“Actually, Wagner had no foes in the sense of absolute, one-sided enmity”—thus wrote Eduard Hanslick in a short obituary piece commemorating the composer’s passing on February 13, 1883. “I have never met a musician so obtuse, or so violently partisan, as to overlook his brilliant endowment and his astonishing art, or underestimate his enormous influence, or to deny the greatness and genius of his works, even granting personal antipathy. Wagner has been fought, but he has never been denied.”1 It is only natural that Wagner’s death might elicit a sympathetic note of appreciation from his celebrated nemesis. But by the 1880s the Viennese critic had also become tired of being cast as Wagner’s archenemy, an aesthetic reactionary intent on turning back the clock on musical progress as proclaimed by believers in the Wagnerian musical-dramatic Gesamtkunstwerk. “We lift our hats to its boldness and consistency,” he concedes, “without, however, giving it our allegiance…. Today I wish only to set right the frequently misinterpreted conception of ‘opposition,’ and to state, for once and for all, that there is no exasperated partisanship against Wagner, but only against the Wagnerites.”2
Nonetheless, Hanslick had undoubtedly developed both a good deal of personal antipathy to Wagner and a principled, “objective” dislike of the mature Wagnerian musical idiom. To the very end he continued to oppose Wagner’s “post-operatic” conception of dramatic composition that eschewed conventional melodic and harmonic syntax, coherently shaped musical-dramatic numbers, and elaborate ensemble singing—the last of which was, for Hanslick, one of the glories of modern opera in more traditional styles.
Hanslick’s personal antipathy to the composer goes back to the time Wagner spent in Vienna in the 1860s, when he pointedly rebuffed the critic’s well-intentioned overtures in several public gatherings (probably because of Hanslick’s less than favorable review of the Viennese productions of Lohengrin) and, most notoriously, read aloud the first draft of the Meistersinger libretto in Hanslick’s presence, possibly with the critic-caricature Beckmesser identified as “Veit Hanslich.”3 Some years later, in 1869, Wagner reprinted his essay “Judaism in Music” as a brochure, with a new afterword largely devoted to attacking the “Jewish press” for an alleged conspiracy to destroy his reputation. Hanslick (a Catholic by upbringing but of Jewish descent on his mother’s side) was denounced here as the ringleader of this alleged anti-Wagnerian Jewish conspiracy.
The professional or aesthetic antipathy developed more gradually. As an aspiring young critic in the 1840s, Hanslick had enthusiastically championed the composer of Tannhäuser as the great hope of a new school of German Romantic opera.4 By the time Hanslick took time out from his nascent career as critic to write what would become the best-known treatise of the nineteenth century on musical aesthetics, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music), 1854, Wagner had recently made a name for himself as a political and aesthetic radical with his extensively formulated theories of operatic and cultural reform: principally, The Artwork of the Future (1849) and Opera and Drama (1852). Hanslick was temperamentally averse to the intemperate polemical grandstanding in Wagner’s writings. His attempt at a clear-headed account of the aesthetics and even the mechanics of musical form and expression in On the Beautiful in Music was certainly meant as a riposte, in part, to Wagner’s overblown theorizing of the “dramatic-musical total artwork of the future,” even if it is only cited in passing there. The legacy of this Wagnerian theory in the excessive posturing of “Wagnerites” and “Wagnerism” is a particular target of Hanslick’s ire in his later criticism, including the two articles translated here, although he cannot disguise the ambivalence he feels toward Wagner the composer as well. A postscript to his later reviews of the Bayreuth festival, dissecting the phenomenon of the modern “Wagner cult,” reinforces this opposition to the theory and ideology of Wagnerism above and beyond that to the works as such.5 Hanslick is willing to evaluate these works as operas, like any one else’s, but refuses to grant them special critical dispensation as some special genre above and beyond the reach of practical criticism.
The essays translated here are pendants, of a sort, to Hanslick’s principal reviews of the two Bayreuth festivals held during Wagner’s lifetime, the premieres of the Ring cycle in 1876 and of Parsifal in 1882.6 The first of them brings together his reviews of the first productions of the four operas of the Ring of the Nibelung seen at the Vienna court opera (Hofoper) between 1877 and 1879. Together with Munich and Leipzig, Vienna was one of the first cities to see the Ring after its complete premiere at Bayreuth, and Hanslick is particularly concerned with proving that these supposedly sui generis musical dramas could be just as well served, if not better, by the resources of a leading modern-day opera house. Hanslick also feels that critics and audiences have a better chance of establishing the true musical, as well as theatrical merits and failings alike of these works, outside the “temple” of Bayreuth. The roundup review of Parsifal (and other Wagner) “literature” appearing in the wake of the second Bayreuth festival aims to deflate some of the overweening ideological pretenses of the “Wagnerites.” (In this regard it is also a companion piece to the exposé of the “Wagner cult” mentioned above.) Hanslick diagnoses as symptomatic the extent to which this literature, like that published in Hans von Wolzogen’s party organ, the Bayreuther Blätter, seeks out the higher significance of its idol and high priest, Richard Wagner, in almost every sphere of human activity besides music. “For a later age, which will be able to look back at the Wagner epidemic of our days in a spirit of calm evaluation, if also one of incredulous astonishment, the Bayreuther Blätter may yet prove to be of no little cultural-historical significance…. The future cultural historian of Germany will be able to give authentic testimony, on the basis of the first five volumes of this journal, how strongly the delirium tremens of the Wagnerian intoxication raged among us, and what sort of abnormalities of thought and feeling it occasioned in the ‘cultured’ people of the time.”7 In this regard, too, it is instructive to compare Hans von Wolzogen’s own essay on Parsifal criticism included in this section, in which he denounces “unauthorized” interpretations of the drama by scholars or critics outside the anointed Bayreuth circle—an exclusionary tendency not unrelated to Wagner’s intention of reserving the performance rights to the sacral “stage-consecration festival play” for Bayreuth alone.
