The Devil's Pleasure Palace (21 page)

It is a powerful and lesser-remarked moment of symbolism in the
Ring
, which has otherwise been exhaustively analyzed. Siegfried has come to Fafner's cave not to seek treasure but to learn the meaning of fear. But he fails to find it in the former Giant (and one of the builders of Valhalla) who has transformed himself into the dragon, a
Wurm
who, though terrifying, spends most of his days napping as he guards the Rhine Gold that Alberich stole from the Rhine Maidens—the original sin that sets the entire cycle in motion.

Although the opera is called “Siegfried,” for the first two acts it might as well be called “Fafner,” since it is the dragon's suffocating presence that suffuses the musical language from the opening of the first act: low strings and low brass color the orchestration, and we sense that Siegfried's confrontation with the monster approaches with every beat and bar. It is only in the third act that the hero finally encounters the only thing he will ever fear: Woman, in the form of the enchanted Brünnhilde, leading to the cycle's most inadvertently comical line,
“Das ist kein Mann!”
(“That is no man!”), which Siegfied exclaims as he removes the sleeping Valkyrie's breastplate to suddenly confront what lies beneath.

And yet it's not really funny, now matter how buxom the soprano portraying Brünnhilde might be. Siegfried has met everything in his short life—dwarves, monsters, even his own grandfather, Wotan, disguised as The Wanderer, whom he defeats in combat by shattering the Spear (the visible and aural symbol of Wotan's authority), thus sealing his fate, Brünnhilde's, and the fate of all the gods—but he has not yet met The Other, the
Ewig-Weibliche
, the Eternal Feminine. Only Brünnhilde can strike fear into his fearless breast; only she can bewitch him. It takes that favorite Wagnerian device, a magic potion, to make him betray her. Only she can redeem him and consummate his quest to return the Ring to its
rightful owners, the Rhine Maidens (who, with their voluptuous bodies, try in vain to seduce him) and bring about the end of the gods, a doom that, by the end of the tetralogy, is something the defeated Wotan, hoist upon his own petard, himself devoutly wishes.

Wagner began as a man of the Left: a firebrand during the Continent-wide republican, anti-monarchical Revolutions of 1848, a fugitive for years thereafter, and a vicious anti-Semite (except musically; Wagner's first major opera,
Rienzi
, consciously aped Meyerbeer, and when it came time for the premiere of his Christian epic,
Parsifal
, he chose a Jew, Hermann Levi, to conduct it). He was also a relentless seducer of other men's wives and taker of other men's money, including most famously that of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who partly built Bayreuth for him. Most notoriously, Wagner was an idol of Adolf Hitler's. Born six years after Wagner's death, Hitler, as
Reichskanzler
, attempted to stage
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
with all Germany as the set and wound up producing
Götterdämmerung
instead.

(It is an oddity of history that Wagner privately feared he was part Jewish, as did the high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich—the principal architect of the Final Solution—and as did even Hitler himself. Wagner's uncertainty about his paternity—his stepfather, the actor Ludwig Geyer, who may or may not have been Jewish, may also have been Wagner's biological father—was a source of deep concern to him.)

But musically and dramatically, it is another story. In this arena, Wagner was no scapegrace. Without question, he is the dominant figure of nineteenth-century music, perhaps of any art of the Romantic period. Yes, “Wagner has his great moments and long half hours,” as the possibly apocryphal saying goes. (This has been attributed variously to, among others, Mark Twain and Rossini, who died in 1868, shortly before the premiere of
Das Rheingold
, the first of the
Ring
operas, and well before most of Wagner's mature works.) And yet Wagner's influence has been so profound that, almost from the start, he created a cult of personality around himself (as “the Master”) that has lasted well over a century and counting.

True, some acolytes—Friedrich Nietzsche, in
Nietzsche contra Wagner
and in
Der Fall Wagner: Ein Musikanten-Problem
(
The Case of Wagner: A Musician's Problem
)—broke with him, criticizing him both personally and musically. Freed of Mephisto's “bands of illusion,” or, in Wagner's
case, Klingsor's (how ironic that in Goethe's poem, Faust's pupil is named Wagner), these acolytes came to see him as a cheap trickster, a manipulator of conventional musical tropes—new wine in old bottles—and purveyor of half-baked philosophical ideas derived from his betters, such as Fichte and Hegel. Nietzsche wrote of Wagner's musical technique:

If we wish to admire him, we should observe him at work: how he separates and distinguishes, how he arrives at small unities, and how he galvanizes them, accentuates them, and brings them into preeminence. But in this way he exhausts his strength; the rest is worthless. How paltry, awkward, and amateurish is his manner of “developing,” his attempt at combining incompatible parts.

