Politics at the Opera
Cohen, Mitchell
Prelude In Brussels, in August 1830, the revolution began at the opera. It was William I's birthday and the fifteenth anniversary of this Dutch king's rule over Belgium, a spoil of the...
...it arose with shouts of "Heil...
...Surely the choice of opera was unwise...
...Of course, none of these characters need be played as Jews, subtly or explicitly, and the operas are in no way dependent on such a portrayal...
...I shall return to these tantrums in due course—they occurred SUMMER • 1994 • 357 Politics at the Opera against the backdrop of Israelis quarreling, as they do every few years, about whether to allow Wagner to be performed in the Jewish state...
...The phrase "final responsibility" is 354 • DISSENT Politics at the Opera critical here, for if, as Kerman puts it, "music articulates the drama," the drama must also be worth articulating...
...Without reducing Wagner's art to a simple function of his times, one way of understanding his worldview is as an instantiation of Germany's combined and uneven development, with its feudal-bourgeois mixture...
...who joked that Jewry should be burned publicly at the end of a performance of Lessing's Nathan the Wise...
...New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp...
...Watching The Magic Flute, a child will marvel at a tuneful fairy story about Pamino, Tamino, Sarastro, and the Queen of the Night...
...While this third observer would still be viewing a musical spectacle in fairy-tale form, its content would be perceived as an aesthetically shaped expression of ideas and of a society...
...Rigor did not characterize his mind for his mind projected in myths...
...Reports of what followed are contradictory and not always reliable...
...If Wagner's revolutionary racism became a "cogent" synthesis between 1847-50, he also distinguished, in "The Art-Work of the Future" (1849), between "the racialnational and the - unnational universal" stages in human development, proposing that the former was at its end and that the latter represented the future...
...This is not to say that all of his claims are flawed...
...As a consequence, he contended a year before his death that "all that can now make an impact is—as I have ventured to express it [in Parsifal, his last opera— MC] —the blood of Christ...
...How does a rigorous scheme seamlessly change meaning...
...An adult who knows neither the libretto nor German could simply relish Mozart's music...
...Both statements are historical libels...
...Sometimes he complained that, with capitalism's triumph, the moneychangers of yore had become dominant...
...The latter is a youthful Franconian knight who seeks victory in Niirnberg's song contest so as to gain admission to the guild and the hand of Eva (for whom Beckmesser also longs...
...the phantom ship finds harbor in a coastal town in which "the villagers' pursuit of money is an expression of the essential Jewishness of bourgeois society...
...Presently, everyone seemed to be pouring into the torch-lit plaza...
...A case in point is Edward Said's discussion of Rose in the London Review of Books...
...Such behavior, it seems, was inscribed in his being...
...Nowadays opera is inaccessible to many (even in the middle classes) either because of its expense or its language (a fact modified by the increasing use of supertitles...
...At one point the fisherman-insurrectionist Masaniello sings a duet with a comrade: "Amour sacre de la patrie/ Rends-nous l'audace et la fierte" —"Sacred love of homeland/Give us audacity and boldness...
...Verdi's "imaginative imagery," to use Stendhal's terms, clearly corresponded to the passions of his listeners...
...My point is not that one should respond to music solely on an intellectual level—a silly proposition...
...Nor is it just a matter of "revolution": at virtually any point of Wagner's life one can show him espousing opposing notions...
...Another observer might, however, find it a gloss on the fate of the Enlightenment in Joseph II's Vienna...
...Many operas permit different levels of appreciation...
...6 See Deryck Cooke's brilliant I Saw the World End: A antinomical out into the open, rather than glossing over it and generating a kind of harmony to which the most profound element in Wagner is antithetical...
...Wagner, as Bernard Shaw remarked, "was not a Schopenhauerite every day in the week, not even a Wagnerite...
...Music, he wrote, "cannot think...
...Rose is right to say Wagner sought to link "revolution" to Germanic myth, but again he fails to pose the interesting question: if myth is eternal, why "revolution...
...Yet having characterized Wagner as "rigorous," Rose tells us also that "the political and artistic elements of the German Revolution may be formally distinguishable but in the realm of sensibility as well as the world of practice, these elements tend to blur into one another...
...Save for one fact: he was, indeed, an artistic titan, and wrote some of the most sublime music we have...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992...
...It doesn't seem to concern Paul Lawrence Rose, the author of the latest contribution to Wagner controversalia, Wagner: Race and Revolution...
...Recall Stendhal's comment, quoted by Irving Howe in Politics and the Novel: "Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's attention...
...In nineteenthcentury Italy the opera house was perhaps the central cultural institution for many Italians, and in the era of the Risorgimento, it inevitably became political...
...It resulted in "a new moral philosophical understanding of revolution...
...the former allowed for conversion and assimilation (at least in principle) and the latter precluded it...
...Feuerbach, the radical materialist who declared "you are what you eat...
...With it he shatters Wotan's staff—a revolutionary act allowing the new to supersede past authority...
...Wagner expressed a mélange of both...
...With ease if your historical method borders on free association, which seems to be the case with Rose...
