In 1993, the London Review of Books conceived the remarkable idea of assembling three gentlemen to pass judgment upon Richard Wagner: Paul Lawrence Rose, a Jew and one of Wagner's most determined prosecutors; Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual and critic; and Michael Tanner, perhaps the most formidable defender Wagner possessed among English-speaking scholars. One must congratulate the editors upon their ingenuity. They had brought together the accuser, the defender, and a third gentleman who, as we shall discover, had devised the extraordinary theory that the surest way to understand an artist is to contradict him. The result was a controversy in which the participants occasionally remembered Wagner, more frequently remembered their own prejudices, and ultimately furnished a magnificent exhibition of the human intellect's capacity to mistake its own confusion for profundity.
The principal exhibit is Edward Said's article, The Importance of Being Unfaithful to Wagner. I knew comparatively little of Said before encountering this performance, and I regret to report that the acquaintance has not inspired me to seek his company more frequently. Rose and Tanner, on the other hand, will be familiar to students of the Wagner controversy as two of its most distinguished antagonists on the question of antisemitism. The proceedings are rather lengthy, and since life is short and academic nonsense apparently inexhaustible, I propose to extract the principal arguments, examine their claims, and discover whether anything resembling reason has survived the wreck.
1. Wagner Cannot Be Reduced to a Single Interpretation
Said begins with an observation so reasonable that one is almost inclined to trust him. Wagner's works, he tells us, have inspired a vast and contradictory literature, a multitude of interpretations, and an extraordinary variety of philosophical explanations. No single interpretation can exhaust their meaning. Excellent! Here, at least, we have a proposition worthy of assent. These dramas are among the most profoundly suggestive creations of the human imagination, and Wagner's own account of artistic inspiration provides abundant justification for precisely this inexhaustibility. Had Said stopped here, I should have been delighted to shake his hand, congratulate him upon his good sense, and bid him farewell before he had the opportunity to spoil it.
Wagner regarded artistic creation as something immeasurably deeper than the mechanical arrangement of ideas by the conscious intellect. Its origins lay in the obscure and mysterious regions of the unconscious, beyond the jurisdiction of that respectable little magistrate called Verstand, who imagines that whatever cannot be entered into his ledger must have no existence. Drawing upon Schopenhauer's theory of dreams, Wagner described the artist's task as the translation of an inward revelation into a second, more intelligible dream, analogous to that strange intermediate vision which precedes our awakening. The artist does not manufacture truth as a carpenter manufactures a chair. He receives an impression whose depths he may never fully comprehend, and through poetry, music, and dramatic action he gives it a form by which others may participate in the revelation.
It follows that the deepest significance of a Wagnerian drama may remain, in some respects, as mysterious to Wagner himself as to his audience. The creator is not necessarily the supreme commentator upon his own creation. He may know what he has written, what he has intended, and what he has consciously sought to express, without knowing everything that his imagination has brought into being. Others may discover within the work meanings which never entered his conscious thoughts, yet which belong legitimately to the work itself. Here is a noble conception of art, an acknowledgment that genius may reveal more than reason can explain. Here is an invitation to humility before the mystery of creation. Unfortunately, Said and his philosophical accomplice are about to convert this magnificent freedom into a new form of intellectual tyranny.
2. Adorno: Wagner Must Be Liberated from Wagner
Into this agreeable discussion enters Theodor Adorno, bearing the customary equipment of the modern philosopher: a formidable vocabulary, an inexhaustible appetite for contradiction, and a confidence in his own intellectual superiority which no evidence seems capable of disturbing. Said approvingly invokes Adorno's contention that Wagner's dramas contain "irreconcilable contradictions," concealed beneath the deceptive appearance of dramatic unity. Now, that Wagner's works abound in what appear to be contradictions is certainly true. I should prefer to call them paradoxes, but perhaps this expression is insufficiently depressing to satisfy the requirements of critical theory. A paradox illuminates a mystery; a contradiction, in the hands of the academic, provides employment for a department.
Consider Wotan, who in his determination to preserve his power brings about its destruction, and who, in establishing laws to maintain the world's order, constructs the very machinery of its ruin. Consider Tristan and Isolde, who drink what they believe to be a potion of death, only to discover that their separation as individual beings is itself the final obstacle to the union they desire. Consider Kundry, whose kiss awakens in Parsifal not the anticipated pleasures of desire but the terrible consciousness of another's suffering. Consider Hans Sachs, who seeks refuge from the world's Wahn, only to discover that his own intervention has helped unleash the madness of Nuremberg. What magnificent dramatic ironies! What astonishing reversals! What profound revelations of the human condition! Yet to the philosophically trained eye, apparently, these are not the very means by which the dramas acquire their unity, but evidence that their unity is an imposture.
