Wagner and the Erotic Impulse

WAGNER AND THE EROTIC IMPULSE WAGNER AND THE EROTIC IMPULSE LAURENCE DREYFUS harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Laurence Dreyfus All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Dreyfus, Laurence, 1952– Wagner and the erotic impulse / Laurence Dreyfus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 01881- 5 (alk. paper) 1. Wagner, Richard, 1813– 1883—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Opera— 19th century. 3. Sex in opera. I. Title. ML410.W13D74 2010 782.1092—dc22 2010011118 Need I add that Wagner also owes his success to his sensuality? Habe ich noch zu sagen, daß Wagner seiner Sinnlichkeit auch seinen Erfolg verdankt? —Friedrich Nietz sche, Nachlaß (1888) C ONTENTS Preface ix Abbreviations xv 1. Echoes 1 Music and Eros — Søren Kierkegaard — Suggestive Music — Peculiarities of Musical Erotics — Charles Baudelaire — Friedrich Nietz sche and Malwida von Meysenbug — Édouard Schuré and Hans von Bülow — Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld — Gabriele D’Annunzio and Thomas Mann — Wagner’s critics — Clara Schumann 2. Intentions 40 Julius Kapp and Ernest Newman — Das Liebesverbot — Salvation from Arousal — Wilhelmine Schröder- Devrient — Arthur Schopenhauer — Opera, Not Philosophy 3. Harmonies 73 Der Fliegende Holländer — Tannhäuser — Erotics in the Literary Sources — A Tour of the Venusberg — Love in the Ring Poem — Die Walküre — Tristan und Isolde — The Tristan Chord — Musical Paradigms in the Tristan Prelude — Tristan, Act II — Renunciations of Love — Die Meistersinger and Götterdämmerung — Parsifal 4. Pathologies 117 Theodor Puschmann — Nietzsche the Pathologist — Worries about Masturbation — Pink Satin and Rose Perfumes — Wagner viii Contents and His Milliners — Judith Gautier — Julius Cyriax — Fetishism and Cross-dressing — Fabric and Perfumes in the Operas — Flower-Maidens — Kundry — James Gibbons Huneker — Paul Lindau, Max Kalbeck, and Paul Heyse — Berthold Auerbach and Daniel Spitzer — Max Nordau and Theodor Herzl — Otto Weininger — Effeminacy and Jewishness 5. Homoerotics 175 Paul von Joukowsky and Pepino — Henry James — Richard von Krafft- Ebing and Oscar Panizza — Hanns Fuchs and the “Homosexual in Spirit” — Homosexual Sensibilities in German Literature — Ludwig II of Bavaria — Rejection of Pederasty — Signs of Romantic Friendship — Brangäne — Kurwenal — King Marke — Parsifal — Wagner and His Romantic Friends Epilogue 218 Appendix: Musical Examples 225 Notes 243 Index 261 P REFACE All books about Richard Wagner are acts of love or hate, often a strange mixture of the two. While Wagner is an easy man to hate, he has become increasingly diffi cult to love, and his well- deserved reputation as unrepentant anti- Semite has prejudiced several generations of listeners against enjoying his music, predisposing them to hearing in it a harmful ideology. My own love of Wagner’s music will be obvious to readers of this book, and I give relatively short shrift to twentieth-century ideologies and politics, as my goal was to survey what I take to be one of Wagner’s most important contributions to music— what I call his erotics. I fi rst came to know Wagner’s Ring in 1969– 70 while studying the cello at Juilliard. My roommate, the pianist Jeffrey Swann— who went on to win the Queen Elizabeth Competition— barred me from joining his equally talented friends David Golub and Robert Black in a 24- hour ex- travaganza (including breaks), during which they listened in darkness to Georg Solti’s Ring recordings. Since I hadn’t ever studied the leitmotives, this trio of Wagnerians felt justifi ed in banning me from their commu- nal reverie and drove me from my apartment. Provoked, I began my own study of the Ring. A more generous Juilliard pianist, Steven Mayer, offl oaded an unwanted copy of Solti’s Götterdämmerung—a prohibitively expensive purchase for a student in those days—and I was hooked, col- lecting scores, books, and vintage rec ords and supplementing the latter with a regular diet of Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. While teaching at Yale, I became fascinated by the fi rst conductor of Parsifal, Hermann Levi, son of a rabbi, and began investigating the ori- gins of his Wagnerism, a project which included a visit to the archives at Bayreuth. Hoping to hear Wagner in his native habitat, I wrote to the grandson of the composer, Wolfgang Wagner, who helped me obtain x Preface tickets in 1987. There, in the Festspielhaus, I attended several operas along with my wife and daughter, the latter still in utero at the time. Since then, a multitude of students at Yale, Stanford, King’s College London, and Oxford have put up with my passion for Wagner, sometimes bewildered, but often enough enthused. Not all the journey has been smooth sailing, and like the rocky sea voy- age that inspired Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, my travels were nearly ship- wrecked by the tidal wave of Wagner literature, which overwhelms the inexperienced