Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

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WAGNER’S RING CYCLE AND THE GREEKS

Through his reading of primary and secondary classical sources, as well as his theoretical writings, Richard Wagner developed a Hegelian-inspired theory linking the evolution of classical Greek politics and poetry. This book demonstrates how, by turning theory into practice, Wagner used this evolutionary paradigm to shape the music and the libretto of the Ring cycle. Foster describes how each of the Ring’s operas represents a particular phase of Greek poetic and political development: Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re create epic national identity in its earlier and later stages respectively; Siegfried expresses lyric personal identity; and Go¨tterda¨mmerung destructively culminates with a tragi-comedy about civic identity. This study sees the Greeks through the lens of those scholars whose work influenced Wagner most, focusing on epic, lyric, and comedy, as well as Greek tragedy. Most significantly, the book interrogates the ways in which Wagner uses Greek aesthetics to further his own ideological goals. d a n i e l h . f o s t e r is Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Duke University, and Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has appeared in many publications including Modern Language Quarterly, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Text and Presentation. This is his first book.

CAM B RIDGE ST U DIES IN OP ERA Series editor: Arthur Groos, Cornell University

Volumes for Cambridge Studies in Opera explore the cultural, political and social influences of the genre. As a cultural art form, opera is not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced, whether directly or in more subtle ways, by its social and political environment. In turn, opera leaves its mark on society and contributes to shaping the cultural climate. Studies to be included in the series will look at these various relationships including the politics and economics of opera, the operatic representation of women or the singers who portrayed them, the history of opera as theatre, and the evolution of the opera house. Published titles

Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna Edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture Camille Crittenden German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner John Warrack Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance Ian Woodfield Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Hale´vy’s La Juive Diana R. Hallman Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Re´gime, 1647–1785 Downing A. Thomas Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in Cosı` fan tutte Edmund J. Goehring Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini Emanuele Senici The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930 Susan Rutherford Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu Edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity Alexandra Wilson Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life Benjamin Walton

Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks Daniel H. Foster

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521517393 © Daniel H. Foster 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-67717-5

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-51739-3

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Kelly: editor, wife, scholar, mother, author, lover, the leitmotif of my life – always there, always the same, and yet always adapting and changing. And to Oona Prudence Freya Foster-Amienne: she feeds me the golden apples that keep me forever young.

CONTENTS

List of musical examples | ix Preface | xi Acknowledgments | xviii Introduction | 1 Part I Epic 1 Introduction: what is epic? | 33 2 Retrospective narrative and the epic process | 45 3 The orchestral narrator and elementary epic | 65 4 Spiritual and factual realities in epic | 83 Part II Lyric 5 Introduction: what is lyric? | 111 6 Orpheus and lyric liberation | 122 7 First-person opera and lyric identity | 140 8 Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy | 157 Part III Drama 9 Introduction: what is drama? | 183 10 Opera and tragedy | 197 11 Opera and comedy | 220 12 Resolution and ambiguity in comedy and tragedy | 235 Epilogue: Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies | 253 vii

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Appendices Wagner’s primary and secondary sources | 267 Appendix A Wagner’s primary sources | 269 Appendix B Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew personally | 276 Appendix C Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation or by reading | 284 Notes | 295 Bibliography | 352 Index | 363

M U S I C AL EX A M P L E S

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Nibelung motif | 70 Ring motif | 70 Freia motif | 71 Valhalla motif | 72 Rhine motif | 72 Valhalla motif | 79 Corrupted power motif | 80 Remembrance of corrupted power motif | 81 Siegfried motif | 135 Tarnhelm motif | 214 Curse and oath motifs | 218 Mime’s nursing song | 226 Remembrance of nursing song | 226 Chorus of vassals | 227

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PREFACE

The basic thesis of this book is that each opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen) represents a particular phase in the cultural evolution of a mythic world modeled in part upon the ancient Greek world. This thesis is immediately supported by two claims that Wagner made about the Ring in a letter to his friend, August Ro¨ckel, on August 23, 1856. The first is that in the Ring Wagner claims he intended to construct “a Hellenistically optimistic world [eine hellenistisch-optimistische Welt1] for myself which I held to be entirely realizable if only people wished it to exist.”2 This world he says he constructed by relying upon his intellectual “conceptions.”3 Wagner’s second claim is that, “instead of a single phase in the world’s evolution, what I had glimpsed [in the Ring] was the essence of the world itself in all its conceivable phases.”4 Wagner attributes this second claim not to his intellectual conceptions but his artistic “intuitions.” Thus we have the notion of a Greek model in the first claim and cultural evolution in the second. But because Wagner attributes the second claim to intuition more than intellect, he favors that one. And yet, upon closer examination, it appears that the only real difference between the two claims is chronological. The intellectual idea is one Wagner intended to carry out before he completed the Ring, and the artistic idea is one he began to see only after he had been working on the Ring and began to see where it was going. In other words the intellect came first, art second. But since there is no fundamental reason to discount the first in favor of the second, especially since both fit the facts, the two claims can be combined into the compound thesis that the Ring evolves, opera by opera, according to an idealized paradigm of Greek culture. Beginning with this as a tentative thesis it in turn raises further questions: What are the phases of Greek cultural evolution the Ring xi

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supposedly depicts? How did Wagner arrive at these particular phases? And why did he do this? To answer these three questions – what, how, and why – this book delves into three further claims that other scholars who have written on the subject have developed only in part or not at all. They are: (1) The forms and content of the four operas in the Ring follow a quasi-Hegelian evolution of Greek poetic expression from epic to lyric to drama, with each genre pertaining to a particular stage in the world’s cultural development. (2) To understand Wagner’s perspective on the Greeks it is important to study not only the primary works Wagner knew but also the secondary works of scholarship that influenced his understanding and his use of the Greeks.5 And (3) Wagner used the Greeks not only for aesthetic purposes but also political purposes, particularly nationalistic and anti-Semitic ones.6 Fleshing out my original, tentative thesis with these three subsidiary claims leads to the more complex thesis that through his reading of primary and secondary classical sources, as well as his writing of critical essays, Wagner developed a Hegelian-inspired theory of Greek cultural evolution that moves from epic through lyric to tragedy and finally comedy, a genre that, according to Wagner, both announced and was implicated in the downfall of classical Greek civilization. In this evolutionary theory of poetry and politics, one genre does not simply disappear into the next but is transformed into it. Thus each genre not only retains something of the preceding evolutionary phase but also foreshadows something of the following one.7 The objectivity of epic prefigures the reality of drama; lyric focuses on the individuality of character; and in drama both epic objectivity and lyric subjectivity combine to form civic identity. Seen not only as a theory but also a model, this evolutionary paradigm in turn shapes the cyclical plot and the individual operas of the Ring cycle. Each of the Ring’s operas represents a particular phase of poetic and political development that points both before and beyond itself, to what precedes and follows it. Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re create epic national identity in its earlier and later stages respectively, Siegfried expresses lyric personal

Preface

identity, and Go¨tterda¨mmerung destructively culminates with a tragi-comedy about civic identity, an individual’s failure to find a place in society and the ultimate failure of that society itself.8 CHAPTER OUTLINE

The three main sections of this book trace Wagner’s evolutionary model for Greek poetic form as it appears in the Ring. Each section corresponds to one of the three major genres upon which Wagner based his trilogy: epic, lyric, and drama. These three parts are then further sub-divided into four chapters. The first chapter of each part reconstructs Wagner’s respective theories of epic, lyric, and drama by discussing his arguments in the context of their major scholarly influences, especially Hegel’s Aesthetics, but also the works of other scholars that helped him formulate his opinion of the three genres. Because these theories are sometimes abstruse, complex, and/or unknown to the non-Hegelian reader, these prefatory chapters are intended to serve as analyses and introductions to the subject rather than full-blown interpretations. They are an attempt to reconstruct Wagner’s thoughts about the Greeks by looking at the Greeks through the same theoretical lenses that Wagner saw them.9 The next three chapters in each part then use these findings to discuss how the Greeks influenced both the Ring as a whole and its individual operas. In the introduction I begin by analyzing how and why Wagner venerated the Greeks from his early childhood until his death. I briefly survey all the specific primary and secondary classical authors he read and/or knew personally.10 Beyond this more bibliographical argument I claim that through his interest in antiquity Wagner participated in a trend that was sweeping Europe during the nineteenth century. However, one of the things that sets Wagner apart as an artist and a German was that he did not turn toward a more generically “classical” culture. Instead, he avoided the Romans as the ancestors of the Italians and the French, and he disdained the ancient East for its ties to Jews and Jewishness. At one time or

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another Wagner counted at least one of these groups as a threat to German national identity and so he criticized their cultural offerings. By turning specifically to Greek epic, lyric, and drama for inspiration, he made a choice based on more than just form or style. It was also informed by national politics. In Part I, after an introductory chapter on epic as a genre inextricably bound up with national identity, I begin chapter 2 with the thesis that, despite Wagner’s own arguments against narrative in general and epic in particular, the libretto for the entire Ring owes an important artistic and political debt to Greek epic. This debt can be seen by examining the Ring’s libretto as both a process and a finished product. Unlike what previous authors have said on the subject, I argue that in his theoretical works Wagner does not dismiss all epics and every narrative technique as somehow “bad” or imperfect. He praises Homer, and in the Ring he strives to do for Germany what he imagines Homer to have done for Greece, namely, provide his country with a national bible rooted in the sagas and myths of the Volk’s collective past. One way in which he achieves this goal is by emulating Homer’s technique of retrospective narrative and writing the libretti for the Ring in reverse order.11 He begins with the fatal wound received by his hero, Siegfried, and generates prequel after prequel in search of its original cause. Finally, he arrives back at the very origins of time itself and the original sin of the Ring: the valuing of culture over nature, power over love. By focusing more specifically on Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re, chapters 3 and 4 discuss the ways in which Wagner uses basic and advanced forms of epic in both the music and the libretti for these operas. Borrowing not only from Homer but also Hesiod and other epic poets, in Das Rheingold Wagner uses theogonic, didactic, and epigrammatic epic forms to create the inherently flawed world of the Ring and the gods that rule over this fallen world. Then in Die Walku¨re, as the Ring evolves both aesthetically and politically, Wagner introduces humans, depicting their interactions with the gods as more concrete and more Homeric by making his Teutonic source stories conform more closely to the ideal of proper Greek epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Preface

I begin Part II with chapter 5, an analysis of the essential relationship between lyric and personal identity. In chapter 6 I argue that in Siegfried Wagner creates a liminal space occupied by lyric forms and characters. With Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re Wagner represents his characters in an embattled epic context. In Go¨tterda¨mmerung he puts them in a more civilized setting, similar to the way that Greek dramatists made their heroes face the problems of personal responsibility within the civic context of tragedy and comedy. But between these two stages lies Siegfried, a poetic and political proving ground where heroes are neither wholly consumed by outside forces nor entirely subsumed by inner ones. In his eponymous opera Siegfried fills out the contours of the mythical Greek lyricist, Orpheus. He does this not only to further the plot of the Ring but also to facilitate Wagner’s own self-discovery as an artist and an individual. Like Orpheus, Siegfried is a singer, a child of nature, friend to forest creatures and rescuer of maidens from death (or in Bru¨nnhilde’s case death’s counterfeit, sleep). But like Wagner Siegfried is also anxious about his biological and artistic paternity (chapter 7). Just as Siegfried fears that Mime might be his real father, so Wagner fretted over the possibility that his own father was a Jew named Ludwig Geyer, his mother Johanna’s second husband. By allowing Siegfried, his operatic double, to discover his true paternity through nature Wagner tries to solve what he saw as both his country’s and his own identity crisis. Such a solution is undercut, however, by the similarities Wagner shares with Wotan and Mime. These similarities with “flawed” characters are further complicated by Siegfried’s slaying and slaking of his thirst with the blood of the dragon Fafner (chapter 8). His subsequent transformation via Fafner’s blood hints not only at miscegenation and pollution (such as that which contaminated Apollo through his slaying of the Python at Delphi), but also at the possibility of a new, hybrid creation that would combine the best of two worlds, symbolized by Siegfried on the one hand and Fafner on the other. Startlingly (perhaps even for Wagner), through his transfusion and subsequent transformation Siegfried becomes a symbol of music drama as the synthesis of German lyric and French spectacle.

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In Part III I begin with chapter 9, which analyzes the notion that civic identity and collision, mostly between national and personal identity, are essential to drama. In chapter 10 we see Wagner enlisting the aid of Aristophanic parody and Greek tragedy in order to write the finale to the Ring cycle. Somewhat against the evolutionary progress of the Ring as a whole, in this final opera Wagner seeks through ridicule and critique to destroy the old perhaps more than he seeks to create the new. In other words he does not deliver on the formal promise he made at the end of Siegfried to create a hybrid opera that would combine both French spectacle and German lyric. Instead, he works within the ambivalent genre of tragi-comedy, thus fulfilling Siegfried’s and Bru¨nnhilde’s ecstatic wish at the end of Siegfried to die laughing. To some extent Wagner is forced into this semi-destructive attitude by the fact that the music for this final opera was written last chronologically while the libretto, the oldest for the Ring, was written first and clearly reveals the influence of French and Italian operatic models, complete with massive choruses and wedding ceremonies, blood-brother duets, and princes and princesses. Instead of upgrading the libretto or scaling back his musical invention, Wagner uses his music to deconstruct what the libretto seems to say in earnest. Most obviously, he scores the music for his male choruses in Go¨tterda¨mmerung in such a way as to parody the chorus of French grand opera, a form he denounces in his theoretical works as both retrograde and unnecessary (chapter 11). For, according to Wagner, the Greek chorus had long ago evolved into the operatic orchestra. From an aesthetic perspective its use on the modern stage thus constitutes a needless repetition. Similarly, from an ethical perspective the chorus represents an unnecessary luxury. As the representation of an unhealthy civic body this chorus has to be purged, a cleansing that is eventually achieved through the ending of the Ring, itself a darker and more destructive version of certain endings for Greek New Comedy. Instead of being united through the civic ceremony of a wedding, Siegfried, Bru¨nnhilde, and, symbolically, German society as a whole are tragically united upon a funeral pyre that eventually engulfs the entire world of the Ring, negating the old through destruction and yet, perhaps, neglecting

Preface

to create the new (chapter 12). In this way Wagner disrupts and terminates the Ring’s cycle of poetic and political evolution. By brutally negating history, as Adorno would have it, the Ring may ultimately not only evolve but also revolve, in both senses of that word. It revolts against the past only to return to it, ending almost exactly where the entire cycle began, thus embodying certain Greek notions about the return to stasis at the close of tragedies. As we leave the Ring the stage is once more flooded and the Rhinedaughters once more in possession of the Rhinegold. Ambivalent to the end, the Ring cycle’s finale both is and is not what it seems: a new beginning and the eternal return of the same. In the epilogue I reconsider the Ring’s relationship to time and history by using the language of performance theory. Because books do not appear instantaneously but rather over time, this epilogue in part represents my own evolution as a scholar and a teacher, a widening of my interest in theater to include performance studies. But beyond this more personal reason for the epilogue lies the fact that Wagner’s own theoretical writings and the Ring cycle itself have been essential in shaping certain modern and post-modern ideas of performance, especially with respect to ambiguity, recycling of the past, and mixing art, politics, and self-expression. Such a re-examination of opera through eyes other12 than those used in more conventional studies of music, theater, classics, and aesthetics is intended to further one of the main methodological goals of this book: to open up opera to new hermeneutic practices.13 In light of this I argue that twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatrical practitioners and theorists have adopted and adapted certain Wagnerian innovations despite the fact that they have sometimes violently disagreed with Wagner’s ideological leanings. In the same way that Wagner took from the past, picking things over and piecing them together through his own unique blend of mytho- and politicopoeisis, so history has dealt with Wagner. Ultimately, by acquainting ourselves with the complex and sometimes corrupt ways in which Wagner Hellenized his world, we become that much freer with respect to the ways in which we may or may not choose to Wagnerize our own.

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A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Perhaps more so than any books that might follow, the merits of a first book reach well beyond its covers. But unfortunately its faults must stop with the name that appears on the binding. The case is no different with this first book. It certainly possesses its share of faults and although I do not have a lot of people to thank for whatever merit it might possess, I would like to thank a few people a lot. Because it was a dissertation first, I would first like to thank my dissertation committee, each of whom passed on to me a certain bit of wisdom, virtue, or knowledge without which this book never would have seen the light of day. My dissertation director, Sander Gilman, taught me (as some advisors do not) that one cannot get a first job or publish a first book until one finishes a dissertation first. Easy advice in theory, not so easy in practice. Just ask any grad student. My first reader, David Bevington, showed me what dedication meant. And not just dedication to his research, but dedication to his students, a rare combination in today’s academy. And last but not least, my second reader, Michael P. Steinberg, opened my eyes to the political dimensions of opera. It is to him that I am indebted for one of this book’s fundamental premises, namely, that opera can be a powerful ideological weapon. There have of course been other readers and opportunities that have shaped my work since I was a graduate student. As a Mellon Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum I was able to pursue my research on Performance Studies and opera. At Duke University three colleagues in particular read and commented on early drafts of this book and assessed it from their particular disciplinary perspectives: Bryan Gilliam read it as a musicologist, Peter Burian as a classicist, and John Clum as a theater historian.

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Acknowledgments

More recently, while a visiting fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences I was able to finish my final revisions. And lastly, there are the people associated with Cambridge University Press: Arthur Groos, who closely read the manuscript and kindly allowed it to be published in his Cambridge Studies in Opera series; Rebecca Jones, who has been very prompt and thoughtful in all of her contacts with me and in helping me get just the right cover for the book; and Victoria Cooper, who initially thought enough of the book to send it off to readers and who successfully persuaded the Cambridge University Press Syndicate to publish it. On a more personal note, I would also like to thank my family, particularly my mother, Eugenia, and my father, Harmon. While they may not have contributed directly to the pages of this book, they did author its author. When I was younger they told me I could do anything and I (foolishly enough) believed them. When I wanted to pursue something as impractical as the Liberal Arts – worse yet, a “Great Books” program at St. John’s College – they let me go with their blessing. Combining their belief in me and the philosophy of my undergraduate institution, further fostered by my graduate work in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, produced someone who believes in the benefits of interdisciplinary study and that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. True, I have tried to climb down off the shoulders of some of those giants, but I still look up to them. Finally, my wife and partner, Kelly Amienne, deserves my gratitude for reading and re-reading this book ever since it began life as a dissertation. She has seen it wax, wane, wither, and be reborn over the years, and all that time she has been there to help me write and rewrite it. She was there at my defense, stayed up all night helping me apply for fellowships, and helped to celebrate every achievement along the way, teaching me the importance of ritual on a small scale even as I was writing about it on a grander scale. In academia we have a name for those spouses who follow us as we travel from job to job in the early years of our careers. They are called “trailing

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spouses.” But the more appropriate term for Kelly is “leading spouse.” She has led me to where I am today and has shown me the way in terms of professionalism and even in the publication of a first book. But trailing or leading, it doesn’t matter; she has always been there for me. Words may fail to describe how much I have to thank her for, but she has never failed me.

Introduction

To be able to understand the relationship between Wagner and the Greeks one must be conversant with those primary sources that Wagner read and re-read throughout his life. This seems obvious.1 But what does not seem so obvious, at least given the way that previous authors have approached this topic, is that one should also be conversant with the ways in which Wagner’s understanding of the Greeks was influenced by secondary scholarship and scholars. And yet it is this academic research that sometimes, quite surprisingly, illuminates the murk of Wagner’s prose and the peaks of his music. In fact I would argue that, as with all other modes of research, one can never really speak of the Greeks per se, much less Wagner and the Greeks, no matter how much scholars, Semele-like, may desire to gaze upon their subjects unadorned. Because even scholarship is political, one must recognize that Wagner’s Grecocentrism was part of his own ideological bent as well as a larger national trend, a particular manifestation of the nineteenth-century German Zeitgeist. The way in which Wagner and his compatriots chose to dress up the Greeks says as much or more about them and about Germany as it does about Greece. But what does it say? In his acute but all too brief appraisal of such philhellenism John Deathridge summarizes how and why Wagner and like-minded Germans used the Greeks: “from the start of his career Wagner was in thrall to the idea of the Greeks as the pristine source of a lost culture – an ideal of fundamental origins projected onto the utopian future of a society encumbered by alienated living and a lack of spiritual freedom.”2 While the compact truth of Deathridge’s summary is striking, it omits one important detail. At least in Wagner’s case this ideal of a “lost culture” was not merely a figment of the composer’s imagination. It was also based on a surprisingly 1

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Introduction

wide familiarity with classical scholars and scholarship, some of it the most respected of the period. Although previous works on the topic of Wagner and the Greeks have sometimes pointed this out, nevertheless, if they have developed the claim any further they have tended to focus primarily on Wagner’s relationship to Friedrich Nietzsche and Johann Gustav Droysen, a landmark translator of Aeschylus and founder of Alexander studies. While these two men might have been co-chairs of the virtual classics department one could people with Wagner’s professor friends and mentors, there were others too who were, at least in their own time, equally if not more esteemed.3 The two scholars that this book focuses on in addition to Nietzsche and Droysen are Karl Otfried Mu¨ller, an authority on all things Doric, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose Aesthetics presents a Grecocentric paradigm for the evolution of poetry. Information on how these classical influences impressed Wagner is best gathered from numerous sources: Wagner’s own theoretical works, letters, and the so-called Brown Book; the catalogues of his Dresden library and his Wahnfried library; works about Wagner by other scholars; and the very detailed and helpful entries in Cosima’s diaries about her and Wagner’s life together, their discussions, and their nightly readings.4 One caveat though. And this is directed mostly at classicists.5 Despite Wagner’s broad acquaintance with classical sources, scholars, and scholarship it is important to remember that he was not himself a scholar and we should not treat him as such. In the case of Greek scholars one assumes that the Greeks are an end, not a means. In the case of Wagner the opposite is true. For him the Greeks were a means, not an end.6 And this must sometimes make him seem rather dilettantish in his knowledge of antiquity. While not disqualifying his perspective it does complicate the goal of figuring out exactly what Wagner knew about the Greeks, to what extent he knew it, and how far it influenced his theoretical and musical works. But as we shall see later in this introduction, being a dilettante was in Wagner’s case not all bad. In fact ignorance was in some cases more fruitful than knowledge.

Introduction WAGNER AND HIS SOURCES

In an open letter to Friedrich Nietzsche, Wagner once told the classical philologist that, from his earliest childhood, Greece had a profound emotional and intellectual hold on him: “no boy could have had greater enthusiasm for classical antiquity than myself; although it was Greek mythology and history which interested me deeply, I also felt strongly drawn to the study of the Greek language, to such an extent in fact, that I was almost rebellious in my efforts to shirk my Latin tasks.”7 The self-portrait that Wagner paints here differs in one small but important detail from an earlier account that he gives in Mein Leben concerning the philhellenic tendencies of his boyhood. In Mein Leben Wagner tells us that his interest in Greek myths and stories far surpassed his interest in the grammatical forms of the Greek language itself: With regard to the ancient languages I was also able to concentrate only as much as absolutely necessary to learn through them about subjects that stimulated me to reproduce their most characteristic aspects for myself. In this I was particularly attracted by Greek, because the stories from Greek mythology seized my imagination so strongly that I wanted to imagine their heroic figures speaking to me in their original tongue, in order to satisfy my longing for complete familiarity with them. Under these circumstances it can easily be imagined that the actual grammar would only be considered a tiresome obstacle and not an academic subject with its own attraction.8

Despite this early fascination with the Greeks it seems that Wagner’s study of the ancient Greek language never progressed beyond his boyhood efforts. He was all his adult life a novice in the field of classics and, once out of school, he eventually lost most of his ability to read Greek texts in the original.9 The last time that Wagner contemplated relearning Greek was while he was living in Paris. He was ultimately persuaded by scholar and translator, Samuel Lehrs, not to waste his time. As Wagner tells it, Lehrs advised him that “the way I was and the music I had in me, I would find a way to extract knowledge from them [the Greeks] even without grammar and dictionary.”10

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Introduction

But whatever one might say about the deterioration of his translating capabilities, Wagner’s youthful interest in the Greeks is still impressive, and, significantly, it was not limited to tragedy alone. It also extended to epic. While still a young man Wagner even tried his hand at writing a Homeric-style epic. Entitled Die Schlacht am Parnassus, the poem was based on a story by Pausanius that tells of how the muses descended from Parnassus in the second century B.C. in order to help defend Greece against, appropriately enough, the Gauls.11 In his “Autobiographical Sketch” he also claims that while still in his early teens he translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey.12 This interest in Homer and the Greeks did not fizzle out as he grew older. In fact, it seems only to have grown to include comedy, lyric, history, rhetoric, and philosophy. As far as primary works are concerned, from various sources we know that Wagner owned, read, and re-read a wide selection of Greek authors (albeit mainly in German translation). Curt von Westernhagen’s catalogue of Wagner’s Dresden library includes not only the major tragedians, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, but also Aristophanes, Aristotle,13 Demosthenes, Herodotus, Homer, Pindar, Plato, Plutarch, Thucydides, and Xenophon. Although less represented, the catalogue lists Roman authors as well: Gaius Julius Caesar, Horace, Livy, Tacitus, and Virgil.14 The Wahnfried library catalogue, cross-referenced with the Dresden catalogue, Cosima’s diaries, and Wagner’s own writings, adds a few more names to the list of those primary authors that Wagner mentions by name.15 On the Greek side: Anaxagoras, Hesiod,16 Lucian, Polybius, Pythagoras, Sappho,17 Thales, and Zeno.18 And on the Roman side: Epicurus, Lucretius, Ovid, Pliny the Elder, and Seneca. There are also several other classical personages who, although not primarily remembered as authors, also figure prominently in Wagner’s picture of antiquity: Alexander, Cato, Lycurgus, Pericles, and Thrasybulus. These at least are the ones that show up with any frequency in Wagner’s writings and conversations. His knowledge of other historical and mythological figures probably extended far beyond this, given his reading of Plutarch and other primary and secondary sources particularly rich

Introduction

in such examples. Finally, although Pindar and Sappho are the only Greek lyric poets whom Wagner mentions by name, nevertheless, given the number of times he mentions lyric poetry in general and the importance that both he and his secondary sources place upon this genre, I think we can safely assume that Wagner did read some of the other lyric poets represented in his Wahnfried library. At least we can be relatively sure that he knew something about Anacreon, since he owned several editions of this lyric poet’s works and had conducted the overture to Luigi Cherubini’s opera-ballet, Anacre´on, ou L’amour fugitif.19 In addition to this extensive list of primary sources Wagner was also aware of some of the most influential scholars and secondary sources of his era. These secondary authorities on antiquity can be broken down into two categories: (1) those classics scholars20 whom Wagner knew personally and (2) those whom he knew through their work. Authors in the first category include Johann August Apel, Ernst Curtius, Wolfgang Helbig, Hermann Ko¨chly, Samuel Lehrs, Oswald Marbach, Theodor Mommsen, Carl F. Na¨gelsbach, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Ritschl, Erwin Rohde, Julius Sillig, Heinrich von Stein, Adolf Wagner, Christian Hermann Weiss, and Hans von Wolzogen.21 Turning next to those authors whom Wagner knew through their scholarship alone, one can see that his libraries, especially his Wahnfried library, contained many more books on classical subjects than are listed here. I am including only those for whom there is strong evidence that Wagner actually read or was somehow familiar with their work:22 Friedrich Creuzer, Johann Gustav Droysen, Max Duncker, George Finlay, Constantin Frantz, Edward Gibbon, George Grote, Gottfried Hermann, Karl Dietrich Hu¨llmann, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Karl Philipp Moritz, Karl Otfried Mu¨ller, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Charles Sismondi, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Christoph Martin Wieland, Ulrich von Willamovitz-Moellendorf, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Johann Heinrich Voss.23 For someone who was not himself a classical scholar these lists seem quite extensive. By any standard Wagner must be counted as

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an impressive amateur classicist, an amateur, that is, in the best (albeit Latin) sense of the word. Add to these lists the many other primary and secondary sources Wagner owned and read on other subjects, especially philosophy, history, and literature, and the image of an extremely well-read artist begins to emerge. WAGNER, HEGEL, AND HEGEL’S AESTHETICS

In the context of secondary scholarship and its influence upon Wagner there is one more author and one particular work that deserve special attention. The author is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the book is his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Although this particular author was more a philosopher than a classicist, he influenced not only Wagner’s understanding of the Greeks but aesthetics in general, not to mention the fact that he was arguably the most influential thinker for Wagner and Germany during the composer’s lifetime. But there is a serious problem in making the claim that Hegel and his Aesthetics deeply influenced Wagner and the Ring. Hegel’s Aesthetics is never explicitly mentioned by Wagner in any of his recorded writings, conversations, or diaries. Nor is it listed in the catalogues for either his Dresden or Wahnfried libraries. Moreover, time and again when Wagner mentions Hegel it is often in a negative vein. And yet there are good reasons to believe that Hegel’s Aesthetics did influence Wagner, directly as well as indirectly.24 With respect to Germany in general one can at least assert, along with no less an authority than Friedrich Engels, that Hegel was “in the air” during Wagner’s lifetime. His philosophy was like a perfume (or an air-borne pathogen, depending on your point of view) that “extensively permeated the most diversified sciences and saturated even popular literature and the daily press from which the average ‘educated consciousness’ derived its pabulum.”25 With respect to Wagner in particular, even beyond 1854, when the composer first discovered Schopenhauer and reputedly shifted much of his philosophical loyalties from Hegel to Schopenhauer, he remained deeply

Introduction

influenced by Hegel, Hegelian philosophy, and the Young Hegelians. To give just two important examples: (1) Hegel was the teacher of one of Wagner’s favorite Greek scholars, Johann Gustav Droysen, and (2) he was the philosophical point of embarkation for one of Wagner’s favorite philosophers, the Young Hegelian philosopher of love and compassion, Ludwig Feuerbach. Even if the references are often negative, throughout his prose Wagner repeatedly refers both directly and indirectly to Hegel and Hegelian aesthetics. For example, at a key moment in his appendix to “Judaism in Music,” Wagner calls Hegel’s system of aesthetics “a dreary set of dialectic nothings” that has devastated German thinking ever since Kant and Schiller’s interpretation of Kant were superseded by Hegel.26 In his essay, “Music of the Future,” Wagner claims to have come to his conclusions about the relationship between poetry and music only once he had all “the sayings of the most eminent art-critics in my head,” among whom one might reasonably include Hegel.27 We also know for certain that Wagner had a copy of Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History in his Dresden library, and that, according to his own account in Mein Leben, he read the book as well. In his autobiography Wagner recounts how he struggled through this and probably other works by Hegel while living in Dresden: “For my introduction to the philosophy of Hegel I chose his Philosophy of History. Much of this impressed me, and it appeared as if I would gain admittance to the inner sanctum by this route. The more incomprehensible I found many of the most sweeping and speculative sentences of this tremendously famous intellect, who had been commended to me as the keystone of philosophical understanding, the more I felt impelled to get to the bottom of what was termed ‘the absolute’ and everything connected with it.”28 What this passage tells us is that Wagner only began his study of Hegel with the Philosophy of History; it is not improbable to suppose that he went on to read other works by Hegel as well. Supporting this conjecture there is also evidence that he read the Phenomenology of Mind. Friedrich Pecht, a friend of Wagner’s from his Paris days, recounts how once while visiting Wagner in Dresden

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he found the composer struggling through some pages of the Phenomenology of Mind.29 But the most conclusive evidence that Wagner was somehow influenced by Hegel’s Aesthetics in particular is also the most illusive evidence: internal evidence from Wagner’s writings. As with many things Wagnerian I am not the first person to notice the Hegelian slant to Wagner’s writings. James Treadwell observes in his Interpreting Wagner that the composer’s peculiar brand of aesthetics resembles that of Hegel (and Schiller and Lessing too, for that matter), insofar as it “is a kind of symbolic history, closer to myth-making than scholarship. It interprets all the individual phenomena of culture as manifestations of some deep universal tendency.”30 With maliciously felicitous phrasing that brings together Hegel and the Greeks and shows their influence on Wagner, Deathridge calls Wagner’s three most formative enunciations of his aesthetics and politics – “The Art-Work of the Future,” Art and Revolution, and Opera and Drama – a “quasi-Hegelian merry-go-round of ideas – presented at numbing length . . . which dogmatically asserted that the preservation and the annulment of Greek culture were part of an essential stage in the dialectical progress of history towards the ‘purely human.’”31 In a more adulatory tone, when referring to Wagner’s ideas about the synthesis of poetry and music, in 1885 Edouard Rod asserted that Wagner’s “idea of a synthesis of the arts is completely Hegelian, especially that of the union of poetry and music, the two subjective arts, as opposed to the objective arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and with the philosopher [i.e., Hegel] as with the musician [i.e., Wagner] . . . the result is the supremacy of the dramatic form.”32 Citing the political and philosophical climate and context in which Wagner reached maturity as a thinker, Dahlhaus and Deathridge cite the Vorma¨rz period before the 1848 Revolution, when he and his comrades adopted the Hegelian dialectic as a way of expressing their ideas.33 As Dahlhaus and Deathridge conclude, the Vorma¨rz was “an era which left on his way of thinking a stamp that any changes in aesthetic or political convictions never expunged.”34

Introduction

But beyond what Treadwell, Dahlhaus, Deathridge, Rod and others have said about Hegel’s influence on Wagner’s theories and theoretical writings, I would argue that Hegel influenced Wagner’s music as well. As Sandra Corse cogently argues and amply demonstrates, Wagner avidly “read and studied Hegel, and internal evidence in the Ring cycle and Oper und Drama shows the influence of Hegel.”35 Along with Corse I would argue that Wagner’s interest in Hegel extended beyond a “mere” interest in philosophy. As an artist he was invested in how these philosophical notions were related to aesthetic practice as well as aesthetic theory. This investment is particularly evident with respect to Wagner’s conception and application of the Greeks in the Ring cycle. For this reason much of the body of the present book compares both Wagner’s Ring and his theoretical works with the theoretical model provided by Hegel’s Aesthetics, a model that unifies poetry and politics in a decidedly German and Grecocentric fashion. Before ending this introduction to Hegel, for those readers unacquainted with his Aesthetics it may be helpful here to give a very brief summary of his overall approach, that part of the Aesthetics that seems to have most influenced Wagner, and his national biases, which reinforced some of Wagner’s own national biases. In the Introduction to his Aesthetics Hegel tells us that the original way of writing about aesthetics in Germany was by treating the subject “with regard to the feelings they were supposed to produce [i.e., in the audience], as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on.”36 But what Hegel offers is an approach that Adorno usefully refers to as “content-aesthetics [Inhaltsa¨sthetik].”37 Superseding both his German predecessors – what I would call reception-aesthetics – and more formally based aesthetics Hegel’s content-aesthetics offers us a way to account for those things in art that do not necessarily agree with a certain pre-conceived notion about art. It is a way of “defining characteristics that contradict its [art’s] fixed art-philosophical concept” and thus allowing us to recognize art’s “otherness.”38 With respect to that part of the Aesthetics that interested Wagner most, it seems to have been Hegel’s

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Grecocentric, evolutionary account of poetry as it developed from epic to lyric to drama. It is with this final stage, drama, that poetry culminates. It is the sublation or Aufhebung of epic and lyric, combining the epic objectivity of national action together with the lyric subjectivity of individual self-consciousness to produce individuals who act within and collide with the ethical order of the states. Because of his classical bias Hegel imagines this dialectic development of poetry to have occurred most paradigmatically in ancient Greece. By following the pinnacle of Attic tragedy and comedy, that drama eventually devolved into two sub-genres representative of its two constituents: epic and lyric drama. It is to these two genres that Hegel (as well as Wagner) attributes the national identities of French (epic) and Italian (lyric). WAGNER AS DILETTANTE

While much may be said for Wagner’s enthusiastic embrace of the Greeks, his interest in this as in most things did have its limits. Nietzsche was perhaps the first – but certainly not the last – to go on record as suggesting that Wagner was essentially a dilettante. As early as his “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” while he was still friends with Wagner, Nietzsche cautiously suggested that “a superficial view of him [Wagner] might suggest that he was a born dilettante.”39 It was Thomas Mann, though, who took the greater leap forward by suggesting that the very key to understanding Wagner’s greatness was to first understand that he was a dilettante through and through: “Wagner’s art is a case of dilettantism that has been monumentalized by a supreme effort of the will and intelligence – dilettantism raised to the level of genius.”40 In the case of Wagner’s interest in the Greeks, despite the breadth of his reading of classics and classical scholarship, one might still argue that he was somewhat dilettantish, especially from the perspective of today’s very minutely trained classicists. In fact he sometimes seems to veer so sharply from the truth (that is, what we now take as truth in the field of classics) that one is tempted to correct rather than understand him. But such

Introduction

judgments and temptations should be avoided if one is to grasp how Wagner used his ideas about the Greeks as artistic and political means rather than as ends in themselves. The reason for pointing out Wagner’s dilettantism is not so that we may measure his work against that of scholars and find it wanting. To do so would seem somewhat churlish, beside the point, and ultimately like shooting fish in an academic barrel. True, because he was not a classics professor and because his love of the Greeks inspired his artistic output while his artistic output in turn inspired his love of the Greeks, Wagner’s understanding of the ancients was not necessarily guided by the kinds of fact, methods, and/or goals that we often assume guide scholarly inquiry. But it was through this so-called “dilettantism” and his often over-simplified comparisons between Germany and ancient Greece that Wagner was able to justify some of his most creative and monumental ideas, among which one may include the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Ring cycle as trilogy, and the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth41 – all of which were based in part on various “unscholarly” ideas about Greek tragedy. One might even claim, somewhat generously but not egregiously, that Wagner’s sometimes less than scholarly understanding of the Greeks was a positive factor in the spurring on of his creative and theoretical work.42 Through a lack of serious scholarly exertions Wagner may have unleashed rather than hampered his genius. To understand this aspect of Wagner’s creativity, to some extent one must be able to sympathize with his dilettantism. Although this does not entail being a dilettante oneself, it does mean that one should be willing to take Wagner’s dilettantism seriously. As a paradigm for taking it seriously one might compare his researches on the Greeks to those of a dramaturge. In preparation for a given performance a dramaturge can play an important role in researching a script, its background, and parallel works of art. However, it is ideally and ultimately the artists more directly responsible for the actual performance who decide what to do with this research. The dramaturge’s findings may well find their way onto the stage, but

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the decision about what, how, and why to include these findings is based more on dramatic effectiveness than scholarly interest, let alone faithfulness. Thus, even if Wagner qua dramaturge believed or wrote certain things about the Greeks this did not guarantee that Wagner qua dramatist allowed these ideas onto the stage. And this despite the fact that where Wagner was concerned the souls of both dramaturge and dramatist beat within one breast. With these caveats in mind it should begin to be apparent that the ways in which Wagner arrived at his various ideas about the Greeks and how he in turn applied these ideas is a complex subject. We must take into consideration not only the Grecocentric Zeitgeist of German Idealism but also Wagner’s own personal history and predilections, the dialogue between his scholarly research and performance choices, his nationalist and racist ideology, his Hegelian influences, and the fact that he was not a classicist and so lacked the typical goals and methods we associate with that branch of scholarship and the academy in general. With all of these variables at work, trying to understand the relationship between the Ring cycle and the Greeks requires that one adapt oneself to an almost ceaselessly shifting kaleidoscope of perspectives. And even then there is a further complication. It seems that Wagner not only made copious statements about the Greeks in his theoretical works and elsewhere, but that these statements do not always seem to agree with each other or with Wagner’s musical works. The bottom line (if there is one to this seemingly bottomless subject) is that to understand the relationship between Wagner and the Greeks in terms of his theoretical and practical works requires that one familiarize oneself with both sets of writings and that one address these works on an individual basis and not be too strict in the search for a single, unified theory that would account for all individual cases. Wagner was not a seamless whole. Like his leitmotifs he was made up of many parts that continually transformed themselves into one another and sometimes even into their opposites.

Introduction THEORY VERSUS PRACTICE

If we are to believe Mann’s claim that Wagner’s tendency to dabble was responsible even for his musical genius, then we might also observe that this same dilettantism has apparently presented few obstacles to taking Wagner and his music seriously. After Christ and Napoleon, they say, Wagner is the most written about man in history. But the critics have often been reluctant to take Wagner’s theoretical writings seriously, a reluctance that naturally extends to his theoretical writings on the Greeks in particular. Even Mann, although willing to accept Wagner’s dilettantism as a composer, was apparently unable to abide it in Wagner the theorist. In “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner” he confesses an extreme indifference to Wagner’s theoretical aesthetics: “I have hardly ever been able to convince myself that anyone could ever have taken it [the corpus of Wagner’s theoretical works] seriously.”43 Mann has since been followed by opera enthusiast and scholar alike in dismissing the work of Wagner qua theorist.44 Such a dismissal may be motivated by seemingly harmless convictions about the perceived pre-eminence of artistic practice over aesthetic theory, the imperviousness of genius to human failings, or a particular artist’s theoretical musings being incommensurate with his or her creative output. But if the musings exist and exist in abundance, as they do with Wagner, it would seem somewhat irresponsible of one to overlook them purposely. More importantly, in the case of Wagner the “overlooking” of his theoretical pronouncements may even be construed as tantamount to dismissing some of his more destructive ideological pronouncements against the favorite objects of his spleen: the Jews, the French, and the Italians.45 For Wagner aesthetics was all too often the velvet glove concealing the iron fist of politics. Despite their obvious shortcomings in terms of scholarship, style, and originality Wagner wrote some of his most important theoretical works on the Greeks in conjunction with and in preparation for some of his most important operatic works. The most fruitful examples of this type of symbiosis between Wagner’s art and his

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study of Greek antiquity can be seen by comparing his theoretical statements about the Greeks with his practical application of these statements in the Ring cycle. That Wagner’s theory and practice were linked by their mutual admiration and application of the Greeks can be seen most readily in those prose works he wrote just as the idea of the Ring was taking shape in his mind. Witness the oftquoted beginning of his essay, “Art and Revolution”: “In any serious investigation of the essence of our art today, we cannot make one step forward without being brought face to face with its intimate connection with the Art of ancient Greece.”46 It was with this peroration that Wagner launched one of his longest and most important journeys as both an artist and a theorist: his twentyfive-year trek toward the completion of the Ring cycle. And yet, Wagner was well aware that, despite his attempts to marry theory and practice, there was still a tension between the two. He was also aware that artists sometimes failed miserably when they tried to theorize their own creative practices. Despite his own endless attempts Wagner ultimately sided with the Platonic Socrates in claiming that artists were some of the least qualified to understand their own art. The artist “stands before his own work of art – if it really is a work of art – as though before some puzzle, which is just as capable of misleading him as it can mislead the other person.”47 With typical, if justified, self-aggrandizement, Wagner compares his sufferings in this realm to the rest of humanity and finds humanity wanting: “Rarely, I believe, has anyone suffered so remarkable a sense of alienation from self and so great a contradiction between his intuitions and his conceptions.”48 The suffering Wagner speaks of here was probably intensified precisely by the fact that he expended so much ink and energy trying to conceptualize his artistic intuitions. And given the sheer effort needed to create such a work as the Ring it should come as no surprise that it was with this work that Wagner claims to have experienced the most “striking experience” of conception clashing with intuition.49 For this reason alone it would be naive to expect a one-to-one correspondence between Wagner’s theory and practice. Moreover, Wagner even contends that his

Introduction

treatises on operatic practice were sometimes merely hypothetical. This at least is what he points out in a moment of almost humble clarity when, in a footnote to Opera and Drama, he writes, “I here am obliged to make express mention of myself, and, indeed, with a single eye to removing from the reader’s mind any suspicion that with the above account of the Perfected Drama I had attempted an explanation of my own artistic works, in any sense as though I had fulfilled my present demands in my own operas, and had thus already brought to pass this hypothetic Drama.”50 From this statement we might rightfully conclude that Wagner’s theoretical position on aesthetics was not simply an intellectualized version of his artistic practice. But neither were his musical works a practical demonstration of his theoretical works. There is a more subtle dialectic at work here. Anything Wagner wrote about his own artistic process must be regarded with suspicion and judged on a case-by-case basis for its merits as a useful guide to his art. Practicing what he preached was not one of the Master’s strong points. In some ways, though, Wagner can be forgiven for not practicing what he preached. Certainly in the case of this book I am not looking to “catch Wagner out.” This is true partly because I am looking at whatever non-musical/theoretical works I can, regardless of when or under what circumstances Wagner wrote them, in order to understand the Ring and its relationship to the Greeks. But if a contextualization of these works is wanted, Dahlhaus and Deathridge provide one that is brief and useful. They divide Wagner’s theoretical writings into four general periods: “the time of acute poverty in Paris (1840–42), the revolutionary years (1849–51), the period in which he resumed work on the Ring after interrupting it for the composition of Tristan and Die Meistersinger (1869–72), and the last years in Bayreuth (1878–83).”51 Because the middle two periods correspond to the periods before and during which he worked on the Ring (1849–51 and 1869–72) I am most interested in these two. However, as with many thinkers some of Wagner’s most important ideas can be found in both his earlier works and his later works. His words inform both forwards and backwards. Thus one should not be

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too nice about trying to create a coherent and conveniently contextualizable whole out of Wagner’s thoughts. As Dahlhaus and Deathridge helpfully point out, Wagner thought of his collected, non-musical works as an autobiography rather than a systematic working-out of various philosophical, aesthetic, and political issues.52 And whenever something turns autobiographical in Wagner’s hands (which it almost always does) he does not shy away from selfaggrandizement and over-advertising. One should therefore be extra careful on this point. Some critics tacitly accept that everything that Wagner theorized about the Greeks he then put into practice in his operas. Other critics assume that Wagner was essentially a liar and that almost nothing he said was really reflected in anything he did. My preference is to take the middle road. Rather than assume one extreme or the other, one should analyze on an individual basis what Wagner wrote or said and carefully weigh it against what he composed. This is certainly the line of questioning to be recommended when it comes to Wagner’s hinting that his operas constitute the rebirth of tragedy. To take only one example of a discrepancy between practice and preaching that will be examined more closely in the body of this book, one of the most important and influential pronouncements that Wagner ever made about opera is that this genre is properly a form of drama and that its most important dramatic model is Greek tragedy.53 To support this theory Wagner wrote, among other treatises, his longest theoretical work on the subject and aptly entitled it Opera and Drama. In “The Art-Work of the Future” he also claimed that the future of opera was to be found in the origins of Western drama, that is, Greek tragedy. And, as previously mentioned, he opens his essay “Art and Revolution,” the first among many of his most important theoretical documents and declarations of aesthetic war, with the observation that we cannot even begin to think about the opera of today unless we first think seriously about the Greek tragedy of yesterday.54 Again and again Wagner seems to claim that Greek tragedy in particular and drama in general should be the most important models for opera. At one point he even seems

Introduction

to rank drama above music, declaring in Opera and Drama that the problem with modern opera is “that a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means. . .”55 Beyond claiming tragedy as opera’s ultimate model Wagner also makes clear in his theoretical writings what he believes should not be used as models for opera: narrative in general and epic in particular. But we neither need nor should take Wagner at his word that all narrative in opera is bad and that opera in general or his own operas in particular aspire to the condition of Greek tragedy. Raising a quizzical eye at Wagner’s suggestions on this score, Peter Conrad argues that using the term music drama as a synonym for opera might be partially responsible for impeding our understanding of Wagner in particular and opera in general.56 As an important counter-claimant for the title of opera’s proper literary model, Conrad considers the genre of narrative, specifically the novel.57 The novel can provide a very useful way for thinking about the relationship between the operatic orchestra and operatic characters, insofar as the one can be said to resemble a narrator and the other characters. Music, often seen as personal and internal, can be compared to the way the narrator divulges a character’s thoughts, conveys moral judgment, and/or provides a sense of perspective. To complete the parallel, the words that a character in an opera sings can be compared to the words a character in a narrative speaks. Indeed, as simultaneously text and subtext the novel may provide a much better analogy for opera than drama, which almost always has characters but rarely a narrator. Moreover, since the novel is the genre that in many ways defines nineteenth-century European literature it may be particularly useful to think about this genre as a literary model for nineteenth-century opera as well. In addition to the above parallels that one can point to between opera and the novel, this popular nineteenth-century literary form helped to revive such genres as the epic and the romance as proto-novelistic forms, which in turn became key literary sources, analogues, and inspirations for many operas, including some of Wagner’s own operas.

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From this brief argument alone it should be coming clearer that Wagner’s claims about drama and tragedy’s pre-eminent relationship to opera should at least not go unchallenged. While Dahlhaus and Deathridge’s view of the relationship between Wagner’s theoretical and his musical works may be too one-sided for me, they are nonetheless right, I believe, when they issue the reminder that it “is a rule of hermeneutics that an author’s statement about his own creations belong not to the premises but to the material on which the interpreter must work.”58 And in Wagner’s case this is particularly true. THE HELLENIZATION OF POLITICS

If what I have just suggested is true, that Wagner sometimes claims to disdain in theory what he embraces in practice, how then are we to reconcile theory and practice with respect to narrative, drama, and similarly essential questions of form in Wagner’s Ring and in his theoretical writings? Put differently, why should Wagner the artist apparently contradict Wagner the theorist in such a blatant way by, for example, first condemning and then deploying narrative? And if this is a fair assessment of the case then how are we to use Wagner’s theories to understand his music when the two cannot be trusted to agree? Of course there are some cases in which we might resolve this conflict simply by claiming that the artist in Wagner realized the importance of certain things, like the usefulness of narrative, while the theorist in him did not. However, this is not a satisfactory solution in every case. Nor can such contradictions between Wagner’s theoretical and operatic works always or easily be dismissed by privileging practice over theory. On the contrary, in the case of Wagner the theorist shapes the artist and vice versa in such a way that produces both theoretical and practical conflicts. To understand the importance of these conflicts we must listen to as many of Wagner’s various personae as we can. What we will sometimes discover through such close listening is that another voice emerges from these debates, namely, Wagner the ideologue, yet another side

Introduction

of this many-faceted man, a side that seems at times to have an ever-changing worldview whose only constants are its contents – art, self, and society – arranged in myriad configurations. This is true of his use of the Greeks just as much as his use of German culture. Many authors have explored the subject of Wagner and the Greeks both during and after the composer’s lifetime, including Wagner himself.59 But like so many other authors on the subject, even Wagner does not always explore the political or ideological goals to be gained by using the Greeks as he did. Exemplary of Wagner’s own writing about his operas and the Greeks in this way is a passage in “A Communication to my Friends” where he rather shallowly points out a few character and plot similarities between some of his operas and some Greek myths. He sees in the Flying Dutchman and Odysseus two sea-tossed wanderers. With Tannha¨user and Odysseus he points to the shared dilemma of men torn between lust and love. And in Zeus/Semele and Lohengrin/Elsa he claims that the female halves of these mythical couples want at all costs to know their lovers as they truly are.60 Much of what is written on Wagner’s use of the Greeks is merely an extended version and variation on this. Perhaps Michael Ewans in his imaginative and (perhaps for that reason) too much maligned Wagner and Aeschylus comes closest to understanding the ideological uses to which Wagner put the Greeks when he claims that Wagner used them as a “means to register and clarify his fundamental dissatisfaction with the theatre of his own times.”61 Because Wagner saw the theater as ineluctably connected to politics, he also used the Greeks to register, clarify, and even reform the politics of his own time. By adapting Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht’s famous assessment of National Socialism as the “aestheticization of politics,” we can aptly describe Wagner’s deployment of the Greeks as a specific kind of aestheticization, a “Hellenization” of politics.62 In other words, to make his politics more palatable and authoritative Wagner presented them in the theoretical and practical guise of ancient Greek art. Such Hellenization has a long and illustrious history. To some extent it has been going on since the time of Alexander the Great;

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this at least is the claim made by J. G. Droysen in his History of Hellenism, a book much read and respected by Wagner. Moreover, as a Hellenizer Wagner participated in a widespread nineteenthcentury European phenomenon whereby artists and thinkers alike sought inspiration for new works that would tell their own national stories by rooting them in the notion of a purer, more classical past. By aestheticizing politics according to such fabled pasts, Wagner and other idealists in Germany and elsewhere tried to unify their nations against foreign cultures that reputedly threatened them with contamination and ruin. What is distinctive about Wagner’s desire to merge the past with the present, though, is that it extended mainly in one direction: toward Greece. He did not model his works indiscriminately on an apolitical, abstract, or timeless notion of classical Western culture. Nor did he emulate ancient Roman culture. As an initial example of how and why Wagner’s ideological bent drove him to the Greeks rather than another ancient culture, look again at the excerpts above from Wagner’s letter to Nietzsche and from Mein Leben. Seen from one angle these apparently apolitical anecdotes may be read as hinting at something beyond simple admiration for the Greeks and a schoolboy’s rebellion against the tedium of grammar in general and Latin grammar in particular. Wagner’s remembered distaste for these things may in fact be read as a critique of anything even remotely connected with the French and/or the Italians. For Wagner as for other nineteenth-century German nationalists even an interest in the Latin origins of the Romance languages could be considered un-Germanic. Thus, by linking Germany to Greece and by emulating Greek rather than Latin culture, even here Wagner may have been trying to distance Germany from its French and Italian neighbors, whom he felt were crowding its aesthetic, political, and geographical borders.63 This does not mean, however, that one should ignore the Romans when it comes to Wagner. To Wagner the Romans were the photographic negative for which the Greeks were the positive. Throughout his theoretical works Wagner specifically and repeatedly criticizes the Romans as mere mimics interested more in leisure,

Introduction

money, and foreign entertainments than in nationally grounded art, what Wagner considered the focus of much Greek culture. For Wagner these traits were not just part of the past, they were also part of the present. By discrediting Rome in these ways Wagner hoped to discredit its linguistic and national descendants, the French and the Italians, as well as what he perceived to be their more Asiatic “spiritual” descendants, the Jews. Combining these national and spiritual Others into one hybrid enemy, in his essay “Herodom and Christendom,” Wagner calls Rome “the great Latino-Semite realm.”64 Similarly, in a letter to Heinrich von Stein, a classics scholar and tutor of Wagner’s children, the composer writes about how Rome’s vitality was “quite lost to the so-called Latin world through its total Semitising [ ga¨nzlich semitisierten].”65 Bringing this threat home to his own national audience, in other theoretical works and in the Ring itself Wagner sets up the analogy that just as Rome and Asia had once threatened Greece with extinction through contamination, so now do their national and cultural descendants, the Italians, the French, and the bourgeois Jews, threaten Germany. In the above excerpt from Mein Leben Wagner also displays another facet of what he considered to be particularly German when he contrasts the content with the form of the Greek language. Even as a boy, Wagner tells us, he felt drawn more to the myths expressed in the Greek language than to the language itself. For anyone who has ever tried to learn ancient Greek or has witnessed young students struggling to do so, Wagner’s reaction is entirely understandable. The youthful context of his animosity further naturalizes his critique of such conventional constraints, while the exuberance of boyhood guarantees an unspoiled and naive reaction against the perceived artificiality of rules. This anecdote, however, should not be dismissed as merely the impatience of a young boy bristling at the strictures of study. After all, it is not Wagner the young boy who tells us this story but Wagner the revisionist biographer. From the perspective of adulthood Wagner looks back and emphasizes that he rebelled against Greek grammar as a “tiresome obstacle” not because it prevented him from pursuing boyhood pastimes or childish

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pleasures, but because it prevented the budding dramatist in him from reproducing the contents of the Greek language to himself in imaginary dramas. All his life Wagner complained about such rules, from Greek grammar to “decadent” French operatic conventions and other such hindrances that seemed to stand between him and the kinds of dramas he wanted to produce. These conventions are nearly always stereotyped by Wagner as intellectual, arbitrary, foreign, bourgeois, and/or Jewish. In his open letter to Nietzsche on classical education Wagner repeatedly takes jabs at German philology and its promotion of the letter rather than the spirit of ancient literature. To prove his point Wagner uses Felix Mendelssohn as Exhibit A. He claims that it was Mendelssohn’s very ability to read Greek that prevented him from composing appropriate music for a famous production of Sophocles’ Antigone sponsored by Friedrich Wilhelm IV and involving Ludwig Tieck, his court “reader,” as Michael P. Steinberg calls him, and the translator J. J. Donner. According to Wagner, “while envying Mendelssohn his philologic fluency, I could but wonder at its not having prevented him from writing just his music for dramas of Sophocles, since, with all my ignorance, I still had more respect for the spirit of Antiquity than he here seemed to betray.”66 Given that Wagner also links Mendelssohn’s Jewishness to his other “shortcomings” it would not be amiss to link it here to his ability to read Greek fluently, to follow rules, and to adhere to the (Jewish) letter rather than the (Christian) spirit of the law.67 At the risk of further over-reading, in this simple anecdote we may also detect Wagner’s nationalistic dichotomy between content and form, nature and convention, German and Other. In “Judaism in Music,” to cite only the most well-known theoretical statement of this dichotomy, the Jew (who is always foreign for Wagner) is seen as incapable of producing anything other than formal, intellectual, and technically proficient artwork. Such Jewish “art” has no spiritual content for Wagner and the Jewish “artist” can only display a kind of mastery by following rules set down by others. Good Germans, on the other hand, like Greek tragedians, create art out of mythological

Introduction

substance, the common store of their race, without reference or deference to any arbitrary rules. This same dichotomy between form and content repeatedly resurfaces in the symbolic logic of Wagner’s operas. In Die Meistersinger von Nu¨rnberg Sixtus Beckmesser, Wagner’s infamous caricature of the Jewish critic Eduard Hanslick, only impotently reproduces the formal rules of mastersinging and thus fails as an artist. It is also interesting to note Beckmesser’s Latinate first name in light of the above discussion about the Germanic preference for Greek rather than Roman culture. Walther von Stolzing on the other hand represents the noble German who is more concerned with the content of his song and whether or not it is emotionally expressive than formally “correct.” Form is secondary. It comes later, is generated out of substance, and can be shaped only through the guidance of the Volk, as represented here by the shoemaker, Hans Sachs.68 Finally, it must be pointed out that this argument about the national/racial origins of one’s artistic ideas is not only intrinsic to but also problematic for Wagner’s work and his conception of what that work should be. Because he argued that artistic form should naturally evolve out of the contents of an artist’s rightful national and racial culture, Wagner was obliged by this logic either to claim that the Germans were somehow Greek or to admit that they were not Greek and thus accept responsibility for breaking one of his own aesthetico-political rules.69 Because in the Ring and in his theoretical works Wagner extensively borrows from and praises Greek aesthetic forms he does not wish to be accused of doing what he accuses Beckmesser of doing, namely, transplanting art forms from foreign climes rather than growing his own. Importing artistic traditions from other lands and races was the degraded practice of the French, the Jews, and the Romans. In fact it was partially this desire for foreign luxuries that led Rome, Wagner argues, to its downfall and would, sometime in the future, eventually lead to the downfall of Europe’s various nation states and European culture as a whole – or so Wagner predicted. Caught between the desire to Hellenize his German myths and to avoid using foreign art forms, Wagner

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Introduction

vacillates between deploying and deploring these foreign traditions. This dichotomy is in part responsible for the Ring cycle’s ambiguity as simultaneously creative and destructive. Wagner’s use of the Greeks was essential to his aesthetic plan for the Ring and he believed that understanding them was essential to the creation of great European art. But he also believed and represented in the Ring how reliance upon such “foreign” cultures was destructive to art in general. Not unlike other Romantics, for Wagner, too, art is the site of both creation and destruction. And as will hopefully become clear by the end of this book, Wagner did not uncategorically endorse the Hellenization of German politics. He was divided on this as he was on so many other issues, and so it is that the end of the Ring seems both progressive and regressive, constructive and destructive. As Bru¨nnhilde says of the self-sundered Siegfried upon his demise, so Wagner and the Greeks: in his Hellenization of politics, Wagner reveals himself to be simultaneously the most faithful and unfaithful of Germans. ART AND SCHOLARSHIP

Before moving ahead, as a final introductory note it is worth mentioning one of the larger issues that motivates me in uncovering how and why Wagner borrows from, translates out of, and incorporates into his work the literature and the philosophy of the Greeks – if for no other reason than it explains a bit of why I require an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates the rather different scholarly paradigms of classics, music, literature, and philosophy to explore the questions about Wagner I have raised. I am driven here by the more broadly applicable question of how and why some artists rely upon scholarship, research, analysis, and the like to help them create their art. Or to put it in Wagner’s own terminology, how and why certain artists rely upon conceptions as well as intuitions. For at least in Wagner’s case it is clear from his essays, letters, diaries, and operatic works that he was influenced not only by the artworks of the ancient world but also by what scholars have had to say about these works

Introduction

and that world.70 Just as research on Greek music and tragedy by scholars like Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei served the Florentine artists and literati credited for the formation of opera, so too the work of classicists like Johann Gustav Droysen and Karl Otfried Mu¨ller served Wagner for the reformation of opera.71 I do understand that this image of the artist as dependent on scholarship runs contrary to the more common image of the artist as lonely genius whose imagination, if fired by anything out of the past, is fired only by like geniuses of bygone generations. Like the beacon fires in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, those lights that flash across barren plains, deserts, islands, and mountain tops, carrying the message of Troy won and Agamemnon returning, so the artists of the past pass on their inspiration down through the ages, carrying the message of creativity from Prometheus to the present. While it is certainly the case that the ancients have inspired countless artists in this way – including Wagner to some extent – the distance between ancient and modern art neither was nor is merely a vast wasteland that can be brightened by art alone. There are also dimmer lights along the way, produced by bits of kindling, twigs, scrub brush, and even the occasional tall tree. These are the scholars and scholar-artists that have helped beacon fires like Wagner burn all the more brightly, and they deserve recognition and consideration too. Although he does not always seem to think of geniuses as connected only to other geniuses,72 in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers Nietzsche argues that across the chronic gulf between past and present there stretches “an invisible bridge from genius to genius.”73 That Nietzsche had Wagner in mind when he spoke of this “invisible bridge” is evident from a footnote where he expands this discussion to include Schopenhauer’s related idea of a “Republic of Geniuses.” Comparing Wagner to the lone, wandering philosopher of the modern age and contrasting this figure with the pre-Platonic philosopher, Nietzsche claims that the Greeks knew how to recognize the greatness of their citizens. They were not, therefore, lonely outsiders like Wagner (or for that matter Nietzsche himself ). From this Nietzsche concludes that such artists would be more at home in

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Introduction

the past than the present, better off as honorary citizens in Greece’s “Republic of Geniuses” than, say, professors with honorary degrees from German universities. Extending this bridge to Germany in general, Wagner similarly conceives of a kind of special alliance between the Germans – as opposed to his own personal axis of evil: the French, the Jews, and (less so) the Italians – and the Greeks.74 Of particular import in this regard is the fact that, as Cosima records in her diaries, Wagner thought the Germans very much like the Greeks in “the way they handle legends” and the way they “worship the supremacy of Nature.”75 Elsewhere Wagner also notes that certain Germans have been more successful than others at connecting with the Greeks. In a characteristically fulsome encomium to the “greats” of German literature and their efforts at reviving the Greeks, in “German Art and German Poetry” Wagner salutes his heroic forerunners thus: Hail Winckelmann and Lessing, ye who, beyond the centuries of native German majesty, found the German’s ur-kinsmen in the divine Hellenes, and laid bare the pure ideal of human beauty to the powder-bleared eyes of French-civilized mankind! Hail to thee, Goethe, thou who hadst power to wed Helena to our Faust, the Greek ideal to the German spirit! Hail to thee, Schiller, thou who gavest to the reborn spirit the stature of the “German stripling” [deutscher Ju¨ngling], who stands disdainful of the pride of Britain, the sensuous wiles of Paris.76

What I find significant in this passage is that laying “bare the pure ideal of human beauty” was not, says Wagner, merely the work of artists like Goethe and Schiller. It was also the work of more scholarly and critically minded men such as Winckelmann and Lessing. In this respect Wagner believed that even (or particularly) in their scholarship Germans have a special bond with the Greeks through their intellectual gift for aesthetics and philosophy. In his essay “What is German?” Wagner further extols these scholarly virtues as part of the peculiarly German spirit that opened up antiquity to the understanding of modern Europe:

Introduction a people can make nothing fully its own but what becomes possible for it to grasp with its inborn feeling, and to grasp in such a fashion that in the New it finds its own familiar self again. Upon the realm of Aesthetics and philosophic Criticism it may be demonstrated, almost palpably, that it was predestinated for the German spirit to seize and assimilate the Foreign, the primarily remote from it, in utmost purity and objectivity of intuition [in ho¨chster objektiver Reinheit der Anschauung]. One may aver, without exaggeration, that the Antique would have stayed unknown, in its now universal world-significance, had the German spirit not recognized and expounded it. The Italian made as much of the Antique his own, as he could copy and remodel; the Frenchman borrowed from this remodelling, in his turn, whatever caressed his national sense for elegance of Form: the German was the first to apprehend its purely-human originality, to seize therein a meaning quite aloof from usefulness, but therefore of the only use for rendering the Purely-human . . . One may say that the true idea of the Antique has existed only since the middle of the eighteenth century, since Winckelmann and Lessing.77

As one can see from this excerpt, while it was certainly open to Wagner to follow only in the footsteps of, for example, Goethe and Schiller, he also chose to benefit from the German “gift” for classical scholarship. In this use of a more historically contextualized kind of Hellenization, Wagner was perhaps influenced early on by his beloved uncle Adolf Wagner.78 Something of a rogue classicist, Uncle Adolf stood firmly against what he disparagingly labeled “Grecifying” and was “a professed opponent of all idealizing Grecomania.”79 One might reasonably speculate that it was through this early influence that Wagner first came to realize, as it seems certain previous artists had not, that one could not naively import Attic art into Germany and expect it to work the same miracles it worked in Athens. As Wagner saw it, “removed from its time and surroundings, that product is robbed of the weightiest part of its effect.”80 Neo-classical plays merely based on Greek myths and imitating Greek forms could not have the same kind of effect on modern audiences as they had

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Introduction

on ancient ones. Content best vitalizes form from within, not vice versa.81 As proof of this, Wagner’s greatest operas use Hellenized German myths not Germanized Hellenic myths. Richard Strauss wrote Elektra, not Richard Wagner. Arguing for a more scholarly approach to the use and abuse of the classics for modern art, it is with this sort of circumspection that Nietzsche approaches Wagner’s way of thinking. Given the historical accuracy and linguistic precision that was a product of Nietzsche’s training as a philologist, he was very careful not to regard the Greeks with an ahistorical, imprecise, or, as he called it, a “soft concept of modern ‘humanity.’”82 As Nietzsche saw it, in the recent past those classical scholars and philologists who could provide a more robust and precise picture of the Greeks were often anathematized by the very people with whom they should have been allied. Goethe, Schiller, and other such “artistic friends of antiquity, the warm supporters of Hellenic beauty and noble simplicity” believed classics scholars to be “the real opponents and destroyers of the ideals of antiquity.”83 While Nietzsche was not, of course, entirely satisfied with the state of classical scholarship during his lifetime, he did believe that the relationship between art and the academy could become more productive if one could somehow bring the “ideal antiquity” of Goethe and Schiller, a mere “Teutonic longing for the south,” closer to the “real antiquity” that scholars could help provide.84 Relying on a poetic figure important to Wagner and several other Germans discussed in this book, Nietzsche asked himself how one could replant the flower of antiquity in German soil. For Nietzsche the solution was to “fertilize” that soil with the work of classical scholarship: “it has now come about that the heap of ashes formerly pointed to as classical philology is now turned into fruitful and even rich soil.”85 In Siegfried, through the comparative smithing practices of Mime and Siegfried, Wagner presents us with two paradigms for Hellenizing Germany. Like Mime, certain artists try to re-forge German art by using the Greeks to solder back together the broken pieces of German myth and culture. But like Siegfried, Wagner tries to

Introduction

re-forge German art by using the Greeks to melt down the broken pieces of German myth and culture so that they can be molded anew. In this sense the Greeks are a fire, a fire which, as I hope to prove, was fed not only by Wagner’s knowledge of primary sources like Greek epic, lyric, and drama, but also secondary ones about Greek epic, lyric, and drama. It was in this fire that Wagner sought to forge many of the weapons he wielded in his Kulturkampf against the Jews, the Italians, the French, and any other group he considered Other. Exactly how and why he melted German myth and forged the Ring in the fires of ancient Greece is the point of this book.

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part i

Epic

1

Introduction: what is epic?

Of the three genres into which this book is divided, epic is possibly the most difficult to define. Perhaps more than drama and certainly more than lyric, the meaning of the word “epic” has been continually loosened by everyday speech, especially the kind of hyperbolic speech that tends to surround the film, television, and publishing industries. Every time we use epic to describe a summer blockbuster; every time we apply it to the latest mini-series; every time a story beyond two hundred pages turns out to be epic, it becomes that much harder to narrow our notion of this genre down to something more intellectually specific. It is not necessarily the case that these popular idioms do not deserve the epithet epic; genres do grow and change. But it seems we have all but forgotten that this term is something more than just a synonym for “really big.” Beyond the grander notions of its heroes and its length, we have conveniently forgotten epic’s less splendid characteristics: its wordy lists, meandering plots, and attention not just to the great things in life but also the small – minute descriptions of basics like food preparation, clothing, and other domestic affairs. This is not only an aesthetic observation. Epics like the Odyssey and the Bible were/are not merely entertaining narratives about a certain group of characters, but cultural and religious guides for their readers and listeners. Looking at this genre from the perspective of politics and not just poetry, of nation and not just narrative, national group identity is at the very core of epic. It should therefore come as no surprise that, during the process of defining its identity, a nation may begin to wonder whether or not it has a national epic. In the nineteenth century this is what happened to Germans like Hegel and Wagner. To Hegel the question may have been “only” theoretical, but to Wagner, interested in describing as well as prescribing national identity, the question of 33

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German epic was also a practical one: not only what and whether but how and when. Despite this difference in ends, though, both Wagner and Hegel sought answers to their questions about epic through the same means: the ancient Greeks. They consulted not only Homer, but also Solon, Hesiod, and Parmenides, searching among these ancient authors for a validation of their views on national identity and epic. Not surprisingly, through this search they helped to Hellenize the entire genre of epic and, through this, German national identity. HEGEL ON EPIC

It seems useful to begin an exploration of the relationship between nation and epic with the fact that for Hegel, as for many who have thought or written about this topic, epic is a very Greek genre. In his Aesthetics Hegel repeatedly cites the ancient Greeks for essentially every positive definition and example of epic. Defending this position through somewhat circular logic, Hegel argues that the Greeks and particularly the Homeric poems provide us with “the true fundamental character of epic proper” and therefore we are justified in deriving from these works the most paradigmatic traits of epic.1 Laying out a three-step process for how this genre evolved, Hegel begins his Grecocentric analysis with what he calls the first sorts of elementary epic, then proceeds to a more advanced stage, and finally culminates with “epic proper [eigentlichen Epopo¨e],” the sort of perfected epic that we usually think of when we think of epic, for example the Iliad and the Odyssey.2 Epic proper represents the culmination of epic as well as, in the case of the Iliad, the triumph of the West over the East. And while Hegel refuses to admit the possibility of an Eastern epic, yet the East remains the very thing that the Greeks must triumph over in order to define themselves as a separate culture. Without the East the West cannot say what it is not and therefore, to some extent, also what it is. The first stage in this kind of self-definition and epic development begins with the epigraph, didactic poetry, and the gnomon or maxim.

Introduction: what is epic?

