Drama and the World of Richard Wagner
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Drama and the World of Richard Wagner
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Overview
Borchmeyer uncovers a vast field of cultural and historical cross-references in Wagner's works. In the first part of the book, he sets out in search of the various archetypal scenes, opening up the composer's dramatic workshop to the reader. He covers all of Wagner's operas, from early juvenilia to the canonical later works.
The second part examines Wagner in relation to political figures including King Ludwig II and Bismarck, and, importantly, in light of critical reactions by literary giants—Thomas Mann, whom Borchmeyer calls "a guiding light in this exploration of the fields that Wagner tilled," and Nietzsche, whose appeal to "philology" is a key source of inspiration in attempts to grapple with Wagner's works.
For more than twenty years, Borchmeyer has placed his scholarship at the service of the famed Bayreuth Festival. With this volume, he gives us a summation of decades of engagement with the phenomenon of Wagner and, at the same time, the result of an abiding critical passion for his works.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691114972 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/30/2003 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 408 |
| Sales rank: | 1,149,100 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Drama and the World of Richard Wagner
By Dieter Borchmeyer
Princeton University Press
Dieter BorchmeyerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0691114978
Chapter One
Chapter 1
LOVE'S MADNESS, FAIRY-TALE ENCHANTMENT, AND A SICILIAN CARNIVAL
DIE HOCHZEIT, DIE FEEN, AND DAS LIEBESVERBOT
We must seize our chance and honestly seek to cultivate the age's new forms, and he will be its master who writes in neither an Italian nor a French-nor even in a German-style.
-Richard Wagner, "German Opera" (1834)
IN 1830 the seventeen-year-old Wagner first turned his hand to writing an opera,1 but beyond the fact that he described it as a "pastoral opera" and that it was modeled on Goethe's pastoral play of 1768, Die Laune des Verliebten (The caprice of the infatuated lover), we know nothing about it, as he quickly abandoned the idea, and no text or music has survived. His next operatic venture (WWV 31) dates from the year of Goethe's death-1832-and on this occasion Wagner completed the libretto and made a start on the score. Three numbers were set, and these have survived,2 but Wagner later destroyed the libretto on the grounds that his sister Rosalie hated it. (This is entirely plausible, as Rosalie was then working as an actress at the Royal Saxon Court Theater in Leipzig and was therefore in a position of some influence. Wagner evidently hoped for her support in this and other operatic ventures.) In his "Autobiographical Sketch" of 1843, he refers to it as an "operatic text of tragic import, although I no longer remember where I found the medieval subject" (GS 1:8). Later, in My Life (ML 75), he recounts the plot of the opera in some detail and states that he had first encountered it in Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching's Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen (The age of chivalry and nature of chivalry), a farrago of fact and fiction about the Middle Ages that had been published in Leipzig in 1823 and whose importance for Wagner cannot be overstated, for it was here that he found the seeds of ideas for all his operas based on medieval themes, up to and including Parsifal. (A copy of the volume also found its way into Wagner's library in Bayreuth.)
PRE-ECHOES OF TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
A frenzied lover climbs up to the bedroom window of the fiancée of a friend of his, where she is waiting for her lover; she struggles with the madman and hurls him down into the courtyard, where every bone in his body is broken. At his funeral, the fiancée utters a cry and sinks lifeless upon his corpse. (GS 1:8-9)
Wagner was so attracted to this tale that he even thought of turning it into a short story in the style of E.T.A. Hoffmann. It is based in turn on a medieval verse narrative by an anonymous late-thirteenth-century German poet. (Its title, Frauentreue [Women's fidelity], is not authentic but derives from an epilogue added by a later poet: "Das heizet vrouwen triuwe" [This is an example of women's fidelity].) The young Wagner knew this poem only at second hand, namely, from Büsching's retelling of it, but by the time that he came to dictate My Life, he had already forgotten it, so much so that he confused its plot with that of his own libretto. Only much later did he get to know the original in Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen's 1850 three-volume anthology, Gesammtabenteuer (Compendium of adventures). "In the evening," we read in Cosima Wagner's diary for 1 May 1873, "R. reads me Frauen Treue [sic] by Konrad von Würzburg, the original of his Hochzeit [The wedding]." (Wagner was in error in attributing the poem to Konrad von Würzburg, who was in fact the author of the previous texts in Hagen's collection.)3 It left a "wonderful impression" (CT, 1 May 1873). Wagner was clearly so fascinated by the poem that he read it again eight years later. "We are very moved by its great respectability," Cosima noted on 17 October 1881. "There is something almost petit-bourgeois about it, in spite of all its boldness." And she follows this up with a remark on the middle-class husband of the story, a comment that suddenly makes it clear what Wagner found so fascinating about this tale: "In the husband R. recognizes his King Marke" (CT, 17 October 1881).
