Springtime for Wagner

The March 25 matinee of Das Rheingold begins the first of three complete turns of Wagner’s epic justifying gods’ ways to man. The other operas, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung, roll out on April 1, 15, and 22, with the entire cycle performed again the last week of April, and again the first week of May. Singers Placido Domingo, Jane Eaglen, James Morris, and Deborah Voigt appear in each cycle, with a rotating cast that includes Stig Anderson, Graham Clark, Philip Langridge, Wolfgang Neumann, Felicity Palmer, Hanna Schwarz, Birgitta Svenden, and Ekkehard Wlaschiha. James Levine conducts the orchestra, and Otto Schenk oversees the production.

The Ring takes nearly twenty hours to perform. It begins underwater, travels from the underworld to Valhalla, and ends in fire, its action spanning three generations of gods and heroes. Whether measured by the demands it makes on the theater, or by the performers it requires, or by its ambition and expense, Wagner’s Ring remains the standard for colossal music theater.

Last fall, by way of preparation, the Metropolitan Opera mounted a new production of Tristan und Isolde starring Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen, the first tenor and soprano up to the task in a generation. Tristan has always been regarded as the purest expression of Wagner’s artistic ideal. The leads must sing their hearts out for over four hours, without benefit of action, or plot, or suspense, since everyone in the house already knows the lovers will die. (In fact, the original Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr, died within weeks of the opera’s 1865 premiere in Munich.) Their sole support, and the source of all intensity, is the orchestra, which plays without ceasing and carries them away.

Although he may not have intended to kill his first Tristan, Wagner did intend to abolish the borders between representation and experience, myth and history. He wanted his operas to be more than music, drama, poetry, or spectacle. His “art of the future” was not merely outside the usual limits of his artistic medium; it was the execution in music of the kind of thinking usually found in magnates and explorers, or conquerors and tyrants. Wagner propounded an absolute art that would enlist the sister arts in service of a transcendent form. Whatever one may think of it, his work displays a more intimate relationship with power than any other artist’s, before or since.

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22, 1813. His mother was married to a police actuary who died shortly after his birth, and after a brief widowhood, she married Ludwig Geyer, an assimilated Jewish theatrical performer whose family had been musicians for generations. Wagner had a sound Gymnasium education, but received little formal musical training. And he certainly sat at the feet of no living master.

Wagner wrote his first symphony and first opera when he was nineteen, but it was in the 1840s, after a spell in Paris, that he first found real success. A string of operas — Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin — became hits, and the young lion was appointed royal music director at Dresden. Those composers who promoted his early career found themselves discarded (like Giacomo Meyerbeer, whom he rejected as an internationalist and a Jew), or exploited (like Franz Liszt, whose charisma he traded on, and whose daughter he lived with before marrying).

Along the way, Wagner embraced language as no composer had before. Rather than treat the libretto as an occasion for the music, he wrote his own texts in which he invented an alliterative verse style that struck the ear as formal and slightly medieval. He fashioned a mythology out of Norse and Celtic myth that felt meaningful and allegorical (which is not to say explicable). Here was an unexplored musical continent of gods, dragons, dwarves, and heroes, haunted by recurrent strains and dissonances, lapped by alien seas. It wasn’t just new opera; it was a new form of art.

This new art required a new building to house it, and the ideal auditorium Wagner finally succeeded in building in Bayreuth represented a complete departure from previous custom. The audience all faced forward toward the raised stage in a darkened house (as moviegoers do), with the orchestra concealed in a pit below the level of the stage. This was not a ballroom, where the performance was incidental, or a curved opera house, where the audience gazed across the orchestra at one another. Wagner transformed the music theater of bourgeois Western Europe into a church of the emotions. His operas, as Charles Baudelaire put it, had the same effect as drugs.

