Politics. Aristotle’s contention that man is by nature a political animal (ζῷον πολιτικόν)
might have been formulated with Wagner in mind (Aristotle I.1253a2). Whatever he claimed
on occasion, for instance when seeking amnesty for his revolutionary deeds, or writing MEIN
LEBEN for LUDWIG II, Wagner’s life and oeuvre were intimately and often explicitly
concerned with political questions. “Questions” is the moot word, for, whilst Wagner rarely
hesitated to proffer answers, he ultimately found them wanting. Political involvement arose
from artistic need and vice versa, art and politics being inextricably related in Wagner’s
conception. Inspired by Attic tragedy, Wagnerian musical drama was necessary political:
communal celebration and perhaps incitement. Wagner also treated with political ideas in
essays, CORRESPONDENCE, and the dramas themselves.
1. Karl Marx, German idealism, and French socialism
2. The Ring
3. The Ring: Political order
4. The Ring: Heroic challenges
5. After Wagner
1. Karl Marx, German idealism, and French socialism
Wagner was a contemporary of Marx (b. 1818) in more than a chronological sense. They
shared influences, not least the philosophy of Friedrich SCHILLER, G.F.W. HEGEL, and Young
Hegelians such as Ludwig FEUERBACH; they shared friends and acquaintances, such as
Mikhail BAKUNIN and Georg HERWEGH; they denounced many of the same social ills, not
least nineteenth-century bourgeois capitalism. Both, moreover, were master dramatists; even
Capital is as much psychopathological history as work of economic analysis. The differences
between Marx and Wagner are, however, equally telling. That Marx would have dismissed
Wagner’s work largely as “ideology” does not mean that we should do so, yet there lies
therein much of that “true socialism” Marx and Engels excoriated in favor of their
“scientific” variety. Wagner’s politics concern themselves with some issues of lesser
importance to Marx, for instance despoliation of the natural world (“green politics,” one
might say) and a pre-Nietzschean conception of the will to power (Liebesgelüste, see Wagner
to Uhlig, 11/12 Nov. 1851).
For Wagner, standing firmly in the tradition of German idealism, the Athenian polis
had embodied harmony between individual and society, private and public. Tragic enactment
represented the supreme manifestation of harmony – in every sense. The problem of modern
political life, both for Wagner and idealism, was how to reconcile the apparently idyllic
communal integration of Hellenic life with post-Classical, Christian subjectivity (individual
souls: the Lutheran priesthood of all believers). Art, as life in general, fragmented following
the political decline of Athens. A higher unity – Wagner aimed not at a restoration of tragedy
but at its renewal – entailed wholesale transformation of the public realm: individuality
would flourish, but not empty, mercenary individualism as abetted by modern civilization.
Socialization of art and aestheticization of society would be one and the same. As for Schiller
and the German Romantics, art was the paradigm of free, productive activity – or would be
when liberated from forcible division of labor. For the divorce of “opera” from “drama” was
as much a dehumanized and dehumanizing consequence as factory wage-slavery:
REVOLUTION
would overcome both.
French socialism – “utopian” according to the typology inherited from Marx and
Engels – played an important role here too, not least via August RÖCKEL, though Wagner also
read much for himself, returning to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon after the DRESDEN UPRISING. In
Mein Leben, Wagner recalls having questioned Röckel in Dresden about his “new moral
order of things,” founded upon “the annihilation of the power of capital by direct productive
labor.” Where, asked Wagner, would the “free spirits, let alone artists,” be found, “if
everyone were to be swallowed up into the one working class”? Röckel replied, “that if
everybody participated in the work at hand according to his powers and capacities, work
would cease to be a burden, and would become an occupation which would eventually
assume an entirely artistic character, just as it had already been proven that a field worked
laboriously by a single peasant with the plough was infinitely less productive than when
cultivated by several persons according to a horticultural system.” This utopian socialism
stood closer to Marx than one might think, for division of labor is to be transformed into
something voluntarist rather than merely abandoned in Romantic reaction. Wagner thus “took
pleasure in developing conceptions of a possible form of human society which would
correspond wholly, and indeed solely, to my highest artistic ideals” (ML/E 373-4). The
“ZURICH reform writings” – DIE KUNST UND DIE REVOLUTION, DAS KUNSTWERK DER ZUKUNFT,
and OPER UND DRAMA – do just that.
2. The Ring
One might say that Wagner’s politics are expressed most clearly, or rather most probingly, in
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN. This is true and misleading: there is no single doctrine to be
expressed, but a continual, questioning process of development. Dramatic form, radicalizing
rather than resolving – there are harmonic implications here too – arguably proved better
suited than essay-writing to such development, at least for Wagner, though we should never
reduce the dramas to tracts.
There nevertheless remains much political truth in Wagner’s encouragement to LISZT,
“Mark well my new poem – it contains the beginning of the world and its destruction!”
