ANDREAS DORSCHEL Life’s Work. Wagner’s Tristan and the Critique of Biographism1 Interpretation would be impossible if the expressions of life were utterly unfamiliar. It would be unneces- sary, were there within these expressions nothing that was unfamiliar. Interpretation, therefore, must take place between these two opposite extremes. Wilhelm Dilthey I. Mozart composed his great G minor Symphony because he was in a dark mood, Schubert set the cycle of poems Die schöne Müllerin to music because he was unhappily in love, Wagner created Tristan und Isolde because he was having an affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, Brahms wrote his Four Serious Songs because he sensed his approaching death: such assertions fulfil all the criteria of biographism. It is everywhere, yet at the same time hardly a reasonable person feels at ease with it. This contra- dictory state of affairs gives us good reason to examine the question of what makes biographism attractive, and what makes it inappropriate. Proponents of biographism attempt to draw conclusions from works about the mental makeup of their authors – and vice versa. In the simplest case this procedure is circular: Mozart wrote his G minor Symphony because he was in a dark mood. What is the evidence for this? The G minor Symphony. And what explains the genesis of the symphony? The dark mood. There may of course be independent evidence of this mood. A composer may have expressed such a mood in letters. However, this hardly makes biographism any more acceptable as an explanation of art. After all, 63 Andreas Dorschel many people get into dark moods, and yet they do not write symphonies in G minor – and certainly not this particular one, KV 550. To explain something means to deduce the unknown from the known. Mozart’s G minor Symphony may be unfamiliar, even unsettling, but almost everyone has dark moods at some time. Thanks to biographism, the sphinx that stares at us in the form of every great work of art is a little less of a sphinx. Should one therefore counter biographism by demanding that the sphinx remain a sphinx? No and yes. No, because to learn something new about Mozart’s G minor Symphony is not the worst thing that can happen to us regarding the work – though at the same time it is clearly not the only good thing. Yes, because the reduction of art to that which lies outside art deduces the unknown from the known to such an extent that those aspects which make the attempt to understand worthwhile in the first place are lost in the process. Precisely that which constitutes the art of Mozart’s composition is still not understood. Is biographism then wrong to make deductions about art from that which lies outside of art? Even this is problematical, because art is not something that leads a separate existence beyond that which is not art. If this is the case, what is wrong with bringing both sides into contact? Marcel Proust attempted to expound upon this question in his major essay Contre Sainte- Beuve of 1908/09.2 Proust distinguishes between “the ‘me’ who produces the works” (“Le moi qui produit les œuvres”) and the “external me” (“extérieur”) (222). This he also calls the “fundamental me” (“moi profond”), distinguishing it from a “much more external me” (“soi bien plus extérieur”) (224). The “moi profond” has its own “unique world that is the soul of the poet, closed, without contact to the outside world” (“ce monde unique, fermé, sans com- munication avec le dehors qu’est l’âme du poète”) (225). For Proust the difference between the ‘me’ who simply experiences, and the authorial ‘me’, “le moi véritable du poète” (225), lies in “inspiration” (224). The artis- tically productive ‘I’ is a medium, whereas the everyday ‘I’ is simply itself. In effect, Proust’s sole criticism – a criticism he repeatedly formulates in different ways – is that Sainte-Beuve fails to recognise this distinction. The objection that one should avoid false deductions about the work from life appears to make sense, but from what historic and systematic position does this objection exactly spring? Between Proust, born in 1871, and Sainte- Beuve, born in 1804, lie two generations. Proust appears to be taking leave of a bad piece of nineteenth century in favour of a decidedly modern 64 Life’s Work. Wagner’s Tristan and the Critique of Biographism position. In fact, however, precisely Proust’s “moi véritable” or “moi profond” is an echo of the romantic aesthetic of genius and the concomitant cult of profundity. As a creator, the great artist is no longer fully of this world.3 However, very much of this world is the artist as conceived by Sainte-Beuve, in whose writings Proust recognises the distasteful tone of urbane conversation, with all the critics’ lack of respect for the poetic creator.4 Meanwhile, in