I should also like to discuss Wagner’s musical theories, which, put briefly, hold that, while the words tell the story, the singer’s melody portrays the character’s expressed emotions, with the orchestra painting in the same character’s inner psychology, memories, and associations during the Wagnerian monologue. Wagner remained an artist, I suspect, because he specifically abjured using his orchestra to signal to the audience what they were supposed to be feeling (see the incident of the incidental music in Gutzkow’s play at the Dresden Opera), but wanted it rather to depict meticulously, even objectively, what was happening inside the characters that could neither be said nor sung in words. The opera composer, he declared in Opera and Drama, was above all a psychologist.
In light of those theories I would have to mention how an editor of the French journal, La Revue Wagnerienne, Edouard Desjardin, a handful of years after Wagner’s death, wrote a novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés, in which, by his own statement, he tried to do in words what Wagner had done in music. James Joyce read that novel, was impressed with the method’s potential, and from it took the idea of “stream of consciousness” or what is sometimes called “silent monologue” or “monologue intérieur” I would also recall for you how Joyce’s Stephen, who like Wotan in the Ring carries an ashplant, when he raises it to strike the chandelier in the Nighttown bordello cries out, “Nothung!”—Siegfried’s cry as he forges his sword.
At the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce had his young hero write in his journaclass="underline"
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Well, both the sentiment and the metaphor were Wagner’s; and that uncreated conscience was a recreation of the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist (now moved to Ireland), the sine qua non of art as religion.
I’d like to discuss the Wagnerism in which the whole of Eliot’s Waste Land, as well as its major source, Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, are sunk. Miss Weston’s book on the significance of the Parsifal legend, you will recall from its preface, was inspired by her 1911 visit to Bayreuth, and is, after all, a continuation of the work begun in her first book of 1896, The Legends of the Wagner Dramas.
Is it wholly attributable to the political climate after the Second World War that, during the 1950s and ’60s, one could sit through college class after college class dealing with The Waste Land, in which, while Webster and Kyd were ceaselessly discussed, Wagner, the most frequently quoted writer in the poem, was not mentioned? This suppression did nothing to diminish Wagner’s influence; it only denied it its name and mystified it, making it that much harder to seize, analyze, and combat. Today there seems to be afoot a concomitant academic enterprise to find the roots of modernism in every nineteenth-century artist except Wagner. This is not difficult to do. The point is that most of Wagner’s ideas were not his own, whether they were about the ends of art or the Jews. (Baudelaire wrote in his diary: “A fine conspiracy could be organized for the purpose of exterminating the Jewish race.” And even before Wagner — under the pseudonym of K. Freigedank — published “Jewry in Music” in two parts on the 3rd and 6th September 1850 in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Wagner’s friend Heinrich Laube had written, “… there are only two ways to solve the Jewish question. One must either fully annihilate the Jews or completely emancipate them.”) But it was through Wagner that these ideas were disseminated to become part of the very codes by which the general middle class, first of Europe, then of the United States, learned to recognize art, even if the name Wagner, over two World Wars, was erased from that recognition.
I’d also like to discuss D. H. Lawrence’s 1912 novel, The Trespasser, called in its first draft The Saga of Siegmund, which is almost a panegyric to Wagner. In its first version the heroine’s name was Sieglinde, before Lawrence revised it to Helena — after Helen Corke, on whom the character was modeled. She is learning German so she can better understand Wagner in the original. And the hero and heroine whistle Wagner and hear his music in every rustling tree.
But the fact is, in the post-Edwardian pantheon, any writer who took herself or himself seriously had to appeal to Wagner in some way, whether by direct reference or by implication; for by then, Wagner was Serious Art.
But though there may someday be an ideal version of this paper in which these topics are discussed rather than glossed, I cannot try your patience with other than glosses too much longer. We must leap, like Valkyries, ahead.
What we overleap is an occurrence that not only changed the course of Wagner’s life, but absolutely changed the way we consider him and his art. Without it, we would remember Wagner’s work as we do any famous nineteenth-century opera composer’s — if indeed we remembered him at all. (The four new operas that were produced in Germany in the year Lohengrin’s premiere was cancelled at the Dresden Opera House are all by composers unknown today.) Wagner’s technical innovations would be just that: technical. His trials and tribulations would be, at best, one with Beethoven’s and Berlioz’s. Thanks to this occurrence, however, Wagner’s art became the exemplar of all nineteenth-century art. And more than anything else it is responsible for the pervasive Wagnerian influence, overt before World War II and covert after it, that the above galaxy suggests.
In the spring of 1864, the newly crowned eighteen-year-old king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who, since age thirteen, had been mad over Wagner’s music, sent for the composer. “I can only adore you,” the young king wrote, “only praise the power that led you to me. More clearly and ever more clearly do I feel that I cannot reward you as you deserve: all I can ever do for you can be no better than stammered thanks. An earthly being cannot requite a divine spirit.” Ludwig went on to bail Wagner out of copious debts, set him up in a household, and committed himself to supporting Wagner through the rest of his life (on a level that dwarfs, say, the Archduke Rudolf’s support of Beethoven or the Esterhazys’ support of Haydn), building for Wagner the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth and funding the Wagner festivals. The relationship between Ludwig and Wagner was not easy, and problems plagued every aspect of it. Ludwig was, after all, mad.
Remember those metal music stands — and the idea of placing the conductor in front of the orchestra — that the Dresden cabinet rejected in 1847? Bayreuth is why almost all orchestras and musicians use them today.
Here are some more customs that Wagner established at Bayreuth. He was the first opera producer to insist that the house lights be lowered during performances. Wagner was the first person to have the audience sit in darkness with light only on the stage. In Wagner’s theater, for the first time latecomers were seated only at the end of the act, or at a suitable pause between scenes. He made it clear with placards in the lobby that in his theater talking would not be tolerated during the performance. Applause was to be entirely suppressed until the act was over — and, with Parsifal, he stipulated that there should be no applause at all after Act I, with its pseudo-religious closing. Our current custom of not applauding between the movements of symphonies and string quartets is another of Wagner’s impositions on concert audiences at Bayreuth. This is not even to mention his advances in stage-craft and general performance standards that characterized, if not the first Bayreuth Festival (where the full Ring premiered, somewhat rockily, in 1876), then all the many non-operatic concerts he conducted there.