Wagnerism

To seek a conclusive meaning, though, is to miss the point. Joseph Acquisto remarks that Mallarmé’s work “marks the rebirth of poetic language in a performative mode … The poem is re-created each time it is read aloud.” At the end of his life, Mallarmé took this indeterminate aesthetic even further in his free-form graphic poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (“A roll of the dice will never eliminate chance”). A text of some seven hundred words is scattered across eleven double pages, in staggered lines and in fonts of varying sizes, often with independent sentences juxtaposed. The layout has the look of musical notation, with voices rising and falling amid expectant silences. Mallarmé invokes Wagner in his introductory note: “A sort of general leitmotiv that unfolds itself constitutes the unity of the poem: accessory motifs have gathered around it.” But the performance is a private one, taking place on the inner stage of the reader’s mind. The Cirque d’Hiver is obsolete.

For all their inscrutability, Mallarmé’s writings on Wagner are clear-eyed and judicious. In many ways, the poet is dealing with the same ambivalence that tormented Nietzsche, but he spares himself the oscillations between adulation and disgust. As Lacoue-Labarthe writes, he is “critical, in some sense, but in no way hostile.” The tone is “reserved. Measured, even. And thus, again, admiring.” When Mallarmé died, a book about Beethoven and Wagner was found on his bedside table.

3

SWAN KNIGHT

Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America

The wedding of Princess Victoria and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, 1858

In the past century and a half, countless millions of women have walked down the wedding aisle to the accompaniment of the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin, also known as “Here Comes the Bride.” The custom is a little strange, because in its original context the music is a prelude to catastrophe. Marriages in Wagner’s world tend to go badly, and the one in Lohengrin is no exception. Elsa of Brabant is engaged to a knight from a faraway land, but the groom has imposed a stifling condition: “You must not ever ask me / Nor should you care to know / Whence I made my way / Nor my name and kind.” The wedding, with its indelible lilting tune, takes place at the beginning of Act III. Afterward, Elsa cannot refrain from posing the forbidden question. Lohengrin reveals himself to be a Knight of the Holy Grail—the son of Parsifal, no less. Because his secret is out, he must return to the Grail Temple. Before departing, he undoes the evil magic performed by the pagan witch Ortrud, who has trapped Elsa’s young brother in the body of a swan. Despite that happy event, Elsa is too bereft to live, and expires.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Bridal Chorus had become a fixture of the marital ritual around the world. In 1894, the Nebraska State Journal carried this account of the wedding of Miss Nell Cochrane and Mr. Frank Woods, in the city of Lincoln:

At half past six there was a little pause, and then came the first stirring notes of that perfect wedding march of Lohengrin. Twenty girls of the Delta Gamma fraternity entered, marching down the left aisle, carrying ropes of smilax and bunches of loose roses, singing the words of the wedding march. Dr. Lasby took his place under the palms before the chancel. The twenty girls came slowly forward and ranged themselves on either side of him. Next came Miss Daisy Cochrane, the maid of honor, dressed in white silk and carrying a bouquet of pink roses. Last came the bride herself, in white ottoman silk, her veil drawn back from her face, carrying bride roses. She came slowly down the aisle, with perfect repose, seeming scarcely to move, but rather to be borne onward by the triumphant tenderness of Wagner that surged from the organ.

The author of this item, a precocious University of Nebraska student named Willa Cather, added a more idiosyncratic perspective in her column the following day: “If people are going to be foolish enough to be married they might as well do it with a glare of torches and a blaze of trumpets, and have a church wedding and give the community the benefit of it. Then they can have Wagner’s wedding march on the organ, and it’s worth getting married to have that.”

The British royal family, arbiters of wedding fashion across the ages, promoted the Bridal Chorus as a marriage anthem. In 1840, Queen Victoria, of the House of Hanover, wed Prince Albert, of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The prince loved German music and showed skill as an organist and a composer. The young queen assimilated Albert’s taste, and in June 1855 the couple attended one in a series of concerts that Wagner conducted in London, at the invitation of the Philharmonic Society. The program included, by royal request, the Tannhäuser overture. “A wonderful composition, quite overpowering, so grand, & in parts wild, striking and descriptive,” Victoria wrote in her diary. She received Wagner and found him “very quiet”—possibly the only time he ever made that impression. They spoke about the composer’s dog and parrot. In letters home, Wagner reported that the queen was “very small and not at all pretty, with, I am sorry to say, a rather red nose, but there is something uncommonly friendly and confiding about her.” Victoria’s willingness to associate with a “politically disreputable person wanted for high treason”—Wagner’s self-characterization—flattered him deeply.

