Thomas S. Grey

Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs

Introduction Wagners personal library at Dresden The Royal library in Dresden Wagners other Ring reading The work of 1848, 1: Der Nibelung-Mythus The work of 1848, 2: Siegfrieds Tod Young Siegfried The Ring Conclusion Appendix A Wagners Ring text: A chronological table Appendix B Wagners Nibelung studies Appendix C Wagners Edda reading Bibliography Index

Leitmotif, temporality, and musical design in the Ring

New paths In the first years of the nineteenth century, Ludwig van Beethoven famously announced to a friend, the violinist Wenzel Krumpholz, that he intended to embark on an entirely “new path.” Half a century later, in 1853, Robert Schumann proclaimed the advent of the young Johannes Brahms in the same terms – Neue Bahnen , new paths – in a valedictory feature of sorts in the progressive musical journal he himself had founded, the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik . This was a deliberate provocation, since the journals new editor, Franz Brendel, was currently championing the radical theories of Richard Wagner, which provided much better fodder for journalistic debate than did the mostly unpublished works of a quiet twenty-year-old pianist. Beethovens earlier “new path” gradually became apparent in works like the Eroica Symphony, while the novelty of Brahmss voice was much slower to be heard by the larger public. But probably the most emphatic decision made by any composer to chart a whole new course was that made by Wagner, at precisely the time of Schumanns tribute to Brahms. Indeed, Wagner himself later spoke of the “new path,” or neue Bahn , he entered in Das Rheingold .

Commentary: Opera in the Age of Revolution

Despite the apparent political subject matter of nineteenth-century opera, the aesthetic elements remained in the forefront. Practitioners, no less than audiences, placed more of a premium on factors relating to the operatic medium (style, vocal character, dramaturgical effect, and spectacle) than on political or social messages. Alternatively, such messages may have been embedded in issues of national style, apart from the implications of the drama enacted.

The “Romantic operas” and the turn to myth

In describing Der fliegende Hollander ( The Flying Dutchman ), Tannhauser , and Lohengrin as “Romantic operas,” Wagner fell back on a term that he had first used for Die Feen ( The Fairies ) in 1833–34, but the taxonomical similarity conceals an ideological difference that we can best understand only by briefly examining the conceptual background to these works. As a literary movement, Romanticism had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a protest against the utilitarian, skeptical spirit of the Enlightenment. If Kant had lamented the limits of the powers of reason, Fichte now proceeded to glorify the potentialities of the imagination, opening the floodgates of subjectivity and the irrational, often expressed in the language of Catholic mysticism. At first the movement was apolitical, but the sense of inadequacy induced by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and by the Wars of Liberation of 1813–15 led to a desire to escape from the sordid, reactionary present into a past in which Germany had once been united and strong. One of the leading apologists of the Romantic movement, August Wilhelm Schlegel, summed up the aims of his fellow poets with reference to this feeling of nostalgia: “The poetry of the ancients was that of possession, ours is that of longing.” Sehnsucht , or longing, became a leading motif of Romantic poetry, specifically a longing to re-create the world of the Middle Ages.

Wagner and the Third Reich: myths and realities

The subject of music in Nazi Germany invariably elicits the name Wagner, whether as a reference to Hitlers legendary adulation of the composer, to the notorious admiration for Hitler on the part of the composers (posthumous) daughter-in-law and Bayreuth festival director, Winifred Wagner, to the presumed prominence of Wagners music in the Third Reich, or to Wagners anti-Semitism as a harbinger of the extermination of European Jewry. Yet the multiple roles of “Wagner” – the man, the family, the works, and the cultural-ideological legacy – in the Third Reich cannot be understood without peeling away several layers of myth. While some of these myths arose in Hitlers Germany, most were inspired by German expatriates and developed from postwar debates resulting from the desperate attempts to explain how a highly cultured people could carry out such atrocities. scholars have only recently begun to sort the myth from the reality in assessing the functions of Wagner and Bayreuth in Nazi culture, politics, and musical life. The following exploration will examine the many roles of the phenomenon of “Wagner” in the Nazi state, considering Nazi-era realities as well as their postwar historical interpretations and, sometimes, distortions.

