In 1849, a year before the premiere of Lohengrin in Weimar, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) wrote the pamphlet The revolution: “From now on there are only two peoples: the one that follows me and the other that opposes me. One I lead to happiness, the other I trample under my feet, for I am the Revolution, I am the eternal creative life, I am the only god recognized by all beings, who embraces all that exists, breathes life into it and makes you happy!” It is true that the revolution itself is speaking here, but we may nevertheless assume that Wagner, who never shunned pathos, identified himself so much with the revolution that he believed himself to have been the eternal creative life.
In an informative introduction to Wagner’s Writings on art, politics and religionin which also The revolution is recorded, translator Philip Westbroek writes that Wagner had a mission, namely “the redemption of man.” There is, according to most saviors, an enormous amount from which man must be saved, the shortest summary being that man must be saved from modernity. And aversion to modernity is still going strong, especially because modernity continues to persist. The commercialization of everything, not least art, in other words the power of money, individualization, which undermines the community, etc. Behind it lurk alienation and meaninglessness. As is often the case, Wagner’s aversion to modernity is accompanied by anti-Semitic outbursts. The Jews, on whom much can be projected, are seen as pioneers and profiteers par excellence of modernity, although personal settlements also played a role in Wagner.
Initially, Wagner tried to achieve success in Paris, “the European capital of opera in the first half of the 19th century.” But his time in Paris was, to put it mildly, not a success, leaving him with “an almost pathological contempt for French culture.” It is a peculiarity of many saviors that despite their hard work they have not been able to free themselves from resentment.
Who was successful in Paris was the Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Wagner is said to have asked Meyerbeer for help in a “pleading tone”, according to Westbroek, and when that made little difference, the seeds of Wagner’s “notorious anti-Semitism” found fertile ground. It should be added that in nineteenth century Europe excitement about the bad qualities of Jews was as natural as excitement about global warming is today. What can be termed as progress.
Passion
In his essay Judaism in music, from 1850, Wagner writes: “The Jew speaks the language of the nation where he lives from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner.” And also: “Music is the language of passion. In his way of speaking, the Jew can only express himself with ridiculous passion, but never with palpable and moving passion.”
The Jew, however talented he may be, and Wagner admits with some reluctance that the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847) had a “special talent,” simply has no real “creative capacity.” His essay on Judaism and music also ends with the promise of redemption, although for the Jews redemption is identical to destruction. “But remember that there is only one deliverance from the curse upon you: the deliverance of Ahasuerus – destruction!” Westbroek rightly writes that we should not view such a comment exclusively from the perspective of the Holocaust. How literally Wagner envisioned that destruction is unclear, but what is certain is that as a savior, as an artist who wished to create his works of art for a “new, utopian community”, he tramples the one underfoot and leads the other to the earthly paradise. The earthly paradise, whatever forms it takes, always requires that its opponents, the non-elect, be trampled upon.
The accusations against the Jew that he can never be a real German, Frenchman or artist because he is never capable of more than dissimulation and play are not new, but Wagner formulates it quite brilliantly with passionate venom, and he does not shy away from it either. to sacrifice his old friends (Heinrich Heine) on the altar of his resentment. The message is clear, insofar as the Jew has a role before his destruction, it is that of a clown.
Anti-Semitism
Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his ideas about redemption and utopian communities intertwine, without saying that Wagner is nothing more than his hatred of Jews. What he consciously or unconsciously saw clearly is that redemption and destruction go hand in hand, one person’s bone meal is the other person’s redemption and sometimes redemption appears to lie in one’s own bone meal. It is there that knight Lohengrin comes into play.
Elsa von Brabant is accused of murdering her brother, who was first in line of succession for the duchy. She is challenged to prove her innocence, after which she appeals to a knight who appears to her in a dream: this knight must fight for her in a duel with her challenger Friedrich, Count of Telramund, the winner will be chosen by God – an elegant way to explain the law of the strongest. To everyone’s surprise, a knight on a swan indeed appears, the knight only sets one small condition for his services: Elsa must never ask who he is.
That’s a reasonable demand for a mythical knight who travels not on horseback but on a swan and who is trying to woo a duchess. Even in our time, that requirement has not lost its validity. Infatuation is the overestimation of the love object, Freud already knew, a state of mind that presupposes some ignorance. Romantic love exists by the grace of inadequate knowledge.
