Wagner and the Sublime: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Erotic passion is a more dominant theme in Wagner’s operas than it is, for example, in Mozart’s oeuvre, where seduction, its charms and risks, is brought to the fore. Wagner presents a shared but impossible passion of which Tristan and Isolde is not merely an example but the thing itself. Here, the extreme tension produced by the conflict between desire and interdiction attains the sublime. But what is the sublime? In the first century a treatise attributed to Longinus, On the Sublime, defined sublimity as ‘a distinction and excellence in thought and expression’ that ‘elevates the soul’, enabling it to transcend its limits. Ancient rhetoric distinguished three categories of style: simple, temperate and sublime, the sublime being a style that exerts an irresistible force and emotion, distinguishing it from the lesser intensities of the other two styles.

We will consider, within the framework of this definition, the extent to which Wagner’s oeuvre enables us to gain a deeper understanding of the sublime. Concurrently, we will examine what psychoanalysis has to say about the origin of the conflict between desire and interdiction. We shall draw on Wagner’s operas as well as his autobiography¹, written in collaboration with Cosima² who, for reasons of discretion, carefully suppressed any evocation of Wagner’s love, let alone his passion. The 800-odd pages of the book describe a man grappling with the composition of a gigantic oeuvre in which, at first, he alone believed. Relatively late in his career Ludwig II of Bavaria rallied to his cause, offering him generous financial support and extravagant friendship. It was Ludwig who commissioned the autobiography, a sweeping epic of a genius’ life.

1 – Richard Wagner, Ma vie (Paris: Perrin, 2012)

2 – Cosima, the daughter of Franz Liszt, was married to Hans von Bülow. She was Wagner’s mistress at the time he dictated the autobiography to her.

This mixture of terror and the sublime became a major motif in Wagner’s inspiration, justifying Nietzsche’s critique of him as a hypnotist. Indeed, the philosopher likens the effect on his soul of Wagnerian orchestration to the exasperating sweat induced by the sirocco, and he reproaches the composer for resorting to the great stimulants of the decadents in his efforts at seduction, namely the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent.¹ Furthermore, Nietzsche found in Wagner a feminine and adolescent sensibility that ‘requires the sublime, the profound and the overpowering’². For him, the decadent musicians, and foremost among them Wagner, traffic in the chaos of emotions, forestalling  all thought. In philosophical terms, far from producing the rigorous precision of a demonstration, these musicians exhibit the uncontrolled élan of Schwärmerei, the illusion that consists in believing one sees something imperceptible to the senses.

1 – Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, tr. Thomas Common (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899)

2 – Ibid.

Beyond the presence of his stepfather, Wagner, surrounded by his mother and sisters, grew up in a world of women. Speaking of his mother’s role in his life, he wrote: ‘What influenced me most was the strange zeal with which she expressed, in almost pathetic tones, her ideas about the beautiful and the sublime in art.’ His mother might also have exerted a religious influence on him. Of this he kept only the mysticism, which, from early on, he mixed with his passion for Greek mythology. Did Wagner, in writing of this, want to pre-interpret for the royal reader of his autobiography the psychological links between his childhood and his work? Perhaps.

Like the characters in his operas, Wagner was himself rebellious, upholding his intuitions irrespective of reality. This rebellion against the established order is consistent with his position as (almost) the youngest child in the family. It also has to do with his certitude that his sisters, in particular the eldest, the beloved Rosalie, would protect him. Indeed, he perceived Rosalie as a strong woman, maternal and generous, under whose protection he could do as he liked.

Doing so only for the ‘glory’ of acquiring the status of ‘university student’, Wagner belatedly sat his university entrance exams. He did not attend classes. Instead, firmly believing in his poetic vocation, he undertook extravagant projects, attempting, for example, to write dramatic works in the vein of Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante.

One must remember that in Wagner’s work, writing (words) comes first and composition (music) after. Confident in his self-taught certitudes, the composer-to-be bought himself a manual of composition. Why did he believe he had the capacity to create when nothing and no-one gave him reason to believe it? In fact, it was the force of his phantasy that demanded he respond to it,¹ and the emotion that ‘carried him away’ was what he would put into words and then into music. These ‘visions’ could also arise when listening to music. We’ve seen Wagner’s fascination with Weber, but Beethoven fascinated him just as much. Indeed, Wagner claimed that it was thanks to Beethoven’s ‘Adelaïde’, a charming if slight lied, that he discovered the ‘invocation of love’. In contrast, he found Mozart’s piano adaptation of Don Giovanni ‘frivolous, futile and lacking in virility’, and it was only thanks to the Requiem that he ‘admitted Mozart into his spirit world’, a world that could not fail to please its protector, given to creating semblances of himself.

