The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (89 page)

The modern problem, according to Wagner, is how to bring together word-language and tone-language. But modern opera has made this effort only in a crude mechanical way. The poet writes his words and waits for the composer’s music to “transform the nakedness of articulate speech into the fullness of the tone-language.” The result is confusion. For a
Gesamtkunstwerk
the artist must from the outset create an organic work fusing words and music. Wagner himself would prove this possible by writing his own librettos.

Looking ahead to “Poetry and Music in the Drama of the Future,” Wagner proposed a new kind of verse, better for “the purely emotional element,” going back to “the sensuous substance of the roots of speech.” Modern opera makes the mistake of treating the voice as only another musical instrument, but in the unified art work the voice part will become “the connecting link between articulate speech and tone speech.” Then the words will “float like a ship on the sea of orchestral harmony.” Modern instrumental music does “possess a capacity for speech,” for all that cannot be expressed in words. “The unifying bond of expression therefore proceeds from the orchestra.” “Translated” opera, he says, makes no sense and destroys its very essence. The German language is better than others for the art work of the future because it “still displays an immediate and recognizable connection with its own roots.” The art work needs a new public, not like the present, which seeks only to be amused, but a public with a feeling for cosmic unity.

Opera and Drama
, which Wagner called his “testament,” was also his manifesto. He created a new concept of opera to which Verdi’s talents were not equal, and which Verdi in fact found menacing. Verdi would consider it an insult to be accused of “Wagnerism.” Wagner spent the next twenty years composing
Der Ring des Nibelungen
(The Ring of the Nibelung), which came close to fulfilling his grandiose hopes. The
Ring
, which Wagner himself described as “a stage festival play (
Bühnenfestspiel
) for three days and a preliminary evening,” provided twelve hours of opera:
Das Rheingold
(the Prologue),
Die Walküre, Siegfried
, and
Götterdämmerung
. His earlier operas had been adapted from folklore, history, or legend, but the myth to which he now turned did much more.

Not mere entertainment, this Germanic mythology dramatized the eternal conflict between people and with their gods, giving opera the seriousness proper to a
Gesamtkunstwerk
. Some felt Wagner’s operas merely embodied the interminable. Combining two Germanic myth cycles, the stories of Siegfried and of the fall of the gods, the
Ring
dramatized the great issues of power, love, humanity, and divinity. In
Das Rheingold
Wagner revealed his unifying concept, for the music is continuous with the drama, without
discrete melodies or set numbers. Leitmotivs now were not in vocal melody but in instrumental orchestral themes. After completing his prose sketches for
Das Rheingold
and
Die Walküre
in Zurich in late 1851, he declared, “With this conception of mine I
totally
abandon all connection with the theater and audiences of today.… I cannot think of a
performance
until
after the revolution
, only the revolution can give me the artists and the audiences.… Then I will summon what I need out of the ruins. I will find
then
what I must have.”

Before Wagner could complete his own
Gesamtkunstwerk
and see it performed, a friend introduced him to the stirring
World as Will and Idea
(1819) of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). As he worked on the sketch for
Die Walküre
, Schopenhauer’s work had an effect like that of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And he read the whole book four times over in 1854. For him it expressed the powers of intuition and the irrational that would be explored by Bergson, Freud, and others in the next century. Schopenhauer was saying something Wagner wanted to hear. Apart from philosophy, it seemed to justify Wagner’s pessimism for never having had a fulfilled love in his life. About this time, too, he had conceived a hopeless love for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the Swiss benefactor who had recently saved him from catastrophe by paying all his debts. Was he inspired to compose
Tristan
by his love for Mathilde? Or, as others suggest, was writing
Tristan
what inspired his love for Mathilde? The liaison made it uncomfortable for Wagner to stay on in Zurich. He went to Venice and then to Lucerne to complete
Tristan
in 1859. After seventy rehearsals in Vienna in 1862–63 it was given up as unperformable, but was finally performed in Munich in 1865.

