Siegfried can't help it
Moral philosopher Bernard Williams in conversation with Gudrun de Geyter
Interview & binding texts : Gundrun de Geyter
The passion for Wagner's enchanting work has accompanied my life since I first became aware of it and started to conquer my mind, to penetrate it with knowledge. What I owe to him as an enjoyer and a learner, I can never forget, never the hours of deep, lonely happiness in the midst of the theater crowd, hours full of shivers and delights of the nerves and the intellect, of insights into touching and great significance, as only this art provides them. My curiosity about it has never tired; I have not grown tired of eavesdropping on it, of admiring it, of watching it - not without suspicion, I admit it; but the doubts and objections did as little harm to it as Nietzsche's immortal Wagner criticism, which I have always felt to be a panegyric with a reversed sign, another form of glorification. It was love-hate, self-mortification. Wagner's art was the great love passion of Nietzsche's life.
THOMAS MANN, Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners, 1933
The Voice
In his moral philosophy books such as Ethics and the limits of philosophy or Shame and necessity, published in 1993, Bernard Williams defends a relativistic moral concept. What we should do, the basic ethical question, Bernard Williams does not want to answer in an objective and universal, valid-for-all way as, for example, Kant does in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.
Reflections on the philosophical foundation of ethics become reflections on the relationship of the moral individual to the society to which it belongs, and this view or this starting point can be read not only in the way Bernard Williams analyzes and interprets Wagner's art but also in the considerations toward us who relate to Wagner's work in one way or another.
Wagner's work is worthy of our concern - it is by no means simple, it is challenging, it is beautiful, compelling, overwhelming. And his work is ethically and politically disturbing to us, that is, disturbing to people who have seen what we have seen, and that disturbance is insurmountable because we have to think about what these works mean.
Given that every opera performance amounts to a recreation of a work, Bernard Williams, following Thomas Mann, attaches importance to asking what are the general properties of Wagner's style that create problems. And one of those generally recognized properties is the totalizing omnipotence at work in Wagner's operas.
Williams: It is a characteristic that has often been cited by people concerning Wagner and was described rather well by Thomas Mann in his 1933 essay Größe und Leiden Richard Wagners. He writes that each of the works has an extreme power of persuasion and that they also have this musical characteristic - especially in the Ring - which makes it seem as if it all arose from a single leitmotif. To use Thomas Mann's own expression, each of the works has a kind of "Grundlaut," a fundamental way that makes them sound a certain way. It is a musical characteristic that also spills over into the dramatic, literary and textual aspects of the work, and the characters tend not to be highly differentiated. This is not equally the case in all the works - most differentiated in Die Meistersinger, which is the more traditional work, least so in Tristan und Isolde where the characters flow into each other, so to speak. It seems as if the works were all created from one mind and one quickly gets the feeling that there is always one Voice speaking to you.
People react very differently to this: some turn away from Wagner for this and begin to hate Wagner because he gives them the feeling of being locked up in his own head. Others allow themselves to be taken in by the immensely seductive music but then become distraught by this loss of self-control. In any case, Wagner is quick to give you the impression that in a certain sense he knows all the answers, that there is no doubt as to the message he wants to communicate. There is this tremendous bold vision of the world as if he wanted to say: this is what the world looks like and this is the kind of salvation we can achieve. He's like a preacher, a persuader, and that's why people get instantly distressed by nerving similarities that evoke the association with Hitler: this idea of The Voice which can lead people into the most extraordinary things. So after the war Mann made his famous remark "There is a lot of Hitler in Wagner" .
Siegfried
The connection of myth and individual subjectivity, of myth and psychology, is what Thomas Mann considers to be the characteristic by which Wagner's art rises far above the level of older opera art. Psychology seems to us to be something rational, Mann writes, its access to the mythical land seems to be full of obstacles. It seems antithetical to the mythical, antithetical also to music although this complex of psychology, myth and music appears to us as an organic reality in the cases of Nietzsche and Wagner. He thinks of the technique of memory motifs that Wagner builds into a profound virtuoso system. How Siegfried under the linden tree, thinking of his mother, dreams away in erotic reveries, how in the scene where Mime tries to instill fear in his foundling Siegfried while the orchestra plays the motif of Brünnhilde sleeping in a circle of fire and thus darkly indicates the essence of that fear. That is analysis, Mann writes, that is Freud. With Freud, too, an interest in the mythical and pre-cultural goes hand in hand with his psychological interest.
But where Thomas Mann values the mythic underpinning or linkage or connection, Bernard Williams sees the danger of containment, confinement in Wagner's mind in particular. No question about the picture Wagner offers, the danger of the power of conviction. With that "being locked up in someone's head," shouldn't we also think of a feature of some great modernist literature, the "stream of consciousness"? With Wagner, why don't we speak of a "stream of conciousness"?
Williams: One of the characteristics of Wagner's work, and which, by the way, was a core theme in 19th-century art, was that he merged myths with subjective depth psychology. Quite unlike Ibsen and other writers, Wagner appeals to typically medieval myths drawn from rather vague sources and injects them with a completely 19th-century form of subjectivity. In his most successful pages you then notice that a kind of "stream of conciousness," this sense of subjectivity, of depth psychology, takes over from the myth and begins to shape the myth itself.
I think this is the case for Tristan und Isolde and for Parsifal, and that is why for me these two are ultimately his masterpieces. They are his most radical and in a sense his most modern works. Tristan und Isolde has always been considered very sophisticated, it's really no coincidence that the piece is so difficult to bring to the stage, you can't make a routine opera out of it.