But Baudelaire was thinking of its private, individual effect, and German music had a national mission. According to Wagner, the Romantic impulse in poetry had turned away from the heroic to the aesthetic, inward, and decadent. He believed that even Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the seminal figure of German Romanticism, could not bear to represent the true condition of the human spirit. The voice of individual striving could not resist the “practical plurality of everyday occurrences,” Wagner wrote. “The romance poem turned into journalism.” And thus “the poet’s art has turned to politics: No one now can poetize, without politicizing.”

Wagner’s artistic ideal was instead to represent feeling so powerful that the beholder “passes into that ecstatic state where one forgets the fateful question ‘Why?'” Rather than being accountable, civilized, and sensible, his art would move the human spirit out from under labor and frustration. It was to this end that he deployed all the artistic means at his disposal — mythology, poetry, drama, spectacle, symphonic orchestra, even architecture — to imply some kind of new human being and new world order.

A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to explain just what Wagner’s Ring is about. Wagner himself thought the operas sang the origin of the German national spirit in the legends of pre-Christian Europe. (The Nazis and other nationalist mystagogues made much of this same source.) But George Bernard Shaw, remembering Wagner’s youth on the revolutionary barricades of Dresden, interpreted the gods of Valhalla as proto-capitalists and the dwarves (who actually build the castles and forge the weapons) as the despised workers. Musicologist Richard Taruskin makes a witty case for the Ring as an allegory of godlike composers giving laws to performers, whose glory consists in faithful realization of their masters’ intentions.

A precis hardly does justice to the complexity and recalcitrance of Wagner’s libretto. Much of the mythical strength of the narrative comes from its refusal to be reduced to an explanation — but then, mystic incomprehensibility has always enjoyed a long run.

In Das Rheingold, Alberich of the Nibelungs (a tribe of dwarves who inhabit the underground realm of Nibelhelm) renounces love, which is the magical requirement for anyone who wants to steal the gold of the nymphatic Rhine maidens. Meanwhile, up in the heavens, Wotan is trying to weasel out of his promise to give his sister-in-law Freia, goddess of youth and beauty, in payment to the giants Fafner and Fasolt for building Valhalla, the hall of the gods. But the crafty god Loge has a plan. He suggests to Wotan that they give the giants as substitute payment the treasures a dwarf named Mime has forged for Alberich from the Rhinegold: the Ring of Power and the Tarnhelm (a helmet that allows whoever wears it to assume any shape). So Wotan and Loge descend and trick Alberich out of the Ring and Tarnhelm, which they swap for Freia. Alberich curses whoever possesses the Ring. Fafner kills Fasolt. The gods cross the rainbow bridge back to Valhalla, ignoring the pleas of the Rhine maidens to return their stolen gold.

In Die Walkure, Siegmund, the mortal son of Wotan, finds himself in the house of Hunding, his enemy. Hunding’s wife Sieglinde falls in love with Siegmund. She tells about a sword a stranger plunged into a tree that only her long-lost brother can remove. Siegmund removes it. The lovers discover they are brother and sister. Wotan orders the Valkyrie Brunnhilde to protect his son from Hunding, but Fricka, Wotan’s wife, insists that the marriage bonds be defended. Caught between law and will, Wotan at last decides for law and orders Brunnhilde to aid Hunding. She defies him, but Siegmund is slain anyway, though the pregnant Sieglinde escapes with the (now broken) sword. Sieglinde shelters near Fafner’s cave. Brunnhilde is sentenced to become a mortal and sleep, surrounded by a wall of fire, until awakened by a mortal hero.

In Siegfried, the hero Siegfried, reared by the dwarf Mime after his mother Sieglinde’s death, knows no fear. At Mime’s forge, he remakes his father’s broken sword. Mime sees the youth as a way to gain the Ring. Wotan warns Alberich against Mime, and both try to rouse Fafner (now a dragon, thanks to the Tarnhelm’s magic) and urge him to return the Ring to the Rhine maidens. Siegfried kills Fafner and claims the Ring. Tasting the dragon’s blood, he understands the language of the forest birds, who tell him that Mime is piloting against him. The hero kills Mime. The birds also tell him of a maiden asleep on a rock, circled by fire. Siegfried meets Wotan at a crossroads, and shatters the god’s spear. Siegfried wakes Brunnhilde. They love.

