Richard Wagner and his World

Name: Musikdrama abominable (according to Richard Wagner)

If Wagner continues to be the name for the ruin of music, as
Bernini for the ruin of sculpture, he is not its cause.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

A recent contribution to Wagner scholarship is a New Grove Guide titled Wagner and His Operas.¹ In each chapter devoted to the individual works, the author, Barry Millington, opens with a descriptive name, given in German, with mention thereafter of the work’s number of acts. Usually that number is three, although there are some exceptions, as the following chronological list makes explicit. Millington designates Die Feen, first, as a grosse romantische Oper (grand romantic opera); second, Das Liebesverbot oder die Novize von Palermo as a grosse komische Oper (grand comic opera) in 2 acts; and, third, Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen as a grosse tragische Oper (grand tragic opera) in five acts. After this, Der fliegende Holländer is introduced as a romantische Oper, Tannhäuser as a grosse romantische Oper, and Lohengrin also as a romantische Oper. Tristan und Isolde follows as a Handlung (action, implicitly “dramatic action”), after which comes Der Ring des Niebelungen as a Bühnenfestspiel (stage-festival-play), of which Das Rheingold is the Prologue (Vorabend) in four scenes, Die Walküre the first day, Siegfried the second, and Götterdämmerung the third, in three acts with a Prologue. Parsifal, a Bühnenweihfestspiel (stage-consecration-festival-play) concludes the oeuvre.

So far, no surprises. However, one opera is made into an exception. Millington withholds from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Wagner’s own designation—Komische Oper in 3 Akten—and calls it instead, in English, a music drama. Why single out Meistersinger in this way? The answer is not clear; maybe the exception is made unwittingly. Still, something interesting can be made out of it. Had Millington introduced Meistersinger with the German term Musikdrama, he might have led readers to believe something false, that this work alone is a music drama or that Wagner assigned to this work this particular description, which he did not. Millington does not make this mistake. Designating Die Meistersinger as a music drama, in English, he seems to treat the descriptive name generically, as though Meistersinger were just one of Wagner’s many music dramas, of which Holländer is sometimes claimed chronologically to be the first and Parsifal the last.

But if Millington uses the term “music drama” generically, why does he title his book with the other generic name, Wagner and His Operas, and not Wagner and His Music Dramas?² It would not have been controversial to do the latter. Quite the reverse: it would have continued a well-established tradition within Wagner reception, according to which Wagner’s mature works are all named music dramas—and this despite Wagner’s sometimes vigorous objections to doing so.

This essay concerns the difference it makes, if it makes a difference, to speak of Wagner’s works either as music dramas or as operas. It assumes this concern as part of a larger interest in the practice of naming or titling works of art. The general literature on titles awarded or denied artworks is remarkably sparse, which is surprising given the significance that even the briefest inquiry will show acts of naming or titling to have.³ Of course, titling and naming are not the same acts, although we will find them here inextricably connected. In what follows I argue that a significant part of the tension regarding naming and titling, as it manifests itself in Wagner’s oeuvre, turns on a move Wagner encouraged, to cease thinking about names and titles as merely descriptive or classificatory and to start thinking about them as pointing toward an unnameable ideal. Given his outlook, what he produced were operas aspiring toward an ideal of a form of art that was preferably left unnamed (namenlos), though if the ideal had to be named, then the term Musikdrama probably served him better than any other he considered.

Wagner’s argument bears on how one thinks about the concept of a genre under early Romantic-idealist conditions of modernity and on how one identifies, individuates, and interprets his works. Although he produced several operas, the Musikdrama remained for him a singular ideal or Idea, though this was not to pronounce the Idea either fixed or determinate. The point was to leave the Idea underdetermined by conceptual articulation and thus sufficiently open for each opera to approximate it differently and in its own exemplary way.

Wagner suggested this argument in several of his essays and most explicitly when he described his operas as moving toward music drama, where, however, music drama was now the end toward which all opera ought to aspire. Nowhere did he treat the argument more evidently than in one of the most polemical pieces he ever wrote, “Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama.’” The title is usually translated into English as “On the Name ‘Music Drama,’” missing much of what is actively involved in giving something a name.⁴ Behind Wagner’s polemics was a serious theme: naming or titling a work is just as serious a baptismal act as naming a person. In his piece, Wagner addressed the compromises implicit in the act of naming his works with a general or generic descriptive term. He did this to support a critical strategy characteristic in nineteenth-century German aesthetic theory bearing on the thesis of exemplarity. To name an Idea too academically risks closing off productive possibilities in the works themselves. As long as the Idea is not so named, the focus remains on the works as self-standing exemplars. The more a name fixes the Idea, the more the works resist being named, even if, in this resistance, each work strives to define the Idea by its name alone. In this sense, an exemplary work entitles itself to the Idea.

Accompanying Wagner’s aesthetic argument of exemplarity was, however, a grand conceit. Although he did all he could to prevent his works from being fixed by a generic name, especially when that name was awarded by his critics, he also did all he could to affix his own name—and his name alone—to the future of art. He desired that his name would come to stand for an entire age in the history of German culture as Goethe’s name did before him (the Goethezeit naming the era of Weimar Classicism). The more he regarded his name as having found its place, the more he turned to the names “Bayreuth” and “Germany” to fix them, too. On one occasion, in a piece on “Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth,” he contrasted eighteenth-century court culture with nineteenth-century bourgeois culture—or, more specifically, an extraordinarily spirited performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, performed by German musicians and singers, with the earlier spiritually impoverished offerings of Italian opera and French comedy—only to declare:

Without any resistance, I was granted the opportunity to give this meaning to our introductory festival. And for all who celebrated with us, the name Bayreuth, which now carried this meaning, became a dear memory, an encouraging notion, a meaningful motto.

