What about Richard Wagner? Art and Revolution (I)

The following is a selection of notes on Richard Wagner’s 1849 essay “Art and Revolution.” He was 36 years old. It was the year after the widespread wave of revolutions across Europe in 1848. He was personally involved in the uprising in Dresden in Saxony, after which he was forced to flee to Switzerland. Text in quotes is taken from the original text which can be found in English translation here.

On Apollo

Not as the soft companion of the Muses, as the later and more luxurious art of sculpture has alone preserved his likeness, must we conceive the Apollo of the springtime of the Greeks; but it was with all the traits of energetic earnestness, beautiful but strong, that the great tragedian Æschylus knew him. Thus, too, the Spartan youths learnt the nature of the god, when by dance and joust they had developed their supple bodies to grace and strength; when the boy was taken from those he loved, and sent on horse to farthest lands in search of perilous adventure; when the young man was led into the circle of fellowship, his only password that of his beauty and his native worth, in which alone lay all his might and all his riches.

With such eyes also the Athenian saw the god, when all the impulses of his fair body, and of his restless soul, urged him to the new birth of his own being through the ideal expression of art; when the voices, ringing full, sounded forth the choral song, singing the deeds of the god, the while they gave to the dancers the mastering measure that meted out the rhythm of the dance, which dance itself, in graceful movements, told the story of those deeds; and when above the harmony of well-ordered columns he wove the noble roof; heaped one upon the other the broad crescents of the amphitheater, and planned the scenic trappings of the stage.

Thus, too, inspired by Dionysus, the tragic poet saw this glorious god: when, to all the rich elements of spontaneous art, the harvest of the fairest and most human life, he joined the bond of speech, and concentrating them all into one focus, brought forth the highest conceivable form of art—the DRAMA.

The influence to those familiar with Nietzche’s aesthetics is clear: Apollo stands as the God of proud, beautiful and life-affirming form. The final paragraph outlines Wagner’s vision of drama: combining the spontaneous, Dionysian intensities of folk music, dance and intoxication with definite rhythm, harmony and grace, Apollo casts a spell that lifts man up above himself towards the heavens.

The deeds of gods and men, their sufferings, their delights, as they, in all solemnity and glee, as eternal rhythm, as everlasting harmony of every motion and of all creation, lay disclosed in the nature of Apollo himself; here they became actual and true. For all that in them moved and lived, as it moved and lived in the beholders, here found its perfected expression; where ear and eye, as soul and heart, lifelike and actual, seized and perceived all, and saw all in spirit and in body revealed; so that the imagination need no longer vex itself with the attempt to conjure up the image. Such a tragedy-day was a Feast of the God; for here the god spoke clearly and intelligibly forth, and the poet, as his high-priest, stood real and embodied in his art-work, led the measures of the dance, raised the voices to a choir, and in ringing words proclaimed the utterances of godlike wisdom.

One detail here is particularly beautiful: the Apollonian art allows the audience to see the entirety of life made manifest in spirit and in body. One need no longer daydream or fantasy in isolation — the community, the political body, witnesses the spirit and the body as one.

Wagner then points to the independent and bold character of the Greeks — these were, he claims, not a people who indulged passivity, complacency, or stiff adherence to tradition. They prized freedom, creativity, enterprise, the fates and fortunes of war and conquest. And yet, claims Wagner, the tragic theatre was their highest catharsis: higher than the rituals of tradition and religion, it was the Art which made him one with the absolute. For us today, “still it intoxicates our senses and forces from us the avowal, that it were better to be for half a day a Greek in presence of this tragic Art−work, than to all eternity a non−Greek God!”

Such words might seem rhetorically loaded, and yet who who has studied the extant Greek tragedies with sensitivity can deny Wagner’s point? Antigone, Oedipus, Iphigenia, Medea, Orestes, Agamemnon, Electra all haunt us, men and women of myth, and yet also of the same stuff as ourselves.

And yet, Wagner claims, as the great Athenian state declined, Tragedy waned, replaced by comedy and then in turn by the stiff and gloomy proclamations of philosophy.

“To Philosophy and not to Art, belong the two thousand years which, since the decadence of Grecian Tragedy, have passed till our own day”, claims Wagner. Art became the preserve of a privileged few, or the servant of this or that religious doctrine, but never again the “free expression of a free community”, as it was amongst the citizens of Athens.

