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In
Search of Wagner
By
Theodor Adorno, trans. Rodney Livingstone
New Left Books, London 1981
l59 pp.
Reviewed
Meanjin, 41 (1)
April 1982
pp. 84-88.
'
But in listening to The Ring I
felt that every scene could stand not only the most extensive cuts but
also the most extensive expansion wrote the anti-Wagnerian critic Eduard
Hanslick after the premiere at Bayreuth in 1876. The same point can be
made against Theodor Adorno's ln
Search of Wagner, which has just appeared in English. The book
breaks most of the rules for good writing that Adorno laid down in his
magnificent Minima Moralia, especially his warning that 'The thicket is no
sacred grove'. Paragraphs in his Wagner book average almost three pages
in length because distinct ideas have been run together, so that his
interpolation of 'or put more simply' in the middle of a muddled
sentence is as infuriating as it is insulting: Adorno forgot his own
dictum that 'When several sentences seem like variations on the same
idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something
the author has not yet mastered.' The weight of the title falls heavily
upon 'Search'.
Adorno's
poor constructions are particularly annoying because he was so well
equipped to master Wagner and was in no sense just another recycler of
biographical details spiced with some freshly uncovered primary source.
As a pupil of Alban Berg's and the author of two other books on music -Philosophy
of Modem Music and Introduction
to the Sociology of Music - Adorno's training meant that he could
follow a score and thereby check his social-philosophical commentary
against Wagner's composition. Adorno's appreciation of these wider
issues grew from his involvement with the Institute for Social Research,
the so-called Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, where he became close
to Walter Benjamin before working in New York with Max Horkheimer.
Horkheimer's 1936 essay on bourgeois egoism provided much of the
grounding for Adorno's study of Wagner, which was also written and
partly published in the late 1930s, a complete German edition appearing
in 1952.
Despite
the period during which Adorno wrote this book he made few directly
anti-fascist asides apart from picturing King Mark as 'the ancestor of
appeasement' and Rienzi as the 'first bourgeois terrorist'; the
composer-conductor whose gesturing expropriates the audience's responses
was implicitly compared with the Hitlerian demagogue who dominated his
listeners by expressing an egoism that was denied to them. While
anti-Semitism was barely mentioned, Adorno's handling of this aspect of
Wagner provides a necessary corrective to those biographers who, like
Ronald Taylor, want to diminish Wagner's culpability by arguing that all
his Jews were also his best friends; just so, con- tended Adorno, since
Wagner's psycho-pathological make-up required that Jews be on hand in
order to be humiliated.
Adorno's
attitude towards Wagner the man is condescending and he endorsed Thomas
Mann's suggestion that Wagner was a dilettante by adding that 'till the
end of his days the entire pleasure of reading was inseparable from the
thought of rows of classics bound in gold' while 'Even
his boldest master strokes were unable to overcome the
fundamental stance of the amateur, that of enthusiastic respect'. Adorno
considered Wagner's works from the vantage point of an expert who felt
no need to illustrate his argument with snatches from the scores. Some
of Adorno's judgements were standard ones and, following Nietzsche, he
developed the idea that Wagner had said 'No' to life by identifying
pleasure with sickness. This point leads on to a passage which displays
Adorno's typical irreverence plus an all too rare liveliness:
Many
of Wagner's heroes perish without physical pain, and indeed without
any explanation other than that of the exigencies of the plot . . .
Brunnhilde's death on a funeral pyre is nothing but a piece of Indian
ostentation. In the teeth of the cult of the prevention of cruelty to
animals, she even insists that her horse should neigh with joy as it
leaps into the flames. Fear is repressed and becomes farce; only the
sub-human Mime can scream 'ouch!' when he is beaten.
Similarly,
Adorno believes that the rapturous 'motive of the resolve to die' in Tristan
can offer an 'impression of frivolous gaiety' and in general that Wagner
trivialises Schopenhauerean suffering through 'the accoutrements of
grandeur' and profundity. From this standpoint, Adorno defends Parsifal
against the common charge of 'false religiosity' by arguing that 'it
carries out a legitimate critique of the ornamental components in
Wagner's characteristic style of orchestration.'
