfgang, at the 1951 (re-)opening of ‘New Bayreuth’, that political discussion be banished from the Green Hill. An image of Wagner is bricked up behind Parsifal’s childhood wall, the composer remaining too hot to handle. Might we also recall that Wahnfried wall built by Wolfgang, on whose other side Winifred remained until her death, a standing, tenacious reminder that politics could not so easily be banished?

 

If anything, politics stand still more starkly at the heart of the final scene. Amfortas’s trial – in every sense – takes us from post-war Nuremberg to the present-day Bundestag. The problematical nature of charismatic leadership is here for all to see. Parsifal is not one of the trio seen at the close, presumably hastening us to an uncertain future; instead, we find ourselves in the hands of Gurnemanz, Kundry – she does not expire – and a young boy. Or is he Parsifal, and has the whole drama been a dream or, rather, the ultimate nightmare? Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’, the purported Sonderweg of German history? There is certainly no solace to be had from the bickering politicians of the Bundestag, the flag of the Federal Republic draping Titurel’s coffin, yet Parsifal seems to have offered at best a dead-end, a touch of snake oil: a modern politician? Amfortas, like Siegfried, seems to have gained in dignity through death. Nihilism, as Nietzsche would doubtless have had it? Or Wagner’s lifelong anarchism? Again, questions are dramatically suggested rather than dogmatically answered.

 

What of Herheim’s aforementioned turning the mirror upon the audience?  It comes across as an invitation, indeed an incitement, to question everything we have thought. ‘Educating Parsifal’, the character, is also ‘educating Parsifal’, the work, is also ‘educating us’ – not in merely didactic but dramatic fashion. As Horace put it many years earlier, ‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’. It is perhaps only what Wagner had been doing all along, although, in the emotional context both Wagner and Herheim have developed, as opposed to the abstraction of a mere act of reporting, it would be an unimaginative soul indeed who did not relish the mirror’s ambiguous invitation. For, in the words of Carl Dahlhaus, ‘It is precisely in order to radicalise conflicts – so that “resolutions” are ruled out – that dramas are written; if not, they would be treatises.’ It is for precisely that reason that we perform rather than re-enact, that we study as well as perform, that we think rather than wallow, that history enlivens rather than deadens, that the artwork is of past, present, and future. Indeed, it is also for those reasons that music, as Daniel Barenboim has pointed out in his work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, has the potential, the extraordinary power, if not to resolve political conflicts, then to bring people together, to have them work together – and that includes the audience. The communal, religious, and political role of Attic tragedy Wagner wished to recreate is just as relevant, to a revolutionary artwork of our future as to one of his.

 

I have suggested, then, some ways in which Wagner, viewed in performative terms, might use the past, often highly controversial, to look to the future. The idea of an ‘artwork of the future’ remains in many respects as burningly relevant as it did during the years of Wagner’s Zurich exile. An artwork that engages critically with the concerns of humanity and yet strenuously declares the (transcendental?) value of art as extending beyond mere pamphleteering, and which in form and content dramatises, problematises that tension is not simply saying something about art and its reception. As Ludwig Hevesi’s words, inscribed upon the Vienna Secession Building, have it, ‘To every age its art, to art its freedom’. That need not, indeed cannot, be accomplished by all-too-easy evasion, by distancing oneself from the musical works. Herheim’s dramaturgy, as discussed, enabled the music – not in a now discredited sense of ‘absolute music’, with the reactionary, neo-Romantic connotations that has acquired, but in a critical sense more suited to our time, which will doubtless thereafter be subject to criticism – to emerge as its own redeemer, the immanent theology of Parsifal thereby renewing and reinvigorating itself

 

Bayreuth and Wagner’s artwork of the future might yet, then, prove further beginnings, in a sense that both honours, in Meistersinger-fashion, the claims of art as time-honoured tradition and, as Wagner always insisted, reaches beyond the restricting limits of art merely for its own sake. Moreover, a Franconian festival theatre and its surroundings might prove just the place, out of season, for the first intégrale of Stockhausen’s neo-Wagnerian Licht cycle, indeed for a host of new works. Without falling prey to the ‘operatic’ danger we saw Boulez sketch above, custodians of the Wagnerian repertory would have nothing to fear – and everything to gain.

