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crumbled, and to focus on the unprecedentedresults is arguably the historian's first task.Schorske performs it with a masterly combina-tion of learning and interpretive strength,which he puts at the service of an intellectualpassion that is evident on every page. Hisstance on the arts

maysometimes narrow his

results, but it never compromises their impor-tance. Fin-de-Sikcle Vienna will be necessaryreading for anyone interested in its subject.

JOHN DEATHRIDGE

Anne Dzamba Sessa. Richard Wagner and the En-glish. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dic-

kinson University Press. London: Associated Uni-versity Presses, 1979. 191 pp.Penetrating Wagner's Ring: An Anthology. Edited

by John Louis DiGaetani. Rutherford, Madison,Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.London: Associated University Presses, 1978. 453PP.

The Wagner Companion. Edited by Peter Burbidgeand Richard Sutton. London and Boston: Faber andFaber, 1979. 462 pp.

Curt von Westernhagen. Wagner: A Biography.Translated by Mary Whittall. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1978. 2 vols., xxiv, 654 pp.

Anne Dzamba Sessa's monograph Richard

Wagner and the English is an interesting andwell-written account of Wagnerism in nine-teenth-century England. It has all the famili-ar ingredients: incessant controversy, royalsupport, the sycophants, political dilettan-tism, simplistic philosophies, and Wagner'sinfluence on literature and the visual arts.There are good passages on Swinburne and thePre-Raphaelites, and some perceptive pages onOscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Yet thebook just misses its target. Sessa loves com-parisons, but she avoids the ambiguities cen-tral to Wagner and Wagnerism. A remark like:

"It is interesting to consider how manythousands of modern couples have been mar-ried to the strains of the Wedding March" (p.152) should at least be peppered with the ironythat, far from glorifying conjugal love inLohengrin, Wagner presents it in a decidedlyambiguous light. Sessa should have told us,

too, that the Wedding March was used at theroyal wedding of Princess Victoria of Englandand Prince Frederick William of Prussia in1858, three years after Wagner's successfulmeeting with Queen Victoria, and one yearafter the London publisher J. F. Hope had

brought out a complete English edition of theLohengrin text-the first full translation of aWagner opera to appear in any language. Sessainforms us that Wagner was drafted by someEnglish authors "for the task of overthrowingVictorianism" (p. 87). But why did he attractboth the rebels and the Establishment? Andhow did the moral quicksands of Lohengrincome to support the pious morality of Victo-rian society? Was it lack of perception? Or didthe music tell a different story?

Sessa's most original chapter is devoted tothe radical Scotsman David Irvine. Besides

writing several books on or relating to Wagner,Irvine became a watch-dog for sloppy schol-arship and misguided proselytizing on Wag-ner's behalf. His philippic against the Eng-lish translation of Wagner's autobiographyMein Leben, where he found single and multi-ple errors on 430 of its 886 pages, was, if any-thing, vastly understated; and his descriptionof the empty moralizing in the young ErnestNewman's A Study of Wagner (1899) as fod-der for a society of "Tartuffes, Scapins ...Beckmessers, and Mimes" is still refreshing.Sessa is surely right to accuse Irvine of using

the best of Schopenhauer "to coat the most vileof Wagner's ideas" (p. 78). Irvine's plunderingof Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Ideato justify Wagner's racial ideology makesgrotesque reading.

Elsewhere Sessa tends to rely too much onsecondary sources. Her conclusion that Wag-ner's notoriety after his first English con-certs in 1855 was due to (among other things)his poor conducting sounds suspiciously likeWilliam Ashton Ellis, the ponderous translatorof Wagner's prose works. Unwilling to admitthe critical foibles of his countrymen, Ellis

searched desperately for explanations ofWagner's raw treatment by the English critics.The original reviews, however, show that thecritics objected less to Wagner's spirited con-ducting than to his unconventional readings ofBeethoven and Mendelssohn which, because ofshort rehearsal time, often led to ragged en-

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semble and misunderstandings between con-ductor and orchestra. In fact, it was a compli-ment to Wagner's talents as a conductor thatthe Old Philharmonic Orchestra grasped somuch that was new so quickly. In addition, theexcerpts from Tannhdiuser and Lohengrin in-cluded in the concerts

hardly gavea true im-

pression of the famous enfant terrible and hisallegedly epoch-making innovations. TheWedding March as the "Music of the Future"?Beethoven conducted without a score and withconstant changes of tempo? No wonder thecritics were annoyed.

