Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Chapter 1
Derrick Everett
writings of his Zürich years. This was a period during which Wagner
composed very little music. Between 1849 and 1853 he made an abortive
attempt to write his Siegfried opera ('Siegfrieds Tod') and tinkered
with the score of 'Tannhäuser' in the hopes of publishing the revised
score but composed nothing else of substance.
This essay can be seen as a manifesto for 'The Nibelung's Ring',
although at this time (1849) Wagner had no intention of writing a
dramatic cycle. He had narrowly escaped from the collapse of the
Dresden revolution and, finding no work for him in Paris, settled in
Zürich as a political exile. He devoted himself to writing, sometimes
only to earn money but often so that he could work out his developing
ideas (and obsessions) on paper. This essay is the first of those
prose writings.
Commentators have seen in the essay features (such as the three
intertwining sisters) that might foreshadow elements of the 'Ring' and
so give some hints about the deeper meanings of this work. The essay
is dedicated to Ludwig Feuerbach, the humanist philosopher who made a
lasting impact on Wagner's world-view. It was primarily from Feuerbach
that Wagner got ideas about man's evolution. Although this was a
decade before Darwin's 'Origin of Species', such ideas already were
current in humanist discourse. Later Wagner, who was in general little
interested in science, would read Darwin's books with great interest.
The text that follows is the English translation by William Ashton
Ellis, slightly edited to improve readability.
--------------------------------------------------------
DEDICATION
To LUDWIG FEUERBACH, with grateful esteem.
To no one but yourself, honoured Sir, can I dedicate this book; for, in
offering it you, I restore to you your own property. Only in so far as
that property has become not your own, but that of the artist, must I
be uncertain how I ought to approach you: whether you would be inclined
to receive back from the hand of the artistic man that which you, as
philosophic man, have bestowed upon him. The strong desire and
deep-felt obligation to at least express to you my thanks for the
heart-tonic administered by you to me, have overcome that scruple.
No personal conceit, but a need too great for silencing, has made of me
- for a brief period - a writer. In my earliest youth I made poetry
and plays; to one of these plays I longed to write some music: to learn
that art, I became a musician. Later I wrote operas, setting my own
dramatic poems to music. Musicians by profession, to whose ranks I
belonged in virtue of my outer station, ascribed to me poetic talent;
poets by profession allowed currency to my musical faculties. The
public I often succeeded in actively arousing: critics by profession
always tore me into rags. Thus I derived from myself and my antitheses
much food for thought: when I thought aloud, I brought the Philistines
upon me, who can only imagine the artist as a dolt, and never as a
thinker. By friends I was often begged to publish in type my thoughts
on art and what I wished to see fulfilled therein: I preferred the
endeavour to convey my wish by artistic deeds alone. From the
circumstance that this my attempt could never quite succeed, I was
forced to recognise that it is not the individual, but only the
community, that can bring artistic deeds to actual accomplishment, past
any doubting of the senses. The recognition of this fact, if hope
herein is not to be entirely abandoned, means as much as: to raise the
standard of revolt against the whole condition of our present art and
life. Since the time when I summoned up the necessary courage for this
revolt, I also resolved to enter on the field of writing; a course to
which I had already once before been driven by outward want.
Literarians by profession, who after the calming of the recent storms
are now filling their lungs again with balmy breezes, find it shameless
of an opera-poetising musician to go so far out of his way as to invade
their own preserves. May they permit me, as an artistic man, to make
the attempt to address - by no means them, but - merely thinking
artists, with whom they have naught in common.
May you, however, honoured Sir, not take it ill of me that, by this
dedication, I connect your name with a work that in my own eyes most
certainly owes its origin to the impression which your writings have
made upon me, yet which may perhaps not meet your views as to how that
impression should have been developed. Nevertheless I venture to
presume that it will not be quite indifferent to you, to gain a certain
proof as to how your thoughts have operated upon an artist, and how the
latter - as an artist - endeavours, in all sincerity of ardour for
the cause, to interpret them again to artists, and indeed to no one
else. May you attribute to this zeal, which you will be the last to
treat with blame, not only whatever may please you, but also whatever
may displease you in its expression!
