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Wagner's Gold Standard: Tannhäuser and the General Equivalent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2010
Abstract
Twenty years of Cambridge Opera Journal: in view of the journal's place in the discipline, the occasion seemed worth marking. When Roger Parker and Arthur Groos founded Cambridge Opera Journal in 1989, it offered the first forum to the musical community for serious opera criticism that took into account changing orientations in literary studies and seriously engaged with ideology, reception history, and representations of race, class and gender. Subsequent editors – Mary Hunter, Mary Ann Smart, and Emanuele Senici – continued to foster this wide intellectual perspective and to engage with an extraordinary variety of methodologies. For the current issue, we gave carte blanche to authors who contributed in the first two years of publication to reflect on their past work, or on opera studies, or on the journal, either informally as an opinion piece or through new scholarship – and so to measure time by developments in the discipline itself.
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References
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), 3–25.
2 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 25.
3 I refer to David Alden's 1994 production, with Brian Large directing the Bayerische Staatsoper at the National Opera of Munich, released on DVD by Image Entertainment in 2001. The cast included Nadine Secunde (Elisabeth), Bernd Weikl (Wolfram), René Kollo (Tannhäuser) and Waltraud Meier (Venus).
4 The 1875 revision was for a production in Vienna, but it is effectively the Paris version; its most significant change is a segue from the Overture to the Bacchanale that Wagner had intended, but not realised, in 1861. For details on the opera's tangled history, see Carl Dahlhaus, ‘The Musical Works’, in Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, trans. ed. John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 422–7.
5 ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Harry Zohn in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2003), IV, 390. The editors (p. 398) gloss the phrase to mean ‘a citation of pressing concern at a given moment’ and add that in a military contest the reference may be to something mentioned in the day's dispatches.
6 Frank Kermode ‘Sequence and Narrative Secrets’, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), 89–90.
7 See Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Gage (Ithaca, 1990), 1–133. For a synoptic account, see George Baker, ‘The Artwork Caught by the Tail’, October, 97 (2001), 63–6.
8 Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 2005); Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation” of Authority’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell (New York, 1992), 3–67; Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ (Kritik der Gewalt), in Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Peter Demetz (New York, 1986), 277–300.
9 This concept is embedded throughout Lacan's writings; see, inter alia, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, 2006), 20–239 (‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’), 457–63 (‘On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’) and 672–701 (‘The Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’). On Wagner's symbolic field and his ambivalent attempts to surmount it, see my Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley, 2004), 75–106, 222–8.
10 For further discussion, see my ‘The Mysteries of Animation: History, Analysis, and Musical Subjectivity’, Music Analysis, 20 (2001), 151–76.
11 Willa Cather, Coming, Aphrodite! And Other Stories, ed. Margaret Anne O'Connor (New York, 1999), 141.
12 Cather, 141.
13 Franz Liszt, ‘Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard Wagner’ (1851), in Franz Liszt, Artiste et Société, ed. Remy Stricker (Paris, 1995), 290.
14 In Graham Vick's 2007 production for the San Francisco Opera, Wolfram actually dispatches Elisabeth in a mercy killing. The gesture is too crudely literal, but its figurative underpinning is real enough.
15 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York, 2001), 165–84, esp. 173–8. Perhaps ‘symbolic destitution’ would be the more apt term. Either way, Žižek connects this mode of voiding one's place in the symbolic order with an extreme form of what Lacan called the ‘second death’ – a death in or to the symbolic that blurs into death proper.
16 My translation from Wagner ‘Ouvertüre zu Tannhäuser’ (Overture to Tannhäuser) in Richard Wagner Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols. (Leipzig, 1898), V, 178.
17 Although the programme says that the rustle in the air had earlier sounded like the lamenting tones of condemned souls, this observation cannot plausibly be referred back to the first appearance of the haloing strings, in part because the strings simply do not sound like lost souls (there is more below on what they do sound like) and in part because the Overture at that point has not yet reached the Venusberg. Wagner simply overreads the retransition; his programme does one thing and his overture another.
18 A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Poetry, First Lecture, trans. Ralph R. Read III, in German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York, 1982), 183.
19 Schlegel, 183.
20 For further discussion see my ‘Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute’, in Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary, ed. Raymond Knapp, Steven Baur, and Jacqueline Warwick (Aldershot, 2008), 3–16.
21 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843), trans. Alastair Hannay (London, 1992), 381–474. As is his custom, Kierkegaard does not speak in his own person in this text, but through personae representing different points of view; in this case the observations come from his spokesman for the ethical.
22 Kierkegaard, 393; the phrase in the next sentence, 386.
23 Kierkegaard, 400. For a more positive account of the marriage standard under discussion, see Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume Two: The Tender Passion (Oxford, 1996).
24 Slavoj Žižek and F. W. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World, the latter trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor, 1997), 39.
25 Homi K. Bhabha, The Locations of Culture (New York, 1994).
26 The concept of the remainder has been important in different ways for both Derrida and Žižek in relation, respectively, to signification and desire. The musical remainder, of which those discussed here form a special case, is hermeneutic and historical. For discussion, see my Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, 2001), 145–72.
27 My translation from Wagner, ‘Über der Aufführung des Tannhäuser’ (On the Performance of Tannhäuser), Gesammelte Schriften, V, 149–50. For a reading of the Venusberg as an embodiment of operatic theatricality, see David Levin, ‘Interstitial Redemption: Wagner's Tannhäuser and the Dramaturgical Vicissitudes of Music Drama’, Monatshefte, 98 (2006), 180–91; for an extension of the same reading to the world of the Wartburg, see Brian Hyer's ‘Response to David J. Levin’, immediately following in the same issue (192–7).
28 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, V, 155–6.
29 Wagner, V, 155.