Episode 25: Richard Wagner: Act II

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Loira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we're going even deeper into the life, the work, the ideas of our friend, Richard Wagner.

Yeah, not a friend of the pod, not quite ready for that sort of commitment, but person of interest for sure.

And yeah, this is, you've now, for the second time, allowed me to kind of drag you into his wild, weird, and not so covertly racist world.

So thank you for that.

I hope that we can come to some sort of conclusion today.

But then again, given that we're talking about four operas, I'm hopeful, but I can't promise it.

Well, I mean, there's a lot to cover here.

So like last time we went over the career of Richard Wagner.

And am I saying this right?

Is this the correct German intonation?

Richard Wagner.

Oh, Richard Wagner.

I'm not going to get that right.

I'm not going to get that right.

I'm like, I'm such a vulgar American.

I'm like, the R is very hard.

My buddy Dick, you know.

But Wagner's life is really interesting because he's a really interesting character, right?

He's kind of a trickster.

in some ways, in addition to being a wild racist, right?

So he is a composer of operas from pretty humble origins.

He's kind of crisscrossing across Europe in flight from debtors for a lot of his life.

And he eventually sort of strikes out on his own.

He abandons the sort of conventional opera music business models and he sets up his own theater

where he has very precise, very exacting standards for how his operas are going to be performed and how they're going to be watched.

And you took me through the first of the four operas in his ring cycle.

Yes.

So we basically covered Dasreingold, the shortest of the operas, which, you know, spoiler alert is why we can't do this for all the operas, because it's just like, it's a lot of plot.

And we kind of covered his life mostly up to 1848, which is the moment where he does three things.

He sort of sides with the revolution in 1848 to an extent that you sort of you can't easily take back and has to flee.

his employment and has to move to Switzerland, which was just a place where you could say more stuff.

And he remains in exile for quite a while.

And we'll talk about that today.

But it's also the moment when he starts hitting on the ring of the Nibelung as an idea.

I'm hedging a little bit because the plot you heard last time wouldn't have probably occurred to him quite then yet.

He works backwards.

He wants to write an opera about Siegfried, but Siegfried only shows up.

in Siegfried, which is the third opera, right?

So he kind of, as it grows, it grows more into the stuff that we talked about last time.

But from the beginning, he didn't just want to tell, right?

There is a way you can have an opera, like a hero's opera, where like there's, you know, one guy on stage and eventually he dies, right?

Like it's very clear that he wasn't going to do that from the very beginning.

And it had this tendency to sort of overflow the bounds of a traditional opera to the point that he almost always, I think, figured it might be more than one because he had all this mythology that he wanted to cram in there.

But I think it's fair to say that in 48, he didn't have a notion that he were going to spend an entire opera just with like the gods basically like trying to figure out how to get out of a deal yeah so the bringing the knee belong is a cycle of operas as you said it's kind of like maximalist in its plot and in its sort of like musical excesses right and it's about or drawn from the sort of mishmash of Norse mythologies, right?

You said he is drawn from Icelandic myths, that he's drawn from some later German sources.

A lot of these mythical collections of the pre-Christian pagan religious practices and legends are being sort of put into

his big operatic work, his sort of major operatic work.

When people think of Wagner, they think of the ring cycle.

But also, I wanted to touch on the very interesting fact that this is something he starts.

right after 1848, right?

Because we talked a little bit last time about his political convictions, right?

You say this is a guy who had in his youth come to really distrust the aristocracy, had come to really distrust capitalism, didn't really like the working class either, seemed to have some

contempt for their taste, oftentimes seems to be expressing a bit of physical disgust.

Right.

And this was really interesting to me when we talked about the Rheingold, that first opera in the ring cycle, the short one, which is an opera in which the gods and a dwarf are fighting over this specific magic gold from the bottom of the Rhine River, right?

And the gold is said to be more valuable than love.

The dwarf has renounced love in order to attain the gold.

Now the god Odin is trying to get it back because he has, I believe, a construction debt to pay.

Yeah, basically.

Odin is in debt to these giants.

He needs to pay them off with something very, very valuable.

And what he decides to do is steal the gold from this dwarf who has renounced love for wealth, right?

Yeah, without himself renouncing love because he's basically a Zeus figure.

And he's like, well, that's kind of, that's my whole deal.

I don't, I don't want to really let go of that.

So exactly.

You're hitting the two, I think, the main themes I was hoping to get through in the first episode, like on the head.

On the one hand, you know, we get these gods who are not themselves the good guys.

They are part of the problem.

And then the other thing we get is this politics that, as you say, should

be in great solidarity with the working class.

It's supposed to be an anti-aristocratic, a egalitarian ethos.

And I should say, Wagner was not youthful anymore.

Like this is a person your age who basically holds these convictions.

Like these are not, this is not like his student radical days.

Like this, this man is, I think, in his mid-30s, right?

I'm sorry, Adrian, are you saying that i am no longer youthful

i'm sorry but you know what i mean like but we're not you're not a student radical you're a little late for student radicals it's not a yeah so actually he was actually like and he was 41 i guess no he would have been no late 30s when he when he started right working on the ring material and for all of that the moment when it comes to actually depicting what's going on with the working class he he kind of flinches.

He's, as you say, he's grossed out, physically grossed out by this.

I should mention that that's something we pick up on today as like a huge contradiction around 1848 it really wasn't there was a lot of sort of idealistic kind of class solidarity it didn't really reflect the kind of cultural factors that were keeping these classes apart right so you among a lot of students in 48 you get these kind of things where they're like oh and we want freedom for everyone like oh but god what are they doing like right like part of why 48 fails is in fact that like a bunch of kind of democratically minded liberals kind of ally with what they perceive to be urban rabble.

And then when the urban rabble is like, well, okay, can we now loot the granaries, please, and start communism?

They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

No, not like that.

We wanted incremental reform.

See, there's a failure to unite like left liberal bourgeois intellectuals

with the actual proletarian masses.

Much like the campaign of like Bernie Sanders, you know, like this is a common failure in radical movements.

Yeah.

And I mean, and that's another thing that makes Wagner so interesting is if we, as we have been doing, look at the ring of the Nibelungs as kind of a reflection on the failures of revolution, like his story is that of a generation.

His answer is not everyone's answer.

There's a lot of people who come up with way more reasonable and way shorter answers to what had happened there, but there's some suggestion that he's working through that trauma of like, we thought we were going to do something and then it just we were going to change the world and it didn't didn't work.

But that's a really sympathetic vision of Wagner that I think a lot of like millennials on the left, like people like, you know, so many of my best friends can relate to, right?

We were on the cusp of this great moment of social change and we were defeated.

Yeah.

And what do we do now with the ruins of these hopes, right?

That is a

very sympathetic story.

Yeah.

But we got to be like a little more precise because we are talking about Richard Wagner, right?

And he does get really racist with it.

And so, like, even in the Rheingold, you've got some pretty explicit, you know, metaphorized, but like hard to miss anti-Semitism.

Absolutely.

And we should say, you know, this is in some way the difficulty of discussing sort of mid-19th century leftism in that even people that you and I would like, whose politics we would like, you know, in hindsight, you're like, ooh, that's more than the FDA recommended dose of anti-Semitism in there.

So Wagner was in no way unusual in this.

It's not universal.

I don't want to excuse it on that level.

Like there are people who call this out and say like, absolutely not like that.

But it was just a bit more acceptable.

I deal with this as a feminist encountering historical thinkers.

I deal with all this all the time.

You're like, oh, my God, this is like you're reading along like, yes, yes, yes.

This is very beautiful.

I'm so enlightened and edified by this.

And then you get to the point where they say something about.

women and you realize you're actually excluded from their vision of the human project.

It's like, oh, no, you didn't mean me.

And now I have to like read you with that knowledge and try and access you anyway.

Right.

So there's one way to read Wagner where you kind of just try to put the anti-Semitism in a box, maybe not for, you know, the whole of your project, but when you're trying to understand him from his own perspective.

Well, certainly when you're trying to explain him in 48, right?

So that's the thing, like the opera plot we went through last time really didn't come together like that until the late 60s, early 70s.

