Historical Background

In 1870 Wagner was approaching the summit of his creative achievement as he brought the Ring towards completion with the orchestration of Siegfried Act III and the composition of Götterdämmerung. There was also a longed-for and welcome improvement in his domestic circumstances: Cosima's marriage to Hans von Bülow was formally dissolved on 18 July, leaving Wagner and Cosima free to legalise their union and legitimise their already well-established domestic household at the Villa Tribschen on Lake Lucerne. The pair married in the Protestant Church in Lucerne on 25 August with Hans Richter and Malwida von Meysenburg as witnesses.

1870 was also a momentous and fateful year on the wider political stage of continental Europe. On 19 July, Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismarck had finally goaded France into declaring war on Prussia, which on 2 September was to reach the culmination of its first stage with the capture of Emperor Napoleon III and the defeat of France at the Battle of Sedan. Wagner's patron, King Ludwig II, had already placed Bavarian troops at the disposal of the Prussian High Command in the complex series of power games that preceded the outbreak of hostilities. The conflict encouraged Wagner's deepseated anti-French sentiments and it is clear from Cosima's diaries that enthusiasm for the war ran high at Tribschen.

It is a received commonplace that Wagner's prose works are difficult of access to the English reader. The entire corpus exists in translation only in the late Victorian version prepared by William Ashton Ellis. Although it is fashionable to denigrate Ellis for the prolixity of his rendering of Wagner's prose into English, it must be said in his defence that his often convoluted syntax and arcane vocabulary come close to replicating that of the original German. Whatever its faults may or may not be, Ashton Ellis's work represents a formidable achievement for which the English-speaking student of Wagner's ideas must remain ever grateful.

Beethoven (1870) has been better served for the English reader than most of Wagner's prose works: it also exists in an undated pre-Ellis translation by Wagner's advocate in England Eduard Dannreuther, and there is a substantial extract elegantly and imaginatively translated by Martin Cooper in 1988. This present version originated as a series of discrete excerpts prepared as supporting material for tutorial teaching at Oxford. There was no initial intention to translate the entire essay. The impulse to do so came from the late Brian Hitch, a retired diplomat with astonishing linguistic skills supported by a profound knowledge of music and boundless generosity with his time.

Prelude

The first two parts of this book having been organised broadly chronologically, the third part will look more to after-lives, to performative reception, to some of the process of writing history and histories. Such matters have not of course been absent earlier; they may now, however, move centre-stage. ‘Working’ is shown in the treatment of Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth production of Parsifal, opportunities to see that staging in three different seasons having afforded a further opportunity to look back at the progression of my thoughts on work and staging, and also to bring that cumulative experience together through further reflection. That chapter might therefore seem something of an exception, but insofar as it is, exceptionality pertains to style rather than idea. Discussion of Herheim’s Parsifal remains and indeed participates in a context of what we might learn about musical dramas and their status as artworks, both in and through history.

Parsifal, as already discussed, is in many respects an unusual or, perhaps more accurately, an extreme work. That characteristic of extremity certainly holds for issues of performance, since, as William Kinderman has pointed out, the work’s ‘special position … is closely bound up with the renewal of the Bayreuth Festival in 1882’. What Kinderman unassumingly calls an ‘unusual performance restriction’ had the consequence of confining the work to Bayreuth. That restriction pertained until its flouting in the so-called theft of the Grail by New York in 1903 – the United States not being a signatory to the Berne Convention – and the expiry of copyright shortly before the outbreak of war: the terminus, as we shall see, for Herheim’s first act. Though unsuccessful, Cosima’s bizarre, if far from financially disinterested, attempt to have the Reichstag pass a ‘Lex Parsifal’, restricting the work to the temple of Bayreuth in perpetuity, gained support not only from Strauss, who as a conductor had obvious reason to remain in favour with Wahnfried and who spent eight days lobbying the Reichstag, but from farther afield too; petition signatories included Gustave Charpentier and Puccini. Not until 1934 would Bayreuth itself mount a new production, though some changes had been made to the ‘original’ in the meantime. ‘The notion of Urtext’ could therefore, in this almost unprecedented situation for a repertoire work, be understood as applying to the staging too.

