Wagner and Gobineau

(Article, ‘Gobineau, (Joseph) Arthur, Comte de,’ first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))

Gobineau, (Joseph) Arthur, Comte de (b. Ville d’Avray, 14 July 1816; d. Turin, 13 Oct. 1882), novelist, diplomat, essayist, ethnologist. Protégé of Alexis de Tocqueville, who as Foreign Minister appointed Gobineau his Cabinet Head. Gobineau’s diplomatic career took in Germany, Persia, Brazil, and Sweden. In Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (The Inequality of Human Races, 1853-5), Gobineau made racial distinction – white (intelligent, courageous), black (sensual, brutal), and yellow (materialistic, feeble) – history’s guiding principle. The white race, whether Germanic, ancient Greek, or Indo-European (“Aryan”), enabled civilization. Apparent exceptions, such as China, were ascribed to white influence. Civilization partly depended upon miscegenation, interracial breeding, yet in that dilution lay its downfall. Gobineau was not anti-Semitic; he admired the effort of “white” Jews through Mosaic Law to maintain their “purity.” Tocqueville protested that Gobineau’s argument was probably wrong and certainly pernicious.

Palazzo Vendramin, Venice, 1870, photograph by Carlo Noya

The Wagners briefly met Gobineau in Rome in 1876. There is neither evidence nor likelihood that Wagner read Gobineau or learned of his ideas until after their 1880 meeting in Venice; Wagner makes no mention of Gobineau’s theories before 1880, nor does Cosima in her diaries. Thus, despite the claims of writers such as Robert Gutman (Richard Wagner: The Man, The Mind, and his Music, ch. 13), the possibility of influence upon Parsifal, whose poem was essentially completed in 1877, its “orchestral sketch” in 1879, tends towards zero. Gobineau visited Wahnfried in 1881 (when Wagner presented his collected writings to “the Count”) and in 1882.

“Scientific” fatalism might appeal to Wagner as Schopenhauer’s disciple, though not as revolutionary. Gobineau presented not a political program, but an alleged scientific truth, echoing the Enlightenment project of discerning fundamental historical laws, akin to those of Newton – or, as later racists would prefer, Darwin. Gobineau believed in human degeneration; Wagner varied. Whereas Gobineau’s driving force was miscegenation, Wagner, in a late echo of Feuerbach, pointed to dietary change. Though Wagner seems to have come to attribute some importance to miscegenation, he introduced a gendered element and retained the prospect of regeneration or redemption through art and religion. Thus an 1881 Brown Book entry, possibly intended in part to correct Gobineau’s non-racial essay, La Renaissance: “In the mingling of races, the blood of the nobler males is ruined by the baser feminine element: the masculine element suffers, character founders, whilst the women gain as much as to take the men’s place. (Renaissance). The feminine thus remains owing deliverance: here art – as there in religion; the immaculate Virgin gives birth to the Savior.” (BB/E, 23 Oct 1881). Gobineau denied universality and founded morality upon ontology: Aryan deeds were good because they were performed by Aryans. Wagner, however, desired universal redemption, Jews included; morality should transform ontology.

Yet, as with Schopenhauer, Wagner found “confirmation” of previously held views, and “corrected” instances in which both writers erred. Cosima describes Wagner, during Gobineau’s 1881 visit, as “downright explosive in favor of Christian theories in contrast to racial ones” (Cosima Wagner's Diaries, 3 June 1881). Correspondence demonstrates mutual respect but both men standing their intellectual ground. Despite some writers’ claims, Gobineau’s influence on Wagner was minimal, differences more revealing than correspondences. However, the pan-Germanist Ludwig Schemann and other members of the Bayreuth Circle founded a Gobineau Association in 1894, transforming Gobineau’s pessimism into a racial and political opposition between Aryan and Jew. Cosima dissociated herself and the Festival.

Eugène, Eric (ed.), Richard et Cosima Wagner/Arthur Gobineau: Correspondance 1880-1882 (Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 2000).

Schemann, Ludwig, Gobineau. Eine Biographie, 2 vols. (Strasbourg: Triibner, 1913-16).