All footnotes at the bottom of the page are Hanslick’s; all endnotes are the translator’s.
EDUARD HANSLICK
Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at the Vienna Hofoper
(1879)
The Vienna Hofoper [court theater] staged Die Walküre in March 1877, followed by Rheingold in January 1878, Siegfried in November 1878, and finally, in February 1879, Götterdämmerung.,8 Our much disputed prediction was thus quickly enough fulfilled: Mohammed will come to the mountain, and Bayreuth, after having hosted visitors from throughout Europe, now goes on tour across Europe.9 These Viennese productions have conclusively invalidated the grounds on which the Wagner theater in Bayreuth was built at such expense: the claim that only there could The Ring of the Nibelung receive a viable performance.
Not everything that glittered in Bayreuth was pure gold. Like his own music, Wagner’s deeply pondered stage reforms suffered from exaggeration and lack of proportion. Ideas that seemed intelligent and sound enough in themselves turned out to lose something of their intended effect through stubborn excesses in the course of their execution. It was more beneficial than detrimental to the resulting production in Vienna that these ideas were subjected here to reasonable limits. Consider these factors. First, the orchestra. In Bayreuth Wagner introduced the entirely invisible orchestra; sunken into cellar-like depths, this was covered at the top by a roof of tin. The modification of the sound thus achieved did create a poetically mysterious impression, but a musically weakened one. Orchestral brilliance was sacrificed, a dark pall cast over the jubilant sounds of the strings or the blaring horns. In Vienna, the recent lowering of the orchestra pit (following the example of Munich) was retained, but that was all; and as a result the orchestral timbres had more volume and brilliance here than in Bayreuth. Louder and more brilliant, too, despite the smaller instrumental contingent; while in Bayreuth the deliberate muting of the orchestra meant that one seemed to hear a group of only about half the size of the one actually performing.*
Another of Wagner’s reforms that sounded wise in theory but proved to be distressing in its draconian application was the complete darkening of the auditorium, so that one’s neighbors disappeared from sight, while the brightly lit stage with its panoply of changing colors had a blinding effect. Here at the Hofoper both of these situations were mitigated—the lighting above and the darkness below—with distinctly beneficial results. At Bayreuth the performance began at four o’clock; in Vienna, thankfully, not until six. Even so, the first performances of Die Walküre here lasted until ten-thirty! Every face registered complete exhaustion; musical enthusiasts sitting on either side of us who had delightedly applauded the first act were afterward heard to complain that their pleasure was turning to pain.
In comparing the Viennese productions with those at Bayreuth we certainly cannot overlook the fact that the construction of the Wagner theater (no boxes, no central chandelier, a higher and more distant stage, etc.) allows for a more perfect stage illusion, and one more equally available to all parts of the audience; even smaller things contribute to this, such as the removal of the prompter’s box. All the same, we do think it worthwhile to retain the latter form of aide-memoire, since we cannot help but sympathize with the needs of ordinary mortals. We would no more want to withhold the prompter’s assistance from the singers of the Nibelungen, who have to memorize hundreds of lines of the most hair-raising poetry, than we would wish to banish our musicians to the subterranean slave galleys of Bayreuth. Such measures, reminiscent of that imperial tone-poet Nero, hardly seem worth emulating, even if it means sacrificing a small bit of theatrical illusion. No amount of aesthetic despotism will ever make the audience completely forget that it is in a theater, after all, nor is it in the least necessary that they should do so. It has now been proven in Vienna that a modicum of intelligence and ability can suffice to realize the Nibelungen, even on the “operatic” stage so passionately denounced by Wagner.
The Vienna Rheingold was subject to an irregularity in that, contrary to the poetic structure of the cycle, it was performed after the Walküre. Thus the audience had already been exposed to the brave new world of Wagner’s Nibelung style. Significant mainly as the prologue to the Nibelungen trilogy proper (Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung), Das Rheingold is by itself quite the least satisfying of the four pieces.10 Rheingold does have one advantage over Die Walküre, however, in being significantly shorter. The listener does not leave the theater in that state of utmost exhaustion to which he is reduced by Die Walküre, spoiling the recollection of the individual beauties that work does contain. Granted, in Bayreuth the audience found their nerves fatally strained even after Das Rheingold; this was even more so the case earlier, in Munich, where they were not yet inured to the “stage festival play” manner and hence their sensibilities had not yet been hardened.11 In Vienna the situation was considerably alleviated, thanks to a willingness to ignore the composer’s imperious demand that Rheingold must be performed continuously, with no intermission, not even a short pause such as one gets between the movements of a symphony or the break that normally accompanies a change of scenery in the opera. In Munich and in Bayreuth the whole opera was played as Wagner wrote it, nonstop from beginning to end, for over two and a half hours. An opera of that length would be one thing, but a single act would be unimaginable. In Vienna one simply seized the reins of Wagner’s restlessly galloping orchestra by means of a cadential chord at the end of the first Valhalla scene, and thus granted us a short intermission often minutes. In the future people will no doubt continue to emancipate themselves—for instance from the decree that no single measure may be cut. A theater is not a galley manned by slaves, and musicians—no less than listeners—are, after all, human beings.
