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The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by
by Bernard Shaw
Preface to the First German Edition
In reading through this German version of my book in the
Manuscript of my friend Siegfried Trebitsch, I was struck by the
inadequacy of the merely negative explanation given by me of the
irrelevance of Night Falls On The Gods to the general philosophic
scheme of The Ring. That explanation is correct as far as it
goes; but, put as I put it, it now seems to me to suggest that
the operatic character of Night Falls On The Gods was the result
of indifference or forgetfulness produced by the lapse of
twenty-five years between the first projection of the work and
its completion. Now it is clear that in whatever other ways
Wagner may have changed, he never became careless and he never
became indifferent. I have therefore inserted a new section in
which I show how the revolutionary history of Western Europe from
the Liberal explosion of 1848 to the confused attempt at a
socialist, military, and municipal administration in Paris in
1871 (that is to say, from the beginning of The Niblung's Ring by
Wagner to the long-delayed completion of Night Falls On The
Gods), demonstrated practically that the passing away of the
present order was going to be a much more complicated business
than it appears in Wagner's Siegfried. I have therefore
interpolated a new chapter which will perhaps induce some readers
of the original English text to read the book again in German.
For some time to come, indeed, I shall have to refer English
readers to this German edition as the most complete in
existence.
My obligation to Herr Trebitsch for making me a living German
author instead of merely a translated English one is so great
that I am bound to point out that he is not responsible for my
views or Wagner's, and that it is as an artist and a man of
letters, and not as a propagandist, that he is conveying to the
German speaking peoples political criticisms which occasionally
reflect on contemporary authorities with a European reputation
for sensitiveness. And as the very sympathy which makes his
translations so excellent may be regarded with suspicion, let me
hasten to declare I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my
nature most strongly. Not that I like the average German: nobody
does, even in his own country. But then the average man is not
popular anywhere; and as no German considers himself an average
one, each reader will, as an exceptional man, sympathize with my
dislike of the common herd. And if I cannot love the typical
modern German, I can at least pity and understand him. His worst
fault is that he cannot see that it is possible to have too much
of a good thing. Being convinced that duty, industry, education,
loyalty, patriotism and respectability are good things (and I am
magnanimous enough to admit that they are not altogether bad
things when taken in strict moderation at the right time and in
the right place), he indulges in them on all occasions
shamelessly and excessively. He commits hideous crimes when crime
is presented to him as part of his duty; his craze for work is
more ruinous than the craze for drink; when he can afford
secondary education for his sons you find three out of every five
of them with their minds lamed for life by examinations which
only a thoroughly wooden head could go through with impunity; and
if a king is patriotic and respectable (few kings are) he puts up
statues to him and exalts him above Charlemagne and Henry the
Fowler. And when he meets a man of genius, he instinctively
insults him, starves him, and, if possible, imprisons and kills
him.
Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have to
struggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call my
higher impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to
be self-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable
and well-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and--as far as human
fraility will allow--conquer it, whereas the German abandons
himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually
proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will
cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing
taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social
experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery,
jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor
and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse
than any official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is
respectable, says the German, therefore it must be good, and
cannot be carried too far; and everybody who rebels against it
must be a rascal. Even the Social-Democrats in Germany differ
from the rest only in carrying academic orthodoxy beyond human
endurance--beyond even German endurance. I am a Socialist and a
Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the
leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England. I
am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German
Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats
tolerate me? Not a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be
taken to the bosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the
Super-Proletarians of all lands should unite. I have pointed out
that the German Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its
Congresses for the last ten years except the things I told them
to do ten years before, and that its path is white with the bones
of the Socialist superstitions I and my fellow Fabians have
slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether I am a Socialist
or not. All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in
my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary
authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me
as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin
bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you
believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was
his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and
that Das Kapital is the Bible?" Hastening in my innocence to
clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of credulity and
ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten times as much
of economics and a hundred times as much of practical
administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and
rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who
despised modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men
of like passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and
that I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and
still consider it one of the most important books of the
nineteenth century because of its power of changing the minds of
those who read it, in spite of its unsound capitalist economics,
its parade of quotations from books which the author had either
not read or not understood, its affectation of algebraic
formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of
propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily
scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in
1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted
as a Bible. In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real
fathers of the Church; and nobody would listen to religion,
poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had to call itself
"scientific," and predict the date of the revolution, as if it
were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."