Sessa writes interestingly about Ellis'seditorship of the London Wagner Society'sjournal The Meister. Less convincing is herhypothesis that the journal's demise after onlyeight volumes was due to quarrels provoked byEllis's exposure of Ferdinand Praeger's book

Wagner as I Knew Him (1892). The quaintbilingual title of the journal, Ellis's heavy-handed editing, and the dissolution of the Lon-don Wagner Society in 1895 were probably thereal culprits. Sessa also forgets to mentionHouston Stewart Chamberlain's blistering re-view of Praeger's memoir in the BayreutherBldtter (1893), and his publication in the samejournal (1894) of Wagner's letters to Praegercomplete with a damning list of the latter's dis-tortions. Chamberlain's attack was morethorough than Ellis's; it finally convinced theworld that Praeger was a fraud and prompted

Breitkopf to withdraw the German edition ofthe book. Incidentally, it is a pity that Sessasays so little about Chamberlain. This ren-egade Englishman not only helped forge thevolkisch ideology of the Third Reich, he wasalso a significant influence on English Wag-nerism, as his unpublished correspondencewith Ashton Ellis shows. His first book (1892)was a clever, though tendentious, discussionof all Wagner's stage works. It was not spe-cifically about Lohengrin, as Sessa incorrectlystates.

The anthology Penetrating Wagner's Ring byJohn DiGaetani consists mainly of excerptsfrom books and essays printed elsewhere.Apart from old friends like Bernard Shaw andJessie Weston, the intellectuals are less in-teresting than the practitioners. Solti's advice

to young conductors on how to conduct DasRheingold tells us more about the distributionof dramatic weight in the work than a host ofhigh-minded analyses. And Sol Babitz's com-ments on some difficult, if well-nigh impossi-ble, violin passages in the Ring are revealingabout the realities behind

Wagner's impres-sionistic effects. I only wish DiGaetani were amore penetrating editor. For example: unawareof the difference between Marxism and Shaw'speculiar brand of Romantic Socialism, BryanMagee describes The Perfect Wagnerite inaccu-rately as an interpretation of the Ring "as aMarxist allegory" (p. 76); Ernest Newman in-forms us that Wagner brings on the dragon inGdtterdammerung (p. 173); William Manntranslates Die Gdtterddmmerung as "God's[sic] Go-down" (p. 193); George G. Windellwrites Curt von Festerhagen instead of Wes-

ternhagen (p. 253); Wagner did not break off inthe middle of Siegfried Act II before going on toTristan as W. J. Henderson claims (p. 258)-except for the orchestration, Wagner composedthe second act to the end in 1857; JosephWechsberg mixes up Wieland and WolfgangWagner, giving the children of the former tothe latter and vice-versa (p. 431); and Frank B.Josserand on "Richard Wagner and GermanNationalism" misconstrues Bismarck's letterthanking Wagner for a poem dedicated to thevictorious German army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Bismarck did not quite

say that Wagner's music "had contributed tothe German victory as much as had militarysuccesses" (p. 211). Referring to the Tann-hduser scandal in Paris and the gradual accep-tance of Wagner's works there, Bismarckwrote: "Your works ... have also overcome theresistance of the Parisians after a hard fight;and I hope and wish that many more victorieswill be granted to them at home and abroad."

The Wagner Companion and Curt von Wes-ternhagen's biography Wagner are to be con-

gratulated on the unlikely feat of turningWagner into a paragon of virtue-a diplomatictour de force supported by errors of fact' and a

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'I have pointed out some of the more serious distortions inThe Wagner Companion in the New Statesman ("Epic Er-rors," 16 November 1979).