By far the best impression was made here, as has been the case elsewhere, by the opening scene of the Rhine Maidens, a dazzling synthesis of poetic, scenic, and musical attractions. Otherwise one heard here in Vienna (just as in Munich, Bayreuth, etc.) much more talk about the wonders of the stage production than about the music. The technology of stage production has no doubt gained much in trying to meet the great challenges Wagner poses for it; indeed, the scenic arts of the theater already have his ambitious imagination to thank for some notable advances. It is just a pity that all of this spectacle is being expended on serious opera rather than on the ballet, where it would be more appropriate. In the opera, this sort of thing rather detracts from the music and from the dramatic content: it is a luxury that, when held up to scrutiny, only serves to mask poverty. There is no other opera whose success, indeed whose very existence, is so dependent on the role of stage design as is the case with Rheingold. In such scenic marvels and surprises Wagner has found himself a Nibelung’s Ring that will only bring ruin to the entire field of opera.
At the Vienna Hofoper the musical performance succeeded splendidly; the scenery and the stage machinery achieved (within the limits of the possible) their intended effects. What I do not consider possible is a realistic representation of the Rainbow Bridge at the conclusion of the opera; this was ludicrous in Munich, and again in Bayreuth—and in Vienna. If one builds the Rainbow Bridge massively enough and positions it low enough to the stage so that half a dozen real-life “gods and goddesses” can promenade upon it, there is no way that it will resemble an actual rainbow, rather than, say, a painted bridge in a park, if not a seven-colored liverwurst. Were it truly to resemble a rainbow, there is no way that human beings, right in front of our eyes, could walk upon it. Wouldn’t the best solution be to manage this troublesome Rainbow Bridge by means of dissolving views or in the manner of the Wild Hunt in the Wolf’s Glen scene of Der Freischütz: that is, by means of projections on the back of the stage?12
Rheingold was received at its first performance in the Hofoper with enthusiastic applause, but already by the second performance the house was only half full.
Incomparably greater and more lasting was the effect of Die Walküre, as was to be expected, and which, as I have mentioned, was produced before Rheingold as a sort of captatio benevolentiae. Indeed, Die Walküre has no real need for the preceding Rheingold or the following Siegfried. It is quite intelligible by itself, insofar as these Wagnerian mythologies, so alien to our modern culture, can ever be wholly understood by a modern public. Of the Rhine Gold and the curse on the Ring, ostensibly the principal theme of the entire cycle, there is not a word in Walküre, and whatever will happen twenty years later to Siegmund’s and Sieglinde’s still unborn son (Siegfried) has no bearing on the self-contained narrative of the conjugal sibling pair of Die Walküre.
That demon of excess to which Wagner is subject (to an extent that recalls Faust’s remark: “Reason becomes nonsense, good deeds turn into torments”)13 is most of all evident in the extreme length of Wagner’s scores. In the second act of Walküre Wotan conducts two long dialogues, consecutively—first with Fricka, then with Brunhilde [sic]—which, in their exhaustive prosiness and their incredibly tedious music, tax the patience of the listener in the extreme. The fearful prolixity of this dim-witted, henpecked husband who passes for a “god” (alas, Nestroy died too young to do him satiric justice),14 this endless beating around the bush about things that could easily be said in far fewer words caused some dismay even for many true believers in Bayreuth. There, of course, no word could be cut; in Vienna cuts were made, to the distinct advantage of the work. Wotan’s narration[s] were subjected to two cuts amounting to fifteen pages of the vocal score (p. 107 to p. 119 and p. 247 to p. 248)—a sizable amputation, but even so, the scene was still too long with respect to its limited dramatic interest.15
The great success of Walküre in Vienna was due as much to the scrupulous casting—of which the roles of Sieglinde (Frau Ehnn) and Brünnhilde (Frau Materna) were especially outstanding—as to the virtuosic achievement of the orchestra under Hans Richter and the splendid staging.16 The very important episode of the combat in the second act, which had been quite unintelligible in Bayreuth, was both clear and effective here.17 The Valkyries leaping across the stage on their rapid coursers made for a wild and picturesque tableau, whereas the Bayreuth shield-maidens, unsaddled, merely boasted about their steeds. Even the ram-drawn chariot of the “noble” Fricka, an object of sardonic mirth in Bayreuth, suggested the dignified carriage appropriate to this Frau Privy Counselor of the gods.
Siegfried did not succeed in making the impression here that was being predicted for it after the Bayreuth festival. In Vienna it did not remotely approach the effect of Walküre, and before long it was playing to a very reduced audience. Even so, the performance could be called exemplary in musical as well as scenic terms. The tenor Jäger was sought out exclusively for the role of Siegfried at Wagner’s own request.18 Seemingly made for the role with his tall, powerful figure, Jäger is also vocally effective in the energy of his delivery and the clarity of his diction. The voice is not an appealing one, already somewhat worn (probably from singing too much Siegfried). It is characteristic of this “Wagner singer par excellence” that he is scarcely adequate in any other roles, and indeed as Joseph in Méhul’s opera he was nearly a disaster.19
On February 14, 1879, the Hofoper produced the fourth and mightiest course of the musical banquet from Bayreuth: Götterdämmerung.
