FIGURE 4.1 Brangäne’s vibratory shriek.
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
Tonight, I was in the Euterpe that had begun its winter concerts and which delighted me with both the Introduction to Tristan und Isolde and with the Overture to Meistersinger. I cannot find it in my heart to remain critically cool towards this music; every fiber, every nerve in me twitches, and I have not had such a lasting feeling of transport than in listening to the last-mentioned overture, in a long time.
NIETZSCHE TO ERWIN ROHDE (October 28, 1868) (2.77)
WAGNER’S NEURAL AESTHETICS
Wagner’s characters as hysterics, Wagner’s music as an attack of nerves, Wagner himself as a walking nervous breakdown—and a contagious one at that; Nietzsche’s oedipal assaults (harsh echoes of earlier encomiums) were savage but less than novel. Indeed, by 1888 (which saw the publication of both The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner), neuropsychological rhetoric generally and accusations of nervous degeneration specifically were well-worn slings of anti-Wagnerites. The powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick pursued this line of attack with particular vehemence long before Nietzsche and persisted in it throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. “Wagner’s music affects the soul less than the nerves; it is not moving so much as eternally exciting,” he writes in a review of Lohengrin in 1858, and in subsequent reviews concludes that Die Meistersinger is shot through with “continuous nervous unrest,” that the “nerve-racking orchestral effects” of Götterdämmerung exhaust listeners by the end of the second act, and that the general impression of Tristan und Isolde is “one of oppressive fatigue resulting from too much unhealthy stimulation” (Hanslick 61, 128, 169, 261). Remarking on the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876, Hanslick once more dismisses Wagner’s music as “a direct nervous stimulant (directer Nervenreiz)” that works “powerfully on the audience and on the female audience particularly” (171).
As James Kennaway notes, Hanslick’s medicalized attack on Wagner’s music was quite typical (Singing 145–151). Another German critic, in 1894, opined that “[t]he nervousness of our times is only increased by Wagnerian music; its outward effects in connection with its inner formlessness perturb and exhaust the nervous system” (Slonimsky 247). And in his widely read Richard Wagner: A Psychological Study (Richard Wagner: Eine psychiatrische Studie, 1872), the medical historian Theodor Puschmann argued that Wagner’s works combine “brain-shattering instrumentation and the most unearthly dissonances, so that, as a music connoisseur would say, one would need cranial nerves as thick as a ship’s towing line in order to emerge safe and sound from such noise” (30). Taking such complaints to their logical conclusion, the dramatist and historian Julius Leopold Klein compared effects of Wagnerian music on women to Luigi Galvani’s electrical experiments on frogs. This “scandal-mongering pistol-music (scandalsüchtige Revolvermusik) with an orchestral accompaniment slapping you in the face,” he writes in the eighth volume of his gargantuan Geschichte des Dramas, was beloved of “courtiers covered with reptilian slime, and of the blasé hysterical female courtesans who need this electrical stimulation by massive instrumental effects to throw their pleasure-weary frog-legs into violent convulsions” (8:738). Needless to say, anti-Wagnerians hardly held exclusive rights to such language, which could be used to praise as well as to damn. Seven years before Nietzsche’s ecstatic first impression, Baudelaire had already rhapsodized that “[f]rom the very first bars [of the Tannhäuser overture] our nerves vibrate in unison with the melody” (342)—a conception of Wagner as nerve stimulant that became a leitmotif of La Révue Wagnérienne. When it came to Wagner, one person’s neurasthenia was another’s nervous euphoria.
While the idea of music as pharmakon has recurred since antiquity, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed profound transformations in this old trope. As neurological accounts of the subject gained ground generally in the eighteenth century, musical effects became increasingly associated with nerve stimulation. One of the earliest texts to draw the association was Richard Browne’s Medicina Musica; or a Mechanical Essay on the Effects of Singing Music (1729), but it is with late-eighteenth-century writings such as those of Robert Whytt that the neurological account becomes firmly established. Whytt—a president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, personal physician to George III, and one of the founders of modern neurology—argued that music, alongside the use of “sudden fright” as shock therapy, could heal “the disordered state of the brain and its membranes” (242). The Swiss scientist and philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer perused similar connections in his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), arguing that music’s ability to soothe the savage beast derives from its unique effect on sensitive nerves. By the 1790s, the idea that music healed the body and soul through vibrations on the nervous system had become commonplace (Rousseau 47). Following the French Revolution, however, the eighteenth-century conception of music as civilizing the soul through the ennoblement of the nervous system gave way to increasing fears of nervous degeneration through too much musical stimulation. As the nineteenth century advanced, according to Kennaway, “music became entangled in a range of discourses on class and gender, as sensitive nerves and an excessive ability to feel came to be seen more as a sign of pathology and less as a sign of leisured class refinement” (“From Sensibility” 415).
Ever since they were first staged, Wagner’s works have been viewed as causes and cures of nervous illness, but it is important to recognize that their pharmacological effects go beyond mere reception history. Wagner’s works both shaped and were shaped by modern understandings of connections between neurology and aesthetics. Wagner’s most fully realized music dramas—Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, elements of the Ring, and Parsifal—are all marked by an impulse away from gesture and toward the body. The impulse, which appears self-contradictory only if one forgets the body’s neural inner life, is one of the most important and least understood gifts that Wagner received from Schopenhauer, and, through him, from a large body of nineteenth-century neurological science. Recovering this gift will help us to make better sense of Wagner’s neural art and, more specifically, of his final music drama, Parisfal. Wagner’s mature music dramas, in short, embody the modern shift from gesture to nerves and from representation to sensation; their avant-garde qualities are largely linked to their crucial role in both staging and forming the modern neural subject.
There are two kinds of Wagner critics: those who care about Schopenhauer and those who don’t. The former group tends toward a cultural conservatism of the high-modernist sort.1 Take, for example, the philosopher-critic Bryan Magee: “[w]hat has bred such confusion in much of the Wagner literature of recent generations, especially in the literature about Parsifal, is that Schopenhauer has remained a closed book to so many people who have chosen to write on the subject” (Tristan 278). For Magee, the problem is not simply one of ignorance, but of a general decline of cultural values. Scholars’ obsession with “politico-social programmes” has made them lose touch with “serious and deep concerns” (279). Thus the short-shrifting of Schopenhauer becomes but one particularly egregious “example of attempts to explain the greater in terms of the less, art in terms of journalism, the subtle and sophisticated in terms of the crude, the insightful and revealing in terms of the imperceptive, and altogether the profound in terms of the superficial” (279).
And Magee is right to worry, if only because the latter group, the ones who don’t spend much time writing about Schopenhauer, has become the larger of the two. Catherine Clément, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Carolyn Abbate, Marc Weiner, David Levin—to name just a few modern thinkers—all mention Schopenhauer sparingly, if at all, in their work on Wagner.2 And one takes their implied point: what more is there to say? After all these years of influence studies, beginning with Wagner’s own writings about himself, Wagner’s relationship to his philosophic mentor has perhaps become a tiresome topic of conversation, maybe even a false lead: what’s really going on must surely be elsewhere.3
The lines, then, are clearly drawn. Or are they? Schopenhauer, after all, was not simply the philosophical inspiration of Symbolists and latter-day gnostics of all stripes; he was also a central if controversial figure in nineteenth-century materialism who developed a number of ideas (the existence of the unconscious; the relation of the unconscious to repression; the importance of the body generally and sexuality in particular) that eventually proved central to psychoanalysis.4 To a degree never before seen in a philosopher, and rarely seen since, Schopenhauer was the thinker of the gross material body, of genitals and guts, nerves and brains. More than many of the critics Magee excoriates, and certainly long before them, it was Schopenhauer who attempted to explain “the greater in terms of the less,” “the sophisticated in terms of the crude,” “the profound in terms of the superficial.” Schopenhauer’s whole philosophy of the will, indeed, might be understood as precisely this inversion carried out on a universal scale.
