A tale of two starlings?
Whether or not Richard Wagner’s well-documented anti-Semitic opinions find expression in his operatic oeuvre is a question that divides his admirers and critics alike into two broad camps. On the one side are writers such as Theodor Adorno, Robert Gutman, Barry Millington, Paul Lawrence Rose, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Marc Weiner and David J. Levin who argue that certain of his works, especially the Ring des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal, symbolise in various characters and situations the anti-Jewish ideology found in Wagner’s writings and private utterances.Footnote 1 Adherents of this viewpoint see in characters such as Alberich, Mime, Hagen and Beckmesser representations of attributes – off-putting physiognomy and behavior, cunning and calculation, greed, emotional shallowness, lack of homeland and native language, artistic sterility and so forth – that Wagner imputed to Jews in his writings, in particular is his notorious essay ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’, first published in 1850 as an article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. According to this view, Wagner incorporated anti-Jewish symbols in his operas as coded warnings about the threats posed by Jews to the health of German culture.
On the opposite side of the question are such writers as Dieter Borchmeyer, Brian Magee and Hermann Danuser, who separate Wagner’s hateful ideology from the messages conveyed by his operas.Footnote 2 The arguments for this position are both empirical and philosophical. The empirical arguments adduce three main points: first, that the operas contain no characters, settings, situations or musical styles that are explicitly identified as Jewish; second, that Wagner himself never pointed in public or private to any features of his operas as symbols of Jewish attributes; third, that there is very little evidence that Wagner’s contemporaries understood his operas to contain coded representations of anti-Semitic messages. For these writers, anti-Semitic content in Wagner’s operas is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder, a product of the hermeneutic enterprise. More philosophically, one has made the argument that aesthetic experience is not the same as knowledge of historical, biographical and social contexts, and that the meaning of an art-work floats freely, determined not by authorial intention nor by the original historical matrix that gave rise to it. From this perspective, even if Wagner did seek to encode anti-Semitic images in his operas, that would not be relevant to the aesthetic experience of the work. Further, some resistance to readings that find anti-Semitic subtexts in Wagner’s operas arises from a sincere concern that such readings inadvertently reinforce negative stereotypes in the present day, an age still haunted by the spectre of racism.Footnote 3
Were the debate about almost any other topic, one might be tempted to cry out like an exasperated Siegfried hushing the uninformative and repetitive Mime ‘Still mit dem alten Starenlied’ (literally, ‘Silence that old starling song’), to call for an end to a debate that is unlikely ever to reach a consensus resolution. But as Thomas S. Grey notes, this is not a normal topic of academic debate; whether Wagner’s anti-Semitic views influenced his artistic decisions is a question of unusually high moral stakes.Footnote 4 Painful though the answer might be, one really should try to know whether works admired as some of the most impressive accomplishments of human creativity were inspired by reprehensible and ultimately dangerous attitudes and, if they were, how this came about.
Another reference to a starling in Wagner’s oeuvre points us, I believe, in an interesting new direction to approach this difficult subject. Wagner’s critique of the opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer in the closing pages of Part I of Oper und Drama brings together an allusion to Meyerbeer’s Jewish origins with an ornithological metaphor for creative deficiency: ‘He was like the starling that follows the plowshare in the field and joyfully pecks up the exposed earthworms from the churned-up furrows.’Footnote 5 Metaphorically, Meyerbeer and Mime are both ‘starlings’. What might this mean? Are there other links between the two?
Taking a cue from the fact that Wagner characterised both Mime and Meyerbeer as ‘starlings’, I will argue that Wagner ultimately did allow his strong anti-Jewish sentiments to guide his artistic decisions. There is of course a long history of interpreting Mime as a parody of anti-Jewish stereotypes,Footnote 6 but striking parallels between Wagner’s views about the Jewish composer on the one hand and his treatment of the Nibelung dwarf on the other suggest that, at some level of consciousness, Wagner drew on his hostile feelings towards a specific individual, Giacomo Meyerbeer, to work out the character of Mime – and the dwarf’s relationship with Siegfried – in the libretto for Der junge Siegfried of 1851. And because by 1851 Wagner imputed Meyerbeer’s shortcomings largely to the fact that he was Jewish, in symbolising Meyerbeer’s faults, Mime came to embody characteristics that Wagner attributed to an entire group of people.
The idea of linking Mime to Meyerbeer is, to be sure, not new. Grey, for one, has drawn parallels between Mime and Meyerbeer to give support to the notion that Mime is a ‘Jew’ and has also tied Wagner’s antipathy towards Meyerbeer to Siegfried’s loathing of Mime. Noting the chronological proximity of the start of work on Der junge Siegfried to Wagner’s definitive break with Meyerbeer as expressed in a letter of 18 April 1851 to Franz Liszt, Grey writes:
Wagner goes on [in the letter to Liszt] to express his horror that anyone should suppose he has ‘anything in common with Meyerbeer.’ He feels ‘driven with genuine desperation’ to separate himself from him,’ this falsely flattering Jew who posed as young Wagner’s protector while secretly willing his professional demise, this musical hack who speaks a foreign tongue and whose works care nothing for the organic integrity of language and melody (as Wagner sees it). In short, Wagner is horrified at the prospect that Meyerbeer might be regarded as his operatic, spiritual and aesthetic ‘father’ – a supposition that was far from outlandish, as comments from both Schumann and Liszt (vigorously parried by Wagner) attest. Thus it seems to me eminently plausible that Mime, above all in Siegfried, is suffused with traits Wagner identified as Jewish, and even that Wagner regarded himself as something of a musical-cultural Siegfried to Meyerbeer’s Mime.Footnote 7
I would go even further, however, to suggest that Wagner’s rupture with Meyerbeer, which culminated in the years 1849–51, was a major source of inspiration behind – and arguably a catalyst for – the work that would eventually become Siegfried, the second ‘day’ of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
My article will start with a review of the biographical evidence for Wagner’s relationship with Meyerbeer, one that began with admiration and dependency and ended with disillusionment and rupture. The next section considers in detail parallels between the Mime of Der junge Siegfried and Meyerbeer (and as a corollary, between Siegfried and Wagner), comparing situations and descriptions from the dramatic sources with Wagner’s comments about Meyerbeer in his letters and prose writings.Footnote 8 Important for the argument here is the fact that numerous details in the characterisation of the dwarf and of his relationship to Siegfried changed between 1848, the year of Wagner’s initial conception of his Nibelungen project, and 1851, the year in which he wrote the libretto for Der junge Siegfried; these dates also enclose the period in which Wagner’s radical break with Meyerbeer occurred. In the final section, I will argue that Wagner’s conception of Der junge Siegfried entails an unusually tight coincidence of autobiography, aesthetic theory and artistic expression at a crucial juncture in Wagner’s career.
Wagner and Meyerbeer: a declining relationship
A brief review of Wagner’s relationship with Meyerbeer up to 1851 will provide some context.Footnote 9 As is well known, in the early stages of his career, Wagner both professed admiration for Meyerbeer as an artist and sought out the older composer’s help in furthering his own career ambitions. As early as 4 February 1837, Wagner, writing from Königsberg in East Prussia, solicited Meyerbeer’s assistance in interesting the Paris Opéra in an opera on Die hohe Braut and in getting his comic opera Das Liebesverbot accepted for performance at the Opéra-Comique.Footnote 10 During his first Paris sojourn (1839–42), Wagner repeatedly turned to Meyerbeer for help in gaining entrée to the Opéra and the Théâtre de la Renaissance. When Wagner’s Parisian ambitions came to naught, he turned to Meyerbeer to assist with the dissemination of his works in Germany. Alongside his frequent appeals for support, Wagner early in his career wrote in glowing terms about Meyerbeer’s accomplishments, putting him in the succession of great German opera composers such as Handel, Gluck and Mozart who had escaped the confines of German provincialism by absorbing foreign influences, particularly those of Italian opera, to achieve a transcendent universality of technique and expression.Footnote 11 For his part, Meyerbeer seems genuinely to have taken an interest in his younger colleague; he facilitated contacts for Wagner in Paris and recommended Rienzi to the authorities in Dresden and Der fliegende Holländer to their counterparts in Berlin.
