Wagner in America (2/5)
Early Wagner criticism and the Wagner literature in the run-up to the First World War
The appropriation of Wagner before World War I bore fruit in the work of Willa Cather, author of two subtle stories about the effect of Wagner's music on women and of a major novel, "The Song of the Lark" (1915).
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Author : Jos Hermans
In general, it can be argued that the creator of Der Ring des Nibelungen was seen in early American Wagner literature as an idealist, as a do-gooder in a fundamental sense, with the unassailable self-image of the United States as a "force for good," coloring the perception.
Henry Krehbiel places Wagner against the horizon of world literature and surprisingly emphasizes that Der Ring des Nibelungen should also be considered a great achievement from a literary point of view. He surprisingly relates the work with its Germanic mythology to Weimar classicism and emphasizes the Christian foundation of the ethics of both Goethe and Wagner. Krehbiel is always mindful of the part of his readers for whom moral integrity in Wagner's work is a concern. In his "Studies in Wagnerian Drama," he is always ultimately concerned with "the ethical idea," "the ethical principle" and "pure humanity freed from the bonds of conventionality." In a country heavily influenced by Protestantism, the question of whether Germanic mythology was compatible with the spirit of Christianity was crucial. This question was not only answered positively by Krehbiel in terms of Christian morality. Symptomatic of this is also a 1906 book title by Mary B. Lewis: The Ethics of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung."
Freda Winworth, who wrote a guide to the Ring, also emphasizes the profoundly moral nature of the work and even speaks of a "triumph of morality" with regard to the brother/sister love between the Wälsungen. In essence, this line of interpretation goes back to Krehbiel, for whom the patriarchal notion that humanity is redeemed by the self-sacrificing love of women is the ethical core of Der Ring des Nibelungen. In this respect, he places Wagner's Ring alongside Goethe's Faust, anticipating by a good decade an insight that the young Thomas Mann will articulate thus: "The last word of 'Faust' and what the violins sing at the end of Götterdämmerung are one, and it is the truth. The Eternal-Feminine attracts us."
Henry Finck also attributes to the Ring the same high rank within German cultural history as Goethe's Faust. The real novelty of Wagner's Ring, however, is its return to nature, to the elemental forces of physical and human nature; the musical expression of these elemental forces is Wagner's true domain. Not coincidentally, Wagner's musical dramas take place almost entirely outdoors, in the open air, an observation that brought the mythologically charged and thus alienating work closer to the American environment - a concern that Finck, a garden lover and conservationist, naturally took to heart. Not surprisingly, he harbored a particular love for Act 2 of Siegfried, which he set in a wooded setting. In terms of philosophical content, Finck also moves within the framework of the emphatically positive moral interpretation outlined by Krehbiel.
This underlines what Joseph Horowitz claimed at the turn of the century about the American reception of Wagner: that it could be described at its core as a "meliorism," that is, a form of appropriation aimed at moral improvement. It is a picture of Wagner that does not include Nietzsche's decadent-psychological perspective that typified French and German Wagner discourse. Krehbiel and Finck's first concern was to present Der Ring des Nibelungen as a cornerstone of Germany's great cultural achievements, and to see them confirmed in this way in America as well. They largely succeeded in doing this.
Unlike in Germany, there was a clear distinction in America at the time between Wagner the artist and Wagner the ideologue. His nationalism was considered quite normal; no one made a fuss about it. Something else was his hostility toward Jews. When Wagner published an expanded edition of Das Judentum in der Musik in 1869, it was denounced in the country's most widely read music magazine, Dwight's Journal of Music, as undignified, petty and a disgrace. Like almost all Americans, Henry Krehbiel seems to have simply ignored the problem. Finck, on the other hand, devotes a 20-plus page section of his book to it, calling Wagner's hostility to Jews absurd and ridiculous.
Wagner's claim that Jews were incapable of producing great art was nothing more than an absurd and regrettable prejudice that could not be taken seriously, if only because some of Wagner's own statements about Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer contradicted the position of his pamphlet. The reservations of a Wagner enthusiast such as Henry Finck regarding Wagner's anti-Semitism found no echo and would be raised only later, under the influence of Hitler's Wagner cult, by Peter Viereck and Robert Gutmann. The question that dominates the American Wagner discussion today, namely whether Jew-hatred also infected his stage works, plays no role in either Krehbiel's or Finck's work.
The American Wagner enthusiasm of the Seidl era is comparable in intensity to that of the French and English. It marks a brilliant and memorable period in American musical life. It is therefore all the more surprising that this chapter, as Joseph Horowitz has shown, is an unexplored part of American cultural history. The reasons for this are complex. But it was not Hitler and World War II, as one might suspect, that caused this break in memory. The decisive break occurred earlier, notably during World War I. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Wagner remained banned from the Met's repertoire until 1920.
The interruption of the Wagner tradition, however, was short-lived. Nevertheless, World War I marked an important kink in the history of attitudes that permanently altered the United States' relationship with Germany culturally. America was at that time forced to choose between its older Anglo-Saxon heritage and its younger German heritage. It chose England, and the Anglo-Saxon part of the United States consolidated not only its economic and social dominance, but also its cultural dominance. As a result, serious music, which was central to German cultural consciousness, remained a marginal phenomenon in the minds of most Americans.