Wagner and the Dresden Uprising (May 1849)

(Article, 'Dresden Uprising (May 1849)', first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))

Prussian and Saxon troops attack the revolutionary barricades in Dresden's Neumarkt
(Sächsische Landesbibliothek Abt. Deutsche Fotothek)

Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein:
Frederick Augustus II of Saxony (r.1836-54)

One of the final wave of revolts during the 1848-9 revolutions, parallel to uprisings in Baden and the Bavarian Palatinate, all quelled by Prussian armed intervention. Across Europe, the “springtime of peoples” had witnessed liberal, constitutional victories. Rhetorical liberty, however, proved just that: initial coalitions – revolutionary socialists such as Wagner and laissez-faire Rhenish industrialists; pan-Slavists such as Bakunin and völkisch German nationalists; monarchists and republicans, etc. – proved irreconcilable. Moreover, the old order proved stronger than either it or its opponents had believed – and for many bourgeois seemed less threatening. Representatives to the Frankfurt Vorparlament moved towards national unity, promulgating a German constitution (March 28) and offering the imperial crown to Prussia’s Frederick William IV. His refusal (April 3) to “pick up a crown from the gutter” threw them into disarray. Emboldened, Frederick Augustus II of Saxony rejected the constitution and dissolved the Saxon parliament (April 30), elected in January with a democratic majority. Unlike Prussia, Saxony had long been a constitutional monarchy, and a reform ministry had governed from March 1848 to February 1849. But the king’s appointment of a reactionary movement, headed by Friedrich von Beust, and rejection of the constitution, ultimately provoked democratic opponents into a hurried response. On May 3, the town council organized the Communal Guard into a defense committee. Loyalist troops opened fire. Early on May 4, king and government escaped to Königstein; townsmen formed a provisional government.

Provisional government

Even at the time, the extent of Wagner’s involvement was obscured. Eduard Devrient reports Minna visiting him in desperation for advice concerning her husband, implicated yet not directly involved (Diary entry for 17 May 1849). Devrient is clear that she has been deceived. Wagner would downplay his role further in Mein Leben, yet nevertheless admits considerable involvement. He had the printer of Röckel’s Volksblätter print appeals to the Saxon army: “Are you with us against foreign troops?” (My Life, English translation, 394). Wagner probably ordered hand-grenades; he certainly served on the barricades and acted as look-out, observing street-fighting from the Kreuzkirche tower, whilst engaging in animated politico-philosophical discussion. Prussians entered the Neustadt on April 6. “Immediately the troops, supported by several cannon, opened an attack on … the people’s forces on the new marketplace” (ML, 397). On April 7, miners from the Erzgebirge singing the Marseillaise arrived to reinforce the opposition. However, Prussian and loyalist troops outnumbered the rebels and were gaining ground, even though barricades meant that every street was hard fought. As the provisional government began an unsurprisingly abortive attempt to retreat to the Erzgebirge, to encourage revolt across Germany, Dresden’s streets, including the opera house were ablaze. In his Introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, Engels would bracket Dresden’s barricade heroism with that of Paris and Vienna, yet also pointed to the inevitable, once politics gave way to the “purely military standpoint.”

May 1849 barricades (Sächsische Zeitung Archive)

Repression was brutal. Many leaders, participants, and sympathizers were killed or punished: Bakunin, Röckel, and even Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient were arraigned. By chance, and with Liszt’s help, Wagner escaped into Swiss exile, intending in the Ring, as he explained, to “make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense” (Wagner, letter to Uhlig, 12 Nov. 1851).

Eduard Devrient, Aus seinen Tagebüchern, ed. Rolf Kabel (Weimar: Böhlau, 1964).

Frederick Engels, “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols. (Progress: Moscow, 1970), 1: 300-89.

Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1994).

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).

