Wagnerism

Wagner chose not to issue this program, apparently because Mathilde Wesendonck, the object of his own Tristan-like affections, deemed it too personal in tone. In a letter to her, he parsed his music in terms of what he described as the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world: “A breath clouds the clear expanse of heaven.” As in the Ring, Wagner must relive the moment of creation before he can begin his story.

More words may have been spilled about the first three bars of Tristan—a rising minor sixth in the cellos, a semitone descent, a pungent chord of cellos and winds—than about any short passage in music, with the possible exception of the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. That first chord, named the “Tristan chord,” is a nebulous, ambiguous half-diminished seventh. In a well-defined harmonic context, it would be unremarkable, but in the hazy space delineated by the cellos it assumes an identity at once sensuous and unstable. The sequence seems to repeat, departing at a higher pitch, yet the music is not quite the same. The initial leap in the cellos is wider than before, a major sixth rather than a minor sixth. We drift deeper into the mist. The third iteration introduces further irregularities: an extra downward step in the cellos, an extra upward step in the winds. With such minute variations, Wagner captures the texture of unconscious, dreaming states. David Michael Hertz, in his book The Tuning of the Word, relates the passage to the literary technique known as parataxis: phrases appearing one after another, without a clear sense of connective tissue. Hertz’s description of the opening of Tristan—“A chain of fragments, each one freely bonded to the next”—pertains just as well to Baudelaire or Mallarmé.

All of Tristan is a hymn to oblivion. The political realities surrounding the Irish princess and the Breton-Cornish knight dissipate like a mirage. When, in Act I, Brangäne announces that their ship is approaching land, Isolde asks, “Which land?” And when Tristan is told that King Mark is approaching, he asks, “Which king?” The obliteration of reality is most pronounced in Act II, much of which is given over to the Liebesnacht, or Night of Love. After King Mark and his party go out on a hunt, Tristan and Isolde sing a forty-minute duet that oscillates between extreme sexual agitation and blissful lassitude. Serene ecstasy settles over the music as the two foresee their death together:

So starben wir, Thus we died, um ungetrennt, so that, undivided, ewig einig, forever one, ohne End’, without end, ohn’ Erwachen, without waking, ohn’ Erbangen, without fearing, namenlos namelessly in Lieb’ umfangen, enveloped in love, ganz uns selbst gegeben, given entirely to each other, der Liebe nur zu leben! we might live for love alone!

The Gestalt philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels claimed to have found not one but two places in Act II where “orgasmic ejaculations” occur.

With a crashing orchestral chord, erotic stasis gives way to savage action. The lovers are caught; Tristan is fatally wounded; King Mark launches into an agonized lament. Act III, set at Kareol, Tristan’s ancestral castle on the Brittany coast, tracks the encroachment of death: prolonged, fitful, and feverish, in the case of Tristan (“Where—was I? Where—am I?”); becalmed and beatific, for Isolde (“Do I alone hear this melody?”). Isolde has crossed the Channel to heal his wound, but as she approaches Tristan tears off his bandages and lets his life bleed away. He dies in her arms, with a musical phrase that evaporates into silence. Taking charge of the “So starben wir” melody, Isolde sings a colossal monologue of farewell—“Mild und leise wie er lächelt,” or “How softly and gently he smiles”—and dies by Tristan’s side.

How that overwhelming music came to be known as the “Liebestod” (“Love-Death”) is another curiosity of Wagnerian apocrypha. The composer applied the word “Liebestod” not to the ending but to the opening passage of the prelude, which evokes the switching of the potions. His preferred title for the final monologue was “Isolde’s Transfiguration.” Then, in 1868, Liszt published a piano paraphrase of the ending, calling it Isolden’s Liebes-Tod. Because of the popularity of piano transcriptions, Liszt’s title supplanted Wagner’s own. Originally, the Liebestod was a seeming death that turns into love. It became almost the opposite—love that turns into death.

