{"id":777,"date":"2020-06-08T20:24:50","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T20:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/?p=777"},"modified":"2023-03-15T11:32:54","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T11:32:54","slug":"ideology-and-machines-in-the-work-of-richard-wagner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/21\/ideology-and-machines-in-the-work-of-richard-wagner\/","title":{"rendered":"Ideology and Machines in the Work of Richard Wagner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Themelis Glynatsis<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

A new production of a Richard Wagner work can in no way be compared to other stagings from the current repertoire in its demand of artistic, technical and financial capital. The aesthetic and ideological universe as envisaged by the composer is caught up in a profoundly bourgeois dialectics of regression and progress, which is played out through an intricate interrelationship between nature and machines. This paper investigates the signification of the machine as object and as metaphor in the works of Wagner, as well as in the cultural context from which his operas emerged, aiming to show how the mechanistic universe of the industrial nineteenth century is simultaneously upheld and subverted through Wagner\u2019s reconstruction of nature and myth. 
Keywords:<\/strong> Wagner, Gesamtkunswerk<\/font>, ideology, machines, nature, myth, Adorno, Benjamin, La Fura dels Baus, Lepage<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no doubt that a new production of a work by Richard Wagner is not the same thing as the new staging of any other work in the opera repertoire. There is a special status which has adhered to the Wagnerian opus, a status requiring an army of top-notch singers, directors, conductors, stage designers and so on, as the specific works are considered to be inordinately difficult, \u201cheavy,\u201d exceedingly costly and overall in demand of forces that are rarely employed in the realization of the work by any other composer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wagner work is unique in its sense of expenditure, whether financial or artistic; and this expenditure is anticipated, hunted after, sometimes delivered and frantically enjoyed or anathematized by an entire community of opera artists, technicians, sponsors, advertisers, and of course, audience members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Productions of Wagner works ought to be an artistic, technical and financial event\u2014an event of radical artistic difference whose cultural reverberations were to a great extent conceived by Wagner himself.[1]<\/sup><\/a> This eventfulness is attached to the directorial vision, the dramaturgical approach and the scenographic application that become spectacular attempts to unfold the knotted and often suspicious ideological material of the works themselves, and desperately try to come to terms with the works\u2019 unrepresentability.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The auditorium of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus<\/a>. <\/strong>Photo: Wikimedia<\/a>. <\/strong>Accessed 25 April 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Every Wagner work, from the howling tempests of the Dutchman<\/em> to the consecrative mysteries of Parsifal, <\/em>incorporate moments of theatre that evade, confound or defy staging; we have here a sense of \u201cnegativity\u201d that coaxes stage artists and technicians to invent the mechanical<\/em> means to surpass the unrepresentable-as-negativity and offer the audience the \u201cauthentic\u201d Wagnerian vision, which is none other than the total immersion[2]<\/sup><\/a> of the senses within this originary and mystical negativity of unstageable moments. Subsequently, this immersiveness leads to the eradication of the present as historical, spatial and temporal experience shared by audience members and, perhaps, by the artists themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is this complex equation of machines and experience that this paper will investigate by proposing that the entire Wagner enterprise is built upon an accumulation of machines, either as literal objects or as metaphorical means, which aim to reveal that<\/em> which cannot be shown, a phantom signifier that is always there, <\/em>traversing the dialectical axis of the natural and the phantasmal. This revelatory dimension of machines is fundamentally ideological and historical, and it is the metonymy through which the entire work presents itself as a bourgeois construction that negotiates and produces a vision of radical futurity born out of a sense of eternal regression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, the Wagner work constantly projects a deep-rooted sense of ambivalence as regards to historical progress, futurity and the nobility of the mythic pasts; it is a historical work par excellence<\/em> and the machine is the thing that allows this hesitant historicity to iterate itself in all its complicated and undecided discourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before embarking on this analytical trail, one needs to consider one of Richard Wagner\u2019s own fantasies about the stage that would have welcomed the first performance of Siegfrieds Tod<\/em>: \u201cI would have a theatre erected here on the spot, made of planks . . . I would then . . . give three performances\u2014free of charge of course, one after the other in the space of a week, after which the theatre would be demolished and the whole affair would be over and done with\u201d (Carnegy 70).