FREE ESSAY ON RICHARD WAGNER; WUNDERKIND OR MONSTER

RICHARD WAGNER; WUNDERKIND OR MONSTER

Diana Glazer
European History AP
Research Paper
Richard Wagner; Wunderkind or Monster?
Richard Wagner remains the most controversial genius in music, perhaps in all the arts.
The controversy began during his life - over ten thousand books about him were published
before Wagner's death in 1883 - and continues still. The musical world is divided in
Wagnerians (sometimes called Wagnerites) and anti-Wagnerians. Many have switched
positions as the discover more about their genius, or their monster. In the case of most
artists, knowledge of their private lives is not essential to an understanding of the
nature of their work. Although Wagner's life doesn't explain his work, it cannot be
ignored in an analysis of his work, because it is often the direct antithesis of his
creative spirit. Furthermore, bad people are generally more interesting than good ones.
Wagner is fascinating: an incredible music-dramatic genius who was an undiluted monster.
Wagner is that enigmatic blend of good and evil, great and cruel that sporadically
appears in Germany, the country of Kant and Himmler, of Bach and Walter Ulbricht, of
Goethe and Goebbels. Wagner's conceit was almost pathological. He read everything aloud
to his relatives and friends. He didn't expect criticism, only applause. In Of Mice and
Music, Deems Taylor writes Wagner had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child.
When he felt out of sorts he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom...He was
almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. He was convinced that the world owed him
a living...He was equally unscrupulous in other ways. His second wife had been the wife
of his most devoted friend, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to
persuade her to leave her first husband he was writing to a wealthy woman, whom he could
marry for her money...He had a genius for making enemies. He would insult a man who
disagreed with him about the weather... But he also concludes that this undersized,
sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time..What if he was
faithless to his friends and to his wives? There is a greatness about his worst mistakes.
The miracle is that what he did in the space of seventy years could have been done at
all, even by a great genius, is it any wonder that he had not time to be a man? He was a
complex monster. 
Financially, he cheated his best friends. For example, Otto Wesendock (the man whose wife
Wagner stole away) who bought the publishing rights to Rheingold and Walkure in 1859, had
wide experience with Wagner's character, and was perhaps not too startled to learn that
Rheingold was sold again to Schott of Mainz without any intention on Wagner's part of
repaying the original advance. As a requital Otto was granted the rights to
Gotterdammerung - an unwritten work! But in 1865 Wagner demanded that Otto without
reimbursement give up all claims to Ring (he had also paid for the incomplete Siegfried)
and even surrender - amiably and generously - the orchestral score of Rheingold, his only
remaining asset of these transactions, to the Ring's newest proprietor, the Bavarian
King. The climax of double dealings came, when King Ludwig's ownership rights, for which
he had paid untold thousands of marks, were ignored by Wagner, who proceeded to sell the
Ring to individual theater for his own profit.
Obviously, Wagner was a crook on a scale befitting his musical genius. His duplicity
extends to almost everything else he did. He extolled the virtue of chastity in his early
operas while having numerous affairs. Working in his study in Haus Wahnfried in Bayreuth
on the first act of his Buhnenweihfestspiel ( a stage-consecrating festival play)
Parsifal allegedly a religious work, he wrote to his douce amie, Judith, to send him
amber and powdered scents which he spread in his bathroom, located underneath the study
so that he could breathe in the ;aromatic fumes rising from below and with them memories
of Judith's glowing embraces, while working on the pious admonitions of good, old
Gurnemanz. Yet he had the audacity to refer contemptuously to Rossini as Italia's
voluptuous son, smiling away in luxury's most luxurious lap.
Wagner's pathological hatred of the French and the Jews is a matter of record, and made
him the idol of Adolf Hitler. Wagner had incredibly bad taste; most nineteenth century
anti-Semites would have been horrified by Auschwitz, but one has the uncomfortable
suspicion that Wagner would have wholeheartedly approved. In 1881, Wagner wrong, about
the great solution concerning the Jews, urging his fellow Germans to conquer false shame
and to shrink from ultimate knowledge. To many, this is a terrifying sentence. Wagner's
letzte Erkenntnis, the ultimate knowledge, later become the Endlosung (final solution) of
Himmler and Eichmann.