A poetic echo of the exciting and glorious Seidl era, the cornerstone of this first phase of American wagnerism, was provided by the poets. This literary wagnerism seems almost unknown in Germany. Its main representative was a woman: Willa Cather (1873-1947). Her stories about the effects of wagnerian music and her great artistic novel "The Song of the Lark" can easily stand comparison with those of her German contemporary Thomas Mann, Hans Rudolf Vaget believes.
In the roughly three decades before 1917, when the United States entered the war, Wagner was indeed much more present in American cultural consciousness than one would think from today's perspective. The extent to which American literary culture was imbued with an awareness of Wagner's central place in modernity can be seen in numerous testimonies. Chief among these is "The Waste Land" (1922), the seminal poetic manifesto of American poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, who lived in St. Louis, Boston and Paris before moving to England. Wagner figures prominently in this core text of literary modernism, a firework of quotations and allusions. Eliot quotes from Tristan und Isolde and from Götterdämmerung. That Munich is evoked at the beginning of the cycle of poems can be explained by the fact that the premiere of Tristan took place there.
By far the most important testimony to literary Wagnerism, however, is to be found in the work of Willa Cather, an author long considered quantité négligeable, but now increasingly placed in the forefront of the great names of 20th century American literature. Her model was Henry James, whom she far surpassed in the art of landscape description and of musical performance. Case in point is the novel "The Song of the Lark," published in 1915, which must be considered the most important document of American wagnerism and which apparently has not yet been translated into German.
Willa Cather, a Virginia native, grew up in the cultural desert of Nebraska, a harsh, treeless prairie landscape of which she paints an unsentimental and inexhaustible picture in several novels. With grim humor, she dates some of her early letters with "Siberia," her pseudonym for Red Cloud, Nebraska. In order to hear her first opera, the musically interested young woman had to travel to Chicago. She sees her first Wagner operas in the spring of 1897 in Pittsburgh, where she is working as a journalist when the Met visits Carnegie Music Hall for a week. The program includes Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Götterdämmerung. She reports on it for a local newspaper in Nebraska: quite a few singers were apparently not in good spirits, but the music was so glorious "that one wishes the singers would not come to ruin it."
As unsatisfying as singing in Pittsburgh was at the time, the music made an indelible impression and aroused in her a lifelong fascination. During occasional visits to New York and then entirely after her move to the city on the Hudson in 1906, the Met exerted an irresistible attraction on her. Her companion Edith Lewis reports that Cather was constantly to be found at the Met. It was the "golden age" of the Metropolitan Opera under the direction of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, when stars such as Caruso and Schalyapin, Melba, Sembrich, Farrar and Tetrazzini performed there and Toscanini was also on the stage.
However, it was not the great names of the Italian repertoire that most fascinated Willa Cather, but the outstanding star of the Wagner repertoire: Olive Fremstad, who sang on 351 nights from 1903 to 1914. On January 1, 1908, Cather experiences the artist, who made a great impression both vocally and on stage, in the legendary performance of Tristan und Isolde conducted by Gustav Mahler. From then on, dates her deep admiration for this quirky artist, whose demeanor on and off stage was reminiscent of another Met celebrity, Maria Callas. From then on, Cather attends just about every performance she sings.
An insightful 1913 article, "Three American Singers," pays tribute to three American singers, including Fremstad, who was arguably the real raison d'être of this work. Interviews with Fremstad had revealed an artistic kinship that formed the basis for a rapidly deepening friendship. Soon Cather felt the urge to put herself in Fremstad's shoes to describe that which could explain her enormous impact, for example, in the role of Kundry. This proved to be the germ of her third novel, "The Song of the Lark," a bildungsnovel based on the life stories of the singer and herself. To understand how Fremstad thought and felt - this is the starting point of her novel project - all she had to do was look inside herself. The fictional Thea Kronborg, whose rise from childhood in the deep backwoods of small-town Colorado to the most celebrated Wagnerian singer at the Metropolitan Opera is recounted, can easily be interpreted as both a biographical and psychological amalgam of Olive Fremstad and Willa Cather. Not only are we dealing with the first serious novel about a female artist, "The Song of the Lark" also represents American literature's greatest tribute to Richard Wagner.
Wagner as a subject, that is, the impact of his music on America's way of life, interested the budding writer from an early age. In 1904 and 1905, respectively, two novel studies emerged in which the world of Wagner's music dramas is characterized as the outward appearance of a more fulfilling counter-world to the harsh realities of life in America. In the first, "A Wagner Matinee," we find a woman, the narrator's aunt, scarred by her hard life, making her way to a Wagner concert at Boston's Symphony Hall. The old whimsical lady, a former music teacher who ended up in the Nebraska borderlands with her husband, is so moved and brought to tears by the performed pieces that the thought of returning to the poetry-less world of Nebraska makes her shudder.