There is much truth in this statement. Wagner's control of inherited musical forms was shaky at best. His early piano sonatas are forgettable, and the “Centennial March,” written for the American birthday of 1876, feels mercenary, knocked out for the money. (As it was: Wagner had lifelong financial problems, and 1876 was the year of the first performance of the
Ring
cycle at Bayreuth, a particularly desperate time.) The fake counterpoint in the
Meistersinger
overture is perhaps the low point of Wagner's mature technique; it's really just ornamentation, made to feel structural, but we fall for it anyway. Aside from the music dramas, Wagner has little else to offer, and were it not for them and his overwhelming drive to succeed across all cultural fronts, he would probably be a minor or even forgotten figure today.

David Goldman (who often writes as “Spengler”) takes on
Der Fall Wagner
with characteristic perspicacity and eloquence in a long essay written for the magazine
First Things
in December 2010. He sees Wagner as a false Redeemer—the quintessential leftist—a magician who loses his luster once you catch on to his tricks. Goldman places Wagner squarely in a Faustian context:

Wagner had a gift, as well as an ideological purpose, for the intensification of the moment. If Goethe's Faust bets the Devil that he can resist the impulse to hold on to the passing moment [
Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen: / Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! / Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen / Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!
(Were I to say
to the moment: / “Abide with me! You are so beautiful!” / Then you may clap me in irons, / Then may I wish to go to perdition!)], Wagner dives headfirst into its black well. And if Faust argues that life itself depends on transcending the moment, Wagner's sensuous embrace of the musical moment conjures a dramatic trajectory toward death. . . .

Wagner was more than a musician. He was the prophet of a new artistic cult, a self-styled poet and dramatist who believed that his “totalizing work of art” (
Gesamtkunstwerk
) would replace Europe's enervated religion. His new temporal aesthetic served a larger goal: the liberation of impulse from the bonds of convention.

In other words, a classic leftist: anti-religious, anti-Semitic, and obsessed with death. Nearly all of Wagner's heroines meet their demise; as Goldman quips: “The opera's not over 'til the fat lady dies.” The heroes fare little better. Wagner even provides us with his own version of the Devil's Pleasure Palace, the seductive erotic prison of the Venusberg in
Tannhäuser.

So is there a contradiction in praising Wagner within the context of our ur-Narrative? I think not. The solution lies in separating the man from his work. Most among us would find Wagner the man reprehensible; we would not want him for a friend or an ally or a son-in-law. However, he had what I term the “necessary selfishness of the artist,” the drive that pushes everything else before it, subsuming all life's tragedies, triumphs, and experience into fuel for the larger mission—the creation of art, which is what brings us closer to God.

It is perfectly possible to think that Wagner was, “like the Nazis, a neo-pagan,” as Goldman puts it, adding: “Wagner provided much of the Third Reich's background music, and not without an underlying affinity. . . . Very little distinguishes Siegfried, who is too impulsive to pay attention to rules, from Parsifal—the protagonist of Wagner's last opera—who is too innocent to understand them. . . . If the Germans, in Franz Rosenzweig's bon mot, could not tell Christ from Siegfried, it is because Wagner deliberately conflated the two.”

But Siegfried never feels Christlike; his sacrifice is pathetic but unmoving. He dies because he has made a cardinal error; fearing nothing but Brünnhilde's sexual allure, he turns his back on the Nibelung's
bastard, a mortal enemy he cannot not recognize. Whereas Christ, in his sacrifice on the Cross, consciously picks up Satan's gauntlet and accepts the mortal challenge posed by the Battle in Heaven, after the spawning of Sin and Death. On his visit to Hell, Christ not only defeats Satan but vanquishes Sin and Death as well, for all those who (in the Christian theology) believe.

