The Nervous Stage by Smith Matthew Wilson;

Author:Smith, Matthew Wilson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Staging the Invisible Body

The neural aesthetics of the Wagnerian stage are personified above all by the recurring figure of the clairvoyant. Has any other writer given voice to so many lucid dreamers? Erda, the earth goddess of the Ring cycle who eternally sleeps at the font of clairvoyant dreams, arises in Rheingold and again in Siegfried to prophesy the course of future events. In Götterdämmerung, Hagen, in a state between dreaming and waking, with eyes open but still asleep, is visited by his father, Alberich. In Tristan und Isolde—a work that, like Büchner’s Woyzeck, continually draws our attention to vision and hearing16—the realms of day and night are repeatedly analogized to those of illusory appearance and of inner insight, culminating in Tristan’s clairvoyant vision of Isolde’s approach in act 3 and Isolde’s concluding Liebestod. As Hans Sachs puts it in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, written two years before the Beethoven essay:

My friend! It is precisely the poet’s task

To interpret and record his dreams.

Believe me, the truest madness of men

Is revealed to him in a dream:

All poetic art and versification

Is no more than true dream interpretation. (Gesammelte 7.235)

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