Adorno's accusation is that traditional Wagnerian stagings conceal these supposed contradictions beneath the appearance of a harmonious dramatic whole. Observe the audacity of the indictment. Wagner spent his life perfecting the integration of poetry, music, gesture, and dramatic representation into an organic unity, and the learned professor informs us that the resulting unity is precisely what prevents us from understanding the work! The remedy is as ingenious as the diagnosis. We must abandon Wagner's staging instructions, introduce deliberate discrepancies between what is seen and what is sung, and replace the dramatic conception of the composer with one calculated to expose the contradictions which the composer had supposedly endeavored to conceal. Thus we arrive at the extraordinary doctrine that Wagner's works can be rescued from falsehood only by contradicting Wagner himself. The patient is to be cured by the destruction of the very organs through which he lives.
I ask the gentlemen of this philosophical tribunal a simple question: If the contradictions are already present in Wagner's dramas, and if you discovered them through the very works whose traditional presentation you now condemn, what exactly has been concealed? How did you find what was supposedly hidden? Did the contradictions escape from their prison when the professor entered the opera house? Did Wotan cease to destroy his own power because the scenery represented Valhalla? Did Kundry's kiss cease to awaken compassion because the stage depicted Klingsor's enchanted garden? What remarkable spectacles these must have been, that could conceal the meaning of a drama from everyone except the very gentlemen who now insist that they have discovered it! I have heard of men who searched for their spectacles while wearing them, but never before of philosophers who discovered the truth in a work of art and concluded that the work of art must be prevented from expressing it.
3. To Be Faithful to Wagner, One Must Betray Him
Said now carries Adorno's doctrine to its natural and absurd conclusion. The proper approach to Wagner, we are informed, is not reverent fidelity to his dramatic intentions, but an ironic, Brechtian examination of his works, a rational dissection calculated to expose their hidden tensions. Productions must not be treated as historical reconstructions of what Wagner intended. Each director and conductor is to offer a possible Wagner, determined by the intellectual fashions, political preoccupations, and social anxieties of the present. To be truly faithful to Wagner, therefore, one must be prepared to betray him. It is a proposition of such exquisite absurdity that one hardly knows whether to answer it with an argument or a burst of laughter.
Let us admire the convenience of this philosophy! Wagner's own intentions may be disregarded because they belong to a particular historical consciousness, while the stage director's intentions must be enthroned because they belong to another. The composer is a prisoner of his age; the director, apparently, is the liberator of all ages. Wagner's understanding of his drama is provincial, contingent, and suspect; the modern academic's understanding is penetrating, emancipatory, and true.
The author has no authority over what he has created, but the gentleman hired to arrange the furniture upon the stage possesses authority to correct him.
We are asked to believe that the most faithful servant of a work of art is the man who refuses to serve it, that the finest interpreter is the one who substitutes his own conception for that of the creator, and that the shortest road to Wagner leads directly away from Wagner. One might as reasonably declare that the proper method of appreciating the architecture of a cathedral is to demolish its spires, replace its altar with a factory chimney, and congratulate oneself upon having finally revealed the architect's innermost intentions.
And let no one mistake the issue. I do not demand that every production reproduce the painted scenery, mechanical contrivances, and theatrical conventions of the nineteenth century. The question is not whether the stage machinery may change, but whether the drama is to remain the master of its representation. A director may simplify, illuminate, and interpret. He may discover unsuspected possibilities in the action.
But when he deliberately sets the visible drama at war with the poetry and music, when he regards contradiction as a virtue in itself, and when he employs the masterpiece as an advertisement for his own intellectual originality, he has ceased to interpret Wagner and begun to exhibit himself. He may possess opinions of extraordinary interest to his friends and colleagues. He may have read every philosopher from Hegel to Derrida. But I confess that when I attend Tristan und Isolde, my principal interest is in Tristan and Isolde, and not in the remarkable circumstance that the director has read a book.