The Romans, claims Wagner, replaced the high ideals of the Greek Art with a brutal, absolute realism. Instead of God and myth, they preferred the gladiator and vicious beasts

These brutal conquerors of the world were pleased to wallow in the most absolute realism; their imagination could find its only solace in the most material of presentments. Their philosophers they gladly left to flee shuddering from public life to abstract speculations; but, for themselves, they loved to revel in concrete and open bloodthirstiness, beholding human suffering set before them in absolute physical reality.

One is tempted here to think of our world today, academies filled with critics churning out books read by noone, while the masses doomscroll reels of ordinary people being bombed or arrested.

In such a world, claims Wagner, where humanity was so reduced to base violence and absolute realism in its representations of itself, every man, even the emperor himself (who would often be murdered before completing his term) felt himself a slave. The only universal impulse that could express itself in this corrupted age was the antithesis of Art:

"For Art is pleasure in itself; in existence, in community; but the condition of that period, at the close of the Roman mastery of the world, was self-contempt, disgust with existence, horror of community. Thus Art could never be the true expression of this condition: its only possible expression was Christianity.”

Here again we see the Nietzsche in Wagner. Christianity as the opposite of pleasure in existence, in community, in the movements of life itself. Christianity expressing rather an absolute sickness with life, a despair, and a disgust at the state of humanity, and the things with which man entertains his senses.

"Christianity adjusts the ills of an honorless, useless, and sorrowful existence of mankind on earth, by the miraculous love of God; who had not — as the noble Greek supposed — created man for a happy and self-conscious life upon this earth, but had here imprisoned him in a loathsome dungeon: so as, in reward for the self-contempt that poisoned him therein, to prepare him for a posthumous state of endless comfort and inactive ecstasy. Man was therefore bound to remain in this deepest and unmanliest degradation, and no activity of this present life should he exercise; for this accursed life was, in truth, the world of the devil, i.e., of the senses; and by every action in it, he played into the devil's hands. Therefore the poor wretch who, in the enjoyment of his natural powers, made this life his own possession, must suffer after death the eternal torments of hell! Naught was required of mankind but Faith — that is to say, the confession of its miserable plight, and the giving up of all spontaneous attempt to escape from out this misery; for the undeserved Grace of God was alone to set it free.”

Wagner then embarks on an interesting digression and psychologisation of Christianity, once again reminiscent of Nietzsche. We wonder about the late parties . The gist of his point: the teachings of Christ himself seem not the teachings of a pacifier and an anaesthetist, but a firebrand and a thunderer against hypocrisy and Roman rule. It is the later Paul who propagandizes the teaching and makes it palatable for the Pharisees and imperial Rome. An interesting digression, and one not dissimilar to the one made by Nietzsche in his Will to Power notes, where Paul, not Christ, comes out as the enemy.

Digression aside, Wagner concludes that the candid artist perceives immediately that whatever salve Christianity offered, it was not Art, nor could it ever be a source for true and living Art. The Greek could express a genuine joy in life; the Christian could only sacrifice and renounce it. The Greek could give his actions in the world, his strivings, his conquests and his achievements as genuine offerings to the God; the Christian could offer only his renunciation thereof.

Then we get another fascinating description of Greek vs. Christian art:

Art is the highest expression of activity of a race that has developed its physical beauty in unison with itself and Nature; and man must reap the highest joy from the world of sense before he can mould therefrom the implements of his art; for from the world of sense alone, can he derive so much as the impulse to artistic creation. The Christian, on the contrary, if he fain would create an art-work that should correspond to his belief; must derive his impulse from the essence of abstract spirit (Geist), from the grace of God, and therein find his tools. What, then, could he take for aim? Surely not physical beauty, mirrored in his eyes as an incarnation of the devil? And how could pure spirit, at any time, give birth to a something that could be cognized by the senses?

Art must go through and via beauty, sensuality and pleasure in order to place man in unity with himself, with nature, and with the absolute. The Christian attempts at culture must conversely aim at abstraction and invisibility, forever skeptical of that which appears and makes itself known via the body.

Wagner then makes a bold political claim about the implications of these contrasting views:

Where the Greeks, for their edification, gathered in the amphitheatre for the space of a few short hours full of the deepest meaning: the Christian shut himself away in the life-long imprisonment of a cloister. In the one case, the Popular Assembly was the judge: in the other, the Inquisition; here the State developed to an honorable Democracy: there, to a hypocritical Despotism

Greek Art, affirmative of life, leads to a state of free individuals, debating and negotiating their causes in a People’s forum; Christian religion, denying life, leads to tyranny and eternal vigilance against corruption.

