The Wagner Journal, 9, 2, 4–18 Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner: An Electronic Roundtable Moderator: Nicholas Vazsonyi Participants: Barry Emslie Sanna Pederson Eva Rieger
The idea for this roundtable emerged from the happy coincidence that at least three important books on the topics of gender, sexuality and love have appeared in the last few years. These are Barry Emslie, Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (Boydell & Brewer, 2010); Eva Rieger, Richard Wagner’s Women, trans. Chris Walton (Boydell & Brewer, 2011); and Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Harvard University Press, 2012). Add to that, Sanna Pederson has been writing and speaking about Wagner and masculinity, especially in the composer’s essays and letters written around 1850, for a couple of years, and has an article forthcoming.1 So I wanted to invite these eminent Wagner scholars to talk a little bit about this complex of issues, to see how their thoughts resonate in active exchange with one another. Larry Dreyfus was invited to participate in this roundtable, but he declined.
Vazsonyi: Barry Emslie, Sanna Pederson, Eva Rieger, welcome to this e-roundtable on ‘Gender, Sexuality and Love’ and thank you for agreeing to participate in my little experiment. The idea for this conversation came to me because all three of you have recently been working on aspects of this topic area, but your focus and your findings have been so different from each other. In this respect, it is not at all like the recent debate about anti- Semitism, which has circled around essentially one question. Instead, with the topic of this roundtable, it is almost as if there are many different Wagners and, depending on which Wagner you look at, questions of gender and sexuality take on a different hue. So, I would like to get started by asking you simply: what is the first thing that pops into your head when you hear the topic ‘Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner’?
Rieger: first of all: please excuse my English. I left London at the age of 12 and since then have lived in German-speaking countries. My vocabulary isn’t very elaborate! I’m going to plunge in and start our discussion. So here goes! What pops into my head when I hear the topic ‘Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner’ is a great swirl- 1 Sanna Pederson, ‘Wagner Unmanned’, in: Music Theater as Global Culture: Wagner’s Legacy Today, ed. Anno Mungen, Nicholas Vazsonyi, Julie Hubbert, Ivana Rentsch and Arne Stollberg (Würzburg, forthcoming 2016).
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Minna Planer (1835), portrait by Alexander von Otterstedt
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ing mixture of many issues: a) Wagner’s life and his treatment of women; b) his idea of love in his writings; c) love and sexuality as described in his music. This is too much for a first mail! I was at a loss as to what to pick on. Then I hit on the idea of finding out what Sanna Pederson thinks of the subject, and I found your presentation on WagnerWorldWide2 and watched it. I see that there are many parallels and similarities in our work. I agree that Wagner was compulsively dependent on hav- Mathilde Maier ing a woman at his side, as we can first see by his fiery love letters he sent to Minna3 for many years. And even when their marriage was going to pieces he stuck to her, inviting her to Paris and later on to Biebrich4, until he had to realise that there was no future in store for them. Then a period of great searching ensued. He begged Mathilde Maier5 to join him, which she wisely declined, and he had an affair with a young woman in Vienna, before he fell in love with Cosima. Why was he so dependent on women? I agree with you in that it was a great inner dependency. I am no psychologist and don’t want to ruminate on suggestions why he turned out to be like that, but you, Sanna, have quoted a psychologist and other literature which admit- tedly sounds quite convincing. I don’t agree that it had to do with the fact that he was politically unsuccessful in 1849, although I find the idea fascinating. I think there could have been a variety of reasons. For one thing, he was surrounded by sisters in his child- hood and described later how sensuous the contact was; his relationship to his mother was very close; he desperately needed someone to talk to every evening after he had worked hard; and he also needed a woman to look after everyday work at home, which was much more extensive than it is today. I agree however that this does not explain his extreme emotional dependency on a woman partner. As to his operas, his compulsive repetition showing women who live and die for men (Senta, Elisabeth, Elsa, Brünnhilde) has to do with the rules of the time which de- veloped around 1790, putting women and men in their places and allotting character traits with their gender (Riehl6 is a good example of this ideology, you mention him in your presentation). Wagner was brought up on this ideology and remained convinced that the ‘good’ woman had to serve her lover or husband, and he shows this compul- sively in his operas, as if he wanted to remind women again and again. He didn’t mind educated women as long as they stayed stuck in their places, and in Cosima’s diaries we find her giving in and giving way all the time, permitting him to be the boss. He loathed independent women, so-called ‘blue-stockings’ whom he despised (as quoted in Cosima’s diaries).
2 Sanna Pederson, ‘Wagner Unmanned’, talk given at the University of South Carolina during Wagner World Wide: America conference, 31 Jan. – 2 Feb. 2013,
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This leads to his idea of love and also to the question how he coped with this in his music. I will leave that for a later mail. I just wanted to say ‘hello’ to Barry too and tell him that I read his book on R.W. and the Centrality of Love with great interest. You think that Wagner’s idea of love covers the sensual aspect as well as the altruistic aspect and you quote many philosophers and authors. This shows how many perspectives there are from which to do research on Wagner. What was it that influenced him most of all: his reading, his fight in Dresden, his childhood? I simply don’t know.