And such a motto is needed to sustain us in the daily fight against the intrusive demonstrations of the profoundly alienated spirit that shows itself now in the German nation. (GSD, 9:333-34)

Wagner’s obsession with naming and titling sustained a lifelong and highly charged confrontation between aesthetic resistance and cultural-political arrogance. For there to be a new concept of art there had to be a new institution of opera and a new country. The confrontation did not lead to what Wagner wanted. It led far more to “Wagnerism” than to a Wagnerzeit. No one commented more immediately or with more passion on the missed opportunity than Nietzsche. When he proclaimed that “Wagner sums up modernity,” he added: “It doesn’t help, one must first be a Wagnerian.”⁵

Nietzsche was no less fascinated than Wagner with acts of naming. That Nietzsche never employed the term “music drama” in his text on the birth of Wagnerian opera out of the ancient spirit of Greek tragedy (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872) is a fact one should not ignore.⁶ When, in “The Greek Music Drama,” another essay of the same period (1869-70), Nietzsche employed the term with a distinct titular pride, Wagner strongly objected.⁷ As Cosima Wagner recorded, “In the evening Prof. N. reads us a lecture on the Greek music drama [“Das griechische Musikdrama”], a title for which R. pulls him up, explaining the reason for his disapproval.”⁸ Unfortunately, Cosima didn’t spell out exactly why Wagner objected on this night of June 11, 1870, but given Wagner’s own essay (“Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama’”), written in October 1872, one sees that the issue was and remained for him, as for Nietzsche, an urgent one.

Wagner’s argument for and against the name “music drama” is traceable throughout his writings. Let us focus on one of the first observations from his piece “Über die Benennung,” namely, on the “astounding” works of Aeschylus, which, Wagner wrote, the Athenians “named not dramas, but left with the holy names of their origin: ‘tragedies.’” Apparently the Greeks were content to have no generic name for their unprecedented works and to leave them “nameless” (namenlos). Everything, however, began to go wrong when the great and powerful critics began to insist on fixing the canonic works of opera and drama according to “abstract ideas” (Begriffe), when they began to celebrate the word as absolute or the generic name for its sake alone. Recall, Wagner continued, the “good Polonius” who edified everyone with an “elegant list” of names in Hamlet or the Italians who “topped up” their works with the generic name dramma per musica.⁹ After which Wagner listed all the empty, nichtssagenden (literally, “nothing-saying”), generic names imposed on the musical world: “music drama,” “opera,” “opus,” and “work.” And yet, despite all this namenlos Unsinniges (nameless nonsense), the aim behind these acts of naming was to capture something unnennbar Tiefsinniges (unnameably profound) (GSD, 9:305-6). Why this sudden turn in an otherwise damning criticism? Likely because Wagner wanted to remind his readers that it is one thing to grant the deep value of an artist searching for a name, and another to complain of the burdens or restrictions that result once it has been found.

There was an extraordinary synchronicity of language and terms between Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s criticisms, raising questions of who was influencing whom. Thus, Nietzsche also opened his lecture on “The Greek Music Drama” with the issue of names.

In our theater of today, one finds not only memories and echoes of the dramatic arts of Greece: no, their fundamental forms also stem from the Hellenic soil, either in natural development or because of artificial borrowing. Only the names have often changed and shifted, just as the medieval music still really possessed the Greek scales as well as the names for these, except that, for example, what the Greeks called “Locrian” was renamed “Doric” as a church mode. Similar confusions present themselves regarding the terminology associated with drama: what the Athenians understood by “tragedy,” we have at best subsumed under the notion of “grand opera”: or at least this is what Voltaire did in a letter he wrote to Cardinal Quirini. (KSA, 1:517)

Like Wagner, Nietzsche also traced the “genealogical affinity” between the ancients and moderns, to claim:

What we call opera today is a caricature of the antique music drama. It developed solely out of a direct aping of antiquity according to an abstract theory and without the unconscious influence of a natural drive. As a result, it is an artificially generated homunculus, an angry goblin in the development of our modern music. (KSA, 1:518)

Nietzsche’s lecture was a tour de force, as Wagner well recognized. Nevertheless, what Nietzsche most wanted to tell Wagner, Wagner least wanted to hear. “The Greek music drama,” Nietzsche concluded,

had for the entire ancient art a free sort of drapery: everything unfree, everything isolated in the individual arts was surmounted. In the sacrificial festivals, beautiful as well as daring hymns were sung. Commitment but also grace, diversity but also unity, different arts at the peak of their activity, but still one work of art—this was the ancient music drama. But whenever someone is reminded of all this when looking at contemporary reforms of art, they will have to conclude that the artwork of the future is less a shining image than a deception. What we expect from the future was already once a reality—that existed in the past, one thousand years ago. (KSA, 1:531)

Nietzsche, I suggest, preserved this conclusion in the first fifteen original sections of his Birth of Tragedy, yet compromised the conclusion in the sections he subsequently wrote on the birth of Wagnerian opera. Here he changed the thought that there could be nothing genuinely new for the modern art of the future to do. However, the change was rendered most subtle the moment Nietzsche decided not to use the term “music drama” as a designation for Wagner’s works. This way he complied with both Wagner’s demand that the term not be used and Wagner’s conviction that Wagner alone could do something new (a conviction Nietzsche more elaborately supported in the fourth of his “untimely meditations,” that of 1875-76, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”).¹⁰ Nevertheless, Nietzsche left it ingeniously ambiguous as to whether the “new” that Wagner would do would now necessarily be a discontinuation of what the Greeks once did under a rubric or name Nietzsche determined no longer to speak.

If there were tensions in Nietzsche’s argument, there were tensions equally in Wagner’s. Although Wagner wanted to show his aesthetic commitment to protecting his works from an overly subsuming generic articulation, he frequently argued from a position of resentment. For example, he wrote that he would rather leave his acts of art unnamed to protect them from those critics he didn’t regard as his “friends” or, more provocatively, to protect his acts of art from an opera world that was unable to produce them as anything but “operas.” Consider the conclusion of his essay “Über die Benennung”:

Since my poor labors [Arbeiten], given their great dissimilarity to Don Juan, were not even allowed to pass as operas, I was unhappily obliged to hand them over to the theaters without any designation of their genre at all. By this means, I believed I could survive so long as I had anything to do with theaters that understandably knew nothing other than opera, and hence, even if one were to offer these theaters a music drama, they would have made an opera out of it. In order to emerge from this confusion successfully, I hit upon the idea of the stage-festival-play [Bühnenfestspiel], which I hope now to bring about with the help of my friends in Bayreuth. This designation came to me from the nature of my enterprise; I already knew of singing festivals, gymnastic events, etc., and I was well able to imagine a theater festival in which the stage and that which happens on it—which we sensibly term “a play” [ein Spiel]—would clearly be the main thing. If those who attend my stage-festival-plays preserve some memory of the event, they will easily think of a proper name for that which I now propose to offer to my friends as an unnamed deed of art.¹¹

