[In the following essay, Rather chronicles Wagner's development as a prose writer and as a poet (particularly in regard to his Ring librettos). Rather concludes by noting Wagner's theories on the decline of language.]

Wagner's writings, including the nine volumes of collected works published during his lifetime, together with his voluminous correspondence and huge autobiography, constitute a formidable bulk of material, much of it still available only in German. William Ashton Ellis's Richard Wagner's Prose Works, an eight-volume edition of Wagner's essays, short stories, and posthumous writings, appeared in the 1890s; it has been reprinted as recently as 1972.¹ Wagner's ten-volume collected works in German (volume ten appeared in 1883, after his death), the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, have been reprinted often enough, most recently in 1976.² Neither of these two collections includes Wagner's “The Work and Mission of My Life,” a long essay, published in two parts, in the North American Review in 1879.³ Wagner's autobiography, Mein Leben, was privately printed and circulated among his friends in the 1870s. It was not made public until 1911, when it appeared simultaneously in German and in the very faulty, authorized English translation, My Life. The translation was reprinted in 1972, and in 1983 an entirely new and much improved English version of Mein Leben appeared, based on a new German text.⁴ An older edition of Wagner's correspondence, edited by Erich Kloss, amounts to seventeen volumes, and a critical and complete edition of the correspondence is now under way in Germany.⁵ As for Wagner's poetry, it takes up, in the form of the libretti of the music dramas, approximately two of the ten volumes of the Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen.

Wagner's letters to members of his family from 1833 through 1836 have a fresh, open, and often charming tone. A letter to his ten-year-older sister Rosalie on December 11, 1833, for example, tells her of the progress he is making on his second opera, Die Feen (The Fairies, based on Carlo Gozzi's La donna serpente, [The Lady Serpent]). He had already abandoned Die Hochzeit, we recall, because of Rosalie's distaste for the blood-drenched story. The letter to Rosalie is a spontaneous and ingenuous outburst of creative joy.⁶ Wagner was then chorus master at Würzburg. His Symphony in C Major had already been performed. Confident of his future success, he would soon be directing the musical affairs of the Bethmann theater company and living the life of a carefree and popular young lady's man. This life ended in 1836, when he and a young actress in the Bethmann company, Minna Planer, were married. The marriage broke up almost at once, with Minna deserting him for another man. Wagner went on alone in 1837 to the Russian town of Riga, where he had been appointed musical director (the repentant and forgiven Minna subsequently joined him there).

During the three years that the couple spent in Paris (1839-1842), Wagner finished Rienzi, which he had begun in Riga, composed his Faust Overture, and wrote the words and music of The Flying Dutchman. Working for Maurice Schlesinger, editor of the Gazette musicale, Wagner arranged operatic numbers by Gaetano Donizetti and Jacques Halévy for the piano or cornet, and wrote short stories and critical articles. He scraped an existence for himself and Minna out of the purest Bohemian vein. The alternating episodes of abject despair alone and wild gaiety in the company of friends (whom, as always, he quickly acquired) are amusingly and often brilliantly described in his autobiography—although not the few days that he may have spent in a debtors' prison.⁷ The Paris milieu in which Richard and Minna Wagner then lived is captured in Gustave Flaubert's Éducation sentimentale, the first version (discarded) of which was written between 1843 and 1845. The art dealer Jacques Arnoux and his wife in Flaubert's novel are said to have been drawn from Maurice Schlesinger and his Christian wife—for whom Schlesinger abjured Judaism, and with whom Flaubert himself had fallen in love at the age of sixteen. It may even be that the shade of Wagner haunts Flaubert's Éducation sentimentale in the form of a poverty-stricken painter.⁸

We note only in passing that two essays by Wagner, “Pasticcio” and “On German Opera,” were published in 1834 in journals edited, respectively, by Robert Schumann and Heinrich Laube, and that an essay entitled “Bellini” appeared in the Riga Zuschauer, a German-language paper, in 1837. Wagner's contributions, ten in all, to Schlesinger's Gazette musicale were published between 1840 and 1842. A long and rather favorable account of Halévy's opera La reine de Chypre, which made its appearance shortly after the Paris premiere in December, 1841, was subsequently published in German in a Dresden newspaper, thus helping to keep Wagner's name alive in Saxony. A few weeks before the Paris premiere of Carl Maria von Weber's first and most hauntingly mysterious opera, Wagner's essay “Der Freischütz” appeared in the Gazette musicale to inform the French that their logical minds were, on the whole, little fitted for the understanding of such a work. He contrasted the civilized purlieus of the Bois de Boulogne with the mysterious depths of a remote German forest, and added that only a Berlioz, composer of the Symphonie fantastique, would fully understand Weber's score. Wagner tells us in his autobiography that the essay on Weber's opera came to the attention of George Sand, and that she had used some of its ideas to lead into a “legendary tale from French provincial life.” He was much flattered, he says, to have thus attracted the famous writer's attention. Wagner does not give the title of Sand's tale, but it proves to be Mouny-Robin. Wagner's name is not mentioned in Sand's lead-in to the story, but there are unmistakable references in it to his essay. Mouny-Robin begins at a performance of Der Freischütz in Paris, where the first-person narrator hears a Frenchman assert that Germans must be simpleminded to countenance such rubbish. To this a German retorts that the French are too skeptical to countenance the marvelous. A “cosmopolitan spectator” nearby then makes some of the points made in Wagner's essay, and the narrator sums up as follows: “The French, for love of truth, deny or fail to recognize any new truth; the German, for love of the marvelous, refuses to recognize any truth that denies his chimaeras.” Sand, after commenting that no one has better depicted the German spirit than Heinrich Heine, then begins the story proper.⁹

Wagner's three short stories all have as their central character a young German musician, “R.” The first of these, “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven” (1840), recalls E. T. A. Hoffmann's fantastic tale Ritter Gluck (1809), which was also the first of Hoffmann's stories to be published.¹⁰ Hoffmann was eleven years old when Christoph Gluck died, Wagner fourteen when Beethoven died, and in both stories a first-person narrator encounters the shade of the eponymous musician in question. R. does so in the company of an unknown and erratic Englishman, a lover of music given to scattering gold pieces abroad and shouting “Goddam!” After presenting one of his own musical compositions to Beethoven for approval, the Englishman departs. Beethoven advises R. to stay in Vienna and compose galops, adding that this is what he himself should have done. So far the story is in a style somewhere between that of Hoffmann and Heine, but suddenly a serious, entirely Wagnerian note is struck: Beethoven tells R. that he intends to compose a choral symphony, making use of Schiller's sublime words in the Ode to Joy. Why, Beethoven asks R., should we not take vocal music as seriously as we do instrumental music, instead of completely subordinating the words so that light-minded virtuosi may use them to display their vocal wares? The human voice represents the human heart in its limited individuality, whereas the instruments of the orchestra represent the primary organs of creation; they express the inexpressible, the “chaos of first creation.” Beethoven sighs for a musician capable of writing poetry fit to take its place beside music. Words are weak in comparison with tonal language. But when the elementary force of tone is limited by the word, Wagner says, speaking through the mouth of Beethoven, “the human heart itself will be … brought into [a state of] godlike consciousness.”¹¹ In this passage, written when Wagner was at the very beginning of his career as composer, we have the core idea informing the Wagnerian music drama, together with an indication of how that idea was to be embodied in the orchestral prelude to the Ring, where a broken, repeated E-flat major chord culminates at last in the voice of the Rhine-maiden Woglinde. The “cosmological,” or rather “cosmogonic,” aspect of music had already been pointed to by Arthur Schopenhauer in the first volume of The World as Will and Representation (1819), but Wagner had not yet found his way to the writings of that philosopher.¹²