To the extent that Götterdämmerung exceeds the preceding three dramas of the Ring of the Nibelung in dramatic vitality, so it commanded a livelier, more consistent attention on the part of the audience. The opening scene of the three Norns (whose tossing about of the rope made a somewhat ludicrous impression in Bayreuth) was omitted entirely in Vienna; in view of the intolerable length of the first act, this seems quite justified. I would recommend the same course of action for another, equally superfluous scene similarly taxing of the public’s patience: Waltraute’s scene. This valkyrie shows up quite unexpectedly in Götterdämmerung when she visits Brunhilde in order to give her a most moving description of the poor condition in which the great Wotan finds himself. We suspect that by the fourth evening of the cycle the greater part of the public wishes, whether openly or secretly, that they might finally be altogether rid of this Wotan, and therefore they would be very happy to forgo any extended sentimental representation of his melancholy and loss of appetite. Similarly unexpected is the quite episodic appearance of the dwarf Alberich, who pops up from a trap in order to tell Hagen some long-familiar information in a scene rife with painful dissonances. Both Waltraute’s and Alberich’s scenes were cut (in addition to the Norns’ scene), starting with the second Viennese performance of Götterdämmerung.
The most dubious part was, again, the ending: the unmotivated and unintelligible precipitation of the “twilight of the gods,” which has really nothing to do with the fate of Siegfried and Brunhilde (the only thing that does command our interest here). The whole catastrophe is a very hasty affair. Most of the time Wagner is a master at drawing out situations to the most incredible lengths, yet he rushes headlong into the concluding scene of Götterdämmerung. The murder of Gunther by Hagen, Brünnhilde’s sacrificial death, Hagen’s salto mortale into the river, the reappearance of the Rhine Maidens, the flood below and the twilight of the gods up in Valhalla—all of this comes at us with such material haste, such balletic alacrity, that the audience scarcely has an opportunity to make sense of it. Wagner seems to have been unsure, for his own part, on just how to stage the concluding tableau of the gods’ downfall. In Bayreuth it was confusing, unattractive, and misconceived—as it was in Vienna, even though it had been prepared according to Wagner’s updated specifications and in collaboration with officially certified experts, as well as secret agents in the Master’s service. This final tableau has been attempted in different ways by other German theaters, but with scarcely any better results. The root cause of the problem is undoubtedly to be found in the libretto: Wagner’s demands here transcend the bounds of what is possible, at any rate of what can be reasonably executed. Two small changes could do much to mitigate the confusion of this fourth drama: the title Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) might be dropped in favor of the original title, Siegfrieds Tod (Siegfried’s Death), and along with it, the cloud picture meant to represent that “twilight of the gods.”
Initially, Götterdämmerung has enjoyed a loud and enthusiastic reception in Vienna. Whether this success will prove to be a lasting one, only the future can tell. Die Meistersinger was greeted even more enthusiastically, though soon its appeal began to diminish, and performances became fewer until now it has (unfairly) disappeared altogether from the repertoire.20 And yet, at least in my estimation, Die Meistersinger stands far above the entire Ring of the Nibelung, musically as well as dramatically. There the poet’s natural feeling and the composer’s creative powers appear in all the glorious freshness and health of youth, quite unlike Götterdämmerung.
In May 1879 the Vienna Hofoper produced the four Nibelung dramas consecutively, as a complete cycle, thereby fulfilling the demands of the powerful musical party so prettily designated by Hans Hopfen as the “elegant conspiracy.”21
And so we find that, quite contrary to Wagner’s original assurances that the cycle could only be produced in his festival theater at Bayreuth, it has for some time been crisscrossing all of Germany like a huge wandering spider covering everything with its white web. Everywhere the first performances draw immense crowds and enthusiasm, but it seems both of these quickly dwindle. A considerable portion of the public finds that, after its initial curiosity has been sated, the rather demanding, indeed grueling pleasure afforded by the cycle is one they would rather not sample too often. A smaller portion admits outright that the overall impact of one Nibelung drama, let alone several in a row, is really more of a torment than a pleasure. To this unhappy minority I myself belong. I should like to convey this impression honestly to my readers, as a personal experience, leaving aside any critical pretense.