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cavalier attitude toward important evidence.Although these books describe themselves re-spectively as "authoritative" and "up-to-date,"neither mentions the invaluable source studieson Bayreuth by Michael Karbaum, Egon Voss,and Hartmut Zelinsky which the present

writer brought to the attention of English-speaking readers in the Times Literary Sup-plement (5 August 1977). Nor does the multi-lingual bibliography of the Companion includethe newest editions of the Collected Corre-spondence and the Collected Works. EvenWesternhagen belittles these publications bymentioning the latter in only a single sentenceand informing us that the first three volumes ofthe Correspondence "for the most part ... re-publish, as far as possible in their original form,letters that have appeared in print before" (p.x). In fact, these volumes (up to 1851) include

no fewer than fifty-five previously unpublishedletters, another thirty published complete forthe first time, Wagner's early diary (the so-called Rote Brieftasche), the original version ofthe Autobiographische Skizze, and a wealth ofeditorial detail invaluable to serious scholars.2As for the Collected Works, if Westernhagenbelieves that 1841-48 is Wagner's "First Crea-tive Period" (p. 57) or that Parsifal was con-ceived on Good Friday 1857 (p. 226), he shouldtake a look at the first volume of orchestralworks which shows that Wagner was busycomposing as early as 1830, and the documen-

tary volume for Parsifal which demolishes theGood Friday legend once and for all.3The real trouble is that neither book seri-

ously challenges the Wagner myth. Even as cir-cumspect a scholar as Robert Bailey, the solecontributor to the Companion who realizes theimportance of documentary evidence, per-petuates one legend in his chapter on "TheMethod of Composition" when he writes: "Itseems quite unthinkable that a great deal of the

musical setting did not suggest itself to Wagneras he was constructing the verse" (p. 271). Butit is unthinkable only if you accept Wagner'sdescription of himself as a "word-tone poet" orthe constant implication in his writings, andparticularly the aesthetics of Die Meister-

singer,that his texts

and music were conceivedin the same moment of inspiration. Western-hagen, too, succumbs entirely to Wagner's"word-tone poet" image when he writes that"the text and the music are only two differentfacets of the same thing" (Biography, p. 174); or"the verse itself must owe its form to themusic that already existed within the com-poser" (p. 185). Why "must"? There is not onescrap of evidence proving that Wagner's musi-cal ideas were anything but rudimentary whenhe was writing his librettos. Far from being apreordained unity, text and music were con-

ceived in a more conventional sequence thanmost Wagnerians would like to suppose. Thisis not to cast aspersions on Wagner's art, ofcourse. It simply means that those impressivephrases about "word-tone synthesis" and"drama emanating from the spirit of music"we all know from countless tomes on Wagner'saesthetics are to be taken definitely cum granosalis.

The late Deryck Cooke was another solidWagnerian unwilling to reject a lot of Roman-tic hocus-pocus. One of the first traps Wagnerset for posterity was his description of his mu-

sical education. Cooke falls right into it whenhe writes in the Companion that Wagner "wasin fact almost entirely self-taught ... he had afew harmony lessons when he was sixteen; andfinally, at eighteen, he studied composition forsix months with Theodor Weinlig, the Cantorof St. Thomas's Church in Leipzig" (p. 248).Several friends and acquaintances of Wagner'slater years were witness to his astonishing as-sertion that he was "musically uneducated,"including an adoring young Hugo Wolf whovisited Wagner in Vienna in 1875.4 Nietzsche,too, based his unpolemical observations about

Wagner's "dilettante" upbringing (later devel-oped more polemically by Mann and Adorno)

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2Siimtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf

(Leipzig, 1967-). Invaluable as it is, even this edition cannotclaim to be complete. A list of more than a hundred letterseither published incomplete or omitted altogether from thefirst three volumes is included in Egon Voss, "Wagners'Saimtliche Briefe'?," MeloslNeue Zeitschrift fuir Musik 4(1978), 291-23.3Siimtliche Werke, gen. ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1970-),XVIII [Orchesterwerke 1, ed. Egon Voss], XXX [Dokumen-tenband Parsifal, ed. Martin Geck and Egon Voss], 12-13.

4See Frank Walker, "Hugo Wolf's Vienna Diary, 1875-76,"Music & Letters 28 (1947), 18. Also Dannreuther's valuablearticle on Wagner in the first edition of Grove's (London,1889), IV, 369.