Whether or not Wagner knew it, he was putting into Beethoven's mouth words that had been used by Jean Paul twenty-seven years earlier with respect to E. T. A. Hoffmann. In introducing Hoffmann's first collection of tales, Jean Paul wrote: “The author is … music director at Dresden. Connoisseurs and friends of his, and the knowledge of and enthusiasm for music in the book itself, promise and assure the appearance in him of a great artist in tones. So much the better, so much the rarity! For up to now the sun-god has always thrown out the gift of words with the right hand and the gift of tones with the left to men who stand so far apart that to this day we are still waiting for the one who will simultaneously write the words and compose the music of a true opera.”¹³ Hans von Wolzogen was the first to call attention to this curious passage—which seems in retrospect to announce the coming of Wagner. It was written at Bayreuth on November 24, 1813, the day after the death of Wagner's father, when Wagner himself was only six months old.¹⁴

“An End in Paris,” Wagner's second contribution to Schlesinger's Gazette musicale, will call for further attention. … It is the story of a young German musician who has come to Paris to give the world his art. The narrator of the story, a Heine-like figure, explains to the young German innocent that in Paris art is a business: commodities packaged with known names are sold to a public that would not otherwise know how to evaluate them. One must have a name to be heard, yet to have a name one must be heard. More important than talent is the influence of a powerful protector. The narrator assures R. that Beethoven is now a “name” in Paris, but let some piece of Beethoven's music be hawked about the city with an unknown name attached to it and there would be no buyer. R. refuses to accept this apparently cynical view, quarrels with the narrator, and drops out of sight. Fourteen months later he is found dying of starvation.

R.'s last words (which can be taken as the young Wagner's own confession of faith) are justly famous. They show us at a glance how unfitted this twenty-seven-year-old German idealist was to cope with the commercial world of Paris, where—after the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, had been ushered into office by the predatory banker Jacques Lafitte in 1830—“the finance aristocracy made the laws … [and] dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, [and] the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere.” The aim of the finance aristocracy was, adds Karl Marx, “to get rich not by production but by pocketing the already available wealth of others.”¹⁵ R.'s last words are as follows:

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, in the disciples and apostles likewise;—I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of art one and indivisible;—I believe that this art proceeds from God and lives in the hearts of all enlightened human beings;—I believe that whoever has even once luxuriated in the sublime delights of this high art must forever after be her subject, and can never deny her;—I believe that through this art everyone will be blessed, and that it is therefore the privilege of everyone to die of hunger for her;—I believe that death will give me great happiness;—I believe that I was, on earth, a dissonant chord, which will at once be wholly and magnificently resolved by death. I believe in a last judgment with frightful damnation for all those who dared to practice usury with high, chaste art in this world, who shamed and dishonored her out of base desire and sensual lust, and in the evil of their hearts; I believe that throughout eternity they will be condemned to listen to their own music. In contrast, I believe that the true disciples of high art will be transfigured in a heavenly fabric of fragrant and radiant harmonies, and united for all eternity with the divine source of all harmony.¹⁶

Occasional notes of self-irony are heard in this credo. Wagner's characterization of R. as a dissonant chord on this earth is one such—although Wagner could not have known how startlingly accurate it would prove to be. The sentence passed on faithless musicians, who will be forced to listen to their own music for all eternity, is an old one. It is a joke; but the condemnation of those who “practice usury with high, chaste art” coupled with it is meant seriously. The “privilege” of dying of hunger for the sake of art, a traditional fate of artists, had almost been granted to Wagner himself during his stay in Paris. As for the “dissonant chord,” it was not resolved at Wagner's death: the musician himself, if not his music, remains as controversial as ever.

The third in the trilogy of stories about the musician R. is entitled “A Happy Evening.” It was published in the Gazette musicale in late 1841 under the title “Une soirée heureuse; fantaisie sur la musique pittoresque.” Wagner's Rienzi had been accepted in June, 1841, by the Dresden court theater. Wagner's end in Paris had turned out to be a happy one after all. The narrator of the story recalls a summer evening in the public gardens of Paris when he and R. heard performances of Mozart's Symphony in E-flat and Beethoven's Symphony in A Major, and afterwards enjoyed a bowl of steaming punch together. They had conversed on the contrasting features of the music of Beethoven and Mozart, on program music and tone painting (musique pittoresque), and other such topics. R. reveals himself as very much a musical purist. “Nothing is more insufferable,” he tells the narrator, “than the tasteless pictures and anecdotes that people attach to instrumental works. What poverty of spirit and feeling is betrayed when someone listening to a Beethoven symphony being performed is able to keep his attention up only by imagining that the course of some romance or other is being imitated by the torrential flow of the music!” R. says also, “It is true once and for all that where human speech ends, music begins.” These last words stand in some conflict with what he had said a year earlier on the subject in “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven.” (They present the more usual view. As George Sand wrote in Consuelo (1842): “Music … is the manifestation of a higher order of ideas and sentiments than any to which human speech can give expression.”¹⁷) “A Happy Evening” ends with R.'s enthusiastic outburst: “Long live happiness, long live joy! Long live courage that inspires us in the struggle with our fate! Long live victory, gained by our higher consciousness over worthless vulgarity! Long live love, that rewards our courage, friendship, that keeps our faith upright, hope, that weds our foreboding! Long live day and night! Hail to the sun! Hail to the stars! A triple hail to music and her high priests! Let God be honored and praised, the god of joy and happiness—the god who created music!”¹⁸

We are reminded here of Brünnhilde's cry when Siegfried awakens her from her deathlike sleep:

Hail, thou sun!
Hail, thou light!
Hail, thou shining day!
Long was my sleep(19)

Wagner himself was rising up from the darkness that had almost covered him in Paris: his Rienzi had been accepted in Dresden, and his Flying Dutchman was almost ready to set sail for Berlin.

Back in Dresden now, Wagner was no longer the nameless youth who had so nearly gone under in the giant metropolis of France. In Saxony the name Wagner already had some renown. Richard's brother Albert was a successful actor and teacher of singing in Leipzig. His sister Luise, an actress in Dresden, was now the wife of Friedrich Brockhaus, the publisher; Klara, another sister, was married to a well-known singer; Ottilie, youngest of the sisters, was the wife of the Indologist Hermann Brockhaus. Rosalie, Richard's oldest sister and artistic conscience, had given up her acting career and married a doctor of philosophy, only to die in childbirth a year later. Richard's uncle, the polymath Gottlob Heinrich Adolph Wagner, had died in 1835, but he was still remembered as the editor of Il parnasso italiano and as the man to whom Goethe had presented a silver goblet in return for the dedication of that series to “al principe de' poeti.”²⁰ A few may have remembered Richard Wagner's kindly stepfather, the actor and portrait painter Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer.²¹ Wagner himself had contributed seventeen “letters from Paris” to the Dresden Abendzeitung between March, 1841, and January, 1842, and he became a celebrity overnight after the first performance of Rienzi on October 20, 1842.²²

During the Dresden years, from 1842 to 1849, Wagner was busy conducting at the royal theater, and working on Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. The already finished Flying Dutchman was given its first performance in January, 1843, and Tannhäuser in October of 1845, but Lohengrin was not performed until 1850; Wagner, having escaped arrest by the police of Dresden during the Saxon uprising of 1849, had by then fled to Zurich, to begin his eleven-year period of exile from the Germanies. Under the auspices of Franz Liszt, the premiere of Lohengrin took place at Weimar, in the grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar, where Bach had been court organist and concertmaster a little over a hundred years earlier, and where Goethe—dead since 1832—had once been chief minister of state (a position that Wagner would later be accused of usurping, under Ludwig II, in Bavaria).

