The Road to Bayreuth

...Similar complaints, albeit not musically based, were voiced by one Ernst von Pidde in his unintentionally hilarious pamphlet, " 'Ring des Nibelungen' im Licht des deutschen Strafrechts" (" 'The Ring' in the Light of the German Penal Code") Von Pidde scours the Ring for crimes and misdemeanors, handing down sentences In his peroration, the half-crazed legal counsel quotes Schiller's lambent verse, Der-fremde Zauber reisst die Jugend fort ("The foreign magic sweeps our youth away"), and declaims "That may apply in Switzerland But the German nation will know how to protect its young " Wagner's great structural innovation, the leitmotif technique, has provoked further wrangling between those who regard its free-associative suppleness as the extension of subjectivity in the later Beethoven, and those who denounce it as the mechanistic death blow to thematic development His genius at orchestration passes in some circles as an expansion, in others as a dilution of musical substance Martin Gregor-Dellin, the German author and scholar, has the credentials to tell Wagner's story His new biography is the product of 15 years' research Before this book he prepared the complete annotated edition of the composer s autobiography, Mem Leben In addition, he coedited the diaries of Cosima \\ agner, the composer s infinitely protectee and adoring second wile, the daughter of Franz Liszt, who braved convention and bore Wagner s three children while si ill mai ned lo her hrsi, protoundl\ humiliated husband, Hans \on Bulow Gregoi-Dcllm uimmands the primary sources (voluminous diaries, letters, tracts and more) as well as the immense secondary literature, and he brings a comprehensive knowledge of 19th-century history and culture to bear on his subject Moreover, he has polished his narrative skills in numerous works of fiction Gregor-Dellin is scrupulous about dates (though he omits many and does not always make the others easy to find), he even reconstructs the turbulent climax of Wagner's revolutionary career in Dresden day by day He claims to settle once and for all the questions surrounding Wagner's paternity (legitimate, he finds) and the cause of Nietzsche's breach with his former idol (the composer's tactless meddling in the philosopher's psychosexual health, not the apparent espousal of Christian symbolism in Parsifal, he says, drove Nietzsche to heartbroken vengefulness and spite) In general, the author presents the facts as he has sifted them, without prejudice or favor It gratifies a low curiosity to hear once more that until the demented, suicidally impolitic King Ludwig II of Bavaria stepped forward as the troublesome, unreliable deus ex machina in Wagner's never-ending melodrama, the composer was constantly hounded by creditors It is interesting, too, to read again of his disastrous first marriage, and of the muses, glamorous and lowly, grand and domestic, who ministered to his boundless craving for romance and comfort And the discussion of Wagner's chaotic attitude toward Jews (often contradicted in his behavior) is worthwhile Other well-worn tales, like the Tannhauser fracas in Pans, are colorfully retold All the same, there is something deeply pedestrian about this epic contribution Neither Wagner himself nor the swirling cast (from his valet Georg to such diverse notables as Bakunin, Bismarck and Queen Victoria) come alive on the page Nietzsche alone gets a coherent portrait here, but as Gregor-Delhn rightly points out, the philosopher was not the consuming presence in Wagner's life that Wagner was in Nietzsche's Where the biographer tries to shape events into quasiliterary forms, as in recounting the Jessie Laussot fiasco or the "royal comedy" initiated by Ludwig's summons, the results are self-conscious, patronizing and contrived Most often, the supporting players drift in and out, barely introduced, hard to distinguish, their actions explained (if at all) by novelistic truisms The protagomst himself is reduced to his crackpot enthusiasms (hydrotherapy one day, Schopenhauer the next), his chronic ailments (erysipelas, sluggish bowels), his arrogance, his peeves, his love of luxury, his conducting schedule, his spellbinding readings, his mil-lenananism, his delusions, his money troubles The single overriding factor that lends interest to all this—Wagner's genius—is treated in the merest asides Nor does Gregor-Dellin have much to say about Wagner's sense of humor (an unsuspected quality not discernible in the biographer's numerous examples) The book's handful of hit-and-run interpretive suggestions are provocative, but are never really explored J Maxwell Brownjohn's translation is readable enough Unfortunately, little attempt has been made to clue the reader in to the countless unfamiliar allusions The defect is serious, since an offhand remark frequently packs far-reaching value judgments Struwwel-peter, that unkempt wild child of German nursery rhyme, is not identified The brief gloss on Marquis Posa, from Schiller's great tragedy Don Carlos, does not indicate what he stands for Worse still, unattnbuted snippets from Wagner's librettos are worked into the text at key points, set off by quotation marks without the German Brownjohn apparently is relying on the reader to place them correctly without the original wording to go on Given such lapses, it is perhaps not surprising (though hardly excusable) that the Bibliography has been "condensed to major sources and works available in English ", we are referred to the German edition for fuller listings The Chronology is sketchy and the Index, which looks imposing, is riddled with errors and omissions...

