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| Publications [#28483] of Daniel H. Foster
Books
- D.H. Foster. The Hellenization of Politics: Wagner's "Ring" Cycle and the Greeks. Cambridge University Press,
(2005). (forthcoming)
Abstract:
Table of Contents
Introduction - DeBabelization,
Hellenization, and Nationalism
Part I - Greek Epic, Lyric, and Drama in
the Ring Cycle
1 A Classicist Manqué: Richard Wagner and
the Greeks
2 Art and Ideology: An Evolutionary Theory
of Poetry and Politics
Part II - Epic and National Identity
3 Bleeding the Past to Build the Future:
The Ring as Homeric Epic
4 The Orchestral Narrator: Elementary Epic
and Epic Proper in Das Rheingold and Die
Walküre
Part III - Lyric and Personal Identity
5 “All Opera is Orpheus”: Lyric versus
Drama in the Italian Formation and
Wagnerian
Reformation of Opera
6 The German Orpheus: A Question of Jewish
Paternity in Siegfried
Part IV - Drama and Civic Identity
7 Opera and Comedy: Greek Drama and the
Ring
8 The Music of the Future as Parody of the
Present: Comedy and Götterdämmerung
Introduction - DeBabelization,
Hellenization, and Nationalism
Most scholars seem to tacitly believe that
adaptation is a binary process with regard
to agency: the work to be adapted is seen
as
passive while the adapting artist is seen
as
active. In the study of operatic
adaptations of literature, this
active/passive dichotomy is further
supported by the prevailing notion that, of
these two media, music is somehow the
stronger. While supportable on the whole,
these assumptions lead to an incomplete
understanding of adaptation in general and
operatic adaptation in particular. To
counteract such assumptions, this book
reverses the polarity of adaptation in a
way
that recalls Walter Benjamin’s theory of
translation. In Benjamin what is usually
regarded as active—the translator—becomes
passive, while what is usually regarded as
passive—the translated—becomes active.
Benjamin insists on this reversal of agency
because he believes that the best
translators do not try to familiarize the
foreign but to “foreignize” the familiar
and
thereby expand their own language with new
words, structures, and ideas. Through such
linguistic change, Benjamin looks forward
to
a greater sense of global understanding, a
kind of de-Babelization when revelation and
language will once again seamlessly flow
into one another, washing away the
watershed
of meaning that now separates them. Moving
from the interlinguistic to the
intermedial,
this book posits a similar theory for those
composers to whom literature is something
more than a passive bit of clay. As a test
case for this theory, I turn to the works
of
Richard Wagner, arguably the most well-read
opera composer of the nineteenth century
and
perhaps of all time. An indefatigable
author in his own right who wrote his own
libretti as well as countless theoretical
tracts on art, politics, and religion, one
of Wagner’s greatest influences was not
another composer but rather the literature
of ancient Greece. This is especially true
of the opera that will serve as the primary
artistic focus for this study, Der Ring des
Nibelungen, a work that reveals its Greek
influences in form as well as content.
Unlike Benjamin’s vision of global
inclusion, however, in Wagner we see that
the collapsing of difference between the
foreign and the familiar leads to national
exclusion, an aestheticization of
nationalist politics along Greek lines.
Thus the portmanteau “Hellenization.” This
phenomenon, though, is not restricted to
Wagner or even to Germany. As a
Hellenizer,
Wagner takes part in a widespread European
trend whereby artists and thinkers alike
sought inspiration for new works that would
tell a national history embedded in the
notion of a purer past. By thus
aestheticizing politics according to such
fabled pasts, these men and women tried to
unify their nations against other cultures
that reputedly threatened them with
contamination and ruin.
Part I - Greek Epic, Lyric, and Drama in
the Ring Cycle
Although there are several candidates for
which literature had the deepest impact
upon
Wagner, it is his lifelong interest in the
Greeks that I will focus on here. As
Wagner
himself claims at the beginning of “Art and
Revolution,” a work that inaugurates the
most important period in his theoretical
output and roughly coincides with his first
sketches for the Ring, “In any serious
investigation of the essence of our art
today, we cannot make one step forward
without being brought face to face with its
intimate connection with the Art of ancient
Greece.” My decision to focus on Greek
literature is informed, however, not only
by
the profound impact it had upon Wagner, but
also because, strangely enough, it has not
received the scholarly attention it
deserves. Surprisingly few book-length
studies examine the Greek literary
influences on Wagner, and no book
extensively examines Wagner’s use of Greek
literature beyond tragedy. I argue,
however, that Greek epic, lyric, and comedy
also profoundly influenced the ways in
which
Wagner Hellenized and legitimated his
vision
of German opera and identity against an
encroaching Other, most often figured as
Jewish, French, and/or Italian. In his
theoretical works, Wagner specifically
praises the Greeks and discredits the
Romans
as mere mimics interested more in money
than
in art. By discrediting Rome in this way,
he sought thereby to discredit their
linguistic descendants, the French and the
Italians, as well as what Wagner perceives
to be their spiritual descendants, the
Jews. Having separated the Greeks from the
Romans, Wagner theorizes a specifically
Greek model of poetic and political
evolution. This model of evolution then
helps him to structure the Ring cycle.
