Musikfest Berlin (1) - Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim: Mozart, 29 August 2020

Philharmonie 

Images: © Monika Karczmarczyk / Berliner Festspiele 

Symphony no.39 in E-flat major, KV 543
Symphony no.40 in G minor, KV 550
Symphony no.41 in C major, KV 551

Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Almost six months ago, I penned my last concert review, Daniel Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman having completed, all of three days in time, their latest survey of the Beethoven violin sonatas. I had had every reason, or so I believed, to look forward to a good deal more Beethoven in Berlin before reluctant return to London. The nine symphonies from Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin, together with Fidelio from the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko were all booked, as were several other concerts and theatre visits, two new Mozart opera productions (Idomeneo and Così fan tutte) included. None took place. Instead, I scrambled to make another booking: a flight ‘home’ before it was too late. Literally homeless and unable to find anywhere to live during lockdown, I spent three months in Yorkshire with my brother and his family, to reach London once again only in mid-June, to start to rebuild my life. Since then, one short dress rehearsal apart, that life has truly been a Land ohne Musik, an especially strange coincidence with reception of the chalice, more bitterly poisoned than ever, bearing the name ‘Head of the Department of Music’ for the next three years. (There are baptisms of fire, and there are baptisms of March 2020.)
 

I could scarcely believe, then, that not only had I been able to reach Berlin, to say goodbyes previously denied; not only was I about to hear music once more in the flesh; but also that it would be with Mozart and the man who was to have conducted that never-to-be-seen Così, as well as the never-to-be-heard Beethoven series: Daniel Barenboim. But so it was. All was not the same. Under necessary social distancing, the Philharmonie can only offer interval-less concerts of up to ninety minutes and, more importantly, at what looked to me barely more than one in five capacity. This was no orchestra for Mahler; it was a typical Barenboim Mozart orchestra, strings 12.10.8.6.4, spaced so as to fill the stage, whether masked, as the players came on to and left the platform, or not, when (of course!) they played. Barenboim too was masked until after taking his podium bow. But then, in the presence of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, the attempt to create a ‘new orchestral normal’ could begin.
 

It was not normal, of course; how could it be? That E-flat chord with which the first of the evening’s three symphonies opened would, even at the best of times have been heard with all manner of resonances. Here, however, it was not only a matter of presaging The Magic Flute. ‘The music itself’, a few years ago the bane of many a musicologist’s life, was recreated before our very ears, and to hell with pedantic criticism. It is always an introduction rich in expectancy; here, a whole world of possibilities lay before us, with all the fabled warmth of this great orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, and its music director, Barenboim. Unsurprisingly, I welled up, surrendering—as if I had any choice—but then found myself able to listen, almost as if the intentness and immediacy of the experience were to compensate for the deprivations of the last six months. Silences to shame Bruckner played their part, but as ever with Barenboim at his best, it was above all understanding and communication of harmony that led us to the exposition proper, in a performance both collegiately genial and generatively constructed. Every note mattered, was connected, played its part: like every player, perhaps even every audience member. All the drama of opera denied erupted. Cello scales sounded for the miracles they are, transmuted from figures into music by the most Mozartian of alchemy. The lack of a repeat—one ear on the legal clock?—made for an uncommonly Boulezian overview from Barenboim, but it worked with similar purpose and acuity. Not his least strength as a musician has been constant rethinking of his way with familiar works, constantly on offer here today. The recapitulation sounded as a second development, that lack of an exposition repeat perhaps necessitating this still more strongly: how everything had changed by the ‘return’ to the second group! The triumph of the coda, often overlooked among the miracles of this triptych, sent shivers down the spine. Yes, music had returned, and it was music at its most exalted.

In the slow movement, Barenboim negotiated the difficult balance between development and, well, balance so well that would never have known its difficulty. The minor-key episode was expertly prefigured—harmony again!—so that the strange description I read as a teenager in a borrowed LP liner note, ‘bizarre’, seemed more bizarre than ever. The personal inscrutability born of apparently different subjectivity, which so strongly differentiates Mozart and Beethoven, however close they may otherwise become, was a guiding spirit here. Mozart never judges. Dramatic flexibility of tempo suggested, not without reason, the world of Don Giovanni. There was all the time, also all the urgency, in the world, and how we needed them; how those dissonances ached and their resolutions healed. The minute, ebullient yet yielding, likewise was founded on the securest of harmonic understandings. Its counterpoint told with a directed clarity vouchsafed only to the finest of Mozartians. The trio proved a garden of similarly directed delights, straight out of Così, or rather vice versa. Champagne with especially present pinot noir was the hallmark of the finale, its extraordinary concision uncannily prophetic of Webern. Motivic integrity and dynamism played a crucial role, once more founded upon harmony. The final, Haydnesque phrase was thrown away not as if nothing, but as if almost nothing, thereby rendering it everything.

