Richard Wagner

A Research and Information Guide

Michael Saffle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135839529
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Richard Wagner: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer.

1
Introducing Wagner

WAGNER IN 1,000 WORDS

Born in Leipzig on 22 May 1813, the son of Carl Friedrich Wagner (or Ludwig Geyer) and Johanna Rosine Wagner, Wilhelm Richard Wagner grew up in a Leipzig household filled with enthusiasm for the theater; later Richard developed enthusiasms of his own for music, antiquity, and the opera. Lessons in piano, violin, and the elements of composition anticipated his career as a music dramatist, by 1833, when he left Leipzig and university studies in law to settle in Würzburg, Wagner had written a symphony and several sonatas and arranged for piano the Ninth Symphony of his musical idol Beethoven; the following year he began work on Das Liebesverbot, based on Measure for Measure by his dramatic idol Shakespeare.

Wagner’s early career was tumultuous; during the later 1830s and most of the 1840s he held musical-theatrical positions in Magdeburg, Königsberg, Riga, and Dresden; his attempt to break into Paris’s musical establishment failed dismally, however. By May 1849, when he participated in the Dresden revolution, he had completed Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin, published pamphlets, articles, and reviews, and made public his anti-royalist, aesthetically radical sympathies. Condemned to death in absentia by Saxon officials, Wagner fled to Switzerland with the help of his loyal colleague, sometime friend, and (later) father-in-law Franz Liszt; there he spent the 1850s writing books and articles—Opera and Drama, Art and Revolution, and the dreadful Jewishness in Music among them—and hoping for a pardon; visits to London and Paris added to his growing reputation as a brilliant innovator and a difficult human being. By 1853, he had completed the poem for what eventually became Der Ring des Nibelungen; by 1856, he had written Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, two of its four parts, and begun work on a third, Siegfried; Tristan und Isolde, conceived during his love affair with Mathilde Wesendonk (one of several liaisons he conducted during his insatiably self-aggrandizing life), was finished in 1859. In 1862, he received a full amnesty from German officials; the previous year, however, Tannhäuser failed spectacularly in Paris and there seemed little hope of a Tristan production.

In 1864, rescued from enormous debts and mounting disillusionment by Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, Wagner settled briefly in Munich; there Tristan received its premiere the following year, but Wagner’s demands upon the Bavarian treasury and disapproval over his liaison with Cosima Liszt von Bülow, then wife of Hans von Bülow (who, in 1868, conducted the premiere of Die Meistersinger in Munich), led to Wagner’s “dismissal” from that city in December 1865. The following year his long-suffering wife Minna finally died (they had wed in 1836), and Wagner settled with Cosima at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne; they were married in 1870, although their first daughter, Isolde, had been born the year before, and their other children—Eva and Siegfried— had appeared in 1867 and 1869. The Franco-Prussian War and complex shifts in Wagner’s political enthusiasms occurred almost simultaneously with renewed work on Siegfried, which he completed in 1871; the fourth and final Ring music drama, Die Götterdämmerung, dates from 1873–1874. Meanwhile the Wagners met and befriended the remarkable, mentally unstable philologistturned-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose “pro and contra” Wagner pronouncements rank among the most controversial in music history.

In the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, Wagner built his own home (Haus Wahnfried, completed in 1874); there, in 1872, he laid the cornerstone for his own theater. Tremendous effort and last-minute financial assistance from Ludwig II enabled the Festspielhaus to open in 1876 for the first complete Ring production; a second Festival, presented in 1882, witnessed the premiere of the “stage-consecration play” Parsifal, Wagner’s last music drama. In 1880, at the urging of his physician, the composer moved with his family to Italy; it was in Venice, apparently after a row with Cosima over his amorous interest in a pretty English singer named Carrie Pringle, that he suffered a heart attack and died on 13 February 1883. Ludwig II followed Wagner to the grave in 1886; so did Liszt, but not before finishing several remarkable piano pieces “about” Venice and his son-in-law’s death. Cosima and son Siegfried succeeded Wagner as directors of the Bayreuth Festival, which continues to this day; Cosima died only in 1930, after welcoming Adolf Hitler to the Festspielhaus. Bayreuth’s “Nazi legacy” still haunts Wagner’s descendants and Germany’s international reputation; for decades it was forbidden to perform any of the composer’s works in Israel.