However bitter at times the expression, it would be wrong to conclude that names or titles signified for Wagner only loss. Indeed, there was profound purpose in his having so long sought the right name or best designation for his works, even if ultimately he was tempted to refuse the name as inadequate the moment it was made explicit or public. Likewise, in the reception of Wagner’s oeuvre there has been considerable purpose in becoming similarly preoccupied with names, especially when the point has been to determine which of Wagner’s works stands, for good or bad, as music drama’s best exemplar. Does the best exemplar lie in the more suggestive and youthful first, Der fliegende Holländer, or in the mature and culminating last, Parsifal? Or perhaps it lies in one of the operas—Tristan, Meistersinger, or The Ring—produced in the middle of his creative life? Much is gained in posing this interpretative question.

In constructing my own argument, I follow neither Wagner nor his critics in trying to determine the correct or authoritative description of his artistic labors. I aim only to render transparent something that was profoundly at stake in the many Wagnerian acts of naming and titling both within the works and of the works. Here I am influenced by an argument Adorno once offered in notes he collected under the title Titel. In one of these notes, he remarked that the “and” in the title that joins Tristan to Isolde and she to him (which is also an “and” taken by the characters themselves in the lines they sing), resembles, “in gothic print, … a black flag flying from the bow of a sailing ship.”¹² For Adorno, the conjunctive “and” sealed the fate of the lovers, just as, following Walter Benjamin, a person’s name seals his fate, which is a thought originating in the Book of Genesis. Pursuing this argument further, the titular “and” is increasingly given the power to remove from both Tristan and Isolde their ability to remain differentiated from each other, rendering them nameless as they themselves sing “ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen, neu Erkennen” (without naming, without dividing, new perceiving). Allegorically, the opera’s title seals the fate of a modernity that is content to move toward an emptying out of both name and title, rendering each a slogan or caption, because any is now exchangeable for any other: Tristan becomes Isolde, Isolde Tristan. Or, if the title is not completely emptied out, then, at the other extreme, it becomes overloaded with conceptual meaning, as though the title was meant now wholly to determine the work’s meaning: sucking all enigmatic content out of it, denying to the work its aesthetic life. A title, Adorno argued, serves a work best when it remains elusive, suggestive, and nonconceptual, when it refuses to give away the work’s secret, when it renders the actual experiencing of the work necessary. A title that assumes all the power for itself ultimately forbids entry into the work—and the work dies. What Adorno argued of titles, he argued of all aesthetic principles or “prescripts” (ästhetische Präskripte).¹³

Wagner also recommended this sort of resistance when it came to naming the future genre or kind of art his works should point toward. Against this background, what explanation should now be given of his decision to title so many of his works with men’s names corresponding to characters who might have brought about far less destruction in their worlds had they themselves remained nameless? Lohengrin, Siegfried, Parsifal: is it their namelessness or their naming that marks the redemptive possibility in the works? When Siegfried, for example, asks where he comes from, he discovers that his origin is also the source of his name. The moment he sings out his name, the “wild one”—Fafner—meets his death.

The answer to the question of redemptive possibility isn’t obvious. What is at stake in naming Wagner’s works “music dramas” or in speaking a man’s name? Given the intricate relationship that Wagner developed between name and title, why is it that, in the one “exceptional” opera in which Wagner focused on presenting an explicit philosophical argument regarding the thesis of exemplarity, he chose a title that pointed not to a man’s name at all, but to a group—Die Meistersinger. This title refers to a community in which the formal pomp and ceremony associated with its singing shows itself perfectly when master Fritz Kothner dutifully sings out the names of the other masters in roll call.

Although Millington describes Meistersinger as a music drama, he stresses its comic nature. Describing it first as “a comic appendage to Tannhäuser” and later as the “only comedy among Wagner’s mature works,” he emphasizes how much this work is “a rich, perceptive music drama widely admired for its warm humanity.” Only “by some,” he then adds almost dismissively, is it regarded “with suspicion… for its dark underside,” as though, now in my terms, the dark underside contradicted rather than sustained its comic character.¹⁴

I suggest that whatever talent for comedy Wagner had was an unfortunate one for making manifest the cruelty made possible by comedy: the barbarism of humiliation, the satire of didacticism, the polemic of bitter reflection. If Meistersinger paints a picture of “warm humanity,” it does so at the expense of those characters who fail to contribute to its warm tones. The mastersinger Sixtus Beckmesser is coldly dismissed with no acknowledgment from the final warm tableau after he has been made to stand abstractly for the “Beckmesserei” of his times. The name that makes of him a mastersinger is denied him in an act of dehumanizing humiliation. To deny a man his name or to assign him a generic name is to deny him his personhood. In Wagner’s philosophy of history, a warm humanity is not one that exists in the present, but, having existed in the past, might exist again in the future if only the present would rid itself of the coldness Wagner claimed to find in the stifling pedantry of the culture.

The argument here tracks Adorno’s. In a chapter he titled “Musikdrama” in his monograph on Wagner, Adorno concluded that when Wagner gave music the Schopenhauerian task “to warm up the alienated and reified relations of men to make it sound as if men were still human,” he simultaneously displayed his hostility toward a consciousness that had become technological and his favor toward that which remained unconscious. For Adorno, Wagner’s hostility marked no less than “the a priori of the music drama,” signifying as it did a refusal to try to save enlightenment reason from its decline. When Wagner gave up on reason and entered the realm of unconsciousness and myth, the catastrophic fate was sealed not only of art but also of enlightenment as a whole.¹⁵ In my terms, when namelessness is used to sustain mythic construction instead of aesthetic resistance, the name—here, Musikdrama—should now be explicitly named or rendered explicit if the naming exposes the dehumanizing work Wagner’s operas ended up performing.