1 – Just as it would continue to do in everyday situations, such as the sight of a wild landscape discovered during a journey by mail-coach.

During his adolescence, Wagner’s rebellion derived from his incapacity to find at school the intellectual sustenance his phantasies demanded. His rebellion was characterized by an immense self-confidence that went hand in hand with a propensity for self-instruction. This propensity, it seems, did not have the pre-paranoid dimension that often accompanies it, since Wagner’s concern was not with constructing explanations but with capturing the chaos of real-life experience. Mastering an instrument was not his concern, since composing does not require it. As for music theory, its dryness put him off. Nevertheless, without any teaching, Wagner composed fantasies, sonatas and overtures.

Wagner, seventeen at the time of the July Revolution in France in 1830, writes in My Life: ‘For me, history came into being at that time. Of course, I was on the side of the Revolution, which I saw as the courageous struggle of a people fighting victoriously, without tainting themselves, against the excesses of the first French Revolution’. He composed a ‘Political Overture’ and, even though he was not a student, took part in the student uprising in Leipzig.

Soon after, the students were enrolled as an irregular force to fight against a workers’ uprising. Wagner took pleasure in the destructive rage of the rebels, determined as they were to enjoy their power while it lasted. He wrote that one of his models of insubordination and bravery was ‘a desperado straight out of the Nibelungen’.

Wagner himself continually engaged in the traditional saber duels between competing student societies, this being a primary reason for his becoming a student.

The passion that Hitler would develop for Wagner could thus embrace not only Wagner’s anti-Semitism but also his specifically Romantic and German phantasmagorical intensity, as far from the solar light of Mozart’s Italy as from Nietzsche’s ‘joyous science’.

‘The immorality of hypocrisy and all that is unnatural in the rigidity of moral laws’: that is precisely the denunciation we find in, for example, the dialogue between Wotan and Fricka in Act II of Die Walküre. The hero, Wotan’s illegitimate son Siegmund, is set to fight Hunding, who is pursuing him. He is on the run with his twin sister Siegelinde, who had been kidnapped and forced to marry Hunding. The twins, narcissistically fascinated with each, have fallen in love. Wotan praises this incestuous love in the face of his wife’s anger. She, goddess of marriage, takes Hunding’s side and demands that Siegmund die. To Fricka, his lawful wife, Wotan retorts: ‘Unholy I deem the vow that binds unloving hearts.’ We thus find in Wotan, god of war and treaties, the same passion as that found in the psychopathic adolescent, Wagner.

Brünnhilde, too, will not fulfill her father Wotan’s will. Fricka’s arguments prevail. She forces Wotan to face up to his solitude, which is absolute since nothing exists outside him. She convinces him to side with the established order and to support the divine power she represents. Addressing Brünnhilde soon after this episode, Wotan speaks of the state of aporia he finds himself in:

O, how shall I find
or shape me the free one, by me ne’er shielded,
in his firm defiance the dearest to me?
How fashion the Other who, not through me,
but from his will for my ends shall work?
In loathing find I ever myself
in all my hand has created;
the Other whom I have longed for,
that Other I ne’er shall find:
himself must the free one create him;
my hand nought shapeth but slaves.

It is indeed here that the figure of the hero (heroine) comes into play: he (she) must be passionately loved by the father who sees in him (her) his own youth; at the same time, he (she) must free himself (herself) from paternal tutelage, betray the father and affirm his (her) own freedom.

Brünnhilde goes even further. Captivated by the courage of Siegmund, she unconsciously takes Wotan’s love for his son upon herself. She will therefore disobey the father and rebel against his power, while protecting Siegmund, his sister/lover, and their unborn child. In so doing, she—a heroine in love with a hero while expressing the father’s love for his son—breaks the bond that fusionally binds her to her father:

In her deeds my desires were born to the day:
our holy bond she hath now so disdained
that, faithless, she my own will hath defied,
my sacred command openly scorned,
against me she lifted the spear
that by Wotan’s will she bore!