To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous
blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any
word of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the
scandal of my heresy damaged them more than my support aided
them; and I found myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy
at the moment when, thanks to Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie
and nobility began to smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of
playing with fire, and perhaps by Agnes Sorma's acting as
Candida.
Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a
Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and
stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law,
order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to
put on a headier set of chains; expels anti-militarists with the
blood-thirstiest martial anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser
reason to thank heaven that he was born in the comparative
freedom and Laodicean tolerance of Kingship, and not in the
Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry of Marxism.
Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by
the ties that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I
should have perished of despair in my youth but for the world
created for me by that great German dynasty which began with Bach
and will perhaps not end with Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for
a moment that I learnt my art from English men of letters. True,
they showed me how to handle English words; but if I had known no
more than that, my works would never have crossed the Channel. My
masters were the masters of a universal language: they were, to
go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
and Wagner. Had the Germans understood any of these men, they
would have hanged them. Fortunately they did not understand them,
and therefore only neglected them until they were dead, after
which they learnt to dance to their tunes with an easy
conscience. For their sakes Germany stands consecrated as the
Holy Land of the capitalist age, just as Italy, for its painters'
sakes, is the Holy Land of the early unvulgarized Renascence;
France, for its builders' sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry
and faith; and Greece, for its sculptors' sakes, of the Periclean
age.
These Holy Lands are my fatherlands: in them alone am I truly at
home: all my work is but to bring the whole world under this
sanctification.
And so, O worthy, respectable, dutiful, patriotic, brave,
industrious German reader, you who used to fear only God and your
own conscience, and now fear nothing at all, here is my book for
you; and--in all sincerity--much good may it do you!
London, 23rd. October 1907.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The preparation of a Second Edition of this booklet is quite the
most unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it
first appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its
publisher for printing, as I thought, more copies than the most
sanguine Wagnerite could ever hope to sell. But the result proved
that exactly one person buys a copy on every day in the year,
including Sundays; and so, in the process of the suns, a reprint
has become necessary.
Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to
alter in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has
elicited are protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but
against the facts it records. There are people who cannot bear to
be told that their hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in
a rebellion; that he was proclaimed as "wanted" by the police;
that he wrote revolutionary pamphlets; and that his picture of
Niblunghome under the reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of
unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany
in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels's Condition of
the Laboring classes in England. They frantically deny these
facts, and then declare that I have connected them with Wagner in
a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt them;
and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of
Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of
unquestioned fashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most
exclusive Dresden circles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a
large sale, and be read with satisfaction and reassurance by many
lovers of Wagner's music.
As to my much demurred-to relegation of Night Falls On The Gods
to the category of grand opera, I have nothing to add or
withdraw. Such a classification is to me as much a matter of fact
as the Dresden rising or the police proclamation; but I shall not
pretend that it is a matter of such fact as everybody's judgment
can grapple with. People who prefer grand opera to serious
music-drama naturally resent my placing a very grand opera below
a very serious music-drama. The ordinary lover of Shakespeare
would equally demur to my placing his popular catchpenny plays,
of which As You Like It is an avowed type, below true
Shakespearean plays like Measure for Measure. I cannot help that.
Popular dramas and operas may have overwhelming merits as
enchanting make-believes; but a poet's sincerest vision of the
world must always take precedence of his prettiest fool's
paradise.
As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression
that Wagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and
Lohengrin in his middle age, and The Ring in his later years, may
I again remind them that The Ring was the result of a political
convulsion which occurred when Wagner was only thirty-six, and
that the poem was completed when he was forty, with thirty more
years of work before him? It is as much a first essay in
political philosophy as Die Feen is a first essay in romantic
opera. The attempt to recover its spirit twenty years later, when
the music of Night Falls On The Gods was added, was an attempt to
revive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the Grail. Only
those who have never had any political enthusiasms to survive can
believe that such an attempt could succeed. G. B. S.
