Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner

Fliegende Hollnder
Tannhuser
Lohengrin
Das Rheingold
Die Walkre
Siegfried
Gtterdmmerung
Tristan & Isolde
Die Meistersinger
Parsifal

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 - 1860

Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner
auteur: Karl S. Guthke
Harvard Magazine

Schopenhauer and Wagner--we tend to think of

them hand in hand, as Goethe and Schiller are
depicted in the monument in Weimar. And why
not? Didn't the composer lavishly acknowledge
his indebtedness to the philosopher-who
supposedly gave his follower his blessing? Yet,
how firm is that handshake?
Those of us who hold, with Miss Marple in Murder
in the Vicarage, that theory is "so very different
from practice, isn't it?" can explore the matter
through the single document of an actual
"meeting" of the minds of Wagner and
Schopenhauer (who in real life never met)-the
extensive marginal notes Schopenhauer penciled
into a copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen that its
author had sent him. This copy, now housed
among the treasures of Harvard's Houghton
Library, in its hands-on way may tell us more
http://www.hacom.nl/~detempel/Arthur.htm (1 von 8)11.01.2006 17:44:18

Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner

about the relationship of these two giants of

cultural life, Teutonic style, than any number of
in-depth analyses of their relationship deduced
from intellectual history. (I quote the annotations
by permission of Houghton Library.)
In his autobiography, Mein Leben, Wagner
describes vividly his encounter with
Schopenhauer's The World as Will and
Representation: "The impact was extraordinary
and decisive for the rest of my life." He read the
hefty volume four times between the autumn of
1854 and the following summer. Like a
revelation, the book illuminated for him the
meaning of his own work. "I looked at my
Nibelungen poem," he wrote, "and realized to my
own surprise that what was now stupefying me
[befangen machte] as theory had long been
familiar to me in my own poetic creation. In this
manner, I came to understand my own Wotan."
Throughout his theoretical writings, he would
invoke the authority of Schopenhauer's
understanding of music as the manifestation of
"being" in its true essence or essential truth; no
other aesthetics of music had, to Wagner's mind,
any claim to validity-or was better suited to
further Wagner's own cause. Schopenhauer, on
the other hand, whose magnum opus had
appeared with little notice in 1819, owed his
overwhelming upsurge of fame in the second half
of the nineteenth century to a considerable
extent to the phenomenal ascent of his ardent
follower, who incorporated the Weltanschauung
of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung not only into
his musical aesthetics but also into some of his
later operas-Tristan und Isolde, Die
Meistersinger, and Parsifal.
Schopenhauer confirmed Wagner's own
philosophical mood of resignation, which declares
everyday reality an illusion; he enlightened
Wagner about himself. Wagner stated this
unequivocally in letters written at this time; he
recommended Schopenhauer to any and all of his
friends in the warmest terms and before long had
surrounded himself in his Zurich exile with a
crowd of Schopenhauer fans. One friend was
even dispatched to Frankfurt to visit the
notoriously disgruntled sage with an invitation to
come to Switzerland to be lionized.
Schopenhauer played coy: he no longer traveled,
he responded. Undaunted, the Zurich Wagnerians
intensified their veneration to the point of
promoting the establishment of a professorship of
http://www.hacom.nl/~detempel/Arthur.htm (2 von 8)11.01.2006 17:44:18

Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner

Schopenhauerism at the University of Zurich.

Schopenhauer acknowledged that "would be a
great honor for me."
The project failed. But that did not dampen the
enthusiasm of the Zurich cnacle for the grim old
man in Frankfurt-nor Schopenhauer's gratitude
for their attention: he had, after all, been chafing
for decades at the inattention of the reading
public. Yet the beautiful Zurich-Frankfurt
relationship wouldn't have been quite the same if
Wagner had known how Schopenhauer the
reader reacted to the copy of Der Ring des
Nibelungen that Wagner had sent him in
December 1854 "in veneration and gratitude," as
the autograph dedication of the Houghton copy
proclaims. Wagner's autobiography discloses a
slightly embarrassing secret: Schopenhauer
never did send a written reply. Like the good
Schopenhauerian that he was, Wagner claimed in
Mein Leben that he had "resigned himself" from
the outset to the prospect of not receiving a
reply. But in fact he did suffer from
Schopenhauer's chilling silence; Cosima Wagner's
diary records his grief and chagrin as late as
March 1878-a generation after the fact.
Still, Wagner did not hold this disappointment
against Schopenhauer. His forbearance was
made easier by reports from two friends who had
visited the philosopher. They told him that
Schopenhauer "had made significant and
favorable comments on my poem." That the truth
was cosmetized more than a little in this
formulation is proved by wording reported in
Schopenhauer's Conversations. But what the
sage of Frankfurt penciled in the margins of his
presentation copy of the Ring was even more
drastic. For Schopenhauer did look this gift-horse
in the mouth, and what he saw didn't please him
in the least.
Taking a good look at these marginal notes is not
without some voyeuristic thrill. Do they, for
example, confirm what we are told in the
authoritative Wagner-Handbuch, published in
1986-namely, that the philosopher's comments,
no matter how biting, "evidently appreciated the
literary rank" of Wagner's ambitious work?
No doubt about it: Schopenhauer, reading
Wagner's Ring in the winter of 1854-55, pencil in
hand, was in a difficult position. The book had
been sent to him as a token of reverence, and
yet only the
http://www.hacom.nl/~detempel/Arthur.htm (3 von 8)11.01.2006 17:44:18

Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner

preceding May he had been flattered by reports

that music critics were using his
"pronouncements" about music in their polemics
against Wagner's operas, "and rightly so," as he
wrote to a friend. What exactly did Schopenhauer
indicate about his admirer and adversary in his
marginal annotations?
It is obvious from the start that it is
Schopenhauer the famed stylist, the universally
acknowledged master of German prose, who was
wielding the pencil. Wagner's language was
offensive to Schopenhauer-as it still is to many
readers for precisely the same peculiarities that
irritated Schopenhauer. And the sage of Frankfurt
read the text most carefully. Of course, much of
Schopenhauer's criticism loses its pungency in
translation, but a few examples of his stylistic
comments may give anglophone readers some
idea of his objections.
Schopenhauer was particularly annoyed, as his
vigorous question marks and critical underlinings
(sometimes accompanied by multiple
exclamation marks) suggest, by Wagner's
artificially archaic vocabulary. Nobody but an
expert in things medieval would know today, any
more than Schopenhauer did then, that a
freislicher Streit is a "terrifying quarrel." Nor did
infelicitous constructions, stylistic awkwardness,
and illogical turns of phrase escape
Schopenhauer's angry pencil. Some of these
passages are mildly funny, like the one
suggesting that Erda does not know--to judge by
her syntax in Rheingold--whether she gave birth
to her three daughters or whether they were
created at the dawn of time. Another such
stylistic aberration, which rated one of
Schopenhauer's quizzically amused exclamation
marks, eventually caught the dull eye of Wagner
himself when he revised his text slightly: Wotan
originally says about Wala in Walkre, "News I
received from her; / but from me she received a
child."
What Schopenhauer found consistently
exasperating about Wagner's style were his
characteristic composite nouns, like Felssteine,
Felsensaum, Felsspitze (rocks, rocky edge, rocky
peak). "Ears!" Schopenhauer repeatedly penciled
in the margin in his powerful hand, "he has no
ears! the deaf musician." It is the sound of these
and other such difficult words that go against
Schopenhauer's grain. The implication is, clearly,
that Wagner is a poet-composer who is at odds
http://www.hacom.nl/~detempel/Arthur.htm (4 von 8)11.01.2006 17:44:18

Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner

with the building materials of his trade, "the deaf

musician." Schopenhauer summed up this
criticism in large letters: "Language should be
the serf of the master."
Other marginal notes remark on elements of
substance and subject matter, rather than style.
In one instance, Schopenhauer was reminded of
Goethe's Faust, writing in the line that came to
mind, without implying any criticism or
worthwhile comment. But the running
commentary becomes more interesting when the
text becomes more immoral. The prime bone of
contention is the adulterous and incestuous love
scene of Siegmund and Sieglinde that concludes
the first act of Walkre. Sieglinde's seductive
suggestion that, were she to find "the sacred
friend," her arms would embrace the hero, is
translated into plain English (Schopenhauer was
notoriously anglophile) in a firm marginal note:
"Go, and murder my husband." Near the
beginning of this fervid scene he writes in large
letters, "One may forget about morality on
occasion, but one should not slap it in the face,"
and a little later, "Infamous!" Likewise, it is the
dubious morals of the sibling lovers that the
austere critic has in mind when, at the end of the
scene (after brother and sister have recognized
each other, which only increases their turgid
infatuation), he comments as the curtain falls,
"High time, too." Understandably, Schopenhauer
couldn't let pass such unbridled abandon to what
he called the "will," in the sense of animal drive.
The "slap in the face of morality" occurs a second
time in the first act of Siegfried, when the
uncouth young hero turns brusquely against
Mime, who has raised him with paternal love and
sacrifice. "Outrageous ingratitude," says
Schopenhauer, "maulschellirte Moral." The
philosopher who preached abnegation of the
world (and who in private life was much less
inclined to such abstinence) here took the
position of conventional morality and pedestrian
propriety-rather an unexpected spectacle. In any
case, and contrary to what the WagnerHandbuch tells us, Schopenhauer seems to see
neither hide nor hair of literary value, be it
stylistic or substantive, as he goes over the Ring,
pencil at the ready.
This is confirmed by a few additional, satiric
comments, all pointing to something
unintentionally comical in Wagner's writing. How
else should one take Schopenhauer's comment
http://www.hacom.nl/~detempel/Arthur.htm (5 von 8)11.01.2006 17:44:18

Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner

on Fricka's obstreperousness toward her

husband, Wotan, in Act II of Walkre? "Wodan
henpecked," he writes in the margin (Wotan
"under the slipper" is the somewhat more
domestically picturesque German). A stage
direction soon after is annotated by the remark
that Wotan-a god, after all-"cowers and obeys."
At the beginning of the third act of Walkre,
Wagner isn't doing much better, his critical
reader thinks. Die Wolken spielen die Hauptrolle,
we read: "The clouds play the lead role."
Schopenhauer also seems to be amused by the
inept and tongue-twisting description in Siegfried
of the dragon, Fafner, which he underlines and
marks with an exclamation mark:
eidechsenartiger Schlangenwurm (lizardlike
serpent-worm) is apparently just a bit too much
for him. (In 1904 Wagner biographer W. A. Ellis,
who knew of Schopenhauer's comments, came to
his hero's rescue, somewhat unhelpfully, by
pointing out that this was a zoologically accurate
description of an iguanodon.) Siegfried's
simplemindedly blunt self-introduction to Gunther
in Gtterdmmerung--"Now fight with me, or be
my friend!"--rates three astonished exclamation
marks in the margin. Nor does the pencil-happy
critic seem able to take Brnnhilde entirely
seriously. When she announces her intention to
be burned alive, and on horseback, too, on
Siegfried's funeral pyre, Schopenhauer, who
drew so much inspiration from Indian culture,
writes "Suttee" in the margin. This is hardly a
compliment; more likely it indicates amused
surprise about the inappropriateness of such
fulsome expression of sorrow in the world of
Nordic mythology.

What, then, was Schopenhauer's overall

impression of Wagner's Ring as a text? Nothing in
the marginal notations points to any kind of
appreciation of the "literary rank" of the work. On
the contrary, both the infelicitous style and the
questionable morality of the Ring provoke
Schopenhauer the stylist and the moralist, and
the evidently amused reactions to involuntarily
comical scenes continue this critical vein. When
latter-day Wagnerians (as represented
magisterially in the Wagner-Handbuch) claim that
on the whole Schopenhauer approved of the text
of the Ring, they take into account the
conversational remarks he reportedly made
http://www.hacom.nl/~detempel/Arthur.htm (6 von 8)11.01.2006 17:44:18

Arthur Schopenhauer reads Richard Wagner

about the work shortly after reading it. But

remember that these remarks, to the effect that
Wagner-or rather, "the jerk" (der Kerl), in one
honest report-was a poet, not a musician, were
repeated to Wagner by friends who no doubt
heard what they wanted to hear and told him
what he was eager to hear. The remarks,
moreover, were suspiciously similar, and by the
time they reached Wagner they had already been
purified to unadulterated flattery. In Cosima
Wagner's diary of 16 January 1869, some 14
years after the fact, they are: "I admire Wagner
as a poet; but a musician he is not."
So, would "admiration" for Wagner the poet have
been Schopenhauer's last word on the subject?
The marginal notes to the Ring in Houghton
Library suggest nothing of the sort. Not one of
his notations appears favorable, by any stretch of
the imagination. The Weltanschauung of mystical
resignation both men may have shared. But in
their literary and musical tastes (Schopenhauer
preferred Mozart and Rossini), they were
antipodes. Harvard's copy of the Ring
demonstrates this only too clearly. That
handshake (symbolically celebrated at Bayreuth
year in, year out) could only have been
somewhat backhanded. But that pose is not quite
suitable for a monument.

Karl S. Guthke is the Kuno Francke professor of German art

and culture and a Corresponding Fellow of the British
Institute of Germanic Studies.

Graf van Arthur Schopenhauer - Hauptfriedhof Frankfurt

| Home | Naar Boven |

http://www.hacom.nl/~detempel/Arthur.htm (7 von 8)11.01.2006 17:44:18