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MUSICon Wagner's own account in Mein Leben, thefirst proofs of which it was Nietzsche'sprivilege to correct. But Wagner's diary, theRote Brieftasche, proves that the "few har-mony lessons" he had with the Leipzig conduc-tor Christian Gottlieb Miiller lasted at least

three years.5 His contrapuntal exercises forTheodor Weinlig (in the Bayreuth archives),and above all the early letters to his family,show that he worked hard and conscientiously,always seeking to please his superiors and notat all averse to arid conformity as Cookesuggests. Wagner skillfully obscured his birthpangs as a composer in Mein Leben by turninghimself into a renegade prodigy "almost with-out actual learning" (fast ohne eigentlichesLernen)-a very adult idea not unrelated to theRomantic concept of "natural," uneducatedgenius projected onto Siegfried n the Ring, but

hardly borne out by Wagner's youthful corre-spondence and the long list of highly imitativeworks he wrote as a surprisingly uninspiredbeginner.

Cooke is a little ingenuous, too, on the sub-ject of leading-motives. It is true of course thatmost of the nonsense written about leitmotivoriginates with Wagner's disciple Hans vonWolzogen. But it is not true that Wagner re-frained from attaching labels to his musicalideas, as Cooke states. Nor is it true thatWagner "never intended his music to conveythe conceptual ideas of the drama" (p. 227). By

clinging to the first legend Cooke createsanother: Wagner not only labeled his motiveson rare occasions, he also gave them a concep-tual and emotional significance at variancewith the labels provided by his interpreters. Agood example is the transition to the secondscene of Das Rheingold where the motivewhich Wolzogen called the "Ring" is charac-terized in Wagner's composition sketch as"World Inheritance" (Welterbe). But perhapsthe most interesting case is the motive in the

Ring which we all know as "Redemptionthrough Love." I counted four different in-terpretations of this motive in the presentbooks under review, none of them with thesimplicity and logic of Wagner's own. In 1875he authorized Cosima to write to an intelligent

inquirer that "the motive sung to Briinnhildeby Sieglinde [in Die Walkdire] s the glorifica-tion of Briinnhilde which at the end of thework [Die Gdtterddmmerung] is taken up, soto speak, by the entirety."6 Not only is this aspecific concept, it also touches on one ofWagner's perennial concerns and an importantaspect of the Ring which is often overlooked:the relation of the individual to the commu-nity. The isolated appearance of the motivesung by an individual in Die Walkare and itsfrequent repetition in the presence of a silenton-stage chorus in Die G6tterddmmerung

could be seen as a striking symbol of this idea.Westernhagen's hypothesis about the so-called "Redemption through Love" motive inhis biography s exceedingly fragile. Noting theconspicuous absence of the motive in the com-position sketch of Die Walkaire, he suggeststhat Wagner must have conceived it originally"for its transfiguring role in Gotterdiimmerung... and only subsequently decided to anticipateit in Die Walkire" (p. 202). This sounds plaus-ible until the reader remembers one simplefact: Die Walkire was given its first perfor-mance in Munich on 26 June 1870 (complete

with "Redemption through Love" motive) al-most two years before Wagner began sketchingthe end of Die Gotterdammerung in 1872.Westernhagen also misses the important pointthat the sketch of the full score of Die Walkurealready contains the motive. In all probability,then, Wagner first introduced the motive be-tween the completion of the composition

5A letter to Muiller not included in Sdmtliche Briefe and

published for the first time by the present writer provesthat Wagner took these lessons far more seriously than heever admitted publicly. See John Deathridge, "Wagner undsein erster Lehrmeister. Mit einem unver6ffentlichtenBrief Richard Wagners," Meistersinger Programmheft derBayerischen Staatsoper (Munich, 1979), pp. 71-75.

6Unpublished letter from Cosima Wagner to the chemistEdmund von Lippmann: "Geehrter Herr, / AuBer StandeIhnen pers6nlich I/zu antivarten, trigt mir Sie mein Mann /auf, Ihnen zu sagen, daB das Motiv, / welches Sieglinde derBrUinnhilde zu-/singt, die Verherrlichung Briinnhilden's /

ist, welche am Schluss des Werkes / gleichsam von derGesammtheit / aufgenommen wird. / Den Empfehlungenmeines Mannes / fUige ich den Ausdruck meiner /Hochachtung bei / Frau Richard Wagner / 6 September1875." See Catalogue 100, Proszenium. Theater- undFilm-Fachantiquariat, Kemnath Stadt (Germany, n.d.).