Possibly Wagner’s praise of and dependence on Meyerbeer in this early period harboured the seeds of the antagonism that would erupt around 1850: the abject servility of tone in Wagner’s desperate appeal to Meyerbeer of 3 May 1840 may belie resentment and envy of the older composer’s wealth and success.Footnote 12 Wagner’s recurring complaint that Meyerbeer’s prolonged absences from Paris limited the efficacy of his advocacy for the younger composer may hint that the struggling Wagner felt that his famous colleague was not doing enough to help him. A characterisation of Meyerbeer as an ‘intentionally cunning deceiver’ (absichtlich schlauer Betrüger) that, however, Wagner immediately retracts as a jest in a letter written to Robert Schumann on 5 June 1842 may nevertheless reveal incipient distrust.Footnote 13 A letter to Gottfried Engelbert Anders of 14 June 1842 acknowledges Meyerbeer’s ‘good qualities’ (gute Eigenschaften) but expresses doubt as to whether he is ‘magnanimous enough’ (großherzig genug) to be of help to Anders.Footnote 14
Unambiguous signs of a break with Meyerbeer started to occur in the wake of the premieres of Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer in 1842, as Wagner took exception to the implication in press reports that he had been a student or protegé of Meyerbeer, or even worse, that his work seemed to be artistically indebted to Meyerbeer.Footnote 15 Wagner’s desire to distance himself artistically from the older composer is clearly articulated in the oft-cited letter to Robert Schumann of 25 February 1843 in which he rejects the notion that his work – in this case Der fliegende Holländer – could in any way be deemed ‘Meyerbeerian’, because, according to Wagner, ‘not even Meyerbeer himself is “Meyerbeerian”, but rather Rossinian, Bellinian, Auberian, Spontinian etc. etc.’Footnote 16 Thus by 1843 what he had formerly praised as Meyerbeer’s ‘German’ universalism is now condemned as eclecticism.Footnote 17 To judge from a letter to Eduard Hanslick, by 1847 Wagner’s critique of Meyerbeer as an eclectic had expanded into a broader indictment of Meyerbeer as the embodiment of everything that he considered wrong with the operatic world, in particular a conscious striving for effect and popularity resulting in triviality:
But whenever I sum up everything that is repugnant [zuwider] to me in operatic music-making as inner distractedness & outer laboriousness, I lump it all together under the concept ‘Meyerbeer’, & all the more because I recognize in Meyerbeer’s music a great skill in external efficacy that holds art back from attaining a noble maturity all the more as it seeks to gratify in every possible way with complete denial of inwardness: – whoever strays into triviality must atone for it for the sake of his own more noble nature; – but he who seeks it deliberately, that man is – fortunate, for he has nothing to repent.Footnote 18
It is noteworthy that throughout this phase of deepening disenchantment with Meyerbeer’s approach to opera, Wagner continued in his correspondence to acknowledge a debt to the older composer on a personal level, to count on Meyerbeer’s continuing good will towards him, and to claim to esteem him as an honourable and sympathetic person (although one may reasonably question whether such protestations were completely disingenuous). He also continued to approach Meyerbeer for help, in particular with the adoption and performance of his works in Berlin, where his senior colleague was appointed Musikdirektor in 1842, for Wagner considered the north German metropolis to be better suited than Dresden to promote his reputation to the larger German-speaking world. For instance, in late 1844 Wagner enquired about the prospects of a Berlin production of Rienzi,Footnote 19 and in January 1846 he asked Meyerbeer to intercede with the king of Prussia to bring about a commission for Lohengrin (despite the fact that Wagner by this time had already promised his next opera to Dresden).Footnote 20
Wagner’s alleged good will towards Meyerbeer the man vanished, however, between 1847 and 1850. An important stage in the deterioration of Wagner’s personal feelings towards his colleague seems to have been the project of bringing Rienzi to Berlin. Although Meyerbeer took interest in the work (his diary records his favourable impressions on seeing the work in Dresden on 20 September 1844Footnote 21) and did advocate with the authorities in Berlin on its behalf, Wagner became frustrated with delays, which Meyerbeer blamed on the lack of an adequate Heldentenor in Berlin for the title role. By the time of the production in Berlin in autumn 1847, Wagner clearly no longer considered Meyerbeer a friend; although he had dined with him at Meyerbeer’s mother’s house, he reported to Minna that he was glad that Meyerbeer would leave Berlin soon after the premiere of Rienzi.Footnote 22 And by June 1849 at the latest, Wagner had come to the conclusion that the opera’s disappointing outcome in Berlin had been the result of Meyerbeer’s ‘Intriguen’,Footnote 23 by which he seems to have meant that Meyerbeer had influenced the Berlin press to write unfavourably about Rienzi and thus prejudice audiences.Footnote 24
By 1849, of course, Wagner’s participation in the revolutionary movement in Dresden had fundamentally altered his own professional prospects, forcing him into exile and leading him again to Paris, where his distaste for what he considered to be the commercialised opera-culture industry merged with his conviction that Meyerbeer used his wealth to block access to the Opéra for any and all potential rivals (including Wagner himself). An awkward encounter at Schlesinger’s music shop, where Wagner thought Meyerbeer had tried to avoid him, convinced the younger composer that Meyerbeer had a ‘bad conscience on account of his intrigues in Berlin’,Footnote 25 and Wagner sought to disabuse Liszt, whose essay on Tannhäuser had just appeared shortly before Wagner’s arrival in Paris, of Meyerbeer’s good intentions:
My arrival in Paris followed shortly after the appearance of your article: we know best of all that this was a coincidence, and least of all did you think about this coincidence when you wrote and dispatched the article. This coincidence, however, immediately gave my position in Paris a very definite colour, and – our friend Meyerbeer sees this colour as black as possible! – My dear Liszt, you have to recognise who this man is! – But what am I saying? Shouldn’t you have known for a long time that personalities like Meyerbeer’s are directly opposite to yours and mine? Shouldn’t you have known for a long time that between you and Meyerbeer there could only exist a bond that for your part was tied by magnanimity, but for his part by shrewdness [klugheit]. Where both elements meet in this web, there deception may prevail for a while, but I believe that you indulged in a magnanimous deception with loving intention; Meierbeer [sic] is small, through and through [klein, durch und durch], and unfortunately I no longer encounter anyone who would have the desire to doubt this in any way.Footnote 26
Whatever small hope that Wagner might still have harboured for establishing an operatic toehold in Paris all but evaporated with his experience of Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, the much anticipated, much delayed work whose premiere at the Opéra on 16 April 1849 confirmed Meyerbeer’s mastery of grand opéra and his hold on Parisian audiences. Acknowledging the enthusiastic reception of Le prophète at the Opéra in a letter to Theodor Uhlig written on 24 February 1850,Footnote 27 Wagner nevertheless could hardly conceal his scorn for it in a thickly sarcastic appraisal that he subsequently wrote on 9 March.Footnote 28
For Wagner, the triumph of Le prophète, a symptom of the bourgeois decadence that had survived the Revolution and proof of the gulf between his own artistic sensibilities and those of contemporary audiences, was the last straw, a provocation to respond forcefully in print with the ideological essay ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ and the poetological treatise Oper und Drama. With these Wagner could proclaim a definitive break with Meyerbeer and possibly also resolve the conflict between personal indebtedness and aesthetic disdain that had characterised his relationship with Meyerbeer since 1843 at the earliest. With ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’, completed by 24 August 1850 and published in two instalments in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on 3 and 6 September under the pseudonym K. Freigedank, Wagner seems to have justified to himself his loathing of Meyerbeer’s art and his personal distrust of his former advocate in the fact that Meyerbeer was a Jew, a thought that never once appears in any of Wagner’s comments on Meyerbeer before 1850.Footnote 29 Drawing on the growing German anti-Jewish literature of the 1830s and 1840s, Wagner postulated a ‘theoretical’ basis for what he deemed the hollowness of Meyerbeer’s art – the purported ‘alien’ status of Jews with respect to European (and specifically German) culture and language and the concomitant rootlessness of assimilated Jews; to prove his point he applied this theory to other Jewish artists, most prominently Mendelssohn and Heine.Footnote 30 Curiously, Wagner leaves Meyerbeer, the object of the harshest critique in the essay, unnamed, although any reader of the day would easily have recognised the target of ‘Freigedank’s’ invective. We will cite the relevant passages on Meyerbeer in the next section of this article.
In Oper und Drama (completed by 10 January 1851), Wagner once again saves his most severe criticisms for (the now clearly identified) Meyerbeer, whom he holds up as the prime representative of what he considers to be the folly of modern opera composition. In a lengthy discussion devoted to his former role model, Wagner berates Meyerbeer’s cosmopolitanism and indifference to language (a supposed consequence of his alleged rootlessness as a Jew), likens his eclecticism and lack of originality to the aforementioned scavenging of starlings in newly ploughed fields, and laments his wrong-headed attempt to dictate to the librettist of his grand operas, Eugène Scribe, dramatic conceptions determined by his ‘absolute’ musical priorities. Famously he identifies the essence of Meyerbeer’s operas as a striving for what Wagner calls ‘Effekt’, defined as theatrical ‘effects without cause’ (Wirkungen ohne Ursache) that exist simply for their own sake and the impression they make on the audience. We shall also draw upon this critique extensively in the following section.