Emslie: What pops into my head when I hear the topic ‘Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner’ is present phalluses and absent willies … ‘dicks’ if you are American. Further- more it seems to me that the presence of the former and the absence of the latter are the determining facts of Wagner’s creative and intellectual life, and no doubt of his personal one as well. The latter however doesn’t interest me particularly. Awful though it may be to admit it, I have never thought it mattered very much whether our Übermensch wanted to get into Cosima’s camiknickers or not. I just assume that he loved his mother (as does Eva), was fundamentally polymorphous perverse (like the rest of us), and al- ways had (like the rest of us) an unstable psychic life that would have been marked by changing, unresolved desires in, notably, sexual matters … unresolved that is, until the happy liberation of death. It will not have escaped my two female correspondents that my phallus/dick ter- minology is a smidgeon masculine. It will probably not have escaped them also that it recalls Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the phallus (as a transcendental signifier that is the principal site of all cultural and psychological meaning for everybody) and the penis which is – to employ non-Lacanian terminology – a tool that some people have and others don’t. But let me avoid the froggie theoretical swamp and define my terms in a more hands-on fashion. Remaining in the strict Wagner context, by phalluses I mean love as an ideological and creative force, and by dicks I mean bonking … ’humping’ if you are American. In Wagner’s operas there is an awful lot of the former (arguably too much) and none of the latter. And that’s a pity. But it is also a swindle. And it is also, paradoxically, the principal source of the intoxicating power of the operas. One way we can get a better handle on this is to look at Wagner’s writing. There he has no recourse to his aesthetic big guns, and so he tackles the gender matter in a com- mendably silly fashion, in prose as wretched and clumsy as his music is sublime and bewitching. I have in mind ‘Opera and Drama’ (1851) where we learn that the woman, after a little bit of permissible shilly-shallying, needs to sacrifice herself to the man, oth- erwise she remains ‘soulless’. But having succumbed ‘pridefully’, an act of ‘fertilisation’ takes place. It is clear that this cliché-ridden sexist piffle is thoroughly dick-based. The great ontological gap for The Woman (that soullessness), is filled by vaginal intercourse. But put this into the operas and there is a quantum leap on every level … but one. Now we see that Wagner is struggling to arrive at the existential root of all things, both phenomenal and idealist. This is engineered by turning the dick into the phallus (pre- sent symbolically). The aesthetic liberation that follows also seems to me to be depend- ent on, and expressive of, Wagner’s real genius in finding a solution to not only his intel- lectual problems but also his aesthetic and structural ones. For the Stage Woman fulfils a narrative function in that she frequently becomes the site and fount of knowledge and
7 The Wagner Journal Volume 9 Number 2 engineers (usually) the key encounter that allows the male to realise his predetermined destiny. It is this manoeuvre – again let me stress handled by Wagner with real imagina- tion and originality – that solves a whole raft of difficulties. And it certainly makes of the Wagnerian woman a far more formidable and meaningful creation than her Italian et al. sisters. She is the great enabler. She ‘completes’ the active, killing male so that he can, to some degree at least, understand the world. And she holds onto this status. Her knowledge, like Brünnhilde’s at the end of Götterdämmerung, is all-encompassing. It is of a higher nature. Tristan may die of a (phallic) wound; but Isolde, who is not of this world, expires ecstatically and wilfully. But all this means that the phallus must triumph over the dick. For the dick there is no quantum leap. The acolyte is spared the challenge of vaginal penetration; which is one of the reasons why gay men can’t get enough of Wagner. Instead of bonking, drown- ing in waves of stupefaction is both the dominant metaphor and the inspiration for the musical language. There is nothing here reminiscent of the opening of Der Rosenkavalier or of the climax of Act I of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. But then again there is nothing here of the world. And only Wagner had the musical inspiration and wherewithal to pull this off. Now this leaves lots unsaid. For instance it needs be put in the context of Schopen- hauer, of the late development manifest in Parsifal/Kundry. And, of course, my passing remark on gay men might need the odd spot of modification. But this is surely enough for the time being.
Pederson: I was just about to press ‘send’ and then Barry’s message ‘dinged’! I’ve just gone over Barry’s contribution, and there’s lots to think about. In the meantime, I’ll just send what I wrote.
Dear Nicholas: Thank you so much for initiating this discussion. I am absolutely thrilled to be having this exchange. Regarding your suggestion to get started by saying the first thing that comes to mind: mine was that I feel sad. And that’s why it’s a shame Larry Dreyfus couldn’t par- ticipate, since his celebration of eroticism could balance out my attitude that modernity has killed off any direct access to erotic/sexual experience. I find it very useful that Eva divides the question into Wagner’s life, writings, and operas as separate issues. I also think that the question needs to be separated out, but I have done it differently: into gender roles, love and sex.