Der Ring des Nibelungen: conception and interpretation

The genesis of the Ring project The outline of the drama that was to become Der Ring des Nibelungen , namely “Der Nibelungen-Mythus: Als Entwurf zu einem Drama,” dates from October 1848, the same year as the “Plan for the Organization of a German National Theater for the Kingdom of Saxony,” Wagners radical proposal to establish an association of dramatists and composers along with a drama school and expanded court orchestra. That manifesto for theatrical reform naturally reflected Wagners sociopolitical outlook of the period, hostile as it was to the status quo presided over by the aristocracy. The same preoccupation with nationhood and freedom also informed the contemporary reception of Greek drama, especially as mediated by the leading translator and commentator Johann Gustav Droysen. The essays of the revolutionary period elaborate the emergent concept of the Wagnerian music drama in greater detail. Art and Revolution (1849) celebrates the Greek drama with its integration of all the arts, contrasting it with the vacuous, mercenary theater of the modern age. The Artwork of the Future (also 1849) develops this theme, proposing a Gesamtkunstwerk , or “total work of art,” that would unite dance, music, and poetry in a new kind of theater designed solely according to aesthetic and artistic criteria, no longer for commercial gain or social ostentation. And finally, Opera and Drama (1850–51), after offering a critique of the genres of modern opera and analyzing the nature and history of theater, attempts to illuminate the linguistic, dramatic, and musical ingredients of the proposed Gesamtkunstwerk .

Wagner and the ‘Makart Style’

The visual artist most commonly linked with the name of Richard Wagner from the 1870s to the early twentieth century was the now relatively little-known Viennese painter Hans Makart (1844–84). Makarts Viennese atelier – no less than his sumptuous history paintings, ‘bacchanals’, society portraits and multi-media design-projects (notably a lavish 1879 historical pageant celebrating the Hapsburg monarchy) – defined an influential visual and stylistic idiom for the early fin-de-siecle . The style is recognisable in the salon at villa Wahnfried, in Paul Joukowskys set designs for the first Parsifal , and arguably, in aspects of Wagners music itself. Like most artists of the era, Makart occasionally depicted Wagnerian motifs, but his affinity with the composer was recognised as a matter of style and technique. Two breakthrough works from around 1868 in triptych form, Moderne Amoretten ( Modern Cupids ) and Der Pest in Florenz ( The Plague in Florence ), suggest thematic and conceptual parallels with Tannhauser and Tristan und Isolde , respectively. Makarts Renaissance history paintings and the 1879 Vienna Festzug stage national history as a collective aesthetic experience in the manner of Die Meistersinger . A ubiquitous theme in comparisons of artist and composer is the role of colour (visual, harmonic and timbral), raised to a quasi-autonomous force that dominates composition and ‘idea’. Makarts resistance to conventions of visual narrative, as read by contemporary critics, recalls Wagners resistance to conventional melodic periodicity. This article investigates the cultural and technical sources of Makarts appeal in the later nineteenth century and traces the comparison of Makarts and Wagners styles as a critical topos. The disappearance of Makart and his ‘style’ from modern critical consciousness, I argue, mirrors a cultural Amnesia regarding features central to Wagners irresistible fascination for his contemporaries.

Meister Richard's apprenticeship: the early operas (1833–1840)

Richard Wagners early approach to an operatic career was oblique, yet inexorable. As a boy he was raised in a gesamtkunstlerisch environment, so to speak – an educated bourgeois milieu that cultivated the arts both domestically and professionally. His stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, was a painter as well as an actor; among his sisters were an accomplished actress (the eldest, Rosalie) and a singer (Klara); his brother Albert was a tenor and sometime opera director; his uncle Adolf Wagner was something of a scholar and critic who had been on friendly terms with Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann, though he looked less kindly on the performing arts; and the father he never knew and whose paternity remained a large question mark, Carl Friedrich Wagner, had been for his part an amateur actor and devoted theater-goer until his death in 1814. Music, in this environment, existed as the handmaiden to drama and poetry. The commingling of spoken theater and opera in the Wagner family circle was altogether characteristic of German theatrical culture in this period, similar to England and to some extent France in this respect; only the Italian repertory represented what the later Wagner might have called “absolute” opera.