In his book about the history of the Bayreuth Festival, Frederic Spotts suggests that “Wagner without Bayreuth would have been like a country without a capital, a religion without a church.” Typically for Wagner studies, Spotts limits himself to political and religious analogies, though he could just as easily have written “a multi-national company without a corporate headquarters.” Similarly incomplete is his claim that “Wagner invented the modern music festival.”

The idea of a music festival was not new when Wagner conceived and later realized his vision for one. London boasted a commemorative Handel festival in 1784 and, in the same year, Birmingham launched its Triennial Musical Festival which would become one of the longest-running such events. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, music festivals were also established in Germany. Such occasions combined the renewed idealization of ancient Greek traditions with the urge to articulate a coherent German national identity, with its special emphasis on music. The longest-standing such tradition in Germany was the so-called Lower Rhine Music Festival, launched in 1818 and running through most of the century. This three-day event was held annually in the late spring during Pentecost, rotating its venue between a group of cities including Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Aachen. It was organized by amateurs and, in the early years, many of the orchestral and choral performers were also dilettantes, replaced increasingly by professionals during mid-century.

“I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven.” These words begin the deathbed confession of “R …,” a fictional character of Richard Wagner's creation, the central figure in the novella “A Death in Paris.” “R …” is a poor German expatriate musician who, in an earlier novella, had made “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven.” Between these two short prose works, written and first published between 1840 and 1841, the twenty-seven-year-old Wagner fuses contemporary ideas and topoi with characteristics deeply ingrained in German cultural discourse to produce a figure both familiar and new. The poor, honest, German musician, who composes for the love of music rather than for monetary gain. Music as the transcendental art form. The great composers (Germans, of course) forming a divine succession. All these ideas, rich in signs, were then circulating. With sleight of hand, Wagner concentrates them into a single character, has him die on the printed page, only to reappear as the nucleus of the public persona Wagner adopted for the remainder of his career: therein lies the novelty. Richard Wagner's public image is a literary creation. Moreover, it is one of such complexity, so full of meaning, that it demands the careful unpacking to which the remainder of this chapter will be devoted.

The term “image” can be understood both visually and conceptually. Because the advent of photography coincided with Wagner's adult life, we have an even more accurate idea of how Wagner looked than we do of his illustrious predecessors like Mozart and Beethoven.

Richard Wagner (1813–83) was the architect of the industry that today bears his name. At first, this may seem like an unremarkable statement. We have come to expect that anyone intent on a career in the public sphere will engage in self-promotion, or hire specialists for that purpose. During the nineteenth century, however, this was not at all self-evident. Indeed, for certain professions, engaging too obviously in self-promotion might be regarded as inappropriate conduct and serve to tarnish rather than enhance an image.

Admittedly, Wagner was neither the first celebrity in history, nor the only one of his day, nor were most of the techniques and strategies he used to market himself either unique or unprecedented. Nevertheless, the case of Wagner is special. First, as opposed to most of the so-called “great masters” who became commodities, Wagner not only participated in, but pioneered his own merchandizing. Second, beyond creating a recognizable public persona, he also presented his works as distinct creations unlike all others. So dissimilar were these works to anything comparable that he claimed they belonged to a new category; he even invented a vocabulary to describe them. Building a special theater where they were to be performed exclusively constituted only the most visible gesture in a larger enterprise that stamped his works with the markings of a brand. In the realm of art, nothing quite like it had ever been undertaken.

The period around 1850 marked not only a new and more aggressive phase in Wagner's own promotion of his persona and work, but was a watershed in the marketing of the Wagner phenomenon per se. In the space of less than three years, Wagner came to dominate the music-cultural scene of the German-speaking world and beyond in ways that perhaps no composer or cultural figure before him had. He was fortunate to have committed supporters on his side, because he could not have accomplished this alone. These included figures of stature, foremost Franz Liszt, as well as those who simply had access to what we call “the media,” foremost Theodor Uhlig. If there was a single moment when the “Wagner Industry” (as we know it today) was born, it was at this time when the constellation of his own efforts, those of his advocates, and the possibilities offered by the media combined to produce an unprecedented effect.

That effect was immediate. On February 11, 1853, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik published as its lead article a letter to the editor which announced that Richard Wagner “postulates an artwork which at its very foundation has no competition with any other.” The letter was written by Joachim Raff, Franz Liszt's assistant in Weimar, and a composer in his own right. Wagner was not impressed with Raff and found his article “disheartening.” Maybe Raff hit a nerve?

Wagner operas are also about Wagnerian opera. Wagner weaves the principles of his aesthetic theories into the dramatic fiber of the works themselves, so that they both thematize and perform his aesthetics. This suggestion is not new. Already during the first run of the Ring cycle in 1876, the critic Wilhelm Mohr answered Wagner's opponents by explaining that, “the old forms have not been shattered … but rather, just as Siegfried does with the sword Nothung, filed, smelted, recast and newly forged.” Nothung – forged from the fragments of the old sword – is a metaphor for Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk which unifies modernity's fragmented arts, so misused in opera. In such a reading, Mime stands for Meyerbeer, while Wagner is Siegfried.

