Did Richard Wagner invent the modern opera stage director? Or, at least, did the scenic and dramaturgical requirements of his stage-works establish the function of stage direction as a necessary and integral part of modern opera production? The answers to these questions – a qualified and a definite “yes,” respectively – have been frequently confirmed during the last half-century, a time when Wagner stagings have been perceived increasingly as a touchstone for major trends and styles of opera production worldwide. The main focus of the present chapter will be on Wagner stagings since the first postwar Bayreuth festival of 1951; but it is necessary first to consider some aspects of the first hundred years of Wagner onstage.

Wagner directs Wagner

Richard Wagner grew up, worked, and died in an age where there were no specialist opera directors. Stage productions were realized by a haphazard combination of stage manager, ballet master, composer, librettist, conductor, principal male singer, and (occasionally) a dramaturg. This tradition – or rather lack of one – died hard. As late as 1855 so theatrical a composer as Verdi could write with naïve delight about a newly published pamphlet prescribing the mise-en-scène of Les vêpres siciliennes that now “any child could do the staging.” Wagner himself had to be involved twice with compromised stagings of Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman; the Dresden premiere in 1843 and his improvised Zurich “festival” of 1852) before confessing to Liszt that he had finally learned “with much trouble and toil, how important to this opera the décor is” (2 May 1852; SB IV:484–85).

Introduction

Within the body of work of W. E. B. Du Bois, a figure described by the editors of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature as “the most multifaceted, prolific, and influential writer that black America has ever produced,” his fiction has long been overshadowed by other contributions and modes of writing. None of his five novels received a great amount of attention or acclaim at the time of publication and only relatively recently have the first two, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and Dark Princess (1928), started to be the subjects of critical analysis and debate. In much of Du Bois's writing there are distinctive intersections between sociological, historical, autobiographical, philosophical, and psychological inquiries and interventions. Elements of creative writing, too, can be found in the nonfiction work; the short story “Of the Coming of John” plays its part in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) combines the lyrical with other forms of commentary. This fact, along with the author's case, as laid out in the essay “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), for art as political, offers a sense of Du Bois's own understanding of the value, place, and purpose of imaginative writing. It positions his fictional and poetic compositions as a part of the same investigative, elucidatory, and highly committed project as the rest of his oeuvre and is suggestive in terms of approaching the novels which themselves traverse the genres of romance, historical fiction, life writing, and social realism. This chapter will focus on Du Bois's novels, exploring their attempts to give voice and weight to experiences that have been “stripped and silent,” pushed beyond the veil within American letters.

New paths

In the first years of the nineteenth century, Ludwig van Beethoven famously announced to a friend, the violinist Wenzel Krumpholz, that he intended to embark on an entirely “new path.” Half a century later, in 1853, Robert Schumann proclaimed the advent of the young Johannes Brahms in the same terms – Neue Bahnen, new paths – in a valedictory feature of sorts in the progressive musical journal he himself had founded, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. This was a deliberate provocation, since the journal's new editor, Franz Brendel, was currently championing the radical theories of Richard Wagner, which provided much better fodder for journalistic debate than did the mostly unpublished works of a quiet twenty-year-old pianist. Beethoven's earlier “new path” gradually became apparent in works like the Eroica Symphony, while the novelty of Brahms's voice was much slower to be heard by the larger public. But probably the most emphatic decision made by any composer to chart a whole new course was that made by Wagner, at precisely the time of Schumann's tribute to Brahms. Indeed, Wagner himself later spoke of the “new path,” or neue Bahn, he entered in Das Rheingold.

Richard Wagner's early approach to an operatic career was oblique, yet inexorable. As a boy he was raised in a gesamtkünstlerisch environment, so to speak – an educated bourgeois milieu that cultivated the arts both domestically and professionally. His stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, was a painter as well as an actor; among his sisters were an accomplished actress (the eldest, Rosalie) and a singer (Klara); his brother Albert was a tenor and sometime opera director; his uncle Adolf Wagner was something of a scholar and critic who had been on friendly terms with Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann, though he looked less kindly on the performing arts; and the father he never knew and whose paternity remained a large question mark, Carl Friedrich Wagner, had been for his part an amateur actor and devoted theater-goer until his death in 1814. Music, in this environment, existed as the handmaiden to drama and poetry. The commingling of spoken theater and opera in the Wagner family circle was altogether characteristic of German theatrical culture in this period, similar to England and to some extent France in this respect; only the Italian repertory represented what the later Wagner might have called “absolute” opera.