Wagner hated nearly all fellow composers, and he hated most those from whom he learned
most. He hated Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony. He hated Meyerbeer and ridiculed the
grand opera -and he wrote his own grand opera, Rienzi. He hated Scribe and wrote his
structurally derivative Meistersinger libretto. The difference between Wagner's
aesthetic, polemical writings, and his musical and dramatic practices is bewildering. In
Oper and Drama, his most important treatise about opera as an art form, published in
1851, he severely condemned, Mozart: ...Nothing seems more characteristic to me
concerning Mozart's career as an opera composer than the careless indiscrimination with
which he approached his task; it did not occur to him to ponder over the aesthetic
scruples underlying the opera; on the contrary, he proceeded with the composition of any
text submitted to him with the greatest lack of self-consciousness. One wonders whether
to be infuriated b Wagner's impertinence or amused by his stupidity and ignorance. The
amazing thing is how long people were fooled by him, and how many are fooled by him to
this day.
Theoretically, Wagner condemned duets and ensembles because they make the words difficult
to hear; according to his writings, the words are as important as the music, maybe more
important. Whereupon he wrote Tristan und Isolde, with its great and wonderful love duet
in the second act, in which the words were made nearly
unintelligible by the overwhelming power of the passionate music. In Meistersinger, there
are not only arias, choruses and a ballet (all that Wagner hated so much about eh
despised Meyerbeer), but even a quintet! And because Wagner was such a genius, it happens
to be the greatest quintet ever written for the operatic stage. About the book of
Gotterdammerung, with its poisoned drinks, conspirateurs' ensembles, massed choruses, and
Scribe-inspired coups de theatre, Bernard Shaw wrote quite correctly that it has much in
common with Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. 
In his writings Wagner demanded that conventional arias linked by recitatives are to be
replaces by what he called continuous melos )preferring the Greek word melos to melody
which he considered vulgar). He argued strongly against the singers' opera where plot and
orchestra are subordinated to vocal display, as in the works of Rossini and Bellini.
Wagner carried this out in Rheingold and parts of Die Walkure. But in Gotterdammerung,
Meistersinger and Parisfal, with heir powerful choruses, he wrote post-Meyerbeer
super-grand opera, and in Der fliegende Hollander and Tannhauser he often stops the
action by giving the singers beautiful arias.
Wagner's main problem was not his enemies but his friends. The closest friend was young
Friedrich Nietzsche, the greatest thinker of the late-nineteenth century, who considered
Wagner his ideal superman, the emanation of the eternal, who would bring about eh
regeneration of all the arts in the spirit of ancient Greece. As a young philosopher,
Nietzsche was overpowered by Richard Wagner the man and the artist. he saw in Wagner the
herald of the new Dionysian man said Lang. The break came when Nietzsche's romantic
admiration was challenged by his critical powers. He began, deeply shocked , to sense
Wagner's insincerity. He must have had his first doubts when he was privileged, among
Wagner's closest friends, to read the manuscript his autobiography. He later wrote
...That which is circulated as Wagner's autobiography is fiction, if not worse, intended
for public use. I must confess that every point we know from Wagner's description I
regard with the greatest suspicion. He was not proud enough to utter the truth...even in
biography he remained true to himself - he remained an actor.
In 1873, Nietzsche wrote regarding Wagner that he who believes in himself only is no
longer honest toward himself. The final break came nine years later when Nietzsche heard
Parsifal, which he called Christianity arranged for Wagnerians. Nietzsche had known
Wagner was a cynical atheist, and that what seemed like a conversion was due to Wagner's
wife Cosima. Nietzsche also knew that among close friends Wagner was still cynical about
his wife's beliefs. It is no secret that the editors of his letters deleted many of
Wagner's anti-Christian polemics. Nietzsche, who knew the Master better than anyone else,
rightly sensed opportunistic and materialistic beliefs behind Parsifal. Wagner was keenly
aware of the bourgeois sanctimonious mentality of the Germans, for God, Kaiser and Reich;
Nietzsche knew this was ashamed of Wagner for pandering to the public and der Psycologie
der Masse. It was the end of a beautiful relationship. Wagner survived easily, but
Nietzsche brooded about the disappointment and some believe it may have contributed to
his later insanity.
