But England’s replacement of the ideology of religion with the ideology of literature was only the provincials’ catching up with a process that had been going on all through the European century: the replacement of the general ideology of religion with the ideology of art. While Arnold was speculating on the religious aspects of revolution from across the moonlit channel, Wagner was a wanted political criminal with a price on his head, who had just managed to emerge from the fighting and bloodshed at the barricades. To articulate his situation is to articulate most clearly, if not most importantly, the continental manifestation of that nineteenth-century trend in art, a trend in the vision of what art was and might do, a trend that, paradoxically, went hand in hand with the rise of the ideology of science.
What Arnold and his followers wanted to do with literature, Wagner, of course, had set out to do with music. The theoretical works of 1849 and 1850, written during his exile in Zurich after the calamity of Dresden’s uprising of 1849, are where Wagner formulated his attack on the future of art.
With the accomplishment of the Ring and the other music-dramas that followed this three-volume-plus elaboration of the social function of art in general and music in particular, Wagner came to be considered, for better or for worse, the embodiment of the spirit of his times; which is to say, at the time, the spirit of the modern—that spirit which, in the postmodern view, modernism must dismiss in order to become politically responsible.
Is the lesson we are about to abstract from Wagner, then (to anticipate ourselves just a bit), the idea that all High Art—all Great Art, all Serious Art—is necessarily conservative, or even fascist, because there is no way it can avoid reifying the anterior (and always social) system that prepares the labels “Great” or “High” in the first place? I do not believe we have to do this—not so long as we bear in mind the problematics of a figure, a mind, a creator such as Artaud.
V
If Wagner is kitsch, then the status we have claimed for Artaud’s work should also apply to his.
But of course the operas stand there, a mosaic of one impressively telling psychological moment laid down after another, this one five seconds long, that one forty-five seconds, one lasting a whole six minutes, now another that endures thirty seconds (for Nietzsche, Wagner was finally—with no mean paradoxical intent—the “great miniaturist”), until a massive structure has been bridged, exhausting not because of its duration, which is considerable, but because of the intricacy of its articulations, which are near numberless. They were not always kitsch. And it is our critical duty to look at art that can still speak to us in, as far as possible, its historical context.
At the close of the nineteenth century, in his little book The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), George Bernard Shaw wanted to redeem Wagner from the endless images of buxom, bull-horned blondes with spears and shields that had already become a parodic symbol of all “serious art.” To do it he took Wagner’s four-paneled portrait of eternity, the Ring cycle—where the human, the superhuman, and the subhuman (this last in the form of giants and dwarves) lived, lusted, and battled in a world before time—and tried to read some socialist awareness into it. Was there, anywhere in that great, mythic allegory of history and psychology, some understanding—international understanding, that is—of the new currents of socialism that had blown from west to east and were now blowing back again? Shaw was certain that there were. There seemed to be everything else.
Eighty years later, in 1979 at Bayreuth, the French enfant terrible, then thirty-year-old Patrice Chereau, tried to do much the same.
Allegories being what they are, especially well-articulated ones, it is not too hard to read anything one wants into Wagner’s panorama of the intricate and interconnected failures of gods, men, and women.
But we can reasonably ask, in historical terms, if any of these socialist ideas were, indeed, Wagner’s.
It’s customary to turn to the Dresden Uprising of May, 1849, as the rack on which Wagner’s true political colors were displayed—or the forge at which his political convictions were hammered out. Wagner devotes considerable space to it in his autobiography Mein Leben (My Life). The book is a massive, colorful, sweeping account by a vigorous, inexhaustibly energetic man, as much a document of “the European century,” the century of revolutions, as Hugo’s Les Misérables.
