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No doubt about it: Schopenhauer, reading Wagner's Ring in the
winter of 1854-55, pencil in hand, was in a difficult position. The book
had been sent to him as a token of reverence, and yet only the
preceding May he had been flattered by reports that music critics were using
his "pronouncements" about music in their polemics against Wagner's
operas, "and rightly so," as he wrote to a friend. What exactly
did Schopenhauer indicate about his admirer and adversary in his marginal
annotations?
It is obvious from the start that it is Schopenhauer the famed stylist,
the universally acknowledged master of German prose, who was wielding the
pencil. Wagner's language was offensive to Schopenhauer-as it still
is to many readers for precisely the 
same peculiarities that irritated Schopenhauer.
And the sage of Frankfurt read the text most carefully. Of course, much
of Schopenhauer's criticism loses its pungency in translation, but a few
examples of his stylistic comments may give anglophone readers some idea
of his objections.
Schopenhauer was particularly annoyed, as his vigorous question marks and
critical underlinings (sometimes accompanied by multiple exclamation marks)
suggest, by Wagner's artificially archaic vocabulary. Nobody but an expert
in things medieval would know today, any more than Schopenhauer did then,
that a freislicher Streit is a "terrifying quarrel." Nor
did infelicitous constructions, stylistic awkwardness, and illogical turns
of phrase escape Schopenhauer's angry pencil. Some of these passages are
mildly funny, like the one suggesting that Erda does not know--to judge
by her syntax in Rheingold--whether she gave birth to her three daughters
or whether they were created at the dawn of time. Another such stylistic
aberration, which rated one of Schopenhauer's quizzically amused exclamation
marks, eventually caught the dull eye of Wagner himself when he revised
his text slightly: Wotan originally says about Wala in Walküre, "News
I received from her; / but from me she received a child."
What Schopenhauer found consistently exasperating about Wagner's style were
his characteristic composite nouns, like Felssteine, Felsensaum,
Felsspitze (rocks, rocky edge, rocky peak). "Ears!" Schopenhauer
repeatedly penciled in the margin in his powerful hand, "he has no
ears! the deaf musician." It is the sound of these and other such difficult
words that go against Schopenhauer's grain. The implication is, clearly,
that Wagner is a poet-composer who is at odds with the building materials
of his trade, "the deaf musician." Schopenhauer summed up this
criticism in large letters: "Language should be the serf of the master."
Other marginal notes remark on elements of substance and subject matter,
rather than style. In one instance, Schopenhauer was reminded of Goethe's
Faust, writing in the line that came to mind, without implying any
criticism or worthwhile comment. But the running commentary becomes more
interesting when the text becomes more immoral. The prime bone of contention
is the adulterous and incestuous love scene of Siegmund and Sieglinde that
concludes the first act of Walküre. Sieglinde's seductive suggestion
that, were she to find "the sacred friend," her arms would embrace
the hero, is translated into plain English (Schopenhauer was notoriously
anglophile) in a firm marginal note: "Go, and murder my husband."
Near the beginning of this fervid scene he writes in large letters, "One
may forget about morality on occasion, but one should not slap it in the
face," and a little later, "Infamous!" Likewise, it is the
dubious morals of the sibling lovers that the austere critic has in mind
when, at the end of the scene (after brother and sister have recognized
each other, which only increases their turgid infatuation), he comments
as the curtain falls, "High time, too." Understandably, Schopenhauer
couldn't let pass such unbridled abandon to what he called the "will,"
in the sense of animal drive.
The "slap in the face of morality" occurs a second time in the
first act of Siegfried, when the uncouth young hero turns brusquely
against Mime, who has raised him with paternal love and sacrifice. "Outrageous
ingratitude," says Schopenhauer, "maulschellirte Moral."
The philosopher who preached abnegation of the world (and who in private
life was much less inclined to such abstinence) here took the position of
conventional morality and pedestrian propriety-rather an unexpected spectacle.
In any case, and contrary to what the Wagner-Handbuch tells us, Schopenhauer
seems to see neither hide nor hair of literary value, be it stylistic or
substantive, as he goes over the Ring, pencil at the ready.
This is confirmed by a few additional, satiric comments, all pointing to
something unintentionally comical in Wagner's writing. How else should one
take Schopenhauer's comment on Fricka's obstreperousness toward her husband,
Wotan, in Act II of Walküre? "Wodan henpecked," he
writes in the margin (Wotan "under the slipper" is the somewhat
more domestically picturesque German). A stage direction soon after is annotated
by the remark that Wotan-a god, after all-"cowers and obeys."
At the beginning of the third act of Walküre, Wagner isn't doing
much better, his critical reader thinks. Die Wolken spielen die Hauptrolle,
we read: "The clouds play the lead role." Schopenhauer also seems
to be amused by the inept and tongue-twisting description in Siegfried
of the dragon, Fafner, which he underlines and marks with an exclamation
mark: eidechsenartiger Schlangenwurm (lizardlike serpent-worm) is
apparently just a bit too much for him. (In 1904 Wagner biographer W. A.
Ellis, who knew of Schopenhauer's comments, came to his hero's rescue, somewhat
unhelpfully, by pointing out that this was a zoologically accurate description
of an iguanodon.) Siegfried's simplemindedly blunt self-introduction to
Gunther in Götterdämmerung--"Now fight with me, or
be my friend!"--rates three astonished exclamation marks in the margin.
Nor does the pencil-happy critic seem able to take Brünnhilde entirely
seriously. When she announces her intention to be burned alive, and on horseback,
too, on Siegfried's funeral pyre, Schopenhauer, who drew so much inspiration
from Indian culture, writes "Suttee" in the margin. This is hardly
a compliment; more likely it indicates amused surprise about the inappropriateness
of such fulsome expression of sorrow in the world of Nordic mythology.
What, then, was Schopenhauer's overall impression of Wagner's Ring
as a text? Nothing in the marginal notations points to any kind of appreciation
of the "literary rank" of the work. On the contrary, both the
infelicitous style and the questionable morality of the Ring provoke
Schopenhauer the stylist and the moralist, and the evidently amused reactions
to involuntarily comical scenes continue this critical vein. When latter-day
Wagnerians (as represented magisterially in the Wagner-Handbuch)
claim that on the whole Schopenhauer approved of the text of the Ring,
they take into account the conversational remarks he reportedly made about
the work shortly after reading it. But remember that these remarks, to the
effect that Wagner-or rather, "the jerk" (der Kerl), in
one honest report-was a poet, not a musician, were repeated to Wagner by
friends who no doubt heard what they wanted to hear and told him what he
was eager to hear. The remarks, moreover, were suspiciously similar, and
by the time they reached Wagner they had already been purified to unadulterated
flattery. In Cosima Wagner's diary of 16 January 1869, some 14 years after
the fact, they are: "I admire Wagner as a poet; but a musician he is
not."
So, would "admiration" for Wagner the poet have been Schopenhauer's
last word on the subject? The marginal notes to the Ring in Houghton
Library suggest nothing of the sort. Not one of his notations appears favorable,
by any stretch of the imagination. The Weltanschauung of mystical
resignation both men may have shared. But in their literary and musical
tastes (Schopenhauer preferred Mozart and Rossini), they were antipodes.
Harvard's copy of the Ring demonstrates this only too clearly. That
handshake (symbolically celebrated at Bayreuth year in, year out) could
only have been somewhat backhanded. But that pose is not quite suitable
for a monument.