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Anarchism and Hellenism in Richard Wagner's Revolutionary Cultural Politics (1848-52)

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Anarchism and Hellenism in Richard Wagner's Revolutionary Cultural Politics (1848-52) Anarchism and Hellenism in Richard Wagner's Revolutionary Cultural Politics (1848-52) The Greek “hearkened to the great story of Necessity told by the tragic poet through the mouths of his gods and heroes on the stage. For in the tragedy he found himself again, nay, found the noblest part of his own nature united with the noblest characteristics of the whole nation; and from his inmost soul, as it there unfolded itself to him, proclaimed the Pythian oracle. At once both God and Priest, glorious godlike man, one with the Universal, the Universal summed up in him: it were better to be for half a day a Greek in presence of this tragic Art-work, than to all eternity an―un-Greek God!” (Wagner 1966: 34-35) Writing in his essay “Religion and Philosophy in Germany” (1834) during the emergence of Left Hegelianism, Heinrich Heine draws a direct connection between philosophical doctrines and revolutionary forces in his native country, warning that the disciples of critique and nature, pantheism and idealism, will one day unleash their fury on humanity: “A play will be performed in Germany, compared to which the French Revolution will seem a mere inoffensive idyll.” The Elbe city of Dresden provided a stage for this play fifteen years later, during the wave of democratic revolutions that in 1848-49 swept many European cities including Paris, Vienna, Venice, Milan, Parma, Rome, Berlin, Munich, and Prague. In 1848, German principalities are in a state of unrest, as people demand constitutional government. During Saxony's revolt in March, Dresden, its capital, did not play a major role because its public life was not quite politicized. When the people of Leipzig marched en masse to Dresden in the Spring, the King reformed his cabinet, abolished press censorship, and promised electoral reform. In early April, however, as preparations began for elections of the Frankfurt National Assembly, one of the strongest local political organizations was founded in the city, the “Patriotic Association” (Vaterlandsverein), which had four thousand mostly republican members by the end of the year, half of them journeymen and workers, and dominated the union of all Saxon “Patriotic 2 Associations.” In January 1849 parliamentary controversies in the newly elected Landtag gave another strong impulse to political life in Dresden. Left-wing forces prepared for the anticipated outbreak of a second revolt by collaborating with the central committee of the German democratic alliance as well as Polish and Czech revolutionaries. By Spring, Dresden had become the center of a widespread cooperation with activists of Central and East European countries. A major crisis did indeed erupt when in April 28, 1849, the Saxon King Friedrich August II dissolved the lower house of the Landtag which favored approval of the Reich constitution passed by the Frankfurt parliament. On May 3, the collapsing cabinet requested military assistance from Berlin. The outrage at the King’s refusal to accept the constitution as well as the fear of an intervention by troops dispatched by the Prussian government led to the uprising that broke out in the afternoon of that day. It began when the military opened fire on a crowd of people demanding weapons for the defense of their city. Within a few hours the old town was barricaded. Initially, the government hesitated to suppress the uprising by military means. A committee of public safety made up of democratic deputies prepared for the defense of the town, hoping at the same time that the King would soon adopt the constitution. On May 4 he and his remaining ministers fled to a fortress. A 24-hour armistice allowed the army to bring troops from other parts of the country and to await the arrival of the Prussian soldiers. The insurgents did not use this time to gather their forces, anticipating in vain a possible compromise with the government. Neither did their provisional government succeed in mobilizing the larger population to support the constitution. Here as almost everywhere in the country the liberal bourgeoisie, which had been involved in the earlier, peaceful phase of the constitutional movement, refused to support the provisional government out of fear of radical-democratic and socio-republican tendencies of the uprising. Equally unsuccessful were repeated attempts to draw the Saxon troops to the side of the insurgents. Intensive clashes on May 5 between five thousand Saxon-Prussian government troops and three thousand insurgents supported by irregulars and volunteers from other places of Saxony produced heavy casualties on the side of the insurgents, especially due to the brutal assaults of the military. In the morning of May 9, the revolutionaries gave up the struggle and withdrew. 