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Theorizing ‘Death’ The Meaning of Negation as a Hegelian Inheritance in Richard Wagner's Musik als Idee
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
Extract
If the phenomenon of, or even ‘obsession’ with, the aestheticization of ‘death’ in nineteenth-century German culture was central to Schopenhauer's philosophy, its firm roots lay in Hegel's philosophy.
Hegel is the first thinker to recognize the force of negation; for him negativity creates a positive action: it is brought into presence carried forward by the dialectical activity of the Spirit. It is within this context, as I shall argue in the present article, that Wagner's notion of ‘negativity’, or the ‘utopian celebration of nothingness and death’, appears in his work. Consequently, it is within this framework of thought that Wagner's music acts – or is intended to act – as Musik als Idee.
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References
1 See Higonnet, Margaret, ‘Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century’, Poetics Today, 61–2 (1985): 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Higonnet talks about the popularity of women and death as an aesthetic image in nineteenth century.
2 See relevant critiques of Schopenhauer's, The World as Will and Representation by Mann, Thomas, Buddenbrooks, trans. Lowe-Porter, H.T. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957): 509Google Scholar ; also , Freud, Siegmund, On Metapsychology, The Penguin Freud, vol. II (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984): 322Google Scholar ; for more details, see Tambling, Jeremy, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996): 36–7Google Scholar.
3 See Deathridge, John, ‘Post-mortem on Isolde’, New German Critique, 69 (fall 1996): 99–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar : 102; Deathridge talks about Isolde's death scene which I will present in more detail in the last section of the present article.
4 Nietzsche is one of the first intellectuals who acknowledges the Hegelian quality in Wagner's music by observing: ‘Lassen wir die Moral aus dem Spiele: Hegel ist ein G e s c h m a c k … Und nicht nur ein deutscher, sondern ein europäischer Geschmack! –Ein Geschmack, den Wagner begriff!–dem er sich gewachsen füllte! den er verewigt hat!–Er machte bloss die Nutzanwendung auf die Musik–er erfand sich einen Stil, der “unendliches bedeutet”,–er wurde der E r b e H e g e l 's … Die Musik als “Idee”– – ’(Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Der Fall Wagner’ (1888), in Nachgelassene Schriften, V13 (August 1888–Anfang Januar, 1889) (Berlin: Vintage Books, 1969): 30.
5 My argument on the changes of Wagner's aesthetics is in agreement with Nietzsche's views on this issue; Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, argues that ‘[Wagner's] later aesthetic views completely contradict his earlier ones … What most impresses one is the radical change in his notion of the position of music itself …’( Nietzsche, , The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Golffing, Francis (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956): 237)Google Scholar . Nietzsche believed that Wagner's later aesthetic views perceive music as playing a metaphysical role in agreement with Schopenhauer's ideas. However, my view, which is developed extensively in my PhD thesis, is that Wagner's late creativity – both theory and praxis – creates a Hegelian historiography of spirit, with music symbolizing the process of the evolution of spirit itself. Wagner's late views and theories construct a united system of thought that controls significant aspects of his stylistic methodologies of that period (the example of Liebestod can be seen from this point of view). This is owing to a paradox which I characterize as ‘gradual integration of Wagner's theory into praxis’. Through the hermeneutic processes of theory and music, Wagner becomes conscious of their underlying principles. As a consequence, the text's intentions are subsumed in the art's project. (See Siopsi, Anastasia, Richard Wagner's ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’: The Reforging of the Sword or, towards a Reconstruction of the People's Consciousness (University of East Anglia, 1996).)Google Scholar
6 Prose citations are in English. For Wagner's prose citations I have used the only complete English edition of Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. Ellis, William Ashton, 8 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1892–1899)Google Scholar ; hereafter cited as PW. The standard edition of the original German prose is Wagner, Richard, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd edn, 10 vols (Leipzig, n.d. [1911–1916]: reprint Hildesheim, 1976); hereafter cited as SSDGoogle Scholar.