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sketch in 1854 and work on the full score in1855-56. Wagner could have conceived themotive for its role in Die G6tterddmmerung atthis early stage, of course; but there is no evi-dence for this, and it is certainly not a fact wecan deduce, as Westernhagen does, merely

from the absence of the motive in the composi-tion sketch of Die Walkuire.Westernhagen seems preoccupied with invis-

ible evidence. On the delicate subject of MinnaWagner's alleged adultery, for example, hecatches one of Ernest Newman's typical redherrings. The absence of Wagner's forgivingletter to Minna of September 1837 from theformer Burrell Collection, Newman claimed,"is the completest proof imaginable of the ver-acity of Wagner's account of the episode of herflight and infidelity."' Not content with re-peating this, Westernhagen makes similar

claims about another document. The missingfirst page of a draft of a letter to Theodor Apeldated 25 October 1840, Westernhagen tells us,is convincing evidence that Wagner must havebeen in the Paris debtors' prison at this time.The absence of the very page on which Wagnermentions his stay in prison "demonstratesonce again that the destruction of a documentcan conclusively prove its content" (p. 61).Sadly but simply, Westernhagen believes onlyone of a hundred possible reasons for thedocuments being missing: their destruction byMinna or her daughter Natalie. Also assum-

ing the motivation of these much-malignedwomen, he then arrives at an established factby the questionable process of combining twohypothetical arguments. Minna or Natalie de-stroyed Wagner's letter of September 1837 be-cause it contained an incriminating account ofMinna's unfaithfulness. Therefore Minna wasunfaithful. The first page of Wagner's draftedletter to Apel was destroyed because Minna or

Natalie did not want posterity to know thatWagner went to jail. Therefore Wagner went tojail.

Credo ... et invisibilium. Where is the proofthat Minna or Natalie suppressed the evi-dence? How can we know that Wagner's etter

incriminates Minna if the document does noteven exist? And what about the five good rea-sons, closely argued by the editors of the Col-lected Correspondence,8 why Wagner probablynever went to jail in the first place?

More serious still is Westernhagen's han-dling of evidence which really does exist. Proofof Wagner's enthusiasm for Bakunin's destruc-tivism during the Dresden Revolution of 1849,for example, is simply ignored. Instead, Wes-ternhagen mixes present and future by project-ing Wagner's later, more skeptical view ofBakunin in Mein Leben onto his revolutionary

ideology of twenty years earlier. Thus thereader is misled into thinking that Wagner'sopinion of Bakunin in his autobiography wasalso his opinion during the Revolution, eventhough the documents prove otherwise (see thefirst set of comparative citations, on p. 86). In-direct quotation, too, enables Westernhagen toomit important information unobtrusively.One of Wagner's etters to Ludwig II is quotedin such a way that the reader can never guessits real purpose. Wagner wrote to Ludwig notjust to tell him about his daily routine inTriebschen, as Westernhagen would have us

believe, but deliberately to deceive the kingabout Hans von Btilow's wife Cosima, who,contrary to the impression given by the letter,was actually living with Wagner at the time(citations, 2). Indeed, the barbs in Wagner'scharacter are the cause of some particularlyblatant censorship. One of his worst pieces ofbelligerent chauvinism-a letter to Catulleand Judith Mendes on the German victory inthe Franco-Prussian War of 1870-is suitablytrimmed to make it seem like a charitable out-pouring of high-minded pathos (citations, 3).And Bismarck's alleged opinion about his

meeting with Wagner in 1871 is diplomaticallygarbled. The author of Westernhagen's source,

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1The Life of Richard Wagner (New York, 1933), I, 234.Newman miscalculates the date of the letter as October1837 (cf. Sdmtliche Briefe I, 336) and Westernhagen's trans-lator adds further confusion by assuming that it is a letterfrom Minna to Wagner instead of the other way around.The passage on p. 47 of Westernhagen's biography shouldread: "The absence from the Burrell Collection of the firstletter asking her to forgive him is the conclusive proof ofher guilt." 8Sdmtliche Briefe I, 414-16.

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1. Wagner could not help but see that Bakunin'sinsistence on the need to destroy all cultural in-stitutions rested on premises of vertiginous im-

plications [sicbodenlosesten

Voraussetzungenshould be translated "premises completely with-out foundation"] (Westernhagen, 1978, p. 133).