The G minor Symphony began with Furtwänglerian fury, yet perhaps greater precision than Barenboim’s hero might have elicited. Concision again proved Mozart’s order of the day, likewise a motivic intensity to rival Beethoven, albeit with a tragedy that could only be Mozart’s. Disorienting descent and battle royal in the development wound down in well-nigh Mendelssohnian exhaustion to ignite a recapitulation that was again very much a second development. The fear and fury of the Requiem to come rendered the tragedy of the ‘failure’ to turn away from the tonic minor in the second group and coda all the more vivid and felt. The second movement likewise flowed as a wordless theatrical scene, with both the variety and unity that implies, at least chez Mozart. A particular form of inevitability, recalling more strongly than I can recall the music of Bach, characterised the minuet. Its trio offered balm, the promise of a better world, the purity of the Staatskapelle’s horns enough once again to have tear ducts do their thing. The finale burst forth as resolution to the truest of tragedies: no histrionics, but musical fate. There was hope, of course, but a rock-steady, almost Klemperer-like overall command marshalled its inevitable demise. The disjuncture with which the development opened ‘spoke’ almost as if a Wagner arioso. Here at least, Mozart needed no words.

I do not think it was temporal requirements that led Barenboim to take a brisker, even brusquer approach with the first movement of the Jupiter than I can remember him doing so before. In some ways, it seemed closer to Haydn and Beethoven than to Mozart. I may not have liked the idea a priori, but it worked: again, testimony to his determination to rethink, not to rest on his laurels. It was defiant; perhaps therein lay the key, given our present ‘circumstances’. Beethovenian goal-direction was very much the guiding principle to this movement as a whole, which is not to say that other musical themes lacked charm. However, it unfolded with a solemnity very much of our time, with little sense of celebration, though once again with an increasingly important role played, so it seemed, by Mozart’s study of Bach. 

The second movement was imbued with a humanity to match any of Barenboim’s Beethoven. This mattered, whether in the harmonic depths or on the melodic surface, such opposition more than usually meaningless. Mozart here spoke with all the moral goodness that he would with the late Colin Davis, and all the complexity of Schoenberg. Barenboim’s rethinking of the minuet was striking too, opening intimacy preparing the way for a veritable panoply of Viennese Redoutensaal life. Public-private contrast and interconnection proved the foundation of the trio too, relationship between the diatonic and chromatic adding a further layer of meaning to both dances of this third movement. The finale burned with fiery urgency as much contrapuntal as harmonic, though it was certainly both. (Bach again!) Perhaps it lacked the sense of absolute triumph, of a musical QED, that sometimes it will boast, but surely that was again to be expected in times of plague. It certainly lacked nothing in freshness, nor in thrill. I could happily, repeats or no repeats, have heard it all again.

R.I.P. Anne Ozorio

I have just heard, with great sadness, news of the death of my friend Anne Ozorio. Anne and I first 'met' on the Mahler List, which I joined when, somewhat belatedly, I finally started using the Internet. Hers was always one of the most intelligent, interesting, and generous whilst critical voices there. We became friends, writing to each other often (indeed after both of us had left that list, following unpleasantness neither of us had time or energy to indulge). We then met in person for the first time when she drove over to Cambridge for the launch party for my first book, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire. She acquired a copy and wrote a generous review.


Then, when I tentatively started writing more about music in performance, she encouraged me and recommend that, as well as writing for my blog, I write for another website, Seen and Heard, for which I still write. Apart from anything else, that enabled me to attend more performances and to gain greater experience in such writing, which has in turn greatly influenced much of my 'academic' work too (not that she or I would ever have made such a hard and fast distinction). My most recent completed article, 14,000 words on Frank Castorf's Ring and the politics of postdramatic theatre may otherwise never have been written.