'Redemption to the Redeemer!'



Bayreuth, 1882 premiere:
Amalie Materna (Kundry), Emil Scaria (Gurnemanz),
Hermann Winkelmann (Parsifal)

Questions concerning Wagner and religion are some of the most complex in an altogether complex life and œuvre. Did Wagner believe in God? Was he a Christian? Did his views and practice develop? How do his works reflect, further, develop them? To answer such questions often hangs more upon definition of terms, a task both necessary and hopeless, than gleaning of real insight. Wagner’s attitudes changed, yet rarely in linear fashion. The apparently atheist follower of materialist Young Hegelian philosophy endured; so did the admirer of Jesus as social revolutionary. Yet a mysticism of Catholic if hardly orthodox variety also asserted itself. ‘Our conversation leads us to the mystic Meister Eckhart,’ reads Cosima’s 1873 diary. ‘R. begins to read a sermon by him, which fascinates us to the highest degree. Everything turned inward, the soul silent, so that in it God may speak the highest word!’ In 1881, Parsifal essentially composed yet not fully scored, Cosima writes of her husband looking ‘forward to the better times in which such men as Shakespeare, now prophets in the wilderness, will be brought in to form, as it were, part of a divine service. Thus the world once was – first a ceremonial act spoken, then to Holy Communion.’ Questions multiply; answers seem more remote than ever.


Is Parsifal, then, a religious artwork, or is it a work ‘about’ religion? Unsurprisingly, the answer turns out to be: both. More profoundly, however, the very material of Wagner’s drama may be understood to lie in exploring the relationship between the two tendencies. Specific concern with Christianity is far from incidental, in that it enables exploration of both cyclical (Schopenhauerian) and teleological (Hegelian) conceptions of time – otherwise understood, the archetypal ‘Greek’ and ‘Jewish’ strands of the Christian faith. Parsifal, like Christianity, is neither merely cyclical nor straightforwardly linear; it is certainly far from the ‘timeless’ work that reactionary commentators have claimed. Instead, we watch, listen to, and participate in a struggle between time and eternity.


An abiding conflict, dramatic and intellectual, already starkly dramatised in the Ring, is taken further in Parsifal. We might characterise it as taking place between Hegel and his school on one hand and Schopenhauer on the other, or, to put it another way, between history and anti-history. For Hegel, history represented the progress of the ‘Idea’ or ‘World Spirit’, sometimes referred to as ‘God’, which might embody itself, often anything but consciously, in a ‘world-historical’ figure such as Napoleon – or Siegfried. Where Hegel divined purpose, Schopenhauer discerned no sense in history whatsoever, merely the inchoate striving of the irrational, resolutely non-developmental Will. Recall Hans Sachs’s Meistersinger ‘Wahn’ (illusion) monologue: ‘Wahn, Wahn, everywhere Wahn! Wherever I search, in city- and world-chronicles.’ True reality lies not in the external, phenomenal world, but in the noumenal realm of the Will itself, music being the only art with a direct relationship to that realm. Musical drama thus became for the Schopenhauerian Wagner the metaphysical vehicle for granting real existence to the categories of the understanding, for penetrating, beyond the ‘surface’ words of his poem, to the essence of his myth.


In that spirit, Wagner observed, in the wake of its 1882 performances, that Parsifal owed much to ‘flight from the world,’ for:

 Who could look all his life long with an open mind and a free heart, at this world of murder and theft, organised and legalised through lying, deception, and hypocrisy, without having to turn away, shuddering in disgust? Whence then would one avert one’s gaze? All too often into the vale of death. To him, however, who is otherwise called and singled out by destiny, there appears  the truest reflection of the world itself, as the foretold exhortation of redemption, despatched by its [the world’s] innermost soul.