My two interests, highlighted in bold:
Life Gender Writings Love Operas Sex
Life Gender Writings Love Operas Sex
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Those two sets of three can be combined in many other different ways, mine are: 1. I am interested in how gender roles of the time affected Wagner’s behaviour and also how he used ‘love’ as a ‘get out of jail free card’ throughout his life. 2. But my interest in his love relationships was a result of trying to understand the prominence of gender, love and sex in the Zurich writings. Eva, I found your biography of Minna in particular to be the most insightful about Wagner’s need for a woman in his life.7 I am still amazed at how Minna continues to be dismissed as a slut who didn’t appreciate Wagner as an artist. His letters are so frantic at the thought of being without her. In the version of my paper on YouTube I am going about accounting for Wagner’s be- haviour in the aftermath of the 1849 revolution in two ways: 1) psychological analysis, reframing Wagner’s love for Minna as part of a narcissist’s need for a constant ‘supply’ of assurance and praise; and 2) the expectations of a man under the conditions of 19th- century patriarchal masculinity: that he should be employed in the public sphere, be the bread winner for a family; and also have a family to come home to. At one point in 1848, Wagner was at the top of his game: at the prestigious Dresden opera, exercising his rights as a citizen in the public sphere of political debate, a nice home and a wife who was proud of him. Less than a year later, Wagner had no employment and no family to come home to. Without an official position, he was just a musician, and hadn’t written any new music for an increasingly and distressingly long time. I think he had an identity crisis and worked through it using gender, love and sex as the means for rebuilding his sense of self. But I’ll stop there and look into dicks vs. phalluses …
Rieger: I’ll respond one after the other: Sanna, thanks for the explanation as to what motivated you to try to understand the prominence of gender, love and sex in the Zurich writings. Your fascinating theory reminds me a bit of a similar theory that the historian Hannes Heer has developed.8 He is convinced that Wagner’s failure to premiere Tristan in Vienna, combined with his huge debts which forced him to leave that city, produced a great frustration and led him to put all the blame on the Jews, and that was the reason why he wrote in his Annals in 1868: ‘Jewishness contemplated again’ (‘Judenthum wieder ins Auge gefasst’). Shortly after that, he wrote an extended version of his essay on Jews. Interestingly enough, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen has a similar theory: he thinks that Wagner wrote the first version of that venomous essay because he was so unsuccessful in Paris.9 You are following a similar principle by suggesting that he had an identity crisis precipitated by his prestige drop from Dresden to Zurich, and that was why he keeps mentioning gender issues in his essays. This sounds good, but we must remember that he was pretty unhappy in Dresden, having to wear a uniform and conduct works he
7 Eva Rieger, Minna und Richard Wagner: Stationen einer Liebe (Düsseldorf and Zurich, 2003). 8 ‘“Alles dort morsch, treulos. Und so roh”: Der Blick auf Richard Wagners Wien’, in Andrea Winkelbauer (ed.), Euphorie und Unbehagen: Das jüdische Wien und Richard Wagner (Vienna, 2013), 36–65. 9 ‘Die Zürcher Kunstschriften’, Wagner Handbuch, ed. Laurenz Lütteken (Wiesbaden and Stuttgart, 2012), 125–36, esp. 133.
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far left Jessie Laussot
left Mathilde Wesendonck (1850) by Karl Ferdinand Sohn, in the Stadtmuseum Bonn
didn’t like, piling up debts etc. And there were periods of happiness in Switzerland. On the other hand, it is quite clear that the moment Minna refused to reply to his letters for three months, he started to move away from her and shortly thereafter fell in love with Jessie Laussot.10 When that failed, he fell in love with Mathilde Wesendonck. This proves in my opinion what you say of his love for Minna being ‘part of a narcissist’s need for a constant supply of assurance and praise’ is in truth an element of his love for all women. I would stress that during his whole life – from the moment he fell in love with Minna up to his death – he needed a woman at his side, the nurturing, altruistic type. Mathilde Wesendonck and Cosima were absolutely ideal, because they realised the uniqueness of his music and helped him with great understanding, listening to his long monologues which must have been awfully fatiguing. Now to Barry: I thoroughly enjoyed your text! I must admit that I don’t know what bonking or humping is, but I suppose I managed to guess correctly. I agree that there is a great gulf between his writings and his music. I gather you don’t think that sexuality is included in his music. But think of Tristan Act II and the Liebestod in Act III. The music starts with waves mounting upwards in a huge tension, and the text tells us quite clearly that Wagner is portraying an orgasm. What I like about this is that in order to portray de- sire in his music he has to endow not only men, but also women with desire – something which was unheard of in the 19th century (a ‘good’ woman was not supposed to show such a thing as sexual desire). The text is divided into three sections: erection (‘how he glows, lifting himself high […] how his heart bravely swells’), then penetration (‘sound- ing from within him, penetrating me’) and finally the climax (‘in the heaving swell – to drown, to founder – unconscious – highest rapture!’). After the words ‘penetrating me’, the wave-like musical motions begin that lead to the climax at ‘in the universal stream of the world-breath’. This is even more than the opening of Rosenkavalier with the horns describing an ejaculation. Of course Wagner couldn’t admit what he was doing at the time, but in his letter to Mathilde Wesendonck of April 1859 he writes that he is afraid the opera will be banned. He certainly knew how daring he was.
