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RICHARD WAGNER AND THE GERMAN NATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2015

Tim Blanning
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Abstract

Richard Wagner's relationship with the German nation was inconsistent and often contradictory, veering between pride and distaste. One constant feature, however, was his intense hostility to the German princes. He held them responsible for the decline of German culture after the Reformation and, more especially, after the Thirty Years War. Their imitation of Italian and French models amounted to cultural treason in his view. The great revival of the ‘German spirit’ in the eighteenth century, he asserted with characteristic vehemence, came from the common people. It was they too who rose in revolt against Napoleonic tyranny in the great ‘War of Liberation’ of 1813–15. Yet once again the princes betrayed them, restoring despotic rule once the French yoke had been removed and resuming the patronage of French plays and Italian operas. In forming this narrative, Wagner was strongly influenced by Friedrich Schiller, who ranks with Shakespeare and Beethoven in his rather limited pantheon. It found its way into several of his music dramas, most explicitly in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, whose political message has often been misunderstood.

Type
The Prothero Lecture
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 25 , December 2015 , pp. 95 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2015 

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References

1 Wagner, Richard, My Life, ed. Whittall, Mary, trans. Andrew Gray (Cambridge, 1983), 729Google Scholar. This is the best translation available, although bizarrely it has no index.

2 Wagner, Richard, The Diary of Richard Wagner: The Brown Book 1865–1882, ed. Bergfeld, Joachim (1980), 73Google Scholar.

3 Ibid.

4 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (1987), 503.

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6 Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner (6 vols., 1900–8), i, 493. On Wagner's idolisation of Uncle Adolf, see Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, his Mind and his Music (1968), 16.

7 Wagner, The Diary of Richard Wagner, 73.

8 Ibid.

9 Wagner, My Life, 28.

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13 Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 7.28, 10 July 1830, 222–3.

14 This was well put by the director David Pountney in the course of an interview with Hilary Finch, published in the Times on 8 Sept. 1999. Asked what Der Freischütz could do for the future of opera, he replied: ‘Well, it happens to be exactly the type of piece we should be trying to create in a modern context. It was written in essentially popular language; and it addressed a subject which was in its day absolutely contemporary – and still is. Weber wrote it within five years of the end of the Napoleonic wars which had been so deeply traumatic for Germany. This highly sophisticated and civilised country found itself being marched over by an arrogant dictator, and realised it had no social or civil apparatus to resist him.’

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16 Richard Wagner, ‘ Der Freischütz: a Report to Germany’, in Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 5th edn (12 vols., Leipzig, n.d.), i, 220.

17 König Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Strobel (Karlsruhe, 1936), iv, 8. Reprinted here are the diary entries Wagner made for Ludwig to read and which he later rewrote as What is German? in 1878 – Jürgen Kühnel, ‘The Prose Writings’, in Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, trans. John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 612–13.

18 König Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner Briefwechsel, ed. Strobel, iv, 9.

19 Ibid., 9–10.

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22 ‘Die Gerichstbarkeit der Bühne fängt an, wo das Gebiet der weltlichen Geseze sich endigt’, quoted in Peter-André Alt, Friedrich Schiller, 2nd edn (Munich, 2009), 38: ‘[I hope to convince you]. . .daß man, um jenes politische Problem in der Erfahrung zu lösen, durch das ästhetische den Weg nehmen muß, weil es die Schönheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert.’ ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen’, Sämtliche Werke, v: Erzählungen, theoretische Schriften, ed. Wolfgang Riedel (Munich and Vienna, 2004), 573.

23 Sämtliche Werke, v: Erzählungen, theoretische Schriften, ed. Riedel, 572.

24 T. J. Reed, Schiller (Oxford, 1991), 67–9.

25 König Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner Briefwechsel, ed. Strobel, 17.

26 Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, iii, 149. Translation from The Artwork of the Future, trans. Emma Warner, a special issue of The Wagner Journal (2014), 71.

27 Cosima Wagner's Diaries, ed. Gregor-Dellin and Mack, i, 128, 136, 431–2. He would have enjoyed Treitschke's comment on the German princes competing for territory when Napoleon destroyed the Holy Roman Empire: ’they battened on the bleeding wounds of the fatherland like a swarm of hungry flies’: von Treitschke, Heinrich, Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (5 vols., Leipzig, 1927)Google Scholar, i, 178.

28 Dokumente und Texte zu ‘Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen’, Richard Wagner Sämtliche Werke, ed. Reinhard Strohm, xxiii (Mainz, 1976), 156.

29 Ibid., 200–1.

30 Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ii, 21.

31 Ibid., 107.

32 Ibid., 112.

33 Wagner, My Life, 362.

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36 Wagner, My Life, 390, 402.

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38 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. Spencer and Millington, 171, 183, 226.

39 Wagner. A Documentary Study, ed. Barth, Mack and Voss, 172.

40 Eduard Devrient aus seinen Tagebüchern, ed. Rolf Kabel (2 vols., Weimar, 1964), i, 451.

41 Richard Wagner. Stories and Essays, ed. Charles Osborne (1973), 39.

42 Barry Millington, Richard Wagner. The Sorcerer of Bayreuth (2012), 83. Wagner's debt to Schopenhauer is discussed with exceptional clarity and cogency in Bryan Magee, ‘Wagner and Schopenhauer’, in idem, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1983), 326–78.

43 Wagner, My Life, 510.

44 I have discussed this in ‘Richard Wagner and Max Weber’, Wagnerspectrum, 2 (2005), 93–110.

45 Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ii, 270.

46 Thomas Grey, ‘Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as National Opera (1868–1945)’, in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago and London, 2002), 83.

47 Gutman, Richard Wagner, 282.

48 ‘Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik’, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, viii, 31–2.

49 Cosima Wagner's Diaries, ed. Gregor-Dellin and Mack, i, 431–2.

50 Deutsche Grösse: ein unvollendetes Gedicht Schillers 1801, ed. Bernard Suphan (Weimar, 1902), 5–8. This includes the original in facsimile. For a modern edition, see Friedrich Schiller: Sämtliche Werke, i:Gedichte, Dramen 1, ed. Albert Meier (Munich, 2004), 473–8. Here, the work is headed ‘1797’, although the explanatory note on p. 954, following Suphan, states that 1801 is more likely.

51 Schillers sämmtliche Schriften, xi: Gedichte, ed. Karl Goedeke (Stuttgart, 1871), 412–14. I am most grateful to Barry Millington for supplying me with a copy of the Wahnfried catalogue. Barry Millington drew attention to the similarity between the speech of Hans Sachs and Schiller's fragment in Wagner (1986), 255. On Wagner's debt to Schiller, see my article ‘Hans Sachs and Friedrich Schiller’, in Richard Wagner. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ed. Gary Kahn (2015), 40–6.

52 Cosima Wagner's Diaries, ed. Gregor-Dellin and Mack, i, 325.

53 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. Spencer and Millington, 780, 853.

54 Cosima Wagner's Diaries, ed. Gregor-Dellin and Mack, i, 362.

55 Ibid., ii, 84, 196.

56 Ibid., 229.

57 Ibid., 551, 644.

58 Ibid., 533–4.

59 ‘The number of books and articles written about him, which had reached the ten thousand mark before his death, overtook those about any other human being except Jesus and Napoleon’ – Magee, Bryan, Aspects of Wagner, 2nd edn (1988), 33Google Scholar.