Anne's blog, Classical Iconoclast, was always one I would check and read with enthusiasm, even, perhaps especially when we differed, in order that I might be challenged to rethink. I shall greatly miss her thoughts on performances and on much else, not least her Macau family history, from which she has been posting so many fascinating old pictures with commentary. I shall also miss her presence at the Wigmore Hall, the Festival Hall, Covent Garden, and many other venues, whenever, God willing, they reopen. Bumping into her and, often, Roger too for a pre-performance or interval chat was so often part and parcel of the experience, not least with respect to new music. Anne's voice will, of course, remain with us.


R.I.P. Anne. 

Wagner and Ludwig von der Pfordten

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

Pfordten, Ludwig Karl Heinrich, Freiherr von der (b. Ried im Innkreis, 11 Sep. 1811; d. Munich, 18 Aug. 1880), politician and jurist. Held professorships in Würzburg and Leipzig. Appointed Minister of Education by Frederick Augustus II of Saxony in 1848. Wagner failed to interest him in his “Plan for the Organization of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony.” Bavarian Minister-President and Foreign Minister from 1849-59 and 1864-6. During the 1850s, Pfordten failed to unite the smaller German kingdoms under Bavarian leadership against Prussia and Austria. He advised Maximilian II against a Munich staging of Tannhäuser, a slight Ludwig II held against him. Suspicious of Wagner’s influence upon the King, and horrified at his plans for a music school and festival theater, Pfordten and colleagues manufactured a public scandal in 1865, compelling Ludwig to choose, in Pfordten’s terms, between the love and respect of his faithful subjects and the friendship of Richard Wagner. Pfordten’s second ministry proved disastrous, Bavaria emerging on the losing side in the Austro-Prussian War (1866).

Sāvitri, HGO, 11 August 2020

Image: © 2020 Laurent Compagnon

The Lawn, Lauderdale House

Sāvitri – Esme Bronwen Smith
Satyavān – Alex Aldren
Death – Theo Perry
Dancer – Laura Calcagno 

Julia Mintzer (director)
Eleanor Burke (assistant director) 
Anna-Lou Mary (choreography) 
Ryan Wilce (company manager) 
Charles Ogilvie (props) 

Chorus

HGO Orchestra

Thomas Payne (conductor)

Opera returns to London. As we know it? Yes and no—but then, is that not always the case? Convention dictates that one does not review dress rehearsals, but what is convention in times such as these? More to the point, I have permission to write and should not have dreamed of doing so without. HGO (formerly Hampstead Garden Opera) and its ever-enterprising impresario David Conway deserve our deepest gratitude and heartiest praise for merely conceiving of this project, let alone for bringing it to the garden stage with such zest and conviction. 


First performed in 1916, another time of troubles—also, as now hear ad nauseam, shortly prior to another pandemic—Sāvitri, more importantly, was conceived for outdoor performance, ‘or else in a small building’. No small building here, though a fascinating large building, Lauderdale House, made for a lovely backdrop to events on the lawn below. Theatrical hustle and bustle between rehearsals—arriving just after the first, I saw the second cast—brought to mind of another opera premiered that year, Strauss’s Ariadne, at least in the final version we all know and love. A bird flew overhead, sang cheerily, and: action… 


Birds of the forest, perhaps the Indian jungle, we heard. A woman wrote in red on glass. A man, unseen, singing with perfect pitch and diction, evoked something beyond, physically and metaphysically. Music, drama, opera were reborn before our eyes and ears, both the oneness in veil of illusion of Holst’s Mahābharata piece and that of the endlessly reborn and reinvented bastard progeny of an Athens that never was. In Julia Mintzer’s thoughtful, elegant staging, we were able to make connections, yet never pushed unduly. Sāvitri in her struggle with the Death that would take her husband could stand for the creative act itself, both abstract and concrete (Holst), but also in a time of pandemic could lead our thoughts elsewhere, whether particular or universal. ‘The world has now become a grave.’ 


Were those English, imperial memories we saw and heard? Perhaps, given the summery lightness of costume, orientalist harem pants and all. Above all, however, these were bodies, physical in their fear and trembling, archetypal in the stylised shaping of Anna-Lou Mary’s choreography. Space was rethought, Satyavān approaching our vision from behind, Death heard and occasionally seen from around us, even from within the house: the word, long and lingering, its musical shadows, as well as the character. Yet that use of space flowed, like Holst’s score, Straussian artifice put to one side in favour of something winningly ‘natural’, whatever the undeniable art and craft involved. Likewise Thomas Payne’s keen conducting, alive to the ebb and flow of Holst’s chamber orchestral subtleties—and its harmonies. Harmony, the greatest glory of Western music, Schoenberg’s final word: how we have missed you these long months ohne Musik. 