For Wagner, the move toward the music drama was a move of musical form, aesthetic concept, and sociopolitical life. The move has been described as away from opera toward the symphony, from Rossini toward Beethoven, or from Italy and France toward Germany. Or, away from the externally operatic toward the internally symphonic, away from patchwork construction toward wholeness, away from fragmentation toward unity, or away from the hollowness of absolute or formally constrained music toward the reuniting of the sister arts of sound, word, image, and gesture. Moving away from what then dominated in culture and society toward a better future also required, in this historicizing scheme of things, a moving back or, more accurately, a rebirth of something lost. For Wagner, as for the young but only sometimes compliant Nietzsche, it was the muse-inspired spirit of music or musicality that had to be reborn from the womb of the world, a spirit once present in the tragic music dramas of the ancient Greeks. On what did this rebirth depend? On determining the correct form for an artwork, one most fitting the condition and needs of the modern age. “We must seize the day,” Wagner insisted, “and seek to develop its forms in new and solid ways” (GSD, 12:4).

In my reading, Meistersinger presents an explicit argument for the future terms of Wagnerian art. Whereas for Millington the opera is “a comic appendage of Tannhäuser,” for me it is also an intentionally produced or highly reflective analogue to Tristan und Isolde, a sustained, almost six-hour argument offered in archaic operatic form in support of a vision of the future form of art. Even more broadly, Meistersinger offers an argument designed to award Wagner, as composer, a true freedom from the community he desired but which he also refused to be a part of. To what end is this true freedom? So that he could compose an opera in a form that rejected the operatic form of his day, to show his contemporaries—by example—to what they should also aspire. To compose this way, in freedom or by retrieving a freedom repressed by the community, was to give back to that community something that both Wagner and Nietzsche thought it had lost.

I shall not repeat what I have written elsewhere regarding the relationship of Meistersinger to Tristan or the role the concept of musicality (das Musikalische) had in the modern rebirth of opera as Musikdrama.¹⁶ Nevertheless, I do want to stress that the move toward Musikdrama was made by Romantic and idealist aesthetic theorists and composers in France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere before Wagner made the move, as Wagner acknowledged. I emphasize this point because Adorno seemed more or less to be denying it in the opening sentences of his chapter on music drama: “Even though [Wagner’s] intention was to obliterate the frontiers separating the individual arts in the name of an all-pervasive infinity and even though the experience of synaesthesia is one of the corner-stones of Romanticism, [his] Gesamtkunstwerk is actually unrelated to the Romantic theories of fifty years earlier.”¹⁷

Adorno argued from a double perspective: first, from the Wagnerian perspective of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and, second, from his own perspective fifty years after Wagner’s death, when, as he argued, the rational planning, the emptying out of aesthetic substance, and the movement toward totality in Wagner’s self-described phantasmagoric production of the Gesamtkunstwerk had become most explicit. In my view, however, it should remain more open than it does for Adorno whether what one claims of the Gesamtkunstwerk is automatically to be claimed of the Musikdrama, as though one could simply glide from one name to the other quid pro quo because they now connoted the same thing. Indeed, one might argue that the Musikdrama continued the early Romantic project, while the Gesamtkunstwerk did not. Or that, when the Musikdrama transformed itself into a Gesamtkunstwerk, the former was deprived of any freedom it once promised. Nothing is stable here. Depending on what content one attaches to the different names, the claim might be reversed: that the Gesamtkunstwerk continued to hold out more promise than the Musikdrama.

To make the instability more evident, note that it is quite misleading to speak of the move toward music drama as a move away from opera, as though it were not Wagner’s point to continue the production of opera under the condition of Musikdrama. When Wagner pronounced that he was no longer composing opera (which he did many times), his insistence should be read rhetorically as, “I’m not composing what others are currently composing under the rubric of opera, but what I produce are operas nonetheless.” So read, Millington might after all be justified in titling his book Wagner and His Operas, especially if what his title expresses is some resistance to Wagner’s own often exaggerated claims.

III

Millington is only one of many Wagner scholars to have devoted attention to the right naming or correct describing of Wagner’s works. However, critics have rarely treated the matter of naming or titling explicitly; more often they have engaged in further and sometimes quite authoritative acts of naming. Contrast Millington’s list of names with another list, offered by Werner Breig, extrapolated from the authoritative Wagner-Handbook in a chapter titled in translation “The Musical Works” and in the original “Wagners kompositorisches Werk.”¹⁸ Even if the aim of the chapter title is somehow to avoid the conflict between opera and music drama, the reference to musical works or to compositional process (as suggested by the German) only creates other conflicts bearing on the work concept, as we shall see more explicitly below in presenting Carl Dahlhaus’s view.

In Breig’s list, Die Feen is named, in historical context, a “three-act Romantic opera,” citing Wagner’s own claim, “I set [my opera libretto] according to my impressions of Beethoven, Weber and Marschner.” Das Liebesverbot is then described as a work modeled more after French and Italian opera than after German Romantic opera, and Rienzi subsequently a “grand tragic opera” after Auber’s La muette de Portici of 1828. In discussing Rienzi, Breig quotes Wagner’s declaration, here taken from his 1851 essay A Communication to My Friends (so titled to exclude his enemies): ‘“Grand opera,’ with all its scenic and musical splendor, its richness of effects, its large-scale musical passion, stood before me, and my artistic ambition was not merely to imitate it, but with unbridled extravagance to surpass all its previous manifestations.”¹⁹ Breig next describes Der fliegende Holländer as Wagner’s “first fully valid work” and, quoting Wagner again, as marking a breakthrough to his “true style,” moving away from the “species of Romantic opera” and toward “a true musical drama.” Breig notes Wagner’s albeit tentative suggestion written in a letter to Ferdinand Heine, April 1842, that with Holländer he perhaps founded a new genre, or at least that with its rejection of broken, modern patchwork construction this new work was meant to be “very unlike what we now understand by the term ‘opera.’”²⁰ After this, Breig seems more or less to brand all the works that follow Holländer as music dramas, although he continues to employ Wagner’s alternate descriptions. Siegfried’s Tod is thus described as a “grand heroic opera” until it became part of a music drama, in which Siegfried thrived for quite a while unnamed. However, Breig notes, the Ring cycle might also have been named a “word-music drama.” Breig further cites Wagner’s Communication:

[Whoever looks forward to the Nibelungen opus] with the expectation of experiencing something similar to opera is completely mistaken. I no longer write operas: since I do not wish to invent an arbitrary term for this work, I am calling it a drama, because this describes most clearly the viewpoint from which my work must be received.²¹

Parsifal, finally, is described by Breig as “Wagner’s sole music drama (if we discount the four-voice setting of the motive ‘Durch Mitleid wissend’ for four squires in Act 1) which is completely without ensemble singing.”²²

To further understand Breig’s approach to music drama, consider what he writes while discussing Tristan’s relationship to Meistersinger, just having quoted Wagner’s remark from a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck from 1860 that “in a certain very deep sense that only the World-Spirit can understand, I can now only repeat myself in new works: I can reveal no new essence of my nature [Wesenhaftigkeit].” Breig comments: “Even in view of his later works, Wagner never retracted these astonishing words; in fact he even repeated them in March 1879, when the draft of Parsifal was nearly complete.” To support the thought, Breig then quotes from Cosima’s diary Wagner’s apparent conviction that after Tristan he “produced nothing new [nichts Neues],” whereupon Cosima reminded her husband of all that was new from a “technical point of view” in Meistersinger, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung. Putting technical matters aside, all that Wagner meant (in Cosima’s view) was that after Tristan “there had been no need for him to write a single note more: he could have just said ‘Do it as I do’” [Macht mir’s nach], bidding others to follow him as he had followed the truth opened up to him by Tristan (even if, Wagner added, only the “World-Spirit” could fully understand that truth).²³

By quoting Cosima, Breig arguably obscured the far more intimate point of Wagner’s earlier comment to Mathilde. If, according to the “World-Spirit,” works after Tristan could only ever be repetitions of what had already been achieved, then plausibly it was Tristan even more, say, than Parsifal that most deserved the honor of being named the music drama. That Wagner never called Tristan a music drama does little to halt the realization of the World-Spirit or, better, the expression of the World Will. For in Schopenhauerian matters of Will, such expression requires no name, no conscious understanding, only the closest possible musical approximation to that a priori or unconscious something (to which Adorno referred), experienced at a complete remove from representation (Vorstellung). In these terms, namelessness certainly suits an opera that strives to shed itself of any daytime semblance of individuation or reason, as when during the night Tristan melts into Isolde and Isolde melts equally into him.

Yet this is the exact proposition that Adorno subjected to critique. For the metaphysical namelessness that promised so much freedom marked, in his view, the beginning of another kind of namelessness, according to which, increasingly under the conditions of late modernity, names that once named were turned into empty slogans of the culture industry. Still, it is important to recognize here that the emptiness that resulted from the sloganizing of names was actually more a reorganization of meaning by which the very term “meaning” lost its former honorific connotation. When Isolde relinquished herself to Tristan, as he to her, it was his name and not hers that remained to serve as the singular title of their work. But was this to his or to her or ultimately to the listener’s or to culture’s advantage? The answer pulls in two directions. The more the reference to Isolde’s name is withheld, the more the audience forgets what her voice once stood for—namely, sirenic music. In this forgetfulness, all that is heard are Tristan’s solo words. Yet the more Isolde’s name and voice are shielded from the appropriating tactics of the culture industry, the more chance her work has to hold on to its aesthetic or musical meaning, if only as residue, for those who have ears still open enough to hear it. Here, in the fragile space between the memory of meaning and the amnesia that comes with the culture industry’s reorganization of meaning, Adorno situated a redemptive gesture of hope.

Consider Adorno’s further claim that when Samuel Beckett titled his work L’innommable, he did this not so much to comment upon art’s modernist movement into abstraction or untitling as to point to art’s passage toward death. In this thought, nameability goes hand in hand with the idea that art is still possible and unnameability with the idea it is not. In other words, the idea that something is still nameable suggests that acts of Benennung are still part of a living, productive activity, though, dialectically, nameability preserves the possibility of art because something in art remains unnamed—“das Mehr.” After everything is named or titled, art reaches its end or its death and only cold repetition is possible. There is nothing further to be named and nothing exemplary further to be shown, because all has already been named. “Can literary works that can no longer be called anything still exist?” Adorno asked, and answered: “One of Beckett’s titles L’innommable, The Unnameable, not only fits its subject matter but also embodies the truth about the namelessness of contemporary literature. Not a word in it has any value now if it does not say the unsayable, the fact that it does not leave itself unsaid.”²⁴ Everything in this thinking turns on what happens to names when they become empty words.

Another way to make the point is to render explicit a distinction between names and titles that Adorno leaves implicit. The distinction draws on a theological argument for the Bilderverbot, which could also be called the Namensverbot. The beginnings of the distinction are suggested in the sixth paragraph of Benjamin’s essay on technological reproducibility in a passing remark in a discussion of Atget’s photographs and the new picture magazines, in which “for the first time, captions become obligatory. And it is clear, that they have a character altogether different from the titles of paintings.”²⁵ Where once titles had the power of names and kept the language attached to things, so now titles, under modern conditions of disassociation, have been turned into empty or interchangeable inscriptions. Adorno concurred: the more names “concede to communication,” the less they serve as names: “Material with the dignity of a name no longer exists.”²⁶

Let us return now to Meistersinger, where it is argued that after the lesson of art has been learned—as it is learned in Walther’s “morning dream interpretation” song—repetition does not necessarily preclude further technical development or even a different sort of culmination, as Cosima suggested. That something can come after the lesson is learned is demonstrated by what was named, not in the opera itself, but soon after by Wagner and contemporary critics, as the “Prize Song” (Preislied).²⁷ Even if, following Wagner’s own anxiety, Walther’s “Prize Song” no longer expresses the freedom of his second dream song or the naturalness of the song with which he first goes to trial, the last song does confer public honor and reward on this songwriter. Nevertheless, whereas Cosima seemed content with the argument of public recognition, the troubled ending of the opera suggests more ambiguity the moment it leaves open the question whether Walther, as Wagner, will ever again produce or need to produce anything new once the “Prize Song” has been sung. When master Pogner proposes to confer the title of master on Walther, the young singer resists: “Not master, no! I’ll seek my bliss without that,” after which Sachs sings his most famous speech, here interpreted as attempting to convince Walther not to throw out the baby (the song) with the bathwater (the potentially corrupting baptismal act of being named master).²⁸