There is something almost paradoxical about Schopenhauer’s thought, at once vertiginously abstract and as meaty as a bloody wound. On one hand, it would be hard to find a more thoroughly elusive, utterly intangible category than Schopenhauer’s omnipresent “will,” the single reality behind the veil of illusion that passes for the world. On the other hand, Schopenhauer’s most important development of Kant is this: that he brought the body to bear on the mind, and thus on the world. While, for Kant, we have access to the world only through the lens of the transcendental categories, for Schopenhauer we are able to perceive the world immediately and directly only through our bodies. It is through the body that we discover the will; as Schopenhauer writes in The World as Will and Representation, “My body and my will are one; … or, My body is the objectivity of my will” (1.102–3). Without a body, the “purely knowing subject” might imagine the operations of the world to be merely causal, and would have no access to the inner force beneath all phenomena. For it is only by analogy with the perception of our own bodies that we are able to discover the truth of the will in all things (1.105).
Schopenhauer struggles throughout The World as Will and Representation with a dissonant cultural condition by attempting to reconcile German idealism with the discoveries of nineteenth-century biology, particularly the biology of mind. Neurological studies play a significant role, and are even more central to the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (published in 1844) than to the first (published in 1819). Especially in this second volume, composed during a deep immersion in medical writings, Schopenhauer draws heavily on several prominent physiologists of the previous generation. Three Romantic-era physiologists are especially prominent: Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813), who established the journal of psychology in Germany and coined the term “psychiatry” (Psychiatrie) in 1808; Pierre Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808), a physiologist and materialist philosopher who argued for connections between psychology and the nervous system, whose work Schopenhauer first encountered in 1823; and Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), an anatomist who pioneered the use of the microscope to study human biology, whose work Schopenhauer first encountered in 1838. In addition to this earlier generation of scientists, Schopenhauer also draws on four contemporaries we have already encountered: Charles Bell, Marshall Hall, François Magendie, and Johannes Müller.5 Much of the second volume is devoted to harmonizing the neurophysiological discoveries of these figures with the post-Kantian idealism elaborated in the first volume. The neurophysiological picture of the psyche, Schopenhauer concludes, is not only compatible with the idealist; it also supports and completes it. In this sense, at least, he echoes Naturphilosophen such as Lorenz Oken, who, as we saw in Chapter 2, similarly attempted to fuse (in a far more positive vein) Romantic-era neuroscience with critical idealism. Indeed, this attempted synthesis was a leitmotif of German sciences in the nineteenth century, engaging not only Naturphilosophen but also, as we have seen, opponents of the movement such as Hermann von Helmholtz.
One of Schopenhauer’s least appreciated contributions to this scientific discussion is his conception of the mutual participation of external stimuli, sense organs, and the brain in the production of perception. Throughout his oeuvre, Schopenhauer argues that sensory experience is essentially an internal affair of the body. Though sensations may stimulate the nerves from without, our experience of those sensations is entirely subjective: “what is immediate can be only the sensation; and this is confined to the sphere beneath our skin” (2.22; emphasis in original). Our brains thereby form a kind of mental theater: our sense of sight, for instance, really “resides within our head, for there is its whole scene of action; much the same as in the theatre we see mountains, forest, and sea, yet everything remains within the house” (2.22). Schopenhauer was led to this position, at once idealist and neurological, by his reading of both Kant and contemporary neurology; a particular case of the latter was Johannes Müller’s “law of specific nerve energies,” which, as we discussed in Chapter 2, seemed to lend credence to critical idealism by asserting that a sensation is always appropriate to the stimulated nerves of the body rather than to the external cause of the stimulation. Moreover, Schopenhauer’s neurological account of perception partly anticipated that of Müller’s student Helmholtz.6 In an essay on perception in 1878, Helmholtz argued that
objects in the space around us appear to possess the qualities of our sensations. They appear to be red or green, cold or warm, to have an odor or taste, and so on. Yet these qualities of sensations belong only to our nervous system and do not extend at all into the space around us. Even when we know this, however, the illusion does not cease, for it is a primary and fundamental truth. (Selected 377)
For Helmholtz as for Schopenhauer, sensations are nothing more or less than qualities of our body as a whole and our nervous systems in particular, and the Ding an sich remains concealed behind an inextricable condition, a condition describable either as mind or as nerves. By such means Schopenhauer, like Helmholtz, hoped to reconcile neurology with Kantian idealism.
But Schopenhauer was just as interested in dissonance as in harmony, and at times took special delight in the apparent irreconcilability of the wide world of perception and the three-pound pudding that produces it. The second volume of World as Will and Representation opens with the shock of this difference. “In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a moldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is empirical truth, the real, the world”—Schopenhauer writes lyrically, until abruptly coming to “all this in the first instance is only a phenomenon of the brain.” The chapter concludes with a debate between “[t]he Subject” and “Matter,” arguing over which one contains the world. The argument reaches a crescendo of sorts in Chapters 22–24, in which Schopenhauer (almost certainly inspired by Cabanis) bluntly states that thought is as grossly physical as digestion, that “the intellect, being of a secondary nature, is absolutely dependent on a single organ, the brain, and that it is the function of the brain, just as grasping is the function of the hand; consequently, that it is physical like digestion, not metaphysical like the will” (2.245–246). This distinction between the intellect and the will—the former of which is an utterly material manifestation of a neurological process, while the latter is an ultimately unknowable metaphysical drive—allows Schopenhauer to balance, however precariously, neurological materialism with critical idealism.7 But he never allows the reader to forget the vertiginousness of the balancing act:
the whole of the objective world, so boundless in space, so infinite in time, so unfathomable in its perfection, is really only a certain movement or affection of the pulpy mass in the skull. We then ask in astonishment what the brain is, whose function produces such a phenomenon of all phenomena. What is this matter that can be refined and potentiated to such a pulpy mass, that the stimulation of a few of its particles becomes the conditional supporter of the existence of an objective world? The dread of such questions drove men to the hypothesis of the simple substance of the immortal soul, which merely dwelt in the brain. We say fearlessly that this pulpy mass, like every vegetable or animal part, is also an organic structure, like all its humbler relations in the inferior dwelling-place of our irrational brothers’ heads, down to the humblest that scarcely apprehends. (2.273)
The radical mundanity of Schopenhauer’s vision cuts sharply against its celebration of artistic genius. In the chapter “On Genius” (World vol. 2, chap. 31), for instance, Schopenhauer begins in a high-idealist vein that reflects his years of immersion in Plato and Kant. “Genius” he defines as the “predominant capacity” for the perception of “(Platonic) Ideas,” the ability to “perceive a world different from [that of the rest of humanity], since [the world] presents itself in his mind more objectively, consequently more purely and distinctly” (2:376). Just a few pages later, however, this idealist account of the abstract consciousness of genius turns suddenly, grotesquely neurophysiological. In order for genius to be possible, we are told, “the cerebral system must be clearly separated from the ganglionic by total isolation,” “even a good stomach is a condition on account of the special and close agreement with this part of the brain,” “the texture of the mass of the brain must be of extreme fineness and perfection, and must consist in the purest, most clarified, delicate and sensitive nerve-substance” (2.392). Drawing on postmortem evidence of Byron’s brain, he tells us that “the qualitative proportion of white to grey matter … has a decided influence” on genius, while, ruminating on Goethe’s shortness, he concludes that “a short stature and especially a short neck” are favorable for genius as “the blood reaches the brain with more energy” (2:392–3). Thus is the Romantic cult of the artist forced into near-farcical marriage with physiological determinism.