All who study W. E. B. Du Bois's conceptualization, interrogation, and international activism regarding the sociopolitical significance of race must contend with a foundation built upon his most famous words:

Originally published in Du Bois's first nationally circulated article, “Strivings of the Negro People” (from an 1897 issue of Atlantic Monthly), these words were then collected into The Souls of Black Folk, by far Du Bois's most famous work, in 1903. The “double-consciousness” metaphor often serves as a proxy for Du Boisian racial theory in its entirety. Du Bois, however, was a notoriously complex and prolific thinker whose views continued to evolve for another sixty years until his death in 1963. Thus while any commentary on Du Bois and race begins with the theory of double-consciousness by no means should it end there.

Wagner's impact on Western culture can hardly be overestimated. When Howard Shore describes his use of leitmotifs in the Oscar-winning score for the blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001–03), for example, he reveals himself as but one recent musician in a long line of creative artists affected by Wagner the composer. Wagner's theories about musical theater can be felt even in contemporary discussions of Broadway musicals, such as Oklahoma! (1943) and Rent (1996). As for modern opera, Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise (1983), Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto (1984), and Karlheinz Stockhausen's cycle Licht (1977–2004) are among the more recent responses to the challenges posed by Wagner almost 150 years ago. In fact, artists from all disciplines over the last century and a half have likewise relied on aesthetic concepts shaped prominently by Wagnerian ideas about the nature of art, whether Symbolist poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé avant-garde painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, and Anselm Kiefer; the sculptors Hans Arp and Auguste Rodin; or the architects of the Bauhaus. Media technology itself, when related to art, has drawn its aesthetic justification from Wagner's thoughts. And his political and social views influenced the Zionist Theodor Herzl as well as the anti-Semitic fascist Adolph Hitler, with repercussions still powerfully felt in concert life today – in Israel, above all, but worldwide as well.

A protean figure such as W. E. B. Du Bois is difficult to place according to almost any criterion one can think of. Having been advised by his Harvard mentor William James to avoid philosophy because one could not make a living at it, Du Bois still felt the need to apply what he had learned as a student of philosophy to social problems. Knowledge without application, theory without practice or policy implications, or, for that matter, art for art's sake made no sense to him. In this, he was clearly in the American grain, expressed in the overlap of pragmatic and Enlightenment traditions of thought, particularly of the progressive variety. Yet, Du Bois became less sanguine about the efficacy of knowledge in correcting social ills over the years. Not all prejudice responded to greater enlightenment. In this respect, he knew what Michel Foucault later emphasized - the inseparability of knowledge and power.

Because of his protean intellectual engagements, Du Bois is a rich but difficult subject for the intellectual historian. His extensive political journalism as editor of Crisis might be seen as a waste of his (intellectual) time, but it was a way for him to remain engaged with the everyday life of African Americans and their problems. His efforts on behalf, for instance, of Pan-Africanism and much of his writing about Africa lacked the intellectual complexity of first-rate philosophical or historical work. He was one of the “producer-directors” of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s rather than one of its major creative spirits. Not quite “theoretical” enough to be classified a social and cultural theorist, his work as an historian ranged from the iconoclastic to special pleading, while his literary style could be florid and unmodified by irony or self-criticism. Yet Du Bois was perhaps the best judge of how best to use his talents, and in the long run he may have done what was best for them.

On June 22, 1903, George White of Wilmington, Delaware, was at the workhouse while the pastor of Olivet Presbyterian Church was giving a sermon. Suddenly, several members of the community broke in to abduct Mr. White, who was actually a black man accused of rape and murder. He was tied to a stake, burned, and riddled with bullets. When the Chamber of Commerce of Wilmington met a few days later, it refused to pass a resolution condemning the lynching but instead passed one against forest fires. Their unwillingness to take a public stance against lynching was paralleled on the national level.

