00:01:12.740But Wagner's life is really interesting
00:01:15.600because he's a really interesting character, right?
00:01:18.580He's kind of a trickster in some ways,0.81
00:01:21.280in addition to being a wild racist, right?0.84
00:01:23.260So he is a composer of operas from pretty humble origins.
00:01:28.520He's kind of crisscrossing across Europe in flight from debtors for a lot of his life.
00:01:34.160And he eventually sort of strikes out on his own.
00:01:36.800He abandons the sort of conventional opera music business models.
00:01:40.960And he sets up his own theater where he has very precise, very exacting standards for how his operas are going to be performed and how they're going to be watched.
00:01:52.360And you took me through the first of the four operas in his Ring Cycle.
00:01:59.620So we basically covered Das Reingold, the shortest of the operas, which, you know, spoiler alert, is why we can't do this for all the operas.
00:02:06.360Because it's just like, it's a lot of plot.
00:02:08.340And we kind of covered his life mostly up to 1848, which is the moment where he does three things.
00:02:14.620he sort of sides with the revolution in 1848 to an extent that you sort of, you can't easily
00:02:20.440take back and has to flee his employment and has to move to Switzerland, which was just a place
00:02:26.920where you could say more stuff. And he remains in exile for quite a while. And we'll talk about
00:02:31.300that today. But it's also the moment when he starts hitting on the ring of the Nibelung as
00:02:38.040an idea. I'm hedging a little bit because the plot you heard last time wouldn't have probably
00:02:44.140occurred to him quite then yet he works backwards he he wants to write an opera about siegfried
00:02:49.340but siegfried only shows up in siegfried which is the third opera right so he kind of as it grows
00:02:55.120it grows more into the stuff that we talked about last time but from the beginning he didn't just
00:03:01.740want to tell right there is a way you can have an opera like a hero's opera where like there's you
00:03:06.320know one guy on stage and eventually he dies right like it's very clear that he wasn't going to do
00:03:10.640that from the very beginning. It sort of, and it had these tendencies to sort of overflow the bounds
00:03:15.960of a traditional opera to the point that he almost always, I think, figured it might be more than one
00:03:21.520because he had all this mythology that he wanted to cram in there. But I think it's fair to say
00:03:26.520that in 48, he didn't have yet a notion that he was going to spend an entire opera just with like
00:03:31.900the gods, basically like trying to figure out how to get out of a deal.
00:03:34.920Yeah. So the Ring of the Nibelung is a cycle of operas. As you said, it's kind of like maximalist in its plot and in its sort of like musical excesses. Right. And it's about or drawn from the sort of mishmash of Norse mythologies. Right.
00:03:54.640you said he is drawn from Icelandic myths, that he's drawn from some later German sources.
00:04:02.040A lot of these mythical collections of the pre-Christian pagan religious practices and
00:04:08.240legends are being sort of put into his big operatic work, his sort of major operatic work.
00:04:16.280When people think of Wagner, they think of the Ring Cycle. But also I wanted to touch on the
00:04:20.560very interesting fact that this is something he starts right after 1848, right? Because we talked
00:04:26.080a little bit last time about his political convictions, right? You say this is a guy who
00:04:32.380had in his youth come to really distrust the aristocracy, had come to really distrust capitalism,
00:04:41.140didn't really like the working class either, seemed to have some contempt for their taste,
00:08:09.700There's a lot of people who come up with way more reasonable and way shorter answers to what had happened there.
00:08:14.780But there's some suggestion that he's working through that trauma of like, we thought we were going to do something and then it just, we're going to change the world and it didn't work.
00:08:23.620But that's a really sympathetic vision of Wagner that I think a lot of like millennials on the left, like people like, you know, many of my best friends can relate to, right?
00:08:33.920We were on the cusp of this great moment of social change and we were defeated.
00:09:03.100Absolutely. And we should say, you know, this is in some way the difficulty of discussing sort of mid-19th century leftism in that even people that you and I would like, whose politics we would like, you know, in hindsight, you're like, ooh, that's more than the FDA recommended dose of anti-Semitism in there.
00:09:22.020So Wagner was in no way unusual in this.
00:16:42.200You know, nature is something that's much easier to talk about in the abstract than to actually delineate where nature ends and human influence begins.
00:16:53.420So, like, nature is really something we need to think of as, like, a descriptive fiction more than, like, an actual entity, right?
00:16:59.700But that's not true in Wagner's thought.
00:17:02.360In Wagner's thought, nature is not just real.