Cultural change is such a complex process that it is difficult to assign a single set of reasons for the sudden emergence of Schopenhauer into popularity in the 1850s, after decades of languishing in obscurity. Certainly the collapse of the revolutionary movements of 1848–1849, the consolidation of conservative power across Europe, the upheavals of the Second Industrial Revolution, and a wealth of biological discoveries and their increasingly wide reception created a more fertile ground for Schopenhauer’s funereal flowers. In light of such sweeping transformations, Schopenhauer’s murder of the Romantic promethean-man myth suddenly seemed sensible, even attractive, to a number of intellectuals and artists. His writings have a Gothic sensibility not only in their singular gloominess but also in their reversal, through extension, of Romantic idealism. If Kant’s crowning of subjective perception was treated as an elevation of the artist to semi-divinity by so many Romantics, then Schopenhauer’s relentless pursuit of Kantian logic ended up in a frigid landscape littered with body parts and haunted by a single, insatiable ghost. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Schopenhauer swept aside that centerpiece of bourgeois virtue and that backbone of modern masculinity: willpower. In the face of the Schopenhauerian will, such concepts as “willpower” and “free will” came to be seen as so much flotsam atop a great sea, and consciousness itself as “the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior, but only the crust” (2.136).
It is a commonplace that Wagner was never the same after reading Schopenhauer in October 1854.8 Critics who have discussed Wagner’s transformation generally focus on three or four themes: his turn away from the relative optimism of such mid-century works as The Artwork of the Future or Siegfried’s Death; his subsequent embrace of an ideal of renunciation and the annihilation of the will to live; the central ethical importance he gave to compassion (Mitleid) for all living things; and, finally, the increasing centrality of music in the construction of the music dramas. All of these changes in his ethics and aesthetics were inspired, or at least reinforced, by Schopenhauer’s writings, a debt Wagner was the first to acknowledge. Unexplored, however, is a less thematic and more formal transformation: an increasingly neural conception of genius and art.
We find this new discourse entering Wagner’s writings soon after his turn to Schopenhauer. Having written to Liszt six months earlier to announce his discovery of the philosopher who has “entered my lonely life like a gift from heaven” (Selected 323), Wagner writes again in June of 1855. The letter opens with a paean to Liszt’s artistry and to the miraculous powers of creativity in general. The terms are textbook Künstlerkult.
Allow me, best of men, to begin by expressing my amazement at your immense creativity! So you are planning a Dante Symphony? And you hope to show it to me, already completed, this autumn? Do not take it amiss if I sound amazed at this marvel. When I look back on your activities during recent years, you strike me as being quite superhuman (ganz übermenschlich)! There must indeed be something quite unique about it. But it is entirely natural that we should find pleasure only in creative work, indeed only in that way can we make life at all tolerable: only when we create do we become what we really are. (342)
are created to meet various needs, and one of these organs is the intellect, i.e. the organ for comprehending whatever is external to it, with the aim of using such objects to satisfy life’s needs, according to its strength and ability. A normal man is therefore one in whom this organ—which is directed outwards and whose function is to perceive things, just as the stomach’s function is to digest food—is equipped with sufficient ability to satisfy a need that is external to it, and—for the normal person—this need is exactly the same as the most common beast, namely the instinct to eat and to reproduce; for this will to live, which is the actual metaphysical basis of all existence, demands solely to live, i.e. to eat and reproduce itself perpetually. (344–345)
At a stroke, Wagner has reduced the whole panoply of mental functions to mere appetite, and placed the mind on the level of the gut. And while this instrumental materialism holds true for “normal” people, with geniuses the light shines no brighter.
[S]o we also find (albeit rarely, of course) abnormal individuals in whom the cognitive organ, i.e. the brain, has evolved beyond the ordinary and adequate level of development found in the rest of humanity, just as nature, after all, often creates monsters in which one organ is much more developed than any other. Such a monstrosity (Eine solche Monstruosität)—if it reaches its highest level of development—is genius, which essentially rests on no more than an abnormally fertile and capacious brain. (345)
The artist-genius, “übermenschlich” at the beginning of Wagner’s letter, has degenerated into “eine Monstruosität” by the end. And not grandly monstrous in a manner that might recall Milton’s Satan, but something closer to a big-brained freak. Just four years later, the French physiologist Jacques-Joseph Moreau was to be one of the first scientists to argue for genius as a nervous condition. In his Morbid Psychology in Its Relations with the Philosophy of History or the Influence of Neuropathies in Intellectual Dynamism (La psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire, ou de l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel, 1859), Moreau viewed the genius as a subspecies of the neurotic and akin to the madman, both of whom suffer from excessive nervous energy.9 Through the efforts of Moreau’s student Valentin Magnan as well as Cesare Lombroso, Theodor Puschmann, Max Nordau, and numerous other medical authorities, the kinship between artistic creativity and nervous illness steadily cemented over the course of the fin de siècle. If Wagner was a favorite target of the discourse, he was also a sort of pioneer.10
Wagner’s embrace of Schopenhauer’s writings on neuropsychological conditions is particularly central to Wagner’s Beethoven essay of 1870, a work rightly seen by Carl Dahlhaus as a turning point in his aesthetics (Dahlhaus, Bedeutung). This crucial essay of Wagner’s was largely inspired by one of Schopenhauer’s, entitled “On Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith” (“Versuch über das Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt”), included in the first volume of Schopenhauer’s collection Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). An extended meditation on dreams as well as parapsychological phenomena, the essay is now almost entirely forgotten, despite the influence it exhibited not only on Wagner but also on Freud, who mentions the essay several times in The Interpretation of Dreams (67–68, 94).
In the essay, Schopenhauer wonders whether such baffling occurrences as dreams, clairvoyance, somnambulism, mesmerism, and oracular states might be explicable both idealistically and neurologically—that is, as products of the fact that the knowable world is a representation of our consciousness and our brain.11 While some (though not all) of these phenomena would now be dismissed by scientists as mere occultism, and were likewise scorned by many at the time, they were by no means universally rejected as fields for scientific investigation. The sources from which Schopenhauer draws for the essay include the Zeitschrift Archiv für den thierischen Magnetismus (Journal Archive for Animal Magnetism, 1817–1824), edited by the scientist, physician, and Jena professor Dietrich Georg von Kieser, Geschichte zweier Somnambulen (History of Two Somnambulists, 1824) by the medical writer Justinus Kerner, and the influential Traité complet du magnétisme (Complete Treatise of Magnetism, 1856) by Dupotet de Sennevoy. For Schopenhauer, while the reality of such phenomena had been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt, their cause and nature remained mysterious. Recent developments in neurology, which showed that internal stimuli can produce effects identical to those of external stimuli, provided a possible solution to the mystery.
[S]ensory nerves can … be stimulated to their characteristic sensations from within as well as from without. In the same way, the brain can be influenced by stimuli coming from the interior of the organism to perform its function of intuitively perceiving forms that fill space. For phenomena that have originated in this way will be quite indistinguishable from those that are occasioned by sensations in the sense-organs which were produced by external causes. (Parerga 1.236)
To Schopenhauer, neurology had collapsed any strict separation between internal and external experience since sensations, in both cases, were mediated through the nervous system and could well register to the brain as experientially identical. Experience had become nothing more or less than a neurological condition.
