Together with revolutionary comrades such as Mikhail Bakunin, Wagner was one of the leaders of the Dresden manifestation of the Revolution of 1848–1849. He was involved in the manufacture of grenades and attempted to incite the troops of the Saxon king to resist the Prussian troops summoned by the king to restore order.
The 1848 Revolution was, in broad terms, a rerun of the French Revolution whose ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” had simmered away throughout Europe ever since 1879. The Revolution failed. Narrowly escaping certain imprisonment and possible execution in Saxony, Wagner spent the next thirteen years in political exile, mostly in Switzerland. It was there, between 1849 and 1852, that he wrote the revolutionary “Zürich” writings that form the primary topic of this and the following three chapters. The purpose of these writings was to explain why a revolution was still needed, to explain what was wrong with the current state of affairs and what should replace it. In particular, Wagner wished to focus attention on the role of art in the revolution and its role in the “society of the future” that was to replace the current order.
As with all the radical revolutionaries of 1848, Wagner was, in a broad sense, a Hegelian. He subscribed to Hegelian “optimism” (S&M 193), to the picture set forth in The Phenomenology of Spirit of “world” (actually Western) history as a Bildungsroman, a “rational” and inexorable evolution from the primitive toward the perfect.
After Hegel’s death his followers split into two camps: the “Right” or “Old” Hegelians and the “Left” or “Young” Hegelians. For the Right Hegelians the Bildungsroman of history had already reached its end. History, they argued, had terminated in the model provided by the Prussian state (the source of Hegel’s university salary in Berlin), a state characterized by strong monarchical authority, a powerful bureaucracy and military, limited democracy, and the beginnings of social welfare. The Left Hegelians, by contrast, believed that history still had a very long way to go and that its eventual terminus would be something far more utopian than the flawed institution of the Prussian state.
Wagner was, of course, a Left Hegelian. In “Art and Revolution” he admits that his political ideals are “utopian,” but adds that to use the word as a term of abuse is merely an excuse for inaction. The only utopia that is genuinely unobtainable, he adds—disclosing one of his early bêtes noires—is the Christian one (AR, 59).
Nearly all of the Left Hegelians were critics of capitalism and most believed in the replacement of private ownership of property by communal ownership. Most of them were, that is, “communists.” (The moderate left, the social democrats, did not appear on the scene until the 1860s.) Despite recognizing the label as “police-dangerous” (AF, 75 fn.) Wagner explicitly called himself a “communist.”
This radical, “communist” left was, however, itself split into two broad camps. On the one hand were the Marxists who believed that while the state would eventually (in Engel’s phrase) “wither away” as the absence of private property allowed human nature to perfect itself, a dictatorial state—the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—was the essential precursor of that final goal. The immediate point of the revolution was thus to seize control of the state rather than to abolish it.
Opposing the Marxists were the anarchists who demanded the state’s immediate abolition. Inspired by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), the first person to describe himself as an “anarchist” and author of the famous slogan that “property is theft,”[1] their leader (insofar as anarchists can have a leader) was Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). (The split between the Marxists and anarchists was finalized in 1872 when Marx had Bakunin expelled from the International Workers’ Association.) It was to this anarchist wing of the radical left that Wagner belonged.
Bakunin and Proudhon were the political theorists who most strongly influenced Wagner (ML, 509, 467). While both agreed with Marx that a just society demands perfect economic equality—Proudhon quotes Cicero to the effect that in the great theater of nature each individual is entitled to (and needs no more than) one seat (1994, 44)—they broke with Marx on the issue of “liberty” which for Bakunin was a revolutionary ideal even more fundamental than equality: “liberty,” he wrote, “stands at the head of the agenda of history” (1973, 37). From this perspective, a dictatorial state was something that could not be tolerated even as a supposedly temporary measure. Bakunin pointed out that since government could not literally be placed in the hands of millions of workers the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” would inevitably become dictatorship by a self-serving and self-perpetuating elite, an elite that would actually prevent rather than promote the notional “withering away” of the state. (Noam Chomsky, a self-declared anarchist and admirer of Bakunin, points out that this is one of the relatively few predictions in the social sciences which [in the history of China and the Soviet Union] has been proved true [2003, 48].)
In the main, then, Wagner’s revolutionary ideals were inspired by Proudhon and Bakunin. What, however, moved him to add to the revolutionary literature was, above all, a concern for his chosen profession, that of the artist. The place of art in the revolution had not, he felt, been properly worked out.
Art, Wagner observes, is the product of leisure. It requires, therefore, that the artist’s material needs should be satisfied by someone other than himself. This tends to generate a mutual antipathy between socialists and artists. Socialists regard artists as parasites living off the sweat of the workers, which in turn leads artists to fear revolution and to ally themselves with the reactionary classes. In “Art and Revolution” (a work which appeared in 1849, one year after “The Communist Manifesto”) Wagner argues that this mutual suspicion is unjustified since people—“the people”—desire more than material adequacy. Alongside that desire they have an “instinct” for a “noble” kind of satisfaction. People want and need something more in life than “civilized barbarism” (AR, 56).
Wagner’s account of how art can and should provide this “something more,” his account of the place of art in the revolution, constitutes the constructive, and most original, side of his revolutionary writings. Yet prior to the question of the place of art in the revolution is the question of the revolution itself, of why it is needed. Why should we not join the Right Hegelians in holding the current order of society to be, if not perfect, at least as good as human beings are capable of achieving? Wagner’s answer to this question constitutes the critical aspect of his writings, his “cultural criticism.” In the retrospective “‘Zukunftsmusik’” he explains that his turn to philosophy arose out of his frustrations as a practicing artist. Realizing that art in general and theater in particular is a “mirror” of the society that produces it (AR, 24, S&M 69), and that artistic reform is therefore inseparable from social reform, he decided to investigate the social conditions responsible for the dismal phenomenon that is modern art. It is possible, I think, to distinguish five interconnected strands in Wagner’s critique of modernity: his critique of the state, of the capitalist economy, of social relations, of what I shall call “postmodern nihilism,” and—from his own perspective the most important—his critique of the current state of art.[2]
Whereas for the Right Hegelians the model provided by the Prussian state represented the “end of history,” for Wagner it is the paradigm of what is wrong with the modern state as such. The focus of his critique is what twentieth-century thinkers refer to as the “totalizing” character of the modern state.[3] The modern state is, Wagner observes, repressively bureaucratic. By compelling us to submit to a host of identical procedures it enforces a “red-tape uniformity” (AF, 203–4). Permanently militarized (AF, 204) and assuming the right to control the education of the individual, the modern state seeks to completely determine the culture and values of its citizens. Aided by a pliant press and the dogmas of an at least implicitly state religion, the modern state says “so shall you think and act” (OD, 196–97) and not otherwise. The modern state thus bureaucratizes its citizens, turns them into mere functions of itself, its “instruments” or “tools” (AR, 55, 57).
What is wrong with this absorption of all aspects of life into the life of the state is that it oppresses, constricts, places an “iron harness” on a plastic body (AF, 80). There are two aspects to this oppression: the oppression of groups and the oppression of individuals.
A natural grouping of individuals, writes Wagner, is the product of shared land, climate, genealogy, language and customs. Human beings need, can only flourish in, a “communal homeland” (AF, 89). Modern states, however, created by “capricious”—usually dynastic—interests, destroy such natural groupings and force people into “unnatural unions” (AF, 203). The natural need for homeland is thus replaced by the fractiousness of enforced cohabitation with an alien humanity.
The modern state oppresses individuals (individuals in their individuality rather than in their need for a shared homeland) because while they have a deep need for the “breathing space” in which to develop “freely, elastically” into the individuals that they are, the state confronts them with a “stiff, dogmatic, fettering and domineering might” that homogenizes them into the types of being of which it approves (OD, 196–97). Variety, to be sure, is not absent from modern life. Diachronic variety is provided by changes in fashion. But this is merely a form of economic oppression: Wagner particularly objects to the Paris fashion industry telling the “German wife” how she should dress (B, 19). Synchronic diversity is provided by differences in “class,” yet that, too, is merely a kind of enforced uniformity: “these days we cannot conceive a human being otherwise than in the uniform of his ‘class’” (OD, 100).
The total state is, then, inimical to the liberty that is the precondition of individual happiness. But it is also fatal to itself. The reason for this is that only genuine individuals can create, and only creation can enable a society to meet the novel challenges of an ever-changing environment. Wagner makes this point in terms of “genius.”
Whereas talent is merely the ability to work within the existing scheme of things more quickly and accurately than others, genius, says Wagner (in remarkably modern language), is the ability to “open up new pathways.” The genius is one who “abrogates” existing forms and is thereby enabled to “fashion new forms of life and art” (CF, 289). Wagner rejects the romantic idea that genius comes as a bolt out of the blue, a gift of the gods. The ossified character of Chinese history is, he says, a plain proof that social conditions can either promote or, as in the case of China, stifle, the appearance of genius.[4] But now, laments Wagner, genius is being crushed by the modern state, particularly by modern, state-controlled education. His own genius, he observes, he owes to his being, relatively speaking, uneducated. To his boring, time-serving teachers, he told Nietzsche, he paid almost no attention (TFN, 292–93).
It is, surely, this idea of the “finder of new pathways” (“entrepreneurship” in even more up-to-date language) that is presented in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Wagner completes a prose sketch of the work in 1845). Walter von Stolzing with his new style of singing is the epitome of untamed “genius,” while the “marker,” Beckmesser, epitomizes the stifling weight of tradition. (In his “Communication to My Friends” Wagner says that it is not, in fact, Walter but rather Hans Sachs—who brings about the reconciliation between Walter and the mastersingers—who embodies the “productive spirit of the people,” implying that genius must be tempered by rules of intelligibility to produce something of value to either art or society [CF, 329].) But the “finder of new pathways” reappears, too, in Nietzsche’s insistence on the necessity of the “untimely man” or, later, “free spirit,” to a society that has the capacity to adapt to an ever-changing world. More remotely, it belongs to the brew of ideas that were “in the air” and about to find their expression in The Origin of Species (1859). Like Nietzsche’s “free spirit,” Wagner’s “genius” is a cultural analogue of Darwin’s “random mutation.”[5]
A critique of the total state is not, of course, a critique of every kind of state, and, as an anarchist, it is the abolition of the state as such to which Wagner is committed. It is plausible to see the call for such an abolition as an element in the narrative of the Ring[6] (the “state” that is created by the treaties engraved on and enforced by Wotan’s spear is one in which everyone, mermaids, dwarfs and gods, is miserable) and is explicitly argued for in 1852, in Opera and Drama’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone. (In the tragedy, Antigone dies because she gives a proper burial to her brother, thereby defying Creon’s order that, as someone who attacked his own city, Polyneices body shall be left to the vultures.) The moral Wagner draws from the tragedy, one that is “true for all times,” is the need for, and inevitability of, the downfall of the state. He argues as follows. The state arises out of the “well-meaning” attempt to embody and enforce the “ethical view” of the community, its shared understanding of the proper order of communal life. But rapidly and inevitably, the state turns from being the preserver of communal ethos into its enemy. The support of vested interests and desire of the majority for a quiet life allow corrupt men to come to power. The actual state, Wagner claims, always embodies the vices, never the virtues, of individuals (OD, 186–95).
Two elements in Wagner’s thought, when taken together, lead one to wonder, however, whether there might not be a hyperbolic element in his advocacy of anarchism. The first is the plausible thesis that art in general and theater in particular “mirrors” the society that produces it (p. 5 above), so that a healthy art mirrors a healthy society. The second is the fact that the great age of Greek tragedy—for Wagner, as we shall see, the pinnacle of Western art—coincided with the great age of the (somewhat) democratic Athenian state: Sophocles and Pericles were almost exact contemporaries. Given this, together with, as we shall see, Wagner’s positive approval of the fact that the playwrights and actors in Greek tragedy were often “the most illustrious members of the state” (Z, 307), it might be best to conclude that, while skeptical about its lasting for any length of time, a genuine nation state, one that keeps itself constantly in tune with the ethical sense of its citizens, might be something to which Wagner would find no real objection.
Turning from politics to economics, the second strand in Wagner’s modernity critique focuses on capitalism and its effects on the use of modern industrial technology. In Rome, Mercury (the Greek Hermes) was the god of tricksters and thieves (elements of Mercury’s character are surely incorporated into the Ring’s Loge). But in the modern world he is the principal god, the god of the “holy five percent” (AR, 41–42). Modern life is based, in other words, on the acquisition of wealth, not by labor, but by the ownership of wealth. It is based, in short, on capitalism.
Capitalism has resulted in a new form of slavery. Though we condemn the slavery of the ancient world, modern industrial capitalism reduces its workers to nothing but “steam power for the machine” (AR, 54, TR, 233)—mere, as we now say, “human resources.” Whereas work in the pre-modern craft economy was a joyful, creative activity, work in the modern factory is unpleasant, dehumanized, mechanical “drudgery” (AR, 50). It is, in Marx’s terminology, “alienated.”[7] The reduction of workers to industrial slaves, Wagner continues, is endorsed and enhanced by Christianity’s doctrine of the “worthlessness of human nature” (AR, 55). Life is not meant to be fun: the poverty of the many is a sign of the worthlessness of the many. Conversely, the wealth of the few is a sign of the virtue of the few, of God’s blessing. As “our [modern] God is gold, our religion the pursuit of wealth” (AR, 51), so our modern moral heroes are “hero[es] of the bourse” (AR, 50).
One might think that though the workers are likely to be miserable in a capitalist economy, at least the “slave”-owners, the bourgeoisie, are happy. But this in not so. One reason for this, implicit in Wagner’s Prussia-focused critique of the state, is that though not reduced to industrial “resources,” the middle classes are nonetheless reduced to “resources”—bureaucratic, state resources. Another is that since capitalism engenders a materialistic conception of happiness—since production depends on consumption, capitalism has a systematic need to promote the conception of happiness as consumption —the bourgeoisie conceive of happiness as “luxury,” as the consumption of more and more things. But once genuine desires are satisfied, the acquisition of unnecessary things produces less and less pleasure, becomes in fact, boring. Because they can satisfy only “artificial” (AF, 75), manufactured desires, the bourgeoisie are “bored to death by pleasure” (Z, 306).
Capitalism is thus a double curse. The working classes are miserable because they exist in a condition of slavery and destitution. The bourgeoisie are miserable because they are bored. (In 1854 Wagner will rediscover this idea in Schopenhauer. “Need and want,” writes Schopenhauer, “are the ‘scourge of the people,’” boredom is the affliction of “the world of fashion” [WR I, 313].)
A further curse of capitalism is social atomization. Capitalism is ruled, says Wagner, by a “religion of egoism” (AF, 155). (The point can be put by saying that, while presented as purely descriptive, classical economics is, in fact, a normative account of capitalism.) By producing a society of competitive individuals who pursue private interest to the exclusion of all else, to the exclusion, in particular, of communal interest, capitalism destroys community. Why community should be important is something we shall come to later on.
Although he thinks that the Ring cycle loses its way at the end, Bernard Shaw claims, in The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), that at least Das Rheingold is a critique of capitalism. Whatever the opera might be in addition to this, Shaw’s claim is surely undeniable. The Nibelungen slaves working in Alberich’s underground cave are evident “steam-power” for his industrial machine; some productions emphasize the point by making Nibelheim a very steamy place.
In Das Rheingold, Alberich can only acquire the power to turn the Rhine-gold into the ring of world domination by swearing an oath renouncing love. This brings us to a further strand in Wagner’s critique of modernity, his claim that it is “loveless.”
Wagner claims that to the extent we are engulfed by the culture of modernity we are rendered incapable of genuine love. This is the meaning of his treatment of the Lohengrin myth, which, he says, has been widely misunderstood as a Christian allegory. In the opera, the swan-born knight makes it a condition of their union that Elsa give him the absolute trust that needs to ask neither his name nor origin. Through frailty and intrigue she eventually raises the fatal question thereby forcing him to return to the heavenly region from which he came. The opera’s tragic hero, Wagner surprisingly asserts, is not Elsa but rather Lohengrin himself. He descends from the “cold” realm of his “lonely, sterile bliss” seeking the warmth of unconditional human love. He yearns to be man, not god. He seems to have found true love with Elsa but in the end is betrayed by her. This, says Wagner, is “the tragic element of modern life.” The principle of unconditional love seemingly embodied by Elsa but in the end betrayed by her, he adds, “made me a revolutionary at one blow” (CF, 347).