The Middle Ages which followed, claims Wagner, saw the fresh spirits of the European nations, still flush with life, wrestling with the Christian ideal. Chivalrous poetry was one product of this spiritual battle, a parody of heroism, balancing passionate, worldly life with an ethereal, delicate fantasy of romance and love. It could never, Wagner claims, be an art of spiritual harmony, only one expressing hypocrisy, the incurable split of the medieval soul.

The Renaissance began, Wagner claims, when the Church shamelessly proclaimed itself as a worldy despotism in league with worldy absolutisms — belief waned, and a new sensuality was born. This necessarily was forced to seek the Greek forms to train itself, which was an embarassment to the Christian spirit — and yet, hypocritical as it ever was, the Church was happy to appropriate the Renaissance back to itself, with “borrowed plumes of paganism”.

Meanwhile, the absolute rulers of Europe sought the refinement of pleasures and wealth that only Art could bring. They cultivated Greek style around them, once more turning a blind eye to the Greek hatred of tyranny and love of free citizenship.

At this point, a new character appears in our story: Commerce. Wagner views Commerce as synonymous with the Roman god Mercury, himself a corruption of the older Greek Hermes. Where Hermes was a spiritual messenger and a guide to souls, Mercury became the patron of material commerce and merchants. In such an age of material wealth and general corruption, as already depicted, Mercury took on the additional character of being a god of cheats and rogues.

Wagner then shows his anti-capitalist hand — he scorns the bankers who pay actors to entertain them privately, instead of performing to the public in the theatre. “Behold Mercury and his docile handmaid, Modern Art”.

Now we get to see Ricardo at his most impassionated and vitriolic:

"This is Art, as it now fills the entire civilized world! Its true essence is Industry; its ethical aim, the gaining of gold; its aesthetic purpose, the entertainment of those whose time hangs heavily on their hands. From the heart of our modern society, from the golden calf of wholesale Speculation, stalled at the meeting of its crossroads, our art sucks forth its life-juice, borrows a hollow grace from the lifeless relics of the chivalric conventions of medieval times, and — blushing not to fleece the poor, for all its professions of Christianity — descends to the depths of the proletariat, enervating, demoralizing, and dehumanizing everything on which it sheds its venom.”

Wagner then shreds contemporary theatre in his day: the drama is dead and without poetry, whereas the opera is sensuality without a higher concept. We can see implicit his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art, festival of spirit and body, movement and form together.

Wagner argues that the Western tradition has had masters, but has not had the ability to raise them to the status of a Sophocles or an Aeschylus. “We tremble at their fame, but mock their art… The one, great, genuine work of Art they cannot bring to life unaided: we, too, must help them in its birth. The tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles were the work of Athens!”

Now we turn to contemporary politics: the revolutions of 1848.

Wagner lambasts the reactionary French elite for wanting to keep the Paris theatres open: paradoxical, perhaps, except that the motive is precisely to serve as bread and circuses for the hungry Proletariat. This, he claims, merely betrays the spiritual emptiness of the current custodians of Art.

Then we get a comparison of modern European public art with Greek public art:

"To the Greeks, the production of a tragedy was a religious festival, where the gods bestirred themselves upon the stage and bestowed on men their wisdom: our evil conscience has so lowered the theatre in public estimation, that it is the duty of the police to prevent the stage from meddling in the slightest with religion; a circumstance as characteristic of our religion as of our art.

Within the ample boundaries of the Grecian amphitheatre, the whole populace was wont to witness the performances: in our superior theatres, loll only the affluent classes. The Greeks sought the instruments of their art in the products of the highest associate culture: we seek ours in the deepest social barbarism.

The education of the Greek, from his earliest youth, made himself the subject of his own artistic treatment and artistic enjoyment, in body as in spirit: our foolish education, fashioned for the most part to fit us merely for future industrial gain, gives us a ridiculous, and withal arrogant satisfaction with our own unfitness for art, and forces us to seek the subjects of any kind of artistic amusement outside ourselves, like the rake who goes for the fleeting joys of love to the arms of a prostitute.

Thus the Greek was his own actor, singer, and dancer; his share in the performance of a tragedy was to him the highest pleasure in the work of Art itself, and he rightly held it an honor to be entitled by his beauty and his culture to be called to this beloved task: we, on the other hand, permit a certain portion of our proletariat, which is to be found in every social stratum, to be instructed for our entertainment; thus prurient vanity, claptrap, and at times unseemly haste for fortune-making, fill up the ranks of our dramatic companies.

Where the Grecian artist found his only reward in his own delight in the masterpiece, in its success, and the public approbation: we have the modern artist boarded, lodged, and paid. And thus we reach the essential distinction between the two: with the Greeks their public art was very Art, with us it is artistic Handicraft."

