Wagnerism

In 1893, Adler and Sullivan unveiled an even more arresting color-symphony at the World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. Their Transportation Building, nearly a thousand feet long, was a prominent feature of the White City, the makeshift metropolis that arose on the Exposition grounds. The sea of white was broken by a polychromatic Golden Doorway, its predominantly crimson hues including some forty different tints. As the art historian Lauren Weingarden points out, the color scheme acted to diminish mass, to “dissolve enveloping surfaces,” to make the structure seem to hover. A guidebook to the Exposition stated: “The architects of the building have called its vari-colored effects ‘Wagnerian,’ and we may accept their ideas so far as to name this entrance the wedding-march of a ‘Lohengrin’—in other words, an unquestionably beautiful feature in an ensemble that is purposely devoid of entertainment and delight.”

The Golden Doorway has vanished, along with the rest of the White City, but Sullivan’s vari-colored aesthetic persists in the “jewel box” banks that he designed in his later years, when his reputation was in decline and commissions for large-scale projects eluded him. In towns across the Midwest, Sullivan pursued his dream of making buildings that vibrate with color over the course of the day. Echoing Root, he spoke of a “color symphony” or “color tone poem,” with “many shades of the strings and the wood winds and the brass.”

The exterior of the National Farmers’ Bank, in Owatonna, Minnesota, is an imposing red-brick box, its grand arched windows facing the town center. Orange and green hues give the interior an ethereal air, with stained glass filtering light from the sides and above. The Farmers & Merchants Union Bank, in Columbus, Wisconsin, is heavily ornamented on the outside, with eagles and lions standing guard; the interior is again much warmer, its stained-glass windows centered on abstract, swirling discs of many hues. Bank business is still conducted in both buildings; townspeople depositing checks must walk around tourists gazing upward in awe. Wagner’s Bayreuth was designed as a respite from capitalist clamor; Sullivan hoped to cast a wholesome light on the daily life of American commerce, as if the unsullied Rheingold were gleaming from the vaults.

DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

By the turn of the century, Wagner loomed large in American life, his operas laden with the neo-Gothic trappings that informed so much American architecture of the period. The master of the Gothic Revival, the Boston-based architect Ralph Adams Cram, identified himself as a “besotted Wagnerite,” seeing the composer as a foe of materialist decadence. He and his partner, Bertram Goodhue, built churches that dissented from the teeming sidewalks and streets around them, their interiors giving an exaggerated, almost cinematic sense of space. Goodhue remarked that St. Bartholomew’s, a neo-Byzantine church in New York, would “look more like Arabian Nights or the last act of Parsifal than any Christian church.” One could even hear Wagnerian strains ringing from bell towers. The carillon of Riverside Church, in New York, still marks the passing quarter-hours with a sequence based on the bell motif in Parsifal. It was donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., son of the Standard Oil tycoon.

Yet the “Wagner fever,” as a character in William Dean Howells’s 1889 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes calls it, spread only so far. The nation’s aspiration toward European grandeur, Parsifal Entertainments included, clashed with a contrary impulse to shrug off an effete, unmanly European inheritance. American popular culture was in ascendance, seeking its roots in homegrown folk traditions, and Wagner presented himself as an obvious target for insolent jibes. In Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith’s 1905 musical Miss Dolly Dollars, a millionaire heiress flouts the Parsifal fad at the Met:

Oh, I love those songs where “honey”

Is the only rhyme for “money”

They are better than old Parsifal to me.

Tin Pan Alley lyrics for Scott Joplin’s “Pine Apple Rag” follow a similar line:

Some people rave about Wagnerian airs,

Some say the Spring Song is divine,

Talk like that is out of season,

What I like is something pleasin’,

Pine Apple rag for mine …

In pop culture, Wagner was both a phenomenon to be emulated—he was, after all, a master of spectacle—and a rival to be defeated. This American Wagner complex will play out most obviously in Hollywood movies, but it is already evident in Owen Wister’s attempt to reconcile his love of Wagner and his adulation of cowboys. It also surfaces in the alert ambivalence of two earthy-minded American authors who repudiated Gilded Age pretension: Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.