For the small female chorus sounded as if discovering music for the first time. The primal, wordless sounds from the Burning Bush in Moses und Aron came to my mind, however simpler the particular means; Evensong too, albeit the distinctly superior version of the college and cathedral choirs singing Holst’s own Nunc dimittis (1915, as I later discovered). The Death of Music, even of Anglican music, might yet be stopped, as Sāvitri conquers Death and saves, in quiet ecstasy, her beloved. Chords could be heard in all the evergreen freshness of, say, Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, and yet built and rebuilt in different ways, the ninths and beyond—that word again—of Holst’s imagination gently yet surely staking out their own territory. ‘Art thou the Just One? Art thou Death? Or art thou but a blind spirit, knowing naught of what is round thee? Give me life!’ Music is death, yet is far more than death, just as it is maya, yet far more. Holst, like the Schopenhauerian Wagner, knew that—even as he distanced himself, or thought he did, from that most overbearing of operatic predecessors. We may wait a while for our next Meistersinger, just as for our next Moses. Art, however, will find a way, not only along those paths, but along others not yet seen. We must find a way too.

Wagner and August Röckel

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

Röckel, (Karl) August (born 1 December 1814, Graz; died 18 July 1876, Budapest.) Conductor, composer, pamphleteer; son of tenor, Joseph Röckel. Assisted Rossini at the Paris Théâtre Italien, before assuming positions in Bamberg, Weimar, and finally Dresden (1843-9) as assistant to Wagner. Röckel withdrew his 1839 opera, Farinelli, accepted for Dresden performance, as unworthy compared to Wagner’s work. Dismissed for subversion, Röckel edited the socialist Volksblätter, to which Wagner contributed. Following the Dresden uprising (account published in 1865), Röckel received a death sentence, commuted; prison correspondence adds greatly to understanding of the Ring. In a letter of 25/26 January 1854, Wagner presents Wotan (Wodan) rising to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction, summarising a fundamental ‘pessimistic’ shift in his conception. Following release from prison in 1862, Röckel edited newspapers in Coburg, Frankfurt, Munich, and Vienna, and joined August Bebel’s Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine.  Friendship faltered during the later 1860s: Wagner held Röckel responsible for dissemination of rumours concerning Wagner’s relationship with Cosima.

Wagner and Ludwig II

(Article, ‘Ludwig II, King of Bavaria,’ first published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013))

Lohengrin's arrival in Brabant, August von Heckel, 1882-3 (Neuschwanstein)

 

Ludwig II, King of Bavaria (b. Nymphenburg Palace, Munich, 25 Aug. 1845; d. Lake Starnberg, near Munich, 13 June 1886; reign 10 Mar. 1864 to 13 June 1886). Succeeded his father, Maximilian II, but closer in artistic ambition to Maximilian’s deposed father, Ludwig I. Aestheticism was a hallmark of Ludwig’s reign, which witnessed construction of neo-Romantic, “fairy-tale” castles such as Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee, and Neuschwanstein; the latter’s wall frescoes depict Wagnerian scenes. Though Ludwig was hardly devoted to the more mundane of his duties and was no consummate politician, Bavaria under his rule nevertheless successfully held out for a high price even when there was no alternative to German unification. Ludwig won a private, secret income from Bismarck’s Guelph fund in return for putting his name to Bismarck’s “Kaiser letter,” bidding Prussia’s William I to “re-establish a German Empire and German imperial dignity.” Extensive correspondence, both with Wagner and Cosima, is an invaluable source for the Wagner scholar.