In a text about Lohengrinincluded in the program booklet for the National Opera & Ballet’s Lohengrin production directed by Christof Loy, which premiered on November 11, Wagner suggests that love also needs to be destroyed.
Also read
here the review (●●●●) of ‘Lohengrin’
The greater the love, the greater the downfall. “This woman [Elsa] plunges into destruction with full knowledge because of the necessary essence of love. (…) With her demise she reveals this being to her beloved who does not yet understand this.”
Not only the revolution, but also love, whether metaphorical or not, needs bone meal.
Divine sex tourism
Wagner also writes about the vehicle of salvation, the swan. He rightly links it to Greek mythology. Zeus took the form of a swan to seduce the mortal Leda.
The writer and Nobel Prize winner John Coetzee also writes about the love between gods and mortals, but unlike Wagner he speaks soberly about it, and we are a century and a half and several disillusions further. Coetzee mentions Elizabeth Costello calls the gods “inventors of death and also inventors of sex tourism.” It is not the desire for love that makes the gods descend to the human world, but horniness, the trembling of death that apparently goes hand in hand with that horniness and which the immortals only know from hearsay.
Coetzee imagines the swan’s sexual act in a strange but plastic way: “It’s bad enough when an adult male swan pokes your behind with his swimming legs.” But if the crush is deep enough, even the feet of a swan in your behind are probably pure pleasure. (The modern government that does not believe that swans can be gods will probably object to such practices.)
In Wagner, the swan is also a dead person in disguise, Elsa’s murdered brother. Divine sex tourism is not happening. The utopian community cannot tolerate that.
Der Fall Wagner
Wagner’s ideas have not always been the same, just like Nietzsche, Wagner was also strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. (We must withdraw from the will by focusing on it.) When Wagner moved more and more into the religious direction, Nietzsche recognized pure nihilism in Wagner’s utopias, in a text entitled Der Fall Wagner the philosopher settled with the composer.
In Wagner’s essay Art and the Revolution from the time of his Lohengrin he is still close to Nietzsche and seems to prefer the Greek world of perfect forms to the darkness of Christianity, which in fact only promises light after death. “The free Greek, who placed himself at the head of nature, can create art out of the joy of man as such. The Christian, who rejected both nature and himself, could sacrifice to his God only on the altar of abstinence.”
We see how contemporary revolutionary commitment is thoroughly Christian, although Jesus is hardly involved anymore. Degrowth is just one of many contemporary altars of abstinence. The rejection of self, in some cases of all humanity, now seems a prerequisite for being on the right side of history. Only the truly marginalized need to reject themselves less because others have already done it for them.
What can a swan as a pagan vehicle of salvation still mean in a thoroughly Christian world that believes itself to be secularized?
Christof Loy has elegantly solved this problem by sculpting the swan as an ephemeral aesthetic community of mortals. Thus the Greek world of perfect forms is sought in the communion of mortal bodies.
It is exactly the dichotomy that Wagner himself described Art and the Revolution, Christian art was “incurably and irreconcilably split between conscience and life instinct.” Medieval chivalric poetry would only be “the honest hypocrisy of fanaticism.”
Honest hypocrisy
This honest hypocrisy of fanaticism is excellently reflected in Loy’s direction. During his wedding, Lohengrin (Daniel Behle) is more reminiscent of an ambitious pulmonologist who has just discovered a new drug for COPD than of a knight, which is not to say anything negative about Behle’s singing skills.
At most, a ritual remains of the belief in salvation. At Dutch National Opera, Knight Lohengrin only represents a vague idea of justice and an equally vague idea of great love, the only thing that remains is the realization that destruction is a requirement for both.
What does that remind us of? To the clown. To Wagner’s essay on Judaism in music, about Jews who do not know great passion and who would have to make do with second-hand, inauthentic passions.
And the forbidden question, who is that clown anyway? It only refers to the long-established realization that only not knowing can bring salvation and that there is no way back for those who know. Conscious forgetting is impossible.
For a long time, Wagner was associated with a scene from the film for me, and not only for me Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola in which the music of Wagner (de Valkyrie ride) American helicopter gunships destroy a Vietnamese village. There salvation finds a bottom, there fanaticism suddenly becomes a matter of life and death, Wagner’s pathos no longer matters as such.
But to us homely folk, Lohengrin is a handsome, ambitious pulmonologist who, on nights when he is off duty, is willing to play knight, much as Wagner thought German Jews played German.