Wagner researcher with its clashing currents and danger- ous undertow. In attempting to master the scholarship and sources—not to mention coming to terms with the composer’s anti- Semitism—I am sure to have come up short, though not for lack of trying. As an under- graduate at Yeshiva University in 1973 studying politics and Jewish theology—having briefl y abandoned music for religion—I wrote a breez- ily researched essay on Wagner as forerunner of the Nazis and was about to submit it when I put on a recording of Tristan und Isolde. The shock of the musical experience forced me to admit that my denunciation was hypocritical. Much to the dismay of my professor— Ruth Bevan—I ap- pended an “afterword” challenging my own conclusions and was rewarded by a curt note suggesting I articulate a coherent argument about Wagner and stick to it. This book tries to do just that. Writing about Wagner and sex wasn’t imaginable when I was a graduate student in musicology at Columbia (1973– 1980). It wasn’t because the music historians who taught me were prudes, but because they would have considered erotics, like politics, demeaning to scholarly discourse. Times have changed in both regards. Having held a Chair in London (1995– 2005) honoring the scholar and performer Thurston Dart, I was inter- ested to learn— thanks to Margaret Bent— that in 1967 the editors of a trade press asked Dart whether they should commission a translation of a book defending Wagner against charges of indecency and perversity. Al- though the original exposé of Wagner’s fabric fetish had appeared in 1877, and everyone from Brahms and Nietzsche to Thomas Mann knew about it, this wasn’t a subject appropriate for scholarly treatment over much of the twentieth century, much less fi t to be linked to the composer’s music. Dart’s private response was typical for the time: “My own feeling is against [an En glish translation of Wagner und die Putzmacherin (Wagner and his preface xi Milliner)],” he wrote, “simply because there is no end to the correspon- dences of composers’ laundresses and wine merchants (cf. G[eorge] F[rederick] H[andel]) and these usually tell one absolutely s[od] f.- a. new.” As it turns out, Dart was wrong, though his coded obscenity turns out to contain more than a grain of truth. The fi ve chapters in the current book began life as a series of public lectures delivered at the British Library in 2003–2004, which have since spun off in unexpected directions. In their fi nal form, the fi ve chapters tell a story that requires a brief preamble. Chapter 1, Echoes, introduces Wagner’s musical erotics by surveying important nineteenth- century re- actions to Wagner that have often been marginalized in contemporary scholarship. I contend that these “receptions”— both glowing and scathing—do not merely record subjective responses but actually help identify intrinsic components of Wagner’s practice. Chapter 2, Inten- tions, investigates whether Wagner knew what he was doing in compos- ing music representing “sensuality.” It seems he knew exactly what he was doing, even if— given the mores of the time— he must be classed as a re- luctant if obsessive eroticist. Chapter 3, Harmonies, surveys the key musical techniques Wagner developed for his erotics and focuses especially on Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, and Tristan und Isolde. With Tristan, Wagner revealed the fundamental outlines of his erotico- musical world, and though I could have gone further in discussing Die Meistersinger, Sieg- fried, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal, I believe the subtle variants of erotic experience found in these later operas are better treated in specialized studies. Chapter 4, Pathologies, considers late nineteenth- century receptions of Wagner’s “diseased” erotics to show how critics like Nietz sche unwittingly identify positive values in Wagner’s erotics at the same time that they expose the composer’s unconventional masculinity. The link between the composer’s silk and perfume fetishes and their represen ta- tions in his operas seems remarkable in this light, as is the absence of his interest in “sexualizing” anti- Semitism. Finally, Chapter 5, Homoerotics, treats Wagner’s surprising regard for same- sexual love (Männerliebe or Freundesliebe) as a complementary aspect to his personality: Wagner en- couraged a spate of younger, sometimes “homophile,” men to become passionately attached to him and this sensibility, too, surfaces in his operas. xii Preface Throughout the book, I aim to understand musicians and critics from their own vantage points, and try to traffi c in concepts and categories contemporary with them. Although twentieth- and twenty-fi rst- century critical theories may be pulling strings behind the scenes, I don’t advo- cate any par tic u lar theoretical position beyond pursuing what I’d call a radical historicism, seeking out relevant documentary and musical evi- dence wherever I can fi nd it.

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