All pieces of music develop in dialogue with many others. Far from being self-contained, a composition produces meaning through its use of codes transmitted and reproduced within a variety of repertories, its generic affiliations, the social contexts in which it is written and received, as well as through the strategic arrangement of its particular parts. This is true even of the most apparently autonomous of instrumental movements: its medium, formal procedures and aesthetic premises all have social histories, engaging associations that can neither be predicted in advance nor – even with the best of formalist intentions – kept altogether silent. But it is more obviously true of a work such as Carmen, which operates in large part on the basis of its transgressive mixture of codes, genres and styles.

Bizet's first audiences recognized this transgressive mixture and responded accordingly (see Chapter 6). But because we no longer possess their expectations with respect to genre, we now tend to hear the opera as an unruptured entity: whether listening to the placid lyricism of Micaëla or the third-hand Cuban strains of the “Habañera,” we hear only … Carmen. Thus, before embarking on a reading of the opera itself, I want to sketch out some of the principal musical discourses it engages and juxtaposes.

Opéra-Comique

Carmen belongs to the genre of opéra-comique, and it must be read in part in terms of the conventions of that genre, even though Bizet virtually imploded the opéra-comique with this work.

In 1872 the co-directors of the Opéra-Comique, Camille Du Locle and Adolphe de Leuven, approached Georges Bizet and proposed that he write an opera in collaboration with the librettists Ludovic Halevy and Henri Meilhac. De Leuven offered Bizet three scenarios as suggestions, but Bizet rejected them in favor of an idea to which he held tenaciously, even in the face of what became the severe opposition of his collaborators: he insisted that the new work be based on Mérimée's Carmen. From our vantage point, over a century after Bizet's Carmen triumphed as a masterpiece, we may have difficulty seeing his choice as problematic. But this choice contributed to de Leuven's decision to resign, provoked rebellions among the performers and incited the wrath of music critics before the public finally embraced Bizet's vision – unfortunately, only after his death.

During this period, France had two subsidized opera houses: the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, which differed with respect to both target audience and musical genre. The Opéra commissioned and presented French Grand Opera to an upper-class clientele, while the Opéra-Comique specialized in the production of opérascomiques, largely geared for a family-oriented bourgeoisie. A century earlier the genre of opéra-comique had been a vehicle for social satire, aimed in part at puncturing the stuffy conventions of elite operatic procedures. In place of lavish spectacle and uninterrupted singing, opéras-comiques featured a style that alternated lyrical expression with spoken dialogue, and they focused on more topical subject matter.

Bizet's Carmen has often been understood as a story of ill-fated love between two equal parties whose destinies happen to clash. But to read the opera in this fashion is to ignore the faultlines of social power that organize it, for while the story's subject matter may appear idiosyncratic to us, Carmen is actually only one of a large number of fantasies involving race, class and gender that circulated in nineteenth-century French culture. Thus before exploring the opera on its own terms, we need to reexamine the critical tensions of its original context – the context within which it was written and first received – as well as the politics of representation: who creates representations of whom, with what imagery, towards what ends?

Musicologists have long recognized Carmen's exoticism as one of its most salient features, but they usually treat that exoticism as unproblematic. Indeed, until quite recently, most of the exotic images and narratives that proliferate in Western culture were regarded as innocent: the “Orient” (first the Middle East, later East Asia and Africa) seemed to serve merely as a “free zone” for the European imagination. Edward Said, however, has shown that this “free zone” was always circumscribed by political concerns. Some of these were relatively benign. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the “Orient” offered a vantage point from which French writers could criticize their own society. Thus Rousseau addressed the East as a Utopian philosopher contemplating alternatives with the West, and Montesquieu adopted the persona of a Persian traveler writing letters home about the odd social practices he encounters in Paris.

Wagner's philosophy of history

The three stages of history

Wagner saw history from the viewpoint of the evolving history of the arts. This he envisaged as a progression in three stages, which he described as follows: (I) the arts are united in the ‘total art-work of tragedy’ (GSiii, p. 12); 2(i) the ‘decline of tragedy’, entailing the dissolution of the original unity of the arts, and (ii) a ‘renaissance of the arts’ (GSiii, p. 29) ‘among the Christian nations of Europe’ (GSvii, p. 105); (3) at a new and final stage in history the original unity is regained in the ‘art-work of the future’. Wagner deals with this in Parts ii and iii of Opera and Drama in particular.

In his account of the first historical stage and its decline, Wagner makes it clear that his concept of art is bound up with a concept of society:

A notable feature of Wagner's second stage is that with the development of the individual arts, there was a gradual emergence of trends that represented a mutual drawing together.

The theory

Opposed critical viewpoints

One of the particular difficulties of studying the arts is that of tracing an artist's ideas in his works. We must first have a clear picture not only of the theory but also of the relationship between theory and practice. It was basically for want of this that inapposite judgments were passed on Wagner's works right from the beginning. At the time of his Zurich writings on artistic questions, critical discussion was already being determined by the mistaken idea that in Opera and Drama, Wagner wanted to sum up in theoretical terms what he had previously achieved as a composer–dramatist in Tannhäser and Lohengrin. In actual fact, Opera and Drama was influenced by the works Wagner had in view as much as by his past projects. (To his credit, Raff observed in 1854 that the Dresden works could not be judged by the standards of Opera and Drama.) In trying to map out in his head the new works he vaguely envisaged, the composer would draw on the experience of previous works and at the same time distance himself from them. It follows from this that as a creative artist, Wagner did not, indeed could not, adhere rigidly to his theoretical precepts – and that goes not only for Opera and Drama. But the compositional statement is often hard to fathom from an aesthetic viewpoint; this is probably the biggest methodical problem.

