VI
With all the criticism that has fallen on Mein Leben’s account of Dresden, I can find only three places where Wagner has inarguably omitted pertinent facts.
His most eyebrow-raising abridgement is this: Wagner and Röckel ordered a large number of hand grenades from a brass founder, Karl Oehme, and on May 4th (so Oehme claimed at Röckel’s trial for treason) Wagner placed an order for them to be filled with gunpowder.
This is not mentioned in Mein Leben.
Whether the grenades were used in the Dresden fighting at all is not, in fact, known. One theory is that the men placed the order for their friend Bakúnin and that the grenades ultimately went to Prague, where Bakúnin also had his finger in the fighting. While such an interpretation may be bending over backwards to exonerate Wagner, what I think we can be sure of is that, even if he ordered them, whether subsequently they went off in the streets of Dresden or in the streets of Prague, he did not throw them. And if, by some chance, during the fighting he did, while it pertains to whether, at the time, he did or did not commit a criminal act during the fighting that warranted his imprisonment, in terms of what we are interested in today—the political ideas behind his involvement in the uprising as they were to be expressed in his later work, particularly the Ring—, it only makes the extremity of his beliefs that much more intense (and Wagner was nothing if not intense). But it does not change their basic nature.
Wagner’s second suppression in Mein Leben is not so cataclysmic.
Days after the second Palm Sunday concert, on April 8th, 1847, Wagner and his wife, the former actress Minna Planer, with Minna’s illegitimate daughter from an adolescent liaison, Natalie (who was raised all her life to believe she was Minna’s younger sister), a parrot, and a dog, moved into their new quarters in the second floor apartments of Dresden’s beautiful Palais Marcolini, upstairs from a sculptor named Hänel. The palace’s spacious French-style gardens were at their disposal, where Wagner would sometimes go out to sit on the Triton in one of the dried-up fountains, orchestrating. The rent was low. The only drawback to the location, Wagner writes, was its inordinate distance from the theater, where he had to go to rehearse the orchestra and conduct performances.
“. . . I often found the cabfare,” Wagner remarks in Mein Leben, “a serious problem.”
Just after Wagner returned from his mother’s funeral in Leipzig, the news of Louis Philippe’s flight and the proclamation of a Republic in France (February 24, 1848) reached Dresden. February gave way to March, and with it came Germany’s March Revolution. King Friedrich August was besieged with petitions to recreate Germany’s government structure in a more liberal form, on the French model, while he stubbornly withstood all such demands. “On the evening of one of these really anxious days,” writes Wagner, “when the very air seemed heavy and full of thunderclouds, we gave our third big concert, which was attended, like the first two, by the King and his court.” The program was Mendelssohn’s A-minor Symphony (Mendelssohn had died that past November while Wagner was in Berlin and the choice was commemorative) and Beethoven’s Fifth. Just before the concert, Wagner wondered out loud if two such pieces, both in minor keys, might not seem too grim to the audience. His first-chair violinist and concertmaster, Lipinski, quipped to him, however, that after the two opening bars (it was already a performance warhorse), no one ever heard the rest of the Fifth Symphony anyway.
Minutes later, Wagner ascended the podium.
As the eighth note of the Fifth rang through the house, someone from the balcony shouted down, “Long live the king!” and the rest of the audience (bourgeois, paying) seemed to hear the remainder of the rich and sprightly music as a paean to, and an expression of, the unified German spirit—breaking into spontaneous and vociferous applause at every stirring passage! What did the thirty-four-year-old conductor actually think of the audience’s response, so clear in the house behind him—other than that he was off the hook of having to please them with two major works in minor keys? Was he amused at their simple-minded chauvinism? Was he repelled by the anti-republican sentiments their response was clearly based on? Was he annoyed at the interruptions? Did his own spirits, at the same time (politically? aestheticically?), soar along with theirs? Was he pleased with his own powers, in such a charged field, to move his hearers so? In Mein Leben he is, of course, writing for Ludwig. I think we can read his silence on the topic, there—as well as the fact that the incident stayed vividly enough in his memory for him to recount it at all—as a sign that his feelings, as he conducted that evening, probably contained elements of all, and were more complex than any, of these.
