Wagner. Michael Tanner

ones the premiss that there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature to appeal to, though it isn’t clear how that is compatible with using psychoanalytic insights, which were thought, at least by their founder, to have universal application.

      What all these contemporary ways of viewing Wagner have in common is a desire to make him smaller, in one obvious way, in order that he will be seen to be relevant, which will in turn render him a service, even if it takes some of us time to realise that. The effort to make him smaller is not, then, necessarily a manifestation of hostility to him and his works; rather hostility to Wagnerism. Up to a point it parallels something which we are becoming very familiar with in ‘Shakespeare studies’, and also in many productions of Shakespeare, though he doesn’t have the accumulated bad reputation of Wagner to be cleared of. The idea of ‘alternative’, ‘political’, etc. Shakespeares is to question his time-transcending genius, in the interests of genuinely responding to him. It is no paradox, we may warmly agree, to say that we might learn much more from Shakespeare if we ceased to deify him, as both directors and critics have pointed out, while they engaged in their apparently ungrateful task, in both senses of that word. We – those of us unfortunate enough to have received a traditional humane education – have been brought up to revere Shakespeare (while admitting that like everyone else he occasionally potboiled) in a way that removes the possibility of entertaining questions about the success of some of his masterworks. What often happens – and it is an increasingly fashionable critical move – is that the unease we may feel about Hamlet, say, is relocated as an unease the play allegedly feels about itself. Or its subject-matter is changed, in line with feelings about its central characters. Hamlet becomes a study of a pathological case, Oedipally-fixated or not, and ceases to be the portrayal of ‘the most adorable of heroes’, and a great deal more to that effect that was prevalent in the nineteenth-century heyday of Hamlet hero-worship. Or if, as is more plausibly argued, the play exhibits (or attempts to conceal) deep fissures, the plot having been taken over from a traditional revenge-play, while Christian elements are brought into the foreground, then that provides us with a fascinating study of a playwright giving voice to sharply conflicting values within his own culture. Whether the play is a success or not hardly matters: there is, it is implied, something childish about such a preoccupation.

      There is a lot that is attractive about such a sophistication of approach, especially if it leads to more intensive study of what actually occurs scene by scene, line by line, in Hamlet. But it is noteworthy that it always tends in a similar direction: figures who were automatically described as ‘heroes’, in the sense both of being the central figure and of having the kind of status that the Greeks ascribed to Achilles, now dissolve, dramatically, into a ‘complex of meanings’ and simultaneously lose their noble stature. That may not constitute a serious criticism of this approach, but it does indicate that we have a strong need to assert the human all-too-humanness of the figures to whom we were previously keen to allot exalted status. The factors contributing to this change of outlook are bewilderingly numerous and different in kind from one another: acting together they can seem to be devastatingly effective. If Shakespeare is still great, it is not because he is beyond criticism but because he can absorb so much of it, becoming, if anything, much more interesting because so much at odds with himself. And so, in his honesty, he is reestablished as great in quite another way from what we used, rather touchingly, to think.

      The prognostication for treatment of Wagner along these lines, an activity which has been under way for the last thirty or so years, is considerably more complex. For he is very explicitly concerned with the heroic, with heroes and heroines who will effect a cleansing, transfiguring, redeeming change in the whole world in which they live. If the full-blooded notion of the heroic has to be abandoned, how can the Ring above all, but the other dramas too, survive? The question branches into two: in what way can we any longer give sense to the notion of a hero, as relevant to any conditions we might encounter? And what, even if we can, is the mechanism by which a hero has effects on a community which are commensurate with his own private (as it were) stature?

      If Wagner’s works were merely spoken dramas, they might well have been written off in the face of these questions. But the greatness of his music makes that impossible. That, however, is not the end of the matter, since the music functions in the service of the drama at every moment. So we seem to be in an awkward position: a set of postulates about the possibilities of human nature which many people are unable to accept is set to music of vivifying appropriateness, thereby apparently validating, in the way that music so treacherously can, those unacceptable postulates. It took the arch-iconoclast and enfant terrible of the post-war musical scene, Pierre Boulez, to hit on a solution. His most notorious proclamation was that the opera houses of the world should be burned to the ground, but he accepted two invitations to conduct at Bayreuth for several seasons each, and for what seem to many Wagner’s most questionable works, in very different ways: Parsifal in 1966, the Ring in its centenary year, a decade later. The effects were predictably sensational, much more so in the Ring than in Parsifal. For the latter work he took over Wieland Wagner’s magnificent ‘timeless’ settings and production, which tolerated an indefinite variety of musical renderings without incongruity. But for the Ring he was given a free hand in selecting the director, and he chose another enfant, in some ways still more terrible: Patrice Chéreau. And in one fell swoop the Ring, which if it is not Wagner’s most sublime achievement is certainly his central one, was domesticated and demythologised, in fact deconstructed. A new era was born, in which Wagner’s artistic image was aufgehoben, to employ that indispensable German word when dealing with German cultural phenomena: i.e. it was cancelled, transcended and preserved. Wagner, in this self-celebratingly ‘unfaithful’ French production, was firmly put in his historical place, even if it was rather a vague one – but some time during the last one and a half centuries, give or take the odd anachronistic spear. But since the action can’t proceed without them, they are, almost every director has agreed, a wearisome necessity. And if they look odd alongside tuxedos and hydro-electric dams (the Rhine), that adds to the sense of epic theatre. Chéreau’s was, broadly speaking, a Marxist Ring, much as Shaw had envisaged the work in The Perfect Wagnerite, though he might have been surprised, and not favourably, by the production. The gods were humanised with a vengeance, even vengefully. A collapsed crew from the outset, it was hard to see how anyone could give a damn about their Dämmerung, or even to see what that could amount to. Fricka’s savage argument with Wotan in Act II of Die Walküre, to the effect that Siegmund is merely Wotan’s pawn, was driven home hard. And in case one might think that Siegfried really did have to go it alone, he was provided with a hi-tech forge in Act I of Siegfried