Longer Views: Extended Essays

  My own feeling is that Wagner’s treatment of Levi does not mitigate Wagner’s anti-Semitism—from Cosima’s diaries and Wagner’s own late articles in his own paper, the Bayreuther Blätter, we know that by his last years, even after Parsifal, such feelings in him grew obsessive. But one could, indeed, cite Wagner’s similarly warm and respectful treatment of any number of his other Jewish friends. A particular case in point is Heinrich Porges, whom Wagner asked to the rehearsals of the Ring at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 to take down those incredibly revealing notes on the production that have facilitated performances ever since.

  Anyone interested in almost any aspect of mid-nineteenth century romantic art should read the “Introduction” by this earliest, erudite, and most intimate Jewish commentator on Wagner. (Wagner Rehearsing the Ring: An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival [Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876] began to appear in sections in the Bayreuther Blätter in 1881.) It is a wonderful compendium of nineteenth-century critical tropes, some already sedimented for a century or more and some radically new and vibrant with mid-romantic fervor, all of them welded into a brief, impassioned defense of the Wagnerian enterprise. Indeed, Porges’s whole study is equally illuminating. And though the Nazis later suppressed this “Jewish commentary” on the Master, there is no mention in it of anything overtly anti-Semitic.

  What this and the case of Levi point up more than anything else is, first, how insistently modern the form of Wagner’s anti-Semitism was: rationalized, depersonalized, intellectualized, with intermittent moments of liberalism, and constantly excused by what has now become a hopeless cliché: “But some of my best friends . . . !” Second, it shows ultimately how little threatened Jews such as Levi and Porges felt in the face of such ideas in those pre-Dreyfus days. We must remember, as Hannah Arendt points out in her study The Origins of Totalitarianism, anti-Semitism as a virulent political plank in various hard-edged political platforms did not begin till 1886—that, indeed, anti-Semitism was so violently to change its practical implementation and material extent, if not its rhetoric, in these later years of the nineteenth century that Arendt can assign its very “invention” (along with that of South African and Rhodesian racism) to that year, at the end of an explosion of printing and political pamphleteering unheard-of before in history. Presumably after that date, Porges and Levi might have felt somewhat differently.

  I should also like to discuss Wagner’s musical theories, which, put briefly, hold that, while the words tell the story, the singer’s melody portrays the character’s expressed emotions, with the orchestra painting in the same character’s inner psychology, memories, and associations during the Wagnerian monologue. Wagner remained an artist, I suspect, because he specifically abjured using his orchestra to signal to the audience what they were supposed to be feeling (see the incident of the incidental music in Gutzkow’s play at the Dresden Opera), but wanted it rather to depict meticulously, even objectively, what was happening inside the characters that could neither be said nor sung in words. The opera composer, he declared in Opera and Drama, was above all a psychologist.

  In light of those theories I would have to mention how an editor of the French journal, La Revue Wagnerienne, Edouard Desjardin, a handful of years after Wagner’s death, wrote a novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés, in which, by his own statement, he tried to do in words what Wagner had done in music. James Joyce read that novel, was impressed with the method’s potential, and from it took the idea of “stream of consciousness” or what is sometimes called “silent monologue” or “monologue intérieur” I would also recall for you how Joyce’s Stephen, who like Wotan in the Ring carries an ashplant, when he raises it to strike the chandelier in the Nighttown bordello cries out, “Nothung!”—Siegfried’s cry as he forges his sword.

  At the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce had his young hero write in his journal:

  Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

  Well, both the sentiment and the metaphor were Wagner’s; and that uncreated conscience was a recreation of the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist (now moved to Ireland), the sine qua non of art as religion.

  I’d like to discuss the Wagnerism in which the whole of Eliot’s Waste Land, as well as its major source, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, are sunk. Miss Weston’s book on the significance of the Parsifal legend, you will recall from its preface, was inspired by her 1911 visit to Bayreuth, and is, after all, a continuation of the work begun in her first book of 1896, The Legends of the Wagner Dramas.

  Is it wholly attributable to the political climate after the Second World War that, during the 1950s and ’60s, one could sit through college class after college class dealing with The Waste Land, in which, while Webster and Kyd were ceaselessly discussed, Wagner, the most frequently quoted writer in the poem, was not mentioned? This suppression did nothing to diminish Wagner’s influence; it only denied it its name and mystified it, making it that much harder to seize, analyze, and combat. Today there seems to be afoot a concomitant academic enterprise to find the roots of modernism in every nineteenth-century artist except Wagner. This is not difficult to do. The point is that most of Wagner’s ideas were not his own, whether they were about the ends of art or the Jews. (Baudelaire wrote in his diary: “A fine conspiracy could be organized for the purpose of exterminating the Jewish race.” And even before Wagner—under the pseudonym of K. Freigedank—published “Jewry in Music” in two parts on the 3rd and 6th September 1850 in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Wagner’s friend Heinrich Laube had written, “. . . there are only two ways to solve the Jewish question. One must either fully annihilate the Jews or completely emancipate them.”) But it was through Wagner that these ideas were disseminated to become part of the very codes by which the general middle class, first of Europe, then of the United States, learned to recognize art, even if the name Wagner, over two World Wars, was erased from that recognition.