What is non-Christian about this reading of what was, of course, originally a medieval Christian myth (Lohengrin is the son of Percival [Wagner’s Parsifal], the knight of the Holy Grail) is the reversal of the Christian order of value: in Wagner’s early interpretation of his opera (one he will later abandon) the natural, human world is superior to the supernatural, heavenly world.
This reversal, together with the elevation of human love to a supreme value, reflects the considerable influence exercised over the early Wagner by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Wagner dedicated the 1849 “Artwork of the Future” to Feuerbach, making him the most conspicuous of Wagner’s philosophical debts.[8]
Feuerbach’s most famous and influential work is the 1841 The Essence of Christianity which so impressed George Eliot that she developed her German to a point where she was able to translate it into English. Wagner, however, found it relatively boring, calling it “prolix and unskilful” as well as “dull” (ML, 522–23). What impressed him were the Thoughts on Death and Immortality of 1830 (ML, 521), and the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future of 1843; that the latter work impressed him is evident from the fact that the very title of his “The Artwork of the Future” pays homage to it.
Feuerbach (in general terms a Left, but relatively apolitical, Hegelian) is a critic of traditional, especially Lutheran, Christianity. Concerning the traditional, supernatural God he argues, first, that he is a fiction—there is no supernatural world—and, second, that we—we nineteenth-century, educated Europeans—really know him to be a fiction. Unlike our medieval ancestors who lived in a world infested by angels and demons, we, he observes, “have lost the organs for the supernatural” (1986, 23). Third, Feuerbach argues (mirroring Hegel’s critique of the “unhappy consciousness” of the Middle Ages), the location of true happiness in the supernatural world is a destructive idea since it leads to the devaluation of this—the only real—life (1980, 11–14).
An atheist might respond to the last of these observations by demanding that we erase God from our worldview. (Bakunin, for example, responding to Voltaire’s “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him,” writes that “if God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him” [1973, 128].) Feuerbach, however, is no atheist. His famous slogan “theology is anthropology” is not merely a denial of traditional theology, a reduction of the supernatural gods to humanity’s wish-fulfilling projections, but also a normative injunction pointing toward the construction of a “true” theology. What we must do is not abolish God but rather transfer him from the supernatural to the natural, and specifically human, world. “The task of modernity,” he writes, is “the humanization of God . . . the transformation of theology into anthropology” (1986, 5).
Feuerbach’s execution of this program contains in a radically new interpretation the biblical text “God is love” (John 4:8). God, he asserts, exists in loving intimacy, “in the unity of I and thou” (1986, 71). To the extent that human beings love each other—the paradigm of loving intimacy, but by no means its exclusive expression, is sexual love (1903, 22, 276)—the Divine is realized. This is the hidden meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity: in the “I-thou” relation a third being, the Holy Spirit, exists (1986, 72). The more love there is, the more we are genuinely intimate with each other, the more God is realized. Implicit in Feuerbach, I think, is the Hegelian idea of an “end of history” in which all human beings come to exist in loving community with each other, so that, finally, God is fully realized. From this point of view, God is thought of as an historical process, a process of self-actualization.
All this, I believe, lies behind Wagner’s inversion of the traditional Lohengrin myth. Lohengrin’s supernatural world is not a better place than the natural, human world. The human world is the better place, or at least will be if love is allowed to flourish. Love, then, is what makes the human world worth living in, makes it potentially divine. But love is excluded by modern culture. Wagner presents two arguments in support of this claim, both of which have ultimately to do, I think, with the effects of capitalism.
The first of these arguments concerns language. In the grips of modern culture, Wagner argues (OD, 224 3–6), we can neither give nor receive love. This is because modern language is incapable of expressing love. It cannot express love because it cannot express emotion of any kind. Communication within the language of modernity suffers from a kind of emotional numbness, a kind of autism.
Originally, human communication was more like song than speech.[9] Our first language was intensely “lyrical,” primarily used to express emotion. In a simple world, identification of objects of interest (of fear or desire) was achieved by pointing, or by inference from the direction of eyes or the source of sound. The main point of our ancestors’ utterances was thus not to describe states of affairs but to express feelings, either about objects or belonging to one’s inner state. Thus, almost exclusively, the sounds they produced were vowel sounds, faint traces of which remain in the vowel sounds of modern speech. The human Ur-sprache resembled, therefore, the babble of babies. Wagner does not explicitly make this comparison, preferring a comparison with animal communication (CD 3 July 1869), but it is implicit in his operas. As Thomas Grey points out (1995, ch. 5), in moments of high emotion Wagner’s female characters (but not the male ones, suggesting that women are regarded as more “primal”) revert to what one might call the “primal babble.” At the beginning of Das Rheingold, for instance, Woglinde sings a lullaby to her “baby,” the Rhine-gold: “Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle, Walle sur Wiege! Wagalaweia! Wallala wiala wei!” The only bona fide words here are Woge, Welle, Walle (wave), and Wiege (cradle). And the Valkyries’ hunting call, as they make their famous ride—Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heiaha! (act III scene 1)—contains no words at all.[10]
As with human infants, then, the primary role of our first language was to express emotions through a kind of singing. But as civilization became more complex and technical, language needed to develop its descriptive capacity to facilitate and coordinate the manipulation of the outer world. And as the pace of life sped up, description thrived more and more at the expense of expression. For what occurred was the “evaporation of the ringing sound of [emotion expressing] vowels in the hasty clang of talk” (OD, 229).
What I suspect Wagner to have in mind, here, is the supreme value that attaches to efficiency in a capitalist economy. Given that “time is money,” that the fewer man-hours required to manufacture a product the greater the profit, speed of action—and therefore of communication—assumes central importance. And that precludes displays of emotion which occupy time that could otherwise be devoted to productive action—in somewhat the way in which the aria interrupts the progress of the action in traditional opera. A deeper point is that the experience of strong emotion disables the worker, at least temporarily, as an efficient productive unit. And so capitalism seeks to suppress the expression of emotion as a means, ultimately, to suppressing the experience of emotion. The more the worker resembles an intelligent but passionless machine the closer he comes to the ideal.
Language, one might say, is poetic to the extent it is expressive. And, if Wagner is right, it is expressive mainly to the extent it gives full value to its emotion-bearing vowels. In the age of the “txt,” “app,” “blog,” “iPad,” and “uni,” it is hard, I think, not to find prescience in Wagner’s claim about modernity’s loss of the poetic vowel. Increasingly, it seems, our everyday discourse is indeed coming to resemble that of passionless machines. And if there is insight contained in Heidegger’s observation that “language is the house of being,” that the way we speak determines the way we are, then we stand under the threat of becoming passionless beings, of becoming “post-human,” to borrow a term from one sinister line of current thinking.
A second argument to the essential lovelessness of modernity, although not very explicit in Wagner’s theoretical writings, appears at the beginning of the Ring, in the opening scene of Das Rheingold. Having failed in his attempt to gain the Rhine-maidens’ love, Alberich steals their gold. As noted, he can fashion from it the ring of power only by swearing an oath renouncing love. He swears the oath and then enslaves his fellow Niblungen as industrial “steam-power” for his project of global lordship.
It is worth asking why the lust for the power that only gold can bring should demand the renunciation of love. Alberich is, of course, an ugly dwarf whom the Rhine-maidens find repulsive, but why should not an averagely attractive male both pursue success in a capitalist economy and find love?
Thomas Mann suggests that the starkness of contrast Wagner draws between power and love suggests that he is thinking in essentially Freudian terms (1985, 98).[11] There is only one kind of energy, “libidinal” energy, which, because its quantity is finite, can be “sublimated” into the successful pursuit of money and power only at the expense of its natural expression as love. Either Mercury or Eros rules; they cannot co-exist.
The trouble with this interpretation, however, is that it saddles Wagner with an implausible argument. After 1920 Freud abandons the implausible idea that sexuality is the sole source of psychic energy and admits a second, independent source in the form of aggression (Freud 1961). But it is surely far more plausible to view the striving for money and power as, in the main, sublimated (and not-so-sublimated) aggression than as sublimated sexuality, a view that, contra Mann, leaves libidinal energy at least partially free to find its natural, unsublimated expression as love.
Wagner’s real answer to the question of why the capitalist must abandon love is, I think, simpler. To the extent that he loves his workers the capitalist will fail to exploit them. His enterprise will therefore collapse in competition with capitalists who do exploit their workers. To the extent that one is consumed by the capitalist mentality, other people must become exploitable resources—objects of various kinds—and nothing more. Alberich exemplifies this mentality in saying, several times, that it does not matter that he has renounced the pleasure of love since, with his money, he can buy “it.”
Notice that by beginning the Ring in the way he does Wagner also points to the force that will overcome (in Nietzsche’s
language) the exploitative will to power, namely, the power of love. This is confirmed
by the new
ending, the so-called “Feuerbach ending,”[12] Wagner constructed for Götterdämmerung (under its provisional title of Siegfrieds Tod) in 1852, the year in which he wrote Opera and Drama. Whereas Brünnhilde’s final monologue had, in the version completed in 1848, simply
praised the dead hero, Siegfried, she now, before setting light to the funeral pyre
whose flames will consume both herself and the gods, concludes her monologue with
the following vision of the future:
The race of gods has passed,
Like a breath.
I leave behind a[n anarchist] world without rulers.
The treasure of my holy wisdom
I now give to the world.—
Not possessions, not gold,
Nor godlike splendor;
Not house, not court,
Not arrogant pomp;
Not dark treaties’
Treacherous bonds,
Not dissembling customs’
Hard laws.
Blessedness in desire and sorrow
Love alone allows to be. (WW 6:256; my translation)
This, as we shall see, is by no means the end of the story of the ending of the Ring (see further pp. 115–18 below), but as Nietzsche observes, in Wagner’s revolutionary period, the destruction of the old world of the gods is supposed to be followed by Brünnhilde’s singing “a song in honor of free love,” a vision in which “all turns out well in a ‘socialist utopia’” (CW 4).
A further strand in Wagner’s cultural criticism, one that emerges in his later writings,
concerns the effect of the accumulation of unprecedented quantities of information
about past and alien cultures by nineteenth-century scholars, together with its dissemination
by means of cheap and rapid printing on a scale hitherto unknown. We live, he writes,
in a “paper” age, an age in which we are supplied with information about cultures
other than our own on an unprecedented scale. We suffer, in fact, from “lexicomania,”
the obsessive consumption of vast amounts of written material—from “information overload”
in modern jargon. This means not merely that we are easily manipulated by those who
control the press (“the media”) but also that the spirit of the age is essentially
“critical,” critical in a way that undermines the self-confidence required by creativity.
We succumb to the sense that “it’s all been done before,” are reduced to the belief
that “art must renounce all idea of originality and content itself with a merely reproductive
use and combination of existing types” (B, 113–16). Wagner likely has in mind here
such phenom-
ena as nineteenth-century architecture’s inability to do more than “revive” either
the Classical or the Gothic, but what he has actually put his finger on, one might
suggest, is the fact that so-called “post-modernism” is not really “post” modernity
at all.
In the fourth of his Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, and in the second of his Untimely Meditations,[13] works written during the time of his intimacy with Wagner and from within, as he explicitly says, the “Bayreuth Horizon” (KSA 7 19 [303] et passim), Nietzsche makes clear that Wagner’s point does not concern art alone but concerns morality and culture in general. The fact of our “historical consciousness,” our wide knowledge of past and alien cultures, generates, he says, a spirit of “nihil admirari.” In setting “our” ethos side by side with a myriad of other options, history (and “cultural studies” in general) “deconstructs” it, deprives it of its unconditional authority over us. As in the later Roman Empire, modernity’s “cosmopolitan carnival of gods” turns modern man into “a strolling spectator,” his mood into one of cynical “senility.” Deprived of naive confidence in our inherited conception of the proper way to live, we come to “distrust our instincts,” becoming incapable of commitment and action (UM II 10). Postmodern nihilism has arrived.
Thus is Wagner’s critique of modernity in general. As an artist, however, as, in particular, an opera composer, what concerns him above all is the condition of art in modernity, in particular, the condition of opera. Two main strands can be distinguished in his critique of modern art: the first concerns its commodification, the second our loss of “wonder” before the artwork.
Since, Wagner observes, capitalism shapes modernity in general, it shapes, in particular, art: “mirroring” the character of society at large (cf. p. 5 above), the arts—and opera more than most other forms—have become a commodity, a consumer product. The “true essence” of modern art is “industry . . . the gaining of gold.” Opera has been reduced to “the opera industry” (S&M 69).[14]
Modern theatrical art, Wagner observes, is almost entirely dependent on market forces. This, he continues, is a recent phenomenon. In the eighteenth century, theater was still, in the main, supported by royal and aristocratic patronage (in the Middle Ages art had been supported by church and in the ancient world by the state). Now, however, it is dependent on box office sales. Even in theaters that continue to enjoy royal patronage (such as the Dresden theater where Wagner had been conductor at the time of the 1848 Revolution) the commercial spirit is so prevalent that the extra money merely results in more lavish productions (CF, 353–54), more “special effects.”
Since art is now thoroughly integrated into the capitalist market economy its content and character is, Wagner observes, determined by consumer demand. Whereas in the past theatrical art was of the highest ethical significance—the function of Greek (and medieval) theater was, as we shall see, to animate and reanimate the ethical foundations of society—the theater of today provides mere “amusement and distraction.” Whereas the art of the past enhanced and animated life, theater today is merely a “narcotic” designed to “distract” us from it (OD, 43, 46, 372). Modern art has been reduced to escapist entertainment, has become nothing more than a department of the entertainment “industry” catering to the bored and work-weary: “When a prince leaves a heavy dinner, the banker a fatiguing financial operation, the working man a weary day of toil and go to the theater, what they ask for is rest, distraction, and amusement, and are in no mood for renewed effort and fresh expenditure of energy” (AR, 42–44; cf. Z, 306–7). Of course, that the demand is of this character is itself determined by capitalism. The audience is incapable of anything other than passive consumption because it is exhausted by work and because capitalism teaches it that happiness is passive consumption.
The only regulator of art in the modern age, in particular the art of the theater, is the question of which sector of the audience it is directed toward: the “rabble” require gross farces and crass monstrosities (vaudeville, music hall), the “decorous philistines” of the bourgeoisie, who expect entertainment to be wrapped up in conventional morality, require “moral family dramas,” while the aristocracy demand highbrow “art,” the art of connoisseurs. Modern theaters are designed for all three classes: the “gods” for the rabble, the orchestra (stalls) for the bourgeoisie, and boxes for the aristocracy. The commercial genius of nineteenth-century Franco-Italian grand opera is that, rather than having different types of show on different nights, it caters to all segments of society at one and the same time. Thus, for the rabble, it includes lavish special effects (processions, elephants, huge choruses, spectacular costumes, dance and scenery), for the bourgeoisie, a weepy tale of love and death, and, for the aristocratic lovers of high “art,” beautiful singing. In general, the cleverness of grand opera is that it manages to homogenize its audience. The lowbrow rabble are persuaded to enjoy fine singing along with their spectacular effects, the highbrow are persuaded to put up with, and even enjoy, the spectacular effects (CF, 351–52).
The “narcotic,” escapist nature of musical theater means, says Wagner, that, whatever segment of the audience one comes from, it is the desire not for edification but for “pleasure” that takes one to the theater. One desires to have one’s taste buds tickled by the “sauces of the stage” (OD, 39). (One is reminded here of Berlioz’s alleged observation that the Italians “take their opera as they take their pasta” and of Heidegger’s remark that modern art in general is the art of “pastry cooks” [2000, 131].) And what this means, on the crucial question of the relation between words and music, is that all the audience really cares about is the music.[15] This tells us what is fundamentally wrong with “the art-genre of opera” as such: “a means of expression (the music) has been made the end, while the end (the drama) has been made the means” (OD, 17; Wagner’s emphasis). Theater, that is, is supposed to be, above all, drama. But the dramatist–the “poet” as Wagner calls him—is reduced to near—irrelevance by nineteenth-century opera.
Wagner acknowledges a “serious-minded” route to the primacy of music, namely Gluck’s mistaken but sincerely held belief that music, raised to a new level of seriousness, could, as the “immediate language of the heart,” “ordain the drama” (OD, 35), be the primary bearer of the narrative. (As we shall see, on this crucial issue of the dramatic potential of music later Wagner reverses himself.) Mainly, however, the primacy of music is the result of the integration of opera into the capitalist market economy. Since what people want is “sensuous pleasure,” and since, in capitalism, the market is always right, that is what it gets. Thus the heart of opera is the aria—nothing more, Wagner’s polemic suggests, than a lovely tune for easy listening. Apart from this only the pleasure of admiring vocal gymnastics really matters. While this “bel canto” conception of opera had its origins in the courts of sixteenth-century Italy, it was Rossini who first turned it into a mass commercial success (OD, 42–45). (Bearing in mind Berlioz’s remark about opera and pasta, it is no accident, perhaps, that Rossini was, inter alia, a celebrated cook, according to some accounts the creator of the “tournedos Rossini.”)