Wagner’s twentieth-century biographers have gone on endlessly about the ways Wagner suppressed, colored, or outright lied in his book. His account of the spring of ’49 in Dresden, and what led up to the calamitous events there, has fallen under particular censure. But the shortcomings of Mein Leben are basically two. First, Wagner wrote it at the personal request of a king, so that it is really a letter to his most powerful and influential fan. Second, he dictated it to his second wife, Cosima. The three things the book is traditionally taken to task for are, first, its incomplete coverage of Wagner’s debts; second, its fragmentary account of his love affairs; and, third, its muting (and many have used much stronger words) of the active and energetic part he took at Dresden.
Feelings for his amanuensis certainly explain the second reticence. And even there, considering to whom he was dictating, I find Wagner remarkably honest: the only affair he wholly represses (and he had many), so that one cannot even read it between the lines, was his most recent one (at the time of the writing) with Mathilde von Wesendonk. But that, of course, is the one we are most interested in, since it so deeply influenced the writing of Tristan und Isolde, the opera of Wagner’s that, today, we are most ready to concede greatness to in purely musical terms.
Also missing is, of course, the alleged affair with the young Judith Gautier. But Cosima, who is supposed to have known of it, kept up a warm correspondence with Judith through the whole of it till well after Wagner’s death. I suspect this was more likely one of Wagner’s intense friendships that he instituted with young men and, more and more frequently as he grew older, young women all through his life.
If one reads only his biographers, however, one can get the notion that Wagner never once, in Mein Leben, mentions debt at all. Or one begins to assume that, indeed, by 1865 (when, at the request of young King Ludwig II, who had rescued Wagner and Cosima from Wagner’s creditors in a move that was quite like something out of a fairy tale, Wagner began these memoirs) Wagner was presenting himself merely as a spectator to the 1849 events at Dresden. I have seen the whole book dismissed as an unreadable tissue of fabrications. But while, in his theoretical writings, Wagner’s style takes on a Germanic academic recomplication that veers toward the incomprehensible, if not the meaningless, the king Mein Leben was written for was not yet twenty-one; and while he was “artistically sensitive” enough, he was not, in Wagner’s private estimation, overly bright. Wagner was, by this time, a comparatively experienced journalist as well as a musician, and the account is straightforward and (at least in its current Andrew Gray translation—Cambridge University Press: 1983) reads far more easily today than, say, any number of Dickens’s novels.
In Mein Leben hardly a year goes by in which Wagner does not recount some creditor or other harassing him with a bill for one or another loan. The agony of financial embarrassment seems to be his constant companion. His most famous biographer, Ernest Newman (who most rigorously and famously challenged this aspect of Mein Leben), seems to be trying to say that, with all the debts Wagner recounts, there were simply dozens more left unmentioned—and, frequently, unpaid. My own estimation, on considering both Newman’s and Wagner’s versions, is that if Wagner was not accurate to the letter in his autobiographical tally of his financial extravagances, he certainly gave the feel of his debts and doubtless recounted, if not the largest ones, the ones he remembered suffering over most.
There are, of course, numerous inaccuracies all through Wagner’s account of his life. Toward the beginning of autumn in 1847 Wagner left Dresden, the capital of Saxony, where he had been Second Royal Kapellmeister since 1843, to visit Berlin, where he had been asked to conduct several performa
nces of his early and (moderately) popular opera Rienzi. The invitation had come as a result of an audience with the Queen. Wagner felt the trip would further his career and that he might even meet with the King and thus interest Friedrich August II and other powerful people in supporting performances of his newer works, Tannhäuser (which had already had some success in Dresden) and Lohengrin (on which he was still working). Though Wagner liked the man personally well enough, the Berlin tenor, around whom Rienzi turned, was simply inadequate—in an otherwise passable production. But King Friedrich did not attend any of the performances he himself had, at the Queen’s request, commanded. Wagner was obliged to borrow money against his Kapellmeister salary to get back to Dresden, and the trip had to be written off largely as a failure—and a dismal one, given the financial considerations. Wagner came back to his Kapellmeister job that Christmas season deeply dejected. Within days of his return, he learned that his mother had died in Leipzig.
We know Wagner’s mother died on January 9, 1848.