  I’d also like to discuss D. H. Lawrence’s 1912 novel, The Trespasser, called in its first draft The Saga of Siegmund, which is almost a panegyric to Wagner. In its first version the heroine’s name was Sieglinde, before Lawrence revised it to Helena—after Helen Corke, on whom the character was modeled. She is learning German so she can better understand Wagner in the original. And the hero and heroine whistle Wagner and hear his music in every rustling tree.

  But the fact is, in the post-Edwardian pantheon, any writer who took herself or himself seriously had to appeal to Wagner in some way, whether by direct reference or by implication; for by then, Wagner was Serious Art.

  But though there may someday be an ideal version of this paper in which these topics are discussed rather than glossed, I cannot try your patience with other than glosses too much longer. We must leap, like Valkyries, ahead.

  What we overleap is an occurrence that not only changed the course of Wagner’s life, but absolutely changed the way we consider him and his art. Without it, we would remember Wagner’s work as we do any famous nineteenth-century opera composer’s—if indeed we remembered him at all. (The four new operas that were produced in Germany in the year Lohengrin’s premiere was cancelled at the Dresden Opera House are all by composers unknown today.) Wagner’s technical innovations would be just that: technical. His trials and tribulations would be, at best, one with Beethoven’s and Berlioz’s. Thanks to this occurrence, however, Wagner’s art became the exemplar of all nineteenth-century art. And more than anything else it is responsible for the pervasive Wagnerian influence, overt before World War II and covert after it, that the above galaxy suggests.

  In the spring of 1864, the newly crowned eighteen-year-old king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who, since age thirteen, had been mad over Wagner’s music, sent for the composer. “I can only adore you,” the young king wrote, “only praise the power that led y
ou to me. More clearly and ever more clearly do I feel that I cannot reward you as you deserve: all I can ever do for you can be no better than stammered thanks. An earthly being cannot requite a divine spirit.” Ludwig went on to bail Wagner out of copious debts, set him up in a household, and committed himself to supporting Wagner through the rest of his life (on a level that dwarfs, say, the Archduke Rudolf’s support of Beethoven or the Esterhazys’ support of Haydn), building for Wagner the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth and funding the Wagner festivals. The relationship between Ludwig and Wagner was not easy, and problems plagued every aspect of it. Ludwig was, after all, mad.

  Remember those metal music stands—and the idea of placing the conductor in front of the orchestra—that the Dresden cabinet rejected in 1847? Bayreuth is why almost all orchestras and musicians use them today.

  Here are some more customs that Wagner established at Bayreuth. He was the first opera producer to insist that the house lights be lowered during performances. Wagner was the first person to have the audience sit in darkness with light only on the stage. In Wagner’s theater, for the first time latecomers were seated only at the end of the act, or at a suitable pause between scenes. He made it clear with placards in the lobby that in his theater talking would not be tolerated during the performance. Applause was to be entirely suppressed until the act was over—and, with Parsifal, he stipulated that there should be no applause at all after Act I, with its pseudo-religious closing. Our current custom of not applauding between the movements of symphonies and string quartets is another of Wagner’s impositions on concert audiences at Bayreuth. This is not even to mention his advances in stage-craft and general performance standards that characterized, if not the first Bayreuth Festival (where the full Ring premiered, somewhat rockily, in 1876), then all the many non-operatic concerts he conducted there.

  Things that Wagner wanted to do? Liberal to the last, he wanted to make all the tickets in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus one price. (At first he’d wanted the admission to be entirely free!) And he wanted to abolish formal attire as a prerequisite for opera attendance. But because the first was financially impracticable at Bayreuth, finally he had to admit that the second was socially impracticable as well. These changes had to wait until a later epoch.

  Till 1864, certain advanced intellectuals and certain enthusiastic adolescents had been fascinated by Wagner’s music. Baudelaire and Berlioz represent the first; Nietzsche, Judith Gautier, and Ludwig himself represent the second. But soon the entire world was fascinated by the favor of a king; and, though the road was gravel-strewn, progress along it was nevertheless headlong: Wagner and his music swooped on, over the nineteen years that remained to him, to a celebrity that was, till then, undreamt-of: it was comparable to the Beatles’ in its breadth, and surpassed the Beatles’ in staying power.