Wotan, reproaching her for not having understood his distress and solitude, pronounces her sentence.¹

1 – ‘Valkyrie you are no longer / What you are is henceforth only what you are’. To magic sleep upon a mountain she is banished, protected only by a circle of fire. [Translator’s note]

Heroes, however, can also be desperadoes, fearing neither god no man. Even Siegfried, who presents himself as the perfect hero, comes to a bad end. His fearlessness in the face of danger, far from being a sign of courage, is mere recklessness. In Twilight of the Gods, he abandons his beloved to another man by resorting to a vile subterfuge, thus participating in the general de-idealization that, except for the character of Brünnhilde, characterizes the Ring.

How does Wagner typically resolve the oedipal conflict in his operas? The ‘twilight of the gods’ gives way to the victorious figure of the Redeemer, while devotion—’narrow-minded, duplicitous and extreme’,¹ as Nietzsche describes it—relegates erotic passion to concupiscence and the base instincts. In The Rheingold, Alberich, having been mocked by the naiads, renounces love for power and gold. Sanctified by religion, the situation recurs in the triad of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Parsifal. In Tristan and Isolde, the choice is between loyalty to the paternal figure of the King and seduction of the woman who is to become his bride. Passion in Wagner is above all a scenario in which jouissance² drives one mad: only a young woman in a sisterly role can offer a way out. The violent passion of a mother for a son and a son for a mother—that is what is to be sacrificed.

1 – This is a translation of cagoterie, a French term Nietzsche borrowed from Voltaire. [Translator’s note]

2 – Jouissance, as defined by Dylan Evans in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2001) pp. 91-92: The pleasure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible’. At the same time, the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful pleasure’ is what Lacan calls jouissance; ‘jouissance is suffering’. The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction. The very prohibition of jouissance (inherent in the symbolic structure of language and in the Oedipus complex/the incest taboo) creates the desire to transgress it, and jouissance is therefore fundamentally transgressive. The death drive is the name given to that constant desire in the subject to break through the pleasure principle towards the thing and a certain excess jouissance; thus jouissance is ‘the path towards death’. Insofar as the drives are attempts to break through the pleasure principle in search of jouissance, every drive is a death drive. There are strong affinities between Lacan’s concept of jouissance and Freud’s concept of the libido, as is clear from Lacan’s description of jouissance as a ‘bodily substance’. [Translator’s note]

Herzeleide, Parsifal’s mother, is described thus: ‘A mother inconsolable for the loss of her beloved husband’. (Recall the premature death of Wagner’s father and the fact that Wagner readily speaks of maternal violence.) The description of Herzeleide continues: ‘Her life was one of perpetual worry, an endless anxiety for her child’. Kundry to Parsifal: ‘When she clasped you to her in fury, did  you not fear her very kisses?’

Opposing that view, Tannhäuser alludes to his Venusberg experience:

I cannot approach this source
without feeling wild desire,
I must cool a burning thirst
and with my lips satisfy it.
In long drafts I draw pleasure
and will not tremble at the sight,
for just as endless as its wonders
is my desire for its delight

And to Walther, who advises him to ‘drink from the fountain with his heart, not his lips’, Tannhäuser replies:

That which deigns to human contact,
which lies near to heart and senses,
that which, created for like matter,
inclines to us in soft flesh,
that is for enjoyment in happy desire,
and in enjoyment alone do I recognize love!

And to Biterolf, who is threatening him, he lashes out:

Ha, you foolish braggart, Biterolf!
Do you sing of love, you fierce wolf?
Assuredly you have never known
that which I find pleasurable.
What, poor wretch, have you known of pleasure?
Your life was lacking in love,
and what paltry joys befell you
were indeed not worth a blow!

And then, just as Venus had predicted, comes the revelation that leads to Tannhäuser being cast out of the community: ‘Poor mortals, who true love have never tasted—make haste, haste to Venusberg!’ The innocent Elizabeth, in love with him, tries in vain to save him from damnation: she advises him to seek the Pope’s pardon, which he does but does not obtain. Finally, only Elizabeth’s ‘saintly’ death deters him from his desire: he forsakes Venusberg. The weakness of this ‘happy ending’—morality is upheld—shows how Wagner excels in giving powerful musical expression to the violence of guilty sexual pleasure.

That is why, as Lohengrin says, their reciprocal recognition was immediate, as if it had derived from a reminiscence: ‘Though we never met, we sensed each other’. This is a variation on what Siegmund and Siegelinde say.