At thirteen, Ludwig was enthralled by reports of Lohengrin in Munich. He heard it there in 1861 and, inspired by the swan knight (cf. “Neuschwanstein”), engaged in study of Wagner’s writings. Increasingly tormented by his homosexuality, he would sooner withdraw from society, always preferring to experience private performances of Wagner’s works. In response to Wagner’s 1863 call for a German prince to fund model operatic performances of the Ring, Ludwig dispatched Cabinet Secretary, Franz von Pfistermeister, only a month after his accession (1864), to bring Wagner to Munich. The King’s “Friend” received a generous stipend, so that he might compose and perform his works. Soon exiled, if temporarily, to Tribschen, following machinations by Pfistermeister and Ludwig von der Pfordten, Wagner’s counsel persisted. Such was his influence that Bismarck attempted to have him ensure Bavarian neutrality between Prussia and Austria in 1866. In this context, and partly influenced by Constantin Frantz, if not Bismarck, Wagner penned “What is German?” (1865) for Ludwig’s instruction. Wagner counseled Ludwig against abdication, apparently strengthening his resolve – not least since, as King, he would be better placed to assist Wagner.

 

Ludwig paid the most pressing of Wagner’s debts, afforded him free residence, and supported the world premieres of Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger (1868), Das Rheingold (1869) and Die Walküre (1870), the latter two against Wagner’s will. Plans for a Munich festival theater by Gottfried Semper were thwarted, yet land for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was provided at no cost and the first Bayreuth Festival was saved by Ludwig’s loan of 100,000 thalers. Ludwig also sponsored land-purchase and construction costs for Wahnfried.

Bayreuth Festspielhaus, 1882

  

Ludwig grew heavily indebted, though Wagnerian expenses totaled under a seventh of the Civil List. (He funded artistic projects personally.) In 1886, exasperated by Ludwig’s refusal to economize and fearful of dismissal, ministers presented a medical report signed by four psychiatrists, none of whom had ever met Ludwig, declaring him unfit to rule – for life. Maximilian’s brother, Leopold, was declared Regent; Ludwig was transported to Schloss Berg. The cause of his tragic drowning in adjacent Lake Starnberg remains unclear: suicide, accidental death through escape, or murder?

 

Detta Petzet and Michael Petzet, Die Richard Wagner-Bühne Königs Ludwig II. (Munich: Prestel, 1970).

Otto Strobel (ed.), König Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner. Briefwechsel. Mit vielen anderen Urkunden, 5 vols (Karlsruhe: Braun, 1936-9).

Wagner and Young Germany

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

A group of German writers during the pre-1848 period. Reacted strongly against perceived apolitical and reactionary tendencies in German Romanticism. Several, including Heinrich Laube, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Heine, and Georg Herwegh, were known personally to Wagner; others include Ludwig Börne, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Georg Büchner. In 1835, the German Confederation proscribed many such writings as injurious to the Christian religion and morality; Laube’s subsequent imprisonment made a great impression upon Wagner. According to Heine (Die romantische Schule), Young Germans, unlike Goethe and the Romantics, treated life and literature as one; as for Wagner, this signaled revival of the Hellenic spirit following Christian aberration. Wagner published articles in Laube’s Leipzig-based Zeitung für die elegante Welt, including his Autobiographical Sketch (1842), where Wagner likens Das Liebesverbot to Laube’s Young Europe in their “victory of free sensualism over puritanical hypocrisy.” Young German influence may be traced throughout Wagner’s dramatic oeuvre, especially Tannhäuser.

Wagner and Bakunin

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

Photograph by Nadar

Bakunin, Mikhail, (b. Priamukhino, Russia, 30 May [Old Style: 18 May] 1814; d. Berne, 1 July 1876), Russian anarchist. A nobleman’s heir, Bakunin resigned his army commission to study philosophy in Moscow. Part of the “Stankevich Circle,” he translated Fichte and Hegel and fell under Alexander Herzen’s influence. There followed from 1840 an itinerant revolutionary existence. In Berlin, he shared an apartment with Ivan Turgenev, joined the Young Hegelian party, and penned The Reaction in Germany (1842). In Zurich, he travelled with Georg Herwegh, meeting Wilhelm Weitling and other “German communists.” In Paris, he met fellow anarchist and later friend, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and his eventual nemesis, Karl Marx. Sympathy for the Polish cause distinguished him from many Russians and Germans, and got him expelled from Paris. In 1848, he attended the First Slav Congress in Prague and made his Appeal to the Slavs, demanding continental revolutionary unity to overthrow Russian, Austrian, and Prussian autocracy.

