eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
That Wagner conceived of himself creatively as both man and woman is central to an understanding of his life and art. So argues Jean-Jacques Nattiez in this richly insightful work, where he draws from semiology, music criticism, and psychoanalysis to explore such topics as Wagner's theories of music drama, his anti-Semitism, and his psyche.
Wagner, who wrote the libretti for the operas he composed, maintained that art is the union of the feminine principle, music, and the masculine principle, poetry. In light of this androgynous model, Nattiez reinterprets the Wagnerian canon, especially the Ring of the Nibelung, which is shown to contain a metaphorical transposition of Wagner's conception of the history of music: Siegfried appears as the poet, Brunnhilde, as music, and their union is an androgynous one in which individual identity fades and the lovers revert to a preconflictual, presexual state.
Nattiez traces the androgynous symbol in Wagner's theoretical writings throughout his career. Looking to explain how this idea, so closely bound up with sexuality, took root in Wagner's mind, the author considers the possibility of Freudian and Jungian interpretations. In particular he explores the composer's relationship with his mother, a distant woman who discouraged his interest in the theater, and his stepfather, a loving man whom Wagner suspected was not only his real father but also a Jew. Along with psychoanalysis, Nattiez critically applies various structuralist and feminist theories to Wagner's creative enterprise to demonstrate how the nature of twentieth-century hermeneutics is itself androgynous.
Originally published in 1993.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400863242 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in Opera , #160 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 380 |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Read an Excerpt
Wagner Androgyne
A Study in Interpretation
By Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Stewart Spencer
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09141-9
CHAPTER 1
THE THEORETICAL ESSAYS OF 1849 TO 1851
Hardly had Wagner completed the full score of Lohengrin on 28 April 1848 when a whole new series of ideas began to clamor for his attention—The Nibelung Legend, the prose draft of Siegfrieds Tod, an article on the Wibelungs, the prose draft of Wieland der Schmied, the essays. As we saw in the Introduction, theoretical reflections and plans for dramatic works went hand in hand at this crucial moment in the life of a man whose mind was teeming with a thousand simultaneous projects, as he glimpsed the creative opportunities for the whole of the rest of his life even if, for the present, he lacked the maturity' needed to bring them to fruition. In fact, the Ring was not completed until 1874. Even the music was not started until 1 November 1853, by which date Wagner had already written a long series of essays, to the chief among which we must now turn our attention: Art and Revolution (1849h), The Art-Work of the Future (1849m), "Judaism in Music" (1850c), Opera and Drama (1851a), and A Communication to My Friends (1851h).
This whole series of essays is typical of Wagner's creative style: Art mid Revolution is the length of an average article (33 pages in Wagner's collected works). Scarcely had he completed it when he began a much more elaborate work, The Art-Work of the Future (135 pages), which takes up and develops ideas contained in the earlier piece. Rut already he was planning a multipart sequel, originally called "The Artists of the Future," "The Men Who Will Build the Art of the Future," and "The Essence of Opera." Conceived as a single article, it quickly grew into a full-scale work and was published, in two separate volumes, under the title Opera and Drama (327 pages). Even while Art and Revolution was still in press, Wagner was already announcing The Art-Work of the Future, while what was later to become Opera and Drama was explicitly presented as the conclusion of the earlier essay.
Each essay, in fact, amplifies its predecessor, taking us from the abstract to the concrete. In Art and Revolution Wagner traces the rough outlines of a development leading from the original, unified art of the Greeks to the art of the future, which, he argues, will not be viable until after the coming revolution. This development is described in greater detail in The Art-Work of the Future, where Wagner looks more closely at the component parts not only of Greek tragedy but also of the musical drama in which he places all his hopes. Opera and Drama attempts a more historical approach and takes as its essential theme the relationship between poetry and music throughout the evolution of opera as a genre.
It is this that enables us to approach these three texts as a single entity, a unified whole into which other shorter but no less important texts such as "Art and Climate" and, above all, "Judaism in Music" can readily be inserted and which Wagner worked on over a period of only eighteen months. Anyone other than Wagner would perhaps have combined the contents of all these essays and made them the subject of a single work. But scarcely had he committed one idea to paper when he felt the need to see it in print, trying to make himself understood by those who did not understand him (in other words, the entire world), even if it meant starting all over again the following month.
These works have an underlying thematic unity. And because each of them takes up the ideas of the preceding piece, developing and transforming them, the paradigmatic method seems best suited to taking full account of them. What is meant by the paradigmatic method is a technique that consists, in this case, of superimposing the four main essays so that their common thematic axes emerge as though, at bottom, we were dealing with only a single text. This does not mean that we shall ignore the differences between them. Quite the opposite. The paradigmatic perspective allows us to show that precisely the same function is fulfilled by Apollo in the one essay, by Christ in a second, and by Siegfried in a third. But beyond the disparities that they contain, all four essays tell a single story: when the art of drama was still in its infancy, among the ancient Greeks, unity reigned supreme; then, beneath the destructive pressures of the Romans and Christianization, this pristine unity fell apart; a new age will come, however, when unity will be restored.