The initial experience

Autobiographical sources

It is one of the truisms of Wagner research that particular caution is advisable with regard to the autobiographical writings and jottings. That goes not least for My Life. Nobody would disagree with Otto Strobel that the composer of the Ring, Tristan and Parsifal chose to view certain experiences in a different light from when they were recent and fresh in his mind. Wagner's letters contradict or amend many details in My Life (and as far as facts are concerned, the letters tend to be more reliable than Wagner's other writings).

A full-scale critical study of the way Wagner depicted himself has yet to be written. But research undertaken in connection with the Complete Edition has yielded some important new findings – although some of these, in their turn, have given rise to fresh problems. Recently a start was made on a new edition of Wagner's letters, containing all the available texts.

Cosima's diaries, beginning in January 1869 and ending in January 1883, are an important source which Wagner visualized as a sequel to My Life. (The latter is directly followed by his Annals: brief, lapidary jottings which go up to the end of 1868.) Cosima's diaries were inaccessible to the public until 1972 under the terms of a will; since their publication they have proved to be very helpful to researchers. Almost inevitably some things are repeated, and there are major difficulties in connection with a textual critique of the originals.

This is a revised version of a book first published in German in 1974. More than ever, I have tried to present Wagner's relationship to Beethoven with as little prejudice as possible. It is only away from the beaten track, removed from the aura of the Wagner myth, but also beyond scepticism cultivated for its own sake, that the labyrinthine structure of the œuvre becomes evident. Wagner's reception of Beethoven is part of that structure. It therefore needs examining in greater depth and breadth – but even so, this study can only be a partial one: ‘drops from the Wagnerian ocean’ (The Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 1970).

I would like to thank all those who have encouraged and supported this undertaking for their advice and suggestions, as well as their kindness: Reinhold Brinkmann, Harvard; Carl Dahlhaus, Berlin; John Deathridge, Cambridge (UK); Werner Fröhlich, Mainz; Martin Geek, Munich; Günther Massenkeil, Bonn; Wilhelm Perpeet, Bonn; Emil Platen, Bonn; Joseph Schmidt-Görg and Rudolf Stephen, Berlin.

For kindly providing working material and various references I thank Frau Gertrud Strobel, late of the Richard Wagner Archive, Bayreuth, and Dr Joachim Bergfeld of the Richard Wagner Memorial House in Bayreuth. I have also to thank the present director of the Richard Wagner Memorial House, Dr Franz Eger.

I am particularly indebted to the Thyssen Foundation of Cologne for its support, without which neither the work nor the first publication would have been possible.

Wagner as a writer

The problematic nature of Wagner's writings

Thomas Mann expressed the above views in 1911; later he would qualify them, as in ‘The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner’ (1933), addressed above all to the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk. What fascinated him all his life was the immediate artistic experience of Wagner's compositions, with their significance for his own creative work. The theorist in Wagner was suspect to the author in Mann. While his approach may have been a partial one, Mann still represents the critics of Wagner the theorist, the musical philosopher and aesthetician. Wagner has an undisputed place in a cultural tradition that we acknowledge and reproduce. But even today his theoretical statements are regarded with a certain amount of misgiving and prejudice.

In 1869 Wagner successfully requested a copy of Waldmüller's portrait of Beethoven, which was owned by the publishers Breitkopf & Härtel. This was not the only Beethoven portrait that Wagner possessed. For in December 1851, when he wanted a portrait of Liszt, he said that ‘so far I have only Beethoven on my wall, apart from the Nibelung sheet by Cornelius’ (SB, iv, p. 221). Since his teens, in fact, Wagner had been familiar with Beethoven's outward appearance: in My Life (p. 30) he mentions the impression which ‘Beethoven's physiognomy, as shown by lithographs of the time’ had made on him in 1827. The composer's image accompanied Wagner throughout his life, symbolizing his persistent attempts to comprehend the spiritual phenomenon that was Beethoven, to capture his likeness as both man and artist. What, then, did Beethoven look like to Wagner?

Wagner's mental image of Beethoven is an integral part of that myth of himself, or persona, at which he worked all his life and which he handed on to posterity as something binding and sacrosanct. Both during his lifetime and later on, Wagner's staunch admirers took pains to conserve this ‘self-portrait’, including those Beethovenian features to which it owes a great deal. The dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerite has always tended to accept statements by Wagner without stopping to consider the background, the context in which they were made. One illustration of this is the way Curt von Westernhagen interprets Wagner's request for a true and not an ideal picture of Beethoven.

The ‘Romantic image of Beethoven’

As Walter Wiora has shown, music as the ‘primal language of the soul’ and as the ‘geometrical meeting-point’ of various ‘trans-musical’ ideas was a basic fact of the Romantic universe. So was the experience of an intermingling of musical and extra-musical qualities; so too was the intention that the arts should complement one another.

It has been remarked by Wellek, Blume and others that Wagner was much indebted to the categories of Romantic thinking about music as developed in the critical and imaginative writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Wackenroder, Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel, as well as in Schelling's philosophy. Knopf and Fries have particularly remarked on the links between the Romantic movement and Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’.

In addition the Romantic interpretation of Beethoven's artistic personality and his works was a major stimulus for Wagner. Summing up these exegetical studies as the ‘Romantic image of Beethoven’, Arnold Schmitz has subjected them to critical analysis and has considered their transmission basically from the viewpoint of the history of ideas. In the process, the Romantic layers of the Beethoven image were stripped away to expose important sections of a portrait which is faithful to history. Beethoven no longer resembled a child of nature and a revolutionary, a magician and a priest – attributes created through an inspired act of forgery. A ‘Classical’ Beethoven took the place of the specifically Romantic composer.