10 Jessie Laussot (1826–1905), née Taylor, studied piano together with Hans von Bülow in Dresden, married Eugène Laussot, a wealthy wine merchant, in 1844. Met and fell in love with Wagner in 1850.
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As to your remarks on the Stage Woman – here I disagree, but I will leave this to the next instalment.
Vazsonyi: Please feel free to continue the previous dialogue, but I have a two-part ques- tion which I wanted to insert at this point. The first is directed to Sanna. In your little chart, you indicate that you are interested in Wagner’s ‘Life’ and ‘Writings’, but not his ‘Operas’. Can you explain why? My second question is to all of you, but connected to the one I posed to Sanna. Spe- cifically around the time Sanna is looking at, 1850, Lohengrin was premiered. This is an opera that fascinates me, particularly in relation to this set of issues. It seems to me, there is a lot to discuss when it comes to gender in this work. Not just Lohengrin and Elsa, but also Ortrud and Telramund. But what about sexuality and love? I get the feeling there is no sex whatsoever, and I ask myself whether there is any love either? What motivates Lohengrin and Elsa?
Emslie: Before taking up Nicholas’s Lohengrin question, let me try and clear up a massive misunderstanding. Eva gathers that I ‘don’t think that sexuality is included in his music’. No way. I think sexuality utterly drenches Wagner’s music. But it is sexuality aestheti- cised. In that, it is quite unlike the (explicit) bonking scenes I mentioned. And as such it is used as a quasi-philosophical concept that gets Wagner’s heterosexual couples into the noumenal Schopenhauerian realm – something he is well aware of. In other words, it is not an activity solely focussed on orgasm (unlike masculine bonking), but on transcend- ence. Developed over long intoxicating (and randy) musical stretches it takes the loving (sexual) pair out of the real world. Do not forget the obvious: the penis is a thing (a mas- culine exclusive ‘tool’) of the here and now; the phallus is an idea, allegedly (but bogusly) universal. If he can turn the former into the latter, the megalomaniacal male can realise his desire to be master of everything. Which means he can also violate the incest laws – at least on the stage. Wagner is the artist who has engineered this to a degree that has seduced well-nigh everybody. For instance, feminists invariably tackle him on territory where he is easiest to wound (the life, the essays, etc.), but where he is least a threat. Like so many others they are happily intoxicated by ‘the music’ – so much nicer than all that racist, sexist, nationalist scribbling. But Wagner in his music-dramas is the phallocentric artist par excellence. And this takes us to Lohengrin and Nicholas’s question. Lohengrin is an interesting exception (but not the only one) to the model I have al- ready laid out. Here the hero is all-knowing and the ‘privileged’ woman not privileged at all. In fact she is dreamy and ignorant and, moreover, must swear to remain ignorant. The man – literally her dream man – is so alien that she may not ask him the most basic questions as to identity. This, like the freedom to violate the incest taboo, is male mega- lomania unconditional and pure. And when Elsa fails, as she must, she is dismissed as the silly little Weib (woman) that – in truth – she always was. Hence her death is ordi- nary and worldly. She was never going to reach the noumenal realm. Furthermore, we know that this encounter with the feminine has been for the hero meaningless, nothing fundamental has changed. He leaves by the same means of transport with which he ar- rived. And of course the bourgeois wedding was a farce. But, even so, what name did Elsa write in the marriage register?
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The other exception among the non-comic works is Parsifal which actually enjoys a familial relationship with Lohengrin. It too upturns the traditional Wagnerian coupling between the man and the woman, even though the key (sexual) encounter rests on the classic premise: the man knows nothing and the woman knows everything. Indeed no Wagner Held drinks as much wisdom as Parsifal does from Kundry’s kiss. In this case, however, the noumenal realm is forgone. It is replaced by the ‘real’ world of Monsalvat and is therefore not something that is attained via extended sexual bliss. This is the triumph of Wagner’s late Christian phase where, as he points out in ‘Religion and Art’, the killing hero is ditched in favour of the mystic washed in the blood of the lamb. Drag- ons and bourgeois weddings both, are out. But uniquely in this last work, the woman is thoroughly exhausted of meaning. The man takes everything from her. At the end drained of all signification, Kundry is thrown away lifeless. True, unlike Elsa she had learned to shut up, but she is useless nevertheless. Meanwhile the triumphant male lives on in his worldly brotherhood. Sanna and Eva, I couldn’t agree more: Wagner needed the love and devoted ser- vice of women. Mind you, he also needed adoring males. A megalomaniac’s vanity is, after all, cosmic. We should not, therefore, forget his misused ‘house Jew’ (Joseph Rubinstein),11 who quite properly couldn’t live after the master’s death and duly killed himself. But perhaps in the wider context, Cosima does remain number one. Doesn’t she state explicitly what we might call the Lohengrin principle: ‘A woman may and should sacrifice everything for her beloved; a man, on the other hand, can and should have a point from which he neither shifts nor wavers’.12 And Cosima’s devotion is enshrined in the only word that Kundry utters in Act III of Parsifal. It is a word Cosima used a lot: ‘dienen, dienen’ (to serve, to serve). However, were we to look for ironies we might note that if on 13 February 1883 Cosima did indeed go ballistic when she discovered that Carrie Pringle13 was about to visit and if this was the reason Richard wouldn’t join his guest for lunch, the essay he was writing when he died is rather relevant. In ‘On the Womanly in the Human Race’ he struggles with the demands of monogamy and can’t quite free himself from its evolutionary claims. But he clearly wants to, and ends up, as so often in his writ- ings, producing a racist argument. But in the operas exactly this struggle is flagrantly successful. There the cosmic phallus triumphs and has the field (and the stage) to itself. And all this is accomplished in large part courtesy of, and with the eager cooperation of, the Woman. What man could ask for more?