Original Unity
Greek Tragedy as a Unifying Rite
In the beginning were the Greeks: "If we consider the matter closely, we shall admit the impossibility of taking even a single step in present-day art without noticing the way in which it is bound up with the art of the Greeks. For, in point of fact, our present-day art is but a link in the chain of development of the whole of European art; and this development started out from the Greeks" (1849h, GS 3.9). What Wagner is struck by, above all, is the existence of an elevated artistic genre—tragedy—whose creation and execution reveal an underlying unity of god, populace, poet, and theater: "Having placed the beautiful, strong, and free human being at the very pinnacle of religious consciousness, the Greek spirit ... found its fullest expression in Apollo.... It was this Apollo who fulfilled the will of Zeus upon the Grecian earth; who was, in fact, the Grecian people" (ibid., 3.10). This being, who embodied both man, the people, and god, was a familiar figure to Aeschylus, "the tragic poet who, inspired by Dionysus, joined die bond of speech, the supreme poetic intent, to all the elements of those disparate arts that had sprung unbidden, of themselves, and as the result of inner necessity, from the fairest human life, concentrating them into a single focus in order to produce the highest conceivable work of art, the drama" (ibid., 3.10–11). The theatrical celebration was, therefore, nothing more nor less than a "divine festival" in which the whole of society' communed with itself, and "the poet, as its high priest, was reified and embodied in his work of art.... Such was the Greek work of art; such their god Apollo, incarnate in actual, living art; such was the people of Greece in its highest truth and beauty" (ibid., 3.11). And what did the populace do, in amphitheaters built to seat thirty' thousand people? They flocked to see the Prometheta, each member of the audience "finding inner harmony before this mightiest of works of art, gaining self-understanding, fathoming the meaning of his private actions, and merging in intimate oneness with the essence of all that was Greek, with his community, and with his god" (ibid.).
In The Art-Work of the Future Wagner insists on the ritual character of the Hellenes' theatrical ceremony: "Lyric and dramatic works of art were a religious act.... Tragedv was thus a religious ceremony raised to the level of a work of art" (1849m, GS 3.132).
Wagner's insistence on the fusion of the constituent parts of Greek society, united in the theatrical mystery, must not be underestimated. Greek tragedy was unity' embodied, unity' enacted
Unified Society
It was necessary, however, for society itself to be unified if tragedy was to fulfill this function. The unity' of the populace, the creative artist, and art itself presupposed a harmonious relationship between man and nature:
The free Greek, who placed himself at the head of nature, could create art from man's delight in himself ... Art is the highest form of activity on the part of each and every individual who has developed his physical beau tv in harmony with himself and with nature; man must derive supreme delight from the world of the senses before he can create the instruments of his art from it; for only in the world of the senses can he find the will to create the work of art. (1849h, GS 3.15)
Nonetheless, this harmonious union of man and nature does not signify a state of equality. After all, Wagner insists that man places himself "at the head of nature," the better to dominate her:
It was left to the Hellenes to develop the purely human work of art and, of their own accord, to extend it to the point where it represented nature. They could not be ready for this human work of art, however, until they had triumphed over nature in the sense in which it presented itself to the Asiatic peoples and until they had placed man at the head of nature, imagining those individual forces of nature as gods who, fully anthropomorphized, bore themselves with the beauty' of human beings. (1849m, GS 3.124)
Wagner returns to this theme in his article "Art and Climate": 'The progress made by the human race in developing its innate ability to wrest from nature the satisfaction of those needs that increased as its own activities increased is synonymous with the history of culture.... Only the man who, by dint of individual activity', gains his independence from nature is the historical individual, and only historical man—not primitive man, who is dependent on nature—has summoned art into life" (1850a, GS 3.208–9).
The union of creative man and nature presupposes societal unity. 'Tragedy flourished for only so long as it was inspired by the spirit of the people and so long as this spirit was truly popular, in other wurds, a communal spirit" (1849m, GS 3.105). Greek tragedy, therefore, was less the work of an individual artist than of a community' of artists: "In tragedy he [the Greek] rediscovered himself, finding there the noblest part of his own nature united with the noblest parts of that common nature shared by the nation as a whole" (1849h, GS 3.12). Not even the "greatest minds" can create "the one, true, great work of art: we, too, must help them to produce it. The tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles were the work of Athens" (ibid.).
This collective achievement w'as due to men whose intellectual qualities were equaled only by the physical qualities of the holistic human being: "thus the Greek was himself actor, singer, and dancer" (ibid., 3.24). The spectator was indistinguishable from the performer: "In chorus and protagonists Greek tragedy brought audience and work of art together.... The drama developed into a work of art only when the chorus's clarifying judgment found such irrefutable expression in the actions of the protagonists that the chorus could retire from the stage and mingle with the audience and thus become useful as a participant in the action, enlivening that action and helping to bring it about" (1851a, GS 3.268).