Wagner gave the title Die Meistersinger to this work, although there were earlier versions, such as Albert Lortzing’s of 1840 (after Johann Ludwig Franz Deinhardstein’s play), that went by the name of Hans Sachs. In the earliest drafts, Wagner referred to Die Meistersinger and only later added the city of belonging: von Nürnberg. This meant that he never considered awarding the opera with the name of a man, be it Walther or Hans, just as he never considered naming Tristan und Isolde after King Marke, or even Melot, despite the latter’s explicit assertion that it was he alone who had protected the King’s name from shame.

Generally in Wagner’s operas names are often spoken of in relation to the honor or disgrace that attaches to them. So much turns on the dramatic, cultural, and political significance of knowing a name, withholding a name, learning one’s name, naming a name, protecting a name, and living up to one’s name. Consider Magdalene’s opening explanation to Walther: “No one yet knows the bridegroom’s name, until the masters’ court names him tomorrow.” Or David’s “St. John’s Day” song performed for Sachs about the “woman from far-off Nuremberg” who had her little son baptized Johannes in the river Jordan (by none other than John himself), only to discover that back home on the Pegnitz he was just plain Hans. Or Lohengrin’s refusal to speak his name as the condition for fulfilling his roles as husband to Elsa von Brabant and overall protector of the culture—der Schützer von Brabant. Intent on destroying Lohengrin, Ortrud is both first and last to recognize that his mythic or magical power, which is to say, his persuasiveness over the people of Brabant, lies in his refusal to make his name known, which is also connected (as in Siegfried) to his demand that no one ask where he comes from.

Wagner’s acts of naming play into the crucial transition he urged on the path to music drama, from history to myth, a transition that began in his historical opera Rienzi but was made quite explicit in Fliegende Holländer, which some deem his first music drama. Senta’s leap to her death tracks or mirrors the living death of the forever-unnamed Dutchman, and might well be read as the first of several failures for the women in Wagner’s works to release the men from their namelessness by denying them their mythic status. Having failed to do this, they then turn back, as it were, to express their own fidelity to the myth. When the woman of all women, Kundry, openly names Parsifal “the foolish one,” she expresses no doubt where his “blessedness” will lead. Similarly, Wagner expressed no doubt where his name would lead so long as he remained the protector of German culture. However, my point is both Kundry and Wagner could have expressed doubt.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once used “Cezanne’s Doubt” as a title for a marvelous essay.²⁹ I would like to borrow the title and suggest that “Wagner’s Doubt” would have been an excellent title for the book Adorno actually titled Versuch über Wagner, although Versuch is also a term that perfectly precludes certainty. Adorno’s actual title and my own suggested title both thus serve to remind readers of Adorno’s doubt that Wagner was to be dismissed outright through vigorous critique. In fact, Adorno shared the conviction with Nietzsche, captured in the second epigraph of this essay, that however much one holds “Wagner” responsible for opera’s decline, Richard Wagner or, even better, his works cannot and should not alone be held responsible. To mark him as solely responsible is to inflate his status, whereas the aim of critique is to deflate it. Even in the most damning critique there is always something still being sought after, something that remains in the works of value for Nietzsche, and of resistance for Adorno, a resistance even to the most pervasive Wagnerism of their times. To speak of Wagner’s Doubt is to do a little justice to this deflationary aim.

Carl Dahlhaus titled his classic book of 1971 Richard Wagners Musikdramen (Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas). In his preface, he justified himself thus: “Wagner rejected the expression ‘music drama,’ which he interpreted as meaning ‘drama for music.’ It has nevertheless taken root, since his own expressions—‘artwork of the future,’ ‘word-note-drama’ (or ‘drama of words-and-music’), ‘action,’ ‘festival drama’—are impracticable as titles for a genre.”³⁰ Interestingly, in this list of names, Dahlhaus omitted Gesamtkunstwerk, leaving it uncertain as to whether it also counted for him as an “impracticable” term. More intriguing, his remark prompts one to ask why, if he dismissed names on the grounds of practicality, he did not then resort to the most practical term already available: “opera.” Had Dahlhaus pursued this route, he would have joined forces not only with Millington after him but Ernest Newman before him. That he did not join these forces prompts one to wonder whether there has been an attitudinal difference between German and English Wagner scholars, and whether the difference, if there is one, has demonstrated a greater or lesser deference to the Master. Unfortunately, pursuing this compelling thread takes us too far afield.

Consider, instead, the issue at stake in individuating a genre, and whether the quarrel between opera and music drama, taken as a quarrel characteristic of modernity, demonstrates the failure to determine the right name for “a new genre.” Was Wagner’s aim to exemplify “a new genre”? Surely sometimes it was, but how then should this aim be interpreted? How, for example, was the new genre meant to relate to the old one? Did the birth or rebirth of modern opera suggest the creation of something new in kind or a radical change only in what already existed? Wagner wrote confidently against his critics about this in the opening of the essay on the naming of opera as music drama:

More and more often these days we read of a “music drama” and of how, for example, in Berlin, there is a society that aims to help the music drama on its way—without, however, our being able to form an accurate idea of what is meant. I certainly have reason to suppose that this term was invented for the sake of honoring my later dramatic works with a distinctive classification. But the less I have felt disposed to accept it, the more I have perceived an inclination in other quarters to use this name “music drama” to designate a new art-genre which, it would seem, was bound to evolve in answer to the temper and tendencies of the day, even without my intervention, and is now readily available to anyone, as a cozy nest to hatch one’s musical eggs in.³¹

