In Our Time - Wagner

Episode Date: June 20, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Richard Wagner who, perhaps more than any other composer, would seem to capture the greatest triumphs and most terrifying excesses of the German spirit. He lived as modern Germany was being born and his republicanism led to exile and nearly execution. He was a mentor of Nietzsche and a disciple of Schopenhauer and changed the face of opera perhaps more than any other single person. Wagner conducted several orchestras and numerous affairs, suffered poverty and rejection but was finally showered with wealth by King Ludwig II. When the Nazis played his music in the death camps was it a fitting tribute to a gross anti-Semite or a travesty for a man who believed in redemption through love and social equality? We ask to what extent can Wagner be typified as demonstrating the German spirit and what were his views on the function of art? With John Deathridge, King Edward the Seventh Professor of Music, Kings College London; Lucy Beckett, Author of Richard Wagner: Parsifal; Michael Tanner, Philosopher and author of Wagner and Nietzsche.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Richard Wagner, more than any other composer, would seem to capture the greatest triumphs and most terrifying excesses of the German spirit.

Wagner lived as modern Germany is being born, and his young republicanism led to exile and nearly execution. He was a mentor to his own republicanism. Nietzsche and a discipline of Schopenhauer, and he changed the face of opera perhaps more than any other single person. He conducted several orchestras and numerous affairs. He suffered poverty and rejection, but was finally shored with gold by the erratic Bavarian king Ludwig II. But when the Nazis played his music in the death camps, was it the deserved recognition of a gross anti-Semite or a travesty for a man who believed in redemption through love and social equality?

To what extent does Wagner typify the German spirit, and what were his views on the function of art, and does his anti-Semitism interfere with our appreciation of his work? With me to discuss Richard Wagner, John Dethridge, King Edward the 7th Professor of Music at King's College London, Lucy Beckett, writer and author of Richard Wagner, Parcifal, and Michael Tanner, philosopher and author of Wagner and Nietzsche. John Dethridge, Wagner lived from 1813 to 1883,

when modern Germany was being created. Did he have his own particular dreams for a new German state? dreams that's a good word because I think he thought by the end of his life that his dream hadn't been realized so it remained a dream changed the metaphor slightly he regarded Germany itself as something asleep that was having a bad dream so to speak and he saw himself and his followers as an enlightened group of people who were shouting to wake up Germany from its slumber as it were And I think in view of that, it's better to describe what he wanted for Germany in a series of negatives, what it didn't have rather than what it did have. And for Wagner, what he didn't have was political and cultural cohesion right from the start.

He made a comparison constantly with France. The model of France and the French Revolution is extremely important for Wagner, although he didn't want that translated into German. His idea was that there should be a people much more in touch with their language. He thought Germans had lost touch with their language and with their culture, and that his purpose was to bring them more into a sort of cultural being with those elements. Where the controversy arises with him is how he wanted to put this into practice. And it varies in his life between a kind of redemptive politics,

that is to say a practical solution from without to the point when the Reich is founded by Bismarck after the 1870 war with France. It's a war Germany won, by the way, that's very important to bear in mind, to a kind of resignation that the idea that his cultural ambition founding by Royt is equivalent to the renewal of Germany,

the political renewal of Germany, wasn't quite right. So he resorted to a much, more inward kind of reformation, belief in the German spirit, and building it from a more subjective viewpoint. Do you think it's odd that we're going to his opera through his politics? No, I don't think that's odd at all, because if you see politics in a realistic sense as something quite literal, and of course opera isn't the right medium for that, but if you see politics as myth, as Schiller did, for example, turning history into myth, then it becomes a much more suitable

subject for opera. Also, he wanted opera to have a much greater role in society. He wanted to have it as something that was important for the community so that individuals could come and renew themselves, as it were, as he claimed in Greek tragedy. That was the case, where the experience of listening to his opera was a kind of religious experience, which meant a renewal of an inner spirit, and one which had to be repeated. This is the important thing about Wagner, that you have to keep coming back to the Vardinirian artwork or music drama, whatever you like to call it, in order to belong properly to the community.