The Unifying Components of Tragedy
When god, the people, the poet, and drama are united, and when man is united with nature and with the rest of the social body, tragedy itself is bound to be an expression of unity. In Art and Revolution there is only one reference to the arts as three sisters engaged in a round dance (1849h, GS 3.20), but the image returns as the central symbol of The Art-Work of the Future in keeping with Wagner's typical procedure of amplifying former ideas: "Dance, Music, and Poetry are the names of the three primeval sisters whom we see entwining their measures the moment that the conditions necessary for the manifestation of art arise" (1849m, GS 3.67). Although Wagner does not refer to the Greeks here, they are evidently in his thoughts since, a few pages later, he alludes to the fate of these "three graceful Hellenic sisters" (ibid., 3.71). The three artistic genres originally formed a single entity since they were a product of the people: "Wherever the people made poetry', ... the poetic intent entered into life on the shoulders of dance and music, as the head of the full-fledged human being" (ibid., 3.103). The mousike of the Greeks, of course, was not only music but a kind of lyric poetry' intoned or sung.
In Opera and Drama Wagner refers briefly to the unity' of text, gesture, and music that had constituted the framework of The Art-Work of the Future:
The lyric and dramatic work of art was a spiritualized form of physical movement, a process made possible by language, while monumental visual art was its unconcealed deification. The Greeks felt impelled to develop music only to the extent that it had to serve to underline gesture, whose meaning was already expressed, melodically, by language. In accompanying dance movements with the melodious language of words, that language acquired so fixed a prosodic meter that ... the natural speech accent ... often took second place. (1851a, GS 4.104)
The thinking behind Opera and Drama, however, is no longer ternary but binary', and although the three Hellenic sisters have not been entirely forgotten, the author is now concerned with rather more recent history in the form of the history of opera. By the same token, the manifestation of ancient unity' that serves as Wagner's point of departure in this third of his major essays is no longer Greek tragedy, with its synthesis of dance, poetry, and music, but the folk song, with its combination of language and music. "Here poetry and music [Wort- und Tondichtung] are as one. It never occurs to the common people to sing their songs without a text; there would be no tune for them without the words. Just as the tune changes with the passage of time and with the different degrees of kinship to the common tribe, so the words change, too: it is impossible to imagine them being separated in any way, since both belong together like man and wife" (ibid., 3.249). A little later, Wagner returns to the sexual metaphor, which is even more explicit this time: "When the common people invented tunes, they did so in the manner of natural human beings, who beget and give birth to other human beings in the spontaneous act of sexual congress" (ibid., 3.309).
Primal unity rests on an act of physical union that, in the case of Wagner s three sisters in The Art-Work of the Future, is possible only when love and liberty reign supreme.
Liberty and Love
As we gaze upon this entrancing measure of the artist's truest and noblest muses, we now perceive all three of them, each with her arm affectionately entwined about her sister's neck; then, now this one and now that frees herself from the others' embrace in order to show them her beauteous form in full independence, merely brushing the others' hands with the tips of her fingers; now one of them, entranced by the sight of her sisters' tight embrace, bowing down gently before their twin beauty; then two of them, transported by the charm of the third, greeting her with tender homage; until at last all three are tightly clasped, breast on breast and limb to limb, melting together with the fervor of love's kiss to create a single, wondrously living human form.—Such is the love and life, the wooing and winning of art, the one true art whose several parts, ever for themselves and ever for one another, diverge to create the richest contrast and reunite in blissful harmony. This is art that is free. The sweet and forceful impulse in the sisters' dance is the yearning for freedom; the kiss of love as their arms entwine is the joy of newfound freedom. The lonely man is not free, because, in the absence of love, he is fettered and dependent; the sociable man is free, because, unfettered, he is made independent by love. (1849m, GS 3.67–68)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wagner Androgyne by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Stewart Spencer. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PrefaceNote to the English Edition
Bibliographical Note
Pt. 1 Androgyny and the Ring: From Theory to Practice
Introduction to Part One: Mythic Narrative, Theoretical Discourse
Ch. 1 The Theoretical Essays of 1849 to 1851
Ch. 2 Wieland the Smith
Ch. 3 The Ring as a Mythic Account of the History of Music
Ch. 4 Art as a Metaphor of Itself
Pt. 2 Music and Poetry: The Metamorphoses of Wagnerian Androgyny
Introduction to Part Two
Ch. 5 Wagnerian Androgyny and Its Romantic Counterpart
Ch. 6 Musica Triumphans (1851-1873)
Ch. 7 The Return of Androgyny (1878-1883)
Conclusion to Part Two
Pt. 3 Wagner and Androgynous Hermeneutics
Ch. 8 Psychoanalyzing Wagner
Ch. 9 Animus-Anima
Ch. 10 Androgynous Structuralism
Ch. 11 Marxism, Feminism, and Romanticism
Ch. 12 Deconstruction or Restoration of Meaning?
Epilogue: Interpreting Wagner in the Age of Doubt
Catalog of Wagner's Writings
Notes
References
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Jean-Jacques Nattiez's book is a breathtaking work of criticism, virtuoso in its control of historical materials and profound in its implications for interpretive scholarship."—Laurence Dreyfus, King's College London and the Royal Academy of Music