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Author : Jos Hermans
The outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 naturally meant the immediate demise of all Wagner performances in Russia. National-patriotic themes inevitably came to the forefront of the operatic repertoire. The city of St. Petersburg was Russified; it was henceforth called Petrograd. And Petrograd became the starting point of two revolutions in 1917, the bourgeois one in February that overthrew the tsar and the socialist one in October that brought about an unexpectedly radical social and political change for Russia. The Bolsheviks under Lenin came to power. Under the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the country would become a communist utopia. After the devastating civil war ended, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established in 1924 with the Russian Soviet Socialist Federative Republic (RSFSR) as the core country. Moscow became the capital.
Amazing at first glance, but quite understandable on reflection, was the fact that Wagner was immediately restored to recognition by the revolutionary society. The reason seemed obvious, for there was now reference with great gesture to the former revolutionary Wagner, to the revolutionary intellectual potential in his artistic views and his works - Wagner now, therefore, under the balaclava of the revolution, Wagner as a comrade in art! The new state leadership itself was infected with Wagner. Nadezhda Krupskaya reported that her husband Lenin "loved Wagner very much" and the esteem in which the first People's Commissar for Education and Enlightenment, Anatoli Lunacharsky, held Wagner's art is well known.
What attracted Lunacharsky most to Wagner (and what, incidentally, also drew the ‘father of Russian Marxism’ Georgy Plekhanov to Wagner) was the composer’s socialist vision in Art and Revolution of an ideal art form that would be for the people. Wagner’s condemnation of bourgeois theatre as a profit-making institution and place of light entertainment, and his dream of a theatre which would be reminiscent of that of ancient Greece in terms of its role in socially educating the masses made Art and Revolution for Lunacharsky an ‘almost classic expression of the theory of theatre’ he hoped would emerge in Bolshevik Russia. He believed that in the artistic sphere Art and Revolution was as important a document as the ‘Communist Manifesto’, which was also a product of the 1848 Revolutions.
As early as 1906, Lunacharsky had written a preface for a Russian edition of Wagner's "The Art and the Revolution." In 1918, he immediately made a similar suggestion to Alexander Blok. Blok was open-minded and positive about the revolution and wrote the desired text, but published it elsewhere. In Blok's essay of March 12, 1918, one can read the following remarkable sentences: "The social tragedy Der Ring des Nibelungen became fashionable. For many years until the beginning of the war, the theater halls in the capitals of Russia were crowded with chattering daemons and indifferent civilians and officers, including the highest officer, Nikolai II. Finally, at the beginning of the war, the news went through all the newspapers that Emperor Wilhelm had a siren attached to his car, playing the leitmotif of the god Wotan, who seeks to win " the desire of change," as it says in the text of the Ring of the Nibelung. (...) Wagner is henceforth alive and henceforth new. As soon as a revolution sounds in the air, Wagner's art also sounds in response."
Alexander Blok's two great poems, The Twelve and The Scythians, were published in 1918. They celebrate the revolution in a metaphorical setting, still in the spirit of Symbolism, and call on Europe to follow the same path. Yet Blok remained more of a romantic revolutionary. He made himself available to the new power without being a convinced Marxist; Lunacharsky reported a conversation with Blok in which the latter had said, "I will try to cooperate with you. To tell you the truth, if you were only Marxists, it would be extremely difficult for me, because Marxism makes me feel cold; but in you, the Bolsheviks, I feel our Russian, Bakunin or something like that. Lenin I like very much, but not Marxism." Blok's early death in 1921 prevented him, like many of his like-minded friends, from later entering the deadly mills of Stalin's persecution machine with such a political viewpoint.
The music critic Leonid Sabaneev was another prominent figure who found Wagner’s works highly germane to the foundation of mass art after the Revolution, as can be ascertained from the ideas expressed in the preface to his unpublished study of Wagner, which he completed in 1923: “Wagner is now the closest to our consciousness, to our spiritual needs ... closer than anyone else . . . One need not close one’s eyes to the fact that far from everything in Wagner’s ideology is acceptable to us today .. . But that monumentalism which he achieves in expressing ideas through symbols must inevitably serve as the example and prototype for the style which is proclaimed today and which is awaited in art transformed by the revolution. In this respect the study of Wagner’s methods is particularly important and necessary . .. His art holds the key to developing the organisation of the masses, his attitude is organically revolutionary and agitational. His great ... powers of expression, his rich symbolism present brilliant methods for agitation, regardless of whom they are addressed to ... In the pantheon of composers there is not one more revolutionary than Wagner.”