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This Ur<\/em>-Bayreuth is not simply a \u201csimpler,\u201d primitive version of what was to become one of the centers of European cultural life, but an architectural project on an entirely different ideological and historical taint. The fantasy of Ur-<\/em>Bayreuth focused on the intensity created by transience; an edifice created for a specific work with specific duration, which then would be destroyed, leaving behind only the experience it evoked to a specific audience, an experience that would have been unrepeatable and to a great extent unrecordable. The history of the work is essentially bound by the tremendous subjectivity of the momentary experience that evaporates the moment it conceives itself as experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, one cannot but pause and wonder at the almost avant-garde approach to performance space and performance in general, and observe how the architecture of the theatre of the future was radically transformed from being a site of transience, of anti-commodification and of anti-historicity, to a place of pilgrimage that is revisited again and again, fashioning a sense of tradition and an experience of sublime permanence. Bayreuth becomes the monument of the Wagner industry, combining history, monumentality and religiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transposition from ephemeral architecture with its connotations of finitude, memory and intimate experience to the sacred site of repetition, consecration and revelation is the first occurrence of an ideological gesture that graphs the bourgeoisification of the Wagner work[3]<\/sup><\/a> through its re-inscription of historicity, on the one hand, and the construction of an aura[4]<\/sup><\/a> that satiated the bourgeois desire for religiosity and ethnic identity, on the other. Bayreuth-as-Besetzung<\/em>[5]<\/sup><\/a> was erected on the trauma of the metaphysical despair brought on by the brutal rationalism of capitalist technology and of the ruins of a Germanic ethnic identity that was frantically attempting to assemble itself into a unified meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To a great extent, Bayreuth resembled in technical scope, means, economic utility and mystification the International Expositions of the nineteenth century;[6]<\/sup><\/a> bourgeois festivals that infused a specific space with all that is current, modern and cutting-edge as present assurance of an enthralling futurity. Relatedly, the neoclassical architectural opulence of European theatres is replaced in the Festspielhaus<\/em> by industrial efficacy and aesthetic asceticism.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Outside view of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus<\/a> (1882). Photo: Wikiwand<\/a>. Accessed 25 April 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In the classic survey Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival<\/em>, Frederic Spotts starts off with a fascinating, and very telling, sentence: \u201cFrom a distance it looks as though it might be an antiquated brick warehouse\u201d (1). He continues by quoting various illustrious intellectuals like Stravinsky, who thought that the Bayreuth theatre looked like a \u201ccrematorium,\u201d and like Romain Rolland, who said that it resembled an \u201cindustrial structure more than a cultural establishment.\u201d This fa\u00e7ade, strongly reminiscent of the capitalist-bound Protestant ethic of efficiency and frugality as described by Max Weber,[7]<\/sup><\/a> presents itself by its deliberate, and rather pronounced, distance from typical nineteenth-century theatre architecture in Germany. The onlooker stands not in front of a theatre, but of a structure which truly captures the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist<\/em>: a factory.[8]<\/sup><\/a> On the other hand, Bayreuth was a temple to the obscurity of the primeval Germanic and Norse myths, which had already been established as an aesthetic and nationalistic skeleton key by the Romantics.[9]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does the visitor then behold in Bayreuth? An architectural palimpsest: factory, church, warehouse, technological wonder, national symbol and archaic monument, each facet contributing to the Gesamteffekt<\/em> of the Wagner ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no question that the architectural concept behind the building of the Festspielhaus<\/em> was tightly connected with the concept of the effect.<\/em>[10]<\/sup><\/a> The Bayreuth theatre, from the seating arrangement and parallel columns that frame one\u2019s field of vision, to the famous hidden orchestra pit, not to mention the intricate theatre machines that were custom-built for the specific space by Carl Brandt\u2014one of the foremost stage \u201cmachinists\u201d of the nineteenth century\u2014aimed to overemphasize the experience of the effect, or else, to become proficient in the revelation of the phantasmal experience, \u201cthe theatre of total illusion,\u201d of (Wagnerian) art. The invisible orchestra,[11]<\/sup><\/a> Wagner\u2019s own fantasy of an invisible theatre, the epiphanies and disappearances of characters, motifs and concepts are part of a syntax that arise out of the unrepresentable core of the Wagner poetics; there can be no doubt that the Wagner work is the musically and theatrically complex inscription of the negativity alluded to earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wagner work is based on something which is not<\/em> there, or cannot<\/em> be there, and this nothing<\/em> is the narrative and musical \u201csymptom\u201d that confounds the onward unfolding of the drama by constantly pushing it back towards its inception, and thus formulate a dialectics of radical futurity and regressive desire. The Bayreuth effect<\/em> is the experience of an immersive intangibility that constantly attempts to convince the audience that its origin is not found in nuts and bolts, vocal chords, bows and body parts, toil and sweat,[12]<\/sup><\/a> but in a void that simultaneously terrorizes and seduces. Yet, this void has to accommodate itself in the banality of the machine in order to be<\/em> on stage, thus inventing spectacles that are chained to the incongruence between the \u201coriginal\u201d or \u201cauthentic\u201d absence, and the necessity of its mechanical appearing.