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Wagner and German History

(Article on 'German History' first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encylopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))

1. Napoleon, France, and the Wars of Liberation
2. Saxony and Germany
3. Wagner, Bismarck, and German unification
4. Wagner’s Writings on German History
5. Wagner and German History after 1883



As with many of Wagner’s ideas, it is all too easy to present, selectively or unwittingly, an assemblage of quotations “proving” a certain line, whereas one might just as readily demonstrate the contrary. Was Wagner “nationalist” or “universalist”? Does he properly belong to “the Right” or to “the Left”? The answer has often been formulated beforehand in essentialist terms, dependent on whether one wishes to convict a monster or absolve a genius. The twentieth-century “German catastrophe” (Friedrich Meinecke) looms ominously over such decisions, not just in sensationalist popular treatments, but in the work of Theodor Adorno – just as in more general controversies concerning nineteenth-century German history, above all the claim of a Sonderweg, or “special [German historical] path,” at its most extreme, viewing the Second Reich merely as a prelude to the Third. Unsurprisingly, Wagner’s attitudes towards a German nation, which, for most of his life, lacked concrete political unity except in the past, proved mixed, complex, and subject to development. However, one thread running through his ideas remained historical: the state of the German nation was in many respects to be attributed towards its particular history, which remained very much an ongoing tale, awaiting resolution.


1. Napoleon, France, and the Wars of Liberation

Battle of Leipzig: Johann Nepomuk Hoechle and Franz Wolf  (1835)

Thomas Nipperdey opened his history of nineteenth-century Germany with the words, “In the beginning was Napoleon.” They might also hold the secret to Wagner’s history of nineteenth-century Germany. 1813 was the year of the Battle of Leipzig and also the year of Wagner’s birth in Leipzig. Napoleon’s defeat, following his retreat from Russia, hastened the collapse of the First Empire, and pushed back French forces from German soil. Those German states allied to France now joined the opposing coalition. The legend of the Wars of Liberation, in which free Germans rather than their princes vanquished the French foe, began to be told and re-told, memorialized in popular rather than official monuments across a “nation,” a concept given new life by the French Revolution, still ruled over by those compromised princes. One can trace back Franco-German enmity as far back as one wishes, but the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) and subsequent French political and cultural hegemony cast lengthy shadows. Eighteenth-century princes might imitate Versailles, but national aspirations pointed away from civilized court and salon to a truer, more honest culture, grounded, for instance, in the forests of the Brothers Grimm – or that from which untainted Siegfried emerges.

“Germany” often had truer existence as an opposing cultural force to France than as a political entity, not least during the 1840 Rhine crisis. Wagner’s miserable, homesick sojourn in Paris (1839-42) sharpened that tendency in his case. If meretricious entertainment (Meyerbeer) were French, then true art might be German. A performance of the German Romantic opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz, made a huge impression at this time: “It seems to be the poem of those Bohemian Woods themselves” (SSD 1:212).

2. Saxony and Germany

Crucial to understanding Wagner, though often overlooked, are his birth and childhood in the Saxon cities of Leipzig and Dresden. Transformed by Napoleon from an electorate into a useful allied kingdom in 1806, Saxony had the misfortune to emerge from the Battle of Leipzig on the losing side. Most Saxon troops defected to the allied forces; King Frederick Augustus I was imprisoned; the state itself seemed imperiled, Saxony proving the great loser from the German states at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. Though Prussia failed to absorb her entirely, the remnant of the Wettin kingdom held but three-quarters of the territory of the new Prussian province of Saxony.

Congress of Vienna: August Friedrich Andreas Campe

As Germans, looking askance at recent French cultural and political domination, increasingly wished for some form of national unification, questions arose: in what form and under whose aegis? A German Confederation formed part of the post-war settlement. Would this safeguard individual states’ rights, or furnish a battleground upon which Austria and Prussia would fight for supremacy? Would there be popular unification founded upon a national movement, as desired by many of the 1848-9 revolutionaries, Wagner included, or a traditional power-political aggrandizement by one or both of the two great German powers? And where would this leave other German states, members of the so-called “third Germany,” such as Saxony and Bavaria? Nineteenth-century history did not lead inevitably to Bismarck’s German Empire which, by excluding Austria, divided rather than unified the German nation. Until the Battle of Königgrätz (1866), there was everything to play for, and the French enemy, now under Napoleon III, remained to be defeated.