In 1899 George Henry White (no relation), a former slave, a Congressman (1897-1901) and the only African American in the House of Representatives, introduced the first anti-lynching bill in Congress. This resolution would have made lynching of a citizen a federal crime. Pointing out that most lynchings were committed by Anglo-Americans against African Americans, White argued that lynching was an extra-legal method used to terrorize them. In spite of his endeavors and passionate plea, the bill was defeated. In fact, 1901 saw the lynching of eighty-six black Americans. In 1902, during the consideration of his “Philippines Bill,” President Theodore Roosevelt intimated that lynching was taking place in the Philippines; and in 1903 he publicly commented on the lynching of George White. That year, the same year in which The Souls of Black Folk was published, eighty-four African Americans were known to have been lynched in the United States.

Wagner's prominence on the present-day musical scene is due primarily to the continued commitment of performers, and of the promoters and producers of opera who employ them. As the second centenary of his birth approaches, stagings of Wagner's works show no signs of failing to attract large audiences; the demand for tickets for Bayreuth is currently as great if not greater than at any time in the festival's history. Wagner the cultural phenomenon also remains a subject of immense interest to writers and scholars of all kinds. Alongside the definitive edition of his compositions which commenced publication in 1970 (Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke), there is an ongoing edition of his complete correspondence (Sämtliche Briefe), a magisterial catalogue of works (Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis), and a multitude of commentaries for specialists and non-specialists alike. Such commentaries are especially valuable in helping to illuminate the increasingly distant world in which Wagner lived and worked. With such reliably authentic texts established or in progress, specialized research on Wagner continues to probe those texts for meaning and significance. The emphasis may be on essentially musical or more broadly cultural matters, but the primary objective is to explain the continued importance of Wagner and his works to the contemporary world.

Wagner had just turned twenty-one when his first published essay appeared, and he was busy with his last on the day he died. Writing for publication was a perpetual accompaniment to his working life. One has only to browse through a catalogue of his titles, and the image of an artist brooding with immense concentration over vast and intricate music dramas, each of them years in the making, gives way to a very different picture: a Wagner who dashed off anything from anecdotal squibs to solemn tracts whenever the impulse struck. This body of work is substantial enough that it cannot be left out of any account of the composer; and, since most of it bears on questions of operatic theory and practice, and much of it refers directly to Wagner's own operas, it virtually demands that we refer to it whenever we are thinking about the more familiar productions of Wagner's genius. Since an essay of this length cannot hope to introduce the themes and propositions of even a few of the major writings, my purpose instead will be to consider the question of their relation to the operas. What can we do with them? How should we read Wagner's published prose to help understand him as a composer and dramatist?

Much of his published writing sets out to answer this very question. In the characteristically melodramatic words of A Communication to My Friends, a semi-autobiographical essay of 1851, “I was burning to write Something that should take the message of my tortured brain, and speak it in a fashion to be understood by present life” (PW I:378; GS IV:331; the remark mediates, in this context, an apologetic reference to the “tortured” style of his recent theoretical essays and an exposition of the unrealized dramatic project Jesus of Nazareth).

In his Biographia Literaria Coleridge took issue with the ideas about meter which Wordsworth had expressed in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads. For Coleridge, Meter's chief function was a symbolic one. “I write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.” Meter is a sign, which produces certain expectations about other linguistic features of the poem. If these expectations are disappointed, a kind of bathos will ensue. For Wordsworth, on the other hand, meter is not primarily a sign but, instead, is essentially connected to the fundamental organization of human knowing itself. We might characterize these accounts of meter, broadly speaking, as “symbolic” and “cognitive” respectively. For Coleridge's kind of account, the effects of meter are dependent upon recognition of a convention; for Wordsworth's kind of account, they depend upon the organization of consciousness itself.

