Reading Right from Left: Hans Mayer and Postwar Wagner Reception (Article), Opera Quaterly 30.2/3 (2014): 228-245 (original) (raw)
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Richard Wagner and the Politics of Music-Drama
The Historical Journal, 2004
This article outlines Richard Wagner's conception of music-drama during the period in which he formulated his intentions for composition of the epic Ring of the Nibelung. Attempting to renew rather than to restore the communal, political nature of Attic tragedy, he wished to transform that model from celebration of the Athenian political order into a savage critique of the contemporary political order, indeed into an incitement to and celebration of revolution. Wagner was determined to restore the dignity of art, a dignity he believed to have been lost in the pursuit of base, commercial considerations; but this determination should not be confused with the idea of art for art's sake. Instead, he wished to renew art in a socialist, even communist, sense as the paradigm of free, productive activity. The direct revolutionary experience of participation in the Dresden uprising of 1849 bolstered his conviction of the necessity of such a transformation. With his magnum opus, Wagne...
Since the middle of the twentieth century Wagner has commonly been considered a figure of the Right. The British newspaper The Guardian, for example, recently contained a review that stated quite simply that Wagner is seen as "a horrible right-winger" and that the "word 'Wagnerian' tends to summon up images of some leathery old fascist with a season ticket to Bayreuth." 1 This is obviously a crude oversimplification, even by journalistic standards, but it does reflect a widespread view of the politics of Wagner and Wagnerians following their colonization by Nazism. While several important aspects of Wagner's own writings and thought can undoubtedly be called upon to support his reactionary credentials, including his pronounced anti-Semitism, his nationalism, and the deepening cultural pessimism of his later period, the ideological implication and possibilities of Wagner's work are hardly monolithic. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the political lines of Wagner's significance were far less clearly drawn than they may seem from today's vantage.; for example, around 1900 various efforts were made to enlist Wagner in causes that were avowedly Left socialist and/or politically revolutionary, as in the cases of George
Crying "Wolf"? A Review Essay on Recent Wagner Literature
German Studies Review, 2001
Evidently, Wagner's Hitler was intended to stir controversy, and it has worked. When released in Germany in 1997, at the same time as Gottfried Wagner's excoriating memoir of Wahnfried family life and while Goldhagen arguments still sparked, Joachim Köhler's book added fuel to the fires of Wagner debate. Based on previous work about Nietzsche's "secret" (homosexuality, in his opinion), Köhler's reputation already ranged from that of "studierter Philosoph" to "Enthüllungsjournalist," and the initial reception of his latest was likewise divided. On the one hand, German reviewers acknowledged the "staunenswerter Fleiss" with which Köhler amassed detail to support his argument: for readers unfamiliar with Wagner-critical literature of the last decade, opined one, this book relates all the juicy bits in condensed form. However, despite its utility as a "Zitatreservoir," critical consensus held that Köhler's book is less than scholarly, full of "gross inaccuracies" that would "make researchers laugh."[1] Most telling was Joachim Fest's assessment: although Köhler grounded many of his theses about Hitler's outlook on Fest's biography, the historian carefully distanced himself from the "accusatory character" of this book.[2] Ronald Taylor, who translated it into English, verifies the thesis of this angry work: "Köhler argues that, as Hitler was the instrument of the Holocaust, so Wagner bears a responsibility, in the same historical continuum, for Hitler. What Wagner urged in words of rabid racial hatred and incitement to political violence, Hitler turned into chilling, murderous reality" (4). In Köhler's own terms, "the man who plunged Europe into disaster was 'Wagner's Hitler'. .. . His campaign to exterminate the Jews was part of his love for Wagner. He had to hate the Jews because he loved the man who hated them" (293). "What was in Hitler's mind?" (11) This is the primary question of Köhler's investigation, and he answers it with bravado: Hitler's goal "was certainly not to pursue a set of political aims, that is, to arrange the political and social realities of the time in the interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was. Reality meant for him the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama" (270). Triggered by youthful experience of Rienzi, Hitler's obsession with Wagner's art and politics marked every aspect of his being, and most of his actions. A brief list of just some specifics in Hitler's life that Köhler identifies as Wagner-inspired will have to suffice here: fear and ruthless persecution of "traitors" (Rienzi [(28)]); theories of blood and race (Parsifal [(209-241)]); the Beer Hall Putsch (Rienzi [(180)]); writing Mein Kampf (Mein Leben [(94)]); removing Germany from the gold standard (Ring des Nibelungen [(74)]); design of party demonstrations (Meistersinger [(245)]); exterminationist anti-Semitism (Music and the Jews [(88)]); double suicide ("from Der fliegende Holländer to Götterdämmerung"[(8-23)]). Not only, in Köhler's view, were Hitler's personality and political leadership modeled on perceptions of Wagner, but the very fact that the little corporal from Austria ever came to be in a position to live out his fantasies was predicated on his Wagnerian impulse. Only with timely support from the Bayreuth circle, especially Houston S. Chamberlain, Winifred Wagner, and henchmen like Dietrich Eckhart in the Thule Society, could the unimpressive Hitler assume the self-then public image of a Wotan/Siegfried figure, complete with telling nickname: "Wolf." Their selection of this boorish nonentity as inheritor of the "master's" mantle, savior of both Bayreuth festival and German nation, was based wholly on perception of Hitler as an uncommonly fanatical Wagnerite who would do their bidding. Above all, according to Köhler, Chamberlain provided the vicious veteran with the confidence required to impose his will to power, dictatorship, invasion, and extermination. A shell of a man, void of style or content-though full of