Wagner's account in his autobiography of the uprising in 1849 and of the part that he played in it is one of the most fascinating episodes in a work that has been called by its most recent editor, Martin Gregor-Dellin, “not the least” of Wagner's “dramas.”²³ Wagner tells us, in an autobiographic sketch first published in 1843, that with the overthrow of the last Bourbon in France in July, 1830, “at one stroke I became a revolutionary and arrived at the conviction that every halfway-aspiring human being should be concerned with politics alone.”²⁴ In Mein Leben he tells of the enthusiasm that gripped him after the Poles rose up against their Russian overlords shortly thereafter. “It was the Polish freedom-fight (Freiheitskampf) against the superior strength of the Russians that soon filled me with growing enthusiasm. The successes that the Poles achieved for a short time in May 1831 moved me with astonishment and ecstasy: to me it seemed that a miracle had created the world anew.”²⁵ A similar enthusiasm gripped him in 1849 during the Saxon uprising. But as the Polish uprising had been suppressed by the Russian troops so the Saxon uprising was quelled by Prussian troops.

During the uprising Wagner was closely associated with the Russian anarcho-communist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), a young man of Wagner's own age. (Wagner thought Bakunin was older, but he was actually a few months younger.) On Palm Sunday, 1849, after Wagner had concluded a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Bakunin stepped up to congratulate him and to announce “in a loud voice that if all music should be lost in the expected world-conflagration, we should bind ourselves at the risk of our lives to preserve this symphony.” In one of the ironic asides frequent in his autobiography, Wagner adds that six weeks later Bakunin seems indeed to have taken on the office of chief incendiary.²⁶ Wagner says that Bakunin, a Russian officer of aristocratic background, had fled the army and Russia under the influence of the writings of Rousseau. In Berlin, he had eagerly taken to the Hegelian dialectic. Wagner was much impressed.

Everything in him was colossal, with a weight suggestive of primeval freshness. I never had the impression from him that he made very much of my acquaintance, for he no longer seemed to be much concerned with intellectually gifted people, desiring instead only ruthless, active natures; but, as became plain to me later, here too theoretical demands were more active in him than purely personal feelings, for he had much to say and explain on these matters. He had in general accustomed himself to the Socratic mode of conversation, and he was obviously at ease when, stretched out on his host's hard sofa, he could hold forth at length before a motley group of people on the problems of the revolution. … In this connection he called attention to the childish-daimonic joy of the Russian people in fire, on which Rostopschin [the governor-general of Moscow] had reckoned in his stratagem against Napoleon at the burning of Moscow.

Bakunin was convinced that the “burning of the lord's castles” was the only goal worthy of a reasonable human being. “While Bakunin was preaching these frightful doctrines in his way,” adds Wagner with an unforgettable touch, “he never ceased, for a full hour, holding his broad hand before me, in spite of my protests since he noticed that my eyes suffered from the harsh glare of the light.”²⁷

“As with his music,” wrote an editor of Wagner's autobiography in 1923, “so also with Mein Leben he draws us into his magic circle.”²⁸ The autobiography is at times quite frank, as when Wagner tells us of Minna's illegitimate daughter (who passed as her sister), whom he accepted along with Minna herself. The most brilliant set pieces are to be found in the first two of the four parts of the biography. Among them are Wagner's account of his relationship with Count Tyskiewicz, leader of the Polish uprising against Russia in 1830-1831, which culminates in Wagner's Hoffmannesque account of his semihallucinatory confrontation with the spirit of cholera while at Brunn; the perilous flight from Riga in 1838, accompanied by Minna and their gigantic Newfoundland, over a Russo-Prussian frontier guarded by Cossacks with orders to shoot to kill; the subsequent and even more perilous journey to London on the little Thetis, still with Minna and the dog, during which the sea-borne, unconquerable Wagner accumulated material for The Flying Dutchman and, as already noted, improved his French by reading Sand's La dernière Aldini; and, finally, the story of the uprising in Dresden and Wagner's flight to Switzerland.

Almost never does the authorized translation truly mirror Wagner's remarkable way with words. On occasion it is simply erroneous. Wagner says, for example, that the rocking, rolling E-flat major triad motif in the opening bars of the Rheingold overture came to him as he lay “in a kind of somnambulistic state,” exhausted and still seasick, in a hotel room in Spezia; he suddenly had the feeling that he was being overwhelmed by rapidly flowing water, and he awoke with a start. The translation calls this “a kind of somnolent state,” and thus fails to express the hypnagogic quality of the episode (all German editions read “eine Art von somnambulem Zustand”). Worse is the translation of a sentence that refers to the young Leo Tolstoy. Wagner says that in 1860 he met in passing a number of people, “among whom a Russian Count Tolstoy stood out especially favorably” (“unter denen ein russischer Graf Tolstoi sich besonders vorteilhaft auszeichnete,” in the three German editions). The authorized translation has “amongst whom a Russian count Tolstoy was conspicuously kind.” Adding to this puzzle is the absence of a Count Tolstoy from the indices of the German editions of 1923 and 1963. The limp translations of what Wagner wrote about the volcanic personality of his friend the singer and dramatic actress Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient make it difficult to read My Life “musically” (as Gregor-Dellin advises us to do). Together with Beethoven and Shakespeare, Madame Schröder-Devrient was one of the three definitive factors in Wagner's artistic development. For Wagner she was a kind of embodied link between music and the drama, between tone and word. She was also, in his eyes, a thoroughly “daimonic” figure, careening through life and exhausting herself in a succession of love affairs and stage performances. The nine-year-older woman made Wagner an unwilling confidant of her love affairs in the 1840s. At times she gave him financial and artistic support. On one such occasion, however, Wagner says that she “laughed like a kobold” (“lachte wie ein Kobold”) when he told her of his troubles with the proposed performance of Spontini's La Vestale in Dresden in 1845. The authorized translation reads “laughed as though she would never stop,” and misses the Kundry-like element in the great diva's response. Daimonic is a word that recurs as frequently in the writings of Wagner as in those of Goethe. But Wagner's characterization of Schröder-Devrient's “almost daimonic warmth” (“fast dämonische Wärme,” in all editions) comes to us in the authorized translation as “almost satanic ardour.” Where he tells us that music was for him “a wholly daimonic realm, a mystic, sublime portent” (“durchaus nur Dämonium, eine mystische erhabene Ungeheuerlichkeit,” in all editions), the authorized translation reads “a spirit, a noble and mystic monster.”²⁹ Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck from Venice in 1859 that the Grail-messenger, Kundry, had risen up before his eyes in the form of “a wonderful world-daimonic woman” (“ein wunderbar weltdämonisches Weib”).³⁰ The word, like a recurring musical motif, reminds us that the features of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient are imprinted on the Kundry of Wagner's Parsifal.³¹