Wagner is vicious against the industrialisation of Art, and indeed of the culture of machines and factories in general. He then ties this to the Christian mindset: “And thus we see with horror the spirit of modern Christianity embodied in a cotton−mill: to speed the rich, God has become our Industry, which only holds the wretched Christian labourer to life until the heavenly courses of the stars of commerce bring round the gracious dispensation that sends him to a better world.”

The otherworldliness of dogma, the negation of the world of senses, flesh and beauty, has its direct counterpart in the brutal world of machines. The love of craft, of sensuously employing oneself to materials with the hand and the eye, is superceded by efficient production. Sensuous enjoyment remains as an anaesthetic at the end of the workday, but not as the ethos of life itself.

For the Greek, Wagner argues, homelife was simple and unassuming. Private palaces were scorned; this formed the basis of the distinction the Greek drew between himself and the rulers of the “barbarian” East. Pleasure, Art, and the culture of the body was a public affair, expressed in the public bath, the gymnasia, the theatre.

And now, we get to a big issue, slaves.

Finally, Wagner ceases to idealise the Greek. For all his freedom and cultivation, this was necessitated by the subjection of a slave class. And yet, Wagner argues, 2000 years of attempts to remedy this have gone in the wrong direction. “It has dragged down the fair, free man to itself, to slavery; the slave has not become a freeman, but the freeman a slave”.

This remains the condition we are in, Wagner claims. The struggle to accumulate wealth for its own sake is but the expression of a slavish existence, attempting to remove itself from its chains.

With the downfall of the Greek Tragedy, art split into isolated fields — rhetoric, sculpture, painting, music, etc. This is how the Renaissance in Europe found art and began to work with it. And yet, Wagner claims, the highest Art, “the great united utterance of a free and lovely public life, the Drama, Tragedy… is not yet born again”.

Wagner then reveals himself as a child of the Enlightenment.

"But only Revolution, not slavish Restoration, can give us back that highest Art-work. The task we have before us is immeasurably greater than that already accomplished in 'days of old. If the Grecian Art-work embraced the spirit of a fair and noble nation, the Art-work of the Future must embrace the spirit of a free mankind, delivered from every shackle of hampering nationality; its racial imprint must be no more than an embellishment, the individual charm of manifold diversity, and not a cramping barrier. We have thus quite other work to do than to tinker at the resuscitation of old Greece.”

"No, we do not wish to revert to Greekdom; for what the Greeks knew not, and, knowing not, came by their downfall: that know we. It is their very fall, whose cause we now perceive after years of misery and deepest universal suffering, that shows us clearly what we should become; it shows us that we must love all men before we can rightly love ourselves, before we can regain true joy in our own personality.

From the dishonoring slave-yoke of universal journeymanhood, with its sickly Money-soul, we wish to soar to the free manhood of Art, with the star-rays of its World-soul; from the weary, overburdened day-laborers of Commerce, we desire to grow to fair strong men, to whom the world belongs as an eternal, inexhaustible source of the highest delights of Art."

Wagner then outlines his dynamic view of culture: Slavery and Christianity have pushed man down, denying the body and Nature, which will return with a gigantic force. Revolution, Wagner claims, is a dynamic response to the failure of the preceding systems of culture.

And yet — he immediately draws a line. The socialistic impulse, which seeks to elevate the principle of labour to the rank of religion, is a mistake. Instead of aiming at an Art expressing a free Politics, it aims at the universalisation of Commerce and Industry. Here he defends the forces of reaction, who he claims have an honest, albeint misguided concern:

"In truth, this is the fear of many an honest friend of Art and many an upright friend of men, whose only wish is to preserve the nobler core of our present civilization. But they mistake the true nature of the great social agitation. They are led astray by the windy theories of our socialistic doctrinaires, who would fain patch up an impossible compact with the present conditions of society. They are deceived by the immediate utterance of the indignation of the most suffering portion of our social system, behind which lies a deeper, nobler, natural instinct: the instinct which demands a worthy taste of the joys of life, whose material sustenance shall no longer absorb man's whole life-forces in weary service, but in which he shall rejoice as Man. Viewed closer, it is thus the straining from journeymanhood to artistic manhood, to the free dignity of Man.

Ultimately, socialism expresses the world-weariness of the Christian, attempting to resolve it in materialistic terms, yet without the sense for earthly beauty and pleasure-in-life of the Apollonian Greek.

In Part 2 we will continue the essay and see how Wagner attempts to synthesize Apollo and Christ, and reflect on its implications for the 21st century.