2. [He] went back to the score again. The even-ings were devoted to reading ... (Westernhagen,1978, p. 413).

3. [Catulle's letter] stirred Wagner o sit down thesame day and write both the Mendes a "vigorous"letter, running to four pages of print: "Mydears, I do not need to tell you how sad your lettermade me. It is truly a tragedy that is taking placebetween us" (Westernhagen, 1978, p. 431).

4. He had never encountered such self-con-fidence, Bismarck told Bucher after the meeting

(Westernhagen, 1978, p. 435).

I want to destroy the order of things ... (Wagner,"The Revolution," 1849; Siimtliche Schriftenund Dichtungen XII, 250).

A really victorious revolutionary must actcompletely regardless of everything . .. his onlyambition is: destruction (Wagner to Minna, 18May 1849; Siamtliche Briefe II, 653).

I go back to my score again (if there are no lettersto write ); after working until about 8 o'clock, Ireturn for tea and a very light supper on the upperfloor which I have finally decided to allocate forthe visits of the Friend [i.e., Cosima] during thesummer. I finish the evening with some reading... (Wagner to Ludwig II, 24 February 1869;Briefwechsel II, 262).

[Richard] writes vigorously to Catulle, alwaysreiterating: you got what you deserved (CosimaWagner's Diaries [12 September 1870], I, 269).

My dears, I do not need to tell you how sad yourletter makes me. It is truly a tragedy hat is takingplace between us. I have nothing, absolutelynothing to offer you which could resemble a con-solation (Wagner to Catulle and Judith Mendes,12 September 1870; Lettres frangaises de RW, ed.Tiersot, p. 322).

Bismarck said that he was certainly not with-out self-confidence himself; but Wagner's self-

confidence just about beat everything he had everencountered in a German before (Glasenapp,Biography [4th edn.] IV, 355).

Wagner's first biographer Carl Glasenapp,gleaned Bismarck's clearly skeptical remarksfrom a Vienna newspaper and rightly doubtedtheir authenticity. Westernhagen thereforeachieves a double somersault: not only is hissource unreliable, he also adds further confu-sion by transforming it from a negative into apositive statement (citations, 4).

The most painful flaw in Westernhagen'sbiography, and in his contribution to TheWagner Companion, "Wagner as a Writer," ishis presentation of Wagner's anti-Semitism.The subject of Wagner and the Jews, of course,is a card that is always overplayed by the

anti-Wagnerites. However, it is one thing to de-fend Wagner against pointless moral outrage,as anyone who sees the historical distance be-tween Wagner and Nazism is bound to do, andquite another to distort his beliefs. Westernha-gen never misses an opportunity to stressWagner's kindness and humanity towards theJews. But the constant

implicationthat he was

therefore less than serious about his anti-Semitism is simply wrong. A letter of 22November 1881 to Ludwig II, from whichWesternhagen quotes only the most trivialportion-up to the word "recovery"-is justone of many documents proving that Wagner's

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5. A year before, indeed, Wagner had refused tosign the mass petition "against the growinginfluence of the Jews" which Bernhard F6rster,

later the husband of Elisabeth Nietzsche, or-ganized for presentation to Bismarck (Western-hagen, 1978, p. 568).

6. Wagner, who had just got to know Gobineau'sEssai sur l'in?galite des races humaines, read hima section from his chapter on the German racesand then played the Prelude to Parsifal. It was asymbolic act, an attempt to express his desire tooverride the severity of Gobineau's ideas on raceby the spirit of Christianity (Westernhagen, 1978,p. 569).

7. By changing the focus of attention, in the lastmoments of Die Meistersinger, from the joys andsorrows of the protagonists [sic] to somethinghigher than purely personal concerns, the fate andthe mission of art, Wagner ound an incomparablemeans of avoiding the dangers of a customaryhappy ending (Westernhagen, 1978, p. 384).

8. Wagner regarded the essay ["Judaism inMusic"] as one of his occasional pieces stimu-

lated by day-to-day events and having no morethan the immediate relevance of journalism(Westernhagen, Wagner Companion, p. 346).

He [RW] does not sign it [the petition] ... he saysthat (1) he has already done what he can; (2) hedislikes appealing to Bismarck, whom he now

sees as irresponsible, just following his own cap-rices; (3) nothing more can be done in the matter(CW's Diaries [16 June 1880], II, 489.