...The audience will be constrained to reflect and the composer will be revealed...
...Operas, of course, do not make revolutions...
...A crucial moment in Siegfried, the third Ring opera, occurs when the title character meets the Wanderer...
...aiming to emotionalize the intel 356 • DISSENT Politics at the Opera lect, Wagner's Geist was not Hegel's...
...the offices of the government newspaper were quickly aflame, and demonstrators set fire to the home of the Dutch Minister of Justice, too...
...Moreover, no serious treatment of the history of ideas would subsume under the same "revolutionism" thinkers as diverse as Kant, an Enlightenment optimist and idealist who demanded that each individual be treated as an end in himself...
...he assumed "progress" came with modern "development...
...Wagner could provide no coherent answer, save that it was explained through feeling, that is, through the music...
...He did this through development of the Motiv (a musical theme associated with a character or an idea or a feeling...
...Wagner perceives natural man in myth, and all history, a realm of garments, hasn't changed the "true human being" beneath...
...The world owes me what I need...
...When it was published last year, this slim volume occasioned considerable uproar...
...But then this was a man whose "humor" included writing a "comedy" about suffering Parisians during the siege of 1870 ("Ein Kapitulation...
...However, as he wrote operas demonstrating how evil arose, he intuited "the very essence and meaning of the world itself in all its possible phases, and had realized its nothing ness...
...Indeed, whenever an issue of law appears in a libretto, Wagner, in Rose's eyes, is chastising Jews...
...At other times he sounds not only "revolutionary" but like the very embodiment of destructive willpower...
...No answer is provided by suggesting that because Wagner was a bigot who called himself a "revolutionary," each sharp and flat in his work dissolves into Zyklon B. Indeed, Wagner's own pronouncements on "revolution" were hardly consistent...
...And then there is Edward Said, whose review of Rose in the London Review of Books served as a pretext for Israel-baiting...
...Mime, Alberich, Hagan, Beckmesser—all the characters Wagner demonized—should be made up to look like Richard Wagner...
...More likely, Schopenhauer provided an intellectual lodestar for Wagner's growing pessimism after the failure of 1849 disrupted his career, a pessimism finally articulated in the cataclysmic finale of The Ring, encompassing the death of Siegfried, "the man of the future...
...only what injures the Wagner orthodoxy is true...
...When Brecht used music (among other techniques) to alienate, his purpose was to prevent the audience from empathizing with particular characters by reminding it that it was viewing actors on stage, not "reality...
...What was composed as a song of the oppressed by a great liberal humanist is now a musical bond for aspiring oppressors...
...He asserts that if Rose's analysis is right, Wagner's music should be played in Israel as a reminder of the calamity of bigotry...
...I take the description of the Italian events from Martin...
...7 Ironically, Verdi, who was different from Wagner in every way—musically, in his personal decency, and in his humane, liberal patriotism—did write a patriotic opera about Friedrich Barbossa, but about his defeat by the Lombards in 1176...
...could his life's work have eluded it...
...But while Attic theater was woven into the civic fabric of the citizenry — and and spoke its language—opera has an uneven historical relation to populism and democracy...
...Poplimont, La Belgique depuis mil huit cent trente (Bruxelles: Philippant, 1848...
...Yet elsewhere he predicted that the era of races was over...
...In German revolutionary thought, the revolution and the Jews are thus nebulous, almost mystical symbols...
...It provided "a rigorous scheme for his random anti-semitism...
...9 The frequent claim that Wagner's relation to Levi proves his prejudices a trifle is misleading: not only was Wagner's behavior towards the self-hating Levi sadistic, but Wagner opposed using the Jewish conductor for Parsifal and the Munich Court Theater overruled him...
...Perhaps the most contentious matter remains Wagner's relation to Nazism...
...The identification of Judaism with money and grubby practicality, and the opposition of love and redemption to enslavement to law are among the oldest anti-Semitic motifs...
...In the end Walthar triumphs but, jaded, he at first refuses Meister status ("I will be happy without Masterhood...
...5 For him, Wagner's opus raises but one question — "revolutionary anti-semitism...
...The result is renewal through reform in which authority modified is authority accepted...
...He cites "Va Pensiero," the chorus of the Hebrew exiles in Verdi's Nabucco, which became an anthem of the Risorgimento...
...Due to a combination of melody and words and circumstances—the posters around town and the agitators in the theater indicate that things were not entirely spontaneous, as scholars have noted—an empathetic chord was struck, so to speak, leading to direct action...
...8 See, in particular, Dieter Borchmeyer, "The Question of AntiSemitism" in Wagner Handbook, U. Willer and P. Wapnewski, eds...
...Well, not for everyone...
...Throughout this essay, I have frequently drawn historical points from this valuable and rich book...
...It was debated publicly at the New York Wagner Society, and reviews ranged from the banal to the insidious...
...It consisted in the way he related sounds, ideas, and words in "music dramas...
...Why, asked August ROckel, Wagner's Dresden comrade, had the composer concluded with apocalypse since the gold, whose theft precipitates the events of the operas, is returned to its owners, the Rhine Maidens...
