Interpreting Wagner (review)

Proving definitively that the 'chiaroscuro of Wagner's genius makes him a volatile subject still,' James Treadwell's fine study offers a sensitively nuanced and carefully argued overview of Wagner's operas and prose writings and, beyond that, a theorizing of the power of Wagner's work as it develops over four periods of his life. The first, entitled 'Romance,' covers the years up to 1848 and includes the first three 'romantic' operas and Wagner's Paris journalism. The enchantment that forms the plot of these operas is read as an allegory of the power of opera itself on the young Wagner's 'seduced' audience. But Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser both 'indulge and fear the temptations of fantasy'; they resist as well as exploit the German romantic 'aesthetic of rapture,' in Treadwell's interpretation.

This explains why in the next period, that of 'Revolution' (1848-54), disenchantment leads Wagner away from the seduction of the audiences through 'remote visions' towards speaking directly to them, announcing prophetically their destiny (or his version of it, at least). In these years Wagner wrote no music, but many words: essays and, of course, the poem of Der Ring des Nibelungen. That four-part work's operatic unconventionality is likened to Wagner's utopian social fantasies: both were equally impossible in the world of his present. But rather than move forward to the future, Treadwell argues, Wagner turned back (giving 'revolution' a new meaning) to the past, the past of myth, to create in the Ring a 'web of repetitions, returns, reflections, narrations' and leitmotifs which recollect rather than anticipate.

In his years of 'Exile' (1855-71), unable to return to Germany because of his politics (and his creditors), Wagner is said to explore contraries: restlessness and dislocation as themes and a resistance to form on a technical level (Tristan und Isolde) but also themes of community and belonging and an interest in the formal craft of music (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). Calling the decision about how to interpret desire in these works (as, respectively, never sated or potentially redemptive) the 'crux' of interpreting Wagner, Treadwell offers a cautionary allegory of how Wagner's art always contains resistances to the consummation of its own desire.

The exploration of these resistances is the real subject of 'Religion,' the section on the 1872-83 period of the 'noxious' regeneration essays, Parsifal, and the building of the Bayreuth theatre. These infamous essays insist on the need for a literally physical regeneration of a diseased and impure humanity through dietary and racial transformation, but the opera takes this literalness and physicality and transforms it into the polarity of sin and salvation, articulated through an astounding corporality of wounded and mutilated bodies and an equally astounding transparent, luminous, ethereal music that represents 'a purity that remembers its cost: not washed clean of error, as the essays imagine, but silently remembering and recording what it has left behind.' In Parsifal, Wagner doesn't just stage redemption, argues Treadwell; he attempts to perform it, to make it into a sacramental act of faith in itself. This book's insightful and innovative reading of the role of Kundry opens up an important theory of the function of repetition and change in Wagner's oeuvre. Treadwell interprets Parsifal as an allegory of incarnation, as he does the Bayreuth theatre itself - the place where Wagner's works are brought to material life on stage.

Treadwell begins and ends his book with a meditation on the experience of seeing and hearing Wagner's work in his own theatre, a place where dogma once ruled (under the widow Cosima's direction) and where today innovation in staging often shocks audiences. Through his self-reflexive, allegorical readings of the music dramas, Treadwell deconstructs the disturbing sureties of the essays through the complexities of the art. As he puts it, 'Interpreting Wagner means asking his works to show us its questions, its uncertainties and ambivalences, its errant restlessness, its unhealed wounds.'