 

Yet, though couched in the language of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, there remains here a revolutionary socialist’s anger at a bourgeois world of lies, deception, and hypocrisy. Moreover, revulsion is crucially tempered by a redemptive prophecy as redolent of Christianity as of Schopenhauer. Indeed, in 1879, Wagner described Parsifal as ‘this most Christian of works’. He had come to believe that charismatic, revolutionary heroes – Siegmund, Siegfried, Tristan, Walther – could never satisfy the hopes invested in them; that was not, however, to say that charismatic heroes as such were to be abjured. Whatever his dark, Schopenhauerian thoughts regarding withdrawal from society, Wagner continued, after the apparent failure of revolution in 1848-9, to engage with the external, political, historical world. Just as Sachs would, following his lament, suppress his depression, turning his attention once again to Nuremberg and to manipulation of Wahn, Wagner maintained, indeed developed, his Hegelian conception of music drama, in the tradition of Attic tragedy, as abidingly political – and religious: a reflection, an incitement, an exploration, by and of society.


What, after the close of Parsifal, will become of Monsalvat, the Grail castle and community, under Parsifal’s new leadership remains unclear, yet the drama is that of its rescue or salvation, not of annihilating destruction. (That has already been accomplished – but in Klingsor’s realm.) Parsifal discovers what he needs through his own historical experience and the transformative influence this exerts; yet he does not control that historical experience. Despite Nietzsche’s venom, Parsifal stands in this respect at least close to the portrayal of Jesus in The Anti-Christ (which itself stands in some respects close to Wagner’s own incomplete prose drama, Jesus of Nazareth): 

One might … name Jesus a ‘free spirit’ – what is established is nothing to him: the word killeth, whatever is established killeth. The concept, the experience of ‘life’, as he alone knows it, for him opposes every kind of word, formula, law, belief, dogma. … his ‘wisdom’ is precisely the pure ignorance [reine Torheit, a referenee to Parsifal] of all such things. Culture is something he has never heard of…

 

Parsifal was, then, to be a different kind of hero from his Wagnerian predecessors. In the drama that bears his name, we deal with a complex, endlessly fascinating interaction between Mitleid (Schopenhauer’s empathetic compassion, literally ‘sorrow with’), grace (Christianity), and the cunning of historical reason (Hegel). Christian grace, in all its ambiguity, mediates between compassion and history. Amfortas, for instance, is unable to do anything to rectify his plight; he must simply wait. He has acted, with disastrous results, as Klingsor impotently continues to act. When Klingsor’s spear is stopped in its tracks by the sign of the Cross, the spear is transformed into an agent of healing. Yet although Parsifal makes the sign, agency comes from beyond.  For both Schopenhauer and Wagner, Mitleid was closely connected, though not exclusively, with Christianity – and what could be more Christian than the sign of the Cross?



Parsifal, it should be stressed, is not Christ. Wagner criticised Hans von Wolzogen, for having, in an essay the composer otherwise admired, called Parsifal a reflection of the Redeemer: “I didn’t give the Redeemer a thought when I wrote it.”’ We should probably take that claim with a large pinch of salt, whilst noting the anxiety to avoid identification. The Hegelian words with which he opened his contemporaneous essay, Religion and Art, may help explain that anxiety:
 

One could say that when religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for art to grant salvation to the kernel of religion, by having us believe that mythical symbols, which the former [that is, religion] would have us believe in their real sense, may be comprehended through their symbolical value, in order to discern therein, via an ideal presentation, the concealed profound truth. 

And yet, it seems that what actually accomplishes Parsifal’s personal transformation is something beyond Hegel and Schopenhauer. Wagner himself called it grace; there are several, far-from incidental references in his poem to Gnade, a term he had not employed in explicitly theological terms in an opera since Lohengrin. In the Prelude to Act III, we hear again the conflict between dynamic passing of time and blind, purposeless circularity; the former has become arduous, yet it has still not been overcome. Grace, however, if it does not supplant, at least enables realisation both of self and community. When, in the Third Act, Parsifal returns to Monsalvat in search of the Grail, his search is successful either through chance or through the intervention of something higher, if something higher exists – and it appears that it does. It is that and that alone which enables Parsifal finally to carry out his deed, to heal Amfortas’s wound, thereby putting Amfortas out of his eternal agony and, crucially rejuvenating his equally sickened community. How ‘symbolic’ such a force may be is open to question, but then a good part of Wagner’s dramatic genius is itself to raise questions rather than to answer them.