In the evening R. reads to the Count those pagesof the latter's book (vol. IV, chap. 3) which he soloves, and afterwards plays the Prelude to Parsi-fal ... (CW's Diaries [12 May 1881], II, 666).

The Master read the Friend [Gobineau] thosepages from the chapter on the Germanic raceswhich he loved so much and finished by playingthe Prelude to Parsifal. With this gesture hewanted to say that he had not forgotten how tohope (Westernhagen, "Gobineau," BayreutherFestspielfthrer [1937], p. 166.

After reading the poem of Die Meistersinger,Frantz wrote to Wagner telling him that heshould introduce the idea of the Reich into thework- 'The Reich should be seen in thebackground," he said. When Wagner came tocompose Sachs's concluding address half a yearlater, he introduced the lines "Habt acht Unsdrohen tible Streiche ...". In these nine lines hegave to this play about middle-class life a largerdimension: the great background of the Reich(Westernhagen, "Wagner und das Reich," NeueWagner-Forschung, d. Strobel [1943], p. 50).

"Judaism n Music"-the essay in which Wagnerscented out the problem of race in order to pursueit and remain hard on its heels until the end of hislife (Westernhagen, RWs Kampf gegen seelischeFremdherrschaft [1935], p. 25).

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much-vaunted largesse on the Jewish questionwas morally ambiguous, to say the least:

Oh My king Where are we living? We've settledourselves so comfortably-between two gardens ofpalm trees -that I look forward with completeconfidence to recovery ... I can safely claim somepraise as far as humanity towards the Jews is con-

cerned .... My relations with some of these peopleare full of friendly sympathy and understanding. Butthis is only possible because I take the Jewish race tobe the born enemy of pure humanity and everythingnoble in it ... perhaps I am the last German whoknows how to maintain his honour as an artist inthe face of the Judaism which is already dominatingeverything. (Briefwechsel III, 228-30).

And if Westernhagen thinks that Wagner's re-fusal to sign F6rster's petition to Bismarck wasanother pro-Jewish gesture, he should look upWagner's real, and not exactly noble, reasonsfor withholding his signature in CosimaWagner's diaries (citations, 5). Westernhagen'sbook teems with similar examples. On the sub-

ject of Wagner and Gobineau, for instance, he isparticularly misleading. Although Gobineauwas not anti-Semitic, as is often assumed, hispessimistic view of the supremacy and declineof the Germanic races greatly appealed toWagner. Yet Westernhagen interprets an im-portant passage from Cosima's diaries as if the

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opposite were true (citations, 6). This is all themore surprising since he quotes the samesource more accurately in one of his earlier es-says. Indeed, many of his early writings, noneof which he has publicly disowned, are closerto the truth about Wagner's cultural and politi-cal

philosophythan his later ones. One infor-

mative essay, "Wagner and the Reich," forexample, puts forward the interesting idea (notto be found in the biography) that it was thepolitician and publicist Constantin Frantz whosuggested the famous revision of Sachs's ad-dress at the end of Die Meistersinger (citations,7). And in 1935 Westernhagen was not afraid osay, quite correctly, that the Jewish questionbecame one of Wagner's central preoccupationsfrom middle age to the end of his life-a strik-ing contrast to his totally untrue assertion inThe Wagner Companion that the essay

"Judaismin Music"

(1850),to which

Wagnerappended a serious and even longer "Elucida-tion" on its republication in 1869, wasmerely an "occasional" piece of journalism(citations, 8).

Wagner's anti-Semitism and his politicalphilosophy are just as much a part of thenineteenth century as his art. To repress or dis-tort them is to disfigure the age in which helived, not to mention the complex personalityof the man himself. Westernhagen's superla-tives do Wagner a disservice by dehumanizinghim. There is nothing of Wagner's wily egoism,

sardonic humor and obsessive character; andeven the excitement of his music is smotheredwith devout prose. In a sense, Westernhagenhas not written a biography at all, but aLobgesang to Wagner's art. This is a "positivebiography," his publishers tell us in a revealingnon sequitur, because "his starting point is theimportance and the supreme greatness ofWagner's artistry." The book has all the trap-pings of a substantial work of scholarship:lavish production in two volumes, an extensivebibliography, plentiful footnotes and a usefulindex. But what Westernhagen has really done

is to bend the truth of Wagner's life into theequivalent of an artistic experience. This istherefore a "positive biography" which, al-though it claims "to leave judgement to thereader" (p. xv), actually patronizes him with aready-made viewpoint artfully concealed by

questionable methods and seductive reasoning.Instead of the in-depth appraisal of Wagner'slife and work that is still badly needed, Wes-ternhagen has written yet another hagiography.