Such works, from poets like Solon, Hesiod, and the Greek elegiac poets, “bring before our minds in concise language what is of eternal worth or really true in this or that object, situation, or field, and also to have a practical effect by using poetry as a tool and intertwining poetry and reality more closely.”3 As with epic in general, this early sort of epic aims to transform the discursive art of poetry into the more static art of sculpture and painting. Because of this goal of objectivity, the epic poet does not recite the poem “in such a way that it could betoken his own thoughts and living passion; but the reciter, the rhapsode, speaks it mechanically and from memory, with a measurement of the syllables which is equally uniform, nearly approaching the mechanical, rolling and flowing on in tranquil independence.”4 Evolving out of this impassive objectivity is the second stage of elementary epic. This stage includes more monumental sorts of epic: cosmogony, theogony, and versified philosophy by poets such as Hesiod, Xenophanes, and Parmenides. Distinguished from the more didactic first stage of epic by quality as well as quantity, this second stage “digs deeper and aims less at teaching and improving.”5 Here poetic didacticism grows more contemplative, and narrative begins to shape the epic material into longer stories peopled by more concrete characters. Having passed through both of these earlier stages, the genre next enters its ultimate and most perfected stage: epic proper. Hegel argues that epic proper is “the Saga, the Book, the Bible of a people, and every great and important people has such absolutely earliest books which express for it its own original spirit.”6 As a nation’s “poetic bible [poetische Bibel],” epic proper can be expected to provide “the proper foundations of a national consciousness [das Bewußtsein eines Volkes].”7 Without it a people cannot become a nation, let alone a great one. In order to create such a poetical bible the epic poet must turn to the founding myths of the nation, those moments when it first began to break away from foreign influences and to define itself as a new and separate collective entity. Updating Hegel for a new generation, these founding myths belong to what Mikhail Bakhtin would call an “absolute past.” Mixing Hegel and Bakhtin,

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one could say that in epic proper the poet does not order time according to mere chronology but according to “a specifically evaluating (hierarchical) category. In the epic world-view, ‘beginning,’ ‘first,’ ‘founder,’ ‘ancestor,’ ‘that which occurred earlier’ and so forth are not merely temporal categories but valorized temporal categories, and valorized to an extreme degree.”8 Think of the Iliad and all those fathers and grandfathers, the great heroes of previous generations who were so much stronger than the men of today; think of all the stones and boulders they could throw at their enemy, missiles and projectiles that not even two men today could heft, let alone hurl. Such memories of the past come to life in epic not merely through simple recollection but through memorialization. Their value is measured not only in aesthetic but also in political terms as a means for converting myth into national identity. The poet seeks less to create an epic about the nation than to create the nation through epic. In its function as spiritual mirror and practical guide to national identity and greatness epic proper embraces both the sacred and the profane. It chronicles the nation’s most mundane means for comfort, food, and survival, while also outlining the spiritual customs associated with the greater issues of existence, such as art, religion, and social order. Separating these “highs” and “lows” that make up the composite layers of epic proper, Hegel distinguishes between factual reality and spiritual reality. What he calls the “entirely positive [ganz positive] or factual world” includes such things as natural environment, geography, climate, and traditions associated with the everyday, like the construction of shelter and the preparation of food, while the “substance of the nation’s spiritual consciousness [die nationale Substanz des geistigen Bewußtseins]” includes the religious, the familial, the legal, and other similar kinds of more advanced cultural practices.9 In order for an epic to survive throughout the history of a nation both of these realities must retain some meaningful significance for the audience of that epic.10 With respect to factual reality the geographical locations depicted in an epic must, from generation to generation, remain within certain recognizable physical boundaries,

Introduction: what is epic?

since “nationality [Nationalita¨t] implies possession of a geographical home.”11 And in the case of persistent spiritual reality epic elements such as gods and heroes must also retain their authority. Otherwise, the significance of divine forces like fate is lost upon the national audience and the epic becomes a story to compel attention but not belief, a fiction instead of a myth. Perhaps there is no more famous image of this blending of high and low into epic totalization than Achilles’ shield. Homer imagines the entire Greek world on that divine disk. As Hegel would have it, he details “the whole sphere of the earth and human life, weddings, legal actions, agriculture, herds, etc., private wars between cities. . .”12 While stressing the importance of representing such factual and spiritual realities in a national epic, Hegel also cautions us that the mere description of these realities does not an epic proper make. Epic proper must not only describe a nation’s factual and spiritual realities, it must also set these realities in motion by creating situations where epic “collisions [Kollisionen]” can occur.13 In other words, the description of Greek national identity on Achilles’ shield is not enough to qualify the Iliad as an epic proper. Achilles must also use this shield in war. Hegel is very specific on this point. He maintains that war is the proper subject for epic proper. Only war involves the entire nation and puts into play all of its factual and spiritual realities. Geography and culture, body and spirit, food and religion – everything is at stake in war. Such a total involvement of the nation presents the epic poet with the most fecund opportunity for revealing national development and for tracing an individual action through the whole gambit of national realities. And since in war we engage with a national enemy, this engagement with difference also allows the poet to define his or her own national identity in contrast to an enemy nation. To put it briefly if somewhat paradoxically, the representation of war not only allows us to say what we are but also what we are not. The war depicted in epic must not, however, be just any old skirmish. Epics are written and epic wars fought at specific moments during a nation’s political development, neither during its veritable

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infancy nor its peak classical moment, but rather during a time of emergent national identity, when the nation is struggling to throw off the yoke of a foreign power and establish its own distinct identity out of indigenous materiality and spirituality. For Hegel, “Only when the poet, with freedom of spirit, flings off such a yoke, scrutinizes his own powers, has a worthy estimate of his own spirit, and therefore has got rid of a beclouded consciousness, can the period of epic proper dawn.”14 War, as it is depicted in epic, represents the epic nation’s struggle against the imposing influences of a foreign culture. In light of this Hegel argues that a truly epic war should be based on an objectively higher goal than simple hostility or personal vendetta. Since all epic forms tend toward objectivity, in epic proper especially the motives for war must be “grounded in a higher necessity [einer ho¨heren Notwendigkeit]”15 than a merely subjective whim. An epic war is what we might call a just war. For example, the war depicted in the Iliad would seem to be a just war – at least from the perspective of the Greeks – because it describe[s] the triumph of the West over the East, of European moderation, and the individual beauty of a reason that sets limits to itself, over Asiatic brilliance and over the magnificence of a patriarchal unity still devoid of perfect articulation or bound together so abstractly that it collapses into parts separate from one another.16

Seen from this perspective we may argue that the Trojan War is a battle between the Greek or Western way of life and an ambiguously Asian or Eastern way of life. As a chronicle of this war the Iliad represents a much broader political goal than Menelaus’ revenge against Paris for the theft and/or rape of Helen. It depicts a “turning point in world-history,”17 when the so-called humanistic values of the West, as circumscribed by Achilles’ shield, finally triumphed over the despotic values of the East, as circumscribed by the walls of Troy. Although taken from the world of drama and not epic, the famous carpet scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon concisely demonstrates what

Introduction: what is epic?

is at stake in the Trojan War as far as East versus West is concerned. Having finally returned home from the war, on the very doorstep of his palace Agamemnon is persuaded by his wife, Clytemnestra, to enter in triumph by treading on priceless purple carpets. Clytemnestra’s ostensible goal is to make her husband commit a symbolic crime that he has already committed in reality, namely, the spilling of a daughter’s royal blood. However, the tapestries’ priceless purple dye upon which Agamemnon tramples represents not only Iphigenia slain but also the children of countless other Greeks dead. By yielding to his wife’s wishes Agamemnon acts out the part of the luxurious, Oriental tyrant Priam who, as Clytemnestra goadingly predicts, “would certainly have trodden on the tapestry”18 if he had won. Although he commits this symbolic crime with an acute sense of foreboding, Agamemnon’s action renders senseless the deaths of so many Greeks who gave their lives for a victory “over Asiatic brilliance and over the magnificence of a patriarchal unity.”19 By treading on the carpets the king tramples down his own culture. But as we will see later in this book, such is often the case with Greek tragedy. It is from the perspective of civilized tragedy that a city-state like Athens looks back upon and criticizes its rude, epic past. And yet, without epic, without its heroes, there would be no city-state, no tragedy, and thus no perspective from which to look back – in anger or otherwise. For, even though an epic might fail to distinguish insider from outsider, it is still an essential step in creating national identity. WAGNER ON EPIC

In his theoretical works Richard Wagner repeatedly refers to the genre of epic as a somehow imperfect but necessary tool for inventing a collective identity and defending it against Others. As for Greek epic, like Hegel, Wagner believed that this particular genre and indeed the whole of Greek culture could only truly begin after its Kulturkampf with Asia. But even more than Hegel, Wagner saw the origins of Greek culture as tainted, from its very beginnings, by

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its contact with the East. In “Art and Revolution” he argues this perspective in highly charged language: After it had overcome the raw religion of its Asiatic birth-place, built upon the nature-forces of the earth, and had set the fair, strong manhood of freedom upon the pinnacle of its religious convictions, – the Grecian spirit, at the flowering-time of its fullest expression in the god Apollo, the head and national deity of the Hellenic race. It was Apollo, – he who had slain the Python, the dragon of Chaos; who had smitten down the vain sons of boastful Niobe by his death-dealing darts; who, through his priestess at Delphi, had proclaimed to questioning man the fundamental laws of the Grecian race and nation, thus holding up to those involved in passionate action, the peaceful, undisturbed mirror of their inmost, unchangeable Grecian nature – it was this Apollo who was the fulfiller of the will of Zeus upon the Grecian earth; who was, in fact, the Grecian people.20

As Wagner knew from his frequent reading of Karl Otfried Mu¨ller’s Dorians, the slaying of Python resulted in the defiling of Apollo, from which some mode of purification was needed.21 As Mu¨ller summarizes: “Although the destruction of the Python is characterized as a triumph of the higher and divine power of the deity, yet the victorious god was considered as polluted by the blood of the monster, and obliged to undergo a series of afflictions and woes.”22 It was these “afflictions and woes” that constituted Greece’s growing pains as it strove to cleanse itself of these contaminants through epic. This understanding of Greek epic was not merely a history lesson or a distant myth for Wagner. It was a paradigm that he mapped onto nineteenth-century Germany in his effort to rid Germany of its own enemies. Throughout his lifetime Wagner felt Germany was being besieged both inside and outside its borders, culturally as well as geographically. But he was often disappointed by certain more strictly political attempts to define Germanness against Otherness, from the 1848 Revolution and its failed attempt to bring about German unification, an attempt in which Wagner participated and for which he was exiled, to Otto von Bismarck’s military and

Introduction: what is epic?

economic attempts to unify Germany. As Michael Hughes argues in Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945, the new unified Germany proposed by Bismarck and his advocates “seemed to be devoted to strengthening those aspects of the modern world which Romantic nationalists believed were corroding the essential and distinct Germanness of Germany.”23 In Wagner’s eyes Bismarck made no provision for a spiritual redefinition of Germany that would set off this country “confined in the centre of Europe.”24 Indeed, Wagner and like-minded nationalists perceived Bismarck’s plan for urbanization and industrialization as a threat to what they saw as Germany’s essential values: “adoration of heroes and soldiers, the idealization of the rural way of life, romanticization of the past, an irrational rejection of modernity, deep pessimism about the future and a total rejection of foreigners and foreign ideas.”25 It is partly through national characteristics like these that Wagner linked Germany with what he perceived as the simple, natural, and unassuming dignity of ancient Greece.26 In fact, Karl Otfried Mu¨ller’s description in The Dorians of particularly Doric characteristics – their pride in the past, warlike nature, slowness to change – could just as easily be applied to Wagner’s conception of Germany. Like the Dorians, Wagner’s Germany put a premium on unity, rootedness, uniformity, and mistrust of foreigners – not to mention the fact that German speech patterns, like Doric ones, might best be described as not soft but rather commanding. Moreover, one could say that both the Doric and the German states valued the old over the new, the masculine over the feminine, and war over peace.27 Repeating Jonathan Hall’s argument about these “New Dorians,” Goldhill notes, “This image of the Dorian race – ‘uncannily Protestant’ – ran throughout German construction of Aryanism, to the extent that the blond Dorians, most Nordic of Greeks, racially most pure, became privileged ancestors of the German race.”28 Beyond these similarities of character, there is also a similarity of geographical situation between Germany and that most famous of Doric states, Sparta.29 Like Germany, hemmed in by its European neighbors, Sparta, as the most inland of all the city-states in the Peloponnese,

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was also hemmed in by its neighbors and surrounded on all sides by hostile forces.30 But if these were the characteristics that defined Germany then what exactly were the ones that Wagner thought he was fighting against? In his 1865 essay “What is German?” Wagner warned Germany against the evils of certain outside influences that had a particular racial profile for him. In this essay Wagner specifically labels the menace Jewish: In this singular phenomenon, this invasion of the German nature by an utterly alien element, there is more than meets the eye. Here, however, we will only notice that other nature in so far as its conjunction with us obliges us to become quite clear as to what we have to understand by the “German” nature which it exploits. – It everywhere appears to be the duty of the Jew, to shew the nations of modern Europe where haply there may be a profit they have overlooked, or not made use of.31

This idea is by no means anomalous in Wagner’s thinking. Again and again in his theoretical works and his musical works we repeatedly encounter this trope of Jewish invasion and the need to repulse it. Like the noble and simple Greeks, purportedly threatened by the luxurious and egotistical East, Wagner believed that Germany was threatened by a very similar enemy. Casting him as a neo-Trojan force, Wagner believed the Jewish “hero of the Bourse,” with all his Eastern “luxury and extravagance,” constantly threatened German national identity. In short, Wagner believed that as Greece was to the east-Asian, so Germany was to the bourgeois-Jew. Although the name of this enemy changed slightly from time to time – Jewish, Italian, French, and/or bourgeois – Wagner included all such “foreigners” in what Michael P. Steinberg aptly calls his “fantasmatic lineup of cultural criminals,” and he regarded it as his main mission to provide an artistic way of teaching other Germans how to recognize and rid their country of such bad influences.32 In the final scene of Die Meistersinger von Nu¨rnberg, for example, Hans Sachs warns Walther of a time when “the German people and kingdom/[may] decay under a false foreign [welscher] ruler.”33

Introduction: what is epic?

Wagner’s word choice of “welsch” and its juxtaposition against “deutsch” in Sachs’s final speech is significant. Not only does this word “welsch” signify foreignness in general, it also refers to Italian and French foreignness in particular. And, to the nineteenth-century German audience who would have been living in that future where German authenticity had purportedly decayed, Wagner enunciates his cultural enemies quite clearly. They are the Italians and the French, the hucksters of grand opera who have lured the Germans away from their older, simpler traditions, seducing them with opulence, luxury, and rootless convention just as Beckmesser, with his bombastic, convention-bound songs, tries to woo Eva away from Walther. In order to give similar warnings in the Ring Wagner turned to certain Nordic founding stories that resembled their Greek cousins. One of his main sources was the Nibelungenlied, what the anti-Semitic Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, responsible for the 1816 edition of this epic, called the “German ur- and tribal-saga.”34 As David Levin recounts in The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, since the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the Nibelungenlied was reintroduced to German culture, this epic had been appropriated numerous times in numerous guises and repeatedly drafted into the service of forming and reforming German national identity.35 German politicians, artists, and scholars alike all used the Nibelungenlied to try to reveal to Germany and to the world its own distinct national identity and, conversely, what was emphatically not part of this identity. In 1849, after the failed 1848 Revolution, when Wagner wrote his essay, “The Wibelungen: World-History as Told in Saga,” he too interpreted the Nibelungenlied in national and revolutionary terms for Germany, viewing property and power as antithetical and foreign to the supposedly German spirit of love and love of nature. Similarly, the Ring itself clearly depicts a world constantly under fire and repeatedly in need of redemption. Tainted by the deeds of Alberich, Fafner, Mime, and Hagen, and betrayed at the hands of Wotan, Bru¨nnhilde, Siegmund, and Siegfried, the world of the Ring mirrors Germany and its “cultural criminals.” But with the help of Hegel and

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the Greeks, in the Ring Wagner also seeks to represent Germany’s relationship to a nobler past, to shape its emergent national identity, and to depict the realities of this identity in a manner both concrete and recognizable to its national audience. As the next three chapters aim to demonstrate, this use of Greek epic not only shaped the Ring as a whole, but especially Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re, the first two operas of this epic cycle. Wagner’s deployment of Greek epic took place at the level of form, with respect to the way he used epic as a model for the libretto of the entire Ring (chapter 2) and his leitmotif technique (chapter 3), as well as at the level of content, with respect to the way he Hellenized various Nordic factual and spiritual realities in order to further his didactic goal of shaping German national identity according to his Romantic and sometimes racist ideals (chapter 4). Through such Hellenization of his German epic sources, Wagner sought to create in the Ring a kind of national, poetic bible for the German people, something better than Bismarck or the failed 1848 Revolution had offered das Volk: a means to unify Germany and so console and consolidate it during a time of general upheaval.

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Retrospective narrative and the epic process

The influences of Greek epic, lyric, and drama can be found both in the whole and the individual parts of the Ring cycle. Wagner not only patterned each particular opera after a particular genre, he also wove the threads of each genre throughout the whole of the cycle. This is most clearly the case with his use of epic. To many a Wagner scholar and Wagner fan alike, the whole of the Ring seems epic in scope. So much so, that Herbert Lindenberger in his study of operatic excess, Opera: The Extravagant Art, claims, “No work in any art form of the last two centuries, with the exception of a few sprawling novels and films, invites the term epic as readily as the Ring.”1 For Lindenberger as for others, the epic nature of the Ring resides in its monumentalism as measured from multiple perspectives: time (length of time to plan, write, and perform), size (numbers of performers and space needed), and ideas (claims to universality of message and the greatness of its creator).2 All of these measurements certainly invite accolades of epic grandeur for the Ring. Further inspired by this Wagnerian monumentalism, we might also be tempted to call the Ring an epic because of the cosmic reach of its plot. According to the Aristotelian definition of epic versus tragic plot, “tragedy endeavors as far as possible to keep within one revolution of the sun . . . whereas the epic is without restriction as to time and herein differs from tragedy. . .”3 Insofar as the Ring begins with the rising of the very first sun and ends with the setting of what might well be the last, this certainly makes for an epic plot. But it is not just in the finished product that the plot of the Ring is epic. It is also epic in terms of its process, that is, the way in which Wagner created the plot for the cycle by reaching further and further back in time to find the ultimate cause of the world’s end in its beginning. Looked at in this way, the Ring reveals a kind of monumentalism of causality. 45

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It is a well-established fact that Wagner wrote the whole of the Ring’s libretto in reverse, beginning with the end and working his way back toward the beginning, a technique that Thomas Mann once labeled “epic radicalism.” And if it were simply the case that, through such a process, Wagner had transformed epic into opera, this might make for an interesting study of cross-genre translation and perhaps little else. But Wagner’s creative process was much more contradictory and his goals more politically far-reaching. Despite this practical deployment of epic, in his theoretical works Wagner wrote numerous and heated diatribes against narrative in general and epic in particular. And yet upon closer examination of these writings one finds that, while Wagner often criticizes narrative and epic in general, what he very rarely criticizes are the epics of Homer, especially the Odyssey. By reading the Odyssey against Wagner’s theoretical writings about and his practical use of epic in constructing the Ring’s libretto, we can begin to see that Wagner aimed to do for Germany what he believed Homer had done for Greece, namely, to provide his nation with what Hegel calls a kind of “poetical bible rooted in the sagas and myths of its people and their collective past.” This is evident not only in the finished product of the Ring but also the process whereby it was written, a process that involves the tracing of Siegfried’s fatal wound back to the origins of time itself. ODYSSEUS’ TELLTALE SCAR

To better understand the epic process behind the writing of the Ring’s libretto it may be helpful to establish a paradigm for this process, a paradigm that, perhaps not incidentally, involves another wound suffered by another hero from another epic. In Book XIX of the Odyssey, after ten years of war against the Trojans followed by ten years of wandering the Aegean, Odysseus finally washes up on his home shore. But instead of finding an orderly household, he meets scores of suitors loitering on his doorstep, besieging both his home and his wife, vying for the wealth of one by seeking the hand of

Retrospective narrative and the epic process

the other. Trusting neither in the constancy of his wife nor his household servants, before revealing himself to anyone Odysseus resolves to discover who has remained faithful to him during his long absence and who has not. To help him carry out this reconnaissance mission, Athena disguises him in the rags of an old beggar, a costume not too far from the reality of Odysseus’ present position as the vagabond veteran of a war that ended a decade ago. In this disguise Odysseus receives hospitable treatment from his wife, Penelope, and his childhood nurse, Eurykleia, who even treats the putative beggar to a bath. During this pivotal bathing scene, the friction between hero and poet is responsible for much of the scene’s dramatic – and comic – tension. At the precise moment that Odysseus is trying so desperately to conceal himself, the poet seems to be trying just as desperately, through his intermediary, the nurse Eurykleia, to reveal him. The exact site of this dispute between concealment and revelation is the surface of Odysseus’ skin. More precisely, it is the scar from a wound he received from a wild boar while still a young man. Engaging a trope that would be used throughout both literary and social history – evidence writ on the body as proof of personal identity – this scar links Odysseus’ past with his present. It reveals that the old man whom Eurykleia bathes now is the same person whom, as a young boy, she bathed then. Fearing that this truth may spill out and his mission miscarry, Odysseus endeavors to turn away from Eurykleia and to cover up the scar. Meanwhile, as Eurykleia continues to bathe him, washing off layer after layer of dirt and dust, she keeps up a running commentary on the remarkable similarities between present beggar and past master. To make matters worse (and slightly more comical), Odysseus’ telltale scar is on his inner thigh. Both its origins from a boar tusk and its proximity to his genitalia mark the scar as a site of invagination, suggesting something faintly feminine and “loose-lipped” about this particular lesion and, by association, Odysseus himself. Moreover, it is not only the feminine nature of the scar but also the masculine nature of the phallus that has Odysseus worried. Semi-comical and sexually tense,

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the scene may even seem to occasion some arousal on Odysseus’ part: as his childhood nurse gently bathes him, “he thought in his heart that, as she handled him,/she might be aware of the scar, and all his story might come out.”4 Ejaculatory and/or leaking, masculine and/or feminine, either way Odysseus worries that through the ministrations of his nurse his story will come gushing forth and with it his true identity. Interpreted as elements not only of this particular episode but also of Greek epic in general, the plot device of the scar may be characterized as aesthetically androgynous. Conceiving of the lesion left behind by the boar as the scene’s feminine side, the body’s natural healing process becomes more than a convincing metaphor for poetic closure. It actually helps provide closure by catalyzing recognition. But rather than exploiting this recognition scene only for its dramatic potential as climax and conclusion, the epic poet avoids a “quick curtain” by embarking upon a long and detailed narrative of the scar’s history. At the precise moment that the whole epic could potentially come to an end and be swiftly wrapped up, it is torn open again by the narrative intrusion of the boar tusk. As the masculine element in this scene, the tusk intrudes upon the plot and causes it to “bleed” narrative. Contrary to our expectations about dramatic compression and exigency, this narrative episode turns out to be no mere summary provided only for the sake of hurrying the plot along to its inevitable conclusion. On the contrary. It becomes a leisurely, seventy-four-line jaunt that thoroughly and precisely details countless tiny circumstances and causes surrounding Odysseus’ old wound. In fact it is through this retrospective narrative that Homer uncovers the origins not only of his hero’s scar but also his hero: how Odysseus inherited his penchant for trickery from his maternal grandfather; how it was he, Autolykos, that named Odysseus; how the geography of Odysseus’ homeland is laid out; how Odysseus was wounded during a boar hunt just as he was about to kill the boar; how Odysseus’ parents reacted when they heard of their son’s misadventure; and so on. All in all, this episode accounts for many, apparently superfluous, spiritual and physical realities that

Retrospective narrative and the epic process

go into the making of our hero’s origins and identity, but especially his prehistory before the epic even begins and how that prehistory contributes to the situation in which the hero now finds himself. Truly, Odysseus’ old wound is a telltale scar. In his famous analysis of this exhaustive episode in Mimesis, Erich Auerbach observes that the Greek epic aesthetic demands here that Homer “leave nothing which [he] mentions half in darkness and unexternalized.”5 Referring to the whole genre of epic rather than just this one episode, in Wagner’s much-loved Dorians Karl Otfried Mu¨ller argues that unlike lyric, which is best known for “expressing inward feelings,” epic is known for “describing outward objects.”6 When confronted with the merest shadow of interiority, in the bodily shape of a scar or the narrative shape of its undisclosed origins, the epic poet feels it necessary to make full disclosure. Thus, in the tale of the scar, Homer strives to leave nothing to the imagination in his attempt to externalize all circumstances and causes leading up to the scar and, not incidentally, the identity, ancestry, and homeland of his hero as well. This is so true, in fact, that the epic presence of Odysseus’ origins eventually upstages the dramatic presence of his return and recognition. It is as if the mere mention of this wounding by a boar’s tusk occasions a kind of anxiety for the epic poet. Having unearthed a detail with which his audience is unfamiliar, the poet feels compelled to fill in its history and thus level the playing field of time, raising an apparently unimportant detail from the past to the same height as a dramatic moment in the present. Then and only then, after revealing the connections between the personal and the national identity of its hero, can the entire epic end and political and social order be restored to Ithaca. SIEGFRIED’S EPIC WOUND

Approximately 2,000 years after this narrative goring of Odysseus, another hero in another epic was similarly wounded. The hero was Siegfried and the epic the Ring cycle, or rather the original libretto

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for the Ring cycle, Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death). And although it may only be a coincidence, there is a boar in this story as well. However, here the boar does not actually do the attacking, he is only emblematic of the attacker, Hagen. But this detail, along with the fact that Siegfried suffers his fatal attack during a boar hunt, no doubt inspires Hagen’s initial prevarication that it was a wild boar, not he, that killed Siegfried. The truth, though, will out. Hagen is quick to admit responsibility for the murder. Although he gives as his reason the fact that Siegfried swore a false oath, yet we as the audience know that he has killed Siegfried because he wanted to take from him the ring of the Nibelung. Shortly after this admission of guilt there follows a fairly classical re-establishing of social order through the necessary deletion of those who have disrupted it. Gudrune (in the final draft of the Ring, Gutrune) the bourgeois seductress swoons, presumably to death, as so many opera heroines have done before her. Gunther, the emasculated hero, is stabbed by Hagen. Bru¨nnhilde, defiler of the patriarchy, is burned alive. And Hagen, the unnatural bastard, drowns in the river Rhine, an elemental force of nature and symbolic stand-in for Germany. These deaths in turn precipitate the return of the ring to its rightful owners, the Rhinedaughters. At the bottom of the Rhine the ring is then presumably further restored to its original state as an unformed lump of gold, thus providing closure to the story by returning the world to an equilibrium that pre-existed Alberich’s initial theft of the Rhinegold. Like Odysseus’ wound, Siegfried’s wound, although open, paradoxically serves as a catalyst for closure. This set of causes and its attendant sense of closure did not, however, seem to satisfy Richard Wagner. And so he began to seek for the more ancient causes of Siegfried’s death by writing three prequels to Siegfrieds Tod (which eventually became Go¨tterda¨mmerung, the final opera in the finished Ring cycle). Beginning with Siegfried’s wound and working his way backward in time, like Homer Wagner tries to raise the past to at least the same level of importance as the present. Along the way, remembrance threatens to overwhelm experience as this epic occasion for anxiety even

Retrospective narrative and the epic process

exceeds that of Homer. While the revelation of the scar in Homer leads to a mere seventy-four-line retrospective narrative, in Wagner Siegfried’s wound leads to the writing of some of the longest operas in the repertoire, not to mention a four-opera cycle some twenty-five years in the making.7 The story of its making, in brief, is this. After completing the first draft of Siegfrieds Tod Wagner grew worried about whether he had told the audience enough to help them understand the true significance of Siegfried’s death. He concluded that he had not and so began to recount Siegfried’s prehistory in another libretto, Der junge Siegfried (The Young Siegfried, in the final draft, Siegfried). Despite the fact that Siegfrieds Tod begins with a narrative that reaches back to Alberich’s initial theft of the Rhinegold, despite the fact that Siegfried narrates a story concerning his own origins, and despite the libretto’s many other stories about the past, this chain of narrative causality did not satisfy Wagner’s valuation of origin myths as explanatory and binding. He therefore altered his plans for this opera and decided to represent the events leading up to Siegfried’s death in an even more thoroughgoing way. In early May of 1851, on the very day that he finished writing the prose sketch for Siegfrieds Tod, Wagner wrote a letter to his friend, Theodor Uhlig, announcing his intention to compose a prefatory work to this libretto in order better to fill in the background story he thought the audience needed to grasp fully the significance of Siegfried’s death. As it turned out, this prefatory work grew exponentially as Siegfried’s fatal wound led to Der junge Siegfried, Die Walku¨re, and Das Rheingold, meaning that, in effect, Wagner wrote the libretto for the Ring in reverse. Through these three prequels he was able to probe not only the origins of Siegfried and his wound, but also the origins of Siegfried’s parents, his future lover, and the gods themselves. In other words, as with Homer Wagner felt it necessary to reach back into the past, to a time before his hero was even born, in order to explain why his hero was wounded. The narrative flow issuing from the wound overcomes the dramatic barriers of Siegfried’s own personal

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history and, with its drive to externalize the causes and meaning behind Siegfried’s wound, the Ring even outdoes the Odyssey. With the opening of Das Rheingold Wagner eventually traces Siegfried’s death back to the origins of time itself, as represented by the static repetition of E-flat arpeggios rolling endlessly through the orchestra.8 EPIC THEORY VS. EPIC PRACTICE

If it were merely the case that during the process of writing these libretti Wagner had not theorized about his artistic endeavors and was intent only on the practical means for transforming epic into opera this would probably be a much less problematic example of the transcodification of literature into music.9 But this is not the case. Wagner was nothing if not both self-justifying and self-contradictory. Although he deployed epic in the writing of the Ring’s libretto, nevertheless in treatises, letters, and other works Wagner repeatedly argues that epic fell far short of drama in a number of important ideological and aesthetic ways. First and foremost, he claims that as a species of narrative, epic makes a less immediate, sensual impact upon its audience than drama does. For Wagner, drama is a living artwork, both in the sense that those who act in it are alive and in the sense that drama is still an evolving genre.10 But because narratives are mental constructs made out of words and ideas rather than actions and people, they intrude themselves between an audience and their aesthetic experience. For these reasons narrative in general seems overly “intellectual.” In every kind of narrative, including epic, the artist’s message must be filtered through the audience’s mind. Therefore epic often tends to be a “narrating, depicting, literary poem, appealing to the imagination and not the senses.”11 Through epic we do not see, we do not experience a story. We only imagine it. By contrast, Wagner considered drama to be much more direct. Even though it too uses words, drama puts actions and characters right before the audience’s eyes and ears. Distinguishing between these two genres in Opera and Drama, Wagner maintains

Retrospective narrative and the epic process

that drama is the more evolved, the more perfected art form. Whereas epic only celebrates the deeds of heroes, drama re-enacts them.12 Judged on the basis of tangibility, drama supersedes epic through its inherently ostensible form. Drama is, in other words, more real than epic, which forever must remain in the less physical, more mediated regions of the mind. Applying these general critiques of epic to the particular case of Siegfrieds Tod, Wagner expressed his frustration with this genre in the above-mentioned letter to Theodor Uhlig. He further complained to Uhlig that, after finishing the libretto for Siegfrieds Tod, when he finally sat down to write the music, he realized how imperfect the libretto was: I felt how incomplete was the product I had planned: all that remained of the vast overall context – which alone can give the characters their enormous, striking significance – was epic narration [epische Erza¨hlung] and a retelling of events on a purely conceptual level.13

Even as late as 1879, after the Ring had been completed and one might reasonably suppose Wagner to have realized just how much of it still depended upon epic narrative, in his essay “Poetry and Composition” he once again took the opportunity to rail against almost every famous epic written since the Middle Ages. Dante, Ariosto, Cervantes, and Scott each come in for special scorn and scant praise. In essence this aesthetic critique is really just a continuation of the anti-epic argument Wagner began long before, in Opera and Drama, where he complains about Virgil as well as these other authors.14 To Wagner it seemed that all such epic poets were “merely” literary artists. Not only were their epics composed for dumb reading, they were constructed through an “unconscious fashioning of Nature’s” and did not involve any kind of divine inspiration from the gods or popular sanction by das Volk.15 Even Homer it seems, through no fault of his own, at last fell prey to this literariness. With the rise of tragedy came the fall of epic, as a dead literary genre replaced a living one. In “The

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Art-Work of the Future,” Wagner writes the following aesthetic obituary for Greek epic: For while those pedants and professors in the Prince’s castle [the court of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus] were laboring at the construction of a literary Homer, pampering their own unproductivity with their marvel at their wisdom, by aid of which they yet could only understand the thing that long had passed from life, Thespis had already slid his cart to Athens, had set it up beside the palace walls, dressed out his stage and, stepping from the chorus of the Folk, had trodden its planks; no longer did he shadow forth the deeds of heroes, as in the Epos, but in these heroes’ guise enacted them.16

By the time tragedy was born in fifth-century Athens, epic was already dead. Wagner derisively labels it a “literary” genre that fascinates only the elite intelligentsia with a shadow play, as opposed to drama, an artwork for das Volk that physically re-creates its heroes’ actions on the living stage. Here Wagner proclaims epic a lifeless and dusty art fit only for the dissection of scholars. It is of no use either to the artist or das Volk. Moreover, as this passage implies, if epic was already dead for fifth-century Greeks, then it would certainly be dead for nineteenthcentury Germans. Thus, alongside the above-mentioned epic authors the composer also includes the useless mass of nineteenth-century epic poetry “thrown upon the market” and then set to music “by composers who still have a bone to pick with opera.”17 Slipping from aesthetics into politics, in “Judaism in Music” Wagner even characterizes the epic process of retrospective narrative as Semitic anathema. The artist who works by looking backward into the past is an overly intellectual and fundamentally un-German artist. He is a Jewish “thinker” and “backward-looking poet.”18 The true German poet is the prophet who foretells what is yet to come, while “[t]he cultured Jew stands alone, alien and unfeeling, in the midst of a society which he does not understand, whose aspirations and endeavors he does not share, and whose history and development are a matter of mere indifference to him.”19 For Wagner, the Jew is without roots in German culture and cannot reach forward or upward, unlike German poets, who are firmly planted in the Nordic

Retrospective narrative and the epic process

tradition and language. Instead, the Jew can only try to understand German culture by delving into its origins and historical roots. From such an analytical technique, however, there can be no spontaneous flowering of poetry. Thus the Jew is condemned to sift fruitlessly through the past, going back as far as possible in order to find logical and causal links between now and then, and yet failing to find anything of truth or beauty.20 Given these aesthetic and ideological critiques of epic, along with Wagner’s obvious use of epic in the writing of the Ring’s libretto, some kind of compromise between practice and theory would seem to be in order. And by November 20, 1851, Wagner had apparently worked out the means for this compromise and recorded his thoughts in a letter to Franz Liszt. He decided he would retain the important content of the Ring’s epic narratives but convert them into dramatic form: In both these dramas [Der junge Siegfried and Siegfrieds Tod] a wealth of necessary allusions was left simply in narrative form [Erza¨hlung] or else had to be worked out for himself by the listener: everything that gives the intrigue and the characters of these two dramas their infinitely moving and far-reaching significance would have had to be omitted from the stage action and communicated on a merely conceptual level . . . In order to be perfectly understood, I must therefore communicate my entire myth, in its deepest and widest significance, with total artistic clarity; no part of it should have to be supplied by the audience’s having to think about it or reflect on it; every unbiased human feeling must be able to grasp the whole through its organs of artistic perception, because only then can it properly absorb the least detail.21

By converting his narrative forms into dramatic forms, Wagner aimed to communicate their epic significance with the utmost “artistic clarity” and “detail” by appealing not only to the audience’s mind but also their “feeling”: Thanks to the clarity of presentation which will thus have been made possible [by staging these moments], I shall now – by discarding, at the same time, all the narration-like passages which are now so extensive or else by compressing them into a number of much more concise

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It was through this transformation of epic into drama, therefore, that Wagner apparently tried to reconcile his theory with his practice. However, this solution still does not negate the fact that, in the process of writing the Ring’s libretto in reverse, Wagner employed an essentially epic technique. Nor can such claims about ridding the Ring of epic be believed by anybody even remotely familiar with the Ring in its finished state. The numerous narrative sequences that riddle the cycle are infamous. Like the Sorcerer’s apprentice, in his furious effort to put the axe to his unruly epic episodes it seems that Wagner succeeded only in multiplying their number. In addition, the resultant episodes very often seem entirely redundant. Time and again they apparently do little more than remind with narrative what the audience has already witnessed as drama. To take only one among many examples, in Go¨tterda¨mmerung several characters tell the story of Siegfried’s life. This fact did not escape the notice of Wagner’s greatest Irish critic and fan, George Bernard Shaw. In The Perfect Wagnerite Shaw impishly accuses Wagner of a “mania for autobiography,” impugning his penchant for twice-told tales as a violation of one of the most basic rules of experienced playwrighting, that “persons must not come on the stage in the second act and tell one another at great length what the audience has already seen pass before its eyes in the first act.”23 But despite Shaw’s and indeed Wagner’s own injunctions against such repetitive narrative, Shaw sees Siegfried inflict on everyone he meets the story of Mimmy [sic] and the dragon, although the audience have spent the whole evening witnessing the events he is narrating. Hagen tells the story to Gunther; and the same night Alberic’s [sic] ghost tells it to Hagen, who knows it already as well as the audience. Siegfried tells the Rhine maidens as much of it as they will listen to, and then keeps telling it to his hunting companions until they kill him.24

Retrospective narrative and the epic process

While his analysis overstates the case with respect to Siegfried as Nestoresque storyteller buttonholing all he meets and boring them to death with biography, Shaw’s exasperation does register a certain truth about the preponderance of narrative – especially twice-told tales – in the Ring. In the final analysis it seems that Wagner not only employed an epic technique in his writing of the Ring’s libretto, but also, by using such a technique, he failed to achieve what he apparently intended as the goal of his pursuit of the origins of Siegfried’s wound: to convert into dramatic form what he disparagingly labeled a kind of “halb epische Darstellung”25 or “half-epic drama.” So apparent is this practical failure to carry out his own theoretical plans that Carolyn Abbate has called this “the great paradox in the Ring’s history, and what many consider to be the great flaw in its text: that the narratives, despite Wagner’s glee over their elimination, were kept.”26 PREVIOUS SOLUTIONS TO “THE GREAT PARADOX”

Confronted by such seemingly obvious contradictions between Wagnerian theory and Wagnerian practice, many critics have set out to solve this paradox. Some have dealt with the problem simply by excluding Wagner’s theoretical works from the discussion.27 Others, despite being more thorough in their investigations and having consulted Wagner’s theoretical works, nonetheless conclude that this is yet another case where the Master simply did not practice what he preached.28 According to this argument Wagner was simply an artistic opportunist. Whenever the ends justified the means, his scruples left by the back door.29 One of the more famous and convincing examples of this interpretive strategy can be found in Thomas Mann’s essay, “Richard Wagner and the Ring.” In this essay Mann asks himself why, despite theoretical principles to the contrary, did Wagner write the Ring libretto in reverse, using the technique referred to above as “epic radicalism.” The answer: Wagner violated his theoretical principles because he could not have written the music for Siegfrieds Tod using his main compositional

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method, the leitmotif technique, if he did not first write about the events leading up to Siegfried’s death. Since the leitmotif method depends upon precedents, by beginning with the end of someone’s life (Siegfried’s in Siegfrieds Tod), Wagner effectively prevented himself from using this “historically” based musical technique. If there were no history behind Siegfried, there could be no leitmotifs and therefore no music. While this argument does make a certain amount of sense, it does not actually reconcile theory and practice but rather justifies the neglect of theory for the sake of practice, which once again, considering the sheer quantity of Wagner’s opinions about narrative, epic, and drama, not to mention the passion with which certain of these claims are repeated over and over again (even after the Ring was completed), risks pushing reverence for art to the point of disdain for theory. At least in the case of the Ring’s relationship to epic, it seems that what possessed Wagner was not only the finished artwork but also a complex mixture of aesthetic theory, practice, and politics. Recognizing the importance of at least the theoretical and practical parts of this mixture, other critics have tried to reconcile these two elements of Wagner’s creation. Two of the more interesting attempts along these lines were made by Carolyn Abbate in Unsung Voices and James Treadwell in “The Ring and the Conditions of Interpretation.” Both of these solutions essentially put forth the idea that Wagner neglected his theories about epic for more important theories about his potential audience. Abbate justifies Wagner’s use of narrative by arguing that he deliberately did not stage certain things because he wanted the audience to use their imagination to fill in the sensual gaps left behind by the words.30 More interested in audience interpretation than imagination, Treadwell sees Wagner’s use of narrative as a means of hermeneutically engaging the audience, inviting them to consider their own interpretive process as they watch and listen to the Ring.31 Although interesting and appealing, both of these solutions fail to confront and account for Wagner’s stated drive for dramatic immediacy. There seems to be no doubt that Wagner theoretically preferred drama to epic because

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he believed that drama engages us more directly, at the level of the senses rather than the intellect. And it was at this level of the senses that Wagner wanted the Ring to engage his audience, not at the level of the imagination (Abbate) or reason (Treadwell). Criticizing Treadwell and Abbate along similar lines, David Levin offers a more satisfactory solution to the paradox. In his Dramaturgy of Disavowal Levin argues that Wagner did not sacrifice his theoretical principles through his use of narrative. Rather, he used narrative in the Ring in order to demonstrate his theoretical arguments against this genre, revealing not only that it was a lesser artistic form than drama but that it could also be destructive to individuals and to society as a whole. Adopting Melanie Klein’s use of the term “bad object,” Levin argues that in Wagner’s Ring, narrative becomes representation’s bad object. It is not just simply another technique deployed by Wagner in order to complete his work. Rather, narrative is used and exhibited in order to serve as a negative example of a certain kind of genre. The Ring does not “merely figure this aesthetic impediment, [it] figures it in order to disavow it.”32 Thus the title of Levin’s book, The Dramaturgy of Disavowal. What is so compelling about this argument is that Levin not only reads and retains Wagnerian practice and theory, he does so by addressing a key factor that is too often forgotten by other critics, namely, Wagnerian politics. Levin proves that certain kinds of narrative get associated with certain characters, like Alberich and Hagen, who exhibit stereotypical Jewish traits. The reason to include such narratives in this opera is to educate the audience, to teach them how to recognize the “bad object” of narrative and why it must be expunged from the Ring in order to purify opera, just as the Jew must be expunged from Germany in order to purify society. While not exactly disagreeing with Levin’s argument or with his methodological introduction of Wagnerian politics, I will take a somewhat different approach that is more particular in one sense and more general in another.33 In this and the following two chapters on Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re I will be concerned with a particular species of narrative that Wagner uses in the Ring and theorizes

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about in his prose works, namely, Homeric epic, and with a more general kind of ideological force behind Wagner’s anti-Semitism, namely, nationalism. A NEW SOLUTION TO THE PARADOX

The first step in offering this new solution to the problem of Wagnerian dramatic theory versus Wagnerian narrative practice is to be more specific about what exactly Wagner meant by narrative. While it certainly seems fair to believe, as Levin and others do, that Wagner directed his disapprobation at narrative (Erza¨hlung) in general and his approbation at drama (Darstellung) in general, yet, in the pivotal letters to Uhlig and Liszt cited above Wagner not only opposes narrative and drama, he also joins the two through his use of the word “epic.” For example, when discussing with Liszt his solution to the problem of using too much narrative in the early stages of writing the Ring’s libretto, he joins the words “epic” and “drama” in the phrase, “half-epic drama [halb epische Darstellung].”34 What this phrase suggests, through its somewhat Hegelian synthesis of the two genres, is that Wagner was less interested in ridding the Ring of his half-hearted attempts at “epic drama” and more interested in turning it into a whole-hearted attempt, voll epische Darstellung, as it were. But not just any kind of epic would satisfy Wagner. It would have to be modeled on Greek epic, Homeric in fact. Abbate, Treadwell, and Levin each fail to point out that Wagner did not always speak disparagingly of every kind of narrative or every kind of epic. While it is true that he did tend to find fault with almost every epic poet, yet, as mentioned earlier, from his youth upward Wagner displayed an avid interest in and a lasting respect for one epic poet above all others: Homer.35 Interestingly, although Wagner certainly admired Homer’s artistry, that is not all he admired about him. Unlike the other epic poets Wagner mentions – Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, and Scott – according to Wagner Homer was no mere “artist.” True, he was a poet, but as Wagner saw it the aesthetic form that his ideas attained through epic was only a

Retrospective narrative and the epic process

secondary goal. As recorded by Cosima in 1869, Wagner thought that with Homer, as opposed to the Greek tragedians, “one does not notice the art.”36 Homer was something more than an artist. Clarifying this a little later in the Diaries, Wagner uses an analogy: “what Shakespeare is to men of letters, Homer must more or less have been to priests.”37 Neither poet nor priest but better by virtue of combining the best parts of each into himself, Homer was that rare person known as a seer and, “as ‘seer,’ [he] saw not the actual but the true, sublime above all actualizing; and the act of his being able to relate it so faithfully to hearkening men that to them it seemed as clear and tangible as anything their hands had ever seized – this turned the seer to Poet [my emphases].”38 The truth, Wagner seems to say, when expressed by a seer of Homer’s stature, need not be expressed in a way that is actually tangible to the senses. Reading this statement in light of Wagner’s championing of drama, we may conclude that, despite their form as narrative, for Wagner Homer’s epics were as true and immediately graspable by the senses as drama was. They were, to borrow once more the terminology of his letter to Liszt, full-fledged epic dramas. But again, it is important to stress here that in these analyses Wagner was not only talking about the dramatic aspects of Homer’s rhetorical method. True, as Wagner once remarked to Cosima, the “interrelated” compactness of the plot in the Iliad makes this epic seem dramatic (even more so than the Odyssey).39 Moreover, as Hegel, Mu¨ller, and Auerbach each point out and as Wagner knew, Homeric rhetoric deals mainly in external objects or in externalizing those objects that are internal, thus making this genre, one might say, functionally dramatic.40 But the key to achieving a reality comparable to Homer’s accomplishments could not, Wagner believed, be achieved simply by copying Homer’s narrative style. In the first place, one would have to be somehow touched by the gods, and in the second place chosen by the people to be their prophet, their seer. Both of these things, it is true, were beyond Wagner’s control (although I have no doubt that he thought himself both popularly and divinely appointed to the task). So what else

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could Wagner do to make his epic more dramatic, more Homeric? The answer to this question comes, in part, from his essay, “On Poetry and Composition,” where he argues that Homer’s drive to seek “the genuine epic fount” of his nation’s culture led him to the “tales and sagas of the Folk alone, where we find it still entirely undisturbed by art.”41 The choice of a phrase like “tales and sagas of the Folk” seems anything but innocent here. By using it, Wagner is in all likelihood referring not only to the Greek myths that Homer deployed in his epics but also the various medieval sources that he himself mined for the Ring and other operas, such as the “tales and sagas” of the Nibelungenlied and the Edda or the German fables and myths that he sifted through on his epic journey backward from Siegfried’s wound to the beginning of time. Here was a plan for epic that agreed with Wagner’s own. By digging up these medieval sources, Wagner could unearth the pagan roots of his cultural heritage, the dark strata that he believed lay still untouched by other traditions, such as Christianity, the religion Wagner blames for uprooting and splintering the tree of Germanic myth and leaving behind only “a monstrous mass of actions.”42 To rescue and replant similar stories at the center of his culture was what Wagner thought Homer had done for Greece and what he was trying to do for Germany, to be a combination poet and priest, to be, in a word, a seer. By looking at epic as not just a set of aesthetic methods consisting of various narrative conventions but as an ideological end, it becomes compatible with drama and drama’s purpose. Not only may the creative processes of epic and dramatic poets both include the mythopoetic sifting and stitching together of national myths to create a tangible reality for their audiences, they might also share the same political ends. Equating the duty of these two types of poet in Opera and Drama, Wagner claims that the highest goal of the epic poet is “to arrest the frenzied downfall of [the] nation,” as the Greek tragedians had once sought to do, or, like Shakespeare, to show the “world its utter emptiness, its violence and horror.”43 With regard to the content of the Ring, Wagner sought to fulfill these goals

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explicitly, both through the creation of his heroes and the world in which (and sometimes against which) they operate. These heroes, especially Wotan, Siegmund, Siegfried, and Bru¨nnhilde, are essentially revolutionaries, exemplars of what Sandra Corse recognizes as the embodiment of the Hegelian concept of the Homeric hero, a character that “struggles against the limitations of his society and blazes the trail into a new consciousness.”44 The epic poem is the map left behind by these heroes, the trail they have blazed. And if dutifully followed by society as a whole, it would lead to a new national consciousness and a new national identity. In the end, Wagner’s obsessive search for the origins of Siegfried’s wound, along with the somewhat long-winded and repetitive retrospective narratives that this search generated, can be seen as part of his effort to create a “poetical bible” for Germany, a representation of the entire Teutonic cosmos to which Siegfried and Germany belong. With Wagner the conceptual pairs of art and theory, epic and drama are here superseded by another term: ideology. Ideology reaches beyond art and theory, just as national identity supplants epic and drama as Wagner’s ultimate creative goal. Or to put it differently, Wagner believed he was more of a Homeric seer than an epic poet. This at least is what Cosima tells us when she completes the above analogy between Shakespeare and Homer by “silently” adding that, as Homer was to the priests of his day, so “Richard is to our present-day men of letters and poets, who are quite unable to classify him.”45 Finally, an offhanded comment may further help us understand Wagner’s relationship to genre and medium. After reading some of Don Quixote one evening and noting how Cervantes did not reproduce a conversation with a peasant but only narrated it, Wagner exclaims, “These people knew what to treat as epic and what as drama.”46 Don Quixote is of course a novel, not a drama. But understanding that such distinctions of genre may cross from one medium to another – theater to prose, for example – Wagner has no problem thinking of a novel as dramatic. Similarly, in analyzing Wagner’s generic debts, one must be willing to allow more flexibility

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in recognizing where genres begin and end, and to be careful about confusing genre and medium. The whole of this book attempts in part to do this, since music is not, strictly speaking, epic, lyrical, or dramatic. These are the genres of poetry, not music. With respect to epic, the process whereby Wagner wrote the Ring’s libretto and the narrative episodes that still mark it may well be part of the epic aesthetic, but more importantly they are part of German national identity. Although the example is too extreme, saying that Wagner was an epic poet is certainly true, but this statement is as significant as calling an oboist who makes his or her own reeds a reed-maker rather than a musician. Wagner tried to be Homeric in both the process of making and in the final product of the Ring, but the method and the form are only important insofar as they helped him achieve the ultimate goal of creating a poetical bible that was as definitive for Germany as the Odyssey was for Greece. The final word? Wagner sought less to create a German epic than to create Germany through epic.

3

The orchestral narrator and elementary epic

Like other nineteenth-century artists, but perhaps especially novelists, Wagner participated in the general trend of rejuvenating his chosen medium by infusing it with epic.1 This meant infusing not only his libretto but also his music with epic, a claim that few scholars have taken seriously. Previous studies of narrative in Wagner’s operas have tended to stop short of discussing the ways in which his most famous musical technique, the so-called leitmotif technique,2 might be connected with his interest in epic. Instead, they have focused their narrative analyses almost solely on the Ring’s libretto.3 But as Dahlhaus and Deathridge point out (but do not pursue) in The New Grove Wagner, “One might well speak of the birth of the leitmotif technique out of the dialectic of the epic element in Wagner’s drama.”4 Indeed, beyond just finding a causal link between epic and music in Wagner, focusing on the epic properties of Wagner’s leitmotifs in greater detail may also help us to arrive at a fuller understanding of the Ring’s use of Greek epic forms to help define German national identity. Specifically, the way in which Wagner’s emulation of epic leads him to compress music so tightly as to reduce its temporal dimension and make it seem almost spatial. With these spatialized and easily memorized leitmotifs, Wagner tries to teach his German audience what they are and what they should be: a people that values love above power. DEFINITIONS OF AN ORCHESTRAL NARRATOR

Because epic is a species of narrative, before discussing the more particular problem of epic and opera, let alone Greek epic and Wagnerian leitmotifs, a preliminary question must first be asked: in what sense can music “narrate”? How can music perform the 65

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signifying and interpretive functions of language? Can an orchestra act as a mediator between the stage and the audience that is in any way parallel to the way a narrator mediates between a story and its readers or listeners? To answer these questions we might begin by observing that one of the most universal characteristics among narrators is the sense of distance they create between their own perspectives and that of their characters. Traditionally we tend to think of a narrator as a more or less objective voice that stands outside of the narrative, relating events that happened sometime in the past. However, this generalization – that the narrator’s voice is usually in the past tense – is not a strictly essential element of narrative. As Abbate points out, the essential element in narrative “is the distance that this [past tense] elicits” in the reader or listener, not the tense itself.5 What we hear in the narrator’s voice is a “sense of the speaker’s detachment, a particular human and moral stance toward the referential object of one’s speech. . .”6 Thus, “In terms of the classical distinctions, what we call narrative – novels, stories, myths, and the like – is diegetic, epic poetry and not theater. It is a tale told later, by one who escaped to the outside of the tale, for which he builds a frame to control its dangerous energy.”7 Narrators guide us through their stories and try to help us make sense of them. They exist for the sake of the audience, not for the sake of the characters, and by establishing an objective distance from the narrative they can better control the “dangerous energy” of the narrative and thus the interpretations of their audience. In Wagner the orchestra works in much the same way. Call it an “orchestral narrator.” This orchestral narrator provides functionally linguistic meanings for extra-musical objects, characters, events, etc. Wagner’s orchestra achieves the status of narrator by transforming musical time, which we usually think of as performative, and therefore as a subjectively immediate sensation, into something that seems more like an objectively mediated meaning. In Opera and Drama, although Wagner does not use the word “narrator” per se to describe his orchestra, he does describe its function in a way that parallels narrative terminology. Much like a simple analysis of the

The orchestral narrator and elementary epic

novel into character and narrator, Wagner separates his operas into two parts: the singer and the orchestra. To the singer he allots “dramatic Expression” or the sung notes that he calls “versemelody.”8 The singer, like a character in a novel, acts unaware of both the looming force of fate, as expressed by the orchestral voiceover, and the presence of the audience beyond the fourth wall. In this sense Wagner’s orchestra is akin to a Mauerschau – literally, “wall-show.” In a Mauerschau the narrator stands on a figurative or a real wall, narrating to us what we cannot see happening somewhere off stage or at a different time.9 The messenger speech in Greek tragedy is a paradigmatic example. Messengers enter from a world other than the one we share with the characters on stage. They bear news about another time, another place. They can see and hear what the audience cannot and, more often than not, they are burdened with the task of telling us a story that will fill us with pity and fear. As a similarly privileged combination of eye, ear, and voice, in the Ring the orchestra functions like a messenger speech or a Mauerschau. It is charged with the duty of conveying to us the action going on behind the fourth wall.10 Wagner’s design of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth further enhances this sense of the orchestra’s privileged perspective, since it remains unseen by audience and performer alike, aloof and hidden under its hood like the Wanderer’s one good eye beneath his broad-brimmed hat.11 Through this orchestral narrator the audience is offered insights unavailable to the characters. He (insofar as orchestral narrators are gendered it seems probable that Wagner’s narrator is masculine and, if not the musical projection of Wagner himself, then at least someone who very closely resembles him) comments on stage actions, judges them, and even interprets them for us. Using brief musical expostulations usually called leitmotifs the orchestral narrator sets the scene, creates atmosphere, and engages our sympathies or plays upon our prejudices.12 Through this leitmotivic technique the orchestra tries to impose on us the single most important interpretive perspective from which we are meant to understand the stage action.

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The narrator’s totalizing power and all-encompassing vision offers us a voyeuristic thrill of comprehension akin to Siegfried’s ability to understand the Woodbird. Like Siegfried we are able to see through characters’ speeches and penetrate to their true motives. It is as if, long before Siegfried does, we too have tasted of the dragon’s blood. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, while we the audience gain through Wagner’s leitmotivic structure such a complete and godlike understanding, the orchestral narrator creates an ever-widening interpretive gap between us and the characters on stage. For, whatever distance the leitmotifs create between the orchestra and the stage adds to the distance between the audience and the stage. Although speaking of Strauss and not Wagner, David Greene offers a singularly useful insight into this interpretive gap between audience and character: “Because listeners cannot plausibly attribute the [leitmotivic] commentary to persons in the stage world, the effect of Wagner’s use of motifs is to drive a wedge between much of the music – primarily in the orchestra but sometimes even sung music – and the opera’s characters.”13 We in turn begin to associate this division between character and orchestra with a division between who the characters are, as told to us by the orchestra, and who they think they are, as told to us by them. By widening this gap between characters and their self-knowledge the orchestral narrator reproduces in them a situation akin to the Hegelian state of the “unhappy consciousness.”14 As often happens in narrative, the storyteller seems to know more about the significance of the story and its characters than do the characters themselves. It knows both their conscious and their unconscious motives, the ancient causes and the far-reaching effects of their actions. Even more so than in some genres of literature, in Wagner opera the narrator comes to resemble an allknowing, all-seeing god. Its presence floats through the stage world and produces in the audience a similar sense of zero-gravity omniscience.15 Wagner’s orchestra, which created the cosmos at the beginning of Das Rheingold through a sustained E-flat rumbling up from the bowels of the orchestra, thus continues in its godlike role as omniscient narrator throughout much of the Ring.16

The orchestral narrator and elementary epic HOW DO LEITMOTIFS SIGNIFY?

By thus striving to endow music with the specificity and interpretive capability of a narrator, Wagner apparently aligns himself with thinkers and artists like those belonging to the Florentine camerata, the literati and amateur musicians credited with “inventing” the genre of opera. He is also like Monteverdi, Gluck, and other formers, performers, and reformers of opera who theorized that the orchestra should in some way act as interpreter of the libretto. But taking this one step further, Wagner does not simply seek to reform opera by making the libretto more articulate through the orchestra. He seeks to reform opera by making the orchestra itself more articulate. Through his leitmotivic technique Wagner aims at making music literate, at making it speak. Adapting and expanding Abbate’s discussion of motifs with respect to Paul Dukas’s L’apprenti sorcier, the following arguments and examples offer a paradigm for the ways in which Wagnerian leitmotifs achieve different kinds of linguistic functionality. By pointing out parallels with the semiotic relationships established by onomatopoetic and contextual meanings, we may distinguish between two basic types of leitmotivic signifiers, iconic and symbolic, and among their subcategories, isosonorous, isomorphous, arbitrary, and cultural. With iconic leitmotifs, the relationship between the musical signifier and its signified object is a simple semiotic relationship where “the musical moment is isosonorous with the object . . . that it signifies.”17 That is, the musical motif and the object symbolized by that motif make the same or nearly the same sound. For example, in Das Rheingold the motifs produced by percussionists striking anvils with hammers signify the Nibelung blacksmiths because they are the same sounds as would be produced by those same Nibelungs striking anvils (see Ex. 1).18 In a footnote on the term “iconicity,” Abbate refers to Hubert Kolland’s work on leitmotifs. For Kolland, iconicity can also be interpreted in “visual and spatial (rather than sonic) terms.”19 With Kolland’s expansion of the term iconicity, leitmotifs such as the ring motif might also be

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Ex. 1 Nibelung motif

Ex. 2 Ring motif

admitted to the category of elementary semiotic relationships (see Ex. 2).20 As one can see and hear from the statement above, the ring motif sonically traces the spatial outline of a ring. Melodywise, it circles back on itself and ends almost where it began.21 Although Abbate restricts her examples of iconicity to isosonorous leitmotifs, leitmotifs like the ring motif do seem to possess a kind of iconicity. But since they also share some characteristics with arbitrary leitmotivic signifiers (discussed in the next paragraph) these leitmotifs can be distinguished by using a term that is analogous to isosonorous, namely, isomorphous. These types of motifs tend to trace the shapes of such visual objects as circles (the ring), undulating lines (the Rhine), or other simple geometrical figures like straight lines (the soaring columns of Valhalla). The second type of leitmotif that Wagner uses in his semiotics of music is symbolic, which can be broken down into two categories: arbitrary and cultural. With respect to arbitrary motifs their meaning is determined by their simultaneous association with a given stage object or idea at a given moment. With this type of leitmotif the relationship between signifier and signified object “is forcibly established and not ‘conventional’ (it exists only within a single piece).”22 In other

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Ex. 3 Freia motif

words, this type of symbolic leitmotif is only arbitrarily associated with a stage object, emotion, character, or event and is usually restricted to one particular piece of music. For example, the Freia motif in Das Rheingold can be classified as symbolic (see Ex. 3).23 The arbitrariness of this motif is further underscored by the fact that it is associated not only with Freia but with love in general, since it recurs throughout Die Walku¨re where the theme of love is undeniably present in the stage action while Freia the character is nowhere to be seen. As a subcategory of the symbolic one might also include a kind of motif that is more conventionally than arbitrarily established. I would call this kind of motif a cultural motif. Like the arbitrary motif, the relationship between this motif and the idea or object it signifies seems forcibly established. But the force behind its significance is less that of a particular composer and more that of a particular culture. Its meaning stretches beyond a specific composition and embraces an entire tradition, such as the use of a fanfare motif to connote royal and/or military associations. See for example the motif for Valhalla (see Ex. 4).24 Reinforcing the cultural weight of the motif itself is the instrumentation used to express it. Brass instruments, particularly members of the trombone and trumpet family, have also long been associated with the military and/or royalty. These two types of leitmotifs, iconic and symbolic, and their various subspecies, isosonorous, isomorphous, arbitrary, and cultural, exemplify (without exhausting) the ways in which Wagner’s music performs the linguistic function of signification in the Ring.

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Ex. 4 Valhalla motif

Ex. 5 Rhine motif

The music becomes the basic grammatical units, so to speak, of Wagner’s narrative language. But as is perhaps already apparent, Wagner’s actual leitmotifs do not always fit nicely and neatly into one category or another. Sometimes they fulfill one function, sometimes another, sometimes many others. To take just a single example, one might argue that the above famous leitmotif occupies three categories simultaneously (see Ex. 5).25 The Rhine motif, excerpted here from the beginning of Das Rheingold, is iconic in both ways: isosonorous in relation to the sound of the river’s waves and isomorphous with respect to the shape of those waves. Moreover, since it is used here and elsewhere to connote nature, the beginning of the world, and timeless infinity, it is also arbitrary and even cultural. Given its established associations with the Rhinedaughters – wherever there is water there are bound to be mermaids – it is also symbolic of their presence. One could continue this exercise almost indefinitely, and while it can be instructive to engage in the game of labeling and classifying leitmotifs, it is important to remember that these labels and categories may continually change as the operas

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progress and leitmotifs develop and transform into one another. As Dahlhaus and Deathridge warn, “The identification and labeling of leitmotifs, like a bridge that one destroys on reaching the other shore, thus fulfills an exclusively heuristic function: the ‘clues’ offer a first, not a last word on the musico-dramatic processes and serve merely as a means of entry into the dense system of relationships.”26 THE SPATIALIZATION OF MUSIC

Having outlined the ways in which Wagner’s music might be said to signify and his orchestra thereby narrate, we must next ask what is particularly epic about Wagner’s leitmotif method and how we might use this notion of epic as a way to untangle the “dense system of relationships” that Wagner has woven into his operas. Oddly enough, one of the best ways to begin finding answers to these questions is to pursue them indirectly, not through analogies with literature but with painting. In part this indirect route suggests itself because Wagner himself writes about his leitmotif technique in spatial as well as temporal terms. With respect to temporal descriptions of his leitmotif technique, in Opera and Drama Wagner claims that he entrusts his orchestra with a twofold narrative duty. Through “absolute orchestra-melody” the orchestra uses the performer’s verse-melodies in order to create in the audience a sense of “Foreboding” and musical “Remembrances” of certain moments, characters, and objects.27 But despite the names that Wagner gives to these different leitmotivic functions, both of which have to do with time, when he further explains how these leitmotifs work he resorts to metaphorical language borrowed from the more spatial art of painting. Mixing temporal and spatial metaphors he writes, “The Foreboding is the ray of light which, falling on an object, brings out to vivid truth of show the tint peculiar to that object, and conditioned by its substance: the Remembrance is the garnered tint itself, which the painter borrows from the object, to bestow it on others akin thereto.”28 Through this use of painterly language Wagner draws attention

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to the fact that his leitmotifs aim at an almost timeless and non-discursive concision. To the extent that they aim at capturing essence through such instantaneous recognition, his leitmotifs may be said to resemble slogans29 as defined by sociologist Philip Rieff in his essay “Aesthetic Functions in Modern Politics”: A slogan is, of course, a combination of words, and words are connected in time and thus have a quality of discursiveness. But it is precisely the characteristic of a slogan that it must strain toward absolute condensation, and in this tendency it approximates a spatial form. A slogan aims at radical concision to gain an immediate and total effect (through assonance, rhythm, rhyming, etc.). It must be remembered as a whole – a spatial, not a discursive, whole.30

Through their outward shape, their extreme concision, and their memorability, Wagner’s leitmotifs try to escape time by transforming the traditionally discursive art of music into a more objectoriented art. To misuse a term originally meant to describe musical scores that present stunning embroideries to the eye but not necessarily the ear, Wagner’s leitmotifs are Augenmusik, music for the eyes. We are meant to grasp them at a glance. Or, in the words of Gurnemanz to Parsifal, here time becomes space.31 Using a quasi-physiological argument to justify this spatialization of music, in Opera and Drama Wagner claims that our sense of hearing is endowed with both a faculty for hearing and for seeing. According to Wagner there are even certain kinds of artistic techniques, like poetic Stabreim, that appeal both to the “ear” and to the “eye” of hearing. Although Wagner’s use of Stabreim in his libretti is obvious and well known, its relationship to his compositional technique has been little discussed. And yet it provides an interesting model for turning music for the ears into music for the eyes and thus helping music’s subjective immediacy obtain a certain objective distance. In his definition of Stabreim Wagner argues that a word’s consonants wrap their vowels in a skin that can suggest similarities between disparate words. Wagner calls this consonance a kind of “physiognomic likeness.”32 It can exist between two or more words of very

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different meaning, and through the use of repeated consonants Stabreim makes the similarities among words intelligible to the “eye” of our hearing. We seem to see the similarity in a moment, to hear it at a glance. On the other hand the vowels of the Stabreimed words simultaneously address themselves to the “inner man” or the “ear” of hearing. Wagner therefore compares these vowels to our “inner vital organs.”33 They are the blood of the Stabreimed words, flowing within them, contained by the outer shell or skin of consonants. As such, they appeal to our inward and more emotional understanding. As in this definition of Stabreim, we might argue that Wagner’s leitmotifs contain a properly inward content. This is the harmonic tissue of the leitmotif and it appeals to our inner feelings or the “ear” of our hearing. But since Wagner’s leitmotifs also have an outer rhythmic and melodic shape, they also appeal to our understanding or the “eye” of our hearing. It is these outward similarities that encourage us to recognize that musical leitmotif A represents narrative element A or that leitmotif B resembles leitmotif C. Through their outward shape and their extreme concision and memorability, Wagnerian leitmotifs not only escape time by appealing to the “eye” of hearing, they also allow the orchestral narrator to distance himself from the stage action and from music’s performative present tense, thereby distancing the audience’s sense of immediacy as well.34 By thus appealing to the “eye” and the “ear” of hearing, Wagner’s leitmotifs combine interpretive narrative techniques with dramatic emotional appeals. They are both narrative and drama simultaneously. In addition to these quasi-physiological arguments, Wagner also argues from a more general aesthetic perspective that operatic music as a rule should somehow be more visual. In part because opera is drama and therefore seen as well as heard, Wagner thought that the operatic audience needed a kind of music that differed from the symphonic or chamber music audience. In some notes for undeveloped essays dating from 1849–51, Wagner articulates this theory that, in the opera house, “the ear is depotenced – no longer to take in the music intensively,” and thus the “music should be able so to inspire

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the sight that it shall see the music in shapes.”35 In a similar passage in “On the Name ‘Music-Drama’,” Wagner argues that opera is a deed of music made visible, an objectification of something usually thought of as intangible.36 Bayreuth and other opera houses that have hidden orchestra pits further heighten this objectification effect through the simple architectural fact that the orchestra seems to interpret the dramatic elements on stage from an invisible, intermediate vantage point between the audience and the stage. The hooded orchestra pit both geographically and interpretively wedges itself between the action and the viewer. Wagner and his first architect for the Festspielhaus, Gottfried Semper, conceived of their sunken orchestra pit as a kind of “mystic gulf” between the Bayreuth audience and the stage: “the spectral music sounding from the ‘mystic gulf’ like vapours rising from the holy womb of Gaia beneath the Pythia’s tripod, inspires him [the audience member] with that clairvoyance in which the scenic picture melts into the truest effigy of life itself.”37 It may well have been Mu¨ller’s Dorians that supplied this notion about the Delphic oracle, the Earth goddess, and the chasm in the ground from which she delivered her prophesies.38 As Mu¨ller further points out, there is something peculiarly Doric about oracular speech in general. In these two kinds of language patterns, one cultural the other cultic, the “object appears to have been, to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible, and to allude to, rather than express, the thoughts of the speaker.”39 Like Heraclitus’ description of the way the Delphic oracle communicates, the seer “neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs.”40 With this notion of the orchestra as Delphic oracle and its utterances as somehow Doric we circle back to the Greeks and Wagner’s use of them in his compositional techniques. Recalling Wagner’s aspiration to become a German seer, it begins to make sense why certain leitmotifs do not explicitly denote certain stage objects, actions, ideas, or characters. Despite their ability to connote, signify, and hint, qua music, Wagner’s leitmotifs simply do not have the specific pointing ability of language. They only gesture in the

The orchestral narrator and elementary epic

direction of meaning. Admittedly, certain musical gestures seem and indeed are more emphatic than others. But sometimes this very emphasis hides another, oftentimes darker meaning below the surface. This is certainly the case with the leitmotif for Valhalla. On first hearing, it may seem like rather a straightforward tone-picture of a fortress, or at least something solid, noble, and royal. But underneath that leitmotif (as I hope to show in the next section) there lurks Wotan’s and Alberich’s willingness to bargain love for power. EPITHETS, EPIGRAPHS, AND LEITMOTIFS

Perhaps the closest, most concrete, and most obvious analogue to Wagner’s highly compressed, object-like leitmotifs is the epic epithet. As a lover of Homer and somewhat proficient in the Greek language, Wagner of course knew some of Homer’s more famous epithets in the original Greek. Cosima tells us that once, after listening to her play the Siegfried Idyll, Wagner alluded to the beauty of the springtime and quoted two of Homer’s most beautiful epithets: “saffron-mantled dawn [eos krokopeplos]” and “rosy-fingered dawn [eos rhododactylos].”41 It would be very easy to equate such epithets with Wagner’s leitmotifs. But in forging a link between Wagner opera and Greek epic, we must beware of over-simplifying the case.42 As Dahlhaus and Deathridge warn, “The idea of a leitmotif . . . as a fixed, recurrent, musical formula, not unlike the poetic formulae [i.e., epithets] in Homer, is simplistic to the point of falsity. Unchanged recurrence is the exception rather than the rule, even in the Ring.”43 While the implication that Homer’s epithets are somehow simplistic is certainly debatable,44 this warning does alert us to the dangers of over-simplifying the influence of epic upon Wagner’s Ring.45 An analysis of Wagner’s leitmotivic method as epic must take into account the fact that his musical utterances, although they resemble Homeric epithets in terms of spatial concision, are not as fixed or formulaic as these epithets. In their initial utterance Wagnerian leitmotifs aim at being, but in their repetition and development they become subject to becoming. What might first appear

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to be a superficial resemblance between epic and opera, epithet and leitmotif, is actually much more politically and aesthetically problematic and interesting. As an example of how the shift from being to becoming works in Wagner’s music, the examples below explore certain similarities and differences between the leitmotif and the Greek epigraph, the more ancient form of the epithet, when it was still tied to a specific place rather than untethered and free-floating in poetic space. A more concrete ancestor of the epithet, the epigraph is considered by Hegel to be one of the most elementary types of Greek epic. In its most basic form it is an inscription on a concrete physical object such as a pillar or a memorial. This inscription points “a spiritual hand,” as Hegel would have it, at something beyond itself, usually a feat or object of some renown.46 But beyond simply announcing this other thing, the epic epigraph is also “a compressed explanation concerned with the kernel of the thing itself.”47 The epithet’s purpose is not merely to describe or record but to reveal the hidden meaning of what it points to. As both objective and object, the epigraph thus includes the most basic building blocks for all other future epic forms. As an example of a Greek epigraph from Herodotus,48 we might examine the inscription on the monument erected to commemorate Darius’ building of a bridge across the Bosporus. Wagner would have probably been especially drawn to this epigraph since he had been, from a young age, fascinated by the battle of Marathon, the battle toward which Darius was on the march when he built this bridge and for which Herodotus is one of our main sources. In his Histories Herodotus recounts the famous story behind this epigraph. In order to attack Greece, Darius, the King of Persia, had first to cross the Bosporus into Europe. To do this he commanded Mandrocles, an architect from Samos, to build a huge bridge of boats for him so that he and his army could pass over the sea.49 Having successfully conquered nature with this architectural feat, which greatly pleased the king, Mandrocles set up a monument to commemorate the event and had the following epigraph inscribed upon it:

The orchestral narrator and elementary epic

Ex. 6 Valhalla motif

“Mandrocles, having bridged the fishy Bosporus, dedicated to Hera this memorial of the bridge. A crown for himself he gained and glory for Samos by executing the work as Darius the King desired.”50 As in other Greek inscriptions and dedicatory epigraphs, here Mandrocles celebrates a remarkable human achievement. But he not only sets up a monument and inscribes it “to preserve the name of the builder of the bridge,” as Herodotus observes, and to record the principle patron of this mechanical feat, namely, Darius;51 he also, and more importantly, dedicates this monument to Hera. The poetic inscription is a way for Mandrocles to thank the gods. As the poet implies, without their aid there could not have been a bridge. In this way the epigraph points beyond the physical objecthood of the accomplishment to its divine kernel of truth. In fact by thanking the god this dedicatory epithet becomes almost incantatory, an invocation that materializes the god through formalized speech. Though set in stone, the epithet aspires to cross over from a kind of statuary literature into a living performance. Returning from the Bosporus to the Rhine, when the Valhalla leitmotif is first played in Das Rheingold, it functions as a sonic inscription on the pillars of Valhalla (see Ex. 6).52 As “a castle with glittering brightness [eine Burg mit blinkenden Zinnen]”53 appears on stage, we hear Wagner’s calm and regal tubas swell with dotted rhythms to a brass fanfare. Both the brass instrumentation and the musical figure of the fanfare – immemorial signs of majesty – signify the splendor of Valhalla. Seen as a cultural leitmotif (in the abovedefined sense), this aural grandeur leaves the audience in no doubt as

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Ex. 7 Corrupted power motif

to the “ewige Macht [boundless might]”54 that the fortress represents. Seen also as isomorphous, the motif signifies solidity and power, its harmonies marshaled in marching, columnar shapes. But more importantly, as with the Hegelian definition of the Greek epigraph and the Herodotean example, the “spiritual hand” of the music not only points to Valhalla’s considerable power, it also points to Wotan and the means by which he obtained this power. Namely, by promising the goddess of love as payment to the fortress’s builders, Fasolt and Fafner, which in turn reveals Wotan’s willingness to trade love for power. In order to signify, in the Heraclitean sense, this corrupt foundation upon which Valhalla is built, the orchestral narrator creates a kind of musical Stabreim between the Valhalla leitmotif and a leitmotif previously associated with the ring, a sinuous and snakelike theme often referred to as the “corrupted power motif.”55 Traditionally, we give the motif this particular name because it occurs in the orchestra at the very moment when Alberich is first drawn to the Rhinegold, seduced by its potential power (see Ex. 7).56 In the original statement of this motif Wellgunde, seconded by two oboes, an English horn, and a bassoon, sings of how “die masslose Macht [limitless power]”57 can be gained by forging the Rhinegold into a ring. Yet this power does, she warns, have a price. The ring can only be forged by someone who has foresworn love. It is no coincidence, then, that the bargain that Wotan has already made with Fasolt and Fafner involves the trading of love, in the person of the Hellenized love goddess, Freia, for power, the Hellenized home of the Nordic gods, Valhalla. In terms of plot – trading love for power – and libretto – the ring’s “masslose Macht” and Valhalla’s “ewige Macht” – there certainly seems to be what Wagner would call a

The orchestral narrator and elementary epic

Ex. 8 Remembrance of corrupted power motif

“garnered tint” that both Valhalla and the ring share. But more to the point, through the leitmotifs used here the orchestra forges a musical link that repeats and reinforces the verbal and narrative connections between scenes 1 and 2 of Das Rheingold. This musical link leaves us in no doubt as to the “kernel” of Valhalla’s meaning. Here is a building that was corruptly obtained through a willingness to commodify love and to trade it for power. The musical link between these two leitmotifs comes as the transition, not surprisingly, between scenes 1 and 2. This time we hear the “Remembrance” of the “corrupted power motif ” played by two horns (see Ex. 8).58 The flexible rhythmic and melodic shape of this passage, its isomorphous character, unmistakably alludes back to the sinuous “corrupted power motif” and forward to the stately Valhalla motif. As with the physiognomic likeness shared by several Stabreimed words, we are made to “see” the connections among these motifs as one morphs into the other. Guided by the orchestral narrator we are led to recognize the parallels between Wotan and Alberich. Through his use of timeless and time-bound musical techniques, the narrator tells us that Alberich’s corrupt dreams of power have now become Wotan’s, who lies sleeping on an Alpine hillside, conjuring up images of the fortress Valhalla.59 Beginning with the first statement of the “corrupted power motif,” we move downward from woodwinds, to horns, to tubas, gaining power and grandeur as we go, but not losing the taint of corruption. The leitmotivic epigraph for Valhalla is no mere sonic picture of a fairytale castle. It is also an interpretation of what Valhalla is at its hollow core. As both being and the product of becoming, the motif not only paints a picture of Valhalla, it also explains its origins and gives us a clue as to its eventual destruction.

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While Wotan’s dream of Valhalla may seem nobler than Alberich’s dream of enslaving the Nibelungs, he is perhaps no less corrupt. Like the hubristic Darius, who tried to conquer nature and was finally defeated at the hands of the Greeks, Wotan will also pay for his dreams of power and his attempts to conquer nature by commodifying love. It is this lesson that our epic narrator is trying to tell us at the very beginning of the Ring, a lesson he will repeat, develop, and expand upon throughout the next three operas in the cycle by relying upon Wagner’s Hellenized ideological stances on culture and nature.

4

Spiritual and factual realities in epic

Because both Hegel and Wagner believed that epic relies on meaningfully recognizable representations of reality, they further believed that this creates serious problems for any modern trying to read, let alone revive, an ancient epic. Demonstrably, the references to Nordic mythology in one of Wagner’s central epic sources, the Nibelungenlied, were not immediately relevant, understandable, and/or meaningful to many of his listeners. It was almost certainly the case that when Wagner first began writing the Ring, as far as his German audience was concerned, its characters and stories came from “a misty Nordic world about which it knew nothing and cared even less.”1 In his effort to influence German national identity through the use of this “misty Nordic” epic, Wagner therefore had to find a way to make it vital to his audience. Nineteenth-century Germany did not inhabit the same factual and spiritual reality described in the Norse sagas, myths, and epics. It neither worshiped the same gods nor upheld the same laws and customs. As Hegel caustically notes of the Nibelungenlied, any attempt to use its pagan Germanic myths, gods, and cultural references to depict reality for a nineteenth-century audience would have been an absurd and childish endeavor. The links between nineteenth-century Germans and their primeval Germanic myths had long been severed: The Burgundians, Chriemhild’s revenge, Siegfried’s deeds, the whole circumstances of life, the fate and downfall of an entire race, the Nordic character, King Etzel, etc., all this has no longer any living connection whatever with our domestic, civil, legal life, with our institutions and constitutions. The story of Christ, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Roman law, even the Trojan war have far more present reality for us than the affairs

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Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks of the Nibelungs which for our national consciousness are simply a past history, swept clean away with a broom. To propose to make things of that sort into the Book of the German people has been the most trivial and shallow notion.2

Naturally, this distance between Wagner’s audience and his German sources would extend beyond the Nibelungenlied to include his other major Nordic sources as well. And to make matters worse, the recorded versions that Wagner had of these myths were themselves culturally distant from their originals. As Deryck Cooke points out in I Saw the World End, Wagner’s original Germanic sources were first written down in the twelfth century, meaning they were recorded during an age when the Teutonic conversion to Christianity was already secure.3 All of these facts meant that Wagner had to figure out how to close the gap between past and present, between Germanic myth and German audience in order to create a meaningful epic. As we have seen in the previous two chapters, Wagner tried to close this gap not only through the use of Greek poetic forms but also through Greek mythic content. More specifically, he attempted to link the modern and the medieval by fusing the Norse – a lesser-known source of myth – to the Greeks – a better-known source of myth. We see this Hellenization of the Ring’s content in several places, including Das Rheingold’s use of certain themes and ideas borrowed from Greek didactic poetry, cosmogony, and theogony. Beyond these borrowings from the more elementary types of Greek epic, in Die Walku¨re Wagner emulates epic proper, Hellenizing the Ring by creating specific and specifically human characters and character types, especially the epic hero. Wagner applied this type of contentoriented Hellenization to his Nordic myths not only because he thought the Greeks would endow his work with that patina of cultural authority that all things Hellenic tend to lend any endeavor, but also because he needed to use myths and characters more recognizable to his audience than his Nordic sources were. The paradox is that, in his effort to teach Germany what was German, Wagner first had to reach them through what was Greek.

Spiritual and factual realities in epic DIDACTIC POETRY AND DAS RHEINGOLD

The urge to teach and to inculcate pervades the epic genre. It is present in its elementary forms, such as epigraphs, epithets, gnomic utterances, and in the culmination of these early epic forms, didactic poetry, as well as in more advanced epic forms, such as cosmogony, theogony, and epic proper. To begin with the most obvious example, in didactic poetry the epic poet unifies under a single theme various gnomoi or maxims by weaving these isolated bits of wisdom together into a greater whole. As Hegel points out, what makes this totality specifically epic is the fact that “the real centre [of the poem] is not provided by a purely lyrical mood or a dramatic action but by a specific and real sphere of life, the essential nature of which is to be brought home to our minds both in its general character and also in its particular trends, aspects, occurrences, duties, etc.”4 One way of reading this is that didactic poetry essentially concerns itself with national identity and aims at the totalization of a specific sphere of factual and/or spiritual reality that is recognizable to its national audience. That Wagner was familiar with didactic poetry and the didactic dimension of epic can be easily assumed if we remember that one of his closest friends in Paris was Samuel Lehrs, who specialized in epic, didactic poetry, and the two or three didactic poems by Oppian.5 In Das Rheingold Wagner apparently borrows one of his most important didactic messages from Hesiod’s Works and Days.6 Joining the physical world of the countryside to the spiritual beliefs of the Greeks, in Works and Days Hesiod is at pains to begin with a complete and pristine picture of rural life in ancient Greece and to show its subsequent corruption. The didactic theme of this poem is the deterioration of humanity through greed and the abuse of power. Whether literary device or historical fact, Hesiod uses the character of Perses, his supposed brother, to teach this lesson. In the introductory lines of the poem we learn that Perses, after the division of the family patrimony, has tried to steal more than his fair share of the property from his brother by bribing the local legislature.7

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This competition between the two brothers seems to be a result and/or example of the evil Eris or Envy (as opposed to the good Eris) that Hesiod talks of in lines 11–26 of the poem: Two Eris-goddesses are on earth . . . If one has understanding, one wants to praise the one Eris just as much as to blame the other; for these two goddesses have a wholly separate kind of temperament [Gemu¨tsart]. For the one promotes the bad war and discord, the cruel one! No mortal suffers her willingly; rather under the yoke of need they render the heavy, burdensome Eris honor, according to the decrees of the immortals. This one was born, as the older, to black night; but the other one Zeus, ruling on high, planted in the roots of the earth and among men as a much better thing. She drives even the unskilled [ungeschickten] man to work; and when one who lacks property looks upon another who is rich, thus he hurries to sow in a similar way and to plant and to appoint the house well; neighbor competes with neighbor, he strives toward prosperity. This Eris is good for human beings. Even the potter resents the potter and the carpenter the carpenter, the beggar envies the beggar and the singer the singer.8

To distinguish between these two goddesses: the evil Eris causes strife, war, and feud, while the good Eris is responsible for inspiring healthy competition. This comparison of the two erides helps Hesiod set the didactic tone and create the ethical crux for much of his moralizing through the myths of Prometheus’ theft of fire9 and the five ages of man,10 by which means Hesiod contrasts a lost golden age of peace and sweatless toil with the social ills caused by the love and acquisition of wealth and power. If we compare Works and Days to the libretto for Das Rheingold, the parallels between the two sets of brothers in Wagner and in Hesiod are instructive. As in Hesiod’s Works and Days, in Wagner’s depiction of Nibelheim we have two brothers, Mime and Alberich, divided by an uneven distribution of wealth and power. Although Mime is certainly not represented as innocently as Hesiod, his counterpart in Works and Days, he does represent the wronged brother. In this role of the wronged, Mime pines for the longvanished golden age of the Nibelungs:

Spiritual and factual realities in epic Sorglose Schmiede, schufen wir sonst wohl Schmuck uns’ren Weibern, wonnig Geschmeid, niedlichen Nibelungentand: wir lachten lustig der Mu¨h’.