...Discussing Wagner's relevance in 1963, Adorn° proposed, "If it is true about Wagner that no matter what one does, it is wrong, the thing that is still most likely to help is to force what is false, flawed, Notes I Details are taken from Sonia Slatin, "Opera and Revolution: La Muette de Portici and the Belgium Revolution of 1830 Revisited," Journal of Musicological Research 3, 1979, and Ch...
...Howe asked, "Once the pistol is fired, what happens to the music...
...His ardor aside, this is hardly an original point...
...Said likes to pose as "the-Other-whoUnderstands," but his essay reveals that when it comes to Jewish pain, he is an Other who just doesn't get it...
...Although Wagner's prose writings certainly confirm his attachment to such anti-Semitic motifs, there is, at least as far as I can see, no justification in the operas for SUMMER • 1994 • 361 Polities at the Opara Rose's assertions here except the leap of an imagination that seems to leap a great deal...
...Now, compare the alternately revolutionary and pessimistic aspects of The Ring with the structure of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg...
...hence he would not have recognized that his own politics were modern and antimodern at once...
...he turned from history after the defeat of the revolution...
...But, but, but . . . . Here we turn to Wagner, that artistic genius and human wretch, to see just how difficult the matter can become...
...his frenzied, possessed persona was easily assimilable to the disorder of the times and the times to his persona...
...By denying the specificity of antiSemitism, one easily denies the need for a specific response to it, say, a Jewish state...
...Do you know what this strange old town of Niirnberg now means to me," Wagner wrote to Ludwig II, "it is the abode of the 'artwork of the future.' " Truth, human reality, was not in history: "the incomparable thing about the mythos is that it is true for all time, and its content, how close soever its compression, is inexhaustible throughout the ages...
...And that is just it...
...And since politics does not occur in fairy lands, another question inevitably ensues: what is the relation between such "understanding" and "reality...
...So with these two...
...Wagner's contradictions become manifest if we (1) contrast the internal structures of Siegfried and Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, operas central to all commentaries on the political implications of his work, and (2) consider how these works suit Wagner's Schopenhauerianism...
...His elevation, sixty years after his death, to Nazi icon rested both on the Fiihrer's love of his operas and on Wagner's copious writings, which are filled with prattling about "das Volk" and venomous anti-Semitism...
...Wagner's vision did not synthesize revolutionism and racism for the simple reason that it was cross-eyed...
...Take, for example, the Motiv...
...If such notions are not sufficiently rattling, one needs only to recall that at the Bayreuth Festival in 1924—the first after the Great War—following Hans Sachs's celebrated declamation on German culture at the end of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, the audience didn't quite pour into the streets as happened in Brussels in 1830...
...Wagner may have imagined himself the visionary of the artwork and the Volk of the future, but in a time of rapid socioeconomic transformation, his eyes were fixed on and his spirit animated by ancient myths...
...As to values, few have equaled him in hating—today the Jews, tomorrow the French, Jesuits the day after, next week someone else—while proclaiming love his supreme value...
...the Motiv seems a musical means well-suited to this incongruity— a means deployed with radical intent that enhances continuity...
...believing that in order to realize such a world, it was only necessary for man to wish it...
...Is not continuity crucial for a nationalist writing works derived from archaic sources—Germanic and Nordic mythology—which he believed held truth for the present day, indeed all times...
...The former, the rigid town clerk and "marker" (scorer) for the guild of Mastersingers, is a being of rules and structure...
...there isn't any...
...But then he elaborates: Wagner's life and art can be grasped only in light of what he calls "the German revolutionary tradition," which apparently includes virtually everybody but Hegel...
...One is tempted to propose that were Stendhal's pistol shot to ring out at a performance in Bayreuth, the appropriate target would have been the composer...
...What finales...
...This from a compciser who believed great art is born of the Volk...
...there are scores of works on left-wing antiSemitism...
...The key, Millington writes, is a "musicopoetic synthesis—that is, the blending of melody and the spoken word into a line that liberated music in order to proclaim the drama instead of being constricted in regular patterns and predetermined forms...
...The same may be said of opera—indeed, some of the greatest operas have political or social settings...
...This is the theme of Nicholas Till's fine study, Mozart and the Enlightenment...
...5 And consider The Ring's finale, Gotterdammerung...
...Stendhal implied that aesthetic properties are vitiated when engaged by politics, by ideologies, by the roughhouse of power, coercion, violence...
...Notably, plans for the Friedrich opera seem to have held his attention when he was closest to historical events (1848-49...
...Its products have been cause for endless controversy...
...Interpretations range from Shaw's The Perfect Wagnerite, which sees The Ring or — most of it—as an anticapitalist allegory born of Wagner's early anarchist politics (with Bakunin, he played an active role in the 1849 Dresden uprising) to Robert Donnington's view of the tetralogy as the incarnation of Jungian archetypes...
...Agitators, it seems, were in the theater and in the crowd outside in the Place de la Monnaie...
...But from a political viewpoint—ignoring aesthetic questions—what is implied when music, appealing to the emotions of an audience, intends to eclipse the intellect...
