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RHEINGOLD
Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Ring
In the beginning was the tone: octave E-flats in the double basses, sustained in a barely audible rumble. Five bars in, bassoons add a pair of B-flats, five steps higher. Together, these notes form the interval of the perfect fifth. Like the fifth that glimmers at the start of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, it is an emanation of primordial nature, the hum of the cosmos at rest. Then eight horns enter one after another, in upward-wheeling patterns, which resemble the natural harmonic series generated by a vibrating string. Other instruments add their voices, in gradually quickening pulses. As the mass of sound gathers and swirls and billows in the air, the underlying tonality of E-flat does not budge. Only after 136 bars—four to five minutes in performance—does the harmony change, tilting toward A-flat. The prolonged stasis engenders a new sense of time, although it is difficult to say what kind of time it is: perhaps an instant passing in slow motion, perhaps eons passing in a blur.
This is the prelude to Das Rheingold, which is itself the Vorabend, the preliminary evening, to the Ring. The orchestra represents the river Rhine, the repository of the magic gold from which a ring of unimaginable power can be forged. In his autobiography, My Life, Wagner relates how the opening came to him while he was staying in La Spezia, on the Ligurian Sea, in September 1853. Resting at his hotel, he fell into “a kind of somnambulistic state,” and the prelude began sounding in his head. Although biographers doubt that it happened exactly that way, we can surmise that the river is not purely German, that it flows from deeper, warmer waters.
“It is, so to speak, the world’s lullaby,” Wagner said. Out of the rocking cradle a universe emerges. The golden triads of Western harmony gestate from a fundamental tone; then language gestates from music. The Rhinemaidens swim up from the depths, singing a mixture of nonsense syllables and German words. Wagner told Nietzsche he had in mind the phrase “Eia popeia,” sung for centuries by mothers to lull their babies.
Wagner is employing a highly stylized version of the old Germanic verse scheme of Stabreim, which is structured around internal alliteration. The affect is epic, the language abstract. The modernists paid heed: T. S. Eliot quotes the Rhinemaidens in The Waste Land, and Joyce has them swim in the river of Finnegans Wake.
The prelapsarian bliss lasts for only twenty-one more bars before the harmony darkens to C minor and Flosshilde warns her fellow maidens that they are neglecting their guardian duties. The Rhine tries to resume its course in the key of B-flat, but it is again tugged into the relative minor. The double basses, having ceased their cosmic drone, play a loping pizzicato. Alberich, the Nibelung dwarf, has entered, his eyes fixed first on the maidens and then on the gold. Wagner sets up a clear duality between the beauty of nature and the malevolent energy of a subhuman outsider. Alberich is the chief antagonist of the Ring, although not necessarily its chief villain. Wotan, the chief of the gods, also lusts after the gold and falls prey to its illusions.
In 1876, in advance of the Ring premiere, Nietzsche, then a kind of intellectual publicist for the composer, issued a pamphlet titled “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.” Amid much flummery, Nietzsche devises as succinct a synopsis of the cycle as can be found: “The tragic hero is a god who thirsts for power and who, after pursuing all paths to gain it, binds himself through contracts, loses his freedom, and becomes entangled in the curse that is inseparable from power.” Needless to say, the topic is eternally relevant. The story of the fatal ring can always speak to the latest soul-stealing technological marvel, the latest swearing of vengeance, the latest rotting empire. The contradiction at the heart of the project is that the Ring is itself an assertion of power—huge in size, huge in volume, huge in ambition. Wagner criticized monumentality as an artistic value, calling for a vital folk art that spoke to its time instead of gesturing toward posterity. Nonetheless, the monumental and the Wagnerian were fated to become synonymous.