Such an approach also applies to Wagner's earlier works. In Tannhäuser, for instance, Venus and Wartburg can function as allegories of voluptuous Parisian Grand Opera versus the aesthetically impoverished German opera of Dresden. The Shepherd in the third scene of Act I occupies a distinct, utopian space reserved for the music drama of the future. Wagner's own analysis of the Lohengrin Prelude suggests that the Holy Grail is nothing other than Wagner's music itself. The Ring has been read as replaying Wagner's version of opera history, a thesis David Levin recently embellished by proposing that Siegmund is guilty of “breaking and entering” into Hunding's (opera) house: an act both figuratively and aesthetically representative of Wagner's project.

As if nothing had changed, Wagner still refers to himself in an 1845 letter to Franz Liszt as a “poor German opera composer.” In fact, everything had changed. The extraordinarily successful world premiere of Rienzi in Dresden on October 20, 1842, was followed shortly thereafter by Wagner's appointment in February 1843 to the Royal Court of Saxony as Hofkapellmeister, a well-paid post he now shared with Carl Gottlieb Reissiger, who had served alone in this capacity since 1828, succeeding Carl Maria von Weber. Reissiger, who conducted the sensational Rienzi premiere, would have been less than human had he not been at least annoyed having to share the limelight with this new, more flamboyant, younger colleague. Wagner sensed this and, in a letter to the Berlin music critic Karl Gaillard, noted that, while he had arrived in Dresden as “the unknown, impoverished musician,” his success since had begun to cause him difficulties, including “envy” (Neid) from his peers and superiors.

A remarkable letter Reissiger wrote in 1843 to Joseph Fischhoff in Vienna not only confirms Wagner's claims but, more significantly, documents the degree to which Wagner's careerist publicity-consciousness and media-manipulation tactics were clearly apparent to those in his orbit. The letter is worth quoting at length:

Something is wrong with Götterdämmerung. Its music jars stylistically with the rest of the Ring and its plot does not seem to follow from Siegfried's optimistic ending. Critics of the Ring's final opera have long noted these discrepancies. Some blame Wagner the artist, others Wagner the philosopher, and still others Wagner the ideologue. To take the three most cogent arguments on this subject: George Bernard Shaw blames Götterdämmerung's shortcomings on Wagner as failed composer, poet, and dramatist; Friedrich Nietzsche thinks Götterdämmerung fails because of Wagner's failed political philosophy; and, more recently, Michael P. Steinberg locates the problem in specific characters in Götterdämmerung and holds Wagner the ideologue responsible for this opera's successful but suspect ideological subtext. It is Steinberg's argument I find most convincing. And while I believe that he is right to critique Götterdämmerung rather than criticize it, as Shaw and Nietzsche do, he neglects to consider the importance of form, especially Greek drama, in this final opera. Moreover, he does not take seriously enough his own interpretation of Götterdämmerung as parody. Thus he misses the essential point that in this apocalyptic opera Wagner is perhaps less interested in creating music drama than music parody.

As suggested by its title – Twilight of the Gods – this final opera in Wagner's Ring cycle focuses more on endings than beginnings, destruction than construction.

Each of the first three operas in the Ring cycle – Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried – more or less evolves from its predecessor according to the Grecocentric paradigm of poetry outlined by Hegel in his Aesthetics and (mostly) followed by Wagner in such theoretical works as Opera and Drama, “Art and Revolution,” and “The Art-Work of the Future.” Generically speaking, these first three operas develop from earlier forms of epic (such as cosmogony, theogony, and epigraph in Das Rheingold) to more advanced forms of epic (epic proper in Die Walküre) to lyric (explorations of the self's relationship to the state and to nature in Siegfried). Given this evolutionary pattern, one would expect the Ring to culminate in Götterdämmerung by re-creating what Wagner, Hegel, and other German Romantics considered the acme of Greek art: Athenian tragedy. However, as we have already seen, in his theoretical works Wagner does not completely embrace the possibility of re-creating Greek tragedy as German music drama. Götterdämmerung further disappoints one's expectations about the rebirth of Greek tragedy by seeking to deconstruct present modes of theatrical practice rather than re-create the past as future. Looking once again at his letter to Franz Liszt on February 11, 1853, we notice that Wagner explains this apocalyptic anomaly as a kind of deus ex machina. Or, more accurately, he writes himself into the role of deus, to alter, through destruction, the expected evolutionary path of the Ring cycle: “Mark well my new poem –, ” Wagner intones, “it contains the world's beginning, and its end [Untergang]!” Reading Das Rheingold as “the world's beginning,” Götterdämmerung would, somewhat obviously, represent its cultural culmination as ruin.