Wagner's self-irony in his autobiography seems to have largely escaped his biographer Ernest Newman. While living in Zurich in the early 1850s, Wagner took the water cure at Albisbrunn and gave up alcoholic drinks. Newman says that Wagner then attempted to convince his friends Jakob Sulzer and Georg Herwegh that for “spiritual ‘intoxication’ regenerate man should look not to the juice of the grape but to love.” According to Newman also, Wagner “argued with his friends about the evil effects of strong liquors, with such vehemence on both sides that they often came near quarrelling.” After citing nine lines from Wagner's autobiography on the episode, Newman concludes: “For him the cosmos was always a matter of Wagner contra non-Wagner; and whenever he adopted a new faith it was the duty of humanity to change with him. In his last years, largely as the result of his horror of vivisection, he preached the virtues of vegetarianism.”³² Other than Wagner's autobiography; it should be noted, Newman cites no other source of information. Wagner's account of the episode in Mein Leben is as follows.

I rejoiced to receive my Zurich friends again as visitors in our new quarters [at Albisbrunn], which were located more conveniently for them as well; but for a long time I spoiled all our friendly conversations with my passionate advocacy of the water cure and an associated polemic against wine and other narcotic drinks. From all this a new religion had taken shape for me: for example, if I were driven into a corner by Sulzer and Herwegh (the latter prided himself on his knowledge of chemistry and physiology) because of the untenability of Rauss's theory on the poisonous properties of wine, then I would hold fast to the moral-aesthetic factor, which allowed me to see in the enjoyment of wine merely a poor and barbaric surrogate for the ecstatic mood to be won only by love. … This led to a general critique of the modern relationship of the sexes to each other, to which I was led by observing the separation of men from women as it crudely presented itself here in accordance with Swiss custom. Sulzer stated that he had nothing at all against letting himself be intoxicated by association with women, but “where to get them without stealing?” Herwegh wanted to go somewhat deeper into my paradoxes, but he thought that wine had nothing to do with the matter and was in itself a strengthening nourishment, which, moreover, fitted in very well with the ecstasy of love, as Anacreon had shown. Looking more closely at my condition, however, my friends on their part found reason to be concerned about my strange and stubborn extravagance: I was exceedingly pale and haggard, slept little at all and betrayed in everything alarming overanimation. Although in the end sleep escaped me almost entirely, I insisted that I had never been so cheerful and well, and I continued to take my chilly baths very early in the morning in the greatest cold of winter, to the torment of my wife, who had to light my way with a lantern on the necessary promenade.³³

Wagner's account, dictated to Cosima ten or fifteen years after the event, is light and amusing in tone. As for his behavior at the time and that of his friends, for example, the vehement arguments on both sides, we know no more about it than Newman did.

Turning now to Wagner's poetry, that is, the libretti of his operas and music dramas, we find that opinions as to its quality have varied widely. In Wagner's day it was the alliterative verse of the Ring that came in for the most adverse criticism. In recent years, in English-speaking countries at least, blanket condemnations of all the libretti are often heard. In 1973, for example, the editor of a collection of Wagner's essays and stories mentioned previously devotes most of his short introduction to a total condemnation of Wagner's libretti. “Instead of collaborating with a dramatist of distinction,” he tells us, Wagner “preferred to write his own libretti.” He continues:

The results are frequently as clumsily illiterate as the work of the worst of the Italian hack librettists whom he derides, and are additionally burdened by Wagner's teutonic inability to be precise. The drama … is provided entirely by the music, which is often seriously hampered by the portentous autodidactic doggerel churned out by the composer as poet. … The sad truth is that Wagner lacked any feeling for words as the raw material of art, though he possessed the artist's instinct as far as his own requirements were concerned. Wagner the composer needed Wagner the poet. He would not have been happy with, say, Goethe or Schiller.

So that we may approach Wagner in the right spirit, the editor tells us: “It is also unfortunately true that some of Wagner's theories, which he was venal enough to adopt and discard always at the expedient moment, are as conscienceless as his character: a character which allowed him to be callous in personal relationships, dishonest in business dealings, and unreliable in most other matters.”³⁴ All this in the three paragraphs of his introduction.

To dispute these sweeping and unsupported conclusions (which come with an escape hatch in the form of the clause “though [Wagner] possessed the artist's instincts as far as his own requirements were concerned”) would be futile. After all, even greater writers have often been very hard on their predecessors: Leo Tolstoy found Shakespeare confused, repetitious, and morally repulsive, Dante's reputation unjustified, and Paradise Lost a bore, while T. S. Eliot's admirer Ezra Pound called Milton “donkey-eared,” and was willing to throw out the whole of Vergil “without the slightest compunction.”³⁵ On occasion all critics agree: Edward Young's long didactic poem Night Thoughts was widely admired in the eighteenth century, but today it is, as poetry, as unreadable as the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have since become. It is conceivable that we become “word-blind” with the passing of time, as George Steiner suggests with respect to the Pre-Raphaelite and decadent verse of one hundred years ago. “Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin-de-siècle ideas,” he writes.³⁶

In a particular case, it may be that we ourselves lack the associations that give beauty and evocative force to lines, or even a few words, from a poet when they are apprehended by a suitably prepared hearer. In Remembrance of Things Past the narrator's boyhood friend Bloch is, or professes to be, enchanted by the beauty of a few words from Racine, la fille de Minos et de Pasiphae—words, Bloch says, that have the supreme merit of meaning nothing. Proust's narrator then speaks of the insoluble problem raised by the existence of “beauty denuded of reason.”³⁷ But the magic of Racine's line, if it has any, depends entirely on its context and on the images it evokes, and not at all on the sound or look of the words. To one who grew up with the figures of Norse and Germanic mythology, the lines of Wagner's Ring may carry an added “Blochian” force.