00:19:00.560Given that how many gods we have running around in the ring.
00:19:03.680So the capsule on him is, his suggestion is essentially, it's a little bit more complicated
00:19:08.780than that, but all religion is anthropology, right?
00:19:12.120Our description of God, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, is a reverse portrait of ourselves who are not omniscient, who are not benevolent and not omniscient.
00:19:22.780And he draws from that a very deeply humanistic philosophy.
00:19:25.580It's like what religion really is, is a self-portrait how we would like to be, right?
00:19:30.060So in some way, religion should inform our politics as a kind of aspiration.
00:19:34.980We ought to be more like our picture of God.
00:19:38.660just be aware that your picture of God is just that.
00:21:35.160For it is not God as God who has redeemed us, but love, which is above the difference between the divine and the human personality.
00:21:42.360As God gave himself up out of love, so we too should give up God out of love.
00:21:47.900For if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God.
00:21:51.040And despite the predicate of love, we have God, the evil being of religious fanaticism.
00:21:57.300So, I mean, it's a little bit complicated at the end there, but like the idea is we've gotten it exactly reverse.
00:22:03.160We should sacrifice the idea of the divine to love, which is really what it's trying to teach us, as opposed to deciding who we are in common wheel with, depending on some abstract notion of the Godhead, basically.
00:22:20.420So this, it makes sense to me that this would be appealing to Wagner because you talked last time about his efforts to distill various forms down to their essential centers, right?
00:22:31.480So, you know, you talked about how he doesn't use a ton of sort of plot embellishments in his operas, right?
00:22:40.840It's very much just the sort of core of the story.
00:22:44.420And we talked also about how he really made a great effort to strip opera of its like social and status markers and make it only about the music, right?
00:22:54.200There's this effort in Wagner to obliterate these like corrupting, extraneous elements.
00:23:01.480And so I could see him doing that with religion as well, like trying to get away from the conspicuous trappings of Christianity towards, you know, these more essential forces.
00:23:12.400Exactly. There's a distrust here of institutions, right?
00:23:15.340Like both Feuerbach and Proudhon are essentially anti-institutionalists, and that's true for Wagner too.
00:23:20.460Like every time human beings get together and make themselves laws and then obey those laws, he's like, this does not seem good.
00:23:28.000On the other hand, if someone sort of relies on natural impulse, and this is where the question of gender and sexuality will become very, very interesting, he's like, people should trust that.
00:23:39.860And we should mention here too that in a twist that will shock no one, given the self-portrait of Wotan that we described last time, Wagner is also a huge philanderer.
00:23:48.520So he just he means this literally. He's like, you know, when you hear institutions also think marriage, you think the ground of love is like having relationships definitely with people who are also married to other people while you're married to other people.
00:24:00.220So, I mean, there's a free there's also just a free love component to all of this.
00:24:03.240Yeah, but I'm thinking of this like very specific kind of like American man in the years when the sexual revolution was really just a sexual revolution for men when they're like, you know, what's real freedom? What's real adherence to nature? What's real rejection of hierarchies of power as me doing whatever to whoever in pursuit of my orgasm? You know, like that's a it's very like it's very Hugh Hefner.
00:24:26.760Yeah, there's definitely some of that. And especially, you know, we didn't talk much about Tannhäuser's opera, but like that sort of has been, that's had that reputation that like basically it's, it is almost like a mid-century sort of free love manifesto.
00:24:40.000Although the ending doesn't quite bear that out, but like definitely it was part of its appeal at the time. Tristan und Isolde, which he'll sort of compose in the next segment of our story, is essentially the, probably the greatest meditation on adultery, right? It's like why it's justified. So absolutely that's there.
00:24:59.680At the same time, I hope, you know, in the mid-19th century, I think around 1848 especially, a lot of feminists would have agreed with Wagner that, like, that women have only things to gain by some of these institutions getting taken down a couple of pigs, right?
00:25:16.540And the dissolution of marriage, for one thing, yeah, very useful for women, yeah.
00:25:20.640Yeah, basically they're like, look, yeah, like, I see how you got there and it's not perfect, but like, let's, let's applaud the fact that you at least made it to the finish line, right? Like, because he doesn't then sort of remoralize it. He is consistent. He's not saying, but in the end, shouldn't through a higher fellow feeling and then maybe we shouldn't have divorced you guys. He's like, no, we'll see. Like if someone is sleeping with someone else, pretty good sign the marriage is already over. So, you know, what's good, right?
