“This collection provides us with that rarest of objects: a genuinely new book on Wagner. Virtually every page offers fresh perspectives, some of them mined from the most unlikely of sources; indeed, the sheer eclecticism of the book, its willingness to range widely and irreverently through both popular and elite culture, is one of its greatest strengths.”―Roger Parker, author of Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio

“John Deathridge is one of the most authoritative, widely-regarded Wagner scholars around in any language. Few can match his command of scholarship and primary sources, and no one else knows how to put them to such clever, provocative uses. In addition, Deathridge enjoys an impressive range of critical, historical, and literary reference. The writing is consistently lively and engaging. The collection will provide a welcome change of diet for those tired of the usual Wagnerian fare. This is a welcome contribution, indeed.”―Thomas Grey, author of Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts

John Deathridge is King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College London. He is the author, with Carl Dahlhaus, of The New Grove Wagner, co-editor of the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (WWV) and editor of, and contributor to, the English language edition of the Wagner Handbook.

Wagner Beyond Good and Evil

By JOHN DEATHRIDGE

University of California Press

Copyright © 2008 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25453-4

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………………………………………………..ixPART I. A FEW BEGINNINGS1. Wagner Lives Issues in Autobiography…………………………………………………………………………32. “Pale” Senta Female Sacrifice and the Desire for Heimat………………………………………………………..183. Wagner the Progressive Another Look at Lohengrin………………………………………………………………31PART II. DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN4. Fairy Tale, Revolution, Prophecy Preliminary Evening: Das Rheingold……………………………………………..475. Symphonic Mastery or Moral Anarchy? First Day: Die Walkre……………………………………………………..546. Siegfried Hero Second Day: Siegfried…………………………………………………………………………617. Finishing the End Third Day: Gtterdmmerung………………………………………………………………….68PART III. THE ELUSIVENESS OF TRAGEDY8. Don Carlos and Gtterdmmerung Two Operatic Endings and Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel……………………………..799. Wagner’s Greeks, and Wieland’s Too…………………………………………………………………………..102PART IV. TRISTAN UND ISOLDE10. Dangerous Fascinations…………………………………………………………………………………….11311. Public and Private Life Reflections on the Genesis of Tristan and Isolde and the Wesendonck Lieder…………………11712. Postmortem on Isolde………………………………………………………………………………………133PART V. MATURE POLEMICS13. Strange Love, Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Parsifal…………………………………………….15914. Mendelssohn and the Strange Case of the (Lost) Symphony in C…………………………………………………..17815. Unfinished Symphonies……………………………………………………………………………………..189PART VI. OPERATIC FUTURES16. Configurations of the New………………………………………………………………………………….20917. Wagner and Beyond…………………………………………………………………………………………227List of Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………………………241Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………….243Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………283Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………….285

Chapter One

Wagner Lives

Issues in Autobiography

Wagner’s biography has been researched to within an inch of its life. It has been dissected, drenched with no end of detail, eroticized, vilified, heroicized, and several times filmed. Its foundations are the collected writings, which in the first instance Wagner edited himself in the spirit of an autobiographical enterprise; a separate and lengthy autobiography, Mein Leben (My life), dictated to his mistress and later second wife, Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt; notebooks and diaries; photographs and portraits; an unusually large number of letters; mounds of anecdotal gossip; and no end of documentation on the way he lived and how his contemporaries saw him. In this sense, he is almost the exact antithesis of Shakespeare, whose life, or at least what is safely known about it in terms of verifiable “facts,” can be told in a relatively short space. I have summarized the history of Wagner biography elsewhere. Here I want to look at Wagner’s own portrayals of his life, some issues they raise, the philosophical spirit in which I believe they were attempted, and their effect on the generation that came immediately after him.