7 Wagner's most important late writings that are taken into account in the present essay are as follows: Zukunftsmusik (1860), Über Staat und Religion (1864), Was ist deutsch? (1865), Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik (1867), Zum Judenthum in der Musik (1869), Beethoven (1870), Über die Bestimmung der Oper (1871), Über Schauspieler und Sänger (1872), Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama (1879), Wollen wir hoffen? (1879), Religion und Kunst (1880), Metaphisik, Kunst und Religion, Moral, Christenthum (1870–1882).
8 Wagner's most important essays of the period c. 1848–52 are Entwurf zur Organization eines deutschen National-Theaters für das Königreich Sachsen (1848), Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849), Die Revolution (1849), Theater-Reform (1849), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850), Die Wibelungen (1850), Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde (1851), Oper und Drama (1852).
9 It is through the notion of experience that Wagner, in his late theory, perceives humanity's evolution so that the idea of ‘time’ is heavily bound up with society's experience of a succession of different states.
10 Meaning through music according to Schiller and, also, in line with Wagner's earlier theories; for the expression see Hans Schulte, ‘Work and Music, Schiller's “Reich des Klanges”’, in The Romantic Tradition: German Literature and Music in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Chapple, G., Hall, F. and Schulte, H. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992): 133–64: 163 (note 17)Google Scholar.
11 Wagner, R., Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik (German Art and German Politics), [1867]Google Scholar , SSD VIII: 30–124; PW IV: 35–135: 123.
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13 See Wagner's, Religion und Kunst (1880)Google Scholar ; I quote a characteristic sentence: ‘Speaking strictly, the only art that fully corresponds with the Christian belief is Music …’ (PW VI: 223).
14 See PW VI; for example, I quote: ‘Have we not the actual documents of life set down for us in our history that marks each lesson by a time example? Let us read it aright, this history, in spirit and in truth…’ (PW VI: 246).
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16 See PW VI: 251; here Wagner states: ‘I grew convinced that Art can only prosper on the basis of true Morals, and thus could but ascribe to it a mission all the higher when I found it altogether one with true Religion.’ Additionally, according to Wagner's later writings, art has the unique ability of being directly related with religion and, thus, in turn, to articulate its principles in the most suitable manner.
17 The term Aufhebung is used by Hegel for the characterization of the transformation by which a constitutive feature of a primitive form of relation is maintained in a modified form within a more sophisticated relationship.
18 Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie, J.B. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931): 492.Google Scholar
19 Although P.W. Ellis has translated Er-innerung as ‘self-collection’, I think that ‘self-inwardization’ reflects its concept better as I hope might be clear in the overall development of my argument of the notion Erinnerung.
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22 See Hegel, G.W.F., Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols, I, trans. Speirs, R.E.B. and Sanderson, J.B. (New York: Humanities Press, 1962): 162Google Scholar ; also, in Phänomenologie I find a similar thought expressed as such: ‘reality is cancelled for spiritual possibilities, … immediacy has been overcome and brought under the control of reflection.’ (Phenomenology: 91).
23 Hegel, G.W.F., Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences [1812–16], trans. Wallace, W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975): 353.Google Scholar
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28 Kojéve, , ‘The Idea of Death’: 147.Google Scholar
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30 Ibid.: 9–10.
31 The identification of the unfulfilled ‘longing’, or ‘desire’, with death, was expressed in Wagner's Entwürfe. Gedanken. Fragmente (1849–51), as follows: ‘Where desire in not extant at all, is lifelessness; where the fulfilment of desire is checked unnaturally, i.e. activity is hindered, there is suffering, where fulfilment is altogether denied to desire, there is death’ (PW VIII: 371). Wagner applied the same concept to the notion of ‘death’ in his unfinished dramatic work Jesus von Nazareth (Opera in 5 acts (prose sketches), October 1846–1848); trans. in PW VIII: 283–340). In this work, death, as Wagner wrote, meant nothing more than ‘[the individual's] revolt against a loveless whole, … a revolt which the altogether Isolated can certainly only seal by self-destruction; but yet which is this very-destruction proclaims its own true nature, in that it was not directed to the personal death, but to a disowning of the lovelessness around [der lieblosen Allgemeinheit]’ (Eine Mitteilung an meine Freude (A Communication to my Friends) [1851], SSD IV: 230–344; PW I: 267–392: 379–80).
