The Consolations of History: Themes of Progress and Potential in Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung

Alexander H. Shapiro, Alexander Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032087993
• eBook ISBN: 9781000672800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikbiographien

In this book on Richard Wagner's compelling but enigmatic masterpiece Götterdämmerung, the final opera of his monumental Ring tetralogy, Alexander H. Shapiro advances an ambitious new interpretation which uncovers intriguing new facets to the work's profound insights into the human condition. By taking a fresh look at the philosophical and historical influences on Wagner, and critically reevaluating the composer's intellectual worldview as revealed in his own prose works, letters, and diary entries, the book challenges a number of conventional views that continue to impede a clear understanding of this work's meaning. The book argues that Götterdämmerung, and hence the Ring as a whole, achieves coherence when interpreted in terms of contemporary nineteenth-century theories of progress, and, in particular, G.W.F. Hegel's philosophies of mind and history.

A central target of the book is the article of faith that has come to dominate Wagner scholarship over the years – that Wagner's encounter in 1854 with Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy conclusively altered the final message of the Ring from one of historical optimism to existential pessimism. The author contends that Schopenhauer's uncompromising denigration of the will and denial of the possibility for human progress find no place in the written text of the Ring or in a plausible reading of the final musical setting. In its place, the author discovers in the famous Immolation Scene a celebration of mankind's inexhaustible capacity for self-improvement and progress. The author makes the further compelling case that this message of progress is communicated not through Siegfried, the traditional male hero of the drama, but through Brünnhilde, the warrior goddess who becomes a mortal woman. In her role as a battle-tested world-historical prophet she is the true revolutionary change agent of Wagner's opera who has the strength and vision to comprehend and thereby shape human history.

This highly lucid and accessible study is aimed not only at scholars and researchers in the fields of opera studies, music and philosophy, and music history, but also Wagner enthusiasts, and readers and students interested in the history and philosophy of the nineteenth century.

1
Siegfried as historical anomaly

The classic definition of Siegfried is the free man endowed with natural gifts and unfettered by the rule of law – a pristine exemplar of nature’s purity and power.¹ These qualities made Siegfried, in Bernard Shaw’s view, the very model of a modern English Protestant revolutionary – an activist who could fearlessly break through the falsehoods perpetrated by Church and State and establish the foundations for a new socialist world. The moment when Siegfried cuts through Wotan’s spear with his newly forged sword is indeed a compelling symbolic pantomime of the defeat of the ancien régime by liberated and free-thinking man. As a result of Shaw, and no less Wagner’s own instinct for broad dramatic gestures, the conception of Siegfried as a force of nature has been routinely wedded to a vision of the revolutionary man of action;² but these two modalities of Siegfried’s character are not logically compatible.

The fundamental dilemma has always been: If Siegfried was to be the heroic progenitor of a new age, why did Wagner subject him to such a crushing demise in Götterdämmerung?³ Shaw did not bother asking that question; he simply ignored the final stage of the cycle. Indeed, as he explained, Wagner’s “revision, if carried out strictly, would have involved the cutting out of Siegfried’s Tod, now become inconsistent and superfluous.”⁴ But as Wagner worked backwards in drafting the libretto of the Ring, he was necessarily conscious of the end point he was to reach – Siegfried not as heroic victor, but as conquered and compromised. Recent commentators have more directly confronted the paradox that the supposed harbinger of the future is not capable of bringing about that future.⁵ The result has been a thorough-going indictment of Siegfried’s character in an attempt to account for this failure.⁶ Kitcher and Schacht have taken a particularly skeptical view of the hero, offering in the process the most damning critique of Siegfried to date.⁷ In their interpretation, Siegfried’s character is fatally flawed: a “brainless youth” marked by “rashness, pride, crassness, insensitivity.” In the end they credit Wagner with describing a “Heldendämmerung” as much as a “Götterdämmerung.”⁸ But it is hard to square these critical appraisals of Siegfried with, among other things, the praise heaped on him by none other than Brünnhilde and the nobility accorded him in Wagner’s powerful funeral march.⁹

Another challenge to comprehending Siegfried as revolutionary is his obvious lack of self-consciousness, which is not at all consistent with the role of a political firebrand. Berry attempts to shoehorn this inconvenient truth into the Shavian heroic framework by explaining it as the “fatal weakness of the charismatic revolutionary.”¹⁰ But how can the charismatic revolutionary be so blind? A revolutionary, by definition, must at least be able to understand and identify what must be destroyed, even as the job of rebuilding may have to be left to another. Berry admits as much when he observes, I think quite rightly, that Siegmund “might even be regarded as a greater hero than Siegfried, for he is not unaware of the laws and customs he is transgressing, nor of the price he might pay.”¹¹ Nor was this notion of the myopic revolutionary at all one familiar to Wagner. Rather, Wagner prescribed:

[O] nly those who are driven by a desire to break away from the cowardly bonds created by our criminal social and political structures, or from mindless subjection to them – who are revolted by the stale joys of our inhuman culture … who are filled with contempt for the self-satisfied sycophants (these most worthless of egoists!) … only he … can discover the power to rebel, to rise up and attack the oppressor of this same nature.

(AF 85)

Needless to say, this portrait of the rebel disgusted by the hypocrisy of contemporary society is not a description of Siegfried.