London, 1901
Preface to the First Edition
This book is a commentary on The Ring of the Niblungs, Wagner's
chief work. I offer it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner
who are unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least
understand the dilemma of Wotan, though they are filled with
indignation at the irreverence of the Philistines who frankly
avow that they find the remarks of the god too often tedious and
nonsensical. Now to be devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is
devoted to his master, sharing a few elementary ideas, appetites
and emotions with him, and, for the rest, reverencing his
superiority without understanding it, is no true Wagnerism. Yet
nothing better is possible without a stock of ideas common to
master and disciple. Unfortunately, the ideas of the
revolutionary Wagner of 1848 are taught neither by the education
nor the experience of English and American gentlemen-amateurs,
who are almost always political mugwumps, and hardly ever
associate with revolutionists. The earlier attempts to translate
his numerous pamphlets and essays into English, resulted in
ludicrous mixtures of pure nonsense with the absurdest
distorsions of his ideas into the ideas of the translators. We
now have a translation which is a masterpiece of interpretation
and an eminent addition to our literature; but that is not
because its author, Mr. Ashton Ellis, knows the German dictionary
better than his predecessors. He is simply in possession of
Wagner's ideas, which were to them inconceivable.
All I pretend to do in this book is to impart the ideas which are
most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's
equipment. I came by them myself much as Wagner did, having
learnt more about music than about anything else in my youth, and
sown my political wild oats subsequently in the revolutionary
school. This combination is not common in England; and as I seem,
so far, to be the only publicly articulate result of it, I
venture to add my commentary to what has already been written by
musicians who are no revolutionists, and revolutionists who are
no musicians. G. B. S.
Preliminary Encouragements
The Ring of the Niblungs
The Rhine Gold
Wagner as Revolutionist
The Valkyries
Siegfried
Siegfried as Protestant
Night Falls On The Gods
Why He Changed His Mind
Wagner's Own Explanation
The Music of The Ring
The Old and the New Music
The Nineteenth Century
The Music of the Future
Bayreuth
THE PERFECT WAGNERITE
PRELIMINARY ENCOURAGEMENTS
A few of these will be welcome to the ordinary citizen visiting
the theatre to satisfy his curiosity, or his desire to be in the
fashion, by witnessing a representation of Richard Wagner's
famous Ring of the Niblungs.
First, The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its
water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring,
enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today,
and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have
been written before the second half of the nineteenth century,
because it deals with events which were only then consummating
themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the
life he is himself fighting his way through, it must needs appear
to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun
out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation
by the principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of
view, The Ring is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes,
both orchestral and dramatic. The nature music alone--music of
river and rainbow, fire and forest--is enough to bribe people
with any love of the country in them to endure the passages of
political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come.
Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil
music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young
woodsman's horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and
nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of
simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short,
the vast extent of common ground between The Ring and the
ordinary music we use for play and pleasure. Hence it is that the
four separate music-plays of which it is built have become
popular throughout Europe as operas. We shall presently see that
one of them, Night Falls On The Gods, actually is an opera.
It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring
of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and
searching philosophic and social significance. I profess to be
such a superior person; and I write this pamphlet for the
assistance of those who wish to be introduced to the work on
equal terms with that inner circle of adepts.
My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may
suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by
their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such
misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has
any power to move them, they will find that Wagner exacts nothing
further. There is not a single bar of "classical music" in The
Ring--not a note in it that has any other point than the single
direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In
classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us,
first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias,
recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with
counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are
passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other
ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their
prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never
driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his
plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets,
triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the
natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The
professors, when Wagner's music is played to them, exclaim at
once "What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no
cabaletta to it--not even a full close? Why was that discord not
prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he
indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key
that has not one note in common with the key he has just left?
