Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (review)

The year 2010 saw the publication of two books on Wagner with seemingly similar issues at their core: Barry Emslie’s Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (Woodbridge, 2010) [reviewed by Roger Allen in Music & Letters, 92 (2011), 492–5] and Laurence Dreyfus’s monograph about ‘the centrality of the erotic impulse in [Wagner’s] music’ (p. 116). However, the two books could not be more different in their approach and content, reflecting perhaps how unstable, or rich, the concepts of Love and Lust are for Wagner. Emslie’s discussion of ‘Love’ is essentially a theoretical tract that journeys to the conceptual heart of Wagner’s ideologies of race, blood, and redemption, and probes the contrasting female archetypes that Wagner—according to Emslie—strove to reconcile and unify: namely the two biblical Marys, virginal and carnal. Depicted perhaps most divergently as Elisabeth and Venus in Tannhäuser, these archetypes reach their ‘reconciled’ union in Wagner’s final drama, Parsifal, in the figure of Kundry. Clearly, Emslie is arguing that for Wagner, Love and Lust belong together, even if they have been separated—one of the many separations in Wagner’s Weltanschauung—by (especially modern) culture. With the aid of Herder, Hegel, Feuerbach, and a dash of postmodern theory, Emslie’s wide-ranging discussion takes him through the texts of Wagner’s dramas and many of his most significant prose works, but he never mentions the music.

By contrast, Dreyfus’s book is driven by the music, and Wagner’s textual apparatus serves only a supporting role. Dreyfus’s focus on the ‘erotic’ also avoids a discussion of ‘love’, an implicit acceptance of the separation that Emslie argues against. So we are left with the aesthetic representation, and ultimately the audio-physical pleasure, of the erotic hinted at in the text of the dramas, but which saturates the score.

Dreyfus is facilitated in his approach by specifically disregarding any recent theoretical arguments. Instead, he returns to the source meaning, in this case, Wagner’s music and the immediate reaction to it by listeners famous and not so famous. Although this methodology and emphasis might dismay some readers, I was happy to be immersed in the music, given that so much recent Wagner literature seems to claim that a coherent argument about Wagner can be made in its absence.

In his own time, Wagner was a scandal, Dreyfus argues, not because of his unusually vocal anti-Semitic pronouncements or protofascistic nationalism—issues that have come to dominate the Wagner discourse over the past two to three decades—but because of his over-the-top eroticism: immediately recognized and rejected by some, wholeheartedly embraced by others. In other words, Dreyfus (re-)visits an old discourse, one of the first produced by Wagner’s overwhelming oeuvre. And yet, to paraphrase a line from Die Meistersinger, Dreyfus takes something old but makes it new, because no one has yet written a book that proposes to examine closely how Wagner relates to and deals with the erotic.

Though the cultural barriers preventing a discussion of eroticism have been eroded, one reason for the lacuna stems from the methodological hazards in the analysis of what exactly constitutes a representation of the erotic in music. Nevertheless, Dreyfus organizes his book into five chapters, pithily titled ‘Echoes’, ‘Intentions’, ‘Harmonies’, ‘Pathologies’, and ‘Homoerotics’. These cover an impressive range of issues, starting with reactions to Wagner’s daring thematics and suggestive sounds by his contemporaries: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, D’Annunzio, and even Clara Schumann. Next, in ‘Intentions’, Dreyfus tries to probe what it is that Wagner had set out to depict, especially in the case of Das Liebesverbot. ‘Harmonies’ is the book’s centrepiece, and offers an often inspired journey through the musically erotic highlights of Wagner’s ‘mature’ works, from Holländer to Parsifal, lingering with ample music examples on the most significant moments: Tannhäuser Venusberg; Walküre Act I; Tristan Prelude and Act II. Having ‘dealt’ with the music...