That is the case for the prosecution, put as cogently as I, not believing in it, can manage. I shall not try to refute it directly, but rather take aspects of Wagner’s works, the ones which I think are most relevant, and see how far they are adequately accounted for by such an accusing account. If the account – the accusation – itself is something of a hotchpotch, that is not only fair to the level of critique to which Wagner is subjected (when it is trying its best not to be merely abusive), but also a faithful report of the confusion which Wagner generates in the minds of his audiences.
Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Der fliegende Holländer might feel that I have been making heavy weather of it, or around it, though heavy weather is a large part of its subject. Surely, it will be argued, it is at most a fine example of early German Romantic opera, a stirring story set to frequently exciting music, but not to be singled out from other more or less equally successful examples of the genre, such as Weber’s Der Freischütz, another story of a demonically driven man and a loving, self-sacrificing maiden. But admirable as Der Freischütz is, it belongs firmly in the realm of the folk opera, and its atmosphere is that of the Grimms. Probably it is impossible to carry out the thought-experiment of viewing Holländer without taking into account Wagner’s subsequent spectacular development. But to the extent that I am able to, I still find the stupendous surge and toss of the Overture evokes metaphysical as well as physical vistas. Though he is an incomparable nature-painter in music, Wagner’s interest in it is always sentimental in Schiller’s sense: there is no nature-evocation in his works which does not affect, and reflect, moods of the human beings who exist in it. Even his most famous portrayal of a natural process, that of the Rhine flowing at the beginning of the Ring, is potent with hyper-natural associations. For before the Rhine gets properly under way, there are those famous bars scored for the lowest strings and wind at the bottom of their registers, more sound than music, which are wholly static, and suggest that we are being taken back to the beginning of all things. As Wagner told Liszt in a famous letter, the Ring depicts the beginning and end of a world, including the beginning from which the world in which it takes place evolves. Once more one thinks, as Wagner surely did, of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Wagner loves and is awed by Nature, its wildness and majesty, but he invariably anthropomorphises it at the same time.
However, the Wagner of Holländer, enormously in Beethoven’s and Weber’s debt, was still, many people feel, obviously an apprentice. Up to a point they are right. I am not claiming that Wagner, in one mighty bound, arrived at a maturity of method and message. Nonetheless, although Holländer may be fairly taken as an exciting evening in the theatre (or, more likely nowadays, at home), it does announce the terms which Wagner throughout his life would imbue with richer and deeper meaning; and it shows, at the least, his potentiality for depth. It is not surprising that in later life he regarded it as the first of his authentic works. Of course, if you find Wagner’s obsessions tiresome because irrelevant, you will appreciate Holländer more for its crude freshness, its lack of the extreme emotional temperatures which pervade some of the later works, and are often thought to be omnipresent in them, though that is false.
When an artist returns, in work after work, to the same preoccupations, it is easy for criticism to weigh in and celebrate his progress to maturity, finding his early efforts touching in their simple-minded adumbrations, attentively reading more into them than they can seriously bear. It is also easy to schematise the oeuvre, overlooking the variety of new concerns. What it seems almost impossible not to do, perhaps in Wagner’s case more than anyone else’s, is to postulate a presence which is given the artist’s name, and then to indulge in the construction of an artistic biography which runs in parallel with the life the artist actually had. And despite the most solemn methodological pronouncements about the illicitness of inferences from the art-life to the lived one, or vice-versa, it proves, over and over again, irresistible. All the more so when the art is of so compelling a kind, and the life so spectacular. In Wagner’s case, once more, the originator of this romantic connecting was Wagner himself. He constructed a life, in his unreliable autobiographical writings and oral reminiscences, which imparts an even more ferocious teleology to the series of works than they manifestly possess. And conversely he justified his existence by the somnambulistic assurance, made all the more glamorous and stupefying through its zigzagging course, with which he brought the works into being. The categories by which the art demands to be judged are taken over from the terms in which Wagner made sense of his wildly implausible existence, one which was an outrage to everyone who, persuaded by this devastating force of will, still failed to succumb to his tirelessly self-justifying rhetoric. His occasional insistences that he viewed his creations with the baffled but tremendously impressed gaze of the outsider, striking as they are, and no doubt sincere, failed to counter the drive towards the celebration of a unique degree of integration, forged from the most disparate and recalcitrant materials.
Why is Wagner so interested in people who have committed a terrible deed, and why should we share his interest? How much moral cum metaphysical baggage does one have to take on board in order to regard his works as more than bizarre actions set to frequently wonderful music, granted that one isn’t going to be so lazy as to feel that something important is going on, but that it is better not to try to find out what it is in strenuous detail? It is in a praiseworthy attempt to answer that question that many recent opera producers, or directors as they are increasingly often called, have gone in for highly specific interpretations of his dramas, and though I believe that their efforts are fundamentally misconceived, I find their rationale sufficiently convincing (to other people) for them to merit some consideration. I have in mind primarily the school of directors who emanate from what until six years ago was East Germany, and their epigones.
They operate on the following premisses: first, every work of art is anchored in the time and place of its composition, and can only be understood on that basis. Any attempt to render the timeless significance of a work in a production is hopeless, since there is no such thing. Second, Wagner’s works in particular need drastic re-presentation, in the first place because they are even now tainted with the Nazi ideology by which the very vagueness of their import rendered them exploitable. Third, because in the first post-war productions of them which had great impact, those of Wieland Wagner, they were freed from their past only to be presented again in terms of their ‘purely human’ significance, a basic error which Wieland shared with his grandfather. Fourth, since the conditions, economic and therefore political, under which Wagner conceived and wrote his works were sufficiently similar to our own to mean that they can cast light on our situation, so long as they are treated with the proper kind of disrespect which great creations deserve and require, one would only be doing him a favour by eliminating a spurious universality and replacing it with an involving topicality.
Besides these broadly Marxist productions, which are now less likely to be well received than they were a few years ago, there is a wide range of styles which sometimes employ the catch-all title ‘post-modern’ to cover their nakedness, and which involve a mixture of times, places, and costumes; Wagner’s works are not, according to them, to be understood in mythological