The most obvious example of the sensory reality of internal states is dreaming, an apparently disembodied experience rooted in the nervous system. According to Schopenhauer, dreams arise when “the brain, that sole seat and organ of all representations or mental pictures, is cut off from the external excitation through the sense as well as from the internal through ideas” (1.234). As a result of this isolation from external impressions, the brain becomes far more attuned to the quiet rumblings of the organism’s inner life—specifically, to the operations of nerves and blood vessels, which now arise like “the murmuring of the spring which is heard at night but was rendered inaudible by the noises of the day” (1.235). Perceiving these primordial inner sounds, the brain elaborates upon them “just as it does those that come to it from without, moulding, as it were, a foreign material into forms that are peculiar and habitual to it” (1.248). The instrument of this internal apprehension and interpretation Schopenhauer dubs the “dream-organ”: that is, a “faculty of intuitive perception which has been shown to be independent of the external impression on the sense” (1.239). The process is essentially neural: “with intuitive perception through the dream-organ, the stimulation starts from the interior of the organism and is transmitted from the plastic nervous system to the brain that is thereby induced to make an intuitive perception which wholly resembles that produced in the ordinary way” (1.302). Listening to the inner hum of the nerves, the dream-organ inscribes it into its own language of time, space, and causality.
Yet more intriguing, if far less common, is the phenomenon of clairvoyant dreaming, such as when dreamers allegedly see “beyond the bedroom” (1.240) into the real world outside, when sleepwalkers “climb up to the most dangerous precipices on the narrowest path” (1.241), when people have oracular dreams, or when people in a state of waking sleep see spirits. Such curiosities, however, lose their “absolute incomprehensibility if we reflect that … the objective world is a mere phenomenon of the brain” (1.263)—a conclusion reached, from opposite directions, by Kantian idealism and contemporary neurology, which jointly show that “space, time, and causality” are essentially “brain-functions” (1.263). For Schopenhauer, then, the fact that actions have effects across space (such as a dreamer perceiving things miles away), or across time (such as a dreamer receiving oracular messages), or without apparent causality (such as a magnetizer controlling a somnambulant subject with hand gestures), only reveals the truth of Kant’s insight that things in themselves lie beyond the conditions of our knowledge, as well as the truth of the neurological insight that all representations occur in the brain.
By “clairvoyance” (Hellsehn) Schopenhauer means not merely parapsychological phenomena such as seeing-at-a-distance; more metaphysically, he means the fact that the deep dreamer has direct access to the root reality of the world, a reality that eludes the transcendental conditions of consciousness. The dreamer thus sees clearly into the vortex of the will. Given that Schopenhauer makes the same claim about music—that it is a direct expression of the will—it is only a simple step to draw the further conclusion that the deep dreamer and the inspired musician are nearly synonymous, and that their common name is clairvoyant. Schopenhauer did not take this step, but Wagner did.
This emphatic turn to the unseen inner realm and the privileging of music over drama makes it tempting to read the Beethoven essay—and indeed the whole of Wagner’s late period—as a rejection of the material and corporeal in favor of the spiritual and disembodied. But the reading misses the centrality of the invisible, neural body to the writings of both Schopenhauer and Wagner. In truth, Wagner’s essay, like Schopenhauer’s, is at once inward-looking and embodied, simultaneously concerned with flights of mind and pulsations of nerves. Thus the reader is on one hand treated with a celebration of the limitless powers of musical genius, while on the other being continuously reminded of the centrality of embodiedness to Wagner’s vision. Wagner uses variations of the word “physiology” (Physiologie, physiologich, etc.) nine times in the essay and references the brain (Gehirn) some eighteen times, and such references almost always appear in contexts that recall us—sometimes jarringly—to the corporeal nature of apparently spiritual or even spiritualist phenomena, as when Wagner explains that “our business would lie less with the metaphysical than with the physiologic explanation of so-called ‘second sight’ ” (5.109).
It should therefore come as little surprise when, midway through the essay, Wagner suddenly turns from a meditation on Beethoven’s defiant and introspective character to remarks on the dimensions of his brain-pan.
Though it has been an axiom of physiology that, for high mental gifts, a large brain must be set in a thin and delicate brain-pan—as if to facilitate immediate recognition of things outside us,—yet upon examination of the dead man’s remains some years ago it transpired that, in keeping with an exceptional strength of the whole bony skeleton, the skull was of quite unusual density and thickness. Thus Nature shielded a brain of exceeding tenderness, that it might solely look within, and chronicle the visions of a lofty heart in quiet undisturbed. (5.89)
To translate from the Wagnerese, Wagner is acknowledging here that contemporary cranial theory held that a genius ought to have a thin brain-pan, but he is intrigued to discover that Beethoven actually had a thick one. For Wagner, however, this thick brain-pan serves to prove Beethoven’s genius anyway, since such a skull could be intended by nature only to pillow such a tender brain and—most importantly—to turn that brain inward in its contemplations. Doublethink aside, Wagner clearly intends such a sharply materialist understanding of artistic creativity to provoke. And so he presses the point, conceding with some relish that he will undoubtedly offend “all Aesthetes” who balk at deriving art “from what appears to them a purely pathologic element” (5.71). Breaking with such airy aestheticizing, Wagner points toward a dramaturgy that, for all the essay’s emphasis on “inner drama,” actually advocates less a de-corporealization than a re-corporealization of the stage—a re-corporealization along neuroaesthetic lines. This music drama will draw from, stage, and directly intone the body’s neural inner life.
A royal road to this inner life—and therefore to music drama—is the phenomenon of clairvoyance, which Wagner makes a vital property of musical genius and a fount of music drama. Reminding the reader once again that clairvoyance is no mystical fantasy but a “physiologic phenomenon,” Wagner recalls that Schopenhauer had connected it to the visions of dreams; expanding on this, Wagner now postulates the existence of a “special organ” in our brain for the purpose of inner musical apprehension, a “cerebral attribute” that would be “analogous to the Dream-organ” (5.110, 79). Music arises, like dreams, from cerebral processes: “[a]s the world of dreams can only come to vision through a special function of the brain, so Music enters our consciousness through a kindred operation” (5.68). By turning inward, the brain hears primal tones—the “direct utterance of the Will” (5.68). In characteristic fashion, Wagner pushes the argument to its extreme, concluding that Beethoven’s late genius must correspond precisely to his increasing deafness, which compelled him to draw directly from the “inner tone-world” of his own brain (5.91).12
These were not, for Wagner, mere airy speculations but a precise description of the way in which he claims to have experienced musical inspiration. In his autobiography, Wagner describes the moment when the first notes of Rheingold—the moment of origin of the Moment of Origin—occurred to him. It was a state of somnolent clairvoyance that came to him in 1853 after returning from a walk in La Spezia, where he had been recovering from dysentery.
Returning in the afternoon, I stretched myself, dead tired, on a hard couch, awaiting the long-desired hour of sleep. It did not come; but I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed itself in my brain into a musical sound, the chord of E flat major, which continually re-echoed in broken forms; these broken chords seemed to be melodic passages of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E flat major never changed, but seemed by its continuance to impart infinite significance to the element in which I was sinking. I awoke in sudden terror from my doze, feeling as though the waves were rushing high above my head. I at once recognized that the orchestral overture to the Rheingold, which must have long lain latent within me, though it had been unable to find definite form, had at last been revealed to me. I then quickly realized my own nature; the stream of life was not to flow to me from without, but from within. I decided to return to Zürich immediately, and begin the composition of my great poem. (2.603)
What Wagner describes here is simply a realization of the theories of the Beethoven essay—the world soul rushing into the brain of the mediumistic artist.