32 The political context of Wagner's notion of ‘death’ is included in Wagner's ‘plan’ of historical evolution, as developed in the 1840s, which may be summarized as follows. To begin with, as soon as the individual commits the ‘error’ and severs himself from nature, he enters a society where the first ethical concepts are gradually developed into a more permanent form of rules (Law), which are protected by the State. The unchanging nature of the State (in contrast to the constant renewal of art) manifests its role away from people's ‘true’ inner needs. Political States, then, result in the destruction (death) of free individuality. Thus, every ‘self-determining’ individual is in conflict with their established society and, therefore, there are the following options, both suggesting the necessary absorption of the individual into human generality: (a) death of the individual, either moral (which makes the individual a proper citizen of the State), or physical and, thus, indicating a spiritual (or metaphysical) passage of an individual into human generality (universality); (b) destruction of the State (necessity of revolution) – a more simple solution, since the State is the problem. In the second case, in the expected post-revolutionary conditions (breakdown of the State), Wagner's art, that embraces all ‘true’ values of the human spirit, will contribute to the formation of a new culture that, moreover, will ideally be understood by the public.
33 Translated from the Bayreuther Blätter, 1902, from the programme notes written by Wagner for the Vienna concert of 27 December 1863. (See Ellis, The Life of Richard Wagner, being an authorized English version of Glasenapp's, C.F.Das Leben Richard Wagners, 6 vols, VI (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1908): 307)Google Scholar.
34 Wagner, R., Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama), [1852]Google Scholar , SSD III: 222–320, IV: 1–229; PW II: 210–11.
35 Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, Paris, 29 October 1859; trans. in Richard Wagner: A Documentary Study, ed. Barth, Herbert, Mack, Dietrich and Voss, Egon (London: Oxford University Press, 1975): 189Google Scholar.
36 Wagner, R., Music of the Future, Paris and Leipzig 1861Google Scholar (written September 1860), SSD VII: 87–137; PW III: 293–345: 319.
37 Wagner, R., Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama (On the Application of Music to the Drama), [1879]Google Scholar , SSD X: 176–93; PW VI: 173–91: 176–7.
38 Dahlhaus's observations on the aesthetics of absolute music around 1870 in Germany (including Wagner's) are in agreement with my own. (See, for example, Dahlhaus, Carl, The Idea of Absolute in Music, trans. Lustig, R. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 26Google Scholar .) In another essay Dahlhaus refers to Wagner's manifestation of ‘a philosophy of absolute music’ and ‘[Wagner's] being in tune with a realistic epoch that demanded immediacy’. (See Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Wagner's Place in the History of Music’, in Wagner Handbook (London: Harvard University Press, 1992): 99–117: 105)Google Scholar.
39 We can accept Schopenhauer's influence on Wagner since he was one of the primary philosophers who organized the concept of music's reference to an ‘absolute’ into a definite ideological structure.
40 Wager, R., Beethoven, [1870]Google Scholar , SSD IX: 61–126; PW V: 57–126: 67.
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44 On the issue of Schiller's notion of ‘musical’, see Schulte, ‘Work and Music’. Schiller's notion of ‘musical’ refers not simply to music but also to other genres of art. The main reason for using the term ‘musical’ as a metaphor is his priority given to feeling in the ‘genetic triad’ of his creativity which is ‘from music – through work – to music’ (see Schulte, , ‘Work and Music’: 153)Google Scholar . Moreover, Schiller – and also Wagner – believed feeling to be projected in the most pure and authentic way by music.