Twain is often credited with a world-class barb: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” In fact, the humorist Bill Nye said it; Twain merely quoted it. An eager operagoer, Twain had his ups and downs with Wagner, emphasizing the downs for his readers. A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, relates one encounter: “We went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree,—otherwise an opera,—the one called Lohengrin. The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.”

In 1891, Twain trained his gaze on the juiciest high-culture target of all, undertaking a ten-day visit to Bayreuth. He reported on the experience in a rippingly funny newspaper article that first appeared under the title “Mark Twain at Bayreuth” and was later republished as “At the Shrine of St. Wagner.” Selective quotations of its sharpest jabs have made it seem a merciless takedown. It is, in fact, an oblique expression of embarrassed fandom, nearly as conflicted as Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner.

The essay begins with a respectful description of the Festspielhaus, “the model theater of the world.” Twain’s response to the Parsifal prelude is rhapsodic, almost delirious: “Out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments.” The visitor has the impression that Wagner was “conscious in his grave of what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his brain.” The music is “exquisite,” “delicious.” The problems start with the singing. Twain wishes that he could listen to Wagner with the vocal parts omitted, so that he could bask in the orchestration. Despite the absence of “anything that might with confidence be called rhythm, or tune, or melody,” Twain enjoys the first act all the same. Later, he falters. “Seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.”

The next day brings Tannhäuser, which, Twain says, “has always driven me mad with ignorant delight.” The Pilgrims’ Chorus sends him into rhapsodic mode again: “music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.” Tristan is more of a struggle. Twain becomes preoccupied with the almost inhuman attentiveness of the audience around him. The most famous passage ensues:

This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some and have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

Less widely quoted are the sentences that follow: “But by no means do I ever overlook or minimize the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.”

When Twain hears Parsifal again, he resists no longer. Instead, his disdain falls on those who tell him afterward that second-rate artists had substituted for the first cast. In an abrupt reversal, he announces, “I was the only man out of 3,200 who got his money back on those two operas.” In all, the essay is the record of a reluctant conversion—another inverted panegyric, like Nietzsche’s. That it has so often been mistaken for a frontal attack indicates the degree to which Twain was hedging his bets on the question of America’s relationship with European culture. Even though Bayreuth won him over, he knew which way the native wind was blowing. Some years later, he reverted to an anti-Wagner line, comparing the composer unfavorably to the blackface minstrel shows he saw in his youth. In his autobiography, he wrote: “If I could have the nigger show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera.” Twain appears unaware of the irony of posing a choice between Wagner’s operas and homegrown racist entertainment.

Whitman felt no embarrassment over his love for the European musical tradition, which he considered essential to his American art. “But for the opera I could never have written Leaves of Grass,” he once said. He was speaking not of Wagner but of Italian bel canto, which was the mainstay of his younger years. By the time the cultus took hold, Whitman was no longer attending opera regularly. He said to Horace Traubel in 1888: “I have got rather off the field—the Wagner opera has had its vogue only in these later years since I got out of the way of going to the theater.” But he mentioned hearing “bits here and there at concerts, from orchestras, bands, which have astonished, ravished me, like the discovery of a new world.”

Poet and composer had much in common. Whitman’s irregular, ever-rolling rhythms seem the American equivalent of “endless melody”; his incantations of signature phrases ring out like leitmotifs; his creed of all-embracingness—“I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds”—resembles Tristan and Isolde’s cry of “I myself am the world.” For all his rude robustness, Whitman was not immune to Liebestod sentiments. “I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most,” he wrote in the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass. “What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?”

