Longer Views (20 page)

I'd also like to discuss D. H. Lawrence's 1912 novel,
The Trespasser
, called in its first draft
The Saga of Siegmund
, which is almost a panegyric to Wagner. In its first version the heroine's name was Sieglinde, before Lawrence revised it to Helena—after Helen Corke, on whom the character was modeled. She is learning German so she can better understand Wagner in the original. And the hero and heroine whistle Wagner and hear his music in every rustling tree.

But the fact is, in the post-Edwardian pantheon, any writer who took herself or himself seriously had to appeal to Wagner in some way, whether by direct reference or by implication; for by then, Wagner
was
Serious Art.

But though there may someday be an ideal version of this paper in which these topics are discussed rather than glossed, I cannot try your patience with other than glosses too much longer. We must leap, like Valkyries, ahead.

What we overleap is an occurrence that not only changed the course of Wagner's life, but absolutely changed the way we consider him and his art. Without it, we would remember Wagner's work as we do any famous nineteenth-century opera composer's—if indeed we remembered him at all. (The four new operas that
were
produced in Germany in the year
Lohengrin's
premiere was cancelled at the Dresden Opera House are all by composers unknown today.) Wagner's technical innovations would be just that: technical. His trials and tribulations would be, at best, one with Beethoven's and Berlioz's. Thanks to this occurrence, however, Wagner's art became the exemplar of all nineteenth-century art. And more than anything else it is responsible for the pervasive Wagnerian influence, overt before World War II and covert after it, that the above galaxy suggests.

In the spring of 1864, the newly crowned eighteen-year-old king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who, since age thirteen, had been mad over Wagner's music, sent for the composer. “I can only adore you,” the young king wrote, “only praise the power that led you to me. More clearly and ever more clearly do I feel that I cannot reward you as you deserve: all I can ever do for you can be no better than stammered thanks. An earthly being cannot requite a divine spirit.” Ludwig went on to bail Wagner out of copious debts, set him up in a household, and committed himself to supporting Wagner through the rest of his life (on a level that dwarfs, say, the Archduke Rudolf's support of Beethoven or the Esterhazys' support of Haydn), building for Wagner the
Festspielhaus
at
Bayreuth and funding the Wagner festivals. The relationship between Ludwig and Wagner was not easy, and problems plagued every aspect of it. Ludwig was, after all, mad.

Remember those metal music stands—and the idea of placing the conductor in
front
of the orchestra—that the Dresden cabinet rejected in 1847? Bayreuth is why almost all orchestras and musicians use them today.

Here are some more customs that Wagner established at Bayreuth. He was the first opera producer to insist that the house lights be lowered during performances. Wagner was the first person to have the audience sit in darkness with light only on the stage. In Wagner's theater, for the first time latecomers were seated only at the end of the act, or at a suitable pause between scenes. He made it clear with placards in the lobby that in his theater talking would not be tolerated during the performance. Applause was to be entirely suppressed until the act was over—and, with
Parsifal
, he stipulated that there should be no applause at all after Act I, with its pseudo-religious closing. Our current custom of not applauding between the movements of symphonies and string quartets is another of Wagner's impositions on concert audiences at Bayreuth. This is not even to mention his advances in stage-craft and general performance standards that characterized, if not the first Bayreuth Festival (where the full
Ring
premiered, somewhat rockily, in 1876), then all the many non-operatic concerts he conducted there.

Things that Wagner wanted to do? Liberal to the last, he wanted to make all the tickets in the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus
one price. (At first he'd wanted the admission to be entirely free!) And he wanted to abolish formal attire as a prerequisite for opera attendance. But because the first was financially impracticable at Bayreuth, finally he had to admit that the second was socially impracticable as well. These changes had to wait until a later epoch.

Till 1864, certain advanced intellectuals and certain enthusiastic adolescents had been fascinated by Wagner's music. Baudelaire and Berlioz represent the first; Nietzsche, Judith Gautier, and Ludwig himself represent the second. But soon the entire world was fascinated by the favor of a king; and, though the road was gravel-strewn, progress along it was nevertheless headlong: Wagner and his music swooped on, over the nineteen years that remained to him, to a celebrity that was, till then, undreamt-of: it was comparable to the Beatles' in its breadth, and surpassed the Beatles' in staying power.

Today, to get some idea of what pre-Wagnerian theater was like, you only have to read some theater scene from Balzac, or, indeed, George Sand—the endless visits from box to box, the conversations, the
recognitions across the auditorium, the romances, the intrigues, now one group applauding, now another group of claquers booing and disrupting the performance. Only by reading particularly carefully can you even be sure, in those candle-lit opera houses, that a performance is indeed in full swing on the stage. (I have known readers to assume some of these scenes were taking place during some interminable intermission!)

Today, however, when we go into a theater, when we sit down and the house lights dim as we fix our silent attention on the stage, we are in Wagner's theater.

We are not in Shakespeare's.

We are not in Moliere's or Racine's.

We are not in Mozart's or Beaumarchais's.

We are not in Goethe's or even Hugo's.

We are wholly in Wagner's.

With Wagner, the proper attitude before the artwork becomes a mass of people, who, for all their physical closeness, now must consent to be more or less oblivious of one another, while each engages in the private contemplation of the object before them all. And from the
Festspielhaus
at Bayreuth, this aesthetic posture spread throughout Europe, to America and all her theaters, her museums, her galleries, and even to family readings from novels in the evening—until finally it had joined with that of the solitary reader and her novel, her poem, her text.