...to the Middle Ages...
...3 George Martin, "Verdi and the Risorgimento," in Wm...
...If Rose reduces Wagner's life and art to anti-Semitism, Said reduces anti-Semitism to one complex among many...
...4 The meaningless world was there to serve him: "I am a different kind of organism, my nerves are hypersensitive, I must have beauty, splendor and light...
...There is, of course, a caveat: Trotsky aimed to explain the possibility of socialist revolution in "backwards" lands rather than advanced industrial societies...
...What does it mean for a "revolutionary" to agree with Schopenhauer that human existence is meaningless, that the only alternative to relentless worldly pain is pessimistic acceptance of nothingness and retreat into Buddhistlike Nirvana...
...Like poetry, music can reveal the quality of action, and thus determine dramatic form in the most serious sense...
...This would be a fitting tribute to a man who believed myth but not history is truth...
...And for all of his efforts to impart philosophical wisdom in his operas, it was through melody that Wagner believed that "the poet's thought becomes an instinctively enthralling moment of feeling...
...After 1849, he wrote in various letters that he couldn't be a true revolutionary because he didn't possess the reckless destructive willpower characteristic only of "the scum of the common people...
...Had W.H...
...and through his effort to transcend the perennial debate on the importance of music versus words, through Sprechgesang, a blending of dramatic speech and orchestration that goes beyond traditional "accompaniment...
...Here, Rose seems persuasive...
...Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries its estate shifted from the nobility to the middle classes...
...Circles of poets, musicians, and critics, most famously the Florentine "Camerata," believed that in SUMMER • 1994 • 355 Polities at the Opera Hellas was realized the appropriate relation between words and music, the former conditioning the latter...
...When Rousseau wrote about natural man, he recognized that humans had changed too fundamentally to return, as he put it in a celebrated footnote, to a state of nature with the SUMMER • 1994 • 359 Polities at the Opera bears...
...As Benedict Anderson has noted in his trenchant study Imagined Communities, nations are objectively modern, but for nationalists they are subjectively ancient...
...But this is not Said's primary concern, at least not here...
...That hardly defines what happened in Brussels...
...The "subtext" of The Flying Dutchman is "money-Judaism...
...This would entail exploring the structures by which Wagner sought to transform operatic form and then asking: do they parallel those of his political imagination...
...Banning Wagner "is a preeminent rite for warding off the dissolution of one of the core experiences of Jewish history and memory...
...It was William I's birthday and the fifteenth anniversary of this Dutch king's rule over Belgium, a spoil of the Congress of Vienna...
...To uphold his thesis about revolutionism, Rose needs to demonstrate a structural homology between Wagner's music dramas and his politics...
...Yet it is none less than Rose who comes to Said's rescue with a letter to the editor rationalizing "transfer" — the Orwellian euphemism adopted by rightwing Zionists for expelling all Palestinians from their homes...
...Wagner developed it in order to break radically from past operatic models, but as a musical means it emphasizes continuity...
...Donald Jay Grout, in his Short History of Opera, calls it a "visible and audible projection of the power, wealth and taste of the society that supports it...
...He is an apostle and genius of falsifying totality...
...So too must all the twists, turns, changes, inconsistencies of human history be secondary—including the inconsistencies of Richard Wagner...
...He embraced national 362 • DISSENT ism—a modern concept—while rejecting the modern state...
...Still, the Brussels events raise perennial questions about the relation between politics and culture...
...Thus, even without Rose, the evidence is substantial, if arguable, that Wagner, consciously or not, vented his bigotry in fashioning some of his vilest characters...
...Although an untutored listener might not be able to specify who was singing about what, "the long unison line of the vocal melody would be enough in itself . . . to tell us that this is the voice of a group lamenting its own collective plight, not mourning the death of a king or an individual...
...Politics at the Opera Act IV This cross-eyed composer, this hate-filled man who preached redemption through love—are his prejudices indeed embedded in his operas...
...It's an interesting claim, but consider: "Va Pensiero" has of late been adopted by the racists of the French National Front...
...Rather like the Third Reich, Wagner believed everyone and everything existed for—or as an obstacle to—his will, to be disposed of as need be...
...Here's a description written some years later: The patriotic ideas alluded to so often in passages of La Muette echoed in all corners...
...Reflective engagement with the issues raised by the spectacle would allow realistic understanding...
...Later, by the 1870s, he attained "a new ideological rigor in his revolutionary antisemitism...
...The artist singing that beautiful song Amour sacre de la patrie was astonished by the enthusiastic welcome and the fact that he was being accompanied [by spectators—MC...
...Alberich can be played as a venal, sniveling, powerhungry capitalist with no Jewish characteristics whatsoever—in contrast, say, to Shylock, who can be nothing other than a Jew...
...He adds that "the crucial characteristic [of] Wagner's and indeed the prevailing German concept of 'Jews' is that it is a plastic, fluid notion that can often change meaning seamlessly without the consciousness or intention of the writer or thinker...
...For that reason, only experimental solutions are justified today...
