Sun, Aug 14, 2011 page14

• Book review: Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, by Laurence Dreyfus

  • By Bradley Winterton / Contributing reporter
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  By the early 1870s the 60-year-old Wagner was in the habit of ordering a wide range of silk underwear, silk and satin dressing gowns and other clothes for home wear, plus furnishings of the same materials for a special relaxation room, all in pale pink. These written orders were discovered by the local press in 1877, together with orders for a variety of perfumes. The resulting image of the great composer was held up to mockery, including a cartoon showing him in high-heeled shoes and wearing roses in his hair.

  But no one seemed to take any notice of Wagner’s intense same-sex friendships, notably with the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The language of their letters is shocking even today, considering Wagner was a married man with children, but at that time romantic friendships between men were totally acceptable to mainstream opinion, and only became suspect at the end of the century when early gay campaigners started to attract public notice.

  But is all this really that important? Mozart wrote to his wife that he would give her pretty bottom a good spanking when he got back from his travels — who cares? Everyone has their own special erotic or quasi-erotic interests, and they are of little concern to others, and certainly don’t, in the case of composers, have much, if any, connection to the music they wrote.

  

  Wagner and The Erotic Impulse by Laurence Dreyfus

  Wagner visited a gay couple when he was in London, but isn’t known to have ever engaged in any same-sex activity himself. The truth appears to be that he was unusually sensitive to the feminine side of his nature, and came to understand that it stood in some kind of special relationship to his creativity. The silk trappings were, it seems, part of the context in which he placed himself when trying to compose, but the results included music of often quite exceptional ferocity.

  All this and much more is examined by Laurence Dreyfus, a professor of music at Oxford University, in Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. In recent decades, he points out, Wagner has been the object of intense scrutiny on account of his anti-Semitism, an undoubted part of his mind-set but only debatably present in the music itself. But in his own day it was his depiction of sexual relationships that caused the most comment. Tristan und Isolde not only shows but celebrates an adulterous relationship, and in Die Walkure, Siegmund and Sieglinde are championed in one that is both adulterous and incestuous. Furthermore, the music in general was perceived as being quite exceptionally sensuous, as is displayed by Thomas Mann in his story Tristan, in which the playing of that opera’s score on the

  piano is seen as capable of provoking hysteria.

  If music can be divided between that which asks for calm analysis and bestows spiritual uplift, as Bach’s or Beethoven’s arguably does, and that which induces a drug-like altered state of consciousness, the sort of experience many people seek at a modern pop concert, then Wagner undoubtedly belongs to the second category.

  Much of the tone of subsequent Wagner criticism was set by Friedrich Nietzsche. As a student he used to visit the Wagner household for breakfast, and was deeply influenced by the great man. In adulthood Nietzsche turned against him, declaring that his last opera, Parsifal, represented a diseased sensibility, and was crudely theatrical. This rupture may have had its roots earlier when Wagner had told Nietzsche’s doctor that masturbation, and possibly homosexuality, were probably responsible for the younger man’s psychological problems.

  But reading this book, and watching the productions of the Ring operas [see Classical DVDs above], has led me again to consider the old comparison between Wagner and Tolkien, both of whom used the same ancient Nordic myths in radically diverse ways, but otherwise could hardly have been more different. Irresistible though it is, there’s something adolescent about Tolkien’s entirely sexless world, whereas Wagner was pushing the boundaries of what was possible, both in matters of sex and in his musical idiom. Both were drawn to a pre-modern world — Tolkien found even Shakespeare too recent for his tastes, while all of Wagner’s mature operas (except Die Meistersinger) were set in Arthurian or, in the case of the Ring, pre-Arthurian times.

  And if I would, in the final analysis, rather take The Lord of the Rings with me onto a desert island than recordings of Wagner’s Ring operas, this may say more about the allure (for me) of quests and British landscapes, plus the author’s unfailing kindliness and good nature, than about any absolute artistic judgment.

  Dreyfus’ book is an excellent account of what is by any measure a crucial aspect of Wagner’s extraordinary art. Whatever their essential nature, Wagner’s music-dramas attracted enormous interest, and a huge following, in his lifetime. They represented “the new music,” but they were also seen as embodying new attitudes and new possibilities. Traditionalists stood firm against them, but it was felt nonetheless that they included the seeds of the future, paradoxically so considering that they were set in a distant, indeed mythical, past.

  Wagner has paid dearly for his anti-Semitism, and for Hitler’s enthusiasm for his music (for which, of course, the composer can’t be blamed). The prominent erotic element was undoubtedly part of the attraction, but also part of the perceived modernity. That these extraordinary operas continue to attract a significant following, when so much else from that era is dead beyond recall, shows that their appeal is both complex and still very much alive.

  That complexity, incidentally, is best displayed in Thomas Mann’s essay The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner, a crucial and magnificent text that is unfortunately given only cursory attention in this new book.
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