00:25:46.840So there are a lot of women in his orbit who absolutely are like, both have his number in terms of what gave rise to that thought and are perfectly appreciative of like, nothing bad for women comes out of denying the sacramental character of marriage in 1850s.
00:26:02.740Yeah. So just to follow his footsteps. So he leaves for Switzerland in 49. He spends about 10 years in Zurich and then sort of moves around peripatetically again, 1859 to 65. And then in 1866 to 71, he lives in Triebchen on Lake Lucerne, which there's a Wagner Museum there. If anyone ever finds themselves in Lucerne, they should check it out. It's very, very pretty. I was there recently.
00:26:30.960And initially, right, as he's traveling, he writes very little music and instead starts
00:27:52.740Will I say, oh, I heard his opera or will I say, oh, I read his anti-Semitic screed?
00:27:56.540You know, like which one is he more known for?
00:27:58.100You would have heard the opera first, right?
00:28:00.060Like, I mean, I don't have the numbers exactly how often they were performed, but they did well.
00:28:05.520An opera house at the time holds something like 1,200 people.
00:28:08.660An evening, in a well-performing week, you might have as many listeners to the operas as you would have readers of one of these periodicals.
00:28:17.700I mean, I'm saying these periodicals had great circulation and like especially people sort of professionally occupied with music, which was a lot of people at the time, would have read it.
00:28:27.300but you know the first oboist playing in the orchestra probably would might know a lot about
00:28:33.020his essays certainly the conductor might have come across it but like no the average person would not
00:28:38.060have and then the other thing is of course very few of these texts were translated meaning
00:28:41.520wagner becomes kind of a big deal in france a little bit later in the 19th century but like
00:28:46.520around that time especially thanks to tristan and i imagine the number of people there who
00:28:52.380were even aware of these writings was was quite quite small so no you would have encountered him
00:28:56.460as a composer and as a composer really associated with these not yet with the ring right but with
00:29:03.300these kind of modernist works really about gender and sexuality so at the same time as he sort of
00:29:10.260turns more towards writing as he starts sort of towards this middle period in his in his work
00:29:15.020he has this big philosophical conversion he he decides to abandon Feuerbach and he gets really
00:29:22.840into the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer, whom we've already encountered in the Nietzsche
00:29:49.020Right. Basically has this kind of what he thinks of as Buddhist, but whatever, like idea of like basically a resignation and the sort of quieting of all desires as a as the only solution to human suffering.
00:30:02.500Right. So he's going from Feuerbach, who in some way is like history's ultimate optimist by saying like we have this picture of the divine that can guide us into a better future.
00:30:12.420And all we have to do is now kill God, basically, and become gods ourselves.
00:30:16.580Right. And then he just makes a hard turn into this guy who's like, nope, everything's futile and we have to accommodate ourselves to that fact.0.91
00:30:25.540Right. So it's a it's a it's a pretty serious change.
00:30:29.260Yeah. Yeah. Do we know what engenders this shift?
00:30:33.580It's tricky. I mean, one thing is certainly like, you know, 1850 is a darker time for him than 1848.
00:39:26.400But tomorrow we're going to kill each other.
00:39:29.120So Glinda does the obvious thing and Rufi's her husband and tells Sigmund her story.
00:39:34.800Basically, she was forced to marry Hunding, and basically at this point, they start realizing that they might well be each other's long-lost siblings.
00:39:43.800But during her wedding to Hunding, which was by all accounts just a very, very sad affair because she didn't want to do it,
00:39:50.560an old man that no one knew, foreshadowing, showed up and thrust a sword into the ash tree at the center of Hunding's house.
00:39:58.260It's been there sort of in the set design the entire time, or it's supposed to be.
00:40:03.160and no one's been able to pull it out.
00:42:49.340So this is the central contradiction, right? There are some people who contravene nature. There are things that are unnatural and therefore immoral, right? But exactly, like the question is like, where does that motivation come from? But generally, good people tend to be best when they're guided by their own natural inclinations, right?
00:43:08.300So what I'm seeing is a hierarchy of people, right? Like there's a good people whose natural inclinations will lead them towards justified, righteous, good things. And then there's the bad people whose natural inclinations will lead them towards corruption.
00:43:23.700Well, see, I think Wagner would say those aren't natural inclinations, right?
00:45:47.940So in some way, Wagner is grappling with these questions of freedom and autonomy on the one hand, our natural instincts, and then how they sort of relate to morals, to rules, to society at large, right?