  Today, to get some idea of what pre-Wagnerian theater was like, you only have to read some theater scene from Balzac, or, indeed, George Sand—the endless visits from box to box, the conversations, the recognitions across the auditorium, the romances, the intrigues, now one group applauding, now another group of claquers booing and disrupting the performance. Only by reading particularly carefully can you even be sure, in those candle-lit opera houses, that a performance is indeed in full swing on the stage. (I have known readers to assume some of these scenes were taking place during some interminable intermission!)

  Today, however, when we go into a theater, when we sit down and the house lights dim as we fix our silent attention on the stage, we are in Wagner’s theater.

  We are not in Shakespeare’s.

  We are not in Moliere’s or Racine’s.

  We are not in Mozart’s or Beaumarchais’s.

  We are not in Goethe’s or even Hugo’s.

  We are wholly in Wagner’s.

  With Wagner, the proper attitude before the artwork becomes a mass of people, who, for all their physical closeness, now must consent to be more or less oblivious of one another, while each engages in the private contemplation of the object before them all. And from the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, this aesthetic posture spread throughout Europe, to America and all her theaters, her museums, her galleries, and even to family readings from novels in the evening—until finally it had joined with that of the solitary reader and her novel, her poem, her text.

  At this juncture, in which—throughout the nations caught up in the social and industrial situation outlined earlier—the public attitude toward the contemplation of an artwork became one with the private contemplation of a printed prayer, art finally and completely appropriated the social position of religion.

  * * *

  Antonin Artaud writes:

  One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live without possible escape or remedy—and in which we all share—is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were not at a point where things must break apart if they are to start anew and begin afresh.

  We must have done with this idea of masterpieces reserved for a selfstyled elite and not understood by the general public. . . .

  Masterpieces are good for the past. They are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone.

  It is idiotic to reproach the masses for having no sense of the sublime, when the sublime is confused with one or another of its formal manifestations, which are moreover always defunct manifestations.

  This is from Artaud’s famous essay in The Theater and Its Double, “No More Masterpieces.” It would be hard to find as succinct and as revolutionary a statement in all of the writings of Eliot or Pound, whose basic strategy, after all, was to resuscitate the tradition and locate themselves before and within it—suspiciously like the bogus historicism of some of Wagner’s own speculative or theoretical works.

  But the “Masterpiece,” considered not as a particular order of object, but rather as an attitude of respect, silence, awe, and attention that certain objects are privileged to receive, is Wagner’s. “Serious Art,” seen as a type of attention and behavior in a general audience, was Wagner’s invention. And it was imposed on the greater bourgeois art world of the West by the celebrity of Bayreuth. Reviews of the Ring’s premiere were among the first half-dozen messages broadcast on the newly laid transatlantic cable in 1876 and were published on page one of newspapers in Paris, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, only a day or two after the performance.

  In his best-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin suggests that what will not survive photographic and other modes of mechanical reproduction is the artwork’s “aura” (the quotation marks are Benjamin’s), so important to serious art: an “aura” socially formed, in the case of Renaissance painting (Benjamin explains) by the spectator’s knowledge or intuition of the artwork’s royal commission, imperial acceptance, and aristocratic ownership over generations—an “aura” communicated for Benjamin largely by the monumental architecture of the museum halls, through which the state appropriates the range of aristocratic privileges, at least at the level of signs.

  Another fifty years, however, have proved Benjamin almost a hundred-eighty degrees off in his assessment. What is lost in mechanical reproduction is, of course, the artwork’s material specificity. Lines blur. Colors dim. Hues, intensities, and color relations shift. All effects dependent on absolute scale and material texture vanish. Mechanical reproduction always distorts (when it does not wholly obliterate) the dimensionality and the plasticity of the artwork. Even when reproducing a work “full size,” reproduction renders that size a variable quantity rather than a fixed form. What “comes through” in a mechanical reproduction is a highly reduced range of relative relations, impoverished because deprived of so many elements, distorted because intruded on by so m
any others: i.e., the materiality of the reproductive medium itself, the surface of the photographic or printing paper, the register of the inks, the hiss of the tape, the dust in the groove, the grain of the film, the grid across the glass screen—materialities that constitute the grounding of the esthetic experience exactly to the extent we overlook them, either in the “original” or in the “reproduction.” The only thing that, through reproduction, survives intact about the artwork is the “aura”—because it is socially constructed, because it is not in the work but rather is entirely around it.

  When we pore over a “translation” of an ancient Greek poem that comes to us as a few English words amidst a field of lacunae and ellipses, trying to perceive its original austerity and beauty, we are wholly within the “aura” of art. When we strain to hear, through the mechanical burr, the sublimity of Enrico Caruso’s voice production or the nuances of Billie Holiday’s vocal interpretation, we are within the “aura.” What the experience of High Modernism has made clear is that this “aura” is a far more complex semiotic structure than the mere juxtaposition of an economic provenance with a few architectural signs.