If the question of genre is difficult, so is the question regarding the status of Wagner’s works the moment Dahlhaus named them “musical works of art.” A year before writing his book on Wagner’s music dramas, Dahlhaus edited an essay collection titled Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk.³² The purpose of this collection, he wrote, was to explore facets of musical form and structure in Wagner’s oeuvre taken as a whole. But what are the consequences of interpreting Wagner’s dramas under the rubric of musical works of art? Doesn’t this rubric risk reducing drama to what is exhausted by the music itself, thereby denying to the drama the representational part of the deed (Tat) made either visible by images or conceptual by words? And doesn’t Dahlhaus’s title imply exactly what Wagner most denied, that the term musikalisch be treated merely as an adjective or appendage to what already exists substantially as either “the drama” or, in this case, “a work of art“? On this matter, Wagner wrote again at some length:

I cannot indulge in the flattering view, that things are so pleasantly situated; and the less, as I don’t know how to read the title “Musikdrama.” When we unite two substantives to form one word, with any understanding of the spirit of our language, by the first we always signify in some sort of way the object of the second; so that “Zukunftsmusik,” though invented in derision of me, had its sense as “music for the future.” —But “Musikdrama” similarly interpreted as “drama for the object of music” would have no sense at all, were it not point-blank the old familiar libretto, which at any rate was a drama expressly constructed for music….

Upon closer inspection, however, we find that the solecism here consists in the now favorite conversion of an adjectival predicate into a substantival prefix: one had begun by saying “musical drama.” Yet it perhaps was not solely that evil habit that brought about the abbreviation “Musikdrama,” but also a hazy feeling that no drama could possibly be “musical” like an instrument or (in rare enough events) a prima donna. A “musical drama,” taken strictly, would be a drama that made music itself, or was good for making music with, or even that understood music, somewhat as our musical reporters [do].³³

Dahlhaus did not pursue the consequences of speaking of Wagner’s dramas as musical works of art beyond saying that the contributors to his volume were concerned with form and structure. However, he did remark insightfully on Wagner’s preoccupation with naming and the mythologizing that accompanied it:

The first principle that provokes the suspicion of historians is Wagner’s inclination to mythologize his own work, which was meant to be neither opera nor music drama, nor any particular, delimited genre at all that might tolerate others alongside it, but rather was supposed to represent the perfection of both history and drama and thus was removed from any classification that would have limited it: the difficulty of designation was a consequence of the all-inclusive claim.³⁴

Given this remark, I suggest interpreting Dahlhaus’s treatment of Wagner’s operas as “musical works of art” as a deliberate strike against the mythologizing of Wagner and in favor of treating Richard Wagner as a composer of musical form and structure. Put this way, the aim was to deflate not the metaphysical or dramatic meaning implicit in Wagner’s most musical works but the mythologizing trajectory of Wagner reception that had dominated up to Dahlhaus’s day (and arguably still does). Dahlhaus fully understood what he was doing when he spoke of matters of genre. Whether or not Wagner was creating a new genre or continuing an old one, Dahlhaus aimed overall to deflate Wagner’s conceit precisely by fitting Wagner’s works into more established musical categories. In this matter, Dahlhaus assumed a more sober approach than Adorno, who, as I note below, posed the question as part of a much more highly charged negative dialectic: whether the category of genre had retained any classificatory power at all under the destabilized conditions of late modernity.

Dieter Borchmeyer opened the twelfth chapter of his study Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre by quoting from the 26th part (Stück) of Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie.³⁵ He did this to introduce a claim that influenced both Wagner and Nietzsche regarding the birth of Wagnerian opera out of the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy. The claim regarded the modernization and replacement of the ancient chorus by the modern symphony orchestra, such that music was awarded not only a purely expressive role but also a reflective or commenting role. Music, accordingly, was no longer simply applied to the word-image-drama as accompaniment or as adjective (where the word applied plays off Wagner’s essay title, “Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama” (1879), GSD, 9:324-42); music, rather, won its substantive claim to stand not just as equal with but now ahead of all other terms: hence, music drama.

Borchmeyer made it quite clear that Wagner knew Part 26 of Lessing’s text. If Wagner knew this part, he likely knew other parts. My final argument takes us to Part 21, in which Lessing introduced a topic that found little echo in the reception of German literature—as far as I can tell—until Adorno drew upon it to open his essay on titles, an essay he in fact subtitled “Paraphrasen zu Lessing.”

In Part 21, Lessing asked after the purpose of a title, rejecting immediately the idea that it should serve as “ein Küchenzettel”—a cooking recipe, which is more or less what Nietzsche suggested when he used the term “formula” and when Adorno wrote of an “aesthetic prescript.” Lessing wrote: “The less a title divulges the content, the better it is.”³⁶ Adorno picked up on this thought immediately in his own “notes,” remarking that when Lessing saw a certain mindlessness (Stumpfsinn) in a “conceptual title” (begrifflicher Titel), he in fact was expressing his aversion to the Baroque. With Lessing, Adorno then noted the absurdity, even the misguided humor (Witz) of naming works after the drama’s chief personage. Lessing asked: “What sort of ownership is granted a poet who titles his work after a certain character?”³⁷ To which Adorno answered: Perversely, what the poet gains is exactly what he probably doesn’t intend, to strip the character of his heroic demeanor to make of him a living person (eine leibhafte Person).³⁸ For Adorno, there was a fundamental failure in the use of proper names as titles when they created the fiction or false promise of a personal or live presence. In my view, however, this use has also a potential dialectic reversal the moment the mythic status associated with the proper name is deflated; when, in the end, a man’s name just refers to a man. Adorno used his dialectical argument to show the contemporary insecurity of the very category of the genre. Genre, he argued, is most appealed to in modern times, when it is least apparent that any generic borders still hold. I use my dialectical argument to suggest that appealing to proper names says as least as much about Wagner’s quest for purity and honor as it does about his tendency to “go Baroque” or to try to stabilize a genre that would have a far better chance of surviving were the Wagnerism of the times actually destabilized.

Lessing argued against the gross proliferation of descriptive titles and subtitles since these had come to dominate the theater pieces of his day. Wagner almost entirely dispensed with the convention of the subtitle. Recently I came across a commentator congratulating Wagner for having had the good taste not to subtitle Tannhäuser with something like Or, His Journey Home, as if the commentator had forgotten the already-given subtitle Und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (And the singers’ contest at Wartburg). Rienzi also has a subtitle, Der letzte der Tribunen (The last of the tribunes), but the other works do not and if they do, mostly they are descriptions of what kind of work it is and how many acts it has. To “Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig,” Wagner thus wrote: “Esteemed Sirs! You have requested a title for the piano-vocal score, and here it is: Lohengrin, Romantic Opera, in three acts, by Richard Wagner” (GSD, 4:148).