Between Leap Day and March 13, Saxony found herself in a sort of mini-revolution, which ended with Friedrich August II, self-styled “the Beloved,” dismissing his cabinet and calling in the opposition. Government censorship was relaxed in the city of Dresden. Trial by jury was introduced there. Electoral reforms were guaranteed, and feudal rights and tithes were abolished. It wasn’t a republic, but it was a step in the republican direction.
The night of the 13th, lights burned late in the Dresden streets, and the king was cheered and applauded by the crowds as he moved about the city that evening. One of the most vociferous cheerers was Second Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner, who moved through the crowds to catch yet another glimpse of the king and shout his approbation of the new freedoms.
But while this was going on, the Paris situation was producing even more reactions throughout Europe. Only five days after that exciting Dresden night of March 13, Metternich was thrown out in Leipzig; barricades had gone up in Frankfurt and Berlin, and the fighting there, so ran the reports back in Dresden, was vicious and bloody.
Meanwhile the Dresden newspapers urged the city’s citizens to eat stale bread and make chicken soup with particularly old and tough fowl. For despite the new political freedoms, economically these months were hard.
Though Dresden was the Saxon capital and the seat of King Fried- rich August, it was a small city of only 70,000. Many of the laboring men in the vicinity worked in the mines. Now two parties formed in Dresden, the comparatively conservative Deutsches-Verein (The German Association) and the more radical Vaterlands-Verein (The Fatherland Association—which Gray translates, somewhat disingenuously, as “The Patriotic Union”). Wagner makes no secret that his good friend August Röckel was the head of the Vaterlands-Verein. Wagner attended Vaterlands-Verein meetings, made speeches, published articles in Röckel’s newspaper, Die Volksblätter, and, toward the end, took over the editorship of the paper, when Röckel was put out of commission. All this is in Mein Leben. Wagner mentions that he attended “some” of the meetings when they were held in “a public garden.” What he does not mention is that the particular public garden was the French garden behind the Marcolini palace, with its non-working fountain and its Triton, and that Wagner himself had invited them to meet there. What does not come across at all is that Wagner was, for all practical purposes, the host for at least some of these meetings.
The third omission concerns Wagner’s publications during these heated and, finally, violent times; it is the most important in terms of our concern here, though it is also the one where he may be least accused of outright prevarication, as it is the one that most clearly segues into matters of tone and interpretation.
In Mein Leben Wagner quotes four lines from a poem he sent off to be published in a Berlin paper in support of the rebels. He does not say, however, that on May 15th, when fighting again broke out in Vienna, Wagner responded with a poem, “Greetings from Saxony to the Viennese,” which was imprudently published in the Allgemeine Oesterreichische Zeitung on June 1st.
In Mein Leben Wagner synopsizes—accurately—a speech he delivered on June 12 to a rally at Röckel’s Vaterlands-Verein (in the Marcolini gardens?),—a speech that went on to appear as a newspaper article which, indeed, attracted quite a bit of public attention—to the effect that he was for the establishment of a republic, but that he wanted the king to remai
n the first citizen of that republic. While he dismissed communism, i.e., “. . . the equal distribution of property and earnings . . .,” as “. . . that most fatuous and senseless doctrine . . .” (no, it is fairly certain that he had not read Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto published a few months before; but he had read Proudhon and may have discussed some of Marx’s ideas with Bakúnin, who was certainly familiar with Marx’s writings), he called on His Majesty to do the right thing by his people and on the people to march towards light and freedom. At least one of the lines amidst his inflated rhetoric, however, scored a hit. He accused his fellow Saxons of having “a standing army—and a recumbent militia.” A day later the speech appeared in the Dresdner Anzeiger. In the various papers of the politically super-charged city, the general response of commentators, after the ire over Wagner’s insult to the local armed forces, seems to have been pretty much what such a harangue might be expected to yield today. In trying to appease all sides, Wagner, said everyone else, while stirring up already uneasy waters with his rhetoric, had said nothing of much usefulness. In one commentator’s words, from another newspaper, Wagner’s speech was far more “full of problems than of solutions.” But as fiery as his speech was, unless one can conceive of a Marxist who is also a Monarchist, however parliamentary, there was nothing of socialism in it.