Adorno
drove his attack was driven into the core of Wagner's compositional
practice where the motiv was found to be infected with 'allegorical
rigidity' and constantly fell back into being little better than
incidental music or, worse still, a film sound-track; the ease with
which hit songs could be extracted from the music-dramas sheds 'light on
the fragmentariness of the whole'; and 'a harmonic monotony corresponds
to the metrical monotony'. In short, Adorno argued that 'Wagner . . .
found it hard to achieve standards of good musicianship . . .'. Yet
Adorno could be as fulsome in his praise as he was trenchant in his
disapproval, asserting that 'the art of orchestration . . . did not
exist before Wagner.' Wagner's strengths were wrested from his
ambiguities, moral and musical : dissonance and consonance were mixed in
his efforts to express his (false)identity of joy with renunciation, and
his 'harmonic innovations lead well beyond . . . impressionism' to 'the
threshold of atonality', but no closer. Wagner's mastery of
instrumentation is analysed around his practice of combination and
through the roles that he allotted to horns, oboes and, on one occasion,
to flutes.
Adorno
rejected the charge that Wagner's music was formless because this
'reactionary cliche' avoided 'the really productive element in Wagner'
namely 'sonority', by which process, 'time seems transfixed in space',
thereby enabling Wagner to establish the importance of orchestral 'colour'.
From
his explication of Wagner's apparent formlessness Adorno proceeded to a
devastating criticism of the timelessness inherent in the music-drama,
whose static qualities were expressed in the plot as well as in the
score. Wagner's 'art of the future' was all located in pre-capitalist
times; 'Gods and men perform on the same stage' while The
Ring concludes as it begins with nature's Rhinemaidens playing with
the gold which has escaped from the historical world of work embodied in
the giants and the dwarfs. Musically, Wagner's atemporality is produced
by the 'gesture' of beating time, a device through which his 'social
impulses are translated into technique', and whose repetition 'evades
the necessity to create musical time' and thus 'abandons the struggle .
. . mastered in the symphony'. When Wagner revokes time in favour of the
gesture, he also 'refutes all history by confronting it with the silence
of nature.' Adorno perceived something much worse than ahistorical
attitudes in Wagner's gesturing, since along with the prospect of change
across time there disappeared that struggle against Fate which had
inspired opera since Monteverdi's Orfeo.
In Wagner, 'music has sold its right to protest'. Similarly, the
responses of the audience are disciplined by the gestural beating of the
composer-conductor who 'both represents and suppresses the bourgeois
individual's demand to be heard.'
We
have gone as far as we can towards an innocent summary of Adorno's book
and to proceed further it is necessary to deal openly with the
ideological underpinnings which the author drew from the Frankfurt
School's indebtedness to Marx and particularly to his interlocking
understanding of the individual, the division of labour and the
commodity within capitalism. These concepts are not spelt out in
Adorno's book, nor are they always employed there as accurately as they
should be, a failing which stemmed partly from the group's over-emphasis
on cultural matters.
With
important exceptions like Franz Neumann's investigation of the Nazi
economy, Behemoth, the Frankfurt School did not pursue the laws of capitalist
development but instead examined the fate of individualism by
penetrating the falsehoods encrusted around it. Here, at least, they
could be at one with Marx in arguing that 'the essence of man is no
abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the
ensemble of the social relations.' When trying to unravel the processes
by which the debauchment of individualism had occurred under late
capitalism, and been disguised as a triumph for individualism, the
Frankfurt School refurbished two further concepts from Marx, namely,
commodity fetishism and the division of labour, which in Capital
were given defined functions but which in the Wagner book are loosened
to accommodate weaknesses in Adorno's thought. The crux of Adorno's
problems was his failure to identify the emergence of a new and monopoly
stage of capitalist development (Lenin's Imperialism)
within which the social categories of individual, commodity and
particularisation acquired fresh and more pressing meanings. Adorno
accepted that some kind of change had taken place when he talked about
'late' capitalism, but lateness is a formulation of time from nature,
not from history.
One
result of Adorno's failure to grasp the fullness of economic
developments was that he analysed Wagner in relation to ideas about
history as well as in a given historical context. Wagner died in 1883
and all of his work, except Parsifal,
had been completed by 1875, that is, before the appearance of the joint
stock companies, trusts and cartels that marked capitalism's monopoly
stage. Because Adorno evaded this transformation he had to wring from
Wagner matters which the artist never had to meet: Gotterdammerung
should be related to the debasement of Romanticism and not to the rise
(and fall) of Nazism. Some of the confusions generated by Adorno's
ahistorical lapses can be seen in the slackness with which he treated
the commodity; his account of the impact of the division of labour is
also confused.