Finallya word about translation. It is discon-

certing to see in Anne Sessa's and John Di-Gaetani's books a revival of Ashton Ellis'selephantine English equivalent of Wagner'sprose. Titles like "What Boots this Knowl-edge?" "Herodom and Christianity" and largechunks of Wagner's essays rendered nto Ellis-English hardly encourage a clear understandingof Wagner's ideas. "No Englishman who doesnot understand German can understand thisEllis-style," Chamberlain once observed toCosima Wagner. "Ellis is faithful enough to theword-too faithful; but not to the sense." Sessa

and DiGaetani should take Chamberlain'swords to heart.For this reader, Mary Whittall's stylish trans-

lation of Westernhagen's biography reads bet-ter than the original. Nevertheless, there arenumerous inaccuracies which add confusion towhat is already a confused book. There aresome minor stylistic points-unnecessary col-loquialisms (e.g., "a bloke without a hope," p.581), occasional solecisms (e.g. "protagonists,"pp. 66, 384), plural for singular and vice versa(e.g., Aufkldrungen is best rendered n Englishas "Elucidation" rather than the clumsy "Clar-

ifications," p. 407; die Kapellmeister is not"musical director," (p. 155), in nineteenth-century German opera houses a person of lowrank in the singular, but "[opera] house con-ductors," persons of higher rank in the plural).And Whittall's handling of indirect speech isnot always happy. Westernhagen's irritatinglyfrequent use of the conjunctive in Germanoften leads to confusion in English. Referringto the English critics Chorley and Davison, forexample, Whittall has: "They were of courserogues and fools" (p. 206), which soundsgrotesquely partisan even for Westernhagen.

But the original is in the conjunctive whichmeans that Wagner's London friends are beingquoted indirectly. The passage should read:"they were of course rogues and fools, Wagnerwas told . . ." More serious are the mistakeswhich change the meaning of Westernhagen's

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text. Apart from two already mentioned (fn. 7and citation 1), Wagner's revealing words "areal melody that was all my own ... was all Iaimed at when I started to compose; I neverwent in for sophisticated ponderings likeSchumann" (pp. 33-34) should read: "I im-

mediately started composing for effect; I neverwent in for introverted ponderings and sophis-ticated subtleties (Grfibelei, Spintisierei) likeSchumann." And Whittall has mistranslatedone of Wagner's most famous sayings. In amoment of doubt about the fate of Parsifal,Wagner did not say that he wanted to create"invisible acting" (p. 544). He used the wordTheater, which in German can mean either thetheater as a whole or the stage in particular.

Incidentally, since its incomplete citation inthe Bayreuther Bldtter (1937) this saying hasbeen misunderstood by generations of Wagner-ians, including Wieland Wagner (who used itto justify his scenic concept of Entrfimpelungor "clearing away of old lumber") and Western-

hagen. Instead of the completely serious re-mark it is often taken to be, it is actually a per-fect example of the sardonic humour seldomappreciated by Wagner's admirers. Here is theend of the quotation in full with the passageomitted by Westernhagen in italics: "Havingcreated the invisible orchestra, I now feel likeinventing the invisible theater And the inau-dible orchestra" (Cosima

Wagner's-.Diaries [23 September 1878], II, 154).I-

REV

IN THE NEXT ISSUE (WINTER 1981)

Special Debussy Issue

ARTICLES Carolyn Abbate: Tristan in the Composition of PellgasRichard Langham Smith: Debussy and the Pre-RaphaelitesJames R. Briscoe: Debussy d'apris Debussy: The

Further Resonances of Two Early MelodiesNicholas Temperley: Schubert and Beethoven's Eight-Six Chord

VIEWPOINT Gary Tomlinson: Verdi after Budden

REVIEWS of The New Grove by John Roberts, Nicholas Temperley,Robert Trotter, William Weber

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