ABSTRACT
It is sometimes remarked that Wagner' s prose works would not be of much interest if their author had not als o turned his creative energies in a very different direction. What is not often observed, however, is the influence this truism has exerted on critical approaches to the theoretical writings. A tacit consensus dictates that these texts be seen as marginalia, ancillary documents whose value lies in the light they shedon immeasurably more important achievements. We have inherited the prose worksin the form of useful gnornie tags: Gesamtkunstwerk, 'endless melody', 'deeds of music made visible' - fragments of text extracted from their context and pressed into service as authoritative pronouncements about the operas. More extensive analysis has usually been cancerned with the relation between the written theories and the works they are understood to describe. There is a powerful hierarchy implicitly at work: text ( theory) is subservient to music (practice); the former is at best an interpretative tool. 1
I do not wish to argue with this assumption. However, I will suggest that it may be worthwhile to adopt a purely literary approach to Wagner's texts, if only because such criticism may direct attention away from their content towards a broader interpretation of their preoccupations, strategies and attitudes. This artide offers a re-reading of Wagner's writing from 1848 to 1852, a period during which the composer wrote virtually no music.2 After the abortive uprising in Dresden in May 1849, Wagner settled his exiled household in Zi.irich, and found himself (apart from links with Liszt in Weimar) entirely cut off from the public musicallife in which he had immersed himself since his first post in Wi.irzburg in 1833. The energetic literary activity of the Zi.irich years gave rise to the Ring poem; drafts for various other operatic subjects; the well-known major theoretical works, comprising the so-called 'reform' essays-Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution) and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Art-Work of the Future) - and the long tract Oper und Drama (Opera and Drama); and a number of other theoretical and miscellaneous essays, notably the splenetic and appalling 'Das Judenthum in der Musik' ('Jewishness in Music'), whose relation to the other texts is not as remote as one would like to believe, and
The critical attitude disenssed above has meant that attention is generally focused on the explicitly theoretical writings, especially Opera and Drama, with its detailed blueprint for assembling the 'art-work of the future'. However, the works written between Wagner's 'Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen National-Theaters' ('Plan for the Organisation of a German National Theatre') and the completion of the Ring poem in December 1852 need to be restared to their wider context. Wagner's speculations about the millennial art-work are inextricably bound up with ideas of political revolution, historical exegesis, theatrical reform, the conditions of performance and interpretation, and so on. Reducing this camplex network of ideas to an anticipation of the coming operas takes for granted what is for Wagner an immediate and vital problem. Indeed, I hope to show that the writings of this period above all provide an intricate model of the very nation of 'anticipation'. By reading these texts as literary constructs rather than technical manuals, it may be possible to discover in them a sophisticated (if confused) cancern with how the imagined work of art can turn itself into the actual work of art - a process that the hierarchy of practice over theory takes for granted. Instead of forcing outselves to accept the prose works as manifestations of Wagner' s intent, we can readthemas encoding a debate about futurity, one mediated by textual structures rather than by authorial intention.