When, in the wake of the Ring, Nietzsche broke with Wagner, he thought of himself as a fugitive slave. Although he disavowed the man, he could not disavow the work. During the twelve years of philosophical activity left to him, he continued to wrestle with the composer’s shadow. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “I actually have it on my conscience that such a high estimation of the cultural value of this movement arose.” The movement is Wagnerei—Wagnerism. Nietzsche is referring to his early gushing on the Meister’s behalf, but it is the later, ostensibly anti-Wagnerian writing that shows the movement in full flower. The rejection of Wagner results only in a new interpretation of Wagner. Such is the infernal logic of his protean presence at the dawn of the twentieth century. As Nietzsche eventually admitted: “Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.”
THE RING AND REVOLUTION
The revolutionary year 1848, which gave rise to the Ring, shook the old European order but failed to bring it down. In Paris, three days of street protests in February brought about the abdication of King Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of the Second Republic. Similar revolts took place in German-speaking lands, and a national parliament attempted to form in Frankfurt. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in London in February; communist, socialist, and anarchist groups organized across the continent. Amid the tumult, counterrevolutionary forces regained the upper hand. The culminating moment—famously described by Marx as historical tragedy repeating itself as farce—was the dissolution of the Second Republic by Louis-Napoléon, Bonaparte’s nephew, at the end of 1851.
The Dresden uprising of 1849, with the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient exhorting the crowd from a window
Wagner, then in his mid-thirties, charged into the melee. Since 1843, he had been serving as the Royal Saxon Hofkapellmeister in Dresden, his reputation founded on his sprawling grand opera Rienzi, a dramatization of populist rebellion in fourteenth-century Rome. Over the course of his Dresden tenure, Wagner became increasingly attuned to leftist politics. By June 1848, he was writing poetry about cries of freedom resounding from France. In a fiery speech before the Vaterlandsverein, a democratic-nationalist association, he demanded the obliteration of the aristocracy, the imposition of universal suffrage, the elimination of usury, an enlightened German colonization of the world, and, somehow, the self-reform of the king of Saxony into the “first of the folk, the freest of the free.” Except for the German-nationalist element, these proposals resembled the philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who envisioned a society made up of communal units, free of state control but traditional in character.
In the same period, Wagner was delving into old Germanic tales of the hero Siegfried, who slays the dragon Fafnir, wins the dragon’s gold hoard, and dies with a spear in his back. Politics plainly motivated this turn: the gold represents the capitalist enemy, Siegfried a new German nation. More broadly, Wagner became engrossed by the evolution and function of myth. Sometime in 1848, he began writing “The Wibelungs,” an impressively convoluted essay in comparative mythology, which muses on the interrelationship of pagan legends, Christian lore, the Nibelung treasure, the Holy Grail, and historical personalities such as Charlemagne and Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa. What fascinated the composer was how the same stories keep getting told in different guises: light against dark, warmth against cold, hero against dragon.
Wagner’s subsequent interweaving of mythic stories in operatic form caused him to be described—by none other than the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—as “the incontestable father of the structural analysis of myths.” The extension of ancient cycles into the present day brings with it an unsettling implication: the same dark, cold, dragon-like adversaries will be present in modern Germany. Ominously, Wagner compares the murder of Siegfried to the Crucifixion, remarking that “we still avenge Christ on the Jews today.”
In the fall of 1848, Wagner emerged with a prose sketch titled “The Nibelung Myth,” outlining a plot roughly equivalent to that of Götterdämmerung. It includes an elaborate backstory of gods, giants, dwarves, heroes, and Valkyries—essentially, the whole of the Ring in a few dense pages. The scenario combines material from various Nordic and Germanic sources—the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Volsunga saga of Iceland; the Old Norwegian Þiðreks saga; the German Nibelungenlied; Jacob Grimm’s German Mythology—into an inspired mishmash that owes as much to the composer’s unruly imagination as to the extant sources.