Carefree smiths, we used to fashion trinkets for our womenfolk, delightful gems and delicate Nibelung toys: we cheerfully laughed at our pains.11

But under the sway of his brother Alberich, Mime and the other Nibelungs now “tremble in awe”12 and toil endlessly under appalling work conditions: Nun zwingt uns der Schlimme in Klu¨fte zu schlu¨pfen, fu¨r ihn allein uns immer zu mu¨h’n. Durch des Ringes Gold erra¨th seine Gier, wo neuer Schimmer in Schachten sich birgt: da mu¨ssen wir spa¨hen, spu¨ren und graben, die Beute schmelzen und schmieden den Guß, ohne Ruh’ und Rast, dem Herrn zu Ha¨ufen den Hort.

Now the criminal makes us crawl into crevices, ever toiling for him alone. Through the gold of the ring his greed can divine where more gleaming veins lie buried in shafts: there we must seek and search and dig, smelting the spoils and working the cast without rest or repose, to heap up the hoard for our lord.13

Like Hesiod, Wagner also makes his didactic message painfully clear through the words of the wronged brother: when humanity is ruled by the bourgeois desire for property and power, social injustice and dehumanization are sure to follow. As Shaw sees it, this constitutes Wagner’s critique of the profit motive: This gloomy place [Nibelheim] need not be a mine: it might just as well be a match-factory, with yellow phosphorous, phossy jaw, a large dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be a white lead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a railway shunting yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little gin-sodden laundry, or a bakehouse, or a big shop, or any other of the places where human life and welfare

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Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks are daily sacrificed in order that some greedy foolish creature may be able to hymn exultantly to his Plutonic idol: Thou mak’st me eat whilst others starve, And sing while others do lament: Such unto me Thy blessings are, As if I were Thine only care.14

No matter how one catalogues the miseries of Nibelheim, Wagner’s lesson about greed and power is clear. The age-old story of two brothers battling over such an uneven distribution is an allegory about what can happen when an individual or an entire nation trades love for power and puts profit and property ahead of compassion and fellowship. It is this moral, perhaps more than any other, that serves as the didactic refrain for the Ring. We also see it in the cases of Fafner and Fasolt or Hagen and Gunther, as well as the less obvious case of Wotan, who internalizes both perspectives and is conflicted from within. In this last and most important example Wagner wants his audience to see that, like Germany itself, Wotan is internally divided by a will to love and a will to power, and that it is love, or, more specifically, love of things German, that should prevail.

COSMOGONY AND THEOGONY

Insofar as Das Rheingold is more introductory, elementary, and didactic than the other three operas of the Ring cycle, it bears most of the burden for bringing to life its factual and spiritual realities for a modern German audience. This prelude is a primer for the world that Wagner creates in the Ring. Turning first to factual reality, it would seem that in the Ring the basic facts of life – eating, drinking, national custom, geography, etc. – do not play as important a role as the more spiritual ones. Wagner is not as interested as Homer is in depicting the physical details of his pagan Germanic world. In contrast with the Iliad the Ring does not concern itself with how its characters obtain food. It does not delve into the mysteries

Spiritual and factual realities in epic

of farming or fishing techniques, nor does it rehearse minute descriptions of food preparation. At least where the mundane life of his Germanic heroes is concerned, Wagner recognized that his audience was too far removed from these factual realities to be interested or to find something familiar in them.15 However, Wagner does employ at least one very powerful and significant piece of factual reality in order to locate his German audience in terms of their relationship to the Ring’s world. He places his epic in the Rhine river valley. The entire geography of Das Rheingold – which includes the locations of Nibelheim, Riesenheim, and Valhalla – lies within the reaches of the Rhine. Since the concept of nation implies geographical location as well as spiritual identification, Wagner’s use of the Rhine as the cosmogonic wellspring of all life in the Ring is a very pointed reference to the fact that this epic opera is directed at the German-speaking world. But not only is this an epic that takes place in Germany, in and around the Rhineland, Germany is also pictured here as the origin of civilization itself, just as the river Okeanos is represented on Achilles’ shield and in other Greek cosmogonies as the origin and boundary of the Greek world.16 Beyond the cosmogonic role of the Rhine in Das Rheingold, Wagner also introduces more complex epic structures borrowed from Greek theogony. Like cosmogonies, which depict the birth of the world, epic theogonies such as Hesiod’s describe natural events in terms of divine beings that have human characteristics. But as Hegel argues, the main distinguishing mark between these two kinds of epic is that theogonies particularize events much more concretely and complexly than cosmogonies. In theogonies the gods possess more individualized personalities. They express their various likes and dislikes and they clearly mark out their specific spheres of influence. Claiming the same set of concrete characteristics for Greek theogony in general as for Hesiod in particular, Wagner writes, “Of Greek theogony it may be said that, in touch with the artistic instinct of the nation, it always clung to anthropomorphism. Their gods were figures with distinctive names and plainest individuality; their names were used to mark specific groups of things [Gattungsbegriffe],

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just as the names of various coloured objects were used to denote the colours themselves, for which the Greeks employed no abstract terms like ours.”17 Das Rheingold taken as a whole demonstrates the theogonic stage of epic. Through this opera Wagner presents us with an epic theogony for the whole world of the Ring. Symbolic of human cultural evolution, Das Rheingold portrays Wotan and his gods’ extrication from nature and their installation in Valhalla. Beginning with a portrayal of nature and nature gods through the Rhine, his daughters, and the as yet unformed lump of Rhinegold, Wagner progresses to the disruption and corruption of nature through the theft of the Rhinegold, the building of Valhalla, the crafting of the ring and the Tarnhelm, the unnatural slaying of brother by brother, and the final supplanting of nature by culture as the gods enter their new abode. As the urbane Loge advises the Rhinedaughters toward the end of Das Rheingold, with the triumph of culture over nature it is now time to stop pining over a vanquished natural world and instead “blissfully bask henceforth/in the gods’ newfound splendour!”18 Valhalla, the cultural seat of a newer, more civilized regime, has replaced the primordial and unformed world of the Rhine and an artificial light source now shines in place of the sun as culture thus evolves out of nature. Seen as a theogony for the entire world of the Ring cycle, Das Rheingold meets part of a rather interesting challenge that Hegel makes with respect to the Nibelungenlied. One of the difficulties facing anyone who would make a viable nineteenth-century epic out of the Nibelungenlied is that the poem is filled, in Hegel’s estimation, with “lifeless abstractions [leblosen Abstraktionen]” rather than flesh and blood characters that have distinguishable traits.19 Das Rheingold strives to meet this challenge by particularizing and concretizing the gods and heroes of the Nibelungenlied. Through Das Rheingold we gain a very clear understanding of the Ring’s mythological world, each god’s special province, and the personalities of its various heroes. This particularity is further underscored by the fact that Wagner attaches to each of his characters readily identifiable

Spiritual and factual realities in epic

leitmotifs. Although these characters themselves may disappear from the stage and their leitmotifs undergo certain shifts in harmony, melody, rhythm, and instrumentation, nevertheless the individual forces at work behind these leitmotifs remain recognizable even to the most unpracticed ear. That is the epic force behind Wagner’s leitmotivic technique. Through its compact pronouncements the orchestra is always able to remind us of the divine world imminent in and operating through the human one. Even when a god or goddess is not visible on stage, we can still visualize that divinity’s influence through his or her music.20 Yet, even if by Hellenizing the Nibelungenlied in accordance with Hegel’s critique and Hesiod’s Theogony Wagner does succeed in making Das Rheingold more concrete and particular, still, the Theogony seems to lack two essential elements that would perfect it and put it in the category of epic proper: “a genuinely poetic finish [echt poetische Abrundung]”21 and a “strictly human reality [eigentlich menschlichen Wirklichkeit].”22 While the demand for human characters will not be satisfied until Die Walku¨re, Wagner does improve upon Hesiod’s Theogony by giving his theogony a “genuinely poetic finish.” By “poetic finish” Hegel means the unification of a story through “an individual course of action proceeding from a single centre [individuelle Handlung, die aus einem Mittelpunkte hervorgeht].”23 For example, the Trojan War serves as perhaps the central epic action in the Iliad. So many of the lesser actions and episodes in the Iliad revolve around this one. Nothing in the Iliad could have ever happened and there would have been no epic without the Trojan War; no wrath of Achilles for the Muse to sing about; no power struggle between Agamemnon and Achilles; Patroclus would have lived on and Achilles would not have been fated to die so young. But Hesiod’s Theogony contains no such central action that unifies the plot. Indeed the Theogony does not have what one could strictly call a plot at all. Instead, it is composed of disparate episodes, genealogies, and myths, all of which are interrelated to some extent, but not unified by a single action as central to the poem as the Trojan War is to the Iliad.

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In Opera and Drama Wagner analyzes what he thinks is wrong with the Germanic sagas that served as the material for the Ring. Whereas the sagas had previously constituted a whole, despite their varied content, this unity was eventually “splintered into a thousandfold plurality; the kernel of its Action into a mass of many actions. These actions, in themselves but the individualizations of a great root-action – as it were the personal variations of the same one action that had been the necessary utterance of the spirit of the Folk – become splintered and disfigured to such a degree, that their separate parts could be pieced together again by arbitrary whim. . .”24 Following Hegel’s instructions for fixing the Germanic sagas, Wagner makes certain that in Das Rheingold the events do revolve around one course of action: Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold, an action whose meaning is also repeated throughout this opera and serves as the central meaning for various other incidents during this “Preliminary Evening.” Wagner aligns this theft of the gold with the idea that power can be obtained only by forswearing love, an action that is in violation of nature. The natural state of paradise at the beginning of Das Rheingold is upset by Alberich’s curse against love and his lust for power: Valhalla is contracted and built upon an unnatural bargain, again based on an exchange of love (Freia) for power (Valhalla); and Fafner, in killing Fasolt, opts for power over brotherly love in a way that repeats Alberich’s willingness to enslave his brother Mime. Furthermore, the theft of the gold unifies Das Rheingold not only insofar as Alberich’s action is paradigmatic for the whole of Das Rheingold, but also insofar as this theft causes Wotan’s journey to Nibelheim, his second forswearing of love (Freia) for power (this time symbolized by the ring), the prophetic intervention by Erda, the eventual ransoming of Freia with the ring, the murder of Fasolt, and the final unheeded pleas of the Rhinedaughters as the gods triumphantly enter Valhalla. The central action or conflict here is indeed power versus love, a war that is waged not only between Alberich and the gods of Valhalla, but also among and within the gods themselves, as witnessed by the altercation between Fricka and Wotan and by Wotan’s own internal struggles.

Spiritual and factual realities in epic

As both paradigm and cause, the initial theft of the gold is so central for Wagner that it is constantly repeated and reiterated throughout the rest of the Ring. Franco Moretti, quoting Francesco Orlando’s “Mito e storia ne ‘L’anello del Nibelungo,’” goes so far as to say that, after the first scenes of Das Rheingold, “nothing more happens, basically, until the end of the long cycle. All we see are repercussions, or repetitions, or vain attempts at abolition, of the only thing that has really happened already.”25 The theft of the gold and the forswearing of love for power thus becomes the central motif in every opera of the Ring cycle. Alberich’s physical transgression into the Rhine and his transgressive desire to put himself above the gods rips the whole cosmic fabric of the Ring from bottom to top.26 This first action in Das Rheingold is the central action of the entire cycle and, unlike the plotless structure of Hesiod’s Theogony, Alberich’s transgressions not only organically unify the plot of Wagner’s operatic theogony, but also the plot of the Ring cycle itself. It is this action and its consequences that need to be negated in the Ring and, by extension to the real world, Germany. Without the Alberichs and Mimes, the Fafners and Fasolts of this world, Germany, Wagner implies, would be less likely to be led astray, like Wotan, or held for ransom, like Freia. The expulsion and/or extirpation of such transgressors and interlopers is necessary for the purification of Germany just as it is for the purification of Wagner’s mythic “Rhineworld.” HUMANIZATION AND HELLENIZATION PART I: ¨ NNHILDE AS HERMES BRU

While Das Rheingold does provide an essential background, context, and causality for the Ring, there are still some important gaps in its epic make-up. The various titles that have been given to Das Rheingold – Vorspiel, Prelude, “Preliminary Evening” – reinforce this sense of incompleteness and incipience. One very recognizable absence is its lack of human characters. In Das Rheingold there are Nibelungs who live below the Earth, gods who live above it, and those who, like the Rhinedaughters and the giants, seem to occupy a

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kind of middle ground upon the Earth. And yet none of these beings are human beings, even if they are anthropomorphic. Like Hesiod’s Theogony, which Das Rheingold closely resembles in so many other respects, this opera lacks what Hegel calls “the strictly human reality which must alone provide the truly concrete material for the sway of the divine powers.”27 In this sense the opera is not yet “perfected,” at least as an epic. It has not yet met Hegel’s second critique of the Nibelungenlied: the presence of human characters that makes an epic an “epic proper.” In order to meet this second half of Hegel’s challenge and further Hellenize his work Wagner had to humanize the Ring by narrating the more human story of Die Walku¨re. In Die Walku¨re, as in epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, we witness not only the workings of the divine world, but also the ways in which that world intersects with the human one. Even though the gods cast a long and fateful shadow over humanity in stories like these, our main interest is human interest. Unlike Das Rheingold, with its epigraphs and didacticisms, its cosmogonic and theogonic structures, Die Walku¨re progresses beyond these earlier stages of epic to epic proper. Wagner achieves this progression by following Hegel’s advice and introducing characters that are recognizable to the audience and embody a “strictly human reality.”28 While the use of human characters would not be seen as a problem for Wagner, yet making these characters simultaneously conform to the Nordic myths and be recognizable to his audience did present a problem for him. As Ewans points out, unlike the Greek poets in the mythopoetic creation of their tragedies, Wagner could not construct a flattering mirror for German national identity out of the Nibelungenlied simply by drawing on “a shared vision of the disposition of the universe and vocabulary for describing it.”29 As previously explained, the Nordic myths were simply not as well known to the nineteenthcentury German audience as the Greek myths were to, say, Homer’s audience, for whom myth meant religion and not just a story. In fact – and this may at first seem odd – the Greek myths were more recognizable to Wagner’s audience than were the Nordic myths. For, despite a surge of interest in Norse mythology, Wagner’s classically educated

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audience could be expected to recognize allusions to Greek myths more readily than allusions to Nordic ones. Given this fact, Wagner decided not only to humanize but also Hellenize his characters. As examples of this kind of Hellenization, in Das Rheingold Wagner makes his Norse gods more recognizable by invoking the traits of their better-known Greek counterparts. Like Zeus, Wotan rules in patriarchal but not omnipotent fashion from the heights of Valhalla, his German Olympus. Fricka plays the shrewish role of Hera, the spurned and apparently barren wife of the divine patriarch. And, as Ewans cogently (if more abstrusely) argues, “the Wala of Voluspa, has become an earth-goddess of Wagner’s invention: Erda’s name is taken from Gaia (Earth), the goddess who is called ‘the first prophetess’ (cf. Wagner’s ‘Urwala’) in the second line of Eumenides.”30 One may also point to certain parallels between Freia and Aphrodite and between Loge and Prometheus.31 Ewans and other scholars are certainly right to point out this kind of Hellenization, yet, the purpose of Hellenization in the Ring sometimes exceeds the mere expedient of making characters more recognizable. In Die Walku¨re its purpose is not only to produce personages that are more recognizable to the audience, but also to produce paradigms recognizable by and beneficial to Germany. These cultural performances, ritual theorists like John McAloon remind us, are “occasions on which a society dramatizes its collective myths, defines itself, and reflects on its practices and values.”32 However, such self-stagings are not necessarily unambiguous celebrations of identity. As Sarah Beckwith puts it, while the goal of a given society’s self-staging may well be to “convert all its outsiders to insiders. . . [yet] the very process of that incorporation cannot expel from its own dramatic rendering the riven ambiguities of the divided collectivity whose concerns” are thus staged.33 Such is the case in Wagner’s Ring, particularly with respect to the characterization of divided characters like Siegmund and Bru¨nnhilde, the first one human and the second destined to be human. These syncretisms work, in turn, by exclusion and inclusion. That is, Wagner suggests certain Greek parallels that provide negative as well as positive traits

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we might associate with these characters and with Germany. Through this process these two characters exemplify what Wagner believes Germans should and should not strive to become. To emphasize once again the ways in which Germany should look to Greece instead of Rome and therefore be truer to itself than to its Jewish and Latin influences, in Die Walku¨re Wagner Hellenizes Bru¨nnhilde to make her seem more like the Greek god Hermes than his Roman incarnation, Mercury. Like Hermes, Bru¨nnhilde performs the role of messenger between heaven and earth as well as conveyor of dead heroes to the hereafter.34 She is also the physical representation of Wotan’s thoughts and will. While coaxing Wotan to share his anxieties with her, she reminds him: Zu Wotan’s Willen sprichst du, sag’st du mir was du willst: wer – bin ich, wa¨r’ ich dein Wille nicht?

To Wotan’s will you speak when you tell me what you will: who am I if not your will.35

As his will, Bru¨nnhilde carries Wotan’s thoughts between heaven and earth, fulfilling both his spoken and his unspoken wishes. Related to her role as messenger is her duty as psychopomp, escort for those fallen heroes who are brave enough to be invited to Valhalla after their death. This explains her sudden appearance at Siegmund’s side before his battle with Hunding. As she instructs him: Nur Todgeweihten taugt mein Anblick: wer mich erschaut, der scheidet vom Lebens-Licht. Auf der Walstatt allein erschein’ ich Edlen: wer mich gewahrt, zur Wal kor ich ihn mir.

The death-doomed alone are destined to look on me: he who beholds me goes hence from life’s light. In battle alone I appear before heroes: him who perceives me I’ve chosen as one of the slain.36

This additional role of psychopomp seems to be Wagner’s own twist on his original source material. True, as Cooke points out in I saw the World End, like Wagner’s Bru¨nnhilde, the Valkyries of the Edda “took

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an active part in battles, and decided, according to Odin’s [Wotan’s] orders, who should win and who should die.”37 But none of Wagner’s original Germanic sources depict Bru¨nnhilde or any of the Valkyries as supernatural emissaries of Wotan’s will who appear to the doomed at the time of their death in order to escort them to Valhalla. This is a purely Wagnerian Hellenization of his original sources. The motivation behind the Hellenization of Bru¨nnhilde in this particular way can perhaps be explained by turning from Wagner’s operatic works to his theoretical works. In “Art and Revolution” Wagner describes the duties of the Greek god Hermes and his relationship to Zeus in terms that sympathetically resonate with Bru¨nnhilde’s role in the Ring: The Grecian Zeus, the father of all life, sent a messenger from Olympus to the gods upon their wanderings through the world – the fair young Hermes. The busy thought of Zeus was he; winged he clove from the heights above to the depths below, to proclaim the omnipresence of the sovereign god. He presided, too, at the death of men, and led their shades into the still realm of Night; for whenever the stern necessity of Nature’s ordering showed clearly forth, the god Hermes was visible in action, as the embodied thought of Zeus.38

Like Bru¨nnhilde, Hermes wings his way between heaven and earth, carrying the thoughts and plans of the father of the gods to the sons and daughters of humanity. Also like the Valkyrie, Hermes presides at the deaths of heroes and then, in the role of psychopomp, leads them “from life’s light”39 “into the still realm of Night.”40 On analogy with other, more obvious Hellenizations of Nordic gods and heroes catalogued by other scholars, it is tempting to argue that Wagner Hellenizes Bru¨nnhilde as Hermes merely in order to aid his audience in the task of identifying and understanding Bru¨nnhilde’s mythological role by reference to a better-known god. According to this argument Wagner mythopoetically reincarnates Hermes in the shape of Bru¨nnhilde for the same reason that he emphasizes Freia’s resemblance to Aphrodite. Since his German

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audience was more familiar with the Greek goddess of love than with Freia, Wagner capitalized on this link by associating Freia with Aphrodite. Similarly, one might argue that Wagner Hellenized Bru¨nnhilde only for the sake of clarity. If we know who Hermes is, then we will also understand who Bru¨nnhilde is. While not denying the validity of this argument, I would also argue that there is a more urgent political reason behind Bru¨nnhilde’s Hellenization. Wagner deploys this particular mythopoetic creation of Hermes/Bru¨nnhilde in order to remind his German audience of the national identity he wishes to inspire in them, specifically, an identity like that of the Greeks and not the Romans. He wants his audience to realize that Bru¨nnhilde resembles Hermes specifically and not that other famous winged messenger, the Roman god, Mercury. At least according to Wagner, Mercury’s role was very different from that of Hermes. Writing in “Art and Revolution,” Wagner argues that the ambivalent Roman god Mercury is like the Jew, one of those chaffering and usurious merchants, who streamed from all the ends of the earth into the heart of the Roman world; to bring its luxurious masters, in barter for solid gain, all those delights of sense which their own immediately surrounding Nature could not afford them. To the Roman, surveying its essence and its methods, Commerce seemed no more nor less than trickery; and though, by reason of his ever-growing luxury, this world of trade appeared a necessary evil, he cherished a deep contempt for all its doings. Thus Mercury, the god of merchants, became for him the god withal of cheats and sharpers.41

Mercury as usurer and merchant embodies for Wagner the nineteenthcentury bourgeois-Jewish mentality that puts power, luxury, and gold ahead of love, nature, and true need. Like the bourgeois Jew in Germany, the god Mercury is a foreigner among the Romans, a wandering, homeless moneylender, a proto-bourgeois merchant who preys upon the Romans’ superfluous desire for luxury and ever-new artificial stimulation. Here as elsewhere, whenever Wagner discusses the Greeks, the Romans, or any other ancient civilization he seems less concerned with historical accuracy than with artistic viability and political

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relevance. It is more important to him to use and/or abuse the past for his own aesthetic and ideological purposes than to represent it faithfully. In the case of Bru¨nnhilde in particular Wagner is anxious to point out the parallels between Rome and nineteenth-century Germany because, for him, the idea of Mercury did not die out with the Romans. On the contrary, this god of commerce, or at least his spirit, lived on to plague Germany and German art even into the nineteenth century. He is what Wagner calls “the holy-noble god of ‘five per cent,’ the ruler of the ceremonies of our modern – ‘art.’”42 Seen in this light, we may interpret Wotan’s actions on the eve of Siegmund’s death thus: influenced by Fricka as the bourgeois-Jewish upholder of ceremonies, property, and marriage contracts, Wotan begrudgingly tries to convert Hermes/Bru¨nnhilde into Mercury/ Bru¨nnhilde by commanding her to kill Siegmund. However, Bru¨nnhilde cannot obey this command because Wotan’s truer and more natural inclination – his will as embodied by Bru¨nnhilde – is too strong to be seduced by the powers of convention. She is more Greek than Roman, more German than Jewish. She sees that the mercurial Fricka is behind Wotan’s supposed change of heart and, after she has tried to save Siegmund, she tells Wotan that she knows this: Als Fricka den eig’nen Sinn dir entfremdet: da ihrem Sinn du dich fu¨gtest, wa¨r’st du selber dir Feind.

When Fricka had turned your own mind against you: in conforming with her thinking, you became an enemy unto yourself.43

Bru¨nnhilde honors Siegmund’s “hallowed need,”44 not Fricka’s decadent Roman cravings. She witnesses his “fearful pain / of freest love,”45 not Fricka’s constant clamoring about marriage contracts. Thus, although Bru¨nnhilde does disobey Wotan’s verbal command, she nevertheless follows his inmost thought and sorest desire: Der diese Liebe mir in’s Herz gehaucht, dem Willen, der dem Wa¨lsung mich gesellt, ihm innig vertraut – trotzt’ ich deinem Gebot.

Inwardly true to the will which inspired this love in my heart and which bound me to the Wa¨lsung – I flouted your command.46

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Significantly, it is with this argument that Bru¨nnhilde finally calms Wotan, helping him to recognize his truer, more Greco-German nature. As Wotan finally admits, So thatest du, was so gern zu thun ich begehrt – doch was nicht zu thun die Noth zweifach mich zwang?

And so you did what I longed so dearly to do – but which I was doubly forced not to do by need.47

In remaining true to need rather than to convention, Bru¨nnhilde remains true to the German reincarnation of Hermes rather than the Jewish reincarnation of Mercury. She upholds the ideal of a Hellenized German art form that arises out of a genuine need, not a spurious desire for foreign luxury. It is through such attempts to say what is German through what is Greek that Wagner aims to fulfill the most important function of epic: to define national identity. But the twist is that here he aims to do so through exclusion as well as inclusion. By Hellenizing Bru¨nnhilde in this way Wagner teaches a political lesson about the threat of bourgeois-Jewish influence and how Germany may define itself not only by declaring what it is but also by declaring what it most emphatically is not. Or, quoting Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s more paradoxical formulation, “[German] society doesn’t exist, and the Jew is its symptom.”48

HUMANIZATION AND HELLENIZATION PART II: SIEGMUND AS EPIC HERO

Turning from Bru¨nnhilde to her half-brother and future (dead) father-in-law, Siegmund, we see that unlike Bru¨nnhilde Siegmund is identified more through inclusive than exclusive Hellenization. Wagner identifies him more through the positive traits that he does possess rather than the negative ones that he does not. Moreover, with Siegmund Wagner is not so much concerned with Hellenizing this character in the mold of any particular Greek god or hero. Rather, Siegmund is created more in the image of the Greek epic

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hero in general, as defined by Hegel and Wagner. According to Hegel, the epic hero experiences as an individual body the same shocks that convulse the nation as a compound political body. For Wagner this Greek linking of the individual and the state is essential not only to his conception of artistic forms in general but also of their political functions. Reflecting upon why he tried to reform opera and how his ideas were influenced by Greek art as opposed to German art – even its greatest exemplars – Wagner once remarked to Cosima that “Faust, the Ninth, Bach’s Passions are barbarian,” that is, “they affect the individual, [but] do not become part of the general picture; it was this feeling which brought me to the art of the future.”49 A decade later, Wagner was even more pessimistic about the relationship between the individual and civilization in its wider context, “With us it is all a matter of individuals, we have no civilization.”50 But with the incorporation of the individual into the whole comes the idea that the individual has less freedom than we, as moderns, are sometimes willing to grant or admit. According to both Hegel and Wagner, this is certainly the case with the Greek epic hero. Threatened and buffeted from without by external forces that are greater than the individual and out of one’s control, the Greek epic hero is someone who does not attain goals actively but rather experiences them passively. This is not to say that epic heroes do not try to pursue goals, dreams, or desires. Rather, they are represented less by these personal aims than by what they meet with during their pursuit of these aims. Fate, circumstance, chance encounters, hindrances, accidents, and effortless triumphs all characterize the epic hero. As the paradigmatic example of epic’s passive adventurer, Hegel cites Odysseus and the trials and tribulations that this Homeric hero encounters along the way to his final goal of returning home to his family in Ithaca. Thus the Odyssey “develops in full detail what he [Odysseus] encounters in his wanderings, what he suffers, what hindrances are put in his way, what dangers he has to overcome, and how he is agitated [emphases added] [was ihm auf seiner Irrfahrt begegnet, was er duldet, welche Hemmungen sich ihm in den Weg stellen, welche Gefahren er u¨berstehen muß und zu was er aufgeregt worden].”51

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Although an avid admirer of the Odyssey, Wagner expresses a similar opinion by recourse to the more Doric figure of Herakles. “The plainest type of heroism,” asserts Wagner in “Herodom and Christendom,” “is that evolved by the Hellenic sagas in their Herakles.”52 Just as the sufferings that arise from his forced wanderings are what makes Odysseus heroic for Hegel, so the sufferings that arise from his forced labors are what makes Herakles heroic for Wagner. It is not that Herakles does not achieve great feats: “Labours put upon him to destroy him, he executes in proud obedience, and frees the world thereby from direst plagues.”53 But it is those “labours put upon him” and his “obedience” to a higher order that impress Wagner as heroic: “Seldom, in fact scarcely ever, do we find the hero otherwise than in a state of suffering prepared for him by fate: Herakles is persecuted by Hera out of jealousy of his divine begetter, and kept in menial subjection [emphases added].”54 It is perhaps Cosima who expresses this idea of heroic suffering most beautifully when, during her first reading of the Odyssey together with Wagner and no doubt guided by Wagner’s interpretation, she reflects on her own state of affairs and compares them to that of Odysseus: “Human intentions are pitiful, a puff of wind brings them to nought, and one finds oneself always in an open sea, rudderless, at the mercy of wind and waves, like Homer’s hero; happy the person to whom in the somber whirlpools a helpful divinity mildly appears!”55 Compared to this kind of hero from the Greek epics and sagas, the Greek dramatic hero is much more active. It is of course true that dramatic heroes encounter hindrances and are often stopped along the way to their goals – Antigone is immured for her efforts to bury her brother, Polyneices. Or they sometimes find that once they have reached their goal it is not exactly what they might have wished for – Oedipus discovers that he himself is the criminal he has been searching for, the regicide and the bringer of the plague. Yet, according to Hegel and Wagner the Greek dramatists tended to represent their heroes as actively seeking such goals. Despite unfavorable circumstances and opposing forces, Antigone tries to bury her brother and Oedipus seeks the causes of the plague and the

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murderer of Laius.56 By contrast, in Greek epic the hero’s adventures happen almost without the hero contributing to them. Unforeseen circumstances are often more effective than personal motivations and actions in helping the hero attain his goals. In the Odyssey it is Calypso who finally provides Odysseus with the materials for his return home, and, after a brief visit with the Phaecians, it is Athena who actually brings Odysseus back to Ithaca, asleep and unaware of how he has been deposited back on his native shore.57 Like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the epic hero is more a man of passion than action. He adopts the style of those around him, always singing and dancing to their tune, in their time and in their key. Embodying this paradigm of the passive epic hero, as Die Walku¨re opens Siegmund finds himself at the end of his journey, both in a very real and a metaphorical sense. This is where his travels have brought him – to Hunding’s home, Sieglinde’s feet, and the sword Nothung – and this is where his life will end. He arrives without really knowing that he has arrived or how he has arrived and without having actively sought to arrive. Harried and half-dead he sings: Durch Wald und Wiese, Haide und Haim, jagte mich Sturm und starke Noth: nicht kenn’ ich den Weg, den ich kam. Wohin ich irrte weiß ich noch minder: Kunde gewa¨nn’ ich dess’ gern.

Through forest and field, heathland and hurst, storm and great need have driven me here: I know not the way that I came. Whither I’ve wandered I know still less: I should be glad to learn.58

Up until this point in his life, through all of his previous adventures and encounters with external circumstance, Siegmund has acted neither for himself nor by his own volition.59 He has fought his enemies simply because he is who he is and not necessarily by choice or out of bravery. He is the offspring of Wotan/Wolfe and so carries the blood of the Wa¨lsungs within himself. There is no mention of moral conviction in Siegmund’s stories about his past battles. He simply accepts these ongoing struggles as part of his fate and

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his inheritance, a necessity forced on him by his “race” and his divine descent. True, he does seem conscious of his choices in some way, since he realizes that whatever he holds to be right, others think wrong.60 But we are never really told what these “beliefs” might be. As he himself puts it, wherever he goes he is simply “caught up in feuds.”61 He does not morally contemplate right and wrong, good and bad. Things just happen and he just happens to be there when they do. Unfortunately for Siegmund, while this absence of self-determination may make him an exemplary Greek epic hero, it is this very will-lessness that also makes him less than the hero Wotan had hoped for. As Fricka rightly points out, Wotan has clearly guided Siegmund’s fate throughout his life: Wer hauchte Menschen ihn ein? Wer hellte den Blo¨den den Blick? In deinem Schutz scheinen sie stark, durch deinem Stachel streben sie auf: du – reizest sie einzig. . .

Who breathed it [independence] into humankind? Who lighted the cowards’ eyes? Sheltered by you, they seem to be strong; spurred on by you, they strive for the light: you alone urge them on. . .62

Later in the same scene, Fricka continues this line of reasoning through a rather lengthy and explicit critique of Wotan’s meddling in Siegmund’s actions. She details point for point how the god has guided Siegmund to the sword, Nothung, and why Siegmund is therefore a slave to the gods rather than the free and active hero Wotan reputedly sought to create: Du schuf ’st ihm die Noth, wie das neidliche Schwert: willst du mich ta¨uschen, die Tag und Nacht auf den Fersen dir folgt? Fu¨r ihn stießest du das Schwert in den Stamm;

You fostered that need for Nothung no less than you fashioned the fearsome sword: would you deceive me who, day and night, follows you hard on your heels? For him you thrust the sword in the tree-trunk;

Spiritual and factual realities in epic du verhießest ihm die hehre Wehr: willst du es leugnen, daß nur deine List ihn lockte wo er es fand’? Mit Unfreien streitet kein Edler, den Frevler straft nur der Freie: wider deine Kraft fu¨hrt’ ich wohl Krieg: doch Siegmund verfiel mir als Knecht. Der dir als Herren ho¨rig und eigen, gehorchen soll ihm dein ewig Gemahl? Soll mich in Schmach der Niedrigste sma¨hen, dem Frechen zum Sporn, dem Freien zum Spott?

you promised him the noble weapon: will you deny that your cunning alone lured him to where he might find it? No nobleman battles with bondsmen; the freeman alone chastises the felon: against your might I might well wage war: but Siegmund was destined to be my slave. Should he who, as bondsman and vassal, obeys you, his lord, bend your own eternal wife to his will? Is the basest of men to heap shame on my head, a goad to the brazen and butt of the free?63

Foreordained to carry out his will, Wotan has obviously created Siegmund for his own purposes and has guided this hero’s actions – albeit through much adversity – toward a very specific goal. Closely corresponding to the Hegelian and Wagnerian conception of the Greek epic hero, Siegmund “has his fate made for him, and this power of circumstances, which gives his deed the imprint of an individual form, allocates his lot to him, and determines the outcome of his actions.”64 As this kind of a thoroughly epic hero Siegmund merely submits to his fate.65 He has no choice and thus “an air of mourning is wafted over the whole,”66 as opposed to the somewhat boorish but jovial atmosphere of his son’s opera, Siegfried. As Siegmund himself recognizes in his semi-ironic foray into philology, “Friedmund [Peaceful] I may not call myself;/Frohwalt [Cheerful] fain would I be:/but Wehwalt [Woeful] I must name myself.”67

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During the epic stage of political and poetic development personal identity is almost indistinguishable from national identity. In epic we have not yet reached the point where there is a need for the concept of individual responsibility. The emergence of individuality can happen only after the national will can be separated from the individual will. For this reason, epic bravery is not as praiseworthy a trait as dramatic bravery. Because epic war is conflict on a national scale, its heroes cannot truly be counted brave. They are defined almost solely as parts of a larger whole and are therefore constricted by a more collective national consciousness. They are not independent enough to maintain a personal moral stance either for or against any given war. As Peter Conrad observes, “The epic hero remains subject to a society itself straitened by military necessity, which imposes on him the rigid conformity of the warrior, receding into the ranks of his fellows.”68 It is only in more culturally evolved genres of poetry like drama that the hero can begin to experience the leisure necessary for exploring alternatives to war. Only then can he or she make personal decisions about which battles to fight, which to flee, and which to object to conscientiously. In the in-between world of romance, heroism is both a national and a personal virtue, but in epic it is more a national one.69 Or rather, since virtue implies a choice, as Montaigne says, we may call the epic hero good or even divine, but not virtuous.70 In the Iliad heroes fight because they are dutybound to Agamemnon and the Greek way of life. Only Achilles really questions this duty, and in this questioning of epic values we see the emergence of the tragic hero. In contrast to Achilles each of the Myrmidons that he commands – excepting perhaps Patroclus – exemplifies the epic hero “receding into the ranks of his fellows.” Their fighting formation is described in terms of Hoplite warfare, wherein each man depends on the neighboring shield of his fellow countryman for protection. These serried ranks fight as an epic unit rather than as dramatic individuals. The nation does not allow its epic

Spiritual and factual realities in epic

soldiers the freedom of choice necessary for virtuous action. They cannot, as it were, “step out of line.” This is not, however, entirely true of Siegmund, insofar as he is not so much a part of society as against it. The Cain-like offspring of Wolfe and the romantic, revolutionary brainchild of Wagner/ Wotan, Siegmund displays his kinship with the sojourning knight who travels from adventure to adventure, engaging in single combat with his enemies wherever he happens to find them. One might say that he is epic in his melancholic bravery, but romantic in his revolutionary solitude. This blend of epic and romance helps to define Siegmund’s character, propel the plot forward, and provide an evolutionary link between the genre of epic and the next major genre in the Ring, lyric. Because of his emergent personal identity and Wagner’s mixing of poetic genres, we begin to recognize that Siegmund is only the forerunner of a greater, more independent hero, a hero that is more self-centered and self-willing than Siegmund. And by the end of Die Walku¨re Wotan also recognizes that Siegmund is not the last link in the chain of heroic becoming. He too realizes the need for a new kind of hero, though not without a sense of bewilderment and pain. As he bitterly complains to Bru¨nnhilde: Wie macht’ ich den And’ren, der nicht mehr ich, und aus sich wirkte was ich nur will? – O go¨ttliche Noth! Gra¨ßliche Schmach! Zum Ekel find’ ich ewig nur mich in Allem was ich erwirke! Das And’re, das ich ersehne, das And’re erseh’ ich nie; denn selbst muß der Freie sich schaffen – Knechte erknet’ ich mir nur!

How can I make that other man who’s no longer me and who, of himself, achieves what I alone desire? – O godly distress! O hideous shame! To my loathing I find only ever myself in all that I encompass! That other self for which I yearn, that other self I never see; for the free man has to fashion himself – serfs are all that I can shape!71

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Wotan’s problem is the problem of the still-emergent lyric poet: how to create an individual voice, personage, or character that expresses a perspective somehow independent of the whole but still expressive of the whole. How, in other words, can the lyric voice ever be more than the limb of a larger body? Is it possible for the lyric “I,” rather than the epic “we,” to stand on its own as a fully developed individual? Or must it always be a combination of the singular and the plural voice? With respect to the plight of Wotan and the politics of Wagner, is Wotan’s dream of a free heroic individual or Wagner’s dream of a Germany free from “corrupting” foreign influences even possible? With these questions in mind, by the end of Die Walku¨re both Wotan and Wagner stand upon the same threshold. Fricka’s critique of Wotan’s creation is also a critique of Wagner’s creation. Both men must now look forward to a new work that not only expresses their identity but is also distinctly different from who they are.72 To solve this paradox, enter Siegfried the lyric hero of Siegfried the lyric opera.

part ii

Lyric

5

Introduction: what is lyric?

In Greek epic poetry the epic poet’s personal identity tends to be superseded by national identity. We rarely hear Homer speak in the first person. From the very beginnings of both his epics he tells us that it is not he who is singing but the muse singing through him. In the case of lyric poetry, though, the opposite is more often the case. Lyric turns epic on its head. In epic the individual disappears into the national, but in lyric the nation is summed up in the individual. The lyric poet links the universal and the particular through his or her own subjectivity in order to defend each poem against the forces of incoherence and abstraction. His or her personal identity usually forms the unifying center of a given lyric poem – the sun to its orbiting planets or, perhaps more appropriately, the black hole to anything within its gravitational pull. But because personal identity, with all its idiosyncratic quirks, twists, and turns, can manifest itself in literally infinite ways, it might seem impossible to establish concrete criteria with which to define the genre of lyric, criteria that would extend beyond the simple observation that this genre is somehow more personal than epic. Realizing this difficulty, Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, gives us a practical if somewhat unserious lesson on the problems of classifying lyric poetry: “we call Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind a lyric, perhaps because it is a lyric; if we hesitate to call Epipsychidion a lyric, and have no idea what it is, we can always call it the product of an essentially lyrical genius. It is shorter than the Iliad, and there’s an end of it.”1 Taking Frye at his word, one might deduce from this pronouncement that in order to do the work of classifying lyric poetry one must use information about the poet and make comparisons with other poems and other poetic genres in order to determine whether something is or is not a lyric. In this way we may conclude that the Epipsychidion is 111

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lyrical because Shelley wrote it, because it resembles Shelley’s more recognizable lyrics in certain ways, and because, in comparison with the Iliad, the Epipsychidion is not quite epic in length. These may seem like rather flimsy categories, but they do provide the basis for many discussions of lyric, including Wagner’s and Hegel’s, and will therefore help us to understand what these two theorists have to say about lyric and the way it relates the personal to the universal and the individual to the national. HEGEL ON LYRIC

Like Frye, Hegel admits that problems quickly arise when we try to classify examples of the highly idiosyncratic genre of lyric and its variants. Also like Frye (but with perhaps less humor), Hegel concludes that one of the most profitable ways to solve the problem of classifying lyric is through comparison. He tries to define lyric by comparing it to one of poetry’s earlier evolutionary stages: epic. According to Hegel, all poetry is comprised of universals and particulars, which makes it eminently susceptible to abstraction on the one hand and incoherence on the other. Because of these susceptibilities some central theme must always unify a given poetic genre. In epic it is the objectified nation that provides the centripetal force needed to unify this genre. In lyric it is the individual. This does not mean, however, that the nation is not present in lyric poetry. It is not the nation’s absence that defines lyric poetry but the way in which it is present, the way it is filtered through the eyes of the individual and how this view of the nation is influenced by the particular kinds of historical moments that favor lyric poetry, namely, peaceful and prosperous ones. Similar to the way in which he defines lyric as a blend of individual and nation, Hegel also defines lyric by examining the ways in which it compares and combines two other pairs of opposites: (1) nature and culture, and (2) more and less evolved genres of poetry. Unlike epic, with respect to its historical moment Hegel believes lyric is not so narrowly restricted to one specific epoch during a

Introduction: what is lyric?

nation’s development. True, lyrics tend to be written after a nation’s epic stage of development or during a time when the nation can encourage individuality and self-reflection rather than collectivity and national reflection. But its historical moment can be more generally defined as a peaceful epoch when the nation has reached a more definite cultural footing, is more organized, less primitive, and can allow its individual citizens the freedom necessary for contemplating themselves and their place in the world. This means that lyric can occur at virtually any time in a nation’s history, even before epic, although this would seem to be rare. During these more cultured, lyrical epochs, the nation and its poets move beyond such fundamental epic concerns as shelter, geography, bodily nourishment, the constant threat of war, and the establishment of basic religious ritual. But unlike the epic poet, the lyric poet does not endeavor to totalize the nation’s entire spiritual and factual realities in a single poem. As Hegel concludes, “The entirety of a nation’s lyric poetry may therefore run through the entirety of the nation’s interests, ideas, and aims, but a single lyric cannot.”2 Epic contemplates the whole from the perspective of the whole. Lyric contemplates the part from the perspective of the part. During particularly fertile seasons of lyrical flowering, the nation’s fundamental spiritual and factual realities are often questioned, reconfigured, and redefined. Given this fact, Hegel observes that the lyric poet may not “free himself of every connection with national interests and outlooks.”3 When lyric poets disdain traditional national interests they risk losing touch with their audience of fellow citizens. The lyric poet’s words must not only be self-revelatory, they must also “arouse and keep alive in the hearer the same sense and spirit, the same attitude of mind, and the like direction of thought.”4 In addition to expressing the poet’s deeply felt personal identity, the poet must also reach out to his or her national audience and arouse in them a sympathetic sense of identification. To do this, the lyric poet draws upon the same national treasure of myth, religion, history, tradition, and natural geography that the epic poet draws upon. Such is certainly the case with poets like Pindar, whose poems are

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famously difficult to interpret, in part because of their many (now) obscure national and topical references. It is through the universally recognizable representations of personal passions that lyric poetry frees the hearts of both the poet and the nation. It liberates us from our cares not by presenting us with an exact and unutterably subjective copy of the poet’s passion, but by purifying this passion “from all accidental moods, [making it] an object in which the inner life, liberated and with its self-consciousness satisfied, reverts freely at the same time into itself and is at home with itself.”5 To this extent, lyric poets objectify some aspect of themselves both for their own sake and for the sake of their national audience. They construct a nationalized vision of their passions in order that both the nation as a whole and the poet as a part of that whole may be purified by this vision. In this way the lyric poet satisfies our more culturally advanced need to define ourselves as independent subjects within an established totality by confronting our own personal passions through universal representations of those passions. Through the epic poet’s representation of our national identity we may discover who we are as a collective whole, but it is through the lyric poet’s representation of our personal identities that we discover who we are as individuals within that collective whole. In the context of this discussion about the relationship between the poet’s internal and external worlds, Hegel describes the three steps whereby lyric poets make national subjects personal. First, the poet absorbs the external world. Secondly, the poet shapes this material with “his own inner consciousness [Innern des einzelnen Bewußtseins].”6 Finally, the poet opens their newly “self-concentrated heart” and expresses through lyric this “inner life” that has been newly enhanced by the external world.7 In this way the lyric poet composes a poem that bears some resemblance to the outside world, but which is also, to a great degree, shaped by the lyric poet’s subjective experience. The more the lyric poet allows his or her own personal identity to shape the poem, the more subjective and lyrical (as opposed to objective and epic) the poem becomes. Yet, no matter how “intimately the insights and feelings which the poet

Introduction: what is lyric?

describes as his own belong to him as a single individual, they must nevertheless possess a universal validity.”8 In order to retain the right to be called a poet, the lyricist must express universalized truths that are eminently recognizable to the national audience. As for how the national mixes with the personal, Hegel cites several paradigmatic examples of such imaginative and culturally advanced self-portrayals among the Greek lyric poets. Standing at seemingly opposite ends of the lyric spectrum are Pindar (discussed in chapter 8) and Anacreon (discussed below). While Pindar dovetails personal with national concerns by placing himself indirectly in his poetic representations of myth and the Greek nobility, Anacreon does not use national heroes or myths to provide himself with an object for his poetry. The poet himself becomes this object and thus depicts “himself as existent objectively as well as subjectively.”9 He is not only the subjective voice of the poem, he is also its main character and central hero. In many of Anacreon’s fragments the poet depicts himself in congenial surroundings, feasts, and celebrations wherein he blissfully participates as would any epic hero. He depicts himself amongst roses, lovely girls and youths, as drinking and dancing, in cheerful enjoyment, without desire or longing, without duty, and without neglecting higher ends, for of these there is no question here at all; in short, he depicts himself as a hero who, innocent and free and therefore without restriction or deficiency, is merely this one man who he is, a man of his own sort as a subjective work of art.10

In these lyrics, the poet contemplates himself as a participant in life. And, more often than not, in order to facilitate his participation, he partakes of wine, as in the following Anacreontic fragment (quoted in Athanaeus’ Scholars at Dinner): Bring water, boy, bring wine, bring me garlands of flowers: fetch them, so that I may box against love.11

Here the poet contemplates himself as one among many objects. He does not express any intense emotions beyond frivolity. “Duty”

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does not play a major role here, but neither does Anacreon neglect his “higher ends.” His actions – falling in love, singing, drinking, and dancing in a Bacchic celebration – are the only “higher ends” he need pursue. In essence he is now the hero of his own poem. Freed from objectively contemplating how others participate in the world, as the epic poets did, Anacreon subjectively contemplates his own participation in that world. Realizing this release as a kind of “spiritual freedom [ geistiger Freiheit],” Hegel claims that by putting himself directly into his poetry Anacreon raises his personal identity to an object worthy of contemplation in relation to national identity.12 More concisely: in Anacreon the personal puts on the mask of the national. In one of the longer Anacreontic fragments that we possess, Fragment 395, Anacreon touches on a theme of national significance for the Greeks: the loss of youth and the onset of old age. Here Anacreon uses the nationally significant motif of “the loss of youth” as a mirror in which to view himself. Unlike Pindar he does not project himself onto historic and/or mythic figures. Rather, he projects himself into the poem and thus contemplates himself in a much more direct manner: “My temples are already grey and my head is white; graceful youth is no more with me, my teeth are old, and no long span of sweet life remains now [emphases added].”13 To the Greeks, and to Anacreon as a Greek, the loss of youth is a grievous thing. Achilles’ dirge in the underworld is only one of the more famous laments upon this theme. But in this lyric poem Anacreon also addresses the issue of aging from his own personal perspective. Here he replaces the epic national hero with himself. Unlike Pindar, who looks into the mirror of myth and history and sees himself reflected in various figures, Anacreon seems to be looking into an actual mirror and what he sees there is his own life fading before his very eyes. But not only does Anacreon lament the loss of his youth and therefore a diminishing number of lovers and Bacchic revelries; in this poem he also fears the coming of death: “And so I often weep in fear of Tartarus: for the recess of Hades is grim, and the road down does not come up again.”14 Tartarus and Hades, the only mythical references in this poem, occur only as a

Introduction: what is lyric?

way for Anacreon to address his own fears. According to a Hegelian reading of this poem there is no one here apart from Anacreon. It is Anacreon whom we hear about from beginning to end and it is through Anacreon that we hear these things. He is both the subjective voice of the poem and the poem’s central object. In his poetry Anacreon impersonates himself. As has hopefully become apparent through this analysis of Anacreon as a paradigmatic lyricist, lyric poetry tends to concentrate upon the more evanescent aspects of life, fixing upon something fleeting that can only be “made permanent by its expression,” taking a poetic stab at eternity.15 This sense of evanescence is also apparent in lyric form. In contrast to the almost mechanical way in which the epic poet ticks off time with uniform iambic hexameters, the lyric poet can employ an infinite array of poetic meters to convey a more fluid experience of this more evanescent world, making lyrical discourse seem, in Edgar Allen Poe’s formulation, “oracular and discontinuous.”16 Unlike epic time, which is controlled by a fixed external world, lyric time is controlled by a fluid internal one. Epic is then made to feel even more rigid because its narrative events and characters are actually in the past or, if not in the past, then the narrator’s distance from the narrative nevertheless conveys a preterite sense of objectivity. Furthermore, as in the episode of Odysseus’ scar, the Greek epic poet cannot resist foregrounding everything. Homer does not pick and choose which national realities to portray; he portrays them all and strives to do so with equal objectivity. By thus foregrounding everything, the epic narrator “juxtaposes or interweaves them [the narrative elements] in rather a spatial extension.”17 Through this spatialization of time, epic breaks up the discursive flow of history through the non-discursive punctuation of mythology. The lyric poet, on the other hand, establishes a more immediate relationship to time through his or her poem. Unlike the nondiscursive style of epic, lyric does not tend to spatialize time. Instead, it attempts to reproduce a more discursive temporal flow through word flow: “the uniformity or alteration of this movement [the lyric poet’s train of thought or emotion], its restlessness or rest, its

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tranquil flow or foaming flood and fountains, must also be expressed as a temporal movement of word-sounds in which the poet’s inner life is made manifest.”18 In lyric, time tends to be in the present tense or, at the very least, it tends to convey a sense of immediacy. This sense of immediacy is further heightened by the fact that the lyric poet often uses the first person and is conventionally thought of either as the primary voice of the poem or as a witness deeply affected by the poem’s contents and/or outcome. Finally, unlike the epic poet, the lyric poet tends not to be a narrator who has escaped from the story and who now tells it to us from an objective distance. Rather, the lyric poet is caught up in the moment of the poem and may even feel trapped by it. Like Keats’ “bold lover,” eternally young, eternally in pursuit of his beloved as she forever outdistances him round and round the Grecian urn, lyric poetry is flux fixed by art. WAGNER ON LYRIC

For Wagner as for Hegel, in the beginning there was epic, wherein the Greek Volk celebrated to themselves the deeds of their heroes. Then, much later in its artistic evolution and political development, this same Greek Volk began to represent heroic actions on stage and to re-enact them through the civic institution of drama. Encapsulating this difference in Opera and Drama, Wagner contends that the hero’s “deeds it [das Volk] celebrates in Epos, but itself in Drama re-enacts them.”19 In between these two poetic extremes, epic and drama, comes lyric,20 just as Siegfried occupies the middle stage between Wagner’s properly epic opera – Die Walku¨re – and his dramatic opera – Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Pursuing these ideas in his posthumously published “Sketches and Fragments” for 1849–51, under the heading “Lyric and Drama” Wagner also classifies lyric as “the enjoyment of art for oneself.” And yet, like Hegel, Wagner argues that the best lyrics are not just inscrutably personal but rather a combination of the personal and the national. A similar sentiment is expressed by Mu¨ller in his Dorians when he claims that “lyric poetry,

Introduction: what is lyric?

though it might more powerfully affect individuals, should nevertheless be of such a nature as to interest a whole people; and the subject, even if suggested by other circumstances, should have a reference to religious notions, and admit of a mythological treatment.”21 In one important way, however, Wagner does disagree with Hegel’s appraisal of Greek lyric: the way it values culture over nature. Or rather, he agrees with Hegel’s assessment of Greek lyric but does not entirely embrace it as a model for German art. Because Wagner believed that nineteenth-century German culture was tainted by foreign influences, he ultimately urges the German artist to throw off the mantle of culture and instead seek refuge from culture in nature. In Siegfried Wagner represents these ideas by Hellenizing a particularly nineteenth-century German fascination with nature and by invoking lyric poetry to guide his hero toward individuality and away from the decadent collectivity of Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re. The Orphic strains in Siegfried reveal not only its German Grecocentrism, but also the liberating power of lyric in general and thus the importance of lyric to individuals and nations seeking to free themselves from epic society and myth. Following Hegel’s theory of Greek poetic evolution, wherein drama emerges from lyric, Wagner claims, “The tragic Hero of the Greeks stepped out from amid the [lyric] Chorus, and, turning back to face it, cried: ‘Lo! – so does, so bears himself, a human being! What ye were hymning in wise saws and maxims, I set it up before you in all the cogence of Necessity.’”22 Alongside this poetic evolution there also occurs a national political evolution that is enabled by it or at least occurs simultaneously with it: “[Greek] Tragedy’s basis was the Lyric, from which it advanced to word-speech in the same way as Society advanced from the natural, ethico-religious ties of feeling, to the political State.”23 The collective nation gives birth to drama, Hegel and Wagner tell us, whereas the individual poet gives birth to lyric out of his or her subjective feelings about the larger issues of life. It is not only this evolutionary proximity to drama that makes lyric more attractive to Wagner than epic.24 Even though lyric, like epic, sometimes relies heavily on narrative elements, Wagner trusted this genre

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more than epic because it appeals more to feeling than epic does. In Opera and Drama he maintains that lyric fundamentally appeals to our physical senses and our aesthetic sensibilities insofar as, like drama, it visually represents action through “the speech-enabled spiritualizing of the body’s motion.”25 Through such genres as the dithyramb, for example, lyric combines physicality, feeling, and understanding in a “creative league of Gesture-, Tone-, and Word-speech.”26 As elsewhere in Wagner, the intellectual “vivisection” of anything into its constituent parts calls for critique, whereas aesthetic unities like lyric’s “creative league” of dance, song, and poetry call for praise. To create these sorts of aesthetic unities, like Hegel Wagner seems convinced that a lyricist needs a peaceful and relatively stable space in which to develop as an individual. But unlike Hegel, Wagner argues that this stable space does not, or rather cannot, lie within the state – at least where nineteenth-century Germany is concerned. In Opera and Drama he argues that, while the Greeks might have possessed a political state that was “a worthy object of Feeling,”27 the Germans do not. Germany, according to Wagner, “is void of any purely-human sentiment, and therefore is uncommunicable through the Feeling’s highest utterance.”28 Since therefore the fate of Germany is controlled by such a corrupt and arbitrary political system, Wagner encourages individual Germans to seek refuge from this state in the pristine and genuine world of nature: “Our Fate is the arbitrary political State, which to us shews itself as an outer necessity for the maintenance of Society; and from which we seek refuge in the Nature-necessity, because we have learnt to understand the latter and have recognised it as the conditionment of our being and all its shapings.”29 Further distancing himself and Germany from the Greeks, Wagner argues, “The Greek Fate is the inner Nature-necessity, from which the Greek – because he did not understand it – sought refuge in the arbitrary political State.”30 For the Greeks, nature embodied the arbitrary fate that they sought to escape by means of the state. For the Germans, Wagner imagines that the state embodies the arbitrary fate that his countrymen should seek to escape by means of nature.31

Introduction: what is lyric?

Only if and when Germany manages this return to nature might it finally begin to rebuild its culture on a truer, purer, and more fundamental basis. As Wagner argues in “Art and Revolution,” only by uniting with nature can the artist find true inspiration and ability: Art is the highest expression of activity of a race that has developed its physical beauty in unison with itself and Nature; and man must reap the highest joy from the world of sense, before he can mould therefrom the implements of his art; for from the world of sense alone, can he derive so much as the impulse to artistic creation.32

It is only in nature, Wagner advises us, that we can truly see things wie sie nur sind ( just as they are). This is in part the lesson of Siegfried. In order to nourish Siegfried’s growth as an individual, Wagner turns away from the political state and toward the state of nature. The political state, as defined theoretically in Opera and Drama and depicted operatically in Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re, is corrupt. Such a corrupt political world cannot inspire a lyric hero to genuine, “purely-human sentiment” or “natural, ethico-religious ties of Feeling.”33 Interestingly, this view of nature contradicts Adorno’s understanding of lyric opera as a genre that frees us from the fateful “bonds of nature.” For Wagner it is nature that frees us from other, more fateful bonds, especially those of the state. Thus Siegfried begins his life’s journey in the woods, making friends with the beasts of the forest and learning the language of woodbirds. Through these Orphic gestures, Wagner demonstrates Siegfried’s practical, functional, and generic debts to lyric (chapter 6). This lyric journey of self-discovery helps Wagner in turn work through certain national and personal, racial and artistic crises (chapter 7). Finally, Siegfried ends on a positive note about the benefits of returning to nature from culture in order to build a purer and more universal artwork of the future. Indeed, it is only after he has achieved this closer rapport with nature that Siegfried can enter the wider society of Go¨tterda¨mmerung (chapter 8).34

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Orpheus and lyric liberation

Since opera’s conception in Renaissance Italy, scholars and composers alike have been asking what can be gained by thinking of drama as its primary model, medium, and literary paradigm. But both in the distant and the more recent past few thinkers have ventured to wonder what opera might gain through its use of lyric. In fact, the most famous formers and reformers of opera have, sometimes quite vociferously, tried to extirpate lyric from opera. Richard Wagner was perhaps the loudest. Looking back at the birth of opera as already a dramatic failure in need of lyrical pruning, Wagner saw the Italian effort to create opera by reviving Greek tragedy as little more than the grafting of church music onto Senecan drama: “Italian Opera is the singular miscarriage of an academic fad, according to which, if one took a versified dialogue modeled more or less on Seneca, and simply got it psalm-sung as one does with the Church-litanies, it was believed one would find oneself on the high road to restoring Antique Tragedy, provided one also arranged for due interruption by choral chants and ballet-dances.”1 It was such lyrical displays as these “choral chants and ballet-dances” that Wagner sought to root out of opera, while simultaneously raising dialogue, hitherto relegated to the mutterings of recitative, to a higher level of musical sophistication and complexity. As he makes clear in a “Prologue to a Reading of Go¨tterda¨mmerung before a Select Audience in Berlin,” Wagner was quite conscious of having elevated “the dramatic dialogue itself to the main subject of musical treatment; whereas in Opera proper the moments of lyrical delay, and mostly violent arrest of the action, had hitherto been deemed the only ones of possible service to the musical composition.”2 As Wagner saw it, lyric often seemed to impede opera qua drama, to delay and even stop the action cold. 122

Orpheus and lyric liberation

But is it possible that there is also a way in which lyric might benefit opera qua drama – or qua anything else for that matter? How, in terms of performance, might the use of lyric pragmatically benefit both the operatic composer and/or the operatic audience? In terms of function, what might opera achieve through the staging of lyric song? And as a genre, how might lyric help opera achieve the goals of its original model, Greek tragedy, if not as a staged performance then at least as a social institution? Such questions are central not only to the study of lyric and opera in general, but also Greek lyric and Wagner’s Siegfried in particular. To understand the lyric dimensions of Siegfried, we must first try to understand the lyrical limits of opera in general and then see how Wagner worked within these limits, how he expanded them, how he sought to escape them, and even how he tried to destroy them. DRAMMA PER MUSICA OR LYRICA PER MUSICA?

Despite the fact that many if not most historical and theoretical accounts of opera claim that drama is opera’s original source of inspiration and its most enduring literary paradigm, lyric has exerted perhaps just as important and long-lasting an influence on the formation and repeated reformation of opera. According to the most widely accepted story of its origins, opera was first brought to light during the late sixteenth century by the Florentine camerata, a kind of Renaissance think-tank composed of Italian literati and amateur musicians. Theoretically, these men invented opera in an attempt to transform Greek tragedy into a contemporary musico-dramatic idiom. By 1600 two of its members, Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, published the first two operas for which we still possess manuscripts. Contrary to what one might expect from a group ostensibly dedicated to the rebirth of tragedy, the camerata’s early operas did not focus on dramatic heroes taken from the Greek tragic tradition. Instead, they dramatized the story of a lyricist, Orpheus, as told mainly through the poetry of Virgil and Ovid in the Eclogues and Metamorphoses respectively. Moreover, the libretti for these operas

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were based on a pastoral play, L’Euridice, by Ottavio Rinuccini, also a camerata member.3 Seven years later it was still the lyrical aspects4 of the Orpheus myth that held center stage when, in 1607, Claudio Monteverdi composed La favola d’Orfeo, what most critics consider to be the first great opera and a defining moment for the genre. Significantly, Monteverdi, as opera’s first professional composer, had previously made his living and secured much of his fame through the composition of madrigals. In other words, the first great composer of dramatic music was also arguably his century’s greatest composer of lyric music. While one may claim that this early influence of lyric and the Greeks upon opera would have been more direct if the first operas had been based on, for example, a Pindar poem, yet, certainly something must be said for the idea that one of the founding mythical figures of Greek lyric poetry – along with Apollo and Hermes – served as the subject of early opera and has recurred so persistently throughout operatic history. The particular Orpheus myth that these operas focused on was Orpheus’ attempt to rescue Eurydice from the underworld. As Joseph Kerman once noted, the decision to stage this particular story about Orpheus – the attempt to rescue Eurydice – mirrors a similar crisis in the history of music – the attempt to create opera.5 According to myth, in order to bring Eurydice back to the land of the living Orpheus had to take action by mounting life’s stage. According to history, in order to represent this moment music had to take action by mounting the dramatic stage. This parallel between myth and history implies that if Orpheus were to succeed in rescuing Eurydice, not only would this prove him a man of action, it might also prove music a medium capable of depicting action. Insofar as Orpheus successfully descends to Hades and rescues Eurydice, he succeeds in turning his talent for passion into action. However, as we all know, his rescue mission was, in the final analysis, less than successful. Ultimately he fails to reap the benefits of his heroics because he loses Eurydice on his way back from Hades. Seen from one perspective the symbolic meaning of this failure can be interpreted as Orpheus’ partial conversion to a belief in the

Orpheus and lyric liberation

possibilities of drama. Hades, perhaps realizing this, takes advantage of the fact that the voice alone is no longer enough to satisfy Orpheus. To ensure that Eurydice is returned to him, Hades stipulates that on their journey back to life Orpheus must not turn around to see if his beloved is still following him. Hearing is allowed; seeing is not. After vainly trying to resist the temptation, so to speak torn between the lyric art of hearing and the dramatic art of seeing, in the end Orpheus turns around. This need to see his beloved signals the success of drama. According to the new doctrine of drama, hearing is no longer believing. Seeing is. The disembodied lyric voice is no longer as powerful as the embodied dramatic voice. At least in Monteverdi’s version of the story, when at the end of the opera Orpheus is apotheosized as a constellation in the night sky, this only confirms the lasting success of the dramatic as visual. But this is not the only possible reading of the Orpheus myth and its relationship to opera. The fact that Orpheus turns around and loses Eurydice does not necessarily signal the success of drama over lyric. It may signify that in some sense drama and music – symbolized here as sight and sound – are incompatible. Although able to hear her on his way back to the land of the living, at the very moment that Orpheus turns to see Eurydice he loses her. That Orpheus thus fails as a man of action should at least cast some doubt on music’s viability as a dramatic, visual medium. But where opera does succeed, at least according to Monteverdi’s adaptation of the Orpheus myth, is during its lyrical moments not its dramatic ones. Orpheus triumphs over Charon through heartfelt lament, through song and passion, not through drama and action. Opera succeeds not as drama but as lyric, not dramma per musica but lyrica per musica. One might therefore argue that Orpheus’ failure proves that music cannot sustain a dramatic, visual reality, just. According to this interpretation, musical drama can only be conjured up by the lyrical voice for a brief and insubstantial moment. In the end it is only lyric that endures and Orpheus’ metamorphosis into a starry constellation merely underscores the lack of concrete and substantial presence of the visual in opera. The final verdict: musical drama is a distant star, not a concrete reality.

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Of course, the relationship between drama and lyric in operatic history is much more complicated than this juxtaposition of failure and success might lead one to believe. Opera’s birth and continued existence can be better characterized as an ongoing rather than a resolved struggle between drama and lyric. Far from disappearing after these early experiments, the importance of the Orpheus myth and the tension between lyric and drama has continued to exert its influence over the form of opera as a living genre. According to at least one responsible count, since the days of the Florentine camerata there have been no fewer than thirty operas explicitly dedicated to the myth of Orpheus and literally countless operas that depict Orphic characters and/or certain elements of the Orpheus myth in one form or another.6 Indeed, it is this ongoing conflict between lyric and drama, as embodied by Orpheus, which seems to have occupied one of the most privileged positions in operatic formation and reformation over the past 400 years. “If there is any meaning to opera at all,” Adorno speculates, “if it is more than a mere agglomerate . . . then that meaning is to be sought in [this] contradiction . . . between real, live people who speak as in drama and the medium of singing.”7 Or more succinctly: “all opera is Orpheus.”8 THE BENEFITS OF LYRIC FOR THE OPERATIC GENRE, AUDIENCE, AND ARTIST

But why is this true? Why has lyric remained such an essential ingredient in opera? What benefits are to be gained through the portrayal of Orpheus and Orphic characters? Beginning from the perspective of the composer, one might conjecture that the presence of a lyric character in a libretto greatly simplifies the task of dramatizing music for the stage. From folksongs to ballads and airs to arias, one of opera’s most fundamental set-pieces and structural supports is song form. Inserting a lyric character into an opera simplifies the task of the composer. With singers for characters, the composer has to worry less about manufacturing moments where song is called for. To take the case of Orpheus again, unlike other heroes that are

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known mainly for their feats of strength, the actions of an Orphic figure coincide with one of opera’s most fundamental forms of expression and can therefore emanate from a character more believably in any given situation. Because theater audiences always expect some amount of mimesis and realism – even in opera – in the case of lyric characters the dramatization process is accomplished a posteriori by the mere fact of their tuneful essence. What do singers do? They sing. So how does one characterize singers? By making them sing. This kind of uncomplicated mimesis in turn encourages the audience to accept the lyrical figure’s musical expressions as believable and “in character.” The use of a character who is a lyricist supports our belief that that character would be justified in using such an extravagant means of expression as operatic song. Look again at Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Almost the entirety of Act I and half of Act II are a metatheatrical performance of lyrical song. Through the staging of a marriage celebration, the lyric characters – shepherds, dancers, and Orfeo himself – unproblematically perform in their personae as singers. These performances in turn make up the various set-pieces of the opera, such as Orfeo’s songful plea to Charon, followed shortly thereafter by his musical jubilation as he leads Eurydice back to life. In fact Monteverdi imports almost two-thirds of the music for Orfeo directly from pre-existing lyrical music forms. While this might seem intolerable or at least unjustified from the perspective of dramatic realism, the operatic convention whereby characters “break into song” is much more readily accepted if such characters are lyricists and therefore devotees, descendants, and/or reincarnations of Orpheus himself.9 Perhaps partly as a result of this preference for lyric characters, opera in general is highly metatheatrical. The repertoire, both old and new, contains an untold number of examples which, by analogy with the spoken drama’s “play within a play,” might be called “songs within a song.” Think of the drinking song in Otello, which displays Jago’s control and Cassio’s lack thereof. Or consider the set-pieces of the “Song Contest” in Die Meistersinger, some of which are beautiful, others comical, and still others that serve more as theoretical tracts

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on the intersection of mimesis, race, and nationality. In a lighter vein recall Don Giovanni’s musical conquest of Donna Elvira’s maid through the canzonetta with which he serenades and seduces her. Of course, given the fact that so many of these metatheatrical moments begin with the libretto, we must recognize that it is not only the composer but also the librettist who pragmatically benefits from the use of lyric in opera, insofar as this genre helps structure the literary text by studding and shaping it with periods, points of climax, and places for reflection. Metastasio, one of the first and greatest masters of libretto form, capitalized on the most common theatrical paradigm of his time by readily incorporating into his libretti both lyric contemplation and dramatic action. As Tovey helpfully summarizes, the Metastasian libretto is a simple “scheme of tableaux strung together by dialogue.”10 In accordance with this formula, “[d]ramatic action is explosive, and each explosion changes one tableau into another.”11 Traditionally, the most popular operatic form for such “tableaux” is the lyric aria, the moment when a character pretends to reveal to the audience his or her innermost thoughts and feelings. Like John Stuart Mill’s fortuitous definition of poetry in general as something not so much heard as overheard, in the specific case of the lyric aria, we the audience are made privy to the character’s inmost thoughts and desires.12 We overhear more than we hear. While it is important to recognize the aria as an intimate moment of self-reflection, we must also recognize it as one of the most public and artificial moments in opera. Like the convention of the soliloquy or monologue in spoken drama, there is perhaps nothing more unnatural or more public than a single singer stepping into the center spotlight and revealing his or her innermost thoughts to a theater filled with expectant fans. Although the convention of the aria begs our complicity in such lyric self-revelations, asking us to believe that these tableaux are deeply personal moments for the character, this convention is nevertheless a highly public moment for the performer, a fact that the audience recognizes through other operatic conventions such as clapping, booing, and/or calling for

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encores, all of which signal our pleasure or displeasure in the performer’s dissimulation rather than the character’s psychic selfautopsy. In the aria form and performance we can discern the tension between presentation and representation in opera, the public recognition of the dramatic audience combined with the private reflection we associate with lyric poetry. Even from this all too brief discussion of metatheatrical lyricism, it should be clear just how ubiquitous and important lyrical form is in opera. Because it frequently performs such important functions, it begins to seem as though lyric is something more than a mere theatrical expedient to ensure that music makes its way onto the dramatic stage and can be unproblematically accepted by the audience off stage. One may even suspect that the lyric presence in opera is not only a means to an end, but also an end in itself. As Adorno beautifully, if somewhat paradoxically, expresses it: “The closer opera gets to a parody of itself, the closer it is to its own most particular element.”13 Through a kind of meta- or double theatricality, the presence of lyric in opera helps us “to confirm [our] pleasure in dissimulation.”14 Like children at play, one of our most fundamental reasons for going to the opera is to seek to indulge in the pleasure of make-believe and to lose ourselves in a world that is not our own. Rephrasing Adorno: the more opera approaches such unbelievable extremes of pretence and pretension, the closer it comes to achieving this ideal goal of naı¨ve delight in dissimulation. Beyond such delight in dissimulation, the lyrical release from the everyday that opera offers us is something that is perhaps even more important than “mere” pleasure. This lyrical release is a performative exemplar of uninhibited self-expression. According to the Orphic paradigm, insofar as Orpheus liberates Eurydice from Hades through his ability to plead his case and thus eloquently persuade, he prevails through the subjective power of his voice. This triumph over death symbolizes, according to Adorno, the way in which lyrical music “intervenes in and transforms fate’s blind, inescapable ties to nature (as they are represented in Western myths).”15 Metaphorically speaking, lyric has the power to raise the dead. Less metaphorically,

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it allows for the expression of a character’s personal identity, augmented by music to an almost magical power to persuade. Lyric can grant every character in an opera the possibility of selfexpression, no matter how beautiful or ugly, intelligent or ignorant, rich or poor, evil or good that character is. It is this operatic cum lyric ability that gives meaning to what in a “merely” literary context might remain meaningless, unspoken, or untransfigured by music’s capacity to represent a character’s inner subjectivity. At this point in the discussion of lyric we have come full circle, arriving back at the origins of opera as drama and, more specifically, opera’s origins in Greek tragedy. Ever since its theoretical beginnings among the Florentine camerata, through its self-comparison with Greek tragedy opera has continuously addressed the all-important conflict between freedom and slavery, free will and fate. And it may well be through specifically lyrical means that opera most nearly achieves the social effects of what the camerata claimed as its aesthetic model, Greek tragedy. Among other debts that opera owes to classical tragedy, the aestheticization of democracy is one of its most important and enduring achievements. Opera revives Greek tragedy not only as a staged musical event involving heroic characters and actions, but also as a lyric embodiment of certain political beliefs. As classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet have argued, tragedy was born at a time when the Greeks began to critique their nature myths from the point of view of the democratic polis or, more specifically, from the point of view of the new democratic law courts, their emergent legal thought, and the evolutionary development of personal identity and free will. Through the civic institution of tragedy, Greek tragedians called into question the ancient mythological and epic notions of fate, miasma, and bloodguilt, weighing such collective tropes against the more individual and emergent civic concepts of will, responsibility, and personal motive.16 Opera was similarly “born” in part as an attempt to scrutinize myth from the point of view of lyric. In opera lyric fulfills the individualizing role that democracy once performed in Greek tragedy.17 It offers freedom from the mythic bonds of nature and

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a voice to those who might otherwise have remained silent or silenced. Off stage as well as on stage, the force of operatic lyric can liberate its listeners, inspiring us to freely express our own personal identities. As W. H. Auden put it, “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.”18 And, I might add, even those high Cs inaccurately struck still strike a blow for freedom. Perfect pitch is not a prerequisite for freedom. THE UNPROBLEMATIC ROLE OF LYRIC IN SIEGFRIED

But what has all this to do with Wagner? Quite a lot, as it turns out. At least on the surface Richard Wagner’s Siegfried seems to exemplify unproblematically many if not most of these sorts of practical, functional, and generic debts to lyric poetry in general and Greek lyric in particular. The truth of this statement can best be tested through an analysis of Wagner’s mythopoetic and musicopoetic decisions in this opera and through his justifications for these decisions in his theoretical works. Turning first to Wagner’s mythopoetic techniques, Siegfried’s affinity for forest creatures and his ability to understand birdsong are traits that have been ascribed to Orpheus from the ancient world to the Middle Ages and beyond.19 And what is more, arching over the entire plot of Siegfried, Wagner seems to deploy a lyrical critique of myth through his hero Siegfried’s search for individual freedom and personal identity. The final scene of Siegfried even re-enacts a pivotal moment in the Orpheus myth. Just as Orpheus liberates Eurydice from the bonds of death, Siegfried liberates Bru¨nnhilde from the bonds of sleep, death’s counterfeit.20 And even before the orchestra or the singers produce one single note of the score, the title of the opera alone suggests that this will be more lyrical in tone than the other three operas in the Ring cycle. The mere fact that Wagner chose to baptize this opera with the proper name of its central character already hints at its dedication to personal identity. Finally, in his theoretical works Wagner intrinsically links his hero Siegfried with Apollo, the Greek god of music and

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poetry who, according to some versions of the myth, was actually Orpheus’ father.21 Attempting to establish the significance of these syncretisms in his essay “The Wibelungen,” Wagner notes that according to Siegfried’s roots in Frankish saga he is known as “the God of Light or Sun-god.”22 For Wagner, his hero is therefore the Nordic equivalent of Apollo, the god of light and the lyre. Moving from plot and characterization to the more particular details of Siegfried, we hear lyrical echoes both in the songs its characters sing and in the orchestration that supports them. Structurally, the opera as a whole includes many metatheatrical songs as well as selfreflective arias that recognize a wider audience. As is consistent with the Orphic strains of opera, Siegfried presents us with numerous characters who express themselves through what Abbate calls “phenomenal song,” that is, through songs that both the characters on stage and the audience off stage are meant to hear as songs.23 The sheer number of times these characters describe themselves as singing metatheatrically marks this opera as an extended dramatization of lyric song. The strophic nature of these songs, along with other recognizable lyric formulae, indeed justifies the name that is sometimes given to this opera: Liederspiel, or song-play.24 For example, in one of Mime’s quasi-folksongs in Act I, scene 1, we hear what is essentially a lullaby with a simple refrain, wherein Mime mawkishly expresses his (presumably false) feelings of tenderness toward Siegfried:25 Als zullendes Kind zog ich dich auf, wa¨rmte mit Kleiden den kleinen Wurm: Speise und Trank trug ich dir zu, hu¨tete dich wie die eig’ne Haut.