Since all that matters in opera is the aria, Wagner continues, the drama being a mere “excuse,” the minimal story-line is relegated to the “recitative.” The audience chatters through that (opera is, after all, a social occasion, a matter of seeing and being seen),[16] pausing only to listen to the big aria of which it demands six encores. This, of course, completely disrupts whatever dramatic continuity might survive the stop-and-start of the aria–recitative division, completing the reduction of the evening to a “chaos of cheap sensations” (AR, 44). Even the most rudimentary requirements of coherence and psychological plausibility demanded of any stage play are cast aside when it comes to opera. As Voltaire said of opera, “If it’s too silly to be said it gets sung” (Z, 310).[17]
The effect of all this on acting and singing is disastrous. Singers lose the capacity for authentic acting. The aim is merely one of “effect,” of producing a display of vocal gymnastics calculated to bring the audience to its feet in outbursts of hysterical applause, followed by the “brilliant exit” that upstages everyone else. Acting has been reduced to a mere parade of the “star’s” inflated ego—a perversion of acting that ought to be the art that conceals art: “art ceases to be art from the moment it presents itself to our reflective consciousness as art” (DO, 133–34, AS, 160–62).
The second strand in Wagner’s critique of modern art concerns our loss of “wonder” before the artwork. In the past, he observes, artworks possessed a charismatic power of quasi-religious intensity that raised them “high above” daily life and preserved them in the memory (OD, 321). (In classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages, of course, most art possessed an actually religious significance.) Reverence for the artwork meant that one brought to it a very high quality of attention that allowed it to occupy the entirety of consciousness. But now, Wagner laments, all that has been lost.[18]
In the writings of the revolutionary period loss of wonder is attributed to the capitalist commodification of art. If all one goes to the theater for is the “sauces of the stage” then going to the theater is no more wondrous than going to a restaurant. In his later works, however, Wagner becomes aware of the industrial reproduction of artworks—an aspect of our living in the age of information overload (p. 15 above)—as a cause of loss of wonder.
Wagner’s observations anticipate those made a century later in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1999, 217–52). Like Benjamin, Wagner sees that the “wonder”—or as Benjamin calls it “aura”—of artworks is disappearing in modern, industrialized society. In an age in which “even the humblest citizen has the opportunity of placing the noblest types of art before his eyes upon his mantelpiece, whilst the beggar himself may peep at them in the art-shop windows” (B, 120), and in which music could increasingly be obtained almost “on demand,”[19] the performance or viewing of an artwork was losing the sense of being a “special occasion” on which its wonder had depended in the past. It was principally to preserve the wonder—and so power—of his works that Wagner wished their performances to be few and far between, wished them to be performed only in festivals. Should they become available for general performance by repertory companies, should they become available for performance “on demand,” he feared, they would be absorbed into the “opera industry,” would merely add to the stock of consumer products.
The Greeks, writes Wagner, sought refuge from “nature-necessity” in the state. We, however, now seek refuge from “the arbitrary political state” in “nature-necessity” (OD, 179). As we saw, Wagner views the state as an originally “well-meaning” (OD, 192) attempt to serve its citizens that ends up by reducing them to its “instruments.” A similar pattern of reversal underlies Wagner’s history of language: originally designed for the expression of emotion, language has ended up stifling that expression and so the emotions themselves. And implicitly, at least, it underlies Wagner’s view of capitalism. Originally the sensible idea of making productive use of accumulated wealth, capitalism ends up turning us into industrial (or post-industrial) slaves.
Wagner realizes that all of these modes of oppression illustrate a common theme: human beings set up institutions, economic, political, linguistic—social “relations” he calls them—to serve their interests but they end up enslaved by those very institutions. Surveying the modern scene he sees
nothing but relations; the human being I could only see in so far as the relations ordered him and not as he had power to order them . . . “relations” whose coercive force compelled even the strongest man to squander all his powers on objectless and never-compassed aims. (CF, 358)
This reversal motif, the reversal of the master–slave relation, locates Wagner (as it locates such diverse thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Foucault) in a particular historical tradition: the critique of the Enlightenment that began with German Romanticism.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a glorification of human reason as a faculty in principle capable of solving every problem. Acutely aware of the dark side of modern life, the German Romantics located its cause in Enlightenment rationalization, in the invasion of all aspects of life by instrumental, calculative reason. So, for example, Novalis (1772–1801) described the combination of the modern bureaucratic state and capitalist economy as a “mill as such, without a builder and without a miller, a real perpetuum mobile, a mill which grinds itself” (Rohkrämer 2007, 35). And Schelling (1775–1854) (with whose writings Wagner had some acquaintance [ML, 521, 615]) described modern society as “a machine which . . . though built and arranged by human beings . . . act[s] . . . according to its own laws as if it existed by itself” (ibid.). It seems to me that Goethe’s parable of the sorcerer’s apprentice whose spell makes the broom do his work but, because he cannot undo the spell, ends up as the slave of the broom, is probably also intended to point to the same phenomenon of reversal. This, then, is the tradition to which Wagner’s critique of modernity belongs.
A further aspect of the Enlightenment the Romantics found destructive was its debunking of religion. Human beings, they were convinced, cannot thrive without a religious dimension to their lives. This conviction did not lead them to wish for the reinstatement of traditional Christian metaphysics—that had unmistakably died at the hands of Enlightenment critique and its death was nothing to be lamented. The death of traditional religion should not, however, mean the death of the religious as such. What it means, rather, is that the religious need must find a new form of satisfaction now that the old form is dead.
Thus the question the Romantics faced was this: since reason cannot support religion, since reason is a merely a critical force with respect to the religious need, where should we look for, in Hölderlin’s words, a “return of the gods”? And their answer was: to art. This, as we shall see, is Wagner’s answer as well.
The aphorism is actually somewhat misleading. Proudhon has, in fact, no quarrel with the absolute ownership of property that is the product of one’s own labor. What he regards as unjust, and as a departure from the “communism” that was the original order of society, is ownership—as opposed to rights of use—of what one had not produced, first and foremost ownership of land (1994, 45).
Wagner’s “cultural criticism,” though appearing mainly in the earlier texts, is roughly speaking a constant throughout his career. The radical transformation of his philosophical outlook induced by the discovery of Schopenhauer did not affect his diagnosis of the ills of modernity but only his thoughts about the possibility and nature of a remedy. I shall therefore treat the modernity-critique as it appears in the later texts as continuous with that of the earlier ones. This being said, it is worth noting that while the earlier texts focus mainly on economic and political structures, the later ones place greater emphasis on the impact of modern technology. The acquisition of this added dimension by the later critique is to be explained, I think, by the fact that the enormous cultural impact of the nineteenth-century technological revolution—railways, mass printing, and global electronic communication in the form of the telegraph—became apparent only in the latter part of Wagner’s life.
Giovanni Gentile, the leading philosopher of Italian fascism, viewed the arrival of the total state with approval, Ernst Jünger (in his 1930 “The Total Mobilization”) with a kind of awed horror.
Wagner personifies his point with a Norse parable. At the birth of the king’s son the three Norns each presented him with a gift: strength, wisdom, and the disposition to have a “never-contented mind always brooding on the new.” The horrified king demanded the withdrawal of the third gift, which duly happened. The result was that the omni-contented son fell asleep under a large rock that promptly fell and killed him (CF, 289). Wagner’s view of China reappears almost verbatim in section 24 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. The capacity for continual “self-transformation,” historically possessed by Europe but conspicuously lacked by China, is due, Nietzsche writes, to its “malcontents.” This is very likely one of the many hidden debts that Nietzsche’s later thought owes to his earlier mentoring by Wagner.
More exactly, Nietzsche’s free spirit of the “first rank.” Free spirits of the “second rank” (GS 23) simply deny current norms, those of the first rank do so in creative ways. See further Epilogue note 8.
Wagner completed Siegfrieds Tod, an embryonic version of its text, in 1848.
Since Wagner was five years older than Marx and seven years older than Engels, and since his Dresden library contained none of their works (Westernhagen 1978, vol. I, 133), while it is possible that there were word-of-mouth influences, it is unlikely that Wagner’s critique of capitalism was influenced by reading either of them.
Nietzsche claims that “Feuerbach’s dictum of ‘healthy sensuality’ sounded like the pronouncement of redemption to the Wagner of the 1830s and 1840s” (NCW “Wagner as apostle of chastity” 3). There is, however, no sign of a Feuerbachian influence in any of Wagner’s writings prior 1849. Moreover, Wagner himself seems to suggest 1849 as the year of his first acquaintance with Feuerbach (ML, 520), and, as Westernhagen points out (1978, 145), there were none of Feuerbach’s works in Wagner’s Dresden library. None, that is, were in Wagner’s possession prior to his flight to Switzerland in 1849.
This idea was first proposed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, of which Wagner may have had some knowledge. It was defended by Darwin in his 1871 The Descent of Man, and most recently by Steven Mithen (2005).
Evidence of the influence of Wagner’s operas on T. S. Eliot is provided by “The Wasteland,” part of which reads: “The barges wash / Drifting logs / Down Greenwich reach / Past the Isle of Dogs / Weialala leia / Walllala leialala / Elizabeth and Leicester / beating oars.” Eliot and Wagner share the perception of modernity as a poetic “wasteland.”
Wagner might possibly be construed as thinking in this early Freudian—or Platonic—fashion at OD, 205.
Given that, as we are about to see, Proudhon and Bakunin are equally present in the monologue, “Feuerbach ending” is a somewhat misleading term.
See Young 2010, 161–62, 176–77.
S&M 69. Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous phrase “the culture industry” owes an unacknowledged debt to Wagner.
Wagner might seem to have suggested that the bourgeoisie, given their taste for “moral family dramas,” care about the words. But all he surely means to attribute to them is the demand that, such as it is, the storyline should be one that endorses conventional morality—by ensuring, for example, the death of the villainous and the bohemian.
Mary Shelley visited Milan’s La Scala in 1840 and reported that “[a]t the Opera they were giving [Otto Nicolai’s opera] the Templario. Unfortunately, as is well known, the theater of La Scala serves, not only as the universal drawing-room for all the society of Milan, but every sort of trading transaction, from horse-dealing to stock-jobbing, is carried on in the pit; so that brief and far between are the snatches of melody one can catch” (1844, 111).
The aphorism may actually be Beaumarchais’s, in which case it might have been a comment on the treatment of his play, The Marriage of Figaro, by Mozart’s librettist, Da Ponte. Notice that, although he considers the recitative–aria form less than dramatically ideal, Wagner’s primary target is the use to which that form is put in nineteenth-century Franco-Italian opera rather than the form itself. Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte he loved (OD, 377–78).
Lost, at least, among the bourgeoisie. In “Actors and Singers” Wagner recalls a chance street encounter with a Kasperletheater, the German version of the Punch and Judy show. He recalls that the audience “seemed to have forgotten all daily cares” in its engaged and rapt attention to the “familiar . . . yet perpetually surprising” tale of Kasper’s progress from “the calmly gluttonous clown [Hanswurst] to the indomitable layer of priest-and-devil ghosts” and general “triumph over hell and death . . . and Roman rites” (AS, 181–82).
Wagner disliked the piano; all it produced, he felt, was a “toneless clatter of hammers” (OD, 122–23). He played indifferently and encouraged Liszt to abandon the piano in favor of composing. It seems likely that part of his dislike was directed toward the ready availability of piano reductions of orchestral and operatic works (Nietzsche studied a piano reduction of Tristan und Isolde in 1861, four years before its first performance). His attitude toward Liszt’s reductions of his own works was a mixture of gratitude and dismay. The application of Wagner’s critique to the electronic recording of musical works hardly needs spelling out.
The single most common narrative structure in the literature of religion and philosophy is that of paradise, fall, and redemption. Anaximander, Plato, the Bible, Rousseau, Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all employ it, more or less explicitly. And so does Wagner. In the previous chapter we looked at the desolate, “fallen,” condition of modernity. In this chapter we turn to that from which we have fallen.
As with most German thinkers, Wagner’s lost paradise is ancient Greece. And, as we shall see, for Wagner, redemption is—with major qualifications—paradise regained. Historians refer to this style of thinking as “conservative revolutionary.” Although calling for a radical break with the present, conservative revolutionary thought calls for the restoration of something that is presented as having once existed. Wagner’s style of thinking is thus different from, for example, Bakunin’s, who frankly admits that what he seeks is a transformation of modernity that will bring about “a new life that has not yet existed in history” (1973, 39).
The slogan, then, that captures the direction of Wagner’s thought is—with, to repeat, important qualifications—“back to the Greeks”: back above all, as we shall see, to the Greek tragic festival. An objection commonly leveled against this style of thinking is that to represent ancient Greece as a lost paradise is to sentimentalize it. In reality, it is pointed out, the Greeks were constantly at war with each other, practiced pedophilia on a widespread basis, and denuded their countryside of trees (so that Wagner’s complaint that modernity treats nature as nothing more than a “milch cow” [AF, 161] would apply equally to the Greeks). The fate of Socrates suggests, moreover, that individual rights were in short supply, while the moral of the Oresteia trilogy—women are intrinsically barbaric and need permanent subjugation to the civilizing influence of men—suggests that women’s rights were even more conspicuously absent.
In considering whether this objection applies to Wagner, three points need to be noted. First, the restoration of “the Greek” that he wishes to see is not to be carried out in the spirit of superficial literalism. He absolutely rejects a “sham Greek mode of art” (AR, 54) (“fascadism,” one might say, borrowing a term from postmodern architectural theory). Insofar as we admire the Greek, rather than applying a veneer of Greek style to our artworks, we must recreate them from the ground up as art that speaks to the realities of the present (CF, 274). Greek art cannot, says Wagner, be “reborn” in the manner attempted by seventeenth-century French neoclassical tragedy (see pp. 41–42 below). Rather, it must be “born anew” (AR, 53). Second, our admiration of the Greeks should by no means be uncritical. It should, in particular, by no means extend to the “dishonorable slave yoke” that was the basis of the Greek economy. For the main goal of the revolution is, after all, precisely the abolition of slavery—the replacement of modernity’s wage-slavery, its “universal indentured labor with its sickly money-soul,” by a “strong” and “free” humanity (AR, 55). And third, while “the Greek artwork embraced the spirit of a fair and noble nation,” “the Artwork of the Future,” says Wagner, “must embrace the spirit of a free mankind, delivered from every shackle of hampering nationality; its racial imprint must be no more than an embellishment, the individual charm of manifold diversity, and not a cramping barrier” (AR, 53–54). Whereas the Greek artwork was a national event, the artwork Wagner wishes to create is to be of transnational, universal significance.
In spite of these qualifications and criticisms, however, Wagner’s picture of the Greeks remains, in many respects a fiction. He exaggerates the number of people who attended the tragic festival (see note 5 below), as he does the solemnity of the occasion. Far removed from the church-like proceeding we will see him suggesting it to have been, the Greek spectators were in fact inclined to bang on their wooden benches and throw food at actors they did not like, which disposed playwrights to distribute small gifts in the hope that audience response would sway the judges of the tragic competition. Wagner fails to mention, too, that the Greeks were constantly at war with each other, and, though personally homophobic, he says nothing about Greek pedophilia. And when he speaks of “Greek optimism” (S&M 193) he ignores precisely what had preoccupied nineteenth-century German classicists and philosophers ever since the “serenely rational” portrait of the Greeks propagated by Winkelmann and Goethe in the previous century had been debunked. As Schelling put it, the crucial issue for nineteenth-century scholars was to understand “how the Greeks were able to endure the terrible contradictions revealed in their tragedies” (1989, 253), how they could have endured what Nietzsche calls the “wisdom of Silenus” (“the best thing is not to be born, the next best is to die soon”) (BT 3), without committing mass suicide. Although, as noted, Wagner does discuss Antigone, when it comes to painting a picture of Greek life in general, the dark side of the Greek psyche, the matter of their tragic myths, is not allowed to appear.