With Lohengrin, it is the sensual delight of childhood that reappears: ‘I come not from darkness and suffering, I come from splendour and delight’, he tells Elsa. She, suspicious and unwilling to follow his lead, will be punished for her refusal: ‘You came to me from a place of delights and you long to return there. How am I, poor wretch, to believe that my devotion will ever satisfy you? The day will come when I am robbed of you because you regret your love for me’.

The Wagnerian hero’s incapacity to unite with the object of his desire is, as we have seen, not only a choice to renounce fulfilment in love in favor of duty to obey the Law. In fact, it is damnation that is constantly at stake, because desire and sensual pleasure are so violent that they drive the hero mad. ‘Enlightened through compassion, the innocent fool’: this line from Parsifal could well serve as Wagner’s self-definition. Consistent with the split described by Freud as ‘the most prevalent form of degradation in erotic life’, Wagner spent the first decades of his adult life with a woman he was not in love with but for whom, over many years of hardship, he felt an enduring tenderness.

We are far from the Rhinemaidens or the flower-girls in the magic garden that Klingsor created after he found himself ‘powerless to stifle the desire within him’ and ‘on himself laid dastardly hands. Wrath taught Klingsor how his deed of shameful sacrifice could give him knowledge of evil magic’. Klingsor is a pervert¹ who, unable to experience jouissance himself, ‘transformed the desert into a magic garden in which bloomed women of infernal beauty; there he awaits the knights of the Grail to lure them to sinful joys and hell’s damnation’. The sensual intensity of puritanism confers on sexuality a metaphysical dimension: at every instant one risks one’s eternal life, but experiences ineffable jouissance. And at the end there will always be someone of noble nature to tell one, like Parsifal to Kundry: ‘For your salvation too I am sent, if you will but turn from desire.’

1 – In perversion, ‘the subject makes himself the instrument of the Other’s jouissance’. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection. Tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977) p. 320

Does the beauty of Wagner’s music advance us in defining the sublime and its possible link with sublimation? The Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment were keen to distinguish the sublime from the grandiloquence of a hollow idealization. They stressed that it had to come from what is natural, thereby asserting, as Freud would concerning sublimation, that the sublime, far from being an abstract quality, is linked to the psychic transformation of the subject himself. German philosophy, in contrast, inclined the sublime towards a psychology of emotions: the object is sublime and gives rise to the corresponding emotion. In his Critique of Judgement Kant writes: ‘The Sublime is what pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of sense’. He sees this opposition as the best safeguard against Schwärmerei, the illusion that consists in believing one sees something imperceptible to the senses. The sublime, like the beautiful, addresses both reason and imagination, but transcends them to induce a feeling of ecstasy and terror simultaneously. Hegel, in his Aesthetics, situates the sublime in the second phase of the dialectic, the antithesis, and thus in the recognition of the negative and the distance that separates absolute Geist from particular existences. The sublime corresponds to that moment when the idea, in manifesting itself, annihilates the sensible medium that expresses it.

Nietzsche: ‘Wagner became the heir of Hegel. Music as “idea”. It was not with his music that Wagner conquered young men, it was with the “idea”—it is the enigmatic character of his art, its playing hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal that leads and lures these youths to Wagner; it is Wagner’s genius for shaping clouds, his whirling, hurling, and twirling through the air, his everywhere and nowhere—the very same means by which Hegel formerly lured them.’ Note that Nietzsche does not accuse Wagner of being abstract—quite the opposite, since he writes, ‘the great symbols approach from foggy distances to resound in his art with muted thunder’.²

1 – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in his The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967) p. 178

2 – Ibid.

In fact, what is most striking in Wagner is his sub-rational certitude, which he transmits in his music. It comes across in an experience he recalls in his autobiography: ‘The mysterious joy I felt in hearing an orchestra play quite close to me still remains one of my most pleasant memories. The mere tuning up of the instruments put me in a state of mystic excitement; even the striking of fifths on the violin seemed to me like a greeting from the spirit world—which, I may mention incidentally, had a very real meaning for me. When I was still almost a baby, the sound of these fifths, which has always excited me, was closely associated in my mind with ghosts and spirits.’ One can of course be surprised at the little child’s fascination with the sounds of an orchestra tuning up—sounds so far from harmony and melody. Wagner himself disregarded melody in his later operas, Parsifal in particular, and Nietzsche reproached him for it: ‘To speak in the language of the master: infinity, but without melody. Melody is immoral. The lack of melody even sanctifies.’¹

1 – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in his The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967) pp. 167-68