Читать книгу Wagner - Michael Tanner - Страница 9

Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Der fliegende Holländer might feel that I have been making heavy weather of it, or around it, though heavy weather is a large part of its subject. Surely, it will be argued, it is at most a fine example of early German Romantic opera, a stirring story set to frequently exciting music, but not to be singled out from other more or less equally successful examples of the genre, such as Weber’s Der Freischütz, another story of a demonically driven man and a loving, self-sacrificing maiden. But admirable as Der Freischütz is, it belongs firmly in the realm of the folk opera, and its atmosphere is that of the Grimms. Probably it is impossible to carry out the thought-experiment of viewing Holländer without taking into account Wagner’s subsequent spectacular development. But to the extent that I am able to, I still find the stupendous surge and toss of the Overture evokes metaphysical as well as physical vistas. Though he is an incomparable nature-painter in music, Wagner’s interest in it is always sentimental in Schiller’s sense: there is no nature-evocation in his works which does not affect, and reflect, moods of the human beings who exist in it. Even his most famous portrayal of a natural process, that of the Rhine flowing at the beginning of the Ring, is potent with hyper-natural associations. For before the Rhine gets properly under way, there are those famous bars scored for the lowest strings and wind at the bottom of their registers, more sound than music, which are wholly static, and suggest that we are being taken back to the beginning of all things. As Wagner told Liszt in a famous letter, the Ring depicts the beginning and end of a world, including the beginning from which the world in which it takes place evolves. Once more one thinks, as Wagner surely did, of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Wagner loves and is awed by Nature, its wildness and majesty, but he invariably anthropomorphises it at the same time.

However, the Wagner of Holländer, enormously in Beethoven’s and Weber’s debt, was still, many people feel, obviously an apprentice. Up to a point they are right. I am not claiming that Wagner, in one mighty bound, arrived at a maturity of method and message. Nonetheless, although Holländer may be fairly taken as an exciting evening in the theatre (or, more likely nowadays, at home), it does announce the terms which Wagner throughout his life would imbue with richer and deeper meaning; and it shows, at the least, his potentiality for depth. It is not surprising that in later life he regarded it as the first of his authentic works. Of course, if you find Wagner’s obsessions tiresome because irrelevant, you will appreciate Holländer more for its crude freshness, its lack of the extreme emotional temperatures which pervade some of the later works, and are often thought to be omnipresent in them, though that is false.

When an artist returns, in work after work, to the same preoccupations, it is easy for criticism to weigh in and celebrate his progress to maturity, finding his early efforts touching in their simple-minded adumbrations, attentively reading more into them than they can seriously bear. It is also easy to schematise the oeuvre, overlooking the variety of new concerns. What it seems almost impossible not to do, perhaps in Wagner’s case more than anyone else’s, is to postulate a presence which is given the artist’s name, and then to indulge in the construction of an artistic biography which runs in parallel with the life the artist actually had. And despite the most solemn methodological pronouncements about the illicitness of inferences from the art-life to the lived one, or vice-versa, it proves, over and over again, irresistible. All the more so when the art is of so compelling a kind, and the life so spectacular. In Wagner’s case, once more, the originator of this romantic connecting was Wagner himself. He constructed a life, in his unreliable autobiographical writings and oral reminiscences, which imparts an even more ferocious teleology to the series of works than they manifestly possess. And conversely he justified his existence by the somnambulistic assurance, made all the more glamorous and stupefying through its zigzagging course, with which he brought the works into being. The categories by which the art demands to be judged are taken over from the terms in which Wagner made sense of his wildly implausible existence, one which was an outrage to everyone who, persuaded by this devastating force of will, still failed to succumb to his tirelessly self-justifying rhetoric. His occasional insistences that he viewed his creations with the baffled but tremendously impressed gaze of the outsider, striking as they are, and no doubt sincere, failed to counter the drive towards the celebration of a unique degree of integration, forged from the most disparate and recalcitrant materials.