Many say Wagner was a man of fascist mentality, colored by something essentially, if not
exclusively Teutonic, and it is above all in the Ring that this side of his nature
emerges. By a fascist mentality, it is meant a preference forward against peace, for
violence against gentleness, for retaliation against forgiveness; a glorification of
strength and a contempt for weakness; an exaltation of health and a disdain for
suffering. And by Teutonism (not for a moment to be thought as the mark of all or even of
most Germans) it is mean as a predilection for vastness as against proportion, for
cloudiness as against precision, for an inflated romanticism and a vague nobility. 
Wagner began by writing poetry and philosophical studies. In 1831, at the age of
eighteen, he began to study counterpoint. Two years later, he wrote Die Feen (the
Fairies), and a historical grand opera, Rienzi. He was under the influence of his
predecessors (Meyerbeer, Halevy, Spontini, Spohr, Mehul, Marschner) and borrowed freely
from them. Hanslick described the first-act finales as mixture of Donizetti and
Meyerbeer, and an anticipation of Verdi. Wagner was furious but then he calmed down and
wrote Der fliegende Hollander where the master's hand becomes visible, and audible
(journeying from Riga, in 1839, Wagner had experienced violent storms between Pillan and
Gravesend which mad his trip, according to his own description, more terrifying than the
first voyage of Columbus). There are already great moments in the Hollander, such as the
Dutchman's appearance in the first act, Senta's ballad and her meeting with the Dutchman,
and the ghost chorus in the last act. The opera was a failure in Dresden, in 1843; the
audience was bored and after only four performance of the work was dropped for twenty-two
years. Tannhauser(1845) and Lohengrin (1847) are romantic operas; but again, there are
long flashes of Wagnerian genius. No romantic composer had yet written anything as
exciting as the Venusberg Music. And there is drama and excitement in the schizophrenic
female characters, Elisabeth and Venus, whom Wagner, with blinding clarity, saw as the
woman. Lohengrin remains the German fairytale opera, in which Wagner used orchestral
colors that had never been heard before.
Tannhauser did quite well in Dresden in 1845 but Wagner's real troubles with the work
began in 1861, at the Paris Opera. During the second performance members of the local
Jockey Club, who used to arrive late at the opera house, started a riot because they had
missed the splendors of the ballet at the beginning of the first act; they were joined by
a large group who were opposed to Wagner. After the third performance, he withdrew the
work.
Lohengrin too had mixed reception. Wagner wrote it backwards starting with the third act,
and ending with the prelude. Liszt (Wagner's future father-in-law) presented the opera at
his small Hoftheater in Weimar. The orchestra had only thirty-eight members and the
singers were second-rate. Gradually, however, Lohengrin was accepted and remains one of
the composer's most popular works. Weber's influence is obvious but Wagner surpasses his
predecessor; no one before him ad created orchestral effects that might almost be called
impressionistic.
In 1849, Wagner joined the revolutionary movement in Dresden, went on the barricades, had
to flee from Germany into Switzerland (he didn't hear Lohengrin performed in Germany
until 861). As a refugee in Zurich, he wrote his theoretical essays, Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft, and Oper und Drama. He had become acquainted with the pessimistic philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer and saw the answer to many questions in Schopenhauer's romantic
interpretation of the cosmic nature of music (music is the melody whose text is the
world). This sounded great to the impressionable mind of Wagner. But Schopenhauer also
said, Music is more powerful than words, music and words is the marriage of a prince and
a beggar. German romanticists always considered music supreme among the arts, but Wagner
wrote that the poetry must derive from the myth, that the musician must be the servant of
the poet.
Gradually, Wagner evolved his grandiose concept of the Gesamkunstwerk (total theater)
where drama, music, scenery and lights are welded into a powerful unity.
Wagner worked long and hard on his librettos. In a letter to Richard Strauss, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, the librettist, praises Wagner's dramatic structures and the inimitable
excellence with which the way is prepared for the music. A good libretto must be a good
play which also prepares the way or the music. Great librettists are rarer even than
great playwrights.
