Wagner Overthrows the Gods

From Romanticism: A German Affair

When Richard Wagner sets to work on Rienzi in 1838—his great opera about a failed revolution in the Rome of 1347—the Young German ideas of freedom, national unity, and progress are prominent in his mind. He is kapellmeister in Riga, thrice-humiliated by the miserable condition of the local theater, by creditors who are constantly dunning him for payment, and by his wife Minna who has run off with her lover. Wagner leaves the city in haste, bound for French soil, which he reaches after an adventurous voyage—fearful storms that force the ship to anchor off the Norwegian coast—with the unfinished score of Rienzi in his luggage. He remains in Paris until 1842, years of coldness inside and out, years of lostness and misery. He becomes friends with Heinrich Heine, who helps him financially and provides him with Romantic material for later works, the stories of Tannhäuser and the Flying Dutchman. With the sparkling success of Meyerbeer before his eyes he comes more and more to hate the city that refuses to accord him the recognition he feels is his due. He writes later, in a letter to Theodor Uhlig, “that I no longer believe in any other revolution save that which begins with the burning down of Paris” (October 22, 1850).

The Paris of 1840 becomes the Rome of 1347, where the innkeeper’s son Cola di Rienzi, relying on a popular uprising against the ruling aristocracy, seeks to establish a republic after the ancient Roman model, but is then forced to suffer abandonment by the populace. In Wagner’s opera, Rienzi stands on the balcony of the capitol and tries one last time to win over the crowd that has been turned against him by a papal legate, but he receives only a hail of stones for his efforts. The building is set on fire and collapses, burying Rienzi along with his utopian vision of freedom and the people’s happiness.

Rienzi and the degraded city of Rome—a constellation in which Richard Wagner, musical tribune of the people, perfectly well recognizes his own destined role. And there is another who recognizes himself in Rienzi. After attending a performance of the Romantic opera in Linz in 1906, a young man of seventeen years is led by this “blessed music” to the most consequential conviction “that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more.” So Adolf Hitler later told Albert Speer.

Richard Wagner’s opera about a failed revolutionary becomes a European success. Theatrical pomp, throng-filled scenes, and magical sets were a challenge for large stages, which is what Wagner, who wanted finally to escape the “misery of the corner nook,” intended they should be.

Wagner leaves Paris in 1842 a famous man. He becomes court kapellmeister in Dresden. But he is soon dissatisfied. His salary is not adequate to his lavish lifestyle. The debts are mounting up again. He sees himself and his artistic career in the stranglehold of the moneyed interests. He hatches a reform plan to enhance the effectiveness of the stage and place the whole direction in his own hands. Opera should do more than serve luxury and pleasure; it should provide progressive, democratic incentives. But he gets nowhere with his suggestions. He is bored by the routine work required by his position. It is the revolutionary unrest of 1848–49 that finally brings change. Looking back on those exciting months, he writes to Minna on May 14, 1849:

Deeply dissatisfied with my position & finding little pleasure in my art . . . deeply in debt . . . I was at odds with the world, I ceased to be an artist . . . & became—in thought, if not in deed—a revolutionary plain & simple, in other words I sought fresh ground for my mind’s latest artistic creations in a radically transformed world.

But Wagner became a revolutionary in energetic fact, not just in attitude. He wrote pamphlets against the aristocracy and the bourgeois plutocracy. When in April 1849 the Saxon king dissolved Dresden...