Richard Wagner Essay, Research Paper
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Wagner: critical essay
I have a friend, Matthew, who is a Wagnerian. For those of you who don’t
know what that exotic species is, “Wagnerian” denotes someone who
listens to the operas of Richard Wagner and loves them to a degree
bordering on the unreasonable. And he’s continually amazed by the fact
that I don’t get off on Wagner to the degree that he does. He also hit
me once when I referred to Wagner as a proto-Nazi. Granted we were both
a bit drunk at the time, but even so, you may get a bit of an idea how
much respect and love Matthew has for the various works of Richard W.
Nonetheless, I stand by both of those statements. There’s no point
denying the proto-Nazi thing, since handsome Adolf said it himself:
“whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must first
understand Wagner.” Michael Tanner tries to minimise Wagner’s effect on
the development of Nazi Germany by saying Hitler was the only one in the
Nazi hierarchy who actually liked Wagner, and all the others had to be
dragged to Wagner productions under protest, but even so I don’t think
he denies Wagner’s influence outright. And even if anti-Semitic views
were less unfashionable in the earlier part of this century than they
are these days (certain quarters like the KKK notwithstanding) so that
Hitler could really have picked them up from anywhere, he himself speci
fically referred to Wagner as his source. So let’s stop quibbling on
this point.
I’m also going to stand by my other statement about Wagner not really
doing it for me. I don’t have problems with 19th century Romanticism.
(of which Wagner became by common consent one of the greatest exemplars
and proponents) per se, and I’d rather have that than the stiffly formal
and correct classicism of the 18th century more often than not. But even
so, I’m not blind to its shortcomings, and there are times when the
Romantic fits and seizures become too much. Wagner, to me, represents
Romantic excess. There was a great moment once in the TV series
Blackadder where Blackadder describes just how evil the Germans are:
they have no word for “fluffy” and their operas last three or four days.
The first example is slightly exaggerated perhaps (say hi to the word
flaumig, Edmund), but in the case of Wagner’s Ring der Nibelungen, the
gibe is cruelly true. The whole thing really does last for four days (or
evenings, at least).
This is what I mean by excessive. Granted that the Ring is of course a
series of four operas, not one, it’s still too much. I’ve written before
about how I don’t like Mozart much, and one of the things I said then is
that the sheer volume of young Wolfgang’s output is one of the things
that defeats me when I approach it. Wagner’s excesses are in the
opposite direction; he wrote relatively few operas but they were almost
all mind- and arse-numbingly long. I don’t think any of them (other than
perhaps The Flying Dutchman) clock in below three hours and most go over
four. Way too much to handle for me.
Still, I’ve actually made an effort to get a handle of Wagner. A
semi-proper effort too, not the half-arsed surface scratch job I did on
Mozart. In preparation for this here bit of writing, I’ve done a bit of
reading and also some more listening?notably, finally listening to the
whole of the Ring for the first time. Way back when I did music at UNSW
in 1993 I heard the first two operas in the cycle, Das Rheingold and Die
Walk?re, then never heard them again for nearly six years (except for an
old Bruno Walter recording of Walk?re Act I at Bowen Library) until I
picked them up again a few weeks ago, and I’d never heard the other two?
Siegfried and G?tterd?mmerung?at all before now. This naturally had a
rather grievous effect on my perception of the whole work, and really it
wasn’t until I started preparation for this thing here that I even
realised really what the story was. So I think I’ve come to a better
appreciation of what Wagner was trying to achieve with the Ring, and
these days I’m prepared to give him more credit than I’ve been in the
past.
Wagner’s source for his exhausting epic was the old German poem the
Nibelungenlied, which was probably given its final form around the same
time as the stories of Parzival and Tristan and Isolde were taking
shape, i.e. about the end of the 12th/start of the 13th century. Those
other medieval stories were the source of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
and his final opera Parsifal. However, having heard the latter and
having also read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, which was Wagner’s
specific source text in that case, I know just what liberties Wagner
took with his source to come up with his own text. I haven’t read any of
the Tristan stories other than Malory’s version of it in his Chronicle
of King Arthur and I don’t know what particular version Wagner used for
Tristan und Isolde, but I suppose he did something similar.
And he certainly played about with the Nibelungenlied. Even if you look
no further than the table of contents, you realise how much he left out.
The whole second half of the story, to be precise, in which Siegfried’s
death is avenged with a little help from Attila the Hun. Brunnhilde’s
position in the original is entirely different, and the gods have only
the smallest of bit parts in the poem. Arguably Wagner’s filleting of
Parzival was a lot worse than that, but that’s heavy enough. Fritz
Lang’s 1920s films of the story, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge, are
much more faithful to the Nibelungenlied than Wagner’s operas. (And just
as Wagner’s Ring cycle was Hitler’s favourite opera [or operas], Lang’s
Nibelungen films were apparently his favourite films.)
