Richard Wagner's suffering and greatness

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Publication ad S. Fischer Berlin 1933
Title page single print of the 1933 essay
Verso title page single print of the essay 1933

Richard Wagner's Suffering and Greatness is an essay written in 1933 by Thomas Mann .

Emergence

The occasion was the request of the Wagner Association Amsterdam on February 13, 1933, to give a lecture in the Concertgebouw on the 50th anniversary of the death of Richard Wagner . Mann received further invitations to speak on this occasion from the Goethe Society in Munich, among others . Mann responded to these invitations with a lecture in the Auditorium Maximum of the University of Munich on February 10, 1933 and a lecture tour that began the following day, which took him and his wife to Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris - and from which they were not to return to the German Reich .

Thomas Mann began working on the lecture in mid-December 1932. When writing, however, the lecture manuscript grew into a larger treatise. It was completed in Garmisch at the end of January 1933. The actual text of the lecture was expanded into an essay of 52 pages in Lugano after the end of the lecture tour. It appeared in the April issue of the Neue Rundschau in 1933 . The actual lecture text was thought to be lost for a long time, but it has been known since 2008 that the typescript is contained in the Thomas Mann Collection of Yale University. In 2012, a proofreading copy of a single edition of the essay planned for spring 1933, but never realized, was rediscovered.

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Richard Wagner (1813–1883) and his century

Richard Wagner's century, the nineteenth, honors Thomas Mann in the opening of the essay as the "bourgeois" one. It was shaped by great men, scientists and artists. In the taste of art there was a tendency towards the "grandiose and the masses". "What huge burdens were borne back then, epic burdens, in the last sense of this enormous word - which is why one should not only think of Balzac and Tolstoy , but also of Wagner."

Wagner's art

The "Homeric leitmotif", used by Tolstoy as a standing idiom with which he characterizes his characters, Wagner develops into a musical leitmotif . At the same time, Wagner's music is “sensuality”. And Wagner's musical dramas contain psychology. "How in Siegfried's dreaming under the linden tree the mother thought fades into the erotic [...] that is Freud , that is analysis, nothing else." Psychology becomes mythical happening in Wagner's operas; Psychology and myth merge, even before Freud.

Thomas Mann sees a relationship between Wagner and Ibsen , the Scandinavian linguist, in psychologizing the artistic statement . "Because they were both Nordic magicians [north of the Alps], badly mischievous sorcerers, profoundly versed in all the art of whispering in a sensual and pronounced devil's artistry, great in the organization of the effect, in the cult of the smallest, in all ambiguity and symbol formation in this celebration of the idea, this poeticizing of the intellect. ”“ In Wagner's case, the art form was the opera, in Ibsen's case the social piece. ”

Figures in the Parsifal stage festival

Thomas Mann considers Kundry to be the strongest, poetically boldest figure that Wagner has ever conceived. The “wild messenger of the Grail” is at the same time a seductive woman, “the thought of a spiritual double existence”. "The heroines of Wagner are generally characterized by a trait of noble hysteria, something somnambulistic, ecstatic and visionary, which permeates their romantic heroism with peculiar and questionable modernity."

A few pages further on, Thomas Mann becomes even more drastic: “ Parsifal's personal slip - what a society really! What an accumulation of extreme and obnoxious extravagance! A wizard emasculated by his own hand; a desperate double being composed of corrupter and penitent Magdalena with cataplectic transitional states between the two forms of existence; a loving high priest who waits for redemption by a chaste boy; this pure fool and boy of the redeemer himself, so different from the bright awakening Brünhilde and in his way also a case of remote peculiarity. "

Seriousness and cheerfulness in art using the example of Richard Wagner

Using Richard Wagner as an example, Thomas Mann describes the artist's mischievous disposition. “New 'truth experiences' mean to the artist new stimuli and possibilities of expression, nothing more. He believes in it exactly as far as it takes it seriously as it is necessary to bring it to the highest expression and to make the deepest impression with it. He is therefore very serious about it, serious to tears - but not entirely and therefore not at all . His artistic seriousness is 'seriousness in the game' and of an absolute nature. "" When Wagner relaxed in the trivial, fooled and told Saxon anecdotes, Nietzsche [with whom he was friends for a number of years] blushed for him - and we understand his shame about such agility in changing the level. "

“It is advisable to understand that the artist, even the one who lives in the most solemn regions of art, is not an absolutely serious person, that he is concerned with effect, with great pleasure, and that tragedy and farce come from the same root. One turn of the lighting transforms one into the other; the farce is a secret tragedy, the tragedy - in the end - a sublime joke. ”Thomas Mann described the essence of tragedy as “ erring action ”in his experiment on the theater (1907).

