Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

Excerpt from
The Debts of Divine Music in Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen
by James D. Herbert

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The charge bites with the instant veracity of the best of his aphorisms. "All of Wagner's heroines," quipped Nietzsche in his late and vicious essay Der Fall Wagner, "without exception, as soon as they are stripped of their heroic skin, become almost indistinguishable from Madame Bovary!" Yes, of course! Without her armored breastplate the goddess Fricka shrinks down to the measure of a Biedermeier housewife, worried into fits about her philandering husband and their mismanaged Haushalt. Gods fare no better than goddesses: Wotan himself becomes hopelessly enmeshed in binding contracts and ill-conceived bargains--the standard legal vehicles of the small-time businessman--as he attempts to look after the entirely bürgerlich concerns of preserving his uncertain corner of power and extending his questionable legacy. Nietzsche's mordant wit penetrates to the marrow of the matter: "Transposed into hugeness, Wagner does not seem to have been interested in any problems except those which now preoccupy the little decadents of Paris...all of them entirely modern, entirely metropolitan problems."1

Although Nietzsche's truth cuts, the philosopher misses the obvious converse to his own insight. If Wagner's Nordic gods found themselves disturbingly close to Flaubert's petty

See Also Gary Tomlinson: Music and the Claims of Text: Montiverdi, Riuccini, and Marino (Spring1982) Robert Morgan: Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism (Spring 1984) Lutz P. Koepnick: The Spectacle, the Trauerspiel, and the Politics of Resolution: Benjamin reading the Baroque Reading Weimar (Winter 1996) James D. Herbert: Bad Faith at Coventry: Spence's Cathedral and Britten's War Requiem (Spring 1999)

heroines, then the ladies and gents of the middling classes who made up the bulk of Wagner's Kaiserreich audience could not have been all that distant from the ethereal precincts of Walhalla. If deities shared bourgeois concerns, then presumably good German burghers could partake in divine essence.2 Wagnerian opera, in short, could strive to grant godliness to a certain class, the sort present for the premiere in 1876 of the four operas of Wagner's Ring cycle at the Festspielhaus, the theater Wagner built expressly for that purpose in the small northern Bavarian town of Bayreuth.

Yet how, as a practical matter, was such an anointment of these auditors to be accomplished? How could Wagner's operas deliver divinity? At the outset we need stipulate that the composer lacked the means, in actuality, to dip into the celestial soup and to ladle the essence of the empyrean liberally over the assembled house at Bayreuth. (Were Wagner to enjoy such superhuman powers, his operas would reside beyond the analysis of mortals, and this essay would have nowhere to go.) Behaving like gods, or at least communicating in their manner, was something the Ring operas represented rather than attained. It will be my argument that Wagner's music served as a rhetorical figure for the language of the deities, a language characterized by an ostensible lack of rhetorical figures. To thus ascribe divinity to Wagner's music in no manner implies a belittlement of his self-authored libretto. Wagner, never modest about such things, undoubtedly would have insisted that his web of words--a complete draft of which he completed before setting the cycle to music--recounted a tale of world-historical import. Nonetheless that text, abounding as it is in complex rhetorical ploys, served the librettist-cum-composer as (among many other things) a ready foil of figures against which to figure the seeming figurelessness of his music.

Wagner's audience could aspire to grasp that musical language, I will suggest, but only at a prohibitive cost. For in pursuing that aspiration, they necessarily encumbered debts--to Wagner's operas, to the gods themselves--that deprived such listeners of the possibility of ever possessing a language, musical or otherwise, freed from the profaning turns of rhetoric.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner (1888), trans. Walter Kaufmann (1888; New York, 1967), p. 176.

2. Nietzsche did subject his initial observation to reversal--"And conversely one understands that Flaubert could have translated his heroine into Scandinavian or Carthaginian terms and then offered her, mythologized, to Wagner as a libretto"--but only for the sake of furthering the downward mobility of the Wagner's gods rather than proposing the unthinkable uplift of poor Emma (ibid.).