Listen to those false relations! What does he want with six drums
and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The
man is no musician." The layman neither knows nor cares about any
of these things. If Wagner were to turn aside from his
straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the professors
with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at once
become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom
the familiar and dreaded "classical" sensation would descend like
the influenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The
unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for
there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them: The
Ring music is perfectly single and simple. It is the adept
musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn: and him
I leave, unpitied, to his fate.
THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS
The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on four
successive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the
other three), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The
Gods; or, in the original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure,
Siegfried, and Die Gotterdammerung.
THE RHINE GOLD
Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking
woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five
years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to
leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking
them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and
preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your
knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the
golden age will endure.
Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the
golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with
common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men
you know. Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he will
only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men,
driven by the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground and
overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him
until he is master of the world! You will find that the prospect
will not tempt him so much as you might imagine, because it
involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with, and
because there is something else within his reach involving no
distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that is
yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the
gold, and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age
will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch out his
hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But
the choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with
him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose
affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you. In
that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and
disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he
can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he
will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting
its lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.
In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great
cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually
reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and
upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly
to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic
powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch. But
few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the
Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human
impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere
appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot
purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits
driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that
course has become to us is plain enough to those who have the
power of understanding what they see as they look at the
plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.
First Scene
Here, then, is the subject of the first scene of The Rhine Gold.
As you sit waiting for the curtain to rise, you suddenly catch
the booming ground-tone of a mighty river. It becomes plainer,
clearer: you get nearer to the surface, and catch the green light
and the flights of bubbles. Then the curtain goes up and you see
what you heard--the depths of the Rhine, with three strange fairy
fishes, half water-maidens, singing and enjoying themselves
exuberantly. They are not singing barcarolles or ballads about
the Lorely and her fated lovers, but simply trolling any nonsense
that comes into their heads in time to the dancing of the water
and the rhythm of their swimming. It is the golden age; and the
attraction of this spot for the Rhine maidens is a lump of the
Rhine gold, which they value, in an entirely uncommercial way,
for its bodily beauty and splendor. Just at present it is
eclipsed, because the sun is not striking down through the
water.
Presently there comes a poor devil of a dwarf stealing along the
slippery rocks of the river bed, a creature with energy enough to
make him strong of body and fierce of passion, but with a brutish
narrowness of intelligence and selfishness of imagination: too
stupid to see that his own welfare can only be compassed as part
of the welfare of the world, too full of brute force not to grab
vigorously at his own gain. Such dwarfs are quite common in
London. He comes now with a fruitful impulse in him, in search of
what he lacks in himself, beauty, lightness of heart,
imagination, music. The Rhine maidens, representing all these to
him, fill him with hope and longing; and he never considers that
he has nothing to offer that they could possibly desire, being
by natural limitation incapable of seeing anything from anyone
else's point of view. With perfect simplicity, he offers himself
as a sweetheart to them. But they are thoughtless, elemental,
only half real things, much like modern young ladies. That the
poor dwarf is repulsive to their sense of physical beauty and
their romantic conception of heroism, that he is ugly and
awkward, greedy and ridiculous, disposes for them of his claim to
live and love. They mock him atrociously, pretending to fall in
love with him at first sight, and then slipping away and making
game of him, heaping ridicule and disgust on the poor wretch
until he is beside himself with mortification and rage. They
forget him when the water begins to glitter in the sun, and the
gold to reflect its glory. They break into ecstatic worship of
their treasure; and though they know the parable of Klondyke
quite well, they have no fear that the gold will be wrenched away
by the dwarf, since it will yield to no one who has not forsworn
love for it, and it is in pursuit of love that he has come to
them. They forget that they have poisoned that desire in him by
their mockery and denial of it, and that he now knows that life
will give him nothing that he cannot wrest from it by the
Plutonic power. It is just as if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse
fellow were to offer to take his part in aristocratic society,
and be snubbed into the knowledge that only as a millionaire
could he ever hope to bring that society to his feet and buy
himself a beautiful and refined wife. His choice is forced on
him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day;
and in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in
the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming "Stop
thief!" whilst the river seems to plunge into darkness and sink
from us as we rise to the cloud regions above.
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