The Ring itself is a new contraption. The old stories make mention of hoards and magic rings, but only in Wagner’s version does the gold yield a weapon of absolute omnipotence. The one vague antecedent is Plato’s Ring of Gyges, which makes the wearer invisible and thereby endows him with “the powers of a god.” Even a just man might misbehave with such a device at his command, Plato suggests. Likewise, Wagner’s Ring bends all to its will. Its companion gadget, the Tarnhelm, enables one to disappear, change shape, or travel far in an instant. It is surely no accident that such magic lore found new life in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass manipulation and mass destruction were coming into view.
“The Nibelung Myth” begins not with an image of natural splendor, as in the finished cycle, but with a sinister picture of an infested earth:
Out of the womb of night and death there germinated a people, which lives in Nibelheim (Mist-Home), that is, in gloomy underground chasms and caves: they are called Nibelungs; with shifty, restless activity they burrow (like worms in a dead body) in the bowels of the earth … Alberich seized the bright and noble Rhinegold, abducted it from the water’s depths, and with great and cunning art forged from it a ring, which gave him supreme power over his entire kin … Alberich strove for domination of the world and everything contained in it.
The good-versus-evil duality breaks down, though, when Wagner makes the noble gods complicit in the general corruption. “The peace by which they achieved domination is not grounded in reconciliation; it is accomplished through force and cunning. The intent of their higher world order is moral consciousness, but the wrong they are pursuing adheres to themselves.” In this early version, Wotan survives the upheaval, like the reformed monarch in Wagner’s Vaterlandsverein speech, and Alberich is set free with the rest of humanity.
Wagner fleshed out the story in a prose draft titled Siegfried’s Death. He then set the project aside and engaged in the most intense political activity of his life. In May 1849, Dresden revolutionaries rose up in protest of anti-constitutional actions by the Saxon king, and Wagner joined them, generating propaganda, helping to obtain arms, and sending signals from the tower of the Kreuzkirche. He was often at the side of the future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had long-standing ties to German radical circles. According to one witness, Wagner fell into a paroxysm of rage, shouting, “War and always war.” The day after the Dresden opera house was set ablaze, a street fighter supposedly called out, “Herr Kapellmeister, the beautiful divine spark of joy has ignited.” This was an allusion to the “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth, which Wagner had conducted a few weeks earlier: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken.”
In the aftermath, both Bakunin and Wagner’s friend August Röckel were captured, convicted, and condemned to death, though the sentences were later commuted to prison terms. Wagner would probably have met the same fate if he had not eluded the authorities and made his way to Zurich, where he remained until 1858. For several years, he all but stopped composing and threw himself into the writing of essays, manifestos, and dramatic texts. In “Art and Revolution,” he assails commercial interests, saying, “Our god is money, our religion is making money.” Because of the false collectivity of capitalist society, artists must join the revolutionary opposition. In “The Artwork of the Future,” he upholds ancient Greek theater as a model for an amalgamation of the arts—the fabled Gesamtkunstwerk. And in the book-length treatise Opera and Drama he sets out the principles that underpin the Ring: a clear, uncluttered projection of the text; the use of recurring motifs to illustrate characters, concepts, and psychological states; the deployment of the orchestra as a medium of foreboding and remembrance.
Wagner’s antagonism toward the other, toward an elemental Alberich-like foe, comes to the fore in “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” or “Jewishness in Music,” published under a pseudonym in 1850. That essay contends that Jews have no culture of their own and that leading Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer are stale imitators of tradition and/or agents of capitalist greed. Chillingly, the analogy of a worm-ridden corpse recurs, purporting to evoke Jews’ presence in German society. Relatively few people read this odious document at the time: the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, where it appeared, had a circulation of about eight hundred. Almost two decades later, Wagner republished the essay under his own name, ensuring that it could never be forgotten or excused.
The violence of Wagner’s language in this period is still startling to behold. He writes to his supporter Theodor Uhlig: “Works of art cannot be created at present, they can only be prepared for by means of revolutionary activity, by destroying and crushing everything that is worth destroying and crushing.” He tells Liszt, his most steadfast musical ally, that he has an “enormous desire to commit acts of artistic terrorism.”
