SIEGFRIED-BAKUNIN
In my interpretation of artists so far I have had to rely, for better or
for worse, upon myself; no one else, so far as I know, has analyzed art
works from the point of view of revolutionary economics.
“Tolstoi?” suggests Mrs. Ogi.
“Tolstoi considered them from the point of view of Christian
primitivism, a quite different thing. But now at last I have help; the
economic interpretation of Richard Wagner has been done by Bernard Shaw
in a little book, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite,’ published more than
twenty-five years ago. So I feel like a small boy taking shelter from
his enemies behind the back of his big brother.”
“If you would talk like that more frequently,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you
wouldn’t have so many enemies!”
Richard Wagner was a towering genius, a master of half a dozen arts,
perhaps the greatest compeller of emotion that has ever lived. He
invented a new art-form, the “music-drama,” in which the arts of the
musician, the poet, the dramatist, the actor, the scene-painter, and the
costumer are brought together and fused into a new thing, “the music of
the future.” It is a terrific engine for the evocation and
intensification of human feelings; in creating it, and forcing its
recognition by the world, Wagner performed a Titan’s task.
He was born in 1813, which made him thirty-five years of age when the
revolution of 1848 drove King Louis Philippe from the throne of France
and sent an impulse of revolt all over Europe. Wagner at this time was
the conductor of the Royal Opera House at Dresden, having a life
position with a good salary and a pension. Previous to that time he had
had a ghastly struggle with poverty; a young and unknown genius, he had
almost starved to death in a garret in Paris. He had married an actress,
who had no understanding whatever of his power, but who had starved with
him, and now clung with frenzy to security. He himself had the full
consciousness of his destiny as an artist; he had already written three
great operas, and had sketched his later works. He had thus every reason
in the world to protect his future, and to shelter himself behind the
art for art’s sake formula.
Instead of which, he attended a meeting of a revolutionary society of
Dresden, and delivered an address appealing to the king of Saxony--the
royal personage whose servant and pensioner he was--to establish
universal suffrage, to abolish the aristocracy and the standing army,
and to constitute a republic with His Majesty as president. Needless to
say, His Majesty did not follow this recommendation from his operatic
conductor; and next year the people of Dresden rose, and built
barricades in the streets, and Wagner joined the revolutionists and
actively took part in organizing their forces. When the Prussian troops
marched in and put down the insurrection, three men were proscribed in a
royal proclamation as “politically dangerous persons,” and condemned to
death. One was Roeckel, assistant conductor of the opera house, who was
captured and spent the next twelve years in a dungeon; another was
Michael Bakunin, who became the founder of the Anarchist movement; and
the third was Richard Wagner, royal operatic conductor.
Germany’s greatest living genius spent his next twelve years as a
political exile in France and Switzerland. He utilized the time, in part
to pour out political pamphlets, and in part to embody his revolutionary
view of life in his greatest art work. Those who are interested in the
pamphlets may find extracts in “The Cry for Justice.” Here is a sample
from a manifesto entitled “Revolution,” published in the Dresden
“Volksblaetter”:
Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken and
oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the inner
desolation of your hearts with the transient glory of riches,
arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful crowd, for I
know not how to make distinction between those who follow me. There
are but two peoples from henceforth on earth--the one which follows
me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to happiness,
but the other I will crush in my progress. For I am the Revolution,
I am the new creating force. I am the divinity which discerns all
life, which embraces, revives, and rewards.
The art work in which Wagner embodied these revolutionary ideas is known
as “The Ring of the Nibelung.” It consists of four long operas, based
upon the old German mythology. It begins with a charming fairy story and
ends with a grim tragedy; and from first to last it is a study of the
effects of economic power upon human life.
In the depths of the river dwell the Rhine-maidens, having a lump of
gold which they admire because it shines, but for which they have no
other use. An ugly little dwarf pursues them; and when he cannot get
their love, he decides to get along with their gold. He steals it, and
makes from it a magic ring, which represents the ability to build cities
and palaces, to command luxury and pleasure--to be, in short, our
present master class. Even the gods are seduced by this lure, and fall
to quarreling and intriguing for the magic power of gold. The god Wotan
wrests it from the dwarf Alberich; and the latter puts a curse upon it,
to the effect that it can only be worn by those who have renounced
love--which is just as you see it in our modern world, and just as
Wagner saw it when he was a court servant in Dresden, and was driven mad
by the insolence of hereditary privilege.
There are two giants, who represent our great captains of industry, and
have built Wotan a palace known as Walhalla. The giants have been
promised Wotan’s sister, the goddess of youthful beauty and goodness, as
their pay for this labor; but they elect to take the ring instead. This
is Wagner’s way of telling us his opinion of the great bankers and
gentlemen of wealth whom he vainly besought to assist him in the
production of his beautiful works of art.
There were no factories in old German mythology; but the scene shows us
a cavern down in the bowels of the earth, where Alberich, by the power
of his ring, compels all his fellow dwarfs to toil at making treasures
for him. We see him wielding the lash, and the music snarls and whines,
and it is precisely the atmosphere you find in every sweat-shop and
cotton mill and coal mine under our blessed competitive system. And when
we see one of the giants slay his brother, and carry off the ring, and
turn himself into a dragon, to sit upon it and guard it for the balance
of time, we know that Wagner has visited the millionaire clubs of
Dresden, and seen the fat old plutocrats in their big leather
arm-chairs.
