Wagner and Feuerbach

(Article, ‘Feuerbach’, first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Engraving from 1872, Die Gartenlaube

Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (b. Landshut, 28 July 1804; d. Rechenberg [near Nuremberg], 13 Sep. 1872) Philosopher, attended Berlin lectures by Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Feuerbach lectured at Erlangen but failed to obtain a university position, an ambition rendered impossible following revelation of his authorship of the atheistic Thoughts on Death and Immortality (published anonymously, 1830); he relied upon income from his wife’s factory. A key member of the “Young Hegelian” school, Feuerbach inspired many 1848 radicals, whilst remaining personally aloof from revolution. Following the factory’s bankruptcy, Feuerbach’s later years were spent in relative poverty. Having read Marx’s Capital, he joined the Social Democratic Party in 1870.

Feuerbach’s interests remained founded upon the theology of his youth. Unmasking the “secret” – a typical Young Hegelian conceit – of religion as inversion, he proceeded to anthropological criticism of philosophy, understood as abstraction from theology, itself abstracted religion. Man had transferred all his greatest qualities to an imagined, transcendental being, God. Humanity was impoverished; love, the essence of religion, was perverted, even denied. Love must therefore be brought back down to earth, as Wagner attempted in the Ring, most clearly in Siegmund’s rejection of Valhalla, of immortality as promised by Brünnhilde, and subsequently, her Siegmund/love-inspired rebellion against Wotan. She loses divinity but gains humanity.

Feuerbach had become, for Wagner, “the proponent of the ruthlessly radical liberation of the individual from the bondage of conceptions associated with the belief in traditional authority” (My Life, English tr., 430). The title of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft echoed its dedicatee’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Like many of his generation, Wagner not only followed Feuerbach’s critique of religion, but extended it to political and economic life. Alberich transforms value-free Rhinegold into possessed – in more than one sense – capital, a classic case of Feuerbachian inversion. What should be loved, enjoyed, and possessed though not owned by all, enslaves the Nibelungs as if it were divine. Likewise, Wotan enjoys not only religious but political power through the fortress of Valhalla. Principles that were, at least for a time, potentially good, have come to rule over mere mortals. Those principles, sapped of life just like the World-Ash tree, have hardened into law. Wotan and Alberich battle for possession of a ring whose imagined power rules the world. As Wagner explained to August Röckel, “the essence of change is the essence of reality, whereas only the imaginary is changelessly unending,” (Letter of 25/26 January 1854). Liberation “from the bondage of [such] conceptions” was the task of the Dresden uprising and its dramatic counterparts: Volsung revolution and Brünnhilde’s elevation to the “purely human.” Such sentiments remained part of Wagner’s conception until completion of the Ring and indeed of Parsifal too, neither supplanted by nor vanquishing newer, metaphysical concerns.

To take one example, that sympathy for fellow human beings (Schopenhauer’s Mitleid), which Brünnhilde exhibits in her benedictory Immolation Scene, is prefigured in Feuerbach’s “species being.” Consciousness of fellow suffering or indeed joy is what distinguishes man from beast, and what must once again be ascribed to man rather than God. Brünnhilde’s example is intended for the “watchers” – as well as us – who might therefore heed Wagner’s Feuerbachian words of 1849: “We see that man is utterly incapable in himself to attain his destiny, that in himself he has not the strength to germinate the living seed distinguishing him from the beast. Yet, that strength, missing in man, we find, in overflowing abundance, in the totality of men. … Whereas the spirit of the isolated man remains eternally buried in deepest night, it is awakened in the combination of men,” (Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 12:242). Wagner’s dialectic between Feuerbach and Schopenhauer harks back to their common Romantic roots in Schleiermacher’s theology of love, creating something dramatically new.

Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006)

Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, tr. Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1986).

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. George Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1989).

Aspects of Wagnerian Love: Sister, Bride, Wife and Son

(originally published as a programme note to a Salzburg Festival Concert, August 2013: programme details below)

 

Richard Wagner (1813–1886)

Siegfried-Idyll in E major, WWV 103
Act One of Die Walküre, WWV 86 B

Springtime Passion: The Heat of the Moment

If ever there were an act taken from Wagner’s Ring one might elect to perform in isolation, arguably from his entire oeuvre, it would be the first act of Die Walküre. It ‘works’ by itself; although only an incurious soul would not to wish to know what happens next, you do not need Das Rheingold to make sense of it. That is not, of course, to say that knowledge of the ‘preliminary evening’ does not have one appreciating Die Walküre differently, more deeply. The very contrast of sound-worlds between the frigid realm of gods, dwarves and giants, in which the goddess of love, Freia, is little more than a cipher, and the world of what Wagner, in thrall to the ‘sensualist’ philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, called the ‘purely human’ is an implied part of the dramatic experience. Yet even the first-time listener will be drawn in by the Walküre tale of a brutalized woman falling in love with a mysterious outlawed visitor, the liberator in whom she will recognize herself and her true potential as a human being and who will likewise recognize himself in her. This is a Romantic journey from darkness to light, just as Wagner would have found in the archetypal musical example, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