But Wagner recounts making the comparatively brief rail journey to the funeral, in time to view her remains and see her buried, as taking place in February. Doubtless he is a couple of weeks off. But the feel of the winter funeral is still there:
It was a bitingly cold morning when we lowered the casket into the grave in the churchyard; the frozen clumps of earth, which we scattered on the lid of the casket instead of the customary handfuls of loose soil, frightened me by their ferocious clatter. On the way back to the house of my brother-in-law Hermann Brockhaus, where the family got together for an hour, my sole companion . . . Heinrich Laube . . . expressed anxiety about my unusually exhausted appearance. Then he accompanied me to the railway station . . . On the short trip back to Dresden the realization of my complete loneliness came over me for the first time with full clarity, as I could not help recognizing that the death of my mother had severed all the natural ties with my family, whose members were all preoccupied with their own special affairs. So I went coldly and gloomily about the sole task that could warm and cheer me: the orchestration of my Lohengrin score . . .
This seems to be the sort of mistake that abounds in Mein Leben. Dates are off here and there. Sometimes Wagner misremembers names. Occasionally events are out of order. But save for those discretionary omissions and a sense of occasion that are the prerogative of any autobiographer, I don’t find examples of rank lies or outright prevarication. Indeed, Wagner expends considerable energy and narrative ingenuity to achieve the proper tone and feel for complexes of occurrences that even the most exhaustive memoirist would have had to abridge in order to remain readable.
In his account of the calamities in Dresden in the spring of 1849, Wagner describes his actions of early May—the decisive period—with dates and days of the week. Researchers have ascertained he was off as much as two days in some of the early events and a steady day off in his account of what occurred on May 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th. Biographers have since tried to document this period in Wagner’s life day by day and, in some cases, hour by hour. The import of these times is easy enough to understand simply by the cataclysmic devastation they encompassed:
On Palm Sunday of spring 1849, Second Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner conducted a triumphant concert of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Dresden Royal Opera House, to a sold-out audience in a benefit performance for the orchestra’s pension fund, recreating for the second time his triumphant Palm Sunday concert of 1846, when he first performed the same work for the skeptical Dresden public. In ’46, through careful placement of articles on the difficult symphony in local papers, an imaginatively written program for the concert, and meticulous rehearsals for the orchestra (and an intelligent rearrangement of the usual orchestra placement into a form we are all familiar with today but which in 1846 was novel) and the chorus of three hundred, Wagner achieved a great success with what had been considered till then a difficult and inaccessible work, which had, when it had been conducted by First Kapellmeister Reissiger a few years before, left the Dresden audience bewildered and unenthusiastic.
By mid-May, some six weeks after this third Palm Sunday benefit performance of the Ninth, which, over three years (missing only 1848), Wagner had made into a Dresden tradition, thousands of men, many of them miners, were dead in the Dresden streets. The Dresden Opera House, where the concert had taken place, had been burned to the ground and was now a charred foundation. And Richard Wagner was in flight from Germany, under an assumed name (“Professor Werder”) and with a false passport, for Paris and finally Zurich.
Three of his friends, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakúnin, the head of the Dresden Provisional Government, Otto Heubner, and the publisher of the radical newspaper, Die Volksblätter (which Wagner himself had edited for a while and written for extensively), August Röckel, had already been arrested, to be sentenced to life imprisonment or death for treason.
Wagner had ridden with Bakúnin and Heubner to Freiberg. A newspaper editor from Rochlitz named Semming, with them in the coach, years later gave this account:
Conversation . . . was out of the question: before us, around us, behind us, was nothing but a crowd of armed men in great agitation. But all the din, all the shouting and rattling of arms, was drowned by the flaming talk of Wagner. Never have I seen a man so excited. . . . “War!” he kept shouting. This was all he had on his lips and his mind: he poured out such a flood of words that it is impossible for me now to remember it all. . . . The paroxysm lasted perhaps more than half an hour: and so overwhelmed was I by the storm of words of this man sitting next to me—shall I call him Wotan or Siegried?—that I could not address a single word to him. This scene remains with me as one of the most thrilling of my memories of those terrible, stormy days.