Having delivered a kind of polemical artillery barrage—a preview of the assaultive manifesto culture of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes—Wagner returned to his Nibelung material, greatly expanding its scope. First he drafted a prequel to Siegfried’s Death, titled The Young Siegfried. Then he went back further and wrote texts for what became Das Rheingold and Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). The two Siegfried librettos were revised as Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. In the final scenario, Wotan and the gods, representative of a failed monarchical order, are consumed in flames. Wagner told Uhlig that he could conceive of a performance of the entire work “only after the revolution; only the revolution can offer me the artists and listeners I need.” A “great dramatic festival,” in a theater erected on the banks of the Rhine, would “make clear to the people of the revolution the meaning of that revolution, in its noblest sense. This audience will understand me: present-day audiences cannot.” The revolution he has in mind is a future one—the “great revolution of humanity.”
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The Ring is grounded not only in politics but also in philosophy. The young Nietzsche called the cycle “an immense system of thought without the conceptual form of thought.” The Rheingold prelude is itself a kind of cosmological proposition. The upwelling of E-flat major is not a creation myth that depends upon a godlike spark, a shout of “Let there be light.” Instead, a world materializes in evolutionary fashion, as in the transmuting organisms studied by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck or the nebularly cohering galactic systems theorized by Immanuel Kant. Early in his career, Kant speculated that the solar system had germinated from a mass of gas and dust. Friedrich Engels saw social implications in that hypothesis: humanity, too, should be seen no longer as a system of fixed relations but as an organism undergoing continual evolution.
The revolutionaries of 1848 leaned heavily on the German philosophical tradition, which, since Kant’s writings of the 1780s, had transformed how thinking beings viewed themselves and the world. As old certainties trembled—monarchic government, religious morality, hierarchies of class—German idealism put forward a new intellectual faith. Kant had enshrined the principle of autonomous reason, of “always thinking for oneself,” as the essence of the Enlightenment. G. W. F. Hegel, Kant’s commanding successor, unveiled a grandiose theory of progress, in which a World Spirit guides history toward a utopian future. To those disconcerted by the condition of evolution and flux, Hegel extended the promise that a perfected world was near.
In the 1830s and ’40s, another wave of thinkers, the Young Hegelians, appropriated the master’s schema, determined to accelerate the World Spirit’s progress. They took aim at religious pieties (David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity) and at social inequality (the early economic thought of Marx and Engels). Wagner especially prized Feuerbach’s notion of the “philosophy of the future,” which, the composer later said, promised a “ruthlessly radical liberation of the individual from the bondage of conceptions associated with the belief in traditional authority.” This fixation on futurity—Wagner spoke variously of the artwork of the future, the drama of the future, the theater of the future, the artist of the future, the actor of the future, the religion of the future, the woman of the future, the humanity of the future, and the life of the future—became a favorite target of satirists, but it was a calculated rhetorical device that moved art out of the domain of upper-class entertainment and into the main sociopolitical arena.
Wagner also absorbed the Romantic precept that art should fill the void left by the retreat of traditional religion. Friedrich Schiller, in his 1795 treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man, declared that humanity achieves freedom through the perception of beauty, that communities find unity through shared aesthetic experience. Schiller saw the advent of an “aesthetic state,” a “joyous realm of play and of appearance.” Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling all held that artistic mythologies could give new spiritual direction to what Max Weber would later call the disenchanted modern world. When Schlegel spoke of a reversion to the “primordial chaos of human nature, for which I know of no lovelier symbol than the motley throng of the ancient gods,” he might have been dreaming of the Ring, even if he had Greek gods in mind. The musicologist Richard Klein summarizes the Wagnerian synthesis: Romantic art-religion is bound to Hegel’s dialectic of progress, creating an aesthetic juggernaut.