Though Wagner does not explicitly draw them in his Beethoven essay, there are disturbing analogies between the hypnotic visions of the clairvoyant somnambulist and the delusional visions of the hysteric. If the musical genius, for Wagner, is linked to the clairvoyant somnambulist, and the clairvoyant somnambulist to the hysteric, then it is a single tenuous element that separates the genius from his feminine other. The possibility of the collapse of these two terms—genius and hysteric—is one of the dangers of Wagner’s neurological aesthetics, a threat made more distinct by the fact that the clairvoyant somnambulist, like the hysteric, was typically gendered feminine.13 The genius, already associated with femininity by his affiliation with somnambulism, was set on a potentially slippery slope toward the hysterical woman—a slope made only more slippery by the fact that Wagner’s post-Schopenhauerian conception of genius is already of a creature poised between transcendent sainthood and neurological monstrosity. In his Manuscript Remains (Handschriftlicher Nachlass) from 1831, Schopenhauer had already wrestled with this problem, attempting to separate the genius from the clairvoyant by placing them at opposite poles: “The genius and the clairvoyant somnambulist are the two abnormal enhancements of the two opposite centers of the nervous system in their functions. The former is possible only with the male sex, the latter only with the female, and perhaps with boys before the age of puberty” (4.56). Wagner, who generally considered the artist to be an androgynous figure, could not take refuge in such neatly gendered binaries.14 For Wagner, unlike Schopenhauer, the genius is not antithetical but of a piece with the somnolent clairvoyant, and thus shares an odd kinship with the hysteric.
The connection between genius and hysteria is drawn yet more tightly by the fact that the audible mark of clairvoyance is that clichéd expression of the hysteric: the anguished cry. Wagner argues that the most intimate link between the inner source of music and its outward expression is the cry of one awakened from a nightmare; it is from this primal scream that all music ultimately derives. From “the most terrifying” dreams “we wake with a scream (Schrei), the immediate expression of the anguished will” (5.69). If we take this “[s]cream in all the diminutions of its vehemence, down to the gentler cry of longing,” we find “the root-element of every human message to the ear” (5.69). Such utterances arise spontaneously from our own anguished will and are understood immediately and unmistakably when voiced by others. “If the scream, the moan, the murmured happiness in our own mouth is the most direct utterance of the will’s emotion, so when brought us by our ear we understand it past denial as utterance of the same emotion; no illusion is possible here, as in the daylight Show, to make us deem the essence of the world outside us not wholly identical with our own” (5.71). Primordial sounds, rather than primordial gestures, now constitute the original language, and in the hands of the composer these cries echo the ubiquitous cry of the world.
Here again, a sharp opposition drawn by Schopenhauer is blurred by Wagner. For the philosopher, direct immersion in the will would be immersion in horror, and the distancing effect of music is critical to its aesthetic effect; music is the stained glass through which we can view the sun. For the composer, on the other hand, music is the art not of distance but of immersion, and what for Schopenhauer would be the road to madness is for Wagner the stuff of ecstasy.15 As with Wagner’s collapse of distinctions between the genius and the somnolent clairvoyant, and thus the peculiar proximity of inspiration to hysteria, so again with the elision of music and the primordial will, and thus the peculiar proximity of artistic enchantment with madness. The Wagnerian genius described in the Beethoven essay is an oddly androgynous creature, a sleepwalking medium for dreamy masterpieces.
The audience, too, is all swoon—a collective, clairvoyant dreamer, experiencing the brain of the inspired artist. In other prose writings appearing shortly after the Beethoven essay, Wagner elaborates on the function of true music drama (which is to say the ancient Greek stage and the modern Wagnerian one) for the inculcation of clairvoyance in its audience. The ancient tragedians, Wagner writes in “On Poetry and Composition” (“Über das Dichten und Komponieren,” 1879), “set the Folk itself in his clairvoyant state” (6:141); the ancient chorus, he writes in “Actors and Singers” (“Über Schauspieler und Sänger,” 1872), “rapt the nation of singers to a state of clairvoyance in which the hero, now appearing in a mask upon the stage, had all the import of a ghostly vision” (5.196). And in his speech on the occasion of the consecration of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Wagner speaks of “music, rising up spectrally from the ‘mystic abyss’ and as such resembling the vapours ascending from Gaia’s sacred primeval womb beneath the Pythia’s tripod, [which] transports [the audience member] to that inspired state of clairvoyance in which the stage picture that he sees before him becomes the truest reflection of life itself” (5:335). The most famous innovations of the Festspielhaus—the creation of a deep orchestra pit (“the mystic gulf”) that entirely hid the orchestra from view, the installation of rows of amphitheater-style seats that allowed all members of the audience an unobstructed view of the stage, and the extinguishing of houselights during performance—were developed by Wagner (together with his designers Gottfried Semper and Carl Brandt) precisely for this purpose. Such technologies helped the audience enter a collective condition of somnolent clairvoyance, such that the Volk may sympathetically vibrate to the brain-state of the musical genius at the moment of inspiration.
The neural aesthetics of the Wagnerian stage are personified above all by the recurring figure of the clairvoyant. Has any other writer given voice to so many lucid dreamers? Erda, the earth goddess of the Ring cycle who eternally sleeps at the font of clairvoyant dreams, arises in Rheingold and again in Siegfried to prophesy the course of future events. In Götterdämmerung, Hagen, in a state between dreaming and waking, with eyes open but still asleep, is visited by his father, Alberich. In Tristan und Isolde—a work that, like Büchner’s Woyzeck, continually draws our attention to vision and hearing16—the realms of day and night are repeatedly analogized to those of illusory appearance and of inner insight, culminating in Tristan’s clairvoyant vision of Isolde’s approach in act 3 and Isolde’s concluding Liebestod. As Hans Sachs puts it in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, written two years before the Beethoven essay:
My friend! It is precisely the poet’s task
To interpret and record his dreams.
Believe me, the truest madness of men
Is revealed to him in a dream:
All poetic art and versification
Is no more than true dream interpretation. (Gesammelte 7.235)
In the “Romantic operas” of his pre-Schopenhauerian period, clairvoyant states present little challenge to aesthetic integration; that is, gestures, words, and music straightforwardly reflect one another during these passages. Consider, for example the character of Senta from The Flying Dutchman (1843). As her former lover Erik relates his prophetic dream of the Flying Dutchman coming to steal her away, Senta assumes the position of the mesmerized clairvoyant.
Senta sits down exhausted in the armchair; at the beginning of Erik’s tale she falls to sleep as though magnetized, so that it seems as though she also dreams the dream told by him. (Gesammelte 1.276)
The musical accompaniment reflects the slide into lucid dreaming, shifting from Presto to Sostenuto as the reverie begins, encouraging the audience to share in the couple’s mutual hallucination. The music faithfully mirrors Erik’s words: a tremolo in the strings underscores his mention of the “strange ship,” the Dutchman leitmotif sounds after his description of how “wunderbar” the vision was, and so forth. Turning to another opera from the Romantic period, we find that Lohengrin (1850) features the clairvoyant dreamer Elsa, who envisions the arrival of her magic knight in shining armor. She slips into a “sweet sleep” that changes her expression “from dreamy ecstasy to rapturous transfiguration,” an effect so peculiar that the assembled knights respond, “How strange! Does she dream? Is she transported?” (Gesammelte 2.70). Her words and gestures are faithfully mirrored by the orchestra, from her first drift into trance (accompanied by a sustained E in the woodwinds, gradually fading away) through her ecstatic vision (accompanied by the Holy Grail leitmotif high in the violins, which tremble thereafter). In such passages, Senta and Elsa are figures not only of the ideal clairvoyant but also of the ideal spectator of Wagnerian opera, sharing in the salvific hallucination of the tragic stage.