Alois Pennarini as Parsifal and Hannah Mara as Kundry, in the staging by Henry W Savage’s theatre company at the New York Theatre, 1904. (Harper's Weekly Magazine, 12 November 1904)


 

Almost despite himself – on account, we might say, of the Will’s striving towards salvation – Wagner finds himself drawn toward Christianity, or at least toward elements of Christian teaching. He resembles Wotan and Kundry, as described in a conversation recounted by Cosima : ‘R. sees a resemblance between Wotan and Kundry: both long for salvation and both rebel against it, Kundry in the scene with P., Wotan with Siegfried.’ Yet both, whether through the urgings of the Will or through the mediating agency of grace, go beyond their respective rebellions and are saved. Their sins forgiven, Brünnhilde delivers benediction to Wotan, and Parsifal’s example converts Kundry. ‘I do not believe in God,’ Wagner told Cosima on another occasion, ‘but in godliness, which is revealed in a Jesus without sin.’ Though heterodox, Wagner’s profession is nevertheless inconceivable without Christ, without Christianity. Such an idea helps explain Wagner’s desire, when telling Ludwig II of the ‘purity of content and subject-matter of my Parsifal,’ to restrict performances to Bayreuth, to protect the work from ‘a common operatic career’. He would ‘not entirely blame our Church authorities if they were to raise an entirely legitimate protest against representations of the most sacred mysteries upon the selfsame boards in which, yesterday and tomorrow, frivolity sprawls in luxuriant ease’.  

Wagner never, however, claims that Parsifal is itself a sacred rite, but rather that it presents such a rite, namely Holy Communion, on stage. The rite, however, is staged at a time of profound crisis for the community of Monsalvat. Amfortas, not only king but high priest, has succumbed to the blandishments of Kundry and therefore been caught off guard by Klingsor, wounded, apparently irreparably, by his own spear, captured by Klingsor and yet the only weapon that can heal the wound. Without the spear, moreover, the Grail, which the increasingly frail Amfortas can hardly bear to uncover, stands in danger of capture by the community’s adversaries. Crisis is underlined, deepened, by the agony Amfortas feels – as, through Mitleied, do Parsifal, and we – in continued revelation, on stage, in the poem, and in the orchestra alike, of his open wound. Parsifal’s Second Act cry of recognition, ‘Amfortas! – the wound!’, is preceded by Kundry’s kiss, its Tristan-chord making the connection with what Nietzsche dubbed Tristan’s ‘voluptuousness of hell’. This is not an incitement to chastity, but an indictment of insufficient or perverted conceptions of love, whether in the trivial delights of the Flowermaidens’ pleasure garden or the terrible self-castration of Klingsor, intended to elevate him to mastery over physical desire yet rendering him all the more its abject slave. Parsifal recoils in terror. ‘His demeanour,’ read Wagner’s stage directions, ‘expresses a terrible change; he presses his hands forcefully against his heart, as if to overcome a rending pain.’ That pain resounds in screaming orchestral sequences, harmonically and melodically, of more-or-less unresolved diminished seventh chords, their dissonance enhanced by added notes.

 

Just as Wagner’s mixture chords both loosen the bonds of tonality and bind the chords on their own terms more closely together – thereby anticipating Schoenberg and the final crisis, agonising and emancipating, of tonality itself – so does the agony of the wound intensify and symbolise the crisis of Monsalvat and ritual. Yet their crisis offers a necessary starting-point for their third-act redemption, on stage and as an audience rite too. The pure fool and we may then be enlightened through fellow-suffering: ‘durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor’. Words and music are repeated in ritualistic fashion; however, they also, owing to development of the drama, develop in their meaning. Only after the mysterious workings of grace have furthered Parsifal’s Mitleid does he gain the understanding necessary to save Monsalvat and its rite, so as to fulfil the ‘durch Mitleid’ prophecy. We might play with the celebrated opening of St John’s similarly predestinarian Gospel: In the beginning were Will’s sorrow and Heart’s sorrow (Parsifal’s mother, Herzeleide), and the sorrow (Leid) was with (mit) the Will, and the sorrow was Will; Parsifal was the representation of that Will and of that Mitleid.