The critic cannot hope to deliver any definitive judgment of an artistic phenomenon so unusual, so divisive of public opinion; in such a case it can only be a matter of an individual judgment for whose truthfulness, not actual correctness, the critic is responsible to his readers. As we know, critical judgment of Wagner’s music dramas is very divided, rather resembling the relation of the prosecution to the defense in a trial. In such cases only time can provide the court of justice that is to decide in favor of one side or the other, and often a relatively long period of time is required for this. Under the immediate demands of the present moment the critic can hardly do more (and certainly nothing more beneficial) than, after conscientious preparation, observe his own responses to a work and give an honest account of these. Although it is usually the first impression that is decisive and correct, I have not spared myself the effort or the self-denial demanded by a subsequent justification of my feelings; and so I have continued to pursue my Nibelungen education. The critic hears a first performance in a certain state of agitation: the need to focus his whole attention on the work, together with the unwelcome thought that tomorrow he must write about it, is likely to render him a little testy. If then further impediments are added to the mix, as in the case of the Bayreuth festival, that irritability will increase and thus diminish his receptivity, like a photographic plate slightly clouded by one’s breath. In such cases I never absolve myself of the responsibility of considering whether the failure, the reason for displeasure, does not perhaps rest with me. One might easily be misled by the heaven-storming jubilation of thousands of Wagner enthusiasts and its propagation in countless brochures idolizing their god. And then there is the ready retort of the enthusiasts: “It’s always easy to criticize!” No, my good sirs, it is not easy to criticize, least of all amid a delighted throng, whose delight one would only be too glad to share. And in this spirit I made a point in recent years, after Bayreuth, of repeatedly attending the splendid productions of Rheingold and Walküre at the Vienna opera. I wanted to hear them at my own leisure, without constraints, simply for my own edification and, if possible, pleasure. And yet—edification and pleasure would not align. It was already a significant (and fatal) indication that, every time, I had to force myself to listen to these works again. Do not all true musical artworks, even those we find at first puzzling or off-putting, still leave us with a desire to hear them again? Not to mention the musical creations [Tondichtungen] of pure, classical beauty—can one ever hear them often enough? In this case I simply had to admit that I might live long and very happily without ever again seeing one of these Bayreuth music dramas. However often I have heard one of the Nibelung operas at one theater or another since that first Rheingold production in Munich (that is, over nine years), however honest my intention of appreciating and taking note of anything beautiful in them, my experiences have always produced the contrary result: the most brilliant passages, involving as they mostly do sudden and surprising orchestral effects, lose their appeal upon repeated hearing; and all the rest only affects me more unpleasantly than ever.
This, I must repeat, is the confession of only one individual; I do not begrudge or misconstrue anyone else’s delight in this music, nor do I mean to convert anyone to my position. Rather, I myself would have gladly converted—gladly pronounced my newly won conviction, gladly published the obituary of my former error, if indeed it had died within me. Only fools can suppose themselves infallible (and besides them, one other).22 But it was no good. Despite all the brilliant and clever details, Wagner’s Nibelung operas have seemed to me upon each rehearing only less true, less natural, less beautiful. Each time I am further convinced, I see more clearly and feel more deeply that in Wagner we see a case of an unusual talent that has stubbornly committed itself to a false system—one that will not reform opera, but simply kill it. For the sake of this new system of the “music drama,” and perhaps due also to a sense of diminishing melodic invention, the same tone poet who was able to marry genuine dramatic expression to musical beauty in the best pieces of his earlier operas will now only furnish us with “dramatic truth”—a stale, unappealing truth whose only effect is boredom. “A scandalous boredom” was the well-chosen phrase that hurtled from Speidel’s latest critique and crashed like a meteor amid the Wagnerian camp.23 Though not unreceptive to the individual beauties of the Nibelung dramas, still I found myself leaving each of the four performances with the unshakable feeling that my experience had been less one of pleasure than of martyrdom. It is indeed a torture to sit through five hours of a laboriously unfolding drama ranging from thin to preposterous in quality—as in Siegfried or Rheingold—declaimed in atrocious German by abdicated gods, ugly dwarfs, and ludicrous magical animals. It is a torture to have to listen to music that lurches from inebriation to barrenness, gnawing at our nerves in painfully restless modulations, in continually overstimulated chromaticism and enharmonicism, and in the yammering monotony of piercing ninth and eleventh chords. It is a torture to listen to a long opera without chorus, without ensembles, without finales, and in the case of Siegfried without even female voices until close to the end—an opera in which the singers do not so much sing as declaim to the most unnatural intervallic leaps, while we cannot understand what they are declaiming without constantly resorting to a printed libretto. And finally, my dear readers, it is a torture to have to write about all this for the umpteenth time.
EDUARD HANSLICK
Parsifal Literature
(October 1882)
Wagner’s literary armada had already done so much work—preparatory, elucidatory, adulatory—on Parsifal, all before the first production, that it would seem there is nothing further left for them to do.24 Granted, the brochures about this “stage-consecration festival play” [Bühnenweihfestspiel] have not flowed quite as liberally as one might have expected; in number and volume they remain at the moment significantly below the flood level reached in the Nibelung year 1876. At any rate, there is much among all this, whether serious or just amusing, that might interest our readers. Let’s begin with the amusing. The leader of this pack is a treatise by Edmund von Hagen on “The Significance of the Morning Reveille in R. Wagner’s Parsifal.”25 The “significance” of this first, introductory scene (in which the sleeping knights and pages are woken up) seemed so immeasurably deep and immense to Herr von Hagen that he has filled 62 pages (octavo) with its explication—surely enough to put back to sleep those the scene set out to wake up. In view of this prolixity we cannot help but smile when the author says in his foreword that “the condensed form of his essay” is “to be excused in view of the abundant spiritual and intellectual content.” The quality of this intellectual superabundance may be gauged from the following sentences:
With the first Parsifal performance we feel that we are on the eve of a new day of national-popular culture [Völkerkultur], as it was in Paris 52 years ago today. With Parsifal we feel that the path of mankind has been newly charted, new paths of illumination have been discovered. We sense, too, the illumination of the night of humanity, the approach of a light that will bring the end of human suffering and the eternal joy of the spirit, even now as in the pure delight of the morning of resurrection.*
Anyone who does not recognize the sanctimonious oracular tone of the true Wagnerian priest here, as this is to be found especially in the earlier writings of von Hagen, might easily take this treatise on the “Morning Call to Awakening” for a parodistic jest. In truth, however, it is in bitter earnest. “A sorry business,” one of our more courageous younger music critics, Gustav Doempke, calls it: “A sorry business, this incredible counterfeiting of philosophical ideas in the glow of the aesthetic frenzy of inspiration—something to be pitied, ridiculed, but also feared and hated if one considers that a direction capable of cultivating such apostles also dares to strive for spiritual dominion, and indeed already holds a spiritual sway over many weak minds and empty heads.”
