Interpreting Wagner (review)

James Treadwell's discussion of how we interpret Wagner's music is an easy book to misunderstand. To begin with, there is the matter of the title itself. Only as Treadwell is concluding the second of his book's four major sections does he finally state his actual intention: "This is not a book about what Wagner's work means, but about how it means" (p. 133). Readers who have been led astray by the title will thus have spent well more than a hundred pages expecting an overview of the major schools of Wagnerian interpretation or (perhaps even better) the introduction of an even more radical school of thought. Nevertheless, Treadwell's central thesis is that Wagner's dramas deserve continual study precisely because they can support an almost unbelievable number of divergent but compelling interpretations. This conclusion may not be particularly startling but, like Wagner's music itself, Treadwell's book has its greatest pleasures not always in the destination we reach, but rather in the connections we make along the way.

The second reason why readers may misunderstand Treadwell's book results from a deceptive summary that appears on its dust cover. Either the author himself or one of his editors describes Interpreting Wagner as "focussing steadily on Wagner's music, dramas, and prose writings, rather than on questions of biography or influence." This is an odd statement indeed, since it is in these very matters of biography and influence that Treadwell makes his most trenchant observations. For instance, he explores the effect that Wagner's months in Paris had on his later works; how the revolutionary sentiments of his day helped him move beyond the romanticism of his early compositions; the ways his wife Cosima influenced him and his works; how he was led by a desire to create a highly commercial work at a time when staging the Ring seemed an impossible dream, and how this desire eventually led to the highly introspective and not at all commercial Tristan und Isolde; how Schopenhauer shaped the composer's views in ways that extend far beyond the conclusion of the Ring;¹ and the role of nineteenth-century German nationalism in shaping Die Meistersinger. In addition, Treadwell provides an interesting discussion of how the Romantic Age's tendency to conflate love and death² plays a central role in Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde and in the relationship between Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the Ring. The author also uses biography, even at times psychobiography, to great advantage when he argues that Wagner's "egotism was so titanic that it rose above mere selfishness into sincere fanaticism, a messianic insistence on the supreme importance of himself and his art" (p. 165). Wagner's egotism led him to produce a form of art that demanded something of its audiences in a way that "mere opera" never did. In this way, Treadwell posits a direct connection between Wagner's inflated view of his own importance and the philosophical content of the works that he produced.

The first image that Treadwell introduces in Interpreting Wagner is the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. This structure, unassuming on the outside but strikingly innovative on the inside, provides a key to understanding Wagnerian drama, and the author returns to this image throughout the book. For instance, by the time that Parsifal was first produced, ritual and repetition had been elevated by Wagner into the basic structural principles of his drama. Not coincidentally, these are precisely the same structural principles that became the foundation for the annual Bayreuth festival itself. In that festival, a single corpus of works is performed repeatedly, with new producers and new audiences finding both fresh interpretations and continuity with the productions of the past. (Anti-Wagnerians might draw, of course, a closer parallel between the dramas and the endless repetitions suffered by such characters as the Dutchman and Kundry, who attain redemption only when their cycle of...