With Wagner, tonal relations are more complex, arguably more equivocal, than in Beethoven. The Ring as a whole opens in E flat major, or rather it opens with that celebrated low E flat, from which even tonality itself seems to evolve, just as life itself may be understood to evolve from the Rhine in the Rheingold Prelude. Götterdämmerung concludes in D flat major, ‘flatter’ than the ‘natural world’ opening to the cycle, and indeed the key associated with the gods’ fortress of Valhalla. Yet the progression experienced in the first act of Die Walküre, if not quite so straightforward as that of Beethoven’s C minor to C major ‘narrative’, still brings with it a clear transformation, from the D minor of the Prelude’s extraordinary opening storm – Beethoven again a progenitor, not least in the Pastoral Symphony, though Wagner goes further in conceptual weight and arguably in sheer fury – to the blazing full orchestral triumph of G major as the curtain falls. That scorching climax, frankly erotic rather than metaphysically Beethovenian, occurs just in time in terms of stage action to spare prudish blushes as brother and sister cross the final frontier of mutual and self-exploration. Even then, however, we must register a qualification – opening and climax sharing a similarity of heroic Volsung defiance – in the flattened subdominant final chord that intensifies the dramatic excitement, yet hints at trouble in store.

Let us take a few steps back to the emergence of Siegmund from wild storm and dark forest. A proud example from Wagner’s line of charismatic heroes, he disdains bourgeois society as it disdains him: morally, politically – and violently. Like Parsifal, he stands so far outside civilization that he knows not even his name. He calls himself ‘Wehwalt’ (woeful) but only discovers his ‘true’ name, Siegmund (victorious protector), when his sister-bride bestows it upon him through love. Siegmund comes closer than most to the revolutionary Wagner wished himself to be. Marriage, forcible subjugation of Sieglinde as chattel by her thuggish husband, Hunding, is to be vanquished, on account both of its instantiation of bourgeois property rights and its thwarting the overpowering love Siegmund and Sieglinde discover in each other. Only later on, in Tristan und Isolde and in Götterdämmerung, do we discover that Romantic love is itself a form of power and thus equally to be suspected. We hear that from a beautiful heart-rending solo cello motif, voiced as water and Sieglinde refresh the fugitive visitor. It will develop into a fully blown theme of sexual love as their feelings develop: ‘Du bist der Lenz’ (you are the spring), Sieglinde will tell him. The emotional world conjured into being as liberation from the stern prison of emotional winter proves as vernal as anything Wagner wrote.

In the meantime, Hunding has returned home. According to customary laws of hospitality –Hunding is nothing if not conventional – the head of the household must offer shelter for the night. He distrusts his visitor, however, as he distrusts all novelty, and notes a suspicious kinship to Sieglinde; it is all in the eyes. It transpires that ‘Wehwalt’ is a foe of Hunding and his kin. Prefiguring his liberation of Sieglinde, ‘Wehwalt’ has rescued a child-bride forced by her family into a loveless marriage; the brothers who were slain are of Hunding’s clan. Though custom will constrain him this evening, Hunding announces his intention to avenge those deaths and the affront to patriarchy the following morning. Sieglinde drugs her tormentor and joins Siegmund, revealing the secret of the sword in the tree, awaiting a great hero. Siegmund’s father ‘Wälse’ – in reality, a disguised Wotan, roaming the human world in search of something ‘new’ – had promised him a sword that he would find ‘in höchster Not’ (in deepest need). The phallic symbolism of extraction is not subtle, nor should it be. Music and words emphasize Siegmund’s triumph: Siegmund the Volsung, you see, woman! As bridal gift he brings you this sword.’ (‘Siegmund, den Wälsung, siehst du, Weib! Als Brautgabe bringt er dies Schwert.’) The final revelation comes with Sieglinde’s recognition in Siegmund of the brother from whom she has long been separated. In defiance of the bourgeois morality of Hunding and his protectress, Fricka – Wagner, in a letter, derided her as the voice of mere ‘custom’ – Siegmund takes his twin as ‘bride and sister ’ (‘Braut und Schwester’). Thus will the blood of the Volsung race flourish (inspiring Thomas Mann initially unpublished 1906 novella Wälsungenblut).

Jeannine Altmeyer (Sieglinde) and Peter Hoffmann (Siegmund) Sieglinde and Siegmund in Patrice Chéreau's classic Bayreuth 'centenary' production of Die Walküre