Herr von Hagen is also the author of a book devoted to The Poetry of the First Scene of “Das Rheingold”26 and with that work he gave the signal for this new school of specialized critical studies which—considering the entirety of a Wagner opera as something beyond mortal compass, a world quite transcending the perspective of any individual person—immerse themselves in a microscopic investigation of just one small segment. There is something touching in the modesty of this younger generation of Wagner enthusiasts who, while driven by a tormenting need to write, feel that the better part of the field has already been grazed by those who have come before. Their solution is to select one individual scene or a secondary character whose “significance” has so far not been sufficiently scrutinized and to place this scene or character under the admiring gaze of their magnifying glass. What more could there be still to say about the characters of Tristan and Isolde, for example? But King Marke! He has yet to be placed on a worthy altar. Of course, even genuine admirers of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde have had to admit that this old king plays a rather sorry, minor part—indeed a tragicomic one; like every cuckold who finds himself entirely ignored by his wife and her lover he is condemned to accept his lot with humble composure. This view, however, has been attacked by Herr Moritz Wirth in his brochure on the subject of King Marke in which he proves that “Marke is by no means a secondary character in Wagner’s drama; rather, in a certain sense, the central figure,” and that in his calm resignation he provides an example of the highest human capacity in the moral realm.27 This King Marke, we learn, is “in spiritual terms to be ranked far above the King of Thule and King Lear.” But onstage he ought to be presented as a seventy-year-old with white hair and beard. That is decisive, since the leading trait of his character is “passion calmed by insight.” Why not give the good king another ten years, say we: with an eighty-year-old the passions are calmer still, and the insight into that “highest human capacity in the moral realm” still greater. Plenty of ink has flowed even about Senta and her Dutchman, but until now we have been lacking a treatise on “Erik and his relationship to the Dutchman and to Senta.” Now that lacuna has been filled. The similarly pressing need for a monograph on the “character of Eva Pogner” has likewise been met by a Viennese musical writer, who illuminates even the tiniest verbal nooks and crannies of that character—naturally discovered to be the “ideal of German maidenhood.” A French-language brochure by the Wagnerian writer E. van der Straaten boasts the classic title Lohengrin: Instrumentation and Philosophy. What next? Perhaps a treatise titled Parsifal: Religion and Chromaticism?
Among the more serious and objective critiques that have been published on the “stage-consecration festival play” those by Kalbeck and Max Goldstein deserve special mention.28
By far the lightest, most readable of the many brochures on Parsifal is Paul Lindau’s Bayreuth Letters from a Pure Fool; it should also certainly be the best-selling of them.29 It remains to be seen whether people find it as entertaining as Lindau’s Sober Letters from the Nibelung year of 1876.30 The latter, though not of much significance as musical criticism, at least did manage to convey, in the guise of a harmless joke, some bitter truths about the Wagner tetralogy. The same irresistible spirit of persiflage does not inform these Parsifal letters. Either Lindau has deliberately refrained from such witty aperçus this time, or else they have withheld themselves from him. There is no lack, of course, of individual intelligent and witty observations (for example, on those bothersome leitmotifs). However our expectation that Lindau would take aim at the most egregiously weak and foolish aspects of the libretto remains largely unfulfilled. As a prolific dramatic author and critic who is wont to take on every modern boob of a playwright and give him a good skewering, Lindau for some reason exhibits an unusually gentle tolerance toward all the false and repellent aspects of Parsifal. How can he truly believe that Wagner has “deepened” the element of moral and ethical conflict in Wolfram’s epic? And that this has been done, moreover, by having Parsifal chosen “to win back the holy spear from its heathen robber,” and to have him go forth heroically “first to struggle against Kundry, and then against Klingsor”? Could Lindau really be blind to the fact that quite the opposite is true? That Parsifal in fact does not make the slightest effort to “win back” the spear, nor does he actively risk any kind of “struggle” with Klingsor? Here indeed is one of the most evident failings of the Wagner drama. Once he is rendered “knowing” by the kiss of Kundry—that is, when he has learned that only the spear now guarded by Klingsor will serve to heal Amfortas’s suffering—then Parsifal ought at once to assail Klingsor and wrest the spear from him by force. And yet he does nothing of the kind; rather he sings some long monologues, and listens to a yet longer one by Kundry, and if Klingsor himself did not finally have the bright idea of hurling the spear right at Parsifal, then poor Amfortas would still be yammering away just as helplessly as he was back in Act 1. For the sake of a cheap operatic effect—the spear hanging in midair above Parsifal at the end of the act—Wagner missed the one opportunity he had to let Parsifal win our sympathy by showing a little courage. Instead, his “pure fool” remains here, as he does throughout, an untalented and simply lazy fool.
In his recently published historical study of The Aesthetics of Music (a very stimulating book to which we would like at some point to give the fuller attention it deserves) Heinrich Ehrlich of Berlin has very aptly demonstrated R. Wagner’s reliance on the views of the Romantic school (Schlegel, Tieck, Adam Müller). Parsifal confirms this once again.31 In this work Ehrlich, like so many critics, takes strong objection to its representation of Christian mysteries. “Is it really possible,” he exclaims, “that any artist who truly honors the spirit of Christianity should allow the holy mysteries of his religion played out in such luxurious trappings before a mixed audience? Does this not rather bespeak a kind of aesthetic refinement [Raffinement] quite removed from true Christian feeling?”