Following Wagner’s 1849 Palm Sunday performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Bakunin approached the conductor, announcing: “if all music were to be lost in the coming world conflagration, we should risk our own lives to preserve this symphony” (Wagner, My Life, English translation 384). Wagner writes a little of their ensuing discussions, generally of a political nature, Bakunin rejoicing in his “creative passion” for destruction (Bakunin 58). Had Wagner not yet heard of Marx, he most likely would have done so during these walks. Upon Bakunin’s next return from revolutionary Prague, he threw himself into the Dresden uprising, despite disapproving of its amateurism. He proposed centralizing gunpowder reserves in the Rathaus to blow up approaching Prussian troops.

Captured and arrested in Chemnitz with other revolutionaries, including August Röckel but not Wagner, Bakunin received commuted death sentences in Saxony and Austria, before extradition to Russia, where he was held in solitary confinement in St Petersburg’s Peter-Paul Fortress from 1851 to 1857. Released into Siberian exile, he escaped via Japan to San Francisco, whence he resumed his itinerant activities, through London, Lithuania, Stockholm, Switzerland, Lyons, Bologna, etc. Disdaining participation in the corruption of “bourgeois” political life, his anarchistic conflict with Marx’s “scientific socialism” intensified, culminating in expulsion from the First International in 1872. In the wake of this and the Franco-Prussian War (1871), Bakunin wrote Statism and Anarchy, perhaps the most complete statement of his beliefs.

Though as coherent a tract as we have from Bakunin, arguably more powerful were: his insistence upon revolutionary activity; his twin passions for destruction (cf. Götterdämmerung’s Immolation Scene) and revolutionary fraternity; and his provision of memorable dicta, e.g., inverting Voltaire to say that, if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him (Bakunin 128). Bakunin’s charisma impressed Wagner greatly; references persist in Cosima’s Diaries. During his final year, 1876, Bakunin seems, in startlingly later-Wagnerian fashion, to have lost some of the Rousseauvian faith he had held since childhood in man’s natural goodness, remarking from Lugano: “If there were in the whole world three people, two of them would unite to oppress the third” (Carr 478). As rehearsals for the first Bayreuth festival began, Bakunin – on his deathbed – requested the works of Schopenhauer.

Arthur Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, tr. Steven Cox and Olive Stevens (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973).

E.H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London: Macmillan, 1937).

Wagner and Constantin Frantz

(This article appeared originally in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi)

Frantz, (Gustav Adolph) Constantin (b. Börnecke, 12 Sep. 1817; d. Blasewitz, 2 May 1891), historian and political theorist. Prussian civil servant, from 1862 a full-time writer. Initially Hegelian, Schelling’s influence turned him rightward. Like many contemporaries, Frantz addressed the “German question:” how to reconcile cultural nationhood with German Kleinstaaterei (petty-statism). This he described, with typical national modesty, as the most obscure, most involved, and most comprehensive problem in all of modern history. Note the German conflation between national and universal, also present in Wagner’s and others’ writings.

Critical of liberal, instrumentalist conceptions of state and monarchy, which he viewed in natural, organic terms, Frantz opposed both the National Liberals (associated with Jewish hegemony) and Bismarck’s kleindeutsch policy, meaning unification as a Prusso-German nation state, excluding Austria. Instead, Frantz advocated particularism within a pacifistic confederation to include Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Austria and Prussia would act from within rather than as would-be great powers. This federal model for Europe as a whole would defend against French and Russian expansionism, and protect traditional Western Christendom. Latterly claimed as a forerunner of the European ideal, Frantz was Romantically nostalgic for the Holy Roman Empire: not a state, but a set of legal institutions, through which sovereign entities, ranging from electorates to Imperial knights, might thrive, as much culturally as politically. It was Germany’s particular privilege and calling, Frantz believed, to form a living connection between state and international law in the development of continental Europe. German unification (1871), he believed, ignored German historical development, transplanting foreign constitutional forms in the name of a national principle.

Frantz may have influenced a surprisingly rare expression of blatant nationalism in Wagner’s dramatic oeuvre: Hans Sachs’s peroration in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Even if the Empire fell to a French (welsch) threat, Sachs exclaims, “holy German art” would endure. Wagner had encountered Frantz’s work during the 1860s, dedicating the second edition of Opera and Drama to him and proposing to Ludwig II in 1866 that he assume leadership of the German Confederation. Cosima records: “R. says, ‘Who suffered more than I did under the drawbacks of life in Germany? Indeed, I even got to the stage of wishing to see the whole nation dissolved, but always in the hope of building something new, something more in line with the German spirit. It was a great joy to me to get a glimpse through Constantin Frantz of the German Empire; and who cannot feel at least some hope, now that the Germans have shown such strength?’” (CWD, 14 Feb. 1871). When Wagner’s initial enthusiasm for Bismarck’s Reich faltered, this almost metaphysical Reich remained an alternative.