The elderly Whitman could not help noticing how often his name was paired with Wagner’s. He told Traubel: “So many of my friends say Wagner is Leaves of Grass done into music that I begin to suspect there must be something in it.” As early as 1860, the freethinker Moncure Conway—who, after the composer’s death, would eulogize him as the prophet of a new social order—connected Whitman’s line “There was a child went forth every day” with the opening chords of the Tannhäuser overture. In Britain, Edward Dannreuther inserted several Whitman references into his 1873 book Richard Wagner: His Tendencies and Theories. And William Sloane Kennedy named Whitman the “Wagner of poets”: “As Wagner abandoned the cadences of the old sonatas and symphonies,—occurring at the end of every four, eight, or sixteen bars,—so Whitman has abandoned the measured beat of the old rhymed see-saw poetry.”

Although Whitman never saw a full Wagner production, he accepted the idea that the operas were “constructed on my lines”—that they “attach themselves to the same theories of art that have been responsible for Leaves of Grass.” In 1881, he wrote an essay with the Wagnerian title “The Poetry of the Future,” in which he bids his colleagues to “arouse and initiate more than to define or finish.” Whitman declares, as van Gogh would do later in the same decade, that music has taken the lead: “The music of the present, Wagner’s, Gounod’s, even the later Verdi’s, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion.” Poetry, by contrast, is stuck in outdated values of “verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure.”

All the same, Whitman hesitated. “Do you figure out Wagner to be a force making for democracy or the opposite?” he asked. His longtime friend William Douglas O’Connor argued for the former. “O’Connor swears to the democracy—swears to it with a big oath. Others have said to me that Wagner’s art was distinctly the art of a caste—for the few. What am I to believe?”

4

GRAIL TEMPLE

Esoteric, Decadent, and Satanic Wagner

Reginald Machell, Parsifal

Here time becomes space,” the sage old Gurnemanz says in Act I of Parsifal. A foolish, lawless lad has blundered into the secret realm of the Holy Grail. Even though he has introduced himself by senselessly killing a noble swan, his arrival appears to be no accident, and Gurnemanz offers to lead him to the Grail Temple, where the Liebesmahl, the communal love feast of the Grail Knights, is about to be held. No path will show the way to the sacred place. Only one whom the Grail has chosen can find the route. Parsifal takes a few steps, and says, “I am hardly moving, yet I already seem to have come far.”

There follows an orchestral passage that the libretto designates as Verwandlungsmusik, or Transformation Music. As Gurnemanz and Parsifal tread the hidden path to the temple, bells sound repeatedly from the pit—the notes C, G, A, E, as in John D. Rockefeller’s Riverside Church carillon. The inaugural Parsifal production of 1882 used a memorable device: as the singers walked in place, a panorama unscrolled behind them, giving the illusion of great distances traversed. The illusion is also musical: the hypnotic repetition of the bell figure, through shimmering orchestration, conjures an “immense horizon,” as Baudelaire said of the Grail music in Lohengrin. The march of industry in the nineteenth century had led to a pervasive feeling of an accelerating, shrinking world. When, in 1838, the steamer Sirius crossed the Atlantic in a mere seventeen days, the New York Morning Herald famously spoke of the “annihilation of time and space.” A similar phrase entered the lexicon of Marx, describing the global grasp of capitalism. Parsifal supplied the opposite sensation: time slowing, space expanding, the fleeting moment stretched into eternity.

Victorian odes to Parsifal tended to glance over the sheer strangeness of what happens once Gurnemanz and Parsifal reach the temple. First the Knights of the Grail enter, taking their places for the feast. The boys’ voices admired by Verlaine float down from the temple dome, delivering unchildlike sentiments: “With joyful heart let my blood now be shed for the redeeming hero.” The Grail is brought forth, covered in its shrine. Squires also carry King Amfortas, the suffering ruler wounded by sin. He is a variant on the figure of the Fisher King, whose fertile realm becomes a Waste Land when he falls sick. Wagner’s Amfortas awaits the “pure fool” who will cure him—Parsifal, as yet unready for the task.