4. Wagner's Music Is Not Antisemitism
There is, amid this philosophical confusion, one observation by Said which possesses the rare distinction of being sensible. He acknowledges that the perpetuation of antisemitism is not the principal purpose of Wagner's operas. This appears to distress Paul Lawrence Rose, who has devoted considerable intellectual energy to demonstrating the importance of antisemitism in Wagner's thought and artistic legacy. Rose is entitled to pursue his argument, and Wagner's antisemitism is a historical fact which no serious admirer should attempt to conceal. But there is a considerable distance between acknowledging the prejudices of an artist and declaring those prejudices the governing principle of his art. One may examine the diseases of a man's character without concluding that every product of his genius is a symptom.
Unfortunately, the proceedings soon wander from Wagner into a quarrel over Israel and Palestine, with Said questioning whether the expulsion of one people by another may be justified merely because the identities of the peoples have changed. This is a grave political and moral question, but its entrance into the discussion does little to clarify the dramatic structure of Parsifal. The participants now appear so occupied with prosecuting one another that the original defendant is nearly forgotten. Wagner, whose works inspired the controversy, might almost be grateful for the respite. I shall spare the reader most of this diversion, observing only that when an argument about musical drama ends in a dispute over the Middle East, the conversation has traveled some distance from Bayreuth.
5. Michael Tanner: A Voice of Reason Before the Tribunal
At last Michael Tanner enters the proceedings, and one experiences something like the relief of a traveler who, after wandering through a fog of academic abstraction, discovers a solid road beneath his feet. Tanner draws a crucial distinction between the innovations of Wieland Wagner and the deconstructive productions associated with Patrice Chéreau and his successors. Wieland, in stripping Wagner's stages of their elaborate nineteenth-century scenery and replacing them with simplified, abstract forms, sought to release the universal human drama from the accidents of historical theatrical convention. His purpose was not to contradict Wagner but to reveal him. One may dispute the success of particular productions, but the governing intention remained the service of the work.
Chéreau and the later directors of Regietheater represent a fundamentally different tendency. Here the work is deliberately removed from its dramatic world, relocated within another historical or political context, and subjected to an interpretation which may openly conflict with its poetry, music, and action. The purpose is no longer merely to make the drama intelligible to a modern audience, but to compel it to pronounce upon matters selected by the director. Wagner supplies the prestige, the music, the singers, and the audience; the director supplies the thesis. The composer furnishes the cathedral, while the professor opens a lecture hall in the sanctuary.
Tanner observes, with delicious irony, that this supposedly rebellious and emancipatory practice has itself become the new orthodoxy of Wagnerian production. And remember, he was writing in 1993! More than three decades ago, the revolutionary had already acquired his official costume, his institutional approval, and his comfortable place upon the throne. The director who congratulates himself upon defying convention now follows a convention so firmly established that a traditional staging is regarded as an act of provocation. We have reached the delightful situation in which rebellion is compulsory, originality is standardized, and every new production must demonstrate its independence by obeying the same fashionable prejudices as its predecessors. The revolution has become an academy, and the academy has mistaken its own habits for courage.
Said and Rose, apparently finding Tanner's distinctions less interesting than their own quarrels, respond with predictable irritation. The atmosphere of reason briefly established by Tanner gives way once more to the pleasing spectacle of intellectual gentlemen defending their positions with all the wounded dignity of theologians confronted by an inconvenient fact.
My Verdict: The Prosecution Convicts Itself
We may now examine the case in its entirety, for the contradictions of the prosecutors are rather more entertaining than those they profess to have discovered in Wagner. Said begins by solemnly informing us that Wagner's works cannot be reduced to a single interpretation. He concludes by recommending a theatrical practice in which the director imposes an interpretation upon the work, even when that interpretation requires the deliberate contradiction of its original dramatic conception. Apparently the freedom to interpret Wagner belongs to everyone except Wagner. The composer may open a thousand doors, but the modern director must choose one, bolt the others, and assure the audience that this imprisonment constitutes liberation. I have seldom encountered so industrious an attempt to destroy a principle in the very act of celebrating it.
Adorno and Said stand before one of Wagner's dramas as Parsifal stands before the Holy Grail. They behold something whose significance surpasses the immediate reach of their intellects. But where Parsifal must learn through suffering and compassion, these gentlemen have discovered a more economical procedure. They declare the Grail contradictory. Having failed to comprehend the revelation, they pronounce the revelation defective. It never occurs to them that the deficiency may lie not in the object contemplated but in the instrument of contemplation. No! The intellect must be infallible, and whatever escapes it must be exposed, dissected, corrected, and, if necessary, contradicted. They are fools, certainly, but hardly pure ones. Purity would require them to suspend for a moment the arrogant pretensions of their Verstand, to confess the limits of their knowledge, and to permit something to reach their Gefühl. Such humility, I fear, would be fatal to the dignity of an academic philosopher.
