Being Wagner by Simon Callow

Author:Simon Callow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Arthur Schopenhauer was thirty when, the year after Wagner was born, he began writing the first volume of his masterpiece, The World as Will and Presentation; its publication in 1819 was barely noticed, nor was that of part two, published twenty-five years later. Herwegh handed Wagner the book a decade after that, in 1854, by which time it was just beginning to impinge on German intellectual life. It marks a radical break with the whole German philosophical tradition, subjecting Kant’s transcendental idealism to a comprehensive overhaul, and rejecting wholesale both Hegel’s dialectical materialism and Feuerbach’s theory of the primacy of the senses. Schopenhauer describes the world as an illusion, and an enslaving one at that, which can only be escaped by connecting to another dimension – that of erotic love. The will, which seeks to conquer the external world, is an obstacle to connecting with this reality; the task of life, says Schopenhauer, is in fact to suspend the will. Any notion of political progress, of reshaping society, is both absurd and impossible.

These propositions – so strikingly similar to the Buddhist world view in which Wagner had recently immersed himself – are clearly in flat contradiction to the materialist philosophical position out of which Wagner’s libretto for The Ring of the Nibelung had arisen, and to which he was still deeply committed when he started composing it. Nonetheless he found himself eagerly imbibing Schopenhauer’s propositions, feeling, indeed, as if he had known them at some subconscious level all his life. The sense that life is experienced as pain, frustration, compulsion; that it is a shoddy charade; and that the only human experience that is in any sense real is sexual love, which, in its all-consuming intensity, obliterates the material world – all this was exactly how Wagner understood the world. Schopenhauer even went so far as to compare the illusory quality of human experience to a theatre performance: the world that we perceive, as his translator Richard E. Aquila says, ‘is a “presentation” of objects in the theatre of our own mind’. Wagner realised with a jolt that he had unconsciously imbued his Wotan in the Nibelung tetralogy with just the sense of inner despair that Schopenhauer describes in his great book. He read the entire massive work over and over again – four times, from beginning to end, allowing it to infuse him with its language and its world view. He was a changed man after his immersion in Schopenhauer, and longed to express himself in poetry: the serious mood created by what he had read, he said, was trying to find ecstatic expression. By chance his young friend and general musical dogsbody, Karl Ritter (another gay member of his entourage), had shown Wagner his treatment of the story of Tristan and Isolde; in it, he had focussed on the comedy of the cuckolded king. It was no laughing matter to Wagner: he saw only the tragedy in it, and immediately started writing his own poem-libretto on the subject,

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