Richard Wagner: Show on art and ideology – culture

Richard Wagner is present. His past alone would not be worth the intellectually pointed exhibition that the German Historical Museum in Berlin is showing until September 11th. It would not explain the avalanche of arguments about the most controversial composer of the 19th century, nor the still acute intoxication, all the incantations, controversies, fights.

Wagner’s presence has remained strong, his music drama has seeped into the world, condensed in his own Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, the original setting for his mythological magic, Adolf Hitler’s musical summer retreat – still in the hands of the great-grandchildren’s generation today. And the present is also the lasting Wagner scandal: his racist anti-Semitism. The Germanness he claimed created the ideological framework for all of this.

In 1871, Wagner was in a nation-state frenzy

“I am the most German person, I am the German spirit,” Wagner noted in his diary in 1865. Six years later he sent his poem “Dem deutscher Heere” to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had enthroned the Prussian King Wilhelm as Emperor of the new nation-state in the middle of the German-French war. Wagner intoxicated? In May 1871 he traveled to Berlin and conducted his “Emperor’s March” for Wilhelm I. Shortly before that, he had decided to turn the city of Bayreuth into an empire of his own festivals, which is still a place of pilgrimage for his art and the Wagnerians today.

There are no apolitical artists, Sasha Marianna Salzmann has just bat the Russia-Ukraine talk by artists in the Berlin Academy of Arts established. The exhibition “Wagner and the German Feeling” is the highly political manifestation curated with clairvoyance by the American music professor Michael P. Steinberg. In the modern Pei building of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, it presents the usual abundance of exhibits: pictures and photos, letters, graphics and manuscripts, sheet music and stage designs through to kitsch-like devotional items. Above all: It has a clear structure, unfolds the phenomenon of Richard Wagner in four chapters, the power of his thinking and work. As there are: alienation, eros, belonging, disgust.

“Alienation” is the ubiquitous basic feeling of the composer, writer and entrepreneur who was born in Leipzig in 1813, the revolutionary, exile and later festival founder. Richard Wagner feels simultaneously as Saxon, German, nationalist and European, as poet and musician. After centuries of aristocratic rule, he experienced the period of dramatic upheavals in the revolutions of the years around 1840. He experienced the beginning of industrialization, the upheaval of the working and living environment in politics, economy, art and society. In his early years in Paris he got to know and at the same time hate the theater and opera world of French and Italian dominance. He makes his way into “German”, in large expansive writings – “Art and the Revolution” or “The Work of Art of the Future” – he develops his ideas for turning away from everything established, not only in the theater, towards his “music drama “.

The other protagonist of the “alienation” of the century is Karl Marx, who analyzed the revolution of the industrialized working world, the birth of capitalism, and promoted it to communist “use”. The fact that Marx and Wagner were able to become the main protagonists of German history and its consequences at the same time in the same museum is tantamount to a higher historical coincidence. This includes the doubts of the exhibition visitor as to whether the category of Wagner’s “German feeling”, in which the negative feeling of powerlessness and frustration plus the will to change and renewal, allows a more precise interpretation at all, whether it does not get stuck in the atmospherically ambiguous, in the emotionally approximate.

Comparably dazzling is the second of the Wagner chapters, called “Eros”. Documented with all sorts of testimonies are not so much Tristan and Isolde, Lohengrin and Elsa, but rather the forces of desire of people and things. Wagner’s longings fulfilled in physical and fashion enjoyment. The existence of the female body with corset and crinoline, the role of Wagner’s available women as partner or lover, muse or manager. He rejects the concept of middle-class marriage, the omnipotence principle of love, proven in “The Ring of the Nibelung”, is threatened by the brutal counterforce of the power of socio-political rule. Twilight of the Gods becomes inevitable.

Only with the founding of the German Empire in 1871, with Bayreuth-Walhall approaching, did “belonging” become the central theme, the question of what “German” and German self-image was. Essentially the experience of community, the experience of language and myths. Wagner knows that “German” is what “is native to those who speak in a language that we can understand”. So: “What is German and real” is what Hans Sachs knows in the “Meistersinger”. For Wagner there is the opposite, the alien, the different, the “Jewish”. Wagner becomes the propagandist of his festival idea of ​​the “Gesamtkunstwerk” in Bayreuth.

In the fourth chapter of the show, the shock awaits the audience

The final shock awaits the visitor of the exhibition with the fourth chapter, entitled “Disgust”. The term includes harshly, unmistakably, the fundamental annoyance, the catastrophe in the Wagner empire, especially today, its anti-Semitism, which is reflected in the aggressive, double-published (1850, 1869) work “Das Judenthum in der Musik” and its ideological environment is documented very closely. One of the crucial questions, whether anti-Semitic shocks soil the musical drama, apart from anti-Semitic shimmering figures such as Mime, Beckmesser or Kundry, was and still is hotly debated, not in this exhibition – right down to the question of whether in “Parsifal” the ” Destruction drum” in the orchestra against the Jewish. Disgust and purity, sin and redemption: the primal forces in Wagner’s world of myths.

Open detailed view

The Berlin exhibition is not, as might be expected, suitable for blissfully immersing oneself in Wagner’s music dramas and their pull. All the more reason for dealing with his intellectual structures, the social, musical and stage ideas, as they are presented here by the Wagner singer Waltraud Meier and the intellectually Wagnerian well-armed director Stefan Herheim deal with in video contributions. Unfortunately, the exhibition cannot solve the riddle of how both, Wagner’s terrible ideology and his music drama, fit together in the enjoyment and intoxication of the visitors.