Though one might deem this a tragedy considered in full – Carl Dahlhaus wrote of ‘the tragedy of the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinde’ – and it is certainly true that both parties ultimately meet their death rather than enjoy or endure a ‘happy marriage’, ‘tragic’ is not how it feels. There is greatness in Siegmund’s subsequent rejection of Valhalla and immortality because Sieglinde will not be admitted; that greatness is born not only in his character but also in the transformative quality of the Volsungs’ love. Shocking experience of that very same quality will initiate Brünnhilde’s transformation from steely, inhuman Valkyrie to ‘purely-human’ woman. When, moreover, we come in the second act to Siegmund’s death, we understand it in the light of that love’s blazing conviction. A thoroughgoing anarchist in matters of love as well as politics, indeed a political thinker who recognized their inextricable interrelation, Wagner insisted that nothing endured for ever. Such, we discover in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, had been Wotan’s error, to inscribe treaties as runes upon his spear, attempting to render eternal that which could only have had temporary validity. So it is for Wagner, the Dresden comrade-in-arms of Mikhail Bakunin and student of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Who knows what might happen to Siegmund and Sieglinde in old age? The very idea seems preposterous. Indeed, when, in the subsequent generation, Brünnhilde attempts to perpetuate her union with Siegfried beyond its natural life, tragedy ensues. Wagner captures the Volsungs’ springtime passion in all its immediacy, its immanence – always a primary concern to Wagner who, as a student of Young Hegelianism, stood determined to bring heaven down to earth. There is no Hans Sachs here, ready to counsel the youthfully impetuous that they need plan further ahead.

Foolhardy, indeed doomed, in the face of societal opposition though their love might be, what matters is the here and now; what matters in retrospect is the there and then. When Wotan returns in the second act, he will be weighed down by reflection, by consequences, whereas Siegmund and Sieglinde do not reflect, they simply act. Theirs is the Young Hegelian ‘Philosophie der Tat’ (philosophy of action) or of ‘the deed’. It may not be a ‘solution’ to the world’s problems. As Wagner discovered, the more he thought about it, the further away that seemed, hence his immersion in the ‘pessimistic’ philosophy of Schopenhauer, which he nevertheless declined to accept wholesale. The Volsungs’ deeds nevertheless thrill and inspire, especially in the white heat of the moment.  

Autumnal Progeny: A Return to the Symphony?

The flourishing of Volsung blood will find its fruit in Siegfried, born of Sieglinde at the moment of her death. We encounter the younger hero in Siegfried and, at a certain remove in the Siegfried-Idyll, or, to grant it its full dedicatory title Tribschen Idyll with Fidi-Birdsong and Orange Sunrise as Symphonic Birthday Greeting Offered to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870 – and one thought Hans Sachs’s christening of the Meistersinger melody, ‘selige-Morgentraum Deutweise’, lacked catchiness. Siegfried Wagner was born in June 1869, whilst work on the draft of Siegfried, from which the thematic material of the Idyll is taken, was completed the following month. Two sons, Wagner’s and the Volsungs’, thereby became intertwined in family mythology (though both would fail to meet unrealistic expectations).  We can smile at the marked contrast between the bourgeois family idyll, Cosima’s divorce from Hans von Bülow notwithstanding, the Wagners had created and the memory of Wagner’s anarchistic attacks upon that self-same thing. Or we can simply enjoy for what it is Wagner’s finest instrumental work: performed on that Tribschen Christmas Day as chamber music, yet conceived, as the autograph score attests, as a ‘symphony’.

Tribschen

Wagner was too hard upon some of his other instrumental efforts, yet he knew the value of this ‘symphony’ in modified sonata form, founded not so much upon Beethovenian dialectics as an idea of development rooted in musico-dramatic ‘endless melody’. Cosima recorded the following thoughts in her diary on on 30 August 1877:

He plays me the sonata for Math[ilde] Wesendonck and laughs heartily at its 'triviality'. […] He says he has never been able to write an occasional piece – this sonata is shallow, nondescript, the Albumblatt for Betty Schott is artificial; only with the Idyll had he been successful, because in that everything came together.

This lullaby of peace, joy and world-inheritance, to employ the conventional leitmotif references from the opera, may be our key to imagining those post-Parsifal ‘symphonies’ Wagner often envisaged, yet was never granted time to write. It seems they might have stood closer to Liszt than Bruckner, let alone Brahms.

 

Norman Tebbit, Wagnerian? Or, Der Ring des Nibelungen: Love versus Inheritance

For the (dubious) benefit of overseas readers, who may until now have been living in blissful ignorance of Lord Tebbit of Chingford, his reappearance on the British political stage might prove, short of Margaret Thatcher’s resurrection, the ultimate in ‘80s retro. Notorious for stances that threatened to make the Prime Minister herself resemble a woolly-minded liberal – his advice to the unemployed was that they should follow his father’s lead, getting on their bikes to find some work, and he suggested a ‘cricket test’ for immigrants, to assess their loyalty on the basis of which team they supported – he seems more recently to have become obsessed with homosexuality, to the extent that a friend of mine suggested he should consider seeking asylum in Iran or Saudi Arabia. (The idea of him as the Abu Qatada of Teheran is not entirely without its amusing side.) He certainly has longstanding form, having written to The Daily Telegraph in 1998, perturbed that gay men might do each quasi-Freemasonic ‘favours’, were they to be permitted to attain political office. His latest intervention, an interview with The Big Issue reported today (click here) has as its context a failed bid by the extreme Right of the Conservative Party to derail legislation to enable gay marriage; Tebbit now finds himself exercised by the possibility of a lesbian queen who might have an artificially inseminated heir. Other interesting light is cast upon his subconscious by his concern that gay marriage might lead to his marrying his son in order to avoid inheritance tax. (If I were Tebbit Jr, I should probably now be in the departures lounge, nervously consulting my wristwatch.)