Let us contrast for the moment, Wagner's heroic Romanticism—like Beethoven, he shook his fists at the heavens—with that of a true believer, J.S. Bach, and specifically Bach's
Goldberg Variations
(1741). At first glance, no two works could be more unlike than this set of variations, which, according to legend, were written to cure the insomnia of one Count Kaiserling, the Russian ambassador to the Saxon court, who brought along his attendant, Goldberg, to play the harpsichord for him during his sleepless hours and requested a piece from the great court composer.

Nothing could have prepared Kaiserling or Goldberg or posterity for what followed. At a single stroke, Bach established the variations form, daring all subsequent composers (including Beethoven, who tried with “
Diabelli” Variations
, and Brahms in the “
Handel” Variations
). But more: Putting the little theme through its paces in what is essentially an extended chaconne, Bach colors a canvas of unearthly proportions, each variation moving inevitably to the next, until the great “Thirtieth Variation,” which finally reveals the true harmonic and melodic possibilities inherent in the melody. The last variation is a magic trick worthy of Klingsor himself, a revelation of the immanence in all God's works. At once sacred and profane, a combination of the harmonic structure of the initial theme and several German folk songs, it stunningly proclaims Bach's musical command—“Look at what I have wrought!”—and then immediately self-effaces with a quiet recapitulation of the melody, which just might be the greatest humblebrag of all time.

(The playwright Peter Shaffer may well have had this effect in mind when he wrote the scene in
Amadeus
in which Mozart takes Antonio Salieri's simple “March of Welcome” and turns it into the “Non più and-rai” march from the end of Act One of
The Marriage of Figaro
, humiliating his rival in front of the emperor and earning his undying enmity.)

Both Bach and Wagner champion man's unique nature; both reach for the stars, although it may be Wagner who lies in the gutter while Bach tidies up the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Still, their unpoliticized mission
(for we must see music and art as separate and apart from politics, no matter the quotidian circumstances that give them birth) is the same: to make man transcend himself and become closer to God. (Wagner's musical genius overrode his crude politics, fortunately.) To reject the transcendence of art is to reject God. Art that is cheap and vulgar no more approaches the Godhead, or taps into that inner ur-Narrative, than cotton candy approaches the state of either cotton or candy.

And this is the distinction we must make when assaying the Western cultural canon. Like Marcus Aurelius in his
Meditations
, we must ask: “What is this thing in itself? What is its function in the world?” The answer is the same as Milton's in
Paradise Lost:
to justify the ways of God to men.

The question of text, therefore, becomes subordinate to the question of meaning. The text of the
Goldberg Variations
, the “aria” that opens and closes the great keyboard work, is trivial, as is, for that matter, the theme of the “
Diabelli” Variations
. The poems of the four
Ring
cycle operas could not stand alone as poetry, although Wagner might have supposed they could. In fact, he wrote them in reverse order as he hammered out his massive masterpiece, waiting for his musical expertise to catch up to the demands of
Siegfried
's third act and
Götterdämmerung.
(In between, on a break that lasted more than a decade, he wrote
Tristan
and
Meistersinger.
)

The error comes in putting text before subtext, which is to say misreading the purpose of both dramatic music and “absolute” music (music without a text or programmatic subject). Music was part of the medieval
quadrivium
, the four subjects, derived from the Greeks, along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, which is to say that it was deemed to have its own independent meaning. Combined with the
trivium
(grammar, logic, and rhetoric), it was one of the foundations of a young man's education.

Both Salieri and Richard Strauss wrote operas that examine the relation of words and music, Salieri in his
Prima la musica, e poi le parole
(“First the music, then the words”), and Strauss in his last opera,
Capriccio
, in which his heroine, the Countess, must chose between two suitors: the poet Olivier and the composer Flamand. “Is there any ending that isn't trivial?” she wonders to herself at the end, leaving us hanging. It's a joke by Strauss: To the man who made himself the hero of his own tone poem,
Ein Heldenleben
, the question was never seriously in doubt. It's a
joke as well to every other composer who has ever composed an opera; the pride of place always goes to the music, a tradition maintained today in the accreditation of pop songs, which list the composer's name first and the lyricist's second—such as “Rodgers and Hart.” Opera can be sung in translation, which does not change its essential meaning, but
Carmen
cannot be tricked out with a new score and remain the same. The words put us into the dramatic situation and outline its overall progression, but the music is the heart of the work.