...The Road to Bayreuth Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century By Martin Gregor-Delhn Translated by J Maxwell Brownjohn Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 575pp $25 00 Reviewed by Matthew Gurewitsch Contributing editor, "High Fidelity", editorial board, "Opera Quarterly" From his own day down to ours, Richard Wagner (1813-83) has inspired passions reminiscent of a holy war in his faithful and in infidels The causes for controversy are rooted both in his history and in his art An esthetic and political crusader, he possessed convictions that collapse under rational scrutiny, without, however, losing their power to polarize His inability to distinguish between art and true religion attracted the circle of fanatics who became keepers of the flame after his death and prompted other contemporaries to violently reject his gospel and works In our century, the anti-Semit-ic delirium of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (completed in 1867) and the four operas comprising the cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen—Das Rheingold (1854), Die Walkure (1856), Siegfried (1869), Gotterdammerung (187r4)—acquired an extra gloss in the eyes of the self-styled master race For many, by no means Jews alone, the hateful ideology contaminates every note of his music Indeed, his thinking on most non-musical subjects is as coarse and sim-pleminded as it is grandiose in pursuit of final solutions The countless tracts he wrote are divisive and partisan Asa result, they do not hold up as subtexts for his fully realized artistic creations The mammoth, frescolike music dramas actually avoid taking sides They suspend judgment, conflict and ambivalence are twisted into every thread of their fabric This is a consequence of Wagner's emotional preoccupations, which he regarded as his "philosophy " He was obsessed with the primordial incompleteness of human-kind, with a longing for wholeness, with redemption Those themes link the canon, from his breakthrough, Der fliegende Hollander (1841) to the valedictory Parsifal (1882), and even weave through the conciliatory, unpretentiously profound Meistersmger In Hollander, the restless soul of the Dutchman at last finds harbor in a young maiden's faithful love, in Tann-hauser (1844, revised 1860), the hero vacillates between a spiritual and an erotic ideal, in Lohengrin (1848) the saintly Knight of the Grail must withdraw to the chaste retreat of Monsalvat as soon as his identity is known Yet despite the deep resonance of these stories, they do not go a step beyond available romantic cliches The master-works of Wagner's maturity—theRing, Tristan und Isolde (1859) and Parsifal (Meistersmger being hors concours)?pierce deeper, but not because they wrestle with more profound "ideas " They merely explore the same closed set of feelings with greater urgency From Hollander through Lohengrin, although the external predicaments are not simple, the characters are Thereafter, complexity invades the protagonists themselves, and increasingly finds its outward expression in images of bodily injury, mutilation and sickness unto death Wotan, the god who rules by contract but undermines his own dominion by mental reservations and outright deceit, loses an eye before the curtain rises on Das Rheingold (Whether he is seen as suffering this loss to win his wife or to drink at the fount of primal knowledge depends on whether one accepts his own words or those of the omniscient Norns of Gotterdaminenm perhaps the variant explanations are two ways ol saying the same thing ) The wounded Tnstan lies languishing through the entire third act of the opera that bears his name, and tears his bandages in ecstasy at the approach of his beloved And Amfort as,guardian of the Holy Grail, hovers in terminal agony during all of Parsifal The penitent, enigmatic temptress Kundry, who has been his downfall, is the only female character in Wagner of comparable complexity The parallels between her salvation and that of Amfortas, both by Parsifal, the holy fool, suggest that she and her victim are aspects of a single consciousness—Wagner's her seduction of Amfortas is an allegory of a soul defiling itself So the mature Wagner's heroes are less dramatic characters than embodiments of states of mind The same is true of the equally arresting but not as fractionated heroines, Sieglinde and Brunn-hilde—in the Ring—and the feral Isolde In any case, whether Wagner casts his action on the cosmic plane (as in the Ring) or plunges into the depths of mysticism (as in Tristan and Parsifal), his epic librettos and symphonic megastructures show no more analytic rigor, synthetic force, or speculative invention than will serve to put across a personal and morose point of view The quarrels over Wagner's ideas still rage, even though Ernest Newman debunked the notion of Wagner as a moral or social theorist in the 1920s, long before the Holocaust When, for example, maestro Zubin Mehta tried to skirt the ban on Wagner's music in Israel by inserting the "Liebestod" and "Prelude" from Tristan as an encore at a concert of the Israel Philharmonic, the ensuing riots made the evening news in the United States Wagner's ideological detractors are not moved by the observation that while the Ring celebrates charismatic leaders and totalitarianism, it predicts the crumbling of empire in under a thousand years The ambiguities of the composer's luxuriant harmonies have also met with outrage The music teacher in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, Herr Ptuhl, is a representative specimen ol this reaction When asked to pertorm some piano arrangements from Tristan, he cries "1 cannot pla\ that, mv dear ladv' 1 am your most devoted servant—but I cannot That is not music—believe me1 I have always flattered myself I knew something about music—but this is chaos' This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness' It is perfumed fog, shot through with lightning It is the end of all honesty in art I must lay down my office, I assure you, if you drive me to it by asking me to play these atrocities1 Look, the child sits there listening—would you then utterly corrupt his soul...