Having staged not just one but two Ring cycles, Keith Warner has become something of a Wagner veteran. In an interesting and, in the best sense, provocative essay, he points out that Wagner ‘almost single-handedly invented, certainly in opera’, the role of director, ‘almost certainly provoked into action by the work of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen [George II] and his celebrated acting troupe’s artistic director, Ludwig Chronegk’, whose production of Kleist’s Der Hermannsschlacht he had seen in 1875, the year before the first Bayreuth Ring, ‘which Wagner chose to direct rather than conduct’. It is not difficult to imagine why, on a personal level, either Wagner or a modern stage director such as Warner should wish to further the Meiningen concept not only of greater professionalism – especially noteworthy for attention paid to individual members of the crowd – but also of a single authority presiding over a production, though it is not altogether clear that Wagner was following that concept rather than working in tandem with it. The directorial Konzept, beloved of devotees of modern Regietheater and detested by its opponents, stands not so very distant; although, by the same token, the Duke’s insistence upon naturalistic historical verisimilitude would find favour with opponents rather than devotees. It is likewise not difficult to understand why Wagner or modern directors should wish to lessen, and preferably to abolish, the cult of ‘star’ performers, a key feature of the Meiningen agenda – and a cause célèbre for all manner of operatic ‘reformers’ from at least Gluck and Calzabigi onwards. Theirs is no more a ‘neutral’ stance than any other; nor should it be. Yet their vision, for which there may be justification to speak of in the singular, which it is no exaggeration to consider both modern and modernistic, has held and continues to hold consequences for the understanding and experience of works both new and from the ‘museum’. The same might be said about the histories we write of those works and the performances which, for many, give them life – and history.

Leaving aside the swiftly outdated naturalism of the designs for Bayreuth’s first Ring – with which Wagner was in any case unhappy – what stands out from contemporary reports of rehearsals is, as Warner remarks, the abnormality of the composer-director’s approach.

Beethoven u[nd] d[ie] deutsche Nation

Welches Verhältniss? – doch nur zum deutschen Geiste? Wie verhält sich dieser zur ‘Schönheit?’ – Begriff der Schönheit – dem Griechischen Geiste eigen; diesem als Begriff entnommen. Der Bildenden Kunst einzig zu eigen. Der Poesie insofern, als sie von Vorstellungen sich nährt, welche der bildenden Kunst zufallen: die wesentlichsten Ingredienzen der Poesie entstammen aber der Musik. In wiefern ist Musik schön?

Nähere Untersuchung. Ausgangspunkt Sch: W. als W.u. V. II. 415. Der dunkle Hintergrund im Bewusstsein für die Idee. Hierzu: 418. Unterschied in dem nach aussen u. dem nach gekehrten Bewusstsein.

Dieses zweite ist das, aus welchem der Musiker schafft. Grosse Verschiedenheit, Traumtheorie. (Tagseite – Göthe. Nachtseite – Beethoven.) Traumdeutung. Musik das unmittelbare Traumbild. Die innerste Kraft, aus der unsre Dichter sich unbewusst ernährten, welche sie ahnten und zu erklären suchten. In Beethoven unmittelbar schaffend. Nach welchen Gestzen? Eigener Schrei –äusserer Schall. Indiv: – Natur. Plastik nur als unmittelbarer Lebensakt i. Tanz. Volksleid. – Weiter – Ideale Realität. – (Franzosen – Italiener.)

Confusion im Erfassen der Musik. Unklarheit u. Geschmacklösigkeit. Selbstverkennen. Die Bildner u. Dichter geben der Nation was sie scheinen möchte, der Musiker was sie in Wahrheit ist. Der Schrecken über die innere Welt Grund des Erhabenen. Erhabenheit. Die Wirkung der Musik ist immer die des Erhabenen: ihre Form aber die der Schönheit, d.i. zunächst Befreiung des Individuum's von der Vorstellung jeder Causalität. Die Musikalische Schönheit ist die Form, in welcher der Musiker mit dem Erhabenen spielt.