Classically Romantic

What did Richard Wagner know about ancient Greece? More importantly, what did he think he knew? How did Wagner's attitudes towards the past shape his construction of the Ring cycle?

Classically Romantic attempts to answer these questions through an examination of Wagner's intellectual background and the structure of the Ring itself. The book explores the differences between Wagner's "romantic classicism" and traditional "philological classicism." Anticipating the "Great Books" movement of the twentieth century, Wagner's views were an interesting blend of classical formalism and romantic idealism. Wagner believed, for instance, that classical literature was important, not because it shed light on the past, but because it had "continued relevance" to each succeeding generation. The classics purified and redeemed ancient society, Wagner concluded, and only an equivalent type of work could purify and redeem the modern world. It was out of a desire to create a "modern classic" that Wagner's four-drama cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, arose.

In Wagner's romantic view of the past, Greek tragedy was the only perfectly unified form of art. The composer believed that, in ancient tragedy, all the arts worked together harmoniously so as to guide the audience towards a single, significant purpose: a harmonious social order. In this way, although Wagner saw himself as imitating classical models, his ultimate goal was identical to that of many Romantic Age social reformers.

Fundamental aspects of Wagnerian drama may thus ultimately be traced to the composer's unusual combination of the classical and the romantic. For example, Wagner's central concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the "total work of art" in which every artistic element blended perfectly with every other artistic element, has a direct connection to the composer's desire to recreate classical tragedy, the one form of art in which he believed those elements had been unified. By examining each of Aristotle's six constituent elements of tragedy (plot, music, speech, thought, character, and spectacle), Classically Romantic demonstrates what Wagner envisioned when he sought a perfect "union" of all the components of art. Perhaps most important of the book's contributions is its demonstration that the leitmotif, usually regarded solely as a musical phenomenon, was actually a thematic principle of construction employed on many levels of the drama. Wagner introduced were repeated themes of plot, characterization, speech, and imagery, all endowed with meaning in a manner precisely parallel to that of the musical leitmotivs. Moreover, since Wagner dictated nearly every aspect of how the original productions of his work were staged, even visual elements of the drama could be given a consistent, "thematic" role. Colors, images of light and darkness, and mist all serve as "visual leitmotivs" in much the same way that one can also speak of musical leitmotivs, leitmotivs of plot, character leitmotivs, and so on.

Finally, Wagner's desire to bring all social classes together in a festival similar to the Great Dionysia of ancient Athens helps explain why the composer created the Wagner Societies throughout Germany in his own lifetime and why the Festspielhaus of Bayreuth was established as it was, with annual festivals rather than continual performances...