45 The term ‘becoming’, or ‘organic growth’, is mainly derived from a historically oriented idea that Herder developed in his theory of the evolutionary growth of culture (see Herder's, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [1784–1785])Google Scholar . Herder's idea of the organic development of culture was also developed by the early Romantics. (For the issue of the Romantics’ organic concept of society, see Beiser, Frederick C., Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Ergang, Herder developed an ‘organic-genetic conception of culture as the expression of the national soul’, which ‘led the romanticists to place the beginning of [the German] national development in the Middle Ages. They saw the Middle Ages as the heroic age of the German nationality’ (see Ergang, Robert Reinhold, Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966): 234)Google Scholar . Such a historical mode of thought, which traces the inner relationships of historic events, was elaborated in Hegel's philosophy, which had an ideological power among the intellectuals in Germany, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. Even more, it was as if they were ‘under the spell’ of the Hegelian ‘absolute spirit’, which had transformed life into a system for it to experience; for this reason, it is difficult for us to understand whether their belief in social evolution was owing to actual historical events that were taking place in front of their eyes, or were due to the embodiment of the ‘idea of progress’ and of ‘cultural organic growth’ in their structural thinking, which Sheeham names as ‘historical structure of German thought’ (see Sheeham, James, ‘Liberalism and Society in Germany 1815–48’, Journal of Modern History, 45 (1973): 583–604:CrossRefGoogle Scholar 601). Marx's unfortunate critique of the French revolutions is a characteristic example of the case. (See some very interesting comments on Marx's critique of the French revolutions in Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, ‘Marx and the Permanent French Revolution’, in The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991): 163–76Google Scholar ; see also Gouldner, A.W., ‘Artisans and Intellectuals in the German Revolution of 1848’, Theory and Society, 12/4 (Jul. 1983): 521–32: 525.)Google Scholar
The inhabitation of such a mentality (belief in the ‘idea of progress’) within the historical context of nineteenth-century Europe corresponded to a series of ideologies (all of them having in common the belief that nations have ‘destinies’, or ‘missions’) that all pointed to a desirable perfect social order at a distant time: from nineteenth-century anarchists (some being followers of Saint-Simon) to social Darwinists and Marxist followers. The same framework was merely carried to opposite extremes in the development of the racial ideology of Gobineau.
46 On Wagner's ‘plan’ of historical evolution see note 32 of the present article.
47 Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘What is a Musical Drama?’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 1/2 (1989): 95–111: 109.Google Scholar
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50 Ibid.
51 Daverio, John, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993).Google Scholar
52 Deathridge, ‘Post-mortem on Isolde’.
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57 For more details, see Ibid.: 61.
58 See Ibid.: 61.
59 See Ibid.: 61. However, Tambling states in his introduction that his study, which attempts to see opera's history (from the nineteenth century up to the 1930s) as ‘one “discourse” among many, inflected by culture and ideology, and inflecting those in its turn’, … ‘inevitably says more about librettos than the music’; thus, as he admits, ‘this reflects [his] own limits of competence’ (see Ibid.: 8).
60 See Daverio, , Nineteenth-Century Music: 189–95.Google Scholar
61 Ibid.: 189.
62 Ibid.: 190.
63 See Mack, Barth and Voss, , eds, Richard Wagner: 189.Google Scholar
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67 See Deathridge, , ‘Post-mortem on Isolde’: 111.Google Scholar
68 For example, in Götterdämmerung, Act III, scene 3, the witnesses of the raising of Siegfried's hand to protect the ring react by remaining motionless with terror. Such a reaction – which, for Wagner, is supposed to be ‘the culminating expression of all the horrors that have heaped upon us’ ( Porges, Heinrich, Wagner Rehearsing the “Ring”: An EyeWitness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival, trans. Jacobs, R.L. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 143)Google Scholar – is necessary for the awakening of the ‘folk’, the ‘folk’ being represented on stage by the community of Gibichungs.
69 See Deathridge, , ‘Post-mortem on Isolde’: 116–18.Google Scholar
70 See Ibid.: 106. The following juxtaposition between Lenau's Beethoven's Büste and Isolde's final section of her death scene has been created by J. Deathridge:
71 Ibid.: 111.
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