Büsching's bombastically overwritten summary of the plot of the original thirteenth-century poem runs as follows:
A worthy warrior and knight, overbold in both body and spirit, had set his mind-as many a God-fearing knight would do-on winning a woman's favors by dint of chivalry, which had cost him full many a gory wound In the course of his journeyings in search of adventure, this knight came to a town. He did not know the people here, with the exception of a single townsman whom he met here and who belonged to his circle of acquaintances. The knight approached him, addressed him as an acquaintance, and asked where he could find the most beautiful woman in the town.4
The townsman informs him that he will be able to see all the townswomen at the forthcoming service that is held each year to commemorate the consecration of the local church. And here the knight discovers a woman who robs him of his senses: "Si kam im zuo der selben stunt / mitten in sînes herzen grunt, / darûz si nimmer mêr geschiet, / biz der tôt ez verschriet" [All at once she entered the very depths of his heart, remaining there until death destroyed it].
The knight who arrives in town, becomes friendly with a member of the local burgher class, and falls in love with a middle-class woman at a church service-the reader is inevitably reminded of Die Meistersinger. In the case of Die Hochzeit, Wagner took up neither the motif of the meeting in church nor the social relationship between the knight and his lover, but instead described her as a "lady of noble birth" (ML 75). Neither she nor either of the two men is given a name: all are referred to merely by their social status. Büsching goes on to explain how the knight
pointed out this lady to the townsman who was accompanying him, and the townsman recognized her as his own wife. With a smile, he asked the knight to stay with him as his guest, but the latter declined, so oppressed was his heart, and each day he wandered through the town, hoping for a glimpse of the woman he loved. He took lodgings close to her home, so that he could see her all the more often.5
It was not long before the woman noticed the lovesick knight and began to grow wary, "wan si ze nieman liebe truoc, / wan z'ir êlichen man" [as she had never loved anyone apart from her lawfully wedded husband]. At this point, Büsching interrupts his summary of the plot, returning to it later and completing it at a totally unexpected point in his narrative. Wagner must have read Büsching's work very carefully for him to have been able to make sense of the story and reconstruct the overall context.
The knight organizes a tournament for the sake of the woman he loves, appearing at it wearing only a silk shirt.6 The point of an opponent's spear becomes embedded in his side, and he will allow only this one woman to remove it: "Mich sol nieman tuon gesunt, / wan durch der willen ich wart wunt, / læt mich diu sus verderben, / sô wil ich gerne sterben" [No one shall cure me except the one for whose sake I was wounded; if she leaves me thus to perish, I'll gladly die]. The idea of a knight being healed by the woman he loves is familiar, of course, from the exposition of Tristan und Isolde. Yet Büsching omits this very motif in his retelling of the plot of Frauentreue.7
The woman is fully aware of the erotic nature of the knight's request and so she initially refuses to draw the tip of the spear from his wound, and it is only in response to her husband's earnest entreaties that, almost dying of shame, she agrees to do so. At this point, Büsching picks up the story again, offering only the briefest account of its tragic outcome.8 The knight has scarcely recovered when he enters the couple's bedroom at night and forces himself upon the wife. In keeping with medieval custom, she was sleeping naked but manages to slip on a silk nightshirt. So violent is their struggle that the knight's wound reopens, and, in a manner reminiscent of Wagner's Tristan, he bleeds to death. Secretly she carries his body back to his lodgings, finally conscious of the greatness of his love for her: "Alrest diu vrouwe gedâhte, / der grôzen liebe ahte, / die der ritter zuo ir hâte: / dô was ez leider nû ze spâte" [Only now did the woman bethink herself and heed the great love that the knight felt for her: alas, it was now too late]. He is laid out in his coffin in church, whither the woman comes to offer a funerary sacrifice. Only her maid knows the secret of her love. (Again there is a striking parallel with Tristan und Isolde, this time with Brangäne.) Standing before the altar, she removes one article of clothing after another-"si vergaz vor leide gar der scham" [in her grief she even forgot all sense of shame]-until she stands there in her shift, then sinks lifeless upon the knight's body in a kind of medieval Liebestod, or Love-death.9
The whole story is permeated with a series of subtle correspondences: at the beginning the townswomen are placed on show, whereas at the end it is the knight's corpse that is laid out on display; the first and last encounters between the knight and his lady take place in church; and there is the recurrent motif of the silk shirt or shift that the knight wears in fighting for his lover and that she in turn wears, first when defending herself in the bedroom and second when standing before his bier. Both here and in the tournament the silk shirt or shift serves to symbolize an amorous relationship that flouts social etiquette. Just as the knight sacrifices his personal safety in the tournament, so the woman sacrifices her honor, hitherto staunchly upheld, in an exhibitionist act that was even more provocative in the case of a middle-class woman than it would have been with a woman of noble birth and that is quite unprecedented in church. Thus she challenges the world, formally excluding herself from society with a finality that can end only with her death. A tale of such erotic eccentricity was conceivable only in the late Middle Ages. "Diu minne kan niht mâze hân" [Love cannot show moderation], we read in one of the poems of Konrad von Würzburg,10 the thirteenth-century poet to whom Wagner attributed Frauentreue. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of all this is that Wagner discovered this tale-it was virtually unknown in his own day but anticipates many of the relationships of his later music dramas-hidden away among the chaff of Büsching's rhapsodically rambling work.
