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Schopenhauer and Wagner--we tend to think of them hand in hand, as Goethe
and Schiller are depicted in the monument in Weimar. And why not? Didn't
the composer lavishly acknowledge his indebtedness to the philosopher-who
supposedly gave his follower his blessing? Yet, how firm is that handshake?
Those of us who hold, with Miss Marple in Murder in the Vicarage,
that theory is "so very different from practice, isn't it?" can
explore the matter through the single document of an actual "meeting"
of the minds of Wagner and Schopenhauer (who in real life never met)-the
extensive marginal notes Schopenhauer penciled into a copy of Der Ring
des Nibelungen that its author had sent him. This copy, now housed among
the treasures of Harvard's Houghton Library, in its hands-on way may tell
us more about the relationship of these two giants of cultural life, Teutonic
style, than any number of in-depth analyses of their relationship deduced
from intellectual history. (I quote the annotations by permission of Houghton
Library.)
In his autobiography, Mein Leben, Wagner describes vividly his encounter
with Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: "The
impact was extraordinary and decisive for the rest of my life." He
read the hefty volume four times between the autumn of 1854 and the following
summer. Like a revelation, the book 
illuminated for him the meaning of his
own work. "I looked at my Nibelungen poem," he wrote, "and
realized to my own surprise that what was now stupefying me [befangen
machte] as theory had long been familiar to me in my own poetic creation.
In this manner, I came to understand my own Wotan."
Throughout his theoretical writings, he would invoke the authority of Schopenhauer's
understanding of music as the manifestation of "being" in its
true essence or essential truth; no other aesthetics of music had, to Wagner's
mind, any claim to validity-or was better suited to further Wagner's own
cause. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, whose magnum opus had appeared with
little notice in 1819, owed his overwhelming upsurge of fame in the second
half of the nineteenth century to a considerable extent to the phenomenal
ascent of his ardent follower, who incorporated the Weltanschauung of
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung not only into his musical aesthetics
but also into some of his later operas-Tristan und Isolde, Die
Meistersinger, and Parsifal.
Schopenhauer confirmed Wagner's own philosophical mood of resignation, which
declares everyday reality an illusion; he enlightened Wagner about himself.
Wagner stated this unequivocally in letters written at this time; he recommended
Schopenhauer to any and all of his friends in the warmest terms and before
long had surrounded himself in his Zurich exile with a crowd of Schopenhauer
fans. One friend was even dispatched to Frankfurt to visit the notoriously
disgruntled sage with an invitation to come to Switzerland to be lionized.
Schopenhauer played coy: he no longer traveled, he responded. Undaunted,
the Zurich Wagnerians intensified their veneration to the point of promoting
the establishment of a professorship of Schopenhauerism at the University
of Zurich. Schopenhauer acknowledged that "would be a great honor for
me."
The project failed. But that did not dampen the enthusiasm of the Zurich
cénacle for the grim old man in Frankfurt-nor Schopenhauer's
gratitude for their attention: he had, after all, been chafing for decades
at the inattention of the reading public. Yet the beautiful Zurich-Frankfurt
relationship wouldn't have been quite the same if Wagner had known how Schopenhauer
the reader reacted to the copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen that Wagner
had sent him in December 1854 "in veneration and gratitude," as
the autograph dedication of the Houghton copy proclaims. Wagner's autobiography
discloses a slightly embarrassing secret: Schopenhauer never did send a
written reply. Like the good Schopenhauerian that he was, Wagner claimed
in Mein Leben that he had "resigned himself" from the outset to
the prospect of not receiving a reply. But in fact he did suffer from Schopenhauer's
chilling silence; Cosima Wagner's diary records his grief and chagrin as
late as March 1878-a generation after the fact.
Still, Wagner did not hold this disappointment against Schopenhauer. His
forbearance was made easier by reports from two friends who had visited
the philosopher. They told him that Schopenhauer "had made significant
and favorable comments on my poem." That the truth was cosmetized more
than a little in this formulation is proved by wording reported in Schopenhauer's
Conversations. But what the sage of Frankfurt penciled in the margins
of his presentation copy of the Ring was even more drastic. For Schopenhauer
did look this gift-horse in the mouth, and what he saw didn't please him
in the least.
Taking a good look at these marginal notes is not without some voyeuristic
thrill. Do they, for example, confirm what we are told in the authoritative
Wagner-Handbuch, published in 1986-namely, that the philosopher's
comments, no matter how biting, "evidently appreciated the literary
rank" of Wagner's ambitious work?