From a suckling babe I brought you up, warmed the little mite with clothes: food and drink I brought to you and tended you like a second self.26

Similarly, in Siegfried’s more “authentic” folksong in Act I, scene 3, while forging the sword Nothung, a talisman from his father that will further guide his lyric quest for personal identity, the hero sings

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what is structurally a strophic worksong. As in Mime’s lullaby, simple melodic and lyric repetition characterize Siegfried’s refrain of “Nothung! Nothung! Neidliches Schwert!”27 Indeed, the somewhat boorish joviality of his “Ho-ho! Ho-ho! Ho-hei! Ho-hei! Ho-ho!” underscores the song’s lyric simplicity and repetition.28 As elsewhere in the Ring, the use of such pre-linguistic exclamations is meant to connote a closer connection to nature, and thus to lyric, rather than culture.29 In his accompaniment to these tuneful airs, Wagner’s orchestra takes on a decidedly lighter touch, as in his tonepainting of the bucolic “forest murmurs” and Woodbird passages. Through such orchestration Wagner shifts the orchestra’s function from a narrative one to an evocative one, from presentation to representation, thus marking the generic evolution of the Ring as a whole from the epic background of Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re to the lyrical mode of Siegfried. LYRIC INDIVIDUATION THROUGH NATURE

Moving from the general to the particular and from form to content, we see that Siegfried is deeply concerned with nature and the role it can play in self-recognition. As Peter Conrad rightly recognizes, “Siegfried belongs to the genres of pastoral, which treats not the politician or soldier but his apprenticeship in private life, and of romance, which describes the hero’s journey through the world towards self-discovery.”30 Both the libretto and the music for Siegfried reflect Wagner’s apparent lyrical bent insofar as the characters in Siegfried are depicted as being more isolated and individualized than in the earlier epic and collective stages of the Ring. They soliloquize, contemplate nature, and lose themselves in self-reflection. In Act I, scene 1 Siegfried tells us how he gazed at his selfreflection in a brook and mused upon his past, his personal history, and his place in nature. Like the cosmogony that begins Das Rheingold, here also flowing water gives birth to identity. The primary difference is one of scale. While the birth in Das Rheingold occurs on an epic scale and the entire cosmos is born out of the swirling blackness

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of the Rhine, here a “limpid brook” gives birth to one man’s awareness of where he fits into that cosmos. Siegfried later recounts this experience to Mime in the lyrical form of folk wisdom: Nun kam ich zum klaren Bach: da erspa¨ht’ ich die Ba¨um’ und Their’ im Spiegel; Sonn’ und Wolken, wie sie nur sind, im Glitzer erschienen sie gleich. Da sah’ ich denn auch mein eigen Bild; ganz anders als du du¨nkt’ ich mir da: so gleich wohl der Kro¨te ein gla¨nzender Fisch; doch kroch nie ein Fisch aus der Kro¨te.

When I came to the limpid brook, I glimpsed trees and beasts in its glassy surface; sun and clouds, just as they are, appeared in the glittering stream. And then I saw my own likeness, too, quite different from you [Mime] I thought myself then: as like to a toad were a glittering fish, though no fish ever crept from a toad.31

While an epic poet might expatiate at length on the size of the brook, how delicately it bubbles, which water gods inhabit it, what myths are associated with it, and from whence it comes and whither it flows, Siegfried merely mentions the brook as one among many other natural objects, a mirror in which he sees the blended harmony of the surrounding pastoral landscape: trees, beasts, sun, clouds. Then, among these natural objects, Siegfried also catches sight of himself: “And then I / saw my own likeness, too. . .” This recognition marks an important moment of self-discovery for him. By means of the brook he recognizes that he too is part of the natural continuum. After Siegfried recognizes that he is a part of nature, he then realizes that he is of a different race from Mime, as similar to him “as like to a toad / were a glittering fish.” Mime, Siegfried joyfully realizes, could not possibly be his father, let alone both his father and his mother – as Mime gratingly and ingratiatingly reiterates. For Wagner, unlike Adorno and the Greeks, nature is not an inconstant judge. More importantly, Wagner intends this to be a liberating

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Ex. 9 Siegfried motif

notion not just for Siegfried, who has long suspected that he is not Mime’s son, but also for Wagner himself and for Germany, both of whom are trying to find their own true roots and to define themselves over and against those that live uncomfortably close to them. It is nature that provides the truth that will set them free from arbitrary convention. Just as his reflection in the brook helps Siegfried to free himself from Mime, so too will the representation of Germany and Wagner in the Ring cycle help Germany as a nation and Wagner as an individual to free themselves from bourgeoisJewish convention and influence. As Siegfried continues to muse upon his communion with nature via his own limpid reflection, his emergent sense of individual consciousness is underscored by the ways in which the orchestra becomes more closely allied to his perspective on the world. At the height of his self-recognition the orchestra enunciates a leitmotif that clearly belongs to Siegfried (see Ex. 9).32 At this point in this lyrical scene, both orchestra and Siegfried sound the leitmotif

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simultaneously. Such vocal-orchestral unities are significant moments in the Ring. Because he has seen himself reflected in nature, Siegfried begins to realize his true identity. Joyously, he cries out this newfound sense of self, vocalizing for the first time the Siegfried motif in this his eponymous lyric opera. The orchestra, singing in the role of nature, duly confirms Siegfried’s sense of himself. The simultaneity of the leitmotif in the vocal line and the orchestra marks the salutary effects of nature, its infallible ability to confirm our genuine identity. Unlike Das Rheingold, here the orchestra does not repeatedly objectify the background narrative with interpretive leitmotifs. The orchestral music seems to emanate from Siegfried himself, flowing out of his lyric tale. He is at one with the orchestra’s natural tone-painting. No musical narrator intrudes upon the scene or seems to know more about Siegfried than Siegfried himself knows. The Hegelian “unhappy consciousness,” as represented elsewhere in the Ring by a split between a character’s melody and orchestral harmony, is here healed by Siegfried’s self-recognition in nature. LYRIC TIME AND EXPERIENCE

A more intimate relationship between the orchestra and Siegfried in turn creates a different sense of time in Siegfried, as is only appropriate in a predominantly lyric – as opposed to epic or dramatic – opera. True to its overall “atmosphere,” Siegfried presents time as something fleetingly present. This sense of temporal fluidity and immediacy reveals itself through the libretto, the characters’ relationship to the orchestra, and the audience’s experience of the opera through the characters’ eyes and ears. One of the most interesting examples of how this opera conveys a sense of lyric temporality is in Act II, scene 2. Siegfried, alone with his thoughts before his battle with Fafner, conveys this fluid sensibility through the wealth of caesuras in his song. He continually changes meter, pauses, halts, and just as suddenly starts singing again. Time and the orchestral accompaniment seem to be completely in his control. The orchestral narrator recedes into the background as things begin to move at the pace of his subjective experience. Alone in the woods, Siegfried grapples

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with his newfound knowledge that Mime is not his real father and that, instead, he is really descended from a race of heroes, the Wa¨lsungs. As these new thoughts, feelings, and realizations assail him, he continually readjusts the flow of his lyric self-expression: Wie sah mein Vater wohl aus? – Ha! – gewiß wie ich selbst! Denn wa¨r’ wo von Mime ein Sohn, mu¨ßt’ er nicht ganz Mime gleichen? G’rade so garstig, griesig und grau, klein und krumm, ho¨ck’rig und hinkend, mit ha¨ngenden Ohren, triefigen Augen – fort mit dem Alp! Ich mag ihn nicht mehr seh’n! Aber – wie sah meine Mutter wohl aus? Das – kann ich nun gar nicht mir denken! – Der Rehhindin gleich gla¨ntzen gewiß ihr hellschimmernden Augen, – nur noch viel scho¨ner! – Da bang sie mich geboren, warum aber starb sie da? Sterben die Menschenmu¨tter an ihren So¨hnen alle dahin? Traurig wa¨re das, traun! – Ach! mo¨cht’ ich Sohn meine Mutter sehen! – Meine – Mutter! – Ein Menschenweib! –

What must my father have looked like? – Ha! – Of course, like me! If any son of Mime’s existed, must he not look just like Mime? Just as filthy, fearful and wan, short and misshapen, hunchbacked and halting, with drooping ears and rheumy eyes – away with the elf! I don’t care to see him anymore! But – what must my mother have looked like? – That I cannot conceive of at all! – Like those of the roe-deer, her bright-shining eyes must surely have glistened – only far fairer! – When, in her dismay, she gave me birth, why did she have to die then? Do all mortal mothers perish because of their sons? Sad that would be, in truth! – Ah, might I, her son, see my mother! – My mother – a mortal woman! – 33

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Following this moment of self-reflection, Siegfried then “sighs deeply and leans further back”34 into the bed of the forest, physically and symbolically joining himself closer to nature in a gesture that he will repeat when he awakens Bru¨nnhilde, leaning down further and further until he joins her at the lips.35 Wagner depicts Siegfried here as one with nature, surrounded by the forest, its sounds, “the song of forest birds,”36 and one famous woodbird in particular: Du holdes Vo¨g’lein! Dich ho¨rt’ ich noch nie: bist du im Wald hier daheim? – Verstu¨nd’ ich sein su¨ßes Stammeln! Gewiß sagt’ es mir ’was, – vielleicht – von der lieben Mutter? –

You lovely woodbird! I’ve never heard you before: is the forest here your home? – Could I only make sense of his sweet sounding babble! He must be telling me something – perhaps about my dear mother? – 37

During this moment of inner peace and self-contemplation, the lyric hero listens to the natural world around him, seeking for understanding like the Pythagorean acousmatic straining to hear, for the very first time, his master’s voice from behind the veil. The “forest murmurs” and the Woodbird’s song are all immediate and real to Siegfried. The orchestral music in this scene is not merely a tone-painting that completes the set design or interprets the plot for the benefit of the audience. As opposed to its function as a Mauerschau throughout much of Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re – where the characters on stage are deaf to the orchestral narrator off stage – in this scene Siegfried hears and immediately comprehends the orchestra as nature. In this transformation from orchestral narrator to orchestral nature, Wagner restores to music the discursive and performative function that he had all but robbed it of in order to convey the decadence infecting the world of his epic operas. The orchestra no longer stands outside the time of the stage action in an effort to control its meaning. On the contrary, in Siegfried the orchestra does not control the characters so much as the characters – or at least Siegfried – control it. In direct contrast with his epic operas, in Siegfried it is the character that sometimes knows more than the audience.

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In his scene with the Woodbird, for example, Siegfried is in a position to teach us to listen to nature in the same way that he does. As with the lyric poet who filters the external world through his or her own internal world, here we listen to an orchestral depiction of nature through Siegfried. That is, we experience this world from Siegfried’s perspective, unfiltered by a third narrative voice. In Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re, the orchestral narrator widens the gap between the audience’s understanding of the characters and the characters’ understanding of themselves, thereby heightening our objective sense of these epic operas. But Siegfried’s orchestra collapses the distance between audience and character. In Siegfried both the characters and the audience are brought closer together through their nearly simultaneous experience of the orchestra. The only difference in lag time occurs because Siegfried must hear the orchestra first and then interpret it for us. Thus Siegfried attempts to heal not only the “unhappy consciousness” of its characters, which was wounded in Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re, but also that of its audience. As one might expect with Wagner, this healing force in the orchestra is the voice of nature rather than the voice of narrative. It is the voice of feeling rather than intellect. With the relative absence of the orchestral narrator in Siegfried, the character of Siegfried becomes, both to the audience and to himself, a freer individual. He is allowed to develop without the constant intrusion of orchestral commentary. It is his own immediate experience of nature that nurtures his personal growth, not the intellectual guidance of a narrator, nor the interference of a god. In this way Siegfried fulfills the act of liberation that Siegmund began in Die Walku¨re. Through Wagner’s choices in terms of mythopoeisis, music, libretti, and theory, Siegfried as lyric opera charts the subjectivity of its hero Siegfried as he gains an understanding of himself by communing with nature. Like Cosima’s happy person “to whom in the somber whirlpools a helpful divinity mildly appears,” Siegfried is at peace with his world and Nature is his mild divinity, whereas his father was continuously at odds with his world and War was his god.38

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First-person opera and lyric identity

The journey of lyrical self-discovery that Siegfried embarks upon in his eponymous opera is also Wagner’s own journey of self-discovery. But since music ostensibly lacks a first-person singular voice, as a composer Wagner has to be more indirect than the lyric poet who can simply say “I.” Through this simple grammatical act, literary poets can imply that both they and their characters are simultaneously the origins of the lines we read or hear. Yet, as a composer specifically of vocal music, Wagner was able to obtain some of this directness through the self-expressive advantage he had over composers of, say, absolute music. Like the lyric poet, his characters can at least sing “I.” And perhaps more so than in any other opera in the Ring, when characters in Siegfried say “I” it is Wagner we hear ventriloquizing through them, trying to express and exorcise the demons that haunted him concerning his own biological origins and his art; specifically, those bourgeois Jewish demons that tormented him concerning his father’s true identity. WHO SPEAKS IN LYRIC POETRY?

There are two primary dangers associated with very traditional readings of lyric as autobiography and, in turn, the application of such readings to opera. The first danger is in identifying the character in a lyrical work too closely with its creator. The second is in overlooking the national dimension of lyric poetry. As for the first danger, recent literary critics have helped to problematize the sorts of traditional interpretations that identify ideas expressed in texts – lyrical or otherwise – with their authors in too direct a manner. At least since Roland Barthes pronounced the death of the author and thus cast a critical pall over all such interpretations, scholars have 140

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become skeptical of those who would try to force too direct a correlation between texts and their authors’ personal identities. Stated in its baldest terms, Barthes insists on radically divorcing the author from his or her own text: “who speaks (in the narrative) is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is not who is.”1 It would seem that from this critical perspective we should question whether it is really the lyric poet’s own voice we hear in a lyric poem. Or, in the case of a lyric opera like Siegfried, is it really Richard Wagner’s voice we hear ventriloquizing through the lyric form and content of this opera, or is his lyric voice somehow radically different from his personal and theoretical voices? Interestingly, whereas literary studies has had to strive to free itself from arguments that rely too heavily upon authorial intention and biography, musicology has had to strive, to some extent, to do the opposite. This is especially true with Wagner or, rather, with Wagner’s more questionable and execrable personal traits and political leanings. Wagner fans, apologists, and conservative critics alike have needed no encouragement from the likes of Roland Barthes to separate “who sings” in Wagner’s operas from certain aspects of “who is” in Wagner’s real life. The desire to drive a wedge between Wagner’s artistry and his personal life and especially his ideology is very strong, especially in a post-Holocaust world that would sometimes prefer to keep Wagner’s more unsavory political leanings and personal faults separate from his music.2 What was once considered a conservative approach in literary studies – to join author and text – has therefore, in Wagner studies, become the more radical approach.3 These more innovative Wagner scholars have tried to establish important links among Wagner’s characters (“who speaks”), his theoretical intentions (“who writes”), and his personal life (“who is”). And although this approach may violate arguments against authorial intention and autobiographical interpretation, ultimately it helps us achieve one of the greater goals that Barthes achieves through his obit for the author, namely, to open up the text to a greater multiplicity of meanings. Overlooking the role of nationality in the creation of lyric – the second danger mentioned above – likewise plagues the study of this

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very slippery genre. Despite its personal subject matter and form of expression, lyric does not exclude the possibility of universality, especially at the national level. According to Hegel, in addition to expressing the poet’s deeply felt personal identity, the lyric poem must also reach out to his or her audience and arouse in them a sympathetic sense of national identification. The lyric poet draws upon the same national treasure of myth, religion, history, tradition, and natural geography that the epic poet draws upon, but a single lyric usually contemplates only one among many national realities. To this extent, lyric poets objectify some aspect of themselves both for their own sake and for the sake of their national audience. They construct a nationalized vision of their passions in order that both the nation as a whole and the poet as a part of that whole may be purified by this vision. To understand fully the lyric nature of Siegfried means allowing that both of these aspects of lyric – authorial intent and national content – are germane to this study. In thus combining the two, Wagner most resembles the Greek lyric poet, Pindar. As Nietzsche himself said in a letter to fellow scholar and Wagnerite, Erwin Rohde, Wagner reminded him not only of Aeschylus but also Pindar, thus implying that the composer was not only a great dramatist but a great lyricist as well: “What I learn and see, hear and understand there [with Wagner], is indescribable . . . Aeschylus and Pindar are still alive.”4 Like Pindar, Wagner uses a lyrical forum to promote his own fears and desires as universal, or at least national. Both artists use their work to address questions about art with respect to themselves and their context. One essential difference, however, is in the way these two artists approach nature and culture. By looking at two specific works, namely, Pindar’s ode, Nemean 8, and Wagner’s opera, Siegfried, we see that the two are divided on what constitutes a guarantee for good art: for Pindar culture trumps nature, but for Wagner nature trumps culture. By examining both the authorial and national intentions behind Wagner’s Siegfried we can begin to understand the complex set of personal and political problems Wagner sought to solve through this lyric opera. Moreover, by comparing

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this opera and its intentions to the work of a Greek lyric poet like Pindar, we can also begin to understand how Wagner once again uses the Greeks to Hellenize German art and politics.5 What emerges is a more complex picture in which the Greeks are used not only to endorse Wagner’s ideas, but also to act as a foil for them. THE INTERSECTION OF PERSONAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN PINDAR

Given its more individualizing parameters, the content of lyric poetry tends to originate from the lyric poet’s deeply personal desire to communicate some heartfelt conviction, experience, or passion. According to Hegel, in the case of Pindar, as bard he puts himself in his hero’s place and independently combines with his own imagination the praise of the deeds of his hero’s ancestors, it may be; he recalls old myths, or he expresses his own profound view of life, wealth, dominion, whatever is great and honourable, the sublimity and charm of the Muses, but above all the dignity of the bard. Consequently in his poems he is not so much concerned to honour the hero whose fame he spreads in this way as to make himself, the poet, heard. He himself has not the honour of having sung the praises of victors, for it is they who have acquired honour by being made the subject of Pindar’s verse.6

In epic the hero achieves immortality through the poet, but in lyric – even with an occasional poet like Pindar, commissioned by wealthy patrons to honor specific occasions – it is the poet who achieves immortality through the hero. We have all but forgotten the identities of those athletes whom Pindar celebrates. But we have not forgotten Pindar. And although we may admire Homer for his breadth of understanding and his ability to encompass the whole of the Greek world in his epics, nevertheless the poetic identities of heroes like Achilles, Penelope, and Odysseus are much more concrete than the persona of Homer. Both in the modern and the ancient world we recognize these heroes’ influence over poetic deeds throughout literature and world history. As evidence of this

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truism, we often use the adjective “Homeric” as if it were something quite tangible, while the man “Homer” remains a hazy concept. But the true hero of Pindar’s odes is Pindar himself. The occasion for one of his poems is not merely an occasion for celebrating its wealthy patrons. It is, more precisely, an occasion for celebrating its creator. We rarely describe something as “Pindaric.” As a lyric poet, Pindar is far too idiosyncratic and personal to become an adjective. Pindar immortalizes Pindar. In order to guarantee this immortality, through poe`mes d’occasion such as his prize odes Pindar focuses indirectly upon his own personal identity through the public or national occasion of his poem. The occasion is therefore neither the poet’s only objective nor perhaps even his primary one. Instead, its main purpose is to provide the poet with a stimulus for self-reflection, a catalyst, an excuse. And although it may be inextricably bound up with the nation’s factual and spiritual realities, nevertheless on such occasions national identity is treated more as a projection of the poet’s own personal identity than as an objective epic fact in and of itself. Pindar may seem to sing about aristocratic victors in pan-Hellenic athletic competitions, but his odes are not only about these athletic contests or their noble contestants. They also focus on Pindar’s own personal identity and then seek to relate this identity to the national identity of the Greeks. In this sense Pindar resembles the mythopoetic dramatist rather than the totalizing epic poet. He makes choices about what to represent and rather than allowing the occasion to speak for itself, as the epic poet tries to do, Pindar’s poetry does not aspire to documentary. Restricting the present discussion to an ode translated by Johannes Tycho Mommsen (1846) and familiar to Wagner through his possession of Mommsen’s edition of Pindar,7 the poem known as Nemean 8 wonderfully demonstrates this sort of tension between the object of the poem – Pindar himself – and its ostensible occasion – the victory of one Deinis of Aegina in the foot race at the Nemean Games. The ode’s central allusion is to the mythological dispute over Achilles’ “golden arms.”8 Despite the fact that this myth deals with a

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competition between two heroes – Ajax and Odysseus – vying for a prize, it seems to have very little to do with the occasion of Deinis’ victory. Instead, this myth expresses something of the utmost importance to Pindar primarily and to his national audience secondarily: an anxiety about the use of rhetoric to gain fame and fortune. In order to purify himself and his audience of these fears, Pindar uses the occasion of Deinis’ victory and the Achillean myth to universalize and then confront and dispel these shared anxieties. According to myth, following Achilles’ death his divine mother, Thetis, decreed that the arms of her son were to be awarded to the man who had most benefited him during his short lifetime. But as it turned out, they were awarded to someone who coerced the Greeks into believing that he had most benefited Achilles. In other words they were given to the man who was most capable of manipulating language, the “man of many ways,” Odysseus. Through his deceptive use of rhetoric, Odysseus wins the prize for himself and so extends his fame, whereas Ajax, the brave but tongue-tied son of Telamon, is unable to speak as craftily as Odysseus and therefore loses the competition and, with it, much honor, fame, and eventually his own life. As Pindar sadly concludes, Ajax, [a] dauntless heart having no able tongue, Howso’er fierce the battle, Lies hid, forgotten; but the highest prize For shifty craft lies spread. The Danaans’ secret votes courted Odysseus, But Ajax, cheated of the golden arms, Wrestled with bloody death.9

Reiterating the culturally central Greek motif of “word versus deed,” Pindar uses this myth to confront an anxiety about his own personal identity as a poet. In the Greek world such nationally conscious authors as Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, and Thucydides, along with countless and forgotten others, engaged in this debate over word versus deed. One might even call it an anxiety about the appearance of words versus the reality of deeds. This concern left the collective

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Greek consciousness wondering how one could possibly escape the accusation of the famous Greek proverb, “poets tell a lot of lies.”10 During a moment of lyrical self-reflection, in the context of a victory ode for an athlete who is a man of deeds but a man long since forgotten, Pindar questions himself about the roles of rhetoric and competition: Story is vast in range: new ways to find And test upon the touchstone. Here danger lies: words are rich food for envy, Who lays her hand ever upon the noble Striving not with lesser men.11

By bringing rhetoric into question, Pindar represents himself in competition with Deinis. Such a competitive spirit may seem strange to modern sensibilities, yet, as Nietzsche points out in his “Homer’s Contest,” envy and competition were essential to Greek culture, and Pindar, with his well-known rivalry against Simonides, was no exception. Indeed, “the greater and more sublime a Greek human being is,” contends Nietzsche, “so much brighter does the ambitious flame break out from him, consuming each one who runs with him on the same course.”12 To support his claim Nietzsche cites Hesiod’s passage from Works and Days on the two erides (quoted earlier in this book): Two Eris-goddesses are on earth . . . If one has understanding, one wants to praise the one Eris just as much as to blame the other; for these two goddesses have a wholly separate kind of temperament [Gemu¨tsart]. For the one promotes the bad war and discord, the cruel one! No mortal suffers her willingly; rather under the yoke of need they render the heavy, burdensome Eris honor, according to the decrees of the immortals. This one was born, as the older, to black night; but the other one Zeus, ruling on high, planted in the roots of the earth and among men as a much better thing. She drives even the unskilled [ungeschickten] man to work; and when one who lacks property looks upon another who is rich, thus he hurries to sow in a similar way and to plant and to appoint the house well; neighbor competes with neighbor, he strives

First-person opera and lyric identity toward prosperity. This Eris is good for human beings. Even the potter resents the potter and the carpenter the carpenter, the beggar envies the beggar and the singer the singer.13

It only requires a small leap of imagination to apply this last idea, what Nietzsche calls, citing its Latin name, “odium figulinum [‘potter’s hatred’ or ‘trade-jealousy’],” to interdisciplinary competition.14 Citing an oft-told tale about Pericles, at one point in his essay Nietzsche even mentions this kind of cross-trade jealousy between rhetoric and athletic prowess: “How characteristic are question and answer when a noted opponent of Pericles is asked whether he or Pericles is the best wrestler in the city, and answers: ‘Even when I throw him down, he denies that he has fallen, he reaches his intention and persuades those who saw him fall’.”15 Like Pericles, who bests his opponent in words since he cannot do so in deeds, with his words, Pindar lays a “hand” upon the noble victor, Deinis, not bothering to strive against lesser men. And as in the competition between Odysseus the rhetorician and Ajax the man of action, Pindar the poet imagines himself competing with Deinis the aristocratic runner. Like the Achillean myth, whose predetermined outcome lies buried in prehistory, the question of who will gain everlasting fame through this ode – Pindar or Deinis – is also a foregone conclusion. We remember Pindar first. Deinis is barely an also-ran. And yet by putting himself into competition with Deinis and defeating him, Pindar, as a man of words, invites us to identify him with the wily Odysseus and Deinis with the honest Ajax. This implied similarity between the false rhetorician and himself rightly troubles Pindar. He realizes that Odysseus gained immortal fame through false rhetoric: . . .even of old Treachery’s tongue, breeder of hate was known, Close companied with tales of guile, False-hearted to the core, She sows the evil seed of blame, Violates true merit’s lustre, and exalts The worthless man’s unsavoury repute.16

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Through myth, a national debate, and the occasion of this poem, Pindar makes an unsavory discovery about himself and his art. By implication Pindar could also be a false rhetorician like Odysseus. And so he prays to Zeus that he might distance himself from this unsavory connection with his fellow rhetorician: Such thoughts, great Zeus, never may it be mine To foster, but of life to tread The simple paths, and dying leave my children No ill-engendered fame. Gold is for some their prayer, for some wide acres; My trust shall be to dwell Beloved of friends, till earth shall shroud my limbs, Praising where praise is due, on evil-doers Sowing widespread rebuke.17

Although admitting his kinship to false poets and rhetoricians like Odysseus, nevertheless Pindar hopes that he may learn to use words justly, “praising where praise is due” and reviling those who deserve reviling. But only “midst poets and just minds true excellence/ Reaches full height. . .”18 By voicing these sentiments, Pindar seeks to free himself from this anxiety about his identity as a poet, and, by extension, to free his national audience from their anxiety about the use of rhetoric. He does so by reminding himself and his audience that one may avoid the use of false rhetoric if one prays to Zeus, avoids a lust for wealth, and dwells among friends rather than in the solitary natural setting of “wide acres” where there is nobody to help one measure the distance between appearance and reality. THE INTERSECTION OF PERSONAL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN WAGNER

Throughout his operatic career Wagner repeatedly projected his personal identity onto his operas and their characters. In the Ring we often recognize certain characters one could easily mistake for members of Wagner’s immediate or extended psychic family. And sometimes, as in Siegfried, we see characters that Wagner may wish

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he resembled more, such as Siegfried, or characters that he may wish he resembled less, such as Mime. Like Pindar in his lyric ode, Wagner in his lyric opera ventriloquizes through these aesthetic projections of himself, disguising both his personal and his theoretical life through art. But beyond his personal passions and obsessions, like Pindar, Wagner also uses his characters to exorcise certain demons that plague his sense of national identity as well as his own sense of personal identity. Nation, author, and character – all three are revealed to have the same goal: to establish the purity of their own identities over and against the encroachment of outsiders, particularly miscegenated and racially degraded Others. In Siegfried these national and personal concerns are in part expressed through the personal anxieties of its central lyric hero, Siegfried. Siegfried is someone deeply disturbed by the thought that he may share a bloodline with Mime, who in turn has certain characteristics that Wagner and the nineteenth century would have identified as stereotypically Jewish. Siegfried is indeed so consumed by these anxieties that, even when he has intellectually overcome the idea of Mime as his parent, he must still physically vanquish Mime ( just as, later in the opera, he must also kill Fafner and overcome Wotan, both of whom also, though to a lesser extent, threaten Siegfried’s identity). Wagner’s German hero must kill the Jew, symbolically erasing all physiognomic and spiritual similarities between this interloper and the pure trinity of Germany/Wagner/Siegfried. But Siegfried’s fear of bourgeois-Jewish influence does not end with the destruction of Mime, nor does his quest for a familiarly and naturally defined subjectivity. Siegfried devotes the whole of his lyric opera to figuring out who he is and who his parents are, and it is through this lyric quest that Wagner also tries to solve his own (as well as Germany’s) identity crisis. Running parallel to this search is Wotan’s own quest and, just as with Siegfried, so too with Wotan we recognize Wagner’s search for identity. Throughout Wagner’s operatic career the theme of parental identity repeatedly resurfaces in the guise of various characters whose parents are at best a hazy presence and at worst an anxiety-inducing

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absence. Viewed as an opera about biological and spiritual patrimony, Siegfried exemplifies Wagner’s lifelong obsession about his father’s and therefore his own racial, national, and personal identity. As Weiner summarizes, “It has become a staple of Wagnerian scholarship that Wagner never knew whether his father was Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, who died six months after the composer’s birth, or the actor, poet, and portrait painter Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer, whom Wagner’s mother married nine months after the death of her first husband and whom Wagner may have suspected of being a Jew.”19 This specific patrimonial concern is a motif that Weiner traces throughout the “most iconoclastic of his [Wagner’s] works for the stage.” In these works Wagner focuses time and again on figures who either have never known their fathers (Siegfried, Tristan, and Parsifal), did not know their true identities (Siegmund and Siegfried do not even know their fathers’ names), or lived with them only for a short time before they disappeared (Siegmund) or died during the hero’s youth (Walther von Stolzing), dramatic testimonies to the importance of the motif in the composer’s thinking.20

But perhaps nowhere is Wagner’s concern for his own identity more fully expressed than in the character of Siegfried. Siegmund’s death and his son’s birth coincide by the narrowest of biological margins: nine months, a length of time that closely approximates the composer’s own margin of moral error between legitimate and illegitimate conception. Like Wagner, Siegfried has a foster-father, Mime, whom Wagner constructs as a conglomerate of negative Jewish stereotypes. Also like Wagner, Siegfried is obsessed with his identity, his race, and the purity of his bloodline. And finally, Siegfried is repulsed by the thought that an Untermensch like Mime might have been his father, just as Wagner was worried about the true nature of his relationship to his step-father. Weiner, Adorno, Ernest Newman, and others have all remarked on the following infamous description of Mime from the original

First-person opera and lyric identity

verse version of Siegfried, Der junge Siegfried. Just as infamous is the description’s conspicuous absence from the finished version of this opera: Mime, the Nibelung alone. He is small and bent, somewhat deformed and hobbling. His head is abnormally large, his face dark ashen colour and wrinkled, his eyes small and piercing, with red rims, his grey beard long and scrubby, his head bald and covered with a red cap . . . There must be nothing approaching caricature in all this: his aspect, when he is quiet, must be simply eerie: it is only in moments of extreme excitement that he becomes outwardly ludicrous, but never too uncouth. His voice is husky and harsh, but this again ought of itself never to provoke the listener to laughter.21

Even in this original description it seems that Wagner has a dim sense of something being not quite right here. Half-way through the description he suddenly changes tack: “There must be nothing approaching caricature in all this . . .” he writes, as if he has suddenly realized that not only is he caricaturing Mime, but also – heaven forbid – himself. It is Adorno who best summarizes the obvious parallels between this cartoon of Mime and Wagner himself. Wagner’s description of Mime, Adorno argues, closely coincides with [Wagner’s] own physical appearance, disproportionately small, with over-large head and protruding chin, bordered on the abnormal . . . The uncontrollable loquacity, on which his first wife remarks, could easily be deduced from his prose works, had it not been documented as thoroughly as his habit of extravagant gesticulation. He pursues his victims down to the level of their own biological nature because he saw himself as having only barely escaped being a dwarf.22

This self-caricature in Der junge Siegfried is, however, only the most obvious sign that the German Master was preoccupied with the fear of being caught Jewish. The finished opera Siegfried also demonstrates this fear through other characters and descriptions that are conspicuously present rather than anxiously absent. One of the most telling locations of Wagner’s anxiety of influence is in the content and structure of the bardic competition between the

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Wanderer and Mime in Act I, scene 2 of Siegfried. Through parallel structures in the Wanderer’s half of this ode, Wagner reveals his doubts about his own racial purity through the conflicted, bourgeoisJewish projection of the Wanderer. As in Pindar’s use of Nemean 8 to solve a personal as well as a national identity crisis, Wagner uses the Wanderer’s ode as a stimulus for self-reflection and an occasion for addressing a national anxiety. Like the familiar mythological and historical content of Pindar’s ode, the content of this competition – the already familiar epic content of Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re – is of little import or interest to the audience. We already know almost everything that Mime and the Wanderer will sing about. However, what is important to the German nation and to Wagner is the lyric manner in which these things are presented. From the perspective of lyric, we must therefore concentrate on the links forged and the parallels drawn between this poem and the poet’s personal identity as revealed through the Wanderer, Wagner’s twice-removed selfprojection of his own life and ideology. In between the time that Das Rheingold ends and Die Walku¨re begins, Wotan has played the role of Wolfe, the anti-social father of Siegmund and Sieglinde. As Siegmund tells Sieglinde and Hunding, “Stout-hearted and strong was Wolfe;/many foes he made.”23 And after unsuccessfully battling the Neidings, the upholders of a decadent social structure based upon property and conventional marriage, Wolfe and Siegmund flee deeper into the forest and become “outlawed.”24 But in Siegfried Wotan returns in another disguise that represents the ideological opposite of Wolfe. In Siegfried Wotan projects his more problematic self onto the Wanderer. He is the homeless Ahaseurus who journeys through the world leaning on Wotan’s spear, the quintessential symbol of contracts and conventions in the Ring. Through this Wandering Jew figure, Wotan confronts his own problematic identification with Alberich and Fafner, members of decadent races that value wealth, power, and convention over love and nature. Twice-removed from this lyrical self-projection, Wagner also contemplates, albeit from a safe distance, his own anxieties about his possible Jewish identity.

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Through prominent rhetorical parallels in the Wanderer’s ode, Wagner links Alberich and the Nibelheim dwarves to Wotan and the gods of Valhalla. The Wanderer, who serves double duty as both Wotan’s and Wagner’s Ahaseurian self-projection, refers to the Nibelung dwarves as “Black elves [Schwarzalben]” and to their leader as “Black Alberich [Schwarz-Alberich].”25 In a perfectly parallel construction, the Wanderer also calls the gods of Valhalla “Light elves [Lichtalben]” and their leader, Wotan, “Light Alberich [Licht-Alberich].”26 In Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, from which Wagner borrows here, “dwarfs and black elves are synonymous.”27 But the Wanderer’s moniker for the gods, “Light elves,” is strictly a Wagnerian invention that mythopoetically underscores the connection between the names “Black Alberich” and “Light Alberich.” Through a dangerous word-play, Wagner brings Wotan and his Germanic gods uncomfortably close to Alberich and his Jewish dwarves. German god and Jewish dwarf might represent the forces of light and darkness, respectively, but the parallel signifiers imply that they share a spiritual similarity. While physiognomies may differ, Wagner’s Wandering Jew still hints at a shared identity. Thus, although by deleting his description of Mime, the composer may have tried to delete any physical similarities between himself and his Jewish caricature of Mime, nevertheless, through the Wanderer we recognize that certain spiritual similarities still haunt Wagner and this opera. The Wanderer underscores these spiritual similarities further through the narrative structure of his ode. The ring as a symbol of unnatural power comes to prominence at two key moments. The parallels between Wotan’s spear and Alberich’s and Fafner’s possession of the ring reveal how Wotan is related to these members of other, more decadent races. At the end of his narrative about the Nibelungs, the Wanderer mentions Alberich and the ring. He represents the ring as a talisman of power that Alberich used to enslave the Nibelungs and to amass a fortune. In conjunction with the giants the Wanderer also mentions the ring at the end of his narrative about them. Once again, he represents the ring as a means to power and wealth. Furthermore, as we know from Das Rheingold, Alberich

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obtained the ring through an unnatural act of forswearing love for power, just as Fafner sacrificed love (erotic and agapic, in the forms of Freia and Fasolt respectively) for power (the ring). In a highly significant parallel within these formal structures, at the end of his narrative about Wotan and the gods of Valhalla the Wanderer also tells of Wotan’s own lust for power. He sings an unsettling paean to Wotan’s spear, how he obtained it, and how he rules the world through it. The Wanderer, apparently unaware of any unnaturalness, boasts of how Wotan first made the spear by cutting off “the world-ash’s/holiest bough.”28 He seems oblivious to the uneasy significance behind this self-confessed desecration of nature and he apparently does not care that “the trunk [of the world-ash] may wither”29 because of this very desecration. The Wanderer mistakenly believes that his spear will not fail him, and thus he freely and proudly boasts that Heil’ger Vertra¨ge Treue-Runen schnitt in den Schaft er ein: den Haft der Welt ha¨lt in der Hand wer den Speer fu¨hrt, den Wotan’s Faust umspannt. Ihm neigte sich der Niblungen Heer; der Riesen Gezu¨cht za¨hmte sein Rath: ewig gehorchen sie alle des Speeres starkem Herrn.

Hallowed treaties’ binding runes he whittled into its shaft: he who wields the spear that Wotan’s fist still spans holds within his hand control over all the world. Before him bowed the Nibelungs’ host; the brood of giants was tamed by his counsel: forever they all obey the mighty lord of the spear.30

Like the ring, the spear is a symbol of power obtained through an unnatural act and used to rule over others, if not enslave them. Indeed, the Wanderer claims that both dwarves and giants cannot escape its sway. As we saw in Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re and as we are reminded here again, the spear is an emblem of law, contracts, unnatural bargains, and bourgeois mentality, all of which

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evoke for Wagner and his nineteenth-century audience stereotypically Jewish traits. Finally, as in Pindar, the objects represented here do not alone unify this scene. This is not a purely epic totalization of the world. If it were, Wotan’s geography lesson would be more complete. But, as Robert Donington remarks in the Jungian context of his Wagner’s “Ring” and its Symbols, “Wotan makes no mention of the human race as among the inhabitants of the earth’s wide surface. This confirms what we should in any case suspect, that we are not being given a lesson in natural geography, but in the geography of the psyche.”31 Wagner could have dwelt on other aspects of these myths in order to give the competition between Mime and the Wanderer a greater sense of wholeness. Instead, these particulars, links, and parallels are chosen in order to point out the uneasy kinship that concerns Wagner personally and Germany nationally. Through these parallels, Wagner implies that Wotan profoundly resembles the members of those other races against which he is ostensibly defining himself. And although his hero Siegfried will eventually prove his true patrimony and thus free Wagner and Germany from their own racial anxiety, this ode points to an uneasy kinship between Wotan, Wagner, and Germany, on the one hand, and Alberich, Fafner, and Judaism, on the other. Like Pindar’s ode, in which the lyric poet uses the historical figure of Deinis and the mythological figures of Odysseus and Ajax to express his personal and national misgivings about rhetoric, Wagner uses the competition between the Wanderer and Mime to express his personal and national misgivings about race. Although the Wanderer does not apparently realize, as Pindar does by the end of his ode, that such spiritual similarities exist, he will eventually. To realize this fully, he still needs to confront his other alter-egos in this opera: Alberich, Fafner, and Erda, the ancient female counterpart to Wotan’s wise old wanderer persona. It is through such lyric confrontations that nation, character, and author will converge in a more intense, collective search for personal and national identity. And for Wagner, unlike Pindar, the earliest historical moment of this lyric search begins not in society but in nature,

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which is where we must turn next. For while Mime and the Wanderer are having their showdown about who rules which natural realm, Siegfried has been in one of those realms trying to establish his own patrimony by studying the animals and himself in the cool reflections of a brook.

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Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy

It is through Wagner’s dual perspective on the past and the future that we recognize how his utopian philosophy was firmly rooted, as Mann reminds us, in the mythological. This kind of progressive backward glance is the essence of Wagner’s political aestheticization of the Greeks. To requote Deathridge: the Greeks were, for Wagner, “the pristine source of a lost culture – an ideal of fundamental origins projected onto the utopian future of a society encumbered by alienated living and a lack of spiritual freedom.”1 But in Siegfried and in his discussions of lyric in general and Greek lyric in particular, Wagner is more interested in a utopian future than a mythological past. He tends to regard lyric as a stop along the way to poetry’s highest evolutionary goal, drama, particularly drama in the form of tragedy. His description of lyric and drama in “The Art-Work of the Future” is emblematic of this visionary perspective. Lyric is seen as “primal,” while drama is lyric’s “later, more conscious, loftiest completion.”2 This forward-looking tendency is further strengthened by the historical fact that Wagner wrote the libretto for his lyric opera, Siegfried (originally Der junge Siegfried), after he wrote Go¨tterda¨mmerung (originally Siegfrieds Tod). In writing Siegfried, therefore, Wagner already knew the dramatic finish to his lyric hero’s life and so, to some extent, his vision of Siegfried’s future dramatic actions determine Wagner’s representation of Siegfried’s lyrical past. However, it must also be said that for an audience viewing the Ring in chronological order Wagner realized the necessity of depicting the lyric world of Siegfried as emerging out of the epic worlds of Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re. In other words, as a narrator Wagner knew that Siegfried had to bear some relation to its prequels (Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re) as well as to its sequel (Go¨tterda¨mmerung). So instead of simply introducing his hero 157

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Siegfried into the failed epic world of the Ring’s first two operas or unveiling him full-grown in the civilized world of the final opera, Wagner chooses to introduce him in a place in between these two unquiet extremes, a place where he can nurture his hero and encourage his growth: the lyrico-natural world of Siegfried. This location turns out to be an ideological and aesthetic space where Wagner can develop his ideas about political states and the sorts of music dramas they might be able to support. Thus Siegfried embodies not only Wotan’s struggle to create a free human being, but, more importantly, Wagner’s struggle to create a genuine music drama. The birth of this genuine music drama is not, however, without its paradoxes. Nor is Siegfried’s fight against culture a pure and unadulterated victory. This can be seen most clearly in Siegfried’s slaying of Fafner and his subsequent drinking of the dragon’s blood. Far from being the simple triumph that some interpreters have supposed it to be, Siegfried’s transfiguration through transfusion constitutes a paradoxical moment in Wagner’s thinking. Here mythology collides with ideology and apparently blocks creativity. For the drinking of Fafner’s blood not only invokes the transfigurative effects alluded to in Nordic myths that deal with the drinking of a defeated enemy’s blood, but also nineteenth-century iconography about Jews, vampirism, and miscegenation, not to mention Greek myths about Apollo as the slayer of Delphi’s protector, the giant serpent known as Python. Even without the idea that Fafner’s blood might be somehow corrupt and therefore have a corrupting influence on Siegfried, according to the Greek myth merely the act of slaying the serpent polluted Apollo and put him in need of purification. And, as I have already noted, Wagner would have been aware of these purification rituals through his reading of Mu¨ller’s Dorians, where Mu¨ller recognizes that the slaying of Python may be a triumph, but a triumph tainted by pollution. Thus Apollo must “undergo a series of afflictions and woes” to cleanse himself of the pollution of blood guilt. For example, according to one myth, after killing Python Apollo fled to the altar at Tempe to find purification there.3 But the thing that ties together many of the stories about Apollo’s expiation is that

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Apollo cleansed himself through some kind of bondage, slavery, and/or degradation.4 This log-jam of symbolism creates a number of problems for Wagner and raises several questions that this chapter attempts to answer. Briefly, the questions are: which myths is Wagner evoking in Siegfried’s confrontation with Fafner, to what extent is he evoking them, and what do they mean in terms of plot, aesthetics, and identity, as both nationally and individually defined for Wagner? Beginning at the level of plot, the first thing we can say is that the drinking of Fafner’s blood means that Siegfried can now understand the meaning of the hitherto incomprehensible Woodbird’s song, which allows him in turn to see the hidden intentions behind Mime’s linguistic front. What this means in terms of aesthetics is that music drama must link the lyric act of hearing with the dramatic act of seeing. And what this in turn means in terms of national identity is that the inward meaning of German lyric must combine with – and this is the most surprising conclusion – the outward show of French theater to produce a new kind of artwork that resembles the subjective-objective synthesis of Greek tragedy. Perhaps stumped and stunned by this strange turn of events, Wagner did not return to Siegfried for nearly seven and a half years. Instead, he took up the writing of Tristan und Isolde and then Die Meistersinger von Nu¨rnberg. The reasons behind this sudden shift in artistic focus have long been a source of critical debate. I will suggest here that one of the reasons for this sudden cessation and shift of focus is that Wagner realized he did not have an institution available to him for the production of the new kind of artwork that Siegfried heralds, and so he only returned to the Ring when it looked like he could finally found this institution in Bayreuth as the Wagner Festival. THE POLITICAL STATE AND THE STATE OF NATURE

Siegfried the opera is not static. Wagner does not simply place his hero in the placid world of the pastoral and let him trill for four hours straight. On the contrary, Siegfried must become. In particular, he

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must become dramatic. And in order to move from one world to the next, from lyric to drama, Siegfried must also meet and defeat various inhabitants of the Ring’s older, epic world. Of the utmost importance in this forward movement is Siegfried’s encounter with the dragon, Fafner, who not only succumbs to Siegfried but also transfigures him. Through Fafner Siegfried evolves as a character, just as the poetic evolution of the Ring moves from the natural world of lyric poetry to the more civilized world of drama. The reason for exhibiting Siegfried’s growth in this way is related to Wagner’s idealization of classical Greece versus nineteenth-century Germany and the state of nature versus the political state. In Opera and Drama Wagner argues that the Germans did not possess the sort of political state that was “a worthy object of Feeling” that the Greeks once had.5 According to Wagner, Germany was little more than a political machine, “void of any purely-human sentiment.”6 As defined theoretically in his prose works and depicted operatically in Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re, this state is corrupt. To Wagner’s way of thinking such a corrupt world could not inspire a lyric hero to “natural, ethico-religious ties of Feeling.”7 But if not here, in the bosom of the state, then where? The answer to that question is nature. For Wagner as for many other Romantics, it is nature that frees us from the fateful bonds of the state. Because he thought nineteenthcentury Germany was built upon an arbitrary political system, Wagner argues that individual Germans should seek refuge from this state in the pristine and genuine world of nature: “Our Fate is the arbitrary political State, which to us shews itself as an outer necessity for the maintenance of Society; and from which we seek refuge in the Nature-necessity, because we have learnt to understand the latter and have recognised it as the conditionment of our being and all its shapings.”8 In this instance, at least, Wagner distances himself and Germany from the Greeks, arguing, “The Greek Fate is the inner Nature-necessity, from which the Greek – because he did not understand it – sought refuge in the arbitrary political State.”9 Through the character of Siegfried Wagner represents the individual’s struggle

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against fate, as embodied by a corrupt state, and his desire to take refuge in nature. Nature in this case is both an ideological and a physical space where the Wagnerian hero can nourish his lyric individuality and realize his genuine identity. Unlike the evolution of Greek tragedy, which “advanced from the natural, ethico-religious ties of Feeling, to the political state,”10 Wagner reasons that he must reverse this process in Siegfried. In order to arrive at a genuine individual by the end of Siegfried and – hopefully – a genuine drama in Go¨tterda¨mmerung, he must first “return from Understanding to Feeling,”11 from the political state to the natural state of things. By thus leading Siegfried along the path from politics to nature, Wagner seeks what Wotan wants: to “advance from the thought-out individuality to the genuine one.”12 This journey effectively reverses and cancels out the one that Wotan made in creating Siegmund. Within the corrupt epic world of Die Walku¨re, Wotan created and executed Siegmund’s fate. Siegmund was not a spontaneous but a “thought-out individuality” and thus a failed one. As Fricka makes clear in her critique of Siegmund, Wotan fashioned this hero, his distress, and his need (Noth) no less than he “fashioned the fearsome sword [Nothung].”13 By contrast, fate and the gods interfere with and guide Siegfried far less than his father. As Peter Conrad rightly recognizes, “Siegfried is a hero jauntily seeking dragons to slay and maidens to woo. Siegmund cannot afford this chivalric exuberance: he is a fugitive. . .”14 Siegmund experiences his Wa¨lsung blood as a curse and so he rebaptizes himself “Woeful [Wehwalt].”15 Like the passive epic hero, Siegmund is caught up, almost unwillingly, in an unending battle against society.16 But Siegfried feels positively relieved by the knowledge of his genealogy. His battle against society is a blithe game, not a melancholy struggle. He effortlessly forges Nothung, cheerfully lops off Mime’s head, and, after failing to make friends with the dragon, he makes a sport of killing it instead. Although he follows Wotan’s divine plan, as does Siegmund, Siegfried does not feel overburdened by the ever-present burden of fate. Such higher powers do not seem to control Siegfried’s thoughts and actions. He is blissfully, if somewhat annoyingly, unaware.

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When he uses Nothung to cut Wotan’s spear in half, Siegfried may be acting according to Wotan’s divine plan, but as far as Siegfried is concerned this action is undertaken freely and without any divine prompting or planning. Siegfried breaks Wotan’s spear as he does everything else in this opera: out of his own bumptious disposition and his naive ignorance about the higher designs of fate and the gods. Only nature, in the guise of the Woodbird, shows Siegfried the way. No oracle has told him to use Nothung at this crucial moment, unlike Siegmund, to whom Wotan had prophesied that the sword would be provided for him in his moment of “ho¨chster Noth [direst need].”17 Although written after Wagner had already dreamt up Siegfried,18 a passage from Nietzsche’s “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” gives a fair portrait of Siegfried and the role nature plays in bringing him up to be what Wagner would consider a true man of culture: If you want to lead a young human being on the right cultural path [Bildungspfad], thus guard well against disturbing the naı¨ve, trusting, at the same time personally-immediate relationship of the same to nature: to him must the forest and the rock, the storm, the vulture, the individual flower, the butterfly, the meadow, the mountain slope speak in their own tongues; in them must he at some time recognize himself again as in countless dispersed [auseinandergeworfen] reflections and mirages [Spiegelhagen], in a colorful whirl of changing appearances; thus will he unconsciously have a feeling for the metaphysical oneness of all things in the great likeness of nature and at the same time calm himself in its eternal persistence and necessity.19

Closing off this description with what could also be a brief description of Siegmund and why he failed, Nietzsche concludes that the pinnacle of culture “cannot be suspected even once by one drawn into the struggle for life.”20 In short, instead of guiding and preparing Siegfried for the role he will play in ushering in a new world, by allowing him to freely nurture his identity through his encounters with nature Wagner and his operatic projection, Wotan, hope this will help evolve a genuine individual who will in turn herald and help generate

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a genuine drama. With this notion of the evolving hero we return again to the figure of Orpheus and, in this case, not so much Orphic myth as Orphic theogony. As Nietzsche points out in the Pre-Platonic Philosophers, unlike many other theogonies, Orphic theogonies “allow the highest and greatest to be not the first in time but instead the outcome of a developmental process, a later Being.”21 It is not Wotan or Siegmund who are the heroes whom Wagner holds up to us for our admiration, but their descendant, Siegfried. Indeed, one might even contend that this Orphic type of theogony governs the entire Hellenistic evolution of the Ring, at least until the end of Siegfried. SIEGFRIED AS BILDUNGSOPER

At the beginning of his eponymous opera we find Siegfried living in the forest in relatively natural surroundings. Wagner uses the next few hours of this opera to shape his hero into a more complex and cultured, but still genuine, individual who will eventually take his place as a married man in society, the Gibichung society of Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Essentially what we see in Siegfried is a kind of Bildungsoper. And because maturation is a process, there is more than one event in Siegfried that helps this hero evolve. The most important events take the form of a kind of confrontation with epic characters left over from the earlier operas of Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re: Siegfried kills Mime, slays Fafner, defeats Wotan, and rescues, weds, and/or beds Bru¨nnhilde. In order for Siegfried to evolve as an individual, it seems he must first confront the conventions of the past as represented by these epic characters and either overcome them or transform them into something new. Without these confrontations, Siegfried would remain alone in an unindividualized state of nature. And much as Wagner claims to extol nature, he also believes that the individual must eventually leave this kind of solitude for a more political world. Human beings cannot apparently evolve and grow if they remain sequestered from society. Thus Opera and Drama: “The individual without society is

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completely unthinkable by us, as an individuality; for first in intercourse with other individuals, is shewn the thing wherein we differ from them, wherein we are peculiar to ourselves.”22 Without challenge, without difference, without intercourse with another – social or sexual – Siegfried cannot become Siegfried. Perhaps the most interesting, or at least the most paradoxical, moment of confrontation and evolution from nature to culture happens the first time Siegfried meets anyone other than Mime, that is, anyone outside of his dysfunctional family of one. Because Siegfried is no ordinary child but rather a hero, his first confrontation with the outside world is spectacular. It takes the shape of a dragon-slaying. The dragon is of course Fafner and his battle with Fafner marks one of Siegfried’s most significant confrontations with the older, more corrupt society of the Ring. Like the process of individuation that spans the entire opera, Siegfried’s confrontation with Fafner takes place in stages. At first he attempts to make friends with the dragon, believing it to be a new “boon companion [Gesell],” like the bear before him and Bru¨nnhilde after.23 So he tries to learn from him through friendly means and without the shedding of blood. After all, in his previous dealings with other creatures of the forest – bears, fish, birds – Siegfried has been able to learn with a modicum of violence. But his attempt at friendship with Fafner fails, perhaps because Fafner is not only a creature of nature but also a creature of culture, a refugee from the epic world of the first two operas in the Ring cycle. Having tried the friendly approach, Siegfried quickly passes on to violence. He resolves to negate (vernichten) this representative from the corrupt society of the past. With this decision, he reveals his revolutionary parentage. Referring to one of Wagner’s real-life models for Siegfried – the anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin – George Bernard Shaw once observed that Siegfried was designed by Wagner “as a type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and order which accompany them.”24 As a revolutionary, Siegfried

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cannot remain isolated and inactive like the solitary, lamenting shepherd of pastoral lyric. He must rise up against the conventions of a corrupt society as embodied by the hoarding dragon. As proof of the fact that Siegfried negates rather than simply replaces the dragon as plutocrat, after slaying Fafner it is not the Nibelung treasure that Siegfried lugs off as his reward. He refuses to identify himself positively with this miser and thus defines himself as an individual by what he is not. For Siegfried does not know what we the audience know: that this filthy lucre symbolizes the commodification of love, since it was originally a payment for Freia, the goddess of love. Therefore his choice to leave it behind reveals to us more of who he is not than who he is. At this stage of individuation, his choice is not a choice of love over wealth. It is a negation of wealth. He sees what it has done to Fafner and wants no part of it. However, this confrontation with the dragon is not simply a negation. In the next stage of his individuation, Siegfried takes from the dragon something that seems to aid him positively. Contrary to his expectations that “the dead can serve as no source of knowledge [Kunde]” to the living, through his encounter with Fafner Siegfried is transformed into someone who can “see” more clearly with his ears.25 This transformation happens when our hero drinks the dragon’s blood.26 Wagner describes such moments of negation/ creation as moments when das Volk overcomes the past and transfigures it into something newer and higher. Such was the case, Wagner argues, at the birth of Greek tragedy: In the beginning, the Folk expresses by cries of Lyric rapture its marvel at the constant wonders of Nature’s workings; in its efforts to master the object of that marvel, it condenses [verdichtet] the many-membered show of Nature into a God, and finally its God into a Hero. In this Hero as in the convex mirror of its being, it learns to know itself; his deeds it celebrates in Epos, but itself in Drama re-enacts them.27

Through an implied play on the words “vernichten” and “verdichten”, Wagner suggests that a negation (Vernichtung) of the old can lead to the creation (Verdichtung) of the new. Interpreting Siegfried’s

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actions in light of this idea we may argue that, in order for Siegfried to create a new type of artwork (Dichtung), the past must undergo a negation (Vernichtung). Following this paradigm of Vernichtung/ Verdichtung, Siegfried does not simply negate, replace, or become corrupted by Fafner. Rather, he is transfigured by Fafner’s blood. He is born anew just as Greek epic and lyric are not so much replaced as reborn in Greek tragedy through the typical Hegelian process of Aufhebung. FAFNER’S AND SIEGFRIED’S RACIAL AMBIGUITY

In recent years scholars have interpreted this transformationthrough-transfusion by invoking the myth of heroes who drink their enemies’ blood in order to imbibe their strength.28 Seen in this light such a moment might be interpreted as an occasion for unadulterated exultation, both for Siegfried and for Wagner. With the death of Fafner the ring of the Nibelung has finally ended up in the right hands: Siegfried’s. With only Wotan and Mime standing in the way – who, in the end, offer very little resistance – it would seem that Wagner and Siegfried are home free. But this turns out not to be the case. Given Wagner’s fascination with racial purity and miscegenation, almost any time blood bubbles to the surface of his work one can be sure that something significant and complex is at stake. To understand the significance and complexity of this transformation we must first try to interpret Fafner not only with respect to his Greek and German mythological precedents but also with respect to nineteenth-century anti-Semitic iconography. What we will find is that, as a dragon, Fafner occupies a liminal space in Wagner’s mythological and ideological world, somewhere between monster and human, German and non-German. To call him by his right name, Fafner is French. According to Marc Weiner’s useful if somewhat reductive reading of Wagnerian iconography and anti-Semitism, Wagner uses animal motifs in order to classify the Ring’s characters as members of superior or inferior races:

Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy In the tetralogy, heroes are associated with beautiful, lithe, and powerful animals, while those figures evincing traits associated with Jews, such as avarice, egotism, and lovelessness, are likened to lowly, disgusting, and clumsy creatures. As the superhuman, superior being, Siegfried is close to Nature, to the creatures of the forest (birds, foxes, wolves, bears, and deer), and even to the fish of the streams with which he compares himself.29

Through these symbols Wagner fairly consistently represents putatively Jewish characters like Mime and Alberich as members of inferior races. Both their despicable human traits and their animalistic associations assure us of their inferior status. Through musical and verbal characterization they are further depicted as limping dwarves and cold-blooded toads driven by greed, selfishness, and a lust for power. Fafner, however, qua dragon, would seem to be allied with “beautiful, lithe, and powerful animals” and could therefore be categorized as a “superhuman, superior being.”30 Given this outward appearance one would assume that Fafner’s inward make-up – his blood – would likewise be superior. Perhaps the most conclusive evidence in support of this argument is the fact that after Siegfried drinks Fafner’s blood he gains a closer rapport with nature, as evidenced by his new-found ability to understand the Woodbird’s song. The unification of Fafner and Siegfried through the mixing of their blood is apparently not like that between Alberich and Grimhild, the exogamous and corrupting semi-rape that produced the cold-blooded and loveless Hagen. On the contrary, this dracohuman synthesis would seem to resemble that of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Apparently endogamous and purifying, it is out of this new commingling that Siegfried is born again. Judging by these criteria it would seem that Fafner must be somehow “German,” or at least racially compatible with Siegfried. If it were simply the case that Wagner strictly followed this formula about superior versus inferior races and their animal symbols, things would be fairly straightforward. But Fafner also embodies certain traits that Wagner and the nineteenth century would have stereotyped as Jewish. He is power-hungry, miserly,

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Eastern, and vampiric. In the second scene of Das Rheingold, when we first meet Fafner, the first thing we learn about him is that he is willing to barter love (Freia) for power (Valhalla), claiming Freia as the payment (Lohn) for his and Fasolt’s stonemasonry. As Fafner rightly observes to Fasolt before killing him, “[You] set greater store by the maid/than you did by the gold, you lovesick loon.”31 Unlike the love-struck Fasolt, Fafner does not apparently desire Freia as a soul-mate. He would rather drain the blood from the gods and rob their cheeks of their rosy “bloom” (Blu¨the) by taking Freia away, which would mean depriving the gods of the golden apples that keep them eternally young.32 Upon first hearing of the ring Fafner counsels Fasolt that they should hold out for the Nibelung’s gold, since that would be a much more powerful payment/weapon than Freia. The gold, Fafner reasons, could not only grant them eternal youth but could also give them power over all the inhabitants of the Ring’s mythological world, including the gods. And yet, when he has finally obtained the ring, Fafner takes on the form of a dragon and by the time he reappears in Siegfried he has apparently accomplished nothing of what he dreamt of doing in Das Rheingold. Instead, he has spent the time in between these two operas as a miser unwilling to part with his gold. From a socialist perspective, Shaw sees Fafner as the consummate tightwad, unwilling to abandon his hoard because such an honest course of action would “occur to anyone except a civilized man, who would be too accustomed to that sort of mania [for wealth] to be at all surprised at it.”33 It is this bourgeois miserliness, Shaw implies, that has bent Fafner into the shape of a dragon. His attachment to money has crippled and kept him from taking any more productive action. Fafner’s inferior status is further revealed by his other actions and by the location of his lair. As we learn in Die Walku¨re from Bru¨nnhilde’s sister, Sigrune, Fafner’s only action since the end of Rheingold seems to have been to set up house somewhere in “the East.”34 Although geographically nonspecific, this compass direction is not ideologically undefined. It implies Fafner’s membership in an Eastern racial community, one “of the moving hordes of ‘degenerated

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Slavs’ and blood-sucking Jews.”35 Despotic, dark, greedy, and vampiric, Fafner would seem to be right at home with such likeminded neighbors.36 But perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence to support the claim that Fafner is not a pure German comes from the way that Wagner links these dramaturgical and ideological meanings back to the Greeks. In his essay “The Wibelungen,” Wagner invokes the Greek god Apollo and his mythic battle with the serpent Python in order to reveal the national significance of Siegfried’s battle with Fafner: “the Frank stem-saga shews the individualised Light or Sun-god [Siegfried], who conquers and lays low the monster of ur-Chaotic night: – this is the original meaning of Siegfried’s fight with the Dragon, a fight like that Apollo fought against the dragon Python.”37 As Wagner further notes, in the context of “Art and Revolution,” again Hellenizing his Germanic source material, Python represents “the monster of ur-Chaotic night,” a threat from the Oriental East and a primeval god left over from the “raw religion of its [Greek culture’s] Asiatic birth-place.”38 In order for Greek culture to purify itself of these despotic origins, Apollo, a symbol of reasoned individuation, had to overcome Python, a symbol of mass chaos. That Wagner evidently had Apollo and the myth of Python in mind when he was working on Siegfried’s battle with Fafner is supported by a letter he wrote to King Ludwig II on February 23–4, 1869. In this missive he compares Siegfried’s position at the beginning of the third act to “the Hellenes at the reeking crevice at Delphi.”39 This arrival of the Hellenes at Delphi is a cloaked reference to the myth of Apollo and his arrival at the pit in Delphi, which Python once guarded and from which Gaia once prophesied. As Wagner knew from his reading of Mu¨ller’s Dorians, the confrontation between Apollo and Gaia/Python was symbolic of a confrontation between an old world and a new one.40 Moreover, it is at such changings of the guard that the world is most vulnerable. As Donington puts it, at moments like Apollo’s confrontation with Python and Siegfried’s with Fafner, “the world is on the brink of destruction; the god seeks to ensure that the world is reborn.”41

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Combined with Weiner and other scholars’ observations about Fafner as German, Shaw’s and Wagner’s understanding of Fafner as bourgeois serpent would seem to imply that he is ambiguously constructed as both “superior” and “inferior.” Perhaps not intrinsically evil, it seems to be the influence of money and power that has corrupted Fafner and turned him into a miser and a dragon. Neither purely German nor Jewish, Fafner lies somewhere in between these iconographic and ideological extremes. Unlike the Nibelungs, he does not live under the earth, nor, like the gods, does he live above it. Instead, like the human characters in Wagner’s Ring, Fafner lives upon the earth. Neither simply clumsy nor solely lithe, in both of his incarnations – as lumbering giant and sluggish dragon – Fafner is strong but lacks grace. Neither amphibious nor warm-blooded, as an overgrown serpent he lives in a dark cavern, although his nest is in the midst of a green forest. Fafner is not a case of racial either/or but both/and. Like Gunther and Gutrune in Go¨tterda¨mmerung, Fafner is situated somewhere in between two extremes and his blood is therefore neither perfectly pure nor utterly corrupt. To make matters even more complicated, it is not only Fafner who appears ambiguous and corrupt at this juncture. Siegfried also appears in a somewhat dubious light. This fact does not escape Fafner’s keen eyes. Seeing himself reflected in the boy’s gaze, he recognizes that, as the offspring of Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried possesses the “gleaming dragon” eye of the Wa¨lsungs. Even more damning than just sharing this draconic mark is the fact that, as Weiner notes, in the Edda – one of Wagner’s primary sources for the Ring – the “gleaming dragon” eye is “found in a figure altogether different from the heroic Volsungs. It is in fact a trait found in Vo¨lund or Wieland, one of the models for Wagner’s head Nibelung, Alberich.”42 Earlier in the opera Mime also affirms Siegfried’s kinship to Fafner. To Mime Siegfried is “the little dragon [das kleinen Wurm].”43 Even Siegfried’s drinking of Fafner’s blood is itself suspect as an act of vampirism, a problematically and stereotypically Jewish act that is in conflict with a more positive motif drawn from Nordic

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mythology, whereby the drinking of a slain enemy’s blood bestows upon the victor the peculiar strengths and abilities of the victim.44 If this more ambiguous and complicated way of looking at Siegfried and especially Fafner is correct, how then are we to understand the moment when Siegfried slays the dragon and slakes his thirst with the dragon’s blood? How do Fafner’s semi-corrupt fluids affect Siegfried? While this certainly is a moment of triumph for order over chaos, why should Wagner want to spoil it with hints of miscegenation and thus seem to impede the forward motion of the Ring? And what of Wagner himself? How do these actions seem to affect Siegfried’s real-life mirror image? While it seems obvious what the Jewishness in Fafner should do to Siegfried – namely, pollute his bloodstream – it is not so clear what the Nordic elements should do to him. And though these are the elements that Wagner would seem to want Siegfried to benefit from, yet he cannot quite do without the “pollutants” in Fafner’s bloodstream either. In the end what Siegfried does in fact gain from this vampiric act and what he should gain from it, given the qualities of Fafner’s “inferior” traits, do not seem to be the same thing. To understand this paradox we must re-examine Fafner to find out what it is about him that could be useful to Siegfried as an evolving character, to the Ring as an evolving tetralogy, to Wagner as an evolving artist, and to Germany as an evolving nation. SNAKE EYES

More than any other character in the Ring, each of whom needs little more than a costume to distinguish him- or herself visually from other characters, Fafner is remarkable for his spectacular appearance. As both giant and dragon, he is distinguishable not only through his costume but also through more “prop-like” accoutrements such as stilts and scales, fire and smoke, teeth and tail. Not surprisingly, Fafner’s actions tend to justify this spectacular stage presence. Qua giant he is co-architect of Valhalla, a visible monument to power; qua dragon he uses his appearance to frighten away would-be thieves from the Nibelung hoard. But it is not only the special-effects

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department that makes Fafner such a visual presence. The visual is also present in his characterization. From the end of Das Rheingold till the day he dies, in a darkened cave Fafner has spent much time exercising his eyes in “watch over the [Nibelung] hoard.”45 Valuing the sense of sight as he does, it should come as no surprise that with his dying words he advises Siegfried to develop this sense better: Blicke nun hell, blu¨hender Knabe; der dich Blinden reizte zur That, bera¨th jetzt des Blu¨henden Tod. Merk’, wie’s endet: – acht’ auf mich!

See clearly now, you radiant youth; he who goaded you in your blindness is plotting the death of the radiant youth. Mark how it ends: – pay heed to me!46

Given these associations between Fafner and visual spectacle, one might assume that drinking the dragon’s blood would improve Siegfried’s eyesight. And indeed, immediately upon drinking it, the stage directions tell us that Siegfried “gazes thoughtfully in front of him,” perhaps expecting – as we might – that Fafner’s blood will benefit his vision.47 However, in Siegfried Fafner’s peculiar strength does not translate into a heightened sense of sight. Instead, it improves his sense of hearing, allowing him to understand the Woodbird’s song. Although previously appreciative of her song and eager to imitate it, prior to this moment Siegfried has been unable to understand and thus benefit from it in anything but a purely aesthetic way. But with an infusion of Fafner’s blood he can at last “see” what the Woodbird has been so urgently trying to tell him. What was pure lyrical gesture before, now has concrete meaning and serves an important purpose: to warn Siegfried that Mime is plotting his death. This means that the more lyrically minded Siegfried, having just succeeded in handling his first real confrontation, is now reaping the benefits of this confrontation. Since his blood differs from Fafner’s blood, he does not simply become what Fafner was, meaning, someone wholly invested in spectacle and the visual. Nor does his body simply reject Fafner’s blood as utterly foreign. Instead, Siegfried’s blood mixes

Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy

with Fafner’s blood to produce a new perspective, a kind of wisdom that enables Siegfried to balance external appearance with internal meaning, sight with sound, drama with lyric. Neither negating the dragon’s over-valuation of the visual nor simply adopting the dragon’s way of life and taking up his post as watcher of the Nibelung hoard, the dragon’s blood transfigures Siegfried into a hero who “sees” with his ears. This scene of transformation, like so many other scenes in the Ring, is not only an important turning point for its characters but also its creator. Both aesthetically and ideologically we may ask what exactly did the imbibing of this somewhat corrupted blood represent for Wagner? Or to put it differently, if Fafner symbolizes something between a German and a Jew, then what could this something be? Wagner’s theoretical essays, especially those written around the time he began working on Siegfried, can again provide some insight. Somewhat surprisingly, what they suggest to us is that Fafner symbolizes French theater, the Woodbird symbolizes German lyric, and Siegfried’s transformation symbolizes the rebirth of Greek tragedy as Wagnerian music drama, which is seen here as somehow combining French theater and German lyric. This interpretation may at first seem strange or shocking, especially given Wagner’s outspoken skepticism about and downright belligerence toward French art.48 However, his feelings toward the French were not always so negative and in fact, even when he criticized them, he still begrudgingly admitted that they had certain things to be proud of. One of these things was their theater, especially its public nature and its use of spectacle. GERMAN LYRIC þ FRENCH THEATER ¼ THE REBIRTH OF GREEK TRAGEDY AS MUSIC DRAMA

In “A Theatre at Zu¨rich,” written in April of 1851, one month before Wagner began working on the libretto for Siegfried, the public and the visual nature of French theater was very much on the composer’s mind. In contrast to the inwardness of the German lyrical

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voice, Wagner praises French theater because it provides French poetry with a visual framework through public staging: what fits these [French dramas] out so bravely for the public eye, is altogether lacking for the freer development of native [German] art: namely a public art-institute in keeping with our spirit, our forces, and our idiosyncrasies; an institute that not only should help our artcreations to the light of day, but, through offering the possibility of such a furtherance, should supply the first incitement to take dramatic art in hand at all.49

Like Fafner, the French are distinguishable by their use of spectacle and their dependence on the visual. Their dramas are fitted out “bravely for the public eye” and performed in a “public art-institute” in “the light of day.” Although complimentary in a back-handed sort of way – since Wagner also believed that the French placed too high a value on the visual – in this passage Wagner does appreciate the universality of French drama in comparison to German lyricism. At least the French, Wagner somewhat jealously complains, can exhibit their work on a public stage where it can become visually meaningful to all who witness it. Meanwhile, the Germans remain far too inward, too contemplative, too lyrical in the worst sense of the word, meaning, too personal to reach a popular or national audience. German lyricism is in this sense like the Woodbird’s song before Siegfried drinks Fafner’s blood: beautiful but inscrutable, a Pindar ode purely subjective and lacking in the objective element. On the subject of the Woodbird itself, this time as an actual creature and not just a character in his opera, in Opera and Drama Wagner notes that the Woodbird “expresses its emotion the most melodiously” of all creatures. Its song is the purest “inner expression of the voice.” Yet, it “lacks all power of accompanying its song by gestures.”50 It is too internal to be understood by all. Like the Woodbird’s song, Wagner complains that German lyricism is also too inward, too exclusive, too “literary.” Turning once more to “A Theater in Zurich,” we read: The German spirit, whose peculiar inwardness prevents it from parleying with any but a public quite familiar, has completely lost itself

Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy in an almost exclusively literary sphere of art; it is in Literature that we have to seek it out – on the one hand to fathom its riches, on the other to wrest from it the avowal of a need, which it can only still, in truth, before a full publicity and in a genuine Artwork.51

True, Wagner believes that Germans still seek out their national literature in order “to fathom its riches,” and indeed this search is not a fruitless one, since German lyric still expresses “the richest and most varied forces, immeasurably surpassing, for individuality and true artistic capability, the hectic glamour of the whole art-herodom of Paris.”52 However, Wagner also confessed his anxiety that, as a high literary genre, German lyric had lost touch with the needs of das Volk and therefore, because it lacked this element of the public spectacle, it was no longer what Wagner considered to be “a genuine Artwork.”53 To prove his point by stamping it with the ancient Greek seal of approval, like the camerata and Gluck before him, Wagner reverts to the myth of Orpheus. In “The Art-Work of the Future” he argues that lyric unaccompanied by visual stimuli is not as effective as that which is accompanied by such stimuli: The Lyrics of Orpheus would never have been able to turn the savage beasts to silent, placid adoration, if the singer had but given them forsooth some dumb and printed verse to read: their ears must be enthralled by the sonorous notes that came straight from the heart, their carrion-spying eyes be tamed by the proud and graceful movements of the body, – in such a way that they should recognize instinctively in this whole man no longer a mere object for their maw, no mere objective for their feeding-, but for their hearing- and seeingpowers, – before they could be attuned to duly listen to his moral sentences.54

Imagining himself/Siegfried as Orpheus and das Volk as the dumb beasts whom Orpheus tames and teaches, Wagner posits the idea that lyric must be more than literary, even more than musical. Lyric must also be visual.55 As has perhaps already become clear, the implication here is that Wagner believed German lyric could benefit from an infusion of

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French theater, a healthy respect for the visual and the public in order to appeal to the whole German nation and not just a select, cultured few. This infusion is depicted in the confrontation scene between Siegfried and Fafner. Siegfried as Germany not only triumphs over Fafner as France, but also internalizes and transforms its peculiar virtues. He does not utterly vanquish Fafner, nor does he simply become Fafner. Instead he is transfigured by Fafner. The meaning this scene had for Wagner should by now be clear. By imbibing the art of French theater, the art of German lyric could be projected to the entire German nation, not just the wealthy, the elite, and the educated, but to das Volk as well. The benefits of this new kind of artwork are demonstrated by the Woodbird’s warning to Siegfried not to trust Mime, but “to listen keenly/to the rogue’s hypocritical words” in order “to understand/what Mime means in his heart.”56 In broader terms: once the German nation embraces this new type of art that combines visual and aural elements in a unified way, it will likewise be better able to discern between enemy and friend.57 Neither purely internal German lyric nor purely external French theater, through Siegfried Wagner advertises his own form of music drama as the transfigured artwork of the future.58 This is Wagner’s ideal for opera, his ideal blend of music and theater, subject and object, for which Greek tragedy is his historical model. Following Hegel’s theory that objective epic united with subjective lyric to form the verbal and visual synthesis of tragedy, in “Art and Revolution” Wagner claims that with tragedy Greek poetry “found its perfected expression; where ear and eye, as soul and heart, lifelike and actual, seized and perceived all and saw all in spirit and in body revealed; so that the imagination need no longer vex itself with the attempt to conjure up the image.”59 Through this series of paired contrasts – ear and eye, soul and heart, lifelike and actual, seized and perceived, spirit and body, imagination and image – Wagner distinguishes between the verbal and visual arts that Greek tragedy united into itself and so created what he considered the perfect blend of subjectivity and objectivity. Revisiting these concepts several

Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy

months later in his 1849 essay, “The Art-Work of the Future,” Wagner further clarifies how these two sides of tragedy are united and how these sides correspond to our dual human nature: “Man’s nature is twofold, an outer and an inner. The senses which he offers himself as a subject for Art, are those of Vision and of Hearing: to the eye appeals the outer man, the inner to the ear.”60 Although opposed to each other as object and subject, the genre of Greek tragedy synthesizes these two elements of our nature and reveals to us an art that employs both simultaneously. And “the more distinctly can the outer man express the inner, the higher does he show his rank as an artistic being.”61 For Wagner, this perfected human being is therefore the one who best unifies internal and subjective hearing with external and objective seeing. The embodiment of this perfect blend of inner and outer is Siegfried, and it is through Siegfried’s confrontation with Fafner that Wagner heralds the German artwork of the future, an artwork that will unite sight and sound, external and internal, national and personal, epic and lyric – in short, the synthetic perfection of poetic evolution, a Hellenized form of German music drama equivalent to Greek tragedy. The rest of the opera after Siegfried’s battle with Fafner reads like the reverse of the Apollo and Python stories. Instead of seeking to subjugate himself to others as Apollo did in order to purify himself of the blood guilt for slaying Python, Siegfried seeks only freedom for himself and others. This freedom is gained through various sexual and Oedipal symbols: he emasculates various father figures and penetrates a mother figure. Mime gets his head lopped off, Wotan’s stick is splintered, and Bru¨nnhilde’s ring of fire is broken. Unlike Apollo, who is essentially a conservative god, Siegfried is a revolutionary hero. True, Apollo may be a young god who overthrows the old gods, but at least he knows the consequences of what he is doing. Siegfried seems here as elsewhere blissfully unaware of just who it is that he is dealing with and the repercussions that his actions will have both for himself and others. A model for Parsifal, Siegfried is a pure fool.