Three years later, Princess Victoria, the queen’s eldest child, wed Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, who, in 1888, would briefly reign as Friedrich III, emperor of Germany. A festive concert after the ceremony featured the wedding scene from Lohengrin, with a new text for the blessing of the couple: “O ne’er may England’s Princess / One hour of sorrow know; / For her may life’s rude billows / With gentle current flow.” (The lyricist was Thomas Oliphant, best known for the Christmas carol “Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly.”) Music by Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn followed. It is a historical curiosity that the British royals chose to pair Wagner with the two Jewish composers whom he insults in “Jewishness in Music.”

Der Meister and Her Majesty met one other time. In 1877, Wagner returned to London for an extended festival of his music, by which time he had become a regal figure in his own right. At the concerts, he sometimes sat in an armchair, facing the audience, while Hans Richter conducted. Victoria wrote in her journal: “After luncheon the great composer Wagner, about whom the people in Germany are really a little mad, was brought into the corridor by Mr. Cusins. I had seen him with dearest Albert in ’55, when he directed at the Philharmonic Concert. He has grown old and stout, and has a clever, but not pleasing countenance. He was profuse in expressions of gratitude, and I expressed my regret at having been unable to be present at one of his concerts.” If Victoria now looked askance at Wagner, missives from her daughter in Germany may have influenced her. An 1869 letter from the princess reads: “If you want to read anything perfectly cracked you should see Richard Wagner’s new pamphlet called ‘Jewish Influence in Music.’ I never read anything so violent, conceited or unfair.”

By the end of the century, memories of Victoria’s interest in the composer had faded. An 1897 book titled The Private Life of the Queen asserted that “Wagner has found little or no favour in her eyes.” But anonymous attendants were not privy to all areas of her spirit. When, in 1889, the singers Jean de Reszke and Emma Albani privately performed an excerpt from Lohengrin for the queen, she wrote in her diary: “Beyond anything beautiful, so dramatic … The music lasted till four, and I could have listened to it much longer. It was indeed a treat.”

The incorporation of Lohengrin into the royal wedding protocol exposes a gap between French- and English-speaking responses to Wagner. In France, he was a scandal, an incitement, a field of battle. In Britain and the United States, he was a somewhat tamer product—a “treat,” in Victoria’s graciously belittling formulation. From Buckingham Palace to the Nebraska plains, the former fugitive could serve as an adornment of Victorian and Gilded Age society. His operas became mainstays of the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera; touring productions drew a diverse public. Popular accounts, including a series of Wagner books for young people, portrayed a noble-minded idealist, one whose industriousness exemplified the Gospel of Work. Cultured clergymen like Alfred Gurney wrote of the “salutary, soothing, and elevating influence” of Parsifal.

Historians have long insisted that the decorous surfaces of Victorian life masked a more complex social reality. Wagner’s mythology appealed to the burgeoning imperialist mind-set on both sides of the Atlantic, where presumptions of cultural superiority—the White Man’s Burden, Manifest Destiny—rested on theories of racial supremacy that Wagner helped to promote. The fetishizing of Anglo-Saxon origins overlapped with the veneration of the Germanic. The British Isles had been ruled by monarchs of German descent since the early eighteenth century, and the Hanoverian dynasty fostered a respect for German music, literature, and philosophy. Thomas Carlyle, the advocate of Hero-Worship, touted Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte; Walter Pater read Hegel; Schopenhauer’s rise to international prominence began in Britain. In the United States, an influx of German immigrants meant that musical culture acquired a Teutonic profile. At the end of the nineteenth century, American orchestras were largely German-speaking ensembles.

Most of all, Wagner captured the Victorian imagination because of his proximity to the Matter of Britain—the tales of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. In 1816 and 1817, new editions of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur were published, helping to spark an Arthurian revival. Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood occupied themselves with Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, and the lovers Tristram and Iseult, whose story occupies the middle part of Malory’s book. The Ring shares with Arthurian legend the motif of the embedded sword: as the young king draws a blade from the stone, Siegmund draws Nothung from the tree. The tale of Venus and Tannhäuser especially mesmerized the Pre-Raphaelites, who, like the agonized knight, were forever torn between the sacred and the profane.

Even as evocations of a mythic past served an imperial agenda, the anticapitalist allegory of the Ring warned against the industrial modernization that fueled the mid-century might of the British Empire and the gathering strength of the United States. Wagner’s own vision of London was nightmarish: “This is Alberich’s dream come true—Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.” The Pre-Raphaelites spoke of the contemporary cityscape in similar terms, lamenting the demise of older, more spiritually grounded ways of life. The novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy registered the transformation of the social fabric wrought by steamships, railways, and the telegraph. For many Victorian listeners, Wagner provided a kind of secular cathedral space in which they could contemplate tensions between an idyllic past and an industrial present.

