Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

For those unwilling to follow the erotic utopia of Tristan, a new answer had to be found to the political and ethical questions raised in the Ring. And this is precisely what Wagner provided in his last two projects. Die Meistersinger (1861-67) as an attempt, partly inspired by the nationalism of Fichte, to see whether something of the political optimism of the Ring might still be salvageable after the pessimistic discoveries of Tristan. The answer the opera gives to this question is affirmative, but the specific content of this answer is profoundly disturbing, a utopia of post-political aestheticized metapolitics pregnant with sinister implications for the future.

Prologue

The music-dramatic core of the book is framed by sections designed to place Wagner’s late works within the context of the political and ethical ideas of his time. The Prologue offers a genealogy of the principal worldviews available to Wagner and his contemporaries and shows how they related to one another. The options I describe are of diverse age, some with roots going as far back as the antiquity (the Judeo-Christian religious outlook), some characteristic of the modern age (the Enlightenment), some arising even more recently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the main currents of the Counter-Enlightenment that proceed under the banners of History, Nation, and Will). Deposited at different times, they all actively shaped the landscape in which Wagner found himself and left traces on his music dramas.

Parsifal

Parsifal (1877-81), Wagner’s testament, offers a vision of ethics that might be viable in the wake of Tristan, a vision derived from Schopenhauerian, Buddhist, and Christian inspirations that suggested a turning away from the nihilistic self-obsessed Eros toward the other-directed Agape.

Epilogue

The Epilogue returns to the philosophical issues raised in the Prologue, but narrows the focus to a single relationship, that of Richard Wagner with his most important critic, Friedrich Nietzsche. The chapter describes the history of the relationship between the two, analyzes the philosopher’s essential objections against the composer, evaluates their validity, and suggests how Wagner’s works might defend themselves against Nietzsche’s strictures.

Tristan und Isolde

Tristan und Isolde (1857-59) put this revolutionary optimism of the Ring into question. Prompted in part by his disillusionment with the failed revolution and in part by his enthusiastic reading of Schopenhauer, Wagner now realized that the erotic love that was supposed to provide the foundations of the new post-revolutionary society was singularly unsuited for this role. Eros turned out to be a cruel deity inexorably driving its devotees to transcend the finite daily realm of customary social rights and obligations and ecstatically enter the infinite metaphysical night of nothingness.

Der Ring des Nibelungen

The Ring, though many years in gestation (1848-74), was essentially the fruit of Wagner’s politically most radical anarchist period concurrent with and immediately following the mid-century revolts. The nineteenth century was obsessed by the Myth of Revolution, the myth that was one of that century’s two most baleful legacies to the one that followed (the other one was the Myth of Nation). In Wagner’s tetralogy this obsession found its arguably grandest artistic expression. Inspired by Feuerbach, Proudhon, and Bakunin, it is a poem intoxicated by the orgy of destruction of the old world in which humans compete for power and riches and by the hopeful anticipation of the world to come, the world of spontaneous solidarity and love—an anarchist utopia.

The Secret of Music-Dramatic Form

Carl Dahlhaus’s voluminous writings on Wagner from the 1960s though the 1980s provide the most important attempt to understand the form of the music dramas since Alfred Lorenz’s studies of the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter offers an analysis and critique of Dahlhaus’s approach and proposes an alternative analytical procedure to be followed in the present book.