It must be admitted, then, that early Wagner’s picture of the Greeks is, in its own way, as idealized as that of Goethe and Winkelmann. In fact, however, it seems to me that this matters hardly at all. For an account of the past, no matter how deficient as history, may nonetheless constitute an inspirational ideal for the future. And for a revolutionary thinker, it is the future, of course, that really matters. At some level, I suspect, Wagner knows perfectly well that he is idealizing, knows that his account of the Greeks is, in most respects, a kind of dream, that his “conservative revolutionary” style of thinking is really just a style. At some level he knows that his “Greeks” are really a trope designed to provide an image of a better future. Wagner freely admits that his thought is “utopian” (p. 4 above) which comes close to admitting that his Greeks never really existed.
There are two aspects to Wagner’s Hellenic “dream”: his account of “Greek” life in general and his account of the place of the tragic festival within it. I shall discuss them in that order.
The Greeks practiced a “noble enjoyment of life” (AR, 56). (Note that “noble enjoyment” is really a pleonasm for Wagner since he has argued that a life devoted to low, sensuous pleasure is a life doomed to boredom [p. 9 above].) They loved life. Their plastic art—Wagner will be thinking, here, of Phidias’s and Praxiteles’s gorgeous male athletes and sensuously proportioned females—is a celebration of embodiment, of the human condition (AR, 38–40). Greek life was the epitome of the “joyous [heiteres]” life. Wagner’s aim is to secure such a life, not just for a privileged few, but for all, a life “modelled” (subject to the above qualifications) on that of the Greeks (SR, 6; AF, passim).
What, for Wagner, are the ingredients of the joyous life? First, simplicity, even austerity. The Greek went forth to devote himself to public affairs “from a simple, unassuming home.” The great palaces filled with the luxuries indulged in by our “heroes of the bourse” would have seemed to him vulgar, “degrading and disgraceful” (AR, 49–50) (which is how they appear in Edith Wharton’s exposés of the lives of the “heroes of the bourse” of late nineteenth-century New York). Second, work will be something other than industrial slavery. In the retrospective “State and Religion” of 1864 Wagner writes that he broke with the “newer socialists,” the Marxists, when he realized that their aim was not (so he claims) to abolish drudgery but merely to redistribute it equally. His own aim, by contrast, is to abolish drudgery completely. And he believed it possible that
when equally divided among all, actual work [Arbeit], with its crippling burden and fatigue, would be completely done away with, leaving in its stead nothing but an occupation,[1] which necessarily must assume an artistic character of itself. A clue to working out the character of this occupation which would take the place of work was presented to me, among other things, by the life of farming. This, when participated in by every member of the community [Gemeinde], I conceived in part as gardening turned into something somewhat more productive, and in part as joint observances of times and seasons of the day and year, which, looked at more closely, would take the character of strengthening exercises, indeed of recreations and festivities. (SR, 7–8)
Several points in this passage deserve notice. First, the idea that an “occupation,” as distinct from “work,” must have an “artistic character.” What Wagner has in mind, here, is the difference between pre-modern craft work and the “alienated” labor of industrialized modernity. That Kunst, in German, traditionally covers both craft and fine art points to the essential continuity between the two. Craft (which embraces, one might add, the crafts of philosophy and music) is, like fine art, creative and pleasurable, a “joyful occupation” (SR, 6). People engage in the “craft” of gardening, cultivate vegetables as well as flowers, for pleasure, which is why Wagner portrays his ideal farming as a kind of gardening.
The second point to notice is that Wagner’s dream of his past and future utopia, is essentially rural. This is characteristic of most anti-modern thinking. Since the city is the place of the dark, satanic mills of industrial capitalism, a return to paradise is a return to the countryside.
The third point to notice is that Wagner’s community is essentially small—for farming to resemble gardening and for production to be craftwork it has to be small. As Ellis thoughtfully notes, a possible translation of Gemeinde is “parish,” and while Wagner would want to reject the Christian connotations of the word, the observation makes the point that Wagner’s ideal “community” is small. What he has in mind as the ideal, immediate social unit is the village or small country town—something about the size of Renaissance Nuremberg, the setting, it may be noted, of Die Meistersinger.
A further point to notice is the requirement that all members of the community engage in manual labor. Since the division of labor produces “castes,” Wagner observes, there needs to be a “universal occupation” (SR, 8). He cannot mean, however, that artists and philosophers should be engaged in full-time farming because then there would be no art or philosophy. Proudhon holds that the exchange value of a commodity, whether it be a cheese or a poem, ought to be determined simply by the number of hours it took to produce (1994, 103–4), so that a four-hour poem would be a fair exchange for a four-hour cheese. Wagner, one imagines, would endorse such a conception. So his idea seems to be, not that artists and intellectuals engage in full time manual work, but rather that they do enough to remain in touch with the lives of those who do so work and who will constitute their audience. One finds the same idea in Tolstoy, and it was a requirement placed on artists and intellectuals in many communist states. The sentiment goes back, of course, to the medieval revolutionary John Ball, who famously asked: “When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
The final and most important claim made in the passage is contained in the reference to “recreations” and “festivities.” Any society in which people live “joyful,” satisfying lives must be one that is somehow “strengthened” by regularly recurring communal gatherings. Almost certainly Wagner’s paradigm “recreation” is the ancient Olympic Games and quite certainly his paradigm “festivity” is the Greek tragic festival. For it is this, he claims, that constitutes “the perfect artwork” (AR, 53), “the exemplary model [typisches Modell] of that ideal relation dreamt of by me between theater and public” (Z, 306). Wagner’s claim is thus that any society in which people live flourishing lives must have its festival, a festival that conforms to the paradigm established by the tragic festival of the Greeks. In particular, his own society of the future will have its own “artwork of the future,” an artwork that will conform to the Greek paradigm. It will be Greek tragedy “reborn”—or rather “born anew” (p. 24 above).
To assess this exalted status given to the tragic festival, we need first to investigate just how Wagner conceives of Greek tragedy. The idea of (in a slogan) a “rebirth of Greek tragedy” was, of course, not his invention. It was the motivating ideal behind the very creation of opera at the hands of the sixteenth-century Florentine Camerata and, a little later, Monteverdi. Wagnerian opera is, however, a very different phenomenon from that of Jacopo Peri or of Monteverdi. We thus need to inquire into Wagner’s particular conception of Greek tragedy, into what differentiates it from, inter alia, that of the Florentine Camerata.[2]
How, then, does Wagner conceive this paradigm artwork, the paradigm to which all great—all “world-historically” significant (AF, 75)—art, art such as he himself aspired to create, must conform? In what follows I shall attempt to regiment Wagner’s somewhat scattered observations by exhibiting his conception of the Greek artwork in terms of seven defining features.
(1) The artwork is a sacred occasion. Far removed from the triviality of the modern entertainment “industry,” Wagner observes, the Greek tragic festival was a sacred occasion, a “religious festival” (AR, 47). The “enjoyment of art [Genusse der Kunst] was coupled with the celebration of a religious rite” (Z, 306–7). The occasion was religious partly because the gods appeared as protagonists in the tragic drama (the leading protagonists in Aeschylus’s Eumenides), but more importantly because it was performed in their presence; in the presence, in particular, of Apollo, the inspirer of the music of its chorus, and Dionysus, the inspirer of its poetic speech (AR, 32–33).[3] Moreover, the masks and elevated language of the actors—who were often leaders of the state—gave them a priestly role. Particularly after the rites in the temple had decayed into empty ritual (Wagner means us to note, here, the parallel to the condition of the Christian Church in the modern world), tragedy became the focus of Greek religious life. Everything, Wagner points out, came to a halt for the tragic festival—law courts, shipping, parliament and economic activity—so that people from the city and the surrounding countryside could gather together in the amphitheater (AR, 34; Z, 306–7). The fact that the tragic festival was the most important event in Greek public life meant that the audience brought to it a quality of attention quite different from that of the modern opera audience: the audience that filled the amphitheater was, writes Wagner, “filled with such high anticipation by the sublimity of the artwork to be set before it, that a Sophocles, an Aeschylus could set before the people [Volk] the profoundest of poems, assured of their understanding” (Z, 307). (This last claim is, surely, an overstatement. What is true is that the Greek audience knew the myths intimately and were thus extremely sensitive to the “spin” put on them by a particular playwright.)
(2) The artwork occurs only occasionally. The awesomeness of the festive occasion, the depth of its impact on its audience, was, Wagner believes, essentially dependent on the fact that it occurred only occasionally, “only on special, sacred feast days” (Z, 306–7). Greek tragedy did not suffer the overexposure of modern repertory theater but was performed exclusively as a festival. This, Wagner suggests, is the precondition of the unique “wonder” (pp. 18–19 above) that gave it the power to mold people's lives (OD, 321). And so, as we saw, Wagner wished his “reborn” Greek tragedies to be performed solely in festivals. In medieval Germany, he records, travelling singers would erect a kind of wooden tent, give a single performance, and then depart, leaving behind only the memory of a unique and special occasion. The wooden beams incorporated into his design for the exterior of the Festival Theater in Bayreuth are, he says, intended to recall these temporary wooden structures (BR, 324).
(3) The artwork is an aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk. The tragic artwork was, to use Wagner's celebrated term, a Gesamtkunstwerk (AR, 35, 52),[4] a “total” or, more accurately, “collective artwork” in one of the two senses—I shall call it the “aesthetic” sense—implicit in the term: it collected together, synthesized, all the individual arts into one collaborative work: painting in the form of set-design, sculpture in the form of the “living sculpture” of acting (OD, 119), and dance in the form of the ritualized movements of the actors and chorus. Above all, it collected together words and music. (Though the music is lost, which makes us think of them as plays, Greek tragedies were actually musical dramas, although not, as the Florentine Camerata believed, operas. The Camerata imagined not just the choruses but the entire text to have been sung, but as Aristotle records in the Poetics there was in fact an alternation between speech and song [1987, 1449b 28–31].) As we shall see, early Wagner holds that within the collective artwork the words are the most important element since it is they that convey the “message” of the work. But the music is an essential element, too, since, we shall see, it lends the words a life-affecting emotional intensity that Wagner believes no other art form is capable of achieving.
(4) The artwork is a social Gesamtkunstwerk. The combination of the above three features produced an artwork of enormous power. This power, observes Wagner, was exercised over the “whole population.” This, he says, marks a profound difference between Greek tragedy, on the one hand, and modern opera, which caters only to the “affluent classes” (AR, 47) on the other. (And a profound difference, too, between Wagner's “artwork of the future” and the operas of the Florentine Camerata that catered only to wealthy connoisseurs.) Thirty thousand, he suggests, would regularly gather in the Greek amphitheater (AR, 34).[5] The tragic festival was thus a “collective artwork” in a second, as I shall say, “social” sense: it collected together the entire community. To understand the purpose of this gathering of community we need to understand what Wagner takes to be the topic of Greek tragedy.
(5) The topic of the artwork is communal ethos. Hegel, whose conception of Greek tragedy[6] seems to me to have strongly influenced Wagner,[7] says that Greek tragedy is about the “ethical substance” of the community, its Sittlichkeit (which he takes to be a translation of the Greek ethos), its shared view of the good life. Wagner says the same thing in his own language. Greek tragedy is an exposition of what he variously calls the Greeks’ “life-view in common [gemeinsame Lebensanschauung]” (OD, 156), the “fundamental laws of the Greek race and nation,” their “own noblest essence,” “the noblest characteristics of the whole nation,” the “abstract and epitome” of what it was to be a Greek (AR, 32, 34). Through the tragic festival, says Wagner, the Greek nation engaged in a “concrete meditation” on its ethical substance, the result of which was a “judgment on itself” (OD, 60).
What is the character of this judgment? The function of the artwork in “public life” (the function of the Greek artwork and of the Wagnerian “artwork of the future”) is to provide a “summons” to “the self-collection [Sammlung]” of a community “from out of the distraction and dispersal [Zerstreuung] of . . . [daily] life” (SR, 6). In everyday life we are apt to lose sight of the “big” ethical picture of our lives, its proper overall shape, on account of the seeming urgencies of the moment. Our lives, as Nietzsche puts it, tend to become nothing but “foreground” (GS 78). And even when we have not entirely abandoned the ethical in favor of the expedient, we are inclined to engage in false consciousness as to what the requirements of the ethical really are. The function of the artwork is to recall us to the simple and essential principles of ethical substance by making us aware of the moral gap between our ideal selves, our “noblest essence,” and our actual selves. The function of the tragic festival is to “summon” us to do better, to live up to our ideal selves, to (in Heideggerian language) overcome our lostness in the “dispersal” of the everyday.
Thus far, Wagner's account of the tragic festival makes it sound like the Gesamtkunstwerk that occurs in the Christian cathedral: a vivid exposition of a body of established and relatively well understood ethical doctrine. But this is not his view. Like Hegel, he is alive to the fact that Greek tragedy often addresses tensions within, clarifies as well as expounding, ethical substance. In the tragic festival, he observes, the Greek nation “communed with itself” in order to work out just what its most “fundamental laws” really were (AR, 52). So, for example, in understanding the justice of Antigone’s burying her dead brother in defiance of Creon’s edict, the Greek audience became clear, perhaps for the first time, that there exist laws higher than those of the state (OD, 184–94). At least often, therefore, tragedy was a “summons” to a clarified understanding of ethical substance. It is worth noting that many such clarifications occur in Wagner’s own artworks. The conflict between Wotan and Fricke in act II of Die Walküre, for instance, addresses the tension between law and love, while, as already suggested, the whole of Die Meistersinger can plausibly be read as a meditation on the seemingly conflicting claims of tradition and innovation, rule and inspiration, in both art and society.
(6) The artwork’s principal medium is myth. The tragic artwork is, then, not just a drama. It is a drama through which one is supposed to come to a clear and compelling grasp of communal ethos. This means that it must be presented in a way that allows its ethical point to emerge clearly, and this, says Wagner, makes “myth” the ideal medium of tragic drama. What, we need now to ask, does he understand by “myth”?
In the Poetics, Aristotle claims that “poetry is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history: poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (1987, 1451b 6–8). History, as Aristotle knew it, is just a narrative of facts—“one damn thing after another”—while poetry, good poetic drama, tells us something about human nature, something universal about human beings. Wagner makes essentially the same point. When, as she records in her diary, Cosima Wagner “jokingly remarked that things had been easier for Aeschylus with his few characters” than for Shakespeare, Wagner replied, “That is the difference between myth and history.” Shakespeare’s very genius presents him with this difficulty because, Wagner continued, he “sees everyone he makes speak; he sees everything” (CD 21 Nov. 1881; quoted in Berry 2006, 22). Wager found a similar difficulty with his project of writing an opera about Friedrich Barbarossa. In trying to write about a real historical figure he was confronted, he says, by “relations, nothing but relations.” The “human being,” universal human nature, disappeared into a forest of merely local circumstances. And so he abandoned “history” for “myth,” abandoned Barbarossa for Siegfried (CF, 357–59).[8]
This makes it sound as though Wagner conceives of the Greek (and of course his own) tragic hero as an archetype rather than an individual. But this is not so. The Greek tragic hero, he emphasizes, is never reduced to a cipher or “abstraction.” Greek tragedy is, to repeat, a “concrete meditation” on ethical substance (OD, 60). For only by portraying real people, “plastic individuals” rather than “fixed and rigid character-masks” (OD, 61), can the audience achieve “understanding . . . through empathetic feeling and suffering” (Mitleiden und Mitfühlen) (CF, 270). Only if the hero is convincing as a human individual can we have an emotional as opposed to merely intellectual understanding of the ethical content of the work, and only if we have emotional understanding can the work make a genuine impact on our lives.
The tragic poet, then, has to perform a delicate balancing act between simplicity and complexity. This is a point Wagner may well have derived from Hegel. There is, Hegel observes, not much more to Antigone that the principle of family and not much more to Creon than the principle of state. But, actually, more than principle must be involved, for if the hero is reduced to a mere symbol, then we have philosophy rather than art.[9] It follows that the tragic hero must occupy a “vital central position” (Hegel 1975, II:1209) between a fully rounded individual and a cipher.
(7) The author of the tragic artwork is, in a sense, not the playwright but rather the entire community, “the people [Volk].” Tragedy, Wagner writes, was “poeticized out of the spirit of the people (Volksgeist) (AF, 136). It was “the artistic completion of the myth,”[10] a myth which is simply “the poem of [the people’s] shared view of life” (OD, 156). What is expounded in the artwork is the people’s ethos. (The idea goes back at least to the eighteenth century, to Herder who published a collection of folk songs as “Voices of the Peoples” and to Hölderlin who, in the title of one of his poems, presents the poet as “The Voice of the People.”) It follows that the idea that the Greek poet “taught” the people (Homer, as Plato tells us, was known as “the educator of Greece”) is potentially misleading. Rather, the function of the playwright is to articulate what, at least “unconsciously,” the people have known all along (AF, 79–80). If we seem to acquire new ethical knowledge through the artwork, that acquisition is really a kind of Socratic “recollection,” a clarifying discovery of what we have been committed to all along.