So that's, you know, another 15 years on.

And I think that he really makes the turn afterwards.

So he writes an essay I've already already alluded to, I believe it's in 1851 on Judaism and music.

And that's when, that's where you can sort of see the fault lines where a lot of composer colleagues are like, what the fuck, man?

Like, no, Jesus, like, there's no intrinsically Jewish way of making music.

What are you on?

What are you reading?

Right.

So that's like a moment where like people who politically agree with him or even who are politically to the right of him are like, oh, what?

You know, so like, but in 48, like he's still sort of like hidden.

Yeah.

Okay.

So this isn't like, it's not like, oh, well, everybody

was wildly racist in that era.

Like this is also another historical corrective you end up making a lot when you're dealing with these figures.

It's his contemporaries, you're saying, were often also like, dude, you're creeping us out.

This is really racist.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think I should say, so there's two points to be made about that.

One, it got worse over time, right?

Okay.

His anti-Semitism and his racism just intensified.

He read more stuff, basically, and he expressed it more.

And so his contemporaries were like, whoa, so, well, what does that mean for this opera's plot?

So that's one thing.

It intensified in the reaction to it.

It became just more undeniable.

And then the other weird thing, and this is hard to talk about a little bit, is that the status of anti-Semitism was also changing, right?

Like this was an age where especially leftists really believed in progress.

And so the same way that we kind of have these debates about like shows like 30 Rock, like, is this still racist or is this making fun of, or is this like kind of a dumb little bit of superstition that we sort of carried into our post-racial age, right?

Like, we don't believe that anymore, but there there was a time when people could sort of make that argument.

And give you an example, there is an anecdote, I've never verified it, but I've heard it multiple times, where Gustav Mahler was putting on one of the Wagner operas, I think it was Siegfried, in Vienna at the Hof Opera.

And he takes aside his singer, who's singing Mima, I believe, and he goes, dude, you have to make it more nasally.

Like, don't forget, this is supposed to be an anti-Semitic caricature, right?

So it's like a Jewish conductor being like, man, you're not giving me enough anti-Semitism.

There's anti-Semitism in this character, right?

Like, meaning

he clearly thought of it as like something a little bit different than how, how, and this is a man who suffered from anti-Semitism in that position.

Like, it's a like it's just our view of it, given what happened afterwards, basically, is in the 20th century, is also clearly different from the way they dealt with it, right?

So, this is

it's pre-Holocaust, so anti-Semitism anti-Semitism has a greater ability, I guess, to be

trivialized or transcended by this kind of like, you know, cosmopolitan smugness.

Like, oh, look, this was something that we used to do.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

Well, it's like, I love that story as he's like literally turning the dial that says racism on it and like looking back at the conductor for approval.

But as an aesthetic effect, he's just like, this is how the work is intended.

Like, I don't like it, right?

Like, it's the same way.

I think he's thinking of it the same way that, like, if you're going to perform a requiem mass, like yeah you're going to act like God is real and he's going to judge everyone right like it's it's kind of inherent in the thing and so it's just an interesting moment right where like you basically where you can sort of tell that like today right and you can doctor said that to you like I'm quitting right now right but like that's quitting and I am filing a lawsuit yes yeah the most winnable lawsuit in history ever yeah

yeah so in terms of getting into or towards our next opera I did want to sort of talk very very briefly about two influences I sort of name-checked last time, but that I'm guessing are not like household names anymore to our listeners, just to give you a sense of just how far on the left Wagner was.

He's not like this sort of nice liberal who turns right, he's a diagonalist, he's a JFK Jr.

He's going from like you said, he was kind of like a dirtbag leftist, right?

Kind of.

I mean, like he's definitely

vulgarity, anger.

Yeah, exactly.

So, just to give you, you know, I mentioned two names.

I thought I might briefly just give you a sense of who these people are.

So in Paris, he reads Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who's famous for this book, What is Property?

with the famous answer, property is theft.

I think I've heard it.

Theft.

It's theft.

And it's really worth kind of thinking about that.

I'm going to just have one quote here from him, just to give you an idea.

And just remember, sort of think back to the Greingeut and its question of the origin of capitalism.

And this is from a chapter called Of the Causes of Our Mistakes, the Origin of Property.

So he's saying, not only is property theft, it's a mistake, right?

It's a moral failing that we have the concept of property at all.

He says, quote, property not being our natural condition, how did it gain a foothold?

Why has the social instinct so trustworthy among the animals erred in the case of man?

Why is man who was born for society not yet associated?

It's a really interesting question, right?

Like he's basically saying like the idea of property is kind of a fall from grace, right?

We were naturally sociable animals and then someone did something and basically it put us in this fallen condition where we can no longer feel love for each other but really have to communicate and relate to each other as property owners and the end effect is not that that's what our society is like that's not even a society right right it's a pre-lapsarian fantasy you see this in a lot of conservative thought like there was a ideal past when we were in a state of moral perfection and we have been corrupted.

And the corrupting influence here is stuff.

It's property.

It's ownership.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I should say this is not conservative.

This is as far left anarchism as you can get.

But you're already putting pressure on the interesting thing, like the fact that probably most anarchists today would, well, who knows?

But like the interesting category here is nature, right?

Like the thing is property is not only wrong, it's also unnatural.

And that's the part where your Wagner sense should ring, right?

Like, because he loves things that are natural.

And that, as you point out, can really lend itself to some gnarly stuff, stuff.

Right.

Right.

Like Wagner is a thinker, or in his plays, his character's looks really reflect their character.

Yep.

Natural instinct is never wrong.

And, you know, this appeal to nature, you know, nature is something that's much easier to talk about in the abstract than to actually delineate where nature

ends and human influence begins.

So like nature is really something we need to think of as like a descriptive fiction more than like an actual entity, right?

But that's not true in Wagner's thought.

In Wagner's thought, nature is not just real.

It is an absolute truth.

Yeah, exactly.

He's kind of substituting the theological horizon for like the nature becomes a theological horizon.

It just doesn't err.

Also, like the bit about animals, I'm sorry, have you actually seen animals?

I know.

They do absolutely resource card.

They are not in this harmonious community with one another.

Like get high and watch planet Earth because you will be horrified by like all the things that animals can do.

Yeah, I mean, there's Marx's famous critique of this, which I mean, he goes, it was even simpler and he sort of makes the same point about nature through a very, very funny kind of dissection where he's like, property is theft is actually a meaningless statement because what is theft if not the misappropriation of property, right?

Like the concept of theft implies the existence of property.

Yeah.

Right.

And the bigger point behind that is like none of this is natural.

Like we've never been natural.

We are intrinsically, naturally, not like other animals.

And you're going to have to solve it by recourse to society, not recourse to nature.

Right.

So you can see where these diverging paths sort of happened in the 1840s, that Marx just does not abide and does not like this recourse to nature, as he says in the German ideology, and a line that I love.

He says, like, nature can't tell you anything because it is well known that as you shout into a forest, so it shouts back.

He's like,

Nature can be used to prove anything.

Nature told me that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So these are two, I imagine like rough contemporaries, right?

Marx and Wagner.

Oh, yeah.

These are all writing at the same time.

Exactly.

And they're going in different directions post-48.

Exactly.

And the other person that I mentioned last time was Ludwig Feuerbach, who was arguably even more influential at the time and I think today read very rarely, if at all.

And he's really famous as a critic of religion.

And that's pretty important, right?

Given that how many gods we have running around in the ring.

So the capsule on him is his suggestion is essentially a little bit more complicated than that, but all religion is anthropology, right?

Our description of God, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, is a reverse portrait of ourselves, who are not omniscient, who are not benevolent, and not omniscient.

And he draws from that a very deeply humanistic philosophy.

He's like, what religion really is, is a self-portrait, how we would like to be, right?

So in some way, religion should inform our politics as a kind of aspiration.

We ought to be more like our picture of God.

Just be aware that your picture of God is just that, it's a picture, right?

That's Feuerbach's overall sense, his overall project.

Wagner is deeply impressed by that.

And so that's important to note, right?

That like the traffic between the gods and mortals in the ring, sort of follows this logic.

It's a logic of projection and realization.