Far-seeing Victorian thinkers devised new paradigms through which to comprehend large-scale social change. In 1859 and 1860, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s partner, published his two-volume Physiology of Common Life, which posits a “vast and powerful stream of sensation” as the sum total of our sensibility—a “stream of Consciousness.” Lewes’s work appeared at the same time as two other epochal books written in the area of London: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which shows the determining power of evolutionary processes; and Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which demonstrates how economic conditions control all human affairs. The reasoning intellect is dethroned from its sovereign position. Jacques Barzun, in his 1941 book Darwin, Marx, Wagner, noted that Tristan, too, was completed in 1859, and that it posed an equally jarring challenge to the sensibilities of the day: romantic love dissolves into a quasi-biological music of sexual desire. Wagner’s courtly tragedy thus becomes another treatise of and against the Victorian Age.

GEORGE ELIOT

Circa 1855, when Wagner crashed into the Victorian world, music had pride of place as the supreme medium of moral uplift among the arts. This was a different primacy from the one described by Schopenhauer, who considered music the embodiment of the restlessly striving Will. For the Victorians, music, especially instrumental music and choral singing, soared above the vulgar sphere of popular entertainment, opera included. It was an art “exempt from the trail of the serpent,” wrote the art critic Elizabeth Eastlake. Musical events in spaces like the Crystal Palace and the Royal Albert Hall offered a fantasy of a harmonious, spiritually elevated public, free of class strife and political division.

Some effort was required to make Wagner conform to Victorian ideals. The creator of Tristan had meager credentials as a teacher of virtue. Early on, his music met intense resistance in Britain. During the 1855 visit, the Sunday Times had trouble deciding whether he was a “desperate charlatan” or a “self-deceived enthusiast.” J. W. Davison, the lead critic of the Times and of the Musical World, derided Wagner as the “Mahomed of modern music,” as a “priest of Dagon,” and, most obscurely, as a “veritable man-mermaid.” Lohengrin was “poison—rank poison.”

Wagner’s British reception was further complicated by awareness of his anti-Jewish feelings. Thanks to a maladroit article by a supporter, Ferdinand Praeger, the English-speaking music world had recently learned of Wagner’s authorship of “Jewishness in Music,” which otherwise received almost no international notice. The pamphlet’s critique of Mendelssohn as a somehow stunted talent was a particular affront to British music-lovers, who revered that composer almost as an honorary Englishman. When Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides appeared on one of Wagner’s London programs, Davison pointedly called it a “magnificently Jewish inspiration.”

Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, was one of the first major English-speaking figures to take Wagner seriously. Born in 1819, she had immersed herself in music from an early age, playing the piano and attending concerts. A close student of German literature and philosophy, she published translations of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity—Young Hegelian treatises that left a mark on Wagner.

In the summer of 1854, Eliot left England for an eight-month stay in Germany. With her was George Henry Lewes, with whom she had begun a nonmarital relationship, shocking friends back in London. The arrangement raised fewer eyebrows in the circle around Liszt in Weimar, where they spent three months. With Liszt installed as the Kapellmeister for the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Weimar had become the de facto center of Wagnerian activity—part of an attempt to restore the exalted status that the city had enjoyed in the age of Goethe and Schiller. Eliot saw performances of Tannhäuser, The Flying Dutchman, and Lohengrin, and heard Liszt expound on Wagner’s theories. She summarized her experiences in an unsigned 1855 article titled “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar,” in which she makes reference to the “propaganda of Wagnerism”—one of the first appearances of that word in English.

Music is evolving: this is the main insight that Eliot gains from Wagner. Opera should become an “organic whole, which grows up like a palm, its earliest portion containing the germ and prevision of all the rest.” Pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought affected Eliot’s aesthetics, as Delia da Sousa Correa observes in George Eliot, Music, and Victorian Culture. Lewes and his colleague Herbert Spencer were examining the interaction of evolution, physiology, psychology, and the arts; Spencer held that music, the language of emotion, had grown out of a more objective spoken language. Eliot, who often attended opera performances with Spencer, sees a similar logic at work in Wagner: “It is just possible that melody, as we conceive it, is only a transitory phase of music … We are but in ‘the morning of the times,’ and must learn to think of ourselves as tadpoles unprescient of the future frog.”

Eliot endorses Wagner’s progressive ideas, but the music itself gives her trouble. Accustomed to clean-cut classical forms, she finds the endlessness of Wagnerian discourse bewildering. The biological metaphor is given a humorous twist: “The tadpole is limited to tadpole pleasures; and so, in our state of development, we are swayed by melody.” Lohengrin reminds Eliot of “the whistling of the wind through the keyholes of a cathedral, which has a dreamy charm for a little while, but by and bye you long for the sound even of a street organ to rush in and break the monotony.”

