Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love by Barry Emslie

Author:Barry Emslie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2013-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

We might feel that this notion of roots transcends in metaphor and meaning what we generally call the cultural sphere, although it is productive of that sphere. That is, just as Freud explains the birth of culture as the psychic consequence of a wholly anthropological and communal act (the first act of ‘Father Killing’ – a matter, as we will see, that is scarcely irrelevant for Parsifal), Wagner begins with language as the first step in myth making and cultural development. One sees that the elements he is foregrounding here are not only chronologically on the first place, they have an (anthropological) quality which raises them above the conditional and arbitrary sphere of culture as we experience it now. We also note in the above that at this stage ‘man could speak his feelings.’ When we turn to Opera and Drama we will meet more unambiguously what is here merely implied; namely, that there is an essentialist, biological configuration to all this. These roots, as it were, go as deep as roots can go and therefore we should not be surprised to learn that biology and culture are in their origins indissoluble.

‘Music is woman’ says Wagner. More than this, music is ‘the bearing woman.’ The poet, meanwhile, is ‘the begetter’. Woman is also, and intrinsically, ‘love’; but a ‘receiving … unreservedly surrendering love’ [II: 111f]. The aesthetic marriage between the male begetter and the receptive woman is unremittingly portrayed by Wagner in sexual terms. As a result, there is a clear parallel between the inseparable link, on the one hand, between the ‘living Folk’s melody’ and the ‘living Folk’s poem’ and, on the other hand, the act of fertilisation that takes place between the female embodiment of music when she duly and ecstatically accepts the male poet. Conception (Empfängnis) occurs in such a way that it is hard – and possibly improper to try – to disentangle the biological from the cultural and from the spiritual. A woman, for instance, is ‘soulless’ until ‘she receives her soul through the love of a man.’ In passing we should also note that these categories enable Wagner to engineer a further ideological and aesthetic shift that, we might think, has also more to do with playing fast and loose with metaphor than with stringent cultural and anthropological analysis. It is, moreover, one that is very relevant to the last scene of Siegfried. While the woman must surrender completely if she is to be true to her deepest intrinsic nature (‘the true woman loves unconditionally, because she must’), it is understandable if, as prelude to the necessary act of surrender, she struggles somewhat; if she feels a certain pride in the expression of her own ‘Will’. But this is all dialectically accounted for in the most nebulous terms so that opposites merrily spill over into, and confirm, each other. Clearly, some kind of struggle goes on between a certain ‘constraint’ that the woman feels when confronted by the male who is going to impregnate

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