Soldiers had climbed on the back of the coach, and the vehicle was loaded down. The coachman complained that the carriage had very delicate springs and was likely to break under the weight; he begged people to dismount, and at one point even broke out sobbing. Bakúnin thought this viciously funny. (“The tears of the philistine,” he whispered to Wagner, “are the nectar of the gods,” and continued by telling how, earlier, when he’d had to order trees along the Maximilians-Allee in Dresden cut down, so as not to provide shelter for the Prussian invaders, the people who lived on the street had complained volubly of the fate of their “bee-yoo-ti-ful trees.”) But finally Wagner and Heubner dismounted and continued together on foot, while Bakúnin stayed in the coach. While they were walking, some messengers from a group of soldiers the two men spotted on a hill extended an invitation to Heubner to come to Chemnitz and set up his provisional government there. (Wagner was on his way to Chemnitz because his wife had already gone there to be with brother-in-law Brockhaus, and Wagner was going to rejoin her.) When they reached Heubner’s Freiberg home, Wagner ate with Bakúnin, Heubner, and Heubner’s family, and rested there a while. The exhausted Bakúnin went to sleep sitting on the living room couch, his huge, bearded head falling on Wagner’s shoulder.
As Wagner recounts in Mein Leben, it was only a mix-up, due to a delayed mailcoach from Freiberg to Chemnitz, on May 9th, that prevented Wagner from ending up again in the same carriage with Heubner and the Russian, who had already ridden on to Chemnitz; when they announced themselves come to set up the provisional government, they were arrested at their inn.
The invitation from the soldiers to establish the new government there had been a lure and trap set by the opposition officers.
In the course of Wagner’s flight, on May 10th, he stopped to attend a rehearsal of Tannhäuser his friend Liszt was conducting in Weimar. From there, on the 14th, he wrote to his wife Minna of revolution:
[P]eople of our sort are not destined for this terrible task. We are revolutionaries only in order to build on fresh soil; it is re-creation that attracts us, not destruction, which is why we are not the people whom fate requires. These will arise from the very lowest dregs of society; we and our hearts can have nothing in common with them. You see? Th
us do I bid farewell to revolution. . . .
I think it’s to Wagner’s credit that, while he did send the above to Minna, he neither quotes it in Mein Leben nor does he express any similar sentiment there. By 1865 he was willing to take responsibility for what he had done—at least for what of it he was willing to admit to. But despite any personal regrets he had at the time, by the 19th of May a Wanted notice appeared in the Dresdner Anzeiger:
Warrant. The Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner, of this place, being somewhat more closely described below, is wanted for questioning on account of his material participation in the rebellious activities that took place in this city, but has not so far been found . . . Wagner is 37 or 38 years old [Actually he was three days shy of 36], of medium height, has brown hair and a high forehead.
. . . And an unpublished personal description (quoted in his biography by Martin Gregor-Dellin) goes on: “Eyebrows: brown. Eyes: gray-blue. Nose and mouth: well proportioned. Chin: rounded. Wears glasses. Special characteristics: movements and speech abrupt and rapid. Clothing: overcoat of dark green buckskin, trousers of dark cloth, velvet waistcoat, silk cravat, ordinary felt hat and boots.”
But Wagner was now more or less safe in Zurich, where he began writing what turned out to be nearly 700 pages in his collected works: Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future, the notorious anti-Semitic article “Jewry in Music,” and Opera and Drama, a theoretical outpouring which was apparently necessary before he could move onward with the music of the Ring. There is a great deal of social observation in all of these works, much of it very modern. All of it has been commented on, at length.
But we must examine the Dresden events and what led up to them if we really are to learn of Wagner’s politics. We must also examine them because in the year that preceded them and, arguably, during the Dresden Uprising itself, the ideas that shaped the Ring were fired, forged, and annealed.