Longer Views (18 page)

“Obviously this enthusiast had attended the last performance of the
Ninth
” Wagner comments wryly in his journal. (The “Ode” is, of course, the choral text for the
Ninth's
final movement.) Later, when he had a moment to note the conflagration, Wagner (again in his journal) wrote: “Opera house now burned down; strangely contented.”

After meeting with Bakúnin, Wagner got Minna and Natalie (and the parrot and the dog) off to Chemnitz, after taking a last walk along where he had done much of his thinking, talking with friends, and composing, while the sounds of gunfire rattled through the melancholy spring morning. Leaving Minna and her little “sister” with his own married sister, Klara, he returned to Dresden on May 8th (Wagner writes May gth):

. . . the only safe way to advance was through shattered buildings, making my way toward the city hall on the old market place. It was already evening; what I saw offered a truly horrible picture, for I was passing through those parts of the city where everyone was prepared for house-to-house fighting. The unceasing roar of big and small arms fire made the other sounds of the armed men calling to one another from barricade to barricade, or from one shattered house to another, seem merely an uncanny murmur. Torches burned here and there, and pale exhausted figures lay about close to the guardposts, while stern challenges met the unarmed intruder.

At the city hall, everyone was exhausted. People's voices croaked or were hoarse. The old city council clerks stood around, cutting up sausages and spreading butter on slices of bread, while others distributed provisions to the hungry.

Heubner alone seemed to have retained his energy, though his eyes flickered with an “unearthly fire”; he had not really slept for seven nights. He was glad to see Wagner, and the two men conversed.

Bakúnin . . . received me on one of the mattresses which had been spread out in the city hall council chamber, a cigar in his mouth and at his side a very young Galician Pole, by the name of Haimberger, a young violinist whom he had referred to me recently for recommendation to Lipinsky for further training on his instrument . . . Bakúnin had made a place for him on the mattress, and gave him a vigorous slap on the back whenever he twitched at the sound of a heavy cannonfire. “You're a long way from your violin here,” he called out to him. “You should have stayed with it, musician.”

Bakúnin brought Wagner up to date. No one had seen the recently returned Röckel since the previous evening. He had probably been caught. Wagner told of the troops he'd seen between Chemnitz and Dresden, including several thousand reinforcements. Bakúnin and Heubner sent Wagner off to drum up more vehicles for the rebels, along with Wagner's old friend Marschall von Bieberstein, which the two men did, going to Freiberg and, after various adventures and some success, returning.

The retreat from Dresden had already begun before Wagner quite reached the city. Someone pointed out the coach carrying “the provisional government,” and Wagner flagged it down to join Heubner, Bakúnin, and the Rochlitz editor (remember Wagner's arguments for war) in the overloaded carriage on the trip to Erzgebirge—which is where we started our story in the previous section.

All that lay ahead was the dismounting, the trap, the missed coach, the arrest of Heubner and Bakúnin—and Wagner's flight.

* * *

Again, we must ask: Is there anything in all this
Sturm und Drang
that is in any way radical as we understand the word in its political sense today?

Certainly Wagner was aware of oppression. Shortly he was to write in his book,
Art and Revolution:
“Our modern factories present a wretched picture of utter human degradation: ceaseless exertion, destructive of mind and body, devoid of love and enjoyment—often, too, almost devoid of purpose.”

His answer to these ills, however, was neither a major redistribution of wealth nor any basic reorganization of society: what he proposed was to reinsert some enjoyment into the worker's lives, and that via music—Wagner's music.

The air of a socialist critique hovers about the
Ring
for the same reason that the air of a socialist revolution hovers about the incidents at Dresden—which is to say, because it
was
a revolution, complete with guns (and grenades), we associate it with the twentieth-century revolutions that we are more familiar with. Because the
Ring
grew out of a real revolutionary critique of society, we associate that critique with the most radical critiques of today, starting from
them
as we begin to unwind its allegorical threads. But though what the Dresdeners rebelled against was real enough, what it was a rebellion
for
simply could not be called in any way, by today's standards, radical.