3 One of the three leaders of the failed May 3-9 revolt is Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76), a veteran of European revolutions. The Russian refugee, who has not become an anarchist yet, combines left republicanism with pan-Slavism, an interest in both socialism and nationalism. He first moved to Dresden in 1842 as an aspiring philosopher to collaborate with Arnold Ruge, the leader of the Young Hegelians, and left a year later, after undergoing a thorough radicalization and publishing the essay “Reaction in Germany” (1842) which introduced the twin ideas of destruction as the necessary first stage in the process of social transformation and of perpetual revolt. During 1848, Bakunin participates in the Paris uprising in February, has his first split with Marx and Engels in Cologne in March (a month after they published the Communist Manifesto), participates in the Prague uprising in June, produces the Appeal to the Slavs (which ended by seeking “the complete overturn of society”) in the Fall, and goes to Dresden again in April of next year to coordinate efforts of the Slavic East with those of Saxon activists. Bakunin relies heavily on an indispensable person on the three-member core of the Dresden conspiratorial group, August Röckel (1814-76), a man of many talents and commitments: he edits the weekly republican magazine Volksblätter (1848-49), giving it its radical-democratic profile; he writes essays and editorials; he composes classical music; and he has been working since 1843 as an assistant conductor (Musikdirektor). Röckel performs at the Hoftheater Opera House, built in Dresden in 1838-41 as part of the building program of the King of Saxony. It is the first masterpiece of another eminent Dresden resident, Gottfried Semper (1803-79). After traveling to Italy and Greece in 1830- 32, the scholar, theorist, and architect Semper was appointed to the Chair of Architecture at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1834, a remarkable achievement for a 31-year old with no building record and little teaching experience. At that point his strength was theoretical as he was pioneering a total approach to classical architecture incorporating considerations of color, texture, ornament, and style. In May 1849, Semper uses his architectural expertise to build barricades in the streets of Dresden. Another person who is active in the revolutionary circles and the May barricades is Richard Wagner (1813-83), a composer who became friends with Bakunin through Röckel, his assistant at Semper’s theater. Wagner is a year younger than Bakunin and Röckel, and was born the same year with Kierkegaard, Hebbel, and Büchner. He moved to Dresden 4 after he tried in vain for three calamitous years (1839-42) to find a place in the Parisian music scene. In 1837-40 he composed his third opera, Rienzi, based on Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835, German translation 1836). In the novel, the eponymous tribune of the people in Rome established a republic in 1347, fled after his excommunication, returned from exile seven years later to become a senator, and was eventually assassinated. This monumental opera, Wagner’s longest and most political, has everything – anarchy and revolution, war and peace, mobs and priests, popular victories and aristocratic conspiracies. The tremendously successful premiere was given in 1842 at Hoftheater, the new opera house which Gottfried Semper had just built in Dresden, with Wagner conducting the Royal Court Opera, and it led to the composer’s becoming assistant Kappelmeister at the court of the King of Saxony next year. Although technically second, he was essentially the primary conductor since he assumed most of the duties. With this dramatic improvement in his career, he begins to reconsider extensively the Romantic philosophy of music that he espoused until now. The premieres of The Flying Dutchman (1843) and Tannhäuser (1845) that followed in the same theater are thunderous testimonies to that. By 1845 Wagner is preoccupied with the conditions under which music is produced and disseminated in the court, and submits specific proposals which are rejected next year. In the realm of aesthetics, he begins to search for a holistic conception of art under the influence of Semper’s total approach to classical art, his theatrical understanding of architecture (which he grouped with the performing arts) and his applications of this view to the architect’s own stage designs in his theater. In 1847 he reads Aeschylus as edited by historian and politician Johann Gustav Droysen (1832, 1841), and is inspired both by the surviving Oresteia and by the reconstructed Prometheus trilogy to proclaim their author the greatest tragedian. Moving the peak of Greek civilization from the classical period admired for centuries to the archaic one proved one of his many daring innovations of lasting impact. Politically, Wagner was first exposed to radical ideas in 1834 in his native Leipzig, when he came into contact with the progressive movement Junges Deutschland which drew political inspiration from French utopian socialism and cultural models from Italian sources.
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