These reservations aside, Eliot supplies some of the most positive and perceptive commentary that Wagner had yet received in Britain. She rejects any “cheap ridicule” of the composer, respecting his skill in dramatic construction. Of Tannhäuser, she writes: “I never saw an opera which had a more interesting succession of well-contrasted effects.” The title character, she writes, “has become weary of hectic sensualism,” and “longs once more for the free air of the field and forest under the blue arch of heaven.” Tannhäuser sounds a bit like Will Ladislaw, the hotheaded young artist of Middlemarch, who quits Rome for the Midlands.

Eliot’s visit to Weimar left subtle traces on the succession of novels that culminated in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Monumental in scale, these books discard the episodic, panoramic structure that defined many prior efforts in the form. In the “Prelude” to Middlemarch—Wagner preferred that term from Lohengrin onward, in place of “overture”—Eliot vows to honor women who have “found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action.” She later speaks of the “roar which lies on the other side of silence”—the storm of feeling behind the façades of ordinary lives, especially those of women. Such a project may seem far removed from Wagner, even opposed to him, yet several contemporaries made the connection. In 1876, Charles Halford Hawkins, a master at Winchester College, argued that Wagner’s “minute development of tone and character painting” and his extraordinary demands on the audience made him the “George Eliot of music.”

In that same year, Eliot published Daniel Deronda, her most deliberate bid for the kind of “organic unity” that she valued in Wagner. She later said that she “meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there.” As serial installments were published, readers struggled with the sheer scope of the narrative. Henry James captured the debate around the novel—and his own ambivalence—by publishing a review in which three imaginary readers express a range of opinions. For one, the book is “so vast, so much-embracing”; for another, it is “protracted, pretentious, pedantic.” This sounds like a group of operagoers quarreling over Wagner—particularly when the skeptic says, “The tone is not English, it is German.”

Eliot all but invites Wagner comparisons by including a character named Julius Klesmer, a beret-wearing composer-teacher who preaches the music of the future. When Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine, sings a bel canto aria by Bellini, Klesmer reproves her:

You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair organ. But you produce your notes badly; and that music which you sing is beneath you. It is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture—a dandling, canting, seesaw kind of stuff—the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody; no cries of deep, mysterious passion—no conflict—no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it. Sing now something larger.

Klesmer’s rhetoric fairly reeks of Wagner, although his cosmopolitan ideas about the “fusion of races” depart from the party line. As one member of James’s critical roundtable says: “And you must not forget that you think Herr Klesmer ‘Shakespearian.’ Wouldn’t ‘Wagnerian’ be high enough praise?” The character paraphrases Eliot’s own 1855 exposition of Wagner’s theories, with “puerile state of culture” supplanting “tadpole pleasures.” And when Klesmer performs a composition of his own, one listener compares it to a “jar of leeches, where you can never tell either beginnings or endings”—exactly the sort of insult that critics routinely lobbed at Wagner. Klesmer may be a satire on German seriousness, but his exhortation to “sing now something larger” reverberates beyond the situation described on the page. It can almost be heard as a challenge from the author’s Wagnerian character to the author herself.

Sing something larger she does. Daniel Deronda breaks the frame of the domestic novel. Gwendolen’s marriage to the icy, controlling Henleigh Grandcourt at first seems to follow the pattern of Middlemarch, where Dorothea Brooke is trapped in an unrewarding union and then finds her way to a happier outcome. Then the tone darkens: Grandcourt is a monster from whom Gwendolen sees no escape. “I think we shall go on always, like the Flying Dutchman,” she says. During a dismal Italian holiday, Grandcourt drowns, and Gwendolen accuses herself of having deliberately failed to save him. It is like an ironic inversion of the ending of the Dutchman, where Senta leaps to her death to save the cursed mariner. Meanwhile, Deronda discovers that he is Jewish, triggering meditations on race, religion, and identity. Eliot had no patience for antisemitism, and denounced it in an 1878 essay titled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” To what extent she knew of Wagner’s anti-Jewish writings is unknown, but when she wrote of the muddled thinking of “the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant,” she might have had the author of “Jewishness in Music” in mind.

Nicholas Dames, in his study The Physiology of the Novel, conjectures that Eliot bound together her “much-embracing” novel with a version of the leitmotif—a technique that she had perceptively described in “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar.” The motifs include phrases from an accusing letter, objects such as a ring and a necklace, and physical tics and gestures. Such recurrences jog the memory of a reader who may be overwhelmed by the novel’s extended span. They organize a flow of material that begins to resemble Lewes’s “vast and powerful stream of sensation.” In the end, Dames says, the reader of Daniel Deronda is not so much searching out significant events as “enduring temporality itself.” We read the book as we live a life. In this sense, the arch-Victorian Eliot begins to look ahead to literary modernism, which has its own tangled Wagnerian roots.

WAGNER AMONG THE PRE-RAPHAELITES