I have often wondered where Wagner’s religion, his art, his
metaphysics, in a word his working theory of life, would have led him,
had he lived longer. That he had, dimly floating in his extraordinary
brain, the outlines of a greater work than Parsifal we learn in his
correspondence with Liszt. He died with the Trilogy incomplete, for
Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, and The Penitents, (Die Büsser) were to
have been this Trilogy of the Will to Live, Compassion and Renunciation.
Wagner was going to the East with many other Old World thinkers. That
negation of the will to live, so despised by his former admirer
Nietzsche, had gripped him after he forsook the philosophy of Feuerbach
for Schopenhauer in 1854. He eagerly absorbed this Neo-Buddhism and at
the time of his death was fully prepared to accept its final word, its
bonze-like impassivity of the will, and sought to translate into tone
its hopelessly fatalistic spirit, its implacable hatred of life in the
flesh.
That the world has lost a gigantic experiment may not be doubted, but
that it has lost the best of Wagner I greatly question. In Parsifal his
thematic invention is not at its high-water mark, despite his wonderful
mastery of technical material, the marvellous moulding of spiritual
stuff. Even if Parsifal is almost an abstraction, is not that “howling
hermaphrodite,” as Hanslick called Kundry, a real flesh and blood
creation? It is with no fears of Wagner’s power of characterization
failing that we should concern ourselves, for the gravity of the
possible situation lies in the fact that Wagner had drifted into the
philosophical nihilism, the intellectual quietism which is the sweet,
consoling pitfall of the thinker who wanders across the borderline of
Asiatic religious ideals. The glimmer of Christianity in Parsifal seems
like the last expiring atom of Wagner’s faith in the value of Christ.
That he used the church in the dramatic sense cannot be doubted, and
that in the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church he found grateful
material, which he employed so deftly yet so reverently in Parsifal, is
also incontrovertible; but in Wagner’s Christianity I place no faith.
He went to the roots of Christianity, its Buddhistic roots, and there
sought philosophical consolation. 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 Richard of the
giant brain.
The speculation is a fascinating one, especially when you remember
that he changed the title of his projected work from The Victors
(Die Sieger) to The Penitents. First spoken of in 1856, the name was
altered a quarter of a century later. Wagner had encountered Oriental
philosophy in the interval, and its mysticism had become a vital,
integral part of his strenuous intellectual and emotional life.
It is not safe yet to pass judgment on this emotional product of the
age; Wagner carried within his breast the precious eucharist of genius.
In music he is the true Zeit Geist.