In
Marx's vocabulary, commodity meant more than an item for sale since it
embodied expropriated labour power while disguising the alienation that
arose from that expropriation and from the division of the labour
processes. The social need to disguise exploitation produced what Marx
in a notorious passage called 'the fetishism of commodities', by which
the social relations between wage- labour and capital were reproduced as
relations between the workers and the objects which they manufactured.
For as long as Adorno discussed Wagner in terms of commodity fetishism
his analysis was on safe, that is to say historically appropriate
ground, and it allowed him to explicate what he called the
'Phantasmagoria' in Wagner's output as that which conceals 'the labour
that has gone into making it':
In
this respect Wagner's oeuvre
comes close to the consumer goods of the nineteenth century which knew
no greater ambition than to conceal every sign of the work that went
into them, perhaps because any such traces reminded people too
vehemently of the appropriation of the labour of others. To make works
of art into magical objects means that men worship their own labour
because they are unable to recognise it as such.
Adorno
traces Wagner's attempts to remove all evidence of production through
his instrumental combinations and his spurious Gesamtkunstwerk,
which confused the real unity of the totality with the false identity of
its parts and which depended upon 'intoxication, ecstasy' since 'a
moment of reflection' would reveal its 'underlying fragmentation'.
Equally, the senses were to be deprived of their specific tasks while
the allegorical substance of his alleged symbolism allowed 'everything
to mean the same as everything else'.
While
it is possible to quarrel with Adorno's account of Wagner's
'Phantasmagoria', its historical possibility cannot be denied. The same
cannot be said for his extrapolation of the 'commodity' beyond the realm
of production (where in Wagner's lifetime it had fetishistic attributes)
and into that era of mass consumption which had scarcely been glimpsed
before Wagner's death. Adorno wisecracked that the leitmotiv anticipated
the advertising of mass culture and he was smart-arsed when he wrote
that Wotan's slogan
Who
ever fears the tip of my spear Shall never pass through the fire!
could
easily be supplemented by copy in praise of a piece of equipment that
would enable the cautious but resolute buyer to pass through the fire
notwithstanding.
These
clevernesses could be considered extraneous to Adorno's main argument.
No such plea can be sustained for his free-ranging use of the division
of labour to include everything from the guilds to Wagner's introduction
of the short score (orchestral sketch) between his compositional sketch
and the full score. The abolition of history involved in Adorno's usage
here is doubly significant because he believes that
Works
of art owe their existence to the division of labour in society, the
separation of physical from mental labour'; having said this, he
immediately contradicts himself by recognising that 'their medium is
not pure mind; but the mind that enters into reality.
What
is wrong here is not only Adorno's notion of art but his misconception
of work, whose medium is not pure reality but reality reconstructed in
advance of labour by the mind; that is, he neglects the difference
between the architect and the bee. Adorno's error at this point is at
odds with the Frankfurt School's defence of Reason against mere
technique and against phantasms.
The
difficulties that abound in Adorno's study of Wagner have more sources
than those touched on above. When Adorno wrote this book he was still
learning his way into social philosophy, and his uncertainties and
contradictions derived from this fact as much as from the inherently
intractable task of producing a coherent account of Wagner. Another
element was Adorno's cultural attitudes which were snobbish as well as
justifiably elitist.
In
Search of Wagner
shows that a Marxist critique of culture cannot proceed without an
understanding of Marx's economic analysis which, let it be underlined,
does not require any return to the economic base determines the cultural
superstructure model. What is needed is a more thorough-going
materialism with which to combat, as Adorno puts it, 'the idea of an
unvarying human nature'; otherwise, we show ourselves, like Wagner, 'to
be bourgeois through and through in [the] conviction that poetic depth
is synonymous with the omission of historical specificity.'
Adorno's
comment that both Wagner and his works suffered from 'garrulous longueurs'
can be turned with equal justification against In Search of Wagner. After grappling with its 150 pages for more
than a month my equivocations about both Wagner and Adorno have been
raised to a higher plane. Nonetheless, of this much I remain sure: Tristan and Minima Moralia
are works to which I can return with expectations that are never
disappointed.
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