The force of the idea of the poet as articulator rather than “teacher” is, I think, democratic. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao created profound ruptures within the ethical substance of their communities. They were, one might say, artist-tyrants operating on giant canvases who indeed “taught” their societies something entirely new. In Nietzsche’s grandiose phrase, they forcibly introduced a “revaluation of all values.” As with Herder and Hölderlin, both of whom were enthusiastic supporters of the French Revolution, Wagner’s insistence on the ethical primacy of the people is a rejection of tyranny, in particular, the tyranny of the total state that was discussed in the previous chapter (pp. 6–7 above). It is an insistence that one’s commitment to communal ethos must be a commitment to one’s own ethos.
We are now in a position to understand why Wagner takes Greek tragedy to be the “exemplary model” for all truly great, epoch-shaping, “world-historical,” art.[11] The tragic festival was, we have seen, a festive, religious occasion possessing a profound “wonder” on account of which it had a powerful effect on its audience—on, that is, the entire community. This effect was further intensified by the fact that the work gathered together all of the arts, the fact that it employed, in particular, not merely words but also music. Thus the medium of the tragic artwork. The “message” that medium was used to express, the content of the artwork, was communal myth, that is to say ethos, a shared understanding of the proper conduct of life. Hence the Greek artwork was a profoundly affecting exposition of communal ethos. As the medieval Church did for its ethos so the tragic festival empowered its communal ethos, made it a living ethos, the dominant force in Greek life.
Why, however, is it important that there be a living ethos? The answer is that a free commitment to a shared ethos by all, or nearly all, members of the community is what constitutes a community as a community: the possession of a shared ethos is what constitutes the difference between a Gemeinschaft and a Gesellschaft, between a community and a mere society. (Wagner, I think, overstates the case in taking any social group that is not a community to be a mob or “mass,” the latter being defined as “the material leavings of a people, from which the living spirit [i.e., ethos] had been sucked dry” [OD, 63]. There can be principles of order and discipline other than a shared ethos.)
History shows, observes Wagner, that a “bond of union” (AF, 91) created by a shared religious myth expounded through a communal artwork has been essential to all human communities that have extended beyond the biological unity of the “tribe” (AF, 164–65). Every thriving culture has had its Gesamtkunstwerk, its church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or amphitheater, in which art and religion collaborate to form the social “glue” that unifies individuals into a single community. Hence the tragic festival, while it flourished, “strengthened” (p. 26 above) community in two ways. First, by expounding and clarifying communal ethos, it allowed implicit community to become explicit, “self-conscious” community (AR, 41), allowed the Greeks to recognize,[12] celebrate, and affirm their community with each other (AR, 34). And second, through its periodic recurrence, it recalled them from ethical forgetfulness and compromise (AR, 6). In so doing it was, in the best sense, “conservative”: it conserved the life of the community, preserved it in existence (AR, 52).
Many moral philosophers follow Kant and Kierkegaard in arguing that morality presupposes religion; that whether one admits it or not, to be committed to morality is to be committed to God. They hold, in short, that if God is dead all things are permitted. An equal number of philosophers argue the opposite. Wagner, however, is not a party to this debate, for the connection he sees between religion and morality is not the one at issue in it. Whether or not there is a logical connection between religion and morality there is, Wagner holds, a psychological connection: there cannot be a morally observant society in the absence of religion and religious art. Moral discipline can of course be enforced by the “hard” power of fear. But, Wagner believes, there cannot be a genuinely, that is freely, observant society without the power that is not force, the “soft” power of religion and art; without, that is, the “festival.” Nietzsche (the mature, ostensibly anti-Wagnerian Nietzsche) agreed with him. With the “death of God,” he says, we can expect the collapse of “our entire European morality” (GS 343). The only hope of avoiding moral chaos, he writes, is (to anticipate the discussion in the Epilogue to this book) through the establishment of new “festivals” and “sacred games” (GS 125).
A morally observant society, an authentic community, requires, then, that individuals be “collected” into community by a “collective,” communal artwork. Why, however, is it important that there be community? Why do we need Gemeinschaft, why should we not rest content with the mere Gesellschaft provided for us by modernity?
In Thoughts on Death and Immortality Feuerbach writes: “The Roman did not consider his self to be a reality over and above the actual common life and did not understand it to be something substantial and autonomous . . . The Roman was the soul, the “I,” of the Roman; he was something only in union with his people.” (1980, 6) This “submersion” of individuality in community, he continues, determined for the individual the meaning of his life: his “ethical ideal” was that of “the perfect Roman.” The meaning of his life was to “glorify Rome, to expand its might beyond all boundaries, and to establish it for the future.”
This communitarian conception of the self was, in essence, Feuerbach claims, preserved by medieval Catholicism. One’s being was one’s membership of the Community of all Christians, living and dead. But then came the Protestant Reformation which taught us that we were atomic individuals, that our lives were ones of “isolated autonomy” (1980, 7). The result, however, was that we were left with an “inner nothingness,” indeed a “double nothingness,” “[b]ecause nothing exists in the subject but the truthless subject itself and because nothing exists outside of the subject but the temporal and transitory” (1980, 15). The solution to this “desolate and empty” (1980, 7) condition is a new “submersion” of the self in a wider entity, at the limit, humanity as such.
As is typical of Feuerbach’s aphoristic style the point here is exaggerated. Yet his meaning is relatively clear. If, Feuerbach argues, one is a member of a community (of, as it were, an all-embracing team), if one’s primary identity consists in that membership, then one possesses an “ethical ideal” and one’s life has meaning. If one enjoys no such membership (undergoes no such “submersion”) then one has no life-defining meaning. One is left “empty” and “truthless” for—this is the crucial claim—the sole source of genuine meaning is dedication to the preservation and flourishing of one’s community, a dedication that consists in commitment to the ethical substance that makes it the community it is. In post-Reformation modernity, however, our sense of community has atrophied. And so our lives appear “empty” and meaningless. Thus, to overcome the anomie that Feuerbach (and later Durkheim) takes to be the defining condition of modernity we must rediscover community.
As earlier observed, Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality made a deep impression on Wagner. And so it is unsurprising that his answer to the question of why we need community essentially repeats Feuerbach’s observations. The only kind of “necessary” action one can perform, Wagner writes, is that which “recognizes individual want in collective want or finds it based thereon.” All else is “artificial,” “caprice” (AF, 75–76), in Feuerbach’s language, “empty.” Wagner’s point, like Feuerbach’s, concerns the meaning of life. Only, he is suggesting, if we understand our lives as organized around a principle that contributes, more or less directly, to the flourishing of our community, only if we understand ourselves as, as we say, “making a contribution,” will our lives be meaningful. If we cannot find such meaning, deep down, our lives will seem to us pointless and so, ultimately, worthless.[13] And, of course, as Wagner emphasizes, one’s commitment to community must be a “free” commitment (AR, 35), for if it is compelled, then the principle around which one’s life is organized cannot be one’s own meaning of life.
In sum, then, the Greek Gesamtkunstwerk represents the paradigm of the great artwork because individuals can flourish, can find genuine meaning in their lives, only through a contribution to community, and community can only come into articulate, enduring, and visible existence, through the mediation of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Beschäftigung. The difference between Beschäftigung and Arbeit, like that (at least in English) between “occupation” and “job,” is that the former precludes activities that are demeaning or exhausting while the latter does not.
After the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876 the music historian Emil Naumann claimed that the program behind Wagner’s “music of the future” merely repeated the program of the Florentine Camerata (Vazsonyi 2010, 99). As far as the theory behind the “artwork of the future” is concerned we will shortly see that Naumann was quite wrong. In chapter 7, however, we will see that, as far as what actually occurred in Bayreuth in 1876, he was not far from the mark.
Notice that, contrary to Brian Magee’s suggestion (2000, 299) that Nietzsche derived his celebrated distinction between the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” from Wagner (he actually derived it from Hölderlin), Wagner’s division of tasks between Apollo and Dionysus is actually the opposite of the division made in The Birth of Tragedy. In that work Dionysus appears as the god of the musical, and Apollo as the god of the linguistic. By the time Wagner writes “Poetry and Composition” (1879), however, since Dionysus is now aligned with the singing of the Greek chorus (PC, 140), he has reversed the distinction, a reversal almost certainly due to still-remembered discussions with Nietzsche.
Ellis speaks of a “united” and a “unitarian” artwork. Wagner only actually uses the term Gesamtkunstwerk (which he spells with a double “m”) five times. Nonetheless the concept is present throughout the revolutionary writings. No other single term captures so effectively the central ideas of his conception of the great artwork. Wagner was not quite the first person to use the term. That appears to have been Eusebius Trahndorff in a work of 1827. It is unknown whether Wagner was acquainted with Trahndorff”s book (see Finger 2006, 16). However we have Nietzsche's testimony that Wagner was “the first of our time to begin experiments with the unification of the arts” (KSA 9 10.E 92).
This is probably an upper limit. The average was probably closer to seventeen thousand. It is uncertain whether women attended, although the legend of a pregnant woman being so shocked by the appearance of the Furies in Aeschylus' Eumenides that she miscarried and died on the spot might suggest that at least some women did.
See Young 2013, ch. 7.
In his autobiography, Wagner only mentions having read Hegel's Philosophy of History (ML, 521). But since Hegel was the dominant philosopher of the age—prior to his Schopenhauerian conversion, Wagner thinks of him as the “keystone of all philosophical thought” (ibid.)—he may easily have gathered an idea of the content of the Aesthetics lectures (the principal record of Hegel's views on tragedy) indirectly.
But, one might ask, could Wagner not simply have mythologized Barbarossa, simplified him down to a few essential features? The answer, perhaps, is that this would have confused and marred the reception of the work: one recalls the howls of protest from Mozart experts over the supposed “inaccuracies” that marred the reception of Milos Forman’s 1984 Amadeus.
One might think, here, of the cipher-like character of the examples typical of analytic ethics (“the trolley problem,” “the fat man on the bridge”)—as contrasted with the “real life” richness of the examples in, for instance, that artist-philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre.
As does Nietzsche (BT 23, Attempt at a Self-Criticism, 1), Wagner speaks, here, of the individual Greek myths as the constituent elements of a single, unified myth. This is grounded in the idea that there is a fundamental ethical coherence between the individual myths, that, for all their diversity, they present a single, coherent, “view of life,” though it may require tragic drama's working through of ethical conflicts to discover that coherence.
Notice that “great” is a metaphor of size—which makes “great” and “world-historical” natural bedfellows.
“Recognize,” I think, in Hegel’s sense of the term, which is also the sense Nietzsche uses when he says that religions in general are “long festival[s] of recognition” (GS 353).
Wagner’s distinction between action that is “necessary” and action that is “caprice” mirrors a distinction made by (his exact contemporary) Kierkegaard. A life that is not based on an ethical “calling” or command, writes Kierkegaard, is an optional, “experimental” life that lacks ultimate meaning, the “seriousness” that comes from absolute and inescapable commitment (Kierkegaard 1946, 110–12; 1944, 495). Wagner’s point can thus be expressed by saying that a life not dedicated to community is a life that lacks Kierkegaardian “seriousness.” Of course, whereas Wagner thinks that community is the ultimate source of the ethical command, Kierkegaard thinks that God is.
Fifth-century Greece was, we saw in the previous chapter, blessed by the “perfect artwork.” But in modernity art has become a consumer product designed for the production of cheap pleasure. Art, epoch-shaping, “world-historical” art, art that is an “ethical deed” (CF, 279–80; AR, 123), is dead. The question thus arises as to how this “fall,” this expulsion from paradise, occurred, of how we got here from there. The shape of Wagner’s answer is strongly influenced by Hegel whose philosophy of history had deeply impressed him (ML, 521). Famously, Hegel claims that “[a]rt considered in its highest vocation is . . . for us a thing of the past.” “The beautiful days of Greece and the golden age of the later middle ages” are, he says, “gone” (1975, I:10–11). Wagner of course agrees with this. What Hegel actually says, however, is that art is “and remains for us” a thing of the past. For Hegel, this is no cause for regret since the task of art, the exposition and clarification of ethics, has been taken over, and is done better, by philosophy. With this, of course (and like Heidegger after him) Wagner profoundly disagrees.
Hegel thought that great art died at around the time of Plato in the fourth century. Wagner agrees. “With the dissolution of the Athenian state,” he writes,
marched the downfall of tragedy. As the spirit of community [Gemeingeist] split itself along a thousand lines of egoistic cleavage, so the great Gesamtkunstwerk that was tragedy disintegrated into the individual arts that made it up. Above the ruins of tragic art was heard, weeping with mad laughter, Aristophanes, the maker of comedies; and, at the bitter end, every artistic impulse collapsed before philosophy, which read with gloomy mien her homilies upon the fleeting stay of human strength and beauty. To philosophy and not to art, belong the two thousand years which, since the decay of Greek tragedy, have passed till our own day (AR, 35).
There are three theses in this passage that require discussion.
(1) The rise of ethical pluralism caused the collapse of the Greek artwork. Wagner knows perfectly well that Greek tragedy survived into the fourth century, that Euripides was a contemporary of Socrates. He is not, therefore, claiming that tragedy disappeared as an art form. The claim, rather, is that by the fourth century it has ceased to play its community-“strengthening” role, that it no longer gathers individuals into communal ethos.[1] This it can no longer do because the rise of individualism brings with it a refusal to recognize the existence of any shared communal ethos. Rampant ethical pluralism has arrived and so the social conditions for the artwork to play its “strengthening” role no longer exist. It is worth noting that Aristotle supports Wagner’s view that by the fourth century the great age of tragedy was past. Speaking of his own day, he says that its comedies are greatly superior to its tragedies (1987, 1451b 13–15).
(2) Paralleling the rise of ethical pluralism and the decline of the Gesamtkunstwerk is the rise of aesthetic pluralism. As we saw, Wagner observes that the fifth-century artwork combined the “enjoyment of art” with “the celebration of a religious rite” (p. 28 above). But with the loss of the latter ethical function it was left with only the former aesthetic function. People’s aesthetic tastes, however, differ and so, without the centripetal force of the ethical and religious, they gravitate to the kind of art that pleases them best. And that means that art ceased to be a “public,” communal phenomenon and became instead (from the world-historical perspective) “the irrelevant pastime of the private connoisseur” (Z, 207–8). The locus of art moved from public to private space. (One might think of the arrival of multichannel, cable, and Internet television as having a somewhat analogous, centrifugal effect.)
(3) The place formerly occupied by art was taken over by “gloomy” philosophy. The “gloomy” philosopher—the philosopher who thought that incarnation was a punishment for sin, that embodiment “imprisoned” the soul in its body “like an oyster in its shell,” and that redemption is a matter of the soul’s exiting the body and returning to the “rim of the heavens” from which it had fallen—was, of course, Plato (Phaedrus 245c–252b). And it was Plato, too, who, in Book X of the Republic, pursuing the “ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy” over which of them was the true source of knowledge, banned the tragic poets from the ideal state. But what of the claim that to “philosophy” has belonged the two millennia since the collapse of the tragic artwork? Wagner appears to ignore here the obvious fact that it is religion rather than philosophy that has been the dominant cultural force for most of the past two millennia. This appearance is, however, misleading for, as we shall shortly see, Wagner subscribes to the thesis Nietzsche expressed by calling Christianity “Platonism for the people” (BGE Preface), the thesis that Christianity consists in a grafting of Plato’s “world-denying” metaphysics onto Jesus’s ethics.
The Romans, of course, preserved much of the form of Greek life. They continued to build amphitheaters. But the amphitheater was no longer the place of art—that had withdrawn into the houses of the wealthy. Rather, it was the venue for coarse and brutal entertainment of the masses. In place of the gods and heroes of the Greeks appeared lions and gladiators. The Romans, Wagner claims, those “brutal world conquerors,” felt comfortable with material reality only at its most basic level and so could only enjoy material, crudely sensual, and often vicious, pleasures (AR, 36).[2]
Some writers have attempted to argue that the great collective artwork survives in modernity as the “sport-work,” that the football stadium is the modern equivalent of the Greek amphitheater. Wagner’s observations on Rome suggest, however, that this project is misguided. For while the great sporting event may indeed gather the population, and while there may be much talk about the noble ideals of sport, it seems hard to argue that that this is more than lip service, that there is any genuine gathering to an ethical ideal. Since the age of professionalism, indeed, it seems at least as plausible to argue that sport gathers its audience into an anti-ethical ideal, that what is displayed and glamorized is more bad behavior than good.