Thomas Mann's dominant artistic role model, Richard Wagner, is characterized by his admirer as follows: “Yes, he is a buffoon, god of light and anarchist social revolutionary all at once - the theater cannot ask for more.”

Wagner as a bourgeois

It cannot be denied that “Wagner's passion for bourgeois elegance shows a tendency to degenerate”. It no longer has anything to do with “the dignity of a master and a drought's cap”, but is “the worst international nineteenth century”, and has “the character of the bourgeoisie. The not only old bourgeois, but modern bourgeois influence in his human and artistic [!] Personality is unmistakable - the taste for opulence, luxury, wealth, velvet and silk and Wilhelminian style splendor, which goes deep into the spiritual and artistic. In the end, Wagner's art and the Makart bouquet (with peacock feathers) that adorns the quilted and gilded salons of the bourgeoisie are of the same temporal and aesthetic origin. "

Wagner's work discipline

Wagner's work reveals "so much that is thoughtfully and wittily thought, allusive, intelligently woven, so much clever dwarf work in addition to the work of giants and gods that it is impossible to believe in trance and dark creation." "It is solidity, civil Work accuracy, as it is reflected in his by no means rooted out, but extremely carefully and clean scores - that of his most remote work, especially, the Tristan score, a model image of clear, meticulous calligraphy . "

A morning without work seemed "so completely unbearable" to him.

Thomas Mann's commitment to Richard Wagner

“The passion for Wagner's magical work has accompanied my life since I first became aware of it and began to conquer it, to penetrate it with knowledge. I can never forget what I owe him as an enjoyer and learner. "

"What I have always complained about, or rather, what left me indifferent, was Wagner's theory" of the total work of art. "What should I do with this addition of music, words, painting and gestures?" In art, "one does not need to add up their genres to make them perfect."

Regarding Richard Wagner's contradicting personality: "Let us content ourselves with venerating Wagner's work as a powerful and ambiguous phenomenon of German and Western life, from which the deepest stimuli will always emanate from art and knowledge."

Reaction and reproach

In response to the lectures, the Easter edition of 16./17. April 1933 in the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten a small double column with the headline Protest of the Richard-Wagner-Stadt München , initiated and written by the director of the Bavarian State Opera who adored Wagner , Hans Knappertsbusch , and signed by 45 personalities, in an addendum again by another three Men, mostly from Munich, including the composer Richard Strauss , Siegmund von Hausegger and Hans Pfitzner as well as the famous draftsman Olaf Gulbransson . In it, Thomas Mann is sharply accused of having vilified Richard Wagner. Pfitzner had defused the text with an evil sentence. Knappertsbusch had neither heard one of the five lectures nor read the essay. He only knew the content from hearsay and from newspaper clippings that had been made known to him from the Netherlands and by the editor of the Münchner Zeitung (MZ), Wilhelm Leupold. Leupold was Knappertsbusch's acquaintance from the Munich Rotary Club , of which Thomas Mann was a member until it was deleted on April 4, 1933. The removal of Mann from the Rotary Club had also intrigued Leupold. Leupold and the editor-in-chief of the MZ Schiedt were also the ones who primarily edited the text of the “protest”. Knappertsbusch had nothing in mind with the Nazis, whom he always called “Prolets”. He was removed from Munich by the Nazis in February 1936.

Thomas Mann's reprimand in National Socialist Germany contributed significantly to the fact that he took the warnings of his children Erika and Klaus seriously and decided to emigrate . He hadn't prepared this step. The husband and his wife never returned from their planned recreational stay after the lectures in Arosa .

In his reply, Thomas Mann admitted that the full essay was "a confession rich in refractions and shades of thought". But in the lecture, which could only be a part of the 52-page print manuscript, he had "given up some psychological sharpness" that could have run counter to the festive occasion. Mann also doubts that the signatories had all read the full text, which he was absolutely right. None of the signatories knew the speech or essay. A public polemic with Pfitzner and von Hausegger followed; in Switzerland, Willi Schuh , who later became Strauss' biographer , spoke up vehemently . Strauss later called the "protest" "the stupid thing", Gulbransson asked for his name to be deleted. Knappertsbusch himself apologized, also publicly. He lost his post in Munich.

literature

Web links

Wikibooks: Ambiguity as a system - Thomas Mann's demands on art: Richard Wagner's suffering and greatness  - learning and teaching materials

References and comments

  1. ^ Announcement from the Thomas-Mann-Förderkreis München e. V. 2008.
  2. ↑ Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Thomas Mann Essays Volume 1, p. 63
  3. ↑ In a telephone conversation, the two had warned of the “bad weather” in Germany.
  4. ↑ in the Vossische Zeitung on April 21, 1933, also sent by Mann to the Frankfurter Zeitung , the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Berlin) and the Neue Freie Presse (Vienna)