An advantage the Lang films have over the Wagner operas, apart from
their greater textual fidelity, is their brevity compared to the
duration of the Ring. They’re still fairly long?the versions I have on
video occupy about 3? hours of your time between them?but Wagner is four
or five times as long. The famous Solti recording adds up to near
fifteen hours of playing time. I personally dread to think how many
operas Wagner might have required if he had included all the events of
the Nibelungenlied that happen after Siegfried gets done in.
Given that these days people are supposed to have attention spans
lasting no longer than a few minutes, if even that much, this obviously
seems absurd. Fifteen hours, even over a number of nights, is a lot of
time to devote to something. The sheer length of it all has admittedly
been one of the things which has proved most daunting in any of my other
attempts to get a grip on Wagner. To sit and listen to Parsifal
continuously for four and a half hours proved extraordinarily difficult
when I tried it, and the first time I listened to Tristan I just
couldn’t do it and had to spread it over three nights, one act each
night. This was also what I finally wound up doing with Siegfried and
G?tterd?mmerung, splitting each one up over a few days. The amount of
mental preparation necessary even for that, to force myself to listen to
them at all, was considerable.
I say “listen” advisedly because I don’t habitually watch operas. I’ve
seen only one on a stage (an amateur production of Rigoletto) and seen a
few more on TV. But normally I discover operas through recordings of
them, and this is the case as well with the Ring (the recording in
question being the 1958-65 Solti set mentioned above). Given what I’ve
read about some of the more recent productions, especially some of the
ones perpetrated at Bayreuth, I’m not sure that I even want to actually
see a Ring production. Anyway, I like listening to operas and trying to
visualise them for myself by listening and reading the text.
What bothers me about some of these productions is a tendency many seem
to share to dislocate the text from its proper mythical point in time.
Patrice Chereau’s centenary production with the Rhinemaidens in a
hydro-electric dam and Fafner as a tank, for example. If the original
text has a reasonably specific historical setting, then I don’t see why
producers can’t stick to it. Obviously, being a work of “myth”, the Ring
doesn’t really have a specific historical date attached, although the
presence of Attila the Hun in the Nibelungenlied presumably places the
action around the mid-5th century AD. I’d be wary of updating that
setting too much in case the thing looked even more ridiculous than it
already is in many ways. (The 1957 Warner Bros cartoon What’s Opera Doc?
showed just how easy it is to take the piss out of Wagner’s
pretensions, with Bugs Bunny in Brunnhilde drag and Elmer Fudd singing
“Kill the WAB-bit!” to the tune of the Ride of the Valkyries. The best
joke, though, is that the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Tannh?user actually
provides most of the musical material for the cartoon.)
This isn’t to say we can’t interpret the Ring?I’m not so literal-minded
as to seriously think we can’t take the cycle on anything other than
face value?just that I have reservations about how some people seem to
interpret it. And I don’t think we need to burrow too deeply to find
meaning in this story of gods, giants, dwarfs, magical treasures and the
occasional human being. The story gives us the passing of the gods and
the rise of mankind, who are raised up by the power of those same gods
they cast aside. One system is vanquished by another system with help
from the first. If we accept the 5th century setting (which is
admittedly extremely tenuous), we could further read it as the victory
of Christianity over the pagan belief systems of whichever lands it
filtered into. Politically speaking this could be seen as revolutionary
(i.e. the replacement of the old with the new is inevitable) or
reactionary (i.e. there are ruling classes and lower classes, and good
reasons why the former shouldn’t let the latter get above their
station), so whether you choose to see this victory as wonderful or
lamentable is open to question. At any rate, though, I think this theme
of the displacement of the old gods and beliefs is a profound and
important one.
But even so, I keep wondering: does the bloody thing really need to go
on for as long as it does? Does it need to go on for fifteen or sixteen
hours? A grand theme is a grand theme and obviously all themes should be
given fitting treatment, but even so the Ring stretches one’s tolerance.
Tchaikovsky apparently said leaving the first production of the cycle at
Bayreuth in 1876 was like being released from prison. And I’ve always
liked Edgard Var?se’s comment on Parsifal, which can easily be extended
to any of Wagner’s other works: “Some of it is so grand, so strong, but
it goes on and on.” Don’t know about anyone else, but it cost me a
reasonable amount of effort to steel myself for the Ring, to force
myself to even listen to the last two parts one disc at a time with a
break in between each one.