In fact, the word “death” is missing from Isolde’s valediction. Rather, this is a hallucination of life: Tristan’s lips forming a smile, his eyes shining, his heart beating, his breath rising, mysterious music emanating from him, sound merging with sight, taste, and smell. And Isolde is desperate to share the mirage with others: “Friends! See! Do you not feel and see it?” A mystical synthesis transpires:

In dem wogenden Schwall, In the surging swell, in dem tönenden Schall, in the ringing sound, in des Welt-Atems in the world-breath’s wehendem All,— wafting vastness— ertrinken, to drown, versinken,— to sink— unbewußt,— unconscious— höchste Lust! highest bliss!

Her death is spelled out in the stage directions: “Isolde sinks, as if transfigured, in Brangäne’s arms, gently onto Tristan’s body.” But, as the musicologist Karol Berger writes, it is a mistake to think of the ending as a “glorification of the nihilistic death wish,” as he characterizes the common view. The monologue is ultimately concerned with the metamorphosis of the lovers’ story into myth, into art. Tellingly, even as the language dissolves into fragments, the music achieves a radiant simplicity, the vocal line becoming fixed almost exclusively on the notes of the B-major scale, with the elemental interval of the octave rising at the end. You have the sense that Isolde is not so much dying as disappearing back into the music that set the tale in motion.

In Paris, it took time for Tristan’s potion to kick in. When Wagner conducted the prelude at the Théâtre-Italien, it met with a tepid response. “A sort of chromatic moaning,” said the composer-critic Hector Berlioz, a sometime supporter. Baudelaire was bewitched by most of what he heard but had nothing to say about Tristan. Wagner had a more difficult time in France than he had hoped; it was not Tristan but the more conventional Tannhäuser that reached the stage of the Opéra in 1861, and even then a storm of opposition arose. Tristan did not arrive at the Palais Garnier until 1904. By century’s end, though, Wagner had become a godfather of modern art, his name invoked variously by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. The short-lived journal Revue wagnérienne facilitated the emergence of the Symbolist movement in literature. Tristan set the course for an avant-garde art of dream logic, mental intoxication, formless form, limitless desire.

Wagnérisme, the French cult of Wagner, was an astonishing development, as those who lived through it knew. “You cannot imagine the impression that this music made on those of my age,” the novelist Alphonse Daudet said, according to his son Léon. “It truly transformed us. It renewed the atmosphere of art.” Camille Mauclair, a devotee of Mallarmé and the Symbolists, remarked that Wagnérisme had the rhythms of a great love affair—“the first stammerings of the Wagnerian revelation; the arguments, the disavowals, and the enthusiasms, all equally furious; the blazing apotheoses and then the restless unease, the god debated …” Mauclair’s generation felt not only an intemperate love for the god himself but also a “terrible disgust” for everything else. The fervor was all the more notable given the mutual distrust that festered between France and Germany in the decades after the Franco-Prussian War. That so many Parisian intellectuals welcomed the cultural figurehead of a nation that had humbled France on the battlefield never ceased to baffle the patriotic bloc.

Nietzsche monitored the early stages of this national obsession. In The Case of Wagner, he links the composer to contemporary France (“Very modern, right? very Parisian! very décadent!”). In Ecce Homo, he names Baudelaire “the first intelligent follower of Wagner.” The philosopher cherished French culture, but his ascribing of Parisian manners to the master of Bayreuth had a cutting edge; his goal, surely, was to embarrass those who considered Wagner the most German of artists. The Wagnéristes, though, sincerely believed that their idol belonged in France—that Paris was his “proper soil,” as Nietzsche said. The early twentieth-century author André Suarès openly declared that France was the place where Wagner had been understood best; the operas had transcended their German milieu and become essential to French intellectual life. Indeed, in a 1916 essay, Suarès wrote, “Wagner at the end of his life is freer of Germany than is Nietzsche, who prides himself on having escaped from it.” This proposition would have annoyed Nietzsche no end.