Wagner's poetry is dominated by alliteration. The third accented syllable alliterates
with the first or second, or both. Sometimes Wagner overdoes this, sacrificing sense and
lucidity, as in Isolde's Liebestod: In des Wonnenmeeres woggenden Schwall, In des
Welt-Atems wehendem All.
At the first Bayreuth Festival, in 1876, Lilli Lehmannm the Woglinde in Rheingold, had
the doubtful pleasure of singing the first words in the Ring: Weia! Wag! Woge, du Welle,
walle zur Wiege! Wagala weia! Wallala weiala weia. Pretty meaningless in German or any
other language; but all criticism is suspended when one listen to the music. Wagner's
wonderful orchestra always reflects on, or interprets, never just accompanies, the events
on the stage. It delivers a running commentary on the psychology of the characters. This
is not Wagner's invention. Monteverdi did it in his stile recitative much earlier, but
Wagner brought it to unprecedented perfection. Yet even in his orchestral passages in the
Ring, there are sometimes grand opera moments that impress adolescents of all ages -
thunder and lightning in Rheingold, the gods' entry into Valhalla - in between moments of
great beauty.
Much academic nonsense had been written about Wagner's use of the leitmotif. Wagner
didn't invent it - Monteverdi had already used recurrent themes, and so did Gretry and
Gluck - but he developed the principle and used it with astonishing freedom. His
leitmotifs are not musical cliches; he never used them rigidly or mechanically, as one
would assume after studying some German guidebooks and commentaries. Wagner uses
leitmotifs to express psychological happenings, using them to build up his amazing
symphonic technique. Debussy called the leitmotifs visiting cards, and it is true that
sometimes Wagner used the them absurdly. When Brunhilde is torn by wild passion in the
third act of Siegfried, one suddenly hears the dragon, motif. Some people think it might
have been a private joke, but Wagner's humor wasn't very subtle, except in Meistersinger,
when he suddenly impresses us with wonderful nuances of humor (but everything about
Wagner is unpredictable - for every one of his rules, there are many exceptions). In the
prelude to Gotterdammerung, Siegmund's and Sieglinde's love theme is used skillfully and
concurrently with Brunhilde's devotion to Grane, the horse. Such inconsistencies prove
that it would be absurd to interpret Wagner's creative genius literally, through
mathematically used leitmotifs. Wagner was no bookkeeper but a genius.
When he is carried away by inspiration on a magnificent scale, which happens often in his
late works, he writes wonderful symphonic music of such sensuous beauty and passionate
power that one should close one's eyes and surrender. The problem of listening to Wagner
is that total theater demands total immersion. If we are to get the full benefit from
Wagner's operas, we have to simultaneously identify ourselves with what we hear and see
on stage...and to distance ourselves.
In 1854, having evolved his aesthetic principles, Wagner began to write Gotterdammerung,
the last day of his tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he tackle first. When he
found that too many things remained unexplained, he went backward Siegfried (which
happens earlier than Gotterdammerung). After that second act of Siegfried, he became
involved in the conflict between the principles he had written and the music he was
inspired to write. He gave up Siegfried, and resumed work on it only twelve years later,
after he's written Tristan und Isolde and Meistersinger, two totally different
masterpieces, each unsurpassed in its own way. Tristan remains the greatest orgy of love
ever written for the stage, and Meistersinger is a wonderful romantic comedy - and the
only work of Wagner's whose characters are not artificial heroes, gods and dwarves, but
real human beings (Wagner called it, rightly, his perfectest masterpiece).
And suddenly he went back to the interrupted Siegfried, and when he'd finished and there
were more things to say he went farther backwards and wrote Die Walkure, and finally
Rheingold, which opens the tetralogy. Such achievements imply hard work. In his working
habits, Wagner was a bourgeois - pedantic, writing clean pages, keeping regular hours;
but in his conception he was entirely the opposite.
Tristan und Isolate completely reverses Wagner's lofty theories on the poet ruling the
musician. Triton is a musical masterpiece. The music - the orchestra - always comes
first. The words often retard the plot or, at worst, create boredom. No one goes to
Triton to listen to the poetry. It's the music that matters.
