SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
Revolution of 1848
The first ideas of Siegfried were contemporary with the Revolution of 1848, which Wagner took part in with the same enthusiasm he put into everything else. His recognised biographer, Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain–who, with M. Henri Lichtenberger, has succeeded best in unravelling Wagner’s complex soul, though he is not without certain prejudices–has been at great pains to prove that Wagner was always a patriot and a German monarchist. Well, he may have been so later on, but it was not, I think, the last phase of his evolution. His actions speak for themselves. On 14 June, 1848, in a famous speech to the National Democratic Association, Wagner violently attacked the organisation of society itself, and demanded both the abolition of money and the extinction of what was left of the aristocracy. In Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) he showed that beyond the «local nationalism» were signs of a «supernational universalism.» And all this was not merely talk, for he risked his life for his ideas. Herr Chamberlain himself quotes the account of a witness who saw him, in May, 1849, distributing revolutionary pamphlets to the troops who were besieging Dresden. It was a miracle that he was not arrested and shot. We know that after Dresden was taken a warrant was out against him, and he fled to Switzerland, with a passport on which was a borrowed name. If it be true that Wagner later declared that he had been «involved in error and led away by his feelings» it matters little to the history of that time. Errors and enthusiasms are an integral part of life, and one must not ignore them in a man’s biography under the pretext that he regretted them twenty or thirty years later, for they have, nevertheless, helped to guide his actions and impressed his imagination. It was out of the Revolution itself that Siegfried directly sprang.
In 1848, Wagner was not yet thinking of a Tetralogy, but of an heroic opera in three acts called Siegfried’s Tod, in which the fatal power of gold was to be symbolised in the treasure of the Niebelungen; and Siegfried was to represent «a socialist redeemer come down to earth to abolish the reign of Capital.» As the rough draft developed, Wagner went up the stream of his hero’s life. He dreamed of his childhood, of his conquest of the treasure, of the awakening of Brünnhilde; and in 1851 he wrote the poem of Der Junge Siegfried. Siegfried and Brünnhilde represent the humanity of the future, the new era that should be realised when the earth was set free from the yoke of gold. Then Wagner went farther back still, to the sources of the legend itself, and Wotan appeared, the symbol of our time, a man such as you or I–in contrast to Siegfried, man as he ought to be, and one day will be. On this subject Wagner says, in a letter to Roeckel: «Look well at Wotan; he is the unmistakable likeness of ourselves, and the sum of the present-day spirit, while Siegfried is the man we wait and wish for–the future man whom we cannot create, but who will create himself by our annihilation–the most perfect man I can imagine.» Finally Wagner conceived the Twilight of the Gods, the fall of the Valhalla–our present system of society–and the birth of a regenerated humanity. Wagner wrote to Uhlig in 1851 that the complete work was to be played after the great Revolution.
this was: Revolution Of 1848
go to next chapter: The opera public