Recalling Wagner’s own words from Religion and Art, has musical drama vouchsafed salvation to religion itself? Might the relationship even have worked both ways? That possibility may help us understand Wagner’s unwieldy designation, Bühnenweihfestspiel (‘stage-festival-consecration-play’). It also suggests one possible interpretation of Parsifal’s notoriously enigmatic concluding words: ‘Redemption to the Redeemer!’


(originally published as a programme essay for the Royal Opera's 2013 production of 'Parsifal')

Writing the 'Ring'

‘Yes, I should like to perish in Valhalla’s flames! — Mark well my new poem — it contains the beginning of the world and its destruction!’ Wagner’s words in an 1853 letter to Liszt, a copy of the Ring poem enclosed, express abiding theatricality, often overlooked, despite Nietzsche’s vicious attack on Wagner as ‘actor’. They point also to his framing of the Ring dramas on which he had been at work since 1848 and whose completion would lie more than two decades hence, in 1874.

The Immolation Scene from the 'Centenary' Ring
Copyright: Bayreuth Festival

It is well known that Wagner wrote his poems in reverse order, beginning with Siegfrieds Tod, soon to become Götterdämmerung, and needing to write three prequels, before composing the music in the order we know today: the trilogy ‘with preliminary evening’. Likewise that he broke off composition of Siegfried to write Tristan  and Die Meistersinger; likewise  that he found it necessary to write a number of verbal endings to Götterdämmerung between 1848 and 1856 before resolving upon the ‘wordless’ solution, or rather enigma, with which he continues to tantalise us. But the consequences for his dramas are often misunderstood. Wagner’s thought always tended towards an amalgam of the agglomerative and the synthetic. That characteristic renders him especially attractive to the historian of the nineteenth century. Ideas and influences overlap, not necessarily supplanting or resolving, but heightening conflict, the very stuff of drama, thereby rendering him especially attractive to audiences and to performers. Not every idea and influence need be reflected in every performance; were that attempted, we should most likely end up with an unholy mess. However, not only will any production, indeed any audience, have to make choices; they also need to consider what is being left out, or at least played down.

Feuerbach, Bakunin, Marx

 

Keith Warner’s production emphasises Wagner’s intellectual influences during the 1840s, as he worked not only towards the Ring but also towards active participation in the violent, abortive Saxon revolution of 1849. Precisely what role he took on the barricades remains unclear, but it is unquestionable that he was close to the visiting anarchist revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, and that he was consequently ‘wanted’ by the authorities, Wagner being exiled from German soil until 1860, an amnesty from Saxony taking longer still.

Bakunin

In Warner’s words, ‘Whatever you personally believe, Wagner is dealing in the Ring with the nature of God and the universe.’ Indeed, he is, which takes us to ‘the beginning of the world,’ or at least to the beginning of a world. It is actually more complex even than that, for Wagner presents us, like the Book of Genesis, with alternative beginnings. Take the following words, which describe the Prelude to Das Rheingold: ‘the gradual development of the material world … a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher,’ not ‘the vile matter of the idealists … incapable of producing anything,’ but ‘matter … spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive.’ Those words describe the opening perfectly, from the first sounding of the double basses’ low E-flat pedal, held throughout the Prelude, reflecting unchanging Nature: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be – or such would be the claim of the Church, and of many others. Except that those words were not written with Das Rheingold in mind at all. They come from Bakunin’s God and the State, the convergence a testament to both men’s preoccupation with the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx and Engels owed a similar debt. Indeed, the young Engels’s enthusiasm for Feuerbach and Teutonic mythology mirrored Wagner’s own.  Engels wrote in 1840, eulogising Siegfried as the representative of German youth. … We feel the same thirst for deeds [Taten, the same word with which Brünnhilde will send Siegfried out into the world from her rock] … we want to go out into the free world.’ Romantic words, one might think, for a founding-father of ‘scientific socialism’. That is the point: Engels’s socialism did not lack on account of his mythological enthusiasm; nor did Wagner’s.