Wagner gave the world more than Bayreuth, however; more even than great music and an intoxicating vision of Germany Triumphant. His compositions, which look backward in certain respects to the works of Beethoven, Marschner, Meyerbeer, Spohr, and Carl Maria von Weber, influenced many of his contemporaries and successors, including Berg, Bruckner, Debussy, Elgar, Franck, Edward MacDowell, Mahler, Massenet, Schoenberg, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and Hugo Wolf. (Wagner’s musical interactions with Berlioz, Brahms, and Liszt were more complex; each influenced and was influenced by the other.) “Wagnerism” was perhaps even more influential; movements sprang up in America and almost every part of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, including Catalonia, Hungary, and Russia; the individuals affected included French poets, painters, and novelists Baudelaire, Fantin-Latour, Monet, Proust, Renoir, and Valéry; English authors and illustrators Beardsley, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde; and German cultural icons Heinrich and Thomas Mann among a host of others, including Hitler. Wagner helped shape our understanding of the Middle Ages, of the German stage, and of art as business and politics; his impact on Adorno, on Thomas Mann, on Nietzsche, on film music (think of John Williams and the Star Wars movies), on conducting, staging, and operatic singing, on musical instruments (the Wagner tuba), and on musicologists and aestheticians from Dahlhaus to Hanslick to Ernest Newman—should not be underestimated. Even Wagner’s prose polemics, often dismissed (except by German scholars), seem today both more sensible and more outrageous than they once did; postmodernist critics are turning increasingly to Wagner, and an entire industry has grown up around Wagner’s anti-Semitic attitudes.

WAGNER RESEARCH, PAST AND PRESENT

Those familiar with Richard Wagner’s career, compositions, and influence know that a great deal has been written about him. And them. The number of books and articles devoted exclusively to Wagner’s life and music dramas, for example, may have been exaggerated in the past, but it is safe to say there are thousands of them. If one also takes into account the editions of his compositions, correspondence, and prose works, the total probably reaches the tens of thousands. Add to this figure the reviews of Wagner productions, performances, and recordings published during the past 165 years in hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the world, and the total probably reaches the hundreds of thousands.

These estimates are by no means inflated. In his survey of German Wagner criticism prior to the end of 1855, Helmut Kirchmeyer identifies and reprints the texts of some 3,257 periodical publications of the 1840s and 1850s. Many of these were overlooked or ignored by Nicholas Oesterlein, whose “comprehensive” Wagner bibliography appeared in 1873 and mentions some 10,200 artifacts. The National Union Catalog’s “Pre-1956” series of volumes identifies at least 2,000 editions of individual music-drama texts and scores, and that source is far from complete.¹

Years ago, when editors at Garland Publishing—today, Routledge—asked me to prepare a Wagner research guide, they also asked me to confine myself to 400 printed pages of text, including front matter, a brief survey of the composer’s life and works, and an index of authors and editors. To meet those goals, or try to, I set out initially to identify and describe no more than 1,000 publications in some 350 pages of print. The first edition of this guide contained 1,175 numbered citations; the present contains 1,290. In no sense, therefore, do I consider even the revised edition of my work “complete.” It isn’t, nor was it ever intended to be. Anyone who wishes can easily locate studies I overlooked, or chose to ignore, or mention only in passing. And new Wagner publications appear in print virtually every day.²

The questions remain, however: what to include and what to leave out? In a review-article devoted to Tom Sutcliffe’s Believing in Opera (London, 1998), James Treadwell indirectly identifies one of the problems associated with the Wagner literature in general and especially with performance and production studies:

[The a]rguments … have the same kind of wearisome predictability as family squabbles. One enters the debate with resignation rather than trepidation, the much-rehearsed script already known to all parties. Appeals to the historical inevitability of reinterpretation will be countered by citations of the composer’s and/or librettist’s instructions. What to one person looks like theatrical inventiveness is absurd self-indulgence to another. Directors are brilliant interpreters or arrogant and patronizing buffoons. Tradition and innovation square off against each other, as if the former never had anything to do with the latter. We’ve heard it all before.³

This does not mean, however, that conflicting claims of “tradition and innovation” are of little interest to Wagner researchers. Quite the contrary: reception is an acknowledged musicological specialty. On the other hand, Sutcliffe has a point; reviews are legion and many of them cover the same ground. With the exception of those incorporated or examined in secondary sources, then, reviews of production and performance have been excluded from the present research guide.

Quantity is one issue, quality another. Some experts, John Deathridge among them, have argued that there is very little worthwhile Wagner secondary literature. The late Carl Dahlhaus would have agreed. Dahlhaus, in fact, opened the Introduction to Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas with the following statement:

For decades writing on Wagner was compounded of wide-ranging, historico-philosophical speculation, insatiable delight in the minutiae of his life, however far-fetched or trivial, and a curious complacency when it came to the study of the music, which hardly aspired to anything beyond labeling the leitmotive. Views were stated in one of two tones of voice: emphatic or outraged. And even today, a hundred years after the founding of the theater in Bayreuth, people who write about Wagner veer to one pole or the other: to polemics or apologetics.