Mesitersinger is Wagner's finest work. The libretto had genuine humor and great poetic
beauty and the music both drama and charm. It is everything a comic opera should be,
though not according to Wagner's theories - but fortunately he didn't bother about those
when writing the work. Compared the hallucinations of the suffering, feverish Tristan,
who is an artificial creation and a bore, Hans Sachs is real and human, and proof that
Wagner was a poet. Ironically, Sachs reaches greatness not when he is on stage, during
the Fliedermonolog or Wahnmonolog, but when he is talking to Eva, or to Stolsing, or in
the quintet of the third act
All composer are glad to be performed; Wagner, however, the incurable egomaniac - Thomas
Mann called him a theatromaniac - demanded to be performed in his own shrine, a monument
to his Musikdrama, and - as he later saw it - a Valhalla to the German Empire that had
emerged in 1870. Wagner, the former revolutionary, had come full circle. He had been in
Bayreuth as in impecunious twenty-two-year-old conductor one summer evening in 1835, and
exclaimed, Ten horses couldn't pull me away from here; he was given to extravagant
statements even at that early age. Within a day or so he set our for Nuremberg, to
conduct a concert, and he didn't return for thirty-five years. In 1870, when he was
trying to finish the Ring,, he revisited Bayreuth. He'd for some time wanted a theater of
his own. I'm going to build my own house and educate my own artists, he wrote. I don't
care how long it takes.
He went to Bayreuth to see whether its baroque Margravian opera house, which then had the
largest opera stage in Germany would answer his requirements. He immediately decided it
wouldn't. The auditorium was too small and the acoustics were nothing special. Then he
walked up the nearby Green Hill, a wooded slope a mile north of town, and concluded that
its summit would make a splendid setting for his theater. Nowhere else! Only here! he
said. The city fathers of Bayreuth, overwhelmed by his enthusiasm, made him a present of
the site. On March 22, 1872, the cornerstone was laid. Wagner composed his won Imperial
march for the occasion, and afterwards he conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, his
favorite. He was convinced he had a mandate from Beethoven.
The Festspielhaus was opened on August 13, 1876. On opening day there was formal
procession of notables and musicians from the center of Bayreuth to the top of the Green
Hill. The first festival was an artistic success but a financial failure (the deficit was
150,000 marks), and Wagner couldn't afford to put on another until 1882, the year before
his death. On July 26, Parsifal was first performed. Wagner had assembled a topnotch
cast; Hermann Winkelmann Parsifal), Amalie Materna (Kundry), Emil Scaria (Gurnemanz), and
Theodor Reichmann (Amfortas). The honor of conducting this Christian Buhnenweihfestspiel
was given to Hermann Levi, a Jew. Parsifal is really two things, depending on whether one
is exposed to it in the mysterious dimness of the Festspielhaus or analyses it in the
cool light of next morning. As a spectacle, it is an emotional experience with moments of
indescribable beauty. It is impossible not to be moved by he Transformation Scene, the
scene of the flower maidens, the divine beauty of the good Friday music. But afterwards
one has second thoughts. There are times when it becomes a children's play for retarded
adults. The mumbo-jumbo around the Holy Grail is strictly late Cecil B. De Mille.
Parsifal is only sincere in the passages where the composer's imagination triumphed over
the self-imposed religious-metaphysical bonds, where the irrepressible creative force of
the musician overcame the calculating preoccupations of the thinker: everywhere else
Parsifal is false and mere theatralism. Wagner is a better magician that Klingsor, the
magician in Parsifal. Klingsor remains a parody. Wagner hypnotizes us with beautiful
music.
Perhaps he isn't the composer or logical-thinking people - and thus will always be
assured of a worldwide audience and perennial popularity, though he will have his ups and
downs. Richard Wagner raises the philosophical, ethical question whether genius makes
badness permissible in man. And perhaps this question cannot be answered simply, but one
thing is sure. Richard Wagner was a complex man whose music and whose ethics will amaze,
baffle and intrigue audiences for years to come.
Bibliography
Detwiler, Harriet The History of Opera. New York; Barrett Press, 1978.