On the eve of Wagner’s 200^th birthday, I wondered initially whether this story might draw a few threads together. Might we out Tebbit as a Wagnerian? Had he simply been listening to too much of Die Walküre (see the clip below for Siegmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, declaring their love for each other, the curtain falling just in time to spare too many Chingford blushes.)

 

 

But alas, not. I reminded myself that in the world of Tebbit, the issue is about inheritance. He does not seem so much as to consider the possibility that some of those gay couples might wish to marry out of love. One might claim Wagnerian influence in that respect too; Wagner was at best ambivalent concerning marriage, arguing rightly, in Proudhonian fashion, that it was little more than an instantiation of bourgeois property relations, and having his Jesus of Nazareth stand as a liberator of mankind – and womankind – from all such constraints to human flourishing. Inheritance – ‘the world’s inheritance’ of the Ring and the Ring’s ring – is equally deadly. Yet in Die Walküre, Wagner straightforwardly offers us a portrayal of two human beings who fall in love, unconcerned with society’s judgement upon them, unconcerned even by the discovery that they are brother and sister. Their love, of the moment, refusing to be set in stone either by the runes of Wotan’s spear of law or Fricka’s dead hand of custom, defies bourgeois marriage, yet not after the fashion of Norman Tebbit’s Thatcherite reduction of all to financial and contractual concerns; quite the opposite. Now it may well be, as Wagner's intellectual development tends to suggest, that the hopes placed by many in love are illusory, that we should do better to attend to Schopenhauer than to Feuerbach, and that marriage may certainly not prove to be the best way forward for anyone of any sexual orientation; Brünnhilde belief that she is married, cruelly symbolised by the ring itself, does her and Siegfried no good at all. But Wagner points to renunciation; he certainly does not suggest that we retreat to a world of loveless marriages, such as those of Sieglinde to Hunding, or others conducted purely for reasons of inheritance. Wagner’s relevance? (Wagners Aktualität, as an essay by Adorno has it.) It has never been stronger.

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.

 

 

On the anniversary of the first performance of Das Rheingold...

... and two days before the Ring opens at Covent Garden. (Alas, I have been unable to acquire tickets, but look forward to hearing from those who have.)





Valhalla is not only a stronghold of political power, but also a sacerdotal fortress — Ein’ feste Burg, in the words of the celebrated Lutheran chorale. Wotan’s initial greeting to his castle in the sky had possessed a similar magnificence to the chorale, both in the vocal line  and in the full statement of the noble Valhalla motif. His words upon awakening from his dream, ‘Vollendet das ewige Werk!’ resembled those employed by the angels in The Creation in praise of God’s creativity, ‘Vollendet ist das große Werk’: ‘Achievèd is the everlasting [Wagner]/great [Haydn] work.’ Yet one of Wagner’s fundamental claims is that Wotan’s proud edifice is thoroughly illusory. As Feuerbach had proclaimed in The Essence of Christianity: ‘Religion is the dream of the human mind,’ a dream 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.’ It is through the imagination alone that ‘man neutralises the opposition between God and the world’. Boulez, at work on the Ring (he conducts here), noted that our first encounter with Valhalla is in no wise a moment of triumph, for ‘Valhalla is not clearly delineated but belongs to a world of dream, phantasmagoria, and mirage.’Religion, according to Marx’s critique of Hegel, ‘is but the illusory sun, around which man will revolve for as long as he does not revolve around himself’.

Nowhere is the claim of illusion more apparent than during the gods’ entry into Valhalla, when Loge turns upon the gods’ triumphalism. It is as if a Young Hegelian critic such as David Strauss or Bruno Bauer had entered stage left. Bauer himself recalled that prior to Strauss's Life of Jesus, Hegel’s followers had ‘lived in patriarchal calm, as blessed gods in the kingdom of the Idea.’ Thereafter, the ‘lightning of thought’ had struck in that realm, and ‘disturbed the dream’. In the words of another Young Hegelian writer, Max Stirner: ‘If you devour the sacred, you have made it your own! Digest the sacramental wafer,’ or burn Valhalla, ‘and you are rid of it!’ Loge thus speaks as both a Young Hegelian critic and a harbinger of Bakunin, with a distinct tinge of Mephistopheles — ‘I am the spirit that always negates!’ Consider Loge’s disdainful soliloquy, in which he also refers menacingly to his annihilating role as god of fire:

They hasten to their end,

they who imagine [wähnen, a usage preceding Wagner's encounter with Schopenhauer] themselves so strong and enduring.

I am almost ashamed to associate myself with them;

I am tempted to transform myself

once again into flickering flames.

To burn those who once tamed me,

rather than to die foolishly with the blind,

even though they be the most divine gods!

That does not seem stupid to me!

I shall think about it: who knows what I shall do?
 