Lucy Beckett, in 1848, there was a great number of revolutions across Europe, and the young Republican vaguely, I think we use a word Republican, found himself on the barricades in Dresden. How did he get there, and what did you think he was doing? I think he was catching the spirit of the... the times, which he was given to doing all through his life. When he was young in the reactionary Europe that had been put together after Napoleon, he regarded the establishment he had to contend with as a younger palmeister in various German cities

as putting a break on everything he was trying to do. So when in the late 1840s, the revolutionary spirit was abroad in most of the continent, he caught it and was all for wrecking in order to build something better. He was a bright young man with tremendous ambition who wanted to clear a way for the art of the future, which he felt he could make a major contribution to, and he found the way in which opera houses were organised in the cities of Germany inhibiting and difficult,

and there was never enough money. There was never enough money. was a feature of Vognan's life throughout. We still haven't sort of nailed the question of how did he find himself on the barricades in Dresden? Was he waving a sword standing on the barricades like they do in Lé Miserables, what was he doing? He was certainly right there,

conspicuous enough to be arrested. He escaped. He was very lucky to be escaped. This was serious stuff. His friend Ruckel, who was on the barricades with him, spent the next 13 years in prison. And having escaped, Von was in exile with a price on its head for a bit.

So it was not a joke. It was not a frivolous demonstration. It was a serious commitment to destruction more than construction in a young man who had a feeling that the old world had to be, you know, taken apart before something better could happen. But you think it's to do with his personal views? You think that what's pushing him through the politics is very much his personal view of how he's going to, what, further his career?

do what he felt he had a great vocation to do, which was to produce the art of the future. I think it's much more that than an altruistic political enterprise for the sake of everybody. Michael Turner, do we find a change in political outlook in Wagner after the failure of 1848? Off he goes into exile and to Zurich, whether to start, as Lucy Becker said, a price on his head and so on.

Does this failure begin to affect his views? Does he look for other ways to express himself and other beliefs through which to express himself? Yes, he does, although as Lucy said too, I mean, everything was a... Wagner's mind was a melting pot the whole of his life, I think, so that he was working out his ideas about politics and about music, about personal fulfilment,

about the integration of the individual with society or the possibility only of, fulfilling oneself in a private relationship. Those are all going strong as also his thoughts about music. And certainly the disappointment about the revolutions had a big effect on, in the end about what he thought about society in general. But these things are all kind of going on in a perpetual state of development. He lived in a state of perpetual private revolution about these ideas

and his own idea that there should be a revolution. and that there would be one in 1848 to 9 which would change things in a republican way. When that was disappointed, he fled to Zurich, he worked out at enormous, grotesque length in his prose writings, many of his prose writings. He worked out the future for art and hoped he was thereby going to work out the future for society too

because he couldn't, he himself couldn't take seriously any view of art which didn't involve a view of society or the other way around. I'm afraid we don't have grotesque length on this programme yet, but maybe we'll achieve Vagnian proportions as the next 50 years ago. But still, he did write art and revolution in 1849. Can you give us some idea of what that fundamentally said that's important to this conversation?

Well, what he felt was that, I mean, as many people did at the time, but he, I think particularly acutely, was that people, thanks to all kinds of forces such as industrialisation, were leading lives of terrible aridity, sterility, mechanised, I mean, the kind of plea that many great people have felt, and Marx's exact contemporary was feeling and so forth, and that there had to be some kind of drastic step taken in order to revolutionise the way in which people lived,

and also to revolutionise their demands on life, otherwise they were just synced to a level where they didn't mind the fact that they were living so much less fully than they could do. And at that stage in art and revolution, and really constantly for the rest of his life, his idea was that a sufficiently potent new art form, such as he perhaps uniquely was able to write, a new art form would just by being experienced,

communally, change people's consciousness, so that just by attending a performance of a Varden opera, intelligently and conscientiously, listening and looking, you would emerge a different person. It would be a kind of conversion experience. Wagner was never interested in less than everything, and that's one of the things I think

that makes people so fascinated or repelled by him that, I mean, the Vagnian experience is one that is quasi-religious in that sense, that it demands that you, in some way, change your whole life to conform to the experience. that he's offering you, and it's not surprising that a lot of people say they find it completely repulsive that anybody should make that demand, just as they do with other religions. Moving to the idea of his work now, John Dehriech, in exile, Wagner developed the idea of total art. Can you explain what this was? Well, you mean Gazamte Kuntzvark, which translated as total work of art. This is something that's banded around quite often in conversations about Wagner.

