The Political Passions of Richard Wagner

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session, presented by Mitchell Cohen, will explore the political passions of Richard Wagner. It will examine how his political and ideological convictions shaped his artistic output and contributed to his enduring significance in European cultural history.

"Few cultural figures have been as controversial as Richard Wagner (1813-1883). In various phases of his life, he was attached to liberalism, humanism, anarchism, intense nationalism (although he was never an advocate of a strong centralized state) and fervent hostilities (especially towards Jews, but also to the French and Jesuits). Debates have raged over the extent to which these ideas are embedded in his operas (or “Music Dramas,” as he called his works after the revolutions of 1848-49), both in the librettos or even in the music. In addition to his operas, Wagner was a prolific writer of essays and letters on a wide variety of themes, ranging from music and opera to politics, and participated in a failed, violent revolution in Dresden in May 1849 together with Mikhail Bakunin, famous in history as the father of Russian anarchism, and Gottfried Semper, who was perhaps the most celebrated German architect of the 19th century.  (Wagner fled to Zurich with the help of Weimar’s court music director, Franz Liszt and was exiled from German lands for thirteen years afterwards. Many of his works are preoccupied by his hostility towards law and custom. His massive Ring of the Nibelungen is animated by the predicament of a king of the Gods who is trapped by the laws he needs to sustain his power. Wagner had fraught relations with France; Paris was the capital of the opera world and he spent 1839-42 there, failing as a musician and living in poverty. (His French was mediocre and when he wasn’t focused on opera, he lived mostly within the German exile community, then the largest in the world). He was, however, then also writing his two first successes, Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman, staged in Dresden after his return there. He now stressed a desire to write “German” operas. In 1861 there was a quasi-riot at the Paris premiere of Tannhäuser (Baudelaire would defend Wagner); a later furor came over a “comedy” Wagner wrote (“Kapitulation”) mocking Parisians at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. In the meantime, her became an admirer of Arthur de Gobineau, author of “Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines,” arranging for a partial translation of and wrote an introduction to it."

Mitchell Cohen is professor emeritus of political science at Bernard Baruch College of the City University of New York and co-editor emeritus of Dissent magazine. His book The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (Princeton) won the Prose Award for Music of the American Association of Publishers, was named one of the Best Books of 2017 in the Critic’s List of the London Evening Standard, won the Presidential Achievement Award for Excellence in Scholarship of Baruch College of the City University of New York, and was shortlisted for the Shannon Prize in European Studies. His earlier books include The Wager of Lucien Goldmann and Zion and State.