almost dwarfish composer riding in a carriage directly behind the German Kaiser, not the servant but the equal of the rulers of the world.
Bayreuth’s illusion of cultural omnipotence is maintained every summer during the annual Wagner festival, when the cafés fill with people debating minor points of the Ring libretto, the composer’s visage stares out from the windows of almost every shop, and piano scores for the operas are stacked on tables outside bookstores. For a few weeks in July and August, Wagner remains the center of the universe.
Until the advent of movies, there was no more astounding public entertainment than the Wagner operas. Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and the Ring were works of mind-altering breadth and depth, towering over every artistic endeavor of their time. Notwithstanding the archaic paraphernalia of rings, swords, and sorcery, the Ring presented an imaginative world as psychologically particular as any in the novels of Leo Tolstoy or Henry James. The story of the Ring was, in the end, one of hubris and comeuppance: Wotan, the chief of the gods, loses control of his realm and sinks into “the feeling of powerlessness.” He resembles the head of a great bourgeois family whose livelihood is destroyed by the modernizing forces that he himself has set in motion.
Even more fraught with implications is Wagner’s final drama, Parsifal, first heard at Bayreuth in the summer of 1882. The plot should have been a musty, almost childish thing: the “pure fool” Parsifal fights the magician Klingsor, takes from him the holy lance that pierced Christ’s side, and uses it to heal the torpor that has overcome the Knights of the Grail. But Parsifal’s mystical trappings answered inchoate longings in end-of-century listeners, while the political subtext—Wagner’s diseased knights can be read as an allegory of the diseased West—fed the fantasies of the far right. The music itself is a portal to the beyond. It crystallizes out of the air in weightless forms, transforms into rocklike masses, and dissolves again. “Here time becomes space,” the wise knight Gurnemanz intones, showing Parsifal the way to the Grail temple, as a four-note bell figure rings hypnotically through the orchestra.
By 1906, twenty-three years after his death, Wagner had become a cultural colossus, his influence felt not only in music but in literature, theater, and painting. Sophisticated youths memorized his librettos as American college students of a later age would recite Bob Dylan. Anti-Semites and ultranationalists considered Wagner their private prophet, but he gave impetus to almost every major political and aesthetic movement of the age: liberalism (Théodore de Banville said that Wagner was a “democrat, a new man, wanting to create for all the people”), bohemianism (Baudelaire hailed the composer as the vessel of a “counter-religion, a Satanic religion”), African-American activism (a story in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk tells of a young black man who finds momentary hope in Lohengrin), feminism (M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, said that Lohengrin made her “feel a little like my real self”), and even Zionism (Theodor Herzl first formulated his vision of a Jewish state after attending a performance of Tannhäuser).
The English composer Edward Elgar pored over the Meister’s scores with desperate intensity, writing in his copy of Tristan, “This Book contains … the Best and the whole of the Best of This world and the Next.” Elgar somehow converted the Wagnerian apparatus—the reverberating leitmotifs, the viscous chromatic harmony, the velvety orchestration—into an iconic representation of the British Empire at its height. As a result, he won a degree of international renown that had eluded English composers for centuries; after a German performance of his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius in 1902, Richard Strauss saluted Elgar as the “first English progressivist.”
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, in Russia, rummaged through Wagner for useful material and left the rest behind; in The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, the tale of a magical city that disappears from view when it comes under attack, Parsifal-like bells ring out in endless patterns, intertwined with a tricky new harmonic language that would catch the ear of the young Stravinsky. Even Sergei Rachmaninov, who inherited a healthy skepticism for Wagner from his idol Tchaikovsky, learned from Wagner’s orchestration how to bathe a Slavic melody in a sonic halo.
Puccini came up with an especially crafty solution to the Wagner problem. Like many of his generation, he rejected mystic subjects of the Parsifal type; instead, he followed Pietro Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo, composers of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, into the new genre of verismo, or opera verité, where popular tunes mingled with blood-and-thunder orchestration and all manner of contemporary characters—prostitutes, gangsters, street urchins, a famously jealous clown—invaded the stage. Almost nothing on the surface of Puccini’s mature operas sounds unmistakably Wagnerian. The influence is subterranean: you sense it in the way melodies emerge from the orchestral texture, the way motifs evolve organically from scene to scene. If Wagner, in the Ring, made the gods into ordinary people, Puccini’s La Bohème, first heard in 1896, does the opposite: it gives mythic dimensions to a rattily charming collection of bohemians.
The most eloquent critic of Wagnerian self-aggrandizement was a self-aggrandizing German—Friedrich Nietzsche. Fanatically Wagnerian in his youth, the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra experienced a negative epiphany upon delving into the aesthetic and theological thickets of Parsifal. He came to the conclusion that Wagner had dressed himself up as “an oracle, a priest—indeed more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the ‘in itself’ of things, a telephone from the beyond—henceforth he uttered not only music, this ventriloquist of God—he uttered metaphysics.” Throughout his later writings, most forcefully in the essay The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche declared that music must be liberated from Teutonic heaviness and brought back to popular roots. “Il faut méditerraniser la musique,” he wrote. Bizet’s Carmen, with its blend of comic-opera form and raw, realistic subject matter, was suggested as the new ideal.
By 1888, when Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner, the project of mediterraneanization was well under way. French composers naturally took the lead, their inborn resistance to German culture heightened by their country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Emmanuel Chabrier presented his rhapsody España, a feast of Mediterranean atmosphere. Gabriel Fauré finished the first version of his Requiem, with its piercingly simple and pure harmonies. Erik Satie was writing his Gymnopédies, oases of stillness. And Claude Debussy was groping toward a new musical language in settings of Verlaine and Baudelaire.
Wagner himself wished to escape the gigantism that his own work came to represent. “I have felt the pulse of modern art and know that it will die!” he wrote to his comrade-in-arms Liszt in 1850. “This knowledge, however, fills me not with despondency but with joy … The monumental character of our art will disappear, we shall abandon our habit of clinging firmly to the past, our egotistical concern for permanence and immortality at any price: we shall let the past remain the past, the future—the future, and we shall live only in the present, in the here and now and create works for the present age alone.” This populist ambition was inherent in the very technology of the music, in the vastness of the orchestra and the power of the voices. As Mahler later explained: “If we want thousands to hear us in the huge auditoriums of our concert halls and opera houses,” he wrote, “we simply have to make a lot of noise.”
Richard Strauss—“Richard III,” the conductor Hans von Bülow called him, skipping over Richard II—grew up almost literally in Wagner’s shadow. His father, the French-horn virtuoso Franz Strauss, played in the Munich Court Orchestra, which reported to King Ludwig II, Wagner’s patron. The elder Strauss thus participated in the inaugural performances of Tristan, Die Meistersinger, Parsifal, and the first two parts of the Ring. Strauss père was, however, a stolid musical reactionary who deemed Wagner’s spectacles unworthy of comparison to the Viennese classics. Richard, in his adolescence, parroted his father’s prejudices, saying, “You can be certain that ten years from now no one will know who Richard Wagner is.” Yet even as he criticized Wagner, the teenage composer was identifying harmonic tricks that would soon become his own. For example, he mocked a passage in Die Walküre that juxtaposed chords of G and C-sharp—the same keys that intersect on the first page of Salome.
Franz