I began my essay with these sorts of descriptions of Wagner’s operas. So this is where I end, noting, finally, how the genre designations that Wagner gave to his individual works managed to attain at least the authority of a subtitle. Name and description: each is rendered unique for each of Wagner’s works, as though each opera, as I claimed at the start, were in its own exemplary way aspiring to the unnameable idea of what, if it must be named, is best named Musikdrama. Comic opera, romantic opera, Handlung, Bühnenfestspiel, or Bühnenweihfestspiel: all these singular descriptions making their way, like the singular names of exemplary men, toward what, given the force of logic, can only end up being subsumed by a general name.

Lessing wrote: “Earlier, writers gave to their comedies seldom more than meaningless titles.”³⁹ Adorno concluded his own essay on titles by isolating part of a sentence from Part 17 of Lessing’s treatise, in which Adorno said he found a “secret and melancholy pathos.” Lessing’s words read: “The title is truly a nothing [Kleinigkeit]…. What is easier to change than a tide?”⁴⁰ Wagner, as we have seen, sought no Kleinigkeit and thus no insignificant title. Far more, he sought a true metaphysical namelessness for works he mostly titled with men’s names. Given Lessing and Adorno on the one hand, and Wagner on the other, we are given a glimpse, as we have been given a glimpse here, of the many deflationary and inflationary tactics that have accompanied the long history of titles. These are tactics that have also served to make this history most significant—because in matters so small (klein) as how one titles one’s work, often the most is learned.

NOTES

All translations in this essay are my own unless stated otherwise. The present essay was first published in German in Wagner und Nietzsche, Kultur-Werk-Wirkung: Ein Handbuch, ed. Stefan Loren Sorgner, H. James Birx, and Nikolaus Knoepffler (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2008). I thank the editors for permission to reuse the essay here. Thanks also to Andreas Dorschel, Susan Gillespie, Thomas Grey, Robert Hullot-Kentor, Craig Knobles, Ernst Osterkamp, Christian Thorau, David Sidorsky, Hans Vaget, and Ståle Wikshåland for their insights and expertise.

1. Both epigraphs are drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke—Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (henceforth KSA), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich and New York, 1967), vol. 7, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 79; and “Der Fall Wagner,” 6:46. The author of The New Grove Guide to Wagner and His Operas is Barry Millington (Oxford, 2006).

2. For the sake of the argument, I have to ignore the fact that Millington’s book belongs to an Oxford series of which X and His Operas is the generic title.

3. For a witty essay with overlapping concerns, see Ludwig Kusche, “Von der Magie des Operntitels,” in Der nachdenkliche Musikant: Eigenwillige Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte (Munich, 1964), 78-98. I am grateful to Thomas Schmidt-Beste for pointing out this essay to me. Kusche’s essay pays attention specifically to the difference between opera and film titles, the author’s point being that what has worked for opera has not necessarily worked for film, and vice versa.

4. Richard Wagner, “Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama,’” Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (henceforth GSD), 10 vols. (Leipzig, 1887-1911), 9:302-7. See also William Ashton Ellis, trans., “On the Name ‘Musikdrama,’” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (London, 1896; repr. Lincoln, Neb., 1994), 5:299-304.

8. Cosima Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries: An Abridgement, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New Haven, 1977), 62.

9. By mentioning Polonius, Wagner was referring to that character’s speech from Hamlet, Act 2: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light, for the law of writ and the liberty: these are the only men.”

10. Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen 4, KSA, 1:429-510.

11. Wagner, GSD, 9:307; trans. amended from Ellis, Wagner’s Prose Works, 5:304.

12. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, “Titel,” Noten zur Literatur, in Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth AGS), 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 11:325-34 (quotation, 327); “Titles,” Notes to Literature 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York, 1992), 3-11 (amended quotation, 5).

15. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, AGS, 13:95; trans. amended from Rodney Livingstone, In Search of Wagner (London, 2005), 89.

16. Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford, 1998); and “The ‘Ode to Joy’: Music and Musicality in Tragic Culture,” in Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York, 2008), 45-78.

18. Werner Breig, “The Musical Works,” in Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, and trans. John Deathridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 397-482.

25. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Selected Writings 1938-1940, vol. 4, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 251-83 (quotation, 258).

27. How Wagner’s “songs,” such as Walther’s “Prize Song” or “Senta’s Ballad,” attain their names is a topic that deserves independent inquiry. Recall here, however, the young David’s explanation to Walther von Stolzing that, concerning the songs sung by masters: “Those are just the names: now learn to sing them/just as the Masters have ordained them!”

28. I have written more on Walther’s refusal in “The Dangers of Satisfaction: On Songs, Rehearsals, and Repetition in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger,” in Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Rochester, N.Y., 2003), 565-70.

29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill., 1964), 9-25.

30. Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagners Musikdramen (Stuttgart, 1996); Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1979), 4.

31. Wagner, GSD, 9:302; translation amended from Ellis, Wagner’s Prose Works, 5:299.

32. Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Das Drama Richard Wagners als musikalisches Kunstwerk (Regensburg, 1970). For further pertinent discussion of genre matters in Wagner, see Thomas Grey, “Opera and Music Drama,” The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge, 2002), 371-423, and Grey, “Richard Wagner and the Legacy of French Grand Opera,” The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge, 2003), 321-43.

35. Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre (Oxford, 1991), 161.

36. G. E. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, in Werke, ed. Karl Eibl and Herbert G. Göpfert (Munich, 1973), 4:229-720, 326.

Du Isolde,	You Isolde,
Tristan ich,	Tristan I,
nicht mehr Tristan,	no longer Tristan,
nicht Isolde;	no longer Isolde;
ohne Nennen …	without names …

From Opera to Music Drama: Nominal Loss, Titular Gain

LYDIA GOEHR

I

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NOTES