...But it is a strictly aesthetic power that orders a mental kaleidoscope of romanticism, revolutionism, archaism, modernism, universalism, chauvinism, irrationalism, cruelty, profundity, insipidity...
...He expected it of them...
...These notes were repeated in chorus by the throng in the public square outside which keenly felt the impressions coming from the hall...
...In the real world, Feruccio Busoni once observed, people don't communicate through versified song accompanied by orchestras...
...Wahn!IUberall Wahn...
...And last, though certainly not least, it would allow Richard Wagner's demon to sing for himself...
...After all, some of us might suspect that had there been no biblical injunction against coveting his neighbor's wife, Richard ("I am a different kind of organism") Wagner still might not have been a model husband and faithful friend...
...What crystallized, however, was not a synthetic whole, at least not conceptually...
...And worse: their wretchedness may drive or thread their creativity...
...This, indeed, has been the task of Sachs himself, for it is he who taught Walthar the musical necessities permitting him to produce the Prize Song...
...Probing Germanic mythology, Wagner found "no longer the figure of conventional history, whose garment claims our interest more than does the actual shape inside...
...In drama "we must become knowers through the feeling...
...His mind changes as often as his mood...
...His future looked backward: to the Hellenic world...
...When Wagner rebelled against modernity, he also rebelled against history...
...it is the work of a modern nationalist...
...The latter is really Wotan, his grandfather, King of the Gods, on whose staff the law is inscribed...
...This is how Wagner attains (which isn't to say he always sustains) coherence...
...It was this opera, La Battaglia di Legnano, whose premier he conducted in Rome in 1849— with Mazzini, Garibaldi and the republicans arriving on the scene after the Pope was deposed—the same year in which when Wagner and Bakunin were on the Dresden barricades...
...Indeed, Wagner's music imposes coherence on what is often irrational and contradictory...
...40-1, 56...
...and Schopenhauer, who espoused pessimism and an irrationalist metaphysics resting on the "nothing 358 • DISSENT Politics at the Opera ness" of the world...
...Sachs sees it Uberall (everywhere), and, wanting stability, he recognizes that order requires change and not inflexibility...
...Contrary to Wagner's aim of emotionalizing the intellect, the opposite will be the case...
...Given the philosophical ambitions of his tetralogy, Wagner could surely have fashioned something better...
...Rose's "method" simply impedes posing the essential question: why was Jew-hatred a constant among so many thinkers with significantly different— and often opposed—structures of thought...
...How is cogent thought also plastic, fluid, nebulous, and imprecise...
...The evening was to crown three days of celebration—or so it was intended...
...He only set one mature opera in a real time and place—Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg — and sixteenth-century Nurnberg (Nuremburg) was also a myth for him, both of the future and the past...
...5 Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992...
...If, as a consequence of the opera, the third observer reflects upon ideas or society, reflection is bound to sensory experience, not to pure intellect...
...364 • DISSENT...
...2 Still, this doesn't always have conservative implications...
...The result was a disputation that extended over several issues in which Said, Rose, and others shed more light on themselves than on Wagner...
...An alienation effect would thereby be ensured...
...Indeed, Mozart believed that "in an opera, poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of music...
...Nietzsche once complained that Wagner's music "sweats" too much...
...The opposition between the old and the new—Wotan and Siegfried in The Ring—is played out between Beckmesser and Walthar in Meistersinger...
...The combined influence of Darwin and Gobineau generated biological racism...
...Notably, Schopenhauser's philosophy 360 • DISSENT Politics at the Opera was "based on the promise of a revolutionary liberation from the shackles of a soul-corroding Jewish 'optimism.' " But if we turn to Wagner himself, we find that it is not "Jewish" but "Greek" optimism that is the issue for him, as for so many Romantics...
...The artisan (cobbler) Mastersinger Sachs bemoans the anarchy: "Wahn...
...Some critics insist: he was too much the artist to despoil his art with such boorishness...
...Wednesday...
...The internal structure of the latter expresses a consciousness that is in fact reformist, not revolutionary...
...Auden written these words to Wagner instead of to Benjamin Britten, Wagner would not have been fazed, for not only was suffering part of his self-image—such, ach!, is the fate of unappreciated genius—but he hadn't the least compunction about making others suffer on his behalf...
...in any event, "The Jewish race," he believed, is "the born enemy of pure humanity...
...He provides no evidence that Wagner ever repented...
...He conceived das Volk— "necessity's vicegerent in the flesh"—as the source of the "artwork of the future" in which "we shall all be one...
...The latter, not embedded naturally and by language in the Volk, had come to dominate commerce-obsessed Western society...
...What Said ignores, conveniently, is this: debate as one might if hydro-obsessions are expressed in his operas, no political movement hailing Wagner sought to destroy the oceans...
...If you are really to develop your full stature you will have, I think, to suffer and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present and against every conscious value you have...
...2 Donald Jay Grout with Hermine Weigel Williams, A Short History of Opera, 3rd edition...
...The revolution came later and proclaimed Wagner its cultural harbinger...
...It is only Wagner's musical brilliance— his use of Motiv, "infinite melody," Sprechgesang, all of them unifying forms—that makes him appear cogent, that yields wholeness, that indeed gives him such uncommon power...
