The Trouble with Wagner by Michael P. Steinberg (review)

One of the most remarkable insights the reader discovers in Walter Benjamin's essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1916) is that artworks have a language independent of that of man. One can talk about "a language of music and sculpture," Benjamin tells us, that has nothing to do with the language in which specialized terminology in German or English is couched. Astonishingly, Benjamin gives artworks the autonomous capacity to communicate without man. The reader of Steinberg's The Trouble with Wagner will be similarly astonished. Steinberg's inquiry focuses on Wagner's Ring cycle and its introduction of the form commonly labeled "music drama" (in contradistinction to opera). Music drama, Steinberg argues, is not only autonomous enough to speak a language that is fundamentally different than that of its author, Richard Wagner, but is also sentient enough to possess an unconscious of its own.

The Trouble with Wagner expands on ideas that Steinberg articulated in earlier studies, among them his book Listening to Reason: Culture and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Music (2004). The insights in the present book have been enhanced by Steinberg's role as dramaturg in the 2010–2013 coproduction of the Ring by the Teatro alla Scala Milano and the Staatsoper Berlin. The production was conducted by Daniel Barenboim and staged by Guy Cassiers, whose artistic choices inform Steinberg's analysis no less than those of Wagner himself. This equal footing that the Ring's performance receives (more on that soon) distinguishes Steinberg's study from other works—the most recent among them is Karol Berger's Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche (2017)—that regard Wagner's music dramas independently of any specific mode of delivery.

Each of the book's four chapters is dedicated to a discussion of one music drama in the tetralogy. Steinberg is interested in the claims that music drama and the Ring cycle, in particular, make to self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. Music drama, Steinberg argues, has a unique capacity of reflecting not only on its present but also on its past and future. Steinberg treats the Ring cycle itself as a historical subject whose life and ultimate death are defined by a "desire for knowledge along with the incapacity for absolute and certain knowledge" (23). This engagement with knowledge and its lack, according to Steinberg, is by necessity also an engagement with the Other (and here one should emphasize: not only with the Other in the world, but also with the self as Other), for knowledge always assumes differentiation. Thus, music drama's quest for knowledge involves a critical self-reflection that reveals an unknown part of the self, namely, the unconscious. Music's property of unfolding in time allows Steinberg to regard it as an autonomous being. It has its own life, and accordingly, so does the Ring. The different chapters of Steinberg's book, therefore, address different modes of negotiation with knowledge that correspond to different periods in the Ring's life cycle: reaching maturity, overripening, and death. Steinberg's analysis of "proto-music" and "proto-language" in the first measures of Das Rheingold reveals knowledge as a process of becoming rather than an accomplished end. This process reaches maturity in Die Walküre, among other things, with the construction of the Jewish Other as a repressed self (a compelling claim that Steinberg has already introduced in Listening to Reason) and begins its decline in Siegfried with the ossification of knowledge as the dynamic idea of Bildung into stagnant Besitz. This is what the ring becomes in the possession of both Fafner and the knowledgeless Siegfried, who will receive knowledge only upon dying in Götterdämmerung.

The Berlin-Milan Ring production, and particularly Guy Cassiers's staging, are essential to Steinberg's analysis. If music drama does, indeed, have an unknown side, Steinberg believes it is up to the performance to return it "to the borders of its own unconscious" (125). This...