It would be difficult to point to another figure in the history of Western music who was as comprehensively involved with the larger “world” about him than Richard Wagner, or whose impact was felt throughout so many varied domains in his lifetime and for long after. Wagner’s intensive involvement in the music, the arts, and ideas of his century is witnessed in the famously vast bibliography that has grown up around him, and of course no single volume can hope to encompass the whole range of his musical and cultural legacy. That legacy seems to remain, for the time being, nearly inexhaustible, and Wagner’s many-faceted career provides an ideal object for a book series examining composers in the context of their life and times by means of critical essays and annotated historical documents. While the life, in Wagner’s case, ends in 1883, his “times” are interpreted more freely in this volume as extending up to or beyond the turn of the twentieth century. As with his Italian counterpart, Giuseppe Verdi, who was born in the same year (1813) and who outlived him by almost twenty years, Wagner’s “world” was that of the nineteenth century as a whole. The controversial prestige of Wagner the Gesamtkünstler or “total-artist” reached a high-water mark with the founding of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, which featured the premiere of the most ambitious operatic undertaking of the century, the epic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen. With the quasi-sacral “consecration” of this festival endeavor in the premiere of Parsifal in 1882, near the end of Wagner’s life, the range of his cultural ambition extended even further, and for at least another quarter of a century the momentum of “Wagnerism” as an artistic and ideological phenomenon seemed almost unstoppable. Hence, while the material of the present volume focuses largely on the life, work, and immediate context of the composer himself, it also extends into the early twentieth century and addresses other issues of interpretation, aesthetics, and performance that are not historically delimited.
Since Wagner insisted so volubly on the larger national, indeed worldwide cultural significance of his musical dramas, conceived ultimately as a modern answer to the mythic tragedies of ancient Greece, and since he himself published on almost every conceivable subject, writing about Wagner has often tended to overlook his specifically musical achievements in favor of his broader “messages” and ideas. The present volume attempts to address the whole range of his activities—musical, theatrical, critical, polemical—without, of course, pretending to cover them all equally or fully. Karol Berger’s “Note on Tristan’s Death-Wish” is the only essay here to address one specific work, though it does address that work as a paradigm, of sorts, of Wagner’s musical-dramatic enterprise generally, that is, of Wagner’s passionate belief in the “redeeming” power of the musical-dramatic work of art. Lydia Goehr, by contrast, addresses issues pertaining to the entire oeuvre through the contested question of what the works are to be called—operas, music dramas, or something else? The concern of Wagner and his contemporaries for the naming of new genres and practices, as Goehr demonstrates, is reflected in concerns thematized by his own characters such as Lohengrin or Hans Sachs. The essay touching most directly on the actual notes of Wagner’s scores does so, appropriately, in a manner mediated by the world around him, specifically, through the numerous arrangements or transcriptions of Wagner’s music made by his friend and advocate Franz Liszt, as well as the subtler traces of a musical dialogue one might discern in the compositions of these two friends, especially in the 1850s. These “Elective Affinities” described by Kenneth Hamilton are reflected, too, in the influential essay on Wagner’s Tannhäuser published by Liszt in the early stages of their friendship, excerpted in Part III of this volume with commentary by David Trippett.
The “combined” or “total artwork” advocated in Wagner’s theoretical writings from the time he was conceiving the Ring cycle has often been thought of as necessarily the work of single artistic mastermind: poet, composer, designer, director, and conductor all in one. Wagner did participate in most of these roles, if not in all of them equally. At the same time, this unusual degree of “multitasking,” as we might put it today, required Wagner to engage in the same collaborative networks as would any opera composer of his day, indeed more intensively so, given the scope of his artistic ambitions. Such interaction of creative and collaborative work is demonstrated in Katherine Syer’s study of Wagner as stage-director or Regisseur of his own dramas.
The concept of opera as a “stage festival” in the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy invited (or demanded?) a new level of attention or aesthetic participation on the part of the audience; they, too, had a part in this collaboration. Since the early days of opera it had been customary to provide audiences with texts of the libretto (a practice revived only recently in the form of projected supertitles). The system of associative musical themes or motives, or “leitmotifs,” made famous by Hans von Wolzogen’s musically illustrated handbooks (Leitfäden) to the Ring cycle and other Wagner operas, initiated a new level in the “aesthetic education” of the opera audience. This process is described in Christian Thorau’s essay on these “Guides for Wagnerites,” publications that combined the qualities of the traditional hymnal or prayer-book with the modern touristic guidebook.