(Wagner to Liszt, 11 Feb. 1853). At the heart of the Ring’s action lie the foundation of
modern state and society, and their dissolution, the latter seeming increasingly uncertain
following the apparent failure of revolution in 1848-9, yet never abandoned. Even in the
1880s, Wagner would record, recalling his earlier, highly political Jesus von Nazareth: “Jesus
could foresee nothing but the end; we no less. Materially and empirically composed, we await
the destructive forces which, even, for the Roman world, did not fail to appear” (BB/E 201).
Annihilation remains political as well as metaphysical, the Christian dialectic between
cyclical (Greek) and linear (Jewish), at least as understood by Wagner, SCHOPENHAUER, and
many other German idealists, re-imagined, just as in PARSIFAL.
3. The Ring: Political order
In WOTAN’s winning the Ring’s “world,” the necessity of its end (GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG) is
already clear. The Norns recall him fashioning his spear, political instrument of domination,
from the World-ash tree: Nature raped in founding the artificial state. In 1849, Wagner noted,
under the heading, “On the Principle of Communism,” that, historically, such arbitrary
(willkürlich) deeds of possession, on the part of a people or an individual, were invariably
justified by religious, mythical, or otherwise spruced-up contracts (SSD 12:254). When we
hear of Wotan’s subsequent actions, we understand them as inevitable consequences of that
original political sin against Nature (and humanity). His spear shattered in combat by
Siegfried’s sword of (would-be) revolution, Wotan has commanded his tamed heroes to fell
the withered boughs of the World-ash. “The ash fell; the spring ran dry eternal!”
(Götterdämmerung, Prelude). Domination achieved, disaster has ensued, not least for Wotan
himself, now surrounded by the ash-tree logs, awaiting their final all-consuming blaze:
further wanton natural despoliation. The state, as Bakunin insisted, “is not a direct product of
Nature; it does not, like society, precede the awakening of thought in man.” Instead, it
“dominates society and tends to absorb it altogether” (Bakunin 137-8).
Wotan, however, is no mere gangster. We sense the religious aura and majesty of
Valhalla: the ideological defenses of the gods’ stronghold should not be underestimated,
especially as it emerges in Wotan’s musical dream. Wotan’s vision is not, moreover, of
“might is right.” He restrains Donner from resolving the problem of the giants as in the Prose
EDDA: “Stop, you savage! Nothing through force! My spear protects contracts: spare your
hammer’s power” (Rheingold, Scene 2). Such is a remnant of the originally creative urge that
led him to inscribe contracts upon his spear; the problem with laws is that as soon as they are
rendered unalterable, human creativity is stifled. They are transformed into their opposite;
they entrap, as Wotan laments in his WALKÜRE monologue. Conflict between love and the
Law is a constant refrain in Wagner’s plans for Jesus von Nazareth. Indeed, Wagner portrays
Jesus, who proclaims that his death will also bring about that of the Law, as an heir to
Proudhon and Bakunin (SSD 11:290). Law has, in a classical case of Feuerbachian inversion,
acquired divine power over the men whose original creation it was, as Valhalla (or Heaven)
has in religious terms. The temporary and imaginary have become feared and obeyed as
eternal and super-real. And yet, as we read in the 1848 prose sketch (“Die NibelungenMythus. Als Entwurf zu einen Drama”), though the purpose of the gods’ “higher world order
is moral consciousness … they are tainted by the very injustice they hunt down.” From the
oppressed “depths of Nibelheim consciousness of their guilt echoes threateningly” (SSD
2:157). Wagner originally intended that the oppressed Nibelungs be liberated by revolution;
experience taught him the struggle would be harder.
In Nibelheim lies a more modern – at least to Wagner – instantiation of domination,
and a threat to the gods’ relatively enlightened variety. For, as Marx observed, though
Wagner might readily have done, “the relationship of industry and, in particular, the world of
wealth to the political world is a principal problem of modern times” (Marx, “Zur Kritik der
Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie”). Both extended Feuerbach’s critique of religious alienation,
this time into the realm of capital. ALBERICH’s parallel rape of Nature – there are two creation
myths in the Ring cosmos – is theft of the Rhine gold. Value-free in its natural state, Alberich
transforms it into capital in the Nibelung hoard, and would-be totalitarian power in the ring,
with which he enslaves his kinsmen and would vanquish ancien régime Valhalla. He may not
accomplish that himself, yet his bourgeois challenge, born of his lowly place endured in its
feudal order, hastens its destruction.