It is difficult to find a theoretical language inclusive enough to embrace all aspects of opera, partly because the methods prescribed by a critic's chosen discipline – music, drama, literature, etc. – by definition tend to neglect one or more aspects of opera's inherently multimedial form. To take only one example of how one's disciplinary approach can lead to incomplete and biased readings, look at the ways in which opera's different media order time. The approximate real time of dramatic recitatives contradicts the apparent timelessness of lyric arias, while the linear movement of dramatic plot opposes the circular movement of ABA musical forms and harmonies. Given that so much contradiction and conflict arises from and is determined by the different kinds of disciplinary approaches one takes, the problem becomes finding a language that can analyze opera as inclusively as possible. In Wagner these chronological contradictions become even more important, interesting, and far-reaching. Bracketing the Ring within a four-day performance time, Wagner aligns himself with the tragic festivals of ancient Greece while prefiguring theatrical happenings in America during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as certain absurdist theatrical experiments that involve racing against the clock.

While the main body of this book has dealt with the ways in which the Ring cycle looks to the past and is influenced by that past, briefly, in the space of this Epilogue, I would like to pick up on something mentioned at the close of the last chapter: the ways in which the Ring cycle looks to the future, both in terms of some of its far-reaching aesthetic features and the theories one might use to describe these features.

In Greek epic poetry the epic poet's personal identity tends to be superseded by national identity. We rarely hear Homer speak in the first person. From the very beginnings of both his epics he tells us that it is not he who is singing but the muse singing through him. In the case of lyric poetry, though, the opposite is more often the case. Lyric turns epic on its head. In epic the individual disappears into the national, but in lyric the nation is summed up in the individual. The lyric poet links the universal and the particular through his or her own subjectivity in order to defend each poem against the forces of incoherence and abstraction. His or her personal identity usually forms the unifying center of a given lyric poem – the sun to its orbiting planets or, perhaps more appropriately, the black hole to anything within its gravitational pull. But because personal identity, with all its idiosyncratic quirks, twists, and turns, can manifest itself in literally infinite ways, it might seem impossible to establish concrete criteria with which to define the genre of lyric, criteria that would extend beyond the simple observation that this genre is somehow more personal than epic. Realizing this difficulty, Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, gives us a practical if somewhat unserious lesson on the problems of classifying lyric poetry: “we call Shelley's Ode to the West Wind a lyric, perhaps because it is a lyric; if we hesitate to call Epipsychidion a lyric, and have no idea what it is, we can always call it the product of an essentially lyrical genius.

INTRODUCTION

The following three appendices attempt briefly to introduce and give Wagner's opinion about all of the primary and secondary classical authors and sources that I could find specific mention of in writings about or by Wagner. Although Wagner owned more primary and secondary classical texts than are listed here, I have restricted myself to those that I can prove Wagner read or knew by reputation. Whenever possible I have also kept the entries brief because some authors seem to have had little influence on Wagner and those who were more influential are discussed more thoroughly in the body of this book. As for those authors who are only mentioned in these appendices, I have included them in order to provide what I believe is the most exhaustive list of its kind with respect to Wagner and the Greeks, in the hopes that this information may prove useful to future scholars.

In addition to my appendices on secondary scholars who influenced Wagner's concept of antiquity I might also have included a list of “secondary artists” inspired by antiquity who in turn inspired Wagner. At the top of this list would be authors such as Goethe and Schiller, but also lesser-known authors like Joseph Addison, who greatly inspired Wagner as a young boy with his play on Cato, especially the monologue spoken by the great Roman Stoic before his suicide. This list could also have contained artists who worked in genres other than literature.

Does the finale to Götterdämmerung offer us an ending that is progressive or regressive? Does it emblazon a path forward or opt for apocalypse by, as Adorno would have it, nullifying both the progress its characters have made on stage and the time its audience has “wasted” off stage? With the apparent demise of its gods, heroes, and monsters is the stage finally cleared for the grand entrance of das Volk, as represented by the Gibichung vassals, seemingly the only survivors left at the end of the Ring? Or does the ending of Götterdämmerung point backward to a pre-cultural or even pre-chronological world – if one could imagine such a thing? And what are we to make of the apocalyptic forces of nature that Wagner uses here, those ur-elements of fire and water, which bring with them various connotations of birth and destruction from their pre-Platonic place in the history of philosophy? Seen from this angle, as a struggle between two opposing philosophies of history – Young Hegelian radicalism and Schopenhauerian quietism – the whole of the Ring can be reduced to an either/or proposition: either history revolts and progresses or it revolves and regresses.

But is it perhaps, as with so much else in Wagner, that here again we are left in limbo, between fire and water, death and transfiguration, forward and backward motion? Have we somehow both revolted away from and revolved back through to the beginning of the Ring?