You never really see anyone follow anyone's order or be better at anything than anyone else, right?

Just to give you one quote here too, quote, religion is the division of man from himself, meaning human beings take a part of themselves what they would like to be like and they oppose it to themselves, right?

Man sets himself up against God as a being that is opposite to him.

God is not what man is.

Man is not what God is.

God is infinite, man the finite.

God is perfect.

Man is imperfect.

God is eternal.

Man is temporal.

God is almighty.

Man is powerless.

God is holy.

Man is sinful.

God and man are extremes.

God is the absolute positive, the epitome of all realities.

Man is the absolute negative, the epitome of all nothingness.

So that's Feuerbach.

And one reason this matters, I think, is one thing he points to.

He's a Christian theologian by training, and he says, think of the way divine love works in Christianity.

On the one hand, he's like, the original impulse here is clearly, again, it's a self-portrait of our capacity for sociability, sociability, for fellow feeling, for the amazing acts of sympathy and kindness that we're capable of.

And yet, can't help but notice that in positive religion, meaning in our institutions, it usually becomes a cover for being a real asshole to one another, right?

What horrible crimes have not been committed by reference to God's love, right?

I'll read another quote here, which kind of gets you to this idea that the thing that Wagner will take from this, which is that love in some way is the great reconciliation and not the divine.

He says, who then is our redeemer and our reconciler?

God or love?

It's love.

For it is not God as God who has redeemed us, but love, which is above the difference between the divine and the human personality.

As God gave himself up out of love, so we too should give up God out of love.

For if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God.

And despite the predicate of love, we have God, the evil being of religious fanaticism.

So, I mean, it's a little bit complicated at the end there, but like the the idea is we've gotten it exactly reverse.

We should sacrifice the idea of the divine to love, which is really what it's trying to teach us, as opposed to deciding who we are in common will with, depending on some abstract notion of the Godhead, basically.

So this, it makes sense to me that this would be appealing to Wagner because you talked last time about his efforts to distill various forms down to their essential centers, right?

So, you know, you talked about how he doesn't use

a ton of sort of plot embellishments in his operas, right?

It's very much just the sort of core of the story.

And we talked also about how he really made a great effort to strip opera of its like social and status markers and make it only about the music, right?

There's this effort in Wagner to obliterate these like corrupting, extraneous elements.

And so I could see him doing that with religion as well, like trying to get away from the conspicuous trappings of Christianity towards, you know, these more essential forces.

Exactly.

There's a distrust here of institutions, right?

Like both Feuerbach and Proudhon are essentially anti-institutionalists, and that's true for Wagner too.

Like every time human beings get together and make themselves laws and then obey those laws, he's like, this does not seem good.

On the other hand, if someone sort of relies on natural impulse, and this is where his question, where the question of gender and sexuality will become very, very interesting,

he's like, people should trust that.

And we should mention here too, that in a twist that will shock no one, given the self-portrait of Wotan that we described last time, Wagner is also a huge philanderer.

So he just, he means this literally.

He's like, you know, when you hear institutions also think marriage, and when you think the ground of love is like having relationships, definitely with people who are also married to other people while you're married to other people.

So, I mean, there's a free, there's also just a free love component to all this.

Yeah, but I'm thinking of this like very specific kind of like American man in the years when the sexual revolution was really just a sexual revolution for men when they're like, you know, what's real freedom?

What's real adherence to nature?

What's real rejection of hierarchies of power is me doing whatever to whoever in pursuit of my orgasm.

You know, like that's a, it's very like, it's very Hugh Hefner.

Yeah, there's definitely some of that.

And especially, you know, we, we didn't didn't talk much about tanhuiza's opera but like that sort of has been that's had that reputation that like basically it's it is almost like a mid-century sort of free love manifesto although it the ending doesn't quite bear that out but like it's definitely it was part of its appeal at the time tsanuniseuide which he'll sort of compose in the next segment of our story is essentially the probably the greatest meditation on adultery, right?

It's like why it's justified.

So absolutely, that's there.

At the same time, I hope, you know, in the mid-19th century, I think around 1848, especially, a lot of feminists would have agreed with Wagner that like, that women have only things to gain by some of these institutions getting taken down a couple of pigs, right?

And the dissolution of marriage, for one thing, yeah, very useful for women.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically, they're like, look, yeah, like, I see how you got there and it's not perfect, but like, let's, let's applaud the fact that you at least made it to the finish line, right?

Like, cause he doesn't then sort of remoralize it.

He is consistent.

He's not saying, but in the end, shouldn't through a higher fellow feeling, and then maybe we shouldn't have divorced you guys.

He's like, no, we'll see.

Like, if someone is sleeping with someone else, pretty good sign the marriage is already over.

So, you know, what's good, right?

So there are a lot of women in his orbit who absolutely are like, both have his number in terms of what gave rise to that thought and are perfectly appreciative of like nothing bad for women comes out of denying the sacramental character of marriage in 1850s.

Yeah.

So just to follow his footsteps, so he leaves for Switzerland in 49.

He spends about 10 years in Zurich and then sort of moves around peripatetically again, 1859 to 65.

And then in 1866 to 71, he lives in Tripschen on Lake Lucerne, which there's a Wagner Museum there.

If anyone ever finds themselves in Lucerne, they should check it out.

It's very, very pretty.

I was there recently.

And initially, right,

as he's traveling, he writes very little music and instead starts cranking out basically pamphlets.

So the art and the revolution, the artwork of the future, opera and drama, and the aforementioned Judaism and music.

So that's sort of the moment when Wagner becomes more than just a composer.

Sort of in the early 1850s,

there are Wagner operas being performed.

Loewengrin has its premiere without the composer present in 1850 under direction of Franz Biszt, his father-in-law.

And of course, he sort of writes Trussan Museu, the Meistersinger von Nuremberg, so the master singers of Nuremberg.

But sort of, especially in the early years, he would have been present more to people who read music periodicals, which at the time was quite a substantial.

Like people subscribed to, you know, it was like reading Rolling Stone in 1970.

Like people read about the music, but they were engaged in the debates.

And so we would have become a household name also just as a philosopher of aesthetics to some extent and a political philosopher of aesthetics at that.

So how famous is he

for his music versus how famous is he for his politics?

Like, tease that out a little bit more.

Yeah.

If somebody in Wagner's in, like, say it's like 1857

and you tell me, oh, have you heard about this guy, Rihard Wagner?

I will say, oh, he's the X.

Will I say, oh, I heard his opera?

Or will I say, oh, I read his anti-Semitic screed?

You know, like, which one is he more known for?

You would have heard the opera first, right?

like i mean okay i don't have the numbers exactly how often they were performed but they they did well okay an opera house at the time holds something like 1200 people an evening in a well-performing week you might have as many listeners to the operas as you would have readers of one of these periodicals i mean i'm saying these periodics had had great circulation and like especially people sort of professionally occupied with music, which was a lot of people at the time, would have read it.

But, you know, the first oboeist playing in the orchestra probably would might know a lot about his essays.

Certainly the conductor might have come across it, but like, no, the average person would not have.

And then the other thing is, of course, very few of these texts were translated, meaning Wagner becomes kind of a big deal in France a little bit later in the 19th century, but like around that time, especially thanks to Tristan.

And I imagine the number of people there who were even aware of these writings was quite small.

So no, you would have encountered him as a composer and as a composer really associated with these, not yet with the ring, right, but with these kind of modernist works really about gender and sexuality.

So, at the same time, as he sort of turns more towards writing, as he starts sort of towards this middle period in his work, he has this big philosophical conversion.

He decides to abandon Feuerbach and he gets really into the thought of Arto Schopenhauer, whom we've already encountered in the Nietzsche episode.

And that's pretty important.

He seems to have first read Schopenhauer in 1854.

And it's a funny story.

Well, first of all, do you remember about Arto Schopenhauer?

What's his whole deal?

Absolutely nothing.

You're going to have to bring me back up to speech.

So big misogynist for our purposes and sort of the most famous pessimist of 19th century philosophy, right?

Basically, has this kind of what he thinks of as Buddhist, but whatever, like idea of like basically resignation and the sort of quieting of all desires as

the only solution to human suffering.