4. The Ring: Heroic challenges
Subsequent challenges issue from SIEGMUND and SIEGFRIED, both standing in Wagner’s line
of charismatic revolutionary heroes from RIENZI (indeed from the hero of the FAUST
OVERTURE) to PARSIFAL. Enthusiasm for the figure of Siegfried was widespread amongst
Vormärz radicals, including the young Engels, for whom nineteenth-century “heroic deeds”
(Heldentaten) might be endeavored by “sons of Siegfried” (see his essay, “Siegfrieds
Heimat”). Brünnhilde, we might note, sends Siegfried out into the world: “to new deeds, dear
hero” (Götterdämmerung, Prelude)
If our opening quotation might have been made for Wagner, so, in the VOLSUNG
context, might Aristotle’s subsequent words: “And he who by nature and not by mere
accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the ‘Tribeless,
lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homer [Iliad, Book IX] denounces – the natural outcast is
forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts” (Aristotle
I.1253a2-6). Siegmund and Siegfried both appear out of nowhere, or rather out of the
Teutonic forest, suggesting a world in which Franco-Roman rules (laws) do not apply – that
is, a stateless place of anarchy. Wagner does not consider them “bad men”; foes such as
HUNDING and FRICKA do. In Wagner’s attempt, confounded by state power, to have them
transcend or at least transform existing society, they echo Aristotle’s “above humanity” – and
prefigure NIETZSCHE’s Übermensch. Both heroes stand opposed to “tribe” and “law,” and are,
in the face of society and its institutions, “lovers of war.” Such was Wotan’s intention, having
turned against his own laws and attempted to free himself from the merciless dialectic of
power-politics. “Hearthless” the Volsung heroes are too, whereas Hunding – his second line,
“Holy is my hearth” – prides himself upon his outwardly respectable, internally repressive
(bourgeois-equivalent) household (Walküre, Act I).
Siegmund’s rescue of SIEGLINDE from Hunding’s domination therefore represents
dramatic progress; it is blessed with heroic progeny. By contrast, BRÜNNHILDE’s wish that
Siegfried settle down attempts (again) to render permanent what should be temporary.
Marriage, symbolized with cruelest irony by possession of Alberich’s ring of power, would
pervert and destroy their love through intervention of law and property. Her need to constrain
Siegfried thus helps initiate, in alliance with Gibichung state corruption, the tragedy of
Götterdämmerung, the undoing of all concerned. Nothing could be further from the truth than
George Bernard SHAW’s claim that in Götterdämmerung, Wagner relinquished his political
vision; his politics, however, stood far from Shaw’s Fabian variety.
Instead, there persisted a vision of free LOVE inspired by Young German and Young
Hegelian “sensualism,” and by French socialists such as Charles Fourier and the SaintSimonians – despite Wagner’s Schopenhauerian recognition of love itself as a form of power.
Fourier lamented: “Our legislators want to subordinate the social system to … the Family,”
which he contrasted with “groups” of honor, friendship, and love, and “which God has almost
entirely excluded from influence in Social Harmony, because it is a group of forced or
material bonds, not a free, passionate gathering, dissoluble at will…. Since all constraint
engenders falsehood … both civilized and patriarchal society, where this group is the
dominant one, are the most duplicitous” (Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements). It is
no coincidence that conventional marriages in Wagner are duplicitous – and barren.
Siegfried, if unconsciously, destroys the bonds of law and state as much through his betrayal
of Brünnhilde as his defiance of Wotan.
5. After Wagner
Wagner was not the first to treat with political ideas in his musical dramas, yet those coming
after tended to take their leave from him. That might lie in rejection, for example, Igor
Stravinsky and even Richard STRAUSS, in his marriage of Wagnerian musico-dramatic
construction to decidedly Nietzschean aestheticism, or in continuation. Alban Berg’s Wozzeck
and Lulu dealt explicitly with socio-political concerns, likewise Arnold SCHOENBERG’s
Moses und Aron, an exemplar regarding difficulties and opportunities provided by the
Wagnerian-modernist tradition. Schoenberg contrasts Moses, at loss for words, and therefore
lacking power, with Aron, whose dangerous political power lies in BEL CANTO ease of
communication and its catastrophic consequences. If Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill reckoned
themselves resolutely anti-Wagnerian, they could hardly have done so without him; there
remained, in any case, more than a little residue. Post-war “engaged” composers such as
Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono were compelled to confront Wagner’s legacy: in
Henze’s case almost equally through inescapable homage and angry confrontation.
Wagner’s dramas have also stood at the forefront of political Regietheater. There are
specific historical reasons for this, not least a post-war Adornian desire to “salvage” them
from their fraught relationship to GERMAN HISTORY, but content and political purpose have
proved equally important. If WIELAND Wagner’s “New Bayreuth” understandably
downplayed the taint of politics – itself a political act – then directors such as Joachim Herz,
Ruth Berghaus, Patrice CHÉREAU, and Stefan Herheim have continued, in Wagnerian
tradition, to question the dramas, to venture out to “new deeds.” Man remains a ζῷον
πολιτικόν.
MARK BERRY
See also: GENDER; MODERN MUSIC; PHILOSOPHY;
Aristotle, The Politics, tr. Jonathan Barnes, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1988).
Mikhail Bakunin, “State and Society,” Selected writings, tr. Steven Cox (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1973).
Udo Bermbach, Der Wahn des Gesamtkunstwerks (see bibliography).
Mark Berry, “Is it here that Time becomes Space? Hegel, Schopenhauer, History, and Grace
in Parsifal,” The Wagner Journal 3.3 (2009): 29-59.
Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire (see bibliography).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach and
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998).