[Militant International Review, No 61, Summer 1995, p. 30-32]
Following Channel Four’s series on the composer Richard Wagner, John Bulaitis looks at the life and art of this controversial 19th century figure.
The centrepiece of Channel Four’s Wagnermania series was an interesting documentary entitled Wagner vs Wagner featuring the composer’s great-grandson, Gottfried Wagner. The documentary was an important statement dealing with the relationship between Wagner’s work and Nazism.
Wagner’s biographers – and his other descendants – have nearly always attempted to play down his reactionary ideas. But here was his great-grandson making an unanswerable case, exposing the racism in his works and, moreover, describing and attacking the links between his own family and Adolf Hitler.
Against images of Nazi stormtroopers marching to Wagner’s themes, Gottfried described how his grandmother Winifred Wagner, had joined the Nazis in 1923 – ten years before they came to power – and how she had played a major role in opening up links between Hitler and big business. Under her directorship, the yearly music festival at Bayreuth – a theatre built by the composer – became a Nazi gala.
Of course, there are countless examples where an artist’s work has been utilised by others in a way that they themselves would not have endorsed; the British composer, Edward Elgar, wrote the Pomp and Circumstances marches but always detested the jingoistic ditty, Land of Hope and Glory, attached to one of them.
But, while one cannot say that Wagner would definitely have approved of Nazism, it cannot be denied that he ended his days a virulent nationalist and racist and that these ideas are clearly expressed in his later works.
It does not take much stretch of the imagination to interpret his last opera, Parsifal, as the story of a community (the Aryan Race) in decay due to interbreeding with racial inferiors (the Jews) and redeemed by adopting a new racial religion and the principle of racial exclusivity. Hitler once described Parsifal as the “ultimate experience… the only thing that anticipates what I have to do”.
The case is further strengthened by the fact that Wagner not only wrote operas, but churned out a series of tedious essays and ‘philosophical’ writings. The crudest of these were written between 1878 and his death in 1883 and include the notorious Know Thyself, which talks about the “great and noble character” of “pure-bred races” like the Germans and looks forward to a time when there will be an “absence of Jews”. All this has sometimes led to calls for his music to be banned – and indeed it is still forbidden to perform Wagner in Israel.
But the Channel Four season left a big question unanswered: how was it that Richard Wagner, who ended his days as one of the biggest reactionary egotists of all time1, was in 1848 a revolutionary democrat, fighting on the Dresden barricades, helping to manufacture hand-grenades in his back garden and – after the revolution’s defeat – only escaping arrest, imprisonment and a possible death sentence by the skin of his teeth? After that he was exiled from Germany for eleven years and invariably trailed by the secret police.
In fact it is only by exploring this contradiction that we can gain a real understanding of the development of Wagner’s ideas, and their connection with, and influence on, the development of his art.
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In terms of the Western tradition of classical music, Wagner was a true revolutionary – the most influential figure in the second half of the 19th century. As well as redefining the relationship between music and drama, he stretched what musicians call tonal harmony to its limits. Without getting too technical, this device can create for the listener a feeling of unresolved tension in music and so act as an emotional trigger.
Even on a superficial level Wagner has had a lasting effect: it is hard to get by a day without one of his themes popping up in a TV advert, documentary, film, brass band concert or wedding.
Trotsky argued that a work of art s should, “in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art”.
And there can be no doubt that from the point of view of his art, Wagner was a giant. But the argument of some that, as he wrote great music, that’s all that matters and his political views are irrelevant, is wrong.
Art is not produced in a vacuum but is connected to the development of society and influenced by the struggles between the different social forces in society, reflecting the ideas that arise on the basis of those struggles.
And Wagner certainly dealt with, what we may call, the big themes in human society – life, death, love, fate, power and conflict. It is this, as well as his musical genius, that helps to explain the lasting impact, and power of his music. Even Trotsky describes
While one cannot say that Wagner would definitely have approved of Nazism, it cannot be denied that he ended his days a virulent nationalist and racist.
in his Diary in Exile how he stayed up to midnight to listen to a performance of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) on the radio.
The decisive influence on Richard Wagner was revolution – and counterrevolution. Beethoven, the colossus who revolutionised Western music in the first half of the 19th century, was inspired by the spirit of a revolutionary age generated by the Great French revolution of 1789. His music is imbued with optimism and revolutionary fervour.
In Beethoven’s day the bourgeoisie was generally still playing a progressive role, although many artists very quickly began to rebel against its destructive impact on communities and human relationships.
The young Richard Wagner mixed in the same radical milieu as the young Marx and Engels2. For a time he even followed a vaguely parallel political evolution as the founders of scientific socialism – influenced first by the philosophical ideas of the young Hegelians and latter by those of Ludwig Feuerbach.
He was politically influenced by the ideas of anarchism. He worked closely with Bakunin3 in the Dresden uprising and was a personal friend of Georg Herwegh4 who in 1844 was on the editorial board of the radical paper Vorwärts! together with Marx and Bakunin.