So he's going from Feuerbach, who in some way is like history's ultimate optimist, right?

Saying, like, we have this picture of the divine that can guide us into a better future.

And all we have to do is now kill God, basically, and become gods ourselves.

Right.

And then he just makes a hard turn into this guy who's like, nope, everything's futile.

And we just have to accommodate ourselves to that fact.

Right.

So

it's a pretty serious change.

Yeah.

Yeah.

do we know what engenders this shift

it's tricky i mean one thing is certainly like you know 1850 is a darker time for him than 1848 like a lot of things seem possible and like you know he's he's looking through the wreckage of you know of a career and of of a revolution there's that but there is also the fact that i think that that you know there were these inconsistencies in his leftism in his belief in the future that schopenhauer may have spoken to more right it's like anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Favre.

Like there's always a little kernel of darkness there.

Yeah, even when he's just going you pee.

Yeah.

And then he gets brought over into the dark side.

Yeah.

I mean, just to give you a sense, and I'm sorry to read you just like large blocks of Wagner here, but like

we, for the, the ending of the entire tetralogy, so cutting ahead a little bit, just a tiny bit.

you know, you can see, see how, like, what that shift is really all about.

So at the end of the opera, spoiler alert, like everything goes to shit.

And a character named Brunhilde, who we'll meet in this opera.

Oh, I like her.

She's fantastic.

She's one of my favorites.

She's great.

Yeah.

She gives basically a speech that is kind of supposed to emblematize and epitomize what this whole cycle has been about, which like after 17 hours, like we're all kind of wanting to know, right?

And this is something that Wagner rewrote periodically.

And in each case, discussed it with his wife at the time, Cosima.

and others sort of being like,

I don't like it that way.

Like it's one of the most worked over passages.

And we have like, I forget how many versions of this.

But so here's the version.

I believe this is the first.

So she says, as she's about to ride her horse into a funeral pyre and cause Ragnarok, the end of all things.

If the race of gods has passed away like a breath, I leave the world behind without a steward.

I now give the treasure of my most sacred knowledge to the world.

Not goods.

not gold, nor divine splendor, not house, not court, nor imperious pomp, not the deceptive alliance of murky contracts, not the harsh law of hypocritical customs.

Only love allows bliss and joy and sorrow to be, right?

So she's saying like

the truth of this is the vanity of

our traditional conventional strictures.

The only thing that is real is love, right?

Like this is pure Feuerbach, right?

Like she's just like, she's taking a huge huff of

a inhaler that says Feuerbach and writing her remorse over the cliff, basically.

And here's the version of the same speech that Wagner also didn't use, but drafted in the 1860s.

So after reading Schopenhauer, quote, everything eternal, blessed end.

Do you now know how I won?

Mournful love, deepest suffering opened my eyes.

I saw the end of the world.

Right.

So like, this is very different.

She's just like, everything's going to shit.

And I understood that.

I finally understand that this is the way of all things.

Right.

Brutal shift, like really 180 degrees.

And how much time time does that take on the stage to get there?

That's like a minute.

Oh, if you get there, 17 hours, but it's.

Well, I mean, but like between those two,

it's just

like 180 right away.

Absolutely.

And the thing is, it's not clear that Wagner, remember how I mentioned that he sort of wasn't very good at, he was very good at reconciling ideas, but at least telling himself he'd reconciled them and very bad at actually substituting them.

And that's part of why he keeps rewriting this is that he, it's not clear he totally abandons Fleuerbach, like even though he like believes now the opposite of it, right?

So just to give you an example, Wagner reads The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer's Magnum Opus, in 1854.

And the first thing he does is draft a letter to Schopenhauer.

It's the fan letter.

Right.

And it's a kind of a weird fan letter because he's like, hey, loved your book.

One quick amendment.

You say that basically we have to recognize our suffering, that everything is suffering and that basically the nullity of human existence, et cetera, et cetera.

But isn't there maybe salvation and love?

Right.

So he's like, hey, I like your whole deal, but what if your whole deal was wrong and Feuerbach was right, right?

It's a weird fucking fan letter, right?

Like Schopenhauer, like, no, read my book, man.

It's very much like inside you there are two wolves.

It's Feuerbach and Schopenhauer.

Exactly.

In his defense, he doesn't end up sending the letter, which is nice.

So he has some self-awareness.

But he's, well, I mean, he's talking to himself.

He's not talking to Schopenhauer.

He's talking to himself.

That's true.

Like,

it's a document of an internal conflict.

It is.

It is.

But it is also like, that's important to note.

Like, this is a man who writes notes for a living.

I'm sorry, but like, is not a professional philosopher being like, hey, man, love your philosophy.

Like, I mean, like, I don't talk that way to like the guy who like grouts my tile.

Like, like, that man, like, does philosophy for a living, like, have a certain modicum of respect, but he's like, quick point, what if everything you said is wrong?

Real big fan, though, right?

Like, he's just like, there isn't kind of, on the one hand, yes, this is an internal contradiction.

On the other hand, like, the pure ballsiness of being like quick amendment all of it right is like really kind of remarkable and like it just speaks to the ego that's behind this right like which kind of can't countenance or can't stand for long the fact that like i am currently grappling with two contradictory impulses that i can't reconcile there are moments when wagner seems aware of it but it's very brief and he loves sort of coming up with these false like i agree with you but what if everything you say is wrong basically it's it's a very weird, very weird move.

Yeah, he's got, you know, he contains multitudes.

He seems very confident and often very confused.

And something that we talked about last time was that when Wagner has

a hole in his worldview that he doesn't quite know what to do with, rather than reassessing from first principles and wondering if maybe he was wrong about the assumptions that led him to this, like, you know, this hole, this incompleteness, this unanswered question.

He often kind of fills that hole in with racism.

Exactly.

He's just like, well, I'll just use some racism to glue these inconsistencies together.

Exactly.

And Slavoj Žižek has a wonderful essay about how this works in Wagner specifically.

And I should say, so the other thing he does end up reading, I think, in the 1850s is Artoul de Gobineau's The Origin of Inequality Among the Races.

So like he, at this point, he's like literally mainlining like what we today recognize as

forerunners of modern-day quote-unquote scientific racism.

And so basically, you're absolutely right.

And he reaches for that spackle a lot more.

So maybe in order to show people how this works, we can look at the second opera in the cycle.

So this is the Valkyrie, the Valkur.

So this is one of our five-hour ones.

This is long.

So this is a opera that is set right after Odin has taken the gold back, rebuilt his nice house, paid off the giants.

And there's some like, ooh, maybe this isn't going to go well.

And then you said last time that the Valkyrie opera begins with two siblings fucking on a bearskin rug.

Oh, yeah.

Like that's a, that's a hell of an opening scene.

Yeah.

Well, it works its way up there.

And you, but I think having followed Wagner down his Feuerbach obsession, you might imagine how and why this happens.

But yeah, so it's about, well, we don't quite know how much, but it's at least 20 years after the events of the Schreingold.

We are led to assume that, well, Wotan has not been doing doing super hot in general, but he's, remember, he's got this scheme.

He's trying to get this gold back, and he's playing the long game.

So it's a very long game.

For listeners at home, Wotan is Wagner's name for Odin is like the Zeus fake air king of the gods.

That's right.

It is a Germanic historic name.

Yeah.

So we open in the opera on a storm, on a lone house in a forest, and a young man bursts in through the door.

And he says he's being pursued by enemies.

And quote, whoever's house this is, here I must rest.

And this is Sigmund.

And the lady of the house is kind of home alone.

She welcomes him, gives him food and drink, and says her name is Siglunde.

She's quite unhappily married to a man named Hunding, who's about to return any minute now.

But basically, she's like, you can shelter here until my husband returns.

So then Hunding shows up, kind of a jerk, questions Sigmund.

And Sigmund says that he grew up with his mother and with his twin sister, foreshadowing in the forest.

One day, he found their house burnt down, his mother dead, and his sister abducted.

He got into a fight with a family that was forcing their daughter into marriage.

And basically, then Hunding is like, well, okay, that's my family.