In Gotterdammerung, the Germanic Fates, the Norns, predict the fall of the gods. Siegfried takes leave of Brunnhilde. He gives her the Ring of the Nibelungs, and she gives him her horse. Hagen, son of Loge and half-brother of Gunther, lord of the Gibichungs, counsels his brother to marry Brunnhilde. They drug Siegfried into forgetfulness, and marry him to Gutrune, Gunther’s sister. The hero agrees to bring Brunnhilde to Gunther. A Valkyrie begs Brunnhilde to return the Ring to the Rhine maidens. She refuses. Siegfried assumes Gunther’s shape, and claims both bride and Ring. Brunnhilde wants revenge. She joins with Hagen and Gunther in a plot to murder Siegfried is stabbed in the back. He remembers Brunnhilde and dies. Hagen kills Gunther, and Brunnhilde rushes into Siegfried’s funeral pyre. The Rhine overflows, the Rhine maidens drown Hagen and regain their gold, and Valhalla burns. Only our world remains.

The entire run of the Met’s production of Tristan last fall was sold out. As the first new Tristan and Isolde in many years, Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen received critical praise, and the orchestra, directed by James Levine, performed to a high standard. The stage was bare, the performers backlit as they sang in tableaux for the full four hours.

Mostly, that production of Tristan und Isolde promised great things for this spring’s performances of the Ring. But not entirely. In Act One of Tristan, as the lovers drank their potion, the stage lighting shifted color and an audible minority in the audience — which would have been receiving erotic communion at this moment a hundred years ago — tittered. Audiences have always been divided into Wagnerites and non-Wagnerites, and going to his operas has always been like attending political rallies: thrilling for the party members, chilling for the strays who wander in.

But the giggling at Tristan und Isolde derived from another source. The opera begins after the fact, with nothing to do but declare and die. There are no seductions, no compromises. All that remains is the composer’s relentless pursuit of the power of his “art of the future.” Some feel it is unfair to blame Wagner for Hitler, who adopted both Beethoven’s music and Wagner’s “art of the future” for the sound track of the Third Reich. But surely it is fair to point out that Wagner’s characters do not live in the way Shakespeare’s Hamlet lives, or Goethe’s Faust, or even Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Tristan, Isolde, and the characters of the Ring, are as powerful a creation as any artist has ever managed — but they are incomplete as creatures. They do not live outside the music.

Even inside the music, the characters in Wagner’s art of the future are doomed victims. That, rather than his rabid anti-Semitism, is the origin of his appeal to twentieth-century tyrants. This is what beguiled Hitler, and prompted Stalin to command a production of Die Walkure at the Bolshoi theater just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Wagner’s impact on an audience — his concentration of every available resource toward a single effect — suits the totalitarian, who wants a useful art to help him sway crowds and topple monuments. The future has always been a convenient excuse in the hands of those who regard themselves as new and powerful, with nothing to restrain them.

Wagner has a deeper appeal to the totalitarian mind, however, for as the despot is to the state, so Wagner is to his created world. Hitler and Stalin are like bad artists, who regard people as incomplete beings waiting to be animated by their masters. Wagner is a great artist — great enough to understand that his heroes, who live only while he animates them, must be incomplete and lacking — but he can’t escape the logic of creation. Like his gods and heroes and dwarves, Wagner’s art of the future becomes merely an instrument when placed in the hands of the state.

Power in politics, or in art, must eventually destroy imagination, by denying that there is any alternative to its single purpose, its directed version of the future. The Ring of the Nibelung, though fed by a wellspring of the spirit, presents life without hope. It is a closed world of sound and shadows on the wall. On the other side of that wall, out of earshot, is where people can actually live.

Laurance Wieder is a poet and reviewer in Patchogue, New York.