Lastly, in a letter of 18 April 1851 that deserves to be quoted at length, Wagner explained to Liszt in no uncertain terms why he had come out against Meyerbeer in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (and what he says could apply equally well to the discussion in Oper in Drama). Confirming Liszt’s suspicion that he was in fact the author of the essay, Wagner describes a profound antipathy rooted in shameful memories of his first stay in Paris, wherein to pursue his own ends he allowed himself to be deceived by the ‘intentional inefficacy’ of the favours that Meyerbeer did for him; Wagner is glad not to have to feel any gratitude towards his former protector. Equally if not more important – and here Wagner may have been thinking more of the open and ‘signed’ critique in the as yet unpublished Oper und Drama – Wagner claims to have attacked Meyerbeer from an urgent need as artist to distance himself from perceptions that he has anything in common with Meyerbeer, to declare independence in a way that would allow for no confusion among his supporters as to the essential difference of his art from that of his rival:
Meyerbeer is a special case, as far as I am concerned: I do not hate him, but I find him infinitely repugnant [gränzenlos zuwider]. This perpetually kind and obliging man reminds me of the darkest – I might almost say the most immoral – period of my life, when he still pretended to be protecting me; it was a period of connections and back-staircases, when we are regarded as fools by patrons whom we inwardly deeply despise. That is a relationship of the most complete dishonesty; neither has honest intentions towards the other; the one as well as the other pretends an air of devotion, and both use each other only so long as it profits them to do so. I do not reproach Meyerbeer in the least for the intentional ineffectiveness of his obligingness towards me – on the contrary, I am glad that I am not as deeply in his debt as is, for ex., Berlioz. But it was time for me to break away completely from the dishonest relationship with him: outwardly, I did not have the least reason for doing so, for even the discovery that he was playing me false was not able to surprise me or, indeed, justify my action, since basically I had myself to reproach for having intentionally deceived myself concerning him. The necessity of dropping the usual considerations of common sense with respect to him arose in me for inner reasons: I cannot exist as an artist in my own eyes or in those of my friends, I cannot think or feel anything without sensing and loudly professing in Meyerbeer my total antithesis; and I am driven to do this by a genuine despair whenever I encounter the erroneous opinion, held even among many of my friends, that I have anything in common with Meyerbeer. With all that I want and feel, I cannot appear before any of these friends in a pure and clear form until I distance myself completely from these blurred outlines in which I still appear to so many people. This is a necessary act of the complete birth of my mature being – and if God wills it – I believe that I am of use to many by pursuing this act with such zeal!Footnote 31
On the origins of Der junge Siegfried
Wagner wrote his published diatribes against Meyerbeer and the letter to Liszt explaining his need to break all ties to his former protector between summer 1850 and spring 1851. Immediately afterwards he started to draft a libretto for a new opera, Der junge Siegfried. As Grey notes, the chronological proximity of these phenomena suggests that the treatment of Mime in the opera absorbed elements of Wagner’s anti-Jewish sentiments. Indeed, a close comparison of Wagner’s Meyerbeer critique with his characterisation of the Nibelung reveals numerous points of connection between the famous opera composer and the dwarf.
As is well known, at the time of its conception, Der junge Siegfried marked a new direction in Wagner’s ongoing work on a project that he had started in Dresden in 1848, when he had written the libretto for a single opera, Siegfried’s Tod, along with an extended prose overview – originally entitled Die Nibelungensage (Mythus) – outlining the broader mythical-legendary narrative framework behind the hero’s death. And as is frequently noted, Wagner’s theoretical ruminations about the ‘art-work of the future’ in the Zurich writings led him ultimately to reconsider the effectiveness of Siegfried’s Tod as a stand-alone work, in part because of its heavy reliance on narrative as the vehicle for explaining not only the mythical background of the deeds and sins of the gods, giants and dwarfs but also the events of Siegfried’s youth up to and including his union with Brünnhilde. Having emphasised in his prose works the need to transmit a poetic intention to all the spectators’ senses through dramatic enactment or representation, Wagner found himself with a libretto for which many important plot strands were merely intellectual constructs because they had not been witnessed by the spectator: the ‘drama’ was too much like an ‘epic’.Footnote 32
To address this problem, Wagner thus conceived Der junge Siegfried as a ‘prequel’ to Siegfried’s Tod, a ‘cheerful’ work that would present as dramatic action on stage many important elements of plot that otherwise would have been conveyed only by narratives in the tragedy. Wagner explained this, and other, more practical justifications for Der junge Siegfried in a letter to Theodor Uhlig of 10 May 1851, by which point he perhaps had already started to sketch the dramatic shape of the new opera.Footnote 33 Claiming to have been inspired by an epiphanic linking of Siegfried with the fairy-tale character of the boy who leaves home to learn fear, Wagner continued:
‘Young Siegfried’ has the enormous advantage that it teaches the important myth to an audience in a play, just as a fairy-tale teaches a child. Everything is imprinted vividly [plastisch] by means of sharp, sensual impressions, everything is understood – and if the serious ‘Siegfried’s Death’ then comes along, the audience will know all the things that are taken for granted or simply hinted at there – and – I’ll have won the game, – the more so in that the actors [die Darsteller] can train and prepare themselves practically to solve the mightier task of ‘Siegfried’s Death’ with my youthfully human ‘Young Siegfried’, a far more popular work, lying much closer to consciousness, and less heroic than cheerful [heiter].Footnote 34
I suggest that the new project also sparked Wagner’s imagination because it afforded him yet another outlet to project his disdain for and independence from Meyerbeer. Support for such a hypothesis is afforded by a consideration of how the character of Mime and the dynamic between Siegfried and Mime changed between Wagner’s (admittedly sketchy) treatments of these elements in 1848 – in the Nibelungensage (Mythus) and Siegfried’s narration of his life with Mime in Act III of Siegfried’s Tod, both of which preceded the definitive rupture with Meyerbeer – and their elaboration in the sketches, draft and original libretto for Der junge Siegfried of 1851.Footnote 35 Faced with the need to create an entire drama out of these brief discussions, Wagner not only mined various ancient and modern sources for imagery and details to enrich the plot and characterisations, but also (consciously or not) drew upon his own experiences with Meyerbeer for aspects of characterisation and motivation. Put simply, in 1851 Mime became more ‘Meyerbeerian’ while Siegfried acquired attributes that resonated with Wagner’s rejection of Meyerbeer.
The components of the Siegfried–Mime story that parallel Wagner’s relationship with Meyerbeer may be divided into two broad, ultimately interrelated categories: (a) those that portray Mime as a duplicitous foster-father instinctively loathed by Siegfried; and (b) those that characterise Mime more symbolically as a deficient artist whose work is effectively superseded by Siegfried. A third category comprises a few additional analogies that fall outside of the two main categories.
Mime as a duplicitous and detested foster-father
In the medieval sources that Wagner consulted, Siegfried is always raised by a foster-father, a master smith variously named Mimir/Mime (in the so-called ‘German’ sources such as the Thidrekssaga von Bern or Das Lied vom hürnen Seyfrid) or Regin/Reigin (in the Scandinavian sources such as the Volsungasaga and Eddas).Footnote 36 To be sure, a constant in these sources is a certain degree of unsavouriness in the foster-father’s relationship with his foster-son. In the Germanic versions, Mime seems to harbour no ill will towards the boy until Siegfried becomes a threat to himself and his apprentices because of his inordinate strength and recklessness.Footnote 37 In an act of self-preservation, Mime sends the boy into the forest, ostensibly to produce coal but in reality with the hope or expectation that Siegfried will be killed there by Mime’s brother, who has transformed himself into a dragon. In the Scandinavian sources, the foster-father (Regin) harbours ulterior motives from the outset, inasmuch as he has plans for the Siegfried character (called Sigurd) to kill his brother Fafnir in revenge for the latter’s having killed their father and taken his treasure all for himself. In both traditions Siegfried/Sigurd survives the encounter with the dragon/giant and kills Mime/Regin. In the Germanic sources Siegfried returns to the smithy and kills Mime for having set him up. In the Scandinavian sources Sigurd, warned of Regin’s evil intentions by the dying Fafnir and by forest birds that he understands as a result of tasting the dragon’s blood, proceeds immediately to kill Regin.