In "The Garden Lodge," the subtler of the two stories, we meet a successful woman living the American dream, seemingly happily married and mistress of a beautiful garden overlooking the sea. The memory of Wagner performances, revived by a visit from a celebrated Wagner tenor, makes her fully aware of the emptiness and emotional meagerness of her present life. She recognizes herself in the figure of Sieglinde, and since she is presented as a cool-headed, thoughtful and eminently practical woman, it is to be expected that she will emulate Sieglinde and that she will also find dramatic self-liberation in her own life. On closer inspection, a parody of the first act of Die Walküre is discernible in this narrative, albeit without the decadent parallel action staged almost simultaneously by Thomas Mann in Wälsungenblut (1905).
The title of Willa Cather's third novel, "The Song of the Lark," published in 1915, refers to a painting that the heroine, Thea Kronborg, is looking at during a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. It shows a farm girl, sickle in hand, in front of a rising sun, listening with her head held high to something - the song of an invisible lark. Immediately thereafter, Thea attends a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert and in turn listens to music that enchants her. She hears Antonin Dvorak's then-new Symphony in E Minor (Of the New World), premiered in 1893 under Anton Seidl. The second part of the concert features Wagner pieces, including the Rheingold finale, which Thea experiences in a state of twilight: "So it happened that with a dull, almost listless ear she heard for the first time that restless music, ever darker, ever brighter, that would flow through so many years of her life." Not a dramatically awakening scene, then, but - much more realistically - the unobtrusive entrance into a world of new aesthetic and emotional charms to which she is irresistibly drawn and which will henceforth shape and dominate her life.
The novel vividly recounts Thea's childhood and adolescence in a small Colorado hamlet that is the spitting image of Red Cloud, the small Nebraska town where Willa Cather grew up, and traces the steps that led her to become an artist. Powerfully drawn to the world of Wagnerian musical drama and inspired by the example of Wagner's own passionate artistry - his suffering and his greatness - Thea decides to pursue a career as a singer. She leaves for Germany for ten years.
It is not only this triumphant journey that makes Thea Kronborg's career coincide with Olive Fremstad's: even in their earliest beginnings, the lives of Thea and Olive Fremstad seem to overlap. Born in Sweden in 1871, Fremstad came to Minnesota as an adopted child and, like Willa Cather, had to work her way through Chicago and New York as an artist with a dogged passion. Again, Wagner is crucial to the singer's life plan because when she decides to travel to Germany, i.e. Berlin, it is to take lessons from Lilli Lehmann, who had sung under Wagner and Seidl. Thea Kronborg is also sent to Berlin, although no specific reason is given.
While Fremstad was associated with various stages, Cather gives her heroine a permanent place in the ensemble of the Dresden Court Theater. We learn little about the ten years in Germany. Only in the last part of the novel do we see Thea Kronborg at the height of her career as the star of the Metropolitan Opera. Here the novel offers a series of snapshots in which we see her in various roles - as Elsa, as Elisabeth and especially as Sieglinde, a role she studied in Germany but never sang. Thea sings them for the first time when she has to stand in at short notice for an exhausted colleague after the first act of Die Walküre and sings the 2nd and 3rd acts in her place.
By the end, we learn that Thea marries her longtime suitor, an opera and Germany-loving heir to a brewing dynasty in St. Louis - a turn of events treated rather casually. Thea Kronborg is certainly not a "nest-building" specimen of a woman, but represents a kind of modern woman who, like Fremstad and Cather himself, is totally devoted to the arts. In Thea Kronborg, Cather gives us a Wagnerian singer who wants to be taken seriously as an intellectual and whose emancipation is reminiscent of Laura Langford and her Seidl Society friends. The passionate and exclusive devotion to her art is the secret of her success.
"The Song of the Lark" can be considered the literary crowning achievement of American wagnerism. This 1915 novel assumes a familiarity with Wagner's work that shortly thereafter became completely lost to American cultural life during the Hitler years, and which has only recently been showing signs of a comeback, spurred by the new, more critical interest in Wagner. Readers of this novel did not need to be told what Elsa, Isolde or Sieglinde were about.
As with Willa Cather's German colleague Thomas Mann, familiarity with Wagner's operas was a must for readers. The readership captivated by Wagner had, meanwhile, become more and more established since Anton Seidl's work in New York. Of course, Cather never attempts, as Thomas Mann did in Tristan and in Wälsungenblut, to problematize the psychological and intellectual content of a Wagner work.
And yet Willa Cather is part of one distinctive shift in narrative interest in modernist literature from the auditorium to the stage and, in Thomas Mann's case, to the orchestra pit. In novels before Thomas Mann and Willa Cather - for example, in Flaubert, Tolstoy, Henry James and Edith Wharton - the performances that make it worth going to the opera take place in the lodges and foyers. After all, one goes to the opera to see and to be seen. Like Thomas Mann, Willa Cather makes opera a haven of profound intellectual and aesthetic experiences with life-changing impact. In both cases, it is Wagner's operas and music dramas that caused this groundbreaking quantum leap in the literary representation of opera.