Biographers of Shakespeare have had to resort to imaginative reconstructions and not infrequently to knowingly forged documents that have accorded their subject more lives than a cat. In stark contrast, there appears to be only one life for Wagner, which he did his best to determine in large part himself. It was also a singular life in another sense: he was a maverick, turbulent, exceptionally creative on many levels, never afraid to attempt the impossible, uncannily prescient of modern thinking about media and human psychology, genuinely revolutionary in aspiration, and yet prone to an institutionalism with protofascist traits that were largely, but not only, the result of posthumous aggrandizement on the part of his apostles and admirers. In all its colorful detail, the story has been repeated so many times-with its hero’s adventures, amours, tribulations, and eventual acceptance among Western music’s cultural elite all in their proper place-that at first sight it seems like a never-changing biographical myth.

To speak of Wagner’s life in the singular, however, is seriously to underestimate his own sophisticated view of biography and autobiography and the appreciable distance of that view from the standard mapping of famous lives in the nineteenth century. Lytton Strachey rightly spoke in his Eminent Victorians of the “air of slow, funereal barbarism” of the (normally) two leather-bound volumes produced by the biographical undertaker of Victorian times, whose bounden duty it was to incarcerate the distinguished personage in an everlasting literary mausoleum. There is no reason to suppose that Wagner would have disagreed with him. Strachey admitted the value of these gloomy reservoirs of information for his speculative approach to biography. And Wagner, too, was not slow to appoint an official biographer, Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, who began with the obligatory two volumes, later expanding them to six after Wagner’s death. A schoolteacher from Riga, Glasenapp not only had frequent personal contact with the subject of the biography and hence ample opportunity to get acquainted at first hand with his memories and intentions, but he also obtained privileged access to many sources zealously protected by his immediate family. These included the diaries of Cosima, which she continued from day to day with a stubborn and almost bureaucratic thoroughness for fourteen years until just before Wagner’s death, supremely conscious of the biographical burden that had been placed upon her.

THE “LIFE” AS A TOTALITY

Wagner began dictating Mein Leben to Cosima on 17 July 1865 in Munich at the request of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He finally finished its fourth and last part (covering the years 1861-64) fifteen years later in Naples on 25 July 1880. The first page of the manuscript (entirely in Cosima’s hand except for corrections and additions by Wagner) bears their entwined initials “W[agner] R[ichard] C[osima].” This signaling of a pact between them was subsequently reinforced by the beginning of Cosima’s diaries four years later on 1 January 1869, effectively turning her for good into the historian of her husband-to-be (they were married on 25 August 1870), despite her ostensible intention, expressed in the very first entry, to convey to her children “every hour” of her life, and not his. There were occasional doubts:

I want to convey the essence of R. to my children with all possible clarity, and in consequence try to set down every word he speaks, even about myself, forgetting all modesty, so that the picture be kept intact for them-yet I feel the attempt is failing: how can I convey the sound of his voice, the intonations, his movements, and the expression in his eyes? But perhaps it is better than nothing, and so I shall continue with my bungling efforts.

Still, Cosima’s awareness that the aging composer would never have the inclination or the energy to complete Mein Leben, which ends with the young king calling Wagner to Munich in 1864 and pulling him out of a spiral of impecuniousness and anxiety, made her increasingly certain that she would be regarded as the authentic biographical conduit of his life’s final stage. Not unjustly described by one prominent critic as “the foreign secretary of the Holy Grail,” she soon became, after his death, the long-standing prime minister of everything concerning the perpetual refurbishment of his legacy. Only three days before he died, he told her that he still intended “to finish the biography.” Even this was only the last remnant of an earlier promise he had made to the king that he would continue Mein Leben up to the moment his wife had herself begun “to keep a most exact record of my life and work, so that after my death my whole life up to the last hour will one day be available in every detail [lckenlos] to my son.”

