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.

Death in Venice, English National Opera, 14 June 2013

The Coliseum

Gustav von Aschenbach – John Graham-Hall

Traveller, Elderly fop, Old gondolier, Hotel manager, Hotel barber, Leader of the players, Voice of Dionysus – Andrew Shore
Voice of Apollo – Tim Mead
Polish Mother – Lauda Caldow
Tadzio – Sam Zaldivar
Tadzio’s sisters – Mia Anglian Mather, Zhuliana Shehu
Governess – Joyce Henderson
Jaschiu – Marcio Teixeira
Hotel porter – Peter van Hulle
Strawberry-seller, Strolling player – Anna Dennis
Strolling player – Adrian Dwyer
Guide – Charles Johnston
English clerk – Marcus Farnsworth
Glass-maker – Richard Edgar-Wilson
Lace-seller – Constance Novis
Beggar woman – Madeleine Shaw
Restaurant waiter – Jonathan McGovern
Lido boatman. Gondolier, Priest in St Mark’s – Paul Napier-Burrows
Hotel waiter – David Newman
Newspaper-seller – Lyn Cook
Gondoliers – Philip Daggett, Anton Rich
Ship’s steward – Gary Coward
Hotel guests from many countries – Allan Adams, Deborah Davison, Natalie Herman, Suzanne Joyce, Graeme Lauren, Lydia Marchione, Claire Mitcher, Ronald Nairne, Emily Rowley Jones, Paul Sheehan, Andrew Tinkler, Susanna Tudor-Thomas

Deborah Warner (director)

Tom Pye (set designs)
Chloe Obolensky (costumes)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Kim Brandstrup (choreography)
Finn Ross (video)

Paul Brough (chorus master)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

 

ENO is on fine form at the moment. Its recent Wozzeck deservedly received well-nigh universal acclaim. If Death in Venice did not have anything like the same dramatic impact, then that is more to be ascribed to the work than to the performances, which were generally excellent. In certain quarters, it is heresy to question Britten’s standing; for those with a greater sense of discrimination, it is patently obvious that his output is highly variable. The overrating of Peter Grimes offers an especially extreme example: a great story, with some memorable music, interspersed with some that is really rather dull. The Turn of the Screw stands head and shoulders above the rest of Britten’s operas, not least since it suffers less from the formal problems that so often beset his work. ENO, however, has served Britten very well, Christopher Alden’s riveting production, for instance, having elevated the slight, often tedious Midsummer Night’s Dream far above the intrinsic qualities of the work. Death in Venice is a better work than that, but it is not without tedium; an idea, at least as converted into this opera, which might have been better suited to a short one-act work, is drawn out far too long, seeming to take about as long as it would to read Thomas Mann’s novella. And if Britten’s display of his workings helps impart unity, that display, whether in terms of sonorities – the all too ready resort to gamelan echoes – or twelve-note process often sounds too obvious. It is difficult not to conclude that the opera would have benefited from wholesale revision, perhaps from a good editor.   

 

Edward Gardner necessarily conducted the score as if he believed in every note of it; there is every reason to think that he did. If there were a few occasions when greater tightness might have been achieved, that is a minor criticism of a performance as dramatic as orchestral writing that is sometimes more thin than spare would permit. The ENO Orchestra was an estimable collaborator without, fully playing as if this were a repertory work inside the composer’s idiom. If the percussionists inevitably deserve special mention, that is no reflection upon the standard of performance elsewhere in the pit, from which sinewy woodwind lines and dark brass punctuation emerged with equal conviction.

 

John Graham-Hall’s voice is not especially beautiful; nor does it need to be. Whatever claims one might make for Peter Pears’s artistry, that would be an eccentric place to start, and Gustav von Aschenbach is a Pears role par excellence. Graham-Hall offered something far more telling: elusive yet unmistakeable dramatic truth. One felt that this was Aschenbach’s story; one both saw it through his eyes and saw him through the eyes of the story, if that makes any sense. It is a strenuous role indeed, but Graham-Hall used its very difficulty to great effect. Beauty, after all, is to be espied from afar, as it was here, not only in the guise of Sam Zaldivar’s gracefully nonchalant assumption of Tadzio, not only even in the æsthetic contemplation and temptation of the Games of Apollo, but in the society as a whole of which Aschenbach both is and is not a part. Tim Mead’s beautifully sung – and acted – Apollo seemingly tilted the dramatic scales further, though of course it would be the Voice of Dionysus that would eventually, tragically capture him. (That tragedy is perhaps one of the weaker aspects of the opera, pushing it too far in the direction of melodrama; but again, that is not the performers’ fault.) Andrew Shore managed a serious of roles with equal facility, as convincing as the oleaginous Hotel Manager as the ludicrous Leader of the Players (his heightened absurdity perhaps a consequence of Aschenbach’s condition?) A plethora of small roles – is the cast not excessive, especially for an opera concentrating so heavily upon a single protagonist? – emerged with similar qualities of observance.

