HELDENLEBEN UND GÖTTERTOD

Forgive me, Richard Strauss, the composer of Heldenleben, but, regardless of your unmistakable imprint on the title of this entry, this entry is not about you. (Besides, I do not even subscribe to the jocular opinion that Strauss’s celebrated tone poem is autobiographical.) Furthermore, I plead guilty to deliberately miswording the Wagnerian title Götterdämmerung, although its original title, Siegfrieds Tod, makes my offense slightly less offensive than writing a Wagnerian entry using Strauss’s idiom.

There are actually three different questions raised in this entry, and I am naturally starting with the first one: How come that the two great heroes of Wagner’s Ring, that is, Siegmund and Siegfried, are so prominently distinguished by their tragic death, rather than by their heroic life? One could not possibly count Siegmund’s dramatic act of incest with Sieglinde as heroic. (Although the implication that it is awfully hard for a hero to find for himself a match among the members of the opposite sex, except in his own heroically-bred family-- or among the immortals-- comes on very strong in the Ring.) But, other than that, what else is there for Siegmund, besides his glamorous death? And then, as we are getting to Siegfried, his destruction of Fafner the Dragon is musically beautiful, but not exactly… heroic, especially when compared with the Heldenfest of Siegfrieds Tod. Remembering Nietzsche’s observation that around hero there is always a tragedy, it appears that the biggest distinction of being a hero is to die a tragic (read: heroic) death.

So what else was there in the heroic persons of Siegmund and Siegfried that I may have missed? I just keep wondering and marveling at myself for being unable to come up with a lucid and convincing answer.

My second question concerns Wagner’s Göttertod. Apparently, not only the heroes and the scoundrels need to die, to give way to new life, but the gods as well. Only Göttertod can give a closure to the latest cycle of life, so that it can be superseded by the next one. Is there any Hegelian morality, then, in Göttertod? Are we then to assume that the new cycle of life, each defined by its own Göttertod at its end, is somehow superior to the one left behind, the upward moving spiral? Surely, Karl Marx, too, knew what he was talking about!

Is then the tragic end of Heldenleben and its accompanying Göttertod a cause for celebration? An optimistic tragedy, to borrow the catchy title of a play by Vsevolod Vishnevsky. Having been following the steady and inexorable process of collapse (rather than just a decline) of our Western Civilization in the last two or three decades, I find every reason to bemoan the loss of the old gods and heroes, and, frankly, no reason at all to welcome the birth of the new cycle of life, which appears to me from where I am (that is neither here nor there!) like a nest of maggots, already hustling in the dying body that, prior to its current state of rapid deterioration, had been a human world worth living in.

…And lastly, my third question, which is somewhat detached from the previous two (which have a tangible connection with each other), but still it carries on with a Wagnerian subject, and I do not want to turn it into a separate entry. It somehow compares Wagner’s view of art with that of Schopenhauer. For the latter, pure music was the highest form of art. Not so for Wagner, for whom the highest form of art was the Wagnerian drama. Here is how the already quoted authors of Men of Music Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock summarize Wagner’s ambitious and presumptuous finding in his famous literary essay Oper und Drama:

“After “proving” that both Glück and Beethoven had been trying to create Wagnerian drama, and had been defeated because of insufficient intellectual grasp of their material, he [Wagner] goes on to show that music for music’s sake is a colossal mistake. Beethoven, for one, had been striving toward the light in the choral movement of the Ninth Symphony, but had erred by making the poet serve the musician. What is needed, if we are to have the one great human art, instead of the separated, and, therefore, unsatisfying, arts, is that the painter, the sculptor, and the musician will serve the poet. Music is nothing in itself, but it only achieves its destiny when it contributes its part to the common enterprise, the music drama. Thus Wagner!” (From Men of Music, by Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock.)

In a previous entry, Saper Vedere, I defended Wagner’s approach by claiming that there can be some merit in the suggestion that a complex effect on several senses may be in certain ways more fulfilling than when only a single sense is involved. However, I questioned the validity of the broad generalization that multi-sensual perception must necessarily be superior to a single-sense perception.

Wagner’s approach to music is obviously at odds with Schopenhauer’s treatment of the art of music, which is, consequently, called into question itself by Wagner’s bold premise, but who can argue with genius within that genius’s own domain? It is only with his effort to generalize, to reach beyond the realm of his creation, intruding into the space of other geniuses, that we can say stop! to the Drang, and question the legitimacy of a Wagner speaking for a Beethoven, or a Glück, or for anybody else, and being the judge of their successes and failures.