In reviewing the words of Wagner's fiery prose poem “Revolution”—the Goddess of Revolution will come and destroy “the order of things that divorces enjoyment from labor, makes labor a burden and enjoyment a vice . . .”—one of Wagner's recent biographers, Gregor-Dellin, asks, in the midst of quoting one of Wagner's more Utopian flights from another unpublished fragment of this period where Wagner is waxing euphoric over a “communism” that will bring “the full emancipation of the human race and the fulfillment of pure Christian ideals”:

“Who was going to do the actual work?”

But the answer is the people who did it ordinarily; only now they would have wonderful music, composed by Wagner, to make them happy while they did it. Again, we must stress that even if it meant throwing a grenade, the conflict at Dresden was between Monarchy and Republic, not Monarchy and some form of socialism. And Wagner's rare use of the word “communism” in a positive context has to be
taken as the most idealistic of metaphors, rather than any sort of materialist program. When he does use “communism” in any material sense, as we saw in the January 12th speech to the Vaterlands-Verein, it is only to execrate it as “. . . that most fatuous and senseless doctrine . . .”

Those battles were to come—and, when they came, they would obscure much of the conservative theory behind the actions of men like Wagner with a radical aura.

Wagner saw the ills of society. He had real sympathy for the oppressed. He even had some understanding of the machinery through which society replicated its oppressions. But while his answers for those ills included the range of republican rights and liberties, they involved no fundamental reorganization of the social structure.

Higher wages, better working conditions, more leisure for the working classes?

He was certainly for them all. But what they were supposed to do with that leisure was to listen to more music; and that would make them fundamentally content with their lot. His analysis in the end was far closer to Dickens's than it was to Marx's. What would end the evils of humanity was less greed, greater spirituality, stronger love. God was dead. (Wagner was an atheist.) But art in general and music-dramas in particular could disseminate these feelings of love and great-heartedness throughout the people.

Art can, of course (and especially theatrical art), move an audience to great emotion. But the nineteenth century saw this as a material force that could work throughout society for the greater social good.

We have talked about the received idea, current in the nineteenth century, of the destruction of civilization as a prerequisite for the “new order.” But there was another received idea that runs through the whole of Wagner's thought and writing. That is the idea we discussed in terms of Matthew Arnold and English literature in our fourth chapter: i.e., all that reformers in England, from Arnold to Professor Gordon, believed literature would do, Wagner, among many others, believed music could do.

What probably strikes modern readers of
Mein Leben
as most odd is the tone in which Wagner, again and again, justified his activities by claiming that his only interest in the republican revolution was because of the possibility of theater reforms that it held out, the possibility of higher performance standards that could benefit, and even calm, a revolutionary populace. Wagner was certainly serious about the reality of musical performance. And it was precisely these emotions that, again and again, he wanted to appeal to—with his own work, and in his performances of the works of others.

In 1846 he had submitted a hundred-page proposal for the reorganization of the Dresden orchestra to the royal cabinet by way of the Theater Intendant, Baron August von Lüttichau, in which for all practical purposes he invented the modern orchestra as we know it. His proposal covered everything from the musicians' salaries to the placement of the players. This last is worth looking at, because, twenty years later at Bayreuth, Wagner was actually able to institute these changes; and from there they became standard orchestral practices all over the world. Till then, in most European opera houses the players sat with their backs more or less to the audience in a long line, two deep, across the theater. The conductor stood behind the orchestra, facing the stage, his back to the players and the audience, directly conducting the singers, for whom he also acted as prompter. Watching him from behind, the musicians did the best they could. Wagner suggested that the players be pulled together (much along the lines of his
Ninth Symphony
arrangement) so that they could see (and hear!) each other, and that the conductor stand in
front
of the orchestra and guide the players—and that the singers (first) learn their parts better and (second) take a cut in salary, which should be distributed among the orchestral players who more deserved it. He also suggested that the stolid wooden music stands be replaced with lightweight metal ones, which he'd designed. It is a commonsensical document with higher standards of performance as its goal, and must make anyone who has ever played in an orchestra, no matter how small, love Wagner—at least momentarily. We should remember, of course, that all through the nineteenth century such proposals for musical reform were being made by serious musicians all over Europe. Berlioz's biography abounds in such intelligent suggestions—and indeed such defeats:

Shortly after the Palm Sunday concert of 1847, right after Wagner moved into the Marcolini, his proposal had been rejected.