Those words and the chromatic, negating destabilisation of his music with respect to that of the gods make a mockery both of Donner’s bravado in clearing the skies and of the alleged ‘splendour’ of the fortress ‘safe from fear and dread’, as greeted by Wotan. Wotan’s downcast, guilt-laden remark prior to the thunderstorm seems more apposite: ‘With an evil toll did I pay for that building!’ Froh, true to ineffectual form, constructs a rainbow bridge, as if that would seal a new covenant. To quote Peter Wapnewski: ‘The gods are on dangerous ground, but they fail to recognise the fact, dazzled as they are by their own splendour, their foolish arrogance, and their delight in illusions. They are participating in a glorious, richly costumed dance of death.’One can hardly dispute the glory and splendour of the blazing rainbow bridge theme, but the impression is that the brass doth protest a little too much — rather like those repetitions at the end of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, in which the composer seems vainly to be trying to persuade himself that all is well. The difference here is that the composer knows the score, as it were, only too well; the gods are human, all-too-human. Valhalla’s denizens are not unlike those dynasties of whom  the Watchman in Æschylus's Agamemnon’s had reported: ‘their shining blazoned on the air, these stars, upon their wane’. In Stirner’s words, ‘alienness is a criterion of the “sacred”. In everything sacred there lies something “uncanny”.’

Alberich’s world of capital may be no better — it may even be worse — but the Nibelung’s actions have helped lay bare the illusions of Valhalla, just as the cult of Dionysus had once shattered the serenity of Olympus and thereby initiated the great religious struggle between two opposing forces immortalised in the Bacchae of Euripides (or in Henze’s most Wagnerian opera, The Bassarids). The giants’ return to claim their wages and ransom sits uneasily with the ancien régime of the gods, bringing into question any notion of divine right — or, indeed, of divinity. As Marx pointed out, ‘the relationship of industry and, in particular, the world of wealth to the political [and religious] world is one of the principal problems of modern times.’ The present ‘ancien régime’ was but ‘the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead,’ which therefore instead sought ‘its salvation in hypocrisy and sophistry,’ just as the gods of Æschylus had been compelled to die a second, comic death in the dialogues of Lucian.

Such is the gods’ ‘new-found splendour’, in which Loge sarcastically suggests that the lamenting Rhinemaidens, deprived of their gold, might care instead to bask. Yet, rather than heed his none-too-thinly-veiled warning, the gods merely chortle, and stride across the bridge to Valhalla. Everyone, of course — not least the gods themselves, would they be honest — knows the new splendour to be no more real than the modern musicians’ trick, outlined in Opera and Drama, of building ‘shimmering golden towers of music on vapid and unworthy’ foundations. The final words of Das Rheingold are allotted to the Rhinemaidens, victims of the politico-religious war of emancipation against Nature:

Rhinegold! Rhinegold! Pure gold!

If only your lustrous glitter still shone in the depths!

Only in the depths is there harmony and truth:

false [falsch] and cowardly [feig] is the rejoicing above!

The music, now in the key of G-flat major, as far away as possible from the C major tonality of the gold, reminds us of the poverty of Valhalla’s grandiloquence as compared with the true splendour of the previously valueless gold. The C-flat minor chords on falsch and feig drive home the message further, piercing the unreality, the false consciousness, of Valhalla’s diatonicism. Valhalla, however recently it might have been built, is already a simulacrum — as Plato would have understood only too well. Indeed, one may doubt whether an ‘original Valhalla’ ever really existed. Those who would attempt to restore an unmediated ‘authentic’ Wagner Ring ought to take note.

Looking forward to Parsifal at Bayreuth (VI)

Wagner wishes to use Christian myth and Christian history to correct their errors. Thus Cosima records: ‘Much about church and state; he says, “For me Christianity has not yet arrived, and I am like the early Christians, awaiting Christ’s return.” – But in the search for ideality, he adds, things look different!’ (15 July 1879) Not only religion, not only Christianity, but even theology might be aufgehoben. Hegel – the philosophy of history – might yet vanquish Feuerbach, or at least render him less one-sided in his apparent atheism. Wagner, whilst lauding in 1851 (Opera and Drama) the ‘ability of Christian myth to enthral our minds’ via its depiction of ‘transfiguration through death,’ had also condemned it for having distorted and denied the anthropomorphism of Germanic myth and having constructed instead a new theology. Rendered incapable of necessary regeneration, myth – like political and artistic unity – had ‘fragmented into its individual, self-contained, component parts … its dramatic nucleus broken down into a plethora of unrelated deeds.' Now Christian myth and Christian theology, even if of questionable orthodoxy, might help renew that initial unity. If the Ring, despite its incidental Teutonism, had pointed the way, then Parsifal would recognise the necessity of religion in general and of Christianity in particular for any post-Incarnation society. Christ is reintroduced to a community that has abandoned Him. Whilst discussing the issue of Hermann Levi as conductor of Parsifal, Cosima told her husband: ‘the community into which the Israelite would be accepted has itself abandoned Christ, whereas previously blood was shed and everything sacrificed on his behalf’. Wagner responded that he had certainly remained true to Christ. ‘“The trouble is,” he exclaims, “that all great personalities reveal themselves to us in time and space, and are thus subject to change.”’ (19 January 1881) Hegel and history once again intervene, even when the Schopenhauerian language of time and space is invoked.