Wagner’s initial conception of the Mime–Siegfried relationship, as embodied in both Die Nibelungensage (Mythus) and the relevant passage in Act III of Siegfried’s Tod, draws from both Germanic and Scandinavian traditions to suggest in Mime a hypocritical character who rears Siegfried for self-serving purposes. The following passage from the 1848 overview, which subsequently formed the basis for Siegfried’s narration of his youth in Act III of Siegfried’s Tod, would eventually underlie the first two acts of Der junge Siegfried:
After a long pregnancy, the expelled [verstoßene] Sieglinde gives birth in the wilderness to Siegfried (who shall bring peace through victory). When Sieglinde cried out in her pain, Reigin (Mime), Alberich’s brother, stepped out of the chasm towards her and helped her; she dies after giving birth, after she has reported her fate to Reigin and given him the boy. Reigin raises Siegfried, teaches him how to forge, tells him of the death of his father and provides to him both pieces of his shattered sword, from which Siegfried forges the sword Balmung under Mime’s guidance. Mime now provokes the youth to slay the dragon, by which he should demonstrate his gratitude to him. Before doing this, Siegfried desires to avenge the death of his father: he sets out, attacks and kills Hunding; only after this does he fulfil Mime’s wish, he battles and slays the giant dragon. When he leads his finger, burned by the blood of the dragon, to his mouth to cool it, he involuntarily tastes the blood and on account of this suddenly understands the language of the forest birds, which are singing all around him. They praise Siegfried’s enormous deed, point him towards the Nibelungen hoard in the dragon’s cave and warn him about Mime, who has used him only to attain the hoard, and who now is out to kill him in order to keep the hoard for himself alone. Thereupon Siegfried slays Mime, and takes the Ring and the Tarnkappe from the hoard: he hears the birds again, who advise him to win the most magnificent woman, Brünhild.Footnote 38
Naturally, this brief outline had to be amplified in a number of ways in order to fill out the first two acts of Der junge Siegfried, and there is ample evidence that Wagner scoured medieval sources and nineteenth-century adaptations of the Siegfried story for ideas about how to do this; however, many of the details in Wagner’s elaboration of the Siegfried–Mime relationship in 1851 suggest in particular that his recent outpourings against Meyerbeer for better or worse stimulated his poetic imagination. For instance, none of the sources prior to 1851 indicate that Siegfried harbours any long-standing antipathy or resentment towards Mime. With the prose draft and dramatic poem of 1851, however, the hero’s loathing of Mime becomes a major theme, as Siegfried takes numerous opportunities from his first appearance to remind the dwarf that he finds him unsympathetic and repugnant. Preferring the company of wild animals to that of his foster-father, Siegfried goes on in the prose draft to say:
If you make my bed, I prefer to lie on the naked stone etc. – because I can’t stand you. For me it’s as if you did everything to trouble me; if I see you walk, reach around, nod and squint, you displease me so much that I’d always like to beat you. I am disgusted by what you give me: I run into the forest and would like never to see you again.Footnote 39
Siegfried’s description of the features and behaviours in Mime that disgust him can be aligned with Wagner’s claim in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ that non-Jewish Germans feel an instinctive aversion (instinkmäßige Abneignung) when confronted by individual Jews in real life and thus can be taken as one of the key pieces of evidence for interpreting Mime as a stand-in for ‘the Jew’.Footnote 40 One will recall, however, that Wagner expressed similar feelings about Meyerbeer in particular, claiming to Liszt in the letter of 15 April 1851 that he found him (and/or his art) ‘infinitely repugnant’ (gränzenlos zuwider) and already in 1847 telling Hanslick that everything he found repugnant (zuwider) in contemporary operatic music-making – inner distractedness and outer laboriousness – he associated with the concept ‘Meyerbeer’.Footnote 41
The 1851 sources emphasise a second element related to Siegfried’s aversion to Mime: the physical differences between the boy and his foster-father. To be sure, significant difference between the two is implied in the 1848 sources, as Wagner conceived of Mime as a dwarf from the very start of his work on the Nibelungen project.Footnote 42 But the 1851 sources highlight the young hero’s awareness of his differences from Mime – a recognition made possible by having seen his own reflection in a pond in the forest – and his realisation of the impossibility of Mime’s claim of parentage, thanks to his observation of the likeness of young animals in the forest to their parents. The theme of difference has been treated as another anti-Semitic symbol in the Ring, as it resonates with Wagner’s characterisation of Jews as non-Germans in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’.Footnote 43 Insistence on difference is, however, arguably even more pointed in Wagner’s discussions of Meyerbeer, as Wagner seems to have had a profound anxiety about being regarded as a musical offspring of the older, more famous composer. As we have seen, his claims of difference from Meyerbeer surface as early as 1843 in the letter to Schumann about Der fliegende Holländer, and his letter to Liszt of 18 April 1851 all but states that his public denunciation of Meyerbeer in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (and perhaps he has the relevant section in Oper und Drama in mind as well) resulted from a need to declare as forcefully as possible the difference of his art from Meyerbeer’s.
Wagner’s letter to Liszt resonates with another important theme in Wagner’s 1851 reworking of the Siegfried–Mime relationship, the topic of indebtedness and gratitude. To be sure, the concept of gratitude is present in the 1848 Nibelungensage (Mythus): after reforging Siegmund’s sword, ‘Mime incites the boy to slay the dragon, by which he [Siegfried?] should demonstrate his gratitude to him [Mime?].’Footnote 44 In the 1851 materials for Der junge Siegfried, however, the topic is given special emphasis, as Mime reproaches Siegfried early in Act I for the youth’s apparent ingratitude for all the efforts that the old dwarf has taken to raise the boy. In the prose draft, for instance:
Mime tries to calm him by cleverly speaking from the heart: he reproaches him for ingratitude. He cares and toils indeed only for him: he prepares food for him by day, and the bed at night; he forges and creates diligently for him at home, while he wanders around to his heart’s content; – and in return he repays him only with hate and anger.Footnote 45
This passage would eventually become Mime’s ‘starling song’ (‘Als zullendes Kind’), which in the libretto of Der junge Siegfried is prefaced by Mime’s criticism of Siegfried’s lack of gratitude:
Of course, Mime conceals from Siegfried the fact that his apparently selfless efforts to raise him have been nothing but self-serving.
To judge from his letter to Liszt of 18 April 1851 quoted earlier, Wagner had come to the conclusion that Meyerbeer’s efforts on his behalf too had been made in bad faith in order to seek his own advantage; somewhat surprisingly, in the same letter he confesses that his own motives in dealing with Meyerbeer had not been completely honest either because he too had used him for his own purposes. Convinced that Meyerbeer had been ‘intentionally’ powerless in his efforts to assist him while appearing to be ‘obliging’ (gefällig), Wagner is glad (froh) not to have to be in Meyerbeer’s debt, at least not as much as he believes Berlioz to be.Footnote 47 A parallel to this feeling of relief occurs in Act II of Der junge Siegfried: upon learning as fact that Mime has always hated him and his kind, Siegfried rejoices, ‘the fact that you hate me makes me glad’.Footnote 48
Another theme suggesting the influence of Wagner’s relationship with Meyerbeer on the conception of Der junge Siegfried is Siegfried’s perception of Mime as an impediment to his growth or development, a topic that comes up in both Act I and Act III of the prose draft and libretto. For instance, in Act I of the prose draft Mime seems to resist Siegfried’s demand to learn about his father and mother, whereupon Siegfried grabs hold of him and complains of Mime’s unhelpfulness: ‘I have to speak to you thus, because you never yet taught me anything willingly when I came home to ask you a question. I had to persist with force to get anything out of you, almost even that you would teach me to speak.’Footnote 49 In Act III, annoyed by the Wanderer’s questions, an impatient Siegfried threatens: ‘as long as I’ve been alive, an old man always blocked my way: I’ve gotten rid of him; if you stand in my way any longer, take care that you don’t end up like Mime.’Footnote 50 In contrast, in the 1848 sources there is no hint that Mime has outwardly acted in such a way as to appear to hold Siegfried back; up to the slaying of Fafner, the dwarf seems to have been instructive and helpful for the boy: ‘Reigin raises Siegfried, teaches him how to forge, informs him about the death of his father and provides to him both of the pieces of his shattered sword, from which Siegfried forges the sword Balmung under Mime’s guidance.’Footnote 51
Of course, by 1851 Wagner had convinced himself that Meyerbeer had impeded (rather than assisted) his own development. Wagner insisted on various occasions that his former protector had ‘intrigued’ against him in 1847 in Berlin; by this he seems to have meant that Meyerbeer had influenced critics in Berlin to prejudice their readers against the opera.Footnote 52 Further, after visiting Paris in 1849 and again in 1850 he had come to the conclusion that Meyerbeer’s influence in Paris (and the continuing popularity of his works with Parisian audiences, newly confirmed with the triumph of Le prophète) would be a significant obstacle to any hopes that he himself might have for success at the Opéra. For example, Wagner explained on 4 December 1849 to Ferdinand Heine that any plan to produce a new opera in Paris with the assistance of a French librettist would be impeded by Meyerbeer because ‘between an agreement with my poet and a real performance of my opera in Paris lies a great chasm [kluft], that Meyerbeer forms a big, deep hole [loch] in this chasm (and rest assured that this is so!), and that in the best case it would take at least one or two years to pass across this chasm’.Footnote 53
One final point in Siegfried’s relationship to Mime as it is portrayed in the 1851 materials for Der junge Siegfried resonates with Wagner’s personal relationship to Meyerbeer. Despite his loathing of his foster-father and his desire for independence – themes newly introduced in 1851 – Siegfried keeps coming back to Mime’s cave. Unable at first to understand this phenomenon on his own, he asks Mime to explain it: ‘If you are so clever [klug], then tell me how it is that in the end I always come back home, to you, whom I can’t stand. I can’t explain that to myself: animals and birds in the forest all please me better than you – and yet I return to you. Why is that, Mime, you wise fool [du weiser gauch]?’Footnote 54 Siegfried ultimately understands that his returns to Mime are driven by a need to know about his past: ‘You see, now I also know why I always come home to you, even if I’d prefer to avoid you: I have to learn from you who my mother and father are!’Footnote 55
As we have already noted, Wagner constantly returned to Meyerbeer for assistance in the years between 1839 and 1847, despite the fact that by 1843 at the latest he had fully rejected Meyerbeer as an artist; like Siegfried, Wagner was caught in a contradiction between his beliefs, on the one hand, and some need, on the other. Of course, in Wagner’s case the recurrent appeals to Meyerbeer are relatively easy to understand: even after he lost faith in Meyerbeer’s artistic legitimacy, he believed that the advocacy of a famous and powerful senior colleague would pave the way for his own rise to prominence. And perhaps the hypocrisy of Wagner’s own behaviour towards Meyerbeer ultimately became too much even for him to bear.Footnote 56 The demonisation of Meyerbeer as a self-serving ‘intriguer’ in various letters after 1849, the explanation of his artistic inadequacies on the basis of his Jewish origins in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’, and the forceful denunciation of his artistry as hollow entertainment for a misguided public in the closing pages of Part 1 of Oper und Drama allowed Wagner to make an irrevocable break with Meyerbeer as man and artist and thus resolve, as it were, the tension between personal connection and aesthetic rejection.