Because of the stages in which he wrote the
libretti for the Ring, beginning with the
final stage of development and working his
way backward toward the beginning, each of
the Ring’s operas represents a particular
phase in poetic and political evolution
that
points both before and beyond itself, to
what precedes and follows it. Das
Rheingold
and Die Walküre create epic national
identity in its earlier and later stages
respectively, Siegfried expresses lyric
personal identity, and Götterdämmerung
destructively culminates with a comic
parody
of civic identity. Neither wholly
neglecting Wagner’s theoretical works nor
merely mapping them onto his operas, this
book, unlike other studies, strives to
avoid
according either theory or practice too
much
truth-value. With Wagner, each of these
terms is ultimately succeeded by a third
term, ideology, an ever-changing worldview
whose only constants are its contents: art,
the self, and society.
Part II - Epic and National Identity
Despite Wagner’s arguments against epic and
narrative in general, the Ring still owes
an
important artistic and political debt to
Greek epic. Wagner does not dismiss all
epics and every narrative technique. He
praises Homer and in the Ring strives to do
for Germany what he imagines Homer to have
done for Greece, namely, to provide his
country with a national bible rooted in the
sagas and myths of the Folk’s collective
past. Emulating Homer’s technique of
retrospective narrative, as seen most
famously in the episode describing the
origins of Odysseus’ wounding by a boar,
Wagner writes the libretti for the Ring in
reverse. He begins with his hero
Siegfried’s similar wound and generates
prequel after prequel until he arrives back
at the very origins of time and the
original
sin of the Ring: the valuing of culture
over
nature. By focusing more specifically on
Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, we can see
how Wagner is especially wedded to epic in
both the music and the texts for these
operas. Borrowing not only from Homer but
also Hesiod, in Das Rheingold Wagner uses
the theogonic and epigrammatic epic forms
found in Hesiod’s Works and Days to create
both the inherently flawed world of the
Ring
and the gods that rule over this fallen
world. Then, in Die Walküre, as the Ring
evolves aesthetically and politically,
Wagner introduces humans into this scheme
and depicts their interactions with the
gods
as more concrete and thus more Homeric,
making his Teutonic source stories conform
more closely to the ideal of Greek epic
proper, as represented by the Iliad and the
Odyssey.
Part III - Lyric and Personal Identity
In the epic operas of Das Rheingold and Die
Walküre, Wagner represents his characters
within a natural and embattled context. In
Götterdämmerung he puts them in a more
civilized setting, reflecting the way Greek
dramatists forced their heroes to face
personal responsibility within the civic
context of tragedy and comedy. But in
between these two stages lies a poetic and
political space where heroes are neither
wholly consumed by outside forces nor
entirely subsumed by inner ones. This
liminal space is that of lyric and it is
outlined most clearly in Siegfried. In his
eponymous opera, Siegfried fills out the
contours of the mythical Greek lyricist,
Orpheus, not only to further the plot of
the
Ring but also to facilitate Wagner’s own
self-discovery as an artist and a person.
Like Orpheus, Siegfried is a singer, a
child
of nature, friend to the forest animals,
and
rescuer of maidens from death (or at least
death’s counterfeit, sleep). But like
Wagner, Siegfried is also anxious about his
biological and artistic paternity. He
fears
that Mime might truly be his father, while
Wagner famously worries whether his father
was a Jew named Meyer—his mother’s second
husband, whom she married perilously close
to young Richard’s conception. But by
having his operatic double move away from
his companionship with forest creatures, a
substitute father, and a kind of culinary
aesthetic, and move toward his love of
Brünnhilde, the knowledge of his real
father, and a more manly, “Germanic”
aesthetic, Siegfried solves both his own
and
Wagner’s identity crises through this use
of
Orphic motifs.
Part IV - Drama and Civic Identity
Enlisting the aid of both Aristophanic
parody and Greek New Comedy, in
Götterdämmerung Wagner, somewhat against
the
evolutionary progress of the Ring as a
whole, seeks to destroy contemporaneous
incarnations of artwork and society through
ridicule. In part Wagner is forced into
this parodic stance by the fact that the
music for this final opera was written last
chronologically, while the libretto, the
oldest for the Ring, was written first and
clearly reveals the influence of French and
Italian operatic models, complete with
massive choruses and wedding ceremonies.
Thus, instead of upgrading the libretto or
scaling back his musical invention, Wagner
uses his music to deconstruct what the
libretto seems to say in earnest. He
scores
the music for the chorus in such a way as
to
parody the French operatic chorus, a form
he
denounces in his theoretical works as both
retrograde and unnecessary. Since the
Greek
chorus had long ago, according to Wagner,
evolved into the operatic orchestra, from
an
aesthetic perspective its use on the modern
stage constitutes a needless repetition,
while from an ethical perspective it
represents unnecessary luxury within the
civic body. As the representation of an
unhealthy civic body, this chorus must
therefore be purged, a purgation that is
eventually achieved through the ending of
the Ring, itself a darker and more
destructive version of the standard ending
for Greek New Comedy. Instead of being
united through the usual civic ceremony of
the wedding, at the end of this opera
Siegfried, Brünnhilde, and, symbolically,
society as a whole, are united upon a
funeral pyre that eventually engulfs the
entire world of the Ring, negating the old
through destruction and yet, significantly,
neglecting to create the new. In this way,
Wagner disrupts and terminates the Ring’s
cycle of poetic and political evolution.
By
thus brutally negating history, ultimately
the Ring not only evolves but also
revolves,
in both senses of that word. It revolts
against the past only to return to it,
ending almost exactly where the entire
cycle
began: with the stage flooded and the
Rhinedaughters once more in possession of
the Rhinegold. Ambivalent to the end, the
finale of the Ring both is and is not what
it seems: a new beginning and the eternal
return of the same.
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