Indeed. But precisely because this refinement takes on such an unapologetically theatrical form, it does not strike me as such a great danger. I would not want to think that these decriers of profanation underestimate the power and significance of true religion; yet I would say that they are overestimating the power and significance of the theatrical-religious games played in Parsifal. As an audience member watching the semi-biblical scenes of Parsifal I may have felt put off by their affectation and inner hollowness, but I felt no reason to take offense at their religious garb. At no moment did I suppose myself in church, but only in the theater. The controversial scenes of the foot-washing, the anointment, and the communion feast all made on me a thoroughly operatic impression—“operatic” not in a derogatory sense, but in a strictly technical-generic one. I cannot see this “stage-consecration festival play” as anything different from an opera, and there is no reason to see it otherwise if we want to do the work proper justice. Whatever Wagner supposes him to be, the white-clad fool with his youthful locks is no Christ, the screeching hermaphrodite [Zwitter] Kundry is no Magdalen, the hocus-pocus of the Grail and its Bengal-fire illumination is no sacrament at the altar. For this reason I was able to share in Bayreuth neither the religious indignation of the one party nor the religious ecstasies of the other. The latter least of all. For my part, I find myself much more moved to devout, religious feelings by the simple prayer of Agathe in Der Freischütz or the chorus of prisoners in Fidelio than by the whole of Parsifal. The holy spirit of this work impresses me only very slightly, while I am more greatly impressed, finally, by the secular artistic spirit of Wagner: that is what reveals itself here in many new and powerful features.
1. Eduard Hanslick, “February 13, 1883,” given as postscript to “Parsifal (Letters from Bayreuth, July 1882),” in Vienna’s Golden Years of Music, 1850—1900: Eduard Hanslick, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants III, (New York, 1950), 239. See also Hanslick, “Zum 13. Februar 1883,” in Aus dem Opernleben der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1884), 353-55.
2. Pleasants, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music, 239.
3. For details on this event and a brief overview of the relationship between Hanslick and Wagner, see Thomas Grey, “Masters and Their Critics: Wagner, Hanslick, and Beckmesser,” in Wagner’s “Meistersinger”: Performance, History, Interpretation, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Rochester, N.Y., 2003), 162-89, esp. 168-73.
4. The complete text of Hanslick’s extensive early review of Wagner’s Tannhäuser can be found in the first volume of the new collected edition of his writings, Eduard Hanslick, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Dietmar Strauss (Aufsätze und Rezensionen 1844-48; Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1993), 57-93. See also the translated excerpts in Pleasants, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music, 21-36.
5. Hanslick, “Wagner-Kultus” (September 1882), in Aus dem Opernleben der Gegenwart, 338-49.
6. These reviews, originally published in a series of installments in Hanslick’s hometown paper, Vienna’s Neue freie Presse, are translated in Pleasants, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music, 139-74 and 212-38.
7. Hanslick, “Wagner-Kultus,” 339. Hanslick mainly voices skepticism regarding Wagner’s preaching of vegetarianism and his opposition to the use of animals for medical experimentation, as well as the related discourse of “regeneration.” He mentions Wagner’s anti-Semitic agenda once or twice, only in passing.
8. The text of this essay is taken from Musikalische Stationen, vol. 2, Die moderne Oper (Berlin, 1885), 277-89.
9. Hanslick seems to allude to Angelo Neumann’s touring Ring production, which took the principal singers and a simplified version of the sets from the Bayreuth production to London and across much of continental Europe beginning in 1882. The Vienna productions under discussion here, however, predate Neumann’s enterprise.
10. The Ring cycle was officially designated by Wagner as a “trilogy in three evenings” to which Das Rheingold served as a prologue (Vorabend, or “pre-evening”).
11. Hanslick refers to the very first performance of Das Rheingold at the command of King Ludwig II (against the wishes of Wagner), which took place at the court theater in Munich in September 1869.
12. In Hanslick’s reviews of the original Munich production oí Das Rheingold he likened the orchestrally accompanied scene changes to the technology of “dissolving views,” there as here using the English phrase for a particular kind of “magic lantern” projection developed in the early nineteenth century whereby one projected image is gradually replaced by a second, with no visual gap between. In describing the effect of Bayreuth’s brightly lit stage space, in contrast to the darkened auditorium, he also likened the effect to “transparencies or dioramas.” On the Munich production, see Hanslick, Die moderne Oper (Berlin, 1875), 308; on the Bayreuth theater, see Musikalische Stationen, 2:228, and Pleasants, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music, 151-52. Hanslick makes the same complaint, however, about the inadequacy of the Rainbow Bridge (Musikalische Stationen, 2:250; Pleasants, ed., Vienna’s Golden Years of Music, 172). The optical technologies originally explored by Weber and his producers for the Wolf’s Glen scene in Der Freischütz are investigated by Anthony Newcomb in “New Light(s) on Weber’s Wolf’s Glen Scene,” in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Bauman and Marita McClymonds (Cambridge, 1995), 61-91. The difficulty of achieving a properly realistic Rainbow Bridge in Das Rheingold continued to be a vexing problem in the era of elaborate stage illusion. Moritz Wirth (mentioned in Hanslick’s review of writings on Parsifal) devoted a three-part article to the subject in 1888, including technical specifications: “Walhall und Regenbogen,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 19/10-12 (1-15 March 1888): 113-15, 129-31, 141-43.