When Wagner, then, came to advise Ludwig II, earlier experience informed his judgment. Wagner remained at best ambivalent concerning the other German princes, yet suspicion of Prussia, a “barracks state” for many other Germans, always formed a crucial part of his outlook. Bismarck secretly made indirect contact with Wagner, attempting unsuccessfully to have him secure Bavaria’s neutrality between Prussia and Austria (Salmi, 197-99). The contrast, however exaggerated, between Prussian militarism and other states’ – Bavarian, Saxon, etc. – cultural achievement was a mainstay of discourse within those states. “Nationalism” involved many competing strands.


Moreover, though one does not necessarily associate Wagner later in life with Saxony, we find him in Leipzig, publicly and otherwise, more often than we might suspect. Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Erwin Rohde, of attempts to effect a first encounter: Wagner was staying with relatives in Leipzig, unbeknown to the press. When they met, Nietzsche was enchanted by Wagner’s reading from Mein Leben a scene from his Leipzig student days and observed, not for the last time, Wagner’s fondness for the local dialect (Letter of 9 Nov. 1868).


3. Wagner, Bismarck, and German unification

Saxon and Prussian troops in the Dresden Neumarkt, Saxon uprising 1849 (painter unknown)

Wagner and Bismarck were both Germans; neither would have denied that, nor wished to do so. However, particular and particularist identities – both Protestant, but in many respects opposed – counted too. Wagner, on account of his role in the Dresden uprising, was barred for eleven years even from entering the German Confederation. It would take longer still before he would be permitted to return to Saxony. The grudging nature of the Saxon king’s initial concession was mirrored in Wagner’s claim – irrespective of whether one believes him – that he felt no emotion upon his return to German soil (12 August 1860). During exile, Wagner had been a German outcast, indeed outlaw, just like Die Walküre’s revolutionary Siegmund: “I was always outlawed.”

When German unification, such as it was, came from above, through Prussian aggrandizement, it is therefore unsurprising that Wagner’s initial approbation – again, one should not neglect the power of anti-French sentiment in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, witnessed in Eine Kapitulation – soon turned sour. Admiration for the Chancellor’s achievement – “an honest Prussian who succeeded in carrying out a diplomatic coup: ‘At that time he still knew nothing about the German swindle, he was a complete Prussian’.” – is more than balanced a fortnight later by: “That is why I curse Bismarck – for dealing with all these very important problems like a Pomeranian Junker.” “Curse” was obliterated by an unknown hand and replaced by “deplore,” testimony to family sensitivities concerning Wagnerian German identity (CWD, 31 Oct. 1882 and 14 Nov. 1882). Karl Marx could not have been further from the truth, political as well as aesthetic, when answering, at the time of the opening Bayreuth Festival, the persistent question, “What do you think of Wagner?” with the dismissal: highly characteristic of the “New German-Prussian empire-musicians” (Letter to Jenny Marx, August/September 1876).

4. Wagner’s Writings on German History

Wagner’s writings expressed such ambivalence and ambiguities. Die deutsche Oper (1834), his first published piece, expresses the wish that German opera were more open to French and Italian influences. However, during his “revolutionary” period, it becomes clear that the universal artwork of the future will transcend mere national style not so much through synthesis as by development of largely Teutonic art. An intriguing and often confusing companion to the aesthetically-inclined essays is Die Wibelungen. A conflation of history and myth presents correspondences between, for instance, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Siegfried, not only as historical-mythological figures but as revolutionary inspirations. It is hoped that these German heroes, asleep in the Kyffhäuser Mountains, might return, though an original (1848) exhortation for such an awakening was omitted in a subsequent published version, indicative perhaps of Wagner’s disillusionment concerning national revolution. Whoever Barbarossa and Siegfried may have been, they were not Prussians.