Feuerbach

Feuerbach was a central figure in the movement that has come to be known as Left or Young Hegelianism. During the political, social, and religious repression of the period between the uneasy restoration of 1815 and the outbreak once again of revolution in 1848-9, a group of German writers wished to extend the revolutionary dynamism of Hegel’s ontology (philosophy of being) to human realms in which they believed their father-figure to have neglected, through self-censorship or otherwise, to follow its implications. Above all, radicals such as Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Bruno Bauer wished to extend Hegelian criticism to the world of religion.  History, it was claimed, in true Hegelian style, had a purpose; now was the time to cast out Christianity at least and perhaps religion itself from philosophy. In his Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that theology transferred authentic religious impulses, such as love, justice, and charity, to an object outside man, namely a God of man’s own invention. Now, however, was the moment to turn from God to man. Wagner would pay tribute to Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future by dedicating to him the 1849 essay, The Artwork of the Future.


Wotan and Alberich, Valhalla and Nibelheim

 

And so, in the Ring, Wagner unmasks – a favourite Young Hegelian conceit – the realm of the gods, built not upon that first ‘natural’ opening to the cycle, but arising from the second, counterpoised genesis, as told by the Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung. Not that the first is so straightforward as it might seem, for Nature, in the guise of the Rhinemaidens, acts cruelly to Alberich, denies the misfit dwarf love, and is violated by him in turn; there is no golden age in the Ring-cosmos. That said, the natural world stands preferable to the deeds of Wotan, chief of the gods and thus in some sense a representation of the godhead itself. Inscribing runes upon his spear, Wotan commits the primal sin of politics, defining principles which, even had they once been good in themselves, become outdated as soon as they find themselves represented in dead wood. Fricka, according to Wagner the voice of ‘custom’, simply cannot understand this, lamenting with all the outworn moralism of a believer who has forgotten quite why she believes, that Siegmund and Sieglinde should love one another. We never see her again, though she will be invoked, off-stage – out of Heaven? – by Hunding, not that she can help him, and as the recipient of vain burnt offerings in Götterdämmerung. Her day has passed.

The spear is also an instrument of domination; it is with military force as well as ideology that Wotan rules the world. Yet ideology in a sense comes first, which is why Valhalla is built, as much a religious as a political fortress, a classic instance of European ‘representational’ culture, which ‘re-presents’ its power to subjects who must be overawed. For, as Wagner and Bakunin were convinced, the ‘critique of religion is the essential precondition for all criticism’ (Marx on Hegel): that of Alberich’s capitalist tyranny of Nibelheim with its golden hoard, the modern factory incarnate, as well as Wotan’s more sumptuous, more ideologically complex castle in the air. It is intended, in the words of the celebrated Lutheran chorale, as ‘ein’ feste Burg’ (‘a stronghold sure’), yet note that it appears first of all to Wotan in a dream. In Feuerbach’s proclamation: ‘Religion is the dream of the human mind,’ in which ‘we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity,’ a view lent Wagnerian credence by Pierre Boulez’s observation, voiced whilst working on the Bayreuth ‘Centenary’ Ring, that  our first musical encounter with Valhalla ‘is not clearly delineated but belongs to a world of dream, phantasmagoria, and mirage.’ Moreover, the forced, disturbingly empty grandeur, or rather grandiosity, of Das Rheingold’s closing bars tells already of desperation, unnatural prolongation, deceit, and, as Erda has already foretold, ‘a dark day [that] dawns for the gods’. Freia and her golden apples may have been regained, but we have seen behind the throne, as has Alberich. Both Alberich and Licht-Alberich – the Wanderer, in his riddle-confrontation with Mime styles himself ‘Light-Alberich’, his ‘black’ antagonist’s power-seeking alter ego – commit crimes against Nature, one despoiling the Rhine, one sapping the life from the World-Ash Tree; both wish to extend that power through possession of the ring, forged in denial of that love, which was for Feuerbach the foundation of a true, human religion; both can be unmasked and thereby overthrown by extension of religious criticism beyond the ‘merely’ theological; and both have their deeds dialectically connected in the musical metamorphosis between the first two scenes of Das Rheingold of Alberich’s ring into Wotan’s Valhalla.