At this juncture, in which—throughout the nations caught up in the social and industrial situation outlined earlier—the public attitude toward the contemplation of an artwork became one with the private contemplation of a printed prayer, art finally and completely appropriated the social position of religion.

* * *

Antonin Artaud writes:

One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live without possible escape or remedy—and in which we all share—is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were not at a point where things must break apart if they are to start anew and begin afresh.

We must have done with this idea of masterpieces reserved for a selfstyled elite and not understood by the general public. . . .

Masterpieces are good for the past. They are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone.

It is idiotic to reproach the masses for having no sense of the sublime, when the sublime is confused with one or another of its formal manifestations, which are moreover always defunct manifestations.

This is from Artaud's famous essay in
The Theater and Its Double
, “No More Masterpieces.” It would be hard to find as succinct and as revolutionary a statement in all of the writings of Eliot or Pound, whose basic strategy, after all, was to resuscitate the tradition and locate themselves before and within it—suspiciously like the bogus historicism of some of Wagner's own speculative or theoretical works.

But the “Masterpiece,” considered not as a particular order of object, but rather as an attitude of respect, silence, awe, and attention that certain objects are privileged to receive,
is
Wagner's. “Serious Art,” seen as a type of attention and behavior in a general audience, was Wagner's invention. And it was imposed on the greater bourgeois art world of the West by the celebrity of Bayreuth. Reviews of the
Ring's
premiere were among the first half-dozen messages broadcast on the newly laid transatlantic cable in 1876 and were published on page one of newspapers in Paris, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, only a day or two after the performance.

In his best-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin suggests that what will not survive photographic and other modes of mechanical reproduction is the artwork's “aura” (the quotation marks are Benjamin's), so important to serious art: an “aura” socially formed, in the case of Renaissance painting (Benjamin explains) by the spectator's knowledge or intuition of the artwork's royal commission, imperial acceptance, and aristocratic ownership over generations—an “aura” communicated for Benjamin largely by the monumental architecture of the museum halls, through which the state appropriates the range of aristocratic privileges, at least at the level of signs.

Another fifty years, however, have proved Benjamin almost a hundred-eighty degrees off in his assessment. What is lost in mechanical reproduction is, of course, the artwork's material specificity. Lines blur. Colors dim. Hues, intensities, and color relations shift. All effects dependent on absolute scale and material texture vanish. Mechanical reproduction always distorts (when it does not wholly obliterate) the dimensionality and the plasticity of the artwork. Even when reproducing a work “full size,”
reproduction renders that size a variable quantity rather than a fixed form. What “comes through” in a mechanical reproduction is a highly reduced range of relative relations, impoverished because deprived of so many elements, distorted because intruded on by so many others: i.e., the materiality of the reproductive medium itself, the surface of the photographic or printing paper, the register of the inks, the hiss of the tape, the dust in the groove, the grain of the film, the grid across the glass screen—materialities that constitute the grounding of the esthetic experience exactly to the extent we overlook them, either in the “original” or in the “reproduction.” The
only
thing that, through reproduction, survives intact about the artwork
is
the “aura”—because it is socially constructed, because it is not
in
the work but rather is entirely around it.

When we pore over a “translation” of an ancient Greek poem that comes to us as a few English words amidst a field of lacunae and ellipses, trying to perceive its original austerity and beauty, we are wholly within the “aura” of art. When we strain to hear, through the mechanical burr, the sublimity of Enrico Caruso's voice production or the nuances of Billie Holiday's vocal interpretation, we are within the “aura.” What the experience of High Modernism has made clear is that this “aura” is a far more complex semiotic structure than the mere juxtaposition of an economic provenance with a few architectural signs.

For my generation of New York children, who, during the fifties and sixties, walked into that gallery of the Museum of Modern Art displaying Picasso's monumental
Guernica
(before, in the initial years of the eighties, it was returned to its Spanish home), before any of the horrific and angular images from that night of violence during the Spanish Civil War could register as content, the first and overwhelming experience was of the sheer
amount
of paint, white and black, spread ceiling to floor, edge to edge, over an entire
wall!
There simply was no art object within the doors of any other museum in the city that used as much!

Now, after perusing the above account (its verbal reduction straining after the historical
ding an sich
with italics and exclamation points), suppose a reader (who may or may not have walked into that gallery on the second floor of the 53rd Street museum during those years) then goes on to gaze at the next three-by-five postcard of that awesome work (or, indeed, even, in Spain, at the work itself), trying to get some feel of that scale, of that material. For that reader, then, something generated by my childhood experience of the painting will have been exchanged with something of the social “aura,” in all their shared semiotic complexities, repairabilities, interpenetrations, articulations, and flexibilities.

The assumption implicit in Benjamin's essay, that this “aura” is the result of a simple historic, and uncritical imposition by the powerful on the weak, is one of the places Benjamin skirts vulgar Marxism. But because they are constituted of absence/difference, signs can
only
be transformed/exchanged. It is almost impossible simply to “impose” them in an allegory of unidirectional power. The influence of royalty on the “aura” cannot be denied any more than can the influence of popular art and social poverty: in the play of fictions, in the “aura's” construction, there is as much work, both positive and negative, from below as there is from above.

This is what Benjamin (as well as Adorno!) misses. And that construction—that “aura”—is what Wagner, more than any other nineteenth-century artist, helped engineer throughout the Western bourgeoise. Against that “aura,” Artaud's esthetic enterprise was to take precisely the plasticity, the dimensionality of art—all that was lost in mechanical reproduction, all that was material about any and every medium
of
reproduction, all that was in excess of the “aura”—and seize it as the domain of the theater, use it as the substance of art.