Rieger: Barry, I love reading your statements, they are so full of ideas, humour and imagination. I agree with you that ‘sexuality utterly drenches Wagner’s music’, even in 11 Joseph Rubinstein (1847–84), pianist, composer and arranger. In March 1872, he wrote to Wagner ‘demanding salvation’ from his race by assisting with the Ring at Bayreuth. He arrived on 21 April and joined the so-called Nibelung Chancellery, becoming what Wagner later called ‘Wahnfried’s supreme court pianist!’ 12 Cosima Wagner: Die Tagebücher 1869–1883, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, 2 vols. (Munich, 1976–7); tr. and ed. Geoffrey Skelton as Cosima Wagner’s Diaries 1869–1883, 2 vols. (London, 1978–80), 29 Mar. 1869. 13 Carrie Pringle (1859–1930), soprano and one of the Flowermaidens at the 1882 world premiere of Parsifal in Bayreuth.
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Lohengrin, as we can see in his programme notes for a concert of excerpts from his operas in Zurich 1853.14 According to him, the Prelude depicts the Holy Grail descending to earth, accompanied by a band of angels. However in his written text on the Prelude he uses language that is irritatingly sensuous. Words such as ‘verzückt, berauschend, süsse Düfte, bebendes Herz, wonniger Schmerz, Hingebungsdrang’ (ecstatic, intoxicating, sweet scents, throbbing heart, lovely pain, the urge to give oneself) and the phallically charged ‘schwellen, zucken, erbeben’ (to swell, to twitch, to shudder) show that he always also had sex in mind when he thought of love. So I disagree with Nicholas who The Flowermaidens at the 1882 Parsifal. Carrie Pringle is on the far left writes that there is no sex in Lohengrin. As to love, yes – Wagner surely once again is compelled to tell the world how important the love of a woman is. She must on no account do anything in her own interest, but she must stick to what her hubby orders her to do. If she follows her own interests she is wicked, like Ortrud (it is odd that Ortrud teaches Elsa to voice her own opinion!). I don’t quite agree that Wagner’s thinking is purely megalomaniac as Elsa’s purity and virtue inspired him to the most beautiful sounds (tender woodwind solos). Elsa is not for me a ‘silly little Weib’. Wagner wrote to his friend August Röckel that Lohengrin ‘symbolises the most profoundly tragic situation of the present day, namely man’s desire to descend from the most intellectual heights to the depths of love, the longing to be understood instinctively, a longing which modern reality cannot yet satisfy’.15 So I think he was seriously using the finest music to depict Elsa, although the woodwind is restricted compared to the huge orchestral volume of brass etc. which King Heinrich and the soldiers have. Ortrud is obviously unable to love, as the music proves with the diminished 7th chord dominating her theme both in melody and accompaniment. Oddly enough, whereas A major is Lohengrin’s key, she often sings in F sharp minor, which is the parallel key. Is Ortrud a part of Lohengrin? I don’t think so. It is striking that Weber, whom Wagner adored as a model, depicts his black Kaspar in Freischütz in F sharp minor, the parallels are there. By the way, there is no proof that Wagner was in love with Carrie Pringle or that she was the reason for a quarrel between Richard and Cosima. (The article based on all available sources was in one of the former Bayreuth programmes, in those days before Katharina Wagner took over, when they were excellent.16) 14 Richard Wagner, ‘Prelude to Lohengrin’, translated, annotated and introduced by Thomas S. Grey, in Richard Wagner and His World, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Princeton, 2009), 499–501. 15 Letter to August Röckel of 25/26 Jan. 1854 in Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe, i–ix, ed. Gertrud Strobel, Werner Wolf and others (Leipzig, 1967–2000); x–xix and xxi–xxii, ed. Andreas Mielke, Martin Dürrer and Margret Jestremski (Wiesbaden, 1999–2013) [SB], vi.59–76, esp. 66. See also Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, tr. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), 300–13, esp. 306. 16 Stewart Spencer, ‘”Er starb, – ein Mensch wie alle“: Wagner and Carrie Pringle‘, Bayreuther Festspiele: Programmheft (2004), 72–85.
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Just a postscript: I’m a bit out of my depth with this discussion about the transcend- ent phallus à la Lacan. I couldn’t find anything relevant in the History of Psychoanalysis by Elisabeth Roudinesco, who is regarded as one of the most important specialists on Lacan.