Nationalism was a complicating factor. Hegel came to believe that the Spirit would find fulfillment in the modern state, and many shared his view. Johann Gottfried Herder, a member of the Weimar Classical circle that also included Schiller and Goethe, had codified modern nationalism with his thesis that humanity necessarily divides itself into distinct peoples, defined by language and folk traditions. One of philosophy’s great pluralists, Herder had no wish to aggrandize the German Volk at the expense of others. Wagner sounds like Herder when he says, in “Art and Revolution,” that the artist must transcend borders, exhibiting national features merely as a “charm of individual diversity.” More aggressive definitions of Germanness followed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807–1808), upheld the superiority of German culture, saying that it could bring about a worldwide renewal. The later Wagner fell in with the militant chauvinism that flourished in Fichte’s wake, although the imperial state ultimately disappointed him. Dieter Borchmeyer, in his book What Is German?, describes how nineteenth-century Germany wavered between cosmopolitan and nationalist answers to the titular question. Wagner raised the issue himself and never gave a clear answer.
The metaphysical bravado of German philosophy masked a host of insecurities and fears. Why had the “land of poets and thinkers” failed to form a nation in the political sense? Was Germany’s backwardness a condition to be overcome, or did it preserve premodern values amid dizzying change? Many Romantics, Wagner included, recoiled from nineteenth-century modernity—industrialization, urbanization, mass politics, mass media, the collective onslaught of the age of steam and speed. In the Ring, the Rhine is a resource in danger of exploitation and despoliation. The composer’s urge to heal the break with nature culminates in Parsifal, where the hero says, “Only the spear that inflicted the wound can close it.” In a way, that formula captures Wagner’s own method. His critique of industrial society employs advanced stagecraft and tools of promotion—a culture of spectacle that looks ahead to Hollywood as much as it looks back to ancient Greece. What is modern in his work is intended to heal modernity’s wounds.
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Awesome as it is, the Rheingold prelude is something other than an idyll of natural innocence. As Mark Berry argues in Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire, a study of the Ring’s political philosophy, the cycle carries no naïve message about the loss of paradise. Wotan’s world is compromised from the start. The motif of the Rheingold—a C-major trumpet fanfare amid shimmering strings—may seem to possess the same triadic purity as the immemorial rushing of the river, but it gives off an illusory, deceitful sheen. And while the Rhinemaidens make a primeval first impression with their watery sound poetry, in Alberich’s vicinity they become sneering sophisticates, mocking the ugly interloper. In The Perfect Wagnerite, Shaw compares them to denizens of high society who disdain a “poor, rough, vulgar, coarse fellow.” Modern productions often depict them as aloof party girls. Their humiliation of the dwarf is cruel, and breeds a resentment that many in the audience may find sympathetic.
In revenge, Alberich takes the gold and fashions the Ring. Significantly, he does not win the prize by force. Wagner has given the Rheingold a peculiar feature, which is not to be found in the medieval sources:
Only he who renounces love’s power,
only he who spurns love’s pleasure,
only he can attain the magic
to wrest the ring from the gold.
In short, power and love are incompatible. If you have one, you cannot have the other. Alberich is willing to make the trade: “Thus I curse love!”
When the gods enter, in the second scene of Rheingold, they present a handsomer picture of the same ugly contradiction. Wotan is locked in a loveless marriage, with Fricka. Inscribed on his spear are the treaties that keep warring factions at bay and preserve his own preeminence. As we later learn, he cut this spear from the World Ash Tree, which withered as a result. Here is more evidence that shadows fell on the Ring universe long before Alberich shuffled in. Wotan has undertaken a massive construction project, Valhalla, which he can ill afford. The giants Fasolt and Fafner have yet to be paid for their work in building it, and they want compensation in the form of Freia, keeper of the apples of eternal youth. When Wotan hears of the Ring, he realizes he can use it to pay off the giants. With Loge, the demigod of fire, Wotan descends to Nibelheim, Alberich’s world, intending to trick the dwarf into giving up the hoard.
Copyright © 2020 by Alex Ross