For the French, Wagner was, first and foremost, modern. A notion of modernité had become integral to the self-image of the Parisian vanguard. Baudelaire began campaigning for unflinching representations of la vie moderne in the 1840s, and he fashioned an axiomatic definition in the 1860 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” The modern artist can find the eternal within the ephemeral, “poetry within history.” At first glance, Wagner seems distant from modernity thus defined: the ephemeral is not his subject. But Baudelaire will recognize in the composer another kind of adversarial potential. Wagner’s “passionate energy of expression,” his “strange superhuman quality,” makes him, in fact, the “truest representative of modernity.” The last phrase probably inspired Nietzsche’s aphorism about Wagner summing up the modern condition. The two comments are, however, very different in spirit. For Nietzsche, Wagner epitomizes a decadent culture that must be overcome. For Baudelaire, decadence is a site of resistance, a source of secret power.

Decadence long had a purely negative connotation: it was the overripe expression of an exhausted civilization. The conservative critic Paul Scudo found in Wagner’s music “the qualities and the defects of an epoch of decadence.” Baudelaire took possession of the word in his 1857 essay on Edgar Allan Poe, saying that any literature labeled “decadent” was almost certain to be superior to the alternative. In 1881, the novelist and critic Paul Bourget defined decadent style as “one in which the unity of the book breaks down and gives way to the independence of the page, in which the page breaks down and gives way to the independence of the sentence, and in which the sentence breaks down and gives way to the independence of the word.” For some, this atomization of discourse was a misfortune; for others, it advanced the cause of art. Although Bourget does not mention Wagner, Nietzsche makes the connection, using the Frenchman’s analysis to lament that life no longer resides in the whole, that discourse is devolving into an individualist free-for-all. Tristan, with its disconnected, groping phrases, is a case in point—even if Nietzsche cannot stop listening to it.

Wagner was modern; he was decadent; and he was dangerous. Riots and brawls accompanied French performances of his works until the end of the century, when the torch of scandal passed to the modernists. Opposition arose not only because of his German nationality but also because of the perceived difficulty of his music and the undoubted pugnacity of his prose. His rhetoric of perpetual revolution delighted the nonconformist artists and writers of Paris. That the conservative wing denounced Wagner and his followers as “terrorists of music” spoke in their favor. For the Wagnéristes, the composer had little to do with Germany; rather, he represented an international revolt against the artistic status quo.

Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” describes the ambivalence that the likes of Baudelaire felt in the face of an expanding popular marketplace. Recoiling from commerce, they put a premium on absolute novelty, which was a kind of market value in itself. In Benjamin’s estimation, Wagner’s total artwork became the ultimate expression of the art-for-art’s-sake mentality. For that reason, “Baudelaire succumbs to the Wagner infatuation.” Yet Wagnéristes were by no means blind idolaters, nor did they necessarily retreat from social questions, as Benjamin’s analysis implies. Their relationship with Wagner was a double-edged exchange, a contest of wills, an agon. Mallarmé directed writers to “take back what is ours” from the rival domain of music drama. “What a singular challenge Richard Wagner imposes on poets, whose duty he usurps with the most candid and splendid bravura!”

EARLY WAGNÉRISTES

Wagner’s first Parisian foray, from 1839 to 1842, was a humiliating defeat, at least in his own mind. Fleeing creditors in the Baltic city of Riga, where he conducted for two seasons, he and Minna Wagner arrived in the bourgeois metropolis of Louis-Philippe with few friends and no money. For two and a half years, Wagner found work as an arranger and a journalist, but his music received scant notice, and his profligacy nearly landed him in debtor’s prison. Ever after, he viewed this experience as the crucible in which his mature self was forged.

