Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (review)

“It is surely for the best that the world knows only the lovely work, and not also its origins, not the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the origins from which flowed the artist’s inspiration would surely often confuse the world, repel it, and thus vitiate the effects of excellence.” This statement by the narrator of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, made in reference to his disapproval of the protagonist Aschenbach’s homoerotic obsession with the young boy Tadzio, came to mind as I read Dreyfus’s study of Wagner. Like those “unsettling” productions that often make audiences uncomfortable because of the violence or sexuality directors use to reveal new insights in old plots, Dreyfus’s book on Wagner is also unsettling, especially when he chronicles, at great length, the composer’s “unconventional relationship to femininity” (135), with his taste for silk underwear with pink ribbons and rose-scented perfume. But unlike the bully who outs a schoolmate for the purpose of making him a subject of mockery, Dreyfus gives us a probing view of Wagner not to disparage him, but rather to try to understand what it is about him and his music that continues to cast a spell, despite all we know about his distasteful and much-discussed antisemitism, politics, and philosophy. Lesser artists could not have survived the stigma of not only having Hitler’s endorsement but effectively being the Nazi composer of choice; yet Wagner is perhaps more beloved today, in an age of political correctness, than he ever was.

For Dreyfus the answer is quite clear: much of what draws audiences to Wagner is the representation of erotic stimulation and sexual desire in his music. He was able to create a body of work that explored his own sexual penchants; he brought erotics to music; thus one might conclude that it is a kind of aural version of voyeurism on the part of Wagnerian audiences even to this day that keeps them involved in what is sometimes a love/hate relationship with the composer and his works.

Not that Dreyfus is the first to have written about Wagner’s strange fetishes and sexual preoccupations, but he is the first to use this biographical information to try to explain how Wagner’s music does what it does to its listeners. As easy as it is to forget about the politics when steeped in the sound and sights of a Wagner opera, one cannot but sense a thrill and exhilaration that is fed on precisely that erotic element about which Dreyfus writes. He remarks that although most Wagner scholarship to date has chosen not to deal with his musical language as a representation “of erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of love” (2), that aspect has certainly not gone unnoticed by the broader public, as evidenced by record reviews, popular dictionary entries, or essays accompanying recordings. In comparison with earlier operas that deal with sexual themes, among them Poppea, Don Giovanni, or Le Comte Ory, Dreyfus proposes that Wagner’s operas prompt a more intense response in their listeners, and attributes this to either the intention of the older composers not to purposely arouse the audience, or possibly to changes of taste: that is, music that may have had an erotic allure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may no longer work on the modern ear in the same way it was intended. Indeed, there is a subjective element in stating that the music of Monteverdi’s Poppea hardly fuels an audience’s “libidinal drives” (2). Some listeners still find it extremely suggestive. But Dreyfus’s points that Wagner’s music exudes the erotic and that the composer’s preoccupation with sexual love was never far from the surface are certainly not unfounded.

The book is divided into five chapters, which, as the author explains in his preface, began as a series of public lectures delivered in 2003–2004. The first, entitled “Echoes,” deals...