For the Ring, Wagner forged an alliterative verse style entirely different from that employed in his earlier works. From the beginning the Ring has been both the most admired and the most denigrated of Wagner's libretti. In 1909, in a doctoral dissertation on the language of the Ring, John Schuler commented:

It is interesting to note that some important critics have unrestricted praise for the poetry of the Ring but speak disdainfully of the alliteration; while others extol its merits and condemn the poem. Julian Schmidt calls it “Old-Frankonian twaddle”; [Eduard] Hanslick “A frightfully short dog-trot”; and when “Parsifal” appeared he was glad “to be rid of this childish tittle-tattle” … Georg Witkowski thinks that the vast thought-content and the dramatic importance of the Ring place it in the domain of true elevated tragedy; but the freakish external form which applies alliteration with utter want of intelligence, the language which is intentionally antiquated and distorted by numberless word-plays, impair its dramatic value. Dr. Karl Koestlin, on the other hand, holds just the opposite view. He sees no value in it from the viewpoint of tragedy, but has almost unlimited praise for it as a poem.³⁸

Wagner, who had been working on the text of the Ring since 1848, and who would continue to alter it until 1876, finished the first version of the work in 1852. In the following year he had a small private edition of the text published at his own expense (with borrowed funds) and sent out copies to a few friends. He himself gave a dramatic reading of the Ring to an invited audience at the Hotel Baur au Lac at Zurich in 1853.³⁹ During 1854 Wagner developed an enormous admiration for the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, and on Christmas of that year he sent a copy of the Ring to the philosopher at Frankfurt.⁴⁰ Schopenhauer's assessment of it, coming as it does from a master of German prose in his own right, deserves notice. The philosopher remarked to one of his friends: “The man [Wagner] is a poet, not a musician!” And to one of his visitors Schopenhauer said: “Tell your friend Wagner … he should give music up, he has more genius as a poet! I, Schopenhauer, remain true to Rossini and Mozart.” In a letter of 1855 Schopenhauer wrote that he had heard one of Wagner's operas in Frankfurt and intended to hear others; once again he praised the Ring as a work of poetry.⁴¹

The reaction of another reader of the Ring, Ferdinand Lassalle, is worth nothing here. Lassalle was the son of a German Jewish merchant, the author of two scholarly works on philosophy and several political-economic pamphlets, and a founder (in 1863) of the German Workers Party. He was given a copy of the Ring by Hans von Bülow, at the time the husband of the future Cosima Wagner. In the spring of 1862 Lassalle wrote to von Bülow: “I began reading the Ring yesterday morning, was unhappy and angry when I had to go out for twenty minutes around two o'clock, returned as quickly as possible, gave orders not to be disturbed by anyone, was finished with the book at five o'clock, immediately began a second reading, finished this too on the same night, could hardly fall asleep, and even today my soul is so full that I can still think of nothing else, of nothing at all.” Lassalle then says that a “purely poetic view of Wagner's work of art” as yet escapes him, for he is totally involved by the question, the answer to which is not yet clear, of the meaning intended by Wagner in thus restating the old Norse myths. He continues:

Naturally this does not in the least, not in the slightest, diminish the quite inexpressible merit of the poet, the intoxicating beauties of the work, the incomparable power of expression, which often had me reading with bated breath, the ecstatic conception of the whole, accessible only to the expert connoisseur of the subject matter. Only Wagner, the poet of Elsa and Tannhäuser, was capable of this! To me Wagner is one of the absolutely few natures who offers and confirms the certainty that despite the terrible decay surrounding us, there is in the Germans something more than in any other people, provided the German spirit rises up in its true greatness.⁴²

Aside from his lack of clarity as to the overall meaning of Wagner's Ring, Lassalle wondered whether the episode in which Wotan's spear (with its runically engraved law of contract) is shattered by Siegfried's sword could be found in the Edda or in The Song of the Volsungs. He himself, he told von Bülow, could recall it in neither of these old poems.⁴³ As Lassalle suspected, this episode (as well as numberless others in Wagner's Ring) were invented by Wagner himself and endowed with special meaning. I have argued elsewhere that the shattering of Wotan's lance—which bars the approach to Brünnhilde—by Siegfried's sword and the appearance of the perfected, male-female human being of the future, represent the downfall of purely male egoism. Wotan bears a relationship to Wagner's revised view of the swan-knight Lohengrin. For in 1851 Wagner achieved a new understanding of his Elsa, speaking of “my Lohengrin, whom I had to abandon in order to arrive with certainty on the track of the truly womanly that would bring salvation to me and all the world, after male egoism (even in the noblest form) had shattered before this principle in self-destruction. Elsa … had made me a complete revolutionary.”⁴⁴

In writing the Ring Wagner made very free use of an alliterative verse form (called in German Stabreim) found in the Norse poetic Edda, the Old English poem Beowulf, and Old German poetry in general. After the celebrated musical prelude culminating in the lalling song of the Rhine maiden Woglinde, the Ring opens at the bottom of the Rhine, where three Rhine maidens are keeping watch over the gold. The Nibelung Alberich, an ugly powerful dwarf, makes his way up from the depths of the earth and accosts the Rhine maidens.

He he! Ihr Nicker!
Wie seid ihr niedlich, neidliches Volk!
Aus Nibelheim's Nacht
naht' ich euch gern, neigtet ihr euch zu mir.

An English and a French translation of this passage follow.

Hey, hey, you nymphs!
How inviting you look, enviable creatures!
From Nibelheim's night
I'd gladly draw near if you'd but come down to me

and

He He! Les nixes!
Que vous êtes mignonnes, et enviables!
Du ténébreux Nibelheim
j'aimerais venir vers vous si vous veniez vers mois.(45)

Although the alliterative Nicker-niedlich-neidliches-Nibelheims-Nacht-naht'-neigtet sequence, and the alternating assonance of niedlich-neidliches-Nibelheims-neigtet are reflected to some extent in “nymphs-inviting-enviable-Nibelheim's-night-near” (less so in the French translation), the effect is entirely different. The insistently repetitive “n” sounds that begin the seven words in the original German express Alberich's forceful insistence, which he shows when he tries and fails to seize each one of the Rhine maidens in turn. The word Nicker, moreover, is not precisely the equivalent of “nymph” or “nixy” (nixe). It suggests Nickel (a derogatory name for a female) and Nickelmann (a water sprite), but its current meaning is “nodder”—someone whose head is nodding in an intermittent doze. This meaning points back to a warning already given by Flosshilde, the most responsible of the three Rhine maidens, that they are neglecting their assigned task. When the gold comes into view one of the two sisters (Wellgunde) informs Alberich that from it can be forged a ring that will confer on the owner power without limits, and the other (Woglinde) that only one who will forswear love can “force” the gold into a ring. She and her sister believe that no living being will do this. But Alberich sees things differently: He curses love, seizes the gold, and hastily disappears into the depths of the earth, laughing malignantly.

Woglinde's words are worth considering. She sings:

Nur wer der Minne Macht versagt,
nur wer der Liebe Lust verjagt,
nur der erzielt sich den Zauber,
zum Reif zu zwingen das Gold.

The translations, as before, are:

Only he who forswears love's power,
Only he who forfeits love's delight,
Only he can obtain the magic
To fashion the gold into a ring.
Celui seul qui renierait les lois de l'Amour,
en bannerait la joir,
pourrait contraindre par un charme
l'Anneau a sortir de l'or.

Both translations lack the poetic force of the original, and they fail to make the meaning, as Alberich understands it, plain. For, he reflects to himself, once the world is in his hands, can he not satisfy his sexual desires at will? Forget about love, then! Think about lust! Where Woglinde's words imply that love and its pleasures are inseparable, Alberich sees that he will be able to distill the pure alcohol of lust from the wine of love. He sings:

Erzwäng ich nicht Liebe,
doch listig erzwäng ich mir Lust?

This is given, without the force of the antithesis, in two translations.