00:46:02.520And the question of rules brings us back to the hero of our first opera, that's Reingold, Wotan, who is kind of with our sort of hero slash anti-hero last time and who, let's say, has both a penchant for rule-breaking and, awkwardly enough, is also kind of the guarantor of a bunch of rules, right?
00:46:28.300Yeah. So he basically, as a god, safeguards all these rules and treaties. But, you know, he, in Wagner's version, is also someone who, and I think actually in the Edda too, is kind of a figure that doesn't always play by the rules, right?
00:46:45.200Right. Like he's got his staff. You mentioned his staff that's engraved with all the world's oaths, but he has different set of rules for himself.
00:46:52.900Exactly. Exactly. And so you won't be shocked to find out that when we meet him again, he is in a bit of a bind.
00:46:58.020He has once again created a bunch of problems for himself.
00:47:02.400And so I've already kind of alluded to this, right?
00:47:04.900Like, you will not be shocked to find out that Sigmund and Sigmund, the two star-crossed
00:47:10.300twin-cest lovers, are in fact his children.
00:47:13.120Wait, no, that is a plot twist for me.
00:47:14.880Don't make me feel dumb for not anticipating.
00:47:17.500Well, I mentioned that during her wedding, an old man showed up and trust a, right?0.96
00:47:22.060Like that old man is supposed to be Wotan, right?0.96
00:47:24.400Which is going to be important, right?0.86
00:47:25.880It's nice that he showed up at his human daughter's wedding.0.99
00:47:28.520Well, one that she didn't want, which he nevertheless let proceed.0.99
00:47:59.900And obviously, like, he's also married, right?
00:48:02.620So, like, this is, like, you know, he has a wife who's also a goddess and so, like, knows basically all this stuff, right?
00:48:09.480And so, what's happened is that, you know, he has these two extramarital children who have now, you know, broken a bunch of laws.
00:48:17.200So, like, turns out, right, there's an incest taboo, there's marital fidelity, there is the law of hospitality, right?
00:48:23.800Like, whatever else you do, like, if someone's like, yeah, you can crash here tonight, like, maybe don't try and squirt with their wife, right?0.57
00:50:47.720On the other hand, it's very clear that like, again, it's like nature is for him the kind of magic wand.
00:50:55.020And like you can very easily, like part of why the Balsang twins, Sigmund and Sigmunda, are drawn to one another is because they're related.
00:51:02.480Like, you know, yes, there's the kind of incest bit of it, but it's also like they're of a kind, right?
00:51:07.360Right. So this could get racist really fast.
00:51:10.440And it could be used, I'm, you know, extrapolating this kind of nature over a law worldview further.
00:51:16.760that could be used to justify any number of abuses, right?
00:56:15.820And, I mean, I think that there's something psychoanalytically so rich about it, too, that she's like, on the one hand, like, you're like, oh, I want to let everyone be.
00:56:23.320But, like, really, you're living through your children and grandchildren eventually, right?
00:56:27.480Like, you're just basically, you're unable to really let them, set them free, let them go.
00:56:32.140This is, there's real sort of Roy children in succession kind of energy here, right?
00:56:40.420Anyway, so basically Fricke wins the argument and basically browbeats him into agreeing that, yes, there's going to be this fight tomorrow because of the dishonored home and all.
00:56:50.460And Hunding is going to win and Sigmund is going to have to die.
00:56:54.020But then he asks his favorite Valkyrie, Brunhilde,
00:56:57.360another extramarital daughter of his, by the way,
00:56:59.720to basically collect Sigmund into Valhalla after he dies,
01:02:09.840And it is this really, really nice thing that like, in some way, Wagner, in dealing with people like that, sometimes can cast yourself as the tragic hero.
01:02:17.900It's like, oh, I'm doomed if I do, I'm doomed if I don't, right?
01:02:20.100If I accede to this and their own self-understanding or if I go against it.
01:02:26.420But in some way, Wagner even deflates Wotan in that moment, right?
01:02:29.540Wotan's like, I'm in this incredible pickle.
01:06:23.420Yeah. And I mean, the idea that like, sure, I think we all can get behind the idea that like buying partners is not a good idea and maybe not super moral. But of course, if you think about the fact that like, oh, she would only be with someone like him for his money. Right. Like we're already getting into like sort of incel, weird incel territory. Right.
01:06:42.260Right. But the alternative to the naturalized nationalism model is not a mutually symbiotic pluralism, right?
01:06:52.200It's this other kind of corrupt exploitation. That's Wagner's fiction.
01:06:57.720Exactly. Well, I mean, he thinks basically, I think, that the only reason we have marriages that nature does not sanction is capitalism, right?