his attempt to ensure a suitably reverential tone, Proust slips into unintentionally comic analogies: Just as the Heaven of Catholic theology is comprised of several heavens, each superimposed upon the other, our own person – given its external form by our body, with its head that limits our thoughts to a little sphere – our spiritual person is comprised of several, superimposed persons. Comme le ciel de la théologie catholique qui se compose de plusieurs ciels superposés, notre personne, [dans] l’apparence que lui donne notre corps avec sa tête qui circonscrit à une petite boule notre pensée, notre personne morale se compose de plusieurs personnes superposées. (249) If, according to Proust, the empirical, biographically tangible self is not the author of the work, then which self is? Either the empirical self is simply a medium of a higher authority that can itself claim true authorship, or there is a second, intelligible self, radically different from the empirical self. Both cases imply the construct of an ulterior world for which there is little evidence. To recognise the empirical self as the author is quite compatible with the observation that many an empirical self is very much concerned to discover a self which may be significantly different, usually better than this self. Autobiographies such as Wagner’s Mein Leben tell us not so much about how he lived, but rather how he would have liked to have lived. Such an invented ‘I’ is not a self that lies beyond the empirical, as does Proust’s “true me”, but is a product, among other products, of the empirical ‘I’, addressed to his fellow men and to posterity. While biographism makes do with psychological categories, anti- biographism – as soon as it ceases to restrict itself to criticism and affirms what it sees to be true – reaches out exuberantly into the realms of theology or metaphysics. This Leibnizian monad, which has sunk from metaphysics into literary theory, the monad of the enclosed, non-communicative “true me”, is an entitas ficta praeter necessitatem. Any look at life and art, even Proust’s, teaches us that the idea of a world that is “fermé, sans communication” (225) is, quite simply, empirically implausible. The 65 Andreas Dorschel question of any relationship or non-relationship between life and work demands a sober historical appraisal and not excursions into metaphysics, or borrowings from theology. We can at least demand that the appraisal be a sober one, if it is to result in a piece of scholarship. Marcel Proust’s own chef-d’œuvre, which contradicts his preceding essay so grandiloquently, expounds upon the intimate interweaving of life and work in a quite un- sober fashion, in all the candidness and overflowing communicativeness of the éducation littéraire granted to a hero whom we may call by no other name than: Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu, conceived as a work of art, seeks and finds its mark more astutely than Proust’s theoretical statements that preceded it. II. “Now that is art! But this art is very much bound up with my life”, Richard Wagner wrote on the 29th of October 1859 to Mathilde Wesendonck.5 The comment simply postulates that the two are interconnected. Did Wagner envisage the form this connection took when he was working on Tristan und Isolde? The notorious unease that biographism inspires – the suspicion of philistinism – comes not least from its quick answer to the question of how art is interconnected with life. In more or less all popular biographies6 this answer is: art reflects life. The artist experiences certain things; these are then ‘mirrored’ by his art. The work has ‘autobiographical significance’.7 Whoever finds the models in real life – for example Mathilde and Otto Wesendonck – has explained their images in art: in this case Isolde and King Mark. If this version of biographism seems thoroughly inept, this is hardly because such a constellation between life and art never occurs. Of course, artists for better or for worse do draw on their own lives. This may provide models for the figures of their art – sometimes directly, more often indirectly. Details may be taken from reality and supplemented by a wealth of elements from the imagination. ‘Mirror image’ and ‘reflection’ are far too simple terms for something that can take on all conceivable gradations. To fail to see this is the first mistake of a simplistic biographism. This mistake can be compounded by a second. Not only should this scenario – art offering a picture of life – be elucidated in a more nuanced fashion. The fallacy that this is the only possible scenario is more serious. 66 Life’s Work. Wagner’s Tristan and the Critique of Biographism At least Wagner’s statement that with him art is “very much bound up with [...] life” avoids this mistake.