So, like, yes, he kills a bunch of my kinsmen.

And he says, okay, my wife stupidly offered you right of hospitality.

So you can stay the night, but tomorrow we're going to fight for the death.

Right.

Like,

I will not dishonor my house.

I trust that you won't dishonor it either.

Foreshadowing.

But tomorrow we're going to kill each other.

So, See Glinda does the obvious thing and ruffies her husband and tells sigmund her story basically she was forced to marry hunding and basically at this point they start realizing that like they might well be each other's long-lost siblings but during her wedding to hunding which was by all accounts just a very very sad affair because she didn't want to do it an old man that no one knew foreshadowing showed up and thrust a sword into the ash tree at the center of Hunding's house.

It's been there sort of in the

set design the entire time, or it's supposed to be.

And no one's been able to pull it out.

Sigmund pulls out the sword.

The two realize that they are siblings, and they do the next obvious thing and start doing it right there under the ash tree with the sword right there while the roofied husband sleeps off his roofieing off to the side.

As you say, a hell of an opening.

There's a lot happening here.

And I think it's fun to kind of read through the scene again, like the way we've been doing in terms of its politics.

But here you'll notice it's clearly a social critique, but it is a social critique routed through intimate relationships, right?

Like before it was about like capital, gold, our relationship to nature, and gender was sort of overlaid.

But this time it's really about gender itself, I would say.

Like in the Val Cule, really gender takes center stage and sexuality takes center stage and becomes kind of a motive force for politics.

Yeah.

So how would you analyze that scene that I kind of rushed you through?

Well, there's a lot about force, right?

And then there's also sort of divine grace, quasi-divine grace, like natural grace, perhaps on this one family, right?

Yeah.

So there's noble and ignoble masculinities, and then there is the femininity that's virtue as being able to tell the difference.

Exactly.

Where the virtue specifically is not adherence to contract, but adherence to nature.

right right but to say the put the most obvious thing first right in case anyone's wondering, twin cest wasn't something that was usually presented as a morally good thing in 19th century literature and opera.

But Wagner is clearly saying this is justified.

Right.

And the opera makes it, goes out of its way to point out, as you say, that nature smiles on them.

Right.

Basically, right, he's driven into the house by a storm.

And then.

as they recognize each other they sing a whole song about basically oh well the storm has stopped how weird now there's the moon shines onto our bear rug Should we like,

I don't know, are you feeling what I'm feeling?

Right.

Like, so basically it's nature is like, do it, do it, do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and, and they, so they basically, the pleasing moon kind of illuminates the scene.

So it's very interesting, right?

On the one hand, Wagner is very clearly insisting in a very Feuerbachian way on the human element, not a choice, right?

The through line in the entire scene is that anything that human beings are forced into is essentially invalid.

And you can think, again, about property and all that other stuff, but here it's sexuality, right?

But the choices can all, the natural spontaneous choices can also be corrupt, right?

Like they were for,

you know, the Nibalong, the dwarf who like naturally choose, like of his own volition, chooses gold over love in the previous opera.

So this is the central contradiction, right?

There are some people who contravene nature.

There are things that are unnatural and therefore immoral, right?

But exactly.

Like the question is like, where does that motivation come from?

But generally, good people tend to be best when they're guided by their own natural inclinations, right?

So what I'm seeing is a hierarchy of people, right?

Like there's a good people whose natural inclinations will lead them towards justified, righteous, good things.

And then there's the bad people whose natural inclinations will lead them towards corruption.

Well, see, I think Wagner would say those aren't natural inclinations, right?

To imprison another human being.

And And I mean, this, we might even agree with him there.

He's like,

the idea of entering into a marriage someone's being forced into, like, that's not natural.

Like, you have to talk your way into that.

That's a messed up thing to do, right?

It's inhumane.

And like, you know, you're

coercive.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

And he's like, that's not our, that's not our nature as people.

And it shows that you corrupt it to some extent, right?

So Wagner hates arranged marriage.

He hates the kinds of strictures and limitations that kind of traditional morality, economic interests, especially place on desire.

And it's part and parcel kind of its anti-capitalism, right?

Sigmund and Siglinde are obviously breaking some pretty basic rules, right?

Sigmund is, remember, Hunding's guest for one.

He could have just like waited a day and then done it somewhere else, but like be like, oh, thank you, thank you for the food and the shelter.

I'm going to run off with your wife, right?

And what they're doing should, by rights, kind of freak out the audience.

But part of why the opera suggests that Sigmund and Siglinda are right not to respect Hunding, his house, and all that stuff, is because it's all built on a lie.

Basically, he bartered his wife, right?

She tells the story, and I'll quote her here.

The men's clan sat here in the hall, invited to the wedding by Hunding.

He married a woman that without asking her, thieves gave him as a wife, right?

He's like, what is a wife?

It's property and it's theft, right?

And we have also already, because of Sigmund's story, we also know that he sold off his sister, right?

No, he, his sister got abducted.

He would never do that, right?

Like, so, and in fact, he has gotten into another fight with Hunding's family.

No, no, I'm not talking about Sigmund, I'm talking about Hunding's sister, right?

Hunding also sold off his sister, sold off another woman.

I don't know if it's ever made clear, but like, basically, these people are wife barterers, yeah.

And so, and Sigmund is innately, it's just disgusted by that, right?

So, it's a really, really interesting, like the traffic in women basically is a sign of like capitalist corruption, right?

This is the, this is something that Marx, that

Gail Rubin, you know, that like, you know, a lot of people would sign their name to this idea that like the first sign of capitalist exploitation is the commodification of sexuality, of our natural sympathies for one another.

I mean, that's Engels.

That's the origin of the family, right?

Right.

So in some way, Wagner is grappling with these questions of freedom and autonomy on the one hand, our natural instincts, and then how they sort of relate to morals, to rules, to society at large, right?

And the question of rules brings us back to the hero of our first opera, the Scheing Gold, right?

Votan,

who is kind of with our sort of hero/slash anti-hero last time,

and who, let's say, has both a penchant for rule-breaking and awkwardly enough, is also kind of the guarantor of a bunch of rules, right?

Vohan is the Odin.

He's the god of the, yes, okay.

Yeah.

So he basically, as a god, safeguards all these rules and treaties, but you know, he,

in Wagner's version, is also someone who, and I think actually in the Edad too, is kind of a figure that doesn't always play by the rules, right?

Right.

Like he's got his staff.

You mentioned his staff that's engraved with all the world's oaths, but he has different set of rules for himself.

Exactly, exactly.

And so you won't be shocked to find out that when we meet him again, he is in a bit of a bind.

He has once again

created a bunch of problems for himself.

And so I've already kind of alluded to this, right?

Like you will not be shocked to find out that Sigmund and Siglinde, the two star-crossed twincest lovers, are in fact his children.

Wait, no, that is a plot twist for me.

Don't make me feel dumb for not anticipating.

Well, I mentioned that during her wedding, an old man showed up and trusted,

right?

Like that old man is supposed to be her own child, right?

Which is going to be important, right?

It's nice that he showed up at his human daughter's wedding.

Well, one that she didn't want,

which she nevertheless let proceed.

But he's like, hey, here's a sword anyway.

Bye.

And he just sticks it in the tree.

I got a place to be.

I'm buying cigarettes, you guys.

Here's your wedding present.

I'm out of here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And no one knows who he is, right?

She relates this as this, this old man, because they never meet him because he's doing the Zeus thing and just kind of.

He's a deadbeat dad.

Yeah.

Like Zeus, he's got like children kind of everywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And some of them are little magic, right?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

and and obviously like he's also married right so like this is like you know he has a wife who's also a goddess and so like knows basically all this stuff right and so what's happened is that you know he has these two extramarital children who have now you know broken a bunch of laws so like turns out right there's an incest taboo there's marital fidelity there is the law of hospitality right like whatever else you do like if someone's like yeah you can crash here tonight like maybe go and

try and square with your wife right it feels on the single bare rug i mean like it's really quite efficient and all of it just because it was a little stormy outside which is which is really remarkable right and as you say like wutan is the lord of contracts and his wife frica is the guardian of home and hearth so they both should be pretty affronted by this right

so in the second scene of the opera this is what we get we go back up to the gods we like leave the the humans to their fate and the first thing we get is basically that frica shows up and says to to Wotan, like, how are you not pissed at this?