 

Deborah Warner’s production is perhaps the best I have seen from her. The action takes place when and where it ‘should’, but unlike, for instance her dull Eugene Onegin, that provides a frame for imaginative performance. The first, dark scene in Munich, Tom Pye’s excellent set weighed down by the writer’s words, gives way to a plausible journey to illusory, indeed deadly light. For Jean Kalman’s lighting – the initial view from the hotel a fine coup de théâtre – stands as central as Chloe Obolensky’s beautifully-designed period costumes to the often spellbinding success of the staging. Graham-Hall of course deserves the lion share of the credit for the dramatic truth of his descent, but Warner’s direction of him onstage, for instance in the tentativeness of his approaches to Tadzio, must also have played an important role. Kim Brandstrup’s choreography highlights the boys’ natural athleticism, highly successful in conveying its crucial non-reflective quality. Reflection, after all, is Aschenbach’s lot.  

Writing German History

Paper given at the Modern European History Seminar, University of Cambridge, 25 October 2009. Three generations of German historians - Professor Richard Evans, Professor Christopher Clark, and myself - were asked to speak for fifteen to twenty minutes on the subject of 'Writing German History,' in part as a response to Richard Evans's inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of History (now published in expanded form by Cambridge University Press as Cosmopolitan Islanders).

Please forgive me for starting with a brief quotation in German. I hesitate to do so, given that so many of my audience will speak German incomparably better than I do and some will not do so at all. But that is beside the point, for I wish to employ these words as a starting point, from which one might travel in various directions, including translation and its complexities, thus granting a brief impression of the process of studying and writing German history.

Ich bin friedlos.
Ich bin durstig nach fernen Dingen.
Meine Seele schweift im Sehnsucht,
den Saum der dunklen Weite
zu berühren.

Following a significant orchestral introduction, which I wish I had had time to play, it is with a setting of those words that Alexander von Zemlinsky opens – or should that be opened? Much hangs on the tense, in terms of how we historically consider works of art – his Lyric Symphony of 1922-3. They might be translated as follows, though there would doubtless be more potential English versions from around this table than there are seats:

I am restless.
I am thirsty for things that are far away.
My soul wanders out in longing,
to touch the hem
of the dim distance.

In a romantic, indeed mystical, way, such thoughts approach why one might wish to study, to explore another culture or other cultures, or at least decline to cordon off one’s own culture. Like many of the respondents in Richard’s book, it never occurred to me to confine myself to English or British history. At school, my soul would always wander out in longing, grateful for the occasional glimpse of life across the Channel, on what is sometimes still called ‘the Continent’. It ws a bit like regional news: if important enough, it should make the national or international news; otherwise, another cat stuck up a tree was unlikely to set my pulse racing. Whilst I am very happy to write German history, I have no wish to be nationalistic about that; European history, world history, or best, history in that ‘dim distance’ is the common endeavour.

But let us look a little more closely at the words set by Zemlinsky and the context for the Lyric Symphony, or Lyrische Symphonie. First, Zemlinsky only set the words. They were already in translation, by one Hans Effenberger, from the original writer’s own somewhat loose – I am told – English translation from Bengali. That original writer was Rabindranath Tagore. How many instances of the soul wandering out in longing, of the dim distance, might one tot up there? It might be a useful conceit, an immanent one if you will, to help consider the work itself. Its words – but what, of course, of its music? – offer a way to consider its genesis and to its performance and reception. The first performance was conducted by the composer himself, and who was he? Zemlinsky was born in 1871, the son of a Viennese of Slovakian-Catholic descent, who had the year before converted to Judaism and of a mother who was the daughter of a mixed Muslim and Sephardic marriage. There is plenty, indeed almost suspiciously too much, to go on here then – and it is not difficult from these facts alone to imagine why the composer might have felt some degree of alienation.