Mime as a deficient artist: Siegfried as the poet of the future
Besides highlighting the hero’s personal antipathy for his foster-father and exposing from the outset of the drama Mime’s moral failures, the 1851 materials for Der junge Siegfried elaborate the Siegfried–Mime story in ways that can be interpreted as an aesthetic allegory, a story in which superior artistry (Siegfried’s) triumphs over inferior art (that produced by Mime). Interpretations along these lines – prompted in the first instance by the libretto’s frequent references to Mime as a ‘Künstler’ and to his activity as his ‘Kunst’ – have been advanced in one form or another by a number of Wagner critics. And according to some of these interpretations, Mime’s art is deficient because he is – symbolically – a Jew.Footnote 57
I think it possible that Wagner intended Mime as a symbol of the debasement of art in bourgeois society from the start of his work on the Nibelungen project in 1848. For instance, Mime’s interest in forging a sword for Siegfried is stimulated by profit motive, pure and simple, as it is a necessary means for him to take possession of the Nibelungen Hoard and Ring, clear symbols for capital in Wagner’s anti-capitalist allegory. The Tarnhelm, acclaimed as the ‘greatest gem’ of the Nibelungens’ art, serves symbolically as a prop to capitalism, insofar as Wagner has Mime produce it at Alberich’s behest as a tool for control of the Nibelungs, the unfortunate, exploited masses in Wagner’s conception in 1848.Footnote 58 That the Tarnhelm works by means of deception or illusion resonates with another aspect of Wagner’s critique of modern art: his view that modern, commercialised art perpetrates a massive fraud or deception on bourgeois audiences, a point to which we will return later. But with the elaboration of the Nibelungen plan into a libretto for Der junge Siegfried in 1851, the figure of Mime takes on new details that can be more specifically related to Wagner’s critique of Meyerbeer, the modern (flawed, Jewish) artist par excellence in Wagner’s view. That Wagner projects himself into the hero seems an obvious and important corollary.
Just as Siegfried’s natural antipathy towards Mime seems not to have been part of Wagner’s initial ideas for the Nibelungen drama, so too Mime’s deficiencies as a smith are not at all highlighted in the 1848 sources. The Nibelungensage (Mythus) not only credits Mime with having forged the Tarnhelm, but it also suppresses one detail of the ancient sources that potentially would hint at a limitation to Mime’s skill, his inability to forge from scratch a sword capable of withstanding the superhuman strength of his foster-son. In the Volsungasaga, for instance, after multiple failures Mime only succeeds in producing a satisfactory weapon when he forges anew the fragments of Siegfried’s father’s sword. As we have seen in the passage quoted above, Die Nibelungensage (Mythus) makes no mention of Mime’s failures (perhaps here Wagner was following the Eddas, which mention only the one sword), and the prose draft for Siegfried’s Tod even has Siegfried praise his foster-father’s skill when he tells Gunther’s men that Mime was ‘a strong dwarf who could forge magnificently’.Footnote 59 To be sure, in 1848 Wagner does make an important change with respect to the ancient sources, as he shifts the reforging of Siegmund’s sword (called Balmung in the 1848 and 1851 sources) to Siegfried himself,Footnote 60 but, significantly, the synopsis also tells us that Siegfried accomplishes this under Mime’s instruction (‘unter Mime’s Anleitung’).Footnote 61
In contrast, the 1851 sources emphasise Mime’s inadequacies as a symbolic artist and correspondingly stress Siegfried’s intuitive ability to reforge the sword in ways that are counter to whatever he had previously learned from Mime. To his failures to forge a brand new sword worthy of Siegfried (a new detail in 1851 taken over from various Medieval sources) is added Mime’s inability to reforge Siegmund’s sword, an inadequacy that determines the basic trajectory of the first act of Der junge Siegfried: what Mime cannot accomplish on the basis of his craft at the start of the act, Siegfried will accomplish at the end with unorthodox means that Mime did not teach him and that he cannot understand.Footnote 62 The comments of both Mime and Siegfried at the start of the forging scene in the poem of Der junge Siegfried underscore the inadequacy of Mime’s art to the task at hand:
Mime
Siegfried
Mime
Siegfried
Mime
Siegfried
Mime
Within readings that see Mime as a projection of Wagner’s generalised critique of Jewish deficiencies, Mime’s inadequacies as a smith have been interpreted as symbol for the alleged creative impotence of Jews.Footnote 64 It strikes me, however, that Mime’s crisis resonates more specifically with Wagner’s critiques of Meyerbeer in both ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ and in Oper und Drama.
For instance, Mime’s awareness of his own creative impotence is foregrounded right at the start in the 1851 sources; the prose draft raises the curtain on Mime in the midst of a creative crisis:
Mime, the Nibelung, hammers and files on a sword. He is in a great predicament: Siegfried wants a sword from him that is strong enough for him. The strongest and most suitable one for Siegfried, he knows, can only be forged from the pieces of the fragmented sword of his father: but he feels incapable of melding this sword strongly together again; the hardness of the pieces of steel resist his entire art.Footnote 65
Compare the frustration of Mime’s situation – the conflict between a desire to create and an awareness of the inability to do so – with Wagner’s description of Meyerbeer in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ as someone who is caught in a ‘painful conflict between desire and ability’ to create art:
We truly believe that he [Meyerbeer] would like to create art-works and at the same time knows that he cannot create them: in order to extract himself from this painful conflict between desire and ability, he writes operas for Paris and then has them easily performed in the rest of the world, – nowadays the surest means to acquire artistic fame without being an artist.Footnote 66
The prose draft invites comparison with the Meyerbeer critique in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ on another point. In the opening scene Mime finishes a new sword for Siegfried. Pleased with his work,
he tests the completed sword, he praises it as a masterpiece of his art. He convinces himself that he has finally produced something appropriate [etwas taugliches]: the Nibelungen Hoard holds no better sword; perhaps he could manage to send Siegfried to murder Fafner with this sword. With artificially intensified, vain self-deception [eitler selbsttäuschung] he brandishes the sword in desperate joy.Footnote 67
This moment of self-satisfaction – described as ‘self-deception’ in the prose draft – did not survive into the poem for Der junge Siegfried or its successor, the definitive text for Siegfried. Is it possible that Wagner suppressed it because it echoes closely another passage in his critique of Meyerbeer in ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’?Footnote 68 Claiming Meyerbeer’s hold on modern audiences to be a kind of deception (Täuschung), achieved through an expenditure of extravagant means, that only apparently alleviates the boredom that sends the modern bourgeois public to the theatre in the first place, Wagner goes on to say: ‘This deceiving composer even goes so far that he deceives himself, and perhaps just as intentionally as he deceives his bored [audiences].’Footnote 69
Other situations and imagery in the prose draft and dramatic poem of 1851, although not specifically concerned with Mime’s competence as a smith, suggest linkage between Wagner’s characterisation of Mime and his Meyerbeer critique. Let us return, for instance, to the detail that both Mime and Meyerbeer are, metaphorically, ‘starlings’: in the libretto for Der junge Siegfried, the young hero grows tired of what he calls Mime’s ‘old starling song’; in Oper und Drama Wagner compares his former protector to a starling. In both cases the avian imagery seems to highlight a lack of originality or creative potential, with somewhat different implications in each case.