Like, like

they basically took a giant dump on all our rules.

And basically, Wotan's answer is, like, why are you making a fuss?

Like, come on, this is not a big deal.

And the reason is interesting.

And it's pure Wagner, right?

And I'll just read you.

I mean, this is sort of a very rough translation of what he says.

Unholy I deem the oath that unites unloving people.

And do not dare make me hold together by force what you are unable to hold together by inclination and by love.

For where bold forces stir, I openly advise war, right?

So he's basically saying, well, it's nice to sort of insist on the marital oath being sacred

if these people actually love each other.

It's unholy.

to hold together what doesn't want to be together.

It was never going to be together in the first place, right?

Like this man purchased this woman.

And I'm not sure that like breaking that marital bond is the real travesty here.

So he's also endorsing nature over formal law, right?

He's like, there's something higher than our oaths and our rules.

It is this kind of other different calling.

Yeah, exactly.

So he's really interested in this question of nature and he's conferring a certain dignity on nature, right?

He's saying in some way, social convention that has gotten detached from nature is really no binding force at all, right?

Like it has no moral value.

And I think, I think you're already picking up on the kind of ambivalence in that.

On the one hand, like, yay, kind of, right?

Because it's like, there's a lot here of sort of a critique of Christianity, critique of conventional morality, et cetera, et cetera, that is very much in keeping with his kind of social revolutionary tendencies.

On the other hand, it's very clear that, like, again, it's like nature is for him the kind of magic wand.

And like, you can very easily, like, part of why the Walsang twins, Sigmund and Siglinda, are drawn to one another is because they're related.

Like, you know, yes, there's the kind of incest bit of it, but it's also like they're of a kind, right?

Right.

So this could get racist really fast.

And it could be used.

I'm, you know, extrapolating this kind of nature over law worldview further that could be used to justify any number of abuses, right?

It's effectively, among other things, it's a might makes right worldview and it sort of positions

what are posited as like pre-social or pre-legal or pre-political realities or assigned this like a priori status over any kind of higher moral aspiration.

Yeah, exactly.

It's essentially, right?

It's it's a kind of anarchism founded on nature where certain things in nature are taken to be kind of unproblematically hierarchical.

Some things are just better than others.

And like, yeah, that can lead somewhere very, very creepy, very, very quickly.

At the same time, I do think it's important to note that like, this is what a lot of people sort of really fastened onto in Wagner.

Like, they probably didn't notice the more troubling implications of this as much as they did.

That, like, this is pretty bold statement for the mid-19th century.

And it's also just in his defense, Wagner in this scene sort of keeps it.

kind of in balance and really raises some interesting questions.

So just to give you an example, another example of how he puts this, Frica asks Wotan, when when was it heard of that biological siblings made love and wotan says well it happened right he's like today you heard it that is how you learn what comes together by itself she's saying how can you sanction this this is unnatural and he says well it naturally happened right so how is it unnatural isn't maybe the more unnatural thing here that we wedded this woman to this man that she did not love and want to be with right and remember this is right after an entire long scene where the overall point is that basically what's immoral is really going against people's inclinations.

But, and this is what makes, I think, this opera so interesting and makes this scene so interesting, there is of course a problem, right?

Like on the one hand, like, yes, they chose freely.

That's got inherent moral value, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But there's a problem.

They didn't actually choose freely, right?

All of it, their childhood, their separation, the sword, even the storm turns out to be Wotan's doing, right?

And Fricke knows this and calls them out on it in this like really funny way.

So Wotan, for instance, says, do you not respect their own courage?

Really more like initiative in this moment?

And Frica says like, initiative?

Bullshit.

She says, who breathed this into them?

In your protection, they seem strong.

They strive for things that you incite them towards.

And she concludes with this really withering line.

In him, so Sigmund, I only see you, for through you alone, he defies me.

So she's saying, like, what are you talking about?

Their autonomy.

What you call nature and their autonomy, like you are the God who's making them do all these things.

It's absolutely not their own doing.

It's yours.

So Fricka also just made the same critique I made, which is that you can assign any, like the natural is an ideological category more than a descriptive one.

Exactly.

You can assign anything the category of natural and say that it's therefore morally justified.

Yeah.

And I mean, like, she's literally correct, right?

Like, we find out that Wotan, like, basically, like, has impacts on the weather, right?

And remember that the siblings, they see like the storm goes away.

Sigmund has to seek shelter from the storm in her house because of the storm.

Then as they recognize each other, the storm goes away and the moon comes out.

And they're like, well, obviously this is time we should start doing it.

Well, all of that is him.

And she's like, how is this natural?

You've substituted one form of kind of.

outside determination for another and then you called it nature.

Also interesting hermeneutic leaps being made that the the moon necessarily means that it's time to have sex.

I don't know.

This is just not my only interpretation of the appearance of the moon, you know.

Yeah, I am.

But it's this really, I do love that, like, that they both walk in there and you're like, yeah, fair point.

It's like a real ping pong game.

You're like, yeah, come on, like, that guy was an asshole.

It's like, but so are you.

It's like, oh, yeah, that's really fair.

And I really like this stuff.

I have to say, she's, on the one hand, like Wagner clearly kind of casts her as this like shrewish scold, right?

She's both the mistress of the hearth and of the home, but she's also just like the nagging wife.

She's like, you go around having kids everywhere now.

Look what they're doing, you know, but on the other hand, like, she's also got a point and he can tell she has a point.

She's got a huge point.

Exactly.

Right.

She's just correct.

More so than that, she's like, you're a jerk.

Like his plan is incoherent.

Remember, like he thinks, hey, if I don't myself want the rain, if someone else independently wants it, that's how I can get around the stupid curse.

Yeah.

And she's, she doesn't, I think, think about in that register, but she's pointing out the basic flaw in his plan.

She's like, if you keep making it happen, I'm not sure how autonomous anyone's being, right?

Like he has his number.

It is your agency.

It is your desire at play here, Botan.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think that there's something psychoanalytically so rich about it, too, that she's like, on the one hand, like you're like, oh, I want to let everyone be, but like, really, you're living through your children and grandchildren eventually, right?

Like you're, you're just basically, you're unable to really let them, set them free, let them go.

This is this real sort of Reut children in succession kind of energy here, right?

Like, yeah, I was thinking King Lear too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, so basically Frica wins the argument and basically browbeats him into agreeing that, yes, there's going to be this fight tomorrow because of the dishonored home and all.

And Hunding is going to win.

And Sigmund is going to have to die.

But then he asks his favorite Valkyrie, Junhilde, another extramarital daughter of his, by the way, to basically collect Sigmund into Valhalla after he dies, sort of as a, what do you call that?

Like a favor, like an errand.

Yeah.

He's like, go get my son's soul, pick him up, bring him back to our God realm, and I'll.

Yeah, to just kind of like take the bite out of getting killed a little bit, you know.

And his daughter Brunhilde is kind of of two minds about this, right?

She asks, I know that you don't want this.

I would like to do your will.

Which part, right?

The part where you're telling me, let Hunding win, or the part where you clearly want your son to get away with it, right?

And his answer is like really, really interesting.

I'm going to quote it here because he's like clearly just not happy about it.

He says, fight righteously for Fricka, ward for her the wedlock's oath.

What she chose, that too should be my choice.

What good can my will ever gain me, for it cannot fashion that free person?

So fight just for Fricka's servants, right?

So he's saying, like, he's kind of conceding her point.

He's saying, my free will somehow only ever begets executing organs people who are willing to do my bidding i i'm not i'm not getting that person who would be different from me who would actually be independent enough from me for it to matter right and so he just says let's just follow the rules it and it's interesting here like given what we've said about wagner and the revolution note that wotan has gone in two scenes basically from someone celebrating this like new unheard of unheralded thing the natural change the dawning of the new age of Aquarius or whatever, to complete dejection, accommodation to existing power structures, basically like, eh, fuck it, right?