13. “Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohltat Plage.” Goethe, Faust, Part 1, “Faust’s Study,” 1. 1976.
14. Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801-62), Viennese satirical actor and author of numerous highly popular comedies and farces, began his career as an operatic bass.
15. The principal cut described here corresponds to the passage from Wotan’s line “Ein Andres ist’s: achte es wohl” (Act 2, measure 779) to “Fromm streite für Fricka” (Act 2, measure 996). Possibly the cut dovetailed Brünnhilde’s question “Was macht dir nun Sorge, da nie wir gesäumt”? with the later, “O sag, künde, was soll nun dein Kind?” (each of these questions immediately precedes, respectively, the lines of Wotan just cited).
16. Bertha Ehnn and Amalie Materna (1844-1918): the latter was the first Bayreuth Brünnhilde. The two singers performed the roles of Elisabeth and Venus, respectively, in a Tannhäuser production admired by Wagner in Vienna in November 1875.
17. Hanslick is referring to the fight between Siegmund and Hunding (Act 2, scene 5).
18. Ferdinand Jäger (1839-1902), German tenor who had been coached by Wagner as a potential Siegfried for the first Bayreuth festival, although his first performances of the role were in Vienna and in private productions for Ludwig II in Munich. He sang the role in Berlin in 1881 and was one of Wagner’s Parsifals in 1882.
19. Etienne-Nicolas Méhul’s oratorio-like opéra comique of 1807, Joseph, remained popular in German theaters throughout much of the nineteenth century. The simple, lyrical style of the vocal writing is far removed from the style of Wagner’s Siegfried, hence Hanslick’s comment on Jäger’s unsuitability.
20. Die Meistersinger was first produced at the Vienna Hofoper in March 1870. At that time (and earlier, at the 1868 Munich premiere) Hanslick reviewed it quite negatively. Afterward, and despite his own notorious implication in the failings of the master/critic Beckmesser, Hanslick came to admire the work as the most successful—in part because the most “operatic” and least pretentious—of Wagner’s mature music dramas.
21. Hans Demetrius (Ritter von) Hopfen (1835-1904) was a Bavarian novelist and playwright.
22. By “one other” Hanslick presumably alludes to Wagner and his own widely advertised sense of infallibility.
23. Ludwig Speidel (1830-1906) was a fellow anti-Wagnerian critic who, like Hanslick, also wrote for the Neue freie Presse. Though he wrote on music and opera, he was primarily a theater critic.
24. This review was originally published in Neue freie Presse (Vienna), October 1882. The text is taken from Aus dem Opernleben der Gegenwart, vol. 3, Die moderne Oper (Berlin, 1884), 331-37.
25. Edmund von Hagen (1850-1907), Die Bedeutung des Morgenweckrufes in Richard Wagners Bühenweihfestspiel “Parsifal” erörtert (Berlin, 1882), 62 pages.
26. Edmund von Hagen, Über die Dichtung der ersten Scene des “Rheingold” von Richard Wagner: Ein Beitrag zur Beurtheilung des Dichters (Munich, 1876), 170 pages.
27. Moritz Wirth (1849-1917), König Marke: Aesthetisch-kritische Streifzüge durch Wagners “Tristan und Isolde” (Leipzig, 1882), 94 pages.
28. Max Kalbeck (1850-1921), Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal”: Erste Aufführung am 26. Juli 1882 zu Bayreuth (Breslau, 1883), 94 pp.; Max Goldstein, Richard Wagners “Parsifal”: Briefe aus Bayreuth von Max Goldstein (Berlin, 1882), 57 pages.
29. Paul Lindau (1839-1919), “Bayreuther Briefe vom reinen Thoren: “Parsifal” von Richard Wagner (Breslau, 1883), 60 pages.
30. Paul Lindau, Nüchterne Briefe aus Bayreuth: Vergeblicher Versuch im Jahre 1876, Zeit und Geister Richard Wagners zu bannen (Breslau, 1876); ed. with introduction by Hellmut Kotschenreuther (Berlin, 1989), 95 pages.
31. Heinrich Ehrlich (1822-99), Die Musih-Ästhetih in ihrer Entwickelung von Kant bis auf die Gegenwart: Ein Grundriss (Leipzig, 1881), 186 pages.
* In Bayreuth there were 16 first and 16 second violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos and 6 harps. Woodwinds and brass [Harmonie] were the same in Bayreuth as in Vienna. Hans Richter’s new arrangement of the players in Vienna proved wonderfully effective, placing all of the violins in one compact group to the left-hand side of the orchestra, reserving the right-hand side for woodwinds [Bläser] and percussion.
* Thoroughly characteristic of the vaunted “intellectual compression” of this treatise are the following remarkable chapter headings: I. On the significance of the morning. II. On the awakening. 1. On sleep. (a) The aesthetic side of sleep. (b) The ethical side of sleep. (c) The metaphysical side of sleep. (d) The symbolic side of sleep. (e) The historical side of sleep. 2. On the action of awakening. 3. On waking and wakefulness. (a) Awareness of world history. (b) Awareness of life’s symbolism. (c) Awareness of the intellectuality of one’s own personality. (d) Awareness of the morality of one’s own personality. (e) Awareness of corporeality. III. On the lesson of the calling.