In further defense of Siegfried as the revolutionary, many commentators argue that Siegfried is an example of Hegel’s world-historical figure.¹² But in light of Siegfried’s conceptual limitations, such a view hangs solely on the premise that the world-historical individual has “no consciousness of the Idea at all.”¹³ That is indeed what Hegel said in his lectures at the University of Berlin, but it is not the whole story. Hegel’s discussion states in full:

These heroic [world-historical] individuals, in fulfilling these aims of theirs, had no consciousness of the Idea at all…. Yet at the same time they were thoughtful men, with insight into what was needed and what was timely: their insight was the very truth of their time and their world – the next species, so to speak, which was already there in the inner source. It was theirs to know it, this universal concept, the necessary next stage of their world …¹⁴

There can simply be no debate that Siegfried is no “thoughtful man with insight” who has the capacity to grasp “the necessary next stage of the world.”

In the final analysis, the gloss on Siegfried as anarchic revolutionary and world-historical hero puts much too much weight on Siegfried as a dramatis persona. Clearly Siegfried was not designed to function in this way. In The Sorcerer of Bayreuth (2012) Barry Millington intriguingly sketches the outlines of an interpretation that returns to the fundamentals of Siegfried’s role as a man of nature and reads him in the context of Rousseau’s philosophy of culture.¹⁵ Such an interpretation offers a solution to the seeming conundrum of Siegfried’s personality and heroism, and it is time to follow the logic of this thesis.

In attempting to understand the true essence of man and his social organizations, philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries looked back to man’s most primitive origins in the state of nature. From first principles of primeval time they sought to derive the fundamental truths that would guide humankind forward. The most practical thinkers accepted man for what he was, egoistic and violent. Thus, Thomas Hobbes famously declared in Leviathan (1651) that life in nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In his Berlin lectures, Hegel agreed that “[f]reedom, as the ideal dimension of original nature, does not exist as an original and natural state…. [T]he ‘state of nature’ is not an ideal condition, but a condition of injustice, of violence, of untamed natural drives, inhuman acts, and emotions.”¹⁶ In this view, government and laws were necessary to temper man’s antisocial instincts and promote civil peace. Eighteenth-century utilitarians such as Bernard Mandeville in The Fables of the Bees (1714) and Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) made a virtue out of this apparent necessity, declaring that society would flourish to the extent that it promoted the pursuit of each man’s self-interest.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, refused to accept man as a selfish given. In fashioning his construct of the state of nature in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (A Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men; 1755) Rousseau rejected Hobbes’s crabbed vision of humankind: “Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that man is naturally evil.” Rousseau argued instead that the earth’s first men were strong and happy. “[W]hat kind of misery can be that of a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is in health?” Natural man was also essentially good, gifted with moral instincts, among them an “innate repugnance against seeing a fellow creature suffer,” which led to “compassion.”¹⁷

Rousseau’s radical thesis – which turned the Christian doctrine of original sin and salvation through faith on its head – was that man’s natural goodness and strength has been corrupted over time and that centuries of civilization had alienated him from his true self. “[S]ociety no longer offers to the eyes of the philosophers anything more than an assemblage of artificial men and factitious passions which are the products of all men’s new relations and which have no true foundation in nature.”¹⁸ Placing the two historical prototypes side by side, Rousseau observed that “savage man and civilized man differ so much in the bottom of their hearts and inclinations that that which constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair.”¹⁹

Fellow philosophe and friend Denis Diderot shared Rousseau’s vision of an uncorrupted dawn of time and in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (Reflections on the Voyage of Bougainville; 1771/1796) applied Rousseau’s theoretical musings in the context of real-world history – dramatizing the gulf between natural and civilized man in a dialogue between a Tahitian native and a European explorer. Confronted with the apparent absurdity of European laws and mores, the noble savage is bewildered. In a fervent defense of the state of nature, the Tahitian points out the internal contradictions of eighteenth-century civil society and limns a worldview freed of customary constraints. Commenting on the practice of marriage, for example, the wise Tahitian Orou asserts:

I find these strange precepts contrary to Nature…. Contrary to Nature, because they assume that a being which feels, thinks and is free may be the property of another being like himself…. Such rules are contrary to the general order of things. What could seem more ridiculous than a precept which forbids any change of our affections, which commands that we show a constancy of which we’re not capable, which violates the nature and liberty of male and female alike in chaining them to one another for the whole of their lives?²⁰

The Tahitian also understands that under the yoke of laws and custom, man becomes at odds with himself: “You will merely breed rascals and wretches, inspired by fear, punishment and remorse, depraving their conscience, corrupting their character. People will no longer know what they should do and what they should avoid. Anxious when innocent, calm only in crime, they will have lost sight of the pole star which should have guided their way.” He concludes that “the society whose splendid order your leader acclaims will be nothing but a swarm of hypocrites who secretly trample on the laws …”²¹

These philosophes’ compelling vision of the natural goodness of man and the dangerous impact of civilization resonated with many thinkers in the early nineteenth century, inspiring a program of reform that set its goal on clearing out the Augean stables of contemporary belief systems and disposing of the ancient traditions, laws, and customs that had outlasted their relevance and continued to weigh on man’s freedom. By destroying the illusions and falsehoods of the past that hampered man’s potential, these thinkers sought to retrieve a measure of his original strength and happiness. Feuerbach, for example, in 1841 decried the burden of ancient modes of thought: “World-old usages, laws, and institutions continue to drag out their existence long after they have lost their true meaning…. [W]hat was once good, claims to be good for all times.”²² Likewise John Stuart Mill in his famous series of essays in The Examiner in 1831, “The Spirit of the Age,” diagnosed the discontents of English society as symptoms of “an age of transition.” “Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones…. [T]he same jacket which fitted him then, will not fit him now.” The task...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Siegfried as historical anomaly
• 2 Brünnhilde and the tragedy of jealousy
• 3 Brünnhilde’s immolation: dramatizing species consciousness
• 4 Brünnhilde’s mercy
• 5 Renunciation on the Rhine?
• 6 Myth versus history
• Bibliography
• Index