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). 4 Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner: An Electronic Roundtable Minna Planer (1835), portrait by Alexander von Otterstedt 5 The Wagner Journal Volume 9 Number 2 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, <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hw-MMXY8d-g> (accessed 2 Nov. 2014). 3 Christine Wilhelmine ‘Minna’ Planer (1809–66), Wagner’s first wife. Their marriage lasted from 1836 until Minna’s death, though they separated several times, and ultimately in 1862. 4 Biebrich, a small community, at the time on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. 5 Mathilde Maier (1834–1910); Wagner and she met in 1862. 6 Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–97), specifically his book Die Familie (1854–5), the third volume of his four-volume work Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Socialpolitik, 4 vols. (1851–69). 6 Gender, Sexuality and Love in Wagner: An Electronic Roundtable 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’.