but in fact he didn't use the word very much. It does say a lot, though, about his revolutionary ideas around, just after the Dresden Revolution. And it is a political concept. I think this is something that people don't realize. I mean, the idea is that Greek tragedy is the ideal, Gesamte Kunstwerk. Vargler claims that in Greek tragedy

all the arts were combined in an organic way. And since then, fast forwarding a few centuries, humanity has seen a decline, and all those arts have become individualized separate from one another. So the fact that you have opera, symphony concerts, plays, sculpture, painting, this is all an example of bourgeois particularism, that is to say, a bourgeois society based on commodity,

has separated these things out, and they should be reintegrated again, through my, i.e. Wagner's artwork. It's interesting here, I think, that in these writings, he posits the novel as the great enemy of the Wagner artwork. It's an idea he got from Hegel, really, the idea that the novel is the example of the prosaic bourgeois age. And yet he was taken up by some of the great novelists, wasn't it?

He was taken up to one of the great ironists, yes. But because it's a lonely business, reading a novel. because its logic is towards realism and therefore against art in Wagner's agenda and that it has a kind of individualist approach, a particularist approach to culture. He wanted to create something in his work of art that was communal again.

It's very important here to realise, by the way, that Vargas was not democratic. I mean, trying to claim Wagner for the democratic centre, as many people have done, man in particular, and Bernard Williams recently, is a complete waste of time, in my view. And I disagree with my colleagues here that this business about politics was actually a private affair.

I think I would speak of a flight from the private in Wagner, that he was a man of action. He did want change. And the crucial thing with Wagner is not so much diagnosing the problem, but how to solve it. And his meetings with kings, diplomats, he was very highly made sure. he was highly placed and talked to some very influential people,

have this end in view, to change, literally to change society with his work of art? Could I just say something about that? I agree in large part, on the other hand, the work that people associate immediately with Wagner, and I think rightly is Tristan. I mean, Tristan is the unique Wagnerian achievement. Whatever anybody, even people like his great-grandson,

Gottfried Wagner, deny him and think that he was the most appalled. person in many respects, they still separate Tristan and think of it as the supreme, undeniable experience because it revolutionised music, it revolutionised consciousness in many ways, and that represents an entire flight into the personal, where achievement is only, fulfillment is only possible through the meeting of two people completely apart from society, and the voice of society and the moving personality of King Mark making a plea on behalf of society is, expressed at great length, but then firmly rejected. Can you just add a little bit of that?

I think what Michael has said about Tristan is absolutely true, but there are countervailing pressures in the other major works of Vang's maturity. The ring, well, the ring is, I think we probably will all agree a muddle in very interesting ways, which is one of the reasons people will go on talking. writing about it till kingdom come. But the sense of a society

which is damaged and which needs to be put together again in some way is in the very bourgeois, very burglique maister singer, very much part of the meat of the story. And even more so in Pacify, there is a society which is damaged and broken and has to be put together again. Michael, can I ask you what Vangler's influence

was on the thought of the young needs? Yes, well, it was for a time, it was absolutely swamping, and that's the main reason, in my opinion, why Nietzsche became the leading anti-Vargoner, and he just had to cast off the burden. Before he get to the Antibnese, what was the proverb? He, I mean, he says that as soon as he listened to, as soon as he played the score of Tristan to himself in so far as he could on the piano, in the vocal, in the piano reduction, he was a Varnelian, and, I mean, it was love at first sight, and Tristan never lost its grip on Nietzsche. he said all Vargas other works were diversion compared to that,

but he said all other art just seems unimportant or trivial compared to Tristan. And it wasn't only that, it was the idea again of myth of the renewal of Greek culture. I mean, the Germans throughout the late 18th and much of the 19th century tended to feel that something had gone terribly wrong and that it had only been right really in ancient Greece. Hilderling, Hegel, many other Germans, that and that if you could revive the spirit of ancient Athens

you would have a new Athens and that's why Nietzsche took Wagner's key ideas and celebrating them at some length in and with great Vaginian in Turgidity in the birth of tragedy. Yes, did he take philosophical ideas from Wagner's writing?