There's a lot of people who read that as basically like his reflections on the revolution.

Yeah.

Wotan at that moment, Adorno has a very nice passage about that in his, in his great book about Wagner.

This is a portrait of the failed revolutionary.

This is someone who

thought.

that the world wanted to go one direction and that like basically naturally we were on a path to greater freedom, right towards whatever the end of history or something that didn't end up happening and now we're basically stuck with this unloved order that we nevertheless have to kind of accommodate ourselves with and we should say that from then on as adorno points out wutan doesn't really show up as like the king of the gods he usually shows up in the figure of the wanderer often not even identified as wutan even though that's clearly him it's the same singer but he like shows up using his big staff as like a walking stick he's got this big broad-rimmed hat on.

And basically, Adorno is like, he looks like kind of the schlumpy failed intellectual, right?

Like one of those guys from 1968 who showed up at Columbia Alumni Weekend to scream at the protesters.

Yeah, big vote energy on that.

Yeah, but I mean, like, so it's, you can imagine that someone who thinks a lot about like political change and the way gender kind of plays into that, the way Oedipal energy kind of motivates political movement etc etc like why I would love the first part of this opera because it's just it it it manages to tell a family story that really is all about like the big unanswered questions of the 19th century and like while it all does end up getting racist as hell eventually like in the meantime like it's just a pretty good and pretty searching i think posing of the problem right like i like there's there's almost no

there are there are sparks of answers that wagner seems to think he has found but really this is a pretty stumped opera, right?

Everyone's just kind of stumped.

Wudan is like, I don't know what to do.

And then his daughter is like, I don't know what to do.

And in a kind of delicious irony, what she'll end up doing, this is the main plot actually of the opera.

We haven't even really launched into it yet, is that she'll defy him.

Well, she'll defy him.

And then he'll be like, why the fuck would you defy me?

And he's like, because you wanted me to.

Like, you didn't want this, right?

Like, I did what you wanted.

I respect you, not your word.

Your word was like, oh, we got to kill this guy because my wife says so.

And he obviously didn't want that.

So I didn't let it happen.

Well, it's not him.

He dies, but she saves the pregnant Sieglinde, who's going to...

Have his son.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

So Wodan is going to be a grandfather.

Well, probably for the millionth time, but this time very significantly because their son will be Siegfried, subject to the third opera in the cycle.

But like, so basically the defiance.

is this funny thing right like you can't impose his will because his will itself is ambiguous right and and she just kind of reads that out of it and it's like kind of feel like you were giving me mixed signals there, man.

And I, I, so I just went with my natural gut.

And, like, right, basically, like, so the thing that he claimed at the beginning, like, actually ends up happening sort of as a weird boomerang that she kind of defies, defies when he thinks he's made up his mind, he's like, no, no, you haven't.

And then just kind of goes her own way.

It's, it's such a,

I mean, don't you have those friends?

And for me, they're not always elders, but sometimes they are, where the professed desire is clearly not the actual desire.

Yeah.

And it does put you in a tricky ethical situation, especially if there are other loyalties and relationships at play.

Yeah, it's true.

And it is this really, really nice thing that, like, in some way, Wagner, in dealing with people like that, you sometimes can cast yourself as the tragic heroes.

Like, oh, I'm doomed if I do.

I'm doomed if I don't, right?

If I accede to this and their, their own self-understanding, or if I, or if I go against it.

But in some way, Wagner even deflates Wotan in that moment, right?

Wotan's like, I'm in this incredible pickle.

And she's just like, yeah, cool.

I'm just going to solve it for you.

Right.

Like, he, even, even his sort of like indecision, right?

I mean, like, she ends up dooming him with it, but that's

for another opera.

But in some way, like, even that kind of resignatory pose is ironized.

And basically, we, she's like, no.

You just kind of didn't say what you meant.

That's kind of it, right?

When he finally chases her down, she's hiding out among the other Valkyries where the famous bride of the Valkyries comes in.

He asks, What possessed you to do this?

And she says, No wisdom have I, yet I knew this one thing, that you loved the Valsam.

So these two twins.

I knew all the strife forcing your will that drove that love from remembrance.

The other only could you discern, which, so sad to sight, preyed on your heart that Sigmund might not be shielded, right?

Like she's saying, I know what you said, but I also know your natural inclinations, right?

Yeah.

Talk about nature overpowering a lesser law, right?

Because his word is also supposed to be law.

He's the, he's the patriarch of the gods.

Yeah.

And she is

defying him in a, in loyalty and observance to a higher law of his feeling.

Exactly.

Right.

It's basically, I mean, I think I'm guessing Wagner is cripping this from Antigone, right?

Who makes that claim, right?

It's like, I cannot watch my brother decay in the dust, right?

It's just like, I'm sorry.

That's just like not right.

And it's again, like through all these ironies, I think you're, you're, and these reversals, which are, I think, quite fun.

It's psychologically as interesting an opera as I think any is, you're noticing that the one kind of basso continuo, the one sort of drumbeat under it all is nature, nature, nature.

And like, this is the tricky part, right?

That like in the Valkur, it works pretty well because all the figures are so conflictual and like our sympathies keep volleying back and forth.

And we think like, well, now she has a point.

Now he has a point.

Now she has a point, right?

And it's not always clear whose side nature is on.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Right.

But unfortunately, as we get into the Siegfried part of the story, which is operas three and four,

I think it does become a lot clearer that basically like nature speaks a clearer language.

And this is where I would emphasize again for listeners that he essentially wrote these in reverse order.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

So that basically the more complex stuff kind of comes earlier.

It's not to say, I mean, he worked on them continuously, like nothing is the way he first conceives it, but it was starting, it started out as a Siegfried opera, which I think would have been a lot more simplistic.

I mean, like to give you an example, he, around the same time, he was working on the Jesus of Nazareth opera, right?

Like, Siegfried is like, well, he's going to turn out to be kind of ambivalent in interesting ways, but not nearly as ambivalent as any of the characters in the Valkures, where really everyone sort of holds your sympathy at some point and makes a good point.

But this worrying tendency to kind of run towards nature, it kind of reasserts itself again and again.

And this idea that this is basically his big worry: if we allow nature to just take its course, right?

What limits are there to the future of the species or the future of humanity, whatever, right?

And his answer to that is: well, naturally,

no one would want to be with someone who's not like them, right?

Biologically, right?

Like the racism, like he'll make that very explicit in a couple of writings very much towards the end of his life in the 1880s.

But it's already here, right?

That we cannot divide the fact that

Zequon and Ziglinda end up together from the fact that they are of one tribe, that they're sort of equal in station biologically, right?

They're both descended from the same God.

Right.

It's blood and soily, from which you can extrapolate a nationalist

projects.

Like, you know, who else belongs together and who doesn't belong there?

Yeah, it can get real racist real quick.

Yeah.

And I mean, the idea that, like, sure, I think we all can get behind the idea that like buying partners is not a good idea and maybe not super moral.

But of course, if you think about the fact that like, oh, she would only be with someone like him for his money, right?

Like we're already getting into like sort of incel, weird incel territory, right?

Like right, but the alternative to the naturalized nationalism model is not a like mutually symbiotic pluralism, right?

It's this other kind of corrupt exploitation.

That's that's Wagner's vision.

Exactly.

Well, I mean, he thinks basically, I think that the only reason we have marriages that nature does not sanction is capitalism, right?

Like, so, so the, the, the bad kind of way of living gender or living sexuality is identical with barter for him.

Like, on the one hand, like, I think there's definitely a, you know, there's a very progressive element to that, right?

He's very much, he's read some early feminists.

He was sort of on the barricades with early feminists in 48, right?

Like, where this question of like, why are we being, why is religion used to sort of cement our second class status in society, like, is really front and center.

But on the other hand, he does have this odd tendency or this persistent tendency.

It's not very odd.

It's actually quite predictable.

This persistent tendency to kind of think that all the kinds of things that don't accede to his or don't sort of conform to his own racist vision of how people should naturally, quote unquote, relate to each other, it's just an influence of the perverting power of capital, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the gender politics are just so odious, right?

Because it mixes in a claim of wounded masculinity with a class resentment, which is something you see over and over through history, right?