Like many German intellectuals, Wagner thinks of us moderns as the “new Romans.” Like them, we are technologically gifted: our railways (between 1830 and 1890 the European rail network grew from nothing to something at least as extensive as it is today) he sees as the equivalent of the Romans’ roads and aqueducts. With us as with them “beauty withd[raws] in favor of absolute utility”: he has in mind the factory or coal mine, perhaps. Like them we treat nature as a “milch cow” (AF, 161) available for unlimited exploitation. And like them, we cover over our low materialism with a veneer of Greek taste—the bank or railway station disguised as a Greek temple (AF, 74, 160–61, 170).
According to Wagner, then, modernity, the new Rome, is a world without (world-historical) art. His “death of art” thesis, however, embraces more than Rome and modernity. It embraces the couple of millennia separating them, in particular the whole of the Christian era. This seems to make Christian art an obvious and crushing refutation of his thesis. The medieval cathedral—that community-collecting synthesis of religious ritual, literature, architecture and painting (though not dance)—would seem to be, not merely an example, but close to a paradigm of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner tackles the issue head-on: there is, he claims, no such thing as Christian art. “The candid artist perceives at first glance that neither was Christianity art, nor could it ever bring forth from itself true and living art” (AR, 38).
Like nearly all on the nineteenth-century, revolutionary Left, the early Wagner hated Christianity. However, he drew a sharp distinction between Christianity and the historical Jesus, whom he admired. The Galilean carpenter, he held, was (like himself) a revolutionary anarcho-socialist without metaphysical pretensions. “I bring not peace but the sword,” Jesus said, directing his battle cry against the ruling Pharisees, the quislings who collaborated with the Romans in order to better oppress their fellow Jews. Jesus’s inspiration, Wagner continues, was (like his own) the vision of a future world of universal love—an ideal Jesus could not have believed in had he shared Christianity’s disgust at human nature’s “original,” inalienable, sinfulness, since disgusting beings are unlovable. It was not Jesus, however, but the Roman Church, and more particularly that converted Pharisee, St. Paul, who created this image of humanity (AR, 37–41).[3]
Christianity developed from a minority cult into a world religion, Wagner claims, on the back of the self-disgust of the later Roman Empire, its disgust at its own absorption in crude sensuality. Christianity preached that earthly life is intrinsically worthless and that redemption lies in the supernatural, thereby both explaining why things were as they were and offering the promise of redemption. According to the Christian worldview the world is irredeemably the work of the devil so that no activity should be devoted to the futile task of trying to improve it (AR, 37–41). Christianity does not promote, does not even try to promote, the flourishing of human life. Really, it has only one “object,” namely, death. Christianity is nothing but a “longing for death” (OD, 159–60).
Wagner allows one partial exception to his account of the Christian art of the Middle Ages. The “poetry of chivalry,” the troubadours’ poetry of courtly love, attempts to heal the rift “between the force of conscience and the instinct of life, between the ideal [of disembodied, asexual existence] and the reality [of embodied sexuality].” It portrays the red-blooded, passionate man in pursuit of the beloved, though when it comes to actual sexuality there is always the sword of honor down the middle of the bed separating the two. Unlike Greek art, in which there is a perfect “harmony” between the ideal and the real, all that the poetry of chivalry really achieves is the revelation of how glaringly conflicted, how divided against itself, was medieval consciousness (AR, 39).
Since Christianity is the expression of human self-disgust, it can never, claims Wagner, produce art. Its images are, indeed, the very “antithesis of art” (AR, 37). There is an obvious, suppressed premise, here, a premise that amounts to a further condition on the definition of the Gesamtkunstwerk as set out in the previous chapter. Not only must the great work of art articulate communal ethos in a manner that is of world-historical significance—a condition clearly satisfied by the medieval cathedral—it is further required that the ethos in question be (this) life-affirming for the artwork to approach the status of the “perfect artwork” (AF, 74, 160–61, 170).
Two further chapters complete Wagner’s history of the death of art. The first concerns “the so-called Renaissance” (AR, 40). As Christian “enthusiasm” disappeared and the Church became merely another form of worldly despotism, art became the preserve of the aristocracy. The hopeful aspect of the Renaissance was a renaissance of sensuality. Though Christian “fantasies” were the official content of Renaissance painting, “the artist’s delight in . . . sensuous beauty” was
a complete denial of the very essence of the Christian religion; and it was the deepest humiliation to Christendom that the guidance of these art-creations had to be sought from the pagan art of Greece.” (ibid)
The glorification of human embodiment in Renaissance paintings, in other words, contradicts their ostensible content (“esoteric” content contradicts the “exoteric”). Nietzsche takes over this Wagnerian thesis in a witty syllogism: “Let us not be childish . . . Raphael said yes, Raphael did yes, ergo, Raphael was no Christian” (TI IX 9).[4]
The disappointing aspect of the Renaissance, the reason that, for Wagner, it is only a “so-called” renaissance of art, is of course the exclusion of all but the aristocracy from the audience of art. For all the Renaissance’s reverence for Greece, what was “reborn” was, at best, the aesthetic, never the social Gesamtkunstwerk. This, Wagner notes, is particularly evident with respect to seventeenth-century French tragedy. The attempt was made to revive Greek tragedy by telling Greek myths in modern dress. In fact, however, Racine and Corneille’s heroes’ spouting anti-tyrannical, democratic values in the court of an absolute monarch was nothing more than an absurd kind of “hypocrisy”:
Could art be present . . . where it blossomed forth not 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, and was thus capriciously transplanted from foreign climes? Surely not! (AR, 41)
The final chapter in Wagner’s history of the death of art returns us to the condition of art under capitalism that was discussed in chapter 1. By the nineteenth century, we saw, art has become a consumer product, a commodity to be purchased by the bourgeoisie. It is not entirely obvious why Wagner regards bourgeois art as even more worthless than the art of the aristocratic connoisseur. The answer is probably that for all that their artworks ceased to be artworks for the people, the European aristocracy had, at least often, good taste. They had a genuine aesthetic sensibility, and brought to art knowledge, care, and attention, were genuine “connoisseurs.” All the bourgeoisie are capable of, however, as we know, is easy listening, cheaply won shots of an aesthetic “narcotic.” Given the invidious choice between patronage by a prince and patronage by a banker one would choose the prince.
Like Hegel before and Nietzsche after him, Wagner disliked Euripides. For two reasons. First because his poetry is “school-masterish” (AF, 105), didactic in a dramatically counter-productive manner, and, second, because in diminishing the role of the chorus, the principal source of music in Greek tragedy, Euripides moved tragedy toward a merely spoken drama and hence away from being an aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk (OD, 283).
One might think this unfair to Seneca (the only Roman tragedian whose work has survived). However, whereas Greek tragedy banned all on-stage violence—we only know about Antigone’s death or Oedipus’s scratching out his eyes by report—Seneca revels in on-stage violence—both Medea and Heracles murder their children in full view of the audience. One wonders whether he felt the need to compete with the lions and gladiators.
This demonization of St. Paul reappears in Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (A 41–42), likely another mark of the mature Nietzsche’s continuing debt to Wagner.
In turn, Bernard Berenson, who began his famous The Italian Painters of the Renaissance in the 1890s, takes over from Nietzsche the idea that on account of its delight in the sensuous (Berenson’s celebrated phrase is “tactile values”), the Italian Renaissance represented a new moment of “life-affirmation” and therefore a new greatness in art. Although (like Wagner’s notion of “Greek optimism”) this account seems plausible as long as one confines one’s attention to painting, it begins to look more doubtful when one turns to music. For as Wagner later recognizes (p. 100 below), one finds in the sacred works of composers such as Palestrina a genuine, intense, and intensely other-worldly religiousness.
Exploratory Questions
So far, it is the exposition of Wagner’s early philosophy of art and life with which I have been concerned. In this chapter I shall attempt to gain a deeper understanding of his “philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk” by posing a series of six exploratory questions, most of which have a critical edge to them. My questions are the following:
Are Wagner’s own operas “artworks of the future”?
Is the festival the only proper context for great art?
Why does Wagner think that the great artwork needs to be an aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk? In particular: Why, according to Wagner, could the great artwork not be a purely literary work? (and) Why, according to Wagner, could the great artwork not be a purely musical work?
Given that the great artwork needs to be an aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk, which of its key elements is the more important, the words or the music?
Does not the vast size of modern societies render the Gesamtkunstwerk irrelevant to modernity?
Does not the ethical diversity of the modern world render the Gesamtkunstwerk irrelevant to modernity?
As noted, Wagner derives the title of his “The Artwork of the Future” from Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Feuerbach’s book is short, a mere seventy-three pages in translation, and is fairly clearly, therefore, not intended to solve all the problems of philosophy. Rather, convinced that religious supernaturalism and metaphysical idealism ought to have had their day, Feuerbach sets out to provide a template for reform, for a new style of philosophizing, a style in tune with the truth of scientific materialism. And that is what Wagner’s early theoretical writings are intended to provide—a template for reform, for a new kind of art. The question is whether he regarded—whether he ought to have regarded—his own works as conforming to that template.
Wagner uses the term “artwork” in both a broad and a narrow sense. (His use of “Greek tragedy” oscillates between them.) In the broad, and more familiar sense, a (performance) artwork is something—a play, a symphony, or an opera—that can be performed on many different occasions and in many different circumstances. In Wagner’s narrow sense, the sense that was employed in chapter 2, an artwork is a particular performance of an artwork in the broad sense. If that performance is an “artwork of the future,” an artwork that is a “creation anew” of the Greek tragic festival, it is a performance that satisfies the conditions definitive of the “perfect artwork” that were set out in chapter 2. In particular, it is what I called a “social Gesamtkunstwerk,” a collecting of the community, of “the people.”
Did, then, the performances of Wagner’s operas in his lifetime satisfy this condition? Do current performances do so? Wagner writes to his patron, Ludwig of Bavaria, that for theater “to solve [the problems of] the present,” for it to do for us what the tragic festival did for the Greeks, it must be a genuine “theater of the people [Volkstheater]” a “genuinely popular” form of art (WW 8:171–72). But evidently, performances of Wagner’s works have never constituted “popular” art since—like in this respect the works of the Florentine Camerata—they are performed only for the (extremely) “affluent classes.”
Wagner’s ambition to create a Volkstheater, a genuinely community-collecting artwork, manifested in his admiration for the Punch and Judy show (ch. 1, note 18), is what motivated his scheme of Wagner societies and patrons that was intended to make the performances of his works independent of market forces and so accessible to all. Martin Heidegger takes note of this. Wagner, he observes, wanted his works to be “a celebration of the national community [Volksgemeinschaft],” and as such “the religion” of the people (Heidegger 1979–1982, 86). But this, evidently, has not happened and so Wagner’s own works are at best potential artworks of the future, artworks that, should the circumstances of their performance dramatically and unexpectedly change, might one day become artworks of the future.
Since the artwork of the future was to be a popular music festival one modern approximation might seem to be the rock festival. In fact, however, the primary point of the rock festival seems to be ecstasy, that is, a momentary loss of self rather than a collecting of self into communal ethos. As with the football game—where there is also a powerful element of ecstasy, the “football crowd feeling”—what is lacking is genuine ethical content. Still, the character of the rock festival is not immutable. It might one day acquire ethical content, come to be a genuinely “ethical deed.” And so is not beyond imagination that the rock festival might one day become an artwork of the future.
Wagner holds, we have seen, that an artwork is a great artwork only if it “works,” only if it has a powerful effect, only if it is received and digested by an attentive audience. From this he infers that the artwork must be performed, as in the case of Greek tragedy, only in the context of a religious, or at least quasi-religious, festival. It must occur only on rare (though regularly reoccurring) occasions, for otherwise the audience will not be properly receptive. If reception is dulled by repeated exposure, the work will lose the “wonder” which raises it “high above”—and thus renders it an effective force in—everyday life (pp. 18–19 above). Over-familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least indifference.
It is for this reason that Wagner determined that the Bayreuth festival should, like the Greek tragic festival, occur only once a year. Ideally, he wanted performances of his works to be confined to the context of a festival—though only with Parsifal did he have any success in this direction. (For the first twenty years of its life it was performed nowhere outside Bayreuth.)
There is, of course, something right about the suggestion that overexposure renders art invisible, or at best insignificant. The van Gogh cornfield on the wall of the hospital waiting room, the colors faded to a couple of shades of washed-out blue, is literally not seen, not cognized, by the anxious patient. The recording of the Mozart piano concerto, half-listened to for the umpteenth time as one prepares dinner or writes one’s philosophy paper, produces at best a vaguely pleasant feeling. Wagner is surely right: if art is simply part of the background to mundane existence it loses the “wonder” that can make it a significant experience. To make the ethical impact he requires of great art, the artwork must be, as he says, elevated “above” daily life. It must be experienced as something extra-ordinary.
Heidegger, whose work owes a considerable, though unacknowledged, debt to Wagner,[1] repeats this thought in his own language, speaking of the great artwork as an Ereignis. Though this is the ordinary German word for “event,” in Heidegger’s use it comes to mean something like “event of profound, ethical, and ‘world-historical’ significance.” He repeats Wagner’s call for a rebirth, a recreation, of the Greek festival and even repeats Wagner’s key word “wonder”: in the authentic “festival,” he writes, one steps out of “the dull, overcastness of the everyday” (1977–1974:103) and into “the wonder” of the “world,” the ethos, of an “historical community” (1977– 52:64).
Yet one only has to think of that other Gesamtkunstwerk, the medieval cathedral, to recognize that elevation above the ordinary does not absolutely require rarity of occurrence, the confinement of the artwork to the Greek or Bayreuth festival. Granted that something is required to mark a boundary between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary, infrequency of occurrence is not the only possibility. Other possible boundary-markers are: moving from an ordinary into an extraordinary building (the size of the medieval cathedral and the meditative darkness of its space), being required to dress with special decorum, and performing certain rituals (crossing oneself, genuflection, bowing to Mecca) on entering the holy space. What matters is the special quality of receptive attention brought to the Gesamtkunstwerk, and that is something which markers such as these can sometimes—though not of course always—engender.
Wagner’s mistake can be put by saying that what is important is not the festival as such but rather the “festive” state of mind, and by noting that such a state of mind can be fostered in a number of ways other than requiring the performances of the artwork to be few and far between.
The function of the artwork is to “strengthen” community by gathering it from the ethical forgetfulness of daily life into a reaffirmation of communal ethos. Why, however, does the artwork need to be a synthesis of all the arts to do that?
Wagner argues as follows (I shall refer to this as his “multi-modal” argument). In real life our experience is multi-modal or “total.” We do not just see the plane taking off, we hear it too. Therefore the artwork needs to be as nearly multi-modal as possible: the senses “will find what is expressed by the fictional picture [presented by the artwork] completely intelligible [verständlich] only when it presents itself in the selfsame measure in which they originally received outer appearances” (OD, 152). To allow for a “thorough understanding,” the “picture of human life” set forth in the artwork must be a “living counterfeit of nature” (AF, 186).
By “understanding” Wagner means here what he elsewhere calls “understanding . . . through fellow feeling” (CF, 270), in other words empathy. For the audience to empathetically engage with its characters, he claims, the dramatic artwork must be a “counterfeit” of reality. For empathy to happen, for one to care about the dramatist’s characters as one would about real people, one must forget that they are fictional. There must be, in Coleridge’s phrase, a “suspension of disbelief.” But this, the argument claims, can only happen when the artwork presents a perfect illusion of reality. And since reality is multi-modal, so must be a perfect illusion.[2]
As I shall shortly observe, the multi-modal argument explains some aspects of Wagner’s dramaturgical practices. As an argument, however, it is very weak. For first, we do not usually have a lush, orchestral accompaniment to our real life experiences, and neither does the bank teller usually sing her interaction with the customer. So the idea of “total” illusion would not, in fact, lead to anything like the “total” work of art as Wagner conceives it, that is, to the aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk. Second, it is historically probable that Aeschylus used no scenery at all and Sophocles only a little. And it is known that the Greek actors wore grotesque, quite un-life-like, masks. Shakespeare, too, employed only rudimentary scenery. And so the claim that engagement in a drama requires a “counterfeit” of reality is empirically refuted. The mistake in Wagner’s line of thinking is revealed by quoting Coleridge’s remark in full. In responding to fiction, he famously says, what we engage in is the “willing suspension of disbelief.” When we open a book or go to the theater we want to forget that we are in the presence of fiction. And that, from childhood onwards, is what we do—effortlessly, at the drop of a hat, and sometimes too much. But Wagner effectively seems to believe that theater depends on the unwilling suspension of disbelief: we need to be tricked, fooled, duped into a suspension of disbelief in the way we are tricked into thinking the straight stick half submerged in water is bent. And that is a serious mistake.