About 1848 Wagner wrote: “I (revolution) will destroy every wrong which has power over men. I will destroy the domination of one over the other … I will shatter the power of the mighty, of the law of property. Let there be an end to the wrong that gives one man power over millions”.
Around the same time, he penned ideas about art in total contradiction to his later chauvinism: “Art of the future world would embrace the spirit of newly-liberated humanity. Nationality would be no more than an ornament – art would be taken out of the world of profit-making and capitalist speculation”.
But the 1848 revolutions were betrayed by the bourgeoisie. It had ceased to be a revolutionary class – terrified that a revolution would not stop at the demolition of feudal rule but spill over into a workers’ revolution. In particular the German capitalist class – because, historically, it had developed weak and fragmented – had from the outset been thoroughly reactionary. Marx and Engels, by now, were basing their work completely on the understanding that the revolution could only be carried out, not by the bourgeoisie, but against it. 1848 confirmed that the task now fell on the shoulders of the German working class.
But middle-class intellectuals, including writers, poets and musicians – and including Richard Wagner – while being repelled by the social conditions created by capitalism, and the system’s rotten values, were unable to see in the small, relatively young German working class the decisive force for political change.
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In common with most intellectuals, Wagner – despite his courage and self-sacrifice displayed in Dresden – had a haughty contempt for the working class.
Even after the brutal crushing of the Dresden insurrection by Prussian troops, he remained optimistic about the revolution’s victory for a further three years. But – and this is the decisive point – without the perspective of a workers’ revolution, it was inevitable that he would increasingly draw pessimistic and reactionary conclusions from the revolution’s defeat.
Wagner’s evolution was part of a tendency in German art: writers, poets and philosophers reflected a contradiction between, on one hand, a hatred of capitalism and its values and, on the other – because of their lack of confidence in the working class struggling for a socialist future – a looking back to a mystical feudal past or to mythology in a hunt for the values destroyed by capitalism.
Part of this trend was an appeal to the Volk (people) with its denial of class division. This Völkisch ideology, which originally developed with the rise of German national consciousness in the 18th century, contained the roots of the anti-Semitism that was to become an integral part of capitalist reaction in Germany; the Jew was contrasted, as an outsider tied to commerce, to the mythology of pure German-blooded peasants living in a true community.
So although the bulk of German intellectuals – in contrast to the German bourgeoisie – had welcomed and were inspired by the great French revolution – the collapse of ‘bourgeois liberalism’ in 1848 and their failure to base themselves on the struggle of the working class meant that an entire generation took the road to extreme reaction. Wagner’s journey from revolution to reaction can be traced in his epic work, The Ring cycle. He conceived the idea in the revolutionary days of 1848 and began work shortly after. The story, although based in myth, is a depiction of class conflict: an old world corrupted by power, tyranny and greed for control over a gold ring whose possession gives man economic control and power to exploit his fellow man. This old order is contrasted to a struggle for a new order based on freedom and love.
The young Richard Wagner was politically influenced by the ideas of anarchism.
The idea is a Feuerbachian rather than a Marxist one but there is undoubtedly also a socialist element in The Ring. One writer has described the hammering music in Das Rheingold as “the most vivid evocation of the dark, harsh world of early industrial capitalism in nineteenth century music”5.
The work’s socialist element was illustrated magnificently in the acclaimed ‘Marxist’ interpretation of the cycle by French director Patrice Chereau – complete with pit-wheels and hydro-electric dam and an optimistic conclusion that the masses, not individual ‘heroes’, would build a new society.
But The Ring was not completed until 1874 and in its later parts the analogies with class disappear and, of course, the whole thing ends with the doom, pessimism and destruction of Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods).
Between its start and completion Wagner had ditched Feuerbach and embraced the idealist philosophy of Schopenhauer; the reactionary ‘philosopher of pessimism’, who provided the philosophical cover for the German bourgeoisie’s support for the Bismark Junker dictatorship. Wagner was to become a representative of German bourgeois reaction at a particular stage in that country’s capitalist development.
Nazism and fascism – “the distilled essence of imperialism” as Trotsky described it – represented a different later stage of the same capitalist reaction. As always, reaction ransacks the past and Hitler stirred into his reactionary pot, amongst other trends, Volkism, Schopenhauer and … Richard Wagner. In the words of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, Wagner’s was truly a “a great mind trapped by reaction”.
1 Engels wrote that many people have thought themselves “the only true philosopher of today and the ‘foreseeable’ future” but Wagner was “probably the first who has calmly blurted it out”. (Anti- Dühring, p. 35).
2 In a remarkable coincidence the 20-year-old Frederick Engels wrote in 1840-41 a libretto for an opera called Cola di Rienzi – a story of a fourteenth century Roman politician and general who led a popular revolt only to end up a tyrant himself. In 1842 Wagner’s own version of Rienzi was premiered in Dresden.
3 George Bernard Shaw argued that Bakunin was the model for the Siegfried character in the The Ring. 4. 5.
4 In 1848 Herwegh attempted to invade Germany with a guerrilla band to spur on the revolution, an adventure that finished in a bloody shambles.
5 Anthony Arblaster, Viva la Libertà, Politics in Opera.
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