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Before leaving this topic, it is important to point out that Siegfried’s drinking of the dragon’s blood does not give us a concrete example of music drama based on Greek tragedy but only the promise thereof, a promise that Wagner did not immediately fulfill by completing the Ring. Instead, he left the cycle languishing on the shelf for years. In early August of 1857, after completing the piano-vocal score for Act II of Siegfried, which concludes with the drinking of Fafner’s blood and the quick dispatch of Mime, Richard Wagner suddenly stopped work on the Ring and, on August 20th of that same year, began work on Tristan und Isolde.62 He did not return to Siegfried for almost seven and a half years. And even then he still put off completing Siegfried. For, though he returned to the score in 1864, it was not until 1869 that he began composing the music for the final act of Siegfried, which was not finished until 1871.63 Ernest Newman, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Deathridge have each suggested cogent accounts for this sudden change of heart.64 The paradigm for each of these accounts follows the unsurprising causal pattern of the old being replaced by the new. The old, as represented in these accounts by Wagner’s neighborly friendship with Mathilde Wesendonck, his revolutionary French optimism, and the Young Hegelianism of his Zurich period, is replaced by the new: his love affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, his conversion to Schopenhauerian pessimism, and a new ideology that incorporated both Hegel and Schopenhauer. According to Newman, Nietzsche, and Deathridge, these three shifts in focus either caused or surprisingly coincided with the new opera, Tristan, which thus displaced the old opera, Siegfried. No doubt these autobiographical, philosophical, and ideological hypotheses help account for why Wagner stopped work on Siegfried. And yet, each of these arguments seems somewhat inconclusive. This inconclusiveness is in part because of the nature of the problem. The problem of why a certain artist chooses to do things in a certain order can never be solved with absolute conviction. There are too many variables and unknowns in such

Lyric and the rebirth of tragedy

a case. We can only rely on recorded evidence, which is finite, while the unrecorded is infinite and ultimately beyond us. There is, however, something lacking in these three hypotheses. The recorded evidence used in each account relies more on Tristan and Wagner’s new concerns than on Siegfried and the events that led up to his shift in focus. In this sense these interpreters seek traces of the cause in the effect. That is, they look more at what came after this sudden change than what came before it. In order to give a fuller account of what caused this sudden shift and what important consequences followed from it, we might posit the idea that Wagner hit an ideological brick wall during the writing of Siegfried. As I have argued here through a re-examination of Siegfried’s encounter with Fafner, in conjunction with several key works from his Zurich period, in August of 1857 Wagner found himself in the somewhat unique situation of advocating the unification of French theater and German lyric. Having arrived at this formula for the rebirth of Greek tragedy, which he then put into play in Tristan und Isolde, his most successfully tragic opera, he still needed something akin to the Greek tragic festival where he could perform his new music dramas. He felt that, quite literally, there was no place for his new creation. Not surprisingly, as a tentative solution to this artistic homelessness, Wagner briefly turned to France in 1859. Since he had formulated his ideal rebirth of Greek tragedy as a blending of French spectacle and German lyricism, this would only seem natural. Hoping to hold a Wagner festival in Paris, he scheduled the performance of three operas, just one of which – Tannha¨user – actually saw the light of day, only to be sharply criticized. After this failure, Wagner turned to Vienna and even arranged some of the Ring for performance there in 1862. But his plans for a Wagner Festival in Vienna also did not pan out. The year 1862 was not, however, a total loss. He published a foreword to the text for the Ring and, in that foreword, fully spelled out for the first time his fundamental ideas about the location, acoustics, and performance schedule for what would eventually become the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. All that was needed was someone to pay the way. Finally, in 1864, this

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person materialized in the form of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.65 Significantly, it was only after Ludwig’s pledged support that Wagner returned to finish the Ring. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that Wagner left off writing the Ring shortly after Siegfried conquered the dragon and drank his blood, thus symbolically transforming himself into the rebirth of Greek tragedy as music drama. And perhaps it is merely a coincidence that Wagner only returned to the Ring after formulating and finding the financial support necessary for the Wagner Festival. And yet, in the seeking of causes for Wagner’s actions we are often only in the realm of such circumstantial evidence. But if the circumstances fit together cogently enough to constitute an argument, then the argument can be offered as a possibility. And in this case the circumstances might help us to understand not only why Wagner stopped and restarted writing the Ring when he did, but also why Go¨tterda¨mmerung, as I will argue in chapter 10, did not turn out to be the longed-for rebirth of Greek tragedy as Franco-German music drama, why in fact Wagner only tentatively embraced Greek tragedy in the final installment of the Ring, and why he ended by parodying more than emulating French opera.

part iii

Drama

9

Introduction: what is drama?

The difficulty in defining epic arises in part through constant and cavalier application of the term without giving due consideration to form or content. The difficulty in defining lyric arises more from our theoretical clumsiness at grasping this highly elastic and slippery genre. But the difficulty in defining drama arises not from a lack of thought or theoretical dexterity. The problem with defining drama is that there is almost an infinity of things that seem to deserve or at least desire and aspire to the name drama. This problem is in turn compounded by the innumerable theories about what drama is or is not and what it should or should not do. The category of “performance” and “performance studies” is only the latest attempt to circumscribe this ever-expanding theatrical and theoretical universe.1 Even just limiting ourselves to Hegel’s and Wagner’s theories of drama still presents us with a daunting task. To make this task more manageable, my solution throughout these final four chapters will be to concentrate on just a few of the most important convergences and divergences between Wagner’s and Hegel’s dramatic theories. These areas include the use of drama as a civic institution, the roles that tragedy and comedy play within this civic context, and the evolution and eventual de-evolution of drama out of and back into its epic and lyric components. HEGEL ON DRAMA

According to Hegel, when drama first emerged in Athens, this Greek city-state had already successfully evolved beyond its epic and lyric historical moments and their respective phases of political development, namely, national and personal identity. Having passed through these earlier poetico-political stages, Athens found itself in a new world and therefore in need of encouraging the creation and growth 183

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of a new identity through a new art form. This new art form was drama and the new identity was civic identity, defined not merely as an identity related to the city but rather an identity that fuses both facets developed by the epic and lyric stages of art. Thus, rather than being motivated solely by national or personal goals, dramatic civic identity brought together the inner life of human beings and the nation’s ethical order, that is, the sum of what Hegel calls its factual and spiritual realities. During this civic era, both Athenian citizen and dramatic character alike possessed the ability to act (epic) and to be individuals (lyric) equally and simultaneously (drama), thus creating the conflicts that fueled Athenian tragedy. This simultaneous existence of the personal and the national was not, therefore, without its tensions. And necessarily so. Like Aristotle, Hegel argues that action is needed in order to create drama. But not just any action. Tragedy “rests entirely on collisions,” argues Hegel, and these dramatic collisions take place neither in a vacuum nor without repercussions.2 Action begets action and reaction until the drama reaches its final resting place. Like the classical theory of harmonic dissonance, dramatic conflict points to and must eventually produce consonance. But in order to guarantee the initial and certain collisions on which Greek theater thrived, the Athenian dramatists made their characters take definite and immoveable stances on such substantive national issues as state law versus divine law, as in Sophocles’ Antigone. This perspective on drama is important to Hegel because each engagement with essential national issues meant that Athenian drama had a much more “direct relation to the public” than, for example, epic or lyric.3 Not only did Athenian drama bluntly confront its audience members with the issues of the day, these audience members qua Athenian citizens were required by law to participate in the civic institution of drama. This does not mean that Athenian drama simply reflected back to private citizens and public officials alike a mirror image of the city and its inhabitants. In certain cases Athenian dramatists vehemently disagreed with the current version of the Athenian ethical order and refused to pander to whatever powers and tastes were then in ascendance.

Introduction: what is drama?

This type of national critique is particularly evident in the so-called Old Comedy of Aristophanes. Aristophanes delighted in parodying the follies of Athenian civic identity – its politicians, artists, cultural traditions, and even religious practices. For example, his Frogs targets not only the public image of the hero Heracles and the rhetoric of the poets Aeschylus and Euripides, but also the current religious rituals associated with the god Dionysus. For Hegel, what makes Aristophanes the model civic dramatist is that these parodies come not from pure malice or self-indulgence. Instead, Aristophanes patriotically takes the moral high ground in his comedies in general and his parabases in particular.4 In an effort to ensure that his aims were not misunderstood, Aristophanes made his parodic characters pursue only an empty or misguided form of the divine ethical order, “always only what is inherently null” rather than its very essence.5 His characters are not passionately possessed by the divine but instead foolishly obsessed with it. Through these ridiculous obsessions the playwright parodies how human beings fail to understand the gods, not how the gods themselves fail. The divine is never truly at stake in this genre of drama. Thus the gods do not mind it even when, like the character of Dionysus in Aristophanes’ Frogs, they become the apparent object of laughter. The political function of Greek Old Comedy is a conservative one. Its job is to remind us what to take seriously by telling us what to scorn. Because Aristophanic characters embrace “unsubstantial” aims they are of course “self-destructive” and doomed to failure. But far from being overcome and undone by their folly, these parodic characters eventually tend to rise above their failures. While they may be substantively empty and pose no serious threat to the ethical order of things, they are admirably resilient.6 In this light Hegel sees Aristophanes as a patriot who portrayed the Athenians and their gods as blessed by deep conviction and self-assurance, no matter how absurd or dire the circumstances in which they found themselves from time to time. Because the Aristophanic character’s threat to the ethical order is never serious, his or her reintegration into the whole is less a matter

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of life or death, than it is in tragedy. In tragedy the life of the tragic agent is positively possessed by a one-sided – albeit divinely inspired – perspective. But since the gods as a polytheistic whole cannot abide by any assault on their divine unity, then, either through physical death or through the spiritual death of their one-sided ideals, tragic agents must pay for their transgressions and be reintegrated into the unified ethical order through the dissolution of their body and/or their resolve. In Greek tragedy the divine world provides the groundwork for human action, and since the divine is always resolved and at peace with itself – even if the tragic agents, as its human instruments, are not – tragedy must eventually resolve “every conflict and contradiction.”7 To provide closure for these conflicts, tragedy’s final reconciliation must also be moral. Tragic closure is therefore moral closure. It returns the ethical order to its original and unified state of polyphonic polytheism. Unwilling to recognize the wholeness and diversity of the divine world, the tragic agent, whose personal identity is inseparable from his or her aims, must be dissolved by a separation of soul from body. This can mean death, utter defeat, and/or transfiguration. The ending of each of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays exemplifies these three alternatives. In Oedipus Rex Jocasta dies. In Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus is transfigured. And in Antigone Creon is devastated. Each of these agents must give up in some way the life or way of life to which they had hitherto clung so dearly. Thus, while tragedy does depict collisions between agents with opposing aims, there must also preside over the drama a sense of “eternal justice [der ewigen Gerechtigkeit].”8 In the face of this eternal justice tragic agents can only offer mortal justification. In Athenian tragedy the setting for such encounters between justice and justification is usually the epic age of the emergent culture. In contrast to this epic action, however, spectatorship in tragedy is of course civic, since the actual performance of Athenian tragedy takes place during the civic era of the well-established citystate. From this perspective of civic identity, Athenian tragedy looks back upon and scrutinizes its epic age.9 As discussed in chapter 1, Hegel conceives of the epic historical moment as a time when law,

Introduction: what is drama?

morality, and duty are in greater flux than at other times during a nation’s history. Because this divine sphere of “universal ethical powers [die allgemeinen sittlichen Ma¨chte]” has not yet been completely codified and separated from the human sphere, the gods are more directly concerned with human action.10 In the tragic representation of this epic age the divine ethical order emerges from its undisturbed background, engages in tragic conflict, and then recedes again. The most obvious way in which this judgment emerges is through the pronouncements of the chorus. In Greek tragedy nation, chorus, and agent are all organically related to each other in terms of political and poetic evolution, with the chorus occupying a middle position. The chorus manifests itself as a kind of naive consciousness that desires to retain a unified yet differentiated wholeness. Because this type of collective and naive consciousness usually does not participate directly in tragic conflict, it therefore tends to remain neutral. To take an analogy from sports, the chorus is more like a playing field, neutral (though of course there are always exceptions to the rule, for example, when the home field gives the home team an advantage against its visiting opponents). Hegel seems to endorse this sort of analogy by claiming that, caught between abstention from and veneration of heroic action, the choral consciousness is immobilized and provides a kind of “terrain and spectator [der bloße Boden und Zuschauer] of action.”11 Completing the evolutionary chain from the soil to das Volk and finally its heroes, “in contrast to these individuals [drama’s heroic agents] it is the people as the fruitful soil out of which they grow ( just as flowers and towering trees do from their own native soil) and by the existent character of which they are conditioned [den einzelnen Heroen gegenu¨ber das Volk als das fruchtbare Erdreich, aus welchem die Individuellen wie die Blumen und hervorragenden Ba¨ume aus ihrem eigenen heimischen Boden emporwachsen und durch die Existenz desselben bedingt sind].”12 In other words, the chorus emerges from the Greek nation and then, out of the chorus, the tragic agents themselves grow. Because it provides these grounds for Athenian tragedy, it is like the sacred precinct of the tragic theater or like a temple that provides the

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spiritual context and meaning for the statues housed therein. For the Greeks, tragedy demands a physical context that is also spiritual, present outside of the drama in the form of the theater’s sacred precinct and inside the drama in the form of the divinely inspired chorus, the “scene of the spirit [die geistige Szene].”13 In contrast to Athenian drama, modern drama does not seem to need a chorus, just as, Hegel argues, we do not need to shelter our statues under sacred roofs in order to provide them with the physical and spiritual contexts necessary to give them full meaning. This does not mean, however, that the modern sculptor has completely and necessarily done away with context. Instead, he or she now has the option of relocating context to within the sculpture itself, thus making the modern statue its own temple, so to speak. Similarly, in certain kinds of modern drama other elements have also absorbed the national context once provided by the chorus. The objective and epic aspects of the chorus have either been redistributed to dramatic situation, accident, and circumstance, or they have been relocated to within the individual characters themselves, who stand alone just as modern “statues stand under the open sky” rather than within the sanctuary of a temple.14 But for Hegel the evolution of theater from the Greeks to the nineteenth century does not always seem to be for the best. In fact, Hegel contends that by his day the theater had essentially devolved back into the constituent parts from which it was first formed, namely, the genres of epic drama, mostly a French concern, and lyric drama, mostly an Italian concern. In Hegel’s estimation, the lyric school of drama tends to engage audience sympathy through the personal identities and passions of its characters. For the most part, it avoids engagement through the tragic embodiment or comic disembodiment of epic national identity – the serious portrayal or comic parody of the objective ethical order so essential to Athenian tragedy and Old Comedy.15 Instead, it privileges lyric personal identity. Not surprisingly, given its lyrical nature, the most important change wrought by the evolution of lyric drama has been the emergence of the actor as a more individually motivated participant in the theater. In order to express this freer,

Introduction: what is drama?

more personal subjectivity, the modern dramatic actor has had to remove the traditional Greek mask. And once having removed the universal mask of comedy or tragedy, the actor now reveals to the audience a distinctive and individual face, along with a distinctive and individual personality. Not unrelatedly, alongside this thawing of the drama’s rigid mask the lyric actor has also felt free to emancipate bodily movement. He or she can aim at a more complete visual and physical expression than was allowed by the rigid and ritualistic mask that limited the classical Athenian actor to the more spiritual and universal meanings heretofore achieved mainly through poetry. To the extent that the actor is thus emancipated from the rigid convention of the mask, the actor also becomes a full artist, and this artistic emancipation in turn affects the way drama gets produced. Between the lyric dramatist and the lyric drama, there begins to intrude another artist, namely, the newly emancipated actor. According to Hegel, the Italian commedia dell’arte exemplifies this type of drama since, although it did depend on stock character types like Columbine and Harlequin, it nevertheless places its more important roles, and therefore the lion’s share of the drama, into the hands of individual, professional actors. While admitting that this emancipation of the actor-as-artist prevents the Italian dramatist from maintaining control over the means of theatrical production, such emancipation is nevertheless encouraged and endorsed by Hegel. On the whole he welcomes what the newly liberated actor can bring to the dramatic production. With the emergence of the artistic actor, Hegel argues, an individual human being can finally and fully animate what the Athenian dramatist had previously assigned not only to the rigid mask, but also to highly stylized dance, music, and gesture. And since the actors of these dramas are necessarily human beings, through lyric drama dramatic roles become increasingly subjective, personal, alive.16 In direct contrast to this largely Italian school of lyric theater, with respect to actor, author, and national origins the school of epic drama has much less to recommend itself to Hegel and thus he devotes less time to discussing what he views as an essentially French corruption

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of Greek tragedy. He argues that, unlike the lyric emancipation of the actor, in the neo-classical French school epic dramatists still aim to treat the actor as the Greeks did, namely, as a mere means to production. For such Hellenizing dramatists, the actor is “the instrument on which the author plays, or the sponge that can absorb any colour and give it back unchanged.”17 Disregarding the fact that the lyric drama has newly accorded actors the status of artist and individual, French dramatists try to treat their actors in the same way that Athenian dramatists treated theirs. But, as Hegel points out, without closely guarded conventions to limit the actor’s subjectivity, actors and dramatists alike found it difficult to achieve more universal and properly epic goals. Especially in the realm of diction, Hegel concludes that French rhetoric sought to universalize the particular to death, leaving us only with stilted phrases, hollow abstractions, and rigid, meaningless conventions, a “purely formal universality,” not impassioned drama that speaks with both immediacy and objectivity.18 For Hegel, French neo-classism marks not so much the rebirth of tragedy as its reanimated zombie. WAGNER ON DRAMA

Following Hegel’s Grecocentric analysis of drama’s evolution and de-evolution, Wagner also thought the Greeks eminently capable of producing lyric subjectivity and merging it with epic objectivity in order to produce balanced citizens, artists, and artworks. However, perhaps more so than Hegel, through Wagner’s theoretical prose works we see how he thought the dissolution of the Athenian state was connected to the dissolution of Athenian tragedy. Unlike Hegel Wagner also seems to be more ambivalent towards Aristophanic comedy. Without a doubt, Wagner enjoyed and deeply respected Aristophanes, as evidenced by his repeated reading of this dramatist and his estimation of him as the greatest of Greek geniuses. However, he also implies in more than one place that Aristophanic comedy may have been one of the primary causes of the dissolution of Athenian tragedy and Athens itself, its coup de graˆce rather than its

Introduction: what is drama?

saving grace, as Hegel would have it. And yet, despite what Wagner argues about Aristophanes’ influence on Athens and Athenian tragedy, he did not believe it would have been entirely good or perhaps even possible to undo the work that Aristophanes did and thus to revive Greek tragedy. Not only does he denounce the failure of the French neo-classical attempt to do so, he also questions such a revival in nineteenth-century Germany. Carrying out in practice what he argues in theory, in Go¨tterda¨mmerung Wagner uses both tragic and comedic elements not only as a way of reviving these Aristophanic forms but also as a way of critiquing and destroying their present incarnations in drama, opera, and politics. As far as Hegel’s ideas about drama being lyric and epic or subjective and objective, although Wagner avoids such terminology he nevertheless invokes the Hegelian conceit of drama as a unification of internal and external aesthetic elements. Describing the make-up of drama in “Art and Revolution,” Wagner writes, For all that in them [dramatic poets] moved and lived, as it moved and lived in the beholders, here found its perfected expression; where ear and eye, as soul and heart, lifelike and actual, seized and perceived all and saw all in spirit and in body revealed; so that the imagination need no longer vex itself with the attempt to conjure up the image.19

Significantly, as argued earlier,20 he figures the ear as the internal, spiritual, and imaginative organ, and, following Hegel, he also believes that speech alone is the only “element worthy of the expression of spirit.”21 Only through words can we fully convey meaningful, spiritual content. At the same time, Wagner figures the eye as the organ of passion, actuality, and the body. The eye perceives external forms and actions.22 And just as Siegfried symbolizes this highest synthesis of these two sides of human nature, drama is the thing he symbolizes. While Wagner may not have endorsed Athenian comedy quite as heartily as Hegel did, he does come closer to the philosopher’s notion that tragedy unified the aesthetic elements of basic human nature and helped secure the civic identity of Athens. Like Hegel,

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Wagner often emphasizes the importance of national and objective values over personal and subjective ones.23 He believed that Athenian tragedy provided the nation with a mirror that flattered the individual citizen and that in this mirror the individual citizen also found comfort in seeing himself joined with the best and noblest traits of the nation.24 Comparing Athenian tragedy to a flower, Wagner claims that each individual Athenian citizen was integral to the city’s life just as each organic thread of vegetation is essential to the stem from which a flower blooms.25 This nature imagery hints at the essential element in Wagner’s understanding of Athenian drama and successful drama in general: the role of nature in producing great art. Like many other Romantics who saw the natural retreating before the industrial, Wagner idolized the idyllic. But as is evident in Siegfried, for Wagner “nature” was not just some abstract notion of green space and virgin landscape, but nationalized soil, a political and pristine space guarded by physical and ideological borders. Not from the nation alone did the Athenian dramatist find his raw material; he also had to be sensitive to what was natural or indigenous to that nation in order to produce such a physically sensible work as Greek tragedy. As opposed to this collectivity of nature and nation, in Wagner’s estimation an overindulgence in individuality spelled disaster for Athenian tragedy and Athens itself. In “Art and Revolution” he not only attributes unsuccessful drama to too much egotism on the part of the poet, he also attributes the whole of Greek tragedy’s downfall to such egotism. Like Hegel, Wagner contends that when the Greek actor took off the ritual mask, he “lost withal his communistic oneness with a religion-bound community” and began to develop not only as an individual but also as an egoist.26 Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, Wagner implies that the downfall of Athens itself was caused or at least accompanied by the downfall of tragedy. The Athenian genius for creativity, independence, and individuality, the very qualities that made Athens great, also, when pushed into the realm of hubris, destroyed the state, ironically bringing tragedy to a tragic end. Since Athenian civic life greatly

Introduction: what is drama?

depended on this conservative state-sponsored and state-unifying institution, when tragedy fell apart, Athens fell with it. Returning to Wagner’s nature metaphor: once the flower of Athenian tragedy had been cut off, its national fibers split apart and the whole civic stalk withered and died.27 As one of the causes behind or accompaniments to the death of tragedy and the downfall of Athens, Wagner cites Aristophanes. In his theoretical writings and his readings with Cosima, Wagner often links Aristophanes to the downfall of the Athenian state and its great tragic institution. For example, in some notes on the downfall of tragedy, Wagner links Euripides, whom he considers a decadent tragedian, with Aristophanes, tying their artwork to the fall of tragedy and the dissolution of its “stately epic-heroic tendence.”28 In the same passage Wagner also links Aristophanes to Socrates, another figure Wagner considered a destructive influence on tragedy. He calls them both members of the “aristocracy of the intellect.”29 The word “intellect” here is ambiguous with respect to its valence for good or ill. For after the state and tragedy decayed into individualism and Aristophanic laughter, Wagner (along with Nietzsche) argues it then gave way to philosophy, that is, a product of the intellect.30 Even more explicitly, in “Art and Revolution” Wagner imagines Aristophanes crowing over the defeat of tragedy, which is for Wagner also the demise of Athens: as tragedy and the Athenian state split apart into individualist factions and individual arts, “Above the ruins of the tragic art was heard the cry of the mad laughter of Aristophanes, the maker of comedies. . .”31 Like Hegel, Wagner certainly recognized the more personal and polemical nature of comedy in general and of Aristophanic parody in particular. But in Wagner’s mind the so-called righteous laughter that Aristophanes directed at Athens may have sped its downfall. Rather than embracing the Hegelian theory that a parody of Athens was a communal activity aimed at unifying and improving its citizens by helping them to recognize their follies, Wagner implies that when Aristophanes made Athens itself a laughing-stock he only further corroded its civic identity. Unlike Greek tragedy, which

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conserved the Athenian community and upheld the “common bond of its Religion and primeval Custom,”32 comedy – like its cousin philosophy – dissected the community and split it apart into egotistic splinter groups. For Wagner, Aristophanic laughter did not therefore ripple down from a divine distance. Rather, it ripped apart the fabric of the Athenian ethical order from top to bottom and forced the community to vivisect itself through analytical “self-dissection.”33 Comedy was not only a decadent egotistical art, but also an art that led to the egotistical decay of drama and the state. This decay did not, however, end with the decay of Athens. As with Hegel, Wagner similarly believes in the dissolution of drama back into its separate epic and lyric genres. With his description of drama as the unification of internal and external, Wagner does not necessarily use the same language as Hegel but does approximate the same concepts. In “Art and Revolution” he draws sharp distinctions between modern drama and ancient Athenian drama, and, like Hegel, argues that modern drama has been divided into two schools of thought that resemble lyric and epic poetry. Initially, it seems that Wagner disdains subjective or lyric drama because it has devolved into a “denunciation” of national identity.34 Compared to the lyric school of drama, epic drama, as practiced by the French neo-classicists, would initially seem to have much more to recommend it to Wagner’s way of thinking. In direct contrast to Italian lyric drama, which supported the emancipation of the actor, epic drama strove to treat its actors as the Greeks did, namely, as a means to production rather than the ends of production. However, both Hegel and Wagner seem to agree that French epic drama was a much less organic and honest form of theater than Italian lyric drama.35 For Wagner as for Hegel, the French litte´rateur “disposes of the actor as a mere tool, just as the sculptor disposes of his clay or stone.”36 The answer to the question of how to make modern drama as politically engaging and aesthetically effective as Greek tragedy is therefore not simply to try to turn back the clock. This attitude can be seen quite explicitly in Wagner’s argument against the use of choruses in modern opera. In “Art and Revolution” Wagner restates

Introduction: what is drama?

Hegel’s position that Greek tragedy evolved organically out of das Volk. Also like Hegel, he relies on earthy imagery to talk about the chorus and its relation to tragedy, claiming that tragedy arose out of the chorus as though it grew naturally out of the ground.37 Given this less-evolved status of the chorus, Wagner, like Hegel, believed that a chorus in modern drama would be redundant and backward. The chorus of ancient Greek tragedy had long since been resolved into its various parts, argues Wagner, and redistributed throughout the rest of the drama. To try to reform the chorus now would be to go against the natural, evolutionary progress of drama.38 Yet it is not merely the resuscitation of tragic choruses in modern drama that Wagner objects to. He is also skeptical about the idea of resuscitating tragedy as a state-sponsored institution. In contrast to decadent modern drama Wagner emphasizes that, for the Athenians, drama was a civic institution. Athens enforced attendance at its dramatic festivals and its actors were noble amateurs, not paid professionals.39 Indebted to the state for its livelihood, Greek drama was therefore a conservative political art that faithfully strove to reinforce epic national identity: “It was the nation itself – in intimate connection with its own history – that stood mirrored in its art-work, that communed with itself and, within the span of a few hours, feasted its eyes with its own noblest essence.”40 As part of his effort to reform the decadent and commodified drama of his time, in “Art and Revolution” Wagner seems to suggest that Germany should Hellenize its drama upon this ancient Athenian civic model and reintroduce epic elements to the all-too lyric drama. If the Germans were to place drama back into the hands of the state, where the Athenians kept it, then this might help drama reclaim its original, conservative political function.41 But was Wagner really serious about creating such reforms? No doubt he did believe in them to some extent. Yet if one compares his theatrical practices to his theatrical theories, an interesting discrepancy arises. While Wagner extols Greek tragedy and critiques Greek comedy for what each of these arts did for Athens, his use of these forms in the finale to the Ring cycle is anything but a straightforward

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approval of the one and disapproval of the other. As I hope to show in the final section of this book, in Go¨tterda¨mmerung Wagner not only employs the conservative nature of Greek tragedy, he also demonstrates the dangers involved in transplanting such “foreign” works of art into German soil (chapter 10). He also deploys the revolutionary force of Greek parody in order both to deconstruct and reconstruct the ethical order of the Ring and, by extension, of Germany. Specifically, he does this through his parodic use of a chorus (chapter 11) and by complicating the ending of the entire Ring cycle to make it seem both hopeful and hopeless, tragic and comic, an ambiguity that, like much in Wagner, helps insure the composer’s longevity by catalyzing confusion (chapter 12).

10

Opera and tragedy

Something is wrong with Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Its music jars stylistically with the rest of the Ring and its plot does not seem to follow from Siegfried’s optimistic ending. Critics of the Ring’s final opera have long noted these discrepancies. Some blame Wagner the artist, others Wagner the philosopher, and still others Wagner the ideologue. To take the three most cogent arguments on this subject: George Bernard Shaw blames Go¨tterda¨mmerung’s shortcomings on Wagner as failed composer, poet, and dramatist; Friedrich Nietzsche thinks Go¨tterda¨mmerung fails because of Wagner’s failed political philosophy; and, more recently, Michael P. Steinberg locates the problem in specific characters in Go¨tterda¨mmerung and holds Wagner the ideologue responsible for this opera’s successful but suspect ideological subtext. It is Steinberg’s argument I find most convincing. And while I believe that he is right to critique Go¨tterda¨mmerung rather than criticize it, as Shaw and Nietzsche do, he neglects to consider the importance of form, especially Greek drama, in this final opera. Moreover, he does not take seriously enough his own interpretation of Go¨tterda¨mmerung as parody. Thus he misses the essential point that in this apocalyptic opera Wagner is perhaps less interested in creating music drama than music parody.1 As suggested by its title – Twilight of the Gods – this final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle focuses more on endings than beginnings, destruction than construction. By means of a radical formal negation, Wagner uses Go¨tterda¨mmerung in part to ridicule the “artwork of the present” rather than re-create Greek tragedy as the “artwork of the future.” As in his theoretical writings, so too in his operatic compositions: Wagner is deeply invested in revealing what should not rather than what should be. Interestingly, this is not only a trend in Wagner’s

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thinking and composing, it is also a basic formula for parody, ancient Greek or otherwise. And yet, in his parody of current theatrical practices, Wagner also uses the mainspring of tragic action to set things going: the paradox that the Greek tragic hero both ardently desires his own undoing and is forced into it by fate. Putting magic in place of fate, Wagner makes his tragic hero both responsible and innocent. Though not as clear-cut as the love/death potion in Tristan und Isolde, which merely brings to light the love that Tristan has kept in the darkness, Siegfried brings about the apocalypse in Go¨tterda¨mmerung both because he is duped into it, by drinking a potion that sets off an adamantine chain of events, and because he wants to destroy the world – or at least his alter-ego, Wagner, wants him to destroy the world. WHAT’S WRONG WITH GO¨ TTERDA¨ MMERUNG?

For Shaw, writing in The Perfect Wagnerite, the problem with Go¨tterda¨mmerung begins with the composer but does not end there. When Wagner began writing the libretto for Go¨tterda¨mmerung, Shaw points out, he was only thirty-five years old. However, he was sixty when he wrote the music.2 In Shaw’s estimation the aging composer “had lost his old grip” on the meaning of the drama and therefore its musical realization is uninspired. “The musical fabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous,” Shaw admits, “but you cannot say, as you must in witnessing The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and the first two acts of Siegfried, that you have never seen anything like it before, and that the inspiration is entirely original.”3 Go¨tterda¨mmerung is not only a musical failure according to Shaw, it is also a poetic failure. Shifting the blame from Wagner the composer to Wagner the poet, Shaw claims, “Not only the action but most of the poetry, might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The situation of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without being bettered, or even equaled in point of majesty and musical [i.e., poetic] expression.”4 Finally, even Wagner the dramatist comes under fire. The dramatic action in Go¨tterda¨mmerung does not follow in a necessary progression

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from one scene to the next, observes Shaw, and, what is worse, it uses worn out theatrical conventions to gloss over these arbitrary leaps in plot logic: The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the impossibility of any credible scenic presentation of the incidents, and the extreme staginess of the conventions by which these impossibilities are got over, are no doubt covered from the popular eye by the overwhelming prestige of Die Go¨tterda¨mmerung as part of so great a work as The Ring, and by the extraordinary storm of emotion and excitement which the music keeps up.5

As composer, poet, and dramatist Wagner is a three-time loser. His music is too elaborate and he uses it only to cover up his deficiencies as a conventional poet and an arbitrary dramatist. It would seem that, for Shaw, Go¨tterda¨mmerung is not only the twilight of the Ring’s divine authors but also of its human one. From a more philosophical perspective, in The Case of Wagner Friedrich Nietzsche holds Wagner’s shift in ideological allegiance responsible for Go¨tterda¨mmerung’s problems. Nietzsche argues that between the time that Wagner finished composing Siegfried and began composing Go¨tterda¨mmerung, he had replaced his revolutionary French optimism with Schopenhauerian German pessimism. As we have seen in previous chapters, Wagner projected himself onto Siegfried. He made this hero out of his revolutionary impulse to overthrow the old world and build a new one on its ashes. Siegfried, created in his master’s likeness, begins life as a revolutionary, and, in his eponymous lyric opera, he continues as he has begun: he merely follows his first impulse, he overthrows everything traditional, all reverence, all fear. Whatever displeases him he stabs to death. Without the least respect, he tackles old deities. But his main enterprise aims to emancipate woman – “to redeem Bru¨nnhilde.” – Siegfried and Bru¨nnhilde; the sacrament of free love; the rise of the golden age; the twilight of the gods for the old morality – all ill has been abolished.6

Like Siegfried, Wagner began his operatic career by following a revolutionary ideal of politics. As Nietzsche observes, “Half his life,

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Wagner believed in The Revolution as much as ever a Frenchman believed in it.”7 But then something went wrong. He started reading pessimistic German philosophers like Schopenhauer, from whom he learned that such revolutionary optimism was “infamous.”8 Feeling ashamed of his erstwhile French political leanings and seeing the need to repent, Wagner tries to “redeem” his political philosophy by transposing Go¨tterda¨mmerung (and especially its ending) into the key of Schopenhauerian pessimism. As Nietzsche tells it, Bru¨nnhilde was initially supposed to take her farewell with a song in honor of free love, putting off the world with the hope for a socialist utopia in which “all turns out well” – but now gets something else to do. She has to study Schopenhauer first; she has to transpose the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation into verse.9

The ending of Go¨tterda¨mmerung, famously and repeatedly revised by Wagner, reveals a Schopenhauerian anxiety about Wagner’s earlier socialist optimism, an optimism he tried – and yet failed – to conceal within the fog and folds of German pessimism. More recently, Michael P. Steinberg has also tried to solve the mystery of why Go¨tterda¨mmerung seems so out of place at the end of the Ring. Steinberg argues that the problem with Go¨tterda¨mmerung is not with Wagner’s failure as a composer, poet, dramatist, or political philosopher. Rather, the problem lies with Wagner the dramatic theorist and German nationalist, Wagner the ideologue who demonizes and destroys his French and Jewish characters (Gunther, Gutrune, and Hagen), who endorses – in a limited way – his Italian character (Bru¨nnhilde), and who ultimately champions his German character (Siegfried). In contrast to Shaw and Nietzsche, for Steinberg Go¨tterda¨mmerung does not fail. It triumphs. And that is the problem. Like Shaw, Steinberg recognizes the “unmusicality” and conventional insipidness of Go¨tterda¨mmerung. But whereas Shaw locates these problems in Go¨tterda¨mmerung as a whole and holds Wagner’s old age responsible for his artistic shortcomings, Steinberg locates these deficiencies in specific characters and holds Wagner the ideologue responsible for putting them there. In Act II, scene 4,

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for example, when Siegfried falsely swears that he has not had carnal knowledge of Bru¨nnhilde, Steinberg recognizes that “Siegfried is reduced to a state of utter unmusicality. Loaded down with leitmotivs, he attempts inarticulately to assert his innocence. His music seems to be gesturing to a state of lyricism that it cannot achieve. He struggles to get on top of the leitmotivs, and he can’t. In short, he just can’t sing.”10 However, according to Steinberg we are not meant to hold Siegfried responsible for the loss of his voice. From Nietzsche we know that Wagner now regrets and deplores his earlier French political leanings. Through Siegfried Wagner demonstrates just how those French influences have corrupted his hero and thus his concept of German music drama. In addition, the French also seem to be in league with the Jews in their plans to bring Siegfried down. Gutrune, as a coquette lifted from French grand opera, and Hagen, the coldblooded embodiment of Jewish wealth and power, are the people that are truly responsible for Siegfried’s “unmusicality,” his inability to achieve truly German music drama: Gutrune, as Jean-Jacques Nattiez has persuasively argued, is marked as a decadent by a vocal style lifted from French opera. Nattiez identifies Gutrune’s melody in her “comic opera exchange” with Siegfried in Act II, scene 2 as a tune lifted directly from Auber’s La Muette de Portici, which Wagner had heard. The collusion of French opera (Gutrune) and Jewishness (Hagen, son of Alberich) lures music drama (Siegfried) to corruption and doom – a repetition, in Wagner’s fantasmatic lineup of cultural criminals, of the alliance of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn.11

Siegfried’s corruption, though, is not absolute. According to Steinberg, it is neither the French nor the Jews that have the final word in Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Wagner ends by taking the lives of both his French characters (Gutrune and her brother Gunther) as well as his putatively Jewish character (Hagen). With his ideological representation of the Italians, Wagner is less harsh. In Act II, scene 4, when Siegfried cannot sing to support his innocence, Bru¨nnhilde uses Italian lyricism to interrupt Siegfried’s Franco-Jewish warbling. She breaks in during his oath, takes control

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of the spear, and then “takes control of The Ring, qua music drama, plot, and style. She does this by discovering and projecting the power of Italian opera. Suddenly, she is Norma.”12 But like the less musical victory of the French and the Jews, Bru¨nnhilde’s Italian victory over German music drama is also only temporary. According to Steinberg, in the end Wagner reasserts German national identity and German music drama: “At the end of the Immolation Scene, Wagner takes back the hegemonic form of music drama by taking away Bru¨nnhilde’s voice and (in a well known change of mind) placing final comment in the narrative voice of orchestral music.”13 For Steinberg, Wagner the ideologue does not fail in Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Through the final triumph of German music drama over these other musical representations of national and racial identity, Wagner problematically succeeds. And that, once again, is the problem. While I am persuaded by much of Steinberg’s argument, I would argue that music drama is not as successful as Steinberg would have us believe. The fact that the final voice we hear in Go¨tterda¨mmerung is that of an orchestral narrator should clue us in to the fact that it is not drama – German, musical or otherwise – that triumphs in this opera. In fact I think that we are not intended to believe that music drama can wholly succeed in Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Despite his new pessimistic philosophy, Wagner is still enough of a socialist to hope for some kind of revolution. And it is only after this fabled revolution, which will destroy the individual rulers and leave behind only nature and the communal Volk, that Wagner truly believes music drama can be born in a way that resembles how tragedy and the Oresteia, for example, were products of the Athenian people.14 Go¨tterda¨mmerung is only part of the revolution; it takes place before or during, not after it, as Steinberg implies. In Opera and Drama Wagner even argues that such an “artwork of the future” would be impossible in Europe under the prevailing political conditions: No one can be better aware than myself that the realisement of this Drama depends on conditions which do not lie within the will, nay, not even within the capability [Fa¨higkeit] of the Unit – were this capability an infinitely greater than my own – but only in Community, and in a

Opera and tragedy mutual co-operation made possible thereby: of both which factors, nothing but the direct antithesis is now to hand.15

It would seem therefore that in Go¨tterda¨mmerung Wagner is less interested in creating or championing music drama than in deconstructing “its direct antithesis”: the present, corrupted state of European opera. To begin to understand this position it is instructive to look at what Wagner thought about music drama’s ultimate paradigm, Greek tragedy, and the viability of this art form outside of ancient Greece.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF RE-CREATING GREEK TRAGEDY

Throughout his writings Wagner singles out certain cultures as particularly inhospitable to Greek aesthetic and political ideals. In this category are various Eastern cultures, including Jews, Asians, and Egyptians,16 as well as certain Western cultures, including the Romans and their descendants among the modern Romance nations, the French and the Italians. As far as Eastern poets are concerned, Wagner thought them incapable of producing drama on the same scale as the Greeks because they were incapable of producing individual human subjects on or off the stage. In “The Art-Work of the Future” he argues that, among these races, “Man could never form the subject of his own artistic exposition.”17 Nature, by which Wagner here means the pantheon of Eastern gods, was viewed by Eastern poets as an implacable, objective force that enthralled the inhabitants of Asia and kept them from developing a full-fledged dramatic theater. Even when these poets did conceive of nature in human terms “they distorted the human image into horrible monsters, half-human, half-beast, whereas the Greeks achieved freedom from the hegemony of nature and made man the measure of all things.”18 Rather than perverting both human beings and nature, the Greeks “had so far set Man on Nature’s pinnacle that they conceived those personal nature-forces as clothed with the perfect shape of human beauty, as Gods that bore themselves as men.”19 By anthropomorphizing nature into gods, the Greeks endowed individual

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subjects with objective substance. Like Hegel, Wagner attributes the birth of Athenian tragedy to this ability to unify subject and object and thus produce the “most perfect totality of content and form.”20 If a formula is needed to describe both Hegel’s and Wagner’s concept of Greek tragedy, one could say that it is the synthesis of epic and lyric. Athenian tragedians combined lyric personal identity with epic national identity in order to produce dramatic characters that were vivid rather than prosaic and impassioned by national ideals rather than governed by such abstract notions as “duty.” As Hegel summarizes, tragedy’s poetic genius consisted in raising “the character and individuality of immediate reality into the purifying element of universality and in making these two sides harmonize with one another.”21 This, according to both Wagner and Hegel, was an achievement that Eastern poets were culturally incapable of. There could be no tragedy where there were no characters with a sufficient sense of individual identity. Moving from the ancient East to modern Europe, Wagner also discounts the French and the Italians from consideration as creators of a drama comparable to the Greeks. All of the interwoven harmony between Greek epic and lyric was, according to Wagner, undone by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European drama. These more modern traditions dissolved drama back into its two constituent poetic genres and, out of these genres, formed the two competing schools that Hegel names the lyric and epic schools of drama. When modern drama privileges lyric personal identity it does not necessarily altogether dismiss from the stage epic national identity or other similar objective forces, especially since lyric is never completely devoid of national considerations. But when it does consider these epic forces it tends to treat them as background information and situational circumstance. This demotion of the epic, however, did not satisfy Wagner. In “Art and Revolution” it would seem that Wagner disdains lyric drama especially because it eventually devolved into a “denunciation” of national identity.22 In this essay he argues that the audiences for such drama had gone so far as to demand that substantive, national issues like religion be kept completely separate

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from theater. As Wagner saw it, such a demand for “substanceless” theater in turn deprived modern drama of its civic conscience and brought about a kind of social barbarism in the theater. In lyric drama, foreign entertainment, frivolity, and egotism took center stage. Its emphasis on individuality and commercialism rather than community and the free public festival led to a situation where only the wealthy were able to afford the theater. They alone had the time, money, and freedom to attend dramatic productions regularly, while the proletariat usually participated in drama only as paid actors or lesser functionaries and flunkies. The modern theater’s emphasis on the lyric rather than the epic aspects of drama left behind a vacuum that was once filled by nationally grounded ideals. In that vacuum vanity, greed, and luxury found a place where they could luxuriate and thrive, reducing the dramatic art to a “mere” craft, an empty entertainment for an equally empty-headed bourgeois audience.23 Unlike lyric theater, one might expect that the epic theater as practiced by the French neo-classicists would have appealed more to Wagner. As distinguished from the Italian lyric drama and its support of the emancipation of the actor, French epic drama strove to treat its actors as the Greeks did, namely, as the means to production rather than the ends of production. However, in both Hegel’s and Wagner’s estimation, compared to the Greeks the French did not have as strong or as clear a set of traditions to guard and guide their treatment of the actor. The Greek ritualistic mask and other dramaturgical means, such as music, dance, and poetry, took up the burden of conveying the tragic effect in ancient theater and were guided by a strong set of established traditions. As Hegel points out with regard to these varying traditions, “In the case of the Greeks this was easier because . . . declamation was restricted in the main to clarity, and the matter of rhythm, etc., was looked after by music, while masks hid facial expressions, and even acting had little scope. Therefore the actor could easily adapt to a universal tragic ‘pathos’. . .”24 To Wagner, the hollowness of French tragedy sounded all the more empty because the universal sentiments of freedom and love expressed by its tragedians so clearly contradicted the political

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climate that supposedly nourished them. With Louis XIV on the throne, Wagner asks how Corneille and Racine could sincerely express the “Grecian hate of Tyrants, declaimed in polished verses from the boards of his [Louis XIV’s] Court-theatre?”25 In such cases mimicry of the past simply makes the emptiness and hypocrisy of the present seem that much more blatant and distasteful. Once again mixing images of nature and nation, Wagner imagines neo-classical French drama as a flower transplanted from its natural soil in classical Greece: “Could Art be present there in very deed, where it blossomed not forth as the living utterance of a free, self-conscious community, but was taken into the service of the very powers which hindered the self-development of that community it was thus capriciously transplanted from foreign climes?”26 The answer to this (almost certainly rhetorical) question comes back quick and pat: “No, surely!”27 Art must be the natural outgrowth of the nation, not a hothouse orchid transplanted from elsewhere.28 In such cases cultural transplanting does not necessarily fail because it is done poorly but because the new location does not have the right soil, the right sun, shade, and rain, as it were, to support the transplants. Less metaphorically: it is not simply the case that the neo-classical French dramatists were impoverished aesthetic imitators of the Greeks. There was also no national reality to support their grandiose theatrical pretensions, no previous institutions and customs that could provide their works with a workable context. But perhaps even more important than creating unconvincing art, the act of transplanting foreign art can even help destroy the state. This can be seen if we shift our attention from Louis XIV’s court to France’s Romance origins. Wagner argues that Rome began to decline as soon as it began to depend on imported foreign luxuries and pastimes. Once again referring to the mythological figure of Hermes and his Roman mythopoetic equivalent, Mercury, Wagner explains this decline through mythological symbols. Unlike the Athenians, who revered Hermes as a messenger between gods and humans, the Romans became thrall to Mercury, a messenger from other climates, nations, and traditions. While Hermes brought the

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will of the gods to the people, Mercury was more interested in the import/export business. To the Romans (or rather, Wagner’s conception of the Romans) he represented the money-changing god, the god of foreign merchants “who streamed from all the ends of the earth into the heart of the Roman world”29 and polluted Roman austerity with a taste for foreign luxury. Despite their contempt for these merchants and the degradation of their god Mercury to a god of “cheats and sharpers,” the Romans developed a growing desire for “all those delights of sense which their own immediate surrounding Nature could not afford them.”30 It was this desire for foreign luxury that eventually defeated the Romans and, according to Wagner, “usurped their mastery of the world.”31 In fact, to hear Wagner tell it, even the transplanting of such a noble institution as Athenian theater to Rome only further helped to speed Rome’s destruction. For the Romans did not import Athenian drama wholesale, but only the individual art genres of architecture, sculpture, painting, rhetoric, philosophy, and versification, which were all that was left of Athenian tragedy after its dissolution. Unlike the Greeks, therefore, the Romans could not open their theaters “to the gods and heroes of the ancient myths, nor to the free dancers and singers of the sacred choirs.”32 Neither epic nor lyric, the Roman amphitheaters hosted the “absolute realism”33 of actual death struggles between and among savage animals, gladiators, slaves, and Christians. THE VIABILITY OF HELLENIZED DRAMA IN GERMANY

By now it should come as no surprise that Wagner criticizes the dramatic traditions of Rome, Asia, France, and Italy and concludes that the rebirth of Greek tragedy would be or was impossible in any one of these cultures. But should we assume, therefore, that Wagner also felt that such a rebirth was impossible in Germany? As part of his effort to reform the decadent and commodified drama of his time, Wagner does seem to suggest in “Art and Revolution” that Germany should Hellenize its drama by basing it upon the Athenian civic model of tragedy in order to reintroduce epic elements to the

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dramatic stage. If the Germans were to place drama back into the hands of the state, where the Athenians had kept it, this would presumably help drama reclaim its original, conservative political function. Moreover, if the state were to take the responsibility for funding drama, the dramatic production team would no longer be corrupted by their need and desire to titillate audiences for the sake of ticket sales. Instead of art critics as judges of these future dramatic productions, like Athens, Germany might place critical judgment back in the hands of das Volk rather than allowing it to remain in the hands of parasitic scholars. And finally, in order to expunge all other corrupting and/or monetary concerns from drama and to complete this Hellenizing reform, we might also expect Wagner to endorse free admission to this theater of the future, along with state-funded support for all dramatic artists. With this final reform, dramatic artists might finally escape from the humiliating circumstances that surrounded and degraded the theatrical demi-monde.34 But how seriously are we to take these suggestions for reform? Did Wagner really believe that the Hellenization of German drama could revitalize the German nation through a state-sponsored theater? Given his critique of the state in both his theoretical and practical works, even if it were able to follow the Athenian model, should we believe that Wagner really wanted to put drama into the hands of the state? The answer to this question is, I think, no . . . not yet. In some future world, after some fabled revolution, control over drama might be ceded back to the heads of state, but Wagner thought that during his own lifetime a conservative, state-supported theater was not as viable an option for Germany as it was for Athens. The Athenian ethical order was something worth conserving, according to Wagner, whereas the nineteenth-century German ethical order was not. In Wagner’s eyes Germany had become corrupted by bourgeois-Jewish commerce and meaningless foreign conventions, just like Rome before it. In this sense Wagner does not believe in his Hellenizing reform of drama. Nor does he argue that mirroring one’s national identity on the dramatic stage would necessarily produce drama on a par with

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Athens. If in Germany one should truly desire to revivify Athenian tragedy, one would have to do more than simply mirror the present form of German national identity. In “The Art-Work of the Future” Wagner argues that Germany would first need to return to the more universal world of nature in order to “replant” the nation in a richer and purer cultural soil and thus, in a sense, do for itself what Wagner did for Siegfried, namely, provide a natural education: Our modern States are thus far the most unnatural unions of fellow men, that – called into existence by mere external caprice, e.g. dynastic interests – they yoke together a certain number of men for once and all, in furtherance of an aim which either never answered to a need they shared in common, or, from the change of time and circumstance, is certainly no longer common to them now.35

Like the tragic figure of Wotan, the modern German state has been corrupted by wealth, convention, and an arrogant abuse of power. As a state-funded mirror of this type of political machine, German drama would be beholden to the state’s corrupt values. For this reason Wagner incites his audience to overthrow the present state in order to rebuild the nation along more natural lines. Only after this revolution might Germany be able to sponsor a drama such as Athens sponsored for its citizens.36 In symbolic terms Wagner argues that such a revolution would have to unite Jesus’s teachings about freedom and universal equality with Apollo’s celebration of natural beauty and life.37 Returning to this idea of a Greco-Christian fusion in “The Art-Work of the Future,” Wagner proclaims that in order to produce a truly universal artwork, Germany would need to look back to the model of Greek tragedy not in order to slavishly imitate it, as the French did in their neo-classical epic theater, but to “turn Hellenic art to Human art; to loose from it the stipulations by which it was but an Hellenic and not a Universal art.”38 The artist of the future would then have to take that “costume of the Race by which it mutually recognizes itself,”39 and “stretch it out until its folds embrace the Religion of the Future, the Religion of Universal Manhood. . .”40

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Reading these lines in light of the Greek scholars whom Wagner studied, one hears echoes of Droysen and his notion of what Hellenism did for the world and how the Hellenic search for freedom led to a more universal search. But this kind of Hellenism, this turning of Hellenic art into Human art, is neither for Droysen nor for Wagner the simple process of stripping Athenian tragedy of its “garment of Religion”41 and replacing it with another garment. This is what the French tragedians tried to do and, in both Wagner’s and Hegel’s estimation, they merely succeeded in refashioning Athenian tragedy into an abstract and passionless luxury item for the wealthy rather than a universal art for all humanity to enjoy and benefit from. Just as the French could not restore Athenian virtue to the dramatic stage because their own national identity was so corrupt, neither should the Germans follow the French in their attempts to mimic Greek tragedy. To do this would only result in something like Mendelssohn’s music for Sophocles, music that Wagner claims to have truly despised. DRAMATIC TRANSPLANTING IN GO¨ TTERDA¨ MMERUNG

If one puts these theories into practice, part of what one experiences in Go¨tterda¨mmerung is not so much a positive example of drama as a negative one. Through this opera Wagner demonstrates how transplanting a drama foreign to one’s native stage can be destructive both to the drama being transplanted and to the nation into which it is transplanted. In this way Wagner critiques dramas such as the French neo-classical restoration of Athenian tragedy. He demonstrates operatically what must inevitably happen when even the most natural art and artist are uprooted from their native soil and transported to a corrupt political climate. In the same way that Racine and Corneille brought Athenian tragedy to the court of Louis XIV “to win the favor of its lord,” Hagen brings Siegfried to the Gibichung court to win the favor of Gunther and Gutrune – and, not incidentally, to increase his own personal wealth and power as well. But in this inhospitable new climate, Siegfried seems like a “hothouse plant”

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and can no longer “strike root in the natural soil, or flourish. . .”42 Since he was originally conceived of and nourished as a natural lyric hero who acted on his own volition in his eponymous opera, when transplanted to the ultra-civilized world of the Gibichung court, even Siegfried must betray his original nature, become a puppet of the state, and be transformed by Hagen and the Gibichungs into an unconscious hypocrite. In other words, Hagen mocks the hope that was held out to us by Siegfried’s drinking of the dragon’s blood, along with any other hope of unifying epic and lyric to re-create tragedy through the Ring cycle. To understand how this mockery is made we must turn first to the Prelude to Go¨tterda¨mmerung. In the Prelude Siegfried reveals that he is about to journey forth on “new adventures.”43 But, significantly, he tells neither the audience nor Bru¨nnhilde exactly where he plans to travel for these adventures. Whether or not he intends to go to the Gibichung court, that is nevertheless where he ends up in the next scene. Before he arrives, however, Wagner outfits Hagen for the dramaturgical task of making Siegfried’s arrival seem plausible. In Act I, scene 1 Hagen directs his conversation with Gunther and Gutrune toward the subject of Siegfried. Both in the Gibichungs and in us, he stimulates a sense of expectation and desire for Siegfried’s arrival. He does this by creating a kind of fairytale atmosphere, complete with a fairytale’s sense of inevitability. This mixing of the unbelievable with the inevitable pervades the entire scene and never quite leaves it. Like the wicked queen in “Snow White” asking her magic mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all, Gunther questions Hagen about the Gibichung fame. During this questioning, it is almost as if Gunther were merely speaking his thoughts aloud or addressing himself in the third person: Sage mir, Held: sitz’ ich herrlich am Rhein, Gunther zu Gibich’s Ruhm?

Tell me, hero: do I sit here in splendour by the Rhine, Gunther, worthy of Gibich’s fame?44

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Playing the role of the magic mirror on the wall, Hagen will eventually respond, “You may not be the most splendid of them all, but I will tell you how to increase your splendor.” Initially, though, Hagen reassures Gunther that he is indeed famous and enviable. Here as elsewhere, Hagen is very careful to pretend submission to his more princely and more legitimate half-brother. In their relationship to one another Gunther and Hagen thus resemble Wotan and Bru¨nnhilde. Hagen is Gunther’s will just as Bru¨nnhilde is Wotan’s. But this courtly version parodies that divine one. Hagen is more Mercury than Hermes. He occupies the status of a courtier who flatters and entices, but only to do the opposite of what the ruler really wants done. Gunther clarifies the sycophantic basis of this relationship when he tells Hagen, “I merely praise your sound advice/when I ask you about my fame.”45 Once Gunther has touched on the subject of his fame, however, Hagen seizes control of the drama and directs the entire scene toward Siegfried’s arrival. He baits both Gunther and Gutrune, fostering in them a sense of desire and expectation by archly admitting that he has failed to do absolutely everything that he could do to further the Gibichung fame. There are still, Hagen sadly admits, some “hohe Gu¨tter [worthy goods]”46 that he has not yet procured for the Gibichungs, namely, Siegfried and Bru¨nnhilde. Having thus awakened the Gibichung siblings’ greed through this admission, Hagen further titillates them with tales of Siegfried’s and Bru¨nnhilde’s bravery and beauty, along with stories of the Nibelung hoard as well. While Hagen sings, the orchestra reinforces his control of the drama by dutifully punctuating his narrative with leitmotifs that evoke images of Siegfried, Bru¨nnhilde, Loge, the Wa¨lsungs, and Fafner. When Gunther finally grows impatient with this narrative reiteration, Hagen invokes the Tarnhelm motif with a physical gesture and thus switches from the epic past to the dramatic future (see Ex. 10).47 Used here, this motif foreshadows Hagen’s plot, wherein Siegfried will don the Tarnhelm, disguise himself as Gunther, and steal Bru¨nnhilde for Gunther’s bride. Hagen reinforces this stratagem with a tantalizing suggestion:

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Bra¨chte Siegfried die Braut dir heim, wa¨r’ dann nicht Bru¨nnhilde dein?

If Siegfried brought the bride back home, wouldn’t Bru¨nnhilde then be yours?48

Having landed on the subject of sex and marriage, Hagen then brings Gutrune into his plot. If she could magically charm Siegfried into marrying her, then Siegfried would surely do the bidding of his new brother-in-law. As Hagen accurately predicts, Tra¨te nun Siegfried ein, geno¨ss’ er des wu¨rzigen Tranks, daß vor dir ein Weib er ersah, daß je ein Weib ihm genaht– vergessen mu¨ßt er dess’ ganz.–

If Siegfried were to enter now and taste the herbal drink he’d be forced to forget that he’d seen a woman before you, that a woman had ever come near him.–49

At this mentioning of her magic potion, the orchestra again intones the Tarnhelm motif. The repetition in this context not only foreshadows its role in Hagen’s plot, but also refers to magic in general.50 And perhaps even more importantly, it reinforces the fact that Hagen has taken control of the dramatic plot of the opera. This music tells us that Hagen has the almost magical power to make things appear both how and when he wants them to appear. He knows how to manipulate the Gibichungs, Siegfried, love, and reality. He is a conjurer, an artist skilled in the work of making appearances seem real, in other words, a dramatist. Patrice Che´reau’s once infamous, now famous, 1976 Bayreuth production of the Ring underscores this interpretation of Hagen as dramatist by assigning him some rather telling physical gestures. As Siegfried sails toward the Gibichung court, Hagen stands to one side of the stage with eyes closed, gritting his teeth as if in deep concentration.51 He seems to be conjuring up an image of Siegfried in his mind’s eye and then, through the magic of drama, he conjures him up on the stage before the audience’s eyes. As the libretto directs, at first only Hagen can see Siegfried sailing down the Rhine – a rare moment in the Ring, when neither the audience nor all the characters

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Ex. 10 Tarnhelm motif

on stage can see what is happening.52 This solitary vision of Siegfried helps consolidate and confirm Hagen’s control of the scene. As dramatist, Hagen directs the action. Only he knows what will happen next, and it is he who prepares both the Gibichungs and us for the forward movement of the operatic plot, which almost entirely coincides with Hagen’s plot as well. He both literally and metaphorically sets the stage for Siegfried’s arrival. Cleverly manipulating both us and

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the Gibichungs, Hagen creates desire, expectation, and, as mentioned earlier, a kind of fairytale inevitability that Siegfried will miraculously appear just by the mere mentioning of his name – the pricking of his thumb, as it were. Like Racine’s characters in Wagner’s estimation, Siegfried thus becomes one of Hagen’s “theatrical marionettes.”53 To understand the reason behind Wagner’s portrayal of Hagen as dramatist, it is of the utmost importance to recognize that there is not any strictly causal necessity for Siegfried’s arrival among the Gibichungs in scene 1. Remember, he told neither Bru¨nnhilde nor the audience where he was going. Nor does anything else in the plot prepare us for his entrance. There is only Hagen’s intellectual manipulation of us and the Gibichungs. Siegfried simply, magically appears. Or, to use a Wagnerian term of extreme derision, Siegfried’s entrance is “capricious.” This capriciousness does not, however, signify Wagner’s failure as a dramatist (pace Shaw). On the contrary it is Hagen who fails while Wagner as ideologue and critic succeeds. Wagner wants us to realize Hagen’s failure as a dramatist and thereby recognize Siegfried’s arrival as arbitrary.54 Insofar as Hagen stimulates the Gibichungs’ greed and “wills” Siegfried’s appearance on the scene, Wagner depicts Hagen as a type of clever but decadent dramatist who has lost touch with nature and has put thought ahead of deeds, contrivance before nature and necessity. The rope of destiny has already frayed and snapped in the hands of the Norns during the Prelude to Go¨tterda¨mmerung. The world-ash tree has withered, and humanity is now at the whim of caprice.55 The objective world of necessity and nature no longer controls the subjective human world. Individual intellect, as represented by Hagen, has placed itself ahead of universal nature, as represented by Siegfried. The “fly-wheel of Necessity [is] upheaved, and blind Caprice runs headlong – free, boundless, and unfettered, as our metaphysicians fancy – through the workshops of the brain, and hurls itself, a raging stream of madness, upon the world of actuality.”56 “Mere anarchy” is loosed upon the world and the Gibichungs’ desire for Siegfried is only a lust for luxury, “a concocted need, a hunger brought about by stimulation.”57

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From the outset, Siegfried is Hagen’s dupe, his pawn. Or, in more praiseworthy terms borrowed from “The Art-Work of the Future,” Siegfried is the “honestest striving after Nature,” an artwork that Hagen nevertheless betrays and turns into a mannerist and “freshly fangled Fashion.”58 Devoid of truth and uprooted from his natural surroundings, the lyrical Siegfried must fail to convince when the dramatist Hagen sets him before the Gibichung court, an audience that desires only luxury and entertainment. Even though he unknowingly compromises his own lyrical nature, Siegfried is nevertheless guilty of making a hypocrite of himself and drama. Like Corneille and Racine, who Hellenized French tragedy and made it fashionable at the court of Louis XIV, Hagen is the Gibichung fashion plate, creating “the artificial stimulus that rouses an unnatural need where the natural is not to hand.”59 And since fashion does not have any life impulse of its own, it therefore feeds off nature, “just as the luxury of the upper classes feeds only on the straining of the lower, labouring classes towards assuagement of their natural life-needs.”60 In this sense Hagen and the wealthy Gibichungs feed off Siegfried, using him as a mere instrument to obtain fame, a spouse, and the Nibelung hoard. Without any life of their own – it is not only Hagen whose blood is “stubborn and cold” – Gunther and Gutrune are unable to obtain their desires without their Naturmensch, Siegfried.61 By manipulating nature and especially love, dramatists like Hagen and an audience like the Gibichungs can achieve the luxurious splendor that they desire. But the type of natural dramatic import that Siegfried represents cannot live for long in the civilized climate of courtly life, whether among the Romans, the French, the Germans, the Gibichungs, or the gods of Valhalla. The fact that Siegfried has been transplanted into such a court and out of his natural habitat helps account for why there is no Woodbird to warn him about Gutrune’s drugged potion. He has lost touch with his natural surroundings, just as Athenian tragedy lost its naturalness when it was transplanted to the French court. Siegfried’s simplicity is no match for the political machinations of the Gibichung court, and he immediately falls victim to the worldly and polished charms of Gutrune. As soon as he accepts her hospitality and

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drinks her potion, his blood – always the marker of race in Wagner – is immediately tainted. Charmed by her worldly coquettishness and doomed by her blood, Siegfried exclaims to Gutrune, Ha, scho¨nstes Weib! Schließe den Blick! Das Herz in der Brust brennt mir sein Strahl: zu feurigen Stro¨men fu¨hl’ ich ihn zehrend zu¨nden mein Blut! –

Ha, fairest of women! Close your eyes! The heart in my breast is burned by their beam: in fiery streams I feel it consume and kindle my blood! –62

The damage of miscegenation is done. This impurity will slowly eat its way out of Siegfried over the course of the opera, hollowing him as it consumes him, until finally it breaks free and sets the world on fire. To seal Siegfried’s fate, Hagen subjects him to actual miscegenation. During his duet with Gunther, Siegfried both symbolically, through the mingling of voices, and literally, through the mingling of blood, sullies his Wa¨lsung nature with decadent Gibichung culture. Hagen, ever the efficient stage manager, officiates over the proceedings. The stage directions tell us that “Hagen fills a drinking-horn with new wine and offers it to Siegfried and Gunther, who scratch their arms with their swords and hold them for a moment over the top of the horn. Both men place two fingers on the horn, which Hagen continues to hold between them.”63 Having performed this ritual, Gunther and Siegfried then embark upon an utterly banal and conventional operatic duet, during which they swear eternal brotherhood. The exchange value they place on their friendship is also its symbol, blood: Was in Tropfen heut’ hold wir tranken, in Strahlen stro¨m’ es dahin, fromme Su¨hne dem Freund!

What we drank today in drops of sweetness shall stream in rivers, in righteous atonement of a friend.64

Swept away by the civilized charms of the hospitable Gutrune, Siegfried now further betrays his lyrical roots in German nature. Newly

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Ex. 11 Curse and oath motifs

transplanted to the bourgeois court by Hagen, Siegfried immediately abandons his commitment to lyric individuality and engages in the worst kind of operatic convention. And while he sings, the corrupt Gibichung blood worms its way into him and undoes the magic of the dragon’s blood. Appropriately enough, at the beginning and the end of this duet, when both men drink the draught of wine mixed with blood, the orchestra intones the curse motif followed by the motif for Wotan’s spear, the symbol for bourgeois contracts (see Ex. 11).65 The meaning of this concatenation of motifs is clear: contracts like this conventional oath carry their own curse. Through it, Siegfried

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re-enacts Wotan and Alberich’s betrayal of nature in favor of worldly convention and power. It is this action that seals Siegfried’s fate, not the mere possession of the ring. True, the ring may be ultimately responsible for Siegfried’s downfall, since it is the catalyst for Hagen’s plans. But like the love potion in Tristan und Isolde, magic in Wagner is never the sole cause of tragedy. It is always magic accompanied by personal desire, in a way that is deeply reminiscent of how tragedy often takes place in Greek drama, that is, through the Heraclitean dual motive of daemon and character. Like Agamemnon’s paradoxical move to “put on the harness of necessity” and sacrifice his daughter to satisfy his own (and his men’s) lust and wanderlust, an ambiguity grammatically captured by the middle voice in Greek, Siegfried is both passive and active, simultaneously responsible and innocent, victor and victim.66 By luring Siegfried to engage himself to a French operatic coquette and to engage in French operatic conventions with this coquette’s brother, the dramatist Hagen lures German lyric to its doom. A transformation of German lyric through French drama may be what Wagner hinted at in “A Theatre at Zurich” and what he heralded in Siegfried. But given his earlier optimism, this is not what we were led to expect. Rather than creating a new artwork and a new world, Hagen’s dramatic experiments with Siegfried in this first scene will destroy the Gibichung court and perhaps even the gods of Valhalla. Apparently, the civilized world is not yet ready for this new artwork, nor is this artwork ready for the civilized world. First, there must be a revolution, and that is why Wagner allows Siegfried to be used by Hagen and the Gibichungs. He is not only their pawn. He is also Wagner’s pawn. In sum, this opera does not symbolize the end of the revolution, as Steinberg argues. Rather, it is the beginning, the start of a fire that will utterly destroy the present civilization so that it can be replanted in a more natural soil, made rich by the ashes of the old world, ashes that contain, among other things, those burnt pages of classical scholarship that Nietzsche hopes will become a “fruitful and even rich soil.”67

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Each of the first three operas in the Ring cycle – Das Rheingold, Die Walku¨re, and Siegfried – more or less evolves from its predecessor according to the Grecocentric paradigm of poetry outlined by Hegel in his Aesthetics and (mostly) followed by Wagner in such theoretical works as Opera and Drama, “Art and Revolution,” and “The Art-Work of the Future.” Generically speaking, these first three operas develop from earlier forms of epic (such as cosmogony, theogony, and epigraph in Das Rheingold) to more advanced forms of epic (epic proper in Die Walku¨re) to lyric (explorations of the self’s relationship to the state and to nature in Siegfried). Given this evolutionary pattern, one would expect the Ring to culminate in Go¨tterda¨mmerung by re-creating what Wagner, Hegel, and other German Romantics considered the acme of Greek art: Athenian tragedy. However, as we have already seen, in his theoretical works Wagner does not completely embrace the possibility of re-creating Greek tragedy as German music drama. Go¨tterda¨mmerung further disappoints one’s expectations about the rebirth of Greek tragedy by seeking to deconstruct present modes of theatrical practice rather than re-create the past as future. Looking once again at his letter to Franz Liszt on February 11, 1853, we notice that Wagner explains this apocalyptic anomaly as a kind of deus ex machina. Or, more accurately, he writes himself into the role of deus, to alter, through destruction, the expected evolutionary path of the Ring cycle: “Mark well my new poem – ,” Wagner intones, “it contains the world’s beginning, and its end [Untergang]!”1 Reading Das Rheingold as “the world’s beginning,” Go¨tterda¨mmerung would, somewhat obviously, represent its cultural culmination as ruin. In order to express in Go¨tterda¨mmerung this musico-critical stance on tragedy and opera, Wagner deploys elements of Aristophanic parody, albeit in a much 220

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darker and more destructive vein than Aristophanes.2 In this way Wagner again emphasizes and deploys the Greeks to destroy German culture. Commenting on the more general character of the danger that the Greeks present to one’s own culture, Goldhill observes, “The threat of Greek is that it will inveigle its way into your culture, it will destroy the foundations, an enemy within that will bring the walls tumbling down . . . Greek books lead to death and murder, to cultural crisis, to social, religious and intellectual mayhem.”3 While Goldhill is right to a certain extent in seeing Greek culture as a kind of Trojan horse, Wagner at least gave lip-service to the idea that German culture might rise again from its ashes. THE EVOLUTION AND DE-EVOLUTION OF THE CHORUS

Very few critics have, it seems, understood the joke behind Go¨tterda¨mmerung. While it is true that the joke is not very funny, one of the main reasons critics have not realized the parodic dimension to this opera is, as I have argued elsewhere in this book, because they have for so long hailed Richard Wagner’s operatic works as the rebirth of classical Greek tragedy. To a greater extent than other composers responsible for the formation and reformation of opera, Wagner firmly secured his reputation as the modern Aeschylus by stamping his operatic works with the authoritative imprimatur of his own theoretical works. Moreover, as discussed earlier in this book’s chapters on lyric, the genre of opera itself was first formed and has since been repeatedly reformed under the aegis of tragedy.4 But by overlooking what Wagner has to say about the viability of Greek tragedy in the modern world and assuming that only a simple correlation exists between what Wagner praises and what he practices we run the risk of reducing his theoretical writings to manuals and his operas to mere exercises. To be sure, Wagner’s theoretical works do repeatedly hold up tragedy as the greatest of artworks while mostly eschewing discussions of Aristophanic comedy, except when it is mentioned in conjunction with the downfall of Athens.5 Nevertheless, in Go¨tterda¨mmerung it is precisely

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the fall of a civilization that Wagner wishes to depict. And so in this opera Wagner deploys elements borrowed from this parodic playwright and his genre.6 Like Aristophanes’ Frogs, which parodies the corruption of fifth-century B.C. tragedy and its corrosive effects on Athenian culture, Go¨tterda¨mmerung parodies nineteenth-century opera and its corrosive effects on German culture. In particular Wagner singles out the operatic chorus as a symbol of both unnecessary luxury and the decadent cravings of the masses rather than the real voice of das Volk. Given its traditional associations with ancient drama and das Volk, as well as its status as the “womb” of ancient tragedy and the “magic tripod”7 from which issued an oracular voice rivaling that of Delphi, one might expect Wagner to have championed the chorus as a way to revive Greek tragedy. However, in his theoretical works Wagner argues that, at least on the modern stage, the chorus has become backward, superfluous, and decadent. This now corrupt corporate body therefore provides Wagner with an excellent example of how the revered past has been perverted by a decadent present. In Opera and Drama he defends this position by constructing a theory of dramaturgical evolution from the tragic chorus to the operatic orchestra and chorus. According to this theory the chorus had already begun to evolve as soon as the “tragic Hero of the Greeks stepped out from amid the Chorus and, turning back to face it, cried: ‘Lo! – so does, so bears himself, a human being! What ye were hymning in wise saws and maxims, I set it up before you all in the cogence of necessity.’”8 Unlike the tragic hero, who expresses himself through deeds, the tragic chorus expresses itself through narrative and commentary. “Art and Revolution” argues that that which appeals less immediately to the senses is itself less aesthetically perfected. Therefore the chorus, with its “wise saws and maxims,” is less evolved than the hero.9 This claim further supports Wagner’s argument in Opera and Drama that the chorus is the mere protodrama out of which tragedy and the tragic hero evolved and eventually took center stage, “there to unfold the germ of human Individuality, indwelling in the Greek Chorus, to the upmost flower

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of self-dependence as the immediate doer or sufferer in the drama itself.”10 According to Wagner this evolution of the chorus continued until Shakespeare, when the chorus’ communal character had been broken down into separate characters and “resolved into divers individuals directly interested in the Action. . .”11 Completing what the Greeks began so long ago, Shakespeare brought theatrical form to a completed state of perfection through the dissolution and redistribution of the choral voice: “The Drama ripened into Artwork in exact measure as the interpretive judgement of the Chorus so irrefutably expresses itself in the actions of the Heroes. . .”12 Henceforth released from its narrative duty, “the Chorus was able to step down from the stage and back into the Folk itself; thus leaving behind it only actual partakers in the living Action.”13 Resorting to something of an etymological sleight of hand, Wagner connects this evolutionary account of the dramatic chorus to the operatic orchestra. Tracing the Greek orwstra (which Wagner translates/interprets as “chorus”) to the German Orchester (“instrumental orchestra”), Wagner argues that a translation of aesthetic function accompanied this transliteration of linguistic meaning. The chorus handed down to the orchestra the duty of conveying commentary and narrative wisdom both from and to das Volk. Both physically and metaphysically the operatic orchestra inherited the role of mediator, making the vocal chorus obsolete and superfluous.14 Perhaps the clearest explanation of how Wagner imagined his orchestra would take on the function of the ancient chorus is best summarized by his 1860 essay, “The Music of the Future [Zukunftsmusik]”: It [the orchestra] will enter much the same relation to the drama meant by me, as the Tragic Chorus of the Greeks to theirs. This Chorus was always in attendance; to it were bared the motives of the dramatic action going on before its eyes; these motives it sought to penetrate, and thence to form a judgment on the action. Only, this interest of the Chorus’s was more of a reflective kind, throughout; itself had neither part nor lot in action or in motives. The orchestra of the modern Symphonist, on the contrary, will take so intimate an interest

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Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks in the motives of the plot, that whilst, as embodied harmony, it alone confers on the melody in the requisite unceasing flow, and thus convincingly impress those motives on the Feeling.15

Because Wagner believed the chorus to be “reflective,” he also believed it to be a somewhat cerebral experience. But imagining as he did that the chorus evolved out of Dorian lyric song and dance he could not exclude this more sensual dimension from his assessment of the chorus. In her diaries Cosima even records the fact that Wagner believed that the ancient chorus somehow softened the tragic predicament of its ancient Greek characters through something like a “musical transfiguration.”16 Given this account of the chorus’s role in ancient drama and its eventual evolution into the operatic orchestra, Wagner diagnoses its reappearance on the modern stage as decadent. When opera composers began resorting to such devices, Wagner remarks, drama rounded back upon itself, to its eternal shame: the individual personages into which the chorus of the Folk had crystallized, were melted down into a motley, conglomerate Surrounding, without a centre to surround. In the Opera, this Surrounding, and nothing but it, cries out to us from the whole gigantic scenic apparatus, from the machinery, the painted canvas and the piebald dresses; and its voice is the voice of the Chorus, singing: “I am I, and there is none other Opera besides Me!”17

Through such critiques, Wagner concludes that the nineteenth-century operatic chorus pales in comparison to classical Greek choral representations of das Volk. The modern chorus does not represent the people but only the masses, “the material leavings of the Folk, from which the living spirit ha[s] been sucked dry.”18 HAGEN AS FRANCO-JEWISH CHOIR MASTER

Against the backdrop of this critique, the chorus of Gibichung vassals in Act II, scene 3 of Go¨tterda¨mmerung might seem like a strange dramaturgical choice. But reading this paradox as parody helps us to understand more fully the link between Wagner’s theoretical and

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creative works. It helps us to see not how one is a reflection of the other but how this final opera in the Ring cycle problematically deploys that which Wagner’s writings tentatively decry. The composer eludes his own critique by making Hagen, already coded as the ideological scapegoat of the opera, into his aesthetic scapegoat as well. As with Hagen’s earlier summoning of Siegfried to the stage, this scapegoating begins when Hagen summons a male chorus of Gibichungs to the stage. Since the plot neither demands nor is furthered by their entrance, Hagen must lure the Gibichung vassals there under false pretenses. To do this, he invokes one of the most sacred words in Wagner’s ideological lexicon: Noth or “need.”19 Since Wagner usually reserves this derivative from the Middle High German noˆt20 for his most Germanic of characters in the most dire of circumstances, and since Hagen is coded as non-German and is in no visible danger here, this cry for help may be interpreted as a conspicuously ironic bit of metatheatrics. At this point in the opera Hagen’s only reason for summoning the chorus to the stage seems to be a purely decorative one: to swell the impending spectacle of a double wedding between Wagner’s ultra-German characters and his ultra-decadent characters: Siegfried to Gutrune and Bru¨nnhilde to Gunther. In other words, although Hagen abuses the word “Noth” in this context, for Wagner the threat of cultural contamination does merit a call to arms. Moving from libretto to leitmotif, Hagen’s parodic role as dramatist also extends to include the role of composer, since he blatantly defies certain Wagnerian compositional standards about choral variations and the use of unisons. Specifically, Wagner complains that, when composers can no longer wring new variations out of an old aria they try to hide their flagging creativity by making the whole stage “belt out” the old aria en masse and in unison.21 Measuring this critique against Hagen’s music reveals that one of his most important themes, which he then passes on to the chorus, is derived from an earlier melody sung by the character of Mime. In particular, Hagen inherits part of Mime’s so-called “Nursing Song,” itself a parody of German folksong (see Ex. 12).22

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Ex. 12 Mime’s nursing song

Ex. 13 Remembrance of nursing song

Although separated by a night’s performance, Mime repeats this theme so relentlessly in Siegfried that one can neither forget it nor overlook its “physiognomic”23 resemblance to the melodic and rhythmic profile of the theme introduced by his nephew, the choir master Hagen (see Ex. 13).24 Interpreted in light of Wagner’s essay “Judaism in Music,” Mime fails to compose a convincing German folksong because he has no real linguistic ties to any national soil.25 He is capable only of mimicking others – thus the name, “Mime” – and therefore lacks all ability to produce truly national art. A family resemblance between Mime’s and Hagen’s music, together with their shared bloodline, implies that Hagen also shares in Mime’s artistic impotence. Combined with

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Ex. 14 Chorus of vassals

Wagner’s injunction against recycling old arias, Hagen’s melody is in effect twice-removed from reality, the spiritless reproduction of a reproduction. Having called the chorus onto the stage and taught them his rendition of Mime’s folksong, Hagen then leads them in singing what Wagner, in the context of a diatribe against the Franco-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of Wagner’s favorite targets for ridicule, disparagingly labels a “thunderous unison.”26 Invoking fanfares that recall Siegfried’s earlier arrival at the Gibichung court in Act I (as noted above, another entrance staged by Hagen), the allmale chorus sings in bombastic unison a simple tune built up out of an arpeggiated C-major triad (see Ex. 14).27 According to Heinrich Heine’s politico-literary classifications, the musical treatment of this chorus suggests a kind of epic music where “harmony governs, and the melodies die away, yea, are drowned in the stream of unified feeling of a whole race.”28 Although a melody is still to some extent discernible here, harmonic conformity is stressed along the vertical axis rather than polyphonic freedom along

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the horizontal. With considerably more venom than Heine, Wagner extends this analysis of harmonic hegemony by arguing that such music reduces individual voices to an indistinguishable mass: “in an operatic sense, we hear the Masses quite fittingly ‘emancipated’ when we hear them, as in the most famous passages of the most famous modern operas [e.g., choral passages in such operas as Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots], delivering the same old worn-out Aria in hundredthroated unison.”29 As the final evidence of this chorus’s parodic status, Wagner scores it for male voices singing in unison, again, a choice that contradicts his own compositional rules while simultaneously evoking the works of Meyerbeer.30 PARODY AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE

The purpose behind such parodic writing can be explained by analyzing once again how classical Greek tragedy, comedy, and politics relate to nineteenth-century German opera and politics. Seen from the Hegelian perspective, Socrates in Aristophanes’ Clouds and Euripides in the Frogs represent certain kinds of cultural villains. During an age of ostensible decline in Athenian ethics and aesthetics, when the Peloponnesian War threatened Athens with complete destruction, Aristophanes attempted to avert this imminent disaster by parodying various prominent artists, thinkers, and public figures whom he held responsible for this decline.31 Perhaps because he thought his audience knew what was wrong with the world more clearly than what was right, Aristophanes staged comedies rather than tragedies, in the hope that his fellow citizens might recollect the profile of their erstwhile divine order through the ridiculous portrayal of their current eminently human disorder. The conflict at the center of these comic works is therefore not a conflict between two equally compelling sides of a moral dilemma but between a dimly realized ideal and its folly-ridden, human misrepresentation. Such parodies emphasize the distance between the perfect and the imperfect. We laugh because we recognize this distance, because we see

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that the one falls so ridiculously short of the other. And it is through this knowing laughter, then, that we bridge the gap between the human and the divine. Laughter at human disorder is symptomatic of a higher order. We laugh because we know something is wrong, and we know something is wrong because we also suspect that something, somewhere, is right. Though we may not be able to articulate what that something is, yet, like the slave boy in the Meno, we might still be able to point to it if only someone would guide us. That Wagner to some extent agreed with this notion of comedy is evident from a conversation he had with Cosima in November of 1869. As Cosima presents Wagner’s thought, the “conflict between will and idea produces the tremendous comedy” of Aristophanes.32 Reflecting again on the nature of Aristophanic comedy some years later, Wagner points to another aspect of Hegel’s understanding of comedy: the rift between the human and the divine. Summarizing Wagner’s view of how laughter is provoked by Aristophanic comedy, Cosima writes that it turns “its attention to the animality of the human being, shows it in conflict with his qualities as a god, and this, in the middle of a ceremony in honor of this very god, with all the invocations of his priests who are sitting there, must have produced inimitable comic effects.”33 Adhering to this quasi-Hegelian interpretation in “The Art-Work of the Future” Wagner also recognizes a political and polemical dimension to Aristophanic parody. But rather than wholly embrace the theory that such parodies were group activities aimed at unifying and improving the Athenian citizenry, Wagner argues that the so-called “righteous laughter” of Aristophanes may only have hastened the collapse of Athens. While he praises Greek tragedy as a conservative force that upheld the “common bond of its Religion and primeval Custom,” he disparages comedy as a form of cultural vivisection.34 Believing that Aristophanic laughter was a way to analyze and thereby discredit living traditions, Wagner further categorizes it as a revolutionary and egotistical force that either led to or was implicated in the destruction of tragedy and the state: “Hand-in-hand with the dissolution of the Athenian State, marched the downfall of Tragedy. As the spirit of Community split

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itself along a thousand lines of egoistic cleavage, so was the great united work of Tragedy disintegrated into its individual factors.”35 For Wagner, side-splitting laughter accompanies and may even create state-splitting revolution. By contrast, Greek tragedy was a means to create the most “artistic being” by uniting our internal and external natures, a unification that helped to synthesize not only the aesthetic elements of an individual’s basic human nature, but also the political elements within a highly varied community such as Athens. Athenian tragedy presented each audience member with the noblest image of civic identity, thus encouraging unification on a public as well as a personal level: “For in the tragedy he [the Greek citizen] found himself again, – nay, found the noblest characteristics of the whole nation; and from his inmost soul, as it there unfolded itself to him, proclaimed the Pythian oracle. At once both God and Priest, glorious godlike man, one with the Universal, the Universal summed up in him.”36 In other words, not only did Athenian tragedy provide the nation with a mirror that flattered the individual citizen, in this mirror the individual citizen also found comfort in seeing himself joined with the best and noblest traits of his nation. In the Prometheus, for example, Wagner claims that the Greeks not only saw themselves reflected in this dramatic mirror, he also claims that this tragedy afforded individual citizens the opportunity to commune with each other and with their highest civic ideals. While viewing the Prometheus, Greek citizens would have relived, as a civic whole, “the life which a brief space of time before, they had lived in restless activity and accentuated individuality.”37 Giving way to a stereotypically Romantic flight of fancy, Wagner compares each individual Athenian citizen to “one of those thousand fibres which form the plant’s united life.”38 It is from the stems of this plant, which symbolizes the city of Athens, that there blooms the most beautiful bud of tragedy, the flower of Greek drama that wafts its fragrance, “the spirit of Greece,” over all eternity.39 Whatever their questionable worth as poetry, these metaphors, once again involving flowers, fibers, plants, and perfume, do get

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at the final and perhaps most essential element in Wagner’s understanding of Athenian drama and successful drama in general: the role of nature in producing great art. Not from the nation alone, Wagner warns, did the Athenian dramatist find his raw material. He also had to be sensitive to nature in order to produce such a physically sensible work as Greek drama. In Greek drama nation and nature unite: Art is the highest expression of activity of a race that has developed its physical beauty in unison with itself and Nature; and man must reap the highest joy from the world of sense, before he can mould therefrom the implements of his art; for from the world of sense alone, can he derive so much as the impulse to artistic creation.40

As seen earlier in Siegfried’s self-recognition scene by the brook, when the young hero realizes who he is – German – and who he is not – Jewish – Wagner believes that nature is an infallible guide to this realization. As opposed to such collectivities as nature and nation, individuality can spell disaster for art. Arguing for this negative view of individuality, in “Art and Revolution” Wagner not only attributes unsuccessful drama to too much egotism on the part of the poet, he also attributes the whole of Greek tragedy’s downfall to such egotism. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, he also implies that the downfall of Athens itself was caused or at least accompanied by the downfall of tragedy. Following the line of thinking that a nation’s greatest virtue may also turn out to be its greatest vice, to Wagner the Athenian genius for creativity, independence, and individuality that made Athens great also, when pushed beyond the limits of genius and into the realm of egotism and hubris, destroyed the state.41 Since Athenian civic life greatly depended on the conservative, state-sponsored, and state-unifying institution of tragedy as well as its individual resources for genius and talent, when this Gesamtkunstwerk came apart the social fabric of Athens unraveled with it. Both of these creations – state and tragedy – relied upon and reinforced a deep sense of communal identity. Returning again to Wagner’s nature metaphor, once the flower of

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Athenian tragedy had been plucked, its individual civic fibers split apart and the whole civic stalk unraveled, withered, and died. Based on his critique of Aristophanic parody and the fact that Wagner values national unity so highly, we might rightly expect him to avoid parodic elements in his operas. However, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Wagner also believed that, unlike ancient Athens, nineteenth-century Germany did not warrant preservation: Our modern States are thus far the most unnatural unions of fellow men, that – called into existence by mere external caprice, e.g. dynastic interests – they yoke together a certain number of men for once and all, in furtherance of an aim which either never answered to a need they shared in common, or, from the change of time and circumstance, is certainly no longer common to them now.42

If German drama were to follow the model of Athenian tragedy by imitating its national politics, it would necessarily reflect the state’s corrupt values. For Wagner, the most genuine German drama therefore turns out to be revolutionary and individual, not conservative and communal. This kind of revolutionary drama must strive against the bourgeois “public conscience” and find its truths “alone in the conscience of private persons.”43 The good German dramatist should therefore revolt against the state, not defend it. While it is true that Greek tragedy “advanced from the natural, ethico-religious ties of Feeling, to the political state,” Wagner argues that in Germany this process must be reversed and that, instead, Germany must “return from Understanding to Feeling,” from the political state to a natural state.44 In order to achieve this return to nature, Wagner does his part to dismantle the German state by deploying revolutionary parody: “Only the Revolution can bring forth from its hidden depths, in the new beauty of a nobler Universalism, that which it once tore from the conservative spirit of a time of beautiful but narrow-meted [Athenian] culture – and tearing it engulphed.”45 In short, those elements of Aristophanic parody that once helped destroy Athens and Athenian tragedy, if now deployed against the state but for the benefit of the universal Volk, could save Germany and German drama

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from the sort of backwards, superfluous, and decadent intellectualism embodied by political outsiders and artists such as Hagen. Like the end of Aristophanes’ Clouds, when Aristophanes sets fire to the philosophical Thinkery, the embodiment of Socratic impiety, at the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung Wagner sets fire to the Gibichung court, the embodiment of Franco-Jewish decadence. But unlike the Aristophanic ending, which only burns up the Socratic misrepresentation of the divine, even the gods may not escape Wagner’s cosmic bonfire. The Gibichung court is not merely the distorted mirror image of the divine Valhalla. As in the relationship between Athens itself and Athenian drama, the divine order and its representation on earth depend on each other for their very existence. When one falls, the other falls with it. Unlike empty-headed characters like Socrates in the Clouds, the emptiness of Hagen is unmitigated by laughter. Even though Hagen’s Gibichung court and Socrates’ “Thinkery” are both finally destroyed by fire, the Aristophanic Socrates (unlike Hagen) neither kills nor is killed. In fact, Strepsiades, the Clouds’ much-deceived Naturmensch and representative of pre-Peloponnesian War Athens, eventually sees through both Socrates’ and his own folly. Having achieved this recognition, he then rises above his folly in order to reclaim an older, more traditional form of Athenian dignity. Hagen’s plot, on the other hand, eventually brings about the death of Siegfried, the Ring’s Naturmensch. And for this Hagen must die, while the worst Socrates will receive is a kick in the backside for his laughable attempt to corrupt Athenian civic identity. Unlike the villains in Wagner opera, Aristophanic clowns can always laugh at themselves during moments of comic clarity, when it has become ridiculously clear just how far they have strayed from their putatively substantive aims. When they laugh, they recognize their own foolishness and, joining together with the laughter from off stage as well, the entire civic arena is reintegrated into the ethical order of things. But this is not the case when Wagner deploys such parodic elements. By integrating Aristophanic parody into Wagnerian tragedy, Wagner, unlike Aristophanes, seeks to reintegrate his audience not through inclusion but exclusion, seeking the

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permanent banishment rather than the reformation of cultural criminals. And perhaps most importantly, Wagner does not leave them laughing at the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung, on or off stage. Wagner is deadly serious, even when he is joking. After all, who really laughs while watching Die Meistersinger, Wagner’s only mature “comic” opera?