Oh very much, yes. I mean the idea of the most famous basic dualism in Nietzsche's work of the Apollonian and the Dionysian comes almost certainly from discussions with Wagner. And Lucy, did Wagner think that opera could, as it were, fill a gap left by the decline of Christianity? I think in very crude terms you could say that of him some of the time in some of the things he wrote.

One of the reasons for what Michael has just described as the tremendous nostalgia for classical Athens in the theatre of the great great. tragic poets was that it was very congenial to the late 18th century, the early 19th century, because it was pre-Christian. Let's have a return to the Greek pagan classical world because then we can kind of skip backwards over the whole of Christianity as if it had never been and how soothing that would be.

There's a description of the Gazamkwantzvaka, a Greek enterprise in Shelley's defence of poetry, which is quite interesting. just a little paragraph but he says can't we get back to the total work of art for the whole population of a place

Shakespeare had a sort of go Calderon interestingly because Shelley was an atheist of course had a better go and these were two writers Calderon and Shakespeare who Vargan read over and over and over again all through his life

because he regarded himself as their equal with some reason and he had to have the great examples of major a dramatic art in front of him all the time. But of course, Beesivson belonged to a Christian world. Just one more name, and then I would like to move

to another subject if I could. You use the word, I think you used the word fall for, with Michael, about Nietzsche falling for Wagner. Vangels seem to fall for, when he was in his early 40s for Schopenhauer. Now, what did, so we could align now? What attracted him there?

Was that such a powerful passion? Well, again, quite a lot of things, I think. Partly the the pessimism. I mean, he, Vagner was an extremely enthusiastic, but fairly rapid reader

and perhaps a bit casual in some ways throughout his life. He, when he came to Schopenhauer, he was absolutely enthralled, there's no question, read the major work, which is enormous,

the world has will and understanding over and over again, and understood it in a idiosyncratic way, indeed, which is virtually unique in Western philosophy. It's a disgrace, I think, that it should be, but it is. I mean, every other Western philosopher had thought that all for the best and the best of the possible world, more or less, thanks to God.

Schopenhauer didn't believe in God, and thought that all was for the worst, in the worst of all possible worlds, apart from Schopenhauer. And apart from music, too. And music was, so speak, the music or the world, Schopenhauer often says. He actually juxtaposes music and the world as music is the... the complete representation or even replacement for the world. Well, Wagner, who'd just been adopting an official line that music should be subordinate to drama,

actually was very keen on a certain concept of music as being foremost. And so reading Schopenhauer, celebrating the art of music as no philosophy ever had done before, thrilled Wagner enormously and enabled him to reverse very quickly, actually, after he'd come to the view that music should be subordinate to drama, the idea that in a certain way drama should be subordinate to music. There's a great deal that we haven't talked about yet about Beethoven.

I would like to talk about Wagner's anti-Semitism, how profound it was, how it affected his music and his politics, we've talked quite a bit about politics and the influence it had. And we can't duck that nor would anybody want to. Lucy Beckett, he did write some virulent anti-Semitic letters and statements and so on. Can you tell us a bit about that? Of course, now, many people regard this as the only interesting thing to be said about Varna, which is a complete disaster, because of course he was an anti-Semitic person,

particularly towards the end of his life, which is a dreadful thing to be. But the question that we have to constantly bear in mind is whether this makes, his works, pernicious anti-Semitic works. And if you simply go back to the works and it is difficult to forget about the connections between Hitler and Bayreuth, the use that was made of some bits of Wagner's music in the worst of all of the 20th century's horrors.

