Music: Heroic Designer

Each winter thousands of sophisticated Manhattanites throng the Metropolitan Opera House to goggle at old-fashioned Norse gods and blimp-like maidens disporting themselves in animal skins and burlap. The music-dramas of Richard Wagner, with their wilful, slow-witted heroes (Siegfried, Parsifal, Lohengrin), and their clever, conniving villains (Beck-messer, Mime, Alberich), are far & away Manhattan’s favorite operas.

What U. S. Wagner fans like about Wagner is the surging music and the epic drama; but they lose themselves only temporarily in the make-believe of the Wagnerian fairyland. But in Adolf Hitler’s Aryan Germany, that fairyland goosesteps up and down the streets in brown shirts. If Wagner, in his operas, sets will and strength above mere brains, thereby echoing the philosophy of his contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, his present-day German disciples have gone him one better. What to him was a theme for art and philosophy is to them a principle of practical politics. Realmleader Hitler is himself a rapt worshipper of Wagner’s music. The Ride of the Walküre is one of his favorite entrance marches for big State occasions. Frau Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the late great composer and friend of the Realmleader, is Germany’s musical matriarch. Wagner’s Norse heroes, W70tan and Siegfried, have been converted by Official Seer Alfred Rosenberg into neo-pagan demigods.

Last week, while 14 Reichswehr generals were ousted, after protesting among other things Rosenberg’s Wagnerian neo-paganism (see p. 18), Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House opened its annual Wagner cycle. Not even in Wagner-worshipping Germany will these operas (Tannhäuser, Die Meistersinger, the Ring cycle), be more reverently, painstakingly and expertly performed. But where the all-conquering Siegfried represents Der Fiihrer to every starry-eyed German backfisch, he will remain for U. S. operagoers a poetic figure of ancient and barbarous legend.

Richard Wagner, unwitting backdrop-designer for Nazi heroics, wrote words as well as music for all his operas, created a revolution in stagecraft. Musically he influenced nearly every composer of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Inspired by the notions of ancient Greek dramatists, Wagner visioned a super-art in which music, the drama, the dance and painting were combined. For his music-dramas he created a whole new musical language in which tunes and chords (Leitmotive or “leading motives”) represent ideas and personages. Events, motives, characters, situations are all identified by characteristic musical phrases. Their appearance in the music tells the listener what the protagonists are thinking about, what they intend to do, where they came from, what their destiny is. To the inexperienced operagoer, Wagner’s orchestra merely sounds; but to the seasoned Wagnerite it talks. Of Der Ring des Niebelungen, cautious Manhattan Critic Lawrence Gilman recently wrote: “Not only the hugest thing that was ever attempted by the creative will; it is also, in the ultimate sense of the word, the greatest.”