A notable consequence of Wagner’s involvement with the political and social world about him was his long period of exile from the federated German states following his implication in the socialist uprising in Dresden in May 1849. A little over a year later he published his provocative denunciation of “Judaism in Music,” initiating the most lasting and controversial aspect of his social-political legacy. Between the time of the first, pseudonymous publication of the “Judaism” article in 1850 and its republication under Wagner’s own name in 1869, he had also started to become associated with a new German “national” identity, cultural as well as political. For Wagner, this identity was intimately bound up with personal antagonism toward those “foreign” cultures closest to hand and hence most implicated in the definition of the “German,” namely the French and the Jews. The dynamic of a love-hate relationship is evident on all sides of this triangle of Wagner, the French, and the Jews, as illustrated in my essay on Wagner’s polemical wartime satire Eine Kapitulation, and in Leon Botstein’s analysis of German-Jewish musicians in the era of European “Wagnerism.”
Wagner’s fame in his own day ensured that his career was exceptionally well documented. Indeed, Wagner’s sense of his own importance has vouchsafed us an ample documentary record, for example in the form of several autobiographical works, ten volumes of collected writings (not counting posthumously published texts), and a vast quantity of letters (the ongoing critical edition of these has accumulated eighteen substantial volumes and only reached the year 1866, leaving sixteen very busy years yet to fill). Reviews, articles, and monographs on Wagner as composer, theorist, and cultural phenomenon reached legendary proportions even in his lifetime. For all that, there is still much primary material that remains either unpublished, untranslated, or out of print.
The documentary materials collected in Parts II through VI of this volume present a cross section of such sources. Franz Liszt’s early and influential appreciation of Tannhäuser published in the Parisian Journal des débats in 1849, for instance, was the first piece of significant international media acclaim enjoyed by Wagner. In various revisions and translations it became, along with a companion essay on Lohengrin, one of the most widely read accounts of the composer in his lifetime. The translation presented here in Part III reached readers in Boston as early as 1853 (although there is no English translation currently in print of either of Liszt’s essays). The Revue wagnérienne published in Paris between 1885 and 1888 is among the most famous documents of Wagner’s European cultural impact, representing his founding role in the aesthetics of French modernism as formulated by the Symbolist school of poets under the influence of Baudelaire. The three samples offered in Part IV of this volume provide a glimpse of this major document of “Wagnerism” and early literary modernism still unavailable in any complete modern edition either in French or English. Another celebrated Parisian episode in the history of Wagner’s career was the abortive production of Tannhäuser which he hoped would launch a new phase of his international celebrity in 1861 (it did at least advance the cause of his notoriety). Original documentation of this episode remains scarce, however. The two reviews included here give a taste of the cultural politics and latent national tensions of this critical moment, also the time when Baudelaire encountered Wagner’s music.
In the native German sphere of Wagner’s activity—places such as Dresden, Leipzig, Vienna, and Bayreuth—his path to fame was smoother, but hardly uncontested. In Part V, the two short feuilleton pieces by his most formidable critical opponent, Eduard Hanslick, represent the considerable opposition Wagner’s claims to reform the essence of music, drama, and society continued to arouse even after he had established himself as the most visible icon of modern German culture with the first Bayreuth Festivals of 1876 and 1882. These claims go back to his writings from the early years of his political exile in Switzerland, around 1850, but they were also given significant external stimulus when the critic and historian Franz Brendel declared Wagner a lynchpin in a “New German School” of music in his address to the Leipzig Tonkünstler-Versammlung (Musician’s Assembly) of 1859—another frequently cited text hitherto unavailable in a complete translation. Brendel’s address (Part III) responded to ongoing debates over the concept of a “music of the future,” debates that constitute a key episode in the formation of modernist and avant-garde discourses that continued to dominate Western culture for over a century. Johann Christian Lobe’s “Letters to a Young Musician about Richard Wagner” from 1854-55 illustrate the attempt of a musically literate critic and pedagogue to negotiate the specific musical and aesthetic challenges of this “new music” in the early years of these debates (also Part III).
