Joshua Harris

There’s nothing easy about understanding Wagner. His music, his prose, his politics–let’s just call them thorny subjects. The other day I ran across the following quotation from the Gesamtkunstwerk composer:

I renounce all fame, and more especially the insane specter of posthumous fame, because I love humankind far too dearly to condemn them, out of self-love, to the kind of poverty of ideas which alone sustains the fame of dead composers.

If you can’t see the irony here, check out the Met’s 2010-2011 season. Surprise! They’re doing Der Ring des Nibelungen! Again. According to the Met’s website they have performed at least part of the four-opera cycle over 400 times since 1889.

Of course so many performances is a testament to sublime in the work, but one wonders how many versions of the The Ring we need. One also wonders if Wagner was being overly modest. Not only did he leave us so many operas, he left us many volumes of prose writings on philosophy, music and politics. He also left us Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work) which generally combined dramatic, visual, literary and musical arts, and specifically included many theater conventions that we take for granted today (e.g. a quiet audience, dimming the house lights and hiding the opera orchestra under the stage). His orchestrations alone required Richard Strauss to update Berlioz’s classic Treatise on Instrumentation. Strauss parodied Wagner, Debussy railed against him, but everyone was affected by him.

At the risk of sinking this post, I’m going to quote some more Wagner prose, from “Artwork of the Future”:

Yet in Nature each immensity strives after Measure; the unconfined draws bounds around itself; the elements condense at last to definite show; and even the boundless sea of Christian yearning found the new shore on which its turbid waves might break. Where on the farthest horizon we thought to find the ever made-for, never happed-on gateway into the realms of Heaven unlimited, there did the boldest of all seafarers discover land at last,—man-tenanted, real, and blissful land. Through his discovery the wide ocean is now not only meted out, but made for men an inland sea, round which the coasts are merely broadened out in unimaginably ampler circle. Did Columbus teach us to take ship across the ocean, and thus to bind in one each continent of Earth; did his world-historical discovery convert the narrow-seeing national-man into a universal and all-seeing Man: so, by the hero who explored the broad and seeming shoreless sea of absolute Music unto its very bounds, are won the new and never dreamt-of coasts which this sea no longer now divorces from the old and primal continent of man, but binds together with it for the new-born, happy art-life of the Manhood of the Future. And this hero is none other than—Beethoven.—

It seems ironic to me for Wagner, who renounced the immortality of the artist, to resurrect Beethoven in such a grandiose way. I don’t want to offer an explanation–I don’t think I have a good one. It’s just another difficulty in understanding Wagner.

I want to speak more about the first quotation, but I’ll save it for the next post.