...In any event, what makes these themes "revolutionary...
...Act I As the struggle for German unification moved toward a climax in the 1860s, Wagner, a man not given to modesty, proposed in his diaries: "I am the German spirit...
...As he initially conceived The Ring in 1849, Briinnhilde, its heroine, was to lead her love, Siegfried, to Valhalla where they would exult with the gods...
...If you believe Wagner was an unredeemed, virulent antisemite," this book is for you, opined the editor of Opera News, Patrick J. Smith, whose aesthetic posture was apparently upset by a reminder of the sort of fellow Wagner was...
...we discover quickly that he has nonoperatic matters on his mind...
...Music, wrote Stendhal in his Life of Rossini, appeals "to the spirit of man by conjuring up a pattern of imaginative imagery, which in some way corresponds to the passions by which the listener is already swayed...
...These, he presumed, embody eternal verities, all of which somehow allowed him anchors in a world—a country—in motion...
...He tells us, for instance, that "Wagner's whole personal love-life with its several appropriations of other people's wives, taken together with the frequent parallel adulteries in the operas, suggests that he felt the commandment against adultery to be especially irksome and considered it a Jewish imposition on German society that needed to be replaced by a code of conduct based on freedom and love...
...It is to dissent from construing him teleologically, as a synthetic moment in a "revolutionary tradition...
...Adorno proposed that there was a structural parallel between the sadistic and humiliating humor deployed by Wagner in presenting these characters and his personal treatment of Jews like Hermann Levi, conductor of the first production of Parsifal...
...But how does this square with Wagner's embrace of Schopenhauer...
...Wahn, one of Wagner's favorite words, is ambiguous in German: it can mean illusion, madness, or obsession...
...That, of course, is the problem...
...9 More recently, Millington has made an erudite and impressive case against Beckmesser in the Cambridge Opera Journal...
...With lyrics...
...A curious debate...
...Said proposes that Israelis be reminded of genocide by listening to an anti-Semite's music...
...At second glance, one recognizes that there is, if not a method to Rose's silliness, an ideological agenda: implicating the left in anti-Semitism...
...At first glance, this appears ludicrous...
...The Jews?—just another mania, like hydrotherapy...
...Yet this doesn't prevent Said from arguing with Rose about playing Wagner in a state Said thinks shouldn't have been created...
...Music, in other words, necessarily produces an alienation effect...
...In a letter to Rocket in 1856, he explained that The Ring initially took shape "at a time" —he refers to the heady year of 1849—"when with my ideas, I had built up an optimistic world, on Hellenic principles...
...Act II For all his bombastic declamations, and whatever his role in Dresden in 1849, Wagner's only real revolution was artistic...
...Auber's La Muette de Portici tells of the 1647 uprising of Neapolitans, especially the lower classes, against the Spanish (who had been previous rulers of Belgium, too...
...The composer's prejudices, though radicalized by 1850, originated before the revolutionary upheavals, primarily in conflicts with and jealousy of Giacomo Meyerbeer, the German-Jewish grand opera composer who dominated European and especially the Paris opera in the mid-nineteenth century...
...And even mediocre: it is remarkable that the concluding opera of The Ring turns on Siegfried—whom Wagner described as the man of the future, "the most perfect human being"—drinking a magic potion...
...within two years she bears "blessed death-redemption" to the divinities...
...While the influence of Maupassant and Zola in the late nineteenth century engendered "verismo" (truth)—the treatment of naturalistic and realistic themes in works such as Carmen and La Boheme —it would seem that opera, by its nature, resists realism and naturalism...
...One might locate the real ideological turning point in Wagner's life when he turned from the idea of an opera about Friedrich Barbossa— a historical subject—to the myths of the Nibelungen...
...What was radically new in nineteenthcentury German anti-Semitism was the transformation of medieval religiously based Jewhatred into a racial-nationalist doctrine...
...One can, of course, speak of strictly "spiritual" or "metaphysical" revolutions leading to resignation, but this is hardly the same thing as the optimism of the barricades, say in 1849...
...But certainly we can recognize that it is impossible to contend that Siegfried the revolutionary, Schopenhauerian resignation, and the reformism of Meistersinger all constitute a single "revolutionary" vision...
...It seems that the public impact of music—its emotional power—is appreciated across the political spectrum as an aesthetic communal experience...
...So an interesting problem arises for political opera: does its sensory—that is, aesthetic—medium lead the intellect to a more or to a less intelligent understanding of politics...
...Consider the premiere of his La Battaglia di Legnano, which tells of the victory of the Lombards over Friedrich Barbossa in the twelfth century...
...1:1 Study of Wagner's Ring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 23...
...True, few claim, like Rose, that "in the context of nineteenth-century German revolutionary thought, any allegory of capitalism must imply an antagonism to Judaism as both the spirit and the practice of modern bourgeois capitalism...
...Said responds that Rose is "a fundamentalist Khomeini of the arts," who, like the mullahs, would use state power to burn books...
...Thought dissolves into emotion by means of music, and this makes the artist, the artwork, and das Volk "one...