Although Paris generally ignored him, Wagner did attract a glimmer of attention when, in advance of a staging of Carl Maria von Weber’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz, he contributed a two-part article to the Revue et gazette musicale, explaining the work’s roots in folk legend and identifying supposed differences between German and French taste. Wagner predicted that the supernatural dimension of Freischütz—its magic bullets, its enchanted forest, its Wolf’s Glen—would mystify Parisian audiences who were accustomed to promenading in the Bois de Boulogne. Only the melancholy, questing German spirit, steeped in the lore of the Black Forest and the Teutoburger Wald, could feel at home in Weber’s opera. George Sand, near the height of her fame, read that article and paraphrased it in the introduction to her own diabolically tinged story “Mouny-Robin.” The woods of France have their own devilish secrets, Sand retorted.

Interest in Wagner quickened after 1848. The failure of revolutionary hopes impelled a turn away from politics and toward the otherworldly, the bizarre, the visceral, the voluptuous—a distinctively French counterpart to Wagner’s turn to metaphysics. The cult got off to a somewhat shaky start when the author and critic Gérard de Nerval, a flickering fixture of Paris bohemia, reviewed the premiere of Lohengrin without having attended it. The performance took place in 1850, in Weimar, under Liszt’s direction. Nerval fell sick en route but assembled a plausible account using materials that Liszt sent his way. “Lohengrin is one of the knights who go in search of the Holy Grail,” Nerval wrote. “Such was the goal of all adventurous expeditions of the Middle Ages, as with the Golden Fleece in ancient times and, today, California … This is an original and bold talent which has revealed itself in Germany, one that has as yet said only its first words.” Wagner approved of the article, despite its erratic summary of the plot.

Nerval continued to follow the German singularity from afar, writing in 1854 that his own theories were “quite related to those of Richard Wagner”—although he still had not heard any of the operas. He was by then immersed in his unfinished final work, Aurélia, which begins with the sentence “Dream is a second life.” Nerval’s sustained examination of the “overflow of dream into real life” intersects at many points with the Wagner of Tristan and the Ring. Confined to a clinic, the protagonist imagines being attended by Valkyries and has premonitions of world destruction. In one sequence, he meditates on the origins of the white and black races, the Nibelung hoard, Brünnhilde, Siegfried, Charlemagne, and the Holy Grail—a swirl of topics that overlaps with Wagner’s 1848 essay “The Wibelungs.” Nerval committed suicide in 1855, but his preoccupations became central to French literature.

The poet, novelist, and critic Théophile Gautier, a comrade of Nerval’s from schooldays onward, understood Wagner in terms of the art-for-art’s-sake stance that Gautier popularized in his poetry and prose. One of his most famous poems, “Symphonie en blanc majeur” (“Symphony in White Major,” 1852), set off a fad for musical titles in poetry and painting. Gautier, who shared Nerval’s taste for dream states and the supernatural, first encountered Wagner when the Tannhäuser overture was played in Paris in 1850. He judged it “a work full of knowledge, of original instrumental effects,” surpassing “those facile banalities that the French public is always ready to applaud.” When Gautier saw the complete opera, in Wiesbaden, in 1857, his reaction was more measured, not to say confused. Expecting the music of a “paroxyste,” he instead professed to hear a formally conservative work “full of fugues”—an analysis that few musicologists have seconded.

The majority of Francophone critics were unremittingly negative. In 1852, the eminent Belgian theorist and critic François-Joseph Fétis wrote a seven-part series of articles disparaging Wagner’s music and ideas, yoking the composer to such “aberrations of the spirit” as the realism of Courbet and the radicalism of Proudhon. French listeners could not easily judge for themselves, since almost no one was playing the music. Between 1842 and 1860, Paris heard nothing by Wagner except two isolated renditions of the Tannhäuser overture. Then began the “second assault on Paris,” in the words of the Wagner biographer Ernest Newman. First came the concert series at the Théâtre-Italien, then the Tannhäuser fiasco at the Opéra, which launched Wagnerism as an international event.