In mitigation, however, it should be pointed out that it is not a mistake peculiar to Wagner but one that has a long history going back to dramaturgical theorists of the Italian Renaissance and dominating seventeenth-century French tragedy. In particular, the idea that theater must provide a perfect illusion of reality led to the tyranny of the so-called “unities” of action, time and place. With respect to time, for instance, theorists such as Lodovico Castelvetro and René Rapin argued that it would be absurd to present the action of act III of a play as happening several days after the action of act I since the audience would know perfectly well they had only been sitting in the theater a few hours.[3] Wagner is not usually interested in the unities, but it is the same cast of mind—the conception of the proscenium arch as an aperture through which one peeps at a perfectly formed second reality—that lies behind his demand for extremely detailed and naturalistic scenery and for historically accurate costumes. It helps explain, too, his grandson Wolfgang Wagner’s observation that were Wagner alive today, he would undoubtedly be working in Hollywood. He would “not have been able to resist the technical wizardry at his disposal” (Joe and Gilman 2010, x–ix), the means, that is, to create the perfect illusion. (One can imagine a twenty-first century protagonist of the multi-modal argument wanting to add “smellies” to the cinematic repertoire.)
There is, then, no good reason to think that the great artwork must combine literally all the arts. Wagner is, however, on more solid—or at least more interesting—ground when he attends to the two most important elements of the collective artwork, words and music. Let us therefore pose the question, of, first, the necessity of music, and, second, the necessity of words.
To give some focus to the question of the necessity of music, of why the great artwork cannot be simply a play, let us consider that other tale of a ring, J. R. R. Tolkien’s.
Tolkien was far from thinking of The Lord of the Rings as escapist entertainment for the young. It was intended, rather, as a “fairy-story”—Tolkien’s word for myth—for adults. To Robert Murray, S.J., he wrote in December, 1953, “‘The lord of the rings’ is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.” And to Peter Hastings in September of the following year, “I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar [i.e., mythological] embodiments, that may tend to ‘bring them home.’”[4]
Apart, then, from the fact that one was a Catholic and the other was not, Wagner and Tolkien shared the common project of exploiting Germanic myths with the aim of gathering people into communal ethos. Like Wagner, Tolkien wanted to write a community-collecting artwork, a social Gesamtkunstwerk. But by Wagner’s standards he had to fail because his works (unlike Peter Jackson’s movies, which fail on other grounds) have no music.
Wagner’s argument for this, painted with a broad brush, is the following:
The lyrics of Orpheus would certainly never have been able to turn the savage beasts to silent, placid adoration, if the singer had just given them some printed verses to read: their ears must be enthralled by the sonorous notes that come straight from the heart, their carrion-spying eyes be tamed by the proud and graceful movements of the body. (AF, 134)
This might seem to say that to have an effect words must always have music added to them. But, of course, with spoken, poetic language there is music already in the words, in meter, pitch, alliteration, and so on. There can be, that is, no absolute distinction between music and poetic language. As we saw in chapter 1, however, Wagner’s real argument for the necessity of music is that, in modernity, language has lost its poetic capacity, has lost the capacity to express emotion. And because the arousal of emotion relies on the audience’s “mirroring” of the expression of emotion, if language cannot express emotion, it cannot arouse it (pp. 12–13 above).
Wagner’s claim seems to be supported by the character of modern Western film. Filmmakers appear convinced that only with the addition of music to the soundtrack will the drama properly engage the audience’s emotions. There are exceptions. Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon, Amour), for instance, regards film music as inescapably manipulative and never uses it (see Brunette 2010). By abandoning music, his films achieve a stark and powerful effect—one hears the silence of his backgrounds—but that they do so presupposes the almost universal practice of adding music to movies.
Wagner does not view modern language’s loss of expressive capacity with complete dismay because he knows that paralleling that decline is a massive increase in the expressive capacity of music. Through the development of harmony in the sacred music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (with dance rhythms having been banned as ungodly, church musicians were compelled to develop harmony in order to retain interest), through the reintroduction of dance rhythms and melodies by Haydn and Mozart, and through the massive increase in the size and power of the orchestra by Beethoven, the modern artist finds at his disposal an expressive instrument of unprecedented power—the emotionally supercharged device so attractive to filmmakers. Modernity creates the problem of arousing emotion but it also provides a solution. To create an artwork that is moving, and so affecting, and so action and character influencing, language must be united with music and thereby returned to its musical roots (Z, 314–20).
Thomas Mann writes that he cannot “take seriously” a theory of art that ranks Goethe’s Tasso below Siegfried (1985, 101). What he forgets, however, is that Wagner’s aim is to create, not an art for refined men of high culture such as himself, but popular art, an artwork that will gather “the people.” Were he alive now—Wolfgang Wagner is surely correct—Wagner would indeed be found working in Hollywood. But that would not merely be on account of the “technical wizardry” at his disposal. He would work in Hollywood because his aim would be to fill those modern amphitheatres, the multiplexes. Art house cinema (the only venue for a Haneke film) would not interest him. Given, then, the nature of his aims, the character of modern cinema suggests that he may be right: that in the modern age, at least, a “great” artwork must be, inter alia, musical.
Wagner coined the term “absolute music” in 1846 to refer to purely instrumental music. Absolute music he says is “music divorced from the art of poetry” (S&M, 83), music, that is, without a verbal text. In the early writings, “absolute music” is a term of opprobrium. (In the later works it is also a term of opprobrium but, as we shall see, it acquires, in those works, a new meaning.) The reason is that an artwork that is to be an “ethical deed,” that is to gather the community into ethical substance, must articulate that substance, and this is something that music, by itself, can never accomplish: “absolute music can never bring . . . ethically determined man to clear representation from itself alone” (AF, 123). For, as Heidegger (following Hegel) puts it,[5] “a solidly grounded and articulated position in the midst of beings” is “the kind of thing only great poetry and thought can create” (1979–1982, I:88).[6] Ethics, that is to say, seeks to regulate life in the human world: it is about individuals, about individual people performing particular kinds of actions in particular circumstances. And so music, were it to be capable of articulating ethos, would need to be able to speak about individuals. But that it cannot do. While it can express feelings, without the aid of words, observes Wagner, it can identify no “definite object” (OD, 137) of those feelings:
that which can be uttered in the speech of music, is limited to feelings and emotions . . . what remains unutterable in the absolute-musical tongue, is the exact definition of the object of the feeling and emotion, whereby the latter gain for themselves a surer definition. (OD, 364)[7]
And this brings us to the crucial case of Beethoven. A man of passionate moral intention, as is evident in his Fifth Symphony (and, famously, the Eroica Symphony), he strove to turn absolute music into a “moral will”—strove to communicate a moral “message”—but never quite managed it (AF, 123). “Beethoven’s orchestral works,” Wagner writes in 1852, “are real poems in which an attempt is made to represent a real object. The difficulty so far as our understanding is concerned lies in accurately identifying the object thus represented” (S&M 138). Beethoven knows what he wants to communicate but, frustratingly, we do not.
As the sorrows of his life increased, writes Wagner, Beethoven’s need to communicate became more and more pressing. But though, as noted, he developed the expressive powers of orchestral writing to unprecedented heights, given the nature of his chosen medium, all he could communicate was the “general character of an emotion,” never an “individual human feeling,” never any “clearly understandable individual content” (OD, 70). In the end, however, Beethoven made the crucial breakthrough. In the last movement of the Ninth Symphony he finally understands the limits of absolute music and so bursts into “sharp-cut words” (AF, 111). This represented the “redemption of music from out of her own peculiar element into the realm of universal art” (AF, 126). To understand Beethoven’s introduction of the chorus as merely an interesting technical innovation is to miss the central point. For his breakthrough into words was, Wagner claims, a “world-historical” necessity (AF, 127, 130). It was the precondition of art’s becoming “universal” art, that is to say, a social Gesamtkunstwerk, a collection of the community to ethos.
After completing the Ninth Symphony Beethoven in fact turned more and more to writing “absolute” music. And as Mark Berry emphasizes, we remember him primarily as a composer of “absolute” music (Berry 2006, 45). But Wagner, of course, is perfectly aware of this—later on he will praise the late quartets as supreme artworks. His “biography” of Beethoven is not intended as history. Like his picture of the ancient Greeks, it is a trope, a way of presenting a philosophical point. And that point—Hegel’s and Heidegger’s point—is surely correct and crucial. Only in language can ethos be articulated, only in language can we talk about ethics, about norms that are supposed to govern action in the world.
Given that the great artwork must contain both music and words, were there to be conflict between the requirements of the one and those of the other, whose are to take precedence? Which of them (to risk an image with a sexist history) wears the trousers?
One’s first impression is that Wagner rejects the question—as one might expect of an anarcho-communist. The collective artwork should, he says, be the product of an egalitarian “fellowship of players,” a fellowship such as existed in Shakespeare’s company of players (AF, 141). Within the fellowship of artists, Wagner continues, no one may despotically dominate the rest: “egoistic personal virtuosity” is inimical to the true artwork. Not competition but “spirit of community” must reign (AF, 146). And so the impression is given that words and music are different but equal. Poet and composer are, Wagner says, deploying a revealing simile, like two travelers, one describing the land, the other the sea (OD, 300). As only a happy marriage produces a happy child, so only a “loving unity” between the fellows produces a “happy” work: only love can non-despotically constrain the free individual. Either the poet “egoistically” constraining the composer or the reverse would be the death of the authentic artwork (AF, 146; OD, 352–54).
All this sounds very egalitarian. One needs to remember, however, that the metaphor of marriage is the metaphor of traditional, male-dominated marriage—Opera and Drama says that “music is the bearing woman and the poet the begetter” (OD, 111). And, in fact, it rapidly becomes clear that the dominant element in the artwork is the linguistic text, and that in cases of conflict its needs are the ones that take precedence, a requirement already implicit in the land-sea metaphor; since we live on land and not on the sea, if the work is to say something about life, if it is to gather us to communal ethos, the most important element is the description of the “land.” If, as we indeed say, we are “all at sea” then we lose our ethical bearings.
It is important to notice that leadership, the leadership of the poet, is not excluded by the “spirit of community.” Leadership is not necessarily “egoistic,” “despotic,” or oppressive. The captain of the football team, the string quartet’s first violin, the orchestra’s conductor do not need to oppress those they lead; indeed if they are good at what they do that is precisely what they do not do. Given the right conductor, it can be the passionate, free desire of every member of the orchestra to follow each and every nuance of his baton.
And early Wagner is, in fact, completely explicit as to the primacy of words. It is important to recall, here, that, as we saw in chapter 1, Wagner’s program of theatrical reform is a reaction against bel canto opera, especially that of Rossini, in which the libretto is little more than a scaffold designed to provide numerous occasions for beautiful arias. What is fundamentally wrong with such opera is, to repeat, that “a means of expression (the music) has been made the end, while the end (the drama) has been made the means” (p. 17 above).
It may be pointed out that Wagner does not say, here, that the “words” are the “end” but rather that the “drama” is. And it may be pointed out, further, that, at least in his later writings, Wagner speaks of “the drama” as being contained in (absolute) music (see pp. 106–7 below). And from this it may be concluded that what he means here is not that music must be subordinate to words but rather that both music and words must be subordinate to their joint “end,” the “drama.”[8] In fact, however, early Wagner is entirely and repeatedly clear that the vehicle of “the drama” is the verbal (and to a small extent visual) text and the verbal text alone—it should be recalled, here, that early Wagner rejects Gluck’s idea that the drama can be contained in the music (p. 17 above). “Performers,” he says, “who cannot feel the aim of drama as something present in their highest fundamental organ—that of speech—cannot conceive what this aim really is” (OD, 369); modulation from one key to another must always be subservient to the “poetic intention”; at all times the orchestra must be the “accessory organ to the poetic intention” (OD, 306–7); “the [musical] themes I write always originate in the context of, and according to the character of, some visual phenomenon on the stage” (S&M 165); composers should “instead of finding their true and necessary justification within themselves” find it “in the life of the poet and in his ideas, which offer to the musician new material for which, and in which, he must discover new music, i.e., music uniquely suited to the material in question” (ibid.). So completely, Wagner adds, does he follow his own prescriptions that cut loose from their words his melodies will sound unimpressive. But that is as it should be since the function of the music is not to be beautiful in its own right but to add emotional intensity to the drama portrayed in the words (and action) (CF, 372–73).
It might be replied that, whatever Wagner actually said, what he should have said is that words and music are co-equal contributors to “the drama,” something which is identical with neither. But this represents a failure to understand the crucial point that Wagner is not attempting to produce a self-contained “aesthetics” but rather an account of art that is grounded in his general communitarian philosophy. For, to repeat, what follows from the fact that the purpose of the artwork is to gather the audience into communal ethos, together with the Hegelian-Heideggerian point that only words can articulate ethos, is precisely the primacy of words. Only if everything in the artwork is subordinate to the import of the “sharp-cut” words can the artwork fulfill its overriding function.
According to early Wagner, then, the music of the music drama must subordinate itself to the requirements of the verbal text. This raises the question of whether his theory of the artwork reduces its music simply to film music; of whether the poet is to write a drama as a purely literary work and then hand it over to the composer to add some emotional highlights as best he can. The answer is that it does not. An essential requirement of music drama is that the poet have a “musical consciousness” (S&M 76, 83). This means that unlike a film script, the libretto of a music drama must be musically fertile, must be designed to stimulate the composer’s imagination. The heart of Wagner’s notion of musical fertility is an elaborate theory concerning what he calls the “verse melody” of the libretto (OD, 252 et passim). Since the details of this theory belong to poetics and musicology rather than to philosophy, I shall present only the briefest overview.[9]
The “verse melody” of a poetic line is its musical adaptability and suggestiveness. The heart of the traditional verse melody, the verse melody of bel canto opera, is what Wagner calls Endreim (end-rhyme). “Twinkle, twinkle, little star / How I wonder what you are” is a simple example. Traditional opera, traditional song in general, deploys end-rhyme because it is ready-made for setting to music: the end-rhymes correspond to breathing pauses, and the short, easily memorable musical phrases corresponding to its lines add up to the traditional “tune.” Yet, since we never speak in rhyming couplets, Wagner complains that end-rhyme destroys both meaning and dramatic continuity by imposing a metrical straight-jacket that places accents in semantically absurd places. End-rhyme represents the traditional dominance of words by music.
In its place Wagner favors Stabrheim (letter-rhyme, i.e., alliteration). This allows a libretto to approximate the flexible flow of ordinary speech while at the same time creating a rhythm that is musically fertile. So, for example, the alliteration in the Rhine-maidens’ lament in the final scene of Das Rheingold,
Rheingold! Rheingold! Reines Gold!
or in Siegmund’s evocation of a world bathed in newfound love in act I scene 3 of Die Walküre,
Winterstürme wichen
dem Wonnemond,
in mildem Lichte
leuchtet der Lenz . . . ,
begins to write the composer’s melody for him. That which “gives birth” to the melody here is not just the alliteration. What is really important is that the repetition of the consonant creates a framework that allows the changes in vowel sound to become salient. The unchanging framework of consonants allows the full value of the vowels to sing out. This is of crucial importance to Wagner since, as we saw (pp. 12–13 above), according to his genealogy of language, it is in its vowels that modern language preserves a remnant of the primordial language of feeling:
If we think of vowels as stripped of their consonants, and picture to ourselves the manifold and vivid play of inner feelings, with all their range of joy and sorrow, as given out in them alone, we shall obtain an image of man’s first emotional language; a language in which elevated and intense feeling could express itself through nothing but a conjunction of ringing tones, which altogether of itself must take the form of melody. (OD, 225)
Although Wagner’s early theory does not reduce the music of a music drama[10] to film music, it does, it seems to me, deny the necessity of its integrity and unity considered as a piece of absolute music. That I take to be the force of his remark that his own melodies, considered as absolute music, will be unimpressive (p. 53 above). An important and frequently quoted remark of Wagner’s, one to which I shall return, describes his own works as “deeds of music made visible” (MD, 303). First and foremost, that is, the music drama must be a music drama, must satisfy the requirements of musical unity and excellence. That remark, however, comes from 1872, after, that is, what I shall argue to be the wholesale transformation of his thinking about life, art, and music consequent on his turn to Schopenhauer. It is a central thesis of this book that Wagner’s later account of the relation between music and words contradicts his earlier account, so that only confusion arises from the attempt to merge them into a single account.