In 1878, Wagner republished “What is German?” requesting Frantz’s response. Frantz’s Open Letter to Richard Wagner (June 1878) also published in the Bayreuther Blätter, argued that the new Reich was as un-German as could be. Importantly, he distinguishes between (German) “metapolitics” and conventional politics (analogously with metaphysics and physics). Metapolitics must have a higher aim than mere political ends, a privileging characteristic in the idealism of the later Bayreuth Circle.

Wagner and Revolution

(Article, ‘Revolution’, was originally published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi and Mark Berry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Revolution was a constant specter for nineteenth-century Europeans, both a recurring, self-transforming event and a Grundbegriff: a “fundamental concept,” (Reinhart Koselleck), an inescapable piece of socio-political vocabulary crystallized in a single term. Others relevant to Wagner include “state,” “morality,” and “politics.” They require narration and interpretation, not analytical definition.

Jacques-Louis David, The Tennis Court Oath

David, The Death of Marat

The French Revolution (1789) cast a shadow over the nineteenth century and posed a series of questions. Could feudal or aristocratic forms of government and society be maintained, reinvigorated even, with newfound popular conservative support? Were attempts to start anew doomed to bloody failure? Who should rule and how should government be structured? What of national sovereignty? The restorative model of revolution as a “wheel’s turning” was replaced by modern revolution as violent rupture, transforming society, its omnipresence both new and persistent throughout Wagner’s lifetime.

Indications were contradictory. The old order, apparently restored at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), often had its much-vaunted “principle of legitimacy” breached: e.g., the Holy Roman Empire not revived, two fifths of Wagner’s native Saxon territory ceded to Prussia. However, newer ideals of Liberalism and constitutionalism also encountered inveterate hostility, epitomized by Austrian Chancellor Metternich and his European “System.” France’s 1830 July Revolution commenced another wave, replacing ultra-legitimist Charles X with “citizen-king,” Louis-Philippe. Constitutions were granted in Saxony, Baden, and elsewhere.

Delacroix, Liberty Guiding the People

The seventeen-year old Wagner, hitherto repelled by tales of French Revolutionary excess, drew inspiration from news of Paris and Dresden: the “world of history came alive for me … naturally, I became a fervent partisan of the revolution” (My Life, English tr., 39). Increased and increasing public interest in social and political affairs characterized the period, “revolution” and reaction very much alive (Young Germany). Few were surprised – Metternich wearily confessed to propping up rotten buildings – when revolution engulfed Europe in 1848-9, Wagner’s experience culminating in the Dresden uprising.

Barricades in Dresden, 1849

Wagner’s writings now breathed “Revolution,” afforded a capital letter even when he abandoned the practice for other nouns. Die Revolution (1849), written for August Röckel’s Volksblätter, hymns the “sublime goddess Revolution,” the “ever-rejuvenating mother of mankind,” who prophesies a new world of love (Feuerbach’s influence), in which “all as brothers” would be “free in their desires, free in their deeds, free in their pleasures” (SSD 12: 245, 251). Die Kunst und die Revolution and other Zurich writings look to a post-revolutionary “artwork of the future”: essentially Der Ring des Nibelungen.

However, the promise of revolution suggested by the Ring never materializes. Though Siegfried the anarchist love-revolutionary shatters Wotan’s spear of state, he falls victim to Hagen’s spear. Yet, long after many ’48ers lost faith, Wagner maintained his. Even after turning to Schopenhauer, he continued to glorify revolution, above all in Siegfried’s Funeral March that dramatizes the conflict between revolution and resignation: challenging, not denying, revolutionary hopes. Wagner’s chronicle never returns to the older meaning of revolution. The ring is circular; the Ring is not. Indeed, the need to transform a moribund society is pursued in Wagner’s final stage work, Parsifal.

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

Dieter Borchmeyer, Die Götter tanzen Cancan: Richard Wagners Liebesrevolten (Heidelberg: Manutius, 1992)

Wagner and Feuerbach

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

Engraving from 1872, Die Gartenlaube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wagner and Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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