Why is Wagner so interested in people who have committed a terrible deed, and why should we share his interest? How much moral cum metaphysical baggage does one have to take on board in order to regard his works as more than bizarre actions set to frequently wonderful music, granted that one isn’t going to be so lazy as to feel that something important is going on, but that it is better not to try to find out what it is in strenuous detail? It is in a praiseworthy attempt to answer that question that many recent opera producers, or directors as they are increasingly often called, have gone in for highly specific interpretations of his dramas, and though I believe that their efforts are fundamentally misconceived, I find their rationale sufficiently convincing (to other people) for them to merit some consideration. I have in mind primarily the school of directors who emanate from what until six years ago was East Germany, and their epigones.

They operate on the following premisses: first, every work of art is anchored in the time and place of its composition, and can only be understood on that basis. Any attempt to render the timeless significance of a work in a production is hopeless, since there is no such thing. Second, Wagner’s works in particular need drastic re-presentation, in the first place because they are even now tainted with the Nazi ideology by which the very vagueness of their import rendered them exploitable. Third, because in the first post-war productions of them which had great impact, those of Wieland Wagner, they were freed from their past only to be presented again in terms of their ‘purely human’ significance, a basic error which Wieland shared with his grandfather. Fourth, since the conditions, economic and therefore political, under which Wagner conceived and wrote his works were sufficiently similar to our own to mean that they can cast light on our situation, so long as they are treated with the proper kind of disrespect which great creations deserve and require, one would only be doing him a favour by eliminating a spurious universality and replacing it with an involving topicality.

Besides these broadly Marxist productions, which are now less likely to be well received than they were a few years ago, there is a wide range of styles which sometimes employ the catch-all title ‘post-modern’ to cover their nakedness, and which involve a mixture of times, places, and costumes; Wagner’s works are not, according to them, to be understood in mythological terms, as he naively thought, since the time for mythologies is past. We should draw on psychoanalysis, surrealism, and other twentieth-century movements in the humanities, so that once again we can make of these works what we will, but only within limits. This kind of production – and there are correlative written interpretations – has in common with Marxist ones the premiss that there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature to appeal to, though it isn’t clear how that is compatible with using psychoanalytic insights, which were thought, at least by their founder, to have universal application.

What all these contemporary ways of viewing Wagner have in common is a desire to make him smaller, in one obvious way, in order that he will be seen to be relevant, which will in turn render him a service, even if it takes some of us time to realise that. The effort to make him smaller is not, then, necessarily a manifestation of hostility to him and his works; rather hostility to Wagnerism. Up to a point it parallels something which we are becoming very familiar with in ‘Shakespeare studies’, and also in many productions of Shakespeare, though he doesn’t have the accumulated bad reputation of Wagner to be cleared of. The idea of ‘alternative’, ‘political’, etc. Shakespeares is to question his time-transcending genius, in the interests of genuinely responding to him. It is no paradox, we may warmly agree, to say that we might learn much more from Shakespeare if we ceased to deify him, as both directors and critics have pointed out, while they engaged in their apparently ungrateful task, in both senses of that word. We – those of us unfortunate enough to have received a traditional humane education – have been brought up to revere Shakespeare (while admitting that like everyone else he occasionally potboiled) in a way that removes the possibility of entertaining questions about the success of some of his masterworks. What often happens – and it is an increasingly fashionable critical move – is that the unease we may feel about Hamlet, say, is relocated as an unease the play allegedly feels about itself. Or its subject-matter is changed, in line with feelings about its central characters. Hamlet becomes a study of a pathological case, Oedipally-fixated or not, and ceases to be the portrayal of ‘the most adorable of heroes’, and a great deal more to that effect that was prevalent in the nineteenth-century heyday of Hamlet hero-worship. Or if, as is more plausibly argued, the play exhibits (or attempts to conceal) deep fissures, the plot having been taken over from a traditional revenge-play, while Christian elements are brought into the foreground, then that provides us with a fascinating study of a playwright giving voice to sharply conflicting values within his own culture. Whether the play is a success or not hardly matters: there is, it is implied, something childish about such a preoccupation.

