Wagnerism in Strindberg's The Road to Damascus

W AGNERISM IN STRINDBERG'S THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS ... What I have experienced belongs to me alone! What I have read has become mine, because I have shattered it into many pieces like a glass, recast it, and out of the mass, blown a new glass of a new shape,1 Strindberg, speaking here as The Stranger in The Road to Damascus, Part III, describes defensively his creative process. Rarely, however, has he identified the sources of this shattered material. My efforts, then, to establish Richard Wagner as one of them must be directed chiefly to internal evidence; his recorded references to Wagner yield only a baffling ambivalence. The ambivalence, of course, does not surprise us. Whatever the climate of Strindberg's changing, frequently stormy moods, he passionately articulated the feelings and thoughts they induced, sweeping aside the subsequent inconsistencies. What concerns us, therefore, in an investigation of his references to Wagner is not their shifting quality but their record of his sustained awareness of Wagner's inescapable presence as a powerful aesthetic force. Strindberg's awareness of this force is of particular importance because music played such a vital part in his life and art, especially in the plays of his post-Inferno period. The Strindbergs were a musical family-a brother and sister became highly accomplished pianistsand young August turned naturally to the study of harmony and counterpoint during his student days at the University of Uppsala.2 In later years, as his loneliness and disappointment in human relationships deepened, music was his solace, his inspiration. It replaced painting as his principal hobby, and he even taught himself to play the piano "reasonably well."3 Undoubtedly the music of Beethoven had become and would remain Strindberg's great passion, but one of his biographers , Karl Strecker, in remarking his other musical preferences, quotes from Frau von Philp, Strindberg's sister, that when her brother was nervous and unable to sleep he would beg her to play Wagner to him.4 Moreover, an excerpt from Strindberg's diary reveals that as early as 1. The Road to Damascus (Ill), III,iii, tr. S. E. Davidson, Poet L01'e, XLII (1933), 241. 2. Karl Strecker Nietzsche und StrindtJerg (Munich, 1921), p. 144. 3. Brita M. E. Mortensen and Brian W. Downs. Strindberg (Cambridge, 1949), pp. 8384 . See also Elizabeth Sprigge, The Strange Life of August Strindberg (London, 1949), pp. 187-188. 4. P. 145. Strecker makes this point to refute Victor Hellstrom's statement that Strindberg could not tolerate Wagner. Although Hellstrom, in his Strindberg och Musiker (Stockholm , 1907), does seem to stress Strindberg's later hostility.. he also records earlier, favorable reactions and points out, as does Erik Heden, in StrindtJerg (Stockholm, 1921, p. 307), Strindberg's inconsistent attitude toward Wagner (p. 71). 335 336 MODERN DRAMA December May 3, 1897, a new and admiring interest in Wagner had been awakened: In reading Wagner's Rheingold, I discover a great poet, and understand now why I have not comprehended the greatness of this musician, whose music is the only proper accompaniment to his words....5 A few months later he endows Wagner with fantastic magical powers of transformation. Returning to Paris in late August, 1897, Strindberg insists that he finds himself in the Middle Ages: Young men assume monkish cowls, wear the tonsure and dream of convent life. They compose legends and perform miracle-plays, paint Madonnas and carve images of Christ, drawing their inspiration from the magician who has bewitched them with Tristan and Iseult, Parzifal and the Holy Grai1.6 But in 1904 the magician shares the fate of both friend and foe in Strindberg's extremely vituperative Black Standards. Wagner's music and the fashion-seeking Wagnerians are thoroughly denounced.7 And later, when he and August Falck projected plans (unrealized) to produce a Wagnerian music drama at their Intima Teatern in Stockholm, a compromise seems to have been considered-Tristan 'toithout the music.S We have, then, on the positive side, only the record of his awareness, turned now to fierce resentment, of a pervasive, highly fashionable, magical aesthetic force. But an examination of Strindberg's later plays and Wagner's music dramas yields interesting...