What should be noted at once is that scholarship is still not in a position to settle this argument. For one kind of approach to meter, it is a meta-communicative feature of poetic discourse. In this approach it is imaginable that we can, for example, identify “iambic” pentameter as “a hegemonic form . . . a sign which excludes and includes, sanctions and denigrates, for it discriminates the 'properly' poetic from the 'improperly' poetic, Poetry from verse.” For other kinds of approach, meter is connected to the rhythmic organization of consciousness itself. The terrain remains disputed because, despite the startling developments of twentieth-century linguistics, there is still no science of verse.

Rather than trying to understand the historical relation between present-day English and English of the Romantic period, literary scholars have rarely thought much about English at all. Instead, they have concentrated on more abstract and seemingly weightier issues, such as Romantic debates about how language originated and how it related to the operations of the mind. This philosophical focus on language masks the fact that Romantic poets did not necessarily share contemporary critics' ability to take English as a given. They confronted considerable uncertainty about just how to write in English because the ways that the language was defined, taught, analyzed, judged, and printed changed dramatically in the second half of the eighteenth century. Linguistic historians usually describe these changes as “standardization” or “prescriptivism,” the process whereby philologists, grammarians, lexicographers, and orthoepists (codifiers of correct pronunciation) developed rules about right and wrong English usage. While guides to English had existed for centuries, they had largely been designed for foreigners wanting to learn English. The eighteenth century saw the rise of books of usage for native speakers. They aimed to teach readers not how to speak and write English, but how to speak and write English correctly.

Great Britain during this period was an unstable political entity, sometimes subject to violent internal divisions, as in the American War of Independence and the 1798 Irish rebellion, and more generally characterized by significant and widespread variation from region to region, and even from county to county.

Preliminaries

Among the questions confronting students of literature in the twenty-first century is the place of the word - and of “letters” - in the era of electronic media. Should university departments of “English” be subsumed into the more general category of “Media Studies”? Are authors mere “content providers” for owners of iPods and computers? Should poetry be shelved next to other forms of audio entertainment in media megastores? In the context of the Age of Information, the so-called “Age of Wordsworth” seems to retreat into the distant past, and to make the concept of a Romantic revolution in poetic language and form seem remarkably quaint. This chapter begins from the quite different premise that Romantic poetry is both strikingly illuminated by, and capable of illuminating, our multi-mediated situation. We suggest, in fact, that the study of Romantic poiesis - poetic making in its broadest sense - belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship. Defined by its relation to print culture even when it existed in and insisted on oral and manuscript forms, Romantic poetry might even serve as a synonym for what we mean by multimedia. For decades, media theorists and historians have grappled with the impact of new media on our bodies, imaginations, and sensoria; inasmuch as man is the “learning, creating, and communicating being,” new technologies for communication have put pressure on our ideas of “Man” and his or her imaginative ventures, not least poems.

Lyric poetry was long accorded paradigmatic status within the cultural formations we call Romanticism. But for more than a decade now this paradigm has been the focus of intense, productive rethinking. The older consensus prioritized a poetry - and a poetics - of private subjectivity and reflexive interiority, with its formal achievements motivated primarily by a distinctive psychological and philosophical agenda and by a commitment to imaginative transcendence over social engagement. This consensus has now given way to more varied accounts that emphasize generic diversity, canonical openness, and historical determination.

Lyric's status within Romantic scholarship has shifted gradually but decisively since the 1980s. The historicist interventions of that decade by Jerome McGann, Marilyn Butler, Marjorie Levinson, Clifford Siskin, Alan Liu, James Chandler, and others established fresh possibilities for assessing the centrality of lyric in Romantic culture. More recently Chandler has shown that in the case of Shelley especially, lyric is constitutive of - not just constituted by or within - the historicity of Romantic discourse. Anne Janowitz has explored the powerful “communitarian” current in Romantic lyric poetry that developed alongside - sometimes in tension with, sometimes as an extension of - the traditionally privileged “individualist” current.