The supreme absurdity is yet to come. According to Adorno and Said, Wagnerian orthodoxy conceals the "core truth" of Wagner's works, although Said has already declared that no single interpretation can exhaust their meaning. What, then, is this mysterious core truth? Where was it discovered? By what authority is it established? And how does the professor propose to reconcile its singular existence with his earlier celebration of interpretive multiplicity? He does not tell us. He merely assures us that the truth must be exposed by violating the very dramatic unity through which the works communicate. Thus we have a truth which cannot be singular, yet must be authoritatively revealed; a truth which the composer conceals, but which the critic discovers through the composer's own creation; a truth which can be properly exhibited only by introducing into the drama contradictions supplied by somebody else. Such reasoning would disgrace a village debating society, but introduce a sufficient quantity of philosophical terminology and it becomes a distinguished contribution to aesthetic criticism.
And here is the question which ought to bring the entire prosecution to its knees: If traditional Wagnerian productions conceal the contradictions upon which your argument depends, how did you discover those contradictions in the first place? Did you not hear the music? Did you not follow the poetry? Did you not observe the dramatic action? Was it not Wagner himself who revealed to you the very paradoxes you now announce to the world as your discoveries? You have taken the jewels from his treasury, proclaimed yourselves their rightful owners, and accused the man who fashioned them of concealing their existence! The philosopher arrives at the banquet, consumes the meal, denounces the cook for having served it, and insists that true nourishment requires the destruction of the kitchen.
Nor is this merely a dispute about scenery. It concerns the relation between art and the human faculties through which art is experienced. Wagner did not devote his genius to the creation of elaborate philosophical puzzles which the spectator was expected to solve with the assistance of a university professor. He sought an immediate communication with the deepest regions of human feeling. His Gesamtkunstwerk was conceived not as an intellectual riddle, but as an indivisible dramatic revelation in which poetry, music, and visible action should cooperate to overwhelm the spectator with the force of an experienced truth. This does not forbid thought. It gives thought something worthy of contemplating. But the critic who mistakes the subsequent analysis for the original revelation is like a man who examines the chemical composition of a rose and concludes that its fragrance was a deception.
I have no objection to intellectual interpretations of Wagner. Let the scholars interpret! Let them discover a thousand meanings! Let them argue, contradict one another, and fill libraries with their disagreements. The richer the work, the greater the variety of legitimate responses it may inspire. But let them not confuse their interpretations with the work itself, nor claim an exclusive authority to reveal a truth which they have just declared incapable of final definition. Above all, let them not insist that the public must be deprived of Wagner's dramatic conception in order to enjoy the privilege of contemplating theirs. A professor is entitled to his opinions. He is not entitled to compel Wagner to agree with them.
The pretended emancipation of the spectator is therefore nothing but the substitution of one authority for another. We are told to distrust the composer's intentions because they threaten to restrict our freedom of interpretation, and then commanded to accept the director's intentions as the necessary means of attaining enlightenment. Wagner's authority is abolished, only that a lesser authority may occupy his throne. The audience, supposedly liberated from the tyranny of the dead composer, finds itself subjected to the tyranny of the living interpreter. The new priest announces that the old revelation was false, replaces it with his own, and congratulates the congregation upon its escape from dogma.
Let the final verdict be entered into the record. These gentlemen begin by proclaiming the inexhaustible freedom of artistic interpretation, and end by demanding that the stage director impose his own interpretation upon the masterpiece. They discover Wagner's paradoxes through Wagner's art, then declare that Wagner's art must be contradicted before those paradoxes can be understood. They condemn dramatic unity as an instrument of deception, while treating their own philosophical constructions as instruments of truth. They profess to oppose authoritarianism, yet reserve for themselves the privilege of determining what the audience ought to see, what the composer ought to have meant, and what the work must be made to say.
And these are the gentlemen who accuse Wagner of authoritarianism!
If this is liberation, I should like to know what they mean by servitude. If this is fidelity, betrayal has lost its meaning. And if this is the triumph of reason over artistic illusion, then I am content to remain among the deluded, in the company of Wagner, rather than seek enlightenment at the feet of men who have discovered that the surest method of understanding a masterpiece is to prevent it from speaking for itself.