Wagner’s comparison of Meyerbeer to a starling in Oper und Drama gives a figurative spin to his long-standing critique of what he deemed to be Meyerbeer’s eclecticism, the means by which Meyerbeer compensates for his alleged lack of individual voice and ideas. The European starling provides Wagner with a striking image for his critique, as it is both a ground feeder (and thus a kind of scavenger) and a capable mimic of other birds (and thus a symbol of something that can imitate the external traits of a phenomenon without really understanding it):Footnote 70
He was like the starling that follows the plowshare in the field and joyfully pecks up the exposed earthworms from the churned-up furrows. There is not a single direction that is his own, rather he has eavesdropped on his predecessor for each one and exploited it with prodigious ostentation, and to be sure with such astonishing rapidity that the predecessor on whom he has eavesdropped had hardly uttered a word before he exclaimed the entire sentence on this word, unconcerned whether he had correctly understood the meaning of this word, wherefore it commonly arose that he always really said something different than what the predecessor had wanted to express.Footnote 71
Lack of originality is implied more subtly in Mime’s ‘starling song’ itself: a narration of his efforts to raise Siegfried as if he were his own kin and a lament about the boy’s ingratitude. Not only does Siegfried characterise it as ‘old’, but its recurrences in the course of the Act I – first when Siegfried paraphrases it to throw it back in Mime’s face and later when Mime quotes it verbatim in the course of telling Siegfried about his mother, Sieglinde – suggest that Mime has ‘sung’ it to Siegfried on many prior occasions as part of his strategy to stimulate a sense of gratitude and debt in the boy.Footnote 72 In operatic terms, Mime performs something akin to the ballads or romances that are commonly used in early nineteenth-century opera to recount plot developments and situations that precede the start of the opera proper; the only significant deviation from the romance is the fact that the starling song is not strophic. Although it is impossible to know what kind of music Wagner might have contemplated in 1851 for Mime’s narration,Footnote 73 the musical style that he would eventually use in 1856 to set the ‘starling song’ does reinforce the impression that Mime’s creativity is of a conventional and old-fashioned sort. The narration is effectively a self-contained piece that is tonally closed in F minor, the phrase structure and surface rhythms are extraordinarily ‘four-square’ for the Ring,Footnote 74 and the melodic content resides overwhelmingly in the voice part, with the orchestra practically relegated to a traditional accompaniment. Lastly, although notated in 3/4, the regularity of two-bar melodic units creates a lilt that can easily be heard as compound metre, a very traditional choice in the setting of romances and other operatic narratives in the first half of the nineteenth century, including Wagner’s own early operas.Footnote 75
Beyond lack of originality, the starling simile for Meyerbeer in Oper und Drama and Wagner’s gloss on it entails a related idea that resonates with other facets in Wagner’s characterisation of Mime in Der junge Siegfried. Just as the starling (Meyerbeer) relies on the plowman (his predecessors and contemporaries) to till the field (introduce new musical ideas) so that the bird (Meyerbeer) can easily pick at the worms that have been thus turned up (appropriate and exploit such innovations for his own profit), so too Mime obviously hopes to count on Siegfried to do the ‘heavy lifting’ – the slaying of Fafner – that will clear the way for the dwarf to take possession of the Nibelungen hoard. In effect, Mime is (or intends to be) a kind of thief.
As noted above, Wagner did not invent this fundamental strand of the story; in the Scandinavian tradition for Siegfried’s/Sigurd’s youth Mime/Mimir counts on the young Siegfried to kill his brother Fafnir. But Wagner reinforces the idea of Mime as a scavenger/thief unable to accomplish anything significant on his own in a scene conceived in 1851 that has no basis in any of his sources and that is not implied in the 1848 synopsis: the confrontation between Alberich and Mime in Act II of Der junge Siegfried. Having observed the battle between Siegfried and Fafner and its outcome, the brothers argue over which of the two should take possession of the Hoard and Ring. In the prose draft, Alberich scolds Mime for being a thief, since Alberich, not Mime had forged the ring; further, he claims that Mime would not know what to do with it, even if he had it. In another image that suggests Mime’s creative impotence, Alberich mocks Mime as an ‘ape’ that wishes to be king:
Alberich comes out of the rocks; he closely observes Mime; when the latter no longer sees Siegfried and intends carefully to sneak back to the cave, Alberich descends upon him: ‘Whither, my brother, are you sneaking in such haste? Do you lust after my property?’ Mime (frightened and raging) ‘What also brings you to this place? Go away, I have won this place!’ An ever more violent quarrel unravels between them. Alberich scolds Mime as a thief [schilt Mime einen Dieb]. Mime claims the Hoard for himself: he had pursued it with bitter effort; what kind of distress has Siegfried not caused for him, whom he raised from the time he was a suckling! Now, when he is supposed to repay him for it, can it be disputed, least of all by Alberich! Alberich: ‘Do you think that what I created could ever fall to you? You are to be my vassal, as you once were: the ring would be of poor use to a dummy like you! Look, the ape wants to be king. Get back, the ring is mine; I knew how to forge it and I alone know how to use it!’Footnote 76
Such imagery seems of similar cloth to Wagner’s starling simile for Meyerbeer, a composer who in Wagner’s view steals (mimics, apes) ideas created by others without really knowing know what those ideas actually mean.
Another thread in the drama not specifically linked to Mime’s work as a smith nevertheless suggests a connection between Wagner’s critique of Meyerbeer’s artistry and his shaping of the Siegfried–Mime relationship in Der junge Siegfried. Pressed by an adolescent Siegfried, who has discovered bisexual reproduction among the animals of the forest, to explain the whereabouts of Mime’s ‘Weibchen’, a female mate that the youth might call ‘Mother’, the Nibelung seeks to evade the question but ultimately tries to end the discussion with the claim that he is both father and mother to Siegfried:
Mime is evasive, scolds him as childish and stupid: he is neither a bird nor an animal. Siegfr. ‘How could you have made me then? I was also little, you boasted of having nourished and protected me, a helpless suckling, just as the bird does for the little bird in the nest? Tell me now, did I come into the world without a mother?’ Mime. ‘You should believe that, just as I tell you, I am truly both your father and mother!’Footnote 77
This preposterous claim, immediately rejected by Siegfried on the basis of his observations of Nature, plays no role in the sources on which Wagner drew and is not hinted at in the 1848 materials’ treatment of Siegfried’s youth with Mime. Indeed, in both the Nibelungensage (Mythus) and the early materials for Siegfried’s Tod, Mime evidently makes full disclosure to Siegfried about his parents, informing him of his mother’s name and fate and also about Siegmund’s death; after Siegmund’s sword is reforged, Mime allows Siegfried to avenge his father in combat with Hunding before taking him to Fafner’s lair.Footnote 78
Thanks to the writings of Nattiez, references to androgyny in any of Wagner’s operas after 1850 ought to raise an alert that something else is at stake, that Wagner is using the union of male and female in a drama as a symbol of the relationship of Poetry and Music, inasmuch as he develops gendered metaphors for both at length in Oper und Drama. In general, such images of androgyny as occur in the operas (pre-eminently the unions of Siegfried with Brünnhilde and of Tristan with Isolde) are portrayed in a positive manner, lending themselves to interpretation as symbolic enactments of the proper union of the male and female principles of poetry and music, respectively, necessary to beget the ideal art-work of the future.Footnote 79
Mime’s insistence that he is both father and mother, male and female, however, is patently false; his alleged androgyny is nothing but the claim of a single individual to an impossible self-sufficiency in the reproductive process.Footnote 80 And such unproductive androgyny echoes, I think, another important component in Wagner’s critique of Meyerbeer in Oper und Drama, namely that he too aspires to a kind of self-sufficiency, arrogating to himself as a composer the prerogative of determining the shape of the drama to satisfy his musical priorities and mask his deficient musical abilities. Wagner starts this critique with the assertion that Meyerbeer, indifferent to language (because of his Jewish origins), has followed Rossini’s ‘frivolous’ path as an opera composer in conceiving his music for the theatre as ‘absolute’ music unconnected to the words and feelings of the drama.Footnote 81 But Meyerbeer, according to Wagner, has gone beyond Rossini; whereas the Italian (and the kindred spirit Auber) remained content to supply music to the libretto provided by his theatre poets, Meyerbeer felt compelled to meddle with the poem:
If this poet still held the reigns in ‘La muette’ and ‘Tell,’ because it didn’t occur to either Auber or Rossini to do anything else than to make the splendid opera coach musically comfortable and melodiously cozy – thus unconcerned how and whither the well-practised coachman steered the wagon – Meyerbeer however, not possessing that luxuriant melodic coziness, was driven to fall into the coachman’s reins so as to cause through the zigzagging of the journey the necessary sensation that he would not succeed in drawing upon himself as soon as he sat alone in the coach with nothing else than his musical personality.Footnote 82
To support this interpretation, Wagner instances the rumours of Meyerbeer’s undue influence on the librettos that Eugène Scribe had written for him as well as the confused libretti that have ensued from this collaboration:
Only in isolated anecdotes has it reached our ears with what pestering torment Meyerbeer influenced his poet, Scribe, while drafting his operatic subjects. But even if we wished to ignore these anecdotes and knew nothing at all of the secret of the operatic consultations between Scribe and Meyerbeer, we would still have to see clearly in the extant poems themselves what a heavy and confusing compulsion must have pressed on Scribe – who otherwise worked quickly, easily, skilfully and intelligibly – as he patched together the bombastically baroque texts for Meyerbeer.Footnote 83
The aesthetic shortcomings of Meyerbeer’s operas in Wagner’s view thus attest the fundamental insanity of the unnatural desire of the musician/composer to dictate the terms of the drama, to force it into ‘restricted forms’ that impoverish the expressive capabilities of music itself:
This insanity is the eagerness of the musician to want to contest everything for himself and out of his own ability [Vermögen] that which he doesn’t possess at all in himself and his ability, and on whose mutual production he can only participate if it is led to him from the peculiar ability of another. With this unnatural eagerness, with which the musician wanted to satisfy his vanity, namely to represent his ability in the shining light of an immeasurable capability [eines unermeßlichen Könnens], he has brought this ability – which in reality is a thoroughly rich one – to the beggarly poverty in which Meyerbeer’s opera music now appears to us. In the self-centred striving to impose its narrow forms on the drama as the only valid ones, this opera music has underscored the pitiful and troubling stiffness and unproductiveness of those forms to the point of unbearableness. In the craving [Sucht] to appear rich and manifold, it has sunk down as a musical art to the utmost spiritual meagerness and has been pushed to borrowing of mechanisms of the most material sort. In the egoistic claim of exhausting dramatic characterisation through purely musical means it has, however, lost all natural powers of expression and degraded itself into a grotesque clown [zur fratzenhaften Possenreißerin].Footnote 84
Although gendered metaphors for poetry and music do not appear in the course of Wagner’s Meyerbeer critique in Oper und Drama, Meyerbeer is effectively characterised in the same way as the pseudo-androgynous Mime, that is, as an individual who asserts an unnatural self-sufficiency; and insofar as the dominance of music (Wagner’s female principle) over poetry (the male principle) is the hallmark of Meyerbeer’s operas, one might speak too in this case of an improper androgyny – at least from the perspective of Wagner’s Zurich writings.