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Does the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung offer us an ending that is progressive or regressive? Does it emblazon a path forward or opt for apocalypse by, as Adorno would have it, nullifying both the progress its characters have made on stage and the time its audience has “wasted” off stage? With the apparent demise of its gods, heroes, and monsters is the stage finally cleared for the grand entrance of das Volk, as represented by the Gibichung vassals, seemingly the only survivors left at the end of the Ring? Or does the ending of Go¨tterda¨mmerung point backward to a pre-cultural or even pre-chronological world – if one could imagine such a thing? And what are we to make of the apocalyptic forces of nature that Wagner uses here, those ur-elements of fire and water, which bring with them various connotations of birth and destruction from their pre-Platonic place in the history of philosophy? Seen from this angle, as a struggle between two opposing philosophies of history – Young Hegelian radicalism and Schopenhauerian quietism – the whole of the Ring can be reduced to an either/or proposition: either history revolts and progresses or it revolves and regresses. But is it perhaps, as with so much else in Wagner, that here again we are left in limbo, between fire and water, death and transfiguration, forward and backward motion? Have we somehow both revolted away from and revolved back through to the beginning of the Ring? Ambivalent to the end, or perhaps precisely in the end, Wagner’s Ring cycle ultimately refuses to take sides on these issues and to be either solely regressive or progressive. Instead, it is both. The destructive forces in the finale seem to point both forward to a new ethical order and backward to an older one. This ambiguous ending is due in part to the fact that in this finale Wagner deploys two different sorts of endings borrowed from competing dramatic 235

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paradigms: Greek tragedy and Greek New Comedy.1 While the force of the tragic ending pushes the Ring in a circular motion back toward its beginning, the New Comic ending pushes it upward, toward a higher, newer, more evolved ethical order. Or to speak of the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung in platitudes that are also paradoxes: the ending is only the beginning. The finale functions both as the beginning of something new and hopeful and of something old and hopeless, a recycling of the entire sequence of nature, crime, culture, apocalypse. Ultimately, while such insoluble ambiguities may prove frustrating for the interpreter, Wagner courts such frustration. Through his operas, his theoretical works, and even the vagaries of his often perverse personal life, Wagner endlessly seeks an endless fame and, wherever that is not possible, an endless infamy. THE ENDING IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

To understand the interpretation of Go¨tterda¨mmerung’s ending as progressive, turn back to the beginning of the entire cycle. Early in the Ring it becomes clear that something is wrong with this world’s divine ethical order. Loge, as a nature god, realizes this by the end of Das Rheingold. And so he ponders whether to return to his natural state and set fire to Valhalla at that moment or to remain with these gods a little while longer, in order to determine whether they are really worth working for or not: Ihrem Ende eilen sie zu, die so stark im Bestehen sich wa¨hnen. Fast scha¨m ich mich mit ihnen zu schaffen; zur leckenden Lohe mich wieder zu wandeln ¨ spur’ ich lockende Lust. Sie aufzuzehren, die einst mich geza¨hmt, statt mit den blinden blo¨d zu vergeh’n –

They’re hurrying on towards their end, though they think they will last for ever. I’m almost ashamed to share in their dealings; to turn myself into guttering flame I feel a seductive desire. To burn them up who formerly tamed me, instead of feebly fading away with the blind –

Resolution and ambiguity in comedy and tragedy und wa¨ren es go¨ttlichste Go¨tter – nicht dumm du¨nkte mich das! Bedenken will ich’s: wer weiß was ich thu’!

and were they the godliest gods – that seems to me not so foolish! I’ll think it over: who knows what I’ll do!2

Apparently, by the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung Loge has finally made up his mind. These are not “the godliest gods” and so he returns to his natural state as fire and sets ablaze Siegfried’s funeral pyre, which in turn seems to lead to universal conflagration. If the beginning of the Ring resembles the philosophy of Thales, who believes water to be the womb of the cosmos, the end resembles that of Heraclitus, who believes in the necessity of a worlddestroying fire that consumes all in order to make room for the world’s rebirth.3 Wagner, like Heraclitus, sees hubris, an empty egotism, at the bottom of his world and so judges it to be impure, in need of purgation. In the letter to August Ro¨ckel that began this book, Wagner not only speaks of the Greeks and the evolution of his mythic “Rhineworld,” but also of this and the real world’s ultimate “nothingness [Nichtlichkeit].”4 This kind of judgment about the world’s ultimate emptiness is further corroborated by a conversation Wagner had with Cosima in 1872 when he told her that he had just read in an (unspecified) essay that Ragnaro¨k means “judgment of the gods.” And though he decided against changing its title from Go¨tterda¨mmerung (The Twilight of the Gods) to Go¨ttergericht (The Judgment of the Gods) to reflect this knowledge, the theme of justice still remains an important one at the end of the cycle, with nature “sitting in judgment” over the hollow grandeur of the gods.5 Symbolized by the simple elements of fire (Loge) and water (the Rhine and the Rhinedaughters), nature finally overthrows culture (the Gibichung court and Valhalla) at the end of the Ring. Except for a brief and ultimately doomed attempt to return to nature in Siegfried, in its evolution from the simple world of epic to the political machinations of drama and the Gibichung court, culture has slowly gained in weight and complexity with each new opera in the Ring cycle. But finally, by the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung, nature can

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no longer bear this weight and so it revolts. The moral of this story is that culture, which leads to the evolution of humankind, must also lead to its own destruction and thus to its very opposite, nature. In “Art and Revolution” Wagner explains how this evolutionary revolution works: In the man-destroying march of Culture . . . there looms before us this happy result: the heavy load with which she presses Nature down will one day grow so ponderous that it lends at last to down-trod, never-dying Nature the necessary impetus to hurl the whole cramping burden from her, with one sole thrust; and this heaping up of Culture will thus have taught to Nature her own gigantic force. The releasing of this force is – Revolution.6

By the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung there are apparently no gods left, no demi-gods, no dwarfs, no giants, no heroes. Only nature and das Volk, united as one. The world can now begin anew, hopefully upon a sounder – because more natural – basis. In “The Art-Work of the Future” Wagner further corroborates this interpretation that the divine ethical order should be destroyed and replaced with a more natural ethical order. He reasons, “Man erred, from the time when he set the cause of Nature’s workings outside the bounds of Nature’s self, and for the physical phenomena subsumed a super-physical, anthropomorphic, and arbitrary cause; when he took the endless harmony of her unconscious, instinctive energy for the arbitrary demeanour of disconnected finite forces.”7 Reinterpreting the opening of the Ring in these terms, one might argue that as soon as the “endless harmony” of Das Rheingold’s cosmogonic prelude comes to an end and the Ring’s various anthropomorphic characters emerge, this constitutes the initial flaw in the makeup of the world. If this is true, then even if Wotan had not severed a branch from the world-ash tree in order to make his spear, the mere existence of anthropomorphic gods in the Ring already constitutes a division of nature that can only be healed by the complete destruction of culture and the return to a pre-divine world. With this notion, Wagner reveals his kinship with Anaximander, who posits the claim that wrong came into the world as soon as

Resolution and ambiguity in comedy and tragedy

Being became Becoming.8 According to this kind of theological thinking, it might even seem that cosmogony a priori signifies a fall from grace. Once the sustained E-flats sounding at the opening of the Prelude and from the bottom of the orchestra begin to follow their overtones upward and generate wave motifs, this already signals the beginning of the end. After Loge, the entrance of the Rhinedaughters at the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung facilitates this return to nature in a more positive and creative way than we might initially be led to believe possible from a merely destructive conflagration. The three sisters appear, borne along by the waves of the Rhine, while Hagen throws off all the accoutrements of culture and immerses himself in the natural elements that he once – like the gods – foolishly sought to control. As the stage directions tell us, he is seized with extreme alarm at the sight of the Rhine daughters. He hastily throws aside his spear, shield and helmet and plunges into the floodwaters like a man possessed, shouting the words: Get back from the ring! Woglinde and Wellgunde twine their arms around his neck and, swimming away, draw him with them into the depths. Flosshilde leads the way as they swim towards the back of the stage, holding the regained ring aloft in a gesture of jubilation.9

The Rhinedaughters’ entrance and their triumph over Hagen signal the possibility of a reconciliation with nature. After this reconciliation there might at last emerge a new ethical order and a new kind of dramatic artwork based upon but not slavishly imitating (like the French neo-classicists) an older type of drama, that is, Greek tragedy. For the Rhinedaughters not only symbolize nature, they also symbolize the “three most sweet Hellenic sisters,” dance, music, and poetry, which once united to form Athenian tragedy.10 Repeating the arguments of Berlin musicologist Tibor Kneif, JeanJacques Nattiez in his Wagner Androgyne traces Wagner’s dramaturgical concept of the Rhinedaughters back to his theoretical concept of the tragic Greek triumvirate of dance, music, and poetry in “The Art-Work of the Future.” In terms of stage directions, libretto, and a

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kind of Stabreim between the two sets of names for these two sets of sisters, the Rhinedaughters point to a kinship with this tragic trio. First, in terms of stage directions. In Das Rheingold Wagner notes that Wellgunde and Woglinde should swim apart from each other, shrieking with laughter, playing a light-hearted game of tag. Meanwhile, the more sober leader of the three, “Flosshilde tries to catch first one and then the other: they slip away from her and finally join forces in pursuit of Flosshilde.”11 Compare this to Wagner’s description of “the three primeval sisters” who playfully chase each other and finally unify in order to form the “round dance” of Athenian tragedy: As we gaze on this entrancing measure of the truest and most high-born Muses of artistic man, we see the three first stepping forward, each with her loving arm entwined around her sister’s neck; then, now this one now that, as though to show the others her beauteous form in full and individual symmetry, loosing herself from their embrace, and merely brushing with her utmost finger-tips the others’ hands. Again the one, rapt by the spectacle of the twin-beauty of her close-locked sisters, bending herself before them; next the two, transported by her unique charm, greeting the one with tender homage; until at last, all three, tight-clasped, breast on breast, and limb to limb, melt with the fervour of love-kisses into one only, living shape of beauty. – Such is the love and life, the wooing and the winning of Art; its separate units, ever themselves and ever for each other, severing in richest contrast and re-uniting in most blissful harmony.12

The second (and briefest) way in which the Rhinedaughters mirror the three Greek art-sisters is through the libretto. The inevitable and loving embraces of the Greek sisters as described above in “The Art-Work of the Future” clearly reflect the words that the Rhinedaughters sing about the inevitability of love: “all that lives must love; / no one wants to abjure its delights.”13 And finally, the third similarity: their names. As both Kneif and Nattiez note, there is a certain parallel consonance among the names of these two sets of sisters and the order of their mention in Wagner’s theoretical and his operatic works:

Resolution and ambiguity in comedy and tragedy the Rhine daughters enter in the sequence Woglinde, Wellgunde, and Flosshilde, reflecting the order Tanzkunst (Dance), Tonkunst (Music), and Dichtkunst (Poetry) of The Art-Work of the Future. The parallelism of W–W–F with T–T–D would thus suggest a similarity between the Rhine daughters and the sister arts. The fact that Wagner changed the names of the Rhine daughters (they are still called Brobbhilde, Flosshilde, and Wellgunde in the prose draft of March 1852) shows clearly that he had a particular aim in mind here.14

Indeed, there seems to be a kind of Stabreim at work here, inviting us to identify one set of sisters with the other. Flosshilde represents poetry because of her place in the order of their entrances, her wisdom, her leadership, and because of the unrepeated first letter of her name, which corresponds to the unrepeated first letter of Dichtkunst, the guiding spirit of Athenian tragedy. Woglinde and Wellgunde, on the other hand, would seem to represent, somewhat indiscriminately, Tanzkunst and Tonkunst, dance and music. Seen in this way, the reappearance of the Rhinedaughters at the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung opens up the possibility for a future drama that would reunite the three Greek art-sisters as they once were in Athenian tragedy and at the beginning of the Ring. But in this new type of drama not religion but nature would constitute the new ethical order. And love, not conventional law, would bind das Volk together. Quoting Carlyle in his 1872 Introduction to “Art and Revolution,” Wagner reinforces this message of hopeful anarchism behind Go¨tterda¨mmerung’s all-consuming fire. Like the “Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution, the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung represents the “universal Burning-up, as in hell-fire, of Human Shams.”15 One part celestial to one part infernal, this fire is the “breaking-out of universal mankind into Anarchy, into the faith and practice of No-Government. . .”16 Since both the governing bodies and the gods of the Gibichung court have fallen, the members of das Volk are now left alone in a state of nature. Without an ethical order to guide them, they must begin building anew. It is at this point that the orchestral narrator steps in again. Musically speaking, the so-called Redemption motif in the orchestra inaugurates this new

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society while cleansing the old one (as represented by Siegfried and Bru¨nnhilde) of its sins. It is typically Wagnerian, however, that we do not actually witness this newer, more natural world. Instead, as we have seen before, in both his theoretical works and other operatic works, so too in the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung: Wagner relishes demonstrating what this society and artwork of the future should not be rather than what it should be. The Rhinedaughters only hold out to us an enticing possibility; they do not actualize it. While this reading of Go¨tterda¨mmerung’s finale interprets the ending as the beginning of something new, there is another possibility: the ending as the beginning of something old, something previously experienced, namely, the beginning of the whole Ring cycle. In other words, the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung might also signify fruitless negation and the eternal return of the same. According to this more pessimistic (and more briefly stated) perspective, the final redemption of Siegfried, Bru¨nnhilde, and their old society at the end of the Ring cycle may only be fictive. Their destruction is what is real and complete. Through Go¨tterda¨mmerung’s apocalyptic ending, history is negated and the cosmogony of Das Rheingold reversed. Whereas the first scene in Das Rheingold portrays water being penetrated by the sun, a timeless cosmogonic trope of birth, the last scene in Go¨tterda¨mmerung introduces these elements – fire and water – in reverse order, with water dousing the Promethean spark and returning the world to undifferentiated chaos. The final tableau of the Ring further reinforces this fatalistic idea that, after a four-day operatic cycle depicting both Creation and Armageddon, nothing has changed and we are right back where we started. According to one reading of the stage directions, Go¨tterda¨mmerung’s apocalyptic flames only “seem [scheinen] to flare up in the hall of the gods [my emphasis]. . .”17 For all we know, the gods of Valhalla are still alive but only hidden from view, as indeed they have been throughout the whole of Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Nor can we really count Alberich among the dead. Somewhere beneath the waters of the Rhine he may once again be biding his time, waiting to start the whole thing all over again. Seen in this light, Bru¨nnhilde’s self-sacrifice and Gutrune’s swooning might be dismissed

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as misogynistic and merely spectacular, like the death of so many other operatic heroines. No one is really emancipated by this finale, least of all the female leads. They are merely put back in their place by the despotism of Romantic opera, which so often sees women as symbols of sacrifice, nature, and naivete´. From this perspective the only sense in which Go¨tterda¨mmerung is revolutionary is in the sense of a wheel revolving (pointlessly) around its axis.

TRAGIC RECONCILIATION

While it is tempting to make the case that one of these two interpretations is more believable than the other, it must really be said that both are equally and simultaneously supportable if looked at from the perspective of different dramatic paradigms, specifically, the endings for Greek tragedy and Greek New Comedy. As far as tragedy is concerned, in the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung we see at work Wagner’s adaptation of the Hegelian perspective on tragic endings: what we see in front of us are certain ends individualized in living characters and very conflicting situations, and we see them in their self-assertion and display, in their reciprocal influence and design; and all this in the very moment of their mutual expression; and we see too the self-grounded final result of this whole human machinery in will and accomplishment, we see it in its criss-cross movement and yet in its final peaceful resolution.18

In Greek tragedy the divine world provides the groundwork for human action, and since the divine is always resolved and at peace with itself – even if its tragic agents and human instruments are not – tragedy must eventually come to rest. In generic terms, tragedy must resolve back into an epic-like state of being where all gods and goddesses, habits and customs, spiritual and factual realities deserve equal recognition. This is not to say that tragic endings are the same thing as epic endings. Although tragic reconciliations do restore a kind of epic wholeness to the world, these endings differ substantially from the

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kind of closure that epic provides. As Hegel observes, in contrast to tragedy epic tends to mechanistically balance bad fortune with good. In epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Achilles and Odysseus achieve their ends only by first tasting “the bitter wine of a sense of finitude.”19 Before they succeed in their aims, epic characters must first be nullified. Achilles must lose Patroclus and seal his own fate before his wrath can be appeased and his honor restored. Likewise, before he can reach Ithaca, Odysseus must lose all his men, his Trojan loot, and ten years off his life. As opposed to tragic reconciliation there is no moral reconciliation here, merely a balancing of accounts by Nemesis. In epic, “Nemesis is simply the ancient justice which degrades what has risen too high only in order to resolve by misfortune the mere equilibrium of good and ill fortune.”20 As opposed to this “ancient justice” of epic Nemesis, there presides over tragedy a sense of “eternal justice.” In tragedy human agents are guilty of dividing up the moral grounds of the divine ethical order. They have done something wrong simply by choosing a side, and in order to restore the peace tragedy must end with the downfall of those who have dared to take sides and disturb the delicate balance of the world. As Byron epigrammatically recognizes in Don Juan, “All tragedies are finished by a death. . .”21 That is, death, either of a person or an idea, does not merely end a tragedy, it is required to “finish” it, to complete it, to round it off and provide closure. Without some kind of final, definitive judgment, a tragedy remains in an unfinished and unresolved state. Thus, by the end of a tragedy the tragic agent, whose personal identity is inseparable from his or her aims and who has hitherto been unwilling to recognize the wholeness and diversity of the divine world ultimately “finds itself condemned to total destruction, or, at the very least, forced to abandon, if it can, the accomplishment of its aim.”22 One is reminded here again that Wagner thought Ragnaro¨k meant “day of justice,” and that he considered naming this final opera Go¨ttergericht instead of Go¨tterda¨mmerung. From the perspective of its several protagonists, the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung seems to be overloaded with various kinds of tragic reconciliations on this day

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of final judgment. Like the use of sacrifice and sacrificial language in the Oresteia, Bru¨nnhilde attempts to heal the rift in the ethical order by sacrificing herself in a grand gesture of self-immolation. More specifically, she resembles Cassandra, who prophesies her own doom as she willingly walks into the house of Atreus and thus the arms of death. Bru¨nnhilde knows exactly what she is doing. Like Cassandra she is sacrificing herself both in fulfillment of a curse and in order to annul that curse. The death of Siegfried, on the other hand, exemplifies that type of tragic reconciliation whereby we the audience recognize that the tragic agent, recently divided against itself, has finally regained wholeness. In the Antigone Creon refuses to acknowledge his love for his family and his spiritual duty toward them until it is too late. Similarly, throughout most of Go¨tterda¨mmerung Siegfried has refused to recognize his love for Bru¨nnhilde and his duty to keep the Wa¨lsung blood pure. At the moment of his death, however, he does remember these things. But by then it is too late – at least for him. He already has Hagen’s spear in his back. It is only Bru¨nnhilde and, with her, the audience, who can appreciate the reunification of Siegfried’s divided nature, this man who was both false and true, loyal and disloyal, who “sundered himself with his sword” and who was only made whole again through death.23 The ending of Go¨tterda¨mmerung also depicts a subjective reconciliation. Bidden by an unseen, incomprehensible power, Bru¨nnhilde relinquishes her hatred for Siegfried and, in the end, dies happily with him. As in the Philoctetes, where the Gordian knot apparently cannot be untied and so is cut by a deus ex machina, Bru¨nnhilde also ends her life as if inspired by some obscure, divine enlightenment. Finally, both Siegfried and Bru¨nnhilde also experience an “inner reconciliation” like that of Oedipus at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. Through suffering and death, they are purified, transfigured, and redeemed. Their deaths and their funeral pyre release the Gibichung Volk from their enslavement to the gods and to a diseased state. As with Oedipus their deaths sanctify the living. Despite this abundance of possible tragic reconciliations, the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung may also be read as fundamentally different from

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these various kinds of Greek tragic endings in terms of both what it reconciles us to and how it tries to reconcile us to it. Unlike Greek tragedy, which celebrates a return to the diverse but unified ethical order of epic, the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung also seems bent on destroying its older divine order. Unlike the Olympic pantheon, which serves as the tense but balanced ground upon which tragedy takes place, before the action of these operas even begins the divine order of the Ring’s world is already divided. When Wotan cuts off a branch from the world-ash tree and plans to exchange Freia for Valhalla, he disrupts, corrupts, and ultimately dooms the world. His action is a dismemberment of nature and a commodification of love emblematic of a conflict immanent in the divine order itself. There can be no unproblematic reconciliation with divine wholeness in the Ring because there was never any wholeness there to begin with. It is for this reason that Siegfried’s and Bru¨nnhilde’s funeral pyre does not stop on earth. Loge as fire climbs heavenward until his holocaust also engulfs Valhalla itself in flames. NEW COMIC CLOSURE

For the more positive reading of the destruction of the old, corrupt society at the end of the Ring we can turn once again to Greek comedy, but not Old Comedy this time. In the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung it is specifically through the use of Greek New Comic paradigms that Wagner complicates the ending of the entire Ring cycle. As we saw in the previous chapter, by seeking to destroy the state and its decadent operatic embodiment, in Go¨tterda¨mmerung Wagner ultimately recuperates Aristophanic parody not as a conservative force but a revolutionary one. Here we can see the same kind of Hellenization at work with Greek New Comedy. In addition to the fact that New Comedy’s forms are deeply embedded in Western theatrical tradition and can be seen in everything from Shaw to Shakespeare, it is certainly the case that Wagner knew about New Comedy, as is proven both by his readings and writings on the subject. In several places Wagner mentions the fact

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that Roman comedy was modeled in part on Greek New Comedy. He also owned editions of Terence and Plautus by J. J. C. Donner, a classics scholar whose name appears in the catalogues of both Wagner’s Dresden and Wahnfried libraries. As for Menander, our single most important source for Greek New Comedy, although he is not mentioned by name in Wagner’s writings and conversations, in his Wahnfried library Wagner had a copy of Aristophanes that also contained Menander fragments.24 Further, in his essay “Actors and Singers,” Wagner explicitly discusses New Comedy and its role in the evolution of theater. In one part of this essay he claims that all theater that is performed in languages derived from Latin (but especially French comedy) owes its focus upon the actor’s consummate skill to Greek New Comedy by way of Roman comedy. Finally, there is the fact that one of Wagner’s first operatic endeavors was an adaptation of a New Comedy. The Ban on Love (Das Liebesverbot), based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, closely follows the contours of the definitively New Comic movement from an old society to a new one and from outworn cultural beliefs to new ones, often signified by the handing over of authority from an older generation to a younger generation. Under the influence, as he says, of J. J. W. Heinse’s Ardinghello, a Romantic celebration of nature and free love, in transforming Shakespeare’s play into an opera Wagner focuses less on the play’s juridical side – the “measure for measure” aspect of it – and more on the “avenging love” side. Further clarifying that his comic opera had political upheaval at its heart, in it Wagner indicts “old” Germany for its Puritanical hypocrisy by renaming his Angelo character Friedrich and making him a German stateholder: “That Shakespeare simply develops these powerful motives the more conclusively to load the scale of justice in the end, was not my business to regard; my only object was to expose the sin of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of a ruthless code of morals.”25 In other words, Wagner strips down the story to its New Comic essence and focuses on its exchange of an empty, old society for a full, new one. Briefly generalizing this kind of movement within the society of a New Comic play and, by implication, the society in which that

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play is performed, according to Northrop Frye New Comedy is usually marked by a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters [usually paternal] are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognitio.26

As opposed to Aristophanic comedy, which longs for an older, more traditional way of life, New Comedy looks forward to a crystallization around a new world. Furthermore, New Comedy tends “to include as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated.”27 These “blocking characters” or scapegoats are therefore also converted to the new society rather than banished from it. To inaugurate this crystallization, some kind of festive ritual is used to signify the birth of a new society out of the ashes of the old. This festival is most often a kind of wedding ceremony. As Byron points out in the second half of the epigram on dramatic form quoted above, “All comedies are ended by a marriage.”28 That is, they are ended but by no means finished. For marriage is, hopefully, only the beginning. In Go¨tterda¨mmerung, although the hero and heroine are indeed united in the end, significantly, it is through death not marriage. Here the festive ritual that celebrates the birth of the new society out of the ashes of the old is a funeral – Nordic style – rather than a wedding. Furthermore, Wagner’s primary scapegoats – Hagen, Gunther, and Gutrune – receive death as a darker and more permanent form of New Comedy’s traditional and at times temporary banishment. Unlike other operas that follow similar New Comic paradigms (think of Falstaff or The Marriage of Figaro), where the new society softens its heart and allows its scapegoats (Falstaff and Count Almaviva) to reintegrate, there is no place in Wagner’s new society for the likes of Hagen, Gunther, or Gutrune.

Resolution and ambiguity in comedy and tragedy

As Adorno recognized, Wagner’s comedy is the comedy of The Merchant of Venice. It delights in the misfortunes of its Others and, once banished, it does not allow them to reintegrate into society. There is no redemption for such outsiders in the new world order that Wagner imagines, only denunciation followed by permanent night. Through this genius for comic malice, Wagner’s “villains are turned into comic figures by means of the denunciation they are subjected to: misshapen dwarfs like Alberich and Mime, a maltreated bachelor like Beckmesser. Wagner’s humour metes out cruel treatment.”29 In Wagner, Adorno concludes, “The insignificant are punished, while the prominent go scot-free.”30 Indeed, “the prominent” in Wagner’s operas do not just go “scot-free,” they are redeemed and celebrated. Thus, although the tragically statuesque figures of Siegfried and Bru¨nnhilde must die, they merit eternal reward in the Wagnerian pantheon. On the other hand, the ridiculous and pathetic Gibichungs, as parodies of the French operatic “Prince and Princess,”31 must die for their petty bourgeois attitudes toward marriage and wealth, while the Rhinedaughters drown the more dangerous Hagen in the Rhine. Wagner’s central scapegoat is therefore symbolically forced to choke on that nature he once tried to control (insofar as Siegfried is the representative of nature). Such parodic characters are neither possessed by divine substance like tragic agents nor allowed to correct their human failings like Old Comic ones. Without the hope of redemption, negation is the only option as Wagner makes Hagen and other similar dramatis personae – to speak in the language of those Latins whom Wagner so deeply despised – irredeemably non-gratae. WAGNER AND AMBIGUITY

That one can make reasonably coherent arguments for two such seemingly contradictory perspectives on the Ring’s finale, along with the fact that almost countless other contradictory claims have also been made about Wagner, from Nietzsche and Shaw to Mann and Adorno, might make us wonder about the role of ambiguity in

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Wagner’s work and life as a whole. It is in part this very ambiguity that has helped guarantee that debates about the meanings of Wagner’s works continue to persist, a persistence made all the more perpetual because the ambiguities in question are often of such political and aesthetic import. Regardless of whether we attribute Wagner’s actions to ideology or art, we must admit the possibility that his aesthetic theories and artistic choices do seem susceptible to ideological, political, even pecuniary and just plain practical considerations. The point is to allow for all of these perspectives simultaneously, not disregard them from the start and, whether consciously or not, grant others precedence a priori. Because this multifaceted figure confronts us with such endless and important contradictions, the job of the Wagner critic may ultimately be not to resolve these contradictions or to solve the paradoxes, but to ask why is this ambiguity so pervasive in the first place? Or rather, here, at the end of this book, after attempting to solve these contradictions and paradoxes, one might ask why are there so many conflicts in and among Wagner’s art, life, theory, and politics? And with particular regard to the present study, what might this ambiguity have to do with classical scholarship and Wagner’s use of the Greeks? If we regard ambiguity itself as a tool in Wagner’s hands we might conclude that, whether or not he consciously sought to do so, this ambiguity has helped secure immortality for Wagner, just as other virtues like beauty, clarity, or profundity have for other artists. Through his innovative use of leitmotifs and so-called “endless melody,” Wagner made of music an endless meaning. I am referring here neither to the popular notion that music can mean everything and nothing simultaneously, nor to the Romantic notion that music is contentless form. Rather, in Wagner we are introduced to very definite but multiple forms joined to very definite but multiple contents. With his trademark irony, in The Case of Wagner Nietzsche “compliments” the composer on this ability to remain meaningful yet indefinite: “Here we may consider Wagner an inventor and innovator of the first rank – he has increased music’s capacity for language to the point of making it immeasurable: he is the Victor Hugo

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of music as language.”32 In other words, Wagner not only made music more meaningful in a quasi-linguistic sense. He also made it more meaningful by endowing it with the sort of hermeneutic impenetrability one associates with authors like Victor Hugo. This endowment goes beyond the mere prose “style” of such Romantic authors to include a certain obsession with ideas. Bringing this interpretation of Wagner’s multiplicitous meanings back around to Hegel, Nietzsche beautifully articulates what it is in both Hegel and Wagner that seduce: the idea. Explaining that it was an ideological seduction that attracted the youth of Germany to Wagner and Hegel, Nietzsche argues, The two words “infinite” and “meaning” were really sufficient: they induced a state of incomparable well-being in young men. It was not with his music that Wagner conquered them, it was with the “idea” – it is the enigmatic character of his art, its playing hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal that leads and lures these youths to Wagner; it is Wagner’s genius for shaping clouds, his whirling, hurling, and twirling through the air, his everywhere and nowhere – the very same means by which Hegel formerly seduced and lured them!33

These meanings are in turn multiplied by the heavily laden Hegelianism of Wagner’s own theoretical works. One is even tempted to agree with Nietzsche that Wagner wrote not because his operatic works were too profound to be understood without explanatory glosses, but because he was afraid they were not profound enough, and so he needed to obfuscate their meanings with abstract and high-sounding philosophical concepts. But whatever the value judgment one might arrive at with regard to why Wagner wrote his theoretical treatises, one effect is still the same: Wagner’s protean prose has helped to further insure him against a forgetful posterity. In a discussion of Wagner’s infamous dilettantism, Adorno adroitly links Wagner’s love of the “classics” (understood here in a broader sense than just the Greeks) to a longing for immortality:

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“From the very first day he [Wagner] was the author of his collected works, and if you read the detailed diary entries of his reading from the Bayreuth period, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that till the end of his days the entire pleasure of reading was inseparable from the thought of rows of classics bound in gold.”34 Ever conscious, it seems, of posterity and his desire to have his work survive him, Wagner’s Hellenism can be read as just such another means to this end or, rather, endlessness. In Hellenizing his work Wagner sought in the past those works that were heir to the greatest longevity. He did this not only, as I have been arguing throughout much of this book, as a way to influence various kinds of German identity, but also to ensure that his own identity would not vanish. Thus, in the finale to Go¨tterda¨mmerung, like Thetis striving to endow Achilles with immortality by encompassing him nightly in flames and bathing him daily in ambrosia, Wagner uses the contradictory forces of conflagration and flood in an effort to grant his music and thus himself immortality. He is Thetis to the Ring’s Achilles.

Epilogue: Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies

It is difficult to find a theoretical language inclusive enough to embrace all aspects of opera, partly because the methods prescribed by a critic’s chosen discipline – music, drama, literature, etc. – by definition tend to neglect one or more aspects of opera’s inherently multimedial form. To take only one example of how one’s disciplinary approach can lead to incomplete and biased readings, look at the ways in which opera’s different media order time. The approximate real time of dramatic recitatives contradicts the apparent timelessness of lyric arias, while the linear movement of dramatic plot opposes the circular movement of ABA musical forms and harmonies. Given that so much contradiction and conflict arises from and is determined by the different kinds of disciplinary approaches one takes, the problem becomes finding a language that can analyze opera as inclusively as possible. In Wagner these chronological contradictions become even more important, interesting, and farreaching. Bracketing the Ring within a four-day performance time, Wagner aligns himself with the tragic festivals of ancient Greece while prefiguring theatrical happenings in America during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as certain absurdist theatrical experiments that involve racing against the clock. While the main body of this book has dealt with the ways in which the Ring cycle looks to the past and is influenced by that past, briefly, in the space of this Epilogue, I would like to pick up on something mentioned at the close of the last chapter: the ways in which the Ring cycle looks to the future, both in terms of some of its far-reaching aesthetic features and the theories one might use to describe these features. To continue this book’s aim to broaden theoretical approaches to opera in order to appeal to a wider audience and to embrace a greater truth about this multifaceted genre, 253

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this Epilogue uses performance studies in order to understand Wagner’s innovative ways of ordering time. Looking at how linear time and circular time move simultaneously through the action on Wagner’s stage and how bracketed time and free time construct meaning both inside and outside of the performance can provide a richer understanding of not only the internal movements of these operas but also – a question that eternally stands at the center of Ring debates – Wagner’s relationship to his audience, their relationship to him, and Wagner’s influence upon the art and politics of modernity. EVENT TIME AND SYMBOLIC TIME

To understand what causes the contradictory patterns between the senses of circular and linear time created by Wagner’s Ring, we may start by examining the ways in which the Ring differs from less controversial drama. To do this I will borrow some terms from Richard Schechner’s theories about categorizing theatrical time. In what we have come to regard as traditional Western performance, dramas are most often arranged according to event time within a world defined by symbolic time.1 Event time here refers to the order in which a play’s actions occur, while symbolic time refers to the world of make-believe that provides the setting for these actions. In what we now think of as fairly straightforward and traditional drama, event time is usually fixed and linear, a scripted sequence of lines, scenes, and acts that follows a probable but not wholly predictable pattern. In contrast to this fairly fixed category of event time, traditionally, symbolic time varies in relation to the real time being lived through by the audience. In terms of duration, performances may take a longer or shorter time to perform than that measured by an audience member’s watch. A ninety-minute movie may cover a ninety-year history, while a three-minute soliloquy may represent a decision that would be instantaneous off stage. Similarly, in terms of setting, an epoch represented on stage may differ sharply or not at all from the era of the audience. Epics tend to be set in the past; documentaries often parallel the present; science fiction likes to

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look to the future; and myth aims at abolishing history by placing the story outside of time, thus aspiring to universal truth-value. Like this orientation of epoch to audience, in terms of chronology plots may go backward, forward, nowhere, or in any direction the dramatist desires. Most often, dramas go forward smoothly, while movies hurdle time in small hops via the jump-cut or large hurdles via sequences that flash forward or backward. Sometimes, time can even stop, as when certain characters keep moving on stage while others literally freeze in their tracks. But in each of these cases time obeys a kind of performative theory of relativity: it is not absolute but relative with respect to the audience. Analyzed according to the category of symbolic time, the setting of the Ring may seem extreme but not revolutionary. It begins with the beginning of civilization and ends with its destruction. In between creation and apocalypse it depicts a mythical world that lies outside of history or rather, since Wagner’s use of myth aims at timelessness, a world that could just as easily represent past, present, or future. As for the chronology of symbolic time in the Ring, on the whole it moves steadily forward with occasional flashback sequences and prophetic scenes, again making for a not entirely innovative use of symbolic time. However, when both the libretto and the music are analyzed according to event time, various interesting conflicts between linear and circular patterns make the cycle seem both causally driven and endlessly repetitive. In fact, by taking circular and linear event times to their extreme in the libretto and the music, Wagner seems to turn each into the other and sometimes to stop the flow of time altogether.2 Plotwise, a kind of “linear circularity” can be seen in Alberich’s cosmogonic theft of the Rhinegold, an action that embodies the foreswearing of love for power and is repeated, at least symbolically, throughout the Ring cycle. As I argued earlier, like Alberich, Wotan is willing to trade Freia, the goddess of love, for Valhalla, a monument to the gods’ power. Meanwhile, Fricka wants the ring as a defense against Wotan’s straying affections, Alberich uses it to enslave his brother, Mime, and, as the culmination of these

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repetitions in Das Rheingold, Fafner opts for gold over Freia and kills his own brother, Fasolt, in order to obtain the ring, choosing both wealth and power over erotic and agapic love. Alberich’s transgression against love is a kind of traumatic act repeated with pathological urgency throughout the rest of the cycle, amply substantiating the Schopenhauerian thesis of history as repetitive and ultimately hopeless. But however circular the plot may seem according to this argument, a linear cause and effect relationship also governs the Ring, insofar as key actions not only repeat Alberich’s theft, they also originate from it. Alberich’s Promethean transgression causes Wotan’s journey to Nibelheim, his second forswearing of love (Freia) for power (the ring), the prophetic intervention by Erda, the eventual ransoming of Freia with the ring, the murder of Fasolt, and the final unheeded pleas of the Rhinedaughters as the gods triumphantly enter Valhalla. In fact, so relentlessly linear is Wagner’s plot that one could even argue that Alberich’s transgression causes Siegfried’s death and the final apocalypse of Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Thus, through his plot Wagner creates a paradoxical sense of event time that moves in both a circular and a linear fashion. The one motion cannot exist without the other. In order for the plot to move ahead, present actions must repeat past ones, and if characters did not re-enact the past, there could be no future. In short, all actions are not only caused by the first, originating action of the Ring (Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold), they also repeat this first action. This paradox between circular and linear time, which occurs at the level of plot, repeats at the level of poetic device. Just as characters re-enact the deeds of others through the plot, they also relive both their own deeds and those of others through their language. As I argued earlier, in Go¨tterda¨mmerung and indeed throughout the Ring certain actions are so conspicuously repeated as narratives that George Bernard Shaw accuses Wagner of violating what Shaw calls the first rule of a “practised playwright,” namely, that “persons must not come on the stage in the second act and tell one another at great length what the audience has already seen pass before its eyes in the first act.”3 Almost all the major characters in the Ring have stories to tell about the past,

Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies

both their own and those of others. Remarking on this same pattern in his reading of the Ring as epic, Franco Moretti emphasizes the role that memory plays in Wagner’s dramatic technique: “Stemming the flow of people and things: just think about the plot of the Ring, and you will understand the value of memory in Wagner’s world.”4 The poetic rhetoric of the Ring is almost unthinkable without epic reiterations of the past. Paradoxically, though, it is by confronting the past that characters can progress forward. It is like the way Ptolemy once imagined the planets traveling the stars, performing epicycles about their own orbits and thus seeming, from the Earth’s vantage point, to be going both forward and, briefly, backward. It is in this sense that we might imagine how Wagner reconciles the apparent contradictions between linear and circular time. It is not only ancient astronomy that presents us with an analogy for this kind of one-step-backward-two-steps-forward movement. Wagner’s characters also resemble those of ancient epic, heroes who, before they can fight each other, must first reveal their family heritage.5 See, for example, Iliad book 6, when Glaukos and Diomedes meet on the battlefield.6 Before they fight, the first thing they do is compare genealogies. Fearing that he might be a god in disguise, Diomedes asks Glaukos to identify himself and then Glaukos asks Diomedes to do the same. Through this mutual exchange of family histories, both combatants realize that they owe each other the honor of “guest friendship,” which entails a sharing of hospitality and gifts. Having discovered this, Greek and Trojan do not exchange blows but rather, in fulfillment of their obligations to one another, they exchange armor.7 In this case, knowledge of the past is not only a prerequisite for the future, it can also help shape the future. Similarly, in Act I, scene 2 of Siegfried, the Wanderer and Mime retell the stories of Das Rheingold and Die Walku¨re respectively. Through these retrospective narratives a fact about the future is determined and then, because this fact is learned, certain events follow from this knowledge. Interestingly, though, this exchange of stories differs from the Iliad insofar as Mime is not as circumspect as Diomedes in thinking that his opponent might be a god. Because Mime is not cautious he does not

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win from the Wanderer/Wotan the very thing he wants so desperately to learn, namely, who will forge Nothung anew. The narrated past can not only change the future but also help us to understand it. This type of repetitive narrative is so prevalent in mythopoetic writing in part because the idea behind myths is that the present is always repeating the past, that history merely revolves, myths are true for all times, and therefore the past can help us understand the present and future. In this sense Wagner reconciles the apparent contradictions between linear and circular time by making the future dependent on the past. And thus, once again, the linear is seen to flow out of the circular. Turning from time in the libretto to time in the music, Wagner’s leitmotifs create and dispel certain contradictions between linear and circular means of musical progression and expression. Since he develops his leitmotifs with respect to harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation, as well as transforming one leitmotif into another, Wagner creates a linear sense of event time. But the way in which he uses his leitmotifs to foreshadow or remember events and characters undermines this forward dramatic development in the Ring. Through relentless leitmotivic foreshadowing and remembrance, Wagner turns the dramatic into the post-dramatic, making the future immanent in the past and vice versa. In this way he pushes the logic of linear development to its limits and turns the linear back into the circular. In the first case the circular leads to linear motion. In the second case the linear, as an endless development from the original, leads to circular motion. As an analogy for how such “linear circularity” works – imagine looking out at the horizon: in the immediate present and to the eye alone, the land before us seems flat; but raised above the point where we stand, to a more godlike view, high enough so that we can see both forward and backward, we know that the Earth is round. Musically speaking, despite the fact that certain prominent critics have maintained that Wagner’s leitmotifs are either unilaterally one thing or another, either regressive or progressive, the Ring creates a similar tension between leitmotivic repetition and development. Defending the argument in favor of regression, Adorno claims that by using monikers like “the sword motif ” or “the fate motif ”

Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies

scholars draw attention to the leitmotif’s allegorical nature, which in turn alerts us to the Ring’s rigidity, its infinite regression on both the micro- and the macro-level of musical structure: If there is no movement at the macro-level of Wagner’s music, because it rescinds its own temporal flow, it is no less true that the details too are marked by a rigid stasis. The leitmotivs are miniature pictures, and their supposed psychological variations involve only a change of lighting. They remain more loyal than they imagine to Berlioz’s term, the ide´e fixe, and it is their inflexibility that sets limits to and even negates the psychological dynamism.8

Defending the Ring’s progressive and more fluid nature against Adorno’s accusations of rigidity and regression, Dahlhaus and Deathridge make a no less cogent argument for musical development and progression: The idea of a leitmotif . . . as a fixed, recurrent, musical formula, not unlike the ‘periodic formulae’ in Homer, is simplistic to the point of falsity. Unchanged recurrence is the exception rather than the rule, even in the Ring, let alone in Parsifal . . . To counterbalance Debussy’s and Stravinsky’s malicious references to “visiting-cards” and “check-room numbers,” amusing though they may be, it should be remembered that the themes and motifs are unceasingly varied, taken apart and merged or transformed into each other, and that they move gradually closer together or further apart as they are modified.9

However irreconcilable these two arguments may appear at first, they can be combined by recognizing that Adorno is addressing the leitmotif’s spatial dimension and Dahlhaus and Deathridge its temporal dimension. But it is the combination of spatial and temporal dimensions that is the innovative hallmark of Wagner’s leitmotivic technique, an innovation that invites us to use a language that embraces both space and time. This is best illustrated through the example of the so-called “Valhalla motif,” its musical origins, and its visual referents. As I argued earlier, insofar as the Valhalla motif is derived from the “corrupted power motif,” it points not only to

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Valhalla’s considerable might but also to the corrupt means by which Wotan acquired this might, namely, through a bargain with Fasolt and Fafner involving an exchange of love for power. It not only paints a picture of Valhalla, it also explains its origins and gives us a clue as to its eventual destruction. And although Wotan’s dream house seems nobler in its completion than Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold, Wotan is no less corrupt than Alberich, and so he will also pay for his dreams of power and his attempts to conquer nature by commodifying love. The Valhalla motif tells us all of this because, although it is rigid in its repetition, it is fluid in its development. It has both spatial and temporal dimensions. Adorno does, however, have a point about the Ring’s lack of dynamism. Because a leitmotif like the Valhalla motif looks both backward to its corrupted origins and forward to its noble completion, the way in which Wagner uses such leitmotifs to foreshadow or recall events and characters tends to undermine the dramatic development of the Ring. Through relentless leitmotivic foreshadowing and remembrance, Wagner turns the dramatic into the post-dramatic, making the future immanent in the past and the past in the future. Although not as desperate as Beckett’s sense of history in Waiting for Godot, Wagner does push the logic of linear development to its limit, once again bending the linear into the circular. As his leitmotivic technique diminishes the sense of drama as surprise, his dramas become more Aeschylean than Sophoclean, more based on foreboding than reversal. As Moretti observes, Before Nothung fulfils any real function, we encounter it as a (musical) idea of Wotan’s, and his pledge to Siegmund; as a wish of Siegmund’s, a memory of Sieglinde’s, an object illuminated by fire, a motif recalled by the orchestra . . . When Siegmund draws the sword from the Ash, therefore, it is hard to speak of an “event” in the usual sense: more than anything else, his deed is the completion of something long awaited. A duplication, a closure: in a sense, already almost an end.10

As in the libretto, so too in its use of leitmotivic technique, in the Ring the present moves into the future only by first returning to the past.

Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies SET TIME

While Wagner seems innovative in his use of event and symbolic time in the Ring, he is in effect only using the elements that are common to most dramatic and operatic works in the West. However, there is a way in which Wagner introduces – or rather reintroduces – something that seems absent from much traditional or contemporary popular drama: set time. In most traditional theater the order in which the script is performed – event time – occurs within a make-believe context – symbolic time – where the clock by which we measure our everyday lives – set time – tends not to intrude. But Wagner conceived of the Ring as a cycle to be performed during a four-day festival. As an inseparable component of the cycle we may therefore hypothesize that this set time influences not only the Bayreuth experience of the Ring, but also the cycle itself, including its use of event time and symbolic time. Although he obviously did not use Schechner’s term “set time,” that Wagner was alive to and aware of the uses of this sort of performative element can be seen in his remarks in the Brown Book on February 7, 1866, concerning the use of time in a tragic festival performance of the Oresteia: Day – Night. – The Hellenes had a fine sense of the sanctity of night. The profoundest sense of it must have been revealed to those attending the great performances of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. This began in daylight: Agamemnon – complete human error – crime – desire. Afternoon: Electra – revenge – expiation – punishment. With the Eumenides dusk falls; at the end fully night: the young men escort the appeased, reconciled daemons of revenge in torchlight procession to their nocturnal place of rest. – Now the sanctity of the night feeling gives birth to playful merriment also: fauns and satyrs tease each other by torchlight, jocular dismay and disappointment – drunks scrambling for resting-place. The world lightly sheds its burdensome seriousness, and – peace becomes possible. – Here sleep – there death! – 11

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Wagner understood just how important set time could be in the Greek tragic festival. Influencing both what went on inside as well as outside the symbolic time of a play, set time and its natural accompaniment – morning, noon, night, the dew, daylight, the moon, and those “dynasts of the sky,” the stars – could become both setting and symbols. In a letter to Franz Liszt that contains one of the first descriptions of the Ring as we now know it, Wagner writes about its performance context as intrinsic to the performance text. The festival is to be something more than just a concert venue. Having first described how he intends the Ring to contain four operas all related to the same myth, Wagner then begins to discuss his “plans for the practical realization of the whole”: I cannot contemplate a division of the constituent parts of this great whole without ruining my intention in advance. The whole complex of dramas must be staged at the same time in rapid succession, and for that reason I can envisage only the following circumstances as being favorable to the outward feasibility of the plan: – the performance of my Nibelung dramas must take place at a great festival which may perhaps be organized for the unique purpose of this performance. It must then be given on three successive days, with the introductory prelude being performed on the preceding evening. Once I have achieved such a performance under these conditions, the whole work may then be repeated on another occasion, and only after that may the individual dramas, which in themselves are intended as entirely independent pieces, be performed as people wish: but, whatever happens, these performances must be preceded by an impression of the complete production which I myself shall have prepared.12

At least initially, Wagner does not want the Ring to be experienced as four individual operas. Nor does he want it to be experienced outside of its four-day context. By eventually realizing these goals through a festival in Bayreuth, Wagner sought to take his audience away from their routinized, bourgeois lives and put them in the natural “green world” of rural Bayreuth. For this Bayreuth audience, life is then bracketed at either end by Das Rheingold on the first day

Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies

and Go¨tterda¨mmerung on the fourth. Like the characters on stage, the audience members off stage similarly lose some of their freedom to determine their daily activities, such that, between the beginning and the end of the Ring’s festival performance, the hours not spent before the stage are spent in anxious anticipation for the next installment. More than just a means of controlling the conditions of performance, Wagner’s conception of the Ring as something bounded by a specific length of time also helped to shape his writing of the Ring. Set time seeps into the fabric of the work just as it shapes the audience’s daily schedule. In such cases where the clock invades the symbolic world of make-believe, it brings with it its own sense of sequential and circular rhythm, what Schechner calls the “monodirectional, linear-yet-circular uniform measurement adapted from day-night and seasonal rhythms.”13 It is these natural rhythms that are also in part responsible for the Ring’s internal contradictions between linearity and circularity. Exactly how these natural rhythms influence events may be clarified by an analogy with certain kinds of sporting events and performances where the clock more obviously influences agents and actions. Unlike innings in baseball, which take place outside of time, events in sports such as boxing, automobile racing, and American football are in part determined by set time. In boxing awareness of the clock motivates the fighter to hit one’s opponent as hard and as many times as possible within a given round, and, if knocked down, to get up again as quickly as possible before the ten-count is up. Similarly, in American football the clock determines what kinds of plays are chosen and how quickly or slowly they are executed. Even more obviously, all kinds of racing – motor-, wind-, or human-powered – make velocity and therefore time an essential element. Regardless of the patent differences among these sports, they each put the clock in the running as yet another competitor, creating an agonistic relationship between agent and time, where time is an essentially unalterable force that shapes the agent’s actions. Moving from the playing field back to the play, note the similarity between the way the clock affects both athletics and the Ring’s performances. Like the presence of the stopwatch in certain sporting

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events, the set time of Wagner’s four-day festival influences the way its agents act and the principles that govern these actions. The presence of reality in the shape of time determines how the game gets played. Because of the sheer length of the cycle – four days is a long time for an opera – the organizing principle of the work, that is, the music, must take this set time into account. The truth of this is perhaps most easily seen in Wagner’s use of leitmotifs. As Nietzsche once caustically remarked, these musical snapshots are “music for the forgetful.” Seen in a less negative light, Wagner’s leitmotifs are made so concise and memorable that one has no problem recollecting them over a four-day period. Reinforcing this compositional technique, Wagner’s libretto uses retrospective narratives that similarly recap the action for the audience in order to remind them of events that have already taken place. What is occurring on stage in the present is sometimes over-shadowed and even over-determined by the past. This counteracts the forward motion of the plotline by returning the audience to previous events, so much so that by introducing what Schechner calls life-rhythms this circular event time even begins to feel post-dramatic. By the end of Go¨tterda¨mmerung, the ring has been restored to the Rhinedaughters and the world has been returned to a state of nature. Yet, as the final chapter of this book argues, it is at least questionable whether any advance has been made over these four days, on or off the stage. As Schechner argues, dramas of this sort seem episodic and even “pointless”: Drama modeled on life-rhythms contains episodes of varying length, usually short, where tensions increase, explode, and return to the original situation . . . Although tensions are released through explosive discharge of energy, the underlying conditions have not changed, nothing has been resolved; the release is temporary, and the situation is returned to a starting point where it begins all over again.14

As in the theater of Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco, “one rhythmic cycle is completed only to begin again: nothing is resolved. These liferhythms are functions of time. In post-dramatic drama, time replaces

Time, the Ring, and Performance Studies

destiny.”15 Parallel to this substitution of time for destiny, it is also not uncommon in dramas influenced by life-cycles for arbitrarily determined rules to replace plot and for drama to become a game. As Schechner observes, the name of the game in Genet’s Maids, for example, is “Kill Madam.” In the Ring it is, of course, “Get the Ring.” But the rules are, once you get the ring, you must die. In dramas that resemble these types of games, individual psychology becomes less interesting because characters simply follow the arbitrary rules of the game and seem to lack the freedom to find their own way of being. The parallel to certain sports involving balls – American football especially – is hard to resist. Everyone wants the ball, but once you have it you are at risk until you give the ball to someone else. Deprived of freedom and consciousness, the symbolic time in dramas like the Ring becomes determinist and their plot summaries begin to sound like an announcer giving us the play-by-play of a game: “Alberich gets the ring from the Rhinedaughters. Loge and Wotan steal it. Fricka makes a feint, but Fasolt is too quick. He sacrifices Freia. Fasolt’s down and now Fafner has the ring. Fafner passes it to Siegfried. Now he’s down. He fumbles it. No, he’s still got the ring. Here comes Hagen. But here come those plucky daughters of the Rhine, too. Hagen’s overtaken. They pull him down. And. . . And. . . Yes! They have it! The Rhinedaughters have the ring! The game is over! It’s over! The Rhinedaughters have the ring and they are returning it to its rightful place at the bottom of the river Rhine!” In a less hyperbolic sense, like his famed “emancipation of dissonance,”16 whereby harmony is freed from the necessity of consonance and closure, in his operas Wagner similarly achieves the emancipation of time, so that it seems to move in a multitude of directions and/or to stand still. In the Ring cycle and especially the ending of this cycle, such contradictory uses of time align Wagner’s dramaturgy both with traditional and with more avant-garde theater, placing it on the dividing line between the modern and the postmodern. While retaining a hold on the orthodox, Aristotelian inspired notions of action, development, and closure, Wagner’s

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dramaturgy also prefigures the use of post-dramatic, circular, and bracketed time in the theatrical works of 1950s French absurdists like Ionesco, Becket, Sartre, and Genet. While Wagner may not have created the artwork of the future in perhaps just the way he had planned, he may have deeply influenced other artworks of the future, and not only those that are pale imitations of him or ideological rip-offs, but also those that Wagner himself might have deeply despised. To Wagner or some defender of Wagner that might complain about such misuse, one can only respond that as with the Master’s deployment of the Greeks, so our deployment of him: the artist has the final say. The Hellenization of politics may have been Wagner’s dream, but we are just as free to Wagnerize politics in whatever way we may deem fit, even deploying Wagner to undo some of the political damage of which he himself was guilty.

Appendices: Wagner’s primary and secondary sources

INTRODUCTION

The following three appendices attempt briefly to introduce and give Wagner’s opinion about all of the primary and secondary classical authors and sources that I could find specific mention of in writings about or by Wagner. Although Wagner owned more primary and secondary classical texts than are listed here, I have restricted myself to those that I can prove Wagner read or knew by reputation. Whenever possible I have also kept the entries brief because some authors seem to have had little influence on Wagner and those who were more influential are discussed more thoroughly in the body of this book. As for those authors who are only mentioned in these appendices, I have included them in order to provide what I believe is the most exhaustive list of its kind with respect to Wagner and the Greeks, in the hopes that this information may prove useful to future scholars. In addition to my appendices on secondary scholars who influenced Wagner’s concept of antiquity I might also have included a list of “secondary artists” inspired by antiquity who in turn inspired Wagner. At the top of this list would be authors such as Goethe and Schiller, but also lesser-known authors like Joseph Addison, who greatly inspired Wagner as a young boy with his play on Cato, especially the monologue spoken by the great Roman Stoic before his suicide.1 This list could also have contained artists who worked in genres other than literature. Foremost among these would have been Bonaventura Genelli, whose “Bacchus among the Muses” inspired Wagner and his conception of the Greeks at many points in his life (and for that reason serves as the cover of this book). My main reason for excluding such a list is not that it would not make for a fruitful discussion, but that it would be too fruitful and take me further than I would want to travel 267

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from my thesis about how secondary scholars influenced Wagner’s view of the Greeks. I do, however, include in these appendices what might be called crossover artists or scholar-artists, such as Nietzsche, Lessing, and, on a lesser scale, Johann August Apel. For these men were, according to my thesis about Wagner and scholarship, thinkers after Wagner’s own heart.

Appendix A: Wagner’s primary sources

The “Introduction” to this book lists the names of all the ancient authors that I have been able to prove that Wagner mentioned in writing or conversation. This appendix, however, does not contain all of those names because I have limited myself here to only those authors whose books Wagner mentions by name. The two most important authors missing from this appendix are Pindar and Hesiod because, at least so far as I have been able to discover, Wagner never mentions any specific titles by these authors. But since these two poets receive ample treatment in the body of this book, I do not consider this a great drawback. At any rate, I think we can be certain that Wagner read both of these authors but uncertain as to what precisely he read. As for the authors of other primary sources, some of their works are mentioned so often by Wagner that to cite each instance would make the scaffolding bigger than the building, so to speak.1 So I have tried to include what I think are the most significant mentions and have footnoted these. The last thing to say about Wagner’s primary sources from antiquity concerns his readings of Roman literature. One of the more interesting things to point out in this regard is not what the list contains but what it leaves out. Indeed, Wagner mentions few Roman works by name, and he tends not to regard these works with much esteem. Aeschylus. Vying with Homer in Wagner’s affections and perhaps surpassing him was Aeschylus. The Aeschylean tragic cycle in which Wagner seems to have been most interested was the Oresteia – the Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides. Within this trilogy itself Wagner was especially impressed by the parodos of the Agamemnon. In fact it was one of the last things he spoke of before he died. What seems to have interested him most about this choral passage was the way it interweaves and develops 269

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its various motifs: eagles, hare, lion cub, and so on. At one point, on November 27, 1879, Wagner even speculates that “one could write a whole book about” this chorus.2 Although not mentioned as often as the Oresteia, Wagner also read the Persians, Prometheus Bound, and Johann Gustav Droysen’s speculations on how the Prometheus trilogy might have been originally constructed.3 Aristophanes. Like Euripides and Plato, Wagner apparently loved and respected Aristophanes, despite the fact that he also thought him implicated in the death of Greek tragedy and the demise of Athens. As far as his rather complicated notion of how Aristophanes contributed to the death of tragedy, I cover this subject in the body of this book. But as for Wagner’s less complicated admiration for the Greek comedian, his praise shines through, especially in Cosima’s Diaries. At one point Cosima records Wagner saying he thought that Aristophanes was “the greatest of Greek geniuses.”4 Among the works of Aristophanes that Wagner liked best, the Frogs seems to have topped the list. Its influences can be seen in his own Aristophanic parody, A Capitulation, as well as Die Meistersinger and, as I argue in Part III of this book, Go¨tterda¨mmerung. He also read the Acharnians, Birds, Peace, Knights, Lysistrata, Wasps, and Wealth, but seems to have had little to say about these works. Aristotle. Although he does not mention reading Aristotle very often, Wagner did own several editions of the philosopher’s works. Also, although I have not been able to find any moment where Wagner specifically mentions reading the Poetics, he does nevertheless mention Aristotle in connection to the way this work’s ideas became an inflexible set of arbitrary rules for certain kinds of (especially French) neo-classical dramas. In Opera and Drama he calls such neo-classical works a kind of “pseudo-antique [antikisirenden] drama, constructed according to Aristotle’s rules of Unity.”5 Other works by Aristotle that Wagner read include his History of Animals and On Perception. Demosthenes. As far as Greek primary sources are concerned, I could not find any references to specific speeches by Demosthenes that Wagner read.6 The most specific information we have on this

Wagner’s primary sources

subject is that on October 22, 1877, Cosima records that she and Wagner read “two of Demosthenes’ Corinthian speeches.”7 Wagner also would have known Demosthenes’ works and thoughts from reading Droysen’s History of Hellenism. Euripides. Of the three great Greek tragedians, Euripides was undoubtedly Wagner’s least favorite. Essentially he agreed with Nietzsche’s thesis that Euripides’ logic chopping dialectical dialogue subjected tragedy to a kind of vivisection. At one point he even observed to Cosima that he felt that, with Euripides, “All feeling is killed by speech and explanations.”8 In some of his notes for theoretical works that never progressed beyond their germinal stages, Wagner writes somewhat telegraphically about the rise and fall of Greek tragedy as it related to Aeschylus and Euripides: “Birth out of music: Aeschylus; Decadence – Euripides.”9 For Wagner, Aeschylus was the Beethoven of the Greek tragedians, Euripides their Brahms.10 Less reasoned out was the simple fact that apparently Wagner just did not like Euripides. Upon reading his Ion, in her diaries Cosima simply records that Wagner had a “great antipathy toward it both in form and content.” 11 No more detail is given. Cosima also remarks that Wagner found the Bacchae “distasteful.”12 And yet, despite both his reasoned and unreasoned responses to Euripides, he did read these plays, along with the Phoenician Women, probably Alcestis,13 and certainly Iphigenia in Aulis, in which he still found something wonderful to praise.14 Herodotus. In addition to poets and philosophers, Wagner also read the great Greek historians and their representative works. He apparently knew Herodotus’ Histories from a young age, given his familiarity with the author’s accounts of the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis.15 Homer. Because Homer is discussed so often in the body of this book, his entry here is short. Suffice it to say that at many different moments during his lifetime Wagner read, re-read, and translated the Iliad and the Odyssey. And although he once planned a drama based on the figure of Achilles, he seems to mention the Odyssey more often than the Iliad and even seems to have been more

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sympathetic to this work than to the Iliad. Or at least one can say that Wagner mentions a lack of sympathy only with respect to the Iliad and not the Odyssey. At one point Cosima records Wagner complaining that the Iliad had “so much talk” and “sham battles” that made it seem frivolous in comparison with certain “succinct German sagas.”16 Elsewhere Cosima also records Wagner saying that he could not really understand all of the bloodshed and battles in the Iliad and that, in short, the subject of war was “little to his taste.”17 On a more stylistic level, Wagner also found the Iliad somewhat “oriental,” claiming that its “prolongation of the narrative is out of proportion to the cruelty of the legend.”18 Lucian. In August of 1877 Wagner and Cosima read Lucian’s Lucius or the Ass, “The Dream or the Cock,” and “The Carousel or the Lapiths.”19 As a stark contrast to this work, at the same time Wagner was composing Holy Communion music for Parsifal. Commenting on the raciness of Lucian, Cosima muses how surprised she is that she was not “offended by the very brazen things contained in it, though in a modern writer even a hint in this direction would be repugnant.”20 Lucky for Cosima that, as always, Wagner was there to educate her, explaining that she was not offended because the ancients were so open about things of the body, whereas it was the moderns’ very tendency toward secretiveness on such subjects that “made things look improper.”21 Ovid. Wagner seems to have had little regard for Ovid, excoriating his Metamorphoses as an “example of poetic trifling with religious allegories – as outlet for degeneration of religion.”22 Plato. As with Euripides and Aristophanes, Wagner’s relationship to Plato’s work was more complex than simple admiration. Like Nietzsche, Wagner not only respected the Platonic Socrates, he also blamed him (along with Euripides and to some extent Aristophanes) for the downfall of Athens and the civic institution of tragedy. The interrelated themes of philosophy, the state, and tragedy are explored in both Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s writings. While these themes are treated most extensively in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, one can also find them in an earlier form in Nietzsche’s

Wagner’s primary sources

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (both of these works were known to Wagner). In this last work it is not just Plato but philosophy in general that Nietzsche finds disintegrative of nationally unified endeavors. According to Nietzsche the art of philosophy teaches self-sufficiency and individuality and is therefore dangerous to the health of the state, especially when that state is already sick (as was Athens during the demise of tragedy).23 While Wagner seems to agree with these sentiments he also admired philosophy in general, as witnessed by his avid reading of Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, and Plato. In fact, in his essay “The Destiny of Opera” Wagner calls Plato a “poet-philosopher” and maintains that it is in Plato’s dialogues that we see, for the first time in literary history, the use of all three poetic forms: epic, lyric, and drama. Wagner’s favorite Platonic dialogue was, not surprisingly, given the way his work focuses on love, the Symposium. In its use of the three major poetic forms, Wagner calls this dialogue “the model unapproached” for all literary poetry to follow.24 As for other works by Plato, according to Cosima’s diaries she and Richard spent many nights reading the dialogues. They started with Ion and Hippias on Good Friday, March 26, 1869,25 and went on to read a substantial portion of Plato’s complete works: Alcibiades I, Alcibiades II,26 Apology, Cratylus, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Lysis, Parmenides, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Republic, Theaetetus, and Timaeus. Wagner was also familiar with Plato’s famous epistle to Dionysus, better known as the Seventh Letter.27 Plutarch. Although Wagner’s interest in Plutarch and especially his Lives was in part guided by his and Cosima’s wish to educate their children about the great heroes of antiquity, Wagner also read the Lives for his own personal edification and enjoyment, as well as other lesser-known works by Plutarch. His reading definitely included the lives of Agesilaus, Brutus, Cleomenes, Julius Caesar, Lycurgus, Lysander, Nicias, and Pericles. As for Plutarch’s other, lesser-known works Wagner only specifically mentions that he read some of Plutarch’s shorter writings, by which he probably means certain essays from the Moralia.28

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Polybius. One work briefly mentioned by Wagner is Polybius’ Histories, which he seems to have been reading on the same day that he was also reading Aristotle’s On Perception and Cosima was reading Plutarch’s Life of Cleomenes.29 This superfluity of antique greatness led Wagner that day to the melancholy reflection that while “the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome brought forth [greatness] in such vast numbers; we, on the other hand, tremble at the thought that Bismarck might hand in his resignation!. . .”30 Sophocles. Second only to Aeschylus in Wagner’s ranking of the Greek tragedians was Sophocles. Here it is the plays about Oedipus – Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus – that interested Wagner most. In Opera and Drama Wagner makes an extensive, if sometimes baffling, reading of these plays and the Oedipus myth with respect to the Greek understanding of the state and the individual.31 Less conspicuous than Oedipus in Wagner’s estimation were Sophocles’ Ajax, Philoctetes, and Electra. This last he held to be a worse play than its parallel work by Aeschylus, the Libation Bearers. In Wagner’s eyes Sophocles was merely “playing around with grief” in the tutor’s false tale of Orestes’ death. “It is unworthy of a great artist,” Wagner once said of this passage. Further damning it with faint praise, he calls it “a fine piece of Italian opera.”32 He also took issue with Ajax, criticizing as mannerism Sophocles’ habit of bandying about maxims.33 Tacitus. It seems that Wagner was familiar with Tacitus’ Germania, though he never mentions the work by name. It was Duane Roller who teased this knowledge out of a letter that Wagner wrote on July 26, 1869, to Hans Richter about costume designs for Das Rheingold.34 In this letter Wagner expresses his desire that, for models of the gods’ costumes, he might “enquire into the character of the costumes worn by Germanic gods in Roman times – more especially on the basis of allusions in Tacitus.” Thucydides. Wagner knew Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars well enough to single out for discussion and contemplation certain elements like the Melian Dialogue.35 He also used Thucydides to contextualize Aristophanes’ Knights and Peace, reading the comedies in light

Wagner’s primary sources

of the events of the Peloponnesian War. He saw in the Knights “a powerful diversion, complete forgetfulness, and an ideal world of cheerfulness” far away from the blockade of Pylos, and in the Peace he found evidence that “the Athenians went laughing to their downfall.”36 Virgil. Wagner saw Virgil’s Aeneid as something that the Latin races had clung to for centuries, valuing it as a grand prize of their culture. This clinging to the past, Wagner thought, was “typical of the whole Renaissance and all the Latin races.”37 As a further critique of Virgil he saw him as someone who was not very adept at delineating character. Unlike Aeschylus, firmly rooted in his community as a kind of priest, Wagner saw Virgil and Dante as “wanderers who looked around them.”38 In other words Virgil was a kind of Ahaseurus. Elsewhere, thinking no doubt about the many other authors Wagner despises, Cosima quietly notes that Virgil was merely “another poet he [Wagner] can’t bear.”39 Xenophon. While there is little recorded evidence concerning Xenophon, we know that Wagner did read him. Specifically we know that he read the Anabasis, Hieron,40 Memorabilia, and Xenophon’s Symposium.

