Wagner and Morality

(Article on 'Morality' first published in the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Luise Reuss-Belce as Fricka

Historians often adopt a tone of prurient hypocrisy with figures of whom they disapprove. The Russian Empress Catherine the Great long endured persistent references to her “scandalous” love life: that is, she was a successful female ruler with the temerity to take lovers. It has become the practice for moral custodians, Frickas de nos jours, to berate Wagner for his easy way with other men’s money and women. Understanding both as property is instructive, betokening a narrow conception of “morality,” typical of the public opinion and commercial Press by which Wagner not unreasonably considered himself hounded. Wagner believed consistently that private property distorted every relationship between man and man, likewise man and woman. Shortly before his death, he lauded Wilhelm Heinse for having depicted in his novel, Ardinghello (1787), a society in which institution of property had never been permitted (Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 30 Sep 1882).

 

Gustave Courbet: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon et ses enfants en 1853 (1865)

French socialism, directly and through intermediaries such as Heinrich Laube, August Röckel, and Mikhail Bakunin, was a pervading influence. As early as Das Liebesverbot, Wagner tells us, “all I cared about was to uncover the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the artificiality of the judicial attitude toward morality” (My Life, English translation, 83). Friedrich, prudishly shocked by popular licentiousness, employs state power to enforce an unnatural moral code, whilst transgressing it himself. Röckel, during their Dresden discussions provided theoretical ballast: “On the basis of the socialist theories of Proudhon and others … he constructed a whole new moral order of things to which … he little by little converted me … I began to rebuild upon it my hopes for the realization of my artistic ideals.” Wagner questioned Röckel about his desire “to do away completely with the institution of marriage as we knew it,” and was “particularly struck” by the claim that, only after eradication of coercion by money, rank, and family prejudice, would sexual morality be possible (My Life, 373-4). He returned in his final essay “Über das Weibliche” to the subject. Marriage – to Cosima, at least? – raised man and his moral faculties far above the animal world, yet he was dragged far beneath it by “conventional marriage” (Konventionsheiraten), an “abuse” (Mißbrauch) founded upon property (Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 12:343-4).

Self-justification? Perhaps, for instance when Wagner tells us that Minna “became increasingly perplexed at my seemingly incomprehensible conception of art and its relative importance,” and at his “higher delicacy in regard to moral questions,” being “unable to understand and approve my freedom of thought in such matters” (My Life, 130-1). Only up to a point, though, for the contrast between Minna’s need for financial stability and the moral purpose Wagner sought in art is real enough. That they were ultimately unsuited need not send one scurrying for blame. There is, moreover, no mistaking Wagner’s moral outrage at his perception of modern art as “industry, its moral purpose the acquisition of money, its aesthetic purpose the entertainment of the bored” (SSD, 3: 18).

Under the influence of Young German and Young Hegelian ideas, most likely including Max Stirner’s anarchistic manifesto, The Ego and its Own (1844), Wagner created in the Ring an artwork that dramatizes alternative moral possibilities. Fricka, Wagner writes, represents custom (Sitte), (Letter to Uhlig, 12 Nov. 1851). Her marriage to Wotan is fruitless; his children are sired outside wedlock. One of them, Sieglinde, experiences both brutal treatment as chattel by her husband Hunding, and passionate convention-flouting fulfillment with her twin brother, Siegmund. Fricka is outraged: “My heart trembles, my mind reels: bridal embrace between brother and sister! When was it ever heard of that siblings were lovers?” (Walküre, II/i). As the gods’ – religion’s – hold on society falters, moral prohibitions dependent upon their power are insisted upon ever more stridently. The gods would go to ruin, Fricka insists, were her moral law not to be obeyed; they already have. Wagner echoes Stirner and prefigures Nietzsche, providing a crucial link in the inversion of Hegel’s elevation of customary over individual morality: “Note how a ‘moral man’ behaves, who today often thinks he is through with God .… a customary-moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one’s being allowed to touch his sister also as a woman.… Because he believes in those moral commandments” (Stirner, 45); and “They have rid themselves of the Christian God, and thus believe that they must cling all the more firmly to Christian morality … one must, in response to the smallest emancipation from theology, reassert one’s position in awe-inspiring fashion as a moral fanatic” (Nietzsche, 80).

Mathilde Wesendonck by
Karl Ferdinand Sohn (1850)

What, then, of the pre-eminent “affair,” with Mathilde Wesendonck? One can deplore Wagner’s ingratitude towards her husband, Otto, who had offered considerable financial support, only to find himself cuckolded – at least metaphysically. Wagner opposed marriage as legal setting in stone or ring. Moreover, Wagner’s insistence that the world owed him a living – why should someone be favored because he dealt in silks instead of composing the Ring? – is borne out even in capitalist terms by the industry he created for and bequeathed that world. It has done incalculably better from him than vice versa.

One might also consider it significant that, when Wagner condensed the action of Tristan und Isolde into a few words for Mathilde Wesendonck, he did not even mention King Marke’s forgiveness. Were the sacrifices of men such as Wesendonck and Hans von Bülow as naught to such a monstrous ego? Yet Wagner sees the “custom of the time” leading to the sin of marriage for politics’ sake. The action of Tristan is not, moreover, really of this phenomenal world at all, but metaphysical. By now (1859), Wagner had partially converted to a morality founded upon Schopenhauer’s teaching. Though immediately taken by Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, “the moral principles” of The World as Will and Representation had been more difficult initially to accept, “for here the annihilation of the Will and complete self-abnegation are represented as the only true means of redemption from the constricting bonds of individuality in its dealings with the world” (My Life, 509). Either way – in practice, both – Wagner rejected the dictates of bourgeois morality.