There is a long, lugubrious silence. Amfortas is weary of the ritual he must perform again and again. Each time he uncovers the Grail, the miracle of the Savior’s blood gives sustenance to all, but his own wound bleeds anew. “Let me die,” he cries. A sepulchral voice within the temple, sounding “as if from a tomb,” commands Amfortas to do his duty. This is Titurel, Amfortas’s father and the founder of the order. Hundreds of years old, too feeble to rise from his bed, he relies on his son to lead the ceremony, which prolongs his life. Amfortas sings a monologue of dire lamentation—“Take my inheritance from me, / close the wound”—and then performs his office. Darkness descends. The chalice glows red. Amfortas’s blood flows. Titurel cries, “O heavenly rapture!” This grisly sacrament raises the question of what kind of sect the Grail Knights really are. Titurel could be mistaken for a vampire.

In Act II, the evil sorcerer Klingsor, who engineered Amfortas’s fall from grace, attempts to ensnare Parsifal as well. When the troupe of Flower Maidens fails to seduce the newcomer, Klingsor presses into service the enigmatic Kundry, who has been wandering the earth for centuries after having laughed at Christ. Kundry, too, falls short, whereupon Parsifal vanquishes Klingsor and reclaims the Holy Spear—“the lance that pierced the Flank supreme,” as Verlaine calls it. In Act III, Parsifal reappears in the province of the Grail, clad in black, and finds that the situation has deteriorated further. Amfortas can no longer bear to repeat the Grail rite; Titurel is dead. Nevertheless, Gurnemanz discloses to Parsifal the miraculous vision of the Good Friday Spell, in which “all creation gives thanks, all that blooms and soon fades away.” A sinuous melody of grace courses through the strings, then drifts into a harmonic haze.

Suddenly, “as if from far away,” the bells of Monsalvat begin to ring. Their fixed tones clash against the diminished chord on which the strings have landed. The bells are thus turned against their nature and made to sound baleful. The Knights stage a second procession, one group bearing Amfortas and the other bearing Titurel’s corpse. When the bells ring again, gnashing dissonances in the orchestra crash against them. The Grail music has become funereal, catastrophic, demonic.

Once Parsifal has touched the Spear to Amfortas’s wound, a rite of healing unfolds. The opera ends with glowing affirmations of the key of A-flat major, the same in which it began. Yet the shadows of the journey linger in the mind. Wagner’s own comments make clear that Parsifal is no bland exercise in moral uplift. “The Savior on the Cross, blood everywhere” was his concise summary. The night before the first performance, he is said to have issued this exhortation: “Children, tomorrow it can finally start! Tomorrow the devil is let loose! Therefore, all of you who are taking part, seek that the devil enters into you, and you who are in the audience, seek that you receive him properly.” While Wagner was no doubt speaking metaphorically, such tremors of diabolism led the American critic James Huneker, a renegade Nietzschean, to write a story in which a character asks, “What is Parsifal but a version of the Black Mass?”

Parsifal is certainly a Mass of a different color. It is a religious work—Wagner called it his “stage consecration festival play”—yet it belongs to no one religion. Indeed, despite the claims of the Anglo-American genteel tradition, it has an adversarial relationship with organized faith, at least in its modern form. Back in 1849, Wagner had dreamed of a “new religion,” one that would smash the materialist values that imprisoned art, politics, and spirituality alike. By the time he began composing Parsifal, he was no longer remotely a revolutionary, but his antimaterialist slant remained. His 1880 essay “Religion and Art” raises the hope that art can renew worn-out faiths: “One could say that when religion becomes artificial, it falls to art to save the core of religion, by grasping the figurative value of those mythic symbols that religion wants us to believe as literally true, and revealing through an ideal presentation the deep truth hidden in them.” Christianity and Buddhism are the greatest of religions, preaching “renunciation of the world and its passions,” yet secular society holds them captive. They can regain their original strength only if they recognize the unity of living things under the sign of compassion.