If I cannot extort love
then by cunning can I obtain pleasure?

and

Renoncant a l'Amour
j'aurais cependant le plaisir?(46)

In his essay of 1848 on the Nibelung myth Wagner says that Siegfried was originally a god of light, a sun-god who kissed the earth and its treasures awake at dawn, only to be treacherously slain at the end of each day and drawn down into Nibelung darkness. The later Siegfried of the Norse sagas became a human hero, and the treasure of the earth became the Nibelung's hoard. The hoard represents earthly power; whoever possesses it becomes a Nibelung. Eventually, Wagner says, the treasure of the Holy Grail underwent mythical fusion with the hoard of the Nibelungs, and the West turned from Rome to Jerusalem in search of salvation; still later the Grail moved east to the homeland of the Aryan peoples.⁴⁷

The image of Siegfried as sun-god is still evident in Wagner's Ring. Alberich's attention is first drawn to the gold of the Rhine by Woglinde's outcry.

Lugt, Schwestern!
Die Weckerin lacht in den Grund.
(Look, sisters! The waker smiles into the depths.)

Wellgunde adds:

Durch den grünen Schwall
den wonnigen Schläfer sie grüsst.
(Through the green swell she greets the blissful sleeper.)

And Flosshilde:

Jetzt küsst sie sein Auge,
dass er es öff'ne;
schaut, es lächelt
in lichtem Schein:
(Now she kisses his eye to open it;
see! it smiles in the gleaming light:)

The “waker” (die Weckerin) here is female; the sleeping treasure, or “blissful sleeper” is male.⁴⁸

In pursuit of this cluster of images we move on to the third act of Siegfried. After having penetrated the magic fire that surrounds Brünnhilde's mountain, the hero kisses her awake. Brünnhilde opens her eyes and hails Siegfried in the passage cited in connection with Wagner's short story “A Happy Evening.”

Heil dir, Sonne!
Heil dir, Licht!
Heil dir, leuchtender Tag!
Lang' war mein Schlaf
(Hail, O sun! Hail, O light! Hail, O
shining day! Long was my sleep.)

This passage—and probably the similar passage in “A Happy Evening” as well—clearly reflects Brynnhild's “hailing” in the Poetic Edda, after she has been awakened from her long sleep by the hero Sigurd. Ludwig Ettmüller's translation of the Edda, published in 1837, could have been Wagner's source.⁴⁹

One of the images, like a recurring leitmotif, appears again in Götterdämmerung, after Siegfried has been stabbed in the back by Alberich's half-human son, Hagen (who was engendered not by love, but by lust on one side and greed on the other). As light rapidly dims before Siegfried's eyes he sings:

Brünnhilde—
heilige Braut—
wach' auf! öffne dein Auge!—
Der Wecker kam;
er küsst dich wach.
(Brünnhilde—holy bride—awake!
Open your eyes! … The Waker came;
he kissed you awake).(50)

Even without the pulsating musical phrase that so strangely points up the words “the Waker came” in Siegfried, as heard on the stage, this scene has unique evocative force. (The reader will note that throughout I ignore an all-important topic: the shifting relationship among the words, the melodies to which they are sung, and the intricate web of orchestral music in the background.) To feel that force, however, we must be aware that in the original myth, Siegfried was the “Waker,” the sun-god who kissed the treasures of the earth awake each morning. The woman Brünnhilde—to one who has not forsworn love for power—is the greatest of these treasures (she is the daughter of the earth goddess Erda, by Wotan, in Wagner's free version of the myth). In Das Rheingold a gender transformation is evident: a “male” sleeper is kissed awake by a “female” (die Weckerin, die Sonne). In Siegfried the “Waker” is again male, and the sleeper female. The interchange of gender is perhaps meant to emphasize what Wagner wrote in explanation to his friend August Röckel in January, 1854: “Siegfried alone (the man alone) is not the perfected ‘human being’ (der vollkommene ‘Mensch’). He is merely the half; only with Brünnhilde does he become the savior.” (The union of the two separated beings into a perfect whole is implied by Siegfried and Brünnhilde themselves when they sing their parting duet at the beginning of Götterdämmerung.)⁵¹ Claude Lévi-Strauss has called Wagner “the undeniable originator of the structural analysis of myths.” Although Lévi-Strauss made reference here to musical rather than verbal analysis, we can perhaps understand why he, borrowing from Stephen Mallarmé's poem, speaks of his lifetime reverence for “that God, Richard Wagner.”⁵²

Writing in 1904 on Wagner's verse, Wolfgang Golther says: “In the Ring a whole new language takes command, not simply because end-rhyme is dropped and Stabreim taken up, but above all because of the natural, free rhythms … Wagner … by no means adopts the old-German epic Stabreim verse line; rather he shapes his self-sufficient dramatic verse anew, basing it on the laws of German speech accent.” There is, Golther continues, “free interchange of so-called iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, and dactylic feet—or, better, of combined feet of one, two, or three syllables.”⁵³ As these words imply, the traditional classification of quantitative feet used in Greek and Roman poetry does not fit with the non-quantitative, accented feet of Norse, Germanic or Old English verse. In John Schuler's exhaustive analysis of alliterative and assonantal patterns in the verse of the Ring, the traditional classification of feet is ignored entirely. Schuler also illustrates the multiplicity of Wagner's verse forms as compared with the relatively unvaried patterns of traditional Stabreim.⁵⁴

Unlike Schopenhauer, Lassalle, and Wagner's small circle of intimate friends and admirers, those of us who read the Ring today can hardly succeed in separating the verse rhythm from the accompanying musical rhythm. Since musical rhythms are by nature quantitative as well as accentual, it is possible to describe them in terms of the rhythms of Greek and Roman verse. (For the past one hundred years or so the reverse has been done, the quantitative feet being described by means of musical notation.) In her path-breaking book Wagner's Dramas and Greek Tragedy, Pearl Cleveland Wilson pointed out some resemblances between typical Greek lyric rhythms and Wagner's musical rhythms. The so-called Nature leitmotif in the Ring is a trochaic dipody (–s / (–s / (–s / (–s), the final short syllable being omitted. She states that this leitmotif is used in the Ring to produce effects similar to those produced by references to Zeus in the choral odes of the Oresteia, adding, “It is interesting, therefore, to note that the rhythm of this motive is the same as the rhythm of the first lyric reference to Zeus in the Agamemnon, 160ff.” Other Greek lyric rhythms used in the Ring are the iambic (– / s– / s–), in Donner's leitmotif, the cretic (–s–), in the “fate” motif, the logaoedic, in the “lalling” song of the first Rhine maiden, the dactylic, choriambic, ionic, and the dochmiac. The rhythms in Greek and Roman verse are determined by the length of the successive syllables. “But,” says Wilson, “we may read Wagner's text without getting any idea of the variety of rhythm, even in the vocal parts, while the effects often produced by conflicting rhythms in the orchestra must, of course, be heard to be appreciated.” She gives us as illustrative examples the sailor's song, “Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu,” and Kurwenal's reply to Isolde, “Wer Kornwalls Kron' und Englands Erb',” both in the first act of Tristan, remarking that to the reader they seem rhythmically identical, but Wagner makes of the former a “graceful phrase in three-quarter metre,” and of the latter a “heavy, emphatic phrase in four-four metre filling four measures.”⁵⁵

Wagner's skill with words was perhaps most highly praised by Friedrich Nietzsche. Writing in 1876, in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Nietzsche has this to say:

A zestful feeling for the German language runs through Wagner's poetry, a heartiness and ingenuousness in his dealings with it such as cannot be found in any German other than Goethe. Full-bodied expressiveness, audacious brevity, power and rhythmic variety, an extraordinary wealth of meaningful words, syntactical simplicity, an almost unique inventiveness in the language of surging feelings and longings, at times a quite pure, sparkling folkishness and proverbiality—such features might be added up yet others, the mightiest and most admirable of all, go unnoticed. Whoever reads two such poems as Tristan and the Meistersinger one after the other will feel the same astonishment and hesitation before the language as before the music: namely that it was possible to obtain creative command over two worlds as different in form, color and structure as they are in soul.⁵⁶

Not only had Wagner shaped a new language for each new work, said Nietzsche, he had “forced language back into a primal state, where it hardly thinks in terms of concepts, where language is itself poetry, image, feeling. … Anyone else would have failed, for our language seems almost too old and worn out for such a demand.” But Wagner's “blow on the rock set free an abounding source.”⁵⁷

This brilliant and apparently original insight into Wagner's creative use of language differs little from what Wagner himself had written sixteen years earlier in his “Open Letter to a French Friend (Frederic Villot).” The letter, some fifty pages in length, was prefaced to the prose translations into French of Wagner's Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan by Paul Challemel-Lacour, who translated the letter as well. (In 1861 the letter, ironically titled “Zukunftsmusik” [“Music of the Future”—the quotation marks are Wagner's] was published in the original German by J. J. Weber of Leipzig.⁵⁸) Words, Wagner told his French audience, had lost touch with their metaphorical roots, and in consequence language was losing touch with concrete reality. Hence the importance of music in our time:

The metaphysical necessity of the discovery of this entirely new means of communication precisely in our own time seems to me to lie in the ever more conventional forms taken on by modern verbal languages. When we look more closely at the developmental history of these languages we hit, in the so-called roots of words, even today on a primal origin that clearly reveals how the formation of the concept of an object corresponded in the first beginnings almost completely to the subjective feeling engendered by it; and the assumption that the first speech of human beings must have had a likeness to song may not appear entirely ludicrous. From what was in any case an entirely sensuous, subjectively felt meaning of words human language became ever more abstract, so that in the end only a conventional meaning of words remained, and thus all share in understanding was withdrawn from the feelings.⁵⁹

The poet, Wagner continued, must now proceed in one of two directions, toward “an inner fusion with music,” or further into “the field of the abstract.” But the poet who made the second choice was abandoning the muse of poetry. True poetry is “that depiction of the living image of humanity in which all motives clarifiable solely by abstract thought vanish, to reappear instead as motives of purely human feeling (rein menschlichen Gefühles).”⁶⁰ Ten years later, in his essay on Beethoven, Wagner again touched on the lost paradise of primal poetizing, which he traced to the introduction of letters. “From that time on … language, which was until then taking shape, as if it were alive, in a steady process of natural development, deteriorates and stiffens in a process of crystallization; the poetic art becomes the art of decking out the old myths, now no longer to be invented anew, and ends as rhetoric and dialectic.” The last downward steps in the degradation of verbal language was “the invention of newspapers, and the full bloom of journalism” in our time.⁶¹ “Newspeak,” Orwell would christen it in 1948.

The above statements by Wagner will perhaps recall to today's reader some of Martin Heidegger's utterances on the same topic, for example, his comment of 1935 on the need to counteract the decay of language that we see taking place all about us. “We … seek to win back again the undestroyed naming-force of speech and words; for words and speech are not mere hulls in which things are packed away for verbal and written interchange. Things first come into being and exist through the word, through speech. Hence the misuse of speech (Sprache) in mere chatter (Gerede), in catchwords and cliches, destroys our true relation to things.”⁶² Later, in 1950, Heidegger added: “Language is itself, in the essential sense, poetry … Language … guards and preserves the primordial essence of poetry.”⁶³ Heidegger, a close student of Nietzsche, was no doubt aware of Nietzsche's assertion that Wagner had “forced language back into a primal state … where language is itself poetry, image, feeling,” and that Wagner had released the living stream of language “with a blow on the rock.”⁶⁴ The writings of Ezra Pound on the theory and practice of poetry, likewise, show a strong resemblance to those of Wagner.⁶⁵

Notes

1. Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (8 vols.; 1895-99, 2nd ed.; rpr. St. Clair Shores, Mich., 1972).

2. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (10 vols.; 1887-88, 2nd ed.; rpr. Hildesheim, 1976).

3. Richard Wagner, “The Work and Mission of My Life,” North American Review, CXXIV (August, 1879), 107-24 and (September, 1879), 238-58.

4. Richard Wagner, Mein Leben (Munich, 1911); Wagner, My Life, authorized translation (1911; rpr. New York, 1972); Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray, ed. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1983). Cf. my book reviews of the authorized translation and the Gray-Whittall version in Opera Quarterly, I (Autumn, 1983), 179-81, and II (Winter, 1984), 164-65, respectively, for a discussion of the authorized translator's errors and Gray's corrections.

5. Richard Wagner, Richard Wagners Briefe in Originalausgaben, ed. Erich Kloss (17 vols. in 9; Leipzig, 1910-1913); Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf (4 vols.; Leipzig, 1967-).

6. Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, I, 136-42.

7. Wagner, Mein Leben, passim. A letter dated October 28, 1840, from Minna Wagner to Theodor Apel, a well-to-do friend, states that Richard has just been taken to debtors' prison. See Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, I, 61; Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, I, 301.

8. Léon Guichard, La musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme (Paris, 1955), 177; Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, I, 60.

9. Wagner, Mein Leben, I, 207; George Sand, Mouny-Robin (Paris, 1869), 251-77 (bound with Simon); Grange Woolley, Richard Wagner et le symbolisme français: Les rapports principaux entre le wagnérisme et l'évolution de l'idée symboliste (Paris, 1931), 28-29.

10. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke (1957-62), I, 11-27.

11. Wagner, “Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, I, 90-114, passim. According to Gustave Flaubert's dictionary of received views, the word Goddam is “the foundation of the English language” (Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet [2 vols.; Paris, 1945], II, 272).

12. Cf. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction, 134-35.

13. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke (1957-62), I, 5-6.

14. Wolzogen, E. T. A. Hoffmann und Richard Wagner, 11-12.

15. Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works (3 vols.; Moscow, 1969), I, 206-208. Marx's characterization of the July monarchy as a “joint-stock company for the exploitation of France's national wealth … Louis Philippe was the director of this company—Robert Macaire on the throne” (ibid., 208) is witty and probably accurate (Robert Macaire, rogue and cheat, was made famous by the celebrated actor Frederick Lemaitre in 1823 and caricatured later by Honoré Daumier; the latter's caricature of the bloated Louis Philippe swallowing enormous budgets cost him six months in prison.)

16. Wagner, “Ein Ende in Paris,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, I, 114-36.

17. George Sand, Consuelo: A Romance of Venice (New York, [1856]), 331.

18. Wagner, “Ein glücklicher Abend,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, I, 136-49.

19. Wagner, “Siegfried,” ibid., VI, 166.

20. Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, I, 20.

21. On Geyer's possibly closer relationship to Wagner, see Chapter 5 herein.

22. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, I, 288.

23. Wagner, Mein Leben, II, 795-96.

24. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, I, 7.