Wagner’s ambition to present his life to his son in its totality with the aid of Cosima’s diaries raises three complicated issues. First, in terms of its narrative strategy and underlying ideology, the concept depends to no small extent on the inclusion of his own death. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, the first part of which was published in 1782, placed the vanity of his life and its immediacy in the foreground-unremitting self-knowledge as a bastion against the untruth of the mere biographer’s “ingenious fictions”-and did not envisage the prospect of death because the present emotion of the subject and the reliving of the subject’s history in the act of writing were for him all important. A certain confessional style and the reenactment of history subjectively in the moment were crucial for Wagner too, as we shall see. The creation of the self through writing, however, was conditioned in Wagner’s case to a great extent by a score settling with the outer world. In turn this outer world was envisaged as a history in need of “correction” that must culminate, according to the metaphysics of pessimism that pervade his works and writings, in the welcome escape of the subject in death.

A second issue arises from the fact that anyone wanting to present his life in literary form-especially a life like Wagner’s, which has been lived in the supposed spirit of a Greek tragic hero transposed into the mayhem of the modern world (a common male autobiographical model in the nineteenth century)-knows that it will be impossible to narrate the all-important death of the hero in his own words. To put it another way, the search for wholeness in autobiography is plagued by the difficulty that in the real world one cannot tell the tale from a position beyond the grave, unlike countless fictions (e.g., the film Sunset Boulevard) that take advantage of a narrator miraculously able to recount his own death and the logical steps of the life that led up to it. There is no doubt that the older Wagner became the more remorselessly he pursued this idea of the single life “up to the last hour” that could be presented to posterity as a unified vision. He did not enter into intimate relations with Cosima solely to ensure the survival of that vision. But she was nearly twenty-five years younger (and outlived him by forty-seven years), making it clear from the start that she would in all likelihood be in a position to finish the story on his behalf.

The much-discussed issue of gender relations in nineteenth-century biography and autobiography is a third issue, if only because the striking narrative reticence of Cosima’s diaries does not always conceal the real sentiments of a strong-willed woman under the severe constraints of obligatory self-erasure. On 21 November 1874, the momentous day that saw the completion of Der Ring des Nibelungen twenty-six years after it had been started, Cosima experienced some shabby treatment from her husband. Instead of uttering the usual passive words of the admiring wife, she involved her own feelings in the situation with some unusually revealing thoughts. Launching into a bitter description of how she and her children had burst into tears, she asked, not without self-pitying rhetoric, why she was being denied the right to celebrate the completion of the grand project to which she had dedicated her life “in suffering”: “How could I express my gratitude other than through the destruction of all urges toward a personal existence? … If a genius completes his flight at so lofty a level, what is left for a poor woman to do [except] to suffer in love and rapture?” What follows in the diaries is still more eloquent. There are no entries at all until 3 December 1874: almost two weeks of complete silence.

The redoubtable Mrs. Oliphant, discussing Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1882, pointed out that this “noble memorial” to Lucy’s deceased Roundhead husband was erected without a single “I” in the narrative, followed by Lucy effacing herself, “as if she died with him.” Cosima did use the “I,” as we have just seen, though for much of the time it was part of a tense conformity to the ideology of female sacrifice in the name of male authority that included recording the life of that authority “up to the last hour.” But on 13 February 1883, the day of Wagner’s death, Cosima wrote nothing. She took no food for hours, insisted on being alone with his body for the rest of the day and night, cut off her hair and laid it in his coffin, accompanied the body from Venice back to Bayreuth in black robes, and remained hidden from sight for more than a year, receiving nobody and speaking only to her children. Only through Lucy Hutchinson’s reticence about her role in her husband’s life, Mrs. Oliphant suggested, did she achieve immortality for herself. Stung by rumors of an imminent decline in the fortunes of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, Cosima returned from her condition of extreme self-denial to become its renowned guardian for more than twenty years-a right she knew she had earned in the eyes of society after years of discreet labor and self-effacement, most of them recorded faithfully by the diaries that were to secure her lasting fame.