Like I've been deprived, me, the like noble male of, you know, X dominant group, has been deprived of my rightful status at the head of either my household or of the society more broadly by a nefarious influence that I'm going to name as a target, right?

And sometimes that target has been, you know, trans people or gay people.

Sometimes it's been feminists.

And I think we've seen a lot in the 19th century that it was also often like Judaism.

It was often like this ethnic minority that was very proximate and easy to blame.

Exactly.

And I mean, we should say, I mean, like, it's interesting, right?

Like you say the gender politics are odious.

Like, yes, they are to some extent, but they're also like as progressive as anything that's going to come in the 1850s, right?

I mean, like, I've got higher standards, Adrian.

I mean, it's interesting, right?

Like, Brunhilde, like, this is a time, like, you still get for 50 years, like, women on the opera stage that largely either are like murdering maniacs or get killed, right?

The, like, famous De Fet de la Femme, right?

The fact that, like, at the end, some woman has to, has to just die, right?

Like, Brunhilde, well, she'll be put to sleep, fine, but, like, she basically is, she really, her actions in that opera sort of are central to everything.

And she, and.

She's a strong, independent woman.

She's got the Viking horns and the braids and everything.

And all that.

And while, of course, like ultimately her superpower is that she feels real hard, which you might be like, oh, I roll.

Like, you know, still, she makes, she makes the most interesting moral choice in the entire opera, right?

So like, and it's not a reactive one.

She's like, she's like, I choose to help this other woman, right?

She's like, this is like, I feel sympathy.

I think I understand what my dad really wanted.

And I'm just going to make an executive decision here.

Right.

So it's like, it's really interesting.

And you can see why, why people sort of didn't pick up on the other stuff, or the other stuff, you had to often read Wagner's own writings.

Once you sort of hear the do-go-be-no behind it, you're like, oh shit, like, this is actually not girl boss stuff, or it's like a very creepy kind of girl boss stuff.

And I do want to kind of emphasize still that, like, it, it, it took a while for people to sort of pick up on why nature in Wagner sort of is this deeply troubling category.

So you've mentioned before that you wouldn't necessarily pick up on the politics in the opera.

And I wanted to like get you to tease out a little more about how he was received by his contemporaries at the time politically, and then how that sort of changed as, you know, as he became more avowed with his politics and also as the political meaning of his work has shifted in the past like two centuries.

So, I mean, I think that there's a narrative implicit in your question that I would have to reverse.

Right.

People always understood these operas as kind of right-wing and nationalist for the dumbest possible reason, which was like, oh, it's Nordic gods, they're wearing horns, and they have bare rugs, right?

Like, obviously, this is like not a progressive opera, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that was completely self-understood.

On the other hand, it was often the most perceptive fans of these operas, from people like George Bernard Shaw.

to W.E.B.

Du Bois, like they're like, you know, lots of people go into Bayroj being like, are you guys watching this opera?

Like, it is a social revolutionary call against traditional morality and traditional religious categories, right?

Like, there's the book by George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagner, right?

Where, like, you know, the idea basically for a lot of these people was to say, like, just because they run around in loincloths doesn't mean it's your weird Aryan fantasy.

Like, they pointed out that, like, the guy that's supposed to be the sort of Germanic superhero, right?

Like, Wotan is a dirtbag.

Siegfried turns out to be a dummy, right?

Like these are not your heroes.

This is a very, very sort of gimlet-eyed kind of view of these people, right?

And so it's really more the opposite that the initial reception was very much like, oh, this is our Germanic mythology.

Because of course, the Tetralogy sort of first,

you were able to see it in the flesh, as it were, as Germany was becoming a country, right, in 1871.

So basically, it sort of got mashed together with that.

And then there were a bunch of leftists being like, are we sure this guy is the enemy?

Because like, if you watch this up, right, it's really about how like capitalism is bad and we should like dethrone the aristocracy, which like, I don't know, I'm cool with that, you know?

And so like, maybe we should burn down Valhalla.

Yes, Brunhilda has some decent ideas.

Yeah.

Like, let's go for it.

Right.

And so this, so that's, that's sort of where things stood.

And I mean, like, the Wagner clan itself sort of was on the right persistently.

Wagner sort of pulled a votan.

He basically became, what's his name, from succession.

He became Logan.

Yeah.

He basically became Logan Roy in that like he sort of crushed all his children and into submission.

His son Siegfried, Wagner, he named him Siegfried, also tried to become an opera composer.

He was very bad.

He was also an early member of various Nazi groups, was married to a died-in-the-wool.

Well, it was a marriage of convenience.

He was gay, but to a out-and-out Nazi.

And then his sons basically were like very, very close with a man they called Uncle Wolf, who was none other than Adolf Hitler.

So like it, it gets, it gets really, really horrible.

But throughout all of this, you have to imagine as this family, which I always call like the monsters of evil, basically, are putting on these operas, these seemingly retrograde operas, like everyone, who are not everyone, but like a bunch of people that are like.

vital important leftist thinkers, right?

Black, gay, feminist, what have you, right?

Are sitting in the audience and seeing what's also happening in these operas, right?

And in 1933, when the Nazis come to power and basically Bayreuth has this big kind of revival because the Nazis are like, this is our composer, right?

Thomas Mann goes into exile.

Basically, they come to power.

He gives one talk.

And it's like, I'm out of here.

I'm moving first to Switzerland, eventually to Pacific Palisades.

His lecture is on Wagner, right?

Ans Bloch, the Marxist philosopher, gives a long talk the year after, I believe, or 34, 35, basically being like, we cannot leave this guy to the Nazis.

Like there is something else here, and we need to hold on to it.

Like these people do not understand Wagner and like we shouldn't leave it to him, leave him to them just because, you know, yes, it has like the horned helmets in it, right?

So like...

Even, you know, in the 1930s, like there are tons of leftist thinkers, right?

Adorno's Wagner book has written something like 37, 38.

That's late.

Yeah, everyone is basically sort of like still, as the Nazis are putting on like

their own festivals in Bayreuth, like I think

there were operas that ended with the singing of the Horst Vessel elite, right?

So like really, like they're basically propaganda events.

There are Wagnerians all throughout the Western world being like, we have to insist.

We have to keep fighting for the legacy of these operas because it isn't what these people are making it out to be.

It's not, we were not deceived.

They are deceiving themselves.

These operas are doing something different and something more

than they think.

Right.

Is that,

is that, is that cope, though?

Like, because you know, it seems like Wagner was pretty much like personally very much, you know, you don't want to put that much stock in authorial intent, but it does seem like he was quite avowedly like, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah.

I mean it in the racist way, as was evidenced by all of his writing on how racist he was.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely tricky.

And I definitely wouldn't, there are are people who sort of say like, oh, his own ideas don't really matter.

And I'm not in that camp at all.

I do think these are, I'm on record as saying that I think these,

the writings are not distinct.

You can find this stuff in the operas pretty easily.

But at the same time, you know, the question, right, there's this, there's this wonderful about Tabenyamin line that every great work of civilization is also a great work of barbarism, right?

The idea that...

you leave it just to them is I think that's what offended people, right?

Like, I don't think anyone was ever confused about the fact that, like, what Wagner had intended, but they basically thought, like, well, it exceeded what you wanted, and he created something more.

It's the same way that gay people watched Hollywood new mellow dramas about them being brutally murdered and could like find camp value in them, right?

You, there's something in the object itself that gives strength and that gives support to positions that, you know, the creator of the work probably didn't have in mind or had in mind only in a very, in a very unconscious or inchoate way there's always value to be or not always but there's often value to be excavated from reactionary art exactly this is exactly and uh you know this is the work of audiences that might be acting even against the creators exactly exactly so i think we might leave it here with the end of valkur who knows maybe we'll come back with a third episode maybe we won't but uh we'll see how these do i think we should record minimum five hours on wagner yeah just the length of one wagon one opera yeah yeah so you can simulate the experience

thank you adrian i had a blast thank you

the men with the right would like to thank the michelle r clayman institute for gender research for generous support jennifer portillo for setting up our studio our producer is katie lau