<\/em>[13]<\/sup><\/a> The absence of the Wagnerian work is in truth its ultimate surplus\u2014it is where we are convinced that all meaning is stored as a fundamentally indecipherable metaphysical capital that patiently awaits the machine in order for it to appear on stage as meaningful meaning, retaining however the intoxicating effect of its non-signification.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Phantasmagoria in the nineteenth century: the illusion of stage ghosts as developed by John Henry Pepper (known as \u201cPepper\u2019s Ghost\u201d). Photo: Wikipedia<\/a>. Accessed 25 April 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

There is no doubt that the entire Bayreuth enterprise is an effect-industry and can easily be connected to the entertainment phantasmagorias of the nineteenth century.[14]<\/sup><\/a> Technological advancements in the nineteenth century were almost immediately applied to the entertainment industry, before cinema became the ultimate ghost machine of Western culture. Machines and the sites that housed them offered European audiences radical spectacles that promised an unprecedented and immersive experience of the phantasmal and the natural. Even though these two terms appear to be profoundly different, the ideological subtexts of the ghostly and the natural within the nineteenth century framework have more similarities than differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bearing in mind that it is impossible to present the full gamut of ideological transformations that nature underwent after the domination of industrial capitalism and rapid urbanization of the nineteenth century, one should at least aim to reductively approach nature within the specific historical context. Nature became a system that either opened itself up to industrial use as prime matter, or was fetishized as a mnemonic object that hovered unblemished in the past of human experience and promised a cleansing of the degeneration brought on by capitalism.[15]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The development of machinery and industry not only affected labor relationships and production efficiency, but also radically transformed people\u2019s relationship with nature, both as a site of labor and as a site of aesthetic contemplation. In this sense, nature became either pure matter to be transformed within the spectacular phantasmagorias of the factory, or a lost paradise overflowing with authentic meanings, identities and poetics. So, it comes as no surprise that the phantasmagoric entertainment business excelled not only in tales of the supernatural, but in the \u201cbringing-to-life\u201d of fabulous landscapes which, to the eyes of many urban dwellers, seemed as uncanny and spectacular as orientalist fantasies or gothic universes. The machine not only exploits nature in order to commodify it; it becomes the ultimate vehicle of its \u201cauthentic\u201d (re)appearance, and, subsequently, it commodifies it anew by (re)presenting it as a product of the culture industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The capitalist machine inscribes the natural with a fundamentally phantasmal aura; in Wagner, nature becomes ideology par excellence<\/em> by acquiring the essence of myth. What is a myth other than a narrative that constantly looks back to phantasmal origins and provides spectral historiographies that connect authentic roots with the prospect of an apocalyptic and cleansing future that is to come? Nature no longer exists in capitalist society; what does exist is ideology that over-signifies the natural world through the surplus of \u201cauthentic\u201d signifiers (that is, ideological mechanisms of purity, nobility, strength) surrounding nature\u2019s symbolic non-existence. The symbolic reiteration of nature incorporates it only as negativity in order to mold ideologies out of it; just as the factory de-signifies the natural prime material from any qualities other than its future usefulness, condemning it to a sort of negativity which will be transformed in the factory into something<\/em>, the Wagner industry strips nature of its tangibility and transforms it into a reified aura. This aura is disseminated via \u201cmachines\u201d (the orchestra, the stage effects, the scoring process, the construction of the Wagnerian genius, among others) in order to generate phantasmal apparitions or sonorities; effects that function both as regressive echoes and as produce of the artwork of the future.[16]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nineteenth-century phantasmagorias offered audiences immersive experiences that detached them from their historical consciousness and made them lost<\/em> in the non-historical realm of myth. Wagner found in myth the antidote to the devastating ideology of historical and technological progress of the nineteenth century. He was a notorious technophobe, and myth offered him a historicity suspended over the obscurity of origin and of the blazing fires of an upcoming apocalypse. In Art and Revolution<\/em>, he is riveted by Thomas Carlyle\u2019s descriptions of the French revolution as a historical phantasmagoria that brings about utter destruction, an anarchy that reverberated within history as the origin of a new order of things.