By the time we arrive at Wagner’s final opera, however, clairvoyance has become a far more problematic affair, constantly in danger of spilling over into hysteria. The central figure here is Parsifal’s wild witch and redeemed sinner, Kundry. Chronically exhausted, magnetized by a powerful will, deeply connected to the “inner tone world,” Kundry exemplifies many of the traits of Wagner’s somnolent clairvoyant. Though cursed and cursing, she sees deeply and speaks prophetically; as Gurnemanz tells Parsifal, “She spoke the truth; for Kundry never lies, and she has seen much.” Act 2 opens with the wizard Klingsor rousing her from a “deathly slumber,” and as she awakes, she “lets out a fearful cry” (10.345–346). Recall that, in the cry of the awakened sleeper, Wagner finds a primal form of clairvoyance and “the root-element of every human message to the ear”—the origin both of language and of music. Unsurprisingly, after her waking cry in act 2, we find that Kundry sings “hoarsely, and in broken sounds as if seeking to regain speech” (10:346)—here primordial sound gropes toward linguistic expression.
Kundry’s cries—unlike, say, Senta’s scream upon seeing the Dutchman in The Flying Dutchman—exist only in the stage directions: unscored, they function neither as speech nor as music but as the primordial clay from which words and tones may be sculpted. As Philip Friedheim points out, the clearest precursor in Wagner’s oeuvre is Brangäne, whose offstage “piercing shriek” at the climax of Tristan and Isolde’s love duet receives an oddly vibratory notation (Figure 4.1).
FIGURE 4.1 Brangäne’s vibratory shriek.
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
Wagner may not have quite invented the operatic cry (a credit that surely goes to Mozart with Don Giovanni), but he was the artistic pioneer and first theoretician of a scream aesthetics that was to become central to operatic modernism, from Strauss’s Elektra through Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Berg’s Lulu.17 At the same time, Wagner’s use of the primal scream in Parsifal also recalls (without Wagner’s knowing it) Büchner’s scripting of the Child in Woyzeck, the Child who turns away from the idiot Karl and screams a scream even more primary than the Idiot’s “Hop! Hop! Horsey!” Kundry’s scream, as James Treadwell notes, is “the archetype of music itself” (249), but it is also a pre-aesthetic cry that calls us away from representation and toward the materialities of sound and silence.
This interest in sound as basic neurophysiological force further recalls the concurrent work of nineteenth-century neurologists who were researching the material bases of sound, principal among them Helmholtz. Helmholtz’s groundbreaking study of acoustics, On the Sensations of Tone (Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen [als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik], 1863), argued that since a stimulus causes particles of air (Luftteilchen) to vibrate, and those vibrations produce a sensation in our ears, the individual particles of air are themselves what we call sound. Helmholtz, one might say, materialized music—and was, we might further add, not only a contemporary but a friendly acquaintance of Wagner’s. In this light, it is intriguing that the tremulous notation of Brangäne’s cry, cited above, comes remarkably close to the illustration of the wave structure of sound in Helmholtz’s study (Figure 4.2).
FIGURE 4.2 Helmholtz’s illustration of the wave structure of sound (Lehre 1870, 33).
Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University.
One of the most extraordinary and least noted of Wagner’s innovations is the attention his works pay to the elemental physics of sound. On this score as on so many others, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler has been particularly trenchant even if his observations are sadly en passant. His brief analysis of the Rheingold prelude in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter draws our attention to that work’s interest in pure acoustics.
The Rheingold prelude, with its infinite swelling of a single chord, dissolves the E-flat major triad in the first horn melody as if it were not a matter of musical harmony but of demonstrating the physical overtone series. All the harmonics of E-flat appear one after the other, as if in a Fourier analysis; only the seventh is missing, because it cannot be played by European instruments. Of course, each of the horn sounds is an unavoidable overtone mixture of the kind only the sine tones of contemporary synthesizers can avoid. Nevertheless, Wagner’s music-physiological dream at the outset of the tetralogy sounds like a historical transition from intervals to frequencies, from a logic to a physics of sound. (24)
But a Kittlerian awareness of Wagner’s medium-as-message materiality, as insightful as it is, ought not to blind us the ongoing ideological functions of the music dramas. This is especially true of Kundry, who functions as a great cauldron into which all the necessary exclusions of the late-Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk are thrown. Having taken many forms throughout time, Kundry is able to function as a Wagnerian totality in negative, assuming and incorporating all the marginalized and rejected elements of Bayreuth into a pseudo-organic whole. Her “special form of neurosis,” like that of “woman” generally according to Luce Irigaray’s reading of Freud, is therefore “to ‘mimic’ a work of art, to be a bad (copy of a) work of art,” “a counterfeit or parody of an artistic process” (Speculum 125). When we first encounter Kundry, she is hysterical: “Kundry bursts in, almost staggering; wild clothes tied high; a snakeskin belt hanging low; loose locks of black, fluttering hair; dark brownish-red complexion; piercing black eyes, sometimes wildly blazing, but more often glassy and as rigid as death” (10:326). The Grail Knights refer to her as a “heathen” and a “sorceress,” “burdened with a curse,” and Klingsor calls her a “nameless creature,” “first sorceress,” “horrible lack,” “Rose of Hades,” “Herodias,” and “Gundryggia” (a wild huntress of Nordic myth) (10:329, 345–346). Her identities proliferate still further as she plays the roles of lover and mother while attempting to seduce Parsifal, and reveals herself, in the opera’s climax, as the Wandering Jew, eternally cursed for laughing at Christ. Wagner’s decision to make the Wandering Jew a woman of course goes against tradition, and may seem odd until placed in the context of Kundry’s overall dramatic function, which is to serve as the receptacle for all that which the opera must ultimately exclude. Through Kundry, Wagner is able to unify the eternal femme fatale (itself combining deadly seductress with deadly mother) and the eternal Jew in a single hysterical figure; he is able, too, to stage the rejection, the shattering, and the redemption of this creature, whose last words are “to serve, to serve” (dienen, dienen) before she falls silent and dies. The apotheosis of Parsifal, with its union of Spear and Grail, celebrates an androgynous totality that is a mise en abyme of Wagner’s “total work of art” (or Gesamtkunstwerk) itself.18 But redemptive androgyny is here a discourse that occurs exclusively between pure-blooded men; “woman” and “Jew” must be broken and redeemed, and finally die, in order to be preserved in the higher synthesis of Monsalvat. Kundry may be a somnolent clairvoyant who echoes the world’s cry, but, crucially, she creates nothing: she is the very figure of creative potential without potency. She marks the uncomfortable proximity of clairvoyance and hysteria.
One curious thing about modern, neurologically understood hysteria is that it directs our attention not to the external gestures of the body—the wild flailings, the grotesque gesticulations, the paralysis, and so forth—but ultimately to the internal operations of the performer’s body, to the neurological mystery beneath the roiling surface. Performing hysteria, whether on- or off-stage, at once foregrounds the performer’s body and radically destabilizes it, raising the question of who the true actor is: the visible or the invisible person. In this respect, it is worth noting that Jean-Martin Charcot, the so-called father of modern neurology who worked and taught at the Salpêtrière Hospital for thirty-three years and founded the neurology clinic there in 1882, began his study of the condition in precisely the same year that Beethoven was published. Moreover, the period between Wagner’s libretto for Parsifal (1877) and the work’s premiere (1882) coincides with Charcot’s famously theatrical stagings of hysterical subjects—mostly women and disproportionately Jews, categories Charcot believed to be especially predisposed to hysteria—at the Salpêtrière in the 1870s and 1880s.