Wotan, the old god, sees too late the ruin he has brought into the
world; he decides that the only way of escape is to create a hero who
shall slay the dragon of privilege and break the spell of economic
might. This hero is the young Siegfried, the child of nature who knows
no fear; Bernard Shaw says that he is Wagner’s young Anarchist
associate, Bakunin. And note that in this Siegfried myth Wagner
foreshadows the downfall not only of capitalism, but also of religion.
The last of the four operas is called “The Twilight of the Gods,” and
the two evil spells of gold and of superstition are broken by the strong
arm and the clear mind of a human youth.
Wagner wrote the words of these four operas immediately after the
Dresden revolution; the poem was privately published four years after
his flight from the city. During the years of his exile he affords us a
sublime example of a great man contending with obstacles for the sake of
an ideal. He went ahead to compose his masterpiece in the face of
poverty and debt, ridicule and ignominy. His works were absolutely new,
they required an absolutely new method of presentation; so, even when he
could get a chance of production, he had to face the stupidity and
malice of singers and conductors and managers, who were sure in their
own conceit and resented instructions from an upstart.
We find him in 1860, almost at the end of his exile, receiving from
Louis Napoleon an opportunity to put on “Tannhäuser” in Paris. Now this
opera is a music sermon in reprehension of sensual love; it portrays the
ruin and ultimate repentance of a medieval knight who is lured into the
Venusburg, the lurking place of the old heathen goddess. And this Sunday
school lesson in music was to be presented in the great opera house,
whose boxes were rented by members of the Jockey Club, the gilded youth
of Paris who supported the opera in order to provide publicity for their
mistresses in the ballet!
The clash was embittered by the fact that the members of the Jockey Club
came late from their supper-parties, and wanted to see their mistresses
dance; therefore it was an iron-clad law of the opera that the ballet
came in the second act. But in Wagner’s Sunday school lesson the knight
is lured into the Venusburg in the first act, and the composer
stubbornly refused to change his story. Therefore the young gentlemen of
the Jockey Club yelled and hooted and blew penny-whistles all through
the performance, and kept that up night after night. They even took the
trouble to come on Sunday to make sure of breaking up Wagner’s show.
It would be pleasant to have to record that this hero of the social
revolution stood by his guns until the end of his life; but alas, he
weakened, and sold out completely to the enemy. Bernard Shaw excuses him
on the ground that the social revolution was not yet ready, and that the
revolutionists were impractical men. But I say that it was Wagner’s task
to help make the social revolution ready, and to train the
revolutionists by setting them an example of probity. Instead of that,
he decided that the establishing of his own reputation was more
important than the salvation of society. He accepted amnesty from the
Saxon king, and came back and made himself into a great captain of the
music industry, and a national and patriotic hero.
He became the intimate friend and pensioner of the king of Bavaria; and
for this king he wrote a highly confidential paper entitled “Of the
State and Religion,” wherein he explained that he had once been a
Socialist, but he now saw that the masses were gross and dull, incapable
of high achievement. The problem was to get them to serve ends which
they did not understand; they must be deceived, they must have
illusions. The first mass-illusion was patriotism; they must be taught
to reverence their king. The second mass-illusion was religion; they
must believe they were obeying the will of God. The difficulty of
government lay in the fact that the ruling class must see the truth,
they could not believe either in the State or in God. For them there
must be the higher illusions of the Wagnerian art. Needless to say, for
this secret service King Ludwig paid generously, and we find Wagner
spending his pension--I cite one item, three hundred yards of satin of
thirteen carefully specified colors, at a cost of three thousand
florins!
He had craved luxury all his life, and in the end he got it--not merely
silks and satins and velvets, for which he had a sort of insanity, but
all kinds of splendor and homage, with kings and emperors to attend the
opening performances of his operas. When the Franco-Prussian war breaks
out we find our Siegfried-Bakunin drinking the cup of military glory and
pouring out a “Kaiser-march”; we find him stooping to an operatic
libretto in which he casts odium upon all the genius of France, not
sparing even Victor Hugo. He reads Schopenhauer, and decides that he is
a pessimist, and has always been a pessimist, and he tries to
reinterpret his revolutionary “Ring” accordingly. He composes a
religious festival play, a mixture of Christian mysticism and Buddhist
fatalism, called “Parsival,” which made the fortune of his Bayreuth
enterprise, a play-house built out of funds subscribed by his admirers.
Wagner lived to old age, full of honors, and left a widow and a son,
poetically named Siegfried. The widow died recently, but the son still
survives, to bask in his father’s glory, and to gather in the shekels of
the music pilgrims. It is possible to appreciate to the full the
sublimity of the revolutionary Wagner without paying reverence to this
family institution which he has left behind, or for the hordes of
“Schwaermer” who come to eat sausages and drink beer and revel in
emotions which they have no idea of applying to life. Is there anything
in all the tragedies imagined by Richard Wagner more tragic than the
fate which has befallen the young Siegfried-Bakunin--whose prestige and
tradition are now the financial mainstay of the White Terror in Germany,
the Jew-baiting, Communist-shooting mob of the “Hakenkreutzler,” or
Bavarian Fascisti?