...He turned from Friedrich when he perceived him to be "a historical rebirth of the old pagan Siegfried...
...Soon enough, Belgium was an independent land.' Perhaps the authorities should have been more alarmed by posters around town proposing an alteration in the king's festive plans: "Monday, the 23rd, fireworks...
...Prelude In Brussels, in August 1830, the revolution began at the opera...
...But there is a solution, perhaps imperfect, to the Wagnerfrage...
...And what operas...
...Wagner, Said reminds us, was a man of compulsions...
...8 His anti-Semitism was an ill-digested mixture of old and new driven by his own inferiority complexes, egoistic jealousies, and endless obsessions (which included the fear—unjustified, it turns out—that he was partly of Jewish descent...
...He believed in the truth of myth alone...
...Reading Schopenhauer was " a second conversion experience" for Wagner, writes Rose...
...Wotan's goddesswife had persuaded him that a hero must defend himself with his own sword, not one endowed by higher authority—unless that authority (Wotan) is prepared to relinquish power...
...In My Life, "Judaism in Music," and other writings Wagner presented caricatures of "Jewish" speech, music, and personal characteristics and these mark the characters of Beckmesser in Meistersinger and Alberich, Mime, and Hagan in The Ring...
...He seeks to show, contrary to popular views, that Wagner did not transform from pre-1848 liberal into post-1849 racist...
...Philip Rahv once used Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development—the notion that an epoch may contain variant but interactive historical and socioeconomic structures (for example, feudal and capitalist)—to explain how Dostoyevsky's novels could be "radical in sensibility and subversive in performance" despite their author's reactionary beliefs...
...Rose thinks Wagner's operas are intrinsically prejudiced but would ban them in Israel, where, presumably, they cannot foster anti-Semitism...
...his notions are often as ill-digested as they are passionately advocated...
...Rose contends that Wagner should be banned in Israel not because his music distresses Holocaust survivors but because in an "instant" age of mass media, the slaughter of six million Jews will be forgotten without recourse to proper ritual...
...The problem is that vitriolic anti-Semitism was a Motiv of his life...
...Indeed, he defends a striking proposal, which follows suggestions by Adorno and musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez and to which I shall return, that the way to salvage Wagner is to be unfaithful to him...
...and who imputed criticisms of him by Nietzsche to the fact that the latter masturbated too often...
...The imaginative function of music in drama and that of poetry in drama are fundamentally the same," writes Joseph Kerman in Opera as Drama...
...Wagner's skewed worldview was that of a romantic anticapitalist, someone in rebellion against the fast-changing, industrializing world around him, but not on behalf of a future vision of a revolutionary modern rational industrial society...
...We may extend the query: what happens when the music is, well, music...
...and sang "Deutschland iiber Alles...
...in the morning he could be fixated on water and baths, in the evening, on the ills of Italian and French opera, or something else...
...Yet now Siegfried has, from the splinters of Nothung, forged his own sword...
...3 (When Verdi learned of the defeat of papal armies in 1860 by Garibaldi and Cialdini, he proclaimed, somewhat altering the aesthetic questions posed by Stendhal's pistol-shot-in-the-concert, "Those are composers...
...he embodies change and impulse...
...Weaver and Martin Chusid, eds., The Verdi Companion (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 22...
...Let's look at Rose's book first...
...Following Adorno, I'd like to make a modest proposal, one that allows performance of Wagner's operas irrespective of his possibly anti-Semitic intentions...
...The Belgian tinderbox may have been ignited by a combination of sharps and flats and voices and words, but it was hardly fashioned by them—in fact, Auber was apolitical and only composed La Muette (in 1828) at the urging of his librettists to prove that, in contrast to his past work, he could write on serious themes...
...Of course Wagner assumed that his operas would bring about this "one," and the aim of his artwork was not the articulation of drama through music but the "emotionalizing of the intellect...
...In Lieu of a Finale The case of Wagner, it seems to me, must engender resignation: one must simply accept the unpalatable fact that great art sometimes comes of wretched people...
...Obviously, this wasn't the German case, and Wagner could accept no such judgment of modernity...
...Wagner seems to have had entirely contradictory moods at the same time: he wrote Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman concurrently, and they are radically different types of opera...
...In 1849 Republicans overthrew (temporarily) Papal authority and while Mazzini (himself the author of a book on the philosophy of music), Garibaldi, and their supporters armed themselves in Rome, Verdi conducted an opera there whose medieval protagonists, instead of proclaiming loyalty to their native towns as would have been the case in the Middle Ages, cried "Italia...
...the 25th, revolution...
...Wagner too looked back to the intimate relation between the Greeks and their theater— his Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) aimed to restore the organic links among music, poetry, and dance, fragmented like humanity in the post-Attic world...
...Indeed, the invention of opera, around the turn of the sixteenth century, came from a conscious attempt to reinvent ancient Greek music and its role in theater...
...Save when it linked words to music...
...If Wagner used the word "revolution" indiscriminately, that doesn't mean that someone writing about him should do so too, for the consequence is that neither the rabid genius nor anti-Semitism receive their just deserts...