Ultimately, it was mainly Anatoli Lunacharsky himself who, from his political work, repeatedly cited Wagner as the main witness for the new art of the proletariat. Since Wagner was first published in 1906, the core of his views was the proposition that a distinction should be made between a "revolutionary" and a "reactionary" Wagner. His early works, up to and including the spiritual concept of the Ring, had to be made especially serviceable. Then Lunacharsky developed his socialist reading of the Ring des Nibelungen: “ Particularly revealing for the Wagner of the "first" period are his theoretical works, especially his writing Die Kunst und die Revolution. He did not go from revolution to art, but from art to revolution. This was a good thing. He found to the revolution from the needs of his talent and his creativity. [...] In the period that followed, he conceived a great work. He chose as material the central Nibelungen myth from ancient Germanic literature. However, he turned against the previous interpretation. [...] Wagner first planned his tetralogy in the optimistic variant. The main opposing forces were the myth of fate (in which everything, even the gods, is fatefully connected) and the gradual development of the free human being, born of free love, which goes beyond the framework of legal marriage (Siegmund and Sieglinde). This free love develops under special circumstances that steel the will of man. Man, who obeys only his nature, proves capable of directing the destiny of the world in a different direction. He can break the iron chain of fate and bring youth, joy and freedom into life. Wagner lives in the capitalist world and, in those revolutionary times, hates the big bourgeoisie, which increasingly tries to usurp the world. Gold appears to him as poison. In this respect, he stands on the same standpoint that Marx praised in some ancient poets, in Shakespeare, and so on. Fate - that is the lust for gold, the greed. Siegfried's freedom - that is his elevation above gold, above greed. For this reason, he acquires not only the features of an anarchistic free personality, but also the features of a hero who frees himself from the yoke of capital.”
He found the end of the tetralogy problematic in the context of a socialist reception of the Ring, which he felt had led to pure pessimism under the influence of Schopenhauer: "How did Wagner see the world now? The world is doomed to destruction. Life is a funeral procession to a dark end, a procession of struggle, treachery, greed and crime. Even noble personalities move along and are also doomed to destruction. They can do nothing against the fateful course of events. Only the human being who is raised by the wisdom of art can prepare the solemn death, defeat existence and go away in a sublime melancholy into nothingness. Wagner wants to create such a work of redemption. But his tetralogy no longer proceeds from winter to spring. It ends with the eclipse of the sun, with the downfall of the world. The free man is not able to win. The evil powers triumph. They triumph de facto. Morally and musically, however, fate-surrendered humility and the desire to escape fate by departing from life triumph."
So much for Lunacharsky's portrayal of Wagner. It was virtually exemplary of the young Soviet Union and determined the further handling of Wagner, both in music journalism and in theaters. Wagner's principled suitability for proletarian socialist culture had thus been confirmed. As a famous writer and at the same time a high-ranking cultural politician, Lunacharsky thus stood as a guarantor, so to speak.
And so Wagner's music was also played at major mass political events, thus directly serving the revolution. On July 19, 1920, for example, the funeral march from Götterdämmerung was played by a fanfare of 500 musicians, accompanied by the sound of cannons, at a solemn ceremony at the monument to the victims of the revolution on Mars Field in Petrograd; among the participants in this event, which took place within the framework of the Second Congress of the Communist International, were Lenin and Gorky. Newspaper reports paid tribute to the event: "Did the brilliant Richard Wagner ever think that his music would cover the wide field of the victims of the revolution? Did he ever think that his music would be the first to honor the memory of those whom it is the duty of all mankind to honor? This music seems made for this moment. It contains the sorrow of loss, the mourning of death; it contains the joy of gain, the joy of life. [...] The funeral march for the slain Siegfried, which sounded at the moment of the wreath laying by Congress on the graves of the fallen revolutionaries, reveals with incomparable drama the essence and soul of the unforgettable deeds of the giants of our time. [...] Immediately and powerfully, the audience on the Field of Mars experienced the breath of the idea, the gigantic magnitude of its execution. The heroic spirit was represented by the ecstatic bursts of the gathered energy of a huge orchestra."
And again the funeral march sounded at a funeral service, this time in February 1924 at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow: Lenin had died. On Nov. 7, 1927, Rienzi's Overture was performed in Moscow's Red Square to mark the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. Wagner was performing as a socialist revolutionary musician. Six years later, the exact same notes would lend the same regime-affirming lustre to the political rituals of rival National Socialism in Germany.
Next installment : Wagner in the Soviet Union