Emslie: It’s nice of you to write your postscript, Eva. But I really am just a simple coun- try boy trying to have fun with his betters. Nonetheless, here is a quickie reply. I did a simple google search ‘Lacan and the Phallus’ and got a lot of what seems perfectly good summary-type stuff.17 The Wikipedia entry is suitably annotated. May I also suggest from the perspective of the radical French feminists of the 1970 and 80s who had such a difficult time with Lacan and who were basically trying to turn his theories around so that he bites himself in the bum, Luce Irigaray’s gushing This Sex Which Is Not One. Perhaps chapter 5 is es- pecially relevant. And now a little P.S. from me. I know that the ‘killing’ Cosima/Richard row is apoc- ryphal, which is why I put my sentence in the conditional. By the way, isn’t Isolde (Bei- dler) thought to be the bad egg here? Didn’t she put around the rumour after the nasty business in the 1913 court case when her paternity was in fact slandered by Cosima and Siegfried in order to save money on the Wagner estate?
Pederson: Nicholas, to answer the question you directed to me, of course I am interested in his operas – otherwise there would be no reason to try so hard to decipher his writings. If the Zurich writings were by someone else, I do think they would be dismissed as silly, as Barry says, and unintelligible. My scruple is that writing about these issues in the operas is exactly that: it is translating the music into a verbal description. I admire Eva for taking the time and effort to spell out how music uses a system of signification (primary and second- ary parameters) to signify masculine, feminine, sex and love. It is so helpful in teaching, for instance, where we assume the students recognise these signs but they probably don’t. It’s just that I am not confident enough in my writing skills to try to show how (my description of) sex and (my description of) sex in Wagner’s music are commensurate. Barry says Wagner aestheticises sex in the music. That particular formulation re- minds me of several statements in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, for instance, #279 ‘On the alleviation of life’ where he uses ‘idealising’ instead of aestheticising, but the upshot is that in art you have to have distance, and that is why what is unbearable in life is bearable in art. So the whole point would be that sex in music is not the same as in life; it is an idealised version.18 But of course one can write about the operas in terms of the parts that are already in words: the libretto and the paratexts (directions in the score about staging and acting).
17 See also Jacques Lacan, ‘La Signification du phallus’, in Écrits (Paris, 1966), 685–95; tr. Alan Sheridan as ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits: A Selection (London, 1977), 281–91. On the internet, see
14 Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner: An Electronic Roundtable
With regard to Lohengrin, what comes to mind from Wagner’s published writings and letters is that he thought of it (at least at the time) as a political work. In ‘A Com- munication to my Friends’, Elsa is the truly feminine that made him a revolutionary, she is the woman of the future. On the other hand: ‘Ortrud ist ein Weib, das – die Liebe nicht kennt. Hiermit ist alles, und zwar das Furchtbarste gesagt. Ihr Wesen ist Politik. Ein politischer Mann ist widerlich, ein poli- tisches Weib aber grauenhaft: diese Grauenhaftigkeit hatte ich darzustellen. […] Wir kennen in der Geschichte keine grausameren Erscheinungen als politische Frauen.‘19 I am interested in Barry’s psychoanalytic approach because it translates the GLS (gender, love, sex) into power relations, which then relates back to politics … so that it can be seen on some level as all connected. But I’m not well versed in the lingo either.
Vazsonyi: I would like to pose one more question before we finish off this roundtable. So far, we have talked a bit about gender and quite a bit about sex. I agree with Sanna that there has to be distance, and that the artwork is not the same thing as real life: that is certainly the case with sex, and rightly so. So, in closing, I want to turn to love. I expect Sanna’s dictum will hold true for this category also. But is there ‘love’ at all in Wagner’s operas and what does it look like? I have to point out, for instance, that although Tristan and Isolde (especially Tristan) can’t stop talking about ‘love’, he never once tells Isolde that he loves her, or vice versa. I have always found that opera to be quite bizarre in this regard. Which makes me wonder about the rest of Wagner. I still say that I cannot find love or anything resembling it in Lohengrin; that’s also a bizarre exercise in human relation- ships. What do I mean by ‘love’? I think I mean some discernible sense of caring for the other person, and what they are feeling and what they need. Some willingness to sacrifice, and I don’t by that mean Brünnhilde’s sacrifice at the end of Götterdämmerung, I mean loy- alty to a living person. When I think of love in Wagner’s operas, I can only really find three and a half examples. Eva and Walther in Meistersinger: there is some real tenderness there and it is mutual. Siegmund and Sieglinde. No question for me: it is both deeply sexual and passionate and also with genuine emotion. And they are both willing to pay the ultimate price in their loyalty to each other. The other example is Wotan for Brünnhilde, but only after he has been unspeakably horrible to her. It is a moment of realisation for him that we are also witness to. The other is the pull we feel between Sachs and Eva. Anyway, this went way longer than I meant it to, but the issue of love fascinates me precisely because Wagner gives us such deeply passionate and emotional music. But love itself seems to be in very short supply. Thoughts?