Loge, critic and god of fire

Built upon false contracts, entered into with Fasolt and Fafner, which was for guaranteed by Wotan’s very own spear of domination, and perpetuated by continued denial of the gold to the Rhine and its daughters, Valhalla and the gods’ rule are fatally compromised from the outset. The gods’ entrance, punctured by the Rhinemaidens’ plaints and Loge’s (Young Hegelian) criticism – ‘They hasten to their end, they who imagine themselves so strong and enduring’ – is already a dance of death, rendered all the more slippery by the destabilising, negating, almost Faustian chromaticism of Loge’s motif. Not for nothing has he been identified as the Ring’s sole intellectual, and, when one bears Bakunin and indeed the Wagner who prescribed a ‘fire-cure’ for Paris in mind, one realises that there lies no contradiction whatsoever between Loge’s twin roles as critic and as god of fire. Moreover, Loge’s ‘imagine’ (wähnen) is crucial not only in the Feuerbachian sense, but also in that it provides, in its anticipation of the Wahn (‘illusion’) of Schopenhauer, whom Wagner had not yet read, a textbook example of a concept that would acquire additional layerings of meaning as Wagner’s work on the cycle and elsewhere proceeded: recall Hans Sachs’s ‘Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn!’

The ‘purely human’ Volsungs

The contrasting world of the ‘purely human’, a term Wagner often employed in his theoretical writings, is experienced with vernal, magical immediacy in Die Walküre: ‘You are the Spring,’ Sieglinde exults, before submitting to her brother, the curtain falling only just in time, as the music’s passion requires us all to take a metaphorical cold shower during the interval. Feuerbach abides here, for not only does this celebrate love between Siegmund and Sieglinde; it commemorates Siegmund’s rejection of Valhalla, echoing Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality, whose opening pages include a ‘Humble petition to the exalted, wise, and honourable learned public to receive Death into the Academy of Sciences’:

He is the best doctor on earth;

none of his cures has yet failed;

and no matter how sick you become,

he completely heals Nature.

To be sure, he never has concerned himself

with Christian theology,

yet he will have no peer

in understanding philosophy.

So then I implore you to receive

Death into the academy,

and, as soon as possible, to make

him doctor of philosophy.

What Siegmund accepts, celebrating death and his love for Sieglinde in heroic defiance of the illusory promise of immortality in Valhalla, Wotan struggles towards, at one point willing ‘the end’ and yet, even at the last in Siegfried, making a stand, unwilling quite to ‘die in the fullest sense of the word,’ according to Wagner’s words in an 1854 letter. It takes, moreover, a free act, albeit unconsciously free, by Siegfried, revolutionary hope of Engels and Wagner alike, finally to shatter Wotan’s spear of law, and to return the god for good to Valhalla, to await, in Schopenhauerian resignation, the end. Siegfried’s undoing will be his lack of consciousness, though that spontaneity will also point to his greatness, a dilemma which, as revolutionary hopes faded yet never entirely died, became all the more pressing for Wagner. Indeed, it is only in memoriam, in the shattering Funeral March, that Siegfried proves worthy of the hopes invested in him, of Wagner’s stated desire in the Ring ‘to make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’. No longer quite the hero of the drama that he had been in the more straightforwardly revolutionary Siegfrieds Tod, Siegfried has neither quite triumphed nor quite been supplanted: again, Wagner’s intellectual method poses rather than answers questions.

