4 - Richard Wagner and the depths of time

Summary

In September of 1839, Richard Wagner arrived in Paris hoping to make his fortune as a composer of grand opera. Unable to secure a performance of Rienzi in the French capital and in need of funds, he sold the scenario of Der fliegende Holländer to the director of the Opéra for 500 francs. The story attracted the attention of an aspiring composer named Josef Dessauer, who requested that Wagner draft a similar scenario for his own use. In his autobiography, Wagner recalled how he settled on the “attractive and strange” material of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Mines at Falun,” a tale already familiar to us. Since Wagner was an avid reader of Hoffmann’s stories in his teens, it is not surprising that he found the troubled young sailor Elis Fröbom to be a suitable analogue to the wandering Dutchman, nor that the dualism of above and below ground seemed an appropriate substitute for land and sea. Wagner finished a prose sketch for the “Mines” tale in March 1842, but to no avail: Dessauer’s project was rejected by the Opéra. Out of options in Paris, Wagner returned to Germany the following month.

Wagner’s dramatization of “The Mines at Falun” never made it to the stage, but the composer’s later projects arguably bear the imprint of the subject matter and scenic depths of Hoffmann’s tale. In both the “Mines” scenario and Tannhäuser, which Wagner began to draft only three months later, the surface world of socially sanctioned love (represented by Ulla and Elisabeth, respectively) exists in tension with underground realms of temptation: the Queen and her maidens in “The Mines at Falun” and Venus’s love-grotto in Tannhäuser. The subterranean reappears in a more sinister guise in Das Rheingold, where the dwarf Alberich, having renounced love, uses the magic ring he forged from the Rhinegold to enslave his fellow cavern-dwelling Nibelungs. Alberich is dramatically and temperamentally related to Elis, who in Wagner’s sketch rejects the prospect of Ulla’s love and pledges himself to the underground Queen. Marc Weiner has noted the similarity between Wagner’s rendering of Elis’s capitulation – “Ha, those above us are false and treacherous” – and the line that closes Das Rheingold, sung by those slippery representatives of nature’s purity, the Rhinemaidens: “Traulich und treu ist’s nur in der Tiefe: falsch und feig ist, was dort oben sich freut!” (“Only in the depths is there comfort and faithfulness: false and cowardly is what frolics above!”)