That first performance took place in Prague’s German Theatre, not the better known National Theatre. The German Theatre had opened in 1888 with a performance of Die Meistersinger and would during the 1930s provide something of a refuge for artists who had fled the Third Reich. Our initial starting point of the opening of the Lyric Symphony could thus lead us in all sorts of interesting, suggestive directions, which might inform the work and be informed by it. This, for me, is the very essence of historical engagement and which tells us something not only about the source itself, in the historical sense and the sense of source as origin, but also about what it is we might be doing when we write history. The sheer volume of artistic production and the great claims made on behalf of art by so many Germans suggest that an artistically-derived or at least artistically-inspired method might be fruitful.

Let us return to those words Zemlinsky set. One might think them nonsense. How can a soul touch a hem, let alone a hem of the distance, dim or otherwise? One might think them interesting in artistic, cultural terms but think that they hardly enlighten the nature of historical study, certainly as construed in so-called scientific terms. Yet mysticism cautions us against literalism; it invites us to make connections, suggesting that we consider a culture as a whole and in relation to other cultures, and also to consider how cultures might not be wholes. We are invited to employ that most precious of the historian’s tools, the imagination. By this, I do not mean that we should make things up. But even with modern history, however that might be defined, we are faced not only with far too much that we do, or can, know, but also far too much that we do not know. Considering non- or only partly-verbal sources can encourage one to make other sorts of connections even when returning to words; they might be good connections or bad, but I think them no less valid on account of their provenance. Since a good part of my research has involved musical history, I have perhaps become especially aware of the limitations of words – and both the problems and opportunities of notes, of images, and so forth. One cannot always make logical deductions and even if one can, allusion and other forms of connection might have at least as much to tell us.

I shall now turn to the second of my two examples, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, which I have just been re-reading. A passage struck me when, on the train a few days ago, I was beginning to think about this paper. In chapter twenty-six, Adrian Leverkühn, Mann’s fictional composer, is visited by the Devil. Leverkühn protests that the Devil has sought him out ‘here in alien Italy’. The composer would have suffered such a visitation in his home town of Kaisersachsern, in Wittenberg, on the Wartburg; ‘even in Leipzig I would have thought you credible. But surely not here, under a heathen Catholic sky!’ The Devil replies that Leverkühn values him too low, in so limiting his sphere. ‘German I am, German to the core,’ he says, ‘but then surely in an older, better sense, to wit: cosmopolitan at heart. You would disallow me here and make no account of the old German yearning and romantic itch to travel to Italy’s fair shore!’

How many resonances does that immediately conjure, the Italy of the German imagination? One might pursue that with Goethe’s Italian Journey, for instance. In Rome, Goethe claimed truly to have found himself, but it was in southern Italy, including Greece, where, equally importantly, he first encountered Greek architecture. He would take Winckelmann to task for having failed to understand, the difference. If we took that route, we might come to consider The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, as the title of one venerable book has it. Whom one might think about then? Perhaps it would be easier to ask at whom one might not look. But it might be worth spending some time with Nietzsche and his opposition between Apollo and Dionysus, that discussion, incidentally, owing far more than most Nietzsche scholars realise to Wagner, before returning, refreshed and informed, to Mann and Doktor Faustus. One could, in other words, use the intellectual journey – here caricatured to excess – either to inform work on the text with which one started or as a route to quite other aspects of German or other history.

Leverkühn was in many respects modelled upon Schoenberg, greatly to the annoyance of the composer, a fellow exile in Los Angeles. The musical material relied upon advice from Theodor Adorno, yet another of Mann’s Los Angeles neighbours. Schoenberg had little time even for Adorno’s advocacy – when conducting research in the Schoenberg archive in Vienna, I have read his furious marginal scribbling in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music – let alone anything Schoenberg might consider less than due regard. He wrote to Mann in 1948, quoting an entry from an encyclopædia of the future, in which the author stated that Thomas Mann was clearly the inventor of the twelve-note method of musical composition and had had to endure the ‘unscrupulous’ exploitation of his idea by a now-forgotten composer called Arnold Schoenberg. As a result, editions and translations of Doktor Faustus still carry an ‘Author’s Note’ acknowledging Schoenberg’s intellectual property.