In Röckel’s Volksblätter’s October 15th issue, an anonymous article by Wagner, “Germany and its Princes,” appeared. It took the court to task for its indolence and irresponsibility and declared: “Awake! . . . the eleventh hour has struck! Abandon your impotent and futile resistance. It can only visit suffering and ruin upon you!”
In April of ’49, three of his poems appeared in Röckel’s paper, one of which was called “An einen Staatsanwalt” (“To a State Attorney”), another, “Die Noth” (which means, in German: Need, crisis, desperation, or any number of other such concepts): the first heaped scorn on state officials and the second pictured the miseries of the German people while inviting them, only somewhat metaphorically, to take up arms. It is significant, because Siegfried’s reforged sword, in the Ring, was eventually named Nothung—though it started out as Balmung. The third was a prose poem called simply “Revolution,” which is embodied as a goddess, who declares to the people that, among other things: “I shall destroy the dominion of the one over the many, of the dead over the living, of matter over mind. I shall shatter the power of the mighty, of law and of property . . . destroy the order of things that divorces enjoyment from labor, makes labor a burden and enjoyment a vice . . .”
In Mein Leben only the rally speech of June 12 (and the article that appeared from it) is mentioned. What Wagner does not say in Mein Leben is that he published numerous other articles (and poems), some signed, some unsigned, and some of which were far more vehement.
What Wagner does give us in Mein Leben, however, is a portrait of himself at the center of the organization of Dresden’s republican rebels. His advice is sought and he advises. He edits the radical newspaper. He prints posters to propagandize the royalist soldiers and hangs them up. He runs information and goes on missions for Heubner and Bakúnin. Once the open fighting starts he stands guard in the Kreuzkirche Tower all night. And when Dresden has to be abandoned because of the bloodshed, he accompanies Bakúnin and Heubner on their trip to establish a provisionary republican government for Saxony at Chemnitz. Though he does not come out and say it in so many words, he leaves a strong impression with the reader that if, indeed, the new government had been established at Chemnitz, Wagner himself would probably have been third or fourth down on the new totem pole. (If anything, one suspects he is exaggerating his importance, influence, and position!) But while he is clearly not anxious to rehearse the fiery extremes his republican rhetoric reached under military fire from the Prussians, I don’t see how he could have presented himself as more involved in the Dresden Uprising if he’d tried. What I think has been missed in his Dresden account is that Wagner was not trying to exonerate himself from involvement with the republican cause so much as he was trying to make the republican cause, in which he was clearly and centrally involved, appear as rational, logical, and civilized as possible to his young, royal patron. And he does not, of course, admit to any crimes. But we must remember, besides being the century of romanticism and revolution, the nineteenth century was also the century of euphemism and decorum. No one aspired to the late twentieth century’s ideals of radical honesty on all fronts.
If Wagner failed to mention the odd grenade or a slew of over-vehement poems and articles, it is because he wanted the republican cause to look rational to the young king and not seem a criminal enterprise; it is not because he wants to make himself appear any less involved in it or less sympathetic to it.
In his study of 1897, The Perfect Wagnerite, George Bernard Shaw saw the Ring as a clear allegory of the proto-Marxist ideas Wagner received from the anarchist Bakúnin. I think Shaw overstates the case. The question at Dresden was Monarchy or Republic, not Monarchy or Marxism. Still, it would be hard for any reader of Mein Leben not to feel that Wagner wants us—or King Ludwig—to attribute at least one of the important ideas of the Ring cycle to the Russian anarchist, still serving a prison term for his various activities at the time Wagner was writing.
Wagner had already conceived of his Nibelung project when he met Bakúnin. He had written a strangely confused essay, “The Wibelungs: World History as Revealed in Saga,” in which he played with spurious etymologies of the word Nibelung, deriving from it everything from the Wibelungen ancestors of Frederick Barbarossa, or as we are more likely to know them today, the Ghibellines in the Ghibelline/Guelph conflict of Dante’s era, to “Nabelon”—Napoleon! (And, of course, the Gibichungs of the Ring.) It was mystical nonsense, but it fascinated Wagner.