25. Wagner, Mein Leben, I, 66-67.

26. Ibid., 397-98.

27. Ibid., 398-400.

28. Richard Wagner, Mein Leben, ed. Wilhelm Altmann (2 vols.; Leipzig, 1923), I, 10.

29. I have used some of this material in a review of the authorized translation.

30. Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck (Berlin, 1904), 110.

31. Cf. Paul Bekker, Richard Wagner: His Life in His Work, trans. M. M. Bozman (1931; rpr. Westport, Conn., 1971), 487, 498-500.

32. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, II, 274-75.

33. Wagner, Mein Leben, II, 488-89. I have used some of this material in my review of Newman's The Life of Richard Wagner, in Opera Quarterly, I (Autumn, 1983), 184-86.

34. Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays, ed. Charles Osborn (London, 1973), 7-8.

35. Cf. Leo Tolstoy, Journal intime, trans. Natacha Rostova and Mgte. Jean-Debrit (Paris, 1917), 123; Tolstoy's Letters, ed. and trans. R. F. Christian, (2 vols.; London, 1978), I, 666; Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York, 1968), 28-72.

36. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York, 1975), 14.

37. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (3 vols.; Paris, 1969), I, 90, 93.

38. John Schuler, The Language of Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen (Lancaster, Pa., 1908), 45-46.

39. Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, II, 606.

40. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, II, 432.

41. Felix Gotthelf, “Schopenhauer und Richard Wagner,” in Viertes Jahrbuch der Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft (Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1968), 42. Schopenhauer's admiration was tempered by what he saw as Wagner's too-free use of the German language (cf. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, II, 432-33, for Schopenhauer's marginal comments on his copy of the Ring).

42. Ferdinand Lassalle, Ferdinand Lassalle; Der Mensch und Politiker in Selbstzeugnissen, ed. Konrad Haenisch (Leipzig, 1925), 195-97.

43. Ibid., 198.

44. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction, 58-59. Commentators on Lohengrin, beginning with Joachim Raff in 1854, usually overlook Wagner's reinterpretation, in 1851, of Elsa, Lohengrin, and the “forbidden question.” But Henri Lichtenberger, basing himself on the same passages in Wagner's writings that I made use of in 1979, pointed to the Elsa = Brünnhilde and Lohengrin = Wotan equations eighty years ago in his Richard Wagner poète et penseur, pp. 133-34. Charlotte Teller's feminist novel The Cage (1907) appears to be structurally based on the reinterpreted Lohengrin (cf. The Dream of Self-Destruction, 203).

45. The English and French translations here, as well as the original German, are taken from the libretto accompanying the Philips recording of the Bayreuth Ring, conducted by Pierre Boulez.

46. Libretto accompanying the Philips recording of the Bayreuth Ring, conducted by Pierre Boulez. For the most part, libretti supplied with recordings of Das Rheingold read, as in this instance, “versagt.” An exception is the libretto accompanying Sir Georg Solti's recording, which has “entsagt.” It is said on good authority that Wagner himself preferred “entsagt.” Nevertheless, vol. V, p. 211, of Wagner's Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, published during his lifetime, has “versagt.” Julius Kapp in his translation has “entsagt” (Richard Wagner, Richard Wagners gesammelte Schriften, ed. Julius Kapp [14 vols. in 5; Leipzig, 1914], IV, 24).

47. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction, 42-43.

48. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, V, 209 (my translation).

49. Ibid., VI, 166 (my translation). In Ludwig Ettmüller's “Songs of the Edda of the Nibelungs” Brynhild sings:

    Lang ich schlief
    lang schlummert' ich,
    lang ist der Leute Leid.

    After telling Sigurd that she is called “Sigurdisa” and that she is a Valkyrie, she sings:

    Heil dir, Tag,
    Heil euch Tagessöhnen,
    Heil dir, Nacht und Nährling!

    (In Die Lieder der Edda von den Nibelungen. Stabreimende Verdeutschung [Zurich, 1837], 21).

50. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, VI, 246 (my translation).

51. Cf. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction, 67.

52. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: I, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York, 1975), 15. Lévi-Strauss states that his own comparison of myth analysis to the analysis of a musical score was derived from “Wagner's discovery that the structure of myths can be revealed through a musical score.” (Lévi-Strauss uses musical paradigms in his analysis of myths, e.g. “theme and variation,” “sonata,” etc.)

53. Wolfgang Golther, Richard Wagner als Dichter (Berlin, 1904), 7-9. This work forms part of a collection of monographs edited by the eminent Danish literary critic Georg Morris Cohen Brandes.

54. Schuler, The Language of Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen, 50-63. The medieval German Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs), which Wagner had in his Dresden library in Simrock's modern German translation, is made up of stanzas of four long lines rhymed aabb; each line is divided into two sections, one with a feminine ending, one with a masculine. Alliteration is not a feature.

55. Wilson, Wagner's Dramas and Greek Tragedy, 90-94, passim. The “victory” motif on which Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is based is a fourth paeonic foot (sss–). And the unifying rhythmic figure of the allegretto movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is a continuous series of stately Vergilian dactyls and spondees (–ss / – – / –ss / – –) on which a rhythmic melody of the same character is superimposed.

56. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke; Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, (8 pts; Berlin, 1967-77), pt. 4, vol. I, p. 59.

57. Ibid., 58. Wagner used a similar metaphor in the Dresden Volksblätter in 1849, where he has the goddess of Revolution say, “I annihilate what exists, and whither I turn there wells forth fresh life from the dead rock” (Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction, 47-48).

58. Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, III, 54-55. Villot was Conservator of the Picture Museums at the Louvre (Wagner, Prose Works, III, 294).

59. Wagner, “Zukunftsmusik,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, VII, 87-137; see also 110-11.

60. Ibid., 94-95, 104.

61. Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction, 147-48.

62. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen, 1953), 11.

63. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main, 1950), 61.

64. “When dealing with German words,” writes Thomas Langan, “Heidegger likes to re-invent something of the feeling of the ‘ancient forests’ first by splitting these words into their components … this at one blow cuts underneath the accumulations of habitual interpretation” (The Meaning of Heidegger: A Critical Study of an Existentialist Phenomenology [New York, 1959], 114).

65. In his essay “Vorticism” Pound distinguished two kinds of poetry: lyric poetry, “where music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech,” and imagist poetry, “where painting or sculpture seems as if it were ‘just coming over into speech.’” He castigated “contemporary poets who escape from … the indefinitely difficult art of good prose by pouring themselves into verses” (Fortnightly Review, CII [September 1, 1914], 461-71). The following statements are drawn from Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York, 1968): “Go in fear of abstractions” (p. 5); “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase” (p. 3); “poetry withers and ‘dries out’ when it leaves music, or at least an imagined music too far behind” (p. 437); “Poets who will not study music are defective” (p. 437). Pound refused to countenance the chopped-up prose put forward as poetry by some writers of vers libre, and he suggested that poets should “attempt to approximate classical quantitative metres” (p. 13). Cf. also the following statement by Ernest Fenollosa: “Our ancestors built the accumulation of metaphor into structures of language and into systems of thought. Languages of today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. Nature would seem to have become less and less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. … A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary. Only scholars and poets feel painfully back along the thread of our etymologies and piece together our diction, as best they may, from forgotten fragments” (Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound [New York, 1936] 28-29).