See also:

Mark Berry, “The Positive Influence of Wagner upon Nietzsche,” The Wagner Journal, 2.2 (2008): 11-28.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).

Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own, tr. Steven Byington, ed. David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Ma

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')

Salzburg Festival (9) - Hannigan/BPO/Rattle, 26 August 2013

Grosses Festspielhaus

Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht, op.4

Berg – Three Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’, op.7
Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

Barbara Hannigan (soprano)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

 

Had I been asked beforehand which part – ‘half’ would be a little misleading – of this concert would most likely be more successful, I should have said the first: Sir Simon Rattle has long proved a fine advocate for the music of the Second Viennese School. Not that he has no name in Stravinsky, but, without having heard his recent Berlin recording of The Rite of Spring, I have had heard negative whispers, indeed rather more than whispers. As it happened, whilst there was much to admire in both parts, the Rite ultimately proved more convincing.

 

Verklärte Nacht benefited from a wonderful hush to its opening, the build up to Rattle’s unleashing of the full Berlin Philharmonic string tone carefully but not irritatingly handled. What a relief it was to have flexibility yet not to suffer the arbitrary micro-management that nowadays seems to bedevil all of his Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and much else. There was variegation to the Berliners’ playing too, though as time went on, there was a surprising tendency to the homogeneous, as if they were being directed by Karajan on a bad day. (At his best, of course, Karajan was a superlative conductor in this repertoire.) Turbulence registered in the bass: there were times when I even thought of Schopenhauer’s idea, partially adopted by Wagner, of music as the representation of the Will. (Schoenberg’s relationship with Schopenhauer, not entirely incidentally, was complex, and subject to considerable change. Last year, I worked in the Arnold Schoenberg Center, deciphering and reading the composer’s marginal annotations, and have an article in mind on that very relationship, when time permits.) Perhaps there was a slight tendency towards rushing at climaxes, but at least the performance was not staid. Indeed, its propulsive quality, especially during the first half, painted Schoenberg very much as a modernist rather than mere ‘late Romantic’. Alas, that energy petered out somewhat during the second half, which, astonishingly, bore little sign of transfiguration, let alone of ‘Viennese’ sweetness. An increasing edge to the Berlin strings went hand in hand with a resolutely earthbound turn: a pity, a real pity. The audience, however, was enthusiastic; perhaps it was relieved not to have heard, say, the Variations for Orchestra, op.31.

 

The ever excellent Barbara Hannigan joined the orchestra for Berg’s Three Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’. Part of the problem here lay with the piece, or rather the extraction, itself; I am sure it served its purpose once, but now one simply misses what is not there. It seems to convince more when performed without a soloist; here, there is something odd about a single soloist taking the parts of Marie, the children’s chorus, and Marie’s son, an oddness that adds to the sense of arbitrary disjuncture. That said, the first piece was wonderful. The BPO opened with a sadness that suggested nostalgia and yet went beyond it; Mahlerian militaristic parody soon added edge, lest one fear self-indulgence. Hannigan’s command of diction and meaning was second to none, and so far as I could tell, was pitch-perfect too, quite a change from many performances one hears. Nietzsche’s ‘voluptuousness of Hell’ (of Tristan) was certainly to be heard in the final stanza, as the child fell to sleep, a rich irony in more than one sense. In the second piece, the terror of realisation, of shame and sin, proved as searing as it could out of context, Hannigan’s part enhanced by the sweetest of violin solos. Rattle for the most part handled the ensuing transformation very well, Berg’s phantasmagorical colours finely balanced between precision and something approaching its eerie opposite. The great climax was extremely powerful, yet it did not quite register with the dramatic force for which one hopes; perhaps that was a matter of the fragments themselves, but there seemed a partial lack of identification with Berg’s post-Mahlerian truth, both from conductor and orchestra. Hannigan’s final ‘Hopp, hopp! Hopp, hopp!’ chilled, even if it sounds odd not to come from a child’s voice.

 

The Rite of Spring opened beautifully, indeed in many respects quite mesmerizingly. Its introduction teemed with life, with strong echoes of Debussy, with strangeness too. ‘Life’ and ‘automation’ vied for the upper hand throughout. Old Russia was there too, not least from the tuned percussion; Rimsky-Korsakov can rarely have sounded so close, likewise, and perhaps more tellingly, Mussorgsky. Nor did Rattle’s Rite lack wildness, as one might have feared; growling and grinding offered real rhythmic savagery. Compared with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s staggering recent performance, there was not a true sense of being newly minted, but by ‘normal’ standards, this was an estimable account. The sheer volume and weight of sound from the BPO at the end of the first part was quite something to hear in itself. Perhaps I was being fanciful, but at the opening of the second part, I heard correspondences – surprising correspondences – with the opening of the Berg fragments. Sadness seemed to be held in common, despite the alleged ‘impersonality’ – always exaggerated – of Stravinsky’s ballet. Music of real delicacy followed, Stravinsky’s cellular construction always readily apparent: through, not despite, his use of folk melodies. (Boulez would surely have approved, if his celebrated analysis is anything to go by. So too, I imagine, would have Bartók.) The contrast when full orchestral weight was unleashed had dramatic force beyond any that had been heard before the interval. Strangeness rightly persisted too, though, not least from the splendidly versatile string section. The final sacrifice, however, proved as earthbound – in the wrong sense – as the end of Verklärte Nacht had: a mysteriously frustrating close.

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.