This conflict is re-dramatised in the dialectical opposition in Parsifal between the characteristic, indeed almost normative, chromaticism and diatonicism of Tristan and Die Meistersinger respectively. It is noteworthy that the most ‘advanced’ music is given to Klingsor, Amfortas, and Kundry, not to Parsifal, just as it had been to Alberich and Hagen. This diatonic-chromatic opposition takes concrete form in the opposition of the two worlds of Monsalvat and Klingsor’s realm. It is heightened by the incursions of the latter into the former, notably the agonising chromaticism of Amfortas’s wound and Kundry’s kiss, which renders Parsifal able to sympathise with Amfortas’s agony. As William Kinderman points out (‘Wagner’s Parsifal: musical form and the drama of redemption,’ in The Journal of Musicology, 4 (1985)),‘Kundry’s kiss serves … as the point of connection between the heavenly, diatonic realm of the Grail and the diabolical, chromatic realm of Klingsor; from her kiss comes the “pollution of the sanctuary,” reflected in the chromatic contamination of the third bar of the Communion theme.’Yet this ‘pollution’ is enabling too, in a very real sense a felix culpa, for without it redemption could never occur. Grace needs it, as well as vice versa.

And so, when reconciliation, the ultimate driving force of Hegel’s philosophy, comes, it is, despite some appearances, dialectical. Kinderman observes:

The arrival of this final tonic chord of A-flat major thus provides the simultaneous resolution of the Grail and Communion motives, standing in place of the dissonance that had represented a primary source of musical tension from the very beginning of the work, four hours earlier. In these closing bars, both motives are subsumed into the final subdominant cadence, completing and perfecting the musical form as an audible symbol for the utopia of redemption.

Perhaps, however, it remains but a utopia; it can hardly be the end of the story. We cannot be any more sure of the outcome than at the end of Götterdämmerung. Such a plagal cadence was closely associated, especially during the historicising nineteenth century, with the great tradition of sacred music. The music, in a sense, is intoning ‘Amen!’ to the words’ ‘Redemption to the Redeemer!’ This is not to suggest that Wagner is straightforwardly assenting to the dogmas upon which that sacred tradition is based. He remains for that both too much a Young Hegelian, adamant upon the time-bound nature of supposedly eternal truths, and too much a Schopenhauerian, with a metaphysical though not æsthetic bent of atheism. Rather, Wagner is daring to subsume the truths of that tradition into the world of musical drama; he portrays the ‘truest’ elements of Christian mythical tradition on stage and in the orchestra, and thereby contributes to their development. He subsumes the truths, partial though nevertheless real, into a greater, post-Hegelian search for systematic truth: a vain attempt perhaps, yet an impulse to renewal.

(To read more of the essay on Parsifal from which the above is excerpted, click here.)

Owing the World a Tannhäuser



Sándor Liezen-Mayer,  Venus and Tannhäuser, c.1875 (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest)

 (originally published as a programme note for the Royal Opera's 2010 production of Tannhäuser)



‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day.’ Thus Cosima Wagner opened her diary entry from Venice for 23 January 1883, but twenty days before Richard’s death. We progress through Cosima’s characteristic desire ‘not to thwart or overburden the cherished workings of his mind,’ a ride to the Piazzetta during which Wagner extols Bach’s fugues, luncheon, visitors, R. yet again reading Gobineau, to: ‘Chat in the evening, brought to an end by R. with the “Shepherd’s Song” and “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser. He says he still owes the world a Tannhäuser.’


This was not grouchy dismissal of an early work from an ailing composer. It was, if anything, quite the opposite: a vote of confidence, a sense of a more ideal instantiation of a Tannhäuser-in-itself, were only he vouchsafed the time. Wagner did not speak of other dramas like this; he did not still owe the world a Tristan, though he worried that the existing drama would drive audiences mad. Nor, with the partial exception of The Flying Dutchman, do we fret about which ‘versions’ of other dramas to perform, though occasionally we administer the odd, unwelcome – welcome, in Rienzi’s case – excision, or, for Lohengrin, reinstate excised material. We talk about the ‘Dresden’ and ‘Paris’ versions of Tannhäuser. That is harmless, if slightly misleading, for what was performed at the 1845 Dresden premiere and the 1861Paris production led to subsequent revisions prior to publication in 1860 and 1875 respectively. Stage directions differed even in Dresden, for what was only portrayed musically in 1845 – the third-act re-appearance of Venus and Elisabeth’s funeral cortège – was staged at the 1847 revival. (Fetishisers of Wagner’s instructions, kindly take note.) Nevertheless, the principal distinctions nevertheless remain those between ‘Dresden’ and ‘Paris’, however construed. To understand what is at stake, let us return to the world in which Wagner conceived his ‘great Romantic opera’.