(item 606, p. 1)

Unfortunately, Dahlhaus’s argument is in large part indefensible. There is and has long been far more to Wagner scholarship than “speculation,” “minutiae,” and “curious complacency.” True, many outstanding studies— including the New Grove Wagner volume, itself a collaboration by Deathridge and Dahlhaus, as well as the Sämtliche Werke edition of Wagner’s compositions co-edited by Dahlhaus and the Wagner-Werk-Verzeichnis (or “WWV”) co-written by Deathridge—postdate Dahlhaus’s statement above, which appeared in print for the first time in 1971. On the other hand, Dahlhaus had his own “emphatic” agenda—one that, for better or worse, has itself become part of an all-too-often “outraged” Wagner literature.⁴ Finally, Dahlhaus was especially interested in defending the aesthetic significance of Wagner’s music dramas against critics of certain social-critical persuasions. But the issues those critics have sought to explore, anti-Semitism among them, are part and parcel of Wagner’s cultural legacy. They cannot and should not be ignored.

To attempt to deal with all this in my first edition—which is to say, to attempt to meet or at least approach my original goals involving numbers of pages and annotations—I adopted six fundamental strategies. The first five of these involved selecting for annotation those books, monographs, anthologies, editions, and articles that were of outstanding quality or importance; reflected the results of recent researches; were written in English or had appeared in English-language editions; reported on as many Wagnerian topics as possible; and contained the word(s) “Wagner,” “Wagnerian,” “Wagnerism(s),” or the name of one of Wagner’s works in their titles or subtitles. The sixth involved selecting studies that represented as many phases and aspects of Wagner scholarship as possible.

Sooner or later I had to break every one of my own rules. Depending on whom one speaks with, there may be no studies “of outstanding quality or importance” devoted, say, to “Wagner and homosexuality.” The ones I do cite— Hanns Fuchs’s Richard Wagner und die Homosexualität; and Isolde Vetter’s superb “Wagner in the History of Psychology”—are intriguing and valuable for researchers, although perhaps not quite complete.⁵ Another lacklustre publication is Hermann Barth’s Internationale Wagner-Bibliographie, which I place near the beginning of the subsection on “Bibliographies” solely because it is the closest thing to a comprehensive modern reference work. Like many other Wagner studies, it is in German. So are several of the finest studies dealing with Wagner and Medieval legends and literatures, and these were published decades or even a century ago; among them—at least according to Elizabeth Magee, whose Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs has been proclaimed the finest recent work in the field—are several works I have never been able to consult.

I also had to refer to a very few important works of criticism “about” Wagner that do not mention him or any of his music dramas on their title pages. Joseph Kerman’s “Opera as Symphonic Poem” is a case in point, although every Wagnerian understands that the title of Kerman’s volume, Opera as Drama, is a pun on Wagner’s own treatise Opera and Drama. Another exception is Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, which deals mostly but by no means exclusively with the Ring. On the other hand, I omitted publications as important as Nineteenth-Century Music by Dahlhaus primarily because it isn’t “Wagner-specific.” For the same reason I omitted such important volumes as the Oxford History of Music, Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western Civilization, and Rey M. Longyear’s Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music as well as works written in other languages.

This is not to say that I always broke my own rules. Sometimes I merely bent them. I strove, for instance, to include studies by a variety of researchers rather than limit my choices to “reputable” scholars. I didn’t even try to include all of Dahlhaus’s Wagner publications; there simply wasn’t room. Nor did Dahlhaus concern himself with a great many Wagnerian topics, especially non-German ones. It seems to be true that there are more books and articles about Wagner in German than other continental European languages. To argue, however, that Karel Wauters’s Wagner en Vlaanderen, 1844–1914 (“Wagner in Flanders, 1844–...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE MUSIC BIBLIOGRAPHIES
• Contents
• Using this Book
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introducing Wagner
• 2 Surveying Wagner: Compendia and Other Survey Studies
• 3 Researching Wagner: Reference Works of Various Kinds
• 4 The Documentary Legacy
• 5 Wagner’s Life and Character
• 6 Wagner as Composer: Studies in Techniques, Styles, and Influences
• 7 Wagner as Music Dramatist 1: Surveys Studies
• 8 Wagner as Music Dramatist 2: The Earlier (and Unfinished) Operas and Music Dramas
• 9 Wagner as Music Dramatist 3: Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser
• 10 Wagner as Music Dramatist 4: Meistersinger, Parsifal, Tristan, and the Ring
• 11 Wagner as Instrumental and Vocal Composer and Arranger
• 12 Performing Wagner: Studies of Performance Practices, Productions, and Media Issues
• 13 Wagner as Poet, Prose Writer, Philosopher, and Revolutionary
• 14 Criticizing Wagner: Wagner’s Critics and the Wagner Reception
• 15 Wagner and Culture, Past and Present: Literature, Psychology, and the Visual Arts
• 16 Wagner and Anti-Semitism
• 17 After Wagner: Bayreuth, the Festivals, and Wagner’s Descendants
• Notes
• Index of Authors, Editors, and Translators