THE REWRITTEN DIARY AND METAPHORS OF EXPERIENCE

In terms of genuine autobiography, Wagner’s life remains a fragment to this day. Moreover, the fate of the diary he started when barely in his twenties in correct anticipation of his illustrious career is indicative of an unexpected complexity with respect to not only sources, but also the nuanced, and indeed modern, view he took of the whole enterprise. The early diary is known as “The Red Pocket-Book” (Die rote Brieftasche) because in Mein Leben Wagner reports that in August 1835 he began using “a large red pocket-book” to make notes for his “future [auto-]biography.” To King Ludwig he described this document as a means of sketching “vivid tokens of experience, as if for the eye” (plastische Merkmale des Erlebten, gleichsam fr das Auge) in order to hold on to a quasi-visible memory of his impressions and their “inner feeling” (des innerlich Empfundenen). This striking statement transforms the diary at once from an omnium-gatherum of facts into tiny snapshots of a life serving to remind their creator of his subjective reactions to the events in it.

A few years later, Wagner’s recording of his life became still more interesting. At the point in the dictation of Mein Leben when, within its narrative, his health and finances really began to take a turn for the worse (Easter 1846), he sat down-in February 1868-to create a second diary out of the first. These revised “vivid tokens of experience” are known as the “Annals,” which in their complete form run to thirty-six pages of print. Except for its first four pages, which only go as far as Wagner’s arrival in Paris on 17 September 1839, the rest of “The Red Pocket-Book” is lost, most commentators assuming, though no proof exists, that Wagner simply destroyed it. According to one, “the further forward he got in the portrayal of his life, the more he felt constrained by the fact that the Pocket-Book naturally contained a great deal that was impossible to dictate [in Mein Leben] to his friend and later wife.” Given Cosima’s forbearance in her diaries toward his past affairs, the observation is not entirely compelling. But the same scholar then came up with a less banal reason: “he also wanted to see some things differently to when he first made a note of them under the immediate impression of what he was experiencing at the time.”

All of a sudden we are in Proustian territory. To support the idea of autobiography as process-never finished, never complacent-Wagner clearly felt the need to confront experiences noted in the past with an immediate response in the present to his recorded memory of them. Or, as Georges Gusdorf put it in a seminal essay on autobiography, “a second reading of experience … is truer than the first because it adds to experience itself a consciousness of it.” The factual discrepancies between Wagner’s earlier and later accounts of himself and their many striking changes of emphasis can therefore be accounted for by his instinct for a double-edged narrative informed by a philosophical awareness of its own process. He regarded his life as a totality-an epitaph configured by the element of death as an endpoint that paradoxically attempted to convey his life as he lived it. But he also wished to present his life as a series of lived “moments” that resist the idea of a finite end, a contradiction reflecting both an underlying discomfiture with the image of himself as eternal monument, and a hankering for the status that image enjoyed in the nineteenth century.

Skeptical observers with forensic instincts may wince at this argument, unable to quell suspicions of an elaborate ruse to justify some barefaced lying on Wagner’s part. Indeed, the problematic aspect of Gusdorf’s argument is the claim that the “literary, artistic function” of autobiography is of greater importance than its “historic and objective function in spite of the claims made by positivist criticism.” Gusdorf admits that the historian has a duty to countermand self-biography with cold facts and alternative narratives. But he is not prepared to concede the exposure of the “literary, artistic function” as ideology, or, to put it more benignly, to admit that the literary approach itself can serve to distort fact in the name of a larger vision with its own subjective “truth” that transforms harsh realities into positive and powerful images. Wagner’s claim in Mein Leben that he heard Wilhelmine Schrder-Devrient sing Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio in Leipzig in 1829 has no evidence to support it. And the scholarly fuss that ensued after the present author wrote that in The New Grove Wagner (1984) still failed to produce any. The observation was not meant to discredit Wagner. On the contrary, it was intended to draw attention to a deliberately constructed metaphor of huge psychological importance to him in his later years: the great singer of his youth as a redemptive “woman of the future,” carrying the spirit of Beethoven and the destiny of true German art in her hands.

(Continues…)

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