Wagner has many sides. Composer, conductor, inventor of musical instruments, poet, theater designer, impresario, and self-marketer, he was also—such is the argument of this book—a philosopher. Even if he had never written a note of music, I shall suggest, his philosophical writings would still be important: important in part on account of their (acknowledged but poorly understood) influence on Nietzsche and (almost entirely unacknowledged) influence on Heidegger, but important, too, in and of themselves. This, however, has almost never been recognized. Although it is well known that Wagner wrote literally thousands of pages on philosophical topics, the habit of diminishing, or simply ignoring, these writings has been almost universal. Already well underway during his lifetime—he complains bitterly about the “philistines” who “can imagine the artist only as dolt, never as thinker” (AF, 68)—this trend has continued to the present day. So, for example, Reginald Hollingdale, the Nietzsche biographer, assures us that Wagner’s “pose as a philosopher . . . has no justification” since “his reasoning powers were of the slightest,” that he “deck[ed] out his writings with half understood terminology from Feuerbach and Schopenhauer” in order to give them a “spurious air of profundity” (1999, 58). Surprisingly, Wagner’s devoted biographer, Ernest Newman, agrees with this judgment, characterizing his subject’s philosophical efforts as nothing more than “sham-intellectual maunderings” (1946, 601). And even as enthusiastic a Wagnerian as Michael Tanner describes his hero’s philosophical writings as “a bore” (1979, 146). A symptom of the general low regard for Wagner’s theoretical works is the fact that, for those who do not read German, access to them remains almost entirely confined to the translations of Wagner’s prose works that William Ashton Ellis began in 1893 and completed in 1899 (Ellis 1966). Admirable though this project was, and moderately reliable though the translations are, to have Wagner’s thought refracted through the sometimes impenetrable quaintness of Ellis’s Victorian prose can only tend to confirm the accusation of “sham-intellectualism.”
The practice of discounting Wagner’s philosophical writings has a number of different causes. One, I think, is just the romantic paradigm according to which, since philosophy is “intellectual” while art is “intuitive,” a great artist like Wagner simply cannot be a serious thinker, must be a “dolt.” Another, I suspect, lies in the attempt to sanitize Wagner’s art by treating his well-known anti-Semitism as part of his attempted philosophizing and then dismissing this as meaningless “maundering” irrelevant to the “real” Wagner. (This is an unsuccessful strategy, first, because it does not address the claim that the figures of Mime and Beckmesser are anti-Semitic parodies so that Wagner’s art is anti-Semitic in its own right, and second, because, so I shall argue, there is, in fact, nothing in Wagner’s philosophy that mandates anti-Semitism.) A third cause is the fact that most people who write on Wagner are musicologists. Since musicologists tend not to feel at home in philosophy, they tend also to discount its significance for Wagner studies. A further cause lies in the fact that, for obvious reasons, Wagner’s philosophical writings are occasional, usually polemical, works dashed off in a hurry by a writer with no formal training in philosophy. They lack the “scientific” structure, discipline, and taste for qualification, sometimes taken to be hallmarks of genuine philosophy.
There are three notable exceptions to the practice of dismissing Wagner as a philosophical “dolt,” fraud, flâneur, or all of these. The first is Thomas Mann who justly observes that beneath the “random, unkempt amateurish” of the surface of the theoretical writings lies an “astonishing perspicacity and intellectual vigor,” which makes struggling through the “unkempt” prose eminently worthwhile (1985, 105). The second is Friedrich Nietzsche who was, between 1869 and 1872, Wagner’s intimate friend and disciple, and until 1876, at least in public, his supporter. Although Nietzsche’s intellectual development was in some respects a progress away from Wagner (a progress which, I shall suggest in the final chapter, was in other respects a progress toward Wagner), it is surely unthinkable that the most brilliant philosophical mind of the second half of the nineteenth century could, at the end of his career, have described his intellectual-spiritual relations with a philosophical “dolt” as the most “profound” of his life (EH III 5), and Wagner as his “greatest benefactor” (EH II 6). A third exception is Michael Tanner. In spite of having once found Wagner’s philosophical writings “a bore,” a decade and a half later he completely reverses this judgment and, in 1995, describes them as containing “much of the finest reflection ever undertaken on the nature and importance of music drama, and on many other subjects” as well (95). In spite of this reversal, however, Tanner has never undertaken the task of showing in detail just why Wagner’s reflections are so important. That is what this book tries to do. It seeks, first, to provide a clear exposition of the philosophy contained in Wagner’s indeed “unkempt” and formally “amateurish” writings, and, second, to provide them with the sympathetically critical engagement—with the Heideggerian Auseinandersetzung—that any serious philosopher deserves.
Given his usual preoccupation with other matters, there are long periods in which Wagner wrote nothing of a theoretical character. His theoretical (as opposed to poetic) writings fall into three main periods: the very early writings (mostly in French) of 1840–1841; the “Zurich” or “revolutionary” works of 1849–1852 associated with Wagner’s participation in the 1848 Revolution, which I shall refer to as the “early” writings; and the very different later writings produced subsequent to Wagner’s encounter with Schopenhauer’s philosophy in 1854. While the most important of these later works were written between 1864 and 1870, the founding of the Wagnerians’ house magazine, the Bayreuther Blätter, in 1878 provided Wagner with the stimulus and forum for a final elaboration of his later views in essays written between 1878 and his death in 1883.