It is also tempting to relate Wagner’s critique of Meyerbeer in Oper und Drama to one of the most striking episodes in Siegfried, the dialogue in Act II following the death of Fafner, where the hero, thanks to having tasted the dragon’s blood and understood the warning of the Forest Bird, discerns that Mime lusts after the hoard and intends to kill him, despite the latter’s efforts to appear friendly and supportive. The scene is yet another element of the Siegfried story that Wagner appears to have introduced on his own: in both the Poetic Edda and Volsungasaga, Mime (Regin) and Siegfried (Sigurd) argue before Siegfried tastes Fafner’s blood, and Siegfried beheads Mime immediately after being warned by the birds. In the 1848 materials for the Nibelungen project, Mime’s death also follows immediately upon the warning; as Siegfried explains to Gunther’s men in the prose draft for Siegfried’s Tod:
Mime then led me to Gnitaheide; I killed the dragon there; now you shall hear of a miracle; my fingers burned from the dragon’s blood, to cool them I led them to my mouth; scarcely did a little blood moisten my mouth that I was able to understand clearly what the birds were singing all around me. On a tree they hopped and sang: ‘Hei, the Nibelungen Hoard now belongs to Siegfried! O, he should not trust Mime: he was supposed to win the hoard only for the false one: he now has designs on your life! O, Siegfried should protect himself from Mime.’ Hagen: ‘They warned you well!’ The men: ‘Did you kill Mime?’ – Siegfried: ‘The dwarf approached me with treachery: Balmung had to slay him.’Footnote 85
Evidently little or no conversation is necessary for Siegfried to recognise Mime’s treachery and decide to end Mime’s life.Footnote 86
Wagner’s work on Der junge Siegfried in 1851 established the dramatic details of the scene as they appear in the definitive version of the opera: Siegfried (and with him the audience) sees through Mime’s hypocrisy, learning of the dwarf’s hatred of him and his entire clan and of Mime’s plan to kill him and take the hoard.Footnote 87 In a parenthetical note in the prose draft that, however, did not make it into any of the later sources for Siegfried, Wagner sketched a basic musical conception for Mime’s speeches within the dialogue: ‘(the melody to the words of his following speeches always remains flattering and amicable, so that it expresses the intention of how Mime wishes to speak: Siegfried however hears the words themselves as they are really meant)’.Footnote 88
As eventually realised in 1857, the word–melody relationship in Mime’s utterances is more complicated than this,Footnote 89 but for our purposes it is sufficient to note that Wagner’s initial conception posits the fundamental ‘untruthfulness’ of Mime’s melody with respect to his real feelings for Siegfried. In Wagner’s view, such disjunction between musical expression and poetic meaning is of course the hallmark of the ‘absolute Melodie’ of opera since Rossini, a sin of which Meyerbeer is particularly guilty because of his alleged indifference to language:
Meyerbeer, through his indifference to the spirit of every language and the ability [Vermögen] based on this to appropriate its surface with easy effort (a capability that in general is provided to the prosperous through our modern education), was entirely pointed towards only having to do with absolute music, detached from any linguistic [sprachlichen] context.Footnote 90
Mime’s deficiencies as an ‘artist’, whether symbolised through his inability to forge an adequate sword for Siegfried or through details such as the conventionality of his ‘old starling song’ and the disconnect between music and meaning in his attempt to deceive Siegfried in Act II, are countered almost point-by-point in the conception of Siegfried that crystallised in 1851. With Der junge Siegfried the hero not only reforges Siegmund’s sword on his own (an important reinterpretation of the Siegfried legend that Wagner had made already in 1848), but (in contrast to the 1848 sources) he does so without any assistance from Mime, evidently rejecting or ignoring whatever Mime had taught him about the ‘art’ of smithing, at least from the dwarf’s point of view. Mime’s ‘Kunst’ is trumped by Siegfried’s instinctive and unorthodox approach to the challenge. Whereas Mime sees the sword as a commodity with a functional value (it will enable him to take possession of the Ring and hoard and thus rule the Nibelungs), Siegfried values it more for its own sake, as the legacy of his father and as a warrant of his own independence; he takes the Ring and Tarnhelm only because the Forest Bird(s) advise him to do so and values them only as keepsakes. Or to take another example: in contradistinction to Mime’s evidently memorised and unchanging ‘starling song’ about how he raised Siegfried, the hero’s forging and hammering songs are products of the moment, specifically addressed to the rebirth of Siegmund’s sword. Lastly, whereas Mime, an ‘absolute’ artist, lives apart from the world and even claims (falsely) a self-sufficiency in reproductive matters, Siegfried’s instincts drive him out of the cave into Nature, with a curiosity about the opposite sex that will eventually lead him to join with Brünnhilde. If Mime stands for a deeply flawed pseudo-artist of the past (e.g., Meyerbeer), Siegfried represents the artist of the future, someone with whom Wagner himself could easily identify in 1851.
More metaphors for Meyerbeer
A few additional details round out the connections that can be drawn between Wagner’s views on Meyerbeer and his conception of Mime. Wagner decided in 1848 to make Mime a dwarf, following hints in several of the old sources. Meyerbeer was of course not a dwarf, but Wagner did come to think of him as ‘small’. As we have already seen, Wagner described Meyerbeer as ‘klein, durch und durch’ in a letter to Liszt that he wrote from Paris on 5 June 1849.Footnote 91
Another link stems from the fact that Mime is an expatriate, as he tells the Wanderer that he has long avoided his homeland of Nibelheim: ‘I long avoided my homeland, long the mother’s womb.’Footnote 92 German Jews for Wagner were also exiles of a sort, as he stressed their status as aliens or foreigners within German culture – and thus their indirect contact with German language – as a primary reason for an alleged inability to create art. Wagner adduces the same argument at the very outset of his critique of Meyerbeer in Oper und Drama to explain both his cosmopolitanism and his lack of concern for connecting music to language:
As a Jew he had no mother-tongue that would have grown together inseparably with the nerve of his innermost being: he spoke with the same interest in any modern language whatsoever and set it into music in the same way, without any other sympathy for its peculiarities than for its ability to be subordinated at will to absolute music.Footnote 93
It is not without irony that Wagner himself was without a homeland at the time that he wrote this.
Finally, Wagner characterises both Mime and Meyerbeer as figures that should not elicit sympathy, either as a comic character or as a tragic phenomenon. In the case of Mime, a detailed description at the start of the 1851 poem of Der junge Siegfried seems to caution directors and actors that neither the dwarf’s appearance nor his voice should of themselves incite laughter, but should instead create a base-line impression that is ‘uncanny’ and ‘rough’:
He is of small, depressed stature, somewhat deformed and limping; his head is disproportionately large; his face is the colour of dark ash and wrinkled; his eye is small and piercing, with red edges; his grey beard is long and unkempt; his head is bald and covered with a red cap; he wears a dark-grey shirt with a wide belt around the loins; naked feet with coarse soles below. All of this should not be caricature: his appearance, as long as he is calm, should only be uncanny; only when he gets into an extreme affect should he himself become ludicrous through his manners [durch seine äußerlichkeit], but never too coarse. His voice is hoarse and rough; but it too should never provoke the listener to laughter in and of itself.Footnote 94
For Wagner, Mime is a villain who becomes comical only when his emotions get the better of him.