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Appendix B: Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew personally

The following list contains the names and works (whenever possible) of those classical scholars one can prove, by consulting his writings or his conversations, that Wagner knew personally. Because of the prominent role they played in his thinking about the Greeks, some of these authors’ entries are longer than others – for example, Nietzsche’s entry is the longest. Apel, Johann August. From his youth onward Wagner knew and respected Johann August Apel, the father of his boyhood friend, Theodor Apel. The senior Apel’s contribution to Wagner’s understanding of the Greeks included both creative and scholarly works. On the scholarly side, Wagner studied Apel’s book on Greek poetic meter, Metrik, and on the more creative side, the poet in Wagner was influenced by Apel’s poetic output, especially Polyı¨dos and Die Aitolier.1 In his “Autobiographical Sketch” Wagner even goes so far as to say that it was through his acquaintance with these and similar poetic works by Apel that he felt “urged” to “sketch out tragedies on the models of the Greeks.”2 Wagner considered Apel “the master of metrical forms and reviver of Greek verse forms.”3 Curtius, Ernst and Wolfgang Helbig. These two men were archaeologists Wagner knew briefly while in Rome.4 While very little can be said about Wagner’s interactions with Curtius and Hebig, the little that can be said gives one some insight into what Wagner thought about archaeology. Piqued by the seeming plenitude of archaeological finds versus the paucity of ancient literary discoveries, in a conversation with Cosima he exclaimed, “If only a few MSS. of Aeschylus and Soph. were dug up, instead of all the many statues!”5 Ko¨chly, Hermann. While in Dresden Wagner became friends with Hermann Ko¨chly, who was then teaching at the Kreuzschule 276

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that Wagner attended as a boy. Ko¨chly’s specialty was Homer and post-Homeric epic. Wagner met Ko¨chly again in Zurich, after fleeing Dresden and escaping punishment for his part in the failed revolution of 1848.6 Ko¨chly’s main contribution to Wagner’s education seems to have been his critical edition of Homer’s Iliad and his efforts on the Teubner Hesiod.7 Lehrs, Samuel. During the middle period of his career, while in Paris, Wagner became close friends with Samuel Lehrs, brother of the more famous classicist, Karl Lehrs. Like Wagner’s uncle, Lehrs was an independent scholar. But unlike Wagner’s uncle, Lehrs was not a man of independent means. This impecunious classicist from Ko¨nigsberg had to support himself by doing translations of Greek authors for the publishing firm of Ambroise-Firmin Didot.8 Beyond his main interest in Greek didactic poetry, Lehrs was also interested in Germanic myth and history, having introduced Wagner to the legends of Tannha¨user and Lohengrin. It was this same Lehrs who advised Wagner not to spend his time trying to relearn Greek so as to be proficient enough to read the classics in the original. According to Wagner, Lehrs told him that he did not really need to learn Greek in order to get from the classics what he wanted: “the way I was and the music I had in me,” Lehrs apparently told Wagner, “I would find a way to extract knowledge from them even without grammar and dictionary.”9 Marbach, Oswald. Wagner rarely seems to mention works authored by his brother-in-law, Professor Oswald Marbach. But after having read Marbach’s translation of Oedipus, Wagner was impressed enough to urge its translator to show it to Nietzsche. This was of course before Nietzsche and Wagner had their falling-out.10 Mommsen, Theodor. Both in his middle and late periods, Wagner was acquainted with the famous scholar, Theodor Mommsen. (His Dresden library also contained a translation of Pindar’s Odes by Theodor’s brother, Johannes Tycho Mommsen.) While discussing Nietzsche’s lecture, Socrates and Tragedy, in a letter to the young philologist on February 4, 1870, Wagner half complained about the way that Nietzsche modernized the Greeks. Although forgiving this

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trait in Nietzsche, he was less understanding when chastising Mommsen for reducing Cicero to the level of a feuilletonist.11 He addressed this subject again a year later in a conversation when someone brought up the fact that Mommsen dubbed Sulla “a country squire.” To Wagner, such “analogies between positions and persons” seemed absurd. One simply could not say that if so-andso were alive today we would call him a journalist.12 For Wagner the great souls of the past were incommensurable with the mostly small minds of his day. Upon first meeting Mommsen, Wagner tells us (again through his oracle, Cosima) that Mommsen looked “as if he had put on a professor’s mask for a fancy-dress ball.” On June 3, 1879, Wagner complains that Mommsen was creating a “cult” of Julius Caesar (perhaps through his publication of Roman History [Ro¨mische Geschichte] and his championing of Bismarck).13 On August 15, 1880, when Mommsen’s scholarly library was destroyed by fire, Wagner cruelly joked that the fire should not have consumed Mommsen’s books but Mommsen’s body.14 Na¨gelsbach, Carl F. From 1872 to 1874 Cosima records that on several occasions she and Wagner met Carl F. Na¨gelsbach, a teacher at the Bayreuth Gymnasium, and that, at least on one occasion, Wagner began a conversation with Na¨gelsbach and a colleague from his school on the subject of philology. Although Wagner was apparently well pleased with the discussion, Cosima never records his dipping into Na¨gelsbach’s Homeric Theology in its Context (Die homerische Theologie in ihrem Zusammenhange), which was on Wagner’s shelves at Wahnfried.15 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Wagner met Friedrich Nietzsche rather late in life (May 19, 1869), after he had just completed the full orchestral score for Act II of Siegfried (February 23, 1869) and still had work to do on the score for Act III and all of Go¨tterda¨mmerung.16 In Cosima’s diaries she records her husband saying of Nietzsche, “He is the only living person, apart from Constantin Frantz, who has provided me with something, a positive enrichment of my outlook.”17 The fact that much of Wagner’s work on the Ring had already been completed by the time he met Nietzsche must

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somewhat downgrade the importance of Nietzsche’s influence on the Ring. To account for this I have restricted myself to discussing only those works that Nietzsche wrote while still under the influence of Wagner, either after he met him (when he was still on friendly terms with him) or before he met him (when he admired him from afar). Also, at the risk of sounding tautological, I would point out that, given the fact that Nietzsche’s thinking about the Greeks was originally influenced by Wagner, to some extent one can read Nietzsche’s earlier writings as a reflection of Wagner’s thoughts. Thus, while Nietzsche may not have influenced Wagner much, some of Nietzsche’s early works reveal Wagner’s influence and therefore what Wagner thought about certain subjects pertaining to the Greeks. As Cosima once pointed out, Nietzsche knew Wagner’s works thoroughly and respected them enough to quote from Opera and Drama in his lectures at the university.18 Nietzsche also alluded to Wagner both indirectly and directly in his published works. Both Wagner and Cosima found several of Nietzsche’s works especially enriching. First and foremost there was The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, whose ideas both Cosima and Wagner knew in various shapes (as, for example, through Nietzsche’s earlier Origin of Greek Tragedy)19 as well as in its finished state. Wagner apparently read and re-read the book.20 In a similar vein Wagner also read Nietzsche’s The Birth of the Tragic Concept21 and “Greek Music Drama.”22 At one point during their friendship, Nietzsche also made a present to Cosima and Wagner of his Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, of which “The Greek State” and “Homer’s Contest” specifically address Greek subjects.23 On the more philological side, Wagner was also familiar with Nietzsche’s Analecta Laertiana (The Analects of Laertius), a congratulatory address delivered by Nietzsche in Latin on the subject of several disputed passages in the Lives,24 and “Homer and Classical Philology,” a lecture on Homer that Nietzsche dedicated to Cosima and which she thought “excellent” (though she was later peeved at Nietzsche’s rededicating the same work to his sister, an action that made her husband think Nietzsche “addicted to

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treachery”).25 Wagner was also familiar with Nietzsche’s scholarship on the epic poets Hesiod and Homer, through his work on the Florentine Manuscript Concerning Homer and Hesiod, Ancestry and their Contest.26 In an even more straightforward and scholarly vein, there was his uncredited work on the index for The Rheinisches Museum for Philology, for which Wagner praised Nietzsche’s scholarly selflessness.27 On the subject of ancient philosophers, Nietzsche gave the Wagners “The Philosophers Preceding Plato”28 and Socrates and Greek Tragedy, which both Cosima and Richard “found very stimulating.”29 And finally, the Wagners were also acquainted with “The Future of Our Educational Establishments,” a work where Nietzsche uses the Greeks and Greek scholarship to talk about the state of education in nineteenth-century Germany.30 Ritschl, Friedrich. Although Wagner apparently made the acquaintance of Nietzsche’s teacher, Friedrich Ritschl, in Leipzig in 1868, and although he also mentions reading a letter that Nietzsche had received from his former teacher and subsequently passed on to his new mentor, Cosima does not mention Wagner ever reading one of Ritschl’s books on Plautus, Canticum und Diverbium bei Plautus, which he owned in the Wahnfried library.31 Rohde, Erwin. At about the same time that Wagner became acquainted with Nietzsche he also met Nietzsche’s friend and colleague, Erwin Rohde. In 1870, from May 11 to 13, Nietzsche brought Rohde to meet the Wagners in Tribschen. Over time, Wagner got to know and respect Rohde well enough to tell him how grateful he was to Nietzsche for having introduced them.32 An early supporter of Nietzsche and a formidable scholar in his own right, Rohde would go on to become the author of Psyche, a treatise on the Greek conception of the soul.33 During Wagner’s lifetime, the composer was sufficiently well acquainted with Rohde’s treatise on Pythagoras, Iamblichus’ Sources in his Biography of Pythagoras (Die Quellen des Iamblichus in seiner Biographie des Pythagoras) to make some esoteric joke referring to it on April 5, 1873.34 Both Cosima and Wagner were quite impressed by Rohde’s breadth of knowledge on all things Greek. Cosima even thought him more impressive than Nietzsche.35

Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew personally

Sillig, Julius. A figure who deserves special mention as making a deep impression on Wagner in his youth was his teacher at the Kreuzschule in Dresden, Julius Sillig, who prematurely predicted a bright future for Wagner as a classics scholar. Apparently something of a favorite with him, young Richard met often with Magister Sillig to show him his latest poems and metrical translations from the Greek. At one point Sillig had his favorite pupil recite at the lectern “Hector’s Farewell” from the Iliad. Sillig himself was a specialist on Pliny’s Natural History.36 Stein, Heinrich von. First mentioned in Cosima’s Diaries on September 30, 1879, Stein was Siegfried Wagner’s tutor for a year or two and came to Wahnfried after completing his degree in philosophy at Halle.37 Several years later he returned to his home university to become a professor there before moving on to Berlin.38 His principle influence upon Wagner’s understanding of the Greeks was through his translations of ancient Greek literature and through his Platonic-style dialogues featuring notable figures from antiquity. Stein collected twelve of these dialogues under the title of Heroes and the World (Helden und Welt). Wagner was sufficiently impressed with them to write a preface for the book.39 Those dialogues with which we know Wagner was familiar featured such ancient personages as Pompey,40 Solon, and Croesus. The dialogue called “Solon and Croesus” was enjoyed by both Cosima and Richard, especially because of its speech by “Solon on the Egyptians and their attitude toward life and toward Atlantis”41 and its depiction of Croesus as “a mixture of decency and excitability.”42 In a letter to Stein that also served as half of the preface to this book (the other half was Stein’s letter to Wagner that prompted this response), Wagner singles out the “Solon and Croesus” dialogue again, with special reference to a speech by the character of Solon. In essence the speech encourages one to value life and to place a premium upon action because, although perishable, our actions in this life are all that we have in order to reach the truths that lie beyond this life.43 Aside from these dialogues, Wagner was also interested in what Stein had to say about Aeschylus. On November 24, 1879, Wagner read Stein’s translation

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of the opening chorus or parodos of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. He praises the translation and said of the chorus, “That is religion.”44 Picking up this thread four years later, during lunch on the last full day of his life, among some of his final remarks were that “he had read Herr v. Stein’s article about the chorus in Aeschylus [i.e., the parodos in the Agamemnon] with great satisfaction.”45 The article apparently inspired him to exclaim, “My admiration for him [Aeschylus] keeps on growing, Zeus’s eagle for Artemis’s pregnant hare. . .” Wagner, Adolf. One of the most important or, at all events, earliest influences on Wagner’s understanding of antiquity was his uncle, Adolf Wagner, who had studied theology in school but eventually gave it up to devote himself to philosophy and philology.46 By all accounts Uncle Adolf was an independent scholar with very little positive to say about the pedantic ways of the academy during his lifetime, an opinion he may well have passed on to the young Richard. His most important contribution to classical scholarship was not a work on the Greeks but an anthology of the great Italian poets, including Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto. Mixing his Greeks and Romans, though, he called the work Parnasso Italiano.47 He also translated Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and often recited Sophocles for his young nephew’s enjoyment.48 As Wagner himself tells us, he had access to his uncle’s library and read widely and avidly but, as he himself admits, rather haphazardly.49 Weiss, Christian Hermann. Christian Hermann Weiss was a philosopher whom Wagner first met as a young man visiting his uncle Adolf. In Mein Leben Wagner speaks of becoming reacquainted with Professor Weiss when he was called upon to “read the Meistersinger libretto to excellent effect before a stately assemblage of professors.”50 He records that Weiss “interested him very much,” no doubt in part because Weiss “expressed particular amazement at my artistry as a reader.”51 Wagner must have felt particularly gratified by this compliment, given that his much admired Uncle Adolf was also famous for his skill at dramatic reading.52 With respect to Cosima’s diaries and Wagner’s reading, the name Weiss comes up again on October 12, 1881, during a conversation that found Wagner

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reminiscing about the good old days and how today’s generation “know nothing.”53 Weiss reappears yet again when Wagner recounts to his children what he learned from Weiss while he himself was still a boy. The incident is interesting because it once again reveals Wagner’s love of the Greeks and his less than enthusiastic embrace of the Romans. Cosima records the event in her diary: “R. relates that Prof. Weiss once said with an eloquent gesture that the Peloponnesian War had wiped out the flower of Greece and this had spoiled everything for R. – he had had no feeling at all for the Romans. ‘And, God forgive me for my sins, I was always on the side of genius, of Hannibal against the Romans, even though one must admire the energy with which, for instance, they swiftly built a fleet and with it beat the Carthaginians. Regulus, too, amused me.’”54 Finally, in his Wahnfried library Wagner also owned a copy of Weiss’s translation of Aristotle’s De Anima, though no mention is ever made of him or Cosima reading it. Wolzogen, Hans von. Baron Hans von Wolzogen, like Nietzsche, was someone who studied philology and philosophy and met Wagner late in the composer’s life. Also like Nietzsche, Wolzogen was interested in the Dionysian, having translated Euripides’ Bacchae. He read his preface for this translation to Wagner and Cosima on October 23, 1877.55 Ultimately Wolzogen seems to have been more captivated by Wagner than Nietzsche was, insofar as he went on to become the editor of the Wagner festival magazine, the Bayreuther Bla¨tter, and one of the keepers of “the Master’s” flame.56

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Appendix C: Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation or by reading

Not surprisingly, the list of secondary authors that one can prove Wagner knew personally is shorter than the list of those secondary authors that he knew only by reputation or by reading their work. Several of the scholars in this second category merit special attention because (1) their works could be found both in Wagner’s Dresden library and his Wahnfried library, and (2) they are mentioned often by Cosima in her diaries and/or by Wagner in his own writings. The two most important authors in this respect are Johann Gustav Droysen and Karl Otfried Mu¨ller and so I will dwell at length on them and their work, especially Mu¨ller’s Dorians (Die Dorier), Droysen’s History of Hellenism (Geschichte des Hellenismus), and his translation of Aeschylus. In general, though, it is interesting to note that two of these works focus neither on Athens at its most fertile historical moment nor on its most important civic art, tragedy. Instead, Droysen’s Hellenism focuses on Athens after its classical period, while Mu¨ller’s Dorians focuses on that culture that, in so many ways, stood against all that Athens stood for. As I argue throughout this book (but especially in the sections on Go¨tterda¨mmerung), Wagner was always intrigued by destruction and doom (Untergang) and by what a thing was not rather than what it was. Creuzer, Georg Friedrich. One of the ways we know that Wagner owned a copy of Friedrich Creuzer’s The Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient People, Particularly the Greeks (Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Vo¨lker, besonders der Griechen) is that on April 18, 1873, his son handed it to him while Wagner was arranging his library.1 A more concrete bit of evidence that he was familiar with Creuzer’s work is that on December 1, 1880, Wagner tells us that, although he thought Creuzer made some “mistakes,” he concedes nevertheless that Creuzer “saw something.”2 What that something was, though, Wagner does not elaborate. But this does seem to be somewhat of a change from 284

Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation

Wagner’s earlier estimation, when he apparently knew and loathed Creuzer’s Symbolism and was more persuaded by Johann Heinrich Voss’s rebuttal to it, Antisymbolism. Droysen, Johann Gustav. Among those classical scholars whom Wagner knew only by reputation, the one that probably influenced Wagner’s understanding of the Greeks more than any other was Johann Gustav Droysen. In his Dresden library Wagner owned copies of Droysen’s translations of Aeschylus and Aristophanes and seems to have learned much about tragedy from Droysen’s introduction and notes to his translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.3 Cosima records Wagner “speaking highly of Droysen” on June 28, 1880, saying that Droysen greatly influenced him when he was trying to teach himself about the Greeks. Just how highly Wagner thought of Droysen is borne out by a passage from Mein Leben. The text is worth quoting in full in order to grasp just how much Wagner thought he owed to this scholar: For the first time I now mastered Aeschylus with mature feeling and understanding. Droysen’s eloquent commentaries in particular helped to bring the intoxicating vision of Attic tragedy so clearly before me that I could see the Oresteia with my mind’s eye as if actually being performed, and its impact on me was indescribable. There was nothing to equal the exalted emotion evoked in me by Agamemnon; and to the close of The Eumenides I remained in a state of transport from which I have never really returned to become fully reconciled with modern literature. My ideas about the significance of drama, and especially of the theater itself, were decisively moulded by these impressions.4

Note that it is not so much the primary texts themselves, or rather Droysen’s translations of these texts, but Droysen’s scholarship, his “eloquent commentaries” that Wagner credits for his mature grasp of Attic tragedy. And it is this mature grasp of ancient theater which in turn helped Wagner mold many of the theoretical, political, and artistic ideas he used to Hellenize his Germanic material for the Ring. As far as Droysen’s actual translation of Aeschylus is concerned, it is often praised for its ability to capture the spirit of the original text.

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But interestingly, one might attribute this ability to an ahistorical rather than a historical drive on Droysen’s part. Droysen was a passionate nationalist who believed that with Prussian leadership and Prussian military strength Germany could be united. As Michael Ewans and others have realized, Droysen sought in Athens a parallel to his own time and saw in Aeschylus’ Oresteia the theatrical reflection of Athenian history, its hard won victories against the Persians and its struggle to unite internal oppositions.5 As Droysen remarks in the introduction to his translation of the Oresteia: Aeschylus has in his trilogy composed as it were a ceremony of expiation for the blood-guilt still present in the land, and at the same time a reconciliation between the savage parties which threatened to destroy the state, those who all ought to be of one mind in order to ward off the enemy at hand. But he finds the one true safety in the resurrection of the overthrown Areopagos.6

The “savage parties” that Droysen believed the Oresteia represented were the democratic and oligarchic factions that violently opposed each other and threatened to tear Athens apart from within. With respect to external forces or “the enemy at hand,” Droysen thought these were the Persians.7 With these roles and representations in place it is not difficult to recast Germany as Athens and Prussian rule as the key to solving Germany’s disorder. And that is how Droysen saw it. Significantly, it was in 1847 that Wagner was reading Droysen, during his own Dresden heyday of nationalist politics.8 In Droysen’s casting of Athens as an antique Prussia he modeled for Wagner the composer’s own ideological and aesthetic deployment of Athenian culture. Droysen’s theories also suggested to him the power of tragedy to unify dissent from within in order to withstand invasion from without. Seeing himself and the role that he and his operas could play in this German re-enactment of the Athenian search for unity, Wagner must have sometimes imagined the Ring as the new Oresteia and himself as the new Aeschylus come to save Germany from internal strife and external threat.

Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation

Beyond this vision of Greek culture and theater at its height, Wagner also read Droysen’s account of Alexander and the Greeks during the Hellenistic age: The History of Alexander the Great (Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen) and The History of Hellenism (Geschichte des Hellenismus). For Droysen, Alexander was a worldhistorical figure and so he opens his history proclaiming, “The name of Alexander signifies the end of one world epoch, and the beginning of a new one.”9 Because of this seminal work on Alexander, Droysen is regarded as the father of modern Alexander scholarship and credited with coining the word “Hellenism” in its present meaning as that period in Greek history after the fall of Athens, a time when Greece was Orientalized and the Orient Hellenized, the beginning of Greek culture’s bimillennial dominion over Western culture.10 Heretofore considered a decadent period in Greek history, Droysen considered this era to be a watershed moment when Alexander was finally able to unite the squabbling Greek city-states together under one rule against the Persians.11 It is in this internal unification against external forces that Droysen once again found parallels to nineteenth-century Germany, with its internecine squabbles which he hoped Prussia could quell and harmonize under a single rule.12 Relating these concepts back to Wagner and his own self-proclaimed role in the formation of German national identity, it is not going too far to say that Wagner saw in his Siegfried the Teutonic successor to Alexander. That Siegfried and Alexander were related in Wagner’s mind is supported by the fact that, in addition to the Achilles and Frederick Barbarosa dramas that Wagner contemplated before settling on Siegfried and the Ring, he also sketched out a drama called Alexander.13 These dramatic sketches were, as Curt von Westernhagen points out, the first fruits of Wagner’s study of the Greeks and German history.14 Unfortunately, no fragment of the Alexander sketch has yet been found. But given the fact that Siegfried is such an Achillean figure and the fact that Wagner knew from his reading of Droysen and others that Alexander claimed Achilles as one of his mythic ancestors (Heracles was another), some aspects of Alexander can also be found in Siegfried qua Achilles.15 For example, in Siegfried one finds such

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Achillean characteristics as heroic strength, unmatched even by the king of the gods, disdain for any authority beyond his own sword arm, and a mythic duty to bring about the end of the world.16 The link between Wagner and Droysen’s concept of Alexander as the unifier of Greece is further strengthened by Nietzsche, but in a somewhat roundabout way. Whether or not Nietzsche had read Droysen, it is clear from his “Wagner in Bayreuth” that he at least knew the way in which Droysen used the term “Hellenism” in the context of Alexander’s accomplishments. Nietzsche calls the dissemination of Greek culture “the twofold task of the great Alexander” because, according to Nietzsche, Alexander was responsible for the “Hellenization of the world and, to make this possible, the Orientalization of the Hellenic.”17 But in Nietzsche’s lifetime the philosopher thought that the Oriental effects on the Hellenic were beginning to fade, thus allowing its purer, more ur-Greek characteristics to assert themselves more strongly. Using the notion of a hidden bond connecting geniuses separated by epochs and ells, Nietzsche sees “between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, Aeschylus and Richard Wagner such approximations and affinities that one is reminded almost palpably of the very relative nature of all concepts of time: it almost seems as though many things belong together and time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the fact.”18 But unlike Droysen, rather than seeing Alexander and his era as one of unification, Nietzsche saw it here (and in the Birth of Tragedy) as a moment of separation and dissolution. Based on the rise of scholarship during Alexander’s era, the way in which Alexander Orientalized Hellenic culture, and the story of how Alexander cut the Gordian knot, Nietzsche saw Alexander as a divisive character whom, only recently, the West had begun to overcome. To further this overcoming, Nietzsche calls for “counter-Alexanders” who will reunite the many disseminated threads of Greek culture.19 Interestingly, Nietzsche’s description of the counter-Alexander coincides to some degree with Droysen’s description of Alexander as a grand unifier. Leaving aside this difference in nomenclature (albeit an antonymical one), Nietzsche’s meaning is clear. He is calling

Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation

for a hero capable of once again uniting Greek culture. And in Wagner he claims to see just such a hero. At least to the young Nietzsche, Wagner seems to possess “the mighty capacity to draw together and unite, to reach the remotest threads and to preserve the web from being blown away”; what’s more, “he unites what was separate, feeble and inactive”; and he “is master of the arts, the religious, the histories of the various nations, yet he is the opposite of a polyhistor, a spirit who only brings together and arranges: for he is one who unites what he has brought together into a living structure, a simplifier of the world.”20 No doubt, despite the fact that Nietzsche cast him as a “counter-Alexander,” Wagner must have been flattered by this picture of himself as some kind of Alexander or at least Alexander’s equal but opposite number. Wagner’s own understanding of Alexander and Droysen’s depiction of him can, as with so much else, be glimpsed in Cosima’s diaries. Writing about the events of a day when Wagner was revising Wotan’s last words to Erda ( July 3, 1869), Cosima records that Wagner was reading about Pyrrhus in Droysen’s history of Hellenism. In the midst of scolding Cosima that she “never read[s] the right things,” he tells her that Droysen’s history of Hellenism “makes us aware of how at its dissolution this unique people was, as it were, returning to its heroic age; the things which occur in it could have come straight out of Homer. Everything so dramatic, so impassioned, so violent. And Sparta emerges again.”21 And on March 6, 1870, while reading Droysen’s history of Hellenism again, Wagner remarks, “If I were locked up in a prison, I should ask only for Greek literature and things about Greece.”22 For, according to Wagner at least, it was “from them [the Greeks] we have learned happiness, they are without sin.”23 Finally, almost a decade later, on January 4, 1879, after speaking about Plutarch and keeping the German language pure from “un-German” words and phrases, Wagner again praises Droysen’s history, after having read it, apparently, for the last time.24 Duncker, Max. In his quasi-diary, the so-called Brown Book, Wagner records in his notes for the forthcoming Mein Leben that he began reading Max Duncker’s History of Antiquity somewhere

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between June and October of 1863.25 Following through on these notes, in Mein Leben itself Wagner records that, in 1863, to escape from his money problems while living in Penzing, near Vienna, he took “refuge in reading Duncker’s History of the Ancient World.”26 Finlay, George. As for George Finlay’s History of Greece from the Roman Conquest to the Present Time, Cosima records that Wagner read it and that he was “particularly pleased with the appreciation of Alexander.”27 Given this information, it seems that Wagner was most likely reading the volume entitled Greece Under the Romans (1844), since it contains a characterization of Alexander.28 Frantz, Constantin. Alongside Nietzsche, on January 5, 1871, Wagner puts Constantin Frantz into the category of living souls who have “provided me with something, a positive enrichment of my outlook.”29 On December 1, 1880, Wagner mentions Frantz again, this time in the context of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology and Creuzer’s Symbolism. Presumably, Frantz is mentioned here because he was an interpreter of Schelling.30 Gibbon, Edward. Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was part of Wagner’s Dresden library and his Wahnfried library.31 In Mein Leben Wagner mentions having read it, and the book appears again in Cosima’s diaries as part of the Wagners’ nightly readings beginning February 19, 1874.32 Grote, George. Wagner owned and apparently read George Grote’s History of Ancient Greece. He was, however, not impressed by its extreme length.33 In a conversation with Cosima about Gobineau on April 3, 1881, Wagner brought up the subject of long books, saying he would certainly rather re-read Mu¨ller’s Dorians than Grote’s History, presumably because Mu¨ller’s work was two volumes to Grote’s eight.34 Hermann, Gottfried. Recalling the classical scholars who influenced him while living in Dresden, on June 27, 1880, Wagner told Cosima that he not only read Droysen and Mu¨ller during this period, but also Gottfried Hermann, known mostly for his translations of Homer.35 Hu¨llmann, Karl Dietrich. Cosima mentions that on the morning of October 5, 1874, Wagner was reading a work by Karl Dietrich

Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation

Hu¨llmann called The Oracle of Delphi (Das Orakel von Delphi) about the origin of the name Hellas. As a bit of context, later that evening Wagner and Cosima read Xenophon’s Anabasis together.36 Given the way Wagner develops the analogy between his orchestra and the Delphic oracle, this book, along with Mu¨ller’s account of this seer in The Dorians, must have intrigued the composer. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Like Nietzsche and (to a lesser extent) Johann August Apel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing straddled the worlds of scholarship and art. As to evidence in Cosima’s diary concerning Lessing and specifically his thoughts on the Greeks, on January 21, 1869, we know that Cosima read a Lessing biography, G. E. Lessing: His Life and Works (G. E. Lessing, Sein Leben und seine Schriften) by Adolf Stahr.37 As far as Wagner himself is concerned, in a conversation with Cosima on January 15, 1870, he held forth on Lessing’s essay “How the Ancient Greeks Depicted Death” (“Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet”). During this lecturette Wagner argued that German art gives death “a cheerful and homely aspect, which is what makes ‘the Germans so original and closest in kind to the Greeks.’”38 A dozen years later Wagner put his own critical work on a par with Lessing’s Laocoo¨n, claiming on November 26, 1882, that his article, “The Destiny of Opera,” gave a perspective on music that was “completely new” and “probably as worthy of being considered a landmark for a new way of seeing things as Laocoo¨n in another territory.”39 Finally, in his essay, “What is German,” Wagner singles out Lessing as one of the two men (Winckelmann is the other) most responsible for giving Germany “the true idea of the Antique.”40 Moritz, Karl Philipp. On May 4, 1870, Wagner told Cosima about how his perceptions of the modern world were influenced very early by the illustrations in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Religious Mythology, or The Mythological Writings of the Ancient Greeks (Go¨tterlehre oder Mythologische Dichtungen der Alten): “All my later feelings about the ugliness of our present world stem from looking at the illustrations in Moritz’s mythology.”41 It was their depiction of the Greek desire for simplicity and the unadorned human form that, Wagner says, drew him to them. The nearly nude attitude of the Greek hero

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versus the modern-day soldier, with all his ribbons and buttoned-up attire; the simple olive wreath that crowned the ancient poet rather than the modern poet’s thirst for fame and fortune – these are the sorts of things Wagner claims to have admired the Greeks for in the illustrations for Moritz’s Mythology. Mu¨ller, Karl Otfried. Perhaps the second most influential classical scholar Wagner read but did not know personally was Karl Otfried Mu¨ller. Although Wagner was familiar with Mu¨ller’s History of the Literature of Ancient Greece it was his Dorians that he repeatedly read and discussed from his Dresden days onward. For example, as a postprandial entertainment on the afternoon of March 22, 1869, we find Wagner and Cosima reading a chapter from The Dorians.42 Eleven years later Wagner still recalled his debt to Mu¨ller’s work on Doric culture. In a conversation with Cosima on the subject of her growing acquaintance with Aeschylus he told her on June 27, 1880, that it was Mu¨ller who helped him see “the Doric style in a different light from the familiar Apollo Belvedere.”43 This juxtaposing of Mu¨ller’s work against the statue in the Vatican suggests that in Mu¨ller Wagner had found a much more historically accurate and less idealized version of this god whom Mu¨ller saw as the central divinity in the Doric pantheon. I make this point to show once again that Wagner often opted for a more scholarly and historicized view of antiquity than the neo-classicists. (Mu¨ller’s influence on Wagner is discussed more thoroughly throughout the body of this book.) Niebuhr, Barthold Georg. In Mein Leben Wagner briefly mentions having read Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s Roman History (Ro¨mische Geschichte).44 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. To Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Wagner gave a back-handed compliment on December 1, 1880, when mentioning his philosophy of mythology along with Creuzer’s Symbolism as works that, although flawed, at least had some substance, unlike the works produced by the scholars of Wagner’s era.45 Schlegel, Friedrich. On February 1, 1874, Cosima records that Wagner was reading Friedrich Schlegel’s The Greeks and Romans

Secondary scholarship by authors Wagner knew by reputation

(Die Griechen und Ro¨mer, 1797) and was particularly interested in the chapter on Diotima.46 Three years later, on March 13, 1877, she tells us that Wagner was reading Schlegel’s Poetry of the Greeks and Romans.47 On December 14, 1877, apparently after not being able to sleep, Wagner stole downstairs and read Schlegel’s Greeks and Romans again and was finally put to sleep by the distiches that Schlegel quotes.48 On December 18 and 21, 1872, Cosima mentions that she and Wagner were reading “Schlegel’s lectures on Roman comedy,” but she does not specify the origin of these lectures.49 Sismondi, Jean Charles. While in Italy, on October 6, 1876, Wagner began to read Jean Charles Sismondi’s The Republics of Italy (Les Re´publiques d’Italie). He was still reading it on December 24, at which time he had arrived back in Germany. While Sismondi may not have been a classics scholar per se, he does compare Greece and Rome in a way that pleased Wagner50 and inspired him to adopt and extend Sismondi’s theory of civilization.51 Voss, Johann Heinrich. On April 1, 1878, Wagner was reading Johann Heinrich Voss’s translation of the Iliad (1793). Cosima records that Wagner thought Voss’s “translation good but regrets that in his use of German he had not yet progressed beyond Lessing: words like ‘Palast’ [‘palace’] disturb him.”52 Based on the editor’s note to Cosima’s Diaries, we may take this criticism as an example of Wagner’s belief that Germany did not possess a “true literary language before Lessing (born 1729).” Perhaps Wagner found the word “Palast” too anachronistic to capture the spirit of mythic Greece or perhaps he disliked it because he thought it was based on a foreign word, a fault he also finds with Lessing.53 Wagner’s other criticism of Voss’s translation was that sometimes “the sense of a line is often transferred to another, which shows the illusory nature of verse. – ”54 In a vein that seems both critical and wondering, Wagner seems here to be talking about the way in which the meaning of verse has a kind of intangible spirit that flits back and forth between the lines and, in translation especially, sometimes may settle in a place far distant from its origins.

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Appendix C

Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb. In a letter to his nephew, Clemens Brockhaus, dated January 18, 1872, Wagner mentions a work for which Nietzsche had provided an index, namely, the journal Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie, edited by F. G. Welcker and F. Ritschl (Nietzsche’s former teacher).55 Wagner does not mention having read the journal, however, so we cannot be too certain how familiar he was with its contents. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Over the course of several nights in 1877 (August 5–10, to be precise) Wagner and Cosima read the second-century BCE Greek satirist, Lucian, as translated by Cristoph Martin Wieland. Both “The Carousal or the Lapiths” and “The Dream or the Cock” afforded them special pleasure. It seems that some of the characters in “The Carousal” reminded Cosima and Wagner of the professors of their day.56 Willamovitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von. Among Ulrich von Willamovitz-Moellendorf’s works, Wagner was perhaps most familiar with his pamphlet attacking Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy. Upon reading it, Wagner decried the way that specialist professors bred only more specialist professors and that no one received a humanistic education any more.57 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. In a letter to King Ludwig II dated February 23–4, 1869, Wagner tells his royal patron that his reading included not only the great poets, Schiller, Goethe, Calderon, and Shakespeare, but also “learned writings” by Johann Joachim Winckelmann.58 Along with Lessing, Wagner cites Winckelmann as essential in promoting the “true idea” of antiquity.59 From entries made in Cosima’s diaries on February 10–13, 1869, we know that Wagner owned and apparently read a copy of Winckelmann’s collected works.60 From another diary entry on February 16 of the same year we also know Wagner owned an atlas to Winckelmann’s work.61

NOTES

preface 1 Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner Sa¨mtliche Briefe, 16 vols., ed. Hans-Joachim Bauer and Johannes Forner (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag fu¨r Musik, 1991), vol. VIII, 153. Because this book is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience who may not be able to read German, I have used translations (sometimes mine but mostly the published works of others) for all German texts. But when it seemed like the reader could benefit from it, I have included the original German, especially in quotations from Wagner’s libretti. Here I have followed Millington and Spencer’s edition of the Ring libretto by putting the German and English in side-by-side translation. Regardless of what one might think about its quality, the libretto is poetry and deserves to be seen in its original form. The one major fault that musicologists and Germanists may find with these translations is my use of William Ashton Ellis’s edition of Wagner’s prose works. I do this partly out of necessity: no one other than Ellis has tried to translate all of these works into English. (And some might even maintain that Ellis has also not succeeded in this endeavor.) I have used these translations because I want all of my readers to be able to look up these quotations and see their contexts in order to challenge or agree with me. Wherever I (or in many cases Ellis) thought the inclusion of the original German would help clarify things, it has been included. 2 Richard Wagner, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987), 358. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. The letter goes on to mention that he ultimately found this essence to be “nothingness.” About this final judgment I will have more to say in the last section of this book. 5 The unfortunate consequence resulting from my pursuit of this second claim is that I risk losing the readership of certain classicists more

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6

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9

interested in an interpretation of contemporary scholarship on the Greeks than a rehash of stuff centuries old. Nonetheless, I hope that this book may still find an audience among academics, classically or otherwise inclined, interested in the ways that their scholarship can serve as a source of artistic inspiration. This last point has been made very infrequently by Wagner scholars. Apart from my own work, both here and in various previously published essays, the most extensive study of the interdependence of Wagner’s Hellenism and his anti-Semitism has been done by a classics scholar, Simon Goldhill, in his excellent essay, “Wagner’s Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism,” in Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson (eds.), Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 453–80. On the subject of genres and their boundaries Adorno observes, “Probably no important artwork ever corresponded completely to its genre.” Taking this observation to heart I have tried not to take my evolutionary scheme for the Ring – epic–lyric–drama – too seriously. More than an absolute truth this framework is meant to provide a forum for discussion and a way to, hopefully, pique the interest of the reader to ask new questions. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 199. My use of the word “identity” here and elsewhere is of course a contemporary interpretation of Hegel, not a translation of Hegel’s own vocabulary. To me the liberty seems justifiable given the way Hegel speaks of a people (Volk) as having their “own original spirit” or “national spirit” when referring to epic and “the spirit’s own subjective disposition” when referring to lyric poetry (Hegel, Aesthetics, 1045, 1113, and 1111). (Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Hegel are to G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). I realize that the idea of trying to reproduce Wagner’s perspective on the Greeks by reading what he read and acquainting myself with those scholars whom he knew is probably doomed. But doom here is not absolute but relative. Like Dante’s inferno it is layered, and I think my method is at least better than simply reading the Greeks without consulting any of the secondary material that Wagner consulted. To do

Notes to pp. xiii–1

10

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12

13

otherwise is to mistake one’s own perspective with truth and to think that one can read the past without the theoretical lenses, understood very broadly, of one’s own era. More complete lists of Wagner’s classical sources and scholarly acquaintance can be found in the appendices. To my knowledge these are the most extensive and detailed lists of their kind and I hope that, if this book achieves nothing else, future scholars interested in Wagner and the classics will find these appendices more useful than the usual generalizations – supported and unsupported – that previous scholars have provided. Here as elsewhere in this book the reference to a Greek national identity must be understood as a modern construction superimposed upon a much more complex picture of intersecting and competing racial, cultural, and political heterogeneity. For a full discussion of the term “nation” and its applicability to the ancient Greek world, see F. W. Walbank “The Problem of Greek Nationality,” in Thomas Harrison (ed.), Greeks and Barbarians (New York: Routledge, 2001), 234–56. I borrow this phrase and idea from the title of David Levin’s excellent anthology of opera theory, Opera Through Other Eyes, which examines opera from perspectives other than more traditional musicological ones. David J. Levin, Opera Through Other Eyes (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994). One of the ultimate goals of the use of the Greeks in this book is not only to figure out some truth about Wagner’s Ring but also to use them to open up Wagner’s text in particular and opera in general to new kinds of readings. The point is not just to publish interesting and accurate research but to offer a paradigm for future analysis. This work on the Ring is therefore not intended to be exhaustive. Some scenes are discussed in more detail than others because some scenes are simply more to the point.

i nt r o d u c t i o n 1 But whether or not one needs to be conversant with Wagner’s favorite authors in the original Greek is certainly debatable. Although I have read the Greek authors mentioned in this book in the original I do not think it at all necessary that the reader of this book needs a well-honed knowledge of ancient Greek.

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Notes to pp. 1–2 2 John Deathridge, “Wagner, the Greeks and Wolfgang Schadewaldt,” Dialogos: Hellenic Studies Review 6 (1999), 133. 3 The following list, together with the appendices, is, I believe, the most extensive list of primary and secondary classical influences on Wagner. I’ve gleaned these names from numerous sources, including Wagner’s own writings, Cosima’s diaries, and works about Wagner. With most cases that fall into this last category I have been able to substantiate the author’s claims by looking at Wagner’s writings or Cosima’s diaries. For a catalogue of Wagner’s Wahnfried library, see Wagner Museum, Catalogue of Wagner’s Library at Wahnfried, www.wagnermuseum.de/_engl/ downloads/Wahnfried-Bibliothek.pdf (accessed October 14, 2005). 4 It may be objected that Cosima’s diaries can tell us little about the way Wagner’s understanding of antiquity influenced the Ring because most of the Ring had already been completed by the time Cosima began keeping her diaries in 1869. However, reading the diaries leaves one with the impression that Wagner often seems to be taking Cosima’s education in hand and teaching her about those works that he thought she should know and which he also believed influenced “his artistic and earlier living ideals,” as he tells her when they begin their first “lesson” with Homer’s Odyssey (C. Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries 1869–1883: Complete Edition in Two Volumes, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), vol. i, 29). 5 If this book falls under any category within the discipline of classics it falls under the category of reception studies, a field, so I’ve been told, that has recently been generating much interest among classicists. The list of illustrious scholars working in this field can best be surveyed by reading Revermann and Wilson’s Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin. For the purposes of the present work, I found the most useful essay in this compilation to be Goldhill’s “Wagner’s Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism.” See also Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). I was particularly interested in his chapter comparing Strauss’s Elektra and Sophocles’ Electra (a subject which just happens to be the subject of my own M.A. thesis). On the more general subject of opera and the classics, see Marianne McDonald, Sing Sorrow: Classics, History, and Heroines in Opera (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).

Notes to pp. 2–4 6 I am reminded here of how Wagner called down upon himself the scorn and displeasure of many scholars of Germanic myth, from Jessie L. Weston to A. T. Hatto. These scholars generally reproved Wagner, sometimes quite harshly, for his “distortions” of his original sources. But by the same token, one might just as well complain that the Greek tragedians “distorted” their myths as well when they wrote their tragedies. (For an overview of those complaints lodged by scholars of Nordic myth, see Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner’s Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 83.) 7 Richard Wagner in a letter to Friedrich Nietzsche on December 6, 1872, cited in Michael Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15. 8 Richard Wagner, Mein Leben, trans. Andrew Gray, ed. Mary Whittall (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 14. 9 Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 16. 10 Wagner, Mein Leben, 209–10. 11 Ibid., 15. See also Carl Dahlhaus and John Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), 6. 12 Richard Wagner, “Autobiographical Sketch,” in The Artwork of the Future and Other Works (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 4. 13 Aristotle is listed only in Minna Wagner’s (Wagner’s first wife) abbreviated copy of the catalogue for Wagner’s Dresden library. Curt von Westernhagen, Richard Wagners Dresdener Bibliothek 1842–1849 (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1966), 111. 14 Westernhagen, Richard Wagners Dresdener Bibliothek, 84–110. 15 The Wahnfried library contains more classical authors than the ones listed here, but I have restricted myself to listing only those authors that Wagner mentions by name. 16 Although Hesiod is not mentioned in the catalogue of Wagner’s Dresden library, I am sure he knew Hesiod by then since one of his closest friends in Paris was Samuel Lehrs, who was, among other things, a Hesiod scholar. 17 On September 26, 1870 Cosima brings up the subject of Sappho. Wagner chides her that she will never be able to understand her poetry “and from there goes on to speak of the impossibility of our ever even envisaging the Greek world – Christianity has made of us something completely different, and between these worlds lies a chasm, an

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18

19 20

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22

unbridgeable one” (C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 276). While this may be yet another example of how careful Wagner was in his belief of the distance between the modern and the ancient world, yet, given the context of this exchange about Sappho, a poet who celebrates homosexual love, and Wagner’s mentioning of Christianity, a religion that denounces homosexual love, one wonders if this passage reflects Wagner’s sense of history or sexuality. Although they are not mentioned by name, no doubt by the time he lived in Bayreuth Wagner knew about other pre-Socratic philosophers because he had read Nietzsche’s “The Philosophers Preceding Plato.” See Appendix A for a brief account of what Wagner thought about those classical authors whose specific works he mentions by name. Strictly speaking, these authors would not always be considered classicists in our academic understanding of the word today. Some were schoolteachers, some philologists, others philosophers. But insofar as they possessed some scholarly authority on the subject of antiquity and influenced Wagner’s conception thereof, for convenience sake I will usually refer to these authors as classicists, classical scholars, and the like. See Appendix B for how and when Wagner met these authors, with which of their works he was familiar, and how he felt about these authors and their works. There is one name that other scholars claim influenced Wagner that I could not track down in any of the major sources: August Boeckh, a professor in Berlin who was a specialist on Pindar and who taught the famous art historian, Jacob Burkhardt. Though neither cite their original source for this claim, Schadewaldt mentions him in his lectures (Wolfgang Schadewaldt, “Richard Wagner and the Greeks,” trans. David C. Durst, Dialogos: Hellenic Studies Review 6 (1999), 117 and 119) and Lloyd-Jones repeats the name in his essay. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Duckworth, 1982), 129. Given his prominence as a scholar, Wagner would no doubt have run across the name at least in a footnote of Mu¨ller’s work on the Dorians and elsewhere. However, I have been unable to find any of his works in the catalogues for Wagner’s libraries or any mention of him in any of Wagner’s major works or Cosima’s diaries.

Notes to pp. 5–11 23 See Appendix C for Wagner’s opinion of these men and their contributions to classical scholarship. 24 For a brief summary of the argument for Wagner as Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian, see Roy Pateman, Chaos and Dancing Star (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 63–4. 25 Quoted in Sandra Corse, Wagner and the New Consciousness (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1990), 16–17. 26 Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” in Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 113. 27 Richard Wagner, “The Music of the Future,” in Judaism in Music, 308. 28 Wagner, Mein Leben, 429–30. 29 Corse, Wagner and the New Consciousness, 17. 30 James Treadwell, Interpreting Wagner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 104–5. 31 Deathridge, “Wagner, the Greeks and Wolfgang Schadewaldt,” 136. 32 Edouard Rod, “Wagner et l’esthe´tique allemande,” La revue contemporaine, litte´raire, politique, et philosophie, July 25, 1885 (rpt. Geneva, 1971), 305–15, quoted in L. J. Rather, Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 73. 33 Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 69. 34 Ibid., 74. 35 Corse, Wagner and the New Consciousness, 16. 36 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. i (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1. 37 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 7. 38 Ibid. 39 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Wagner in Bayreuth,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 200. 40 Thomas Mann, “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” in Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 103. 41 Whenever people bring up the subject of how Wagner fashioned his festival in Bayreuth after the Greek tragic festivals in Athens, they often seem to forget that, at least for a time, the festival in Athens featured new works by different dramatists who competed against each other for

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43 44

45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

prizes. In the Wagner Festival, by contrast, the repertoire is always Wagner and Wagner is always the winner. In Ewans’s estimation, for example, “Wagner thrived on his lack of formal knowledge. His mind was not a scholar’s, and he drew so much creative gain from his own personal vision of the Greek world precisely because he never submitted to the extremes of formal discipline which were demanded in the higher stages of a classical education in nineteenth-century Germany” (Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 16). Mann, “The Sorrows,” 101. See for example The New Grove Wagner, where noted critics Carl Dahlhaus and John Deathridge warn us that “Wagner varied the philosophical, aesthetic, and political theories he proclaimed in his writings entirely for the sake of his musical dramas, which in the last analysis were the only thing that truly possessed him. The works are the key to the writings, not vice versa” (87). See Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Weiner also recognizes that the neglect of Wagner’s aesthetic theories has often helped to justify another dismissal: Wagner’s nationalist and anti-Semitic ideology as expressed in these writings. Richard Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” in The Artwork of the Future and Other Works, 32. Wagner, Selected Letters, 357. Ibid. Ibid. Richard Wagner, Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 356, note. Here Wagner reasons that a one-to-one relationship between his aesthetic theory and his operatic practice simply could not happen because he believed that “the artwork of the future” could not be written by any single artist, but rather by the collective community of the German Volk. I will discuss this passage more fully in chapters 10, 11, and 12. Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 70. Ibid., 69–70. It should also be noted that this concept was first expressed in Italian long before Wagner translated it into German. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Italian camerata aimed to create a new

Notes to pp. 16–19

54 55 56

57

58 59

kind of artwork in which drama was expressed through music. They baptized their creation dramma per musica (“drama through music”). Later, Christoph Willibald Gluck also claimed that drama was the paramount goal of opera. Seen from this historical perspective, Wagner is just one of the latest – and perhaps the most voluble – artist-critics to discuss the relationship between opera and drama. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 32. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 17. Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1. It should be noted, though, that even Wagner himself had some difficulties with the term and, importantly, he did not devise it. See Richard Wagner, “On the Name ‘Music-drama,’” in Actors and Singers, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 263–84. As models for opera, both narrative in general and the novel in particular have been addressed by several critics recently. See Catherine Cle´ment, Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (London: Virago Press, 1989); Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form; Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System to Garcı´a Ma´rquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1996); Herbert Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and David Levin, Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungenlied: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 72. On the subject of Wagner and the Greeks, see my bibliography for a complete list. The major works include M. Owen Lee, Athena Sings (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003), Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1967); Pearl Cleveland Wilson, Wagner’s Dramas and Greek Tragedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919); Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts; Ulrich Mu¨ller “Wagner and Antiquity,” in Ulrich Mu¨ller and Peter Wapnewski (eds.), Wagner Handbook (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 227–35; Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus; Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Hellas und Hesperion. Gesammelte Schriften zur Antike und zur neueren Literatur in 2 Ba¨nden (Stuttgart: Artemis-Verlag, 1970). Parts of this last work have been recently translated by David C. Durst, with a

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60 61 62

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65 66 67

response by John Deathridge (Dialogos, 108–40). While the response by Deathridge is quite short (only eight pages), he is one of the only authors to address the ideological motives behind Wagner’s use of antiquity. He tackles the subject again at greater length throughout his book, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). As mentioned earlier, Simon Goldhill is another. Richard Wagner, “A Communication to my Friends,” in The Artwork of the Future and Other Works, 334. Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 40. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994), 17. I am also indebted here to David Levin’s The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, which quotes the pertinent text from Lacoue-Labarthe (5). By linking Nazism and Wagner through this concept I do not mean to equate Wagner’s aestheticization with Hitler’s. No doubt there are similarities and no doubt Hitler borrowed certain aesthetic ideals from Wagner. The relationship between Wagner and the Nazis is far too complex to be dealt with in this book, whose historical lens is focused on the past rather than the future, what preceded Wagner rather than what followed. As George L. Mosse argues in The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, the nineteenth-century German fascination with the Greek rather than the Latin origins of European culture can be understood as a nationalistic choice to avoid all things Romantic, in the linguistic meaning of that word. For more on this subject, see Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Richard Wagner, “Herodom and Christendom,” in Religion and Art, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 278. Richard Wagner, “Letter to H. V. Stein,” in Religion and Art, 331. Richard Wagner, “Open Letter to Friedrich Nietzsche,” in Actors and Singers, 293. The fascinating irony with respect to Mendelssohn and the Greeks is that since 1827, when he became Mendelssohn’s tutor, Johann Gustav Droysen was a close, personal friend of Mendelssohn. Thus, the scholar whom Wagner owed most for his mature understanding of Aeschylus

Notes to pp. 23–5 and Greek tragedy, as well as his understanding of Greece’s role in the world history of liberty, was not only friends with but the tutor of the very man whom Wagner thought incapable of grasping the spirit of the Greeks because of his Jewish background. For more on Droysen’s relationship to Mendelssohn, see Michael P. Steinberg, “The Incidental Politics to Mendelssohn’s Antigone,” in R. Larry Todd (ed.), Mendelssohn and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 137–57. 68 For another interesting bit of philology, xenophobia, and cultural correspondences between the Greeks and the Germans, on several occasions Wagner mentions how much he likes Luther’s use of the word “undeutsch” to translate the Greek “barbaros” in 1 Corinthians 14:11. For the Greeks, anyone who did not speak Greek was considered barbaric. They listened to them speaking and could make out nothing more than “bar bar bar bar etc.,” or so the story goes. What Luther’s translation implies is that anything that is not German is barbaric. See Richard Wagner, “Shall We Hope?” in Religion and Art, 123–4, and Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 303–4. 69 Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 90ff. 70 Although Wolfgang Schadewaldt was one of the most important authors to recognize that Wagner’s work was “influenced by the conclusions of scholarly research” and that his Hellenization differed from the “creative figures of the neo-humanist tradition up to and including Goethe,” Schadewaldt did little to explore the possibilities of this relationship beyond citing the usual connections between Droysen and Wagner. Schadewaldt, “Richard Wagner and the Greeks,” 119. Schadewaldt also did little to explore the politics behind Wagner’s use of the Greeks, merely repeating the idea that Wagner’s Hellenization only affected his “thought and art,” that is, the structure and content of his works rather than their political intention (110 and 131). Although Michael Ewans also argues that we must take Wagner’s secondary source reading into account, he too is only interested in comparing Droysen and Wagner. In fact, he rather overstates the case for Droysen’s influence on Wagner when he claims that “it is almost certain that Droysen’s introduction and notes [to his translation of the Oresteia] were his only reading on Aeschylus, apart from the translation itself.” Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 27. Throughout his life Wagner read widely where the subject of Aeschylus was concerned: from Aristophanes’ comic but

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71

72 73

74

75 76

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79 80 81

indispensable portrait of Aeschylus in the Frogs to Heinrich von Stein’s article on the eagle chorus in the Agamemnon, which Wagner read before his death. That Wagner’s work in turn serves as the scholarly subject for the present study (and countless others like it) only completes this circle of influence, reinforcing the sense that scholarship and art can exist in cyclical symbiosis rather than competitive predation. For example, see below where, in “Homer’s Contest,” Nietzsche seems to be more in favor of connecting creativity and scholarship. This image appears in a footnote to Nietzsche’s lecture series on prePlatonic philosophers. In this same footnote Nietzsche also mentions Wagner, somewhat cryptically I think, as someone working against monumental art. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. Greg Whitlock (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 3. Wagner was not the first to propagate the idea that some kind of “special bond” existed between Greece and Germany. Johann Heinrich Voss, an influential classical scholar and the translator of an edition of Homer that Wagner owned, argued that there existed a special affinity between the Greek and German languages. Duane W. Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” Ars Musica Denver 4:2 (1992), 5. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 550. Richard Wagner, “German Art and German Poetry,” in Art and Politics, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 43. Richard Wagner, “What is German?” in Art and Politics, 155–6. In his otherwise informative catalogue of Greek influences upon Wagner, Duane Roller in his article, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” gets it wrong when he says that many of Wagner’s ideas “went back to Winckelmann and Goethe” (7). Or rather, he overstates the case, since some of Wagner’s ideas did go back to the previous generation’s Greek ideal, but Wagner was also deeply invested in exploring the concept of the Greeks as quite Other to modern civilization. Schadewaldt, “Richard Wagner and the Greeks,” 111–12. Richard Wagner, “The Public in Time and Space,” in Religion and Art, 88. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 141.

Notes to pp. 28–40 82 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” in Prefaces to Unwritten Works, trans. and ed. Michael W. Grenke (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005), 81. 83 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” in Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. iii, trans. J. M. Kennedy, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 149. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 168.

chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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Hegel, Aesthetics, 1051. Ibid., 1044. Ibid., 1042. Ibid., 1037. Ibid., 1042. Ibid., 1045. Ibid. M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 13–15. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1056. Ibid., 1056–7. Ibid., 1056. Ibid., 1055. Ibid., 1059. Ibid., 1048. Ibid., 1061. Ibid., 1062. Ibid., 1061. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. David Grene and Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), line 936. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1061. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 32. Karl Otfried Mu¨ller, The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, trans. Henry Tufnell and George Cornewall Lewis (London: J. Murray, 1839), 223ff.

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Notes to pp. 40–8 22 Ibid., 326. 23 Michael Hughes, Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945 (London: Edward Arnold, 1988), 144. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 143–5. 26 Ibid., 49–50. 27 Mu¨ller, The Dorians, 399–401. 28 Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? 150. See also Jonathan Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8, and Goldhill, “Wagner’s Greeks,” 462–3. 29 From his reading of Plutarch and perhaps other sources, Wagner was familiar with the Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, and used one of his famous epigrams as a motto for his unfinished sketches and fragments of 1849–51: “The nation that honours not its past, has no future.” Richard Wagner, “Sketches and Fragments,” in Jesus of Nazareth and Other Writings, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 342. 30 Mu¨ller, The Dorians, 402–3. 31 Wagner, “What is German?” 158. 32 Michael P. Steinberg, “Music Drama and the End of History,” New German Critique 69 (1996), 164. 33 Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nu¨rnberg, trans. Susan Webb (New York: The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc., 1992), 252–3. For this observation I am indebted to David Levin, who pointed it out during a class I once took with him. 34 Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Der Nibelungen Lied, p. xi, quoted in Levin, The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, 6. 35 Levin, The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, 6.

chapter 2 1 Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art, 261. 2 Ibid. 3 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1982), 50. 4 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), 390–1.

Notes to pp. 49–52 5 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 5. Throughout this discussion of the Odyssey I am of course indebted to Erich Auerbach’s famous characterization of Greek epic in Mimesis. 6 Mu¨ller, The Dorians, vol. ii, 384. 7 And as for being “feminine” in the above-defined sense, both here and elsewhere Wagner’s representations of wounds are even leakier than Homer’s, since his wounds do not tend to completely heal. Indeed the later Wagner seems obsessed with wounds, especially those that remain open for a long period of time and only close when the opera itself is over. Or rather, since the possessors of these wounds die in the end, the lesions do not so much close up as dry up. Think of the third act of Tristan und Isolde and the delirium brought on by Tristan’s bleeding, or Amfortas in Parsifal, who bleeds throughout almost the entire opera. Siegfried’s wound is only the first of these famous wounds and, really, the slightest. 8 As seen here, the more it spirals out of control, beyond the centrifugal force of time, epic blurs the lines between itself and romance. As Conrad notes in his perceptive chapter on operatic epic and romance in Romantic Opera and Literary Form, epic is conclusive, romance inconclusive. Epic deals in battles, while romance deals in experience: “Hence the cyclical structure of medieval romance, in which knights cross paths or adventure in circles, every return home being merely a preparation for another journey” (10). In this sense it is not only the Ring that seems romantic but also the Odyssey. Like Baroque compositions built upon endless circles of fifths, the Odyssey is a concatenation of episodes whose final ending can only be arbitrary, a deus ex machina brought about through Athena. And even that ending is undercut by our knowledge that Odysseus’ homecoming is only the beginning of another journey. Remember, it is prophesied that Odysseus must once again leave Ithaca, lugging an oar and shouldering his way toward another adventure, this time on land, to a place where the people will not know what an oar is and confuse it with some kind of farming implement. 9 I am adopting this very useful term from Andrew Crisell’s book, Understanding Radio, where he uses it to refer to the transformation of the signs used in visual theater into those used in aural theater. Crisell, Understanding Radio (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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Notes to pp. 52–6 10 Like Wagner, Mikhail Bakhtin in the twentieth century also proclaimed the death of epic. In his essay “Epic and Novel” Bakhtin conceives of the epic genre as a finished and closed form, “a genre that has not only long since completed its development, but one that is already antiquated” (3). Epic now exists, argues Bakhtin, only as a historical force. The word “form” in regard to this genre can no longer be used as a verb; now it can only be used as a noun to denote the concatenation of certain generic elements. Unlike Bakhtin, however, for whom the novel is the living and developing poetic form par excellence, for Wagner this exemplary form is the drama. 11 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 119. 12 Ibid., 60. 13 Wagner, Selected Letters, 232. 14 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 119. Note also that, aside from Scott, each poet mentioned here is a linguistic descendant of Rome. 15 Richard Wagner, “On Poetry and Composition,” in Religion and Art, 138. 16 Richard Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” in The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, 135. 17 Ibid., 135. If it were not so out of character, this could be a prime example of self-ironizing on Wagner’s part. An epic poem written and then set to music by a composer with a “bone to pick with opera”? Could there be a better summary of the Ring’s raison d’eˆtre? 18 Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 26. 19 Ibid. 20 In light of this it is significant that Hagen, Wagner’s “Jew” in Go¨tterda¨mmerung, is put in control of forgetfulness and memory. Almost his very first action in this opera is to steal Siegfried’s memories in order to make him forget about Bru¨nnhilde so he can fall in love with Gudrune (Siegfrieds Tod, 9). And one of his last actions is to restore Siegfried’s memory in order to provide a pretence for killing him (Siegfrieds Tod, 44). For Wagner it is just this sort of emphasis on the past that aligns epic narrative with Judaism. 21 Wagner, Selected Letters, 237. 22 Ibid., 238. 23 George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on The Niblung’s Ring (New York: Brentano’s, 1929), 109. 24 Ibid.

Notes to pp. 57–9 25 Wagner, Sa¨mtliche Briefe, 188. 26 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 161. 27 For example, Conrad’s observations on Wagner and epic in Romantic Opera and Literary Form, although imaginative and insightful, largely overlook the problematic relationship between Wagnerian theory and practice. So do those of Herbert Lindenberger in Opera: The Extravagant Art. 28 Though justified to a certain extent, the danger in this kind of skepticism is that it ultimately allows the critic to dismiss whichever of Wagner’s theoretical writings do not support his or her own interpretation of the musical works. After all, when we say that Wagner (or anyone else for that matter) did not practice what he preached, what we ultimately mean is that our interpretations of his practice do not jive with our interpretations of his preaching. Perhaps the most prominent contemporary critics that have advocated this approach are Carl Dahlhaus and John Deathridge. In their otherwise indispensable New Grove Wagner, these two critics claim, “Wagner varied the philosophical, aesthetic, and political theories he proclaimed in his writings entirely for the sake of his musical dramas, which in the last analysis were the only thing that truly possessed him. The works are the key to the writings, not vice versa” (87). 29 Taken to its somewhat pragmatic extreme, we may conclude from this that even things that are by nature detestable can be put to good use. It seems this idea became something of a central theme in the later Wagner. Like Amfortas in Parsifal, whose wound can only be healed by the spear that smote him, in the Ring Wagner may be trying to heal German drama by deploying exactly what he believed to be destroying it, namely, undramatic and overly intellectual narrative. Interestingly, even this notion of being healed by the offending weapon may have originated with the Greeks. As Hugh Lloyd-Jones argues in his chapter on Wagner in Blood for the Ghosts, it was Achilles who was once asked to heal Telephus with the same spear he used to wound him. The subject of this myth may have been suggested to Wagner by his reading of Goethe’s Tasso (131). 30 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 161. 31 James Treadwell, “The Ring and the Conditions of Interpretation: Wagner’s Writing, 1848 to 1852,” Cambridge Opera Journal 7:3 (November 1995), 230–1. 32 Levin, Disavowal, 11.

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Notes to pp. 59–65 33 To understand better what I mean here by “Wagner the ideologue” one may compare this to Nietzsche’s famous suggestion that Wagner was primarily an actor, not a musician, theorist, or dramatist. Or, to use an ancient Greek word for actor, Wagner was a “hypocrite.” 34 Wagner, Selected Letters, 238. 35 Though even Homer qua poet came in for criticism once in a while. 36 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 155. 37 Ibid., vol. i, 293. 38 Wagner, “On Poetry and Composition,” 138. 39 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 309. Implying a similar “dramaticness” about Homer, though from a more negative perspective than a positive one, in an earlier discussion with Cosima, Wagner tells her that all of the great poets were dramatists, excepting Dante and Homer (vol. i, 42). The implication here is that poetry and drama are somehow allied, one genre shading off into the other. By association, then, Homer, as a great poet also partakes of the dramatic. 40 Perhaps it might also be worth mentioning here that Wagner imagined that the Homeric epics, at their height, were musical works sung live and performed before an audience. 41 Wagner, “On Poetry and Composition,” 139. 42 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 162–3. 43 Ibid., 248. 44 Corse, Wagner and the New Consciousness, 108. 45 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 293. 46 Ibid., vol. ii, 384.

chapter 3 1 Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form, 9. 2 As is well documented, this is not what Wagner called his technique. The name came afterwards, applied by such Wagnerians as Curt von Westernhagen. The name has, however, stuck, and I will call it this throughout to avoid confusion. 3 Among such analyses I include David J. Levin’s The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic, and Peter Conrad’s Romantic Opera and Literary Form, not to mention the previous chapters of the present work.

Notes to pp. 65–7 Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 145. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 53. Ibid. Ibid. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 335. I am indebted here to Abbate’s discussion of the Mauerschau. See Abbate, Unsung Voices, 63. 10 See also Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 111–12. As previous critics have pointed out, Wagner’s use of orchestral narration is also one of the origins of over-determination in the Ring. Since we can already see and hear the stage action for ourselves, the orchestra as Mauerschau is redundant, or at least a misnomer. Because we already understand the opera through other senses, we do not need the leitmotifs to retrieve or redeem its meaning for us. (Although they probably did not intend it to be understood in this way, it is in this sense of retrieval or redemption that one might also understand Stravinsky and Debussy’s witty disparagement of Wagner’s leitmotifs as “visiting cards” or “check-room numbers”). 11 In claiming that Wagner’s orchestra takes on the role of narrator and interpreter, this argument may seem to point to the orchestra as a dramatic rather than an epic element, insofar as these interpretive functions were, in Wagner’s era, often recognized as the duty of the Greek tragic chorus. And Wagner may also have regarded his chorus in this light. In Opera and Drama, for example, he explicitly links the modern orchestra with the Greek tragic chorus, claiming that one evolved out of the other: “The Chorus of Greek Tragedy has bequeathed to us its emotional significance for the drama in the modern Orchestra alone, and therein, free from any hampering, has evolved to an immeasurable wealth of utterance. . .” (335–6). To this evolutionary account of the orchestra’s origins, Wagner also adds – as an etymological aside to strengthen his point – that even the German word “Orchester” is a transliteration of the Greek word for chorus, orwZstra. (See chapter 11 for a fuller discussion of tragedy and the tragic chorus in the Ring.) However, it is important to remember that philosophers like Hegel (Aesthetics, 1151) and Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy, 55–60) along with Wagner himself, also recognized another evolutionary account of the chorus. All three of these authors espouse the theory that Greek tragedy 4 5 6 7 8 9

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first evolved out of the chorus, as both the lyric and the epic forebear of tragedy. More recently, Jean-Paul Vernant has argued that even in tragedy itself the chorus is not entirely cut off from its epic and lyric roots. The extravagance of its language and the poetic meters of its odes are lyrical, Vernant argues, while its use of narrative and myth is epic (24–5). Thus it should not surprise us that Wagner’s orchestra not only has epic but also dramatic and, for that matter, even lyrical functions. In short, the chorus’s epic interpretive functions are not irreconcilable with its dramatic functions. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece: Some of the Social and Psychological Conditions,” in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (eds.), Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 23–8. For a more exhaustive list of the narrative capabilities of Wagner’s orchestra, see David B. Greene, Listening to Strauss Operas: The Audience’s Multiple Standpoints (New York: Gordon Breach, 1991), 23–8. Ibid., 24. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Before these comparisons between Wagner’s orchestral narrator and the Judeo-Christian God get out of hand, we should note that there is at least one significant difference between these two personae. Robert Scholes’s and Robert Kellogg’s observations in The Nature of Narrative concerning third-person omniscient literary narrators apply equally well to Wagner’s third-person omniscient musical narrator. Like the narrators of fiction, Wagner’s orchestral narrator “does not ‘know’ simultaneously but consecutively. He is not everywhere at once, but now here, now there, now looking into this mind or that, now moving on to other vantage points. He is time-bound and space-bound as God is not” (272–3). While the Judeo-Christian God’s omniscience is inseparable from His omnipresence, the perspectives embraced by the Wagnerian orchestral narrator are fragmented. More like Zeus, Wagner’s orchestral narrator has the limited omniscience of a pagan god: he cannot be everywhere at once or know everything simultaneously (267–79). And, also more like the pagan than the Christian god, Wagner’s third-person narrator may be untrustworthy or even a liar. There is no reason why we must completely trust his perspective, especially when at times it

Notes to pp. 69–74

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

seems so repugnant. See Robert Kellogg and Robert Scholes, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). Abbate, Unsung Voices, 33. Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold: Piano-vocal Score, trans. Frederick Jameson and arr. Karl Klindworth (New York: G. Schirmer, 1904), 113. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 257, note 3. Wagner, Das Rheingold: Piano-vocal Score, 47–8. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 257, note 3. Ibid., 33. Wagner, Das Rheingold: Piano-vocal Score, 85. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 1. Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 114. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 335. Ibid. If the word “slogan” as applied here to Wagner’s leitmotifs conjures up negative connotations – such as commercials, cliche´s, sloganeering, and reiteration for the purposes of brainwashing – these connotations are not accidental. As Adorno recognized, Wagner’s leitmotifs tend to commodify music, turning it into eminently memorable snatches of melody. His motifs sometimes resemble jingles and it is only fitting perhaps that the most jingoistic and memorable of all his motifs – his music for the “Ride of the Valkyries” – has been used so many times to sell so many different products and present so many different perspectives. Even Wagner’s libretto may be understood as a commodification of language. Adorno in In Search of Wagner mischievously suggests that “Wotan’s slogan – Whoever fears the tip of my spear / Shall never pass through the fire! (Valkyrie, Act III, sc. 3) – could easily be supplemented by copy in praise of a piece of equipment that would enable the cautious but resolute buyer to pass through the fire notwithstanding” (91). Although Wagner’s handling of his musical motifs is certainly much subtler than commercial or political jingles and slogans, nevertheless they are one of their artistic forebears. Even film music – especially by the more successful film composers like Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin, and, more recently, Ennio Morricone and John Williams – is deeply indebted to the Wagnerian technique of “tagging” certain characters, ideas, and/or scenes with highly memorable

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Notes to pp. 74–7 leitmotifs. Regardless of Wagner’s subtle changes of color, instrumentation, and harmony in the repetition of these leitmotifs, they aim at an immediate unity with what they symbolize and thus promote a kind of aesthetic degeneration to the mere slogan. Once again, Adorno: “The degeneration of the leitmotiv is implicit in this [aesthetics of immediate unity]: via the ingenious illustrative technique of Richard Strauss it leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotiv is to announce heroes or situations so as to help the audience to orientate itself more easily” (46). Whether or not Wagner intended this kind of immediate interpretative orientation for his audience, that is typically how many audience members follow his operas. See Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981). 30 Philip Rieff, “Aesthetic Functions in Modern Politics,” in The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 178. 31 Richard Wagner, Parsifal, Act I, scene 1. 32 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 268. 33 Ibid., 272. 34 Ibid., 349–50. 35 Richard Wagner, “Sketches and Fragments,” in Jesus of Nazareth and Other Writings, 373. 36 Wagner, “On the Name ‘Music-Drama,’” 301–4. 37 Richard Wagner, “The Festival-Playhouse at Bayreuth,” in Actors and Singers, 335. Through this image one can re-read Wotan’s scene with Erda in Siegfried, where she appears out of the ground and prophesies in an eerie blue light, as a paradigm for how Wagner imagines operatic music and especially operatic music at Bayreuth to work. Picking up on this thought about music, motherhood, and the relationship between music and drama, in his essay, “On the Name ‘Music-Drama,’” Wagner calls music the “very mother-womb of Drama” (302). 38 Mu¨ller, The Dorians, vol. i, 254–5 and 324–5. 39 Ibid., vol. ii, 387. 40 Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 15, note 6. 41 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 54. 42 See also Thomas Mann in “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” where he refers, somewhat disparagingly, to Wagner’s “technical device of the Homeric leitmotif” (93). 43 Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 111.

Notes to pp. 77–81 44 Consider the epithet “wine-dark sea” as it is used in the Iliad. Superficially it is “merely” a striking image of the ocean. But now imagine Achilles as he gazes out over the waters, contemplating the slaughter of so many youths for the vanity of one man. Suddenly the “wine-dark sea” is dyed with the blood of the dead, the pointless tide rushing in and out, telling Achilles of life’s futility. Seen in this way, the epithet is really anything but simplistic. 45 The discussion of Homeric epithets is a long and interesting one and various theories have been promulgated by leading classicists. For example, Milman Parry and his student, Albert Lord, whose Singer of Tales is considered a classic in classical studies. More recently, Egbert Bakker in “From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics” (a paper delivered at the 2004 ALSC Conference in New Orleans) provided a more performative way of looking at epithets and epigraphs that I have found very useful for understanding the epic aspects of Wagner’s leitmotifs. See below my further discussion on epigraphs, both those put to music and those set in stone. 46 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1040. 47 Ibid. 48 Mu¨ller, “Wagner and Antiquity,” 229. 49 Herodotus, Histories, Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), vol. ii, 289–91. 50 The Greek Anthology, Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), vol. i, 480–1. 51 Herodotus, Histories, vol. ii, 290–1. 52 Wagner, Das Rheingold: Piano-vocal Score, 55. 53 Ibid. 54 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 70. 55 Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 93. 56 Wagner, Das Rheingold: Piano-vocal Score, 41–2. 57 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 67. 58 Wagner, Das Rheingold: Piano-vocal Score, 54. 59 In a recent English National Opera production of the Ring this truth is also reinforced by the stage action. Between scenes we see Alberich descending to Nibelheim as Wotan ascends toward Valhalla. As they pass each other by – one going up, the other going down – the similarity between these opposites is unmistakably pointed to.

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Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 92. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1057. Cooke, I Saw the World End, 89. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1041. Schadewaldt, “Richard Wagner and the Greeks,” 112. While it cannot be absolutely substantiated that Wagner ever read Hesiod’s Works and Days, I find it easy to believe that he did, given its story of, in Wagnerian terms, folk versus culture. We do know, however, that both as a boy and an adult he read Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolism, which discusses the Eastern origins of Homer and Hesiod. Also, given his familiarity with Johann Heinrich Voss’s and Karl Ottfried Mu¨ller’s work, it is possible he read Voss’s Hesiods Werke und Orfeus der Argonaut and Mu¨ller’s Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, which again, like Creuzer’s and Voss’s work, deals with the subject of Hesiodic mythology. Hesiod, Works and Days, Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929), 37–41. It is this second sort of Eris that Nietzsche praises in his “Homer’s Contest,” which Wagner knew from Nietzsche’s Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books. I am using Nietzsche’s quotation of these lines. Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” 84–5. Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 42–106. Ibid., lines 107–201. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 91. Ibid. Ibid., 91–2. George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 17. However, insofar as Wagner was very interested in the German and Jewish bodies of his heroes and villains, which is what Weiner’s Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination contends, the composer was to this degree interested in factual reality. Interestingly, Greek philosophy also begins with water and with the idea that water is the origin of all things. This is Thales’ idea on the origins of the cosmos sans anthropomorphic divinities. Nietzsche points this out in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, a work known to Wagner.

Notes to pp. 90–3

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan, reprint of 1962 edition (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998), 38. Richard Wagner, “Religion and Art,” in Religion and Art, 216. Moreover, theogonies depict the gods not only in their natural and original state, but also in a state of development away from primordial nature and toward culture. In this way the poet anthropomorphizes divine evolution in terms of human cultural evolution. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 118. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1072. In this sense Wagner’s music imposes on his characters the force of myth. As Adorno argues in “Bourgeois Opera,” Wagner’s compositional technique achieves an end that is diametrically opposed to all previous opera. In pre-Wagnerian opera, “music intervenes in and transforms fate’s blind, inescapable ties to nature (as they are represented in Western myths) . . .” (33). Wagner, however, “delivered opera a prey over to myth” (35). At least according to Adorno, in Wagner’s operas music no longer functions in its original Orphic capacity as the freer of human beings from the bonds of fate and death. Instead of freeing us from these bonds, Wagner tightens them. See chapter 6, where I discuss this liberating force of opera as a lyric element and how Wagner both employs and subverts this force. See also Theodor Adorno, “Bourgeois Opera,” in David J. Levin (ed.), Opera Through Other Eyes (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994), 25–43. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1043. Ibid., 1044. Ibid., 1043–4. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 163. Francesco Orlando, “Mito e storia ne ‘L’anello del Nibelungo,’” in Intersezioni, August 1983, 351–2, as quoted by Moretti in Modern Epic, 104. For transgression across multiple borders, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression: “The high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains – psychic forms, the human body, geographical space, and the social order – is a fundamental basis for mechanisms of ordering and sense making in European cultures” (3). Any transgression of these “rules of hierarchy in any one of the domains may have major consequences in the other” (3). Alberich’s

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Notes to pp. 94–100 transgressions, his declaration of war against love, and his plot to overthrow the gods, along with his intrusion into the geographical space of the Rhine, all have “major consequences” that resound throughout the rest of the Ring. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 27 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1044. 28 Ibid. 29 Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 53. 30 Ibid., 60. 31 Ibid., 60–1. 32 John McAloon as quoted by Kathleen M. Ashley, “Cultural Approaches to Medieval Drama,” in Richard K. Emmerson (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Medieval Drama (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), 57. 33 Sarah Beckwith, “Ritual, Church and Theater: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body,” in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Unity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 65. 34 The claim that Wagner knew Hermes’ role as psychopomp can be supported by the evidence that Mu¨ller mentions this facet of the Hermes myth in The Dorians when discussing the different burial rites practiced by the Dorians and the Athenians (398). 35 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 149. 36 Ibid., 159. 37 Cooke, I Saw the World End, 217. 38 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 41. 39 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 159. 40 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 41. 41 Ibid., 41–2. 42 Ibid., 42. 43 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 184. 44 Ibid., 185. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 186. 47 Ibid. 48 Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 125, quoted in Levin, The Dramaturgy of Disavowal, 86.