But if I think it is fair to the works to do this, you do go back to the works, there is no case at all for saying that the works themselves are anti-Semitic. And I'm certain that that is true. It would be as if we had had a fascist, totalitarian state of great cruelty in this country, which had used speeches from Henry V to support horrible killings. And we all then decided Shakespeare was a dreadful fellow,

and we could never have anything to do with him again. That would be a parallel. Would you agree with that? No. I think Vargas anti-Semitism, unfortunately, is programmed into the works in some way. You can't avoid this. I think it's quite easy to assuage liberal guilt about Wagner, and often things that have written about Vargas should really be called strange love

or how he learned to stop worrying and love Richard Wagner, despite his anti-Semitism, or something like that. I think the argument that he didn't bring the... issue of anti-Semitism directly into contact with his works himself is a little bit spurious because there are a lot of things that he didn't bring into contact with his works. Vegetarianism, for example. I mean, if you wanted to say, well, he wrote about vegetarianism, but the ring, oh, sorry, parcophile, which is, you know, very much against the killing of animals and so forth, it's not actually hard to interpret it in that way. But he didn't think it was

that important in a... to put it in that way, and didn't want to make the critical mistake of saying my works are about X, Y, Z. I mean, he was critically much too sophisticated to give even to his own disciples very clear clues of what his works were about because he knew that art and myth don't work in that way.

And yet, it's relatively easy, I think, perhaps too easy, to see that this idea of racial purity the exclusion of others from the community, from the idea of a pure community, is brought into the works, even as a kind of benchmark for what is pure or what is German, what is valid for the future and what isn't.

Can I protest violently about that? This is a view that has been taken now for 30 years or so, but Passify in particular. And I do think it is monstrously unjust to the work The point about Amphortas, who is the sinner king, the Fisher King, the Fischer King, the Flaude King of the Grail Kingdom, which is the situation that has to be resolved by a pacifier, is not that there is a sort of blood taint in the whole thing. It is ordinary sexual guilt. There is not a kind of racial purity element in the actual words, let alone the music of the work.

and it is now more or less orthodoxy in many circles that Pasoferal is a racist work and I think it is grossly unjust to the work. We have this interesting, I mean, fascinating situation though, don't we? He was undoubtedly a virulent, nasty, contemptible antisemite. I've got stuff in this book here which would make your hair fall out. It's terrible, right? And yet the music is wonderful.

It's full of things which are not anti-anybody and so on so. So, I mean, how do you bring you? these two things together. That's your business, Michael Talon. You haven't got a great deal of time. No, I haven't. But I don't think I need it because there isn't a question to bring it together because the ideas don't, the ideas, the crass,

crude, paranoid anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism was primarily a matter of Wagner's needing to be persecuted, feeling that he was being persecuted by somebody. He needed that throughout his life and the Jews filled the bill ideally he thought. But anyway, it doesn't

get into his works, as Lucy's I think argued completely convincingly you can have people holding the most terrible views and somehow they don't get into the works it isn't simply a question of the music not being anti-Semitic I've got no idea what anti-Semitic music could possibly be like or any other kind of politically or ideologically tainted music in that sense

but it doesn't get into the dramas either and if you do build anti-Semitism into the dramas if you say for example that this or that figure in the ring is a Jew or this and that figure is an alien, things work out pretty badly in the end for everybody, actually. So it doesn't, you know, it's not something that anybody would be wise to enlist, because, except in Parsifal, where a community returns to a certain kind of order and peace, you simply end in disaster. But these two things, John, do they stand side by side and that they shall never meet? No, of course not. It's inconceivable that Fagner would have written so much about community on the basis of exclusion. That's the important thing.

and that it wouldn't have had anything to do with his works of art. I mean, whenever he wrote an article, even on the weather, because there's an article on art and weather, very obscure article, it had something to do with his major artistic mission. Now, it's up to us to interpret what that relationship is between what he says about Jews, these terrible things, which he said, and what happens in the works of art. but I think it's naive to say that there is no connection between the two.

I just don't agree. Briefly, why do you think he was taken up by the Nazis, if such a way? He was taken up by the Nazis, because anti-Semitism was rife in the Wagner circle, particularly after his death. The Baywright world of sycophants and admirers did a great deal of harm and muddied the water in all sorts of other ways as well as antisemitism.

Well, there's more to come back to you, and I hope you do come back to this sometime, but thank you very much Lucy Beckett, Michael Tanner, and John Deithridge, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.