...The composer imagined that the age crystallized in his being and his operas, and there is truth in this...
...Sachs persuades him that old and new must be mediated...
...there is no evidence that he recognized this or the inconsistency of both these minds with Schopenhauerian resignation...
...Wagner, in Meistersinger and Siegfried, expressed two minds at odds with one another...
...Music was deployed to enhance the intellect, and this, in turn, was meant to generate political engagement...
...Even after embracing Schopenhauerian resignation as the only comportment appropriate to a meaningless world, Wagner had to be immersed in luxury, as Barry Millington notes in his admirable study Wagner...
...who wrote for the theater, a world of illusions, but named his villa at Bayreuth Wahnfriedpeace from illusions...
...the actual history of human beings is secondary to the myth of their essence...
...If one cites him chattering about the Volk, one can also quote him speaking as a universalist...
...To the sound of guns...
...When Wotan punishes Briinnhilde for disobeying him in Die Walkiire, Wotan is on "the side of perverted Jewish legalism" and embodies bourgeois rulership...
...Tuesday, the 24th, illuminations...
...There was, indeed, nothing pleasant about him...
...Previously, Siegfried's father died in combat after Wotan withdrew protection from "Nothung" (Need), his sword...
...Act III begins just after the citizens of Ntirnberg have run riot...
...Postures like Rose's lend themselves to the political abuse of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust...
...through his displacement of enclosed musical forms (for example, a selfcontained aria) by "infinite melody," that is, meaningful musical continuity and direction throughout the work ("The art of composition is the art of transition," he wrote...
...The point is not to deny the radicalism, much less the prejudice, of Wagner...
...True, many operas were written solely for their music and the beauty of the human voice, rather than as vehicles of substantive meaning...
...Wagner's notorious essay, "Judaism in Music" (1850), held that it was not Jews but Germans who needed emancipation— from rootless Jews...
...who thought that "a human being who is born black, urged towards the heights, becomes white and at the same time a different creature...
...but the real naked man, in whom I might spy each throbbing of his impulses, each stir within his mighty muscles, in uncramped freest motion: the type of the true human being...
...he would allow them to be performed elsewhere, where "profoundly anti-semitic" works would, presumably, encourage anti-Semitism...
...Act III When Rose cites anti-Semitic themes in the operas, they are linked to three major strains: law, redemption, and money...
...Adorno argued that several of the operas are indeed racially loaded, even if none of the characters are overt stereotypes...
...It is a "modern prejudice," Rose warns, to see "revolution" and "race" as mutually exclusive, the one liberal and progressive, the other right wing...
...In contrast, Anthony Arblaster, in his recent study of politics in opera, Viva la Liberta, proposes that music itself may bear political meaning...
...On the other hand, enjoying the music of Das Rhinegold, say, without knowing that Alberich the dwarf, in stealing the gold from the Rhine maidens, forgoes love for power, is necessarily an impoverished appreciation of Wagner's opera...
...Forceful arguments have long been made that Wagner's prejudices informed his art...
...Yet if Rose has thought about opera, not to mention aesthetics, one finds no evidence of this in his pages...
...Israelis may not find this convincing, especially since Said then turns from Wagner and announces to London Review readers that all Zionist leaders favored "ridding Palestine of Palestinians by any means necessary" and that Israel was SUMMER • 1994 • 363 Politics at the Opera "projected" as an "Arab-free" state...
...It seems to me that Dieter Borchmeyer is correct to assert that Wagner captured a transitional moment between passing and future forms of Jew-hatred...
...This is not to say that some of his observations are not trenchant (I make some points similar to his...
...By 1848 Wagner "conceived a cogent revolutionary ideology" that would "satisfy him emotionally and intellectually for the rest of his life...
...They are based on—or, in Wagner's case, are secularizations of—traditional Christian notions...
...It is not in the ideational realm that Wagner is lucid...
...New doesn't vanquish old with the stroke of a sword named Need, but old and new are mediated...
...Each art has the final responsibility for the success of the drama, for it is within their capacity to define the response of characters to deed and situations...
...4 Barry Millington, Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984...
...Moreover, his prejudicial mélange parallels that of his political and philosophical ranting...
...rather it can "materialize thoughts" or "give forth their emotional contents...
...Adorno was right when he said that "Wagner makes the case for myth, but accuses it through his creation...
...But here we run into problems...
...The cogency of Wagner, who aimed to emotionalize the intellect, is musical and not rational...
...the starkness of its contentions and the relentless tendentiousness of its arguments make it a convenient means by which to approach an array of questions...
...to Nordic/Germanic myths...
...Such can be the case but, as Howe showed in literature, it isn't necessarily so...
...It fuses revolutionism and antiSemitism, the latter decisively shaping the former...
...Rose, who is stingy in crediting predecessors, goes much further: "Hatred of Jewishness is the hidden agenda of virtually all the operas...
...But then some people think that however often Judaism was conflated with capitalism by bigots in nineteenth century Germany, it was also possible to criticize capitalism on account of capitalism...
Vol. 41 • July 1994 • No. 3