Subsequent interest in German history tended, in the spirit of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, to extol German art at the expense of German politics. A collection of essays written for Ludwig II was published in 1867, its title, Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik, reflecting this shift, likewise the contemporary essay, Was ist deutsch? (unpublished until 1878) asking, “what is German?” Influence and regard of Constantin Frantz are marked. Just as Hans Sachs proclaims that holy German art will endure no matter what political calamity might befall the Holy Roman Empire, so Wagner now chooses the forlornly French-periwigged Bach as epitome of the German spirit, his music triumphing despite both his wretched, unrecognized existence as choirmaster and organist, and Germany’s catastrophic political fortunes. (Lutheran-Bachian chorales loom large in the Meistersinger score, likewise neo-Bachian counterpoint.) Even when the Germans subsequently attempted democracy and revolution, they merely aped the French; German achievement lay with Goethe and Schiller. Enemies within were as much to blame as those without; what remained of the German spirit was imperiled by an alliterative trinity of J’s: jurists, Junkers, and Jews, elsewhere joined by Jesuits and journalists (SSD 10:61).





5. Wagner and German History after 1883


Subsequent generations have often striven to dissolve these ambiguities, or simply failed to notice them. National Socialism provides perhaps the most flagrant example, but it is far from alone. When Thomas Mann challenged hardening nationalist orthodoxy by presenting a more interesting, complex Wagner in a 1933 address, Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners (“Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner”), he was rebuked in an indignant “Protest by the Richard Wagner City Munich,” which spoke on behalf of a “national restoration of Germany … [having] taken on definite form.” Though signatories, including Richard Strauss, Hans Knappertsbusch, and Hans Pfitzner, were not all National Socialists, this was one example of an effort to dissolve the ambiguities sketched above, or a failure to notice them. Such elision of Wagner with Nazi goals has continued to haunt Wagner scholarship and reception into the twenty-first century. The anti-Reich Wagner of Was ist deutsch?, let alone more universalist writings, would surely have objected.





However, performance may herald a degree of hope. Some stage directors, such as Stefan Herheim and Peter Konwitschny – notably both musicians themselves, able to confront Wagner’s dramas musically – have grappled more seriously with the multi-faceted view of German history evinced by Wagner and his role within it. Exemplary in this respect was Herheim’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, simultaneously re-telling Wagner’s story of Parsifal and the work’s reception story. Electrifying was the unfurling of swastikas, long absent from the Festival, as Weimar-artiste Klingsor cast his spear, but still more of a challenge to New Bayreuth orthodoxy was the reproduction on stage in the third act of Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner’s 1951 claim that politics had no place in such a festival. German history always was more interesting than that, as Herheim’s contradiction bravely demonstrated.



Thomas Mann, “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner,” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1976): 307-71.
Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, trans. Sidney B. Fay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1950).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters,  trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 3 vols., vol. 1, “1800-1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat” (Munich: Beck, 1998).
“Protest der Richard-Wagner-Stadt München,” Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 16/17 April 1933, repr. and trans. in Sven Friedrich, “Ambivalenz der Leidenschaft – Thomas Mann und Richard Wagner. Zum 125. Geburtstag Thomas Manns,” in: Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele (2000).
Hannu Salmi, Die schriftstellerische und politische Tätigkeit Richard Wagners (Turku: Turun yliposito, 1993).
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Oxford, Berg: 1997).

Salzburg Festival 2020 will go ahead

News received directly from Salzburg:

The 2020 Salzburg Festival will take place from 1 to 30 August, but in a modified and shortened form, due to coronavirus containment measures.

This decision was made by the Salzburg Festival’s Supervisory Board in its special meeting on Monday afternoon.

The Festival directorate of Helga Rabl-Stadler, Markus Hinterhäuser and Lukas Crepaz as well as Bettina Hering, director of drama, and Florian Wiegand, director of concerts, presented a draft programme covering 30 days as well as the outline of a security concept for all performance venues.

Half an hour before the meeting of the Supervisory Board, Minister of Health Rudolf Anschober and Undersecretary of State for Culture Andrea Mayer presented the decree determining important parameters for all presenters in Austria. This gives the Salzburg Festival concrete indications of how to proceed.

Landeshauptmann Wilfried Haslauer commented: “It is a great relief that this decree has provided greater clarity for all presenters of cultural events. This enables us to present the Festival, which is the artistic and economic motor of our region, after all. Fortunately, it also gives the many smaller initiatives which constitute the cultural diversity of our State a chance.”