(Aubrey Beardsley, Frontispiece for Venus and Tannhäuser, 1895)

Ironically, Wagner’s impetus for the ‘Dresden Tannhäuser’ seems to have come to him in Paris in 1841. His autobiography tells us that, having completed The Flying Dutchman and longing to return to Germany, he came, ‘quite by chance’, upon a chapbook about the Venusberg. Stewart Spencer’s detective work identified this Volksbuch as Ludwig Bechstein’s Der Sagenschatz und die Sagenkreise des Thüringerlandes, a collection of Thuringian legends. Wagner drew, consciously or otherwise, upon various contemporary treatments of the twin tales of Tannhäuser and the Wartburg song contest, Romantic (ETA Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, the Brothers Grimm) and avowedly post-Romantic (Heine’s ironic treatment). But Bechstein’s collection and subsequently a paper by Christian Theodor Ludwig Lucas, identifying the Wartburg’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen with the minstrel Tannhäuser, were crucial in bringing the two stories together: ‘incorrectly’ for the folklorist, fruitfully for Wagner.


Tannhäuser’s subsequent story, plot and history, encompasses a dramatic tension mirroring and responding to that conflation. The work’s proper title is Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (‘Tannhäuser and the Song Contest on the Wartburg’); in that und – the agglomerative ‘and’, not the subtitle’s alternative ‘or’ – there lies as much trouble as in the fabled und of Tristan und Isolde. Furthering that tension is another conflict, based in the array of sources from which he drew: that between courtly love (the Minne of the Minnesänger) and sensual fulfilment (Venus). Both are empty and hypocritical and both are ultimately shamed by the mirror of honest chastity held up to them by another legendary figure, St Elisabeth of Hungary. There is historical disjuncture in this further addition, since the historical Elisabeth, born in 1207, was a mere babe-in-arms at the time of the Wartburg contest, if it ever happened. Wagner’s way, however, is to make connections, to explore and to contest them – and to pursue issues left unresolved in subsequent works. What is particular about Tannhäuser is that he does this not only within the same work, not only by extension to subsequent works, but in different versions of the same work. A related contest emerges between France and Germany – or Paris and Dresden, a tale of two cities.


Before taking the story forward, we should take another step back, to Wagner’s second opera, Das Liebesverbot (‘The Ban on Love’), which he wrote under the spell of ‘Young Germany’, a literary movement including Heine and Wagner’s friend, Heinrich Laube. To quote Wagner’s Autobiographical Sketch (penned 1842-3, whilst at work on Tannhäuser), his youthful opera pits ‘… in the spirit of [Laube’s novel] Young Europe … openly expressed sensuality … [against] puritan hypocrisy’. Loosely basing his plot on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, albeit transferred from Vienna to Palermo, Wagner savages the king of Sicily’s humourless viceroy, Friedrich: a German, be it noted. Not only does he clamp down upon citizens’ enjoyment, closing taverns, banning carnivals and the exercise of men’s – and women’s – natural sexual urges; he transgresses his own prohibitions and is eventually caught out at his own game. The concluding carnival in which citizens celebrate their victory might justifiably be considered Wagner’s first dramatic treatment of revolution – and a rare example of unalloyed revolutionary success.


Wagner’s miserable spell in Paris, having to endure the success of meretricious grand opéra whilst his own work went unperformed, and only narrowly escaping the debtor’s prison, made him rethink his preference for (Latin) sensualism, if not over German hypocrisy, then over some form of superior, if inchoate, German values. (In this as much else, Wagner would be echoed by Pierre Boulez, who announced in 1966, the year he first conducted at Bayreuth, his going ‘on strike against French musical officialdom,’ Paris having become ‘a capital in which music has become a ludicrous appendage’. It was ‘no secret that I have gone to Germany, having been unable to achieve anything on any decent scale in France.’) From Dresden, where Wagner was appointed Saxon court Kapellmeister, sensualism now appeared as hypocritical as the repression inflicted by Prince Metternich’s German Confederation upon Young Germany, resulting in Laube’s imprisonment. In his 1851 A Communication to My Friends, Wagner wrote that he had felt compelled to seek satisfaction in something nobler, something chaste and yet loving. However, he could only conceive of such love as unworthy of this world and necessary entailing death. In Tannhäuser, Wagner has not crossed to the dark side of Friedrich and Biedermeier hypocrisy; he has transformed its erstwhile foe, sensualism, into his present twin foe. Thus, the Minnesänger and Venus are both rejected by Tannhäuser; both he and Elisabeth express truer love in death.

