Things that Wagner wanted to do? Liberal to the last, he wanted to make all the tickets in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus one price. (At first he’d wanted the admission to be entirely free!) And he wanted to abolish formal attire as a prerequisite for opera attendance. But because the first was financially impracticable at Bayreuth, finally he had to admit that the second was socially impracticable as well. These changes had to wait until a later epoch.
Till 1864, certain advanced intellectuals and certain enthusiastic adolescents had been fascinated by Wagner’s music. Baudelaire and Berlioz represent the first; Nietzsche, Judith Gautier, and Ludwig himself represent the second. But soon the entire world was fascinated by the favor of a king; and, though the road was gravel-strewn, progress along it was nevertheless headlong: Wagner and his music swooped on, over the nineteen years that remained to him, to a celebrity that was, till then, undreamt-of: it was comparable to the Beatles’ in its breadth, and surpassed the Beatles’ in staying power.
Today, to get some idea of what pre-Wagnerian theater was like, you only have to read some theater scene from Balzac, or, indeed, George Sand — the endless visits from box to box, the conversations, the recognitions across the auditorium, the romances, the intrigues, now one group applauding, now another group of claquers booing and disrupting the performance. Only by reading particularly carefully can you even be sure, in those candle-lit opera houses, that a performance is indeed in full swing on the stage. (I have known readers to assume some of these scenes were taking place during some interminable intermission!)
Today, however, when we go into a theater, when we sit down and the house lights dim as we fix our silent attention on the stage, we are in Wagner’s theater.
We are not in Shakespeare’s.
We are not in Moliere’s or Racine’s.
We are not in Mozart’s or Beaumarchais’s.
We are not in Goethe’s or even Hugo’s.
We are wholly in Wagner’s.
With Wagner, the proper attitude before the artwork becomes a mass of people, who, for all their physical closeness, now must consent to be more or less oblivious of one another, while each engages in the private contemplation of the object before them all. And from the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, this aesthetic posture spread throughout Europe, to America and all her theaters, her museums, her galleries, and even to family readings from novels in the evening — until finally it had joined with that of the solitary reader and her novel, her poem, her text.
At this juncture, in which — throughout the nations caught up in the social and industrial situation outlined earlier — the public attitude toward the contemplation of an artwork became one with the private contemplation of a printed prayer, art finally and completely appropriated the social position of religion.
Antonin Artaud writes:
One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live without possible escape or remedy — and in which we all share — is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were not at a point where things must break apart if they are to start anew and begin afresh.
We must have done with this idea of masterpieces reserved for a selfstyled elite and not understood by the general public…
Masterpieces are good for the past. They are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone.
It is idiotic to reproach the masses for having no sense of the sublime, when the sublime is confused with one or another of its formal manifestations, which are moreover always defunct manifestations.
This is from Artaud’s famous essay in The Theater and Its Double, “No More Masterpieces.” It would be hard to find as succinct and as revolutionary a statement in all of the writings of Eliot or Pound, whose basic strategy, after all, was to resuscitate the tradition and locate themselves before and within it — suspiciously like the bogus historicism of some of Wagner’s own speculative or theoretical works.
But the “Masterpiece,” considered not as a particular order of object, but rather as an attitude of respect, silence, awe, and attention that certain objects are privileged to receive, is Wagner’s. “Serious Art,” seen as a type of attention and behavior in a general audience, was Wagner’s invention. And it was imposed on the greater bourgeois art world of the West by the celebrity of Bayreuth. Reviews of the Ring’s premiere were among the first half-dozen messages broadcast on the newly laid transatlantic cable in 1876 and were published on page one of newspapers in Paris, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, only a day or two after the performance.
In his best-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin suggests that what will not survive photographic and other modes of mechanical reproduction is the artwork’s “aura” (the quotation marks are Benjamin’s), so important to serious art: an “aura” socially formed, in the case of Renaissance painting (Benjamin explains) by the spectator’s knowledge or intuition of the artwork’s royal commission, imperial acceptance, and aristocratic ownership over generations — an “aura” communicated for Benjamin largely by the monumental architecture of the museum halls, through which the state appropriates the range of aristocratic privileges, at least at the level of signs.
Another fifty years, however, have proved Benjamin almost a hundred-eighty degrees off in his assessment. What is lost in mechanical reproduction is, of course, the artwork’s material specificity. Lines blur. Colors dim. Hues, intensities, and color relations shift. All effects dependent on absolute scale and material texture vanish. Mechanical reproduction always distorts (when it does not wholly obliterate) the dimensionality and the plasticity of the artwork. Even when reproducing a work “full size,” reproduction renders that size a variable quantity rather than a fixed form. What “comes through” in a mechanical reproduction is a highly reduced range of relative relations, impoverished because deprived of so many elements, distorted because intruded on by so many others: i.e., the materiality of the reproductive medium itself, the surface of the photographic or printing paper, the register of the inks, the hiss of the tape, the dust in the groove, the grain of the film, the grid across the glass screen — materialities that constitute the grounding of the esthetic experience exactly to the extent we overlook them, either in the “original” or in the “reproduction.” The only thing that, through reproduction, survives intact about the artwork is the “aura”—because it is socially constructed, because it is not in the work but rather is entirely around it.
When we pore over a “translation” of an ancient Greek poem that comes to us as a few English words amidst a field of lacunae and ellipses, trying to perceive its original austerity and beauty, we are wholly within the “aura” of art. When we strain to hear, through the mechanical burr, the sublimity of Enrico Caruso’s voice production or the nuances of Billie Holiday’s vocal interpretation, we are within the “aura.” What the experience of High Modernism has made clear is that this “aura” is a far more complex semiotic structure than the mere juxtaposition of an economic provenance with a few architectural signs.