Notes to pp. 101–7 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

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C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 456. Ibid., vol. ii, 883. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1069. Richard Wagner, “Herodom and Christendom,” in Religion and Art, 277. Ibid. Ibid. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 61. It is important to point out that what these tragic characters lack is a proper appreciation for a world other than that of their own making. This is so clearly the case with Oedipus, who continually brags about how singular he is, how he does everything on his own, with no help from anyone. That is, until the truth of his own multiplicity is brought home to him through incest, patricide, and regicide. In fact one might even define the tragic as an individual’s refusal to recognize epic. This aspect of drama will be discussed in greater detail in Part III of this book. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1069. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 126. Again, this is also the condition of the Greek epic hero. See Hegel, Aesthetics, 1070. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 128. Ibid. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 145–6. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1070. Perhaps this is why we do not see Bru¨nnhilde really take part in the action again until Go¨tterda¨mmerung. As someone with a will, she does not belong in an epic. She is more of a dramatic character and so must wait until the Ring catches up with her. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1071. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 127. Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form, 9. Ibid. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cruelty,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1971), 306–7. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 152.

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Notes to pp. 108–18 72 Though to speak of Wagner “looking forward” to Siegfried in terms of plot can only make sense metaphorically since, as pointed out previously, Wagner wrote the libretto for Siegfried before the libretto for Die Walku¨re.

chapter 5 1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 246. 2 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1113. 3 Ibid., 1123. 4 Ibid., 1129. 5 Ibid., 1112. 6 Ibid., 1111. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 1121. 10 Ibid. 11 Loeb Classical Library, Greek Lyric, vol. ii (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 80–1. 12 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1145. 13 Loeb Classical Library, Greek Lyric, 78–9. 14 Ibid., 79–81. 15 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1115. 16 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 272. 17 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1136. 18 Ibid. 19 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 60. 20 Both Wagner and Hegel are to some extent ambiguous about the evolutionary moment during which lyric emerges in a given culture. As pointed out above, according to Hegel lyric occurs in a culture that is at peace. While this is more likely to happen later than earlier in a culture’s history, Hegel does allow for the possibility of pre-epic lyric. It seems that Wagner is ambiguous on this point for different reasons. He is ambiguous partly because he uses the word “lyric” in two different ways and because of his reading of Mu¨ller on the role of lyric. As far as his own use of the concept of lyric is concerned, occasionally Wagner seems

Notes to pp. 119–21

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

to use the word to denote more a state of mind in which das Volk is closer to nature than at other times. In Opera and Drama he argues that drama has its evolutionary beginnings when “the Folk expresses by cries of Lyric rapture its marvel at the constant wonders of Nature’s workings” (60). These cries eventually evolve into epic, which in turn becomes drama, when a single character begins to be separated out from the mass of choral dance and song, which is, according to Wagner, the lyric art par excellence. That Wagner believes lyric to be the immediate predecessor of drama is proven later in Opera and Drama when he clearly states, “Tragedy’s basis was the Lyric” (200). Even more explicitly linking tragedy to the chorus and the chorus to the lyric, some pages later in an argument about our ability to fully appreciate Greek lyric without knowledge of its musical component, Wagner claims, “The so exuberant Form of Greek speaking-Lyric, such as it has come down to us, and especially the choruses of the Tragicists, we can never explain as necessarily conditioned by the content of these poems” (282). Wagner may also be influenced in this ambiguous position about lyric by Mu¨ller’s anti-Hegelian argument that lyric did not develop out of epic. Stressing the multiple, choral aspect of lyric, Mu¨ller argues that the single epic rhapsode could not have given birth to something so radically different from itself (378–9). Mu¨ller, The Dorians, vol. ii, 375. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 60. Ibid., 200. For a fuller discussion of Wagner’s critique of epic narrative, see chapter 2. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 240. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 200. Ibid. Ibid., 179. Ibid. Ibid., 193. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 38. Ibid. Admittedly, something goes wrong once he enters that society, but that is for another chapter – chapter 10.

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chapter 6 1 Wagner, “Actors and Singers,” 201. 2 Richard Wagner, “Prologue to a Reading of Go¨tterda¨mmerung Before a Select Audience in Berlin,” in Actors and Singers, 305. 3 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956), 28–9. 4 That is, his lyric as opposed to epic ability to bring back a dead loved one through the power of song. For one could emphasize his exploits aboard the Argo in Diogenes Laertius’ epic, the Argonautica. But to date, these exploits have still failed to attract any great attention from the musical world. 5 Kerman, Opera as Drama, 20. 6 Donald J. Grout, A Short History of Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 11. Among the most celebrated Orpheus operas is Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice. Through his writings about this opera as well as the opera itself, Gluck readdresses opera’s original tensions by once again theoretically claiming Greek tragedy as its model while using the lyricist Orpheus as its central character. 7 Adorno, “Bourgeois Opera,” 37. 8 Ibid., 33. 9 Although as Sir Donald Francis Tovey drolly observes: “human minds, confronted with anything so thrilling as the stage, generally prove as able to jump from plane to plane as Cheshire cats prove able to grin; in fact, ‘they all can, and most of ’em do’” (357). While Tovey may be right in saying that operatic audiences have little trouble accepting the aesthetic and metaphysical leap from spoken-word drama to sung drama, still, many audiences prefer to have a reason to make this jump. See Sir Donald Francis Tovey, “A Note on Opera,” in The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1964), 353–60. 10 Ibid., 354. 11 Ibid. 12 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 5. 13 Adorno, “Bourgeois Opera,” 26. I will expand this notion of opera as parody in my discussion of Go¨tterda¨mmerung in chapters 10, 11, and 12. 14 Ibid.

Notes to pp. 129–32 15 Ibid., 33. 16 Vernant, “The Historical Moment,” 26–7. 17 For a more recent linking of lyric, individuality, and the law courts, see Barbara Johnson’s fascinating article on prisoners’ rights, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10:2 (Summer 1998), 549. 18 W. H. Auden, “Some Reflections on Music and Opera,” in Ulrich Weisstein (ed.), The Essence of Opera (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 360. 19 John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 157–8. 20 I do not mean to suggest here that Siegfried is in any way “based on” Orpheus. Rather, there is something Orphic about the whole of opera and that Siegfried partakes of this. As to Wagner’s knowledge of the Orpheus myth, of this there is no doubt. He was all his life a supporter of Gluck and therefore would have known his Orfeo. Indeed, Wagner claimed that, concerning a production of Gluck’s Orfeo he once saw in Dessau, he had “never witnessed a nobler and more complete performance at any theatre” (Richard Wagner, “A Glance at the German Operatic Stage of To-Day,” in Actors and Singers, 283). 21 Ibid., 16. Also, as Mu¨ller points out, Apollo is not just the god of music but also of dance (The Dorians, vol. ii, 349). 22 Richard Wagner, “The Wibelungen,” in A Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 263. 23 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 5. 24 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 134. 25 What is interesting about Mime’s folksongs, however, is not how he successfully represents national identity but how he fails to represent it, how he botches this simple artistic expression of das Volk. He cannot sing a folksong because he does not rightfully belong to das Volk. Therefore Siegfried, the true artist of das Volk, grows impatient at Mime’s pathetic attempts. Admittedly Mime also irks Siegfried because he uses his nursing-song to deflect Siegfried’s questioning about the identity of his parents. But at least part of Siegfried’s annoyance stems from the fact that Mime cannot sing even a simple lullaby and his voice offends Siegfried’s ears, forcing him to cry out in exasperation, “Stop that eternal

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26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

squawking!” (Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 205). Ibid., 199. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 223. For example, we recognize a similar simplicity in the Rhinedaughters’ repeated refrain of “Wallala weiala weia!” (Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 57). Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form, 35–6. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 202–3. Richard Wagner, Siegfried: Piano-vocal Score, trans. Frederick Jameson, arr. Karl Klindworth (New York: G. Schirmer, 1904), 33. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 238. Ibid. Ibid., 266–7. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 238–9. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 61.

chapter 7 1 Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: The Noonday Press, 1977), 111–12. 2 To take a typical example of this desire to separate Wagner the man from Wagner the composer, in his otherwise informative Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, Frederic Spotts implies that Wagner’s operas are neither ideologically “good” nor “evil,” nor even a mix of the two. Rather, he treats Wagner’s music as an ethically neutral instrument whose ideological uses are determined by the moral and political character of the user. Especially when he writes about Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival after the National Socialists came to power, Spotts tends to cast Wagner’s achievements as passive and helpless in the face of Nazi ideology and pressure. For example, in discussing the uses that the Nazis found for Wagner, Spotts claims that “the Ring had been pressed into duty for German nationalism” (84). Moreover, “Wagner’s operas were being recruited [by the Nazis] for patriotic and racist purposes” (84).

Notes to pp. 141–5

3

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6 7 8 9

Then, after Wagner’s death, “Bayreuth itself was being transformed into a center of an aggressive, chauvinistic ideology” (113). And finally, in Spotts’s view the chorale from Die Meistersinger entitled “Awake! Soon will dawn the day,” so beloved of Goebbels that he enforced its performance at all major National Socialist functions, “was shamelessly traduced in one of the great cultural crimes of the Third Reich” (165). (All preceding emphases are mine.) In Spotts’s eyes, Wagner’s operas and Bayreuth are not only not ideologically problematic, they are in reality purely humanistic. They were just innocent victims “pressed,” “recruited,” “transformed,” and ultimately “traduced” by the National Socialists. By seeking to save Wagner from such obviously propagandistic abuse, Spotts pushes his rescue mission too far. In trying to “de-Nazify” Wagner’s art he also “de-Wagnerizes” it, a fault that, ironically, Spotts also accuses Wagner’s grandsons of committing after World War II when it became politically expedient to strip Wagner down to his most abstract and universal – rather than personal and Aryan – meanings (134–5). See Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). With Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno leading the way, Sander Gilman, Paul Lawrence Rose, Michael P. Steinberg, Marc A. Weiner, and David Levin – to name only a few of the most interesting authors on this subject – have followed with their readings of Wagner, anti-Semitism, and national identity. Westernhagen quoting Nietzsche to Rohde, September 3, 1869. Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, trans. Mary Whittall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. ii, 412. We know that Wagner owned at least one edition of Greek lyric poetry by a poet who must certainly be regarded as one of the greatest Greek lyricists and certainly a focal point of Hegel’s discussions of lyric: Pindar. Catalogued with other books in his Dresden library was a copy of Pindar’s odes, edited by Johannes Tycho Mommsen (1846) (Mu¨ller, “Wagner and Antiquity,” 229). Hegel, Aesthetics, 1130. Mu¨ller, “Wagner and Antiquity,” 229. Pindar, The Odes and Selected Fragments, trans. G. S. Conway, ed. Richard Stoneman (Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1997), line 27. Ibid., lines 23–8.

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Notes to pp. 146–61 10 Mary R. Lefkowitz, First-Person Fictions: Pindar’s Poetic “I” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 111. 11 Pindar, The Odes, lines 20–2. 12 Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” 87. 13 Ibid., 84–5. 14 Ibid., 85. 15 Ibid., 88. 16 Pindar, The Odes, lines 32–4. 17 Ibid., lines 35–9. 18 Ibid., line 40. 19 Weiner, Anti-Semitic Imagination, 3. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Ernest Newman quoted in Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 24. 22 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 25. 23 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 127. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 265, note 25. 28 Ibid., 211. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Robert Donington, Wagner’s “Ring” and its Symbols (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979), 182.

chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Deathridge, “Wagner, the Greeks and Wolfgang Schadewaldt,” 133. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 95. Mu¨ller, The Dorians, vol. ii, 326–7. Ibid. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 200. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 179. Ibid. Ibid., 200.

Notes to pp. 161–5 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Ibid. Ibid. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 145–6. Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form, 39. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 127. On the subject of heroic passivity in epic, see the end of chapter 4, where I compare Siegmund’s wanderings to those of Odysseus, both of whom seem more buffeted by fate than self-directing. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 131. Because of the cycle of influence that played out between Wagner and Nietzsche, it would not be improbable that this passage was influenced by Wagner’s conception of Siegfried rather than the reverse. But then again, the “child of nature” is such a common Romantic notion that to point to any explicit influence here would be to push probability too far. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, trans. Michael W. Grenke (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004), 83. Ibid., 84. Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 11. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 195–6. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 240. Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 57. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 242. Along with other bodily means for recognizing race, Weiner, in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, recognizes blood as a major “guarantor of racial identity in the nineteenth-century imagination” (312). Throughout his operatic and theoretical works, Wagner constantly invokes this warrant for racial identity, both in terms of what one’s blood is and in terms of what one does with one’s blood. These categories of definition and action ideologically secure one’s membership either in a superior or a decadent race. If one’s blood is both pure and German, this guarantees one’s membership in a superior race. But if one’s blood is impure, meaning that it is Jewish blood per se or German blood that has been contaminated by Jewish blood, then this defines one as a member of a decadent race. For example, if we compare Siegfried’s blood to Hagen’s we see that the endogamous union between the German hero and heroine, Siegmund

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29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39

and Sieglinde, guarantees Siegfried’s membership in a superior race. In contrast to this exclusive union, Hagen is the product of an exogamous union. According to Weiner he is produced by “the interracial procreation of a German (as represented by Grimhild) and a Jew (represented by Alberich)...” (310). Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Michael P. Steinberg, however, imply that either she or her husband, Gibich, is not German but French, since her daughter, Gutrune, represents the French through melodic figures that parody Auber. Furthermore, I would argue that Gunther reveals his French blood through the decadent operatic convention of the brotherhood duet he convinces Siegfried to sing with him while he simultaneously sullies Siegfried’s pure German blood with his decadent French blood. At any rate, as Grimhild demonstrates, what one does with one’s own blood has consequences for maintaining membership in a superior race and these actions can contribute either to the purification or, in her case, the corruption of one’s race. Whether or not she sold her sexual favors to Alberich – as Wotan believes – or was raped – as Hagen believes – Grimhild contributes to racial degeneration. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 60. See for example Weiner and Donington, the first looking at anti-Semitism, the second searching for Jungian correspondences in Wagner’s work. Weiner, Anti-Semitic Imagination, 90. Ibid. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 113. Ibid., 76. “Blu¨the” is of course not only blood in one’s cheeks but the sign that one is “white.” According to a well-worn stereotype, only Caucasians blush. Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 49. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 176–7. Weiner, The Anti-Semitic Imagination, 250–1. For more on this Eastern locale and the stereotype of the Eastern Jew, see Weiner (The Anti-Semitic Imagination, 250) and Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Wagner, “The Wibelungen,” 275. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 32. Wagner, Selected Letters, 740.

Notes to pp. 169–71 40 It is interesting to note that although Siegfried does not confront Erda after his slaying of the dragon, Wotan does. This close proximity between Fafner/Erda and Python/Gaia can, it seems, be further supported from a Jungian perspective, as Robert Donington argues in Wagner’s “Ring” and its Symbols, where he talks about the dragon being a terrifying mother figure that Siegfried must overcome (193–6). 41 Ibid. 42 Weiner, The Anti-Semitic Imagination, 76. 43 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 19. See also Weiner, The Anti-Semitic Imagination, 100. 44 In the actual drinking of the blood Siegfried himself imitates the actions of the stereotypical Eastern Jew who is reborn through vampirism. Burnt by the dragon’s blood, “Involuntarily, he raises his fingers to his mouth to suck the blood from them. As he gazes thoughtfully in front of him, his attention is caught increasingly by the song of the forest birds” (Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 242). Wonderingly, he surmises that the taste of the dragon’s blood has brought him closer to nature by enabling him to understand the Woodbird’s song: It’s almost as though the woodbirds were speaking to me: was this brought about by the taste of the blood? – (242–3)

And even this ability to understand birdsong further demonstrates how Wagner mythopoeticizes his German hero with traits associated with Jews. Relying on Bu¨chthold-Sta¨ubli’s Handwo¨rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, Weiner notes that in German folklore Jews were known for their ability to “understand the language of animals” (168). In the context of Siegfried Mime even tells Siegfried about this folktale: A querulous dwarf explained to me once that in time one could come to unriddle the babbling of little birds: but how could that be possible? (139)

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45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

It would seem from one perspective that Siegfried can only learn how to understand birdsong by becoming somewhat Jewish. Through miscegenation, vampirism, and the ability to understand animals, Wagner apparently brings about Siegfried’s Jewification. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 242. Ibid. Ibid. In one of his typical equations between ancient Rome and modern Europe, in 1872 Wagner remarked that, to understand what fifth-century Rome was like, just imagine if the French were conquered by the Americans and the two were then racially and culturally amalgamated (C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 112). Such backhanded complements and thinly veiled insults are typical of Wagner. See for example the German version of “The Virtuoso and the Artist,” an article first published in France in 1840. In this article Wagner sarcastically refers to France as the modern equivalent of Greece and to the Parisians as Athenians. He makes this comparison on the basis of a shared love of form, by which, with respect to the French, Wagner means form without content. Richard Wagner, “The Virtuoso and the Artist,” in A Pilgrimage to Beethoven and Other Essays, 120. Richard Wagner, “A Theater in Zurich,” in Judaism in Music and Other Essays, 50. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 224. Wagner, “A Theater in Zurich,” 49. Ibid. Ibid. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 134. In the passage just quoted the visual is seen specifically as dance. Following Mu¨ller and others who knew about Greek lyric, Wagner also knew that this genre was traditionally accompanied by dance. The fact that the ballet was such an integral part of French opera may only strengthen the argument that Wagner was imagining some kind of Franco-German artform here. (See “The Art-Work of the Future,” 108, for general reference to Greek lyric’s relationship to dance and “The Art-Work of the Future,” 168, for specific mention of Spartan lyric’s relationship to dance.) Just as Wagner thought lyric was accompanied by dance and visual gesture, he also thought it essential that lyric be musical

Notes to pp. 176–85

56 57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65

as well. In his essay “On Poetry and Composition” he contends that lyric without music is merely versifying, a technical craft dedicated to the counting off of rhythmic units, accents, and rhymes (141). Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 247. Despite the ironic fact that its ending vehemently denounces the French through the use of the word “welsch,” Die Meistersinger may well be Wagner’s most successful attempt to blend French spectacle and German lyricism. Wagner did, by his own account, have a predecessor in combining the French and the German. Christoph Willibald Gluck, according to Wagner, based his “reforms of opera on French ‘trage´die.’” And yet, these forms (again according to Wagner) had no lasting effect on German opera. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 37. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 91. Ibid. Dahlhaus and Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 170–1. Ibid., 170. See Ernest Newman, Wagner as Man and Artist (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 112; Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 163–4; and John Deathridge, “Wagner and the Post-Modern,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4:2 (1992), 153–7. Spotts, Bayreuth, 34–5.

chapter 9 1 See the Epilogue for a further discussion of performance studies and an attempt to use this theoretical tool to discuss time and history in the Ring. 2 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1159. 3 Ibid., 1174. 4 The Aristophanic parabasis, as traditionally understood, is that part of the comedy where Aristophanes purportedly speaks in his own voice, expresses his own opinions, and addresses his audience both directly and indirectly, even to the point of parodying particularly prominent members of the audience – as in his infamous parody of Socrates in the Clouds. Furthermore, in the parabasis Aristophanes also makes reference

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to his own personality, ethics, and aesthetics, weighing them against those of his rival poets. In these cases Hegel allows that Aristophanes parodies Athens not merely to aggrandize himself for egotistical reasons – at the expense of art or the city of Athens. Rather, he parodies both the drama and the state in order to improve them, not destroy them. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1220. Like Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” Aristophanic characters like Socrates in the Clouds are not only laughable but also infinitely self-reliant. No matter how many times you knock them down, they always come back for more. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1163. Ibid., 1198. For a fuller discussion of this topic see Vernant and Vidal-Naquet’s interpretation of tragedy as a critique of epic values. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1208. Ibid., 1209. (Translation emended.) Ibid., 1211. Ibid. Ibid., 1212. “To this end, modern drama develops its actions through ‘Leitmotivs’ such as love, ambition, and even crime. Indeed, so long as the dramatic character remains good and admirable at heart, many different and even immoral aims can be admitted as leitmotivic passions for the modern character” (Hegel, Aesthetics, 1207). Hegel, Aesthetics, 1206–7. Ibid., 1188. Ibid., 1171 and 1172. At the beginning of this argument (1172) Hegel specifically mentions the French theater as guilty of being extremely universal in its diction. True, he also mentions the Greeks here, but by the end of his argument on the next page (1173) Hegel circles back and claims that the Greeks are universal in the right way, while others are universal in the wrong way. Given that it was the French that he mentions as being extremely universal at the beginning of the argument and that the Greeks are exonerated and exalted by the end of the argument, I think it is fair to infer that Hegel believes that it is the French who are guilty of using truly empty rhetoric. At least the translator of Hegel’s Aesthetics, T. M. Knox, supports this theory in a

Notes to pp. 191–3

19 20 21 22

23 24

25

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footnote where he claims that Hegel is referring here to “the formal and stilted language of French classical drama” (Hegel, Aesthetics, translator’s note 1, 1171). Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 37. See chapter 8. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1158. On a more mundane but no less important level, Wagner also argues that since all art is a sensible representation it must therefore find its origins in something physical and not merely spiritual. The abstract spirit (Geist) alone, according to Wagner, cannot produce a physical creation such as drama. Wagner’s proof for this argument is through a negative example: if Geist could beget dramatic art, then Christianity, which relies solely on “the essence of abstract spirit [Geist]” and which demonizes physicality, would have produced a dramatic, Christian art. But, according to Wagner, “neither was Christianity Art, nor could it ever bring forth from itself the true and living Art” (Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 38). Therefore drama in particular and art in general must find its origins and impulses from some place other than the spiritual world. For Wagner, these origins and impulses can be found in the sensual world of nature. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 34. Ibid. Interestingly, elsewhere Wagner inverts this observation somewhat. Discussing Oedipus at Colonus with Cosima in April 1870, Wagner argues that it was peculiar to the Greeks that they regarded the cursed individual as sacred. In Oedipus we find “the curse-laden individual who is being punished in behalf of a whole generation” (Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 20). But one might also argue that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Greeks is how wrong-doing by an individual can also be visited upon the entire community in the form of a miasma emanating from some foul deed committed long ago. This is also Oedipus’ case, as seen in Oedipus Rex. Ibid., 34–5. This motif of tragedy as a flower repeats throughout Wagner’s three major theoretical works on poetry, drama, and music – “Art and Revolution,” “The Art-Work of the Future,” and Opera and Drama. Wagner, “Sketches and Fragments,” 355. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 35.

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Notes to pp. 193–7 Wagner, “Sketches and Fragments,” 358. Ibid. Ibid. See also “The Art-Work of the Future,” 136. Wagner, “Sketches and Fragments,” 358. Like Hegel, Wagner certainly recognizes the more personal and polemical nature of comedy in general and of Aristophanic parody in particular. But in Wagner’s mind, the so-called righteous laughter that Aristophanes directed at Athens may have sped its downfall. Rather than embracing the Hegelian theory that a parody of Athens was a communal activity aimed at unifying and improving its citizens by helping them to recognize their follies, Wagner implies that when Aristophanes made Athens itself a laughing-stock he only further corroded its civic identity. This is in direct contrast with Greek tragedy, which conserved the Athenian community and upheld the “common bond of its Religion and primeval Custom” (Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 136). 32 Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 136. 33 Ibid. 34 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 47. 35 Wagner also extends this critique of French tragedy to French comedy. Claiming that French comedy descended from Greek New Comedy by way of Roman comedy, in his essay “Actors and Singers” he notes that it is part of the essence of French comedy that it values technique, convention, and artfulness over more substantive dramatic elements (164). 36 Wagner, “Sketches and Fragments,” 352. 37 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 35. 38 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 60–1. 39 Contrary to Hegel and some more recent scholars, Wagner believed that all the actors in Athenian drama were citizens and unpaid amateurs. 40 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 5. 41 Ibid., 63–4.

28 29 30 31

c h a p t e r 10 1 These criticisms, although I believe them to be valid, are ultimately nitpicky. Anyone familiar with “Music Drama and the End of History,” the article cited here, will know that the true focus of Steinberg’s work

Notes to pp. 198–206

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

there is on Parsifal, not Go¨tterda¨mmerung. However, although Steinberg’s observations might have been made only in passing, they do provide us with a good starting point for understanding the parodic dimension of Go¨tterda¨mmerung. Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 99. Ibid., 96. Ibid. Ibid. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 163. Ibid. Ibid., 164. Ibid. Steinberg, “Music Drama and the End of History,” 163. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 852. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 356. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 157. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 158. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1172. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 47. Ibid., 47–8. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1188. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 41. Ibid. Ibid. While these metaphors of soil and plants are not very original and seem to be a commonplace Romantic notion, it is nonetheless interesting to note that in The Dorians, while discussing the failed attempt to install the Spartan institution of the gerusia in Athens, Mu¨ller observes “that every institution can only flourish in the soil in which it is first planted” (The Dorians, vol. ii, 99).

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Notes to pp. 207–14 Again showing some independence from Wagner, Nietzsche also mentions in “Wagner in Bayreuth” this notion of digging up some cultural outgrowth out of one national soil and transplanting it in another. Nietzsche, however, scoffs at the question of whether such a transplant would be viable in its new conditions, calling this an “old question” and one “over which the moderns weary themselves” (Nietzsche, “Wagner in Bayreuth,” 208). 29 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 42. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 36. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 63–4. 35 Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 203. 36 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 54–5. 37 Ibid., 65. 38 Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 90. 39 Ibid., 165. 40 Ibid., 90. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 182. 43 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 284. 44 Ibid., 288. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Richard Wagner, Go¨tterda¨mmerung: Piano-vocal Score, trans. Frederick Jameson and arr. Karl Klindworth (New York: G. Schirmer, 1904), 52. 48 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 290. 49 Ibid., 291. 50 Since the Tarnhelm and the potion are two different things and since only one motif is used here to denote them both, we might assume that this motif also refers to magic in general because that is a quality that these two different objects share in common. 51 Patrice Che´reau, Go¨tterda¨mmerung (Baarn, The Netherlands: Philips Classics Productions, 1981), videorecording. 52 In Das Rheingold, when the scheming Loge alone can see the giants disappearing, is another such moment.

Notes to pp. 215–21 53 Richard Wagner, “German Art and German Policy,” in Art and Politics, 89. 54 One way of understanding how and why Wagner does this to Hagen is to measure the distance between the time the libretto and the music for Go¨tterda¨mmerung were created. The libretto was written many years before the music and is much more under the influence of other, notably French and Italian, opera libretti. Thus, instead of changing the libretto he keeps it and uses its contrivances to criticize the problems he sees with a particular mode of modern drama. 55 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 280–4. 56 Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 83. 57 Ibid., 84. 58 Ibid., 87. 59 Ibid., 84. 60 Ibid., 85. 61 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 298. 62 Ibid., 295. 63 Ibid., 297. 64 Ibid., 298. 65 Richard Wagner, Go¨tterda¨mmerung: Piano-vocal Score, 78. 66 Perhaps an even more direct parallel and paradigm for Wagner’s commingling of magic and “free will” can be found in Macbeth’s relationship to the witches. To my knowledge it hasn’t been written yet, but a thorough study of Wagner’s use of Shakespeare could prove interesting. 67 Nietzsche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 168.

c h a p t e r 11 1 I am citing Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington’s translation (281), but the original German letters appear in Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt – Richard Wagner Briefwechsel, ed. Hanjo Kesting (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1988), 267. 2 I am not the first to discuss Aristophanes and Wagner. Neil O’Sullivan and Klaus van der Berg have also written on the subject, though they have been more interested in Aristophanes and Die Meistersinger. See Neil O’Sullivan, “Aristophanes, Wagner, and Die Meistersinger,” Studies in

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Notes to pp. 221–3

3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Music 25 (1991), 73–80; Neil O’Sullivan, “Wagner and Aristophanes,” Antike und Abendland 36 (1990), 67–81; and Klaus van der Berg, “Die Meistersinger as Comedy: The Performative and Social Signification of Genre,” in Nicholas Vazsonyi (ed.), Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 146–64. Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? 2. See chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of tragedy and the origins of opera. This association between Aristophanes and the downfall of Athens also surfaces in his readings with Cosima in 1877 when they read Aristophanes’ Knights and Peace together with Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War (C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 944 and 950). This was not Wagner’s first attempt to borrow from Aristophanes. He also wrote a play called Eine Kapitulation that was subtitled “Lustspiel in antiker Manier.” Hans Richter composed some music (which is now lost) for this play. Explicitly identifying its inspiration, at first Wagner used the rather silly pseudonym, Aristop Hanes, though when it came time for publishing he decided against using that name. Drawing the parallel between the context for this play and for that of Aristophanes’ plays, Lee points out that, just as Aristophanes wrote his plays during the war between Athens and Sparta, Wagner wrote his comedy during the war between Germany and France, the Franco-Prussian War (Athena Sings, 78). Wagner, “Actors and Singers,” 195. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 60. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 26–7. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 60. Ibid., 60–1. Ibid., 60. Ibid. Ibid., 360. In this sense Wagner’s orchestral leitmotifs resemble Aeschylus’ choral motifs. Guiding the audience’s interpretation of the Oresteia, the first chorus in the Agamemnon introduces almost every significant motif that will be repeated and developed throughout the rest of the trilogy. Similarly, the orchestral narrator in Das Rheingold introduces almost every significant leitmotif that will be repeated and developed throughout the rest of the Ring. For a discussion of poetic

Notes to pp. 224–30

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

leitmotifs in Aeschylus, see Froma I. Zeitlin “The Corrupted Sacrifice,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 96 (1965), 463. Wagner, ‘“Zukunftsmusik,”’ 338. See also Lee’s Athena Sings, where he cites the same passage. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 46. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 61–2. Ibid., 63. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 315. Ibid., 374. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 63. Richard Wagner, Siegfried: Piano-vocal Score, 21. On the subject of “physiognomic” similarity between and among various motifs, see my earlier section on epic and the way that Wagner aims to make music somehow visible and spatial. Richard Wagner, Go¨tterda¨mmerung: Piano-vocal Score, 163. Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 90. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 63. Wagner, Go¨tterda¨mmerung: Piano-vocal Score, 167. Heinrich Heine, “The French Stage: Confidential Letters Addressed to M. August Lewald,” in The Works of Heinrich Heine, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland (London: William Heineman, 1893), vol. iv, 246. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 63. Ironically, when Heine defines this type of epic harmony he takes Meyerbeer as his paradigm (“The French Stage,” vol. iv, 246). And in this chorus it seems that Wagner has also taken a page out of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, albeit with a different purpose: not to praise but to parody its use of hardy male voices brought together for spectacularly empty effect. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1180. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 165. Ibid., vol. ii, 654. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 136. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 35. For a parallel critique and, quite possibly, the origins of Wagner’s denunciation of Aristophanes, see Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (76–124). On the rarely discussed topic of Nietzsche’s influence on Wagner, see Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner

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Notes to pp. 230–40

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 156–62. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 34. Ibid. Ibid., 34–5. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 38. Interestingly, this pattern also replicates the fates of tragic heroes who reach beyond themselves only to find death. Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 203. Ibid., 51. Wagner, Opera and Drama, 200. Ibid., 53.

c h a p t e r 12 1 Very little has been written on New Comic influences on Wagner. Only “Shakespeare, Wagner, and Measure for Measure” by Brian Robert Morris deals with the topic of New Comedy in Wagner, but obviously from the perspective of Das Liebesverbot rather than the Ring. Also, the essay does not mention New Comedy explicitly but only deals with its revolutionary aspect of transitioning from an old society to a new one. Brian Robert Morris, “Shakespeare, Wagner, and Measure for Measure,” in Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (eds.), Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 119–20. 2 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 117. 3 Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 60. 4 Wagner, Sa¨mtliche Briefe, vol. viii, 53. 5 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 519. 6 Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 55. 7 Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 70. 8 Nietzsche, Pre-Platonic Philosophers, 46. 9 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 351. 10 Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 99. 11 Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 58. 12 Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future,” 95–6.

Notes to pp. 240–9 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30

Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 68. Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne, 56. Wagner, “Art and Revolution,” 23. Ibid. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 351. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1159. Ibid., 1216. Ibid., 1217. For example, we may see the ending of Die Walku¨re in this epic light. Siegmund, Sieglinde, and Bru¨nnhilde are all brought down by their defiance of Wotan and Fricka. But in exchange for this ill fortune, they receive the good fortune of respectively siring, conceiving, and saving the hero Siegfried. For this reason Bru¨nnhilde calls Siegfried a “Pfand” or “pledge” (163, 176). Siegfried balances the accounts of their misfortune. He is the pledge whereby they can redeem their bad fortune for good. But, as we saw earlier, the word “Pfand” also carries the meaning of “pawn,” which takes on certain negative connotations when Hagen, the power- and pawn-broker of Go¨tterda¨mmerung, uses Siegfried in his game to steal back the ring. Indeed, Hagen treats both Siegfried and Bru¨nnhilde as “worthy goods” to be pawned for the return of the ring (288). Byron, Don Juan, in The Works of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), vol. vi, canto 3, stanza 9, line 65. Wagner did own an edition of Byron’s complete works. At one point in her diaries, Cosima records Wagner’s remarks about how honest he thought Byron was for admitting, in the opening lines of Don Juan, that he sought a hero. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1197. Millington and Spencer, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, 348. Wagner Museum, Catalogue of Wagner’s Library at Wahnfried, www. wagnermuseum.de/_engl/downloads/Wahnfried-Bibliothek.pdf (accessed October 14, 2005). Wagner, “Das Liebesverbot,” in Pilgrimage to Beethoven, 8. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 163. Ibid., 165. Byron, Don Juan, vol. vi, canto 3, stanza 9, line 66. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 21. Ibid., 15.

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Notes to pp. 249–63 31 32 33 34

Wagner, Opera and Drama, 63. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 173. Ibid., 178. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 2.

ep i l og ue 1 Richard Schechner, “Approaches,” in Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 8. 2 This notion of event time became for Wagner, at last theoretically, even more fluid as he grew more interested in improvisation. For Wagner, improvisation meant getting closer to nature as art and his greatest examples of this are Aeschylus and Shakespeare. In his 1871 essay, “The Destiny of Opera,” Wagner contends that the essence of dramatic art consists in the poet’s making “the improvising spirit of the mime his own” (143). In following this course of action the dramatic poet merely follows the natural origins of all art, which Wagner claims is improvisation. Dilating further upon the notion of improvisation and its relationship to nature, in a conversation about Aeschylus in 1872 he observes to Cosima, “The remarkable thing about this truly great being is that one hardly notices the way it is done! It does not appear to be art at all, because it is in fact something much higher: improvisation” (Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 449). 3 Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, 109. 4 Moretti, Modern Epic, 102. 5 Ibid. 6 It seems that Wagner knew this passage well enough to quote it from memory. See C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 674. 7 Homer, Iliad, book 6, lines 116–236. 8 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 45. 9 Dahlhaus and Deathridge, New Grove Wagner, 111–12. 10 Moretti, Modern Epic, 104–5. 11 Wagner, The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865–1882: The Brown Book, trans. George Bird, annotated Joachim Bergfeld (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 86. 12 Wagner, Selected Letters, 239. 13 Schechner, “Approaches,” 6.

Notes to pp. 264–71 14 Ibid., 22. 15 Ibid., 21–2. 16 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 67.

a p p e nd i c es 1 Wagner, Mein Leben, 15.

a p p e nd i x a 1 Works by Homer and the Greek tragedians are (by informed guesswork but without making an exact count) mentioned most often. 2 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 402–3. 3 Schadewaldt, “Richard Wagner and the Greeks,” 127–9. See also John J. Reich, “The Rebirth of Tragedy – Wagner and the Greeks,” Mosaic 1:4 (July 1968), 22–3. 4 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 587. Given his admiration of the Symposium, one might guess that Wagner admired Aristophanes’ speech on love, especially the passage where Aristophanes imagines Hephaestus standing over two lovers and asking them if what they would truly like is “to become parts of the same whole” so that the two became one and they would therefore die “a single death” (475, 192d–e). Except for the fact that Aristophanes ridiculously imagines that these two lovers were once two halves of an androgynous spheroid, this characterization of love could have been taken straight from Tristan und Isolde. Plato, Symposium, in Plato: Complete Works, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997). 5 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 139. 6 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 979. 7 Ibid., vol. i, 989. It is not known to which speeches Cosima is referring here, but it may have been to those Philippics that deal with Corinth. Also with respect to Demosthenes, Nietzsche makes a very interesting comparison between this Greek orator and the German composer. In “Wagner in Bayreuth” Nietzsche compares Wagner to Demosthenes, remarking the similarity between the seriousness with which each man addresses his subject, the formal ways in which each strives to hide the

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Notes to pp. 271–4 artistry of their art in order to make it seem seamless and natural, and finally the chronological-cultural fact that both men are the last in a long line of similarly minded artists (243–4). 8 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 748. 9 Wagner, “Sketches and Fragments,” 373. 10 Wagner, “Open Letter to Herr Friedrich Scho¨n of Worms,” in Religion and Art, 297. 11 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 189. 12 Ibid., vol. i, 449. 13 Although he does not mention having read Euripides’ Alcestis, because in 1797 his uncle Adolf published a critical edition of this work it is not hard to imagine that Wagner had been familiar with this play since he was a boy. Duane Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” 4. 14 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 449. 15 Wagner, Mein Leben, 39. Although Wagner does not make the direct connection between Herodotus and the story of these battles, the original source for Wagner’s knowledge of these battles was probably Herodotus, since his versions have provided the basis for so many other versions to follow. 16 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 846. 17 Ibid., vol. ii, 704. 18 Ibid., vol. ii, 847. 19 Ibid., vol. i, 976. 20 Ibid., vol. i, 979. 21 Ibid. 22 Wagner, Brown Book, 200. 23 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 27. 24 Wagner, “The Destiny of Opera,” in Actors and Singers, 138. 25 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 78. 26 As an aside, note that both of these Alcibiades dialogues are now considered spurious. 27 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 473. Mistakenly, Cosima calls this the Ninth Letter. With characteristic egotism tempered by humor, Wagner imagines himself as Plato and King Ludwig as Dionysus. 28 Ibid., vol. ii, 245. 29 Ibid., vol. ii, 346. 30 Ibid.

Notes to pp. 274–6 31 Wagner, Opera and Drama, 179–94. 32 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 992. What Wagner seems to be complaining about here is the fact that the tutor’s speech is entirely made up. It is fiction, not myth. The idea that Sophocles was “playing around with grief” in this scene is interestingly borne out by the story that the actor who first played the tutor used an urn filled with his real son’s ashes, a stunt humorously referred to as the first known example of method acting. In a similar critique of Ariosto and concomitant acclaim of Homer, on another occasion Wagner remarked to Cosima that “every episode [in Homer] has a mythical quality” that gives his poetry “its stamp of eternity,” whereas in Ariosto each episode has the quality of “an arbitrarily invented adventure.” 33 Ibid., vol. ii, 844. What Wagner takes for Sophoclean and mannerist here is probably the formal tragic structure of stichomythia, the sort of back-and-forth dialogue in Greek tragedy that sometimes seems to degenerate into quipping and trading maxims. 34 Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” 14. 35 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 429. 36 Ibid., vol. i, 944 and 950. 37 Ibid., vol. ii, 287. 38 Ibid., vol. ii, 637. 39 Ibid., vol. ii, 866. 40 Ibid., vol. i, 537. Although Wagner’s pride had no problem placing him in the same pantheon as the Greeks, he also recognized just how foreign their way of life was to the modern world. During his and Cosima’s reading of Hieron he remarks how alien it all seems to him. This sense of a different historical moment is what separates Wagner from other artists who, lacking the scholar’s sense of Otherness, liked to elide the distance between the modern and the ancient world.

a p p e nd i x b 1 Wagner, Mein Leben, 16. This is the same Apel who wrote the story upon which Weber’s opera, Der Freischu¨tz, is based. 2 Richard Wagner, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 4. 3 Ibid., 81. 4 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 932–3. See also Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” 13–14.

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Notes to pp. 276–80 5 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 844. 6 Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” 8. 7 Wagner, Mein Leben, 332–3. See also Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” 19, note 40. 8 Wagner, Mein Leben, 171. 9 Ibid., 209–10. 10 Richard Wagner, Family Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. William Ashton Ellis, intro. and notes by John Deathridge (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 384. 11 Ibid., 770–1. 12 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 370. 13 Ibid., vol. ii, 317. 14 Ibid., vol. ii, 523. 15 Ibid., vol. i, 516, 554, 622, 813, and 1083. 16 Ibid., vol. i, 1159. 17 Ibid., vol. i, 319. 18 Ibid., vol. i, 96. 19 Ibid., vol. i, 354. 20 Wagner, Selected Letters, 787, 814. 21 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 312. 22 Ibid., vol. i, 231–2 and 1044. 23 Ibid., vol. i, 579–80 and 1092. 24 Ibid., vol. i, 218 and 1043. See also William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11. 25 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 140–1 and 364. 26 Ibid., vol. i, 590 and 1094. 27 Wagner, Family Letters, 388–9. Some scholars argue that Nietzsche pushed much of the work on this index onto his sister and this might have been the reason why he rededicated his Homer to her: as a token of his gratitude. See also Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon, 28. 28 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 620–1 and 1098. 29 Ibid., vol. i, 186 and 1066. 30 Ibid., vol. i, 470–2 and 1078. 31 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 463 and 1077. Duane Roller claims that Wagner and Cosima read another of Ritschl’s books, Parerga zu Plautus und Terenz, on April 8, 1880. But on this date Cosima simply mentions

Notes to pp. 280–5 that she and Wagner began reading the Parerga (vol. ii, 464). Since Wagner did not own Ritschl’s book of this title and because he did own Schopenhauer’s more famous Parerga und Prologomena, it is more likely they were reading the latter than the former (Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” 21, note 85). 32 Wagner, Selected Letters, 815. 33 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 231. 34 Ibid., vol. i, 619 and 1097. 35 Ibid., vol. i, 424. 36 Roller, “Richard Wagner and Classical Antiquity,” 6. 37 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 1073. 38 Richard Wagner, “Letter to Heinrich von Stein, 31 January 1883,” 324. 39 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 1000 and 1123. 40 Ibid., vol. ii, 444. 41 Ibid., vol. ii, 735. 42 Ibid., vol. ii, 873. 43 Wagner, “Letter to Heinrich von Stein,” 324 and 329. 44 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 400. 45 Ibid., vol. ii, 1010. This entry was made by Daniela von Bu¨low, Cosima’s daughter by her previous husband, Hans von Bu¨low. 46 Wagner, Mein Leben, 3 and 9. 47 Ibid., 10. 48 Ibid., 23. See also Westernhagen, Wagner, vol. i, 20. 49 Wagner, Mein Leben, 23. 50 Ibid., 699. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 730 and 1123. 54 Ibid., vol. ii, 765. 55 Ibid., vol. i, 989. 56 Ibid., vol. i, 1143.

a p p e nd i x c 1 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 623. 2 Ibid., vol. ii, 565. 3 Manfred Eger’s essay in The Wagner Handbook, “The Bayreuth Festival and the Wagner Family,” claims that Wagner also read Droysen’s

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Notes to pp. 285–90 Didascalia. Though I can find no evidence and Eger offers none to support this claim, it is not an unreasonable assumption (485). 4 Wagner, Mein Leben, 342. 5 Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 30–1. 6 Droysen quoted by Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus, 31. 7 Ibid., 31. 8 Ibid., 32. 9 Johann Gustav Droysen, Geschichte des Hellenismus, ed. Erich Bayer (Benno Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1952), vol. i, 3. 10 Robert Browning, “Greeks and Others: From Antiquity to the Renaissance,” in Thomas Harrison (ed.), Greeks and Barbarians (New York: Routledge, 2001), 261. 11 Walbank notes that it was in fact Droysen who first introduced, with his history of Alexander, “the national issue in Greek history” (Walbank, “The Problem of Greek Nationality,” 235). 12 See Eugene Borza’s “Introduction to Alexander Studies,” in G. C. Richards’s translation of Ulrich Wilcken’s Alexander the Great, xii–xiii. Whatever debts Wilcken may owe to Droysen, he nevertheless seems to question Droysen’s nationalist motives when he repudiates the notion that Isocrates’ plan for Greek unification can be compared to the plan devised by “the men of 1848, who prepared the ground for German unity.” Ulrich Wilcken, Alexander the Great, trans. G. C. Richards, intro. Eugene Borza (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1967), 37. 13 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 55. 14 Westernhagen, Wagner, vol. i, 127. 15 Wagner, “The Wibelungen,” 283. 16 For further discussion of Wagner and the Iliad, see Wolfgang Schadewaldt’s Hellas und Hesperion, Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s Blood for the Ghosts, and Ulrich Mu¨ller’s “Wagner and Antiquity.” 17 Nietzsche, “Wagner in Bayreuth,” 208. 18 Ibid., 208–9. 19 Ibid., 209. 20 Ibid. 21 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 118–19. 22 Ibid., vol. i, 196. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., vol. i, 198 and vol. ii, 246. 25 Wagner, Brown Book, 117.

Notes to pp. 290–4 Wagner, Mein Leben, 725–6. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 750. Ibid., vol. i, 113. Ibid., vol. i, 319. Ibid., vol. ii, 565. Wagner, Mein Leben, 343. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 734. If ever there was one, this is certainly a case of stones and glass houses. C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 650. Ibid., vol. ii, 499 and 1092. Ibid., vol. i, 791, and vol. ii, 1119. If the book Cosima is referring to here is the one that Wagner had in his Wahnfried library, then to be (perhaps overly) precise this book is called Wu¨rdigung des Delphischen Orakels not Das Orakel von Delphi. 37 Ibid., vol. i, 45 and 1014. 38 Ibid., vol. i, 180 and 1036–7. 39 Ibid., vol. ii, 879. 40 Wagner, “What is German?” 156. 41 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 216. 42 Ibid., vol. i, 76. 43 Ibid., vol. ii, 499 and 1092. 44 Wagner, Mein Leben, 343. 45 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. ii, 565. 46 Ibid., vol. i, 730 and 1111. 47 Ibid., vol. i, 952. 48 Ibid., vol. i, 1004. 49 Ibid., vol. i, 572–3. 50 Ibid., vol. i, 931. 51 Ibid., vol. i, 938. 52 Ibid., vol. ii, 55–6 and 1028. 53 Ibid., vol. i, 685. 54 Ibid. 55 Wagner, Family Letters, 388–9. 56 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 976–7 and 1154. 57 Ibid., vol. i, 497. 58 Wagner, Selected Letters, 744. 59 Wagner, “What is German?” 156. 60 C. Wagner, Cosima’s Diaries, vol. i, 57–9 and 1017. 61 Ibid., vol. i, 62.

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Bibliography Mann, Thomas. “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” in Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 91–148. McDonald, Marianne. Sing Sorrow: Classics, History, and Heroines in Opera (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). Millington, Barry and Spencer, Stewart. Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). Montaigne, Michel de. “Of Cruelty,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1971), 306–18. Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic: The World-System to Garcı´a Ma´rquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1996). Morris, Brian Robert. “Shakespeare, Wagner, and Measure for Measure,” in Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (eds.), Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 111–24. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Mu¨ller, Karl Otfried. The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, trans. Henry Tufnell and George Cornewall Lewis (London: J. Murray, 1839). History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, continued by John William Donaldson, trans. George Cornewall Lewis (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1858). Mu¨ller, Ulrich. “Wagner and Antiquity,” in Ulrich Mu¨ller and Peter Wapnewski (eds.), Wagner Handbook, trans. John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 227–35. Mu¨ller, Ulrich and Panagl, Oswald. Ring und Gral (Wu¨rzberg: Ko¨nigshausen und Neumann, 2002). Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Newman, Ernest. Wagner as Man and Artist (New York: Vintage Books, 1960). The Nibelungenlied, trans. A. T. Hatto (New York: Penguin Books, 1969). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1967). The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).

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INDEX

1848 Revolution 8, 40, 43, 44 Abbate, Carolyn 57, 58, 66, 69, 132 Addison, Joseph 267 Adorno, Theodor 9, 15, 121, 126, 150, 235, 249, 251, 258, 296, 316 “Bourgeois Opera” 319 opera as parody 129 Aeschylus 2, 4, 185, 260, 261, 269, 271, 274, 281, 284, 285, 304, 344 choral motifs 269 similarity to Wagner’s leitmotifs 340 compared to Virgil 275 compared to Richard Wagner 288 Agamemnon 25, 38–9, 219, 340 Artemis 282 East versus West 38 Clytemnestra 39 parodos 269, 281 Zeus 282 Eumenides 95 Libation Bearers 274 Oresteia 244, 269, 285–6, 340 time 261 Persians 270 Prometheus Bound 230, 270 Droysen on 270 Alexander the Great 2, 4, 19 Amienne, Kelly xix–xx Anacreon 5, 115–17 Anaxagoras 4 Anaximander 238

Apel, Johann August 5, 268, 276, 291 Die Aitolier 276 Metrik 276 Polyı¨dos 276 Ariosto 53, 60, 282, 347 Aristophanes 4, 14, 185, 190, 220, 229, 232, 247, 270, 272, 285, 340 characters 185 and the fall of Athens 193–6 ethical order 185 laughter 233 parabasis 333 Acharnians 270 Birds 270 Clouds 233, 333: Socrates 228, 233, 333; and finale of Go¨tterda¨mmerung 233 Frogs 185, 222, 270; Aeschylus 185; Dionysus 185; Euripides 185, 228 Knights 270, 274, 340 Lysistrata 270 Peace 270, 274, 340 Wasps 270 Wealth 270 Aristotle 4, 45, 184, 265, 270, 299 De Anima 283 History of Animals 270 On Perception 270, 274 Poetics 270 French interpretation of 270 art 9 form versus content 22–4 genres 10

363

364

Index art (cont.) and the intellect 9 and politics 10, 12, 18–24, 54–5, 62–4 and scholarship 24–9 and theology 314–15 see also drama; epic; lyric; Romance Auber, Daniel 330 Auden, W. H. 131 Auerbach, Erich 49, 61 Bakhtin, Mikhail 35, 310 Bakker, Egbert 317 Bakunn, Mikhail 164 Barthes, Roland 140 Beckett, Samuel 260, 264, 265 Beckwith, Sarah 95 Beethoven, Ludwig van 271 Benjamin, Walter 19 Berg, Klaus van der 339 Berlioz, Hector 259 Bevington, David xviii Bismarck, Otto von 40, 44, 278 Boeckh, August 300 Brahms, Johannes 271 Brecht, Bertolt 19 Brockhaus, Clemens 294 Bu¨chthold-Sta¨ubli, Hanns 331 Bu¨low, Daniela von 349 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 244, 248 Caccini, Giulio 123 Caesar, Gaius Julius 4, 278 Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro 294 Carlyle, Thomas 241 on the French Revolution 241 Cato 4 Cervantes, Miguel de 53 Don Quixote 63 Chaplin, Charles 334 Che´reau, Patrice 213

Cherubini, Luigi 5 Christianity 62, 84, 209 Cicero 278 Conrad, Peter 17, 106, 133, 161 Cooke, Deryck 84, 96 Corse, Sandra 9, 63 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich 5, 284, 318 The Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient People, Particularly the Greeks 284, 290, 292 culture evolution 9, 10, 90, 187 versus nature 12, 82, 237–9 Fafner 90 Fasolt 90 Fricka 92 Loge 90 Rhine 90 Rhinedaughters 90, 92, 239–43 Rhinegold 90 the ring 90, 92: as symbol of power 153 Tarnhelm 90 Valhalla 90 Wotan 90, 92 Curtius, Ernst 5, 276 Dahlhaus, Carl 8, 15, 16, 65, 72, 77, 259 Dante 53, 60, 282 death funeral pyres 14 in Greek tragedy 185 and laughter 14 Deathridge, John 1, 8, 15, 16, 65, 73, 77, 178, 259 Debussy, Claude 259, 313 Delphi 13, 40, 158, 169 Demosthenes 4, 270, 345 Philippics 345

Index Donington, Robert 155, 169 Donner, J. J. C. 22, 247 drama 183 as epic plus lyric 184, 190 chorus 188, 194–6 and civic identity 10 dramatic hero 321 dramatic leitmotifs 334 epic drama 10, 188, 205–7 as French 10 external plus internal 191 French drama as spectacle 13, 14, 173 German drama 232 and Go¨tterda¨mmerung 14 Greek drama Greek chorus 221–8 Greek New Comedy 247, 336: closure 246–9; Menander 247 Greek Old Comedy 10, 185 Greek tragedy 10, 14, 204, 230, 235: endings 15; reconciliation 243–6 Hegel on drama 183–90 lyric drama 10, 188, 204–5 as Italian 10, 188 commedia dell’arte 189 emancipating bodily movement 189 emergence of the actor 188, 189 removing the Greek mask 189 modern drama 188 music drama 13, 220 national origins of 203–4 opera as drama 123 parody 14, 228–34 and the state 195, 207–19, 210–19 tragedy and lyric 130–1 tragi-comedy xiii Droysen, Johann Gustav 2, 5, 7, 19, 25, 210, 285–9, 290, 304 on Attic tragedy 285 Didascalia 349

The History of Alexander the Great 287 History of Hellenism 19, 271, 284, 287 Dukas, Paul 69 Duncker, Max 5, 289 History of Antiquity 289 East versus West 39–40 Edda 62, 170 the Valkyries 96 Ellis, William Ashton 295 Engels, Friedrich 6 epic 12, 33–4 Aristotle on epic 45 Bible as epic 33 and drama 52–64 Eastern epic 34 elementary epic, first stages of 34–5 didactic poetry 12, 34, 84: in Das Rheingold 85; Hegel on 85 epigram 12 epigraph 34, 78–9, 85: Hegelian definition of 80 epithet 85 maxims or gnome 34, 85 elementary epic, second stages of 35 cosmogony 35, 84, 85 theogony 12, 35, 84, 85 versified philosophy 35 endings 243 epic drama 188, 205–7 epic proper 35–9, 84, 85 evolution of 34 Greek epic 48 as monumental 45 narrative 12 retrospective narrative 45–9, 49–51 as national bible 12 and national identity 33–9, 63 as performance 312 poet as seer 61, 62, 63

365

366

Index epic (cont.) as poetic bible 63 objectivity 10, 35 and the Ring’s libretto 12 theory versus practice 10, 52–64 and Das Rheingold 12 and Die Walku¨re 12 war in epic proper 37–9 Epicurus 4 Euripides 4, 185, 193, 270, 271, 272 Alcestis 271, 346 Bacchae 271, 283 Ion 271 Iphigenia in Aulis 271 Phoenician Women 271 Ewans, Michael 19, 286, 305 Feuerbach, Ludwig 7, 273 film music 315 Finlay, George 5, 290 Greece Under the Romans 290 History of Greece from the Roman Conquest to the Present Time 290 France 11, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 29, 42 and Ancient Rome 332 and Antiquity 27 epic drama 188, 194, 205–7 actor as tool 190 French drama 204 as spectacle 13, 14 and Fafner 173 and German lyric 175–7 Gauls 4 Louis XIV, King 210, 216 neo-classical tragedy 189, 210, 239, 270 opera 14, 22, 219, 249 Parisians as Athenians 332 and revolutionary philosophy 178, 200 tragedy 159, 205, 210

Corneille 206, 210, 216 Racine 206, 210, 216 Wagner in 179 Franco-Prussian War 340 Frantz, Constantin 5, 278, 290 Frye, Northrop 111, 248 Galilei, Vincenzo 25 Genelli, Bonaventura 267 Genet, Jean 264, 266 The Maids 265 Germany and Antiquity 27 German art 101 as Athens 286 German culture 119 and Doric society 41–2 drama 232 fables 62 folksong 225 Greek state versus German state 120, 208–9 and German language 306 language 277, 289, 306 German lyric 175–7 myth 22, 28, 29, 62, 94 fairytales 211–12 Lohengrin 277 Norse saga 83, 92 Tannha¨user 277 national identity and epic 33–4, 40–1, 65, 94 National Socialism 19, 304, 326 nationalism/national identity 20, 64, 95 nature versus the German state 120 nineteenth-century German audience 94 and the Other 40–1

Index Prussian rule 286 society 14 Volk, das 12, 44, 53, 62, 118, 222, 224, 235, 241, 296, 302 Geyer, Ludwig 150 Gibbon, Edward 5, 290 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 290 Gilman, Sander 16 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 69, 303, 333 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de 290 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 26, 27, 28, 267, 294, 311 Tasso 311 Goldhill, Simon 41, 221, 296, 298 Greece art 100–5 Athens 183 Athenian drama 184, 192: civic institution 184 dissolution of Athenian state 190, 192 Delphic oracle 76, 222 Wagner’s orchestra as 76–7 Doric culture 2 language 76 lyric song 224 Sparta 41 drama Greek tragedy 14, 16–17, 94, 159, 165, 216, 235, 239, 304: agents 186; death 185, 270; fall of Athens 270; dissolution of 194; divine unity 186; endings 15, 235; as epic plus lyric 204; justice 186; messenger speech 67; and lyric 130–1; as collisions 184; political purpose 230; reconciliation (closure) 184, 186; state versus divine law 184; tragi-comedy 14

Greek chorus 14 Greek New Comedy 14: closure 246–9; endings 235, 243 Greek elegiac poets 34 epic 48 Greek epic hero versus Greek dramatic hero 102–3 Homer’s audience 94 language 3, 21, 297 and German language 306 myth 21, 22, 28, 94 Achilles 145 Ajax 144: as Siegfried 287 anthropomorphism 89 Aphrodite: as Freia 95, 97 Apollo 13, 40, 158, 167, 177, 209: as Siegfried 131 Dionysus 116, 185 Erides, the 146 Eurydice 124 Gaia 76, 169: as Erda 95 Hades 116 Hera: as Fricka 95 Herakles 102, 185, 287 Hermes 206: as Bru¨nnhilde 96–100 versus Mercury 98, 206 Odysseus 144 Olympus: as Valhalla 95 Orpheus 13, 121, 175, 319: Siegfried as Orpheus 131–3, 162 Prometheus 86: as Loge Pythagoras 138, 280 Pythia 76, 230 Python 13, 40, 158, 167, 177 Semele 19 Tartarus 116 Thetis 145 Zeus 19, 40, 68, 148: as Wotan 95 national identity 297 neo-classical Greece 27

367

368

Index Greece (cont.) pre-Platonic philosophy 235 pre-Socratic philosophy 300 Greece versus Rome 98, 304 Greek state versus German state 120 Greene, David 68 Grimm, Jacob 153 Grote, George 5, 290 History of Ancient Greece 290 Grout, Donald J. 324 Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der 43 Nibelungenlied, die 43, 62, 83, 90, 91, 94, 95 and German national identity 94 Hall, Jonathan 41 Hanslick, Eduard 23 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Aesthetics 2, 6, 7, 8–10, 11, 243 on drama 183–90: on French theater 334; origins of drama 119 on parody 336 epic 33–9, 34–9, 78: on epic endings 243; epic as external 61; on didactic poetry 85; on Hesiod 89; the Homeric hero 63, 101–2; on Die Nibelungenlied 90, 91, 94; on theogony versus cosmogony 89 Greek tragedy: as epic plus lyric 204 on lyric 112–17: historical moment of lyric 112–13, 322; individual and national identity in 113–14; lyric process 114–15; on Pindar 143–4 poetic evolution theory 9, 119, 183, 187 influence in Germany 6 influence on Wagner 6–7, 8–10, 273 Introduction to the Philosophy of History 7

Phenomenology of Mind 7 “unhappy consciousness” 68, 136, 139 Heine, Heinrich 227 Heinse, J. J. W. 247 Helbig, Wolfgang 5, 276 Heraclitus 76, 80, 219, 237 Hermann, Gottfried 5, 290 Herodotus 4, 80, 271 Darius 78, 82 Marathon 271 Salamis 271 Thermopylae 271 Hesiod 4, 12, 34, 35, 269, 277, 280 Theogony 89, 93 Works and Days 146 Envy 85–6 Perses 85 Homer 4, 12, 34, 46, 51, 53, 77, 111, 143, 271, 280, 290 epithets 259, 317 Iliad 12, 34, 36, 61, 88, 91, 94, 106, 244, 254, 271, 277 Achilles 37, 38, 106, 244, 311: shield of 89 Agamemnon 38–9, 106 Diomedes 257 Glaukos 257 “Hector’s Farewell” 281 Menelaus 38 the Myrmidons 106 Patroclus 106 Trojan War 38, 91 Odyssey 4, 12, 33, 46, 52, 61, 64, 94, 101, 244, 271, 309 Achilles 116 Calypso 103 Odysseus 19, 101, 244: scar 46–9, 50, 117 the Phaecians 103 Horace 4

Index Hu¨llmann, Karl Dietrich 5, 290 The Oracle of Delphi 290 Hugo, Victor 250 Hughes, Michael 41 Ionesco, Euge`ne 264, 266 Italy 11, 20–1, 26, 29, 42 and Antiquity 27 Italian drama 204 lyric drama 188, 194, 204–5 Italian opera 14 Jews, Jewishness 11, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 42, 136, 331 anti-Semitism 10, 54–5, 149–56, 166–71 the East 11, 21, 42, 331 Mime 149 and Rome 21 stereotypes 59 and vampirism 13, 158 and Wagner 140 Johnson, Barbara 325 Kant, Immanuel 273 compared to the Eleatics 288 Keats, John 118 Kellogg, Robert 68, 314 Kneif, Tibor 239 Ko¨chly, Hermann 5, 276 Kolland, Herbert 69 Laertius, Diogenes 324 Lehrs, Karl 277 Lehrs, Samuel 3, 5, 85, 277 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 5, 8, 26, 27, 268, 291, 293 “How the Greeks Depicted Death” 291 Laocoo¨n 291 Levin, David 43, 59

Lindenberger, Herbert 45 Liszt, Franz 55, 220, 262 Livy 4 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 350 Lord, Albert 317 love commodification 82 versus power 12, 77, 88, 92, 153 Lucian 4, 272, 294 “The Carousel or the Lapiths” 272, 294 “The Dream or the Cock” 272, 294 Lucius or the Ass 272 Lucretius 4 Ludwig II of Bavaria, King 169, 179, 294, 346 luxury 14 Lycurgus 4, 308 lyric as autobiography 140–1 and dance 332–3 versus drama sight versus sound 124–5, 171–7, 176–7 as evanescent 117–18 lyric drama 10, 188, 204–5 as Italian 10, 188 commedia dell’arte 189 emergence of the actor 188, 189 removing the Greek mask 189 emancipating bodily movement 189 German lyric 13, 14, 159, 219 and French theater 12, 219 opera as lyric 123–31 lyric characters in opera 126–7 as metatheater in opera 127–9 national identity 141–8 personal identity (individuality) 10, 107–8, 111–12, 133–6, 325 as self-liberation 129

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Index lyric (cont.) and Siegfried 13, 108, 140 as lyric opera 118 subjectivity 10 time 137 Wagner on 118–21 Mann, Thomas 10, 46, 57, 157 Marbach, Oswald 5, 277 marriage 152 McAloon, John 95 Mei, Girolamo 25 Mendelssohn, Felix 22, 210, 304 Mercury 96 versus Hermes 98 as Jewish 98 Metastasio, Pietro 128 Meyerbeer, Jacopo 228, 341 Mill, John Stuart 128 Mommsen, Johannes Tycho 144 Mommsen, Theodor 5, 277 Roman History 278 Montaigne, Michel de 106 Monteverdi, Claudio 69, 124 Moretti, Franco 93, 246, 260 Moritz, Karl Philipp 5, 291 Religious Mythology or the Mythological Writings of the Ancient Greeks 291 Mosse, George L. 304 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Don Giovanni 103, 127 The Marriage of Figaro 248 Mu¨ller, Karl Otfried 2, 5, 25, 40, 41, 61, 290, 292, 300, 318, 332 Dorians 40, 41, 76, 118, 158, 169, 284, 290, 292, 320, 337 on lyric 322 on the seer 291 History of the Literature of Ancient Greece 292

Mu¨ller, Ulrich on Wagner and the Iliad 350 myth 12, 22, 28 Na¨gelsbach, Carl F. 5, 278 Homeric Theology in its Context 278 national identity 10 Greek national identity 297 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 239, 330 nature 203 and necessity 215–19 versus the state 160–3 Newman, Ernest 150, 178 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg 5, 292 Roman History 292 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 3, 5, 20, 22, 28, 142, 178, 197, 219, 264, 268, 271, 272, 277, 278, 283, 288, 290, 291, 294, 312 Analecta Laertina 279 influence on Wagner 341 Wagner’s influence on 329 Works: The Birth of Tragedy 272, 279, 288, 294 The Birth of the Tragic Concept 279 The Case of Wagner 250 on Go¨tterda¨mmerung 199–200 Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books 279 Florentine Manuscript Concerning Homer and Hesiod, Ancestry and their Contest 280 “Greek Music Drama” 279 “The Greek State” 279 “Homer and Classical Philology” 279 “Homer’s Contest” 146, 279 “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions” 162, 280 The Origin of Greek Tragedy 279 “The Philosophers Preceding Plato” 280, 300

Index Philosophy in the Age of the Greeks 272, 318 The Pre-Platonic Philosophers 25, 163 The Rheinisches Museum for Philology 280, 294 “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” 288, 337, 345 Socrates and Tragedy 277, 280 opera, 122 birth out of tragedy 122, 123 operatic chorus 14, 221 as drama 123 Florentine Camerata 25, 69, 123, 302 French opera 14 ballet 332 Italian opera 14 as lyric 122–3, 123–31 as metatheater in opera 127–9 and myth 319 and narrative 17 as novel 17 operatic orchestra 14, 224 and Orpheus 123–31 reformation of 25, 69 Oppian 85 Orlando, Francesco 93 O’Sullivan, Neil 339 Ovid 4, 123, 272 Parmenides 34, 35 Parry, Milman 317 Pausanius 4 Pecht, Friedrich 7 performance theory or studies 15, 183, 253–66 and history 15 and time 15, 52, 253–66 bracketed time 254, 262 circular time 254 event time 254–60

free time 254 linear time 254 post-dramatic time 258, 264 set time 261–6 symbolic time 254–60 Peri, Jacopo 123 Pericles 4, 147 Petrarch 282 Pindar 4, 113, 115, 116, 142–8, 269, 277 “Nemean 8” 144–8, 10 Ajax 144, 155 Odysseus 144, 155 Plato 4, 14, 270, 272–3 Alcibiades I 273 Alcibiades II 273 Apology 273 Charmides 273 Cratylus 273 Crito 273 Euthyphro 273 Gorgias 273 Hippias Major 273 Hippias Minor 273 Ion 273 Laches 273 Lysis 273 Parmenides 273 Phaedo 266 Phaedrus 273 Protagoras 273 Republic 273 Seventh Letter 273 Symposium 273, 345 Theaetetus 273 Timaeus 273 Plautus 247, 280 Pliny the Elder 4 Natural History 281 Plutarch 4, 273, 289, 308 Lives 273, 279

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Index Plutarch (cont.) Agesilaus 273 Brutus 273 Cleomenes 273, 274 Julius Caesar 273 Lycurgus 273 Lysander 273 Nicias 273 Pericles 273 Moralia 273 Poe, Edgar Allen 117 Polybius 4, 274 Histories 274 Pythagoras 4 Ragnaro¨k 237, 244 Richter, Hans 274 Rieff, Philip 74 Rinuccini, Ottavio 123 Ritschl, Friedrich 5, 280, 294, 348 Canticum und Diverbium bei Plautus 280 as Nietzsche’s teacher 280 ritual 95 Ro¨ckel, August 9, 237 Rod, Edouard 8 Rohde, Erwin 5, 142, 280 Iamblichus’ Sources in his Biography of Pythagorus 280 Psyche 280 Roller, Duane 274, 306 Romance 106–7, 309 Rome 11, 20–1, 23 Athenian theater in Rome 207 Roman comedy 246, 293, 336 versus Greece 98, 283, 304 Latin language 3, 20, 23 and modern France 332 Roman myth 96 Sappho 4, 299–300 Sartre, Jean-Paul 266

Schadewaldt, Wolfgang 305 Wagner and the Iliad 350 Schechner, Richard 254, 261, 263, 264 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 5, 290, 292 Schiller, Friedrich 8, 26, 27, 28, 267, 294 Schlegel, Friedrich 5, 292 The Greeks and Romans 292 Poetry of the Greeks and Romans 293 Scholes, Robert 68, 314 Schopenhauer, Arthur 6, 25, 178, 199, 200, 273, 349 compared to Empedocles 288 on history 235, 254–60 Scott, Sir Walter 53, 60 Seneca 4, 122 Shakespeare, William 61, 62, 63, 223, 294, 344 Falstaff 248 Macbeth 339 Measure for Measure 247 The Merchant of Venice 249 Shaw, George Bernard 56, 87, 164, 197 on Go¨tterda¨mmerung 199 The Perfect Wagnerite 56 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 111 Sillig, Julius 5, 281 Sismondi, Jean Charles 5, 293 The Republics of Italy 293 Socrates 14, 272 Solon 34 Sophocles 4, 22, 61, 186, 210, 260, 274 Ajax 274 Antigone 22, 184, 245, 274 Antigone 102 conclusion 186 Laius 102 Oedipus 102 Polyneices 102 Electra 274

Index Oedipus at Colonus 245, 274, 335 conclusion 186 Oedipus Rex 274, 277, 282 Oedipus 321 conclusion 186 Philoctetes 245, 274 Spotts, Frederic 326 Stallybrass, Peter 319 Stein, Heinrich von 5, 21, 281–2 Heroes and the World 281 Croesus 281 Pompey 281 Solon 281 Steinberg, Michael P. 16, 22, 42, 197, 200, 219, 330 Strauss, Richard 68 Elektra 28 Stravinsky, Igor 259, 313 Sulla 278 Tacitus 4, 274 Germania 274 Terence 247 Thales 4, 237, 318 Thrasybulus 4 Thucydides 3, 4, 278, 340 The Peloponnesian Wars 274 and Aristophanes’ Knights 274 and Aristophanes’ Peace 274 blockade at Pylos 275 Melian Dialogue 274 Tieck, Ludwig 22 Tovey, Donald Francis 324 Treadwell, James 8, 58 Uhlig, Theodor 51, 53 Verdi, Giuseppi 127 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 130, 314 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 130

Virgil 4, 60, 123, 275 Aeneid 275 Vorma¨rz 8 Voss, Johann Heinrich 5, 293, 318 Antisymbolism 285 translation of the Iliad 293 Wagner, Adolf 5, 282, 346 Parnasso Italiano 282 Wagner, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm 150 Wagner, Cosima Diaries 2, 4, 26, 63, 139, 281, 298 Wagner, Johanna 150 Wagner, Minna 299 Wagner, Richard on Achilles 287 as actor 312 on ambiguity 249–52 as dilettante 2, 5–6, 10–12 on drama 190–6 Dresden library 2, 4, 6, 7, 247, 277, 284, 285, 290 on epic 39–44, 60–4 on Frederick Barbarosa 287 interest in the classics boyhood 3–4, 21 leitmotifs 10, 57, 65, 90, 258, 264, 312 and Aeschylus’ choral motifs 340 as epigraphs 79–82 and French political philosophy 200 harmonic elements in 75 and Homeric epithets 77–8 individual motifs corrupted power motif 80–2 fate motif 258 Nothung motif 258 Redemption motif 241 Tarnhelm motif 212

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Index leitmotifs (cont.) Valhalla motif 77, 79–82, 259 Wotan’s spear motif 218 as Mauerschau 67, 138 melodic elements in 75 as narrative 65–73, 75 as over-determined 313 rhythmic elements in 75 as signifiers 69–73 iconic 69, 71: isomorphous 69–70, 71, 81; isosonorous 69, 71, 72 symbolic 69, 70, 71: arbitrary 69, 70–1; cultural 69, 70, 71 as slogans 74, 315–16 as spatial 65, 73–6 as Stabreim 74, 80, 81 as temporal 65, 73 on lyric 118–21 music drama 157–9, 165 orchestra as oracle 76–7, 291 choral function of 313–14 paternity 149–52 personal and national identity 148–56 and Pindar 151–6 on problems of interpretation 10, 141, 326–7 study of primary works by the ancients 1, 4–5, 10, 11, 29, 267–8, 269–75, 296–7 study of secondary works about the ancients 1, 5, 10, 11, 29, 267–8, 276, 284–93, 296–7 theoretical writings 2, 4, 9, 10, 15, 39, 46, 311 critique of French comedy East versus West 39–40 Gesamtkunstwerk 231 Greek tragedy as epic plus lyric 204

Wagner Festival Bayreuth 15, 76, 159, 179, 261, 283, 301, 326 Bayreuther Bla¨tter 283 Festspielhaus 67, 76 and Greek tragic festival 301 origins of 178–80 Semper, Gottfried 76 Wahnfried library 2, 4, 5, 6, 247, 278, 281, 283, 284, 290 wounds 311 Plays and other poetic writings: Alexander 287 Eine Kapitulation 270, 340 Die Schlacht am Parnassus 4 Prose works: “Actors and Singers” 247 “Art and Revolution” 8, 11, 16, 39, 97, 98, 121, 166, 176, 192, 193, 194, 207, 231, 241 “The Artwork of the Future” 8, 16, 53, 157, 175, 203, 209–10, 216, 238, 239, 332 “Autobiographical Sketch” 4, 276 Brown Book 2, 261, 289 “A Communication to my Friends” 19 “The Destiny of Opera” 273, 291, 344 “German Art and German Poetry” 26 “Herodom and Christendom” 21, 102 “Judaism in Music” 22, 54, 226 “The Music of the Future” 223 My Life 3, 7, 20, 21–2, 282, 285, 289, 290, 292 “On the Name Music-Drama” 75, 316 “On Poetry and Composition” 53, 62, 332 Opera and Drama 8, 15, 16, 52, 53, 62, 66, 73, 74, 92, 118, 119, 120, 160, 163, 174, 222, 270, 274, 279, 313, 323

Index “Prologue to a Reading of Go¨tterda¨mmerung before a Select Audience in Berlin” 122 “Sketches and Fragments” 118 “A Theatre in Zu¨rich” 173, 174, 219 “The Virtuoso and the Artist” 332 “What is German” 26, 42, 291 “The Wibelungen: World History as Told in Saga” 43, 132, 169 Operas: Die fliegende Hollander 19 Das Liebesverbot 247 Lohengrin 19 Die Meistersinger von Nu¨rnberg 15, 23, 42, 127, 159, 270, 282, 327, 333 as comic opera 234 individual characters: Sixtus Beckmesser 23; Walther von Stolzing 23, 42; Hans Sachs 23, 42 Parsifal 74, 259, 309 Holy Communion music 272 Der Ring des Nibelungen as cyclical or evolutionary 9, 10, 15, 220 libretto 46 retrospective narrative 49–51 paternity 140, 149–56 as revolutionary 15 time 46, 157 as trilogy 11 as whole 9 Individual operas: Go¨tterda¨mmerung 10, 14–15, 50, 197–202 blood 216–18 chorus 224–8 finale 235–52

French Revolution 241 memory 310 narrative in 56 as parody of French theater 180, 202–3 Prelude 211 Der junge Siegfried 51, 55, 151 Das Rheingold 10, 12, 51, 52 as cosmogony and theogony 88–91 as epic proper 93–5 exchange of love for power 92 and Hesiod’s Works and Days 85, 86–8 non-human characters 93 orchestral narrator in 68, 69 Siegfried 10, 12, 14, 28 composition history 178–80 the “Forest Murmurs” 138 lyric evolution 159–63 as lyric opera 118 Siegfrieds Tod 49–52, 53, 55 Die Walku¨re 10, 12, 51 introduction of human characters 91, 95 Individual characters: Alberich 43 as Jewish 59 theft of the Rhinegold 92 and Works and Days 86 Bru¨nnhilde 13, 14, 43 as dramatic hero 321 as Hermes 96–100 relationship to Wotan 97 Erda 95, 331 as Gaia 95 Fafner 13, 43 and blood 68, 158, 331 as dragon 68 as French 166, 173

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Index Der Ring des Nibelungen (cont.) as Jewish 166 as mother figure 331 Freia as Aphrodite 95, 97 Fricka critique of Wotan 108 as Hera 95 Gibich 330 Grimhild 330 Gudrune 50 Gutrune 50, 330 Hagen 43, 50 as dramatist 211–19 as Jewish 59, 310 Loge as nature god 236 as Prometheus 95 Mime 13, 28, 43 and folk song 132, 325 as Jewish 149 and Woodbird 159 and Works and Days 86 Rhinedaughters 15, 50 as symbols of nature 239–43 Siegfried 12, 13, 14, 28, 43, 140 as Achilles 287 as Apollo 131 blood 166 confrontation with Fafner 159, 164–77 his development 163–77 forging of Nothung 132 as lyric hero 108, 161 as model for Siegfried 177 and nature 138 as Orpheus 131–3, 162 and paternity 140 racial ambiguity 165 as rebel 164

symbol of rebirth of Greek tragedy 173 as Wa¨lsung 138 and the Woodbird 68 wound 46, 49–52, 63 Siegmund 43 his death 99, 150 as epic hero 100–5, 161 liberation 139 as Romantic hero 107 Woodbird 68, 138, 159, 162 as German lyric 173 Wotan 13, 43, 68, 79–82 culture vs. nature 90 as Jewish 152, 153 relationship to Bru¨nnhilde 97 his spear 154 as Wolfe 152 as Zeus 95 Elements: Nibelung treasure 212 the Rhinegold 15, 51 Valhalla the building of 92 as Olympus 95 the world-ash 154 Wotan’s spear 154 Tannha¨user 19, 179 Tristan und Isolde 15, 159, 178–80, 309, 345 love potion in 219 Weiner, Marc 150, 318, 329 Weiss, Christian Hermann 5, 282–3 on the Peloponnesian War 283 Welcker, Friedrich Gottfried 5, 294 Wesendonck, Mathilde 178 Westernhagen, Curt von 4, 287 White, Allon 319 Wieland, Christoph Martin 5, 294 Wilhelm IV, King Friedrich 22

Index Willamovitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich von 5, 294 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 5, 26, 27, 291, 294 Wolzogen, Hans von 5, 283

Young Hegelians 6, 178, 235

Xenophanes 35 Xenophon 4, 275 Anabasis 275, 291

Zeitlin, Froma I. 340 Zeno 4 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj 100

Hieron 275, 347 Memorabilia 275 Symposium 275

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