Meyerbeer appears in Wagner’s characterisation as a mirror image of Mime, as someone who should not elicit sympathy as a tragic figure for his flaws. To be sure, Wagner allows that the discrepancy between Meyerbeer’s ambition to create art and his inability to do so might incline one to regard him as such, as well as the ‘self-deception’ that he practises in recognition of the conflict between desire and ability, that is, his passing off of operas to Parisian audiences as if they were genuine art.Footnote 95 In reality, however, Meyerbeer comes across as ‘tragi-comic’ phenomenon, ludicrous and unsympathetic:
Under the pressure of this self-deception, which is not as effortless as one might think, he almost also appears to us in a tragic light: the purely personal element in the offended interest makes the phenomenon, however, into a tragic-comic one, as in general that which leaves us cold or is truly ridiculous is indicator for the particular demonstration of Jewishness in which the famous composer shows himself to us in relationship to music.Footnote 96
To judge from Wagner’s views, then, Mime and Meyerbeer meet in a no-man’s land between comedy and tragedy, creating an unsavoury impression – ‘unheimlich’ on the one hand, ‘kaltlassend’ on the other – that is off-putting to the observer; of course, according to Wagner this is the impression that Jews in general make on Gentiles.
Was nützt diese Erkenntniß?
The sources for the libretto of Der junge Siegfried provide ample evidence that in the process of expanding the story of the hero’s youth from a few paragraphs in his original prose overview of 1848 into a three-act opera Wagner reconceived a number of features in his characterisation of Mime and treatment of the dwarf’s relationship with Siegfried. The evidence hints that Wagner channelled into the conception of Mime that emerged in 1851 both his anger towards Meyerbeer as man and his intense desire to separate himself artistically from his older colleague.
Did Wagner intend Mime as a stand-in for Meyerbeer? In general, sources for the creative process do not allow us to answer this question; because they document actions and not reasons, they can only be suggestive. Nor indeed is there any evidence that Wagner was even aware of the manifold points of contact between the dwarf and the older composer, as he is not known to have connected Mime to Meyerbeer in any utterances, public or private; as Grey notes, a similar silence on his part attends the broader question as to whether he thought of any of the antagonists in his operas as critical portrayals of Jews, despite the many opportunities that he had to do so in his letters and in his comments recorded in Cosima Wagner’s diary.Footnote 97 Was Wagner in fact unaware that the Siegfried–Mime relationship mirrored so closely his own critical stance towards his former protector? Possibly; artistic inspiration is a complex phenomenon that draws on multiple levels of consciousness, not all of which are evident to the creating mind. But I think it more plausible that Wagner, ever ready to interpret his works symbolically, would have recognised (if in fact he had not intended) the parallels that I have adduced, but nevertheless suppressed or even repressed an acknowledgement of their existence for various reasons. For instance, two dreams about the deceased Meyerbeer that the aging Wagner shared with Cosima appear to betray a guilty conscience about having wronged his one-time role model and protector. The first, from 26 September 1872, portrays Meyerbeer as having in fact helped Wagner during his first stay in Paris, something that Wagner actively denied at the peak of his Meyerbeer-phobia. Is it significant that Wagner reported immediately thereafter a dream about an unpaid bill:
He told me that he had all sorts of ‘useless dreams’, among others that we had ridden with the King, who had demonstrated his favour towards us in the most ostensible manner; then he had been arm in arm with Meyerbeer in Paris, and M. paved the way to fame for him, then however also a regularly recurring dream – that a bill is due and has not been collected, and that he could not pay for his apartment.Footnote 98
The second, recorded on 3 April 1880, seems to effect some kind of reconciliation with Meyerbeer:
R. slept well, but dreamed about Meyerbeer, whom he had seen again in a theatre and who said to him: ‘Yes, I know, the long nose’, as if R. as it were had made a joke about his nose, whereupon R. almost excused himself, and the audience applauded at this reconciliation.Footnote 99
Wagner’s silence over the years could have been a tacit acknowledgement that his work contained an element of personal malice that tainted its professed purity.Footnote 100 In this respect it is perhaps worth noting that Wagner shields the character of his idealised alter-ego Siegfried from questionable behaviours that he had acknowledged in his own dealings with Meyerbeer, such as hypocrisy and using people for personal advantage.
Irrespective of Wagner’s ultimately unknowable intentions, does a hypothesis that connects Mime to Meyerbeer add anything interesting to an understanding of Der junge Siegfried? I think so, for to understand Mime in terms of Meyerbeer allows us to observe an unusually close convergence of art-work, aesthetic ideology and biography at a crucial juncture in Wagner’s career. At its most basic level, the opera dramatises a coming-of-age story within a quasi-Oedipal fairy-tale framework: to achieve independence and sexual maturity, the hero takes possession of an obvious phallic symbol (a sword), kills an unsympathetic and symbolically impotent surrogate father, and eventually finds his ideal mate. As noted above, this story can very plausibly be understood as an allegory for Wagner’s own aesthetic agenda of the early 1850s, the superseding of an old, inferior art (opera predicated on a ‘false androgyny’ in which musical priorities dictate dramatic conception) by a vital, Nature-based art predicated on a new (but at the same time older) relationship of poetry and music (the ‘art-work of the future’). In such a reading, the reforging of the sword serves as an important symbol, perhaps of the completed artwork,Footnote 101 but more likely – given its phallic nature, the fact that it is wielded by the male Siegfried, and the fact that this is accomplished rather early in the opera – of a reinvigorated masculine principle of poetry.Footnote 102 In destroying Mime’s anvil at the end of Act I (a coup de théâtre derived from the ancient sources where it exemplifies Siegfried’s superhuman strength), Siegfried symbolically demolishes the workplace of the conventional artist/opera composer. Closely attuned to Nature, the young hero-artist intuits a need for knowledge of/contact with Woman–Music (whether that be his mother or his mate) in order to complete himself. And as Nattiez and Grey have worked out at length, the courtship and marriage of Siegfried and Brünnhilde in Act III provide an elaborate set of symbols for the triumphant union of poetry and music in the artwork of the future.Footnote 103
In a number of ways, the Siegfried story also gives artistic form to Wagner’s own story. The slaying of the foster-father within the story of Der junge Siegfried parallels, as it were, the symbolic parricide that Wagner had already committed in his two published denunciations of Meyerbeer, his one-time role model and protector. ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ and Oper und Drama leave no doubt as to the ‘son’s’ intentions to write the ‘father’ out of the future history of opera in order to clear space for his own artistic ambitions.Footnote 104 Symbolically these ambitions would have reached consummation in the joining of Wagner the poet with Wagner the musician in the realisation of Der junge Siegfried itself, the first ‘art-work of the future’ to be conceived in the wake of the fully elaborated theories of the Zurich writings. Arguably, the catharsis that Wagner experienced in distancing himself from Meyerbeer in the polemical writings of 1850–1 freed him up to conceive a work that would mark a radical break from Meyerbeerian grand opera, a musical drama that did not rely on political intrigues, choruses, processions and typical ensemble forms such as were still present in the pre-existing poem for Siegfried’s Tod (and which continue to be felt in Götterdämmerung).Footnote 105Der junge Siegfried thus not only satisfied a need to present vividly (‘plastisch’) to the audience important dramatic elements necessary for an understanding of Siegfried’s Tod. A work that Wagner conceived in 1851 as the proper vehicle for introducing his ‘revolutionary’ ideas to performers and public alike – an opera about a young hero’s assertion of independence and difference from his foster-father – would prove once and for all to the world Wagner’s artistic independence of Meyerbeer.
Such a convergence of biography, aesthetic theory and artistic product should hardly be surprising for the artist who in Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, the long autobiographical essay drafted immediately after the completion of the poem of Der junge Siegfried, insisted on the influence of lived experience on the artist and the unity of his own life and work, and who retrospectively interpreted Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin in terms of his experiences and moods at the time of their respective origins.Footnote 106 Nor should it surprise us that the dramatist who in 1861 would connect the conservative critic Eduard Hanslick (whom Wagner believed to be Jewish) with the pedantic, unartistic Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg should have made a similar linkage of a personal bête noire and unsympathetic antagonist a decade earlier in Der junge Siegfried.Footnote 107 Perhaps Wagner needed to project his real-world antagonists into the fictional villains of his dramas in order to bring the latter to life in his imagination.
Lastly, does the hypothesis that Wagner conceived of Mime as an outlet to vent his pent-up resentment against a specific individual assuage our moral discomfort about anti-Semitic content in the opera? Hardly, for to understand Mime as a stand-in for Meyerbeer in no way diminishes the more broadly anti-Jewish symbolism that critics from Adorno on have found in the dwarf. Simply put, the individual Meyerbeer and the phenomenon of ‘Jewishness’ had become for Wagner essentially one and the same by 1851. Wagner attributed Meyerbeer’s perceived deficiencies as man and artist to his status as an assimilated European Jew, and he conversely projected what he deemed to be Meyerbeer’s deficiencies as a creative artist – cosmopolitanism, lack of feeling, lack of originality – onto an entire group of people. For Wagner, Meyerbeer was the face of ‘Judentum’. In giving poetic form to his desire to distance himself from a demonised former role model and protector, Wagner inevitably brought his anti-Jewish ideology into his work.