RICHARD WAGNER.
--------------------------------------------------------
As man stands in relation to nature, so stands art in relation to
man. When nature had developed in herself those attributes which
included the conditions for the existence of man, then man
spontaneously evolved. In like manner, as soon as human life had
engendered from itself the conditions for the manifestment of
art-work, this too stepped self- begotten into life.
Nature engenders her myriad forms without caprice or arbitrary aim
("absichtlos und unwillkürlich"), according to her need
("Bedürfniss"), and therefore of necessity ("Nothwendigkeit"). This
same necessity is the generative and formative force of human life.
Only that which is deliberate and intended can spring from a real
need; but on need alone is based the very principle of life.
Man only recognises nature's necessity by observing the harmonious
connection of all her phenomena; so long as he does not grasp the
latter, she seems to him capricious.
>From the moment when man perceived the difference between himself and
nature, and thus commenced his own development as man, by breaking
loose from the unconsciousness of natural animal life and passing over
into conscious life, when he thus looked nature in the face and from
the first feelings of his dependence on her, thereby aroused, evolved
the faculty of thought; from that moment did error begin, as the
earliest utterance of consciousness. But error is the mother of
knowledge; and the history of the birth of knowledge out of error is
the history of mankind, from the myths of primal ages down to the
present day.
Man erred, from the time when he set the cause of nature's workings
outside the bounds of nature's self, and for the physical phenomena
subsumed a super-physical, anthropomorphic, and arbitrary cause; when
he took the endless harmony of her unconscious, instinctive energy for
the arbitrary demeanour of disconnected finite forces. Knowledge
consists in the laying of this error, in fathoming the necessity of
phenomena whose underlying basis had appeared to us capricious.
Through this knowledge does nature grow conscious of herself; and
verily by man himself, who only through discriminating between himself
and nature has attained that point where he can apprehend her, by
making her his 'object.' But this distinction is merged once more,
when man recognises the essence of nature as his very own, and
perceives the same necessity in all the elements and lives around him,
and therefore in his own existence no less than in nature's being;
thus not only recognising the mutual bond of union between all natural
phenomena, but also his own community with nature.
If nature then, by her solidarity with him becomes conscious in man,
and if man's life is the very activation of this consciousness as it
were, the portraiture in brief of nature, so does human life itself
gain understanding by means of science, which makes this human life in
turn an object of experience. But the activation of the consciousness
attained by science, the portrayal of the life that it has learnt to
know, the impress of this life's necessity and truth, is art.
Man will never be that which he can and should be until his life is a
true mirror of nature, a conscious following of the only real
necessity, the inner natural necessity, and is no longer held in
subjugation to an outer artificial counterfeit, which is thus not a
necessary but an arbitrary power. Only then will man become alive; now
he only exists and his existence is defined by the maxims of this or
that religion, nationality, or state. In like manner will art not be
the thing she can and should be, until she is or can be the true,
conscious image and exponent of the real man, and of man's genuine,
nature-bidden life; until she therefore need no longer borrow the
conditions of her being from the errors, perversities, and unnatural
distortions of our modern life.
The real man will therefore never be forthcoming, until true human
nature, and not the arbitrary statutes of the state, shall model and
ordain his life; while real art will never live, until its embodiments
need be subject only to the laws of nature, and not to the despotic
whims of fashion. For as man only then becomes free, when he gains the
glad consciousness of his oneness with nature; so does art only then
gain freedom, when she has no more to blush for her affinity with real
life. But only in the joyous awareness of his oneness with nature does
man subdue his dependence on her; whilst art can only overcome her
dependence upon life through her oneness with the life of free and
genuine men.