That performance was directed by Hans von Bülow, a friend whom Wagner had encouraged to become a conductor in defiance of his family. Von Bülow had married Franz Liszt’s daughter, Cosima. Wagner had met her years before, but now their relationship developed. They traveled together and she bore Wagner three children before her divorce in 1870. The self-sacrificing von Bülow observed, “If Wagner writes but one note more, then it will be due to Cosima alone.” Wagner and Cosima were married in a Protestant church in Lucerne in 1870. This was another chapter in Wagner’s happy relationship with Liszt (1811–1886), who had produced his
Lohengrin
and constantly cheered him on to compose the
Ring
and to build Bayreuth. Von Bülow’s prediction was not far wrong, for Cosima was Wagner’s companion and inspiration till his death.

Wagner had been unduly pessimistic in predicting that his
Ring
could not be properly performed until “after the revolution.”
Das Rheingold
(1869) and
Die Walküre
(1870) were produced separately in Munich. But the first performance of
Siegfried
and of
Götterdämmerung
was reserved for the
festival of the whole
Ring
at Bayreuth in August 1876. More than a bouquet of new operas, this was a
Gesamtkunstwerk
. When before had a composer written the words for his own music, to be performed in an opera house of his own conceiving? At Bayreuth Wagner came close to being the total creative artist. For more than ten years Wagner had been thinking of the proper architectural setting for his
Ring
. With aid from his sponsor, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he would build his own auditorium. In the shape of an amphitheater with two prosceniums, one behind the other, the theater would create “a complete dislocation of scale,” enlarge the appearance of everything on the stage and separate “the ideal world on the stage from the real world on the far side of the … orchestra pit.”

He searched the countryside to find the ideal site for his ideal theater. “Oh, I feel as though I was trying to build a house on a catalpa flower. I should have to fill the world with airy vapours first, to separate me and my art from the human race.” Nietzsche reported Wagner’s emotions in May 1872 as the foundation stone was laid on a hill in Bayreuth in the pouring rain. “Wagner drove back to town with some of us; he did not speak and communed long with himself with an expression on his face that words cannot describe. He began the sixtieth year of his life on that day: everything that had gone before had been preparation for that moment.… What may Alexander the Great have seen at that moment when he caused Asia and Europe to be drunk from the same cup?”

This widely publicized architectural gesture brought attacks on Wagner even from former students. A Munich doctor published
A Psychiatric Study
(Berlin, 1870) proving that Wagner suffered manic delusions. But with encouragement from Cosima and his father-in-law, Liszt, and financial aid from King Ludwig, construction proceeded as Wagner kept in constant touch with the work. Meanwhile Wagner toured Germany in search of the ideal performers. Till the last moment Wagner oversaw every detail, and he hastened to complete the music. The first performance of the
Ring
, August 13, 14, 16, and 17, 1876, was a resounding success. At the end of
Götterdämmerung
, King Ludwig led the applause of celebrities who had come from all over Europe. Wagner said the applause itself justified his calling this a “festival drama.” In retrospect, within a month Wagner was depressed by the inept performers, and he wrote, “There is no footing for me and my work in this day and age.”

Ideally the four parts of the
Ring
should have been performed consecutively and without intermissions. Orchestral interludes would provide the continuity from one scene to the next. Bayreuth had come close to providing Wagner with the kind of audience a
Gesamtkunstwerk
required. Wagner had done much to change the opera atmosphere from the vaudeville informality of the opera buffa to a quasi-religious solemnity. But the first Bayreuth
festival incurred such a heavy deficit that twenty years passed before it was repeated there.