The reader who is unfamiliar with the intricacies of medieval relationships and who assumes the existence of an unambiguous ethical order in which marriage is inviolate will be surprised by the glorification of a love that overrides the ties of middle-class marriage by demonstrating its allegiance to a higher code of ethics involving knightly triuwe, or fidelity. This emerges not only from the prologue to the poem, in which the anonymous poet praises the lovers' reciprocal triuwe and describes the woman as "diu guote, / diu reine, wolgemuote" [good, pure, and well disposed], but also, and more especially, from its ending, where even the husband sings his wife's praises when she dies for love of the knight: "ein wîp sô gar ân' valschen list" [a wife so pure and lacking in falsehood]. (Such praise is presumably possible, as the love between the knight and his lady stops short of actual adultery, a point on which it differs from that of Tristan and Isolde.) And the tale ends with the common burial of the two lovers: "Dâ legte man sie beide / mit jâmer und mit leide / in ein grap, die holden. / Sus het si im ver-golden, / unt tet im ganze triuwe schîn" [Then with grief and anguish both were laid in a single grave, the lovers. Thus she had requited him and given him proof of her steadfast fidelity].
It comes as no surprise to find that the older Wagner was fascinated by the links between this tale of medieval love and his own Tristan und Isolde, even though he did not explore many of their motivic correspondences in Die Hochzeit-indeed, he was unable to exploit them, as Büsching had passed over them in silence. Instead, he introduced a number of new motifs that anticipate other themes in his later works. The marriage between Ada and Arindal, for example, resembles that between Isolde and King Marke in that both serve to bring peace and reconciliation to two warring families or nations. In other words, Ada, the main female character, has evidently agreed to marry Arindal on rational grounds, which in turn explains the undeclared erotic fascination that Cadolt exercises over her. Cadolt later enters her bedroom, and, as Wagner explains in My Life, "his somber glance strikes her to the heart" (ML 75).
In spite of the differences between Die Hochzeit on the one hand and Frauentreue and Büsching's résumé of its contents, on the other, there is no denying the similarity between the two subjects or their affinities with the relationship between the three main characters in Tristan und Isolde-arguably another reason why Wagner described the libretto in such detail in My Life and why he repeatedly returned to it in the final years of his life. The idea of a love that not only destroys an existing marriage but undermines social conventions; the refusal of one of the partners to acknowledge this love (in Die Hochzeit, it is Ada, whereas in Tristan und Isolde, it is Tristan); the "mysterious strength of these passionate but suppressed emotions" (ML 75) that then break out with all the greater force; and their fatal consequence in the form of a Liebestod and the death of the surviving partner: these are all unmistakable motivic parallels between Die Hochzeit and Tristan und Isolde. When we read in Wagner's "Autobiographical Sketch" that the bride "sinks lifelessly over the body" at the end (GS 1:9), we are bound to think of the end of Tristan und Isolde, where we likewise read in the stage directions that Isolde "sinks down on Tristan's body" (GS 7:81). As Bernd Zegowitz has explained in the context of Die Hochzeit, "This sinking upon the body indicates two things. It is both a symbol of Ada's unconsummated bridal night with Arindal and a substitute for their embrace in the bedroom, an embrace that she herself interrupted. Their actual wedding thus takes place in death."11
In My Life, Wagner describes Die Hochzeit as "an out-and-out night piece of the blackest hue," claiming that it was inspired by E.T
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Table of Contents