THE TANNHÄUSER SCANDAL

“The author of the Tannhäuser overture! Open all the doors,” the poet and critic Auguste de Gasperini wrote to his friend Léon Leroy in September 1859, announcing Wagner’s return to Paris. Two years earlier, Gasperini, a former naval surgeon who read German philosophy and espoused radical politics, had heard the Lohengrin wedding march in the spa town of Baden-Baden, and found himself “subjugated” by it—a strong reaction to a somewhat innocuous piece. Since then, Gasperini had been proselytizing on Wagner’s behalf. Leroy, a musically trained journalist and editor, spread the word in liberal circles.

Wagner in Paris, 1861, from Thomas Mann’s collection

The political backdrop helps to explain the ensuing battle over Wagner in Paris. Louis-Napoléon was crowned Napoleon III in 1852, and in the early years of his regime he exercised an authoritarian grip, effectively suppressing opposition at both ends of the political spectrum—the republican left, adhering to the ideals of the Revolution; and the legitimist right, dedicated to restoring the Bourbon monarchy. By the end of the fifties, though, the left was gathering strength, and the emperor responded with a strategy of partial liberalization. The system of censorship that forced Baudelaire to remove six poems from Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 eased modestly in the following decade, giving encouragement to new artistic voices.

Even if Wagner had retreated from politics, his reputation rested in large measure on his revolutionary pamphlets, and he had many fans on the left. The ranks of the Wagnéristes grew to include the politicians Jules Ferry and Émile Ollivier (the latter married to Liszt’s daughter Blandine); the philosopher and future Third Republic statesman Paul-Armand Challemel-Lacour; the poet and dramatist Théodore de Banville, who greeted Wagner as “a democrat, a new man, wanting to write for everyone and for the people”; the pianist Maria Kalergis, who, by Eugène Delacroix’s report, adored the composer “like a fool, as she adores the Republic”; and the author Marie d’Agoult, mother of Blandine Ollivier and Cosima von Bülow, later Cosima Wagner.

When Wagner presented his concerts at the Théâtre-Italien, musical conservatives ratcheted up their opposition to the alleged Marat of composers. Critics mocked the audience as a parade of poseurs: “Dresses of yellow satin with crimson bodices; bouffant skirts held up with belts of gold braid; small amaranth hats with turned-up brims; bundles of cherry pink ribbon intertwined with beads and shells; white plumes perched on the ear; in sum, the hairstyles and toilettes of the future.” Paul Scudo scowled at the “mediocre writers, painters, sculptors without talent, quasi-poets, lawyers, democrats, suspect republicans, deceivers, women without taste, day-dreamers of nothing.” According to Baudelaire, Scudo stood at the exit after one rehearsal and laughed maniacally, “like one of those unfortunates in mental institutions who are called agités.” It was a prophetic aside: the critic died insane four years later.

Wagner was finally famous in Paris, but at a price. Just after his concert series ended, Jacques Offenbach’s musical satire Le Carnaval des revues opened at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, almost next door to the Théâtre-Italien. This entertainment included a scene set in the Elysian Fields, where Gluck, Grétry, Mozart, and Weber pass judgment on a certain “composer of the future” who blends jarring discords with vulgar tunes. When the departed greats hear a pop hit of the Second Empire in the mix, they dismiss the newcomer as a beggar and a brigand. If parody had the power to kill, Le Figaro said, “Richard Wagner would be a dead man at this moment.”

Being branded a revolutionary was of no help in winning a performance at the Opéra, as Wagner knew. He began hosting a salon on Wednesdays, inviting not only republicans but also legitimists and members of the emperor’s circle. His latest commentaries prioritized psychology over politics. For a French translation of his librettos, he wrote an introductory “Lettre sur la musique,” which dwelled on myth, dreams, and the unconscious. The mark of a great poet, Wagner says, is his ability to let his public grasp in silence what is left unsaid. In the case of the musician, “the infallible form of his resounding silence is endless melody.” Music and literature can meet in an ideal space that exists at the outer limits of each discipline. Canny as ever, Wagner sets the stage for a radical literary reception of his work.