When Wagner speaks of the artwork “collecting” the community into ethos what he has in mind is collecting it together in one place and at one time. In the fifth-century Athenian amphitheater this could really happen since the population of citizens (as opposed to slaves and resident foreigners like Aristotle) was probably not much more than thirty thousand. The population of modern Athens, however, is close to a million. And so the question arises as to whether a modern Gesamtkunstwerk is not simply impossible and was, indeed, already impossible in Wagner’s lifetime.
One possible reply might be that, even in modernity, the small-scale, local artwork remains a possibility. As local communities gather to support the local football teams so one can imagine a multitude of artworks gathering local communities into their own particular conception of the good life. Yet of itself this will not satisfy Wagner since his project is to unify rather than to entrench cultural and ethical differences. As we have seen, whereas the Greek artwork “embraced the spirit of a fair and noble nation,” the artwork of the future “must embrace the spirit of a free mankind,” the “charm” of cultural “diversity” being contained within an all-embracing ethical unity. The artwork of the future is to be a “universal,” not merely local, artwork (p. 24 above). But anything approaching such universality, one might say, is, in the modern world, an evident impossibility.
One reply might be that such pessimism fails to take account of the power and scale of modern technology. As the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcasts (often live) to something like six hundred cinemas throughout the world, and as the 2010 Soccer World Cup Final was watched by 3.2 billion people, so, one might suggest, a universal, technologically enhanced, modern Gesamtkunstwerk is no absolute impossibility.
Differences in language, culture and time zones make this a difficult proposition. There is, however, another way in which an artwork can be “universal” that accords more, I think, with Wagner’s guiding ideal. The Greek tragic festival, which gathered the community together at a single time and place, is an example of what I shall call a “uni-centered” artwork. But an artwork can also gather in what I shall call a “multi-centered” way. The medieval Mass is a paradigm example. The same artwork[11] was performed throughout Christendom at numerous different centers and times and its effect was the same as that of the Greek artwork: it gathered a community—a Europe-wide community—to its ethos. This seems, in fact, to have been how Wagner conceived the Bayreuth project—not as the idea of a world pilgrimage (a Haj, as it were) to Bayreuth, but rather as the idea of Bayreuth as a paradigm of gatherings all over Germany and then all over the world at which the same repertoire of artworks would be performed. (As Walter Kaiser remarks, Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk was a manifestation of a general, nineteenth-century disposition to “think big,” to plan all-embracing enterprises on a titanic scale.)[12]
Of course, that it was the same Mass that was performed through Christendom did not preclude the manner of that performance being differently inflected in different localities. Different music and visual art were used in different places; different patron saints would be the objects of special veneration. This is surely what Wagner means in saying that the universality of the artwork of the future should not preclude the “charm of manifold diversity” (p. 24 above).
The later Nietzsche remarks, satirically, that Wagner’s aim was to produce a “theatocracy” (CW Postscript), a community “collected,” and so “governed,” by the theater. Though this may sound absurd, one needs to remember that in Wagner’s day theater was the only medium for the public presentation of drama and thus combined the roles that are now played by radio, television, cinema and, derivatively, the Internet. One way of examining the relevance of Wagner’s conception of the artwork is to ask: could the electronic media possibly provide the large-scale, multi-centered collecting of community that was once provided by the medieval Mass?
One thing that is clear is that if the media, if broadcasting in particular, were to play a community-“collecting” role it would need to have the character of public service broadcasting. This is what Lord Reith, who, as Director-General of the BBC from 1927 to 1938, established the British tradition of public broadcasting, understood. As Wagner wished to rescue theater from the “opera industry” so Reith insisted that the fledgling BBC should be publicly funded in order to obviate the need to compete commercially. That, Reith saw, would inevitably force the lowering of cultural and ethical standards, reducing broadcasting to crass mass entertainment.[13] And as Wagner wished the artwork to gather people into communal ethos so Reith conceived of public broadcasting as occurring “within the overarching ideal of the cultural and intellectual enlightenment of society.”[14] As Wagner wished the Gesamtkunstwerk to be an “ethical deed,” a gathering to ethos, so did Reith.
It is right, I fear, to be worried about the future of public broadcasting. Nonetheless, though “utopian” as he himself admits it to be, Wagner’s ideal of the universal—or at least more than local—artwork is not irrelevant to modernity. Reith’s concerns remain as our concerns.
For many modern thinkers, talk of community, especially German talk of community, together with the allied notions of “people [Volk]” and “homeland [Heimat],” is highly suspect. The fundamental objection is that it is “exclusionary,” that community creates an “us” that by definition requires a “them,” an alien “other.” Community, it is suggested, builds a metaphorical—sometimes, as in Berlin or the Middle East, literal—wall that keeps the “other” out. And that, surely, is immoral. Must we not, that is, agree with Derrida when he tells us, that “hospitality”—unconditional neighborliness toward the other—is “the whole and the principle of ethics”? (1999, 50).
Wagner’s personality is not a topic of this book. And insofar as his well-documented anti-Semitism is a matter of his personality that is not a topic either. It is often suggested, however, that German anti-Semitism is a consequence of historical German communitarianism, and this derivation, it might be suggested, also applies in the case of Wagner. Surely, it might be said, it is precisely Wagner’s communitarianism that is the ground of his anti-Semitism; surely it is precisely his validation of a communal “us” that leads to the Jew being regarded as an alien “other.” Hence, not just Wagner’s personality (and perhaps his art) but also his theory, the whole “philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” is infected with anti-Semitism. The distance from Bayreuth to Nuremberg, from the Bayreuth Festival to the Nuremberg Rallies, is, theoretically as well as geographically, short.
It should be obvious from the foregoing rejection of “hampering” nationalism in favor of a “free humanity” that as far, at least, as Wagner’s early philosophy is concerned, the charge is ungrounded. For what we have seen is that the community Wagner seeks is universal community, a community that is precisely the opposite of “exclusionary.”[15] The artwork of the future will be, he says, a “feast of all mankind” (AR, 58) and thereby “strengthen” “the brotherhood of [all] mankind” (AR, 57). This is why not just the fact that words occur in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony but also the content of Schiller’s verse is as important to Wagner as it was to Beethoven: “Thy magic power re-unites / All that impudent custom had divided, / All men become brothers / Under the sway of thy gentle wings.”[16] According to the logic of Wagner’s early philosophy, then, Jews, too, must be embraced by his universalism. That Wagner never makes this consequence explicit is a failing in his character but not in his theory.[17]
The great artwork, Wagner holds, is something that gathers us into a “life view in common.” But in multicultural (as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra calls it, “motley”) modernity, it may be said, there simply is no such commonality, no such shared ethos for us to be gathered into. This claim is something Wagner flatly denies. There is, of course, a “manifold diversity” of “national characters” the “charm” of which we should celebrate as producing a world of vibrant diversity rather than monotonous homogeneity. Such diversity, however, does not go all the way down. Underlying all diversity is a universal ethics based on a common human nature, on what Wagner calls the “purely human [reinmenschlich]” (OD, 52, 154, 170, 182, et passim).
The “purely human” is contrasted with the “historical,” that is, the culturally variable. It consists in a set of “natural instincts,” “interests,” and “feelings” that are universal to all human beings (OD, 182, 185). It grounds a “view” of things that is valid for all times and places (OD, 170–71). The purely human is the basis of all “virtue,” virtue which consists in “love before all else” (AF, 83), love in its many manifestations.
Wagner belongs to a school of thought according to which the basis of ethics is not justice but love, the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor (including one’s enemy) as oneself. Derrida belongs to this same school with his claim that unconditional “hospitality” (i.e., practical love) is “the whole and the principle of ethics” (p. 57 above), and crucially, with respect to his influence on Wagner, so does Feuerbach with his variations on the theme that “God is love” (p. 11 above). Although Feuerbach and Wagner abhor Christian metaphysics, ethics for both of them (and, as we shall see, for Schopenhauer in his own way, too) remains Christian ethics.
Social constructivists deny the existence of Wagner’s “universally human,” or at least regard it as too “thin,” too rudimentary, to constitute an adequate basis for a universal ethic. Wagner, however, has an interesting argument that the universally human does provide such a basis, an argument grounded in the nature of myth.
Myths, one might think, are specific to particular cultures. But Wagner suggests that they are in fact universal (CF, 333–36). So, for example, the Flying Dutchman myth is really a re-presentation in Germanic clothing of both the Wandering Jew and Odysseus myths, the Lohengrin myth a re-presentation of the Zeus and Semele myth. All the Christian myths, he observes, are appropriations of pagan myths—he probably has in mind, inter alia, the reappearance of the Dionysus myth in the narrative of the Crucifixion. Wagner’s view, in short, like that of Freud and the French Structuralists, is that myths, at least the most important ones, are universal in character, grounded in a universal human nature. Whatever their surface differences, they all share the same deep structure, are all versions of the same Ur-myths. And since myth is the primary vehicle for the exposition of ethics,[18] one can infer from the universality of myth to a universal ethics.
In Wagner’s ideal future, then, the unifying artwork will resemble the medieval Mass in being a multi-centered gathering of community into a universal ethos. Its performances will also, like performances of the Mass, differ markedly in culturally different regions. Not only will language, music, acting, scenery and costume conform to diverse regional traditions, so too will the myths deployed. Underlying this diversity of myth, however, will be the unitary and unifying meaning of the Ur-myth. In this way, Wagner’s global community of the utopian future, while avoiding bland and boring homogeneity, will overcome the “hampering barriers,” absolute ethical divisions, that lead to the demonization of the “other,” to paranoia and war.
Wagner’s world of the future will, then, resemble the Christian Middle Ages in possessing the unity of a universal religion. The “great and universal artwork of the future” will be, he says, “the religion of universal humanity” (AF, 90; Wagner’s emphasis). In place of Christianity’s supernaturalism, its life-denying “longing for death” (p. 40 above), however, will be the life-affirmation, the celebration of the human condition, that he finds in the plastic art of the Greeks. Christian universalism is thus to be combined with, and purified by, Greek humanism. This makes it clear that early Wagner is not, like Marx and Bakunin, an enemy of religion as such but rather, like Feuerbach, a religious reformer, a view Nietzsche takes in comparing him to Luther (WB 8; KSA 7 28.6, 32.29; KSA 8 12.9).
Heidegger read and commented on several of Wagner’s revolutionary works in the mid-1930s, in particular, “The Artwork of the Future.” Although he mentions it as important, he seems not, in fact, to have read Opera and Drama, at least not thoroughly (Heidegger 1979–1982, I:85–89). His description of the great artwork in his celebrated “The Origin of the Work of Art,” written at the same time as he was reading Wagner, bears a striking resemblance to Wagner’s account of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and Heidegger subscribes, moreover, to Wagner’s version of the “death of art” thesis. As I am about to note in the main text, he also believes that the redemption of modernity lies in the “rebirth” of Greek tragedy. See, further, Young 2013, ch. 12.
Thomas Mann thus misses the point when he suggests that the multi-modal argument is based on the “infantile” idea that “the pitch and intensity of an artistic effect [is] equal to the cumulative product of its assault on our senses” (Mann 1985, 101). The argument concerns verisimilitude not emotional impact.
See Young 2013, ch. 3.
These quotations can be found at www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/TOLKIEN.HTM and at touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-01-033-f (accessed 5/28/2014). I am indebted to John Whitmire for bringing them to my attention.
Hegel observes that whereas in tragedy, in serious drama, poetry “must always be fundamental”; in opera “music is the chief thing” rendering it, together with its “magnificent décor, ostentatious costumes, and elaborate choruses,” a “thing of luxury” (interestingly, he observes that Cicero made the “same complaint” about Roman tragedy) (1975, II:1191).
Heidegger makes this point as a criticism of Wagner whose operas he regards as quasi-absolute music. Because he has not properly read Opera and Drama, he does not appear to realize that he is merely repeating early Wagner’s argument in support of the Gesamtkunstwerk. For further discussion see Young 2013, ch. 12.
OD, 364. The passage would acquire greater clarity and precision with the omission of “surer.” The truth is that without words, the “object” of the feeling expressed acquires no “definition” at all. Wagner does better in an 1852 letter to Hans von Bülow. Referring to von Bülow’s persistence in trying to write absolute music, he writes, somewhat testily (obviously having had to make the same point several times already), “once more—absolute music can express only feelings, passions and moods in their opposition and intensification, not, however, relations of any kind of a social or political nature” (WW 4:276).
Dieter Borchmeyer is one of the many writers who make this claim. He wishes, he says, to “clear up a long-standing misconception” and show that “when Wagner describes ‘real drama’ as the end or aim of music he does not mean the libretto—for this too, is no more than a ‘means’—but the whole expressive world that is taking place on stage.” But he only offers one rather inaccurate quotation from the end of Opera and Drama in support of his claim (his reference is WW 4:207). And it is hard to gather from the passage he cites, or from the rather flowery longer passage in which it is contained (OD, 351–55), anything more than a repetition of the call for loving cooperation rather than fractious competition between poet and composer.
A detailed account is to be found in chapter 5 of Grey 1995.
Wagner typically uses “opera” as a term of abuse referring to what he set out to reform and replace. He therefore needs some different term to designate his own works. Already during his lifetime, the term preferred by Wagnerians came to be “music drama [Musikdrama].” To this, however, Wagner himself raised various objections. He points out, for example, that as “‘Zukunftsmusik’” means “music for the future” so Musikdrama ought to mean “drama for music.” But this seems to reduce “drama” to the old libretto of Rossini et al. which is certainly not what his own linguistic texts are supposed to be (MD, 299–300). Wagner’s preferred term is “musical drama [musikalische Drama]” (MD, 300; WW 1:164, 4:17, 5:42, 7:14). Since, however, his grammar-based worries do not carry over into English, I shall continue from time to time to refer to his works as “music dramas.”
In terms of the distinction on p. 44 above, an artwork in the “broad” sense.
Kaiser’s special interest is in literary and museum collections. He mentions James Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary, Leslie Stephens’s Dictionary of National Biography, Thomas Momsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum which by now, he says, contains over 200,000 inscriptions as well as (a little later) the enormous Frick and Lehman collections of art and objets d’art (New York Review of Books March 7, 2013: 33–34).
The BBC’s website, www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/resources/in-depth/reith_5.shtml (accessed 5/30/14).
Does not community presuppose a limit to what it embraces, and hence a boundary, and hence a distinction between an “us” and an “other,” and is not “universal human community”—that perpetual human aspiration—in fact, therefore, an oxymoron? Not so. The necessary “other” might be non-human nature, actual or possible inhabitants of other planets, or “the gods.” Or it might be nothing but humanity’s fractious past carefully preserved as a warning in historical records and public memorials.
By inspecting Beethoven’s original manuscript, Wagner discovered that whereas Schiller had spoken of the reunification of that which convention had “strictly separated [streng geteilt],” Beethoven, finding the line not indignant enough, had substituted “impudently separated [frech geteillt]” for Schiller’s original (B, 122–23). Nietzsche, I think, obliquely alludes to this discovery in the first section of The Birth of Tragedy when he refers not to “Schiller’s” but rather to “Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.”
Though he never makes the inclusion of Jews explicit, it is at least gestured toward in the infamous “Judaism in Music” (1850) itself which observes that the Jews themselves are not the cause of their alien status. The responsibility lies, rather, with “Christian civilization” (of which, let us recall, the revolutionary Wagner is no admirer) which has kept the Jews “in violent severance from itself” (JM, 84). It might, nonetheless, be suggested that Wagner saw his concern for universal humanity as consistent with anti-Semitism because he regarded Jews as Untermenschen, as not properly human. This is possible, although it would have the odd consequence that he had someone he regarded as nonhuman, Herman Levi, conduct the first performance of Parsifal. Even if, however, that was Wagner’s view, then since he was wrong, the issue is uninteresting from the point of view of his philosophy. Jews are embraced by the universal humanism of Wagner’s early philosophy whether he himself realized this or not.
Nietzsche observes, as we have seen, that the Ring, is a “great system of [ethical] thought.” He adds, however, that it is a system that “thinks mythologically” as “the people” have always done (WB 9).