Even after conceiving the
Ring
, Wagner had composed more conventional works. An amnesty had allowed him to return to Germany in 1861. After
Tannhäuser
even when revised was a failure in Paris, and the Vienna production of his
Tristan
was put off because of its unfamiliar style, he turned to comedy-opera. The tuneful
Die Meistersinger
, which he had been working on for a decade, was performed in Munich in 1860 and would never cease to be popular. It has been laboriously interpreted, either as an allegory of two sides of his own character or of the conflict between tradition and creation which was reconciled in Hans Sachs. To escape his creditors, as he had fled Riga before, in 1864 again Wagner had to flee Vienna. Then by good luck the eighteen-year-old Ludwig II, a music lover, came to the throne of Bavaria. He had read the poem of the
Ring
, which had been published to raise money for the festival production. He invited Wagner to Munich to complete the
Ring
, and he remained the essential prop for Wagner and his Bayreuth theater. In 1874 he also provided the house at Bayreuth that Wagner called Wahnfried (peace from illusion) where he completed preparations for the
Ring
.

After the triumphant festival of the
Ring
, Wagner stayed on at Wahnfried. His last opera,
Parsifal
, the product of five years, pursued again the theme of redemption in the quest for the Holy Grail. Even before its first performance at Bayreuth in 1882, Wagner had written to Ludwig that this
Bühnenfestspiel
should never be performed anywhere except there. Opera, he insisted, was not mere entertainment but a religious ritual that required the proper setting. At Wagner’s death in 1882 as the most famous composer in Europe, he was buried in a tomb he had prepared in the garden of Wahnfried.

Though Wagner was not satisfied to be known as a musician, he has survived as a musician. His Utopian vision of the unity of the arts drew him on. With twin talents in word and in music he united the arts in himself and proved it could be done. In an age of many other unifying concepts—evolution and progress, socialism and nationalism—Wagner pursued his own quest for unity. He proved that a
Gesamtkunstwerk
was possible, but failed to establish the tradition of Total Art Work for which he had hoped.

Later he was to become a patron saint of Nazism, Hitler’s favorite composer. The annual party rallies of the Nazi Party opened with a performance of
Die Meistersinger
. So Wagner tests our ability to separate our aesthetic from our moral judgment. He exalted music as the universal language and said a
Gesamtkunstwerk
would unify all humanity in the arts. But he was himself a narrow, envious man, consumed by chauvinism and bigotry. He
curiously insisted that German was the only proper language for opera. And his venom against Jews, which his defenders would justify as an expression of self-hate in reaction to his “isolation,” may really have expressed a resentment of his personal debts to Jews. The young Jew Samuel Lehrs, a companion of Wagner’s unhappy years in Paris, had introduced him to the legends of the Wartburg War, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin. Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) had strongly influenced his early operas, had lent him money, and had given him enthusiastic critical support when he most needed it. But Wagner made Meyerbeer the target of his vicious anti-Semitism, which he shamelessly dared defend as “necessary for the complete birth of my mature being.” Wagner’s
Jewry in Music
was plainly in the Nazi tradition. His enthusiasm for
das Volk
and his contempt for
das Publikum
were ominous. And his Germanic themes resound with the belligerent spirit of “Deutschland über Alles.”

“When Wagner was born in 1813,” George Bernard Shaw explained in
The Perfect Wagnerite
(1898–1923), “music had newly become the most astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the world. Mozart’s Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra, and of the perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional command of words, can be written in music as symphonies.… After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music.” Wagner, “the literary musician par excellence,” united in himself the arts of word and music. “A Beethoven symphony … expresses feeling, but not thought: it has moods but no ideas. Wagner added thought and produced the music drama.”

To bring dance into Wagner’s universal art, his widow, Cosima, invited the dynamic Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) and gave her “free rein over the dance in Bayreuth.” After her performance of the dance of the Three Graces of
the Bacchanal in Tannhäuser in 1904, Isadora appalled her patron by announcing that the idea of music drama was pure nonsense. “Man must speak, then dance,” she explained to the stunned Cosima, “but the speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries all away. It is impossible to mix in any way, one with the other.
Musik-Drama kann nie sein
.” Cosima was properly shocked, for the performances of the
Ring
in Bayreuth were the living legacy of Richard Wagner’s passion to combine the arts.