The works of the very early period touch on topics—the triviality of the current operatic stage and the proper relation between music and words—that become matters of intense focus (from different perspectives) in each of the later periods. They contain, however, no discussion of culture in general, nor (even though Wagner claimed to have been already radicalized by the July revolution of 1830 [ASK 6]) of politics. Neither the advocacy of “communism” nor the ideal of the “rebirth of Greek tragedy,” major themes, we shall see, in the revolutionary writings, appear in any of Wagner’s writings prior to 1849. These absences are symptomatic of a more general absence in the very early writings; the absence of what Wilfred Sellars calls “the synoptic vision” and takes (as do I) to be definitive of the perspective of philosophy. The very early writings discuss isolated topics in the aesthetics of music but do not attempt to integrate the views expressed into a general philosophy, for which reason I shall discuss them no further.
In fact, however, Wagner had a particular gift for the synoptic vision, for integrating his views on particular topics into a synoptic totality. Nietzsche takes note of this. Even though his stance toward Wagner had, by 1874, become largely critical, he observed in his notebooks of that year that
Wagner’s strongest gift is to feel the unity in multiplicity . . . he has an innate capacity to perceive the relationship of the arts to each other and the connection between state, society and art.[1] (KSA 7 33 [7])
In other words, not only did Wagner have the capacity to conceive and create the Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art,” he also had the capacity to create a “total” philosophy of art and life.
Wagner’s talent for creating a synoptic philosophy first appears in the works of the revolutionary period that provide the topic of part I of this study. For obvious reasons, the center of his concern is art in general and opera in particular. Yet, so I argue, what Wagner offers during this period is not a free-floating aesthetics. Rather, his account of art takes place, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “from the perspective of life” (BT Attempt at a Self-Criticism, 2). His views on art and on opera are anchored in—more specifically, derived from—a general account of politics, society, and culture, a general account of the conditions of human flourishing. His early views on how life is, and how it ought to be, are, I show, influenced by “Left” Hegelians such as Proudhon, Feuerbach, and (Wagner’s comrade-in-arms during the 1848 Revolution) Bakunin. Yet, so I argue, his focus on the place of opera in a Left Hegelian vision of the future enables him to produce a philosophy that is both original and important.
As with many philosophers—Heidegger and Wittgenstein are famous in this regard—Wagner’s philosophical outlook did not remain constant throughout his career. Toward the end of 1854 he discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and underwent what he himself compared to a religious “conversion” (WBK, 257), a conversion from, broadly speaking, Hegelian optimism to Schopenhauerian pessimism. The works of this second philosophically significant period provide the topic of part II of this study. Although the philosophy of this second period is, in nearly all respects, diametrically opposed to that of the revolutionary period, it is nonetheless characterized, I shall argue, like that of the earlier period, by the integration of Wagner’s philosophy of art into a synoptic vision of life (and death). Although less original than the philosophy of the earlier period—its parameters are firmly established by Schopenhauer—there is nothing slavish, I argue, about Wagner’s Schopenhauerianism. Like the youthful Nietzsche, with whom he had innumerable discussions of Schopenhauer (BT Preface), Wagner is aware of the radical contradictions in Schopenhauer’s philosophy and, sometimes in company with Nietzsche, works at resolving them—resolving them in, as Nietzsche puts it, “Schopenhauer’s spirit and to his honor” (BT 5).
The book concludes with an epilogue that discusses the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche. Of the many different kinds of criticism Nietzsche raises against Wagner after completing his turn against both Wagner and Schopenhauer in about 1876, the most fundamental, so I argue, is to the trajectory of Wagner’s spiritual development, the move from the “life-affirmation” of the early philosophy to the “life-denial” of the later. This criticism is one I endorse. Although the later philosophy contains a number of important insights (particularly about music), what is most valuable in Wagner’s philosophical thinking seems to me his early philosophy, “the philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” as one might call it. That he turned against this philosophy is indeed, I shall suggest, a cause for regret.
Nietzsche represents the trajectory of Wagner’s career as a self-betrayal: a matter of the “lower” Wagner triumphing over the “higher” Wagner, over the Wagnerian “ideal.” And he represents himself as the true flag-bearer of that ideal. This, I argue, tells us something important about Nietzsche himself: that the lodestar of all his philosophy, including the philosophy of his maturity, is Wagner’s early “philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk.” And since, according to that philosophy, the “total” or, more accurately, “collective” artwork collects together not merely the arts but also the community—a community that thereby comes into “self-conscious” (AR, 41) existence—a proper understanding of Nietzsche’s relationship to Wagner helps us see that, although, as the standard interpretation tells us, Nietzsche indeed values the exceptional individual, he values the community even more.