While Kundry’s primal scream at once marks her as a clairvoyant and suggests her disturbing proximity to hysteria, her wild laughter reveals her less ambiguously as a hysteric—and a dangerous one. For it is Kundry’s laughter, above all, that captures her threat to the totality of Parsifal. On one hand, her laughter is a threat in the narrative sense that her ancient and eternally returning ridicule of the suffering of the Redeemer is the very antithesis of the compassion that the opera as a whole repeatedly espouses as the route to salvation. On the other hand, her laughter is also a threat in the more formal sense that it becomes an increasingly potent force for the unification of music and gesture, a unification at the heart of Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The unification marked by Kundry’s laughter, however, is connected not to clairvoyance but to hysteria. Kundry’s laughter, which begins as an extra-musical gesture, an isolated diegetic sound, becomes increasingly woven into the fabric of the score until—just before her rejection by Parsifal—it emerges as a crystallized unity of gesture and orchestration under the sign of neurotic Woman: a hysterical totality.
Kundry’s laughter begins divorced from the score, as a non-musical act. Kundry’s slander of Parsifal’s mother in act 1—“the fool! [She laughs]”—is caught in the musical phrase which captures her first laugh of the opera (Figure 4.3).
FIGURE 4.3 The orchestra laughs for Kundry.
Already we find the sudden drop (here from E-flat to F) that will come to characterize Kundry’s laugh throughout the work. In this first instance of her laugh, however, the descending seventh actually represents not the laugh itself but her spoken mockery (“the fool!”—“die Törin!”). Her laughter, by contrast, is represented in the vocal line by five beats of rest, and presumably meant to be either pantomimed or improvised (though often, in performance, the stage direction is simply ignored). The transition from speech (“die Törin!”) to laughter (Sie lacht), meanwhile, is marked by a transition from vocal to orchestral scoring. Thus, in this first instance of her laughter, it is not Kundry who laughs, but the orchestra that laughs for her. As might be expected in light of the Beethoven essay, music gives us Kundry’s bodily gestures in their innermost form.
It is not until act 2, when she recalls her original blasphemous act, that her laughter begins to return from its orchestral dislocation. Now it enters the vocal line with tremendous force, and does so in a fashion that unifies vocal and orchestral lines. “Ich sah Ihn—Ihn—und—lachte …” (“I saw Him—Him—and—laughed…”), she sings, making the last word howl.
FIGURE 4.4 Kundry’s laughter returns from its orchestral sublimation.
Kundry’s huge drop of an octave and a seventh (“lach-te”) recalls the drop of a seventh in the example from act 1, but the line is now, for the first time in the opera, unambiguously one of vocalized laughter. While, in the earlier instance, her laughter was expressed through the orchestra alone, here her laughter is rooted in her body through her voice. Moreover, in what may be the most precipitous vocal descent in all Wagner, he very nearly delineates the singer’s range in the space of two beats. Finally, Wagner brings Kundry’s voice together with the orchestral line, unifying voice and orchestra on high B, before having the voice plummet unaccompanied into the depths. Kundry’s laughter now returns us, forcefully, to the corporeality that defines her, and brings that corporeality into union with the orchestra (Figure 4.4).
This is the outrageously gestural Kundry who erupts, taking the orchestra with her, at the end of act 2. Examples could be multiplied, but consider the return of her laughter some minutes later in the scene (Figure 4.5).
FIGURE 4.5 Kundry’s laughter once more unifies music and drama.
The sudden drop that characterizes Kundry’s laughter has now become a descending, partly arpeggiated line (“Ich verlachte, lachte, lachte, ha-ha!”), but one that once more unifies voice and orchestra, in their unison descents from E to G, from F to A-sharp, and from G-sharp to C-sharp, and in their parallel ascent from G to B (“ha-ha!”). Here the orchestra no longer embodies the “real” drama of which the staged bodies are but shadows; instead, we find voice and orchestra, text and music, drama and will brought into something close to a single expression without subordination. Hysteria, in other words, has entered the score, has become both music and drama, forged into unity, and it is in these passages that Kundry’s aesthetic (and more than aesthetic) threat to the Gesamtkunstwerk is most pointed. It is no accident that these most threatening vocal gestures immediately precede Parsifal’s rejection of Kundry in favor of the Grail, and the shattering of her power over the Grail Knights and the opera as a whole.
In his “Description de la grande attaque hystérique” (1879), Charcot divided the hysterical attack into four successive “périodes”—“épileptoïde,” “des contorsions et des grands mouvements,” “des attitudes passionelles,” and “terminale”—and the scholar Brian Hyer has gone so far as to argue that Parsifal’s second-act aria alone, the “eight minutes of music flowing from his ‘mother’s last kiss,’ in fact conforms to Charcot’s description of the grande attaque down to the last detail” (287). Beyond this remarkable synchrony, it is no accident that it is precisely after this moment when he kisses Kundry he comes closest to her both in her clairvoyance and her hysteria. While exhibiting the conditions of the grande attaque, he “appears to have fallen into a trance” (“fährt … in gänzlicher Entrücktheit fort”), during which he sees the glowing, blood-filled Grail before him as he hears the voice of the Redeemer. Is this entranced vision a somnolent hallucination or ecstatic clairvoyance? And are we in the audience, like Parsifal, in the grip of a hysterical delusion or a moment of transcendent insight? Parsifal’s second-act aria points to the heart of the trouble in Parsifal, the trouble that clairvoyant inspiration might be a sign of hysteria. But no sooner does this crisis reach its climax than it finds its resolution in the clear and final separation of the clairvoyant-hysteric from the clairvoyant-saint, the rejection of Kundry (“Ewig, ewig von mir!”) and the anointing of Parsifal.
With remarkable if not fully self-recognized insight, what Wagner shows us toward the end of Parsifal is nothing less than a desperate addiction to salvific symbols, an addiction that threatens, if left unsated, to turn blood brothers into fratricides. Before Parsifal returns to the Grail Temple at the end of the opera, Amfortas refuses to perform his office as Grail King. The refusal provokes his own Knights to turn on him. “The Knights press nearer to Amfortas,” demanding that he “Uncover the Grail!/Serve now your office!/Your father commands you:/You must! you must!”, and Amfortas reacts by rushing about in “mad despair,” screaming, laughing, tearing open his clothes. It is a scene usually directed with foreboding, as the compassionate order, deprived of its symbol, becomes suddenly brutal (Figure 4.6).
FIGURE 4.6 Symbol addiction and the hysterical order.
Thus does hysteria, formerly displaced onto Kundry and Parsifal and supposedly cured there, come home again to the Grail Knights. Now, in their mob-like desperation for symbolic relief, their hysteria centers even more strongly upon their King, whose ever wilder death drive seems the only alternative to supernatural succor. Even Kundry’s hysterical laugh returns, now, in Amfortas’s hysterical “Ha!”, marked by a single eighth-note ejaculation. Further, Amfortas’s laugh is linked, like Kundry’s, to the exposure of his body, suddenly revealed as he tears open his clothes. We hear the return of the unredeemed Kundry, too, in the “lebhaft” (“animated”) orchestral line beneath Amfortas’s “No!/No more! /Ha!”. This orchestral line recalls Kundry’s motif from the example given above from act 1 (Figure 4.3), most obviously in the rhythmically identical descending lines shaped as a duplet plus a triplet (notated in sixteenth notes in act 1 and largely in eighth notes here) ending chromatically in both passages. For a moment—but only for a moment—the old, bad Kundry risks returning in the shape of the Grail King himself.
Kundry, then, threatens not just Parsifal; she threatens the whole Wagnerian project of returning artistic genius to its neurological roots. She represents the fear that, by grounding creative force in the inner life of the body, one risks falling into an abyss—that clairvoyance and madness may be opposite sides of the same coin, as closely linked as Kundry and Parsifal, or as Kundry and the hysterical order of the Grail Knights. This threat goes to the heart not only of Wagner’s conception of artistic genius but also of his conception of the ideal audience at Bayreuth, an audience so enraptured by the vision of the inspired genius that it shares in that primordial clairvoyance itself. It is a threat linked both to the fear of a certain kind of neural subject and to the fear of theatricality, two fears that link the hysterics of Bayreuth with those of the Salpêtrière.