Bakúnin arrived in Dresden in the high summer of 1848.
Because there was so definitely an influence on Wagner from the brilliant, burly, bearded Russian, even if it did not extend as far as Shaw thought it did, it’s instructive to look at Wagner’s portrait of him.
When I now met him, under the humble shelter of Röckel’s roof, I was at first truly amazed by the strangely imposing personality of this man, who was then in the prime of his life, aged somewhere between thirty and forty. Everything about him was on a colossal scale, and he had a strength suggestive of primitive exuberance. I never got the impression that he set much store by my acquaintance, for by then he appeared to be basically indifferent to spiritually gifted people, perferring on the contrary ruthless men of action exclusively; as occurred to me later, he was more profoundly dominated in such things by abstract theory than by personal feelings, and could expatiate on these matters at great length: . . . He argued that the only thing necessary to conjure up a world-wide movement was to convince the Russian peasant, in whom the natural goodness of oppressed human nature had survived in its most childlike form, that the incineration of the castles of his masters, together with everything in them, was entirely just and pleasing in the eyes of God, and that the least to be expected from such a movement would be the destruction of all those things which, deeply considered, must appear even to Europe’s most philosophical thinkers as the real cause of all the miseries of the whole modern world. To set this destructive force in motion seemed to him the only goal worthy of a reasonable person. (While Bakúnin was preaching these horrendous doctrines at me, he noticed that my eyes were troubling me as a result of the bright light, and despite my protests, held his hand before it to shield me for a full hour.) The annihilation of all civilization was the objective on which he had set his heart; to use all political levers at hand as a means to this end was his current preoccupation, and it often served him as a pretext for ironic merriment. . . . [But] Bakúnin offered the consolatory thought that the builders of the new world would turn up of their own accord; we, on the other hand, would have to worry only about where to find the power to destroy. Was any of us insane enough to believe that he would survive after the goal of
annihilation had been reached? It was necessary, he said, to picture the whole of the European world, with Petersburg, Paris, and London, transformed into a pile of rubble: how could we expect the arsonists themselves to survey these ruins with the faculty of reason intact?
What Wagner has recounted Bakúnin describing is, of course, the ending of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s four-part Festival Play, with both the earthly city and the heavenly city in ruins. I think Wagner wanted his readers, royal or otherwise, to know this was where the notion came from. But what has to be stressed here is that the idea that an effective revolution required an absolutely clean slate and the violent destruction of all previous civilization was not Bakúnin’s personal property—any more than it was Wagner’s. It was, indeed, an idea—or at least an image—widely abroad in the European imagination.
In France at about the same time, Baudelaire was writing, “I say, ‘Long live the revolution!’ as I would say, ‘Long live destruction! Long live penance! Long live chastisement! Long live death!’ I would be happy not only as a victim; it would not displease me to play the hangman as well—so as to feel the revolution from both sides! All of us have the republican spirit in our blood as we have syphilis in our bones . . .”
In the iconography of the Romantic period, the ruin was a backward- looking and melancholy image because it spoke of vanished glories. But it was also a spiritual, uplifting, and sublime image because it alone on the crowded European landscape, in that age of science and industry, vouchsafed the possibility of progress, of building anew, of greater glories to come. (The terrifying ruin, the ruin of ghosts and unspeakable horrors, was the isolated ruin, the forgotten ruin, the ruin where the modern scientific and industrial spirit had not yet come to gaze, and, after gazing, establish its reassuring and progressive erections in the shadow of the old: the materialist reading of that horror is an unsettling projection of wasted real estate without any “spirit” of potential.) The destruction of the Great War of 1914 obliterated this positive reading of the ruin—by saturating the landscape with so many of them, all associated with real and recent death, that we can hardly see the ruin today as the nineteenth century saw it, as redolent of potential as it was of mystery. Similarly, it is only the twentieth century’s critique of so many revolutions accomplished and revolutions failed that makes this demand for a totally clean slate, which the ruin represented, seem like the ultimate in political naïveté—rather than the ultimate modern image, as it marked a locus where new building might begin, absorbing as it did so the spirit of the old.