(Codex Manasse, Der Tannhäuser, Zurich c.1300-c.1340)

Where Heine had ironised the legend, Wagner seemed partially to have re-Romanticised it. This was unlikely to satisfy him for long, if ever, any more than the failure of Tannhäuser’s successor as charismatic hero, Lohengrin, was likely to be accepted with a shrug as just the way things were. The 1849 failure of revolution in Dresden and Wagner’s subsequent Zurich exile further engaged him in wholehearted re-evaluation. Both catalyst to and symptom of Wagner’s rethinking was his immersion in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, who became ‘for me the proponent of the ruthlessly radical liberation of the individual from the bondage of conceptions associated with the belief in traditional authority’. Echoing Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Wagner propounded his new aesthetic principles in theoretical works such as The Artwork of the Future, dedicated to Feuerbach. Part of this liberation was re-celebration of ‘sensualism’, the word Sinnlichkeit a constant refrain in Feuerbach’s writing. Another aspect, closely related, was denial of transcendence. Man was impoverished by alienating his most noble qualities to an external deity; true religion would restore them to man. No wonder, then, that Wagner felt compelled to stress, in A Communication to My Friends, that the Christian framework of his earlier works merely reflected their mediæval hue; their message was not Christian. It is difficult, moreover, to find fault with that. Tannhäuser is not saved by the Pope, who has condemned Tannhäuser’s Venusberg sojourn as having placed him beyond redemption. Salvation, through the intercession of a true saint, Elisabeth, is signalled by the miracle of what the Pope had thought impossible, his staff sprouting leaves. No one would have been more surprised, nor, one suspects, annoyed, than the head of the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that consistently provoked inveterate hostility from Wagner, even when he became more conciliatory to his youthful Saxon Lutheranism. Considering Tannhäuser, Wagner must now have regretted a missed opportunity to extol healthy sensuality, which would have vanquished the Minnesänger, the Venusberg, and transference of love to a world beyond.


However, the time for Feuerbach would pass; or rather, Wagner needed to supplement him with abnegation. When Wagner’s friend in Swiss exile, the poet Georg Herwegh, himself an old Young German, fetched him Feuerbach’s Essence of Religion, Wagner claimed that it had ‘scared me off by the monotony of its title alone … I closed the book with a bang before his very eyes.’ Herwegh soon cannily introduced Wagner to the world-denying, though still atheistic, gospel of Arthur Schopenhauer, which might once again seem to give the upper hand to the Dresden Tannhäuser. Yet Schopenhauer would both be celebrated and partially negated in the eroticism of Tristan, to which Wagner soon turned.


And so, when Napoleon III extended his invitation to stage Tannhäuser in Paris, Wagner had rethought his rethinking several times. He might just have left an old work as it was – though he also Tristan-ised The Flying Dutchman a little – but a Parisian opera must include a ballet. Wagner thus extended the Venusberg Music, with a frustrated and frustrating ‘sensualism’ uncannily reminiscent of his own intellectual struggles. The castanet-led straining towards unsuccessful climax certainly does their work in dramatising the dilemma. Disruption from the Jockey Club, accustomed to skipping the first act for dinner and arriving at the beginning of the second to leer at their favourite danseuses, conformed to and confirmed Wagner’s abhorrence of Parisian ways. It also put paid to the production after three attempts. The ‘Paris Tannhäuser’ nevertheless endured, though production history has witnessed Dresden and Paris do continuing battle.


Proponents of Dresden point to its successor’s stylistic incongruities, claiming the new music, written in the aftermath of Tristan, sounds hopelessly out of place in a work of 1840s Wagner. Consider, however, what Wagner added. Walther’s Wartburg solo was removed on practical grounds – the tenor’s inability to sing it – but the most important transformations lie in the opening two scenes. Feuerbach and Tristan have their say. Venus’s sensualism sounds more alluring, more richly upholstered. She becomes a more interesting character, less readily dismissed as merely ‘Parisian’. Her attempt to win back Tannhäuser looks forward to Kundry’s attempted seduction of Parsifal and attests to Wagner’s struggles. There is no resolution, but Venus becomes more of a match than before for the saintly Elisabeth. Wagner’s self-criticism is dramatised and itself criticised.


Moreover, the critique never ends. Listen to the Venusberg music and you will hear not only echoes of Tristan but intimations of Götterdämmerung: Gutrune’s music, the harmonic potion of Siegfried’s amnesia in the brewing. Whence does this come? Boulez has pointed out that the triviality of Siegfried and Gutrune’s pairing, as opposed to the hero’s true destiny with Brünnhilde, is marked by a recollection of opéra comique, in the particular guise of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, still honoured upon the Palais Garnier’s façade. ‘A heartless fellow, Auber,’ Wagner told Cosima, ‘but a genius,’ quite a compliment when you think what he said about Meyerbeer, although his presence would continue to be felt too. Though Wagner shuns and unmasks Paris, he cannot but return there – similarly with Tannhäuser. Imagine what a ‘Venice version’ might have been – and was not Venice culturally closer to Paris than to Dresden? Would Wagner, had he not already accomplished this in Kundry, have presaged the modern stage director’s fancy of eliding Venus and Elisabeth?

Wagner may, then, have owed the world a Tannhäuser but the work’s very nature conspired against ultimate conclusion. Indeed, its ‘incompletion’ may render it one of Wagner’s most forward-looking statements. What would characterise for many the predicament and also the uncompromising virtue of the modernist artwork, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron its musico-dramatic exemplar, was as present in a sense in this product of Young Germany as another, Georg Büchner’s fragmentary Woyzeck. The chilling, non-concluding halt to which Berg would call his Wozzeck is, however, a related tale for another evening.