It is impossible to miss the fact that Wagner’s seven (or perhaps eight) mature operas—or “musical dramas” as he preferred to call them—are thoughtful in a way that makes them essentially different from the operas of, say, Donizetti or Puccini. Nietzsche described the Ring cycle as a “tremendous system of thought” (WB 9), and while he perhaps exaggerates the systematic element he is surely right about the thought. Wagner’s operas are unmistakably about ideas, philosophical ideas. For this reason, professional philosophers, as well as philosophically inclined thinkers such as Bernard Shaw (1916),[2] have been drawn to the task of determining what the philosophical content of the operas is.
The most obvious approach to this task is to read the theoretical works of a given period, works in which Wagner tells us what his philosophy is, and then interpret the operas of that period in the light of those works. This is what Nietzsche does. Wagner’s operas, he has no doubt (and he has, it should be remembered, a deeper knowledge of Wagner than does anyone else), are Wagner’s works of philosophy “set to verse” (CW 4). Surprisingly, however, modern English-speaking philosophers who have interested themselves in the operas have almost always rejected this approach.[3] Instead, they attempt to discover Wagner’s philosophical outlook from the operas alone. So, for example, Roger Scruton’s Death-Devoted Heart (2004), a philosophical interpretation of Tristan und Isolde, makes only six, glancing references to Wagner’s theoretical writings, while Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht’s Finding an Ending (2004), a philosophical interpretation of the Ring cycle, makes none at all.
There is a reason for this. For, as we shall see, while the philosophical texts of the period in which Tristan was written and the Ring completed are resolutely Schopenhauerian in character—pessimistic, even “nihilistic”—Scruton, Kitcher, and Schacht wish to provide resolutely upbeat interpretations of their respective operas. Thus, according to Scruton, “the religious meaning” of Tristan is “the renewal of community in life” (2004, 194), while, for Kitcher and Schacht, the Ring ends with the “affirmation” that the future of “the earth” and of the life it contains is “charged with promise” (2004, 184, 201). That it ends with such an affirmation, they say, means that the Ring “is as far from delivering a Schopenhauerian negative judgment on life and the world as Wagner could have written” (2004, 23).
What appears to be happening is this. The philosophers in question love the operas and love them as something more than enjoyable music. Unsurprisingly, however, they hate the “nihilism” of Wagner’s later theoretical works. And so they solve their problem by ignoring the philosophical writings and discovering a different and more acceptable philosophical meaning in the operas. (It is worth noting that Scruton’s “renewal of the community in life” sounds rather like his own—indeed rather attractive—Burkean conservatism, while Kitcher and Schacht’s “charged with promise” is what nearly all of us would like to think about the future of “the earth.”)
In itself, this activity is not illegitimate. To reinterpret Wagner’s works as life-affirming rather than life-denying (either as philosophical interpreter or as opera director) is a healthy thing to do. But it is not good scholarship. As an attempt to discover “the” meaning of the works in the sense of Wagner’s intended meaning—which is what these philosophers, none of whom is a “death of the author” theorist, purport to be doing—the approach is seriously flawed. For what it postulates is the extraordinary hypothesis that, as a thinker (and, as I will show, he really was a thinker), Wagner systematically misunderstood his own art for the last thirty years of his life.
Wagner himself, as we shall see, gives a certain amount of dubious aid and comfort to those who would take this approach by suggesting, retrospectively, that as an optimistic, revolutionary thinker, he misunderstood himself as an artist (S&M 193, SR, 8–9). (He never, however, suggests that as a Schopenhauerian thinker he misunderstands himself as an artist.) It is, of course, true that the creator of an artwork does not have infallible access to its meaning. Reflection may, on occasion, be misaligned with artistic intention. Nonetheless, Wagner’s articulated philosophical views of a period, and his frequent interpretative observations about his operas based on those views, must surely be the best guide we have to the intended meaning of the operas of that period, a more authoritative guide than anyone else’s. Unless we have some strong evidence to the contrary (Bernard Shaw’s blustery and biographically unsound claim that the later Wagner was not a Schopenhauerian “every day of the week” [1911, 118] does not constitute such evidence),[4] to suppose an impermeable firewall to have existed for three decades between Wagner the pessimistic thinker and Wagner the artist (but not between Wagner the optimistic thinker and Wagner the artist) is simply not credible. It follows, it seems to me, that the approach of this book, which is to take the philosophical writings of a period as the principal key to deciphering the intended meaning of the operas of that period, is the only responsible approach that there is.
He completely forgets this insight in the ill-judged attempt in The Case of Wagner to claim that Wagner was merely a musical “miniaturist,” that he had no ability to create “organic unities” of any kind (CW 7).
Shaw was, of course, a great admirer of Nietzsche. His claim that with Götterdämmerung, Wagner reverts from serious social criticism to the grand opera he had started out by rejecting, echoes the theme of self-betrayal which, as indicated, I shall argue to be Nietzsche’s principal criticism of Wagner.
Although known more as a journalist than as a philosopher, an honorable exception is Brian Magee (2000).
Approving of the revolutionary Wagner, Shaw wishes to read socialism into the whole of the Ring up to and including Siegfried. He is compelled, therefore, to deny the “authenticity” of the later theoretical works.