Pederson: I found myself completely rethinking Tristan und Isolde after watching Ché- reau’s production and reading his notes published with the DVD. Chéreau sees the two as depressed individuals who met in detox. What brings them together is recognizing they both have the same death drive. He describes the second act as ‘40 minutes of vigorous, passionate, detailed discussion’. They need this discussion because they are
19 Letter to Liszt, 30 Jan. 1852, in SB (note 15) iv.273–4. (Ortrud is a woman who does not know love. By this the most frightening thing is expressed. A political man is dreadful but a political woman is revolting: I had to portray this horror. […] In all of history there is nothing more horrible than political women. – tr. Sanna Pederson)
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‘not at all like each other’. This is the way it is staged, and during the love duet they look like they really are absorbed in a late night talk about Schopenhauer and the meaning- lessness of everything. Chéreau does not deny desire, but it’s desire for death and their love for each other is for ‘a fellow traveller’.
Emslie: In the operas love, like sex, is aestheticised and instrumentalised. Real Wagner heroes and heroines do not love in an everyday manner. Rather ‘love’ is the sacred force that animates redemption, enabling it to take flight. Its chief goal is not – as I may already have had cause to point out – bonking, but transcendence. Therefore to expect love in the fashion we find it in – let us say – Puccini is misguided. This is why Lohengrin is exceptional. For in Lohengrin love is neither transcendent (the hero has no need of it; he is already otherworldly) nor everyday. In the redemption operas the latter is by its very nature a-Wagnerian. So naturally, Elsa is betrayed. True, she is only too eager to love the stranger unconditionally … like Cio-Cio San. But she is, to her own quotidian credit, wholly incapable of sticking to the unreal conditions of his alien world. The bour- geois marriage is thereby made impossible at the very point when it is made theatrically present. Ironically, Cio-Cio San’s fake marriage has more emotional power than Elsa’s ‘real’ one. Wagner cannot give his any meaningful purchase. It is merely a narrative step in the fairy tale. Therefore it’s no surprise when in the end the hero (who is clearly more tied to his swan than to his wife) upbraids Elsa in the same manner as Richard upbraid- ed Minna: you never gave me the unconditional love I needed; you never understood me, and so forth. Pinkerton could never have said that! We can get a better notion of Wagner’s use of love in the essays, but only in as much as they reveal the full vulgarity of the master’s theorising. There love is an ideological card that is played to win everything the ego desires and to trump all problems. It is a univer- sal notion rather than a mere libidinous Trieb (drive). Most notably, it facilitates incest, which, however, is only dragged onto the highest spiritual level by poetry and music. It is also a generalised synonym for loyalty between friends … and enemies. Does not the last word Melot utters make him a (failed) blood-brother of Kurwenal? And it is the blood relationship that binds the Volk. It is racial. One should never forget (though it is of- ten forgotten) that among Wagner’s accusations against the Jews is that they are loveless. As this is my last contribution let me thank my two, more disciplined correspond- ents, and even Young Nick, who have all put up with my wordy contributions. And as I began with phalluses versus penises; and aestheticised sex versus bonking let me end with another, and plainer, creative discourse; one that, I hope, will be more illuminating than my comments hitherto. It is from Kingsley Amis’ novel The Riverside Villas Murder. The teenage hero has just lost his virginity thanks to the older woman next door. But it has not been a Parsifal/Kundry type encounter: ‘What he had imagined so often and so long, and what actually happened on Mrs Trevelyan’s bed, resembled each other about as much as a fox-terrier and a rhinoceros. He had pictured the business as something rather like drifting down a river in a small boat on a summer afternoon; the reality turned out to be something equally like leading a cavalry charge across rough territory under a heavy artillery barrage’.20 Rather good that … isn’t it?