The Romantics among the English poets

John Keats's assertion in a letter that he would be “among the English Poets” after his death is usually understood to be a proudly defensive declaration, against attacks on his poetry in the Quarterly Review and elsewhere, that once he was dead his genius would be properly recognized and his work would become a prominent part of the canon of English Literature. “This is a mere matter of the moment,” Keats declares of his detractors' aspersions: “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.” One might think of Keats's sense that he will be properly recognized only after death as no more than an acknowledgment of the idea that, as Samuel Johnson put it in his 1765 “Preface to Shakespeare,” a century is “the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit”: Keats would be recognized after his death for the simple reason that he could not be recognized before it. And some critics have argued that his comment specifically alludes to a relatively new kind of publishing venture: canon-forming, and nation-building multi-volume collections of poems by the English (or British) poets such as the 44-volume edition of The British Poets overseen by Hugh Blair (1773-6), The Works of the English Poets, with Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Samuel Johnson (68 volumes, 1779-81); John Bell's 109-volume The Poets of Great Britain (1777-83); and Alexander Chalmers's 21-volume The Works of the English Poets (1810). According to this reading, Keats was imagining that after his death his poems would literally take their place within the covers of such volumes alongside, or “among,” those of his beloved Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. But we might also understand Keats to be proposing something rather different - something that is nevertheless consequential upon the desire for his poems to be bound together with those of Shakespeare.

In 1768, when Captain James Cook set sail for Tahiti, Britain had only recently wrested control of Quebec from France. It still ruled its American colonies from London. Spain was still the imperial power in Mexico, California, and “Louisiana” - a vast area of which nobody knew the limits, for parts of America's northwest coast were still uncharted. Britons knew still less of Africa, and were second to the Dutch in the exploration of South East Asia.

By 1833 the picture had changed vastly: Britain had lost its first American empire and, after fifty years of intense exploration and conquest, acquired a new one. It had colonized Australia, spread its missionaries to Polynesia, and planted its manufacturers in South America. It had penetrated Africa, and charted much of the Polar seas and America's west coast. It had crossed Canada, taken possession of India, occupied Burma and founded Singapore. Unrivalled on the seas, it was the most powerful empire in Europe and its explorers were national heroes.

Global power changed culture at home and these changes helped precipitate Romanticism. From the 1780s, London became a city of shows, teeming with the products of empire. As a Russian visitor remarked, it was like a “continuous fair”; its shops offered spectacular displays of “absolutely everything one can think of.” Oriental muslins, Chinese porcelain, Javanese furniture, even caymans and leopards could be viewed, handled, and purchased. And many Britons, rich from the profits of colonial crops, including coffee, indigo, sugar, and, increasingly as empire in India was extended, opium, could afford to cultivate a taste for the exotic.

Introduction

For better or worse, Romanticism and nostalgia are so frequently associated as to be nearly synonymous. An influential account of Romantic thought across Europe once characterized the movement by its “nostalgia for the natural object, expanding to become nostalgia for the origin of this object,” and the longing for nature is but one of many returns associated with the period. These include, in addition, the retrieval of romance modes, the renewed interest or imaginative investment in national and cultural pasts, the turn from polite culture to the “very language of men” - at times conjoined with a full-scale retreat from the anonymity of print culture and its potentially hostile public - and the reanimation of oral cultures and orality, even when, or perhaps especially when, the bards were inauthentic and technologically mediated.

The implicit or explicit understanding of nostalgia in each case casts the phenomenon as a distancing, even a falsification, of the pressing realities of modernity: urbanization, the vexed national politics within a newly but uneasily united kingdom of Britain, the equally if not more vexed international politics, warfare and colonial endeavors, print technology and the marketplace. This is the nostalgia familiar in common parlance today - the sentimental and safe retrospect, the pleasing melancholy, the whitewashing of less lovable aspects of history, past and present alike. Susan Stewart thus writes that nostalgia testifies to “a longing that of necessity is inauthentic . . . because the past it seeks has never existed except in narrative.” The nostalgic, she writes, “is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.” Nostalgia, writes one critic of postmodernity, “exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near”; another, Fredric Jameson, argues that nostalgia, so construed, is “an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.”