IDLE SPECULATIONS

If it had been hinted a half century ago that in the veins of Richard Wagner there flowed Semitic blood, laughter would have ensued. The race that Wagner reviled in speech and pamphlet—though he never disdained its generosity—the hated Jew, daring to claim kinship with him might have set in motion the spleen of the German master. Wagner’s hatred of the chosen race is historical. “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” is not the only expression of this contempt and dislike on the part of the man who was born in a Ghetto at Leipzig. Benefits forgotten, he seldom missed a chance to gibe at Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn or to flout some Hebrew banker who was imprudent enough to advance him funds. The Wagnerian pedigree has been subjected to critical microscopes. Bournot, who was patronized by Baireuth, wrote concerning Ludwig Geyer, the true father of the composer, that his family had been Lutheran since 1700. Which proves nothing; race, not nationality, nor yet religion, counts. Geyer, from whom Richard inherited his versatile aptitudes, was markedly Jewish in features and temperament. So was Wagner. Of the putative father, a Police Magistrate, we know little. In his autobiography Wagner avoids the subject.

But Wagner’s mother, born Johanna Bertz, reveals in her portraits marked characteristics of the Jewish race. There is mystery concerning her origin; even the name of Bertz was only discovered a few years ago. Bertz, too, like Geyer, is a Jewish name. There is in the polemical writings of Richard an almost insane hatred of the Jew; and, ironic circumstance, in his music there are the sensuous glow and glitter of the Oriental. It is certainly unlike any music made by a German, with its vibratile rhythms, its dramatic characterization and magnificent decorative frame. “Was Wagner German at all?” demands Nietzsche. “We have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner, he has learned to imitate much that is German. His character itself is in opposition to what has hitherto been regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician. His father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families [Vulture and Eagle, in English]. What has hitherto been put into circulation as the ‘Life’ of Wagner is a fable. I confess my distrust of every point which solely rests on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride for any truth about himself; nobody was less proud. He remained, like Victor Hugo, true to himself in biographical matters—he remained a stage player.”

Thus Nietzsche, who knew whereof he spoke, as he was the secretary of the composer at Triebschen when Richard dictated his autobiography; not an official secretary, but a dear friend and confidant. But Nietzsche must be taken with reservations in the Wagner case. He alternately adored and abused his idol. Another of his favorite contentions was that Schopenhauer ruined Wagner’s art. The truth is that in Wagner the artist was stronger than Wagner the philosopher. The reflective man was usually overcome by the man poetic. Witness Tristan and Isolde, composed, as Richard confessed, in direct opposition, nay, defiance, of his life’s theories. Wagner began with Feuerbach and ended a victim to the fascinating black magic of Schopenhauer. But now we know, thanks to James Sully’s magisterial work Pessimism, that pessimism and optimism are a question of personal temperament. Wagner succumbed at the last to the Buddhistic quietism of the Schopenhauerian theories, though his elastic, optimistic nature rebelled at the yoke. In the Ring the pessimism never crowds out the vital dramatic power. In Parsifal the vigorous affirmations of the earlier Wagner are absent. He said Nay to the life that had exhausted him, and, bathed in a mystic atmosphere, his soul found consolation in the mere contemplation of Roman Catholic symbolism.

Nevertheless, hold firmly in your mind that Richard Wagner the artist was greater than Wagner the vegetarian, the anti-vivisectionist, Socialist, revolutionist, Jew-hater, and foe of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, also greater than Wagner the philosopher and poet-dramatist. He was first and last the musician. For that reason he did not say the last word in the music-drama. It is a mistaken partisanship that attaches to his every utterance profound significance. We should gladly exchange his collected prose writings for another Tristan. He dearly loved a paradox. A versatile man, he wore many masks. Not that we doubt his sincerity, but that his emotional nature, his craving for excitement, his agitated life often led him to speak and write in misleading terms. He seldom put his best foot foremost when he took up the pen. And the Jews he reviled always proved his best friends.

We have often wondered where Wagner’s religion, metaphysics, his working theory of life, would have led him had he lasted a few years longer. That in his extraordinary brain there had been dimly floating the outlines of a greater work than Parsifal we learn from his correspondence with Franz Liszt. He died with the projected Trilogy incomplete. Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal and the Penitent (Die Büsser) were to have composed this Trilogy of the Will-to-Live, Compassion and Renunciation. That negation of the Will-to-Live, so despised by Nietzsche, had gripped him after he became acquainted with Schopenhauer’s theories in 1854. He eagerly absorbed this Neo-Buddhism and at the time of his death he was fully prepared to accept its final word, its bonze-like impassivity of the will. In Parsifal he sought to transpose to tone its hopelessly fatalistic spirit, its implacable hatred of life in the flesh. That the world has lost a gigantic experiment may be true, but that it has lost the best of Wagner we doubt. In Parsifal his thematic invention is seldom at high-water mark, notwithstanding his mastery of technical material, his marvellous moulding of spiritual stuff. Parsifal is an abstraction, while Kundry is a “howling hermaphrodite,” as Hanslick tastefully called the poor hunted hind and harlot. It is with Wagner’s power of characterization that we might concern ourselves, as the composer had drifted into a philosophical nihilism—that intellectual quietism which is a treacherous pitfall for the thinker who strays across the borderline of Asiatic religions. The Christianity in Parsifal seems like the last expiring glimmer of its values. He deftly drew upon the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, yet in the essential Christianity of the result we place no faith.

He went to the Buddhistic roots of Christianity, perhaps for philosophical reasons. However, Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner’s supposed religious predilections is wide of the mark; no one was less likely to indulge in sacerdotal sentimentalism than the musician. The fact is that all was grist that came to his theatrical mill. Despite his mysticism he never lost view of the box-office. After the rude knocks of his early career he, like Balzac, realized that money is the Archimedes-lever that lifts the modern world. Money is the leading motive of the Human Comedy, and money it is that is the ruling idea of the Ring. The speculation is attractive. He changed the title of his Trilogy from The Victors (Die Sieger) to The Penitents. First considered in 1856, the name was altered a quarter of a century later. In the interval Oriental philosophy had supervened with its accustomed effect.

It was a critic of acuity who said of Tristan and Isolde that “the thrills relieve each other in squads.” Wagner touched the top-notch of his torrid imaginings in this apotheosis of lyric ecstasy. Nothing has been written comparable with its intensity; its double, it is safe to predict, will never be composed. He declared that when he wrote the music he could not have made it otherwise. It is full-blown in its imperfections, glaring excellences, noble turgidity, lack of frugality, economy of thematic resources, dazzling prodigality, soggy prolixity, riotous tonal debaucheries and almost superhuman enchantments. What boots it to gird against a demoniacal art that thrills and makes mock of theories concerning the divine in music? We are no longer on the windblown heights with Beethoven, nor do we worship as in the vast Cathedral of Bach. The Schopenhauerian philosophy hurled at us in the pessimistic dualism of the low episode avails not to stem the turbulent current of fashion. Tristan and Isolde is the very deification of carnalism. Call it what pretty titles you may, wreathe the theme with poetic garlands, yet the stark fact stares at you: The man’s desire for the woman and the woman’s desire for the desire of the man, to put the case in Biblical phraseology. The love potion does but unloosen their tongues; both were mute lovers before Brangaene juggled with the fatal brew. Wagner was the greatest poet of passion—odious, misused term—in the history of the Seven Arts. And he had a more potent instrument than words at his command, an orchestra that wooes and thunders, that achieves in the surging undertow the very soul of love. A mighty master, but a dangerous guide is this same Richard Wagner.