20 Kingsley Amis, The Riverside Villas Murder (Harmondsworth, 1984), 136–7.
16 Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner: An Electronic Roundtable
Rieger: Oh dear, that Kingsley Amis picture is pretty tough! I couldn’t stop laughing. Back to Nicholas’s questions: Wagner’s life and his writings are a vast collection of vari- ous ideas, influenced by books he read and by changing developments, be they social, political or cultural. But there are one or two things which stay put, and his craving for endless love belongs to them. I see it as a sort of basis of his life. ‘Es ist immer wieder das ewig weibliche selbst, was mich mit süßen täuschungen und warmen schauern der leb- enslust erfüllt’ he wrote to Theodor Uhlig, after he had made acquaintance with Mathil- de Wesendonck, stating that he has now discovered his lust for life since he has met a loving woman.21 ‘Die Liebe ist eigentlich das ewig Weibliche selbst’22 – for him, Woman is Love. Wagner needed the sacrifices of others to exist and to be creative, and this desire to be loved is a strong element of all his music. His early operas are all filled by the one doctrine: a woman is only lovable if she lives and dies for her male lover. I don’t want to repeat Catherine Clément’s circle of sacrificing women, which Carolyn Abbate has suc- cessfully deconstructed by showing that women have power through their voices and thus represent other things than that which Wagner wanted. But there can be no doubt that his operas were influenced by his deep dependency on women. Although I also agree with Sanna that artwork is not the same as real life, Wagner’s work mirrors his life situation in an uncanny way. There is certainly real love in the first act of the Walküre, as Wagner’s seventeen different remarks on his composition sketch show – e.g. ‘O.w.i.d.l.!’ (‘Oh wie ich dich liebe’, written over ‘Auf lach’ ich in heiliger Lust’), or ‘G.w.h.d.m.verl?’ (‘Geliebte warum hast du mich verlassen’, written over the moment where Siegmund is left alone) – all dedicated to Mathilde Wesendonck.23 And this act is the only one in all his operas in which a love affair is shown as an organic development, from the moment of meeting to the realisation that they love one another. Tristan und Isolde was written in order to help overcome the separation from his beloved Mathilde. Even Die Meister- singer is a result of his love for Mathilde: after he had met her in Venice and realised that he had no chance any more, he added the resignation of Hans Sachs and suddenly was able to continue composing. Nicholas writes that love has to do with ‘caring for the other person’. True enough, and Wagner did try to look after Minna after they had separated, although this ended up in merely sending her money. But this is not to be compared with his great fear that no one would love him. I find proof for his obsessive occupation with this subject in his wrestling with the final passage of the text for the whole Ring tetralogy. Wagner cast away two versions, both of them dealing with love as the highest element. In the third and final version, Brünnhilde glorifies her love for Siegfried. She dives into the flames singing ‘Siegfried! See! Your wife greets you blissfully!’ So this actually shows what the Ring is all about, although Wagner of course in this huge work opens up possibilities for other analyses. ‘Loyalty to a living person’ which you mention as being an element of love, Nicho- las, was not Wagner’s conviction. In 1850, when he had fallen in love with Jessie Laus- sot, he confronted poor Minna, on whom he had been dependent for years, with an
21 Letter to Uhlig, 20 March 1852, in SB (note 15), iv.320–1. 22 Letter to August Röckel, 25/26 Jan. 1854, in SB (note 15), vi.68. 23 Oh wie ich dich liebe: Oh, how I love you; Geliebte warum hast du mich verlassen?: Beloved, why have you forsaken me?
17 The Wagner Journal Volume 9 Number 2 awful farewell letter, as he planned to flee with Jessie to Greece. So I would say: no real love exists in his life, only the obsessive wish to be loved. For Wagner, being a man of the 19th century, woman embodies love per se, but she also signifies the danger of perdition. In the Venusberg the luminescence of sound, the luscious orchestration and the dissonant harmonies all make evident that when man plunges into the boundless world of the erotic, he must abandon values such as fidelity, honour and virtue, and it can end in his death. I must say I felt a little helpless with my small brain and my limited English, con- fronted with cracks like Barry and Sanna – poor Nicholas will have to deal with this jumble of opinions. Best wishes to all, Eva.
Pederson: Nicholas questions Wagner’s ability to represent loving relationships in the operas. As Barry says, Lohengrin’s relationship to his swan has more musical life to it than his interactions with Elsa. Tannhäuser can musically express torment, but his love song is cast as a jarringly jaunty march. Hmm, I think Nicholas is on to something here. Perhaps because the love of a woman for a man is so important in Wagner’s mind, there is no way he can possibly convey how important it is. Our expectations for the love music for Tannhäuser and Venus/Elisabeth, Lohengrin and Elsa, Brünnhilde and Sieg- fried, Eva and Walther, inevitably are disappointed. On the other hand, his depiction of loving relationships in other contexts can musically exceed our expectations (Wotan and Brünnhilde, Kurwenal and Tristan, Eva and Sachs, Brünnhilde and Grane …). Perhaps Tristan and Isolde are in love with love/death more than with each other. But this opera has always seemed different from the others to me. I agree with Barry and Eva that love is Wagner’s transcendent principle; and, as Eva adds, ‘Woman is Love’. And I agree that, nevertheless, ‘no real love exists in his life, only the obsessive wish to be loved’ (Eva). And, in the writings, ‘love is an ideological card that is played to win everything the ego desires and to trump all problems. It is a universal notion rather than a mere libidinous Trieb’ (Barry). This leads me to conclude that Wagner’s obsession with love allowed him to re- fashion the ugly impulses of a perpetually dissatisfied, manipulative human being into strikingly creative, original, romantic works of art.
Vazsonyi: Thank you, Sanna. I think your last remarks somewhat saved us from a fairly devastating end to this roundtable: Wagner’s inability to (show) love. Since I posed the question, I do want to add that it is probably the most difficult of the three topics we talked about, mainly because simply coming up with an acceptable definition of what ‘love’ is, as opposed to gender or sexuality, is an almost insurmountable challenge, let alone identifying and analysing its manifestation in a work of art, particularly Wagner’s works, where human relationships are so fraught. Maybe some food for further explo- ration? But I’d like to close for now by thanking all three of you for being such good sports, and for taking time out to participate so thoughtfully and with such openness in this conversation.
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