Wagnerians Tripping
Who are these strange people, the Wagnerians? Well, they span the globe and political spectrum. The Wagner Society of Northern California – my group – did a poll of members in their organization, along with other Wagner societies in the nation. In one question the membership was asked to put themselves on the political spectrum, with a 0 being moderate, 100 being far to the right, -100 being far to the left. There were people on both extremes, though the average was significantly to the left. ( Two lefties refused to stay within confines of the scale, and marked themselves as -110 and -130.)18
What unites us, of course, is being deeply moved by his music, many to the point of rapture. Clearly, if he can attract music lovers of both the far left and the far right and everywhere in between, the music dramas cannot be claimed to belong to any particular political view and are, instead, universal, as Wagner intended.19
Bryan Magee has a chapter in his very fine book, Aspects of Wagner, called “Wagnerolatry,” that gives a good overview of why Wagner’s music has attracted the degree of fanaticism that it has, as well as the inverse, an almost bizarre loathing. Of the latter, Magee notes: “His music can provoke a hostility not merely greater than any other’s but, again, different in kind… His music is denounced, as is no other, in moral terms: it is ‘immoral’, ‘corrupting’, ‘poisonous’, ‘degenerate.’ ”19 His answer to why this is so is well worth a read, full of psychological insights. I recommend it to you.
Many people have noted that for Wagnerians, his music seems to provide a near-religious experience. And in fact, many people in his era did feel that his music dramas were sacred. After all, Wagner advocated replacing the church with art, and many took him completely seriously. When people trekked to Bayreuth, it was indeed a religious pilgrimage for those people.
Mark Twain wrote about this pilgrimage in the essay, “At the Shrine of St. Wagner.” He was in awe of—or dumbstruck by—the Wagner audience, who he also referred to in the essay as a “congregation,” noting its collective uniqueness:
Yesterday the opera was “Tristan and Isolde.” I have seen all sorts of audiences--at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons, funerals--but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention, absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.
This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New York they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum airs, they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the attention of the house with the stage.20
Wagner audiences still remain the quietest in the world when it comes to operas. It’s been passed down by generations of Wagnerians that we must not squirm or make noise or clap at the wrong time lest we suffer the consequence of a stern reprimand. But here is a funny story: At the premiere of Parsifal, Wagner was very pleased with the flower-maidens’ performance, and yelled “bravo!” as they left the stage. He was hissed.21
Why so quiet? Well, we don’t want to miss a note, of course. It no longer has a religious aura, but we still want to be enveloped by the music without distraction. Wagner lovers, of course, still take the pilgrim to Bayreuth. But the pilgrimage is now secular; we are the Deadheads of the opera world, as I wrote about here.
In her piece “Wagner’s Fluids,” Susan Sontag hits the nail on the head about this change, and the reason for it:
The smarmy, redeeming higher values that Wagner thought his work expressed have been definitively discredited (that much we owe the historic connection of Wagnerian ideology with fascism). Few puzzle any more, in the way generations of Wagner lovers and Wagner fearers did, about what Wagner’s operas mean. Now Wagner is just enjoyed – as a drug.22
I wrote about the drug-like quality of Wagner’s music here already. But I want to take it up again. After all, this blog is called Wagner Tripping for a reason.
I was watching this video on LSD neuroscience, and the speaker cited the most authoritative reference on pharmacology, Goodman and Gilman, to distinguish psychedelics from other classes of drugs. It explains that, unlike other drug classes, psychedelics have a “capacity reliably to induce or compel states of altered perception, thought and feeling that are not (or cannot be) experienced otherwise except in dreams or times of religious exaltation.”23
I would change that to say “except in dreams or times of religious exaltation or, for some, listening to Wagner.” I mean that quite seriously.
Wagner is not my god; I don’t have one. But the fact is that listening to his music does do for me what I presume religion does for believers: it makes me feel one with humanity and the universe, brings forth feelings of deep love, compassion and empathy, makes me want to be kinder, more giving, more loving, plus it gives me frequent feelings of exaltation.
Why is this so? I can’t explain exactly how he does it but this is why many people considered him a magician. This is often called the “Wagner experience” by people who have felt it. I do know that the state of mind while listening, for me, is very similar to tripping on psychedelics: there is a sense of timelessness, my ego-boundaries dissolve, and a feeling of profound empathy with those outside myself emerges. I described here how I think he achieves the latter. The first two are best described by this talk.
Wagner wanted his audience to be “knowers through feeling.” There is, in fact, really no other way to understand his works, and I agree with Wagner who said, referring to the Ring—but it is true of all his music dramas—“the work’s meaning is only clear through the music.”24Given what I feel when I am in his musical world, the meaning is profoundly good. It’s a extraordinary lovely mental place.
18 I forgot to bring with me to Hawaii that issue of the Wagner magazine with the poll, so this a placeholder until I get back to Santa Cruz, and I will add the reference.
19 Of course, he did have a strong agenda, but his principal aim was to bring forth “the purely human” through the realm of myth. In such a way he wanted to show that fellow-feeling—compassion—was at the bedrock of morality (as Schopenhauer, his guru, believed, see here). I believe his politics, in so far as they were other than compassionate, were ultimately subsumed, even contradicted in some cases, by the feeling that the music gives us. The fact that I feel as one with humanity when I listen to his works shows that, for me, this was his plan and he hit the mark. If you believe as some do that he had malicious intent, then I would argue that it does not emerge in the music. I will be writing more about this in my next post.
19 Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 33
21 Carr, The Wagner Clan, 47
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