The decree and the decision of the Supervisory Board have enabled the Festival directorate to announce the decision on the presentation of the Festival, originally scheduled for 30 May, at this earlier point in time.

The summer of 2020 will not see the implementation of the centenary programme announced with such joy and received with such empathy by the audience throughout the world this past autumn. 

However, it will be possible to implement a programme which is artistically meaningful and economically justifiable. Instead of 200 events over 44 days at 16

performance venues, there will be approximately 90 performances over 30 days at a maximum of 6 venues.

All the productions of the anniversary programme which cannot be shown in 2020 will be postponed to 2021. The centenary programme is to begin with the opening of the State Exhibition at the end of July 2020 and end with the closing of the Festival on 31 August 2021.

Of course, the centenary of the founding play Jedermann will be celebrated on 22 August 2020. The details of the modified programme will be presented by Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser at the beginning of June.

After the cancellation of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival and the refunding this necessitated, the Ticket Office of the Festival now faces an even greater challenge. At the beginning of this year, the Festival was proud to celebrate a new record in ticket sales. 180,000 tickets with a total value of 24.5 million Euros have already been sold.

The modified programme will feature completely different dates and a significantly reduced number of performances, which now forces the Festival to reverse and refund its entire ticket sales. When assigning new tickets, those in possession of tickets for the original programme will have priority. All customers will be informed personally and in detail on the procedure during the coming days.

Markus Hinterhäuser: “It pains me to be forced to cancel so many artists’ appearances for this year, as we had developed special programme constellations with many of them. Still, I am glad to have the opportunity to send a vibrant and powerful signal for the arts with this new Festival programme.”

Dare we hope? A modified Salzburg Festival 2020?

SF/Lydia Gorges

I have just received the following from the Salzburg Festival.


Salzburg Festival’s directorate – President Helga Rabl-Stadler, Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser and Executive Director Lukas Crepaz – comments on initial announcements by Vice Chancellor Werner Kogler and Federal Minister Rudolf Anschober, according to which regulations for cultural events are to be gradually loosened in significant ways from June onwards. According to their statements, in August events with up to 1,000 audience members may be possible if the presenter in question presents an adequate security concept.

The Salzburg Festival is pleased that after long weeks without live events, this means that artists can once again invite their audiences to experience art together.

What exactly will become possible can only be explored after the ordinance has been published. After all, the old saying that “the devil is in the detail” applies particularly to the current situation. In particular, clarification is needed on the conditions under which stage rehearsals and performances by orchestras and choruses will be permissible.

The only thing that is certain is that the new health regulations mean that the Festival cannot take place as planned before the outbreak of the pandemic, both in terms of programming and duration. Therefore, the Festival will present an alternative for this extremely challenging year to the Supervisory Board on 25 May 2020. A modified Festival seems possible.

The Festival aims to publish the newly arranged programme for the summer in early June. Details on the further procedure for tickets previously purchased will be communicated to all our customers shortly and will also be published on our website.

This demonstrates that the directorate was justified to pursue a strategy of not cancelling the Festival too early, but waiting and observing the development of the pandemic, setting 30 May as the goal for decision-making.

The Festival is optimistic that despite the coronavirus, it will be able to send a strong signal for the power of the arts, especially in difficult times.

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx!

Mozart's Final Symphonies: Classical and Romantic

(This essay was written to accompany a Pentatone recording of Mozart's Symphonies nos 40 and 41 by the NDR SO and Andrew Manze and first published in that form.)

There are many temptations to romanticisation of Mozart, not least the lacunae that persist in our knowledge of his life – and perhaps always will. Lttle is known, for instance, of the circumstances of his final three symphonies, 39-41. We know that Mozart wrote all three in Vienna. within a six-week period during summer of 1788, yet know little concerning performance. They were probably written for winter subscription concerts ‘in the Casino’, either in the Trattnerhof or on the Spiegelgasse; a possible visit to London may also have proved a spur. There are, however, indications enough of possible, even likely, performances during Mozart’s lifetime. So far uncontested evidence has recently come to light of a performance of the G minor Symphony in Gottfried van Swieten’s Vienna apartment. We learn from Johann Nepomuk Wenzel, a Prague musician, that alas, Mozart ‘had to leave the room … because it was performed with so many mistakes.’ Furthermore, it is inconceivable that Mozart would have revised that symphony, adding clarinets to his second version, without expectation of performance. He intended and expected these symphonies to be performed.