[17]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spectacle of complete devastation found in Carlyle, conjoined with Schopenhauer\u2019s nocturnal visions of a self-effacing Will, become elements of a profound pessimism underlying the entire work of Wagner\u2019s, and the instigation of a revolutionary art that would confront its audience with a radical sense of loss, destruction and absence as a necessary and desired state prior to a renaissance of a pre-industrial world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wagner\u2019s anarchy consists of a type of Romantic terrorism that aims to see the implosion of the nineteenth century and the revelation of a landscape that lies beneath the ruins of industrial Europe.[18]<\/sup><\/a> There is no question that, at certain key moments of his life, Wagner truly embraced this radical doctrine of ruin. Yet, just as we observed the transition from Ur<\/em>-Bayreuth to Bayreuth proper, one is confronted with the desperately melancholic post-1849 conversion of Wagner\u2019s from anarchist into the figure of the absolute bourgeois artist, the ethnic poet, the anti-Semite, the conservative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apart from the originary negativity that all Wagnerian works bear as a distinguishing sign, they also bear this unbearable\u2014and highly guilt-ridden\u2014contradiction between a past radicalism that was abandoned in favor of a Wagner enterprise that would guarantee the sacralization of its founder. And for this reason, the Wagner work suffers so frequently from kitsch; in Wagner, kitsch is the symptom of guilt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absence, nature, the radical futurity of ruin: the essential triad of Wagner fashions itself through its uncomfortable relationship with the stipulations of theatrical representation. The works by Wagner are by nature purely theatrical, and their stage existence is necessarily traumatic, in the sense that their phantasmal, intangible qualities demand realization and require technology to come into existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wagner\u2019s operas, from the nineteenth century to contemporary highly sophisticated performances, are testing grounds for the latest trend in theatre technology, or sites inviting extreme aesthetic and technical experimentation.[19]<\/sup><\/a> This manic surplus of aesthetic and technical innovation is, at the same time, an anguished attempt for artists, producers and technicians to come to terms with and find tangible solutions for the voids that demand stage realization, and the predominantly bourgeois phenomenon of inventing technological means that fulfill the fantasy of spectacles that exist on the brink of non signification, personal ruin and historical destruction.[20]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Das Rheingold: <\/em>monochrome photograph of Josef Hoffman\u2019s 14 set designs for Wagner\u2019s Der Ring des Nibelungen<\/em> opera in 1876. Photo: Wikipedia<\/a>. Accessed 25 April 2020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

On the one hand, the stage technologies attempt to invent effects that move as far away from the mechanical as possible, thus aiming for a \u201cnatural\u201d effect, in the sense that these effects take place<\/em> rather than are produced by<\/em> mechanical means. The Rhine prelude in Der Ring des Nibelungen<\/em>, the Act I transformation scene in Parsifal<\/em>, the highly elliptical transfiguration of Isolde in Tristan und Isolde<\/em> are dramatic, poetic and musical high points that should appear to occur<\/em>, rather than imply any mechanical cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Equally, Bayreuth architecture offers the ascending \u201cphantom\u201d of sound that occurs as pure tone, rather than as a dense sound wave produced by the massive Wagner orchestra hidden away under the stage. Wagner believed that the audience should be protected from being made \u201can involuntary observer of technical procedure (i.e. the movements of the musicians and the conductor) which should be hidden from him with almost as much care as the ropes, pulleys, struts and boards of the sets, the sights of which from the wings is well known to destroy all illusion\u201d (Carnegy 70). This technical\/mechanical concealment reveals one of the most instrumental aspects of the bourgeois experience of the machine\u2014as object, or as a metaphor\u2014by which the effect is not interpreted as the result of an arduous process of labor, but as an unpolluted manifestation of self-will.[21]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, the machines are the ones that will bring about the favored spectacle of ultimate ruin that Wagner incorporated in works like the Ring<\/em>. There is no question: the Ring<\/em> is a work about a world ending, and what is more, we attend performances of the specific work to sit in silence for four days, roughly fifteen hours of music to fulfill our libidinal drive to watch as Valhala and the Gibichung\u2019s hall crumble in front of our eyes, a collapse accompanied by the tempestuous surge of the musical material that leads the work back to its natural origins, i.e. the Rhine.[22]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video 1<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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