Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002

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Aberbach, Alan D. Richard Wagner’s Religious Ideas: A Spiritual Journey. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.  297pp., ISBN 0-7734-8783-2 (Hbk).  $ 99.95 / £ 59.95. This book also appeared in paperback as Richard Wagner's Spiritual Pilgrimage.  

Reviewed by

Leslie Barcza

                      

            The breadth of Richard Wagner’s thought is hard to grasp at first.  One strong indication is the number of disciplines citing his works.  Probably best known as an opera composer, it might not be surprising to discover that in addition, Wagner was also an important orchestral conductor, and outspoken music critic whose influence extended far into the 20th century.  In addition, Wagner’s dramaturgical writings are not only seminal in understanding the opera of the last hundred years, but also, immensely influential on non-operatic stagecraft and even film theory.  But Wagner was more than a man of the theatre, having been a prolific pamphleteer, and political activist, who became a fugitive from several German states for his part in the Dresden uprising of 1848. 

            Another facet of that mind emerges in Alan Aberbach’s Richard Wagner’s Religious Ideas: A Spiritual Journey.  It may seem odd to associate Wagner with religion.  This is the man, after all, who was the chief inspiration of the young Nietzsche; and he is a man who wrote letters to Feuerbach, the materialist who denied God and inspired Marx.  Although self-abnegation turns up as a theme in more than one opera, his own life reflected expensive tastes, as his penchant for fine clothes, food and drink led him often into debt.  And last but not least, Wagner is, but for Hitler, one of the most notorious anti-Semites in history.  In “Judaism in Music,” for example he wrote the following

“we are deliberately distorting our own nature if we feel ashamed to proclaim the natural revulsion aroused in us by Jewishness …. By this unconquerable feeling, what we hate in the Jewish character must be revealed to us, and when we know it we can take measures against it. By revealing him clearly, we may hope to wipe the demon from the field ... Just as this dialect throws words and phrases together with extraordinary inexpressiveness, so does the Jewish musician fling together the various forms and styles of all composers and eras ...”

The immediate inspiration for this diatribe was probably Meyerbeer, a composer whose success was an affront to the younger composer, at a time when he was literally starving in Paris; yet  Meyerbeer had been more helpful to Wagner than almost anyone else in Paris at the time.  In short, were we to let these examples be our introduction to the man, he would not seem to be a religious thinker at all.  The surprising devotion some feel for Wagner is usually in spite of deep misgivings about the contradictions of a man who seemed to have profound flaws of character, mitigated by his extraordinary creative output.

I would say that Aberbach’s explorations are important additions to our understanding of Wagner the composer and thinker, but with some serious reservations.  For those who care, it is wonderful to read Wagner’s thought as an organic process, through a series of crises; but for those wanting more perspective, there is rarely any sign of critique, of any search for the problematic.  The context seems to be lacking, as for example, in the discussions of the three great romantic operas –Der Fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin – that suggests spiritual motivation only for their evolution without any reference to any other issues, such as Wagner’s development as a composer or librettist.  Indeed, one gets the impression that Aberbach is reading Wagner’s operas as religious allegories or tracts, and not as works meant for the theatre.  Notwithstanding their undeniably spiritual subjects, the milieu is not represented, either in the reception history of these works or in the operatic antecedents influencing Wagner.  Even if those works, such as Marschner’s Der Vampyr  or Weber’s Der Freischütz, represent a more secular path, it would be useful to have them as a contrast, to provide some needed perspective; the net result is that we seem not so much to be inside Wagner’s head, as Aberbach’s. 

An important recurring theme in the book, as in the composer’s life, concerns the distinction between spirituality and religion, as for example each of the three romantic operas mentioned above addresses this theme in a different way. Although serious Wagnerians may be troubled that he calls them “music dramas,” a term usually reserved for the mature works, this is not troubling if one accepts that Aberbach does not really write about Wagner qua composer, but rather, qua thinker or qua mystic.  In the end Aberbach would not force Wagner into any one role, and only strives to make sense of his creations, as for example, in his analysis of Parsifal, the last music drama, and a work whose critique of Christianity is far more direct:

Parsifal offered a unique opportunity, if a sublime dilemma: how to get across the message of Jesus without attacking Christianity for failing to follow the ideals of Jesus; and how to subtly manipulate the religious metaphor to provide a series of spiritual insights that would transcend Christianity without being hostile.

Read in this context, Wagner’s achievement is that much more poignant, even if the mythologists of the Bayreuth image-machine, especially in Wagner’s own family, have dulled the edge of that critique.  Although I wish it had been possible to incorporate more dramaturgical insights alongside the spiritual ones Aberbach offers, there is indeed a spiritual journey in this book, exploring Wagner’s thought.