With Parsifal, however, you have the problem that he has tried to use fragments of Christian life which both Christians and liberals object to. Christians don't like it because it seems overtly manipulative to them, antichristians don't like it because Christian symbolism embarrasses them. I consider this religious problem rather marginal in relation to the success of the work which is in fact a very progressive, modernist work, in which myth is really transformed into depth psychology and further, in a metaphysical sense, also has something to say about death, the meaning of life. I have much more problems with The Ring because in this case the depth psychology, as brilliant as it is in the case of Wotan, fails completely in the character of Siegfried.
Siegfried is not only a fool like Parsifal but he has no inner life. Never does anything happen to him. All he does is question the ancient fairy tale where he comes from and then he grows up by first killing a dragon, of which he hardly knows anything and then he kisses Brünnhilde who reminds him briefly of his mother. His business is to be the hero but he doesn't have the slightest idea why. And so here we have someone who a) has absolutely no inner life which betrays the "stream of conciousness" aspect of Wagner's work and b) who achieves nothing and c) is supposed to be a hero.
Rather, the actual hero of the Ring is Wotan but the funeral march, this crushing climax that is the very climax of the whole Ring, is dedicated to him! And so a problem arises, a vacuum, a certain emptiness. Arriving at this point, I think we can no longer speak of an aesthetic problem only but also of a political problem, because of the implication - which the Nazis capitalized on - that there could be a form of pure heroism that could stand above everyday politics and bring redemption.
Of course, Wagner does not explicitly say that, but the problem is that a void has been created so that someone who is inclined to fill it in this way is tempted by the work to do so.
The tradition of the non-political
The problem with the Ring is not that the Ring avoids politics; rather, the Ring seems to reject a politics of innocence. The redemption motif at the end of Götterdämmerung points to a well-defined kind of redemption. At the end of the first act of Das Rheingold, the three Rhine-daughters sing:
Rhine-gold! Rhine-gold! guileless gold!
O would that thy treasure were glittering yet in the deep!
Tender and true 'tis but in the waters: false and base are all who revel above!
It is not because at the end of the Ring the gold is back in place that with it, through all the deaths that have fallen, the world would be redeemed, let alone the prospect of a better world. The future after the demise of the gods is apparently of no consequence. Political interpretations of the Ring get tangled up here. They begin with much aplomb in Das Rheingold with its manifest images of dispossession, impoverishment and slavery but on their further quest through the Ring find only material pointing to a kind of faded hope for a politics of innocence. If philosophical conclusions may be drawn from the Ring, it must be concluded from the story of the supreme god Wotan that there is no politics of innocence because nothing worth achieving can be achieved in innocence. Only in the depths where nothing is imposed on nature or where nothing depends on it can the true and the reliable be found. Only, the dignity of Siegfried's funeral march contradicts this, not because of what it wants to say, for it does not say anything, but because of what it does in the Ring. The music suggests that there could be a world where a politics of pure heroic action has a chance of succeeding, a politics unhampered by the wiles of Wotan or by the need to strike a chord with the giants, where a settlement with the Nibelungen can be made once and for all, a redemptive reforming politics that transcends precisely the political, the transcendence of the political transformed into the politics of transcendence.
Williams: A recurring theme in the German tradition is the desire to transcend the political. This notion of the non-political is an idea that was also taken up by Wagner in the sense that for him artistic festivals should be the expression of the German people, as the spirit of the nation.
Thomas Mann later wrote a book titled Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen in which he thought that it would be possible to have a life completely devoted to art that would transcend the political, that regarded politics as vulgar and assigned a greater vocation to art. Later he realized that this was a disastrous illusion. It is perfectly possible to see Hitler as an heir to this tradition, and that is what Mann began to see. There is a good book by the author Peter Stern, who emigrated from Germany, entitled The Fuhrer and his people, which describes Hitler as a man who rejected politics in order to take on the weight of the nation in an apolitical gesture. Hitler was particularly fond of this rhetoric. In fact, he was a tremendously unscrupulous politician but his self-image and the image he put up of his people transcended the merely politically democratic: I am in fact a suffering artist, I bear the weight of the nation. Of course, one cannot see this rhetoric within the framework of 19th-century Germany as foreshadowing the horrors of the Third Reich but one of the ideological elements within this strange mishmash that National Socialism represented was indeed the idea of designing a system of power that would transcend the everyday political.
Self-understanding
However, it does not amount to an indictment because Williams turns the problematic in Wagner's artworks toward the accuser. The problem of moral duty at stake when we interpret operas or writings by Wagner, now considered for a moment in their generality, becomes a problem of self-understanding: why is it that this work does what it does to me?
Williams: The issue is not that we should feel morally obligated to criticize Wagner, as if we were saying, we don't want anything more to do with you. What we should come to is self-understanding and a great example of such an attitude can be found in the Ring itself particularly the key scene between Wotan and Fricka in the second act of Die Walküre in which she convinces him to give up defending Siegmund. When Wotan comes to the realization that he must give up Siegmund, it is interesting to know what he means by that: it does not mean that he will be punished by a power greater than himself, it does not mean that there is an abstract law that forbids it, it means two things to him: he can no longer find his own enterprise meaningful if he does it anyway, and the other reason is that it is to her detriment; after all, he lives in a world order in which she is part of his life. So these issues do not seem to me to be subjects of abstract moral laws, these are matters of self-understanding, and it seems to me that when we are attracted to Wagner's works and are greatly moved by them that we should ask ourselves what is going on, why these pieces have such an influence and what is their meaning in our lives. Such an invitation to self-understanding presents itself only with works of exceptional ambition, no one will ask this kind of question with the more trivial works.