PREFACE viiCHAPTER ONE: Love's Madness, Fairy-Tale Enchantment, and a Sicilian Carnival: Die Hochzeit, Die Feen, and Das Liebesverbot 1CHAPTER TWO: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for the Music Drama-Grand Opera: Die hohe Braut, Rienzi, and Their Consequences 29CHAPTER THREE: The Transformations of Ahasuerus: The Flying Dutchman and His Metamorphoses 79CHAPTER FOUR: Venus in Exile: Tannhüuser between Romanticism and Young Germany 101CHAPTER FIVE: Lohengrin: The Mythical Palimpsest of Wagner's Last Romantic Opera 147CHAPTER SIX: Love and Objectification in the Music Drama: Tristan's Isolde and Her Sisters 157CHAPTER SEVEN: Nuremberg as an Aesthetic State: Die Meistersinger, an Image and Counterimage of History 180CHAPTER EIGHT: The Myth of the Beginning and End of History: Der Ring des Nibelungen 212CHAPTER NINE: Redemption and Apocatastasis: Parsifal and the Religion of the Late Wagner 238CHAPTER TEN: An Encounter between Two Anomalies: King Ludwig II and Wagner 261CHAPTER ELEVEN: Wagner and Bismarck: An Epoch-Making Nonrelationship 279CHAPTER TWELVE: Two-Faced Passion: Nietzsche's Critique of Wagner 288CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Parallel Action: Thomas Mann's Response to Wagner 308CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Disinherited Heir to the Throne: Franz Wilhelm Beidler, Wagner's "Lost Grandson"-a Postlude 329NOTES 338INDEX 383
What People are Saying About This
A literary scholar of considerable accomplishment, Borchmeyer . . . offers English readers the chance to share in his erudition on Wagner and his place in German culture of the past century and a half.
This book presents a good deal of entirely new material on Wagner's earliest operas and unrealized opera projects (some of these surprisingly little represented in the vast Wagner literature). Written in a straightforward, nontechnical style free of professional jargon, it provides individual chapters covering the entire Wagner canon, as well as the noncanonic early works, all related here in interesting ways to the composer's literary and intellectual environment.
— Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University
"In his well-organized and eminently readable new book, Dieter Borchmeyer investigates in detail the intrinsic forces, as well as the various intertextual references, influences, and connections, of Wagner's libretti, in the course of which he succeeds impressively in developing the literary, historical, and cultural context of the time in which Wagner the librettist and composer worked. Borchmeyer writes without jargon in a comprehensible, clear, and lively style."—Walter Hinderer, Princeton University"This book presents a good deal of entirely new material on Wagner's earliest operas and unrealized opera projects (some of these surprisingly little represented in the vast Wagner literature). Written in a straightforward, nontechnical style free of professional jargon, it provides individual chapters covering the entire Wagner canon, as well as the noncanonic early works, all related here in interesting ways to the composer's literary and intellectual environment."—Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University"A literary scholar of considerable accomplishment, Borchmeyer . . . offers English readers the chance to share in his erudition on Wagner and his place in German culture of the past century and a half."—Choice
In his well-organized and eminently readable new book, Dieter Borchmeyer investigates in detail the intrinsic forces, as well as the various intertextual references, influences, and connections, of Wagner's libretti, in the course of which he succeeds impressively in developing the literary, historical, and cultural context of the time in which Wagner the librettist and composer worked. Borchmeyer writes without jargon in a comprehensible, clear, and lively style.
— Walter Hinderer, Princeton University
Recipe
"In his well-organized and eminently readable new book, Dieter Borchmeyer investigates in detail the intrinsic forces, as well as the various intertextual references, influences, and connections, of Wagner's libretti, in the course of which he succeeds impressively in developing the literary, historical, and cultural context of the time in which Wagner the librettist and composer worked. Borchmeyer writes without jargon in a comprehensible, clear, and lively style."—Walter Hinderer, Princeton University
"This book presents a good deal of entirely new material on Wagner's earliest operas and unrealized opera projects (some of these surprisingly little represented in the vast Wagner literature). Written in a straightforward, nontechnical style free of professional jargon, it provides individual chapters covering the entire Wagner canon, as well as the noncanonic early works, all related here in interesting ways to the composer's literary and intellectual environment."—Thomas S. Grey, Stanford University
"A literary scholar of considerable accomplishment, Borchmeyer . . . offers English readers the chance to share in his erudition on Wagner and his place in German culture of the past century and a half."—Choice