01:07:08.280So the bad kind of way of living gender or living sexuality is identical with barter for him.
01:07:16.660Like on the one hand, like I think there's definitely a, you know, there's a very progressive element to that, right?
01:07:21.980He's very much, he's read some early feminists.
01:07:24.460He was sort of on the barricades with early feminists in 48, right?
01:07:27.520Like where this question of like, why are we being, why is religion used to sort of cement our second class status in society?
01:07:43.660This persistent tendency to kind of think that all the kinds of things that don't exceed to his or don't sort of conform to his own racist vision of how people should naturally, quote unquote, relate to each other.
01:07:55.440It's just an influence of the perverting power of capital.
01:07:59.780Yeah, so the gender politics are just so odious, right? Because it mixes in a claim of wounded masculinity with a class resentment, which is something you see over and over through history, right?1.00
01:08:13.820Like I've been deprived, me, the like noble male of, you know, ex-dominant group has been deprived of my rightful status at the head of either my household or of the society more broadly by a nefarious influence that I'm going to name as a target, right?
01:08:33.180And sometimes that target has been, you know, trans people or gay people, sometimes it's been feminists.
01:08:38.280And I think we've seen a lot in the 19th century that it was also often like Judaism.
01:08:42.360It was often like this ethnic minority that was very proximate and easy to blame.0.72
01:10:30.680And I wanted to like get you to tease out a little more about how he was received by his contemporaries at the time politically and then how that sort of changed as, you know, as he became more avowed with his politics and also as, you know, the political meaning of his work has shifted in the past like two centuries.
01:10:48.340So, I mean, I think that there's a narrative implicit in your question that I would have to reverse, right?
01:10:54.820People always understood these operas as kind of right-wing and nationalist for the dumbest possible reason,
01:11:01.420which was like, oh, it's Nordic gods, they're wearing horns, and they have bear rugs, right?
01:11:06.340It's like, obviously, this is like not a progressive opera, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:11:09.640And that was completely self-understood.
01:11:12.380On the other hand, it was often the most perceptive fans of these operas, from people like George Bernard Shaw to W.E.B. Du Bois. Lots of people going to Baylor being like, are you guys watching this opera?
01:11:29.360Like it is a social revolutionary call against traditional morality and traditional religious categories, right?
01:11:39.040Like there's the book by George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, where like the idea basically for a lot of these people was to say, like, just because they run around in loincloths doesn't mean it's your weird Aryan fantasy.
01:11:51.280Like they pointed out that like the guy that's supposed to be the sort of Germanic superhero, right?0.62
01:12:04.740This is a very, very sort of gimlet-eyed kind of view of these people, right?
01:12:10.320And so it's really more the opposite that the initial reception was very much like, oh, this is our Germanic mythology.
01:12:16.180Because, of course, the tetralogy sort of first, you were able to see it in the flesh, as it were, as Germany was becoming a country, right, in 1871.
01:12:26.640So basically, it sort of got mashed together with that.
01:12:29.420And then there were a bunch of leftists being like, are we sure this guy is the enemy?
01:12:32.700Because, like, if you watch this up, right, it's really about how, like, capitalism is bad and we should, like, dethrone the aristocracy, which, like, I don't know, I'm cool with that, you know?
01:14:39.700Like, these people do not understand Wagner and, like, we shouldn't leave him to them just because, you know, yes, it has, like, the horned helmets in it, right?
01:14:50.200So, like, even, you know, in the 1930s, like, there are tons of leftist thinkers, right?
01:14:55.320Adorno's Wagner book has written something like 37, 38.
01:14:59.740Yeah, everyone is basically sort of like still as the Nazis are putting on like their own festivals in Bayreuth, like I think there's a, there were operas that ended with the singing of the Horst Wessel League, right? So like really like they're basically propaganda events. There are Wagnerians all throughout the Western world being like, we have to insist.
01:15:21.440We have to keep fighting for the legacy of these operas
01:15:24.260because it isn't what these people are making it out to be.
01:16:37.160It's the same way that gay people watched Hollywood,0.89
01:16:39.500you know, melodramas about them being brutally murdered0.93
01:16:42.820and could like find camp value in them, right?
01:16:45.320I think you, there's something in the object itself that gives strength and that gives support to positions that, you know, the creator of the work probably didn't have in mind or had in mind only in a very unconscious or inchoate way.
01:17:02.900There's always value to be, or not always, but there's often value to be excavated from reactionary art.