The slowness with which the drama proceeds is a good part of the problem
as well for me. Other than Alberich and Mime in Siegfried, I don’t think
anyone else in the Ring gets to sing at a speed even approximating to
normal conversation. Obviously opera is not designed to approximate
conversation, of course, even I know that opera is about singing and not
speaking. But Wagner’s verse (not sure if it can be dignified with the
name “poetry”) reads to me like it has a sort of conversational quality,
by which I mean it could be declaimed on stage as dialogue if you
removed the music. It reads like people speaking rather than singing
songs. But when united with the music, however, things are slowed down
immeasurably. At times I feel like it’s taking ages for anything to
happen, possibly because it is. Combine this sluggishness with the
artifice inherent in all opera (and which occasionally becomes monstrous
in Wagner’s case), and all that grandeur and strength can become
somewhat crushing. It takes an effort to resist it.
It could be argued that my views on Wagner have been too strongly
influenced by Nietzsche, but I’m not a hundred percent sure of that. I
discovered both Wagner and Nietzsche in 1993, but didn’t get much into
Nietzsche until a couple of years after that?I started with Zarathustra,
of course, but don’t recall reading anything else by Nietzsche or
exploring him any more deeply for some while afterwards?by which time
I’d made more progress with Wagner, heard half of the Ring as well as
Tannh?user and a few other items, and hadn’t really been swept away by
them. I’m not even sure if I knew at that stage that Nietzsche was an
anti-Wagnerian; if I did then I’d certainly never read any of his
specifically anti-Wagner statements. I think I’d probably concur with
many things Nietzsche does say against Wagner, but whether he influenced
my opinions or whether he just reflected something I already felt is
certainly questionable.
And yet, does the fact that I like Nietzsche mean I can’t also like
Wagner as well? Of course not. Anyone who says otherwise is operating on
an untenable idea, that a person’s political, aesthetic, religious etc.
opinions should all unite harmoniously and be of a coherent piece, so
that the person becomes a coherent and easily classifiable unit. In
other words, the idea that if you like something then by rights you
should not like something else which is unlike that first thing. There
are things which you are not allowed to like. Wagner represented the way
of the future to the nineteenth century’s forward-thinkers, while
Johannes Brahms became the figurehead for the more conservative element.
Since the two were thus opposed, by rights I should not be allowed to
like them both.
But people aren’t coherent in that way, or if they are then they must be
exceedingly boring. Brahms doesn’t usually pose a problem for me, I must
say. I like most of what I’ve heard by him. But I like Wagner as well?at
least, for all my reservations, I think I like him more than I dislike
him, even if I may prefer some of his progeny (Mahler, Bruckner, etc.)
to Wagner himself. I have reservations about them at times as well, but
their best moments can be very fine, and I’m willing to admit this is
true of Wagner as well. It’s perfectly possible to find both Wagner and
Brahms acceptable, just as it is to find both Wagner and Nietzsche
acceptable. After all, Michael Tanner has written books on both of them,
and come out on both their sides. (Interestingly, he finds Nietzsche’s
later anti-Wagner comments more instructive than his earlier pro-Wagner
ones.)
I think Nietzsche was more profoundly ambivalent towards Wagner than he
was actually against him, though. His last book may have been called
Nietzsche Contra Wagner, but let’s not forget the first section of that
is called “Where I Admire”. He recognised what Wagner was good at, even
if he did not find Wagner’s art terribly healthy. My own ambivalence
towards Wagner is rather less profound than Nietzsche’s was, but it’s
still there. I don’t deny those moments when Wagner really does it for
me, but I find him somewhat problematic nonetheless. In short, I am
neither particularly pro nor contra Wagner. I am neither wholly for nor
wholly against. And this is why Matthew wonders about me, because Wagner
is an artist that you’re supposed to be either wholly for or wholly
against; I don’t feel a need to submit absolutely in raptures nor to
hurl masses of invective against him. He’s not supposed to inspire
people to occupy a relative middle ground in relation to him as I do,
hence Matthew has difficulty understanding my position.
Wagner’s personality was seemingly such that it virtually demanded you
make that one-or-the-other-no-compromise-possible decision. Wagner took
a particular view of art (especially his own) and its possibilities
which I’ve seen described elsewhere as “messianic”, which seems a fairly
good word so I’ll use it as well. He demanded an almost unreasonable
degree of loyalty from his supporters and followers, many of whom gave
him it (even Has von B?low, when he found Wagner shacking up with little
Cosima, stuck by him?and all the performers at the first Bayreuth