Issues in the performance of Wagner’s operas are represented in early as well as later stages of his career. Details of his autobiographical claims about the impact of the dramatic singer Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient on his first ambitions to compose opera are in some crucial respects lacking in documentary support. Original accounts of her included in Part II of this volume allow us, at any rate, to evaluate Wagner’s impressions of this influential singer against those of his contemporaries, and indeed against her own biography. At the other end of his life Wagner was at pains to establish “model performances” of his music dramas and even some kind of “school” of Wagnerian singing and acting in Bayreuth. After his death, his indomitable widow Cosima made it her mission to carry on this project, and the documentation of the Festival performances she directed in the later years of the century, reaching into the early years of sound recording, provide an important link between Wagner’s own activity as director and producer and the subsequent history of Wagner performance in the twentieth century. The Bayreuth enterprise involved a dedicated school of Wagnerian criticism and interpretation, well represented by the prolific acolyte Hans von Wolzogen (“Parsifal Criticism”) and it witnessed, too, aspects of the dawning of a new era of cultural media relations, as suggested by the series of “press releases” about the first Festival, also included in Part V.
While Cosima Wagner left a definitive account of Wagner’s daily life during his later years in the diaries she kept between 1869 and 1883 (first released for publication in the 1970s), it is interesting to have an outside perspective on the composer’s domestic sphere. The selections included in Part II from memoirs by French writer Catulle Mendès and the Wagners’ American acquaintance Newell Sill Jenkins confirm the picture of the composer’s character and manners we know from his wife, but in a slightly different accent and allowing a different range of observations.
The final group of documents, in Part VI, is drawn directly from Wagner’s own (mostly) published writings: short accounts of his own works programmed in concert performances, as well as the works of Beethoven he was most closely associated with as a conductor. While some of these are well known, such as his program for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or those in which he describes the overtures to Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, many others have not been translated before. As a group they offer a valuable glimpse into Wagner’s activity as a conductor and as his own concert impresario, and also into fundamental issues of musical style, influence, and interpretation. Furthermore, the inclusion of these assorted “program notes” by Wagner seems like an appropriate tribute to the Bard Music Festival’s distinguished legacy in bringing together performance, criticism, and historical scholarship over the past twenty years.
The books of essays and historical documents published annually in conjunction with the Bard Music Festival have tended to expand in size over recent years, and it is perhaps no surprise that the present collection devoted to the subject of Richard Wagner has pushed this length to the limits of the possible. For accommodating this abundance of material and helping see it through to publication on the tight production schedule required by this series I am extremely grateful to Paul De Angelis; his expert advice and tireless assistance throughout the process of compiling, organizing, and editing the contents of this book have been invaluable. Much thanks is also owed to Erin Clermont and Natalie Kelly for their quick and careful assistance in copy-editing, design, and proof stages; to Don Giller for the meticulous setting of musical examples (including some long and fairly complicated ones); and to both Ginger Shore, consultant to the Bard Publications Office, and Irene Zedlacher, executive director of the Bard Music Festival, for the continuing excellence of their oversight of this valuable publication series.
The value of these books depends ultimately, of course, on the contributors of the essays and of the introductions, translations, and annotations of the assorted documentary texts; so I am above all grateful to the many individuals who were willing to contribute and able to meet the tight deadlines imposed. In addition, I would like to thank Stewart Spencer for his advice in the early stages of this project and for providing a copy of a chapter from the privately published memoirs of Newell Sill Jenkins included in Part II. I am very grateful to H. Colin Slim for his kind permission to reproduce in Part II the painting in his possession which he has recently identified as an 1839 portrait of the singer Wilhelmine Schöder-Devrient.
When it turned out that the Wagnerian amplitude of the projected contents of this volume had finally overflowed its permissible bounds, Barry Millington kindly agreed to provide a home in future issues of his recently founded Wagner Journal for two substantial items we decided to omit from Part III of the documents section: Franz Liszt’s 1851 commentary on Lohengrin and a detailed critique and analysis of Wagner’s Faust Overture by Hans von Bülow. Ilias Chrissochoidis provided impeccable assistance, once more, in correcting proofs and in a variety of bibliographic matters. Finally, I would like to express my personal gratitude to Leon Botstein, founder of the Bard Festival, and to Christopher Gibbs for extending to me the opportunity to participate in this series, one which continues to provide such an outstanding model for the collaborative interaction of musical performance, musical scholarship, and informed spectatorship.
Thomas S. Grey
Portola Valley, CA
April 2009