There is a lot that is attractive about such a sophistication of approach, especially if it leads to more intensive study of what actually occurs scene by scene, line by line, in Hamlet. But it is noteworthy that it always tends in a similar direction: figures who were automatically described as ‘heroes’, in the sense both of being the central figure and of having the kind of status that the Greeks ascribed to Achilles, now dissolve, dramatically, into a ‘complex of meanings’ and simultaneously lose their noble stature. That may not constitute a serious criticism of this approach, but it does indicate that we have a strong need to assert the human all-too-humanness of the figures to whom we were previously keen to allot exalted status. The factors contributing to this change of outlook are bewilderingly numerous and different in kind from one another: acting together they can seem to be devastatingly effective. If Shakespeare is still great, it is not because he is beyond criticism but because he can absorb so much of it, becoming, if anything, much more interesting because so much at odds with himself. And so, in his honesty, he is reestablished as great in quite another way from what we used, rather touchingly, to think.

The prognostication for treatment of Wagner along these lines, an activity which has been under way for the last thirty or so years, is considerably more complex. For he is very explicitly concerned with the heroic, with heroes and heroines who will effect a cleansing, transfiguring, redeeming change in the whole world in which they live. If the full-blooded notion of the heroic has to be abandoned, how can the Ring above all, but the other dramas too, survive? The question branches into two: in what way can we any longer give sense to the notion of a hero, as relevant to any conditions we might encounter? And what, even if we can, is the mechanism by which a hero has effects on a community which are commensurate with his own private (as it were) stature?

If Wagner’s works were merely spoken dramas, they might well have been written off in the face of these questions. But the greatness of his music makes that impossible. That, however, is not the end of the matter, since the music functions in the service of the drama at every moment. So we seem to be in an awkward position: a set of postulates about the possibilities of human nature which many people are unable to accept is set to music of vivifying appropriateness, thereby apparently validating, in the way that music so treacherously can, those unacceptable postulates. It took the arch-iconoclast and enfant terrible of the post-war musical scene, Pierre Boulez, to hit on a solution. His most notorious proclamation was that the opera houses of the world should be burned to the ground, but he accepted two invitations to conduct at Bayreuth for several seasons each, and for what seem to many Wagner’s most questionable works, in very different ways: Parsifal in 1966, the Ring in its centenary year, a decade later. The effects were predictably sensational, much more so in the Ring than in Parsifal. For the latter work he took over Wieland Wagner’s magnificent ‘timeless’ settings and production, which tolerated an indefinite variety of musical renderings without incongruity. But for the Ring he was given a free hand in selecting the director, and he chose another enfant, in some ways still more terrible: Patrice Chéreau. And in one fell swoop the Ring, which if it is not Wagner’s most sublime achievement is certainly his central one, was domesticated and demythologised, in fact deconstructed. A new era was born, in which Wagner’s artistic image was aufgehoben, to employ that indispensable German word when dealing with German cultural phenomena: i.e. it was cancelled, transcended and preserved. Wagner, in this self-celebratingly ‘unfaithful’ French production, was firmly put in his historical place, even if it was rather a vague one – but some time during the last one and a half centuries, give or take the odd anachronistic spear. But since the action can’t proceed without them, they are, almost every director has agreed, a wearisome necessity. And if they look odd alongside tuxedos and hydro-electric dams (the Rhine), that adds to the sense of epic theatre. Chéreau’s was, broadly speaking, a Marxist Ring, much as Shaw had envisaged the work in The Perfect Wagnerite, though he might have been surprised, and not favourably, by the production. The gods were humanised with a vengeance, even vengefully. A collapsed crew from the outset, it was hard to see how anyone could give a damn about their Dämmerung, or even to see what that could amount to. Fricka’s savage argument with Wotan in Act II of Die Walküre, to the effect that Siegmund is merely Wotan’s pawn, was driven home hard. And in case one might think that Siegfried really did have to go it alone, he was provided with a hi-tech forge in Act I of Siegfried, while the dragon in Act II was nothing more than a large toy, amusing and not faintly frightening, with which Siegfried played at fighting. This was also, and significantly, the first Ring