1 There are, of course, exceptions, such as Paul Lawrence Rose, whose Wagner: Race and Revolution is thoroughgoing in its attention to Schopenhauer’s influence and is anything but culturally conservative.
2 Clément’s Opera: The Undoing of Women; Abbate’s Unsung Voices; Levin’s Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen; Badiou’s Five Lessons on Wagner; and Žižek’s “ ‘The Wound Is Healed’ ” (in Levin, Opera through Other Eyes) offer some of the most provocative insights since the 1990s into Wagner particularly and opera generally, and none contains a reference to Schopenhauer. Similarly, Weiner’s important Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination contains just three references to Schopenhauer (despite his influential anti-Semitism) over the course of roughly 400 pages. While the diminution of Schopenhauer’s importance among Wagner scholars may be at least partly attributable to simple Schopenhauer fatigue, the same cannot be said for his neglect among theater scholars. Despite Schopenhauer’s enormous influence on the development of the modernist stage, his omission from theater history is almost total. Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre (8th ed.), John Russell Brown’s Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre, and Christopher Innes’s Avant Garde Theatre, all works of impressive scope and depth, omit the philosopher. J. L. Styan’s three-volume Modern Drama in Theory and Practice (1981) mentions Schopenhauer just once, in a sub-clause on Wagner’s indebtedness to “Schopenhauer and German metaphysics” (2.5). Nor is Schopenhauer to be found in more focused studies (such as Frantisek Deak’s otherwise excellent Symbolist Theatre) of theatrical movements where his influence was particularly central. Even setting Wagner aside, Schopenhauer’s importance for such central figures of the modern stage as Turgenev, Zola, Strindberg, O’Neill, and Beckett has been largely forgotten.
3 There is another implied reason behind much of the scholarly silence, which is that Schopenhauer’s complete dismissal of Hegel in particular and historicism in general puts him beyond the pale of much contemporary literary theory. Added to this was his excoriation by the late Nietzsche and Adorno, and his almost complete neglect by Heidegger and Levinas.
4 Schopenhauer’s anticipation of Freudian theory was occasionally acknowledged by Freud himself. E.g., “[w]hat [Schopenhauer] says [in The World as Will and Representation] about the struggle against acceptance of a painful part of reality fits my conception of repression so completely that I am again indebted for having made a discovery to not being a wide reader” (“Collected Papers” 1.297; see also 4.355).
5 Schopenhauer credits the importance of these thinkers, as well as Gall, in 2.272, and further writes that “[t]he most recent advances in the physiology of the nervous system by Sir Charles Bell, Magendie, Marshall Hall, and others have enriched and corrected the subject-matter of this method of consideration. A philosophy like the Kantian, that entirely ignores the [neurophysiological] point of view for the intellect, is one-sided, and therefore inadequate” (2.273). Further discussion of the influence of Reil, Bichat, and Cabanis, and of neurology generally, on Schopenhauer’s thought may be found in Brunner; Janet.
6 Despite their occasional similarities, Helmholtz had no use for Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which he considered representative of the wooly-headed speculations of Romantic pseudoscience. Helmholtz’s distaste was sharpened by the fact that one of his greatest scientific adversaries, the physicist and sometime spiritualist Friedrich Zöllner, greatly admired the philosopher. See Cahan 370, 565; also Liebscher 250.
7 Schopenhauer’s disagreement with Gall is instrumental for the system as a whole; the “greatest error in Gall’s phrenology,” according to Schopenhauer, is that it “sets up organs of the brain even for moral qualities” (2.246). By making the brain a seat not only of intellect but also of morality, Gall’s system therefore confuses the realm of the physical with that of the metaphysical. It has been suggested that Schopenhauer’s refusal to entirely naturalize his system—or, to put it another way, his refusal to abandon some form of Kantian idealism, despite the increasingly naturalistic direction of Schopenhauer’s later writings, and despite the tensions this direction created in the project as a whole—was partly a result of his belief that to abandon idealism would be to abandon ethics and embrace pure egoism (Brunner 113).
8 In his letters and autobiography, Wagner emphasized the “vast importance” of Schopenhauer for his development as a thinker and artist (see, e.g., Selected 323, 338; My Life 508). The overwhelming majority of critics have agreed with this self-assessment. Magee of course emphasizes the centrality of Schopenhauer to Wagner’s later work (see esp. Philosophy, chap. 17; Tristan, chaps. 8–11), as do Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer (Wagner, Selected 163) and Michael Tanner (100). Ernest Newman is somewhat more nuanced in his verdict, arguing that “Schopenhauer merely reinforced [Wagner’s] emotions and intuitions with reasons and arguments. That, and that alone, was Schopenhauer’s ‘influence’ upon him: but it was the most powerful thing of the kind that his mind had ever known and was ever afterwards to know” (2.431).
9 For more on the connection to Moreau, see Davis 96; Kennaway, Bad 92.
10 Kennaway notes that “[b]efore the late 1860s there were only a handful of vague allusions to ‘mad’ elements in Wagner’s life and work” (Bad 93). The turning point, according to Kennaway, came in 1869, the year Wagner published Judaism in Music (Das Judenthum in der Musik).
11 Schopenhauer was particularly impressed by an exhibition given by the mesmerist Regazzoni in 1854 (see Ellenberger 159) and writes in “On Spirit-Seeing” that animal magnetism is “[from] the philosophical point of view … the most significant and pregnant of all the discoveries that has ever been made” (Parerga 1.268). On the reality of such phenomena Schopenhauer was in disagreement with Kant, and indeed “On Spirit Seeing” is an implicit response to Kant’s own essay of 1766, “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer” (“Träume eines Geistersehers”), in which Kant, inquiring into the claims of Emanuel Swedenborg, questions our ability to have any insight into a spirit world. For Schopenhauer, Kant’s essay is not so much wrong as incomplete; while it (correctly) attacks “spiritualistic” explanations for these extraordinary phenomena, it neglects to attempt an idealistic explanation (1.229).
12 The idea that Beethoven’s late works were his greatest, which Wagner strongly suggests in the essay, was contrarian at the time, while the further notion that their greatness actually arose from Beethoven’s deafness may have been unique to Wagner. For more on Wagner and Beethoven reception, see Knittel.
13 This gendering of somnambulism, already prevalent in the Romantic period, was further cemented by the immediate and enduring popularity of Vincenzo Bellini and Felice Romani’s opera La sonnambula (based on a scenario by Eugène Scribe), which premiered in 1831.
14 On Wagner’s aesthetics of androgyny, see Nattiez.
15 It is surely telling that, sixteen years before Beethoven (in December 1854), Wagner had sent Schopenhauer a gift of the libretto of The Ring of the Nibelung with the dedication “out of reverence and gratitude”—in return for which Schopenhauer had scribbled sarcastic notes in the margins and advised Wagner through a mutual acquaintance to quit writing music and stick to poetry. It is easy to read this, the closest the two ever came to a direct exchange, as a tragic misunderstanding, but it more likely reflects Schopenhauer’s insight into the differences between Wagner’s aesthetics of reception and his own.
16 For a particularly fine account of this aspect of Tristan and Isolde, see Grey.
17 On Wagner as the “theoretician” of the cry, though not its inventor, see Poizat 77. On the “aesthetics of the scream” and its inheritors, see Friedheim.
18 The “grand united artwork,” Wagner writes in Religion and Art, is a unity of “the masculine principle” of “the poet’s work” (i.e., the text) and “the feminine” principle of “music” (6:165).