Posterity has nevertheless made them its own. Brahms, keen to distinguish between novelty and ‘inner value’, remarked that, although Beethoven’s First Symphony had offered a ‘new outlook […] the last three symphonies by Mozart are much more important!’ A once-heretical judgement now sounds uncontroversial. Indeed, we hear much talk of a valedictory ‘triptych’. Nikolaus Harnoncourt went so far as to suggest that Mozart may have intended the three works as an oratorio without words, a drama of the soul (Seelendrama), liberated by technical and expressive capabilities of instruments vis­-à-vis voices. The Jupiter finale then stood as a finale to all three. For all today’s talk of historical ‘authenticity’, then, we continue to find ourselves mired in neo-Romantic myth. There are worse fates, yet all too readily this can degenerate into that sloppiness (Schlamperei) of Viennese tradition Mahler rightly decried. There is at least equal value in the effort to hear these symphonies ‘in themselves’. In practice, rightly, we do both.


For dramatic tension of a Romantic order and its tragic working out are undeniably the overriding sense of Mozart’s ‘great’ G minor Symphony. Not for nothing did ETA Hoffmann consider Haydn and Mozart, not just Beethoven, as fellow Romantics. Its G minor predecessor, the so-called ‘little’ no.25, had stood very much in an earlier, Sturm und Drang tradition. This has roots therein too; yet, at least with hindsight, it seems to look far beyond into the musical future. Schoenberg was, unsurprisingly, drawn to analysis of a work of often extreme chromaticism in his Harmonielehre. The throbbing of the first bar’s lower strings presents an ongoing scene of quasi-operatic ‘accompaniment’ prior to the first subject’s entry above, Mozart’s divided violas – his favoured instrument as a chamber music player – richly, darkly expressive. Such an opening, in medias res, is very different from the grand slow introductions to Mozart’s Prague symphony and to many symphonies by Haydn and Beethoven. Tension is less built than immediately, intensely present. The opening theme’s nagging semitonal fall prepares us, if only slightly, for perhaps Mozart’s most disorienting chromatic exploration: the shock onset of the development not only yanking first-group material into remote F-sharp minor but by attempting, if never quite succeeding in, Mephistophelian negation through harmony and counterpoint alike. Note Mozart’s typical, ‘Classical’ tragic recapitulation practice of rooting both thematic groups in the tonic minor. In Georg Knepler’s words, this symphony ‘clings relentlessly to the minor mode’.

Chromaticism again haunts the slow movement. We are in E-flat major, yet it is hardly affirmative: more tender, wistful, full of yearning and again of tension. Harmony and counterpoint once again work together to form so dissoluble a union that it is difficult not to think of Bach (whose music Swieten had done much to introduce to Mozart and indeed to the wider musical world). Contrapuntal string variegation suggests – or may be heard to suggest – Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, five fugues from which Mozart had arranged for strings.

Mozart’s G minor daemon drives home cross-rhythms in a Minuet that demonstrates our distance from the dance’s ballroom origins. In an article on the movement’s trio, Leonard B. Meyer argued that his earlier belief, that ‘complexity was at least a necessary condition for [musical] value,’ was ‘at least somewhat confused’, since what truly mattered, this Trio an examplar, was ‘relational richness, and such richness (or complexity) is in no way incompatible with simplicity of musical vocabulary and grammar’. Nevertheless, ‘relative’ simplicity and relaxation of the Trio’s ‘tonal means’ acquire expressive meaning through contrast with complexity elsewhere.