Although the later Nietzsche considered Parsifal a capitulation to Christianity, he better explained the composer’s stance in an 1875 note: “If Wagner takes up Germanic-Christian myth one moment, seafaring legends another, then Buddhistic myths, then pagan-German ones, then the Protestant bourgeoisie, it is clear that he stands free of the religious meaning of these myths, and requires the same of his listeners.” The Christianity in Parsifal is obvious. The ceremony of the Grail in Act I is a Eucharist, and when a penitent Kundry washes Parsifal’s feet in Act III she is channeling Mary of Bethany in the New Testament. But elements of other traditions crowd in. “Redemption to the Redeemer,” the gnomic motto of the work, recalls the formula “Salvator salvandus,” or the Savior saved, in Gnostic teachings. The Good Friday Spell intimates a pagan celebration of nature; the Resurrection carries on age-old cycles of death and rebirth. The no less primordial Kundry earns the nicknames Urteufelin (“Arch-she-devil”) and Höllenrose (“Rose of hell”). “Unfortunately, all of our Christian legends have an external, pagan origin,” Wagner wrote in 1859.

Eastern traditions had nearly equal weight in Wagner’s thinking. He probably first learned of them through his brother-in-law, the philologist Hermann Brockhaus, who translated Sanskrit and Persian. Schopenhauer’s meditations on Eastern concepts pulled Wagner in deeper. In 1856, he began planning a Buddhist drama called Die Sieger, or The Victors, which would have told of the maiden Prakriti’s love for the monk Ananda and her overcoming of desire under the Buddha’s guidance—a story mentioned in the essay Wagner was writing the day he died. The theme of lust turned to love, of self-seeking becoming compassion, passed into Parsifal. Traces of Hinduism and Islam also surface. Ronald Perlwitz proposes that Parsifal’s misdeed in Act I, his killing of the swan, is modeled on a passage in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, which condemns the murder of a crane. Islamic influences reside in the medieval Parzival romance of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the opera’s primary source. The Grail there takes the form of a precious stone; Wagner plausibly compared it to the veneration of the Kaaba at Mecca. He erred, though, in thinking that the name Parsifal was derived from the Persian for “pure fool.”

The philosopher Ernst Bloch handily summarizes Parsifal as “Christian-Buddhist-Rosicrucian art-religion or religious art.” Poised between blinding light and devouring night, it rose as a supreme, enigmatic symbol over the epoch of the fin de siècle, when artists everywhere felt that some revelation was at hand. For some, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth—until 1903, the one place where the sacred play of Parsifal could be seen—was less about worshipping Wagner than about undertaking a private quest toward hidden worlds. These journeys had many different destinations—Catholic mystery, Gnostic riddle, Buddhist enlightenment, Black Mass—but they began with a departure from the world as it was, an escape from Nibelheim.

It was the age of esotericism, occultism, Satanism, Spiritism, Theosophy, Swedenborgism, Mesmerism, Martinism, and Kabbalism. Reinventions or fabrications of medieval sects multiplied: the Knights Templar, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and various Rosicrucian orders, which sought to revive Renaissance alchemical and necromantic lore of obscure origin. Not only fringe gurus but also denizens of high society were dabbling in séances, tarot cards, astrology, and homeopathy. A large number of writers, artists, and musicians took an interest in one or another of these movements; the Symbolists, including the Mallarmé circle, were especially prone. They might have agreed with William Butler Yeats, who saw occult happenings as “metaphors for poetry”—so spirits from the other side told him.

Holbrook Jackson, writing in 1913, associated the mystical revival with a “revolt against rationalism” and a “salvation by sin”—ideas implicit in Parsifal. The spiritualist movements were one more face of the resistance to industrial capitalism that manifested itself in the underworld tableaux of Baudelaire, the neo-primitivism of Gauguin, and the archaism of the Pre-Raphaelites. The advent of positivism, social Darwinism, and other mechanistic explanations for human behavior brought a countervailing urge to restore the dimension of the miraculous. The occultists also rejected dualities of good and evil, seeking a more complex balance of darkness and light. Nietzsche’s jeremiads against conventional morality were widely read, as was Mikhail Bakunin’s posthumous book God and the State, which portrays Satan as “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds.”