But intellectual property here, as in historical writing, is a problematical notion at best. Schoenberg elsewhere spoke more truly, more historically, when he insisted that his method of composition had developed from tradition, that his contribution had not represented a rupture, but rather a step in musical history neither smaller nor greater than any other. He stood on the shoulders of others, and not just other composers, just as we stand on the shoulders of others, and not just other historians. Mann’s meditation on and dramatisation of the course of German art and history, and their interaction has in some respects less in common with the constructivism of Schoenberg than with, say, the summative tendencies of musicians such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Richard Strauss, struggling to deal with what might seem like the end of a line, or indeed with the ill tidings of Oswald Spengler, whom Mann had lapped up, comparing him to Schopenhauer. However, this connection between Mann and Schoenberg, a connection both biographical and intellectual – and exile counts as both – has much to tell us and much to suggest about the experience of war and its aftermath, shattered dreams of humanism, and so forth, in addition to consideration of the artists and their works themselves. I spoke of Mann as being engaged in dramatisation, and this is not a bad way to think of what we as historians are engaged in too, for dramatisation incites rather than settles, opens doors rather than closes them. We no more think of the end of history than the end of art. Dramatisation, composition, or writing and research inspired by artistic forms of production, can suggest something that might not necessarily be vouchsafed by the archives – and vice versa. This seems to me a thoroughly German notion: writing German history in perhaps a different, though I should argue complementary, sense from that our convenor intended.

We might of course have progressed or regressed in entirely different directions. Even if we had not taken perhaps the most obvious path of considering Mann, his novel, the ‘German catastrophe’ and the question of the special German path, the Sonderweg, even if we had still moved from the Devil appearing in Italy to Goethe and to a German opposition between Greece and Rome, we might perhaps have travelled a little further back, to consider this in terms of Enlightenment attitudes: the revival of paganism, as some would have it. We might have questioned that, asserting the fundamentally Christian nature of so much of the Enlightenment, especially the Aufklärung, whether Protestant or Catholic. (Recall Leverkühn’s assignation of his antagonist, rejected by the latter, to the world of Protestantism, to what Hegel considered the Teutonic world.) We might then have asked why Rome was perhaps more valued by the writers of the French Enlightenment, which could potentially have involved a consideration of how Greek thinkers, Aristotle in particular, had been co-opted by the mediæval Church into its ontology and thereby rendered partially suspect to those who would attack its successor. Better, surely, for a Voltaire to cite Marcus Aurelius, likewise that great historian, Edward Gibbon, much cited by Richard Evans in his Cosmopolitan Islanders? Contradiction exists and contradiction drives our endeavours.

Would this then have been German history, even if it started off as such? Not really, though it might well have been in the old, cosmopolitan sense of Germanness posited by Mann’s diabolical visitor. Would it even have qualified as modern history? It does not really matter. However, an awareness of oneself as a writer, as, in the terms of a number of German writers and artists, a mediator between Apollo and Dionysus, bringing some sense of order to the violent eruptions of history and the imagination, that self-awareness is perhaps the positive side of post-modernist conceptions of what it is to write history.

So once again, through a train of historical thought and research, albeit vastly simplified for the purposes of this paper, we have not only managed to impart a little historical understanding to a work, but perhaps, through a particular work – and it need not of course be a work: it could be some other historical source – have gained a little insight into the nature of historical research. The two are intimately, necessarily connected, unless one believes, which I certainly do not, that there is some thing-in-itself called ‘history’, which one can then apply to sources, problems, and so forth. Source criticism, or Quellenkritik, ought not only to be criticism of sources but by them. It is a chicken-and-egg situation – or, since we are dealing with German history and I myself have been so marked by this intellectual tradition, it is a dialectical reality.

In some ways, then, I am not at all sure that I have been writing, or trying to write, German history, though I have at least been trying to write history: something of which I am often reminded when discussing material with colleagues from other disciplines. For instance, a little while ago, I met someone who said that he was writing on Anselm and Derrida. My immediate thought and thus my immediate question was: what is or was – again that problem of tense with regard to texts – the connection? What does, or did, Derrida have to say about Anselm? How did he approach him? What sparked his interest? Was the relationship first-hand or more often mediated by other writers? Though I know precious little about either writer, such were for me the obvious questions. The non-historian – a theologian, I think – seemed bemused; he had simply thought it would be interesting to set up what he called a ‘conversation’ between Anselm and Derrida. By contrast, my imaginary connection of the two writers would surely have led me into the world of German history, not only because I know a little more about it, but also because immersion in that history has formed the very way I think.