But it is only this belief in the possibility that art can be as great a force as religion once was that creates the grandiose potential in the artist's social position, as reflected in artists such as Hugo, Rossini, Sand, Byron, and—later, once Ludwig interfered—Wagner. And it is only this nineteeth-century belief that allows Wagner's explanation of his motivations to make sense at all and not seem a ratiocination too preposterous for any intelligent man to expect
anyone
to believe! It also explains why men like Röckel, Bakúnin, and Heubner would put such trust in an artist like Wagner in the first place or would consider having a conductor and opera composer, even if he was a Second Royal Kapellmeister, among their advisers and intimates.

Today, we might understand (though we would probably smile at,
even so) an artist who threw herself or himself so actively into such a revolution to “get material” for a work. (And that smile and those quotation marks sign an even further historical displacement of the artist's social position.) But that is not Wagner. Although the republican revolution gave him a view of the world that, indeed, marked all his subsequent work almost as strongly as it did Victor Hugo's, Wagner threw himself into that revolution in order to make manifest the real possibility of using what he saw—a possibility and a use that can only be understood in nineteenth-century historical terms.

In its final tableau, the allegory or the
Ring
leaves us with a silent, awed populace, void of articulation but full of expectation, standing among the ruins of history, metaphysically freed of the chains of religion and physically released from monarchy (a monarchy that they have not overthrown but that has simply destroyed itself through its own inner corruption and collapsed), ready now not for socialism but for elected leaders, trial by a jury of one's peers, education, science, public programs for the dissemination of the arts (art that would, indeed, perform the same tasks as religion once had in strictly monarchical times), and the universal (male) vote.

There are many aspects to Wagner that, if not discussed, leave our considerations radically incomplete. Yet this exploration can only be but so long. I should like here, for example, to explore Wagner's anti-Semitism.

Apologists for it, such as Bryan Magee and Martin Gregor-Dellin, to me seem to hover somewhere between troubling disingenuousness and true naïveté. Both appear wholly oblivious to the reality (and demonstrable social effects) of an active, incontrovertible, and energetically functioning social prejudice against the Jews in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, however subtle that prejudice could be or however often it was overtly denied. Even so meticulously researched a study as Jacob Katz's
The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism
, strikes me as somehow misguided. Professor Katz argues that before 1850, in the considerable documentation that exists on Wagner, there is no anti-Jewish statement from the man. During this time Wagner even championed Jewish writers, such as Heinrich Heine—and set two of Heine's poems to music. The notion that Wagner's later statements in
Mein Leben
—that, whether he said so or not, he felt repulsion against the Jews—are therefore suspect, seems to me to ignore the fact that the age under study was one in which, socially, conventions of
hyperbole and hypocrisy were rampant—so much so that we can hardly give them those names today without distorting them.

Certainly anti-Semitism is there in
Mein Leben
—right before the events of the revolutionary Dresden year—in Wagner's discussion of his friendship with the Jewish writer Berthold Auerbach, whose stories he had read and been impressed by. What remains seductive about it, even today, is that Wagner can listen to the stories of the childhood oppressions of his Jewish friends, can hear of the taunts they endured from others, can learn of the ostracism they suffered, all with true sympathy; “[But] . . . one day,” he tells us of Auerbach, “I turned to him in an amiable intimate way and advised him simply to let the Jewish question go hang; there were, after all, a number of other standpoints from which to judge the world. Curiously enough, he lost all his ingenuousness at that point, adopted what struck me as a not entirely authentic tone of whimpering emotion, and assured me he could never do that, as Judaism still contained too much that demanded his complete sympathy . . . When I saw him again in Dresden, I found his countenance changed in a disarming manner: he looked extraordinarily common and dirty; his former refreshing liveliness had turned into the usual Jewish fidgetiness, and every word he spoke came out in such a way that one could see he regretted not having saved it for the newspaper.” (In his study, Professor Katz refers to this account as having “an undertone” of anti-Semitism about it; I can only throw up my hands.) What Wagner is totally blind to is precisely what such blindness as his will lead to historically.