Concluding, thinking, making sense of uncertainty

To have written that the dramas were completed in 1874 was in a sense misleading, for they remain magnificently open-ended, whether in performance or staging. The composer was notably dissatisfied with scenic realisation at Bayreuth. Wagner’s great effort to conclude remains, whatever his own ambitions towards Hegelian totality, stubbornly necessitates further questioning. This may be of the nature, ‘What happens to Alberich?’, not at all a silly question. Does such uncertainty of plot, hardly accidental, suggest that, whatever the ‘watchers’, the mysterious ‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’, at the end of Götterdämmerung may have experienced, even learned, that we are doomed to repeat the cycle ad infinitum? Such, after all, is the implication of a cycle, though what of Warner’s and Stefanos Lazaridis’s double helix, perhaps suggestive of Hegel’s favoured spiral? Indeed, whilst the ring itself tempts us to think in circular form, we should always bear in mind that, more often than not, its powers are ‘unmasked’  as illusory. All forms of power, love included, fall prey to Wagner’s deconstruction and savage indictment – his encounter with the philosophy of Schopenhauer here fuses with prior disillusionment with the more naïve aspects of Feuerbach’s ‘love-communism’ –  and yet we continue to ask ourselves whether a world without power is even conceivable, or merely ‘utopian’, to borrow from Marx and Engels. Siegfried is never better off than when he values the ring at naught; Brünnhilde is never worse off than when she considers it to betoken marriage, another form of property-based power. (The socialism of French writers such as Charles Fourier, with its celebration of something akin to what another generation would call ‘free love’, was always a potent ingredient in Wagner’s intellectual mix, likewise that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose most famous slogan remains ‘Property is theft’, instantiated in Alberich’s conversion of value-free Rhinegold into capital.)

Thus particular questioning readily transforms itself into the more general, conceptual variety, and vice versa. That whole ‘world’ of which Wagner wrote to Liszt develops before our very eyes and ears, both in performance and in subsequent contemplation. The Ring’s web of motifs encourages us to think in such a way, to dart back and forth, reminding us of its world’s past, hinting at its future, and tantalising us with alternative paths of development, which intriguingly become all the more ‘real’ the more strongly we know that they will be denied. What if…? This is not a work one can know too well, or even well enough. And yet, we know ,with Hegel, that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk; or, with Marx, that it is folly to write recipes for the cookery books of the future. It is no coincidence that Hegel and Marx were so taken with early theories of evolution, with their strong facility of backward explanation and their weak predictive powers. Wagner might speak theoretically of the ‘artwork of the future’, but he is wise enough in that artwork to stick to the past and present; he does not present us with science fiction.  The world is rightly given over to the ‘watchers’.

 What about us? We might do well to heed Warner’s words, ‘When you are torn apart at the end of Die Walküre – as I think you should be – it’s because you’ve had five hours of profound information about these people, not because you’ve been manipulated into weeping by mere theatrical or musical devices.’ Wagner, in his own words, aims at ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’, not at its abdication. The Ring acts as a standing rebuke to those people – Nietzsche might have called them ‘Wagnerians’ – who wish merely to wallow. An audience, just as much as a performer or a director, which fails to think is unworthy of the Ring, yet that incitement affords an extraordinary opportunity. There is clearly identification, albeit uncertain, to be had between us and the ‘watchers’ – we are all survivors – and a crucial clue here is that they are human. The end of Wotan’s rule is not hymned with words of revolutionary jubilation as it had been in one of Wagner’s projected endings, the so-called ‘Feuerbach ending’, yet there nevertheless remains a strong sense that, human though we may be in our failings as well as our strengths, our world is that Nietzsche would herald in The Gay Science:  

We philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone upon us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.

 

Uncertainty with respect both to the watchers’ position and to ours precludes glib chatter of a happy ending.Yet, informed as much by Schopenhauer’s ideas of compassion as Feuerbach’s unmasking of religion, they stand a little advanced upon the savagery we have witnessed, a beacon of hope to our world, which has signally failed to destroy Valhalla or Nibelheim. In the words of Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.’ There can be no final words when it comes to the Ring, but let us temporarily conclude with a return to Boulez:

There have been endless discussions as to whether this conclusion is pessimistic or optimistic [in our shorthand, ‘Feuerbach or Schopenhauer?’]; but is that really the question? Or at any rate can the question be put in such simple terms? [Patrice] Chéreau has called it ‘oracular’, and it is a good description. In the ancient world, oracles were always ambiguously phrased so that their deeper meaning could be understood only after the event, which, as it were, provided a semantic analysis of the oracle’s statement. Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.