Complexity continues to rule in a finale that is yet nevertheless conceived as if in a single breath. One passage of chromatic and rhythmic disjuncture delineates a sequence of all eleven pitches save for the tonic G. In perhaps the most radical of all Mozart’s finales, meaning is conveyed through contrast between such proto-Schoenbergian exploration and ‘home’, tragic tonality. It was, Knepler noted, not an unusual practice for Mozart, although another G minor masterwork, the String Quintet, KV 516, does eventually turn to the tonic major. Tragedy is preferred here over either Beethovenian-Romantic journey from ‘darkness to light’ or Classical-operatic ‘happy ending’.

For Mozart’s symphonic method has often been misunderstood. Wagner, for instance, mistook balance and symmetry for feudal conformism. Drama lies in the tension between two principles: that of contrast between first and second thematic groups and that of dynamic propulsion. Such is as true of the Jupiter Symphony as its predecessors. The second group of its first movement takes us unmistakably into the comedic realm of opera buffa, quoting Mozart’s insertion arietta for bass and orchestra, ‘Un bacio di mano’ (KV 541). It offers a perfect foil to the trumpets and drum pomp of earlier material, replete with resonances of the traditional Missa solemnis figuraliter and the forthcoming seria festivities of his coronation opera, La clemenza di Tito. We make sense of them not only in themselves but also in relation to one another. Hence an exposition ‘repeat’ is not really a repeat at all – not in comprehending performance and listening.







Complexity, harmonic and formal, reaches a new level in the slow, sarabande-like Andante cantabile in F major: short, yet so powerfully concentrated so as to seem anything but. (Like Webern?) As with its precursor in the Symphony no.40, its sonata form is best thought of not, near-nonsensically, as being ‘without a development section’, but as in developing variation such as Schoenberg divined not only in Brahms but also in Mozart. It may perhaps be understood as Mozart’s sonata-form response to Haydn’s favoured variation form for slow movements. Serenity and unease prove co-dependent rather than contrasting. Mozart smiles through tears.

The C major Minuet sounds initially simple, if sinuous: again recognisably of a ‘type’ to be heard in the ballroom, if more luxuriantly scored and harmonised. Yet Mozart takes us on a very different journey, ultra-chromatic subversion of the tonic resulting in a passage of only six beats that includes every pitch class other than C. However much that might tempt us to peer once again into the Schoenbergian future, Mozart’s chromaticism retains meaning through relationship to a fundamental tonality, here reiterated by having the trio remain in C major. Its central episode, contrasting and complementary, takes us to the minor mode: development and symmetry work together rather than in binary opposition

Grosse Redoutensaal, Hofburg, Vienna. Mozart wrote a good number of minutes and other dances for this ballroom.
Engraving by Joseph Schütz

The sense of a finale as culminating achievement of the work, its telos or goal, is not the least of Mozart’s legacies. Classical balance and throwaway humour – always more Haydn’s thing than Mozart’s – are retrospectively dealt an historical blow through a construction that accords ultimate weight to a climactic finale. Lest that seem Romantic sentimentalism, there is much evidence to indicate that it was understood as such at the time. Vincent Novello recounted a conversation with Mozart’s son, Franz Xaver: ‘he considered the Finale to his father’s sinfonie in C – which [Johann Peter] Salomon,’ the impresario who invited both Haydn and Mozart to London, ‘christened the Jupiter – to be the highest triumph of instrumental composition, and I agree with him.’ Complexity is triumphantly reinstated, if ever it had gone away. The coda’s quintuple invertible counterpoint – all themes combined in mind-boggling combination and permutation – is nevertheless all the more miraculous for the lightly-worn quality to Mozart’s contrapuntal learning, rooted here as much in the Austrian Baroque pedagogy of Johann Joachim Fux as in Bach. There is triumph, yet no sense of forcibly welding the themes together – as, say, in Wagner or Richard Strauss. A specifically eighteenth-century art that conceals art offers the apparent paradox of effortless, comedic climax.

It is, moreover, difficult not to feel some sense of signing off, of culmination to more than a single work. Had Mozart lived longer, he would have composed other symphonies; however, he did not and therefore could not. This remains, then, both the gateway to the nineteenth-century Romantic symphony’s ‘finale problem’ after Beethoven, and its inimitable Classical solution: forever – tragicomically – out of reach.